by John Shirley
I wondered: had they anticipated, or even directed, the unknown horror that had killed Maile?
I moved at an agonizing crawl toward a thicket near the boundary of what I took to be a base camp in the works. Soon, I detected a pair of voices speaking English. One belonged to the American officer. The other was the same gurgling, growling, buzzing voice I had heard before.
No human vocal cords could ever produce such deep, resonating noises.
“You thought you could control it. We cannot control it. It is beyond control. Your ignorance will be your undoing and ours.”
“You accepted our terms.”
“Extortion.”
“Insurance. You would have used it on us, eventually. We know this.”
I couldn’t make out much that followed — until, after a long, disconcerting silence, the officer’s voice said, “Given time, it may collapse on its own. Until it does, we cannot know.”
I kept hoping one or the other would speak of Van Buuren and Sultan, but the figures moved away from me so I could no longer hear them. From somewhere distant came a low, rhythmic pulsing, like a heavy drumbeat, and when I eventually raised my head to peer through the wall of ferns toward the hub of activity, I realized a thin layer of luminous, violet mist hung a dozen feet or so above my head, like a translucent film spreading over a layer of denser air.
Once again, I heard the American officer’s voice. “What is this?”
“No one knows. As we warned you.”
“Bring out the prisoners. Let’s see what comes of it.”
This was it.
I felt myself tensing. To my right, I made out the rear portion of an M35 truck, and I figured the strangers must be holding my squadmates in there. Sure enough, a few seconds later, both Van Buuren and Sultan appeared, their arms bound, escorted by two uniformed figures, all made into ghosts by the pervasive glow. Van Buuren looked all right, but Sultan’s face was covered in blood, his body slumped in pain and fatigue. Both were gazing at something to my left, in the direction of the crash site. I could barely refrain from raising my head to look for myself.
Then the American officer materialized before them, and for the first time I saw him clearly. He was thirty, maybe thirty-five years old, solidly built, with black hair below the brim of his helmet, narrow eyes, rather oversized ears. His helmet and the collar of his fatigues bore the silver eagle insignia of a colonel. His dark eyes roved over his captives but did not meet their gazes.
The bastard was a coward.
From behind me, the heavy pounding sound grew heavier, more insistent. It dawned on me it might be a kind of signal, a herald of some new unknown. And these strangers, who were in some fashion responsible for it, by their own claim had no idea what they had wrought.
I had loaded a fresh 20-round magazine in my M16 and carried two spares.
I tucked away my fear, my anger, my uncertainty — everything that made me vulnerable—and focused on my targets, some ten meters before me, trusting my peripheral senses to detect any oncoming threat. Apart from Van Buuren and Sultan, there were four figures in view, and I anticipated another four to eight within twenty meters or so. Those would be the ones who could take me out as I made my move. Even so, my gravest concern was that Sultan might be unable to make it out on his own.
Best I could do was give him a fighting chance.
Deep breath.
Go.
I sprang to my feet, finger taut on the trigger, and popped off two quick rounds. The two nearest figures went down, writhing, as the fragmenting rounds ripped through soft tissue. Two more shots took down the next closest. With my first shots, Van Buuren and Sultan had hit the deck. The colonel spun around—he hadn’t seen me and, from his bewildered expression, still couldn’t identify the origin of the attack.
That damned ethereal glow, I realized. It had dazzled them so they couldn’t yet focus on me.
I used my advantage and sprayed half my remaining rounds at the moving shadows beyond my squadmates. A hellish scream shattered the night—an unearthly sound, something between the howl of a wounded wolf and the frantic trilling of some monstrous insect.
The Colonel had drawn his .45, and I knew he could see me now. At point-blank range, I popped off a single shot, putting it just above his left knee. Crying out in shocked agony, he spun and tumbled to the earth, out of my sight. I rushed forward, my eyes locking on Van Buuren’s prone figure. His eyes were blazing, searching the darkness for the source of the sudden confusion. When he realized it was me, a shadowy smile passed over his face. I sprayed the magazine’s final rounds into the brush at the edge of the road, yanked the spent box, and popped in the next. Then I rushed to Van Buuren, unsheathed my KA-BAR knife, and sliced the cords binding his arms.
In two seconds, he was on his feet. “Give me the knife,” he growled. “I’ve got Sultan.”
I slapped the knife in his hand, raised my M16, and cut down a pair of figures that emerged from a thicket to my right.
Then I turned and gazed down toward the crash site—and froze as if a giant, icy hand had taken hold and pinioned me. I sensed movement off to my right, but no shots came, no shadows leaped out of the darkness to take me down. All eyes had turned to the nascent spectacle at the edge of the jungle, some three hundred meters away.
I was gazing into a massive ring of swirling, silver-purple mist, two-hundred feet or more in diameter, hanging in the air like a gaping mouth, its center blacker than black. Not just dark but vacant, like a portal to the remotest depths of outer space. I felt a moment of vertigo, a sense of falling into the abyss, so I turned my eyes toward my feet. I had to, or this thing would swallow me. I felt my heart hammering all the way into my throat.
My eyes locked on another pair staring up at me from below. It took some seconds to realize they belonged to the American colonel, the enigmatic figure I had been forced to take down. His wound was severe but hardly mortal—yet his eyes burned with that awful awareness that comes only in the instants before death, as I had learned too well in this place.
“We had no choice,” he said, and his voice sounded like cracking glass. “So past time to finish the game. We had the means—the meteor. Like it came from God.”
I didn’t understand, but I had heard enough to put at least a few puzzle pieces together. I pointed into the darkness, away from the gaping portal. “Who are they—the strangers?”
“The enemy. The true enemy. But we used them. We had to use them.”
“South Vietnamese?”
“Found them here. But not from here.”
After several moments, I realized someone was tugging my sleeve. Glancing around, I saw Van Buuren, his eyes near-panicked but still lucid. Sultan, dazed and barely able to stand, clung to his other arm. “Come on, Timmons. Time’s running out.”
“We should drag this bastard with us.”
“Don’t you know what’s coming?”
Despite my every instinct warning me against it, I knew I had to look back at that cavernous breach. I drew away from the colonel, overtaken by a sudden, almost irresistible desire to put a bullet in his head. This was a place beyond madness—around me and within me.
I turned and looked.
Inside the shimmering, slowly revolving ring of unearthly color, the blackness remained complete, darker than the deepest cavern beneath the earth. Yet, within it, I discerned something even blacker. Moving. Shifting. Emerging.
I had been wrong to fear falling into the abyss.
The pounding that had begun some time before was rising to an earthshaking, nauseating rumble.
I perceived movement around the base of the ring, and I realized it was the trees. From the largest to the smallest, the kapoks, the cypresses, the palms, all were bending and writhing, like worshippers praising their god, their trunks and limbs driven by seemingly deliberate motor impulses.
A clattering-crunching sound nearby alerted me to someone or something approaching from my right. I gave Van Buuren’s shoulder a shov
e, urging him to get Sultan out of here. “Go on, Sergeant. Get clear.”
He knew better than to argue or attempt to haul me with him. In two seconds, he was gone. I had little ammo to waste, so I raised my M16, trigger finger tense, but held my fire.
When the figure burst into view, only a few feet away, the glow from behind me illuminated his—its—face.
It wasn’t human.
I was on the verge of shooting it, but something stopped me. The uniformed, manlike thing carried no weapons that I could see. Its features resembled an insect’s—an ant’s, or a bee’s—with large, bulging black eyes, no nose or nostrils, and a pair of small, thorny-looking mandibles shielding a thin slit of a mouth. Unlike an insect’s eyes, however, these gleaming black spheres expressed feeling, intelligence—perhaps even emotion. When its gaze met mine, I felt a sudden rush of sickening, debilitating terror, and then a bizarre, dizzying exhilaration as this insane, incongruous image seared itself into my brain.
Though certain my next breath might be my last, I felt no more fear. Just a burning, overwhelming curiosity.
“Stay and die,” the thing growl-buzzed at me, and I noticed a small, metallic object fastened to the underside of one of the mandibles. That, I realized, was how I could understand its speech. “Not by my hand.”
The appendage it lifted more resembled a huge, pale spider than a human hand.
The creature gestured to itself. “Attempted fragment recovery, intercepted by yours. Gave portion, yours to return remainder. But did not.” I could sense contempt even in the translation of the inhuman voice. “That—” the hand pointed to the glowing, cavernous ring behind me— “your work.”
I could almost follow its words. The colonel had made some “arrangement” with these beings but double-crossed them, ultimately resulting in this event. Then a sudden, terrific concussion caused the ground to lurch, and I lost my balance, almost toppled. When I regained my footing, the stranger had vanished.
Another heavy impact rattled my teeth, and a cool, dank draft passed over me, accompanied by a reek like charred flesh. Seized by a new, crushing dread, I could barely summon the nerve to look upward. But I did, and I saw it: a massive, black shape passing slowly overhead, blocking out portions of the star-filled sky. The thing reflected no light, its contours moving and shifting endlessly, preventing me even guessing at its actual size and shape.
I heard creaking and groaning around me, and a quick glance revealed trees, vines, grasses—all the foliage—swaying and writhing, animated by this otherworldly force the B-52 crash had unleashed.
Several more thudding impacts made the ground quiver and crack. Footsteps, I realized, and, around me, numerous huge, tree-sized stalks, which must have been its legs, appeared, vanished, and then reappeared some distance away.
There was nowhere to run, no direction that wasn’t blocked by the sentient trees and vines or the advancing black titan.
I dropped and hugged the ground, forcing my mind to remember its cold, regimented military training. This was an air strike, an assault by a powerful enemy, an attack beyond my ability to counter.
Stay alive until the opportunity to alter my circumstances presented itself.
Somewhere beyond the drum-like thumping, a droning whine or wail began to rise, growing rapidly louder, washing over me, encompassing me. Almost the timbre of a human voice, it seemed, yet amplified beyond any natural or technological possibility. Its ringing tones pierced my eardrums, penetrated my skull, as painful as a thrusting stiletto, and after some time I realized I could no longer hear or sense the repetitive booms. Even stuffing gobs of mud into my ears did nothing to mute this onslaught of sound.
Then it was over.
Only silence remained; not even a hint of echoes or ringing aftertones.
Had I gone deaf?
I found myself immersed in new, unbroken darkness, and I feared I had gone blind as well. But no. Shortly, I was able to discern the vague shape of the thicket a few feet away, and, peering upward, I made out a dim cluster of stars against a midnight backdrop. The heat and humidity of the jungle, however, had been replaced by a startling, shocking cold. I found my fingers aching as if they were submerged in ice water.
Had the level of hell I had previously occupied given way to an unknown new one?
I rose on shaky legs and tried to assess my situation. No lights showed anywhere around me. All traces of that unearthly glow, the color from beyond space, had vanished. No more earth-shaking footsteps. As best I could tell, none of the trees were moving.
Apart from the awful cold, the jungle seemed itself again.
I felt an inexplicable certainty that not one stranger remained nearby.
Praying it was in the direction of the road that had led those others here, I began to move, hoping against hope at least one of their trucks might remain.
My choice earned out. The first thing I saw was an M35 rolled onto its side, smashed, the suggestion of a human body hanging from its cab. But a short distance farther on, I came upon another truck, this one intact—and empty.
Though I knew I might end up in the hands of the Viet Cong or even the North Vietnamese Army, it scarcely seemed to matter. As I had too-well discovered, there were many levels of hell, and all I knew now was that I intended to quit this one.
***
I never learned what happened to Sergeant Christopher Van Buuren or PFC Ronald Sultan. No one ever saw either of them again, and both were designated MIA, presumed dead. I was the only surviving member of my squad; ironically, all but two members of the other squads from which we had gotten separated survived that day’s patrol.
When I returned to the United States six months later, it was with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star Medal for exceptional valor in combat against the enemy. I can safely say that, after my uneventful return to Mai Loc Base on that night, I no longer possessed the slightest regard for my own life. Almost half a century later, my last vivid memories of Vietnam come from what I call the Night of the Game Changers. During those subsequent months, I am certain I existed in a state of deep if undiagnosed shock.
In the early 1970s, I went to work for the U.S. Department of Defense, initially in various low-level capacities, though after a period of years I attained the position of senior librarian in the department of records, with security clearance sufficient to access certain classified documents.
Despite years of diligent effort, I never found any documentation of the events I witnessed that night in 1969. The only relevant notations indicated that a single B-52, on its return to Da Nang from a bombing mission over North Vietnam, experienced catastrophic engine failure and crashed; and that a certain Colonel Everett M. Boothe, a liaison officer working with the South Vietnamese Army, had vanished under unknown circumstances. Personal experience has convinced me that the only explanation for such a deficit of information would be that these events never occurred or were being deliberately suppressed.
Officially, no record existed of any attempt to weaponize an element of unknown properties, which had likely originated with a meteorite. Or of the U.S. military interacting with any personnel, indigenous or otherwise, aware of such an element.
Outside allusions to similar interactions came only from what most reasonable human beings might attribute to works of fantasy or outright fabrication, despite correlating observations by numerous, unaffiliated witnesses, spanning many decades.
Five years ago, on several occasions, I viewed no fewer than four individuals observing me, most frequently in the areas around my workplace and near my home. I can unequivocally state that, despite the distances from which I saw them, based on their unique anatomical proportions, they were of the same type as the ARVN-uniformed beings I encountered in Vietnam.
I am convinced that my investigations, discreet as they were, somehow drew these beings’ attention to me. However, since my recent retirement, which put an end to most of my inquiries, I have observed no further sign of the strangers.
Those “other” sources I discovered relating to the enigmatic color, the inter-dimensional portal, and the entity that emerged from it, however archaic, have convinced me of the existence of another realm of time and space—another reality—ordinarily hidden from the living. By way of some unknown element from interstellar space, brought to Earth by a meteor and used by our military in an ill-conceived attempt to create a weapon, a bridge between this reality and our familiar sphere of existence came about—in this case only temporarily because, to paraphrase those beings I have termed the “gatekeepers,” the element cannot be controlled. I should not hazard a guess as to the horrifying consequences had we been more “successful.”
Those same source materials suggest the black entity that emerged from the portal is something that resides in a realm known only to the dead. Given these accounts, as well as the evidence of my own senses, I absolutely cannot, must not discount such a premise. My nerves in recent days have begun to fray, and I believe my time left to live is running short, for this simple reason:
Increasingly, I have begun to hear the trees around my home creaking and groaning in the darkness, and my every sense assures me not a single breath of breeze is moving them.
WHITE FEATHER
BY T.E. GRAU
The glass of cider arrived without ceremony, set several feet from the tall figure standing at the counter. The barkeep crossed his arms and waited.
The man reached over and picked up his drink, placing a coin in the center of the circle of liquid left on the oaken tavern top. The barkeep made no move to retrieve it.
Chilton held the glass to his nose, working through the alcohol and molasses and smelling the subtle perfume of Newtown Pippins before they were picked, smashed, and ordered to rot. Back when they first emerged as springtime buds from the lifeless branch, so full of promise. This was the aroma of his home, of a particular wind and soil that knew him and held no judgment. He wished he were a boy again, before his father lost his leg and his mother her will, before the responsibilities of adult life solidified a legacy that was as permanent as history written by the bloody victorious. Before his last raid on Nova Scotia.