The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 2

by Andy Ritchie

  But what is totally impossible to describe is the noise.

  They moaned, you see, these monstrous things, they moaned and they wailed and they cried.

  And they did so with such...conviction.

  These weren’t the self-pitying lamentations of those who were physically suffering.

  These weren’t the soul-searching howls of those who had lost a loved one.

  These weren’t the tortured ululations of those overcome by self-loathing.

  These weren’t the suicidal cries of those who had lost all hope.

  These were all of these things, as if each of these creatures was simultaneously enduring pain, grief, guilt and despair on a truly monumental scale.

  I instantly felt tears flowing down my face, as if the anguish which these things were feeling was actually physical, infecting my own soul with their wretchedness.

  Wretchedness.

  That’s the word I was looking for.

  That sums up how these creatures looked and smelt and sounded.

  Utter wretchedness.

  And yet, in spite of the horror I felt in what I saw, I still found myself walking slowly over to look more closely at the nearest one, my morbid curiosity aroused in spite of everything that assaulted my senses.

  As I reached the bed, the first and most horrifying realisation dawned upon me.

  This thing...this creature...was, in fact, a human...a woman to be precise.

  It (I use the term ‘it’, not ‘she’, deliberately) had arms and legs (though these were stunted and malformed with misshapen hands and feet) that simply seemed to flail around uselessly. The limbs were attached to a grossly elongated body, sickly yellow in colour, perhaps twice the length and three times the girth of a normal woman...but recognisable as a female form nonetheless, not least because of the six enormous breasts that hung down at the sides of the body, each adorned with a massive nipple that looked like meatballs sat amidst of plate of red tagliatelle, from which leaked a thick, custard-like discharge. Other parts of the body also leaked what looked like watery pus from tears in the flesh where the skin appeared to have cracked and torn.

  But whilst the body was hideous, the head was unspeakably monstrous.

  It was maybe five or six times the size of a normal human head, but was horribly deformed and distended, as if the brain had been blown up with a bicycle pump to the point where the skull had cracked to allow parts of the brain to break out in big bulges...it wasn’t uniformly oversized, some of the bulges were huge...and some of them, rather incongruously, had the odd tuft of wispy black hair.

  And then there was the face...how do you describe the face...?

  It was almost as if, when the head had been blown up, it had dragged some of the facial features with it, but not at the same rate or in the same direction. As a result, the disturbingly human-looking left eye was quite low down on the face whilst the right eye was at least twelve inches away on one of the prominent bulges.

  Both the eyes were milky white, as if they had large cataracts. The nose had somehow rotated 90 degrees clockwise and the mouth had been twisted into something that resembled a crescent moon.

  It reminded me of something out of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’.

  The creature’s body was lying on a simple bed in a pool of what appeared to be a combination of all these different pus-like discharges and its own excrement. This vile looking and even viler smelling liquid was being gathered in some kind of sump in the middle of the bed and was then being transported away along flexible plastic tubing.

  Around the bed, which was little more than a frame with a shaped plastic mattress, the floor was awash with the same obnoxious fluids that the creature seemed to wallow in, except I noticed that some of the pools on the floor contained what looked unnervingly like blood.

  The whole thing was constantly throbbing, quivering and pulsating, and I got the distinct and disconcerting impression that things were moving inside the creature’s body. In fact, the only bit of the monster that didn’t seem to throb or pulsate or quiver was the head, and that was only because it was held firmly in place by a large metal frame.

  ‘They’re genetically engineered hybrids,’ Tukaal said in hushed tones, standing at my shoulder.

  ‘Engineered for what?’

  I suspected the answer even before Tukaal told me.

  ‘Ever since emotional energy was discovered, the challenge has always been to find a way to make it useable...the term is to ‘physicalise’ it. That’s what these poor creatures have been engineered to do, to take all the emotional energy that is being gathered through the electricity distribution system and then turn it into something...real.’

  ‘But what are these things?’ I asked, looking closer at the creature in the first bed, whilst being careful not to step in whatever it was that oozed so liberally out of it.

  ‘Lots of life-forms have been spliced together at a physical and at a genetic level to create this. Principally human, but I’m sure there’s Yural mixed in there as well.’

  Tukaal then pointed out the large cable that ran down from a much thicker cable near the ceiling, straight into the back of the creature’s unnaturally large head.

  ‘Raw emotional energy is channelled straight into them...’

  There was a note of disbelief, incredulity and, I noted, wonder in his voice.

  ‘...and somehow, I’m not quite sure how yet, they are able to transform the raw emotional energy that is being transferred via Tark Particles into something that can actually be utilised.’

  He pointed to other wires and tubes that also seemed to flow straight into the body.

  ‘Fluids, nutrition, an intravenous cocktail of drugs, perhaps some Calafatamine to keep the hybrid form stable...’

  Tukaal’s voice tailed off as we both noticed something begin to happen to the creature on the bed in front of us.

  It began to shudder violently, so much so that flecks of the pus and shit and God-knows-what-else that it was lying in began to splatter on the floor around it.

  We both moved back, reluctantly though, because we both sensed something important was about to happen...as, indeed, did one of the Tofusbutts because it trotted over to the foot of the bed where it waited expectantly, completely oblivious to our presence but, I noted worryingly, armed with a very sharp looking, very bloodied knife.

  About thirty seconds passed during which time the creature’s thrashing and moaning became even more pronounced and even more disturbing...

  Then, abruptly, the thrashing and moaning stopped...and then something really disgusting happened.

  Of their own accord, the creature’s ‘legs’ spread themselves and several folds of skin seemed to peel back to reveal what I can only describe as the most enormous and most hideous fanny I have ever seen. It was unnaturally hairy as well.

  It was already wide open and was dribbling something that looked like watery blood onto the bed. It was also giving off the most putrid of odours, worse than all the others which, believe me, was saying something.

  Then, without any warning whatsoever, something came out of it.

  As it emerged, the nightmare fanny made an unpleasant farting sound followed by what sounded like someone gargling on honey, before the whole thing disappeared from view, back beneath the countless folds of yellow skin and hair. The creature itself then resumed the same quivering and pulsating movement it had displayed previously, accompanied by the same, haunting moan.

  With the devil-fanny now thankfully out of sight, we both turned our attentions to what the creature had given birth to.

  It was a miniature version of the parent with the same hideous, malformed body and the same bulbous head, but about the size of a cat. It was, however, completely hairless and had a sickly pinky-white hue to its skin. It had the same useless, flailing appendages and it had the same human eyes as its mother...and yet, not the same because these eyes, unlike the parent’s, were not opaque and unseeing. These were a bright, vivid blue (li
ke my own, now) and they were looking and they were seeing...and they were big, like baby’s eyes always appear to be...and, for the briefest of moments, those eyes looked straight at me, opened a little wider as if it seemed to recognise me...and I swear to God that if those eyes had been part of a normal human baby’s face, that face would have been smiling...

  But, alas, there was no opportunity to reflect on the unnerving ‘humanness’ of some aspects of the creature because the Tofusbutt had swung efficiently into action.

  No sooner had the offspring of the monstrosity plopped into the fetid pool of blood, shit and pus that surrounded its parent and blown its first few bubbles in the stinking fluid, than the Tofusbutt used one of its nine arms to snatch it up.

  Before either Tukaal or I could even react, and with a mindless efficiency that was so well-practiced as to be positively chilling, it used the bloodied knife to neatly decapitate the offspring and then to slice open the back of the distended head. Then, with yet another of its arms, it fumbled inside the bloody innards for a moment before pulling out...

  Tukaal gasped audibly.

  I, however, couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. To me, it looked like a Tofusbutt had pulled from the still pulsing head of the infant nothing more exciting than a Werther’s Original; same sort of size, same sort of shape, same sort of colour.

  But, judging by Tukaal’s expression, you would think it had just unearthed the Holy Grail.

  The Tofusbutt now moved quickly away from the foot of the bed towards what appeared to be a large metal container further in the room. It was into this container that it dismissively tossed the decapitated head and the unmoving body of the mini-creature, whose baby-blue eyes were still wide but were now unseeing. Once the corpse had been deposited in the container, it whirred and shuddered for a few seconds, like a household waste disposal unit that people have under their sink...

  That thought made me go nauseous and for a moment I thought I was going to hurl.

  But I swallowed down hard and diverted my thoughts away from the once-smiling but now lifeless eyes of the now-pureed little creature and back towards Tukaal’s continued wide-mouthed staring at the Werther’s Original which the Tofusbutt was still holding.

  ‘So what is that?’ I asked, my voice hushed, but why, I’m not quite sure.

  ‘That, my friend, is an impossibility.’

  Tukaal’s voice was close to breaking.

  Then, suddenly, Tukaal turned back to the Gao’An man.

  ‘How long does it take one of these hybrids to produce one of these pellets?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘They produce an off-spring every hour or so,’ the Gao’An man responded, ‘but only about fifty percent of the off-spring are productive. You were quite lucky to see one with a pellet, as you call it, inside it.’

  I’m not quite sure why I punched the Gao’An man hard and square in the face, but I did...and I felt an awful lot better for it.

  Actually, when I say I’m not quite sure, that’s not strictly true.

  I know exactly what was going through my mind the moment he finished speaking:

  Revulsion.

  It welled up inside me like an explosion rushing up from the soles of my feet, fuelled by the rage and horror I already had within me as a result of what I had witnessed. All it took was the use of the word ‘lucky’. How was our being here, in this delivery unit from Hell, surrounded by an unspeakable stench and witness to unbelievable events, lucky? How was watching a new-born whatever-it-was being beheaded and then cast aside like useless packaging, lucky? How was knowing that here, on Earth, right now, there were...things giving birth to other things...alien things...in a room where the very air is heavy with the sounds of ultimate suffering, lucky?

  So, really, I’m actually pretty sure why I hit the smug little fucker.

  As the Gao’An man held his face with his one good hand and let out a satisfying moan of pain, Tukaal placed his hand on my shoulder and eased me away.

  He then turned back to the Gao’An man.

  ‘How long have you been producing pellets here?’ he asked, his voice laced with dark intent.

  ‘About eight years,’ the Gao’An man replied, looking at his hand to see if anything was leaking from his nose.

  ‘And what happens to the pellets?’

  ‘Most of them are packaged up and transported off-world...I don’t know where they go...they just get taken to another site...some, though, we use to devel...’

  I saw a frown flash across Tukaal’s face.

  ‘Develop? Develop what?’

  The Gao’An man’s expression changed...and worryingly, it changed to one of fear...but not fear of Tukaal, fear of something else instead...fear that he had said something that he shouldn’t.

  Tukaal stared at the Gao’An man.

  The Gao’An man stared at Tukaal.

  I half expected Tukaal to take out his PWS and blow off another part of the Gao’An man’s body (not that there was that much left!), but he didn’t.

  Instead, he grabbed hold of the back of the chair and began to drag it towards the door, the Gao'An man once more clinging on for dear life.

  ‘C’mon, Jeth,’ he shouted, ‘we need to get back to the control room.’

  I have to admit that, happy though I was to leave that place, I did, just before I went through the door, take one last look at the indescribably awful scene in that room.

  To say it is indelibly etched upon my mind would be an understatement. Those horrific sights and sounds and smells will, I know, be forever burnt into my very soul.

  *

  Back at the control room, with the Gao’An man pushed disdainfully to one side and left to moan in self-pity in what was left of his chair, Tukaal took the duffel bag from me and busied himself at the main console.

  From the bag he took out his SICPad and connected it up to the desk with the built-in display.

  Quite what he was doing, I wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, he seemed to get more and more agitated as he went along.

  Eventually, after what must have been three or four minutes, he suddenly turned and strode purposefully towards the Gao’An man, whose eyes went unnaturally wide in a contorted expression of fear.

  ‘What’s on sub-level five?’ Tukaal asked, seizing him roughly by the hair and almost lifting him clear of the chair.

  ‘I...I...don’t...I don’t...know...’ the Gao’An man responded, his voice alive with panic.

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ Tukaal replied, jerking his head savagely upwards. ‘What’s in the encrypted files on the system?’

  The Gao’An man stammered incoherently:

  ‘Don’t...know...have no...access...’

  ‘Who does?’

  Tukaal’s own face was barely an inch from the Gao’An man’s, and he seemed to spit the last question so venomously that the Gao’An man visibly flinched.

  ‘Don’t know...’

  With lightning speed, Tukaal whipped out the PWS and blew apart the Gao’An man’s right thigh and a good part of the seat underneath it.

  The Gao’An man shrieked in pain.

  ‘Who does?’ Tukaal asked again, seeming to scream the question into the Gao’An man’s face.

  Tukaal did not wait for an answer.

  Instead, he blew apart the Gao’An man’s left thigh and, as a result of this, and the damage that the chair had suffered, the Gao’An man pitched forward as the chair collapsed below him, leaving him suspended only by his hair, his good arm and his damaged one both flailing wildly.

  ‘The One...only The One...can access...restricted files...’

  The words came out in short, pain-racked gasps.

  ‘Sub-level five. What’s on sub-level five?’

  ‘Please....’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘I can’t...they’ll kill me...please...’

  The Gao’An man began babbling incoherently, sniffling, moaning, crying even.

  Tukaal cast him aside with what seemed to be ut
ter contempt, and the Gao’An man, now little more than a tortured torso oozing fluids out of three shattered limbs, clattered to the floor along with what remained of the chair.

  ‘What’s up, Tukaal?’ I asked, somewhat tentatively.

  When Tukaal looked at me, his face was dark and concerned.

  ‘There’s something else going on here, Jeth,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘It has something to do with the bottom level of this complex...’

  ‘Sub-level five.’

  He nodded.

  ‘...indeed, sub-level five. And I also suspect it has something to do with that...’

  He pointed at the huge display screen and, in particular at the video stream of what appeared to be a deserted laboratory.

  ‘...and that.’

  He pointed to the letters above the image of the laboratory:

  ‘EEP’.

  ‘So what is it? What does EEP stand for?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s just say that I hope it doesn’t stand for what I think it stands for.’

  His reply was seriously ominous.

  ‘Once I’ve finished downloading, we’ll need to go and have a look.’

  It was another three or four minutes before Tukaal finally disconnected the SICPad and passed both it, and the duffel bag, to me. I noticed that, as he disconnected, he gave a little hiss of disappointment. He then walked over to where the Gao’An man had been left lying on the floor. The shattered body was rocking from side to side like a frightened child and from lips that now seemed unnaturally dry and cracked came the sound of incoherent whispers. Without ceremony or sympathy, Tukaal bent down and grabbed the coat tails of the white lab-coat and began to drag what was left of the Gao’An man across the floor towards the door where we had first entered the control room. The Gao’An man’s shell was now so badly damaged that it was leaving several thin trails of yellow fluid, occasionally tinged with blood, on the pristine white floor tiles.

  I slung the duffel bag over my shoulder, and followed.

  It took us little time to return to the stairwell by which we had descended from the black stuff room, and little time to make our way down the six flights of concrete steps to sub-level five.