Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  He led me to the corridor outside the chamber holding El Tigre. Ventano and del Cuerco were inside suited up. They were filming, taking various measurements, I don’t know what else.

  “I sent your report by fax to the Academy of Science at Caracas. Dr. Nuccio responded by saying that you were hallucinating. When I mentioned that you were physically missing for over seven hours, he changed his approach. He wants me to go in and grasp the torus, just as you did.”

  “Someone has to repeat the experiment,” I agreed. “Or else it’s bad science.”

  “They wanted each of us to try it!”

  “I agree,” I told him.

  “Except that Ventano pointed out that you may have already inadvertently formed some kind of chemical or physiological bond with the torus that provoked it to become operational. It may not work again with another of us. So we decided that I will suit up go into the room and grasp it. And you will be suited up waiting nearby. If nothing happens, you will come in and grasp it along with me.”

  “Fine.”

  “I told Dr. Nuccio you would agree. We’re going to do it at the same time as you did yesterday. Just in case that is a factor. Agreed?”

  I agreed. He looked at me and half smiled. “What an adventure, eh, young man? And on your first job.”

  “What an adventure,” I repeated.

  Ventano and del Cuerco exited finally and unsuited. We all met in Prof Rig’s office and they related their findings: the torus and El Tigre were unchanged since last night. They began unloading their measurements into the Mac, and when they were done, del Cuerco began cackling.

  “Well, as we all suspected,” he said. “The light spectrum being emitted by the torus falls into a fairly unique range. We’ll send out the formula to various labs and observatories and see what they can come up with. You said that the air was pale chartreuse?” he asked me. “But it had no distinctive odor?”

  “I couldn’t smell it. Not through the Haz-Mat helmet, no.”

  “We’ve dusted your entire suit, but it seems you were there for too short a period of time for it to have left any traces.”

  “What are you expecting to come up with?” I asked.

  “Well, we know the torus is not from here.” Prof Rig laughed. “And given the colors you mentioned, the meteorite does not derive from Mars, which has a distinctive pink to red atmosphere that every lander has photographed and relayed back. So it must be from elsewhere.”

  “Methane is yellow,” I said. “So are some sulfur mixtures and metal sulfates. And also I recall some ammonium carbides and perhaps aluminum sulfides?”

  Del Cuerco smiled. “Where in the solar system is it yellow? A moon of Saturn? Titan?”

  “Enough speculation! Back to work,” Prof Rig declared and we all went back to our desks.

  I’m waiting to go back to El Tigre. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

  11:49 p.m.

  At three o’clock this afternoon, both Prof Rigoberto and I were suited up in our Haz-Mat gear and entered the room containing El Tigre meteorite.

  I remained at the back wall; Prof Ventano and Dr. del Cuerco remained on the other side of the triple-paned glass out in the corridor. I was filming from a small digital camera inserted into the helmet of my Haz-Mat suit and so was Ventano from a larger camera. He was hoping to catch the actual vanishing moment and point, if the professor does vanish as I supposedly did yesterday. We’ve also fitted both cameras with a flash filter, which should instantly go into effect if there is a bright flash as happened twice yesterday.

  At 3:03 p.m. Prof Rig went up to El Tigre. At 3:05, he grasped the torus. Nothing happened. He continued holding it, released it, then grasped it again. Still nothing happened. He then gestured to me and I placed the third camera, a video, onto a stand he had earlier set up inside the room but opposite where he and del Cuerco would view us. This would provide a triple perspective.

  At 3:07 I went over to El Tigre where Prof Rig was holding on to the torus with his right hand. I moved to his left and grasped it too.

  Once again there was an explosion of light and color, for which both of us were prepared this time.

  Only a few seconds passed before I opened my eyes. Same yellow-green atmosphere, and we were standing side by side on a rocklike perch once more. This time, however, I felt that we were in a different spot than before, higher up on the outside wall outside of the huge edifice. I could easily make out the top of the wall above, but not at all below.

  Ventano had cleared the internal mics between the two Haz-Mat suits and we had tested them in the office.

  “This is the place,” I now said to Prof Rig. “But we’re higher up and I think further away from that corner.” I pointed to where the two vast walls met.

  “Amazing!” he said, and I realized from his awed tone of voice that none of them had believed me before, at least not completely.

  It was awkward, both of us holding the torus, but we managed to turn about fully on the perch and Prof Rig said, “Look!” pointing with his free hand across from us where, as before, there was an identical wall and perches.

  We could make out the roof line there and depressed in a bit what looked like a natural overhanging lip that extended as far as the eye could see.

  “It’s a natural canyon, I believe,” Prof Rig said. “And these two long edifices were built in underneath the cliff edge. Astonishing!”

  I stand maybe three inches taller than the professor, and I could see something above the natural lip opposite very far along its length of wall. It seemed to be a mountain peak. I mentioned it to him.

  We turned carefully around again and he said, “Now we go in.”

  We put the torus against the wall and it opened an entry for us as it had before for me.

  This chamber seemed to lead to another but was essentially the same as the one yesterday. As we stepped in, we felt a sudden and enormous tremor and both of us put up our free hands to hold on to the wall. Two sudden very large jolts occurred, following by a rolling motion.

  “Earthquake!” Prof Rig said. I’d never experienced one before. “That’s new,” I replied.

  Our opening was still intact and we peered outside. The edifice wall opposite us on the other side of the canyon appeared to be have been riven through. Huge fissures appeared running crazily in all directions. We could make out two little perches angled over steeply.

  Another tremor occurred, this one sharp and loud. Those angled perches fell and more crazy rifts occurred in the opposite wall.

  “We must see if this one is also compromised,” he said calmly, and so I stepped out again onto the perch and looked around. But no, I couldn’t see anything like cracks on this wall. Were we too far away? Was it only affecting that cliff wall on that side of the canyon?

  We went back into the chamber. “Is this how it looked before?” Prof Rig asked, and I looked about and concluded yes, and we took photos of it all, going close-up on the strange protuberances I’d seen at eye level, and the stick-like objects and the rope-like objects too.

  All this took five minutes by my watch. Because I’d been so taken by the time discrepancies we’d all noted before, I wanted to be precise about everything this time.

  He then asked me if I was “ready,” and I said yes, and we placed the torus against the inner chamber wall and quickly stepped back from the window that soundlessly opened in the wall.

  Here the internal ziggurat shape and ramps going up and down were very apparent; we could actually see where they ended in a roof area not high above us. As with across the canyon, there was a space of maybe ten meters between the roof and the overhanging rock cliff edge.

  More crucial was the almost chaotic movement of those dark, animated shapes I’d seen before. To begin with there were scores of them this time. Then too, many were rushing about in what seemed to be a true panic, carrying objects, running into each other, grabbing each other. As before I couldn’t make them out any clearly, but this time I did see that ma
ny of them held out a torus similar to the one Prof Rig and I held.

  He tried stepping out onto the open way that seemed to lead to the ramps, and he fell back as another two or three rushed past him, racing up the ramp. From this close up and because there were so many of them, it became clear that they had three upper limbs growing out of or attached to a clavicle, shoulder area. Also that they had a single thick middle lower limb beneath a cone-shaped torso or trunk that was propelled along as though by some built-in mechanical motion from below; whether it was manufactured or not, I couldn’t tell, because they were moving so quickly and also because there were much thinner, more flexible bottom limbs that wrapped around, supported, and aided the forward motion of this single limb and that also—if any of them would stand still long enough—might also be a prop or support. As they shot by us we could see they had heads of a sort, but nothing like a neck, and I couldn’t make out hands at all, just moving, grasping fingers, or perhaps they were even tentacles.

  “Look how they’re using the torus,” the professor said and pointed. I could see those who reached the roof locate a spot they searched for carefully, then become statue still for a second, as though settling in, then raise up the torus with that upper limb not busily holding objects—treasures? heirlooms? The torus opened a window in the rock ledge above them. Then they were somehow projected there, and we saw them through that hole on the surface of the cliff before they rushed off.

  The noise they made, as it had been before, was high-pitched, horrifying, and tumultuous, so that we had to shut off the speakers inside our helmets.

  But the cause of their panic was clear enough as the floor beneath us was jolted strongly three times in a row, with a sickening rolling motion in between. Peering into the chamber, it was clear the outer walls here too were now badly cracking and might be about to fall.

  Once we felt a slackening in the number of the many shapes going past us, Prof Rig motioned me to go out and up a ramp with him. We began ascending the ramp way up the interior ziggurat.

  The higher we went, the more evident it became that the huge edifice below us was already damaged beyond repair. Once we got onto the roof, distant sections of it began to collapse and fall. Clearly we had to do something fast.

  We tried looking down to find those spots on the roof the shapes had located, but it was nothing but a swirl of textured layers with no rhyme or reason.

  Now we were beginning to panic as the section we’d just been in, where in fact we had entered, fell with a crash, leaving an enormous gaping hole in front of the ziggurat ramp, which now we saw exposed some hundreds, perhaps thousands of meters down.

  We’d barely understood this when two of the dark animated figures shoved up past us and pushed us off the spot where we were standing. We barely kept our balance. One came so close that I could for the first time actually make out a face. I was horrified by its strangeness, as it must have been horrified by mine. But the two of them stood together, holding one torus almost above them, and went still, as the others had, before a hole was somehow pierced in the rock ceiling above and in a second they were gone.

  Prof Rig had not looked them in the face as I had. Concerned to see what they had chosen, he’d looked down at the roof and then up at the ceiling.

  “I’ve got it. I understand,” he shouted. He pulled me alongside him almost two meters. He located a certain swirl of texturing on a roof below our feet, a roof that was starting to collapse in vast chunks all around us, and he pointed up, where he shouted there was an identical texture.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said, and we stood still and held the torus up to the under-ceiling swirl, and suddenly we felt as though encased in some transparent tube.

  “Look!” he shouted and I did, and that ceiling swirl was now open to the sick yellow sky above. Before I could reply we were up there, beyond the roof, and I could see the ground beneath us was now the cliff. As I’d guessed, it ran alongside a canyon that was maybe twenty kilometers long. Across from us, the mountain peak I’d seen a hint of before was huge, and worse, it was shuddering, before one entire side of it collapsed.

  Beyond us, the animated shapes were rushing to flee along the cliff to some interior area. The ground beneath us began to rise and fall so suddenly that we could barely keep our balance.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” Prof Rig shouted. “How did you do it before?”

  In the midst of a cataclysmic collapsing landscape, all I could recall was that I had struck the torus on its thinnest side, which I’m guessing had negated something. I told him so, and we went over to a jut of rock barely holding together and struck the torus.

  Nothing. A second cyclopean tremor shook us, surely destroying the ground under our very feet. Then the light came and blinded us.

  Relieved, we came to together, still holding each other. It was deep night and I recognized the Southern Cross constellation at the horizon. I never before so loved seeing a clear, starry, Venezuelan night.

  It took us a few minutes to locate the Puruana Laboratory some four hundred meters below the rocky outcrop where we had somehow alit.

  I checked my watch and it read 3:28 p.m. We’d been gone only twenty-one minutes.

  In the lab, Ventano and del Cuerco told us it had been over eight hours.

  The torus was where we had grasped it earlier, slightly hovering over El Tigre meteorite.

  This time there were two of us to relate the experience, as well as my camera, to show what we had seen and witnessed.

  I found myself once more ravenous and ate all of what del Cuerco had been saving up in the way of packaged cookies and little cakes in our breakfast area.

  I’m so exhausted I simply have to get some sleep now.

  July 6th, 2___

  Ten minutes after noon.

  I just woke up and went out of the breakfast room. The others were confabbing in the office. Prof Rig looked tired but also very excited. I could see images playing on the Mac evidently downloaded from the camera in my Haz-Mat helmet, and Ventano and Prof Rig and del Cuerco were commenting excitedly about each one as the professor explained what they were looking at.

  I made some fresh coffee, ate what looked like freshly delivered pastries, and returned to the office and also looked on and listened.

  When there was a break in their talk I said, “It’s an eye! The torus. It’s a kind of activating eye that can open…I don’t know how…windows and doors in solid material. I believe that during the disaster we witnessed our torus somehow became embedded into a chunk of that ceiling ledge, and when the ledge collapsed or was shaken apart, it was somehow or other thrust into space. The colors of El Tigre, once you scrape off the burn-surface, should be identical to that rock ceiling, to that that cliff edge that we stood on.”

  I’m not sure how I knew that, but I did, and I persuaded them. Soon Ventano was suiting up and going out to the chamber where the torus still hovered, and he did a careful surface abrasion of El Tigre. What he came back with did in fact look similar to the cliff we’d stood on.

  The second thing I said that startled them was, “I saw one. Close up. This close. Face-to-face.”

  Slowly but surely, the next day, with the assistance of an illustrator, I was able to show them what it looked like: del Cuerco said it resembled a much larger white-faced vampire bat, without fangs.

  “Go over your report,” Prof Rig said, “and I will go over mine. Dr. Nuccio will be arriving in an hour or so to hear us out.”

  Dr. Nuccio is the head of the National Academy of Science and I can hear the noise of the rotors of his helicopter landing. He is coming into the lab now with three other men.

  July 7th, 2____

  3 p.m.

  There has been a terrible incident in the lab. I was out with Dr. Nuccio and his assistant, and Professor Rigoberto and two other people from the academy, having lunch in what passes for a town here in Punto Fijo.

  Prof Rig’s cell phone rang, then Nuccio’s. They heard the story
simultaneously and jumped up. I managed to filch whatever pasteles had just been dropped on the table for desert (why am I so hungry?), and we all took off back to the lab in two cars.

  The video camera we’d set up yesterday afternoon in the lab now goes on when ever anyone enters the lab, and it caught everything, including sound.

  The latter mostly consisted of del Cuerco shouting, “No! No! It musn’t! It cannot! Not yet!”

  We see what he is shouting about: the torus slowly descending until it is no longer in sight, evidently headed into the core of the interior, once again.

  Del Cuerco said that he was passing by the triple-paned windows when he noticed it. He said that it was happening so quickly that he didn’t think he’d have time to change into the Haz-Mat suit. So instead he rushed into the room and tried to grab the torus.

  Del Cuerco didn’t ever tell us what had motivated him to do it. We’d already told him that we now believed that the source of the torus no longer existed, and that we believed we couldn’t ever return. Prof Rig had even speculated that we’d not actually been there but instead within some kind of representation of the event, some four-dimensional video tape loop the torus has somehow reconstructed for us, since where it had taken place had collapsed, had been utterly destroyed by that huge earthquake or enormous volcano burst or whatever it was that we’d seen and experienced.

  Even so, del Cuerco had rushed over to El Tigre, shoved a footstool against it, bent over, reached down into the suffused ultraviolet interior, and grabbed onto the torus.

  It had not risen, as he’d hoped. It had continued to descend, and then it stopped. As he tugged and grabbed at it (luckily with only one hand) and shouted in dismay, the interior rock had begun to close around the torus. Before he could withdraw his hand it had closed solidly upon it, almost, he said, as though it had flowed molten for a moment, while he’d watched it happen in some sort of stupefied wonder.

  He’d been too stunned to even feel pain. He claimed he hadn’t. But suddenly he couldn’t feel anything at all at the end of his upper wrist. The rock interior had fully closed, the fissure and any trace of it were no longer there. The meteorite looked as it had before, when it had first arrived.