The reason for Robert’s visit today was in response to a message from the builders contracted to carry out the work on the institute. They had unearthed a false wall and when they had passed through it a small chamber had been revealed. This room displayed evidence of fire damage, which suggested the wall had been built after the events of the 1922 blaze. The chamber was walled with exposed brick but the far wall was obviously also false. The builders had contacted Robert at this point and asked if he wished this wall to be demolished too. Robert had instructed them to dismantle the second wall then advise him of their findings. And so the door had been discovered and Robert had been summoned. As soon as he had been alerted to the revelation, Robert had been convinced the door would solve the mystery of the ornate key.
Robert parked the car and began to collect a bundle of plans and documents from the passenger’s seat. From nowhere a head was thrust through the open window, filling the space between Robert and the windscreen.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Robert and his head rocked back, hitting the headrest hard.
‘Evening, Mr. Douglas,’ said the builder.
Robert closed his eyes and sighed, ‘You nearly gave me a bloody heart attack, Leonard!’
‘Sorry about that,’ conceded Leonard. Then he added, ‘Looks like the cabin fever’s got to you already and you haven’t even moved in yet!’
‘No, you creeping up scaring the crap out of me got to me, Leonard!’ corrected Robert.
Leonard Willis was a round, short man, ruddy faced with a flattened nose and clownish, curled, copper hair. He was smug, self-righteous, and absolutely convinced of his own importance but he was unequivocally the best builder within seventy miles.
‘Anyway,’ continued Leonard, ‘we got as far as breaking through the second wall after I spoke with you and found the door. You want me to come and take a look with you?’
‘No, it’s fine, Leonard. You get off and I’ll see you in the morning, thanks,’ replied Robert, glad to be rid of the man.
‘Fine.’ Leonard left without saying goodbye, seemingly oblivious to the oversight.
‘Yeah, bye,’ added Robert under his breath and with a note of sarcasm as the builder climbed into his van and began to drive down the long, narrow approach to the institute.
Robert entered the institute by the original, heavily decorative front door, with its twin marble pillars supporting a high stone roof. He fought his way through the plastic sheeting, abandoned tea mugs, and accumulated building paraphernalia. He assured himself that Leonard had a plan and that he had even let the rest of his building team in on it. He crouched to pass his tall frame through the rent the builders had created in the first false wall. As he brushed the plaster and dust from his thick blond hair, Robert scanned the unearthed room.
There was nothing noteworthy, simply a study with desk and chair, bureau, lamp stand, and no windows. Everything was partially destroyed by fire, so it was difficult to gauge whether walls, floor and ceiling had decayed or been incinerated. Directly in front of Robert was the second false wall, partly demolished by the builders. This wall served to conceal the door that Leonard had reported and Robert’s curiosity curled into a little knot in his stomach at the sight of it. There was something intrinsically disquieting about a bricked-up door and Robert’s imagination had already opened it and was exploring a gateway to Hell hidden on the other side! What struck Robert as particularly strange was the fact that the door was made of steel, faded by time, and stained with dull smears where flames had licked at the surface and found it impassable.
Robert withdrew the key from his jacket and stared at it intently before approaching the steel door. He held the key in front of the lock and his hand shook as if the thing was agitated in his grasp, almost animated by the proximity of the lock. Robert wondered how long it had been since the key and lock had last been joined. Foreboding stayed his hand and Robert felt a spasm of dread pass through his body, playing on his skin like an electric current, and he withdrew the key and touched the door instead.
Smiling at his own unwarranted trepidation Robert made to engage the lock again when a beep from his wrist made him start and he almost dropped the key.
‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me?’ he snapped, frustrated by his own jumpiness.
The small strip grafted just below the skin on the inside of his wrist flashed and purred softly. The band was a standard receiving-insert and when he rubbed his thumb over the blinking light a neural link was activated behind his ear, where the cellular communication device was implanted. This in turn allowed a connection to similar implants in other humans or other devices such as computers or cellular phones.
The implants had been introduced over a decade ago in the early 2020s and had been assimilated eagerly by a society hungry for advancement in all areas of technology. A massive publicity campaign was mobilized to assure the public that the advantages outweighed any possible adverse reactions to the interfaces. Potential advances in education, information protection, leisure pursuits, and health were cited as major pluses. However, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the coupling of the human brain with machines. Many people, especially in religious quarters, viewed the procedures as unholy or evidence of mankind’s manipulation by demonic agencies. They abhorred the readiness with which humanity allowed itself to be tagged like pets, in what they interpreted as an exercise in mass control, thinly disguised as gadgetry.
Robert had no such misgivings in becoming a ‘web head’ though. He believed it was an inevitable cog in the machinery of progression and his profession had caused him to embrace the applications. As a physiologist specializing in cybernetic organisms, he worked closely with victims of trauma who had received various implants. His particular field was studying the effects the implants had on human behavior, cognition and higher brain functions such as perception and the changes that occurred therein.
Conversely, Robert’s wife, Alex, loathed the cellular communication implants (CCIs) and she admonished Robert regularly for his use of one. Now the delicate pathways that merged the CCI and his brain waves in an organic, electronic fusion made him aware that Alex was contacting him. The intricacies of the cybernetic network’s interplay with the human brain were still not fully comprehended, even by Robert. It was precisely this vagueness that the non-conformists feared. Alex and Jake were due to travel to Babel today from their old house with the last of their personal possessions. Robert spoke to Alex whilst still scrutinizing the steel door. ‘Hi honey, what’s up?’
‘Hello sweetheart, you at the mad house?’
‘It’s not a mad house, it’s an institute, and yes, I’m there.’
‘No it’s a nut house and you’re its first inmate, honey!’ and she laughed out loud. ‘And I suppose I’m talking to you through that microwave oven in your head, yeah?’
‘If you mean my CCI, yes you are.’
‘I bought you a state of the art cellular phone Robert, why don’t you use it? Why don’t you have the implant reversed? If God had wanted us to communicate like that we would have been born with telephones sticking out of our ears.’
‘That’s like saying, why don’t you use the state of the art bicycle I bought you to get around, instead of the car you own!’
‘Yes, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, would it?’
‘Well, we can’t all be perfect specimens of fitness and health, like you, Alex!’
‘Hmm,’ she mused. ‘I don’t recall you rejecting my perfect specimens last night, lover!’
Robert traced his thumb across his wrist again and a holographic image projected from his eye to hang suspended in the air, eight inches in front of his face. There was his wife Alex’s face, slightly shimmering with the connection but unmistakably beautiful and Robert instinctively reached out to touch the representation.
‘Hello honey!’ and the image of Alex gave a little wave. ‘Me and Jake are setting off now. We’ll be at the house in about four hours. You gonna be home tonight? I
got chicken, fresh vegetables and a bottle of wine.’
‘Yeah. The builders have knocked down that false wall and called me in. There was another false wall inside the chamber, with a door behind it…’
‘The key?’ Alex cut in.
‘Don’t know, gonna try now. Listen, it’ll be dark before you get to Babel and rain’s forecast, take care okay?’
‘Always honey, see you soon. Hello from Jake, our three year old prodigy who has just buried my keys in the garden!’
‘Bye, love. Bye to Jake and kisses,’ and the image was gone.
Robert thought he heard a sound from beyond the door. Impossible, nothing had been beyond this threshold in over a century. His grandfather’s renovations had not reached this section of the asylum and the second wall had only been breached that morning. But there it was again, a faint pulsing hum almost like the rhythmic intonation of a large car’s engine, a deep droning that could be felt as well as heard. Robert leaned closer to the door and put his ear to the steel. The whine definitely seemed mechanical and it appeared to be in the very fabric of the metal resonating through Robert’s head. If it was audible then it had not increased in volume but it thudded in Robert’s brain as a heavy and thick pounding. It shook through his body as if he was inside a free-falling elevator that had just crashed at the bottom of its shaft.
Robert peeled away from the door, shoved the key into the lock, and turned it with a grunt. Ancient apparatus labored inside the lock as it rotated for the first time in one hundred and fourteen years. There was a series of snaps as the innards aligned themselves. Robert turned and pulled the handle and the steel groaned as it left its frame, a rush of sighing air, dust, and time slipping past Robert to taste the world beyond. The blackness beyond the threshold of the door was absolute and preternatural. It did not flood into the room where Robert stood but instead reached out in soft gossamer threads that twisted and turned to embrace him in wispy talons of nothingness. As he stepped into the void, Robert felt like a fly, knowingly entering a web, and he fumbled for the familiarity of a light switch. He had the unnerving impression that he was about to touch something wet and breathing. Something standing in the shadows waiting for his hand to travel one inch, then it would close its rows of broken-glass teeth on his fingers and rip them from his hand. But all he found was a chunky switch. He flipped it and waited for the antiquated configuration of cables and wires to transmit the signal to the bulbs.
There was a hissing sound, like a moth sizzling on a heated coil, and then the lights blazed. Robert’s eyes narrowed as the huge arrays blinked on and revealed a stairway that sank into more deep shadow. Concrete steps ran away from Robert and as he began the descent he suddenly realized he had no torch to rely on should the aged lights fail. He hesitated, looking back up the stairway then down to where the steps disappeared into a recess. He decided there must be a separate generator powering this section of the institute and he continued slowly, until he entered the dimness.
Once again he was forced to grope in the dark for a light switch, this time on the wall, as it turned to his left to drop another flight of stairs. He found the second switch and flooded the next level with artificial light, standing transfixed like a small animal momentarily spellbound in the headlights of a car. The yellow radiance of the bulbs wrapped around him and it took some seconds for his vision to adapt. He stared around the room. The walls were carved out of rock that must have constituted the foundations of the institute, and they were wet and stained with green-brown moss. The low ceiling was deeply scarred and the floor was earthen and uneven. On each side of the galley-like room there was a row of three, iron-barred cells.
Robert could see the room terminated at the far end in another door; this one fashioned from heavy, dark wood. Although time had ravaged the black paint there was no fire damage either on the door or anywhere in the chamber. This room must have been locked from the outside before the fire had taken hold of the institute. Robert sensed an oppressive texture to the atmosphere that might slowly crush him if he lingered too long. It did not feel like this force was intrinsic to the chamber but rather the chamber housed it, imprisoned it, and just for a fleeting moment, Robert felt something very old was present, something clamoring to be set free.
As he alighted from the stairs and cautiously approached the first cell, he heard the noise again, the dull thump that pulsed through his body like a second heartbeat. Robert’s head collided with one of the lights that were slung from the low ceiling. The interiors of the cells were hidden from view, as there was no illumination in any of the six cubicles. But the fitting Robert had disturbed now swung back and forth, brightening the first cell on either side of the room with the sequence of a pendulum. Robert reeled as the grotesque contents of these cells were revealed to him. The stark light washed over the bones of two skeletons, one in each cell, bones bleached in the harsh glow from the bulb as it washed over them briefly, before plunging the cell back into darkness. In the lighted interludes Robert made out manacles secured to the anklebones of the skeletons, oversized and disproportionate now the corpses were stripped of flesh.
He wished he had brought a torch now, if the lights failed he did not relish being alone in the dark with these specimens. Robert assumed they were inmates of the asylum from around the time of the 1922 fire and he concluded with a shiver of revulsion that they had probably died of thirst after around a week of delirium. Was their death made more pitiful by their nature, or could it be judged more merciful because of it? Their death agonies would manifest in the same forms of madness as their “normal” behavior and that made it all the more macabre.
Robert noticed there were cables stretching from the cells, lying across the central passageway and converging to enter a small room at the end of the chamber. The door to that room was open and the trunks of cables ran through, to be tethered to what looked like a machine. Reaching up, Robert held the wire cage of the second light and shone it into the middle cell on the right, empty, the manacle open. Then the middle left cell, another skeleton in the dark interior, again chained to the far wall.
Robert almost crept passed these middle cells, apprehension lightening his steps as if his footfalls would rouse the wretched bundles of bones and re-animate them, still thirsting and still demented. He stopped at the last cell on the right. The lamp here was off centre due to the intrusion of a supporting ceiling beam and it spilled a cone shaped spotlight into that cell. Robert noticed a small table just outside the cell against the far wall. There was a bowl for washing, a shaving kit and a small drawer built into the base. The drawer was open and glass debris was strewed around the feet of the table, reaching into the cell itself.
Because the ceiling light here was positioned off centre, the last cell on the left was in total darkness. Robert suppressed a shudder as he imagined eye-less dead sockets watching him from the inky blackness of that cell. The configuration of the lights also meant that the last cell on the right was fully illuminated and Robert saw the now familiar shackle on the far wall of the cell, restraining the bony foot. However, this skeletal specimen was not connected to a body as the bone was truncated just above the restraint and the procedure looked uneven and brutal.
As Robert peered harder into the cell, trying to decipher what this strange deviation indicated, his hand suddenly rested on something hard and nodular. He looked down and jolted, retracting his hand from the skeletal extremity jammed into the horizontal bar running across its vertical counterparts. The hand belonged to a skeleton that, unlike the others, was located at the front of the cell, its skull tilted up and looking at Robert from two empty, lifeless cavities. Robert then saw that the shin bone of this poor soul was cut short, matching the dismembered foot that was still held in the wall restraint.
‘What the hell happened here?’ whispered Robert.
Robert crouched to the level of the skeleton. He followed the cable that entered that cell with his fingers, up from the floor outside the bars and through a square
purposely cut into the bars. Where the trunk of the cable ended, spider legs of wires flourished and then spliced into slightly thinner versions and these entered small holes bored into the side of the skull. Robert grimaced and removed his fingers from the cable, turning to view the jumble of conduits that wove across the stone floor into the small room.
‘What is this place?’
Standing, but still looking at the pitiful remains in the last cell, Robert pressed his thumb to his wrist again. A holographic menu, five inches by five inches, flashed into life before Robert’s right eye, projected from his CCI. Robert poked the air where the “record” icon flashed. The menu disappeared and a slender red line, similar to an infrared target beam, emanated from his eye and swept across the mutilated skull leaning against the bars of the cell. Robert then turned, filming the intertwining mass of cables as he picked his way amongst them and into the next room. There was no light in this room but the ceiling fittings in the cell chamber lit it adequately enough.
The ray from Robert’s eye felt its way around the room like a lighthouse beam cutting through fog. In the centre of the room stood a single chair. It was heavily embellished with gratuitous scenes of debauchery and butchery of every type and the wood seemed to squirm in the ecstasy and agony of the acts wrought upon its surface. Years of dust layered it and it was stained with a substance in blotches that covered a large portion of its surface. Connected to the chair through a series of crude receivers, thick wires entered a small but sturdy looking generator, which stood four feet away from the chair.
As Robert moved towards the chair he realized that the cables that left each cell, like the one he witnessed entering the skeleton’s skull, all meshed together into the generator. His foot kicked against a length of glass, obviously fragmented from the flakes in the chamber outside the last cell, and he knelt to examine the lethal looking sliver. It was covered with the same covering of dust as the chair and generator but when Robert blew some of this film away he saw a skin of darker matter that had dried onto the smooth surface and jagged edges. Robert placed the glass back into its own imprint in the dirt and stood to face the chair. Robert noticed the chair oddly faced a blank wall. He ran the red beam of his CCI over the design of the chair, puzzled as to why such a grotesque piece of furniture would have been produced.
Spawn of Man Page 5