Evil Beneath Us

by Laybourne, Alex

There were no lights in the corridor, but everything was illuminated nonetheless. It took a moment for Jeremy to realize it came through the damp. Whatever made the bricks so wet also produced the light for them to see.

  “Are you coming with me?” Jeremy asked, hopeful. He was trapped in the middle of something he didn’t understand, and having his friend there with him was a comforting thought in a sea of panic.

  “I can’t, Jeremy,” Simon answered, dropping his gaze toward the floor.

  “Please, Si. They think I killed you. They will lock me away for the rest of my life. If you come back, we can explain it, somehow.” Jeremy didn’t want to think about it, but whichever scenario he ran in his head they all ended the same. The result, if they killed Dr Marshall, had him either in jail or running for the rest of his life.

  “It’s not that. I wish I could, but I physically cannot go through the door. None of us can. Not unless we are summoned by someone who has the power to channel the veil.” Simon raised his eyes and held Jeremy’s gaze. “The only way we can go through is if your Dr Marshall allows it, or if the barriers fall, and trust me, you don’t want that.”

  “How do you know all of this? It hasn’t been that long since they … since they took you.” Jeremy paused. It was the first time he had thought about how long he had been kept drugged and locked away inside the institute.

  “I’m sorry, Jeremy. The good doctor up there likes to keep people separated from reality. You have been locked away for close to six months already. Besides, time moves differently down here. I have had plenty of time to ponder everything. None of this is important right now though.”

  Jeremy understood that time was of the essence, but there were so many questions running through his mind. He did not know if he would be able to keep them all to himself.

  “How did you survive?” he asked. It was the one question that burned on the tip of his tongue. Simon was his best friend, his brother, he could not leave without having asked.

  “There are watchmen. I guess you could say, they police the worlds. They ensure that order and balance is maintained as best they can. They found me. They killed the creatures that took me and saved my life. They saved yours too.” Simon didn’t need to explain anything on that front. Jeremy knew what he meant.

  “Anja. She is one of them, right?” Jeremy smiled.

  “Yes, she was once. She still is. It is difficult to explain, but Anja belongs to the watchmen, and she saved your life because out of all of the people the doctor had or has had under his care, you were the only one that had done nothing to deserve being imprisoned there. Jeremy, please understand. You being here, in this world, is extremely dangerous. You need to go through the door. You need to find a way to stop Dr Marshall.” There was a sense of urgency in Simon’s voice.

  “Will I ever see you again?” Jeremy asked as he and Simon walked closer to the door. Jeremy could feel the thrum of its power grow as he drew closer.

  “I sincerely hope not, buddy,” Simon answered. Tears glistened in his eyes. “Take care of yourself, Jeremy.” He hugged his friend one last time and then walked away.

  Alone, Jeremy focused on the door. It did not look like the sort of barrier that separated worlds and kept the fate of humanity in check. It looked more like the door that led from the kitchen to the garage in his grandparents’ house.

  Jeremy reached out and grabbed the handle. A surge of pain flashed through his body. The portal was testing him. As the pain made his flesh feel as if it were melting, Jeremy understood why the other creatures could not just cross over without admittance. Jeremy pulled on the door expecting a degree of resistance, but it opened effortlessly. He almost fell from his overexertion.

  Jeremy stepped through the doorway and found himself in a small, square room. A cold shiver ran through him as his body adjusted to the new world, the pressures and the sensations. Jeremy felt everything slip away, fading back to normal.

  Chapter 14

  The room was full of shelves and boxes, each filled with files and batches of medical records. Some boxes looked new, but others were ancient. Their sides bursting with their contents; pages and pages of notes, the paper yellowed with age.

  Jeremy knew what it all was. Medical charts and patient files. What had him confused was why the more recent files were kept in hardcopy and not stored digitally. Everything was in the cloud nowadays, or so his father would often say. The older documents he could understand, but the current ones … then it hit him. They were Dr Marshall’s personal files. The ones he kept on the patients he held underground. They were the records of his experiments. He could not risk having these stored anywhere other than under his direct control.

  Jeremy walked over to the shelves of newer documents and pulled a few free. They were filled with analytical data, lots of numbers and percentages, none of which Jeremy could understand. He leafed through a few more and found a lengthy report written about a patient by the name of Helen Wilson. Jeremy scanned the pages, hopeful that he may find something there that could help him understand what was needed.

  He was disappointed. The report read like a journal entry and depicted the final moments of a woman who had spent her life in an alcoholic spiral. The only interesting point of note was that she had been brought to the institute by a certain Detective Trevor McIlroy.

  “I knew it,” Jeremy muttered to himself. He knew that there was something wrong with that detective. Jeremy ignored the next burning question that rose in his mind concerning his father’s involvement and his relationship with the detective. Jeremy pushed it into the back of his mind, along with everything else. There was no time for distractions. Instead, he dug into another box, an older box on the other side of the room.

  The papers that Jeremy pulled out were dated October 21st, 1991. The handwriting was the same, as too was the signature. It meant that Dr Marshall had been running his experiments for over thirteen years, and this room was his shrine, a testament to the dark nature of man.

  Jeremy folded up the pieces of paper he had removed and placed them into his back pocket. He was not sure why. Without the rest of the documents they proved nothing, but he felt better for having them.

  Other than the door he had used to enter the room, which when looked at from within his world was almost impossible to see, there was one other door. It made the choice simple.

  Jeremy had assumed that the room was a basement beneath the building. In actuality, it was more of a sub-sub-basement. Opening it, Jeremy stared at a stairway that rose immediately on a steep incline. It was poorly lit by dull lights that were spaced far enough apart to keep the majority of the stairway in relative darkness. The stairs were old, made of solid stone, and clearly not of modern design. Jeremy had assumed that the stately building had a grand history, and the discovery of this buried area confirmed it.

  The stairs offered no place to hide, and Jeremy had no choice but to rise. As he climbed, there was a swirl to the stairs that meant he was not only climbing into darkness, but had no way of anticipating what lay ahead.

  The stairway came to an end with another door. Another single point of entry that meant Jeremy was forced to walk a predicted passage. The advantages of not being able to get lost were easily outweighed by the lack of room for manoeuvre should he be spotted.

  The door he came to was anything but old. It was metal with an electronic lock. The green light on the keypad allayed Jeremy’s initial fear of being trapped; green always meant go. Trying the door, Jeremy found it unlocked. Peering from the door, his heart thundered in his chest and his body shook with adrenaline. The corridor was empty.

  Slipping through the door, Jeremy’s feeling of unease increased. The corridor was long and followed the shape of the house; built within the original foundations. The walls were whitewashed, the floor and ceiling painted the same reflective shade. Powerful lights were set at both floor and ceiling levels, meaning there was no place to hide.

  There was a door opposite Jeremy leading to a room in t
he central core of the building, and while he could not see it, Jeremy had a feeling that the central room took up the entire square that the corridor undoubtedly formed.

  However, Jeremy decided to walk a little further. He did not know what he was looking for, but he had to make every decision count, and that meant being certain of his actions.

  Looking around, Jeremy could not see any clearly indicated security cameras. It didn’t surprise him. Nobody knew about this lower level, and the doctor would not want to have anything anywhere that could give people knowledge of it. That would include security camera feeds and monitors.

  The first two legs of the corridor confirmed in Jeremy’s mind that the level was moving in a square. Both legs were identical, the whitewash, the single door leading into the central area. The endless run of white was blinding. Jeremy’s head ached from it. Even the joins where the walls met both ceiling and floor were invisible. It was disorienting, and Jeremy was beginning to feel helpless. Like a rat in a maze.

  It was only as he rounded the corner into the third corridor that something changed. There were two doors, one on either side. Jeremy knew then that he was in the right place. He had made the right choice.

  Faced with a decision, Jeremy first chose the door on the outside the corridor. His reasoning being that it was the only door on that side. Not to mention the fact that the central area had been deemed important enough to require four different entrances. This mean more points to cover, and eluded to heavier traffic. That meant danger, and Jeremy did not want to come so far to walk to his death without having learned a little something.

  A small light sprouted from the wall above the door. Jeremy guessed that it shone red when illuminated. The dark coloured glass made it impossible to tell for sure. It was a dark blemish on an otherwise flawless canvas.

  Reaching for the handle, Jeremy assumed that the light being dark was a good sign; a sign that the room was unoccupied. At the very least, he told himself that it meant any possible alarms were disengaged.

  The door was heavy, the white plastic exterior merely a cover for the heavy iron sheet that formed the main substance of the piece. Despite its weight, the door opened effortlessly, and with no self-closing inclinations. Jeremy slipped through as soon as the gap would permit and pushed the door shut behind him.

  The wall of noise filtered through to Jeremy’s brain once the notion of his safe passage thus far had settled. It was made all the more deafening when held in contrast to the silence of the corridors. Beeps and whines rose and fell in several different pitches and across a range of different rhythms.

  It took a few moments before Jeremy’s eyes could comprehend what they were seeing. The room was dominated by wires, which hung down like wild jungle vines. They were all attached to various medical machines and scientific looking devices. Jeremy knew what their purpose was; to record the ever fluctuating state of Dr Marshall’s subjects.

  Jeremy had no medical knowledge. He had only spent a very limited period of time in hospital when he was small and needed to have his tonsils removed. However, he was confident in his ability to identify blood pressure monitors when he saw them. Another set of screens showed heart rates in various stages of elevation. Reams of paper were spewing from numerous printers or directly from the machines themselves. Jeremy recognized the sheets from the storage boxes in the sub-sub-basement. The machines were directly opposite the only door into the room. Jeremy followed the mass of wires, travelling to the right-hand side of the deep rectangular room, where they attached themselves to a wall of monitors. They were all powered down, black and lifeless, but their construction was enough to command attention. They were piled one on top of another creating an undulating wave of screens. Two peaks and a central trough. Small diameter monitors were used on the end of the rows and aligned in such a way as to create a false impression of curvature. The wall towered over Jeremy, standing at least three meters at the crest of each peak.

  Jeremy stood lost to the spectacle that was the room. His attention not re-focused until a loud and continual shriek pierced the air. It was coming from within the room. An ALARM. Jeremy’s nerves tingled and his whole body exploded with a rush of adrenaline so powerful he thought he could take down anybody that charged into the room.

  Jeremy turned his head, and saw that the source of the alarm came from the machines he had first seen. Three readouts were recording zero: blood pressure, heart rate, and a third machine the data coming from which Jeremy had yet to fathom. Its readouts were going crazy, creating a printed graph not dissimilar to a seismograph. The needle and ink were stretching from the top to the bottom of the sheet, covering it in a layer of black ink. The needle moving so fast that you could not separate the different points; it was just a black mass.

  They are dead, Jeremy thought, as he watched the machines.

  A whoosh of air behind him brought life back to his frozen form. The door was opening. He needed a place to hide. Looking around, Jeremy was frantic to find anything that could offer him shelter. The monitors. They were set just before the wall, their backs not flush with the raw brick surface. It was a tight fit, but Jeremy managed to squeeze himself far enough behind the wall to not be seen. He had his doubts as to whether he would be able to get out again, but they were problems for another time.

  “X72B,” a female voice spoke out.

  It took Jeremy a few seconds to place the owner; the large black nurse. The one that stank of cigarettes and worse.

  “Damnation. She had been doing so well. I was truly hopeful that we would have been able to keep her going until we saw the final doorway,” Dr Marshall’s unmistakable voice answered. “We are getting very close to breaking through to this next seal. Replace her quickly. Time is of the essence,” he ordered.

  “Do you want me to try the new one? He is fresh and strong.” There was a hint of glee in the tobacco rasped voice.

  “No,” Dr Marshall snapped his response. “No, he is new. He is still too strong and besides, I have a lot of questions I want to ask him.” The doctor calmed his response, his frustrations and losing another patient boiling over. “Take … W47A. He is strong. We have prepared him well, and he can be of no further use to us. Call me once it is done.” At that point, with his instruction given, he walked away.

  Jeremy heard the door open and close, even though his ears still rang with the echo of the siren.

  Jeremy had been holding his breath during the conversation, and his lungs were burning, demanding fresh oxygen to send on to his fear-hungered muscles. However, he was not alone in the room, and the air needed would have to be ingested in hungry gulps, like a fat kid at the end of a race. He tried to ignore it, to take small, silent breaths, but it was not enough to please his body. His head was growing woozy from the lack of oxygen. He knew he was going to have to breathe, and soon.

  Releasing what remained of the held breath, Jeremy opened his mouth and took a series of deep breaths. Luck was on his side once more, for at that same moment, the large nurse stopped her note taking and moved to leave the room. The sound of the door opening, the ‘swoosh’ of rushing air, covered his gasps.

  Wriggling free from the monitor wall’s grip on him was no easy task, and by the time he was free, Jeremy’s body was demanding even more oxygen and was covered in a layer of sweat.

  The monitors, those which had been attached the deceased patient, whose name Jeremy would never know, had been reset, their readouts still zero, but their alarms deactivated. Caught in two minds, Jeremy decided it was best to wait until the new subject had been attached before he made his move. Walking back to the monitors, he stood beside them, ready to dive back into cover at the first sign of company.

  The wait was painful. Every moment, every whirr of the machine, every out of synch beep, seemed to take longer and longer to fall away. Jeremy was tired. His body was coming down from the earlier adrenaline rush, and it was leaving him sleepy. Coupled with the warmth of the room, he soon began to doze off, slipping to the flo
or sitting with his back to the wall. He missed the swoosh sound of the door, and only just managed to regain control as the door opened. Stifling a cry, he threw himself behind the monitors, unsure if he was completely hidden or not. There was no time to worry about it.

  “Vital signs are stable. He looks to be responding well. Start him at 3% exposure and increase it on the hour in full jumps. Direct him to the lower level, but let him skip alternates on the rise. Bring J17 to the front. He doesn’t have long left and I want him to be some use to me.” Dr Marshall’s voice was cold, emotionless.

  The nurse said nothing. Jeremy made the assumption it was the same one, but from his awkward position on the floor he was not in condition to take so much as a peek at what was going on.

  It didn’t take long before both left the room once more. Jeremy waited for a count of ten, calmer now, and then emerged from his hiding place. The three monitors were working again, each one pumping out their own readings and results. Jeremy understood the importance of the room, but also knew that to sabotage anything would only cause trouble. First he needed to see the room where they were doing these experiments. He needed to see the subjects themselves. He had no interest in seeing into the other worlds, but could not deny the small, dark part of his mind that wanted to see what the doctor was doing. How he was going about it. The way he spoke, the cold calculating voice, the strategic way he manipulated people. It made Jeremy shudder, but at the same time a small modicum of respect for the doctor was born. The level of detail being taken was unlike anything Jeremy had ever seen. Dr Marshall was not just some mad scientist playing around. He had invested decades of his life in his research. It was fascinating and disturbing.

  Opening the door to the control room as he had christened it, Jeremy peered out. Once he was happy that the corridor was empty, he slipped back into the sea of white. It was even more blinding after the dim lighting of the control room. Slipping quietly over the floor, Jeremy tried the door to the central core room. He was not surprised to find it unlocked. The intervening years since the experiments had started had seen security grow lax on the lower levels. Then again, Jeremy reasoned that once you had reached this depth, there really was no need for security. If caught, you would never leave.