Cautiously, although he could not understand why he should show caution, he touched the chair. Nothing happened. He put his other hand on the opposite armrest so that he stood bent forward and holding the armrests like he was restricting its movement. At first the sensation in his palms was almost imperceptible, a prickling, scratching feeling as though he held something with spines that pressed into his skin lightly, even pleasurably. Robert turned his head sideways and looked through the open door into the chamber. He thought he heard a laugh, hollow and cold. It was more of an echo of the past than an event from the present. Then there was a click and the faint emission of fumes as the generator’s motor rumbled into life.
Robert’s head clicked back to the generator, he still held the armrests as he watched a light blue shock of electricity travel sporadically along the wires that ran from the machine to the chair. Stupefied and as motionless as a mannequin, Robert observed the current dissipate when it hit the receivers in the chair and a charge jumped to both of his hands like small rodents leaping onto his flesh, claws hooking into the skin. The veins on the back of Robert’s hand become engorged and prominent and the membrane tightened to accommodate the swollen vessels. Beneath, raised tracks began to worm their way up over his wrist and into his forearm like tiny insects burrowing and weaving below the surface.
Robert’s head tilted backwards and his pupils dilated and rolled upwards as the veins in his arms rose further, as if he was being inflated through his fingertips. He began to shake violently and bubbling white foam appeared between his clenched teeth. His temples throbbed and the veins became like thick tubing, stretching the skin painfully. Then Robert dreamed.
He dreamed of a cloudless blue sky above a blue lake with a surface like porcelain. He lay on the shore of the lake alone, gazing lazily at the faultless sky. There was a child playing games in the sun. He could feel warmth on his face and smell the sweet, slightly pungent fragrances of flowers in the air. He turned on his side and touched a flower and its vibrant color smudged and came off on his fingers. Had the child painted these flowers? There was a call from the lake. It was Alex and Jake. They were in a small rowing boat, frantically pointing at something behind Robert and shouting. No, not shouting, screaming.
Robert turned. A huge, clumsy, amorphous black thing was approaching in the sky, contrasting against the blue, dark and blotting out the sun. Its odor was carried before it, rank and acrid. Robert choked on the fumes and his eyes smarted and wept from the effects of the rancid smell. Now the shape soared overhead and Robert strained his eyes against the fireball sun to follow the course of its flight. As Robert attempted to rise, vines crept towards him through the tall grass, like eels wriggling through the murky growths of a seabed. They pierced the skin of his forearms and squirmed in a serpentine path just below the surface, effectively tying him to the ground.
‘Alex, Jake, row to me, for God’s sake row to me!’ Robert screamed as he pulled feverishly at the stems holding him.
The vines continued to race up Robert’s arms, quickly reaching his shoulders. He appeared as if he was growing out of the Earth itself and he screamed again as the cloud-like thing began a descent, with a trajectory that brought it directly in line with the little rowing boat.
And now Alex was sobbing, ‘It wasn’t my fault Robert, it wasn’t my fault!’
Robert opened his mouth to call again but no sound issued. The shoots had arrived at his neck and had begun to push towards his skull, the skin on his throat bulging now like he was exposed to the vacuum of space and straining almost to the point of exploding. His face looked like a badly inked road map and the network of stems spread beneath his cheeks and forced his eyes to protrude. Alex gathered Jake into her arms and watched in terror as the black thing sailed through the air towards them. Then a jab of pain stabbed Robert in the right temple and he opened his eyes. He still held the chair but the swelling in his veins was reducing, swiftly returning them to their normal state and Robert released his grip on the chair, staggering backwards.
The jab of pain in his temple came again and he put his hand to it before realizing it was his CCI. The device’s neural connection had somehow interrupted whatever connection had been instituted by the chair and fed by the generator. Robert stepped back further, unsure still of where he was, then instinctively activated his CCI and spoke groggily.
‘Hello?’ As he did so he displayed the menu, noticing he had recorded twelve hours of footage, yet he had only estimated five minutes to have elapsed since he first touched the chair.
‘Mr. Douglas? Mr. Robert Douglas?’
‘Yes. Yes, who is this?’ Robert asked, still looking at the menu suspended in the air.
‘My name is Detective Andrews sir, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.’
Chapter Six
2036. October, Saturday. Dusk
Six miles from Babel, Alex stifled another yawn and looked at her wristwatch, 8.00 p.m. Only six miles left of their journey home. Jake was still drifting in and out of sleep and he broke his repose slightly with a long sigh. Alex felt fatigue applying heavy pressure on her eyelids and she gave another big, open-mouthed yawn. Jake responded with a less dramatic effort of his own and rolled his head to face Alex.
Four miles. Alex hunched and lowered her shoulders. It was dark now and the road was clouded and blurred by October rain and surface spray. Alex blinked hard and tried to concentrate. Jake was breathing deeply, completely lost in slumber, half-smiling to himself. Alex wondered what he was dreaming of at that moment and she was suddenly washed over by an intense, searing feeling of love for her child. She turned her attention away from the road momentarily to hold her child’s hand and look at his calm, half-smiling face.
A warm, consuming wave of emotion welled and spilled over Alex. The vision of Jake asleep in the car with his face slightly creased into a secret smile and his hair soft and velvety against the skin of the cheek was indelibly burned into her mind. Alex did not see the car driving towards her on the wrong side of the road, travelling too fast in an effort to overtake another car and hoping that Alex would slow to allow the maneuver.
Alex was catapulted forward on impact, her safety belt snapping tight and breaking her shoulder. The breath left her body as she jarred backwards and slammed hard against her seat. Her eyes were filled with intense lights bursting into her field of vision, myriads of colors, reds, whites, blues, greens and all competing to overwhelm her senses. Metallic tasting blood seeped from somewhere into her mouth and her left leg was smashed, the bone protruding from the thigh and glistening wetly like porcelain dipped in glaze.
She tried desperately to adjust her vision as panic bit at her brain and she fought for air. Crescendos of noise rose around her, twisting, grinding, and groaning metal violently collapsing in on itself. Glass imploding devastatingly. And the tumult grew until it seemed it could not grow any more.
A sharp, bitter smell filled her nostrils, as if oil was seeping into Alex’s nose, and she choked on the taste of it as it slid down her throat. The last thing she saw was a large, dark object approaching the windscreen. For a moment Alex thought it was a huge, clumsy bird flying straight at her, demonically intent on ripping her to pieces. Then the driver of the other vehicle exploded through Alex’s windscreen, severing his head and crushing her chest. He had been thrown clean through his windscreen at the point of collision, as he had not worn a seatbelt. He covered the distance between the two cars in seconds, even though they had bounced apart again.
Alex managed a stifled cry as blood spurted from her mouth and splashed over the decapitated form now pinning her into the seat. Alex fought to stay awake, knowing it was the same fight as the one to stay alive. Shards of glass had sprayed over her face piercing her eyes. She didn’t know now if her eyes were open or shut but she knew she was blind. She could not feel her arms or legs but she could somehow feel the pressure of Jake’s hand in hers. Or did she only imagine that? She turned towards Jake and heard his breathing and s
he smiled. Her head felt crumpled and too low on her shoulders, like someone was trying to fold her into a suitcase. Through the rain-splattered window she thought she could see again and there was Robert lying in a field of bright, swaying, tall flowers.
He was asleep too and she heard herself whisper, ‘Everyone’s asleep now.’
But there was no sound. She felt like she and Jake were floating in a small wooden boat on a perfect lake, everything was serene and the sun beat down on her exposed skin. Then the warmth was no longer external and she was aware of a rapid, white-hot rush of pain travelling through her body. Then nothing. But she never let go of Jake’s hand.
Chapter Seven
‘Hello?’ Alex called. She was terribly cold.
Although her body was dead, Alex was faintly aware of noise and colors around her, above her. She thought she might still have been floating. She had the sensation of movement without trying to move. Now the colors seemed to be behind her eyelids, shot from a projector deep inside her brain. Then the noises were far away, as if someone was calling to her repeatedly from the far shore of a great lake. She was mercifully unaware of the car crash.
Her memories were confused and entwined and they overlapped each other in murky, muddled layers. She had been drifting on a lake and she was being called from the distant shore? Warned. Her child Jake had been there. Then something had happened but she just couldn’t remember and now she was floating through this place of flickering, bouncing lights. She wanted to sleep but she felt she should fight against it, at least till the light display subsided and then she would find out what happened next. She felt that was important.
Alex had lost her left leg and right arm and even if she had lived her other two limbs would have been amputated. Her soul was tearing itself free from her body to begin its flight away from the corporeal state. The intangible essence of Alex was almost discorporate now and the play of lights on her eyelids had stopped. She thought her child was embracing her and she fell asleep with him safe and warm in her arms.
Chapter Eight
2036. October, Saturday. Midnight
Hope Hospital was a fifteen-minute drive from the town of Babel but Robert had to make the thirty-minute journey to Babel from the Douglas Institute first. Detective Inspector Andrews had phoned Robert to inform him of a car crash and now Robert sat in a small corridor within the hospital. The room was bare and felt cold. He had spoken to the doctor and had been told Alex and Jake were dead.
Robert assimilated the horror of the death of his wife and only child in the present, whilst simultaneously stepping into a bleak, colorless future where he had lost the two most important people in his life. A future that could not exist because it could have nothing to sustain its state of being; it was unimaginable by definition.
Robert’s head was bowed and he felt as if someone had erased his emotions. As if he was now just a caricature of a man with no real vitality. He looked down at the clean, tiled floor. A hollow and empty feeling reached up through the polished surface and began to creep slowly up through his legs, clawing his flesh with aching, numbing talons. A sterile smelling, disinfected phantom, emerging from the floor, howling its intent to choke Robert’s soul and leave him as cold and vacant as the little corridor he now occupied.
He was lost now within his awful mourning, being devoured by a spectral energy of sorrow that threatened to drag him down into a pool of dark hurting. He struggled not to succumb to the feeling of desolation but it weighed heavily on him. It was pulling deeper into senselessness, where something was waiting for him. Something that would feed on his torment. Something that was curious to taste his sadness. A base thing that was ultimately ruinous and malignant. It lived just below the fabric of his consciousness and it was lonely and hungry.
Robert found he wasn’t breathing. The air had stopped filling his lungs and he was choking on nothingness.
It was as if the invisible presence was depriving him of breath to facilitate his drowning in its world of blackness and wretched grief. Robert gasped, throwing his head back, staring wildly and gasping, ‘Alex! My God, help me, Alex!’
Then he was painfully aware of his chest expanding beyond its capacity in an attempt to get oxygen inside its walls. It seemed as if he fought on the crest of an airless vacuum for an eternity before he surmounted the pinnacle and his chest fell again in the relief of achieving a breath.
A doctor appeared, and even in his half aware state Robert was amazed that the man did not even pass comment. The white-coated man strolled past as if this was a dream and Robert’s behavior was normal, and the doctor’s reaction was fitting because he was merely a character in the dream. Robert looked at him and he continued for two more steps before stopping and turning slightly.
The man peered back over one shoulder of his white coat. But it wasn’t a man. Or a woman. The thing that now stood half-turned and gazing at Robert was inhuman. Something flawed and defiled. Something despicable. It was in the form, build, and attire of a man but in those only. There was the rough outline of a head, a general shape and size, but there was no definition of hair, features and skin. In their place there was an indescribably rapid sequence of violent, spasmodic imagery. An ill-defined, jerking blur of movement.
And an odor accompanied the spectacle; a slight burning or smoldering like the smell that emanates from an electrical appliance as it begins to overheat. It did not overpower or suffocate, but as the smell materialized, it instilled a sharp, metallic sensation in Robert’s mouth. Robert tasted his fingertips and his saliva had turned murky brown like the fluid that issued from a dead battery.
Amongst the accelerated vibrations of the thing in the corridor there was a face. The features could almost be glimpsed but only as one might discern an object that was massively out of alignment and viewed from behind a sheet of heat haze. The whole head seemed to be trying to adjust or tune itself into a frequency where it could sustain a stable condition. There was a whirring, buzzing noise accompanying the frenzied shifting of the head’s outline coupled with an eerie and strained gargling sound.
Through the mesmerizing, frantic shuddering of the head, Robert caught a glimpse of its true form. For one brief moment the movement slowed sufficiently for Robert to discern a malevolent, malformed, heinous lump of flesh sat atop the shoulders of the humanoid frame. Unseeing eyes slid in liquid rivulets of filth and oozed bubbling into a cavity that once may have housed a nose. Teeth sharp and dangerous were protruding at impossible angles from behind wet, engorged, purple lips that spilled a bile-like substance over a long, pointed chin. As the grotesque head slowed its vibrations, the whole body stooped into a crooked, bent pose. And its progress was now hampered by one leg having grown fully ten inches longer than its opposite limb. It dragged this cumbersome, heavy extremity behind it now, as it fixed its sunken, black, empty eye sockets on Robert.
And a thick, guttural voice escaped its quivering mouth, ‘You see me…’
Robert screamed in horror as the thing turned to continue on its way, head thrusting at fantastic speeds and moaning wetly as it shook. Robert realized he was now standing and he suddenly felt fully and acutely aware again of the corridor and his reason for being there. His face carried the pale, bleached pallor of gravestones, painted macabre white by a fluorescent moon.
His forehead was beaded with an icy cold sweat that seeped through his pores to give the porcelain texture of his skin a strange luminosity and he fell back into his chair, bent his head into his hands and sobbed, ‘I’m going mad, dear God that’s it, I’m going mad.’
Chapter Nine
Alex awoke. She did not know how long she had slept and had no means of marking the passage of time spent in that sweet delirium. And what wonderful, vivid dreams, lavishly colored with surreal imagery, somehow impossible yet strangely plausible. She seemed to sleep more these days but she did not know why or for how long that had been the case. Again she wondered, where were all the clocks? Had she not owned at least one or two at so
me time in the past? Recently the division between wakefulness and sleep seemed to have become blurred and sometimes she was unsure if she had actually woken or merely dreamed that event too. It was raining again. It was raining when she had driven to Babel. When was that? It seemed like it had been always been raining.
Thin films of sleep departed gradually and lucidity applied a tenuous grip on her awareness. The fog of slumber receded sufficiently for her senses to allow an awareness of her surroundings. Familiarity began to assert itself, pushing and prodding like the speculative jabs of a stick in the hand of an inquisitive child. Not yet invasive, but testing the sleeper with the outlines of forms that the adjusting eye was acquainted with. The fall of drawn curtains and the indistinct lines of a dressing table. The concavity of a wall made almost spherical by the bent shadows that were formed when the moonlight found opportunities to seep into the room.
Strange how these things possess a metamorphic ability in the brief interlude between sleep and wakefulness. Seemingly immutable objects, that during the hours of daylight do not exhibit the proclivity to transform into menacing shapes and forms, can assume sinister characteristics in the ill-defined half-light of dawn. As our eyes adjust to the shadows, familiar pieces of furniture can become figures, or worse still monsters in those moments. Alex remembered that once Jake had woken and tearfully described a monster standing by his door. An incredibly tall man dressed in black and wearing a hat. Alex had explained how the same mischievous entities that used to make shoes while the cobblers slept, before the advent of mass production, now found themselves unemployed and now busied themselves with creating these apparitions. Then working at incredible speeds they would re assemble everything to its original and rightful design as the sleeper woke.
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