‘It must be your choice, Martin; it must be your choice! Come to us.’
Martin felt a slowing of his momentum. The black emotions washed over him, disorientating him. The second gateway seemed too far away now. He experienced the distance between himself and that bright ring of water and it was measured in loss, not in its span. And now something was emerging from the black gateway. Something shaped like a man, but malformed and twisted. There was a brief taste of panic somewhere in what now constituted Andrews and he peered back at what had been his body.
The form had vanished now and the distorted form pushing out of the black gateway again confronted Andrews. And now Andrews could discern features and detail. It was a version of him. A corrupt, distorted and altered image of his earthly body. It looked no more than a husk, a shell or a vessel awaiting occupancy, and Andrews realized it was being offered up as a receptacle for his essence now.
Then there was activity around the second gateway. The bright ring of water there was agitated now, as its mass was churned into swirling galaxies of whitened water. Andrews’ forward momentum was halted as his attention was drawn to the disturbance and he hung motionless, wrapped in the blackness that spewed from the dark gateway.
‘Come to us, Martin. It must be your choice, Martin, it must be your choice! Come to us!’ The words became frantic and the black strands of nothingness tightened their grip. But they quivered with a latent energy that was ultimately fuelled by nothing more dynamic than their own potential. Andrews resisted their will, as the disruption along the surface of the bright gateway increased. Andrews could now see shapes breaking from the roiling waters of the bright ring and these forms were indistinct and ill defined as they began to travel towards him.
The black strands began to loosen their grip and Andrews felt himself moving away from both gateways now, as if he were in a vacuum and the slightest touch had instigated a propulsion that would carrying him halfway across a universe. The black threads were converging now and had snatched the vessel that had emerged from the dark gateway.
With this action, the malign and malefic emotions that poured from the dark gateway and that had seemed subliminal in their efforts to persuade Andrews, now became desperate. The vessel was thrust at Andrews, and although he had no perception of touch, he sensed the weight of the shell as it was forced upon his being.
The thing had seemed lifeless before, but now the black threads were infiltrating its body and imbuing animation. Its eyes flickered open and its mouth yawned wide, as if in pain. And the blackness of the threads filled these orifices so that the shell appeared even more vacant.
Then it spoke to Andrews with a labored, straining voice and the imploring and beseeching tone had vanished, replaced by loathing and hatred. ‘You fucking weak little bastard. I will suck your fucking soul out of your rotting carcass and swallow it whole. I will rip your spirit apart and piss in the shreds of your being. Come into us! Come into us now, you fucking maggot!’
And Andrews felt as if he was being smothered by the thing’s malevolence, as if he could drown in the disease of its outpourings and he looked to the bright gateway in desperation. There was a shove or a pull, it was hard to distinguish and Andrews was propelled towards the form that had issued from the tumult that was the gateway surface. It had separated into two distinct figures, one smaller than the other, although they were still joined in some way reminiscent of hand holding, thought Andrews.
The dark vessel moved behind Andrews, but its tethers were stretching now and one by one they snapped, leaving it stranded like an astronaut devoid of the tubes attaching it to the mother craft.
The two figures shimmered and their nature leaped from nebulous to solid and back to hazy outlines again. But as Andrews approached, a feeling of remembrance and recognition tugged at his consciousness. The further this feeling matured the more concrete the figures became, and congealed into definite shapes until Andrew knew them.
Andrews stopped his forward motion very close to the surface of the bright gateway, which had now calmed. The two figures faced him and they were holding hands. They were mother and child. They were his wife and son and they were smiling.
Then slivers of light began to worm their way slowly from the luminous edges of the figures. They were not the imposing and aggressive threads that leaped from the dark gateway, but vibrant, vital versions of this phenomenon. They pulsated with an irresistible force that made Andrews want them entwined around his being. And want them to push into him, as the dark threads had pushed into the wasted shell. And moments later they did envelope him. But he was moving too quickly, shooting past his wife and son, and he tried to reach for them and tried to call out. But he could not, his speed was increasing beyond all plausible boundaries, hurtling him forward, so that he was sure his very essence would have ripped asunder, were it not for the cocoon of the bright threads. And everything outside the cocoon, his wife and child and the bright gateway, blurred into one stream of color and light. The crescendo of noise and motion compounded until, without warning, he stopped dead.
Then newly formed tear ducts opened and sent glistening droplets over cheeks, barely keeping pace with the creation of flesh and bone as Andrews was reassembled in the afterlife. Sunlight flooded across his face and Andrews found he could lift and perceive his hands.
And the first sound that formed and stuttered from his newly formed voice box was, ‘Rachel, Joseph.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
2036. October, Sunday. 11.10 a.m.
The gunshots were a distant echo as Robert was lifted into the chair and he was vaguely aware of hands, moist and spongy, arranging his insensible limbs into a seated position. His vision began to impose itself again and shapes and outlines became clearer, although there was no absolute clarity as yet. He knew that some of the beasts he had seen materialize in the corridor were here now. He could hear their whispered pants, their salivating and the splatter of tissue on the stone floor from their loose bodies. As his sight returned he recognized the small anti-room where the chair was housed. The same room he had previously visited with his grandfather’s key. He was seated in the chair now and everything was grey and old.
Robert recalled the events of the last time he entered this room as his hands traced the contours of the chair. The creatures had dragged the cables out of the inmates’ cells in the adjoining chamber and were now holding the ends that accommodated the electrodes. These were the implements that were inserted in the wretches’ skulls over a century before and spliced with their living brain tissue in an attempt to power the chair’s energy. Now Robert could distinguish the individual creatures and they were driving the clawed cables into the soft mass of their temples, frenziedly hammering the electrodes home, fine sprays of red, green and yellow spurting from the wounds as the connection was made with the matter of their brains.
Robert felt the chair begin to vibrate beneath his body, pulsing in time with his own heartbeat, swelling and falling in unison with his own irregular, desperate breaths. Then the wood began to fracture, lengths curling and turning like vines, sprouting like buds as they gravitated towards Robert’s flesh. As the fragments and slivers broke the surface of Robert’s skin and sought the veins below, he felt nothing, save for a detached sense of pain, as if he were feeling the agonies in his mind and not through the nerve endings in his body. And now, in front of the chair, as if superimposed on the wall, another tear was building in energy and size.
This opening was different though. The colors were more intense, reds, blues and harsh whites, and the pungent stench that issued from the developing hole was death and decay. Robert’s skin tingled as if charged and the opening flourished with layers of folded air shedding to reveal a black, cold and ancient emptiness. From this, something was pushing in the throes of birth as it fought to exist and to become. Robert knew what it was before it protruded from the opening. The head extended on its steel umbilical cord, the throbbing matter was both grown and grafted and its bre
ath was labored.
Then the thin mouth spoke. ‘Hello Robert, it is good to see you again.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Time passed and Alex and Frank were unaware of the events that filled the hours. Missiles had destroyed the section of trench where Alex and Frank had been and now they were buried under tens of dead bodies. But the trench had not actually been an objective. The missiles were fired in an arbitrary style and the generals had no more of a plan formulated than the hordes that swept across the plains below them. The machine had introduced electrical technology to this realm of the dead and weapons had been produced. But there was no real enemy, no empirical ambition or ideology behind the war, just the futile staging of half-remembered battles.
The trench was two-thirds full of carcasses at this section and the giant spiders made their way over the bodies, as if stealthily picking their way through a room full of sleeping librarians. Their huge engorged bodies crawled over the fallen bodies with infinite patience, flexing the metallic legs with needle sharp points and lightly treading on the corpses as they searched. Then one would detect movement, slight and momentary, but substantial enough to divert the spider’s attention, and it would then nimbly and slyly creep to within feet of its quarry, like a cat tracking a doomed bird.
In this instance it was one of the organic, mechanic hybrid creatures that had been thrown into the trench when a missile had hit nearby. The thing had been blown thirty feet through the air by the explosion and now sat on the top layer of the fallen horde. It had lost both legs and one of its crab-like arms and now sat dazed, quizzically watching the spider approach, frozen in childlike wonder. The spider edged nearer and the injured creature extended its remaining knurled, crusted arm. Its neck had been torn and ripped and was now kept in place only by virtue of several relays and coils, although bone and tissue were also visible through the wound.
The spider regarded the proffered arm by tilting its eye-less, face-less body and yawning wide its ferociously armed mouth. Then it sliced the outstretched limb off with a single sweep of one of its bladed legs. The hybrid creature continued to rotate the useless and bloodied stump and small fountains of blood and lubricants spilled out from the clean-cut stub. Then the spider crouched and moved in closer, biting the creature’s head from its shoulders in a sudden dipping, darting motion.
Just then Alex opened her eyes and tried to judge her position. She recalled the explosion and she realized she was now buried in the aftermath of that event. Bodies in various states of destruction and dismemberment weighed her down and the stench was palpable, but she was confident she had not suffered anything more serious than cuts and bruises. She tried to push against the thing on top of her but only succeeded in shifting its position.
She heard slight movement as the spider turned. She waited for a second then whispered, ‘Frank, Frank?’
Alex tried again but with more urgency and the huge spider began to glide towards her position. She estimated she was beneath three to four bodies, but it may as well have been a hundred, and she shoved and kicked hopelessly. The spider hovered over her position now and calculated. Its arachnid legs, steel tipped but motored by flesh and bone, jabbed and prodded at the bodies that covered Alex and she heard the turmoil above her.
‘Frank? Frank, down here, get me out!’ Alex shouted and the spider redoubled its efforts, piercing and pulling bodies, cutting and threshing until Alex realized it was not a pair of hands attempting to liberate her at all and definitely not Frank.
Chinks of light dropped into Alex’s tomb and blood flowed over her like an underground stream as the spider hacked and chopped. Alex was frantically trying to dig her way out in the opposite direction but as her arms broke through the top stratum of corpses, the spider arrived at her legs and sent a tapered, metal leg-blade carving through the muscle of one thigh. Alex screamed and the foul creature made a gleeful hissing noise as it shuffled backwards, dragging Alex under the sea of bodies again. Alex grabbed hold of legs and arms, some dissected or mutilated but none able to help her resist the spider’s progress. When she surfaced again Alex saw Frank, dazed and stumbling across the corpse-strewn trench, on a collision course with the spider.
Alex willed the pain searing through her thigh away, but the capacity to do so was eluding her and she realized that panic was overriding her new abilities. The spider kept Alex pinned by her leg, as it turned its body in the direction of Frank. Its legs were ten feet in length and the blade section at the tips occupied two feet of this. As the spider rotated ninety degrees, the steel blade in Alex’s thigh twisted, slicing more muscle tissue, and Alex grasped the thing’s leg desperately. Anger welled up inside Alex, blended with frustration, the dreadful longing to help her child, and injected through with a sense of terrible injustice. She wrenched the spider’s leg from its socket and was showered in a red-green gunk that hemorrhaged from the cavity created.
The spider squealed pitifully and Alex removed the barbed limb from her leg with a yell. The spider scurried in a circle, confused at its imbalance, as it tried to plant a phantom limb on the ground. Completely unaware of Alex and Frank now, it assumed the behavior of a wounded animal, lowered its profile and began to skulk in retreat towards the blasted area of the trench. Alex sprang to her feet, still wielding the severed spider leg and ran towards the monster, leaping into the air as she neared the thing and landing on its back.
She steadied herself, jeering, ‘I’m getting my son, you fucking freak!’ Then she plunged the blade-tipped leg deep into the spider’s plump back.
The spider tried to buck her, rotating one way, then the other and even reversing into the side of the trench. But Alex held on, driving the tip deeper, until three feet of the spider’s dismembered limb was implanted in its back. There was a gushing sound and a spring of black blood erupted from the creature’s back as if the thing had burst and Alex had to jump from the spider as it perceptibly began to deflate. Alex landed near where Frank had now tumbled, and although he looked weak and disorientated he managed to stand and grab Alex’s arm, speaking hoarsely. ‘You are very brave, Alexandra.’
‘Not really, Frank, I just want my child back and these bastards are standing in my way.’
Frank smiled at the profanity, and then looked back over the stack of dead bodies, at the other spiders that were dispersed along the length of the trench, and his smile vanished. ‘I don’t think we can make it any further, Alexandra. We may have followed the trench as far as we can.’
The words of the man in black came back to Alex and she suddenly glimpsed their import, ‘Do not follow the way blindly forever, Alexandra, look up, always up’. The trench continued winding through this landscape ceaselessly and she and Frank were following it as if wearing blinkers. She now appreciated the significance of the situation, Frank would never find his peace on this path and she would not find Jake. She had to look up.
The country that fell away from the other side of the trench was dark, cloaked in an inky gloom that could be mistaken as night at first perusal. But the shroud of night stopped at the lip of the trench, soaring into the sky in a sheer, flat cliff-face, and it hung like a great tidal wave frozen at the precise moment before it broke and swept away everything beneath it.
Alex put out a hand and touched the night and found it had a gelatinous quality, sticky and malleable, not unlike the material the whole environment was shaped from. But as she retracted her hand, the blackness clung, adhering to her skin and gently pulling her towards it. She felt a child-like appeal within its dark folds, an essence clutching her hand, and she thought of Jake again.
Frank’s voice shook her from her fixation and she realized that he had been saying her name repeatedly and that her hand and arm had now been gently tugged into the still, dark curtain. ‘Alexandra? Alexandra?’
Alex dragged her arm from the blackness, feeling the loss that accompanied the act, a hunger that sat in her stomach, unfilled and aching, a connection to the blackness that had seemed mutu
ally dependent.
‘Alexandra?’ repeated Frank.
‘I’m fine, Francis, but you’re right, we must go no further, the trench is your prison, not a route to your salvation, Francis. I realize that now.’
‘You’re saying that we should give up, Alexandra, after coming this far? Just turn around and return to my post? And then what?’
‘No, Francis, that’s not what I’m saying. We can’t go on, so,’ and she lifted her head back and gazed at the perpendicular wall of blackness, ‘so we will go up.’
Frank followed her gaze up at the black wall. Then he looked back at Alexandra and said, ‘After you, Alexandra!’
So they began to climb the sheer vertical barricade and initially Frank did not comprehend how they could achieve such a feat, as the surface was not solid. But Alex tutored him in the manipulating of the matter that surrounded them, enabling them to convert the material into hand- and foot-holds. But two issues became clear as they began to ascend hesitantly, they had no idea how far the obstacle extended, or if indeed it had an end, having only Alex’s conviction to base their decisions on. But of more immediate concern was the wall itself. The longing in the blackness was tangible, an explicit, flagrant need that emanated from the substance and tugged at their souls.
The temptation was great and the blackness poured liquid persuasion into their ears, sighing like a lover or a child, ‘Lose yourself in me, be part of me, be fulfilled in me, all the answers to your questions are on the other side of me.’
‘Don’t listen, Frank,’ shouted Alex as she watched Frank stop climbing and close his eyes. ‘Fight it, Frank, fight it, it’s a lie, a lie!’
But the blackness persisted, sensing Frank’s willingness to listen and eagerness to hear. ‘Francis, Francis, you have hurt for so long. There is nothing for you on that side. I have everything you need, everything, I can end your pain, Francis.’
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