Kurt moved closer, struggling to read the rough etchings. “‘One step for man, one giant leap for its soul. 2007. LD + The Revivers’ … that’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah…”
Lucas smiled, circling the tree. After a full rotation, he gasped, folding onto one knee, clutching his chest. He looked at Kurt with concern on his face.
“Lucas? You okay?”
“I don’t know. I suddenly had a… it wasn’t a pain exactly, but a sensation in my heart. Like it palpitated or something. But that shouldn’t be possible here. I… argh.”
Kurt ran to Lucas’ side, offering support. The closer he got the more certain he was of what he was seeing. It was incredibly faint but Lucas was beginning to fade. Kurt could just make out the edge of the tree trunk through Lucas’ body. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Come on, let’s keep going…”
Kurt helped Lucas to his feet, taking the weight of his arm around his shoulders. In a strange sort of way, it felt good to be the helper for once instead of the victim. Good to make himself feel useful.
They crossed over to the tent, pausing at the entrance. By this point Lucas’ strength was beginning to drain, the weight becoming almost too much for Kurt to bare. He breathed a sigh of relief as he lowered Lucas to a seated position in front of the canvas.
Another sensation fluttered across Lucas’ heart. He clutched his chest, then exhaled slowly as the moment passed. “Open her up, kid. You’re going to love what we’ve done with the place.”
Kurt took the zipper and in one clean sweep opened the tent. His mouth fell open as he looked around inside at the cloth palace that the Revivers had made, utilised and discarded.
“Impressive, eh?”
That’s not the word for it, Kurt thought. Inside the tent, it looked exactly like Kurt imagined a science lab would look. There were rows of tables and shelves lining the sides, piled high with conical flasks, titration equipment, bunsen burners, safety gear, an array of coloured tubes and chemicals with various bright yellow labels on the sides. Atop a fridge stacked with clear bags of opaque fluids sat a record player, a plate of vinyl pirouetting silently.
Kurt stepped inside, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the dark – made more discoveries.
The floor was thick and carpeted. He could just make out the outline of various stains and a couple of burn marks where perhaps acids or corrosive substances had spilled in the trials and filtered through to the earth. In the corner were a bundle of lab coats piled high. He heard Lucas pawing his way forward on his hands and knees behind. “Get the light.”
Kurt looked up and saw an old camping light hanging from a loop in the ceiling. He flicked a switch and was momentarily blinded. He raised an arm to shield some of it, turning back to Lucas and now seeing to his horror that he had grown more transparent. Was fading into nothing, looking like a glass statue of himself.
“Lucas?” he asked softly, not sure what the question was.
To his surprise, Lucas smiled up at him. “Kid…” he raised an arm and pointed to the other side of the tent.
Kurt turned, his breath catching. What he had at first mistaken for a pile of coats, was now moving. Shifting up and down with slow, laboured breaths. It was a girl, sat with her back against the canvas. She looked chalky and tired, like any fast movements might crumble her from the inside out.
“Amy?” Kurt whispered, not daring to move forward. Terrified of another trick from Ira.
Where Amy had been staring vacantly ahead, she now blinked dazedly. It took her a moment, and when she spoke her voice was raspy and weak. “Kurt?”
Kurt turned back to Lucas, now little more than a shimmering outline of himself. “No. Lucas, don’t leave. Not now. Please.”
A rattling noise escaped Lucas’ mouth and faded to nothing. A half-laugh as he passed onto the whatever was waiting on the other side for him.
“I need you!”
“Kurt?” Amy’s voice again.
But he ignored her for a second, straining to see any trace of Lucas but finding nothing. Lucas was gone. Faded into nothingness, leaving Kurt alone in the Deadspace. Alone except for…
His sister, Amy? Or was that the burnt one hiding under that antique skin?
There came the sound of knocking. Kurt looked up and saw Amy staring at him, knocking her head gently on the metal of the cabinet next to her.
Once.
Twice.
A third.
Kurt’s mouth went dry. It was Amy. It had to be Amy. He ran back through recent events and tried to figure it all. Tried to work it all out. How had it happened? Without a door, without a gatekeeper, Kurt was almost certain that it had been he who had brought himself and Lucas here. But how was it possible?
The words that Ira had said suddenly came back: ‘Reality here is a manifestation of intention and memory. I shoot you with a gun here and you still die… move on… whatever, but not because a shard of metal has broken your physical body, but because you believe it would kill you.’
Had Kurt transported himself here? To Amy? Merely because he was so desperate to find her? Because hope seemed beyond reason?
Amy wheezed. “Kurt…”
“That’s three for luck,” Kurt said, kneeling before Amy and wrapping his arms around her. A tear rolled down his cheek as he felt Amy begin to sob into his shoulders. Her hands tied back around her own body through the fabric of the jacket. “I can’t believe I found you.”
“I always knew you would, Kurt,” Amy managed between blubbers. “I never doubted you for a second.”
Kurt grabbed Amy’s shoulders. “We need to get you out of here. Do you know where you came from? Do you know where you are?”
Amy shook her head. “David… Gina… I think I was there. In their house for a while… it was so long ago now… I can’t even… years ago I think. How long has it been?”
It was Amy, for sure, but she seemed a zombie of her former self. A shelled out husk. Ira had found a way to bring her here, had scarred her in ways unfathomable.
“Yellow,” she said suddenly and lucidly. “I remember seeing yellow eyes and I remember his stink. His burnt…”
Here Amy started to cry. At first the tears were faint and sweet but her eyes turned pink and soon enough she was sobbing and Kurt dropped his knees to the cold damp floor and wrapped his arms around his sister. If he didn’t believe it was her before, he sure did now, with his arms clamped around her shoulders and pulling her towards him, burying her face into his shoulder.
It’s okay, Kurt tried to say over and over but he started to cry and soon enough they were just a young brother and sister crying into each other, feeling each others’ presence, and mourning the loss of their parents.
Maybe a minute passed. Maybe it was ten. But eventually they stopped their crying and simply held each other. Kurt wiped his eyes and pushed the matted clumps of Amy’s hair out of her eyes, tucking them as best he could behind her ear. He continued to do so until he felt something there, behind her, something wet. Tears, he assumed.
“What are we going to do?” she said and Kurt remained quiet without much of a clue of how he really got there in the first place.
“I don’t know,” Kurt said, already contemplating their coming years of isolation in the Deadspace. At least he wouldn’t be alone. At least he had his sister there with him. Finally.
He looked away, to the door of the tent, thinking about how he could take them away, to hide from Ira. Amy kissed his hand, the one that was still sat on her shoulder. She kissed it with her moist lips. Cold, cold, dead spit.
Needles seemed to stab at his heart as he turned to see not one but two faces looking back at him. Amy threw him an awkward smile and lifted her head as if to say, “Do I have something on my face?”, and the other, grinned demonically as it poked out through the small gap in Amy’s hair. He pulled his hand back and fell to the floor.
“Kurt!?” she said as she followed his line of sight to see the face e
rupting out of a gap in the shadows The burnt fingers shivering excitedly as they pushed through and found purchase on the cabinets on the side. He laughed in that child’s voice as he writhed through and out, birthed into the tent. The boy grew into the man right before their eyes as plumes of smoke poured from his nostrils like a dragon.
Kurt steeled himself at the monster. Now more aware than ever just what he was and what he’d done to his sister.
“You can’t have her, Ira. You can’t have her!”
“—It’s Lazarus—” Ira flared.
“—and you can’t have her. Leave Amy out of this. It’s over.”
Ira smirked. “Oh, dear child. It’s only just begun. See, Amy was but the starter pistol to a race that I like to call ‘Life in my world’. After all, you were the one who pointed me to her, made the door to her. You just didn’t know how to open it. This is how infection spreads you see. You two are the first of many more. I have seen to that. From you I will create more doorways to more people and I will find ways to bring them here, to my kingdom. And, dear me, I can’t wait to get started.”
Kurt began to cough as smoke crawled across the ground, darkening the inside of the tent
“Here. Put this on.”
Out of the nothingness appeared another jacket, identical to Amy’s. Ira threw it through the air and it opened itself up, attaching itself to Kurt as his arms automatically passed through the sleeves and he felt his body tighten. Several large buckles on the chest strapped themselves up with the hands of ghosts and before Kurt knew it he had fallen to his knees beside Amy.
“Perfect fit.”
Kurt looked desperately around as Ira advanced with a hungry expression on his face. He rubbed his hands together eagerly and licked his lips.
“Finally. Time to get started. Let’s see what you’re made of, boy…”
Kurt turned to Amy, feeling his heart drop as he saw the look of fear on her face. Her eyes were red and puffy, the whites of her eyes streaked with lines. The jacket appeared filthy with soaked patches from her tears. What had this creature done to her? What were the answers that he was looking for? It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair at all. If only there was a way to escape. If he could but create a door or something to get him out of here. He had done it before. Shifted and travelled without them. He had brought Lucas here. To Amy. All because he had…
Ira turned to a desk of instruments and began to rifle through. Needles, scalpels, various chemicals. “Where to begin…” he muttered to himself.
With a final, confident wink at Amy, Kurt closed his eyes, concentrated with all his might, and thought of somewhere far away. No, not far away. Somewhere inside.
A moment later he heard the door appear. Followed swiftly by a gasp, and Amy’s voice. “Kurt… what are you… What have you done?”
Ira screamed. They were falling now. Down and down, into Kurt’s abyss.
*
Such dark places. A child, one that had lost its parents, one that had been passed from family to family like a hot sack of shit, it all does something to a child. It takes them to such dark places.
And then losing Amy.
Rip. Rip.
He could see it all now. He could picture the sweet faces of his mum and dad, could smell the mix of perfumes and musk, hear the clinking of the car keys, the door opening.
“Remember, pizza money’s on the side,” his mum had called to Stacie, the one with freckles and braces from next door, only there to look after him and Amy.
“I’m a grownup!” Amy had scoffed when she first heard Stacie was coming round, convinced she was old enough to not need a babysitter.
Kurt didn’t mind. It was all the same to him. Stacie was quiet, kept to herself. He could play on his Playstation regardless. He and Solid Snake had missions to do. Much more important than who was going to be ordering the pizza and telling them when to go to bed.
“I don’t even need you. I’m eleven!” Amy screamed at her mum as she stomped her way up the stairs towards her bedroom to listen to My Chemical Romance and bitch and moan with her friends from school via WhatsApp.
And with that, Kurt’s dad honked the horn and his mum ruffled his hair, kissed him, leaving a red lipstick mark on his cheek and said, ‘See you later, kid’ … but she never did.
That was the year that changed their lives like no other – their orphan year. The last time he saw them alive was through the hazy headlights of the car disappearing up the driveway. A dark red mark on his cheek from his mother which he furiously washed away in the bathroom sink.
Such dark places.
But Kurt took them further than that. He took them deeper inside of himself. A doorway to the darkest recesses of his imagination. Amplified by all that he’d experienced in the past few days.
It was only a short while back since he’d seen a group of ferals tearing into Emily’s body like she was a loose carrier bag of sweets and treats for all to eat. He remembered the clawing of the fingers against the flesh. The wet tearing. The hiss from some popped organ. The steam rising from the ferals’ blood-warmed hands.
All of that fear and anger and mental scarring now convalesced to create such a shroud of darkness all around that it was as if they were floating in a void, a vacuum of light, sound, physics.
In front of Kurt was Ira King… the one who called himself Lazarus. His burnt body now healed and fresh to show his moon-bathed alabaster skin. The man stood naked in the dark. His awkward adult body looking something close to ridiculous. His scrawny wiry muscles were like thin ropes tied to his skeletal frame. His gaunt cheekbones and slim neck made him look almost half-drawn – not a finished piece. And that outy-belly-button told Kurt all he needed to know. The man was a baby once. He was once trapped inside his mother’s womb by a fleshy pink cord just like all of them.
Ira’s glassy eyes turned to Kurt. He looked confused, lost… lost in his own domain. But that’s what Kurt had figured out. The Deadspace wasn’t anyone’s domain and what a silly thing to think – that they could take something as metaphysical, as intangible as thought itself, and tame it, label it, and claim it as your own. But that was adults being adults, he supposed. A child would never be so dumb.
Ira tried to mouth the word, “Please” but Kurt paid him no mind.
Instead he tried to remember those tearing sounds once again. Rip rip. The arms and fingers, bloodied and blackened with veins of ink. The ones that tore into Emily’s body.
With the thought, the imagination, several feral arms, disembodied, appeared all around Ira. They feverishly danced over Ira’s floating, trapped form, and found their way to the hole in his stomach, beneath the rib cage and above the naval. But there was no hole. Not yet.
With a thought the hole appeared in Ira’s side. He winced as it unzipped itself like a fold in wet paper.
He screamed now, silently, as the feral arms found their way inside. Hands of men, women, children, unpacking him like a bag of groceries.
And Kurt watched for as long as he could bear to. He’d seen many horrors over the past few days but nothing quite as… as pathetic as this.
As Lazarus was deconstructed by the arms and hands, Kurt thought back to Amy. He imagined a door but nothing came. He panicked a little as he forced his mind to think of her but perhaps he’d gone too far? Perhaps he’d be trapped here in this black sea, forced to repeat Ira’s death, over and over, souring over time to resemble something not unlike Lazarus himself. A soul burnt by the whimsy of adults.
*
The swirl of patterns on a dark background. Lines racing each other on different tracks. Sparkles as of diamonds twinkling on a bed of rock. Pain. Relief. Pain. Relief. It was all so absent, and then so present, caught in the ether. Uncertain of it all.
Lucas felt the pain in his chest and tried to open his eyes. Maybe they were already open. He couldn’t tell. For a while, all that he knew was floating through the dark. Unable to comprehend the magnitude of it all.
This is it… the j
ourney to the other side. The final unanswerable question and no way back.
He looked out into the vast chasm of nothing, expecting at any moment for a hand to grab him, or maybe a monstrous mouth to swallow him whole. The manifestation of God in this inky pool in which Lucas was suspended.
In the distance, amongst the bed of pretty lights like an LED canvas on prom night, one light twinkled brighter than the rest. Lucas watched it, unsure if it was his imagination or if the light was actually growing larger. Was he travelling towards it, or was it travelling towards him?
“Maddie! Maddie! Stop!”
The tightening of his chest eased. He focused on the luxury of breath, absorbing every moment as his lungs filled and contracted with the air. That voice. So familiar. So far away.
The light was about the size of a balloon now, and growing quickly. Lucas couldn’t help but stare as it doubled, then tripled its size until all he could see was a burning hot white. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t think. All that there was was this astronomical orb hurtling towards him now. His stomach jolted and something cold poured through his veins. It was over. This is it. The final hurdle. Death—
“Lucas?!” a hand slapped his face. “Luke, can you hear me?”
Lucas blinked stupidly, finding his paralysis lifted. He raised his hand and blocked the light to see three faces staring at him, haloed by a fluorescent light above. His comrades. Ani, Sammi, and Maddie. He tried to sit bolt upright, then found that his body felt heavy, almost quadruple its weight. He looked down to see Sammi with a stern hand on his chest. “You’re going nowhere, buddy,” she beamed, failing to hide the overwhelming relief on her face.
Lazarus: Enter the Deadspace Page 30