Nicholas was in a bad way when I found him. Police had brought him to the Gordon because of peculiar, disruptive and highly irritable behavior he displayed while searching about the fountain in Leicester square the prior evening. There had been several complaints about his screaming into the water one minute, and then curling up into the fetal position beneath the basin and shaking with fear the next. This pattern had repeated over and over for the better part of an hour, and someone had notified the authorities of a disabled man acting queerly.
Nicholas was raving, although in retrospect, I am not sure that his ravings were the product of delusions and hallucinations. It occurs to me now that what he told me then may have been an attempt to reveal some secret beliefs or knowledge that the group all shared, but that they had for consistently remained tight lipped about. He rambled and at the same time searched frantically and ceaselessly about the room as though looking for something he either hoped to find or wanted to assure himself wasn’t there. He was too agitated to use his crutches, and at times crawled about the floor dragging his remaining leg. He talked of “the pure ones” who had finally shed the last vestiges of their imperfect mortal flesh and departed the material world, escaping from the power of something unspeakable. He told of a vague evil that had long lived under the city in the subterranean structures that have accumulated over the millennia that London has existed: in the sewers, abandoned railway stations, catacombs and underground rivers. He shuddered while describing long, wispy tendrils of vague substance indistinguishable as plant or animal that waved and whipped about in dark places rending and tearing and choking and smothering.
On the tube back to Euston Square, I made up my mind to learn more about the International Emporium. It was half noon, and I ordered a fisherman’s lunch and a pint at the Hound and sat by the window where I could watch the Emporium entrance across the street. The bread was stale and the cheese sub-par, but I tasted nothing while I sat and watched. Over the long afternoon, a steady trickle of broken, bandaged persons made their way in and out of the Emporium. I stopped counting after some dozen people entered the Emporium’s door; none of their faces were familiar to me. They came and went at a frequency that would have been unremarkable to a passerby, but to someone monitoring the store over the course of a day, they represented a very numerous clientele, each of which stayed within for a portion of an hour before hobbling out again. Not once did I see anyone leave with a parcel or bag or any other suggestion of having made a purchase. Once, I noticed a young woman leave with a fresh bandage over the bottom portion of her ear that I didn’t remember having seen when she entered a half hour before.
As I watched and drank, I became ever more disturbed and convinced that the strange little man behind the curtain was running some type of horrible, secret surgery in the basement. Phrases from Nicholas’ journal and rantings haunted my unsettled mind. Who were these pure ones? What did he mean by the evil tendrils living in the dark, forgotten spaces below the city streets? Had I discovered the seat of some terribly, apocalyptic cult that practiced ritual amputation as a means of purification?
Then, after several hours, a cab pulled up outside the window by which I sat. The silhouetted party inside paid the cabby and then, when the door opened, Margaret stepped out onto the street. Instantly, I was overcome with panic and horror. I shot up from my stool, knocking it over with a noisy bang. I pounded on the glass and yelled. On the street, as the cab was pulling away, Margaret turned and saw me through the window. She, too, suddenly looked terrified, and as I emerged onto the street, it was to see her running north toward Euston Road. Lithe and surprisingly quick, I followed her to the bend in Tonbridge street, where she vaulted over a chain link fence and through a stained, yellow-bricked alley. I might never have been able to close any distance behind her were it not for the traffic on Euston Road that temporarily slowed her progress. “Margaret, wait!” I called as I followed her into St. Pancras station, where she pushed through the gate just ahead of me in the crowd. I finally caught up with her on the platform. “Margaret, wait! Please, wait!”
As the loudspeaker announced the approaching train, Margaret turned around to face me on the platform. Her eyes were wide with terror. At that very moment, I saw long, snakelike grey-brown tendrils, like flattened mats of twine, whip up from beneath the platform and wrap around her middle and throat. I reached for her, the tips of my fingers just touching her shoulders, when the tendrils tightened as quickly as they had appeared, and pulled her beneath the oncoming train.
Stunned, I barely heard the shouts or running people on the platform. I hardly noticed the hands restraining me or the woman tell the bobby that I had pushed a woman down onto the tracks. I barely remember the ride in the police car or the interview in the small room with the one-way window.
Since learning this terrible secret truth, which will be the death of me, I have lost track of time. I know neither how long I have been here, nor even how long it has been since I last slept. Because of the eye-witness testimony, and the suspicious deaths associated with three other members of my group, I doubt very much that my incarceration here will end before the thing finds a means by which it can extend its tendrils into my cell from the ancient depths it haunts beneath the city. I can imagine how they rustle as they probe about narrow winding subterranean paths, tirelessly exploring possible routes through pipes and walls and floors, seeking me with some enigmatic consciousness and singleness of purpose. It can sense my physical presence because I know it’s there, searching hungrily for my flesh, or at least for its destruction. What was that noise? Under the washbasin...
Kevin Crisp teaches human anatomy and has published some fifteen science articles and book chapters, mainly on peculiarities of the blood-sucking leeches. His other interests include fly fishing, amateur radio and creative writing. His fiction has also appeared in The Horror Zine and Frontier Tales.
Story illustration by Dominic Black.
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How Rare Are Light and Life
by J.T. Glover
In thirty minutes I'm going to climb into the hypersleep compartment and set it for proximity auto-wake. The escape pod's only built to sustain a few weeks of activity, and my hysterics used up a lot of oxygen. Survival seems improbable, but anything that would increase my odds—plotting a course for home, setting a distress beacon—could endanger whoever found me. Better to drift for a few decades, chance discovery by some passing ship or bio-probe.
I'm powering down the systems, one by one. The monitor no longer shows the Chandra orbiting the colossal mass of ice behind me, shrouded in rocks and space dust gathered from eons in the void. Waiting for the right star or planet to change its course, draw it into a rough embrace that would shatter its outermost layers.
All this time, hurtling through the darkness, and that collision has never yet happened.
Chance?
Maybe.
Strains credibility, but I'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it at this point. Better to think that than—anything. Any fucking thing to make—in the whole of space—
Stop.
No fucking gibbering.
I'm starting over.
My name is Marcus Chen. I am... was... geologist and cultural agent on the U.F.P. Chandrasekhar, an exploratory vessel out of Gliese Station D/η. Not the best-equipped platform, but it was home. Our long range scanners located an object passing relatively nearby, but off the normal space lanes. It coincided with no known object, and the radiation it produced was incomprehensible—unique in the records. We sent probes, but they all went dead half a million kilometers out, and none of them got anything useful. Messages flew back and forth, and the fuckers on B/γ almost got tapped, but Command ultimately chose the Chandra.
If you're listening to this, I assume that I'm dead or still sleeping. No idea how much objective time has passed, but our mission began Earth 251.4315/Zarmina 22.2476. We had a crew of four: me, Shar Kohatsu, our pilot, Raj Gupta, who did systems
and agri, and a bot named Aster. There were plenty of workbots on board, of course, but Shar had spent years on Aster's programming, and it served as medic and half-assed social worker. We were a good team, each of us the kind of quiet and self-contained you need for deep space.
We did a nice, easy burn around Gliese, deployed the sails, and hyperslept the rest of the way. The first thing I saw on waking was Aster's brassine grin.
"Wakey-wakey, Marcus," it said, spritzing the caul of vascuwebs from my face with a spray that smelled like lavender and tasted like chlorine.
"Status?" I mumbled.
"High."
"Dammit, Aster..."
"Fine, fine. We're a week out. Primary systems above nominal, life support good. Still no useful data from the object."
"No name yet?"
"I've been calling it 'Nodus' in the log," said someone off to my left.
It took me a moment to process. Someone else awake, female, how big was our crew? Ah.
"Shar," I said. "How long you been up?"
"Hey Marcus. Aster woke me a few weeks back when we were passing through a gravitational anomaly."
My vision was still blurry, the ceiling like a piece of gray felt. Shar was no different when she came into view: brown corona of hair, the rough planes of her face like soft wax.
"Why?"
"Astrogation regs, sleepyhead. 'Human helm oversight must be re-established if, in the course of interstellar transit, any unexplained gravitational variation exceeding ± 0.09 standard—'"
"Got it, got it," I said, wishing my brain would speed up. "I... Wait. If that happened..."
"Yeah," Shar said, softly this time. "Aster says we passed through a dust cloud three years back, and that's it. Only one thing out here could have caused it, unless we're talking some kind of dark-matter-microsingularity-hand-of-god-type crap, and that's your department."
I braced myself against the surface of the bed and levered myself up on one elbow. My joints screamed, and I was shaking like a sick dog, but coming back from hyper's never fun. The sooner you start, the sooner you feel human again.
"God doesn't have a gravitational field," I rasped.
Shar and Aster both laughed, and Shar propped a few cushions behind me. I talked with her about nothing in particular while Aster started me on the usual sequence of injections and musculostimulants. An hour passed before I realized that Raj hadn't commed to greet me, but I figured he was busy playing peasant in the agri module.
"Better let you rest," Shar said a while later.
"I've been asleep long enough. Gotta be something for me to do."
"As soon as you're back up to speed," she said brusquely. "Why don't you finish your wake-up, and then come see me."
That was Shar at her best. Even with things already beginning to go wrong, she didn't waste time on what she couldn't change. She just carried on.
The day cycle passed quickly as I ran through my waking regimen, my own particular blend of prayer and yoga and mnemonic exercises. The familiar confines of the rec module centered me as much as anything—the mottled blue padding on the walls, the holo playing a mix of vids and nature scenes. By "evening" I was ready to get moving, even though my part of the mission wasn't really going to start for a while yet.
"How's she doing, cap?" I asked on walking into control.
"You know as well as I do," Shar said.
I smiled. Captains really do have the easiest job, basically just sitting back and watching unless something goes drastically wrong. The computer always does the real steering work, and the Chandra was perfectly capable of getting us into orbit around Nodus—even landing, if that was feasible. As my body had started to wake up, I'd felt the occasional changes in course as directional thrusters fired.
"Do we know what it looks like yet?"
"See for yourself," she said, twisting a dial until an image came onscreen.
"Why so grainy?"
"I don't know. The cameras have all been marginal since I woke. Aster says it started when we passed through whatever-it-was."
The screen showed the same thing that cameras generally show in space—stars and void. At the center of the scratchy image, however, there was a roughly oval dark patch. It could have been any of a thousand asteroids or random pieces of space debris that clung to no star and had no neighbors. Sights like that always remind me of the vastness of space, how rare light and life are. The archipelago that humans have built out here is tiny by contrast, and either uniquely precious or utterly insignificant, depending on your perspective.
"Get any good readings yet?" I asked.
"Yeah, dozens," Shar said, grimacing, "and they're all different."
"How will we know if it's safe to orbit?"
"I'll decide when we're closer. Things should be clearer in a couple days, anyway."
"Choose wisely, jefe."
Shar looked over at me, cool as ice. I held up one hand, signed a quick apology, and then we just looked at the screen for a while.
"Maybe Raj can fix the cameras, or the relays, or whatever," I said.
Shar looked back at the screen, muttered something too low for me to catch.
"What's that?"
"I said we need to go see Raj."
The sick bay was tiny, befitting a small scientific vessel with a small crew, but it did have a suspension chamber for isolating an infected or otherwise dangerous crew member. For all that space is an airless vacuum, and it should be dangerous, I'm amazed at the number of bacteria and viruses that thrive out here and nowhere else.
Raj hung in his harness like a sleeping baby, silent and unmoving, but for the rise and fall of his chest. I tried to observe dispassionately, consider him as just one element of a complex mission, but I was having a difficult time. Aster put its hands on my shoulders, kneaded the still-stiff muscles. Shar was studying the readouts, comparing them with something on her clipboard.
"No change," she said. "None at all. He's sleeping more deeply, if anything."
"But his face," I replied shakily. "And his arms..."
"We don't know how or why the growths started, but it was after I woke."
"Completely anomalous," Aster said. "Wherever the tendrils came from, they're built along cancerous lines, and the cells keep dividing and changing. If Raj wakes up, he's in for one hell of a surprise."
I stared at Raj, thinking about his sur-daughter, Sita. She'd been a shadow in an incubator when we left, and she'd be moving toward middle age by the time we returned. At this rate her genetic parent would appear more anemone than human when she saw him for the first time.
"He won't wake," Shar said. "We tried gas, stims, heat, cold. No effect."
"Is he still in hyper?" I asked, curiosity aroused in spite of his horrific transformation.
"No Rip Van Winkle here," Aster said, "and no coma either. He's just sleeping, though it looks from the readouts like—"
"He's dreaming," Shar whispered, laying one hand on the glass. "Nine days he's been dreaming, and the growths just keep getting longer."
I looked at her hand, and not for the first time I felt a surge of jealousy, imagining her caressing him. Shar and Raj weren't coupled, but I knew they'd been together on past missions, back before I was transferred to the Chandra. I wasn't to either of their tastes, but spacers aren't supposed to be bothered by these things. That's true enough, though it's definitely easier with Aster on board on the rare occasions I get lonely.
You probably think it's strange that I'm talking about sex at a time like this. It's just—with everything that happened, I've been turning it over in my head—what makes a human. Not the basic physical act. I think it's the connection, the ability to intellectualize it and make a culture of it, a tiny civilization against the darkness.
Someone might have been able to love Raj at that point. A person with very unusual tastes, but it could have happened. How he got later, though—it would have been impossible. When you think—
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The pace of our activity increased as the object grew larger on our screens. I didn't get much sleep, but I didn't mind, and it kept my mind off of Raj. We checked on him constantly, and I pleaded to God on his behalf at every moment I could, but he slept on as the tendrils grew. The shifts in our trajectory came more frequently, until one day they stopped almost entirely. I was in the bay, going through checklists that Raj would normally have run, when I felt it, and then came the clank and whine as the sails retracted.
Orbit.
"How does it look?" I asked after making my way to control.
Shar and Aster were seated side-by-side, monitoring readouts and dealing with the operational stuff I never touched. Neither looked my way immediately, so I leaned against a wall and watched the monitors. They'd set them to cycle through the spectra filters, and even with the static, it seemed likely we weren't looking at some intergalactic ambassador ship or battle cruiser, or even an oversized prayer bead. It looked like a giant asteroid, or perhaps the ghost of a planet that never was, and I tried not to be disappointed. As a geologist, it was my professional duty not to be disappointed by the mundane, but I still had to restrain a sigh.
"I heard that," Aster murmured.
"You hear too well," I said. "So we came out here for... an asteroid."
"Not quite," Shar said. "Whatever Nodus is, the core isn't solid. Still not clear how big it is—probably larger than Mimas or Scylla. Metallic and mineral exterior, and ice below that, but there's something else down there."
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 29