All of a sudden, I was pretty sure I knew what was keeping Jason’s wife and mentor busy, and I didn’t expect Bill or Shandeen along any time soon. And that got me cold. Very, very cold.
What remains to be told is brief, and may be familiar to you from eyewitness accounts. The ground-glass third sound developed more of a whistle, an echo. When I looked up again from where I stood, stock-still, ready to do God knew what, finally, just a few seconds or minutes or even hours before I should have, the storm above us was a literal lake, a swirling lake-hole in the sky that hurt to look at.
Jason had taken the stage. He and Keene were tussling over the microphone.
Lightning flared. Tillinghast jerked forward and bit Brian Keene in the ear. Brian howled, rolling them to the floor with some kind of military-looking takedown and socking him in the back of the head a few times with quick, deliberate rabbit-punches. But Jason was slippery and he had the mic, grabbed it and ran. Keene began to chase after him, involuntarily, but Jason had flipped the mic back on, and feedback screamed through the dimensions.
He got to the machine, eyes everywhere through what he’d wrought. I saw one more knob get flicked, and then he just put his free hand on it like a preacher at a lectern, shrieking, “LOOK ON MY WORK, YE MIGHTY, AND DESP—”
But as Jason shrieked, that new sky answered back.
As I sensed it, as I understood it then, what followed was just a Bump in time, a great big BUMP and then everything was Okay and the lights were back on and everything was a mess and I had just really seen that Thing happen and it was all still there, the disarray and terrified people and...
No more was the shriek winding up in Tillinghast’s throat when Something came down from that lake in the sky, drawn by the sound of the amplified voice.
Something viscid and pustulant and pulsating, raw and winged, bearing a wash of stink like burning film scraps. I could understand its wings, its general mouth, but not much else. No time.
It all took next to no time. The sweep and swoop of those enormous wings, so black and quick I had to put the memories in a straight line almost as they happened. It swept up Jason and the machine, extruding slightly-fluid claws towards his mouth and...
And up. And in. From behind. Taking the air, and gone. For all I know, they may still be travelling together.
At the time, my foggy eyes blinked once. Twice. Thrice. Shocked groups of people were starting to move around again through the ballroom that was just a ballroom now. Just a Con again. Reforming. Making sense of all they’d seen. For each other. Because it was Just That Thing. And now no more.
Because the monster was just a monster. And we could perceive it now. Together. Now the horror was done. Now the human mind could encapsulate it and eat it. I was crying and I didn’t quite understand why, but not for any of the missing. Not at all.
Something to do with the ones who were here right now.
On stage, Brian Keene had found the other microphone, and was brandishing it triumphantly. The whole room looked at him, mute and pleading, but there was no question in his dark, sagacious eyes.
“I DECLARE THIS YEAR’S GROSS-OUT CONTEST A DRAW.”
Cue Thunderous Applause.
TURBULENCE
Scott R Jones
They’re sealing the silo today and the cavern below it. One hundred fifty thousand tonnes of concrete poured down the wet, black throat of the thing. I hope it’s enough.
The facility is down to a skeleton staff now. Topside security and just enough eyes on the monitors to hit the red button if things change down there. I’m not really needed; my MSc is in Avionics Engineering, after all. I don’t even work here anymore, but I felt like paying my respects. I’m not alone in this. Declan made friends easily and there are a lot of project folks here that don’t need to be.
His official funeral was just so goddamned unsatisfying, for one thing. That eulogy! “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth....” They ran that Magee poem into the ground, which was about as tasteless as you could get, considering the circumstances. Considering his resting place.
That’s just it though, isn’t it? Declan isn’t at rest. Declan will never be at rest. I know what they told everyone. That he died testing the DreadMoth. That’s only technically true. I know he’s not dead. Ask anyone who ever sat with him down there, in the cavern. They’ll tell you.
They talked about Icarus at the funeral, too, which is all mytho-poetic and sells the American hero line, sure, but it’s a flawed comparison. Icarus fell. That kid kissed the dirt.
Declan may be half a mile underground, but he hasn’t touched down, yet.
The tech wasn’t new, exactly. Tillinghast Resonators had been around since the 1930s, but no one besides cranky pseudo-scientists and soft-headed ghost hunters paid them any attention. Hell, until a few years back, you could order the plans and parts for a simple device off the internet. Slap it together in your garage over a weekend. Entertain your friends with some low-resolution trippy visuals for an evening and, once the novelty of vague blobs and vibrating eels wore off, forget about the thing.
Then a couple of physics students at MIT did just that. Only, the novelty didn’t wear off; they got their professors interested in it. Turns out, once you got beneath the clunky psychedelic effects, the Tillinghast tech had some revelatory things to say about M-theory, dark energy, gravity. Name your flavour of physics, that machine had surprises for you. Pretty soon, the military got involved. There were applications, of course. The project was born.
Well, projects. It was a big tent: clean energy, faster-than-light communications, weapons. The important stuff that takes time to research and develop. The flight-suit was fast-tracked, though. It was the first and easiest application. They moved my team to Edwards AFB and before we’d even settled in, they started pushing, and pushing hard, because, let’s face it, a flying man? A man in a real flight-suit, not a jet pack or mini-copter, soaring the way every kid ever imagined himself doing? That was some straight-up superheroics that would sell any application to follow.
With the T-Resonator technology, a kind of differential pressure could be generated between our dimension and an oscillating cascade of other dimensions. I don’t pretend to know the higher-order physics of it; that’s for the big brains at MIT. I’m in avionics. I understand things like lift, drag coefficients, Bernoulli’s principle. And this differential pressure? This tug-of-war between our reality and the infinite layers of every other reality as they flowed across and against each other in the incomprehensible depths of the resonator? Well, spread that out across a physical membrane, a wing, and you could create a kind of lift. The spookiest lift I’d ever seen.
It was barely flight. More like levitation. Not even that: It was as if the wing, and anything attached to it, like the suit and the pilot wearing it, stayed absolutely still and the world moved around it, instead. They called this effect “the Pinch” and maybe that’s what it was, but as far as my team was concerned, it acted like lift.
The wing wasn’t even a wing in the traditional sense. It was a super-light reinforced graphite armature, six stubby rectangular panels, three to each side, extending out from the hub at angles. Between the panels, a mesh of miniature hexagonal graphite plates, pliant and smooth. The hub held the T-Resonator unit and a prototype FTL communicator, developed elsewhere in the project. The whole thing slotted and locked into the back of the suit, nestled between the air supply and the chute. Like every other application of the tech, the thing powered itself, something the clean-energy people loved. Wherever it was pulling the power from, it wasn’t here.
It looked completely fragile, like a brittle gray moth. We expected it to fall to pieces in the wind tunnel the moment we turned it on. We dreaded that moment. So, the DreadMoth, a name that stuck, despite our immediate successes with it. Because, when the mesh began to glow with that impossible light, the wing became rigid, as unyielding as stone, and no matter what we threw at the suit in simulation, it would maintain its
position in the air.
All we had to do was figure out a control system, in-suit avionics for moving “the Pinch” between, around, underneath, and on top of the panels. We were in the initial stages of that when they brought in Declan to observe. He’s a lieutenant-commander now, a posthumous promotion, for what that’s worth, but he was a major then. Major Declan Reese, USAF. Our test pilot. We were introduced: He knew he didn’t have to salute me, but he did anyway, out of respect for what I did. I liked that. Then I showed him the DreadMoth.
“I’ve been up in almost everything that can go up. And that has gotta be the most goddamned ridiculous thing I’ve seen. That’s supposed to lift a man? C’mon.”
So, I had my team put on a bit of a show, run it through some high-speed maneuvers. I watched his face as he watched the DreadMoth perform, floating in the serene way that things like that shouldn’t float, not at those speeds. Not in those conditions. Hell, not at all. Declan’s expression moved swiftly from credulity through to wonder, then a childlike excitement. It was charming. Pure pilot.
“What kind of Gs could a guy pull in that?”
I told him what I’d been told. That, as far as the real brains could tell, the field generated by the resonator cancelled that out. Acceleration, banking, deceleration: G-force did not apply. So much did not apply. But it could fly. It flew.
Declan let out a long whistle. “Christ! How soon can you get me up in it?”
A week before the incident, there was a party on the base. Nothing too crazy, just one of those things to help bleed off tension. I got a little drunk and I cornered Declan, who may have been in the same tipsy boat, which we ended up steering into a bed. Just the one time. It wasn’t serious; we’d been working together for months and we were friends. He was attractive, and a pilot, and I’ve always liked pilots in bed, if not in my life. And I was curious about him.
Afterwards, I asked him why he flew. Other than the obvious alpha-male reasons.
“Terror. I like to piss myself with fear,” he said, grinning, and when I punched him in the shoulder he laughed.
“Nah. It’s the view. You can’t beat the view up there.”
I may have asked him not to be a cowboy. To power down and pull his chute if anything seemed even a little off. Declan laughed again.
“It’s going to be great,” he said. “The suit’s been tested to death. Your avionics? Easy as breathing. It’s ready. I’m ready.”
He wasn’t wrong. Only that morning, Declan had taken the DreadMoth for a spin around the inside of a hangar: a test of the controls keyed to the gloves and forearm plates, and the HUD in the helmet. Tethered to guide wires for safety, he’d stayed in the air for 53 minutes. I recalled the light in his eyes when he landed and removed the faceplate. That was probably the moment I decided to get him into bed. I asked him what it had been like.
“Oh, now, you saw. I never wanted to come down.”
The incident.
After the initial howl of pure joy as he launched into the cloudless Mojave blue, Declan had composed himself. Mostly. He’d been sticking to the flight plan: keeping within visual range of the two HH-60 Pave Hawks accompanying him, staying above the hard deck, never accelerating above 300 knots, announcing each maneuver before attempting it, relaying his impressions after. A steady stream of radio chatter, and through it all, beneath the professionalism of Major Declan Reese, seasoned test pilot, you could hear the glee of a little boy, flying, finally, on his own.
The first indication that something was wrong came exactly 23 minutes, 9 seconds into the flight. Declan had just completed a textbook hammerhead at 200 knots, a move that drew appreciative whistles from the pilots in the Hawks. We expected to hear similar from Declan, but instead, he went silent, and stayed silent for another 51 seconds. Then he spoke, panic rising in his voice with each syllable.
“That ... what? No, that can’t be right. No. No no no. Ah! Mother of Christ! Ground, are you seeing this? Are you guys seeing this?”
All there was to see was clear blue desert sky and the floating figure of a man with a grey moth pinned to his back. A figure which immediately began to execute a tortured series of acrobatics: dives, multiple rolls, instantly steep climbs, moves a lesser flyer in a machine susceptible to G-forces would never think of trying. Avoidance maneuvers.
“Ground! I can’t ... Jesus! How are you not seeing this? There are too many of them! Everywhere! Shit! I’m going to—”
Then, at 25:30, the DreadMoth vanished. The shocked chopper pilots immediately reported the loss of visual. Declan was gone from radar and GPS, too.
Nine seconds later, he popped back up. Fifty-three miles SSW from the point where he had vanished and eighty-three hundred feet up. Two seconds later, the same again: gone, then back, only now, he was ten miles due east from the base and a jaw-clenching two hundred and ten feet from the ground. Again: 32 miles NNE, and a mile and change up. And again. And again. The silent gaps between his appearances were awful but not as awful as the screams that came over the radio when he did.
He was being shaken to death in the sky.
Then, by some miracle, one of the Hawk pilots got a visual on him, managed to train their cameras on his last moments. He’d warped in again, practically in their laps. The eggheads were already babbling about “dimensional shear” and “super-positional turbulence.” He’d deployed his chute, as I’d asked him to, but it couldn’t save him, not at the speed he was going. The useless tissue tore away, streaming above him like a spider’s nest.
The earth rose up to meet him, but that fatal kiss never happened. The video shows one final vanishing act, a half-second before impact.
Declan Reese was gone.
Eight hours later, in the middle of the kind of insane scramble you’d expect after a disaster of this magnitude, the prototype communicator in the DreadMoth pinged its location. We never would have found him, otherwise. The T-Resonator, humming the very faintest of signals from deep within the earth, directly below the spot where the DreadMoth had disappeared. The cavern. It seemed unlikely that Declan had survived, went the general consensus. The suit needed retrieval, though, if we were to understand what had happened. As one of the suit’s designers, I was put on the team.
And so, the shaft was sunk and, after we found him, widened into a silo. The space was narrow, maybe thirty meters across. You couldn’t see the bottom, so the catwalks and gantries had to be bolted to the roof. Difficult, nerve-wracking work. I admire those engineers. They had to work around the DreadMoth and its pilot, and that’s a sight no one should ever get used to.
Declan hovered there, nine metres below the ceiling of that lightless void, the crackling glow of the DreadMoth’s wings encasing him in a lambent sheen of violet light. A lot of him was missing: the left leg to just above the knee, most of the torso on the left side, and chunks out of both arms, as if they’d been lifted out with an ice-cream scoop. There was also a large section of the left side of the head, just above the ear. Gone.
That was bad, but there was worse. He was missing so much, but what was gone had not been torn away. Declan was not wounded. The outlines of his body, and of the suit that held it, had changed: They just stopped. He’d become a cut-away anatomical model. Blood and organs and bone on the other side of his new edges, all clearly visible, all clearly working. Veins and arteries still pumping blood from a heart that was only half there. At first, they thought he’d been rendered invisible, but no: You could pass your hand through the space his left lung should have been. A lung that was clearly still breathing, wherever it was.
Declan was alive, sunk in a deep coma. And there was worse, still.
It became apparent that the T-Resonator in the DreadMoth was experiencing power surges. The graphite mesh of the wing would flare with light. If, at that moment, you were watching the man and the machine from the right angle, from the right spot on the catwalk, then you could catch a glimpse of the outlines of the thing.
So, of course, we brought in more
T-Resonator units, repurposed as trans-dimensional floodlights. We wanted to see it clearly.
It was a fractured crystalline structure but organic at the same time. The entity was largely still, though it exhibited an arrhythmic pulse along its shining length, a length that stretched down into the black depths of the cavern. Fine hairs or tubes would sprout from its surface and then burrow below again. Small, obscene fissures would appear, gape, then seal themselves.
The tip of this perfectly still, impossible, monstrous thing passed right through Declan’s body. Where Declan was missing pieces of himself, there was the thing, except it wasn’t really there. It was and it wasn’t, like Declan himself. The eggheads went out of their goddamn minds with excitement.
Moving him was out of the question. They didn’t dare risk disturbing the entity, this now-sleeping beast that had roused itself only long enough to pluck a man out of the air and fling him across hundreds of miles and how many realities before bringing him to rest in this black pit. They couldn’t move Declan, so they declared him dead, though we all knew better. They called him a hero. That funeral. That goddamn poem, with its “high, untrespassed sanctity of space” and its “touching the face of God.”
What do you do when a moth brushes your cheek while you sleep?
All this was very bad, but it wasn’t the worst part. That came when Declan woke up, three weeks ago, in the middle of the night. He wasn’t awake long; there are only 13 minutes of footage. His vitals barely shifted and he didn’t move at all. How could he, with that thing in him? He spoke, though. Whispered, down there in the darkness. No one topside noticed while it was happening; the audio monitors were turned low and some idiot had Coast to Coast AM turned up high. We only learned he’d awakened the next day, when someone noticed the larger-than-usual size of the audio files.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 14