Mary collected the dismembered hand and walked to a small table located near the main operating table, where she laid it with the palm facing up. The fingers still wriggled and grasped at imagined things and the figure on the operating table glanced at its detached hand and smiled, believing it to be waving at its former owner. Mary had made the cut above the wrist and now overlapped its flesh with the ruined remains of her own amputated hand. Where the two overlapped, she drove a nail through the skin and bone, flipping the hand over to bend the protruding end of the nail flat against the inside of her forearm. She lifted her new hand and watched the fingers twitch and curl erratically and she smiled a devious and insane smile of satisfaction. It was a smile born in a mind that sat alone somewhere, frozen, childlike and shrinking from reason, as if reason was something dangerous in the shadows. The figure on the bed had left now, shambling along another corridor, humming its senseless song.
Jake hid under the mummy-man’s bed. A figure passed by, its feet scraping against the tiled floor, nails long and looped. It had one hand missing, like the bad nurse, and the blood dripped bright and runny from the space left behind. The blood splashed onto the floor in regular little droplets, like breadcrumbs being left as markers for a way back out of the enchanted forest. The mummy-man stirred again. His muffled protests, if they were protests, were suppressed by the bandages swathed about his head. When the small boy judged it to be safe, he stuck his head out from beneath the trolley bed. This was a bad place. But if he wanted the fruit, bread, milk and jelly he had found in the kitchen, he had to come this way. He would take the good things back to the nice lady and keep waiting with her until his mummy came for him. The nice lady with black hair and deep, sad eyes.
Jake did not know why he was here. He did not like this hospital and he did not feel poorly. And he was frightened of the bad nurse with a hand missing. The first stopping place on the return journey was the mummy-man’s bed. Then the big room with lots of beds and the people that cried a lot, then across the big hall and down one last corridor to the nice lady’s room.
Jake slid out from under the table and ran as fast as he could to the end of the corridor, where he stopped and peered around the corner. Sometimes there was an old man standing by the big window here and Jake did not like him. When he saw Jake, he always started shaking very fast and made a noise like the tools that Daddy used to mend things with, a whirring, fast noise. But he was not there today and Jake could run past the big window. The big room was next.
There were poorly people in this room and they cried all the time. Jake did not know what they were so sad about and why they lay next to each other like the puppies Jake had last year. But Jake did not think these were nice people, not nice like the puppies, and when they got down from their beds they were all stuck together with not enough arms and legs. Jake walked slowly through the big room. It was dark and smelt of horrible things, old things, wet things. He could hear soft weeping and things moving awkwardly, but he kept his eyes down, concentrating on the dull red line that ran from one end of the room to the other like a train track.
Jake was about to push open the big doors and leave the big room when he heard a noise and he stood very still. The sound was coming from the other side of the big doors. Within seconds, he was under one of the last beds. He tried to stop breathing, as he knew what was coming next. On the bed above him, two people moaned, sighed and sobbed. A limb was draped over the edge of the bed and Jake could see it was two arms melted into one arm.
He could count all the way up to ten, so it was quite easy to add up the eight fingers and three thumbs on the one hand. Then the big doors opened.
‘Jake, Jake, are you in here child?’ It was the bad nurse with a hand missing. ‘Do you want to see my nice new hand, child? It’s very pretty!’ she called as she travelled down the row of beds, further and further away from Jake.
As she moved, she admired her nice new hand, turning it this way and that and sighing. The fingers clawed and fisted themselves without her prompting, as light from the line of high, deep-set windows pierced the gloom at regimental intervals and lit the flesh from different angles.
Jake watched her shoes and listened to the clink of their heels as they carried the bad nurse with a new hand away from his hiding place. Then there was silence. Jake waited. Silence could be as frightening as noise when it was the wrong kind of silence, the kind of silence after a bolt of lightning and before a clap of thunder. The waiting silence was always full of fears and dreads and wild imaginings, mostly worse than the things that came next. Mostly, but not always. Time moved on and Jake waited.
Why had the shoes stopped clicking? Had the bad nurse left? Was he alone, a small boy hiding from nothing? She had gone, he knew it. Absolutely knew it, no doubt at all. Then Jake saw a flower fall to the floor; a single daisy, still blooming, soaked in blood and folded heavily. The delicate petals were cleaved, torn and bleeding as if they were made of ripped skin. He clenched his fists bravely and pulled back the blanket that hung down from the bed.
‘Hello child.’ The bad nurse’s horrible face was there, inches from Jake’s own face, staring at him, smiling like a wicked witch. The flowers were dropping from the big hole in the back of her head, like blooms cascading from a tree, with blood for sap, and the nurse’s new hand was stretching towards Jake, twitching and grabbing.
Chapter Eighteen
2036. October, Sunday. 6.04 a.m.
The connection was established at 6.04 a.m. in the Douglas Institute, in the room that housed the chair and generator. It was only a small beginning, but it was the start nonetheless. The previous tears had been triggered; one by Robert sitting in the chair designed by Daniel Douglas and two by impulses channeled through Robert’s and Andrews’ CCI implants. But the connection generated at 6.04 a.m. was the first pangs of a labor, as the machine began to rip a hole in the veil separating the two planes, unforced from Earth’s side of the divide.
The tear began as an infinitesimal speck of light, suspended in the air, four feet above ground level, in the chamber where the chair and generator were situated. Just as life teems at the microscopic level, an infinite amount of potential was breeding inside this concentrated point. And as it grew, expanded and blossomed it enveloped the space it filled and changed it forever. It was as if the color was being washed from an original painting to leave a cold, grey landscape behind. All vibrancy and vitality had been diluted from the room, to leave a black and white photograph of what was before.
The tear was drawing the potency from this world to feed its own existence, and then reconstituting the energy to fuel its growth. The rupture opened slowly, creeping into the corners of the room, crawling like long shadows and moving through the stonewalls into the cell chambers. The tear’s strength built and concurrently it flowed through the other three walls of the room. The soulless shells of the afterlife clamored to move through the link, but it was still too tenuous to facilitate a mass exodus into this world. Initially it would require the common denominator of electrical impulses, but in time, the dead would learn to pass through the tear at will and walk the Earth as soulless flesh.
***
Robert and Andrews helped each other to their feet and conducted a quick survey of the room.
The bodies were decaying before their eyes and the flesh that had moments before been wet, animate and pulsing with preternatural life was now blowing away as if it was no more than ash.
‘What the hell just happened?’ Andrews spoke first.
‘These were like the one I saw in the chair room downstairs,’ said Robert.
‘The chair room?’
‘Yes. It seems the man who built this place, my ancestor Daniel Douglas, was engaged in slightly more sinister research than I thought! The lines between fact and fiction seem a bit blurred, but I think he built a chair that was hooked up to a generator and acted as a kind of radio to the afterlife.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, I know, sounds crazy
doesn’t it. From what I saw he was trying to punch a hole in… in whatever separates this world from the next and he was using the chair to do it,’ said Robert.
‘Using a chair?’ repeated Andrews.
‘Yeah. From what I saw it was probably feeding off impulses from the brains of the poor inmates kept in cells in the basement here.’
Andrews was aware he was methodically repeating segments of Robert’s sentences, but he could think of no other way to digest them, so again he repeated, ‘Impulses?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine what the chair was supposed to do. There are cables attached to the skulls of the remains of the inmates, fixed straight into their brains, deep inside. Maybe Daniel was just mad in the end. Maybe he found some kind of blueprint for opening up a doorway. God knows. All I know is that when I touched the chair I got a glimpse of something and then one of these things appeared. And then in the hospital I saw something else, you know the rest.’
‘Yeah,’ said Andrews. ‘Listen, we better push on. I don’t know what we’re gonna find, but I want some answers now and I can only think they’re in that cellar.’
Andrews moved to the open doorway. The door was left open from when Robert had looked beyond the room earlier and now Andrews checked the corridor outside and looked back at Robert. ‘Where does this corridor go?’
‘If we follow it to the left it will link us with the corridor that leads to the main reception hall. The basement is across from that.’
Andrews nodded and continued his reconnoiter of the area immediately outside of the room.
Robert spoke next. ‘Andrews?’
‘Yes, Robert?’
‘I’m a little concerned about what you expect to find.’ Robert sounded hesitant, though he tried to keep it out of his voice.
‘I’m not sure I understand, Robert?’
‘I’m not sure I understand either. At best this is an unexplained supernatural event and it will end in the cellar with the destruction of the equipment.’
‘And at worse?’
‘At worse, we will witness the beginning of the end of everything. But I don’t believe my wife and child will really be in that room waiting for me. Maybe that’s what I’m intended to believe, maybe that’s the bait. But my wife and child are dead and nothing can change that.’
The two men looked at each other for what seemed to Robert like a very long time before he continued, ‘And so are your wife and child my friend. Whatever we think is possible.’
Andrews looked away and went through the motions of checking the corridor again. ‘You mean whatever I think is possible don’t you? I’ve always been a pragmatist, Robert, and I won’t jeopardize what we have to do here, but if there is any chance, however small, that I can see my wife and child again, even for a second, then I’ll hold on to that. Okay?’
Robert realized he was not asking him, he was telling him, so he agreed, ‘Okay.’
The two men now moved into the corridor. Robert led the way holding the hunting knife, not feeling particularly well armed, and Andrews followed closely behind holding the gun. They were left alone now with their own thoughts in the dreadful quiet of the house, an absence of sound that seemed to be caused by the stripping down of every paradigm of normality, so that just the abnormal prevailed. Andrews knew Robert was lying. He knew the other man hoped for some kind of reconciliation in the basement, just as ardently as he did, for some contact with the loved ones they had so cruelly lost.
They had arrived at the main corridor that led into the reception hall. Andrews checked it first, peering around the corner and looking both ways, and then they moved into the passageway. Robert faced forward with Andrews behind, walking backwards and watching the sections they left behind, gun leveled and ready. As they progressed, they passed the large windows that ran the length of the left wall. Dawn was washing the main lawn area at the front of the asylum in a ghostly veil of grey light that made the scene look vaguely lunar, and in the distance were the commanding wrought iron gates, bearing the legend, “The Douglas Institute.”
Halfway down the corridor three of their senses alerted them to an alteration in the character of the place. The quality of air changed and was saturated with a metallic taste that made Robert shiver as the image of a rusted fork sliding across his tongue loomed. Then there was an indistinct heaviness to the air, like entering a room where gas has been allowed to build up. This was accompanied by a concentrated, oppressive smell of dead flowers, sickly sweet and suffocating. And this was in turn followed by a barely audible hum. A sound almost undetectable at first, but revealing itself gradually, as its volume fluctuated. It was the sound of the greyness that was proliferating and had now reached the expanse of the main hall, thirty feet ahead of them. Then there was laughter. Far away and tragic sounding.
The two men glanced at each other and Robert looked pale and edgy as he spoke. ‘Guess you get this kind of thing all the time, right?’
Andrews smiled slightly. ‘You wouldn’t believe how often I have to break into mad houses and repel the undead, it’s getting to be a regular weekend thing now.’
‘It’s an institute not a mad house,’ corrected Robert, his smile even weaker.
Abruptly, there was a distinct wavering in the perception of the objects that occupied the corridor. A chair, small table, paintings of hunting scenes, and the walls themselves, now seemed as viewed through dense convex glass or through heat haze off a road.
The two men instinctively crouched, and Andrews whispered, ‘It’s like what we saw in the other room.’
Robert backed up to Andrews’ side. ‘Yeah, but that was localized where the things appeared. This looks like some kind of wave, moving… moving this way!’
The flux they were observing, the making insubstantial of solid objects along the corridor, was coming closer. And the greyish hue that had originated in the chair room was swelling behind it, tainting everything it touched with its lifeless, lusterless fingers. Now it was decaying, defacing and changing the things it swarmed over, leaving them ancient and bent, soaked in time and dilapidation but also fundamentally different; changed on a molecular level into something deformed.
Robert and Andrews were disorientated by the spectacle but unable to avert their eyes. The chair legs had become sinewy in their design, wooden muscle fiber now flexed in the substance of the four limbs and the piece of furniture began to move. It stretched its new attachments and moved them as they were constituted of tissue and tendons. The paintings of hunting scenes became a washed out and bleak depiction of shocking malevolence. The paint swirling on the canvas, reforming the subject matter and reproducing a portrayal of deplorable savagery. Rabid dogs tearing the throat from a helpless fox pinned down by the red-coated huntsmen. A horse with its mouth foaming and eyes wild with abject terror, its guts spilled by the repeated raking assault of the claws and teeth of dogs and huntsmen alike. And the carnage in the painting moved as the scene played out, becoming three-dimensional and bulging from the canvas.
The walls, windows, floors and ceilings dripped a grey sludge, the texture of moist cement, which made surfaces irregular and alien. And as they watched the bizarre display at the head of the corridor, both men became aware of a nullifying of their senses. Whereas they had been keened to the point of razor sharpness only moments before, they now floundered in a quagmire of dulled responses. An oppressive weight instantly brought them to their knees, and when Andrews glanced at Robert, he saw that a thin line of blood was trickling from the other man’s ear.
Andrews quickly checked his own ears, probing lightly with his fingertips and smearing the blood he found there. As he stared blankly at his bloodstained fingers, a scorching pain blazed through Andrews’ skull, searing the area of his brain that recognized it and creasing his body. He screamed, rocking back and forth and holding his head in his hands, inadvertently spreading the blood onto his forehead, as the pain radiated downwards. Then the veins in his neck bulged, as if filled with shards of
steel, and his screams were choked in his throat.
Robert’s face was now a mass of swollen blood vessels that rose from his flesh, like roots visible in shallow soil. He clawed at his face, trying to rip a path in his skin for the air to enter and fill the suffocating emptiness. Andrews made a shallow, desperate sound and his vision began to nip in at the edges as the mutable greyness pressed nearer and nearer. It flowed over a world of absolutes, of status quo and rigid laws of physics, and it brought chaos. The table knocked Andrews over as it scurried along like a wooden spider and behind it, from the grey, sprang changed things, fixtures and fittings imbued now with motor functions.
The pain rose in a steep crescendo, like white-hot blunt rods ramming against the insides of their craniums. And just when it seemed the only outlet left for the pressure was for their skulls to split open, their CCI Holographic Projection implants began to function. Not as they were intended to operate however, but at an accelerated rate, throwing dozens of beams directly into the advancing grey shroud. This caused multiple tears in the membrane of the new, altered world that was approaching. The beams jumped from one rip to the next, in a frantic, random pattern, like the light from a searchlight. Five breaches were created, then ten, then fifteen and then twenty were sliced into the oncoming transmutation of this little section of the world.
The two men pitched forward and vomited, disorientated as if a length of taut cable had been fixed inside each head, temple to temple, and had slowly began to tighten. But then, as their skulls were being crushed from within, the cable snapped and lashed at their brains as it whipped free. There was a silence for a few breathless seconds. Andrew and Robert exchanged looks, almost insensate as they waited, knowing the quiet was full of a building tension. The changing of things was now inches away from their outstretched legs, and both men knew it was hopeless to try and outrun it, though in their present state, it would be more of a crawl.
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