The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  And now, in 2009, that terrible day had arrived.

  “Come on, Ryder, keep talking,” Carla whispered, yanking him back to the moment at hand. “You’re coming to the best part.”

  “So I accepted your challenge,” he said as if his thoughts had never strayed, all rogue memories banished. “I also insisted on picking the spot. And at 11:40 P.M. on Makaha Beach, we stood at the edge of the ocean. ‘Why here?’ you asked me, facing the black, flat water. It lapped at your toes, the ocean being in a puppy-dog mood that night, calm as a lake, and endless as the sea of stars reflected on its surface. But not much good for surfing.”

  Her throaty chuckle warmed him as before.

  “‘I’ve got some friends you might want to meet,’ I said. You glanced over your shoulder and gave me a quizzical crook of an eyebrow, followed by the worst scowl of suspicion I’ve ever seen. ‘Trust me,’ I added, afraid you’d gotten the wrong idea. ‘But we have to swim. They’re waiting a few hundred yards off shore.’”

  “And I went for such an obvious play to get me naked?”

  “Of course. In fact, a little smile played at the corner of your lips, your Polynesian features indelible on the night.”

  “Your getting corny again,” she said, but draped an arm and a leg over him. It felt good, even through HAZMAT suits.

  “This part gets pretty X-rated,” he said.

  She pressed against him. “I’m a big girl.”

  He pulled her closer. “You reached behind your back and unzipped a white, loose-fitting dress, letting it fall to the sand. You’d worn nothing underneath, and your skin had a slight sheen, making it appear honey-glazed in the moonlight. With one shake of your head, down tumbled your hair, its ends curling at your hips.”

  “Did I make you hot?”

  “Oh, yes! Your colors, your contours, your flesh, all Gauguin--it took every bit of my self-control not to touch you.”

  “What then?”

  “‘Come on, Ryder,’ you said, and, without looking back, waded into the water. It closed around your legs and rose up your thighs like black cream. When it reached the inward curve at the top of your buttocks, it floated the tips of your hair off your waist, spreading them apart until they trailed behind you, reminding me of a glistening black cape. Then you gave a little jump, flexed forward at the waist, and plunged, your hips made rounder by the motion. As your head disappeared beneath the water, followed by the flash of your thighs and feet, I had to remind myself to breathe.”

  She squirmed against him. “Then what?”

  “I dropped my clothes and went in after you.”

  She pressed tighter still, her breath growing audible through his headset, like a gentle hiss of steam. “And then?”

  “In seconds I was swimming at your side, matching you stroke for stroke. Our bodies occasionally grazed one another. Your skin, deliciously warm in the cool of the Pacific, teased me. The sensation was one of fire and ice.”

  She began to move against him. “What happened next?” she asked, her breathing becoming more ragged.

  “You dived, and I followed, head first, staying in the wake of a phosphorescent glitter that streamed off your limbs like silver dust. Abruptly you arched backward, and swam up the front of me, nipples brushing against my lips, my chest, my--”

  “I know. Did it feel good?” she asked, almost in a moan.

  “I wanted you, and somersaulted, until I was chasing your heels to the surface. As we rose, I looked up, and to my amazement saw a shimmering night sky almost as clearly as if through air, the calm water above us transparent to the point of disappearing. I couldn’t tell how deep we were, or how much farther we had to swim before we’d be able to breathe again. It was like rising toward an invisible membrane, when suddenly we broke into air without warning. ‘That’s fantastic,’ I said. You laughed at my astonishment.”

  “‘One of the wonders of night-swimming,’ I believe I said,” Carla added, rolling on her back and pulling him on top of her with a sudden fierceness that made their suits crinkle louder than ever.

  “You also did a scissor kick that brought us closer together,” he continued, his own excitement mounting. “‘They’re other wonders to night-swimming?’ I asked, feeling my arm brush your hips. ‘That depends,’ you said. ‘On?’ I asked. ‘How long you can tread water,’ you answered.”

  She arched under him.

  He was fully aroused despite the barrier of the outfits, and writhed against her as he went on speaking barely above a whisper. “You continued to move, yet kept us above water, building the pleasure of it, riding us to the brink, letting it wane, stoking us higher still . . .”

  Her sounds urged him on. Soft throaty cries did a crescendo into high-pitched, excited groans, then plummeted to moist lower notes full of animal growls and shameless exclamations of what she liked, until he couldn’t separate breathless coaxings past from present.

  She began to undulate against him.

  He’d brought her to orgasm with his words as surely as if he were inside her. Drunk with surprise, he propelled himself onward, and far from sated, she matched him, whispering for more. His thrusts became frenzied, his speech pressured, his intoxication with the images behind closed eyes more exhilarating.

  On that New Year’s Eve, for one swirling, star-dazzling moment, they’d thrown back their heads, crying and laughing at the ecstasy of it, his loneliness breached, the twisted world of the chimera transcended, and he’d been swept clean of all the gloom and doom that had buried him for so many years.

  On this night in the here and now, they’d transcended death and spacesuits like oversexed teenagers.

  “I want you for real,” he said, pushing off her and unzipping his hood.

  “Are you crazy?” she said, sitting up, still breathing hard.

  “No. It’ll be okay. The radiation probably isn’t that strong in Waianae yet, and it’s likely even less here inside the house.” He began to peel off the rest of his outfit, hopping on one leg while trying to extricate his foot from the booties portion, and crashed into a bureau.

  Carla giggled. “‘Probably? Likely?’ What’s happened to my scientifically exact Terry.”

  “You made him horny.” He had a sleeve out.

  “But I’m contagious--”

  “It’s a little late for you and me to be concerned about sharing germs.” Tugging his other foot free, he teetered backwards into an antique writing desk, nearly splintering its spindly legs.

  Carla giggled again, clicked off the bedside lamp, and in a heartbeat, the sound of her undoing a zipper ripped through the darkened room.

  * * * *

  Afterward, her breath against his ear softened, the heated quivering of her body fell still, and even her arms lay quiet, temporarily freed from the puppeteer’s strings.

  Before the great darkness of today could reclaim him, he escaped to a deep sleep in Carla’s arms.

  A little later, the birds started to awaken, and they filled the air with their morning song as exuberantly as ever, blissfully unaware that soon they would no longer be here to greet the rising sun.

  But by now he dreamed of floating on the water in the blissful aftermath to their making love back then, New Year’s Eve, 2003.

  He’d not known when the dolphins had showed up.

  They’d just suddenly seemed to be there.

  From all their chirping and head nodding, they had obviously approved of what they’d seen.

  Chapter 20

  That same morning, Friday, January 23, 2009, 6:45 A.M. IPT

  Communications Room, Hickam Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii

  “Okay, what have we got? Positive findings only. I’ve had my fill of negatives,” Terry Ryder began. He sat before two dozen computer screens, each one linked to a member of his team. Banks of dials, switches and winking lights surrounded him. Everything was integrated with everything else, and synapses to the satellite network zoomed their comments through space at speeds faster than thought could trav
el down neurons. It was the world’s first video-conference call to be monitored by just about every doctor on the planet. “First up, MRIs.”

  “They’re mine,” said a voice from the speakers, and a man with a mane of flowing white hair leaned forward. Names didn’t matter. People were identified by the type of data they’d been assigned to collate. CASH-DOC they called themselves, for Collect And Screen Hospital Documents, a data retrieval system able to pull laboratory and X-ray results for a given diagnosis from hospital computers all over the country. On cue, the color images of his twenty-four colleagues switched to a static, three-dimensional cross-section of a human brain. The sharp contrast between cauliflower-type ridges and curlicues of cortex in a thousand shades of gray, and the darker sweep of deeper pathways in equally numerous tones of charcoal, came across as clear as if the speaker held a cleaved specimen of the real thing in his hand. Magnetic Resonance Imaging provides an Alas-poor-Yorick moment.

  “As you can see, this appears to be a normal brain with no space occupying lesions,” he said. “Investigators then injected an infusion to highlight the vascular tree.” Like an exotic coral forming before their eyes, the crimson network of arteries branched out, divided, and subdivided into ever smaller calibers until they extended to all parts of every lobe, ending in a flimsy web of capillaries as fine as scarlet lace. “As you can also see, the vessels are intact and there are no leaks or hemorrhages. To this we added an infusion to tag the blood’s white cells, and here’s where it gets interesting. For the purpose of the demonstration, we coded the computer to render these tags as yellow.”

  Disparate portions of the fine capillary vasculature were suddenly outlined in a yellow haze. They looked on fire.

  “Something is attracting the white cells to different parts of the brain. We’d a hundred subjects in all, and no two had their infiltrations at the same site.”

  A sequence of images from the additional brains flashed across the computer screen, showing the fiery sections to be situated in a variety of anatomical structures.

  “Your conclusion?” Terry said.

  “The obvious. Each victim is mounting an immune response to something in the brain tissue. Whatever that something is, it’s able to turn up practically anywhere in a variety of CNS structures and is being read as alien by the host’s own white cell defenses.”

  The screen reverted to a live feed of his team members.

  A buzz of conversation erupted.

  “Everyone, please, hold your comments and questions until the end,” Terry said, determined not to get bogged down. “Okay, next, PET scans.”

  “Got it,” a woman’s voice said, “but this is going to be short.” She prolonged her o’s by two beats, revealing her New-Englander roots.

  Two multi-colored images of a brain appeared on the computer screen, one frontal, one lateral, like mug shots. Cool blues and greens vied with hotter yellows, oranges and reds, all psychedelic in brilliance.

  “This is a control slide of a normal subject in whom we infused the standard isotopes, tagging sugars as a marker to demonstrate increased cell metabolism. In case any of you have forgotten the fundamentals of positron emission technology, PET scans track such increases in sugar uptake as an indicator of cell activity. Sleepy brain cells that are not firing don’t use much glucose, and appear blue or green. Cells firing at capacity need nourishment, and they show concentrations of yellow, orange and red.”

  The image on the screen morphed into a more neon version of the MRIs, yellow orange and red outlining the periphery of capillary beds at various spots in the cerebral cortex.

  “What’s illustrated here is that the increases in cell activity correspond exactly to the distribution of white cells we see with magnetic resonance imaging.”

  More pet scans flashed across the screens.

  “And as before, we see that these increases in activity occur anywhere, no two brains showing a similar pattern.”

  “Conclusion?” Terry said.

  “Usually, infected neurons increase their own metabolic activity as they cope with the invading organism, and the invader itself utilizes sugar for energy. Such a dual rise in uptake would show hot color patterns that extend well beyond where the white cells are, the spread of microbes through tissue beds always having a jump on the immune response. But here, we don’t have such a pattern.”

  “Which means?” Terry said.

  “Whatever alien substance the white cells are responding to, it’s not a living microbe as we know it.”

  More mutterings erupted on line.

  “Okay, people, I repeat, let’s save our comments until we have all the findings. Though I must say, that’s a shocker. Next up, the hematologists. Anything?”

  “Lymphocyte count a bit high, but everything else, including neutrophils, unremarkable,” a different female voice said, the pronunciation crisp at the edges, fully rounded in the vowels, and leaving no doubt as to this being the true England’s English. “For those of you who are not doctors, I should explain that lymphocytes are the second line of defense in white cells, and they play a role in chronic, more longstanding inflammatory responses. Neutrophils, on the other hand, are the storm troopers of immunity, swarming foreign invaders within hours of their appearance in the body. Our findings here are in keeping with a smoldering inflammatory response. Whatever abnormal substance is deposited throughout the victims’ brains, it didn’t trigger the primary line of defense.”

  “Care to comment on what ‘it’ could be or how ‘it’ got there?” Terry asked.

  “No, other than to say I don’t have a clue.”

  A few people chuckled.

  “Let’s move on. Bacteriology?”

  “Negative.”

  “Virology?”

  “Nothing cultured so far.”

  Identical to the results of his own patients. But that didn’t necessarily mean no microbe existed. Bacteriologists might simply not know under what conditions the organism could be made to grow in a Petri dish.

  “Toxicology screens?” It was a remote possibility, but to be complete, he had to rule out chemical causes, such as heavy metal poisoning.

  “Clean.”

  “Neurotoxins?”

  “None on blood tests. We even have a few biopsy results from peripheral nerves, also negative, at least for known substances. But to say no for certain, you ’d need to test actual pieces of brain tissue.”

  Terry added a mental note to his do-list for San Antonio. “Biochemistry?” he said, expecting a similarly quick pass.

  “I have a surprise for you, Terry. There we found something interesting.” The speaker was a lean-faced, weathered man with a tightly coiffed beard and a thick Spanish accent. He compensated for the imperfect pronunciation by speaking English very slowly. Not that his measured delivery ever bored anyone. He’d elicited a standing ovation with his acceptance speech in Stockholm last year.

  “We scanned all the results submitted to us, and while most physicians who did biochemical investigations focused on more routine studies--all normal--a few teaching centers included more exotic surveys, no doubt the work of medical students--the tick-everything-on-the-requisition-just-in-case-I-miss-something syndrome.

  Everyone on the link laughed.

  “These included immunoglobulin levels,” he continued, and for the sake of lay viewers, explained that immunoglobulins were tailor-made antibodies that target whatever invasive entity the immune system is responding to. “They bind themselves to the intruder, their molecular structure a mirror image of it, then deliver the foreign substance to cellular chop-shops called phagocytes where enzymes cut it to pieces. There are multiple ways that such a response can occur, each involving different types of immuno-gamma-globulins. In the main three, IgGs provide the antibody combatants of the neutrophil storm-trooper response, whereas IgAs and IgMs comprise the second, delayed wave of antibodies unleashed by lymphocytes. What’s surprising here is that IgG levels were normal, whereas IgA and IgM levels we
re raised.”

  The silence on the link told Terry that the biochemist had everyone’s attention. “Which means?” he asked, wanting the man on record, but his own ideas had already begun to form.

  “As my esteemed colleague from England suggested, whatever we’re up against appears to have dodged the sentinels that normally are first responders to any infection or invasive entity. My findings suggest that it accomplished this by accumulating gradually, the way we inject allergy patients with small amounts of an offending allergen until we trick the immune system into ignoring it and the foreign protein is no longer read as alien. While this may dodge the IgG response, IgA and IgM antibodies aren’t so easily fooled.”

  No one said anything.

  Terry’s mind raced. “So let me sum up here. We have evidence of an alien something that doesn’t have a metabolism, it can’t be picked up on PET scans, but it infiltrates neuronal tissue at multiple locations and evades our first line of natural immunity.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “What’s another way?”

  “This something has to have come from somewhere. If you apply the KISS principle--keep it stupid, simple, or is it the other way around?”

  More laughter.

  Terry appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood.

  “The simplest explanation,” the man continued, “would be to consider it a byproduct, some toxic protein laid down by a microbe, and that organism either continues to live undetected in the host, leaving no other traces of itself that hospital testing can pick up, or, having done its dirty work, the organism has died out, its residue left to wreak some sort of metabolic havoc.”