by Ryan Notch
He worked like this for days. Once a man who ran towards what he thought was something wonderful, now he ran harder than ever from something terrible. The nights spent in calculations, the days spent in pretending. Days turned to weeks while his nighttime mind thought nothing but four dimensional mechanics.
He realized that this way of thinking, after a while, began to lead down some very strange paths. It was like his mind was being bent out of shape by it. And the only way to make it fit a shape beyond x y and z was to keep bending. He felt he was going down a dark path, one he wouldn’t have followed so readily if the path behind him wasn’t so much worse.
From madness to madness, he thought. Are those really my only options?
His new way of thinking was hard to explain to other people, even his fellow mathematicians. In fact it was getting harder to even talk to other people at all. The things they said were no different from the things that he had said just weeks before, but now normal words and conversations just didn’t seem to apply to his world. He wasn’t the same, didn’t think as people thought. The math was stripping the normalcy of thoughts just as his obsession was stripping the normalcy from his emotions. Looking in the mirror he was having a harder and harder time recognizing himself.
And yet, the equations really did make sense. They worked. Not in any normal conception of mathematics, but in a new way. They showed something the human mind wasn't designed to see. People who wanted to see things in categories and right angles naturally didn't look at the universe as it really was. But the universe wasn’t made just for us, there were other truths, other angles. There weren't words for the things Collin was discovering. A new way to think. His equations were squirming through the hidden places that the real universe, the unseen but very real universe, existed in.
His equations could show them how so many problems seemed unsolvable because we were trying to solve them with only the things we could see, when so much of the truth was darkness. Show them how certain problems that philosophers had spent years going in circles around, like predestination and free will, were easy to solve when looked at in a proper four dimensional framework. But other concepts like “deserve” and “hope” and “morality” just didn’t make much sense anymore.
And what’s more, the new formulas brought out form from the randomness of the bubble chamber impacts beautifully. And not just any random four dimensional cloud, they were beginning to reveal a specific form. And what form there was. It wasn’t just individual hits from some cloud of particles flying through space. No, the closer he looked the more he realized it was a part of something. Something that didn’t move according to Newtonian physics or gravity, but rather with a will. As different parts of it touched the bubble chamber in its searching, he got a more complete view of it. A shape that had no descriptors amongst all the shapes that had ever been imagined before.
Chapter 16
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It was everyone.
It sounded to Shaw like everyone in the entire asylum. Every patient, every doctor, every nurse, intern and janitor. And him, he was screaming with them. Because what it was, what it felt like, left only a scream as a response. He didn’t know how long the screaming lasted, it seemed like a very long time. He wondered if this was why everyone killed themselves, to get away from this horrible contact. But then people stopped, one by one. Because after a while you began to understand the feeling, the way he had begun to understand Its voice. And once you understood It, you didn’t need to scream anymore. You needed to do something else.
There were a few moments of silence after the screams. A silence without peace, but of expectation. Then other screams started, a different kind. Screams of pain. People had started to hurt themselves. He heard a shattering sound next to him. The TV, he could tell by the electric bursting sound it made with a flash of electricity, feel the static in the air. He heard something else there next to him, a flopping shuffling sound that abruptly stopped. He couldn’t help himself, he reached over to feel it. Someone was standing there, by the TV. He ran his hands up their torso to the head, which was imbedded in the screen. Electrocuted. Bobby?
It was all going to happen again. He remembered his dream, what Hemah had been trying to tell him.
“It’s not following you Shaw. It’s l…”
It’s looking for me.
And he had led It here. He didn’t understand how, but what he had done in the lab had somehow summoned it. And now it was all going to happen again. Everyone was going to kill themselves. To do horrible things to themselves until they stopped living, but not all of them fast. And not painlessly.
And me, how long until I start hurting myself? Maybe I’m doing it already and just don’t know because I can’t see it happening.
Then something grabbed his arm. He felt his fingers pulled into a wet mouth. Shaw panicked, yanked his arm away knowing that teeth would be tearing his fingers off in a moment. But in his panic he slipped, almost fell. The grip held fast and the jaws didn’t close, instead they opened wider. The grip pulled harder. Someone was trying to shove Shaw’s hand down their throat.
To choke on it, he realized. He flailed madly, punching at the persons face and kneeing them in the stomach. Finally he struggled free and ran, tripping and falling after only a few steps. From the floor he heard them all, going about their terrible work. Some mumbling things he couldn’t understand, the words spilling over each other. The sounds they made, Shaw tried to figure them out. Tried to figure out what they meant, what they were doing to themselves. But how could he recognize the sounds of things he’d never imagined outside of nightmares?
What can I do? What should I do? he asked himself. Can I save them? Maybe I could get drugs from the medicine cabinet somehow, put them to sleep?
But what medicine? The pharmacy was full of drugs, all had labels he could only perhaps understand if he could read them. He couldn’t help these people. Couldn’t reason with them, couldn’t restrain them. They weren’t in a mania or directionlessly violent. They went about their grisly work with a will.
That left only the simple answer.
Escape.
There were keys. Nurses, doctors, orderlies. But how to recognize them in the dark. By their clothes? Feel his way over dead and dying until he figured a lab coat from a dressing gown? By their position? Maybe, maybe people would tend to kill themselves where they worked.
He decided to try his therapists office first. He had been there enough time that he hoped he could find it in the dark. He began to make his way out of the rec-room, hands in front of him. He walked slow, trying to make no noise. The things he heard; slurping, shuffling, smacking, weeping. A familiar voice to his right, mumbling to herself.
“I can’t get it out, I can’t get it out now. It’s not its fault it won’t come out, is it?”
He wanted to keep walking, to ignore it. But he didn’t really know for sure, so had to try.
“Teresa, is that you? Teresa, you’re not hurting yourself are you? You don’t have to hurt yourself?”
“But it shouldn’t be in there, should it,” she asked, her voice straining from an effort.
“It’s fine where it is. Come with me Teresa, we can leave,” he pleaded with her. “Please don’t hurt yourself…”
“It’s coming out now. Here, hold this.”
He stepped away, pulling his hands back as if she could see them to grab them. He only made it a few more steps before his hands bumped up against someone. He hands came back wet from some warm liquid. He tried not to think about what it was, but he knew. The person he bumped into just stood there, didn’t move or say anything. Shaw moved around him, loosing his bearings already. He walked until he found a wall, then moved along it until he found a checkers board, then decided he was moving in the wrong direction and turned around. He made his way one hand out, the other staying in contact with the wall, his fingers quietly hissing against the wallpaper.
He made it to the doorway and out into th
e hall. The one, he felt certain, led to his therapists office. He walked for perhaps twenty feet, perhaps five before he heard running footsteps in front of him. They ended with a sharp crack upon the wall just in front of him, then a sound that sounded like nothing so much as an arm full of books being dropped. He crossed to the other side of the hall and continued on. He walked past a bathroom where he heard someone speaking in tongues and bedroom with the sounds of grunting and rubber being stretched.
His senses became more keyed up the longer he was in the dark, and wondered what was the most time without light he had ever spent before. Though he stopped at every sound and wondered at every smell, in truth he didn’t recognize anything without his eyes to provide the lion’s share of the information. He remembered the time he woke up in the black room and wiped cold sweat from his eyes. He was having trouble breathing. He needed to see, kept having involuntary impulses to reach for a cell phone light that wasn’t there.
Finally he came to the stretch of offices. He went door to door to door, all locked. He ran his hands across the windows, feeling the roughness of the frosted glass and the wires that ran along them. Break proof.
He scarcely had time to wonder what to try next when he heard footsteps coming down the hall. Loud taps, hard shoes. Not a patients slippers or the Velcro sneakers they were allowed. He hadn’t thought of that before. He could tell the doctors by their shoes. The sound of jingling, metallic grating and shifting.
Keys. Keys unlocking a door.
It sounded like the third one down. Dr. Morrow’s office. The door wasn’t closed behind him. Shaw cautiously moved in that direction, trying not to make any noise. Standing in the doorway he heard the jangling of the keys again as they hit something wooden. They had been tossed down on the desk, it seemed (habit the doctor had shown before). Then footsteps to the other side of the room. They bumped into something which fell over. They kept moving and Shaw heard a hiss, the same as his fingers had made along the wallpaper. It stopped after a bit and Shaw heard a smash of breaking glass. A window? No, the framed motivational poster on the wall of the Boston marathon, which the doctor had competed in. The glass made a tinkling sound as the doctor manipulated the shards. Then a whoosh of air from a couch pillow as he sat down. A ragged scratching noise started a few moments later which Shaw couldn’t identify, and didn’t want to.
He edged his way into the room, trying to stay on the opposite wall as the couch, to edge around the glass. He moved ever so slow, examining his every move. Every muscle of every step manipulated deliberately so as to make not a sound. Scratch scracth scratch came from the couch. A suicidal inmate once told Shaw that the blade of a piece of broken glass was a hundred times sharper than a razor, because it shattered like a crystal with molecule thin edges. The doctor was finding a much slower way to do what he was doing than the average suicide did.
Shaw’s heart beat like a hammer, his breath seemed ragged and the effort to slow and quiet it was making him faint. Could he be heard? How could he not, he sounded so loud to himself. At last he came to the desk. Carefully, oh so carefully he moved his hands across it. Papers, a computer, the base of a desk lamp. And then, white hot, something burned his forearm. He hissed an involuntary breath of pain. The desk lamp, it was still on, though no light shone forth!
He froze, but to late. The noises from the couch had stopped, was he heard?
“SHHAAAAAWWWWW!!!”
The doctors scream pushed Shaw’s panic to the breaking point. His very skin flushed cold. It was being three and having your parents catch you with a broken vase, times a million. How does he know it’s me?! Can he see me?!
Dr. Morrow stood, and his feet crunched on the broken glass. Shaw broke his paralysis and forced himself to move towards the wall, away from where he was, as quiet and quick as he could.
“Shaw, always looking! I’m your Doctor, Shaw. I want to show you something. I want to show you now.”
Shaw imagined that blade of glass in the doctors hand. The doctor made his way to the desk, hands knocking papers off of it. Feeling around for his patient. Shaw meanwhile edged away from it. The room was not large, he could actually feel the air of the doctors flailing arms as he slipped behind him. He was almost out when he misjudged the location of himself relative to the broken glass and, cursing himself for stupidity, stepped right in it. His shoes protected him but the doctor stopped flailing at the noise and immediately blindly stumbled towards Shaw.
Shaw ran too, hitting almost full tilt on the door jamb. He bent a fingernail back harshly in the impact and pain flashed behind his eyes. The doctor was upon him fast grabbed at his shirt while something made a slicing sound through the air as it whipped by his head. Shaw hadn’t stopped moving though and pulled away out the door, running as fast as he dared. Knowing if he hit the wall and fell it would be the end, as sure as if he was caught from behind.
Alternate strategies ran through his head, though he didn’t have the presence of mind to truly consider them. Try and run quietly and sneak away, lose the doctor in the corridors. No plan seemed to work, as the doctor seemed always a few paces behind. He expected the doctor to scream his name again, but instead he only heard the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing. Shaw could make no progress and could barely maintain what distance he had. How long before he hit a dead end? How long until he was outpaced by this man who Shaw knew ran three miles every morning?
Shaw couldn’t tell how long he ran, it felt both like mere moments and an eternity of twisted passages leaving him hopelessly lost. Just as he was beginning to tire he found a hope. The sound of running water off to his left. The smell of chlorine as well. It was the showers. He ran towards the sound, feeling his way to the double doors on swinging hinges and pushing his way through.
Immediately he felt a blast of steam. There were at least several of the shower heads running, seemingly all on hot. Shaw moved carefully through, remembering as best he could the layout. The very tiles he put his hands on were hot to the touch. He heard the doors swing open behind him, but couldn’t hear the doctors footsteps over the noise. Which meant the doctor couldn’t hear his either. Shaw could escape if he was lucky, but if he was unlucky the doctor would come upon him without him realizing it.
He turned away from the row he was following down a shower isle, hoping the doctor would continue straight. He miscalculated and a scalding blast of water hit his hand. He overcompensated in the other direction and tripped over something, falling into a puddle of searing water. As he jerked to his knees his hand fell on what he had tripped over. It was a leg. In the second he touched it he felt it was smooth and shaved. She was sitting under the scalding water, boiling herself to death. Shaw thought he felt the leg twitch as he pulled his hand away.
He pulled himself up, more careful to stay between the jets of water on either side this time. He made his way towards where he thought the other door was, the skin on his back crawling from the anticipating of a shard of glass being shoved through it at any moment. He could tell by the touch of metal on his fingertips when he came to the locker room (the doors to all the lockers having been removed on installation to discourage hiding objects). He wiped sweat from his eyes, almost laughing at the futility of it. He was almost to the door, almost safe (for the moment anyway). But a few steps from the door he stopped himself.
If I were Doctor Morrow, wouldn’t I be waiting right there? he thought. The perfect trap, Shaw would have to walk right into him. Was it safer to just go for it, or to risk bumping into him while doubling back towards the other doors? The temptation to just leave now was almost overpowering, but Shaw had the worst feeling someone was in the room with him, trying to wait quietly. Shaw carefully turned around and headed back towards the door he had entered by. Not by the same route, but this time circling around the other side of the room. As he went he picked up a towel from a bench, wrapping it around his left forearm in case he had to use it for a shield. As he walked up to the door he held it out in front of him, his right hand
in a fist and ready to strike first should he bump into anyone.
He didn’t though, and pushed through the swinging door as quietly as he could, moving it slowly closed behind him. He had his bearing back, more or less. He thought about heading towards the office to try for the keys again, but thought to head towards the nurses break room instead. Some of them might have gone there to die. It was in the opposite direction but he thought it was safer than risking running into the doctor at his offices again. When he got a good two turns away from the showers, his relief flooded through him so powerfully that he almost threw up.
He forced himself to keep moving, knowing that if he stopped and rested he might not have the will to get up again. And who knew how long he was safe from hurting himself, let alone why? One right, two lefts. He was sure that was the right way to the nurses lounge, but now he was at a dead end. Two rights? The all too familiar halls of Saint Severinus had become completely alien by the loss of a single sense. He felt like he was lost in his own house.
Someone walking past him in the hall. Slippers, not hard shoes. Step slide…step slide…step slide. One leg dragging? Was it even human? Shaw held still until it was long down the hall and went in the opposite direction.
He smelt something strong and chemical up ahead. Ammonia. Not something the inmates had access to. A janitors closet was the only possibility he could think of. As he got closer he could smell other things too, dampness and dirty mop water. But the ammonia above all, it was overpowering. He heard inside as well. The sound of a liquid splashing, and gulping. A male voice. After a minute the gulping stopped and he could hear ragged breathing and moaning. Shaw knew that people sometimes killed themselves by drinking household chemicals. A terrible way to die, with burns to the throat and esophagus. But how fast was it? How long would he have to wait, listening to that poor man? Should he wait, or just go in and search for the keys now?