by P P Corcoran
Deuteros and Hektos rushed toward Falb, only to witness the next metamorphosis of their surroundings. The walls glittered and bathed the corridor in radiological light as they turned into x-ray mirrors. Falb barely recognized his own skeleton: his bones so friable, the rifle enormous in his bare knuckles, his eye sockets hollow and gaunt.
The birds had vanished from the branches, and the memory of their voices was fading.
“We shouldn’t be here.” Hektos’ eyes flickered amidst red scratches. “This place is inhuman ... it isn’t meant for us.”
“But it is.” Deuteros stroked gloved fingers over one of the mirrors. “It is made precisely for us. Do you think the Apparitions built all this for their puppets? It’s a trap.”
Predators scurried through the foliage on all sides, only vaguely perceptible from their rustling. Falb turned around, searching for his brother, for the trail, for the moon in the sky. The clearing with the tree of visions had to be close, the forest’s treasured secret: but would he be able to find it?
“We don’t turn back.” Falb strengthened his voice and purged it of any trembling or hesitation. If he didn’t hold on, his unit would fall apart, and the enemy would pick them off. Tritos and Tetartos waited for them somewhere behind these walls, and so did the Apparitions. “The mirrors are here to lead us astray.”
Hektos cried: “What if you are wrong? What if we are dead already?” Falb let the voice bounce off his skull. All doubts in this place were part of the nightmares, not real, and Falb had to stick to the beliefs he remembered from the cruiser.
#
The heavy steps of puppets approached through the corridors like the incoming tide in the hours after midnight.
Falb, Deuteros, and Hektos moved their spotlights around, the first two steady, the third shaking, and advanced into a dome with multiple levels of walkways.
The floor was two stories below them, the ceiling two or three above, only faintly touched by their lamplight. There were no elevators, stairs, or ladders, only an exit on the other side: and so, they moved along the stainless-steel ledge.
The vast darkness of the dome seemed to echo back at Falb, to make him feel increasingly lost. Was the dome spinning, slowly revolving against their movement, or was it just a matter of perception?
“We are never getting out of here.” Deuteros stopped a few steps behind Falb and Hektos. “The Apparitions will capture us and turn us into puppets. In the next battle, we will fight for them.”
“We can find an Apparition and bring it back to the cruiser. Timeon will wait for us.”
“Even if he waits, there is no way back.” Falb had never seen Deuteros so shaken. “Do you know who they use? The ones that are best-preserved. The ones with a still functioning brain they can rewire for their purposes. At the very least, we should make ourselves useless to them.”
Falb had heard this piece of fiction before, a lie that soldiers told themselves before boarding a Phobosteus: but the statistics didn’t support it. The Apparitions picked at random or according to their own inscrutable designs, and their machines could repair any damage humans were capable of inflicting.
“We’ll do this when there’s no other way. The time hasn’t come yet.” Falb put a gloved hand on Deuteros’ shoulder and flinched as the next wave of nightmares rolled over him.
He had no proprioception anymore, no sense of the position of his limbs and their movements on the narrow ledge. He almost stepped over the edge but managed to activate his effigy at the last moment and hurled his body against the wall with a neural shock.
He felt warmth on his left arm and turned to see his armor melting. The metal liquefied and ran down his wrist and elbow, at first in drops, then sizzling streams. What was left of the underlay and plating formed trickles and rivulets, revolving vortexes that bubbled and steamed without Falb feeling pain.
Thousands of pin-prick lights glowed on Falb’s exposed skin, rose like thin filaments of smoke. Hairs grew where they weren’t supposed to, all over his arm, as if he was regressing into an animal.
Falb tried to blank out his senses and concentrate only on the effigy floating before him. He squinted and imagined his pincers hovering over him, removing one hair after another, but they were too slow, too inefficient.
The hair growth was as much an illusion as the melting armor, but he still convulsed in disgust. The hairs turned into a fur, obscuring his skin with a dark, asymmetrical mass, a chaos of curved lines that stuck out in all directions.
Timeon. Falb visualized the face of his brother before his eyes, his perfect teeth, the strong jaws, his gold-rimmed glasses. He floated over the abomination that Falb’s arm had turned into, lighted by the molten effigy suit.
Larea. He remembered her mouth, which could contort in such a unique way when she was angry, her sharp intellect, her disdain for money.
As long as his brother and sister were with Falb, the Apparitions couldn’t keep him back, not with their puppets and not with their nightmares.
“Deuteros. Take–”
Something whizzed past Falb, and the wall splintered outward in a hail of fragments. A swing of the spotlight revealed a dozen puppets on the ground floor, aiming up and shooting in short bursts. There was no cover here, no scenery to hide behind. Only one way to go.
“To the other side! Move!” Falb fired one volley at the Apparition’s mindless soldiers, but his bullets only hit ground. All around him, impacts turned the wall into clouds of shrapnel, and still the nightmare effects hadn’t worn off.
Behind Hektos, Deuteros was hit by a series of projectiles that came too fast to evade. Holes burst open between her breasts and down to her navel, effortlessly piercing the effigy armor. Soundlessly she plummeted from the ledge and was swallowed by gloom when her lamp broke on impact.
“Jump!” Falb ran and dove through the entrance at the end of the ledge. “Hektos, come on! Don’t stop now!”
Hektos stared at him, his blue eyes gleaming: “I want to go home.”
“Not yet. We came here for a reason, remember?”
“No ...” Hektos took a few steps back, then stopped. “I can’t do this.”
Falb tried to grab him, but a door came down and cut him off, instantly clearing away all sounds and motion.
#
- ACT V -
Every Larvosis play had one more act than the actors played out, the spectral act. In five normal acts, the play escalated toward a climax, but only the sixth act, the one that took place exclusively in the audience’s imagination, unraveled all threads and unveiled the true perspective.
There was a trail again, a set of alternating imprints in the earth underneath grass and dead leaves. Falb searched for his brother and any other human, even for the birds. The forest lurked around him with bared teeth and scraping claws, but he was close, and he could still reach the place he wished for.
Falb stood in the corridor and tried to reach Hektos on the radio. The door gleamed in stainless steel and wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard he hammered against it.
“Hektos!” Falb shouted, and the name echoed along the walls: “Hektos!”
Deuteros was dead. Hektos was lost, Tritos lost, Tetartos lost as well. Falb had no sense of direction anymore and all his instruments had ceased working. He could be anywhere, merely a few rooms from the center or close to the outer hull again.
A part of the wall flipped and revealed another x-ray monitor in which Falb’s skeletal likeness floated as if over a bottomless well.
The bushes parted, and Falb saw yellow eyes, not like the molten gold of the fish, but dirtier, more feral. Inside them, like a fly caught in amber, trembled his own reflection.
More x-ray mirrors appeared as wall panel after wall panel turned in a sea of blackness where miniature versions of Falb flickered like candlewicks. He closed his eyes for a short moment, let oxygen sink into his lungs and carbon dioxide eject again.
He opened his eyes once more, raised the muzzle of his weapon, aimed at one o
f the mirrors and pulled the trigger. The glass exploded noiselessly in a shower of glitter. In the strange silence, Falb pivoted, destroying one mirror after another until the floor was carpeted with shards.
The wind howled, and the forest reared up against Falb.
In space, there were people who couldn’t stand the void, who were overwhelmed by it and recoiled from it even on projection screens—but Falb preferred the emptiness over the maze of reflections.
The corridor led Falb into another hall, but his legs trembled under him. He pressed his back against the wall and let his body slide down to the floor.
When he turned his lamp off, the inky blackness around Falb was absolute; when he turned it on, he sat on a mountaintop, surrounded by a crawling precipice, by steep slopes and valleys of shadow. The spotlight illuminated his arms and a section of the floor, but little else, no walls or ceiling. It was hard to believe that he was inside a spaceship, and harder still to imagine why it had been built with this changing labyrinth as its interior.
Something shimmered in the light, a single hair between Falb’s thumb and index finger that had somehow found its way through the glove. With his other hand, Falb took his pincers, grabbed the hair at its root and yanked it out. The pain was so faint he only felt a familiar tingling.
He moved his arms, stretched his skin and found another hair. The gap of the suit’s elbow joint. The pincers removed it and made Falb more comfortable, even here and now. If he gave up, his unit would have perished without purpose. If he gave up, the Apparitions would keep coming, and no one would know why. For Hektos and Deuteros, for Tritos and Tetartos, for Timeon and Larea, he had to have faith.
Falb took one deep breath, slowly got up and continued.
#
The room yawned enormously , a disturbing parody of a Larvosis stage: tiers of audience seats descended with stairs in between, a platform rose in the center of the floor, and two bridges connected it to the walls.
The wind fell silent, as if it had never existed. The trail ended where the trees had stopped growing and the forest opened into a great empty space with a carpet of grass and something alien in its center.
Two figures stood on the stage, and Falb recognized them both: his brother Timeon and the oneiromancer.
“Timeon!” Falb took several stairs with each step between the tiered audience seating but slowed down when Timeon didn't react.
“Falb ...” Timeon didn't look away from the panorama of painted trees that formed the backdrop of the stage, whispering the name to himself and not as an answer.
The oneiromancer studied Timeon: “There is only one boarding team left on the Phobosteus. We have to retreat.”
“We stay.”
“This is not a decision you can make.”
“Am I not the commander of this cruiser? Am I not in charge?”
The oneiromancer said nothing, his face betraying no emotion.
“Maybe it holds risk, but every person aboard is aware of the dangers of their job. Falb isn’t alone inside the Phobosteus. If we save him, we may gain valuable information, even a specimen. It could be the breakthrough we are all waiting for.”
It was a dialog that could happen, that had to be happening right now: but whoever stood there on the stage, it wasn't Timeon, only an actor or a robot inside a skin. In a Larvosis play, you never knew who played what role until the end, who was the seer and who the companion, who the creature and who the darkness. This uncertainty interrupted the strictly formalized sequence of acts, but it had no place in reality. In reality, you always knew who you were.
“It isn't even that, is it? Not one life against hundreds ... not Falb as the counterweight to the crew of this cruiser. It is his death, or his death and the death of everyone else. We can't save him anymore.”
The oneiromancer nodded, and Falb continued his movement down the stairs, his weapon raised. He reached ground level when he sensed movement behind him, turned, and froze.
“We do not lie to you.” The Apparition stilted between the audience seats toward Falb, its body indiscernible under alien armor. “What you see is real, has really happened.”
A faceless and eyeless head mask stared at Falb, and coldness steamed from its exhaust slits. Long, segmented spider fingers dissected the air, sharp as razors, then the creature continued to speak:
“All life is suffering.” Its voice was evocative of clinking ice cubes, temperature less, but impregnated with a sophisticated horror, as if floating in spilled blood. “All suffering is learning. How much have you suffered? How much have you learned?”
Falb stood before the tree of visions and saw its fruits. Darkened glass bloomed from the branches, globes that held only one image: a reflection of Falb oscillating on their curved surface.
Falb tried to order his thoughts, to arrange his emotions into a shimmering armory again. His weapons had vanished, thawed away without a trace. The trees of the forest backdrop loomed on all the walls though they had only decorated the stage before.
“A nightmare is a dream from which you cannot wake. You suffer and suffer, but there is no way out.” Thin vapor from the exhaust slits drifted over the Apparition, shrouding it with ice crystals that briefly flourished. “Do you believe that?”
Scalpel fingers scraped against each other in the air as the creature approached, folding its hands like a bag of surgical instruments. “Do you believe there is no way out of the nightmare?”
Falb glanced over his shoulder to see two motionless puppets with shrunken, half skeletonized faces.
He looked back at the Apparition, which continued its speech: “Do you believe the forest is without end, and that the darkness stretches further than you could ever run?” The Apparition came to a standstill before Falb and turned its polished head, so that Falb could see his own reflection gliding across it.
He aimed his rifle: “Come with me. If I must, I’ll shoot you.” The gun in his hands felt useless, but he pointed it at the abomination.
The tree bent its branches, and the mirror-fruits chimed like bells, clear and hollow. Falb’s image in them radiated, his spine and ribcage visible through paper-thin skin, his heart beating a million times a minute.
“Again, and again you make the same decisions. Again, and again you lose yourself without learning, without having changed anything. You cannot fight us. You do not see the world as it truly is.”
The Apparition’s torso opened like a blossoming flower of blades, with cold petals that seemed to cut air molecules themselves. “Do you know what you are doing here?”
“I’m taking you prisoner.” Falb couldn’t recognize his own voice anymore.
“Tell me, Falb: What do you believe in?”
“I believe in my brother Timeon.”
“You are lying. If you believed in your brother, you would have come here with his consent. What do you believe in?”
“I believe in myself.” Falb tried to pull the Apparition’s suggestions out at their root, to keep himself clean and orderly, a smooth plane without impurities.
“If you believed in yourself, you wouldn’t need such control. Why restrain and subdue yourself? We are telling you this: True intelligence doesn’t believe in anything.”
“Is this a riddle? What do you want?”
The forest vanished into stylized lines and dried paint, receded into two dimensions onto the stage walls. The eyes of the fish and the birds became one with the tree’s fruits, the grass withered away like the hair on Falb’s body. Everything fell silent.
“You have come here of your own free will. We did not force you, but still you keep coming. You want to know if you are the seer or the darkness. You can sense the stain deep inside you, a thing that needs to perfect itself, and you seek an answer. If you are patient, we will give you this answer: We will show you what you are in the dark.”
- THE END -
About Dennis Mombauer
Dennis Mombauer currently lives in Colombo as a freelance researcher and writer
of speculative fiction, textual experiments, and poetry. His research is focused on ecosystem-based urban adaptation and sustainable urban development as well as other topics related to climate change. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction, "Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism," and has published fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. His first English novel, "The Fertile Clay," will be published by Nightscape Press in late 2019.
Connect with Dennis here:
www.castrumpress.com/authors/dennis-mombauer
The Law of the Jungle
By Mickey Ferron
Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back—For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
-Rudyard Kipling
As the sun set on the vast Alaskan forest, a piercing sharp fracture sound, shattered the prevailing silence. As the sound echoed around the emptiness, a singular dot of nothingness appeared, so small as to be indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. The dot measured one micron in diameter. To cover the point of a hypodermic needle would take one thousand microns. It is difficult to explain in scientific terms the technology needed to create this dot when that knowledge is so far beyond us. For this one-micron diameter dot had penetrated our planet’s space/time fabric, the way a mosquito finds a way between the stratified layers of the epidermis making up our skin. Like a mosquito, micro-mechanoreceptors probed, searching for areas of least resistance, pushing and prodding through layers of invisible strata. Until, eventually, they found an infinitesimal point, where the Earth’s space-time fabric was thinnest and simply punctured a hole through it.
