by Paul Berry
The screen cuts back to the idol. The soldier takes out a gun from his jacket and points it at my grandfather.
‘You’ll join the rest of those poor bastards.’
There is an explosion of thunder and the men cry out. A black object has appeared at my grandfather’s feet and he crouches down and picks it up. He holds it up to his face and smiles.
The Necronomicon.
‘This is the greatest treasure in the universe, my friends. There was never any gold.’ Lightning tears across the sky. Perched on the head of the idol is a gaunt creature, toad-like with leprous skin, its thick lips framing a wide mouth of snaggled teeth. One of the soldiers shoots, but the bullet ricochets off the stone. The thing leaps off and pins him to the ground. Before he can scream, it bites into his face. The other man yells and backs away, frantically patting his jacket pockets in search of a weapon. The thing swallows the face with a wet gulp. The soldier starts running and the thing leaps after him.
My grandfather, seeing his opportunity to escape, runs down the hill back to the boat, stumbling in the mud, still clutching the book. Behind him, the other soldier screams. He reaches a black sand beach and wades into the sea, pushing the boat until the water is up to his waist. He looks back towards the shore, his face contorted in triumph, before clambering in and frantically rowing out to sea. The picture fades to black and the screen hisses with static.
When I wake up I have lost all sense of time and place. For a moment I think I’m in bed at home, then I see my mother sitting in an armchair, the veil undulating around her face.
‘It’s early morning, in case you were wondering. Unfortunately, I don’t have any porridge. I remember you used to love that.’
‘I still do.’ There are marks on the couch, parallel slices through the thick leather. I look at my hands suspiciously.
‘Did I do that?’
She nods. ‘You were having a nightmare. There’s not much time. Soon the vampire will eat everything away until there’s nothing left.’
The idea of being consumed and becoming nothing doesn’t sound that terrible.
She hands me a towel and shows me to the bathroom. Above the basin, where a mirror should be, is an empty frame. Jutting out around its edges are fragments of silver, and I wonder if she’s also thought about dragging a piece of glass along her wrist.
Before showering, I tease off the plaster over the wound on my leg. Like the previous one, it has completely healed, and I pick out the stitches around the scar.
My mother has breakfast laid out on the living room table. The protuberances on her face strain against the veil towards it as though they’re hungry. I half-heartedly try nibbling some toast, but my stomach seizes up. What I really want is red and salty and hot. I push away the plate.
‘I might be able to help you, temporarily at least.’ She takes a wooden box off a shelf and hands it to me. ‘For all the birthdays I’ve missed.’ I open the lid. Inside is a bracelet made of greenish metal inscribed with similar glyphs to those which were on the blade of Dr Stone’s knife. ‘It won’t halt the transformation, but it should slow it down.’ I squeeze my fingers into a point and push them through. As soon as the bracelet encircles my wrist I feel the creature cower in submission.
‘What do you know of this?’ she asks, placing a book on the table, The Travellers Between Spheres in cursive gold script across the spine and cover. The book seems to shimmer from solid to smoke as though it’s struggling to remain in this world.
Or desperate to leave it.
‘It was Adam’s favourite book. And mine.’ I stroke the leather binding and it catches against my fingertips. It’s covered with tiny heart-shaped scales, the skin of some strange reptile.
‘Can you read it?’ she asks. ‘Like the crystal?’ I turn the vellum pages, past the illustrations of the hooded figure and the giant stalactite mouth, an ancient redolence wafting up into my nostrils. The next picture is a demon with black-feathered wings, horned and cloven-hoofed, its arms stretched outwards by shackles, a pentagram inscribed on its forehead. I feel a chill as I look more closely.
In the centre of the pentagram is an eye.
A boy and girl hold hands in front of the demon, their faces creased in defiance. I try to read the opposite page of symbols but they swirl across the paper as I attempt to grasp their tenor. The information I glean is that the boy is called Hastur, the girl Dagona.
‘It’s trying to stop me from deciphering it,’ I say. Under the children’s feet is a rolled cartouche containing six symbols. As I stare at it, I hear them chanting the ritual that wrapped the demon’s arms in chains.
It bellows at them to release it.
‘I think the children bound the demon with these,’ I say, tapping the cartouche.
‘If it’s a binding ritual, those symbols might be strong enough to restrain Adam.’
‘Do you know anything else about him?’
‘Probably less than you. Only that so far, he’s avoided our efforts to find him. Our knowledge of the Datum’s denizens is severely limited, but we made significant progress thanks to Turing. His insights into the codex of the Necronomicon were invaluable.’
‘What exactly is the Datum?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. It seems to defy definition, one place but many, an infinite reticulum of interconnected worlds, spheres, as the book suggests. It’s where the other things live, things like Adam. Some are trapped, desperate to come to our world and destroy it.’
I almost tell her that Adam isn’t the thing they unwittingly summoned, that it was his father. But secrets are power, and in a place like Jupiter Hill my survival depends on them.
I turn to an illustration of a naked man hovering in a sea of clouds, streams of light spilling from his eyes and mouth, striking the planet beneath him and transforming it into a ball of fire. Around him, screaming angels plummet from the sky, their wings burning lattices of bone. I turn to the last page. It’s a rectangle of black ink, a void, like the one I drew for Dr Stone.
I touch the blackness.
Fingertips brush against mine beneath the page.
I jerk away my hand and slam the book shut.
There’s a knock on the door. ‘Enter,’ she says. It opens and Dr Stone walks in. I glower at him, my leg twitching when I think about his knife cutting into me.
‘Sam will cooperate and bring Adam to us,’ she says.
‘That’s wonderful news.’ He looks nervously at my unrestrained arms as I flex the stiffness from them. ‘Are you sure it’s safe for him to be walking around freely?’
‘Sam is our guest, not a prisoner.’
‘I’ll be on my best behaviour,’ I say, smiling at him, and he glares back. I imagine how good it would feel to prise open his ribcage and rip out his heart.
‘Before you go,’ my mother says to him, ‘I’d advise against interrogating Sam again without my permission. Remember what happened to your predecessor.’
‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he says. She pulls back her veil and the protuberances grow longer, angrily lashing the air. He takes a step back, looking at her face with disgust. ‘I’ll prepare the chamber.’ He bangs the door closed.
‘What happened to his predecessor?’ I ask.
‘He made me angry and lived to regret it. What was left of him.’
Chapter 21
‘There’s one more thing you can help me with,’ my mother says. ‘A project I’ve been working on. I remember how you liked making things.’
‘You’re thinking about the fairy trap.’
She laughs. ‘That was one of my favourites. You were so disappointed it didn’t work.’ For a moment I’m back in my parents’ bedroom, seeing them happy together as I excitedly rush in.
As we are about to leave her quarters, I notice a familiar picture on the wall. It’s the collage depicting my bedroom that
I made last year in art class, a skull-headed snake coiling out of the ceiling. When it disappeared, I thought Terry had stolen it.
‘How did you get that?’ I ask.
‘I never stopped thinking about you. Even after I left, I’ve been keeping an eye on you.’
‘You’ve been spying on me?’ The creature inside growls and my teeth start to sharpen and elongate. The black car that followed me down the road, was that at her behest too?
‘Sam, calm down.’
‘You should’ve told me you were still alive,’ I say, digging my nails into my palms. The bracelet vibrates around my wrist, shoving the creature back into its confines.
‘You’re right. But we’re back together. That’s the important thing.’
‘How can I trust you? What’s to stop you leaving again once this is over?’
‘I won’t make the same mistake twice.’ She strokes the side of my face. ‘You’re my son. You’ll always be my son.’ Her touch is soothing and I close my eyes, wishing my dad was here so we could be a family again.
I follow her into the hall and Smith is still next to the lift. He scowls, his neck covered with red weals where my mother’s fingers dug into his skin. As we walk past cell doors, I stop and stare into one.
Inside, a hunched woman with ragged hair walks around in circles, muttering and banging her fists against her thighs. On every square inch of the concrete walls and floor she has scratched glyphs; it must have taken months, even years. She has also clawed the same symbols on her arms and legs. One of her feet is deformed into a bird foot, the three scaly toes flexing every time she takes a step.
On her forehead is a triangular birthmark.
‘Professor Ward?’ I whisper.
She pauses for a moment and looks at me. ‘He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming.’
‘Who?’ I ask. She ignores me and continues to shuffle around in a circle.
The biggest glyph on the wall is a crudely scratched pentagram. In the centre is the eye.
‘Even in her madness she’s trying to find a way back,’ my mother says.
We pass the next cell and I hear something shuffling towards the door. I look through the bars.
‘Sam, don’t,’ my mother warns. It looks vaguely human as it crawls on malformed limbs towards me. Two tentacles stretch from its back and writhe over the floor like bloated snakes. ‘That’s the third person from our cursed triumvirate.’
‘Nathaniel Peaslee,’ I say. It raises its mangled head at the mention of the name and moans sadly. ‘Will I also be left to rot in a cell if I don’t help you?’
‘The Syncret stretches far beyond this facility. I’m not its leader. There’s a limit to my protection.’
‘That almost sounds like a threat.’
She laughs and tugs my ear like she did when I was a toddler. ‘You’ve been watching too many horror films.’
She opens a door next to the one that led to the Kirlian imager room. Inside, a laboratory gleams with steel and glass. There is a cough behind us. We turn around and see Smith, looking morose and rubbing his neck.
‘Please be on your best behaviour or you’ll be singing soprano for the rest of your life.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And don’t talk.’
The smell of alcohol and rotting meat makes me cough. On tall metal shelves around the lab are numerous tanks of bubbling clear liquid containing different body parts. In one, a torso is split open down the middle, its intestines billowing out like ribbons of seaweed; in another floats a hand, which clenches its bony fingers into a fist.
Lying on a gurney, half covered with a sheet, is a thing that looks like a man, his arms attached to his shoulders with thick metal staples. Around his neck is a greenish metal collar etched with the symbols, and Smith clips a long metal chain to it like a leash. I look at the thing in revulsion. One of his legs is black and twisted, the foot a tumorous mass of elongated toes, each ending in a yellow claw.
‘Is this what you’ve been doing to save the world?’ I ask. ‘Pretending to be Frankenstein?’
‘Unconventional methods are sometimes necessary. We’ve tried to resurrect him, but nothing so far has worked.’
‘How did you even create it?’
‘Your grandfather was an expert in the field of reanimation, necromancy specifically. Frankenstein paled in comparison.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He was killed in a lab explosion many years ago. Like me, he underestimated the power he’d discovered. Unfortunately, most of his research was destroyed in the fire, so we had to inelegantly piece together what was left.’
‘It doesn’t look human.’
‘Some parts we salvaged from other creatures, the things that have been affected by the Datum and had to be destroyed.’
‘You mean the people that have been affected. People like me and you.’
‘In a manner of speaking. But, unlike us, they were suffering, in agony, and humane decisions had to be made.’
‘Is that my fate if you can’t find a cure?’
‘Don’t be so dramatic. I would never allow that to happen.’
‘So how I am going to help if I can’t donate any body parts?’
‘According to your grandfather’s research, vampire blood is the key to resurrection.’ I shake my head. ‘This is not a request. I’d rather you give the blood voluntarily or the Syncret will take it from you.’ She sounds like a Jupiter Hill mouthpiece. The bracelet I’m wearing itches, and I resist the temptation to tear it off. ‘Do it for the both of us. We’ll need all the help we can get to stop Adam.’
‘By creating more monsters.’
‘You have to understand what we’re trying to do. Ultimately, something will come through that we can’t subdue. The veil protecting our world from the Datum is becoming weaker every day.’ I lose my patience with her.
‘It was your fucking curiosity that made us like this. You ruined our lives!’ I imagine a different world, one where my mother hadn’t performed the ritual, where she and my dad were still together and my life wasn’t just watching videos alone in my bedroom and thinking of ways to kill myself.
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘I should have left it alone. But you can help me fix everything. It can be like it was before. I can come home.’ Despite everything that’s happened, I still want her and my dad back together. One of my happiest memories is sitting at the dining room table having Christmas dinner with them as a child, my legs swinging from the chair, still not long enough to touch the floor, as my dad clumsily tried to carve the turkey.
‘How do you know this will even work?’ I ask.
‘I don’t, but I have faith in my father’s research and his intentions. As you should in mine.’
‘Forgive me if I have difficulty trusting people in this place.’
‘Sam, listen to me. If we can’t capture Adam, they’ll never let you leave Jupiter Hill. You’ll just be another monster locked in a cell.’
‘If I help, then we go home together when this is over?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
I hold out my arm and she wipes the skin with alcohol and pricks it with a syringe needle. Blood slowly fills the tube, and swarming around inside it are black flecks which seem alive. She pulls out the needle and looks at the syringe with fascination.
‘Your body is being taken over by the creature faster than I predicted.’
‘How much time do I have left?’
‘Not long. We must find Adam quickly.’ She flings back the sheet covering the thing on the gurney to reveal the mottled patchwork flesh of its torso. She stabs the syringe into its chest, pushes down the plunger and steps back.
Nothing happens.
‘Fuck. I thought this would work,’ she says. Smith laughs and she looks at him furiously.
An u
nearthly moan rattles from the creature’s mouth and his arms and legs twitch as though electricity is running through them. He sits up and stares at me through crooked eyelids. The sheet slides to the floor and he climbs awkwardly off the gurney, staggering towards me. I almost turn away in embarrassment at his naked body, the discoloured genitals between his legs hanging in a nest of black hair. Smith yanks the chain and he yelps in pain, hunching his shoulders, and tears blur my vision.
‘You’re hurting him!’ I shout.
‘Aren’t you the protective daddy,’ Smith jeers. The creature snarls at him, saliva sloshing from his mouth. Smith backs away and drops the chain. The thing moans and shuffles into the corner of the lab, jerking his head around fearfully like a frightened bird. I walk slowly over, holding out my hand.
‘Be careful,’ my mother says. He stares at my hand apprehensively as I move it closer and touch the side of his arm, the skin like cold leather. He bows his head, allowing me to stroke it, grunting with pleasure.
‘What will happen to him after we’ve stopped Adam?’ I ask.
‘We’ll decide when the time comes.’
I remove my hand, and he grabs my wrist and places it back on his head. I continue patting his scalp, being careful to avoid the network of staples that hold his skull together. I look at his forearm. There is a burnt patch of skin as though something caustic has been poured on it. Faintly visible under the burn are the remnants of tattoo lines that look like the sails of a ship.
‘Take it away,’ she says. Smith pulls the chain and the creature whines, following him out of the laboratory. Smith shouts an obscenity before a cell door is slammed and locked nearby and the creature howls like an abandoned dog.
I rub the skin underneath the bracelet. The symbols etched on the metal have begun to fade, as though the power imbued in them is starting to diminish. My mother lifts up my wrist and inspects it.
‘Whatever’s inside you is becoming too powerful for this trinket to work much longer.’
My face flushes with anger and I snatch my hand away. ‘Maybe you should fasten a collar to my neck instead and drag me round like a dog.’
