"Of what?"
"I don't know," I said.
#
I stayed on the bridge, punching up more atmospheric scans. They showed a higher-than-usual concentration of organic material but nothing toxic over the short term. I couldn't shake the place's odd odor. Awash in decay and pollution, most of Earth reeked, but nothing quite like what I'd smelled outside.
I pulled up the party's location on my monitor. Each respirator was equipped with a positioning chip, and their red dots clustered, unmoving, in central Arkham. Still, I gathered, checking out the library. I didn't get why Booth had paid a small fortune to drag his posse down here to look at disgusting old books.
I told myself it didn't matter.
As long as they were back by nightfall, they could be having an orgy in the ruins for all I cared. My mind flashed on an image of Booth nude, slipping Shark Fin's shirt over her head. His gray eyes were predatory, wolf-like.
I fussed with the computer again, trying to put the image out of my head.
The immersion helmet stashed next to my monitor seemed to stare at me as I worked. For some reason, it seemed enticing in a way it never had before. I knew I should be watching the monitors, but I wanted to drop back into Booth's world, see what had cracked the stone.
Just a short visit. I knew exactly where I wanted to go.
Even if I lost a couple more hours in there, I rationalized, I'd still be out well before nightfall.
I pushed up the volume slider for the com to make sure I wouldn't miss another call from Singh. My super-ego screamed warnings, but they faded as I pulled on the helmet and logged in.
This time, the immersion felt more complete. I sensed odd swirls in the mist, veins of bluish light that seemed to bend through it. The mottled color of the stones had grown more vivid. Their surfaces looked damp and unhealthy. The distant drips and rushing water also sounded more distinct, almost too clear to have been coming from the helmet's cheap speakers.
The air grew chill as I traced my path back to the octagonal stone. It even felt moist in my lungs. I'd never been in the tanks before, but knew the appeal was their full-body experience. I wondered if the realism of Booth's video and audio could cause the body to hallucinate other sensory details.
I found the stone and touched its surface. It felt smooth like the others, but colder, almost icy.
A faint vibration tickled my palm and I heard the same splitting sound as before. The tick of insect legs returned, amplified like a speaker blared inside my cortex. I ground my teeth. The clatter grew louder and more frenzied, became a burst of white noise.
A thin fault appeared in the stone at eye level and I staggered back.
The surface split along a zigzagging fault line. Spiky shards of light leaked from the fracture. They widened into blinding beams that burnished the fog with an even more vivid blue. I squeezed my eyes shut, protecting them against the light. I turned my helmeted head.
After a few seconds, my brain reminded me this was an art installation on a public pedia. It wouldn't burn out my retinas.
I looked back at the opening.
The emanating light burned like a plasma torch, harsh and metallic, making it impossible to tell exactly what I was seeing. Best as I could tell, the stone was simultaneously cracking open and turning inside out, as if two conflicting video images had been layered atop one another.
The angles that opened in front of me shouldn't have existed--at least not at the same time.
The opening vibrated, strobing the escaping light. Beams refracted as if striking hidden mirrors. They formed a crazy lattice around me.
My depth perception disappeared. I felt weightless, as if gravity had shifted and I was about to tumble into the opening. I grabbed the edges of my chair, dug fingers deep into the foam.
And, once again, Booth's world disappeared.
I lay panting. Cold sweat pasted my shirt to my skin.
I slid off the helmet and looked at the time readout on my monitor. Again, two hours had passed. There was no way the immersion had lasted that long.
Was the installation's time slip part of Booth's artistic statement? Some kind of prank? What about the way I'd been abruptly jettisoned twice? Was that a glitch or also part of the intended experience?
As disorienting as the last scene had been, I still fought the urge to put on the helmet, drop back in and look for answers. Another few seconds and I could see what lay beyond the opening.
Suddenly, I understood Clement's addiction to the tanks.
I eyed the helmet, for a second considered pulling it back on. Instead, shoved it back into its place beside my monitor and slipped off my gloves. I couldn't continue losing time in Booth's eerie diversion. I needed to check in with Singh.
I rung his channel, got no response, and attempted it a second time. I gnawed my lip and tried to reassure myself he was probably talking to the group, too busy dealing with something else.
Nothing to worry about.
I pulled up his coordinates on the view screen. The cluster of red dots hadn't moved.
"Singh," I called into the radio. "You reading me?"
A crackle of static followed, then a reply too low to make out.
"Singh?"
"No, this isn't Singh, it's Aria." She spoke in a rushed whisper. "You've got to get out of here. Take off now."
"Where's Singh?" I stood. Tightness spread through my shoulders.
"You can't help him. Just leave. Now. Booth wants you and Clement too." Her voice broke. "The books, they aren't what he said. Captain, you don't know ..."
"Where are you? Still in the library?"
"The others, Jesus Christ, the others--"
The signal dropped. Silence filled the bridge and its air became cold and damp.
I rang Clement's com and got no response. Lost, no doubt, in his little play world.
I ran to the ship's equipment locker, pushed through the clutter to the small gray safe that housed the Drake's weapons. It was Singh's domain. I couldn't remember the last time I'd opened the lock.
Hand shaking, I punched the code, cursing when it didn't open. I cycled numbers through my head and frantically punched buttons. I got it right on the third try.
The door clicked and a sliver of harsh silver-blue light crept along its edge. Beams radiated from it, refracting against the roof.
I stumbled backward, covering my face. A loud, mocking clatter followed. I whirled, realizing I'd bumped a grubby plastic tub of tools from its shelf. Wrench sockets splayed across the floor like segments of a chromed centipede.
I kicked them away, cursing.
When I returned my eyes to the safe, its door hung wide open. The interior no longer radiated light. I breathed deep, told myself it never had in the first place. I'd hallucinated it, either because of stress or the lingering effect of Booth's art.
I yanked a pair of auto pistols free from their foam nests, snapped a magazine into each, and ran for Clement's quarters.
I found him lying in his bed, head lost inside his plastic bug helmet. His arms splayed to his sides, gloved hands twitching.
"Take that fucking thing off," I yelled, kicking his boot.
Clement bolted out of bed. The plastic beetle on his head swiveled as he tried to figure out which reality he was in.
#
I slid down the landing ladder, respirator in place, pistol in hand. My boots struck the hard roadway, mushrooming dust. Clement ambled down like a sloth lowering itself on branches, no apparent sense of urgency.
The temperature outside had plummeted since morning and the smog shrouding Arkham shifted restless around the city. It burned with the angry colors of the late afternoon sun. A separate light, bluish and liquid, also mingled in the haze. I'd seen the air around Earth take on countless ugly hues, but never this one.
The chill air felt slimy on my skin.
Shuddering, I checked the map on my personal pedia. The red lights blazed from the same location they had moments ago on the bridg
e. If Booth and his merry band of maniacs had overtaken Singh, surely they wouldn't have stayed in the library, waiting for us to come after them with guns.
No, they'd probably dropped their respirators in a pile and moved on. No telling how far they'd disappeared into the city.
"Where do we even start?" I asked myself.
Clement had no answer. He stared at the town's decrepit silhouette, now looking even more skeletal in the bizarre light. His face bore all the emotion of his plastic helmet.
I took a few steps toward Arkham and stopped.
The running water from Booth's installation whispered in time with my racing pulse. I realized for the first time that it didn't flow per se, but surged. Pushed along at intervals as if from some great beating heart. It sounded sticky, viscous.
The click of insect legs, the rattle of carapaces sounded around me. The respirator air became thick and swampy. I turned, dizzy, and managed a few unsteady steps back toward the ship before my legs buckled and I fell.
Clement moved into my flickering field of vision.
"You're not ready yet," he said.
I vaguely recall Clement hoisting me over his shoulder. The clank of his boots on the landing ladder punctuated the song he sang as we ascended into the Drake.
Search the sky from east to west
She's the brightest and the best
But she's so far above me
I know she cannot love me
Still I love her more than all the rest
Ma evenin' star, I wonder who you are
#
Unconscious, I dreamt.
In the dream, a light, tender touch brushed my cheek and I opened my eyes. I lay nude, reclined on my back on a slab of greenish gray stone.
Booth, also naked, knelt between my legs. He smiled and pushed them further open. An erection jutted from below his rounded belly. The tip of his cock looked blue and sickly in the pale light.
The skin of his abdomen twitched. Something crawled beneath the surface.
An awful thing lived inside his gut.
#
I woke up on the bridge, reclined in my chair. My head pounded like I'd been on a weeklong binge and a dull ache crawled my muscles. I tasted chalk and wondered if I'd vomited.
Holding the chair for support, I hoisted myself to my feet. Through the view screen, I realized night had settled. It nearly blotted out Arkham--all but a swath of the city center illuminated by a ghostly silver-blue glow.
Clement was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the pistol.
My immersion helmet and gloves sat neatly arranged in front of my monitor. I wondered if Clement had placed them there.
I licked my lips, felt the itch to pick up the helmet. The installation would help me understand what was happening. I knew I was close to a moment of revelation inside Booth's world. Whatever lay inside that cracked octagonal stone, the thing that radiated from the impossible angle there, would explain it.
One more visit. One.
I reached for the helmet with shaking hands. The plastic surface felt cool, smooth, and reassuring. The mist-shrouded world could help me forget my aching head and body, the disappearance of my crewmember.
Singh.
No! I flung the helmet back onto my station. What was I thinking?
Booth had altered me, planted something in my brain. Those visits to his installation weren't getting me closer to some great epiphany. They were eating my psyche, making me forget he'd likely killed Singh and probably had similar plans for Clement and me.
I backed away from the helmet, shaking, and buzzed open the bridge door.
Somewhere else in the ship, Clement sang in the wavering voice I'd heard earlier, the same song about the evening star. It echoed shrill off the metal walls and made my already throbbing head worse.
I followed the sound to the open engine room door. Clement stood inside, back to me, arms swallowed up to the elbows in the drive manifold. Fragments of the propulsion core lay scattered around his feet. The metal pieces dangled stripped wires. A battered blue toolbox yawned up at the ceiling a few feet away.
My stomach dropped. The son of a bitch had all but destroyed the engine, dismantled it so we couldn't take off. With the core gone, all that would work were the taxiing thrusters, and they couldn't get out of orbit. Shit, they couldn't even jet us more than a mile or two from Arkham.
Oblivious to my presence, Clement paused his song, and with a grunt, wrenched something from the enclosure. He tossed a metal coupling onto the floor with a clank.
I watched the metal ring roll across the deck and bang into the toolbox. Both pistols, I realized, lay inside, perched atop a nest of greasy wrenches.
I slipped into the room and grabbed one of the guns. I kicked the toolbox out of his reach. Its contents scattered and the other pistol spun into the corner.
The metal-on-metal clangor made Clement look up from his work, but he didn't seem especially concerned. He peered over his shoulder, face still impassive.
"Show me your hands," I barked. "Right now."
Clement turned, dropping a miniature plasma cutter to the floor. He raised his hands. I fought the urge to cave in his head with the butt of the pistol. My hand shook.
"Are you insane?" I asked. "We can't take off now. We're stranded."
"I haven't destroyed it." Clement spoke to me like he was explaining himself to a child. "I'm merely preparing this ship for a more important mission. We must ready it for a new power source, one that will take us to beautiful places you can only begin to imagine."
"Right now, you crazy fuck, I can only imagine getting back to the orbital."
"We've been summoned to become part of something far bigger than either of us. Did you log into the installation again? It helped me understand."
What stood in front of me was something that looked like Clement, but the words weren't his. I couldn't even be sure his mouth moved in time with the words. He was an automaton.
"Go back to the bridge, put on the helmet. It takes time, but all will become clear."
An automaton I'd grown tired of listening to.
A dozen people had already died on my watch, one a member of my own crew. Hell, maybe their fate was worse than death. What was a little more blood on my hands?
I squeezed the trigger.
Clement fell against the manifold with a heavy clunk and slid down. The back of his head painted a long red smear down the metal.
The shot's echo vibrated in my ears. It looped on itself, transformed into the frenzied scurry of insect legs. The lingering smoke from the discharge hung blue in the air.
Hands clamped over my ears, I stumbled back to the bridge and closed the door behind me. The glow from the center of Arkham mocked me from the video screen. I shut my eyes, tried to blot it out, but it still beamed through the blackness.
I dropped the pistol next to my monitor and snatched the immersion helmet. I bashed it against the wall until shards of plastic, tangled wire, and shattered circuits rained across the deck. A tiny speaker bounced off my boot.
Arkham disappeared from the view screen, and Booth's face consumed nearly its entire surface. A halo of silver-blue luminescence--identical to the light in his installation, to the one streaming up from city center--shone behind him. The crawl across the bottom told me he was using Singh's camera.
"Poor Clement. You needn't shoot the messenger." Booth flashed a carnivorous smile. Each of his cold gray irises was bigger than my head. "Fortunately for you, that misstep doesn't void our deal."
"Our deal went out the airlock when you killed Singh." I walked to my terminal and tried to turn off the screen. Nothing happened. I saw a deep red gash opened along my palm, no doubt from destroying the helmet. Red droplets wept across my controls.
I tried to press the wound closed. Blood ran warm down my forearms.
"No, Melissa, we're together in this," Booth said. "You, me, all of the others, we have an opportunity to evolve. Achieve an enlightened state, a more unified st
ate."
"Is that what your toxic installation is supposed to be? Enlightenment?"
"No, to put it crudely, it's bait--an enticement, something to show you the possibilities that lay in store. Assuming, of course, you have the right wiring." Booth smiled. "Clement took to it faster than you did. Sadly, you didn't visit it until after we'd landed. You're just beginning to understand, but it's not too late."
"It's eating my goddamned brain, making me see things."
"Join us," Booth said. "I can make the hallucinations go away, give you the new reality the installation only hinted at."
"A new reality? Is that what you gave Singh and Aria?" I pressed my wounded palm against my side, trying to staunch the flow of blood. It drenched my shirt.
"No. They stood in the way of our evolution. Casualties of progress. I assure you, though, their deaths were painless. That's more than I can say for the one you gave Clement."
"He was under your control."
Booth cocked his head, seemed to consider the statement. "No, like the rest of us, he'd simply come to understand there are multiple dimensions ready to open into ours, boundless wisdoms to explore. He was ready to join the collective mind. As many times as you've been back to this dead planet, I thought you would understand."
"All I understand is that you're bug-fuck crazy."
"Earth's current state is the best argument for evolution, why we must leave human thinking behind. We warred and polluted this planet out of existence then exported those same tendencies to the orbitals. Arkham's not the end destination, Melissa, but a gateway. In the Twentieth Century, a private collector amassed an astounding book collection down here, tomes once burned for their forbidden knowledge. Only a few pieces were digitized, made it off Earth, but now we have access to the rest. Treatises on pan-dimensional existence, maps to planes beyond your comprehension, instructions for rebuilding this ship so it can jump between them."
"Well, bully for you. Why drag me into your pan-dimensional psycho party?"
"Genetic lottery, Melissa. DNA. Few of us have the capacity to see beyond this reality, to reach the next evolutionary tier. You do. Your crew did. I accessed your medical data to make sure of it. Ever wonder why you're so bad at being a starship captain? Why you can barely keep the Salamander Drake running? It's below your aptitude, my friend. You're a visionary, a seeker. The beings that opened my eyes need us to help them pass into this dimension. Together we can create more genetically pure hosts for them. It's what the human body is good for."
That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Page 25
