The dark smelled almost metallic and tasted like blood. In fact, he could not tell if he smelled or tasted the thing and he instinctively put his fingers to his tongue, suspicious of blood in his mouth. But there was none. The small, fine hairs on the back of his neck were attentive to the chill borne on the night too, and he noted without comprehension that he had been feeling this a lot lately.
That poor guy. Images of the two corpses pushed their way up into his thoughts, as if they were pushing their way up through damp earth. A wisp of swirling smoke rose from his mouth, disappearing into the cold, bleak night. Then neural connections tingled and a soft vibration in his wrist purred, alerting him to an incoming call. He stroked a glowing light at his wrist and a menu appeared in front of his right eye. He froze. “Number not recognized.” How many times had he endured what was to follow? Sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled into his eyes, blurring the menu’s definition as if he was viewing it from underwater. He touched his wrist, “no HIP link available” as usual. He touched his wrist again and the connection was substantiated.
‘Hello,’ he breathed into the dark. Above him, cigarette smoke and the frozen cloud of his breath joined and drifted off into the night.
There was the crackle and hiss of static interference that rose and fell in its intensity before the voice began. The voice sounded as if it was far away, like it was fighting to make itself heard, broadcasting through a raging blizzard or across time itself. Then there was silence and this pause seemed to last for eternity.
Then the voice spoke again, clearer and with a sadness and hopelessness that managed to reach through the link and curl frozen fingers of emptiness around Andrews’ heart.
‘Stephen? Stephen, can you hear me? Stephen?’
‘I can hear you, Rachel. I can hear you,’ replied Andrews and the first tear formed in one eye.
‘Stephen, are you there? It’s so dark here, Stephen, where are you? We can’t find you, we can’t, Stephen, help us please!’
‘I can’t be with you honey, I’m so sorry.’
‘Stephen, I can’t hear you. I love you so much. It’s so cold. We are so alone, Stephen, please come for us. When will you come?’
‘Rachel, I want to, honey, but I don’t know how, Rachel.’ The blizzard of static energy re-established itself and as Andrews wiped away his tears he heard his dead wife’s failing voice calling his name.
Chapter Eleven
2036. October, Sunday. 4.50 a.m.
The hospital felt alive, the air pulsing with electric vibrations, ethereal energies that had become the essence of the place. The hairs on Robert’s body bristled with static charges and a faint, dull ache grew above the bridge of his nose and reached deep into his brain. Like the rumbling of a gargantuan, ancient machine that had lain dormant, but now stirred into life, a reverberating throb echoed in Robert’s ears. The noise registered as far away, reaching him from miles below ground, buried for an age. Robert covered his ears, not sure if he could block out the noise, or if the pounding was only the echo of the blunt pain building in his head.
When he had lain in Alex’s arms she had always told him he was special. Robert and Alex had been intensely close. She was strong, resolute and fiercely loyal and he had loved her and Jake beyond all else. But when Alex and Jake were together they entered a world too insubstantial to exist in reality. A delicate and intangible fairytale realm, that some mothers can transport their young to, through stories and plays. Alex seemed to exist in both the real and the unreal world concurrently. Being Robert’s wife, and being his partner in everything, anchored her in the practical world, but her relationship with Jake was of that other land, where landscapes were fantastic and improbable, alien and real and painted as if from memory. And she was so very beautiful.
The noise was growing and it had direction now. It was thudding both inside and outside his head. Robert walked to the end of the corridor. For a moment he was confused; there were two routes to take now, left or right, which direction had he come from? There were no signs, no indication of an exit, in fact no information at all. He was sure he had come from the right-hand corridor but now everything looked white, featureless and identical. He decided to turn into the right-hand corridor.
He needed to get out of the hospital now, right now. He was acutely aware that his wife and child were here somewhere and he felt like he was abandoning them, leaving them neatly arranged in a cold room somewhere in the labyrinth of corridors. Leaving them alone with people who did not know them or care about them, save for categorizing them and storing them away.
But he had to get out. He was suddenly seized by the notion that if he did not, he might spend the rest of his life penned in this endless maze of corridors like an experimental rat. The hammer falls of pain in his skull were now compounded by the accelerated beat of his heart. Then, he became aware that although he had walked in excess of maybe one hundred and fifty feet, the corridor still stretched out remorselessly ahead of him. He could not discern any break in the walls, as they yawned out before him, to a vanishing point lost somewhere in a milky-white, tiled and plastered distance.
The lights blinked out and Robert froze. He extended his arms into the thick darkness, his fingers unraveling as if to feel the blackness, and then retracting in case there were things hiding in the gloom. The silence accompanying the darkness was wrong and even the incessant banging deep in his brain had ceased. The Stygian cloak that had enveloped everything felt close, smothering and impenetrable. There was no hint of illumination, either in the corridor or the world outside the windows, and Robert held his breath, eyes closed tight, even though it made no difference. Then a faint glow appeared in the distant reaches of the corridor, slight and flickering but growing. And getting closer. Then came a sound, soft and with a slight slap like the sound of flesh on wet tiles.
Robert took one step backwards, torn between facing what may still be in front of him, or running headlong into the blackness behind, into that pulsating, shifting corridor. Slowly the brightness emitting from the far reaches of the corridor ahead of Robert began to eat up the distance between it and himself, until he realized it was only the overhead lighting concealed in suspended ceiling panels. But the soft padding noise was getting closer. There was a bend in the corridor ten feet in front of Robert, veering to the right, and the sound seemed to be originating from that direction.
Robert moved to the wall on his right and pressed his back against it, palms flat and out to his sides. Then he edged closer to the bend in the corridor. There seemed to be too much of an interval between the occurrences of the sound for it to be the fall of feet. Robert tried to apply a version of the equation used to estimate the distance of a storm by calculating the time that elapses between thunderclaps. He guessed that a separation of three seconds between footsteps meant the owner of the feet must be approximately thirty feet in height. He discarded the theory: the ceiling was nine feet high. He inched closer to the corner.
When he arrived at the corner the noise was so close that Robert was certain he was going to come face to face with whatever was making it within seconds. He steeled himself and swung round into the next section of corridor. Nothing. He rested against the wall again, he could still hear the rhythmic beating and it was closer than ever.
Impossible. He circled twice, nothing in the corridor he had just left, and even the moving corridor had steadied with the lights springing back into life. The left side corridor was empty too and stretched away to its own horizon, too long but unoccupied.
Robert rested his back against the wall, then crouched head in hands, desperately trying to regain some equilibrium and control. What is this? Is this me having some kind of breakdown?
He thought he heard the thuds again, but this time they left a resonance in his chest and he flattened his palms against the wall again. But instantly he felt the vibrations there and before his brain could assimilate this information, the wall collapsed in a shower of brick and plaster.
&
nbsp; Robert flung himself across the corridor, trying to keep his back to the debris that was littering it. He rammed hard against the opposite wall, spinning to face the explosion, as clouds of dust and grit rained down like a shower of hailstones. Through the fog that rose from the rubble, Robert saw the indistinct outline of the cavity created by the blast. It was impossible to see past the opening and to what lay beyond, due to the choking clouds that spewed from the wreckage. Robert coughed, spitting brick and plaster particles as he dragged himself into a sitting position. But there was something moving in the confusion, something chest-high and long coming out of the opening towards Robert. He strained to see, rubbing his eyes to clear the films of filth scratching at his pupils. When he opened his eyes again, a face hung in front of his face, nose to nose, breathing and grinning.
Robert’s heart nearly stopped. His muscles calcified and his stomach hollowed. The face regarded him, cocked slightly to one side as if he was an insect being studied by its captor. When it straightened it did so as if motorized by gears and cogs, rather than muscles and tendons. The face was a totally smooth, flawless thing, crafted from a porcelain-like substance. It had no excesses of flesh, no lips, no eyelids and no ears, so that its eyeballs were virtually visible in their entirety. Its mouth was a functional slit and the ears merely a continuation of the facial skin. There was no hair either, and the forehead terminated abruptly in a crescent shaped line. Similarly there was no flesh below the jaw line or beyond, where the ears should have been located. It was as if Robert was looking at a mask, a mask representing a human face that was somehow invested with vitality.
Robert summoned the courage from somewhere to lean to one side and see what kept the face floating in the air. Behind the face, where the remainder of a head should have existed, there was a lurid, bloody mess of tissue, pulped and drawn together tightly then twisted into cord. It was like a length of rope but braided from living tissue. Where the flesh began to taper away, streams of dark silver wires, curling round each other like mechanical worms, merged with the soft tissue matter, and sinewy tendons were motored by relays. The cable, swaying steadily like an elongated metal-scaled snake, looped and curled on itself, until it disappeared into the vestiges of the wall.
‘Robert, it is rude to stare.’
Robert’s head fell back to its original position. Something dripped from the thing’s “neck,” where it was still composed of organic material, and the face spiraled on its trunk, high into the air, then glided back down to face Robert again. Robert considered running, but his fear rubbed out the picture of him successfully negotiating the maze of corridors to escape. In its place was sketched an image of him maybe achieving twenty feet before the thing caught and entwined him like a giant cobra. He could feel the breath leaving his body, as his mind elaborated the scene.
‘What… are… you?’ Robert said, struggling to form the words.
‘Don’t you mean, who am I, Robert? Or, who are we? For I am more than one. My physical sum is two but my consciousness expands to nurture many. Do you know your Bible, Robert? Call me legion, for we are many!’
From the haze of the aperture that the abomination issued from, came another sound, a humming, buzzing sound, like wings being beaten at incredible speeds. The droning belonged to a different being and it now hovered two feet to the right of Robert. It was some form of wasp, but horrifically mutated, so that it had an insidious little human face, full of loathing and hatred.
The wasp-thing was fully twelve inches long, with gaudy yellow and red coloring, and it licked its lips with a black tongue, displaying a set of sharp, needled teeth. Its long, bulbous abdomen lifted as it held its body vertical, and Robert felt the dread anticipation of a strike and he lifted his arms to protect himself.
There was a wet, flicking sound, like a whip dipped in oil and cracked in the silence of a graveyard, and the wasp-thing was plucked from the air by a tongue. The tongue managed to unfurl from the face-entity and ensnare the wasp in a second. The tongue was grotesquely constructed from flesh and blood, but it was barbed with wicked spines. The spines were so thick and protracted that they could never retract down the throat of any predators born in the natural world. The wasp-thing’s back was snapped and the spikes impaled its body, as it vanished into the face entity’s mouth. Robert convulsed and felt a watery solution of bile and vomit fill his mouth.
‘I apologize, Robert, it’s so hard to retain one’s humanity sometimes, I’m afraid,’ and the face’s eyes widened in their smooth sockets to focus on Robert with a gaze that was both pestiferous and sympathetic at the same time.
‘I am the essence of Daniel Douglas that was. His thoughts, his dreams, his memories and his hopes. I am also the fruit of his death. The thing that was born from his death. Do you understand, Robert Douglas?’
Robert pushed his head back against the wall, but the face followed and continued to speak. ‘Allow me to teach you something about humanity, Robert Douglas.’
Robert turned his head sideways so that he looked into the corridor and replied, ‘You are going to teach me about humanity?’
‘Ha, yes, I take your point,’ said the face and the slit that served as its mouth smiled without humor. ‘However, do not make the error of interpreting my intentions through my outward form. You cannot appreciate the… circumstances that have prevailed upon me and brought me into being.’
Robert still presented the thing with his profile and from the furthest point in the corridor he had recently walked down, he thought he now saw a light, a beam like that of a torch, playing erratically in the gloom. But the hovering face was oblivious to this development and continued to speak, its voice sonorous with a slight synthetic edge passing through it. ‘Robert Douglas. There is great change on the horizon, a change that you must embrace because you are focal to it.’
Robert turned to look at the smooth, white face again and said, ‘I am focal? What are you talking about? And what are you anyway? This can only be a nightmare, or I have lost my mind and I’m trapped inside my own head with… with whatever it is you represent to me!’
‘Ha! I admire your resolve, Robert Douglas, your clinical evaluation of the situation you find yourself in. But I’m afraid this is very real, on many levels, and you must listen to what I have to tell you, however you feel about the validity of it now.’
The thing corkscrewed into the air again, then plummeted to within inches of Robert’s face, but now a fine track of yellow liquid ran from one corner of its mouth and its eyes seemed more manic, another wet drip sounding from the living part of its trunk.
‘Take a look at your twenty-first century, Robert Douglas. Plugged into a computer, barricaded in your rooms, and yet you call it social networking. Radiation pumps into your brains from communication devices, destroying them on a cellular level. Alcohol keeps you docile and oblivious to the machinations of your leaders and to their subversive agendas.
‘Your children are made to mature prematurely and are quickly brainwashed into the compulsive nature of your society. They are bludgeoned with incessant advertising, into the belief that more and more introverted forms of entertainment and materialistic gain are the only goals worth aspiring to. The structured and engineered process of converting the populace into a slave-like, partially awake, automated mass grinds on. And those few enlightened enough to speak out in indignation are branded subversive or maladjusted and are vilified.
‘Zombie-like you stagger, salivating and groping for that new car or new television. You are mimics of the shells that wander the planes of the next world, blindly craving a renewed life force. And so the lie is endlessly propagated. The world is going to hell in a handcart, Robert Douglas, and it doesn’t care.’ The face pushed closer to Robert, forcing his head back against the wall, and its skin was moist and cold. ‘As long as the cart runs on unleaded, of course.’
Robert was aware of the torch beam on the periphery of his vision getting closer and he was certain he could hear footsteps. The face w
as still oblivious to this, however.
‘Do you know what the repercussion of man’s behavior is, Robert Douglas, can you even guess?’
Robert realized he would have to keep the thing occupied so that it did not catch sight of the advancing light and he engaged the face. ‘No, I have no idea, because I don’t know what you are talking about. And I don’t believe you are real. This is not happening.’
‘Then if this truly is fantasy, Robert Douglas, you will not mind if I take the liberty of enlightening you?’
The beam was nearer still, maybe forty feet away now, and there were definitely footsteps accompanying the stream of light, but before Robert could reply the face withdrew slightly. From the pulpiness behind the face, where the flesh and cabling merged, there was the sound of something emerging. Two steel, jointed spider-legs slid forward towards Robert, budding from the carcass-like stalk. They stopped dead, parallel to each other at equal distances from his forehead. From each of the conical ends of the legs came a filament that met its counterpart and fused into a single fibrous spike. The spike quivered in front of Robert’s forehead and from its origin in the fleshy trunk behind the face a viscid, yellow mixture pumped through the legs and built up at the point of the spike.
Robert felt like the proverbial rabbit in the glare of the headlights and could only stare, stupefied at the vibrating needlepoint. Then it rocked backwards slightly, before darting forward to enter Robert’s head, just above the bridge of his nose.
Robert’s body shook as the concoction was administrated into his skull, and the face tilted from side to side to observe his reaction before speaking again. ‘Do not worry, Robert Douglas. This will not harm you. It is a means of transferring information on a biological and chemical level.
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