Company Town

by Paul Neuhaus

  Henaghan’s eyes flicked down to the offered appendage. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” she said.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding? If I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve already done it. Take my hand.”

  She took his hand.

  Quinn was no longer in Verbic’s living room. She was thigh deep in still water, reed patches all around. Above, a dark sky full of roiling clouds, accented by intermittent lightning. She looked down at herself. She was nude but she was still herself.

  Straight ahead, the small body of water gave way to dry, grassy land. She trudged the fifty or so feet and climbed out of the pool. Looking around, aided by the lightning, she realized she was on a veldt with only one tree, a massive, gnarled overseer. A baobab tree. Herds of animals, difficult to make out on the dark plain, jetted this way and that en masse, terrified of the light show above. To her right, Henaghan heard an alarmed chittering, close enough to be dangerous. She turned her entire body and raised her hands, ready to fight if need be. A half-circle of bipedal simians wearing patches of hide and carrying crude spears all jerked backward at once. None of them were taller than four feet and none of them had the presence of mind to raise a spear. To these proto-humans, Quinn was a new creature. Homo sapiens. Their future. Not that they knew that. She opened the fists she’d made, hopeful the gesture would transfer backward through the ages. They all looked at her upraised palms, just as baffled as they’d been a moment before. They chittered and danced from foot to foot. “I won’t harm you,” she said. For the first time, Quinn thought that this little tribe probably hadn’t formed a cultural taboo against cannibalism. She might be in real danger. She dismissed the thought since, on the basis of size alone, she had the advantage.

  Before the situation could escalate, the sound of a flute, drifted over the plain, still clear over the periodic thunder.

  A flute? Here? Now? While the sound was more ambient than melodic, it was still in the general ballpark of “music”. The proto-humans all turned their heads in the direction of the sound, the interloper forgotten. After a moment, as one, they all dropped whatever they carried and moved in the direction of the flute. Giving them a buffer of space, Quinn followed.

  The further they got from the little pool, the taller the yellow grasses became. The indecisive wind whipped them in every direction and they tore at the girl’s naked flesh. She wished she had some covering—from the sting of the grasses and from the lashing of the wind. Looking around, she realized that other clusters of protos were also moving toward the sound of the flute. Groups of four and six, drifting as though hypnotized, in the direction of the music. The groups did not merge but they all shared the same purpose. No chittering. No behaviors outside the singleminded trudge toward… what?

  Quinn saw the mountain. If this was the Serengeti, here was Kilimanjaro. On its slopes, fires burned, but not in colors fire typically had. Blue, purple, green. Glowing on the slopes even through the harsh white of the lightning.

  At last the rain began, coming slow at first but then in what would have been thick curtains had it not been for the wind. Quinn hugged herself against the cold after she brushed her sticky bangs from her eyes. She began to resent the protos for their seeming mindlessness. She doubted they lived in huts, and there would be no caves in a biome like this one, but surely they kept shelter of some kind. Plus, she was almost certain they trudged toward their own deaths. H.G. Wells and his Morlocks had taught her that.

  Coming down the slopes and onto the veldt were balls of light, each leaving a glow on the grasses beneath. Two delegations converging to meet one another. The proto-humans and these autonomous spheres of energy.

  Ahead, some of the proto clusters were closer to the mountain than others, and Quinn saw the first of many meetings. She’d expected the balls of light to attack the apemen and set them on pretty-colored fire. Instead, they became escorts, one on each side of each grouping. Two for every group.

  When their time came, Henaghan’s new family picked up three wingmen. A blue on the left, a green on the right, and a smaller yellow sphere that locked onto Quinn—close but not too close. The girl tried to learn more about her new traveling companion, but her senses told her nothing. No scent (not even of burning ozone) and nothing visual to delineate it from any other glowing ball of light a person might happen upon.

  When they reached the base of the slope, Quinn saw what she had mistaken for standing blazes were actually caves, each emitting a glow in a different hue. She’d been wrong about natural shelter, but she couldn’t imagine the protos going anywhere near the fissures without the bewitching music. Her group, seemingly based on an unspoken agreement, moved into a blue cave. The rain at the entrance hit the ground and turned into a heavy mist. Initially, Henaghan couldn’t see. Once they were through the curtain of white, Quinn’s brain reeled. The cave they were standing in with its one wide open space and its network of branching warrens was huge. Too big to be contained by the volume of the mountain slope—and too big to be next to other such caves.

  Something had happened when they passed through the steam.

  The central chamber was a mind bender. Floating above the rock floor was a human heart the size of a DC-10. It pumped and it pulsed, glowing blue and streaked here and there with yellow lightning. Emitting from it was a maze of organic ductwork—far more arteries than are connected to a standard heart. Through these translucent tubes, glowing fluid flowed—on one side into the heart and on the other, out.

  On the floor of the facility, Quinn caught a glimpse of a sudden anomaly. A white light, flitting of its own accord, not a participant in the dance that animated the other orbs. For reasons she couldn’t pinpoint, she knew the light was special. Since she couldn’t say why, she looked away and put the orb out of her head.

  Unlike Quinn, the proto-humans did not look around in awe. Their purpose was still singular—to get wherever it was they were compelled to go. Where they were supposed to go ended up being one of the warrens branching off from the heart chamber. Here, in this smaller room, were phantasms like the ones Quinn had seen until very recently. Each phantasm was in charge of an apparatus, an organic machine made of what appeared to be a ribcage sprung open like a waiting trap. Each ribcage was held together with living, spasming meat. The contraptions hung suspended at different heights by stretched tendons shot through with veins as big around as Quinn’s arms.

  The horror began almost immediately after crossing the threshold into the cave. The phantasms each picked up a veldt-dweller and carried it to a ribcage. Once inside, passive proto-humans folded their arms across their chests and watched as the ribcage closed around them. When it was Quinn’s turn, she tried to bolt but the phantasm was faster. It caught her under her arms before she could make it back into the heart chamber. Kicking and screaming, the girl fought against her captor, but she could neither break its grasp nor reach it with any of her limbs.

  The wight placed Quinn into her cage and she tried to bolt forward but the ribs were too fast in closing around her. She gripped the warm bones and peered through the slits.

  At each of the ribcages, a procedure was enacted, one cage at a time starting with the cage furthest from Quinn. At that first cage, long, spidery arms descended from the ceiling, each one tipped by a chitinous scalpel. With the arms down, the ribcage opened up again, but not to free its prisoner—to present its prisoner. A wet muscle behind the proto rose up to partly envelope its prize. Then it extended out of the cage far enough to be accessible to the spider-arms. When the arms set to work, the proto woke from its sleepwalk and screamed, awake through the entire operation that followed. The arms didn’t just dissect the proto-human, they disassembled it, taking it apart and feeding the parts into a vagina-like opening on the end of a long tube. The tube fed out of the chamber and into the heart room next door.

  Partway into the procedure, the little creature’s terrible screaming stopped.

  Quinn watched as the empty ribcage ascended into the da
rk and the spider-arms withdrew. She also watched as, one cage at a time, the procedure reoccurred with a new proto. Each time, it was just as horrifying and she gripped the bone bars imprisoning her until her hands turned white. She tried to escape, pushing her essence out the top of her head. But it was to no avail. Whatever this reality was, she couldn’t leave it.

  Finally, there were no more proto-humans remaining and Quinn’s own cage popped open. The tissues behind her tightened their grip and pushed her forward as her cell snapped open. Down came her own set of spider-arms and the vagina on the long tube snaked forward to accept the waste that would soon be made of her body.

  The operation began.

  As the living knives ripped at her, Henaghan screamed again and again. No words. No coherent thoughts, just the terrible reality of being picked apart and discarded. Or was “discarded” the right word? Quinn felt a peculiar sense of dislocation. She was with her body as its painful ordeal went on, but she was also with the bits of herself as they flew, on a river of air, down the tube. More of her became that shattered thing, held together by thought alone, as the last traces of her physical body were plucked apart. When she was nothing but liberated pieces and a will, her panic abated. In fact, all sense of worldly concern was gone. She was still Quinn, but she lacked Quinn’s complex network of anxieties and cares. She settled into a calm state, at home with her lack of need. It was the most at ease she had ever been.

  Then her essence fell into a place of violence, a heaving bellows of energies she did not understand. Swirling, moving in a dance with other freed creatures, separate but intermingled. She passed through being after being (for they were, like her, each a porous matrix of sentient particles). As she moved into and past her traveling companions, she knew them all briefly. Their defining cores, their essential personalities. Something was happening in the eldritch stew. New compounds formed, made from the raw materials of the disassemblies and elements built upon and improved by the primordial currents within the pumping chamber. A rational thought came to her—they were inside the giant heart. But the thought did not last long before she banished it. Rational thinking interfered with the delicious calm that infused her. She didn’t need the human desire to understand and process.

  When all her particles were bonded with new particles, Quinn felt a change in direction. The whirl reversed itself and moved toward a different ventricle than the one she’d come through. A flash flood of energy and disassembled beings. Through one big passageway, then split into two—some creatures going one way, and some going the other. Then a split into four. Eight. Sixteen. At last, Henaghan came to rest in an amniotic sac, alone and suspended in nutrient-giving fluid. Once inside, she felt her parts bond together, becoming again a body of organic matter—but a body better than the old one, a body iterated upon and improved. Soon, she was a hairless fetus, expanding trimester after accelerated trimester. But she did not stop growing when she reached the size and weight for a traditional baby to be born. She became a toddler, a child, an adolescent and, finally, an adult in a span that seemed tiny.

  Then it was time.

  The sac, now desiccated due to Quinn having absorbed all its life-giving fluids, tore, spilling her out onto a soft floor. As she bent double and wretched out the amniotic liquid from her lungs, another new creature came to her, holding her in place with gentle limbs and coaxing the now unneeded nutrients from her body. When she could, she looked up. It was as she had thought. Her caretaker was not a ball of light or a phantasm, it was an organic creature, gray in color with a no mouth, slits for eyes and a fan-shaped crest of bone atop its skull. The thing was utterly alien but also familiar.

  Once she’d purged the fluid from her lungs, she heard herself say, “I’m alright. I’m okay.” Her voice echoed around her. She felt immediately ashamed. This was a sacred place in which one kept quiet. But there was no rebuke from the strange creature. It slid its tendrils off her naked back with what seemed like affection, then—on four legs—it moved backward. Henaghan took the cue and stood. Her muscles stiffened, regaining their former confidence. She looked around. She was in a chamber made not of rock but of bone. Bone interwoven in crazy, organic patterns so that the effect suggested a cathedral. Hanging in racks were more sacs like the one she’d vacated, some of them empty like hers, some of them still pulsing with new life. Around her now—all of them also newly hatched—were the near-humans she’d entered the mountain with, each with its own Caretaker. But the protos had changed. They were more developed, more human-like. Not quite Neanderthal but certainly a step closer.

  Through disassembly and reassembly, they had taken one step up the evolutionary ladder.

  To Quinn’s left, down a long aisle, a startling sound erupted. Far away, another creature, tall and stately but made of the same gray flesh as the Caretakers, sounded a horn. A ram’s horn but larger and smoother. At the sound, the proto-humans all turned and walked toward the Hornsman, shuffling as when they’d first entered the mountain. Sparing one more glance at her alien midwife, Henaghan joined the others. As she walked by the Hornsman she saw that he was clad in gray robes made from what looked like vellum. Each of his arms split at the elbow to form two forearms per side. One set of lower hands were, in fact, pincers while the other set were proper hands (but six-fingered hands more supple and articulated than the human equivalent). She looked up into the creature’s face but found it inscrutable.

  Just beyond the Hornsman, through a cloud of mist, lay the outdoors. They emerged from a different cave on the mountain’s slope. This exit passed downward through two levee-like structures made from obsidian and inscribed with sigils and runes. Atop these structures were yet a third type of gray creature. These were so regal as to make the Hornsman appear common. Their lower bodies were insect-like, each with a set of four bony legs. Connected to this section by segmented organic piping was a very human-like trunk. Their arms were like the Hornsman’s—bifurcated into sections for claw and for hand. Atop a short neck, a head with ridged fans at both ends, a small one protruding from the chin and a large one from the top of the head. Between was a slit for a mouth and three eyes arranged into an upside down triangle. The eyes were amber-colored, protruding half-spheres like spider eyes. Each of the beings had a halo of slowly-orbiting light-spheres, each being with his own signature color. As she passed through the gully, Quinn looked up at their hosts. Free now from the illogic of the Heart, one word entered her mind: “Asura”. These were the gray overlords Aisling had brought low.

  At last, Quinn and her fellow travelers came to the end of the channel and she started when she saw the last of the old gods. It cocked its head at her and there was mutual recognition. She could feel its essence across the space separating her from it.

  It was Verbic.

  With that, the old man dropped his hand and Quinn blinked, the old living room coming back into focus around her. She sat back, exhausted. “We’re stalemated, aren’t we? I don’t know if I should believe you or Olkin. Or if I should believe either. Any decision I make now has an equal chance of being wrong.”

  “Let me help you,” he said. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Examine me.”

  “‘Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly’.”

  “That analogy might hold if you were a fly. You’re strong enough to do me grievous harm, and I respect that. However, some friendly advice: Keep a safe distance lest I do something… reflexive.” He smiled. Was he fucking with her? It sounded like it.

  Henaghan closed her eyes. Shuffling off her body was second nature now. She could do it as easily as breathing. In no time, she was in a black space occupied by two souls, hers and Verbic’s. She couldn’t see herself, but she could see Verbic, and what she saw horrified her. Here was Reginald in his natural state. Here is how he would look if he was orbiting the Cauldron with the other Asura who he’d left behind. He wasn’t moving so his shape wasn’t comet-like. It was convoluted and dense. Swirls within swirls.
Dense black smoke folding in on itself continuously. Spinning in and out like a molecule of hate. Reaching out, she touched his consciousness and recoiled. He was so opposed to everything she understood to be life, she couldn’t separate his thoughts or his personality from his insoluble form. He was something senses-shatteringly new. Was this what he wanted? For her to look upon his works and his person and despair?

  She wasn’t sure, but the sight of him caused her to do something reflexive herself. She turned her vision sideways so that she could see the membrane separating the Astral Plane from the Physical. She saw it pulsating. She saw the maya flowing freely back and forth through its pores.

  With her mind she tore the membrane.

  The black thing in front of her cried out—not in despair for itself but for the natural order. A compact kept between forces both light and dark. His cry said, Child, what have you done?

  Quinn knew she’d only have a moment before the hungry destruction consumed Verbic and broke free of the black space she and the Asura occupied. She didn’t care. She resisted the pull of arcane gravity, standing her ground and determined to see the deed done. If it took too long for Verbic to die and the world outside were consumed, so be it. It was a price she was more than willing to pay.

  Never again would anyone put her in the No-win Situation.

  Verbic, in his dignity, screamed only the one time. He was a sirocco of hot air and black motes, flowing toward the hole the girl tore in reality. As there was less and less of him, his surface became charged with orange lightning and angry bursts of purple light.