Irrelevant Jack

by Prax Venter

  “…the hell is this?” he muttered.

  A persistent itch under Jack’s glove that he’d been ignoring jumped to the front of his mind and he pulled it off, tucking it under his arm. He held his hand up to the light and there on his palm, he saw the same pulsing substance. Panicking, he tossed his glove away and tried to frantically wipe his hand off on his pants. The stuff didn’t come off and he looked closer to see that the disgusting substance was squirming through the flesh on his hand. Jack could feel it writhing inside him.

  He needed to find a way out. Now.

  Staying as far as he could from the walls, Jack found an open door and ran through it into another long hallway. The sheer immensity of this structure he was trapped inside finally became real, and he was losing any hope of surviving this. The door closed behind him as soon as he was through, and he discovered that the dark haze was much thicker on this side.

  Up ahead he could see another door opening for him, beckoning him forward. Light spilled out into the dim hallway, and he could barely make out the purple-black tendrils worming into every surface ahead of him. Jack began to dry heave, his stomach constricting with terrible nausea.

  A primal, unstoppable panic began rising inside him, and just when he was about to snap, he heard something new. A faint melody floated to his ears, and it was coming from above. He shone his light over his head and saw a damaged section in the ceiling of the corridor. There was a hole torn into the structure that he might be able to fit through and into what looked like an exposed ventilation shaft.

  He moved near the wall and strained his ears, trying to pick up the sound again.

  There it was. The wisp of someone singing from many floors up came echoing down to him.

  Jack’s fear-soaked mind latched onto the faint music, and he resolved to find it at all costs. Ignoring the open door ahead, and the sickness he could feel spreading though his body, he started to climb the wall to get up into the shaft. He did his best not to touch the vile stuff pulsating throughout the hallway and used his climbing gear as much as he could, but he knew the precaution was pointless. It was already inside him.

  Then the open door at the far end of the hall started to open and close slowly. Jack paused. He had never seen them do that. He watched it move up and down as its rhythmic percussion echoed down the hall like a metronome. He shook his head- he wasn’t going that way. He needed to go up. Jack needed to find that music.

  He gradually made his way up the vertical shaft, and as he climbed higher and higher, the music slowly grew louder and louder. It was clearly a woman’s voice woven into the faint melody. Jack found some solid footing in the twisted metal and held still for a moment, listening, but he couldn’t quite hear what she was saying.

  “Hello!” he called out, and waited.

  There was no change in the music, and he was getting the feeling that this was a recording set to play on a loop. He resumed his climb upwards through the damaged shaft.

  Jack noticed that as the music grew louder, the nauseating haze grew thinner. It felt like a good sign, and some of the panic in his mind began to unwind- that was, until he caught a glimpse of his hand and saw that the tendrils had wormed their way up his forearm. Clenching his teeth in disgust, he turned his attention back to scaling the vertical shaft. All he could do was climb and hope that whoever- or whatever was playing the music had answers.

  The hole eventually came out onto another damaged corridor like the many others he had seen before. Jack clambered over the edge and laid on his back a moment to rest. He must have climbed up over twenty floors. The air was totally clear, and there was none of that horrible feeling that permeated everything below.

  He got to his feet and noticed a growing numbness in his infected hand. Jack shook it out with a grimace, trying to ignore it as he moved down the corridor towards the location of the music.

  A hissing noise pulled his attention to a door sliding up into the ceiling to his right. He paused and shined his flashlight into the newly opened room. His circular spot of illumination passed over piles of broken furniture and clothes, and it looked as if a bedroom had been run through the tumble cycle in a dryer. The music was not coming from in there.

  Jack stuck to the plan to ignore any more attempts to lead him away from it and turned away from the trashed bedroom. Before he could take two steps down the hallway, the door slammed shut. The force of it sent a wave of unease through him. He paused, and the door opened again and slammed shut one more time.

  “Getting angry, are we?” Jack asked the ceiling. He took another confident step forward and then all the doors in the hallway opened and slammed shut with a concussive force. They were like chomping teeth to either side of him, and the display of deafening rage was utterly terrifying.

  He put one foot in front of the other and crept forward through the middle of the corridor. Toward the end, he came face to face with a junction where a thick bulkhead was repeatedly slamming onto a bent support beam. Whoever was leading him away from the music was attempting to seal off the corridor. The force of the impact was sending sparks onto the floor as steel rhythmically rammed against steel. Jack got on his back and shimmied under the twisted debris, wincing as burning bits of metal fell on him from above. The beam held, and he made it through. As soon as he stood up on the other side, the door slid to a stop.

  The singing was now loud enough to hear clearly, and it was a lullaby he had never heard.

  “Fall deep my dear, and I shall catch you.

  Asleep my love, and I shall watch you.

  Rest your head upon your bed - the stars above can see you.

  Untie your knot and worry not - let the weariness defeat you.”

  There were more verses, but it was all the same kind of nonsense you sing to a child to get them to sleep. It repeated as soon as the song ended.

  Jack could not fathom what was going on. Why was this music in English? Why was this place trying to kill him? What was growing on him?

  Again, moving forward was his only option. He willed his feet to carry him toward the source of the music. Jack knew he was close now and even the doors had given up their attempts to lead him away.

  This new area appeared to be a vast shopping mall. He followed the sound across more damaged sections of floor to a large archway with colorful symbols he couldn’t read.

  He entered a waiting room with chairs lining the walls, but like everywhere else, the place was empty. Maybe this was some type of urgent care? He took a deep breath and followed the music coming from another narrow hallway that was behind the reception desk. It was much louder than it had ever been, and Jack knew he’d arrived.

  After the tight hallway, he emerged in a brightly lit area full of wall-to-wall circuit boards and wires. It was as if a computer had thrown up all over the place. Jack noticed a speaker in the wall, and he had finally found where the music was coming from.

  It shut off the second he walked in.

  “Great, led by the nose again,” he said, looking around. “Now wha-” he stopped short when a beam of light emerged from a point in the ceiling and started to sweep over his body. It focused on his infected hand, and he felt compelled to stand perfectly still. Maybe this thing would fix him? Maybe save him?

  After it had enough of his hand, the glittering beam of light moved up his chest to his head. Jack felt a slight tickle between his ears and a humming that was getting too much to handle. He was about to step back out of the light when it abruptly shut off. There was some commotion under the floor and then a small panel slid open, revealing more machinery below. An object rose out of the opening that looked like an exit sign over a handprint scanner. Jack had to look twice. It was an exit sign that you would see hanging from the ceiling of an apartment complex showing you where the stairwell was, and its contrast to the surrounding futuristic technology was stark.

  The object emerging out of the floor came to a stop, and the hand-scanning panel jutting out from below the sign started flashing. />
  Jack looked down at his hand covered in pulsing tendrils as they wove themselves around his veins. He realized he didn’t really have a choice. He wasn’t about to just walk out and not put his hand on the offered exit sign. He reached out his good, uninfected hand and pressed it on the panel.

  A jolt went up his arm to his brain and then there was an abrupt, crisp blackness.

  - 3 -

  He found himself floating in a sea of static. In every direction there was nothing but a burning blaze of vibrating, white electricity. His mind spun as his eyes clawed around for any hint of sanity. He found absolute nothingness. He had no body. No hands, no feet. Nothing. The white noise he existed in was everything, even himself. He remained in this state for what felt like years, but he wasn’t sure. It was as if parts of his mind were being shuffled like a deck of cards and keeping a constant train of thought was like trying to hold onto smoke. Two flashes of black void caught his attention. The uniquely empty holes in the infinite fizzing nothing were zooming towards him at high speed, and he couldn’t tell if he was moving or if the two distant points were coming toward him.

  When he arrived, his infinite perspective settled into the holes, and the universe wrapped around his mind- containing it inside a spherical shell. He looked down and found his hands. How long had it been since he felt anything? He didn’t know.

  Then he was falling- as if he were a calmly drifting leaf discovering a waterfall. Soft starbursts of vivid color flowed all around him as he plummeted. He glanced upward and noticed a universe of glittering pinpoints falling away from him. As he lazily watched the cosmos far above, a bright orb of light detached itself from the others and spiraled downward. The unique instance of light came straight toward him and was catching up quickly.

  Until now, he was okay with the gentle, leisurely descent, but something about the way this light was sputtering out bits of itself and erratically moving gave him an uneasy feeling. The light slammed into his chest, and it spread itself deep into the center of his being. It started to spin around inside of his new body, and he felt his heart race along with its movements. He took a moment to be surprised that he had a heart again.

  Was he dead? Had he died somehow?

  He couldn’t remember. The light inside him slowed its frantic movements, and so did the pounding in his veins. The euphoria that began to wash over him was like the best runner’s high ever. He closed his eyes and focused on the strange sensation billowing through his body. There was a sense of expansion. It felt like he was more, somehow. A tingle around his midsection prompted him to open his eyes and look down at himself. He was naked except for a leather belt. Connected to the belt and on his left side, was a long, thin, leather container, flapping against his arm as he fell. It took him a handful of heartbeats, but he recognized the object as a scabbard. He had played Dungeons and Dragons enough times at Sean’s house as a kid to know what a scabbard was. Sean always spilled something on the precious papers and maps they had spread over his parents’ dining room table. Usually, it was some kind of juice. It was hilarious. Were these memories?

  Yes! His name was Jack.

  He remembered everything.

  As soon as he remembered who he was, the air changed, and he was yanked in a new direction.

  Jack saw a wooden door slam closed in front of him, and the infinite expanse of the universe he was drifting through was cut off. This strange new vision of a door was interrupted when he hit the ground and started to slide. Rough edges tore up the flesh on his back until his body slowed to a stop.

  Thick, icy raindrops splattered against his naked skin, and his head throbbed like his brain was too big for his skull. Combined with the lacerations, Jack was experiencing the worst pain he had ever felt.

  He laid where he landed, motionless, blinking up into the rain. He tried to figure out what was happening to him, but between the explosives in his head and the stinging, ripped flesh on the back half of his body- he was having a hard time focusing. In fact, Jack thought it was a much better idea to take a little nap instead of dealing with any of this. His eyelids grew heavy and were in the process of surrendering to the darkness that wanted to obscure all sights and thoughts when he noticed a woman with dripping wet hair was looking down on him. Jack tried to reach out to the woman just as her terrified face and an impossible Tower behind her were both illuminated by a flash of lightning. The sight was almost enough to keep his vision from retreating to pin-points, but the argument coming from the back of his head was too convincing to ignore, and Jack’s mind folded into unconsciousness.

  - 4 -

  “Rest your head upon your bed - the stars above can see you.”

  It was a woman’s voice. The same words, but a different woman. Someone nearby was singing the same song that echoed in the abandoned, infested, metal nightmare. Jack became fully alert and awake, but he was too afraid to open his eyes. He tried to remain motionless as his mind raced. It was raining outside, windy. He was lying down on something soft- a bed. There was a flickering heat by his head that must have been a fire. He felt warm. Also, he felt no pain. He could have sworn he lost a lot of skin out there. While he was on that subject, where was here?

  “He’s awake,” a gravelly voiced man in the room called attention to Jack’s failed attempt at feigned unconsciousness. He kept his eyes closed anyway. Panic was raising inside him once again.

  Then she spoke.

  “Jack. I’m Lex, and this is my father, Harrak. I found you after... you entered through the door. You’re safe now.”

  She knew his name. He slowly opened his eyes. The singing woman was sitting on a stool near him, and an old man, her father, was standing across the room with his back leaning against a stone wall. They were all inside a dimly lit stone cottage. Jack sat up to greet them and realized he was still naked. He peeked under the covers and confirmed the existence of his body. After the last few hours, he wasn’t sure of anything. However, he did find the odd leather belt and scabbard were still around his waist.

  Had he been rescued from a cave-in? Had he hit his head and the whole abandoned spaceship adventure been a dream? Then why did he still have this weird belt? The scene before him looked more like he was rescued by Vikings. The man near the back of the room, Harrak, she said, was dressed in slabs of roughed-up leather armor. He had a massive gray beard and oozed scrutiny, staring at Jack over a glowing pipe held in his teeth. Lex was a pleasant contrast. Her blonde hair drank in the firelight, and her large eyes seemed genuinely happy to see him. She just sang the same lullaby as the voice being broadcast throughout the abandoned hallways, and he wondered if she had been the one to lead him here.

  “Where am I?” was the first question to make it out of Jack’s mouth. Her lips pressed into a tentative smile.

  “Let me be the first to welcome you to Blackmoor Cove. We weren’t expecting someone new at our current Town Level. We have so many questions for you.” The look of hope in her bright, golden eyes made him a little nervous. And what was this about a Town Level? The storm picked up as the wind howled around and even through the stones in the wall next to him. What seemed like a lifetime ago, he had been surveying a cave system for precious metals 50 miles north of the Sierra Madre. By the way the air smelled, he now had to be near an ocean.

  “I have a few of my own,” Jack said, wondering where on Earth Blackmoor Cove was. “How do you know my name? How did I get here? And where are my clothes?”

  Her eyebrows furrowed slightly.

  “Um, your name? I just Inspected you.” She paused as if that was enough. “And as to how you got here was a question we had for you. I saw the Tower door open, something that has never happened… then you were tossed out as you are now. And it wasn’t even at Exit.” What she said wasn’t making any sense, but her voice held a quiet reverence. Jack was thinking how none of his questions were really getting answered when Harrak snorted and rolled his eyes.

  Lex turned to face the bearded man behind her. “Why would I li
e to you?”

  Harrak shook his head and looked away, sucking his pipe and blowing out a plume of smoke. Jack decided to just lay his cards on the table.

  “Look, I was underground surveying for the Maxpass Mining Company. There was a cave-in, and then I was in an ancient alien, futuristic spaceship with some kind of crawling purple disease where I followed a recording of someone else singing that lullaby you were singing a moment ago... about the stars seeing me. A massive computer showed me an exit sign, I touched the panel and ended up naked shredding my ass raw on the rocks outside. Obviously, I’ve had some sort of brain trauma.” He paused to take a breath. “Now why am I in this… stone cabin and not in a hospital somewhere?”

  Mild concern replaced the hope he’d seen in Lex’s eyes.

  “Jack, most of what you just said was gibberish. You must have really hit your head out there. But you spoke about the song I was singing. Did you hear someone singing those words in the Tower?” Her darker eyebrows sprang back to hopeful, and Harrak had suddenly found Jack very interesting again.

  “It was coming from a machine. It was a recording, repeating over and over. I was infected- it was all over my hand and crawling up my arm. It felt like I was being consumed.” Jack looked down at his hand. All signs of the tainted, pulsating mess were gone. “I thought I was going to die. Maybe I did. That voice saved me, I think. Following it led me here.” Jack gestured around the small stone cottage, and he noticed Lex staring at him, wide-eyed.