Lazarus: Enter the Deadspace

by Daniel Willcocks

  Time was running short. Kurt was inside. It was now or never.

  Lucas walked ahead, and entered the facility.

  Inside was exactly as he remembered, down to the last detail. The wide-open reception with doors pulling off in every direction. He stood a moment, closed his eyes once more, and placed his hand on the first door he came across, hoping that his logic would work. Thinking of Kurt again. Focusing on manipulating the Deadspace and creating another portal to the boy. He opened the door and found himself on a metal walkway. Though this place was unlike any he’d seen at the Aegis facility in his time as an employee, there was no question that he was still inside. The place was branded with the logo as far as he could see. Hexadecimal code containing messages of warning were dotted along the walls. Of course, he couldn’t ever have imagined that he would have seen everything that Aegis had to offer, but this was nothing like he could’ve imagined. A sort of dungeon, painted and decorated to look less so. Even the rooms he now passed on the right looked like badly disguised prison cells.

  His steps rang loud enough to grab one of the inmate’s attention. “Hello?”

  Lucas cocked his head to the side and paused. I know that voice.

  “Oh, great. Ignore me, too. That’s what you all do.”

  Lucas followed the sound past several empty rooms, stopping just out of sight of the glass panel on the door that looked into the room. A minute of silence followed, the occupant listening for the person outside, Lucas waiting for the occupant to make a move.

  Eventually, Lucas’ curiosity grew too great. He raised an eye just high enough to see through. “Jesus Christ, Fred”.

  “Lucas? Is that…” Fred Mullins crawled closer to the edge of the bed, lowering a leg to the floor and standing. “Is it really you?”

  Lucas couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Maddie’s husband, one of Lucas’ best friends, held captive in the Deadspace. He looked terrible. His face was gaunt and drawn, topped with a crop of unkempt, greasy hair. His eyes were bulging, bright bulbs of keenness. He had lost weight, too – a lot of weight. Whatever the hell had brought Freddy here, it couldn’t have been good.

  “Fred, what’s going on? Where have you been? Maddie’s been worried sick about you.”

  If Fred heard his questions, he made no attempt to answer them. He advanced slowly, as if in a dream in which Lucas wasn’t real. Arms outstretched until they hit the door. They were practically nose to nose. Fred’s breath fogging up the glass.

  “I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d see you again… No, Lucas. Don’t—”

  In a rush of emotion, Lucas tried to push his way into the room. However, the moment he placed his hand on the door handle there came a sizzling sound as the metal flared. The heat was unbearable. Lucas jumped back and looked at his hand, expecting to see melted flesh, but finding no visible change.

  “What the…?”

  Freddy looked down resignedly. “He doesn’t like it when we leave.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Instead of a reply, Fred wandered back into the room, head aimed at the floor. His fingers danced and played between each other as he voiced fragments of sentences. “No… no… can’t leave. That’s not… There’s work to do… yes, yes, yes… But the boy?… HA!… the boy. No, no, no… We’ll leave soon. Just do as we’re told… Lazarus will come… bring back the blue… it’s not over…”

  Lucas watched as Fred babbled, running a hand through his hair, doing his best to make sense of what he was witnessing. Despite the previous attempt, he tried the door again, meeting the same result. As he yelped in a pain which shouldn’t have been possible down here, Fred seemed to re-realise that Lucas was there.

  “You have to stop him, Luke. You have to stop him. It’s all our fault. We started it. We pushed him to this.”

  “I’m going to do what I can. First, you need to tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  Fred pressed his nose to the glass, looking left, then right, as if expecting someone else to appear in the corridor at any moment. “He’s planning terrible things, Lucas. Awful things. I hear bits of it whenever he comes by to check on us. He’s doing the impossible. Experimenting on the Deadspace. Coming back for answers. Coming back? No. He never even left.”

  “How long have you been down here?”

  Fred turned to the wall where a series of scratches indented themselves into the brick. He performed a quick tally. “It’s entirely a guess… I don’t even know what day it is anymore. But I’ve got twenty-three scratches there.”

  “Twenty-three days? But that’s impossible.”

  “Impossible?!” Fred threw his head back and laughed, his eyes turned manic. He clutched his stomach, doubled over and wheezed. “Impossible isn’t a word anymore, Luke. Forget all we thought we knew. The game has changed. There are no rules anymore.”

  A cold breeze blew across the nape of Lucas’ neck, causing the little hairs to stand on end. Somewhere far off he heard a door open and close.

  “There was a girl,” Fred said. “But she left not long ago with the young boy. Couldn’t believe it myself. Her brother. Her brother came to find her. Isn’t that sweet? Oh… how’s Maddie, Luke? How’s my wife?”

  Amy? Kurt did it? The girl was his sister?

  “Maddie’s fine. She misses you.”

  “Yeah… I feel bad for what I did but… it’s better this way.”

  “Fred. What did you do? What are you talking about?”

  “He came to me in my dreams for a while. Lazarus. He has a way of touching people who’ve been to the Deadspace before. People who died for a while. Flatliners. Us. People whose heart stopped. He talks, Luke. He talks until it starts to make sense. He talked to me until I found myself in an abandoned house, putting together a fucking bomb with the yellow inside. All the yellow I had in mine and Maddie’s storage container.

  “I caught myself, saw what I was doing, realised that Lazarus wasn’t going to stop until he had me do something… something awful so I took off my belt, tied it to the boards overhead—

  “Don’t, Fred. Don’t…”

  “But then I called for you… I think I told you, didn’t I? I told you about the plan. The place in Williamsburg. The time. Everything. You stopped it right, Luke? You saved us from the awful thing? You know there are more? Many more. It was all a trial, Luke…”

  Lucas nodded and tried to say, “Sure,” but nothing came out.

  For a while they stood in silence, looking at each other, unsure what to say next. What else was there to say after that? Fred had killed himself to stop something ‘awful’ from happening, but it was useless. The awful thing had happened anyway. And now look, he was trapped here still, trapped by Lazarus.

  Lucas took a deep breath, preparing himself. He already knew the answer, deep down, but he needed to hear it from someone else. “Fred… who is Lazarus?”

  47

  They passed through yet another door. Door after door after door. The feeling was elating, not only for the fact that Kurt now had full access to the Deadspace and its portals but for the fact that it was his sister guiding him. His sister. Although Amy ran ahead, occasionally reaching around to pull on his arm with a worried expression on her face, glancing behind as if they were being pursued, Kurt couldn’t erase his smile. He’d done it. He’d found her. He’d won.

  “Where are we going?” Kurt asked, as though it were a summer day and Amy was leading him through a meadow.

  “No time for that. We’re going away from here. Somewhere we can resurface.”

  They passed through a modern looking rectangular door with no windows and an ornamental figurehead in the centre, emerging into what looked like a thin suburban street. On either side, houses were tightly packed, barely wide enough for one room across their front. Kurt gawped in wonder as he looked up and down the street, trying his best to guess where they might be. Not too long ago they’d appeared in what looked like an old quarry, sliding down loose rubble into a thick, dark door t
hat appeared at the bottom. A little before that had been an industrial estate filled with large machines and scaffolding. However long Amy had actually been down here, she sure as hell knew her way around.

  Was there a sequence to the journey? Kurt wondered how it all worked. Surely there must be a method to Amy’s location-hopping, like a mobile phone puzzle in which random numbers match a sequence. He didn’t question it. The only thing that he really did notice was that he was growing out of breath, and that, with each doorway, the sky grew darker.

  By the time Kurt felt the stitch burning in his belly, Amy slowed down. They’d taken a curious-looking door made of concrete with no walls or handles. On the other side, they emerged in what appeared to be a dark, open room with a single ladder at the end of it.

  “Kurt, are you ready?”

  Kurt beamed at his sister, glad to see her smiling back at him. He nodded, Amy now ushering him forward and up the ladder. He reached the bottom and looked up. About twenty feet above him the ladder stopped at the ceiling. A large metal circle with strange grooves and fragments of light at the top. “A manhole?”

  “What did you expect?”

  Kurt shrugged. “Something a bit more sophisticated, I guess.”

  “Kurt,” Amy began, in the way she’d inherited from their mother. “We’ve just travelled through the Deadspace using a series of doors. I’m sure a manhole cover will do.”

  “I suppose.”

  Kurt put a hand on the rung of the ladder, feeling the metal warm beneath his touch. He raised a foot off the floor and focused on the ceiling. “How did you find out about this?”

  “Eavesdropping mostly. You won’t believe the things I’ve heard while rotting away in that room. Secrets. Oh so many secrets.”

  Halfway up, the rungs grew hotter still. Kurt looked down, surprised to see how high he appeared. He steeled himself and continued.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  Kurt continued to climb. As he neared the top he found the burning now so warm that he could only hold the ladder for a short amount of time before he felt his skin burning. A couple seconds of grip, one step, switch hand, repeat. “What’s happening?”

  “You’re almost there, Kurt.”

  The final step. Kurt’s nose practically touching the top. He locked a leg around a rung of the ladder, used both his hands to push the circular grate, prepared for something to happen. Prepared to see the light of day and to wake up, battered and injured, but somehow with Amy at his side. Hickory Dalton defusing the bomb and rescuing the damsel in distress.

  The cover didn’t budge. He looked down at Amy, tiny from high up, and saw that she was still smiling. The manhole covered disappeared. The heat became so overwhelming that Kurt’s leg lifted off the metal, he let go and fell hard onto the floor. He coughed and dust flew around his face. He heard laughter, smelt the warm scent of burned flesh, and looked up.

  “What the—”

  “Now, now,” Lazarus crooned, stood in place of where Amy had been just moments ago. “Children don’t swear in the Deadspace, Kurt. Tut, tut.”

  Kurt stood and spun. “Amy?! Amy?! Where d’ya go?” He felt tears rising and did his best to fight them back. The last thing he wanted was to cry in front of Lazarus. “Amy?!”

  “So, so naive, Kurt. You didn’t really think you’d be able to rescue your sister, did you? That you could come into the Deadspace and just lift someone out.” He let out a horrific chuckle, the sound like a man choking on phlegm. “There aren’t any doors that lead out of the Deadspace. Believe me, boy. I’ve searched. I’ve searched for years.”

  “No… no. There has to be a way. There has to be.”

  The realisation crawled up him like beetles on his skin, burying him slowly. Lazarus circled Kurt, running a blazing hand across his shoulder blades as he passed, his face a mask of quiet contemplation. “Interesting…” With each revolution, Kurt noticed the presence of smoke thickening. Rising around them like an ashen tornado caught in slow motion.

  No, Kurt muttered. Amy?

  But he knew then, knew it all. He thought of running but what was the point? A victim of his own trust, Kurt had been far too eager to believe. That he had won the journey and would rescue Amy from the clutches of the bad guys. Her smiling face burned in his vision, hovering in front of him before the smoke.

  I’m no Hickory Dalton. I’m just a stupid kid.

  The tears came now, sliding down cheeks without any will to stop them. He was trapped. That much was clear. Because of his stupid impulse he had brought himself down to the Deadspace, without considering the possibility of how he may leave again. How he might be able to get back out and reunite with the people in the real world.

  Kurt coughed on a lungful of the smoke. It was thick and caustic, prodding and probing, finding whatever hole it could to reach inside of him. Meanwhile, Lazarus waited patiently, with all the time in the world, and simply grinned.

  Kurt shut his eyes as the smoke burned.

  “Tell me, Kurt. What is it that makes a soul? Is it idea? Concept? Experience? Something innate? How do we know what really lies in a human’s essence? If you’d have asked me years ago, I would’ve called it all hooey. Nothing exists in life but the mere biology and chemistry of what we are. But… here…” he held his arms wide as if addressing an arena, “here we can see that there is so much more. Oh… if only you could see the things I’ve seen. The wonders that the Deadspace holds. Something that the Revivers never even considered.”

  The tendrils of smoke reached further now as Kurt convulsed, began to shake. Writhing, muscles contracting, defending against the invading fog.

  “Kurt? Are you still with me?” He turned around and laughed, spinning now, giddy with excitement. As Lazarus spun, smoke curled about his feet, spreading and rising until all Kurt could see was the burning of his eyes. Kurt tried to turn but found himself paralysed, held in place by the ashen tendrils. Suddenly there came a whoosh as of a great bird swooping overhead, and Lazarus was an inch from Kurt’s face. “Let’s be honest. You can’t possibly understand the parameters with which I’m working down here. See, for you, it’s all about the journey. About finding your sister. About the quick capture and the release to the surface world. But me? Have you not stopped to ponder why a solitary boy would be guiding souls through this realm?”

  The question was a simple one, that only seemed obvious now Lazarus had asked it. In his visits to the Deadspace Kurt had come across two physical people: Lazarus, and the latino stranger. Now that he thought about it, the latino stranger had even warned him. ‘Be careful, kid. This place isn’t as safe as you might think.’

  “Where is she?” Kurt coughed. “Where is Amy? Please!”

  The smoke wormed further now into him and then came the noise. The sound of frying meat, sizzling and searing, burning his temples. The smell of bacon coming from his own body. “What makes you think Amy is here?”

  There was a flash of white, followed by an immediate blindness. For half a moment the smoke choked Kurt, restricting his body, tightening until his breath caught. Then, as quickly as it had happened, Kurt felt himself freed. The smoke faded into a thin haze and Kurt found himself back in the plain cell-style room he had found along the metal walkway. Amy was curled up on the bed, wearing nothing more than a medical gown. Her legs were thin, her body plastered in black veins.

  Kurt rushed to her. The minute he fell to his knees beside her, her face began to smoke. She turned, and Kurt saw Lazarus’ face on her own.

  “Where is she?!” Kurt shouted, retreating to the far wall.

  “Oh, this is too much fun,” Lazarus said, wiping an evaporating tear from his crusted eye. “You’re far too easy to fool. I haven’t had this much fun since dear old Freddy came down. Even with all the visitors that have found their way here since my blast.”

  “Your blast? The explosion?”

  “Sure. Who else? Don’t get me wrong, it was a difficult process, and there were many times in which I almost g
ave up, surrendering to an eternal imprisonment in the Deadspace. But, if I’ve learned anything over the years, science is progress, and each small victory added and added until I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – figuratively speaking, of course. Over the years, I’ve found ways to test and re-test the boundaries, finding new ways to bring people down here… and stay. It’s always been easy enough to find passers-by. The recently deceased, the comatosed, the stupid, unable to finish themselves off completely. But you? I’ve been looking for more of you. Those who can slip in and out when they please. And… well, you can’t make an omelette without a massacre or two.”

  Kurt pushed himself back up against the wall. The heat was overwhelming now, Lazarus growing hotter with each excited line.

  “The toxin was simply meant to find more like you,” he continued. “People who I could bring over to the Deadspace. It had its side-effects, sure, and it only brought you halfway, but with a bit of creative pivoting I managed to tip you over, didn’t I? The migration is complete and, if my hypothesis is correct, you’ll remain here with me, frozen in limbo, free to assist. A permanent test subject, if you will.”

  Ira smiled. The burnt flesh on his cheeks creased and peeled away, disappearing as it fell.

  “You knew I’d do it?”

  “Of course. You gave the information away so freely” He slapped his hands together, his face twisting and morphing into Kurt’s own. Suddenly Kurt heard his own voice, loud and echoey as though played through a tannoy. ““I’m looking for my sister, Amy. Have you seen her?”

  “Stop it!”

  The face morphed back. “A lonely little stubborn orphan looking for his sister. Textbook waster if you ask me. Throw in a few close encounters, maybe a door that didn’t open, and boom! I knew you’d do it. I’d have placed my money on you doing it at some point. May as well do something productive for the world and come here… to my workshop. The one I built within the fabric of the Deadspace itself! The one I built through my thoughts and memories. You people don’t realise how incredible the Deadspace is… what it can do… the things that exist here.”