The Abyss Above Us 1

by Ryan Notch

  “t water” was written on the wall. He pointed it out to the other two.

  “What’s ‘t water’,” asked Brock.

  Shaw let Kit answer, once he saw that he’d figured it out.

  “Hot water. The H and O’s been bricked over This hallway used to go further.”

  “Who’s been working in the building the longest,” asked Shaw.

  Kit, the computer department’s biggest extrovert and best social networker by far, knew the answer right away. Fifteen minutes later they were standing at the foot of a ladder. At the top of it was an old black janitor named Jake, changing a light bulb.

  “Yeah I remember,” said Jake. “About fifteen years ago there was that big push to separate the two buildings. I think old Peterson, the head of the economics department, knew that the computer department would just keep expanding till it ate his whole building if he let it.”

  “But the wall wasn’t brick on the computer side, it was drywall on a concrete base,” put in Kit.

  “Well different work crews would have gone about it in different ways I guess,” replied Jake.

  “Ahhhhh, yeah I get it,” said Kit, understanding dawning on him. “Different departments are in charge of their own budgets and would have hired their own work crews. It’s all so stupidly compartmentalized around here.”

  “But even so,” said Brock. “No one would be stupid enough to brick up a computer.”

  “They wouldn’t have to,” said Shaw. “Think about it. The work crew on the economics side sees a door that leads to an open alcove coming off from the computer lab. Following their poorly checked work plans, they brick over the door knowing that the room can still be entered from the other side. Meanwhile the crew on the computer side sees an alcove with a door leading to the economics side. Their orders are to make a straight wall along the lab and they follow them, knowing that the alcove can still be accessed through the door. So the computer department work crew, finishing second and unable to see through the closed door to the newly created wall, sealed up the room without knowing it was no longer accessible from the other side. Not wanting to mess around with any wires, they just left a hole in the new wall and let it go straight through.”

  “Oh my God,” said Brock. “You mean there is a whole missing room in there?”

  “You computer people sure is the dumbest smart people I ever met,” said Jake, laughing. Brock and Kit joined in, laughing and making jokes at the genius of the University’s great planners. But Shaw didn’t hear them anymore. He was thinking of those pennies on his nightstand. How his mother wouldn’t let him pry them off for fear of ruining the tables finish. How for years they had bothered him. Four on heads, one on tails. He’d made sure that table had ended its life as firewood, the pennies melting right along with it.

  “Well I guess the one o’clock inconvenience will have to stay,” said Brock. “I mean, what else can we do?”

  “Get me a sledge hammer,” said Shaw. The others started to laugh. Shaw laughed too, but he had a plan.

  It started with the head of the department. Kit thought it was ridiculous. But Shaw understood something that Kit, for all his people skills didn’t. And that was just how long of a lever money was. All Shaw had to say to the head of the department was a few choice words about how much it would cost when that lost workstation inevitably went down, and how it was going to go down very soon. Kit played bad cop, saying how unnecessary the whole thing was. Shaw had encouraged him to do exactly that, knowing people in power loved to ignore subordinates and thought themselves clever for following the advice of fancy consultants like Shaw. It didn’t matter if Shaw had stretched the truth about the imminent death of the workstation.

  Powerful people, the more they had the more they were willing to destroy to save it.

  Thus it wasn’t with a sledgehammer but with two workman and a power saw that Shaw got his wish to cut through that wall. They did it on the Economics side, though it was far more difficult to cut through brick than drywall, because of the lower risk of hitting any hidden wires.

  Shaw stuck around for the entire operation, despite the ever growing heat. It was hypnotic, this dark room, this black box, the sunken treasure. His feelings went beyond excitement. He was so intent on getting in there that, in a strange way, he felt like part of him was already in the room, and he was waiting to be let out.

  Brock waited with him, as did Kit. Though neither seemed to quite share his fascination, and in fact both seemed to be there more for the party atmosphere. Just for the chance to hang out. Extroverts were like that, Shaw thought as the workmen were getting started. No matter how driven they were, no matter how busy, they always found people time. They needed introverts like him, he thought. They needed them for someone to talk to, for someone to bring back the information from the dark quiet places they couldn’t go. It didn’t occur to him in that moment how much he needed people like them. The people he thought of as so much a bother, always trying to get him to come out of where he was most comfortable. He didn’t think about how they kept the dark things in his mind from devouring themselves, and him along with them.

  He didn’t think of any of that, in fact soon he thought of nothing at all. The spinning saw and screaming noise was somehow hypnotizing. His mind was becoming a still dark water, along the surface of which thoughts were only poor reflections. Shaw was like that with white noise. It soothed him, listening to the sounds within the sounds. Even a terrible racket like this had quieter, subtler things inside it.

  Then it stopped. Shaw became alert again as fast as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers. The workman was done sawing, and now the two of them were prying out the bricks with crowbars. The wall fell out and there it was, the door behind the wall. All at once Shaw was no longer hot. His sweat quickly turned to such intense chills that he thought he might see his breath when he exhaled.

  The thought came unbidden to him, Oh my God, what have I done?

  “Oh my God,” said Brock, strangely echoing Shaw’s thoughts but in an entirely joking tone, “I gotta admit, I didn’t really think it would be here.”

  “Well Shaw,” said Kit, “It’s your find, you get to go in first.”

  Shaw looked at him with horror, though it didn’t show on his face. Shaw’s emotions never showed on his face.

  Can’t they see it? We can’t go in there, it’s terrible.

  He didn’t have time to say it though, for the workman who had handled the saw apparently wasn’t much for formality. Without hesitating he opened the door and reached in, finding the light switch by touch. The fluorescents, old as they were, flickered on after only a few seconds. But not bright, something kept them from shining bright. The workman, who was about to walk in, froze mid-step.

  “Oh my God,” said Kit, completing the triumvirate. But his was a tone of surprise, disgust. “What the fuck happened in here?”

  They all saw it, and though the eyes pick up detail incredibly fast, sometimes they share it with the gut before the brain. The room was black, but not the black of paint. Or wallpaper, or dirt, or even ash.

  It was rot. It was mold.

  Black and slick and covering everything. The walls, the floor, the lights. The chair and desk and computer. It was worst at the computer, thickest. Even at this distance you could see the tendrils reaching up from the mold there, psuedopods far exceeding the tiny stalks that make up the fur on old bread.

  “Must be a water leak in here,” said the second workman. “The moisture’s been building up and left unchecked for all these years,”

  “Bullshit,” said Shaw, though he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

  The first workman backed out of the doorway and said, “Probably shouldn’t breathe in there, not until Environmental Services can check it out. That kind of mold can be poisonous.”

  “Like Kind Tut’s tomb,” said Brock. “The bats who flew out when they first opened it infected the entire expedition. Almost all of them were dead in a week, the locals said they
’d been cursed but…Shaw, hey, I don’t think that’s a good idea!”

  But Shaw was already in. His earlier fear was gone and forgotten. Everyone else was still reeling at the mold, but he had moved onto something else entirely. It was the light illuminating the keyboard on and off. He couldn’t see the screen from the angle of the door, but he already knew what he’d find as he walked around the desk.

  A blinking cursor, patiently flashing on a screen that had dimmed but miraculously had not gone out in all these years. A screen that was the only thing in the room without a speck of mold. Green on black, shimmering monochrome. It was waiting, but not for his commands. Only for 1 a.m.

  Finding a face mask to make it safe to work in the room was easy. Finding a keyboard old enough to replace the moldy one at the desk was even easier, given the university’s refusal to ever throw away working equipment. Oddly enough the only hard thing to find was a free chair, the people of any office environment guarded their chairs like refugees protecting their last piece of bread. But even that took less than an hour, which was unfortunate because it gave the three of them nothing to do but wait for several hours.

  Kit wanted to immediately start getting into the computer’s programming. He argued that if they were careful there was only a very slim chance they would mess anything up, and anything they messed up they could almost certainly fix.

  Shaw knew he was right, between them they could almost certainly fix any problem that might beset most of the computers in the world. But he wasn’t hired for almost. Almost was not definitely. Almost was not what got the job done every time. He would wait.

  But the other two wouldn’t. Kit had papers to grade, and Brock had to be at the telescope in time for nightfall. Shaw busied himself with further completing his ultimate map of the network. Patience was a funny thing to Shaw. Waiting for an event was for him like floating down a cool river on an inner tube, time seeming to pass all the faster with the knowledge that there was a waterfall at the end.

  When 12:58 came he was ready, as ready as he could be anyway. Pad of paper and a pen were the best he could do, ready to write down the fleeting commands and their effects as they scrolled across the screen. He kept his eyes locked to it. Not just in case of any pre-commands, but because it kept him from looking at the room around him. At least mostly it did. Sitting here, in the center of it, the pattern was so plain you could see it even with peripheral vision. This mold, this nasty, disgusting, poisonous, venomous mold clearly had grown outwards from the center of the room. And not from the floor, as his brain wanted to tell him in opposition to what his eyes were seeing. Not from some unseen drip landing and collecting in pools in some hollow in the middle of the room. No, it was from the very center. It was from the computer.

  And then it hit. One a.m. Nothing flashy, almost anticlimactic in its simplicity. A set of coordinates followed by a movement command, and a confirmation of commands received at the other end about thirty seconds later.

  And that was it. Deprogramming the thing and detaching it from the network would be the simplest thing in the world. Anticlimactic, but a relief as well. The knot that was Node 8 would be untied soon, and this room could be walled up again. Maybe with a hole on the top to fill it up with bleach, just for good measure.

  Then he heard it. He almost jumped out of his seat, almost out of his skin. It was fucking blaring. A sound from the speakers on the computer, their functionality alone another miracle of electronic longevity. Shaw’s heart was going so hard he had to grab the armrests of the seat to keep from running for it. The screen, the computer, it was running a second program. It was receiving information back from the telescope and analyzing it. Not just that, but pouring it directly out through the speakers.

  Shaw started to reach over to turn them off, but stopped himself. There was something about that sound. Even through the tinny computer speakers something caught at him. It was darkness. Darkness made into liquid and left to float in vacuum airlessness. He lost himself in it. It had depths within depths. It moved inside itself and out of itself suggesting dimensions that should be impossible for any sound. It had no order but no randomness either, it just didn’t have anything to do with either. It was fascinating.

  And just like that it was over. Shaw opened his eyes, not having noticed he closed them.

  How long?

  He looked at his watch. Not hours had passed, only two minutes. It had only taken two minutes for Brock to override the orders and move the telescope to its proper pitch. There was a last command displayed on the computer screen. An attempt to send the information from the analysis to another computer on the network for writing to disk. A dead command, that computer having been re-routed to other tasks years ago.

  Shaw suddenly felt very alone in that dark room at the end of an abandoned corridor in the middle of the night. Alone and a little afraid, he walked with a briskness that was just short of a run until he was back in the world of artificial light and breathable air. At home he tore off his clothes and showered, scrubbing off the mold he felt was still coating his skin somehow. Even then he was still rushing, as if he still wanted to run but didn’t know where. He felt pumped up, lying down on the couch instead of the bed, knowing he couldn’t sleep. Moments later he was asleep anyway.

  That night he had a dream. He dreamed he was standing inside the door to the black room, patches of light filtering weakly down through black mold. At the desk was a thing. It was shaped like a man but its features were indistinct, blurry from its constant convulsing. Its hands had no fingers, only flipper like things that pounded at the keyboard, spastically. It was naked with flesh that was wet and grayish, covered with dark splotches. To touch that skin, to have it touch you would be worse than death.

  Shaw turned to leave the room, but when he opened the door he saw the bricks were once more in place. He was walled in. He turned around, afraid to leave his back exposed to the thing. Almost by instinct he began whispering to himself over and over something that he had first learned as a child.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up…”

  Though he tried to say it as quietly as he could, and stay as still as he could, the thing heard him. It stopped its mad flopping and seizures and looked up at him. It had no face.

  He opened his eyes to find himself on the couch from last night. He lay frozen for several moments, the fear still so tangible that he could not move. When he finally did he caught a parallel movement out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head to find only his blurry reflection in the TV screen. Without his glasses on, it didn’t seem to have much of a face either.

  The dream followed him around the next day like a guilty secret, even into the sunlight. He met Brock at 10 a.m. Early for Shaw, though Brock had already been awake for hours. He wondered when Brock ever slept.

  “Well yeah it makes perfect sense,” said Brock. “I mean it’s a radio telescope. Radio waves are just another form of light, one that cuts through the atmosphere better than visible light and so gives us really clear pictures of things out there. But since it’s radio waves, it also translates really easily into sound. There’s whole New Age CDs out there of the literal music of the stars, various nebula and other neat things translated into sound.

  “You know it’s funny,” added Brock thoughtfully. “All this time I watched that telescope move and wondered what was moving it, and I never once thought about what it was looking at.”

  “This sound Brock, you never heard anything like it. It was like…. I don’t know, I don’t have the words for it.”

  “Well I bet it’s pretty similar to some of the other space sounds I’ve heard. But I guess I could listen to it tonight, I mean as long as the telescope is going to be pointing out there anyway I might as well collect some data. My boss has been asking, how long do you think it’ll take you to cut it from the system?”

  Shaw hesitated. He almost never lied, but something…

  “A few days.”

  “Well, hell, I’ll see you tonig
ht.”

  Chapter 3

  ********************

  Shaw spent the day making preparations. First half of the day went to buying supplies. He ran simulations by reason and experience, creating the network connections in his head and running over what would be needed and where. New cables, new portable hard drives and adapters. Speakers, the best available. He fled from store to store, skittering away from the bright sun as he moved from building to car and back again. He thought about getting sound analysis software, but knew he wouldn’t have time to learn how to use it. Kit would know someone, people like Kit always knew someone. He ended up spending almost as much on new equipment as he was making from the entire job.

  The second half of the day was spent at the university. Finding the right computer was easy, he remembered which one Node 8 had tried to communicate with from the night before. After all these years the second computer still had the programs to receive and process the data, all he had to do was activate them again. Around 2 p.m. a class came down, the professor planning to use the older section of the network to teach some computer basics to his class. Shaw bullied them off, with a sense of authority, of entitlement he’d never known before, and didn’t even question. When the professor complained he merely invoked the name of the head of the department, a confrontation that was more trouble than the professor was interested in just to get access to some junk in the basement.

  By 4 p.m. he was ready. The data coming from Node 8 would be recorded on the portable hard drives, as well as whatever data came from the buried program on the second computer. He had nine hours to go, and nothing to do. His period of frenzied activity had way overshot the mark. As he sat there, for the first time that day, he looked up at the wall where the cable vanished into it. He realized he must have been blocking out the very thought of the black room on the other side of that wall all day. Should he go over there, make sure no one had messed with it? He shivered and realized he was afraid of it. Afraid of walking alone into the room that had encompassed his nightmare just hours before. Most nightmares seemed silly in the light of day, so much less real somehow. This one somehow made the light of day seem less real. He decided to spend the rest of the day dozing in a student lounge somewhere on the other end of the campus.