It took five lengthy minutes for the door to fly open, and when it did he was hit with an odor unlike any he had ever known. It nearly knocked him over. When he regained his balance he leaned forward uncertainly to peer into the dim room.
The curtains were pulled close to keep out the dying afternoon light, and the mess of clothes and papers remained scattered across the floor. There was nowhere to walk without stepping on something, and in the middle of the chaos was a small double-sized bed with blankets twisted and bundled into a curled comma shape. The room smelled of unbathed Olivia, of rotten strawberries. Randal cupped his hand over his nose and mouth and stepped in farther.
On the bedside table, he saw something he immediately recognized: the large glass stone that Markowitz had sent to the lab. Encircling it, page after page of frantically scrawled notes in no discernible order. Some had small drawings on them, some strange patterns. Words were repeated, trailing across the page in a strange shapes. Just as in Markowitz’s journal.
Randal swallowed and stepped even closer. There were photographs of the stone at different distances, different angles, close-ups of its scratches, and those photos too were marked by circles and symbols and scrawled words. Whatever Olivia had discovered, she had bored fully into it, far more than Randal would have expected from someone looking to share a project. If only he hadn’t been so distracted by the lectures, by what Dean Coxwell had promised him, he might have been able to stop her. Randal’s eyes scanned some of the pages, but they made no sense, and his anger distracted him from what lay before him. It was no matter: she was caught, and he would do everything he could to make sure she was expelled not only from her position in the lab but possibly from the school. First, though, he would have to understand what she’d found. And the best method was to start gathering the work she’d left behind.
Randal grabbed handfuls of notes and shoved them indiscriminately into his pockets, wanting to collect all he could before she came home. He shuffled through the pile, and hidden at the bottom was a folder thick with page after page of Olivia’s scratched handwriting. He thumbed through them, but they looked like paranoid delusions. Still, he added them to the pile he intended to take with him. There were more documents lying on the bed, and when he turned to retrieve them he realized the bedding was too wet, too warm. It was then that Olivia’s sore-covered face emerged from amid the twisted sheets, and Randal leapt back, stifling a scream.
Olivia panted shallowly, hair plastered with sweat across her swollen face, and though her clouded eyes were cracked open, Randal could not be sure if she was asleep or awake.
She was far sicker than he’d understood, and the tale of Linden from Markowitz’s journal reared in his memory. He could no longer deny the connection, but how had she been infected? Randal slipped his hands in his pockets and stepped forward, the scientist within curious about the transformation, even while the man was repulsed. It was no longer her looks, nor the smell of rotting strawberries, that attracted his attention. It was the spread of the infection that he couldn’t stop watching.
“Olivia, are you okay?” He wanted to nudge her awake but was too afraid. The pages of notepaper pinned beneath her were soaked with sweat and stained a dark shade of red.
Olivia moaned, but he did not know if he reached her. She made no further indication beyond another heavy exhale. The glass rock glinted on the night stand. It was flecked with white, much like her pocked face.
“Olivia, where did you put everything you took from the lab?”
She moaned again. It was a good sign. Randal licked his lips.
“Olivia, can you hear me? We need everything Markowitz and Linden found, including the journal. Where did you put it?”
He held his breath, staring at her, waiting to see what she did. At first she rolled slightly, then went still. Randal wondered if she might be crying. Then the moans returned, and he could hear words forming in the noises she was making. Not clear words, not words that were anything more than mumbles, but words nonetheless. She was trying to speak. He pressed her.
“It’s Randal. I need to take the research, including your files,” he said. “I need everything. I need it all.”
Olivia’s pale white eyes fluttered open. Dim light reflected off their surface, making it appear as though something was moving across them.
“E’speriment,” she muttered in semi-consciousness. Randal stayed close, urging her on.
“Yes, the experiment. Where is everything?” He was studying her face closely, trying to piece together what she knew and what she might not have figured out yet. Her complexion had worsened considerably in the short time he was there, her face sprouting blemishes under her unsettled eyes. Beneath the swelling and the illness he could barely see the girl he’d wanted for so long and lost. He ran his hand across her brow, brushing some stray hairs back before he knew what he’d done. He almost didn’t notice how slick it left his fingertips.
Olivia’s head shook, her stomach creaking as it swallowed itself. She coughed effortlessly, then clicked her shriveled tongue. Randal wished he knew how to get what he wanted.
“Too much . . . everyone . . .” she managed in the grips of her delirium. “What . . .what did you . . . stop talking so I can sleep.”
“Olivia!” he said, hoping the sharpness would cut through her fevered thinking. Her eyelids pulled away, revealing the milky pupils that would not focus on him. She winced.
“It hurts. So much it hurts. Everything is so loud.”
He was not going to get the samples. She’d probably already ruined them. But he wouldn’t know for certain until he removed her from the apartment.
“Olivia, I’m going to get you help. I’m going to call an ambulance.” He fumbled his cell phone from his pocket. She breathed heavily. Heat radiated from her.
“Wait,” she said, her voice gaining strength. “Let me see it.” Randal waited, phone in hand, but instead of continuing she slumped onto the bed. He pocketed his phone and took her by her frail shoulders and shook her.
“Olivia! Wake up, goddamn it!”
One cloudy eye opened, then the other. They rolled slowly to look at him.
“I don’t want you,” she said, and Randal went cold. His nightmare becoming real. The sound of those three words from her fissured lips was worse than anything he’d witnessed so far.
“W—what?”
“Linden. Where are you, Linden?” The gravel of her voice gave it a strange otherworldly quality. He struggled for words.
“Olivia . . .” Several hundred questions raced through his head simultaneously. He wanted to reassure her. To smile, to touch her, but couldn’t. A voice in the back of his head asked why wasn’t he calling an ambulance.
She kicked the covers, struggling as though she’d been caught in a net. Strange sounds emerged—a concoction of grunts and a deep-throated gurgle. Her white eyes turned into her head and she kicked out. Randal took a step back and watched as she grabbed the sheets and blankets and wrenched them aside, throwing them across the room, revealing her sweating nakedness.
“Linden, I need you. I need you.”
Randal’s thoughts crashed into one another, a cascade of emotions and reactions to what he was witnessing. He sputtered at her announcement with disappointment and devastation, appalled and disgusted and angry and terrified. The gorge in his throat rose, and yet something else stirred in him at the sight of her nakedness, at the sudden smell of her sweating sex filling the room. He couldn’t think straight and tried closing his eyes, but it only made things worse. Olivia chanted.
“Need need I want you I need need you Linden need you,” she coughed as she continued, rubbing her pallid, sore-covered body. Some pustules were so full they broke as she ran her hands over them, streaking her flesh with blood. She moaned Linden’s name, and Randal wished he could do something to stop his own arousal, but he was trapped, rooted in the horrible nightmare. That awful creaking noise resumed from her body, a stretching wail that intensified as
she writhed on the bed. The odor in the room turned sour instantly, and Randal gagged. But it was Olivia who was making heaving sounds, her mouth opening and closing and opening, though nothing emerged. Nothing slipped from her lips. Instead, he noticed her flesh turning a bright shade of red, a color that intensified as it travelled down to the place between her legs. Her body swelled, and she started calling again, “I need you I need you now Linden now,” as that bulge grew, her legs slipping apart.
From within the folds of her labia appeared the white head of something pushing out, the crowning of a blister both slick and white. The air was fetid, and the noises that filled it were of breaking bones and rending flesh. Randal found himself calling Olivia’s name, or thinking he was calling it out, but the sounds he made had nowhere to go in the imprisoning atmosphere. Olivia was crying out in pain, her white scarred eyes staring straight ahead as the membranous bulge grew larger, an inflating amniotic sac. From where he stood he could see movement through its translucence—millions of tiny creatures squirming, waiting to be born, and as the sac grew larger and thinner, as Olivia’s screams grew louder, those things moved in a more frenzied manner in anticipation. “Oh, God, I can see! I can see!” she screamed, the extremities of her flesh becoming unmade. Too late Randal realized what was about to happen and could not escape the swell before it ruptured, explosively cleaving Olivia to her clavicle, filling the air with flesh and blood and disseminating tiny creatures wide. Randal raised his arms to shield his face, but he felt them rain against the flesh of his arm, fall between the hairs on his head, travel down the back of his shirt. Like thousands of burning hot needles the tiny alien creatures burrowed into his flesh, searing his body permanently in their wake. They writhed under his skin even as he scratched furiously at them, and the flush of blood that raced to the wounds only brought further nourishment.
Randal was gasping, his brain frazzled in disgust and confused terror. Pieces of flesh lay twitching about the room, unrecognizable as the woman he once knew. The smell was like overpowering offal, and the air tasted of a rusty tang. Randal coughed out the vomit that threatened to choke him, and the sputum was already filled with his own blood. He pulled himself away from the horror, tears running from his rheumy eyes. With hands covered in Olivia’s blood, he acted autonomously, removing the clear rock from the night stand, grabbing another handful of notes as he stumbled backwards. Back and out the bedroom door. Back and over the tangle of his feet that sent him crashing down. The impact against the floor was hard, knocking the wind out of his chest, and he writhed, suffocating, until consciousness slipped mercifully away.
6
Randal did not return to the university the next day. Nor the day after. His class found an empty lectern where he should have been standing, an empty lab where Olivia should have been prepping. Talk among them increased, as the days went on, about where Randal and Olivia were and about if they were ever coming back. Eventually, the crowd of students who bothered coming to class dwindled, most of them eager to have more free time in which to sleep, while some of the more studious hunted down the university’s administration. They wondered what had happened to their class, and whether two missing lecturers in a single semester was not two too many. Some wanted to be sure Randal and Olivia were still alive, whereas others merely wanted a refund or, better, an automatic passing grade. News of what happened appeared more frequently on the lips of the students and faculty, until Dean Coxwell finally realized it was time to intervene, lest the reputation of Sandstone’s Microbiology Department start to suffer in the eyes of other schools and institutions—and, most importantly, Sandstone’s board of trustees.
Dean Coxwell’s numerous telephone calls to both Olivia and Randal over the following days went unanswered, and he suspected the two had run off somewhere, abdicating their responsibilities. It wouldn’t have surprised him; young, impetuous—he saw the way Randal looked at her, like a salmon on a fish hook. Perhaps giving him Markowitz’s class had not been the wisest of decisions, but it made the most sense, and for a few weeks it worked fine. But reports from the students and the faculty—and even his own discussions with Randal as time progressed—led Coxwell to question the wisdom of the act. Randal’s reaction to the death of Dr. Markowitz and young Linden was the most troubling, and it led to many quiet meetings among the university’s peer oversight group about what should be done.
After the twelfth day, Randal contacted Dean Coxwell via a short message left on his campus telephone line. Randal’s voice shook and at times was barely above a whisper, but he urged the dean to visit him in his apartment home, said it was urgent, and asked only that the notes and dissertation from Randal’s office be brought as well. They were too important to be left behind, he stressed.
Randal’s apartment was located off of Speedvale Avenue, in a nearly vacant industrial park. Dean Coxwell’s windbreaker was too slight for the weather, but he hoped the trip would be a quick one, lasting only long enough to inform Randal that he was not needed back. The board had agreed to withdraw any offers previously presented and cancel the class for the remainder of the semester. It would be a financial nightmare, but there was little they could do. The dean climbed the warped wooden stairs to Randal’s apartment, his speech practiced until it was near-rote, but once he witnessed the repellent squalor in which Randal lived he forgot what he had intended to say.
If Dean Coxwell were to squint, the remnants of a well-kept residence were there, hidden beneath the mess. Walls were straight and painted brightly, the wood of the bookcases was solid and not the particle board so many students bought. Plates and glassware were unique and upholstery intact. Even the artwork on the wall was more than a series of film posters. And yet, covering the bulk of the room were unclean blankets and rags, overturned mugs whose coffee formed dark brown stains like blood. There was the pervasive odor of sweat. Dean Coxwell pulled his arms closer to avoid contact with anything.
“Dean? Is that you?” The voice was hoarse, a whisper straining for more. It originated in one of the rooms.
“Yes, Mr. Souris.”
“Please come in here.”
Dean Coxwell scowled as he stepped over the remnants of a half-eaten pasta meal and into the bedroom. He was surprised to find Randal was not confined to bed but instead in a wing-back armchair. His legs were covered by a blanket; his swollen head tilted up, mouth agape, as he stared at the ceiling. On the other side of the room, close to Coxwell, was a desk covered with sheaves of loose paper, two microscopes, and a large glass stone. As the dean reached it, Randal tilted his head to reveal a startling degradation of flesh. And a pair of clouded white eyes.
“That’s close enough. Even after everything, I’m still not sure about the radius of infection. There’s a chair somewhere . . .” Randal pointed, but at nothing. Which is where he faced as he blindly spoke to Coxwell. “I can imagine your reaction to coming here. It was probably the same as mine when I discovered Olivia. The truth is, I’m not going to survive much longer. That’s why I need you here. I need to warn someone about what’s going to happen. Dr. Markowitz, Linden, Olivia—they each had only a piece of the puzzle. It took me to put it together. Not that I’ll be remembered for it.”
“Randal,” Coxwell said, “We need to call an ambulance. You need to be at the hospital.”
“No, the time for that is long gone.” He blinked several times in succession. “You need to listen now. I only wish I could have told you sooner, but I’ve been delirious for days. It’s only through force of will I’ve managed to cobble together this much rationality, enough to explain things to you. I hope you remember that later, when people start to ask questions. You’ll tell them, right? That I alone was able to keep it together, even this close to the end?”
“What are you talking about?”
Randal grimaced, then motioned again toward the desk. Scattered across it were a series of frantically scrawled notes weighted down by the large glass stone. Some pages were full of crude diagrams, others stran
ge patterns, yet none were in any discernible order, and Coxwell was disturbed to find that many appeared to be stained with blood. Mixed in with them were photographs of the stone at different distances and angles, including a number of microscopic images of its scratches, marked by circles and symbols and further scrawled words.
“I don’t understand, Randal,” he said. “What is all this?”
“I took everything from Olivia’s when she—when what’s happening to me happened first to her. I figured it was finally my ticket.”
“Ticket to what? What’s happening to you?”
“Do you see the large blue folder on the desk, beneath my research? Those are Olivia’s notes. Markowitz and Linden unwittingly discovered something on their expedition, and while I was too busy and blinded by establishing my name to notice, she was trying to piece everything together. It’s a very interesting read. She didn’t understand the whole picture—she wasn’t wired that way—but she figured out most of it. There are a few a sections I’ve marked. Can you see them? Good. Please read them to me so I can explain.”
The dean turned the pages in the worn folder until he reached the first of the highlights. He lifted the note closer to his face and removed his glasses. His eyes had some trouble focusing on the tight cursive.
It’s been three days and I don’t feel any better. If anything, I’m progressively getting worse. I wish Linden were here to help me. He’d know what was going on. He always knew what was going on. But he’s not here. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Things that have been no help: the hospital, my doctor, the Internet, none of the med students I know. Nobody has any idea what’s happened, and I’m not sure I would trust them if they thought they knew. There’s only one person who can help me with this.
“You think she meant me, don’t you?” Randal said. “I know I did, the first time I read through her papers. I mean, who else could it be? But it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been, because she never asked. I wish she had—maybe the two of us could have figured it out. Did you know I was in love with her? I barely like anybody, but I think I loved her. I tried to tell her a number of times, but somehow she still ended up with Linden. God, how I hated him. When he was gone, it seemed like everything was finally going my way.” Randal’s chuckle turned into a wet cough. “Keep reading.”
Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales Page 16