Dark Matter

by Luke Donegan

  “History Dome,” she said.

  Hand in hand they ran to the Dome of History, soldiers filling the corridor behind them - a mass of black forms, armor, leather, surging forward, batons raised. As they passed into the anti-chamber, Erys slammed and locked the door. But as he stepped backwards, batons crashed against the door from the other side, the surface buckling with each blow.

  It would not hold for more than a few moments.

  Sian gripped his hand and pulled him into the dome.

  They followed a corridor lined with paintings. Their adversaries crashed through the door and poured into the dome.

  Random corridors led to a junction. Here control panels allowed the visitor to rearrange the exhibition design, to gain access to different displays. As soldiers appeared in the corridor beyond the room, Erys punched random controls. The door slid shut and the room slowly rotated as counter weights and balances beneath the floor twisted and shunted into new positions.

  Doors opened into a stairwell. They ascended the stairs onto the next level and emerged into a large octagonal room displaying classical weaponry. Cases displayed bows and arrows, swords and spears. As they passed through the room Erys snatched a short mace from the armored hand of a medieval knight.

  Through a second gallery they came to another junction room and re-orientated the galleries. Corridors and rooms shunted around, confusing the pursuing soldiers. Erys and Sian entered an ancient throne room. Erys slammed the door and slid a bolt across its frame.

  It was a relief to rest.

  “The soldiers have come for you,” explained Erys. “They will take you to the Courthouse.”

  “Maybe I should just ...”

  “No! You shouldn’t!” He sat on the step below the throne. “They will not be merciful. You must disappear, far away from the Museum. Somewhere they won’t find you.”

  She sat beside him, breathing heavily.

  She looked at him, and only at that moment saw what he had become. Dark Matter seeped from his sweat glands like oil.

  ”Erys,” she sympathised. “It’s all through you.”

  He looked at his hands. Dark Matter slid across his palms. With a brief thought he retracted the substance back into his body.

  “We have to get out,” he said. “The soldiers will split up and search the History Dome. We need to get out ... or find a good hiding place.”

  “It won’t take long before we’re found. The dome is not as big as it looks.”

  “I agree. But we can’t go out the way we came.”

  Sian pushed herself from the wall and crossed the room. “What about a service tunnel,” she suggested, pointing at a grill in the floor. “We could get to the Workshop.”

  Erys crouched by the grill and examined its catch.

  “Stand back.”

  A solid blow from the mace smashed the lock into pieces. Lifting the grill revealed a set of iron rungs leading down into darkness. Erys lowered himself down. Once Sian followed through the grill, he sent two strands of Dark Matter up the shaft. Smokey fingers splayed out, curled around the metal grill and pulled it shut.

  They descended to a level shaft.

  “Left or right?” asked Erys.

  “I don’t know.”

  He closed his eyes. Tendrils of smoke sprang from his eyelids and whipped along both stretches of the tunnel. Acting as his eyes they searched for clear passage.

  “This way.” As his eyes opened the smoke dissipated. They turned right and shuffled along the tunnel.

  After fifty feet a wide grill appeared, revealing an exhibition room overhead. The grill extended the length of the room, leaving them exposed to anyone standing above who should look down. They were halfway along before three soldiers entered the room.

  Erys and Sian froze. Two of the soldiers passed across the room and exited through the opposite door. The third paused. The soldier walked slowly across the grill, his boots clanking on the metal bars. His black mask tilted down, eyepieces scanning the shadows beyond the grillwork.

  Erys wrapped his arms protectively around Sian, masking her body with his. A diffuse cloud of smoke discharged from his body, shielding the two within. They kept completely still and tried not to breathe.

  The soldier bent down. He tested the grillwork with his baton, knocking it against the metal spars.

  Erys’ lips against Sian’s ear whispered a soft warning. “Shhh.”

  The soldier poked the baton between the spars. Its tip brushed Erys’ hair. Filaments of smoke laced around the baton before Erys pulled them quickly back.

  But something happened in that moment of connection.

  Erys sensed the soldier’s fingers through the wood. Fingers, hand, arm and body. And within the soldier’s body, Erys sensed his Spirit. He visualised it in his mind – red sparks in a night sky, swirling, moving. The sparks merging into the form of a wonderful horse with wings.

  He saw the soldier’s Spirit. And he hungered for it. He drew part of the Spirit through the baton into himself. He tasted its glorious flavour, and he craved nothing more than to consume this Spirit. But he denied himself and pulled the filaments of Dark Matter back.

  The soldier also felt something. He did not know what it was. A horrible nausea. Fear.

  The soldier backed away from the grill. He had sensed something menacing. Something hungering for him. Something sucking on his soul.

  He staggered back, clutching at his chest. A pain flared there. A prelude to Passage. He walked quickly from the room to rejoin his colleagues. He would not talk of it, nor know how close he had come to being a meal for this unseen creature.

  Sian and Erys emerged into a vast room beneath the History Dome - the dark, greasy engine room that controlled the hydraulics of the exhibition space above. Huge metal arms reached from the floor to the ceiling, pulleys and levels that could lift and lower, rotate and slide the rooms and corridors into endless shifting parameters. As they descended a ladder, three of the arms across the room suddenly powered into motion, grinding and clanking as they rearranged the matrix above.

  “The soldiers, trying to find us,” said Erys as Sian joined him at the ladder’s base. “There should be a service tunnel to the Workshop.”

  A passage opened in the wall across the vast room. They ran through the engine room, around towering steel pillars to the exit. As they were about to leave the engine room, a red-suited girl appeared in the corridor.

  Recognition creased the girl’s face.

  “Not that way,” said Ismet. “There are soldiers in the workshops.”

  “How did you find us?” asked Sian.

  “Attendants are all through the Museum searching for you,” she told them. She looked back along the service tunnel. “There are soldiers coming this way.”

  “We need to find a way out,” said Erys. “Is the front entrance guarded?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “But there is another way.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Science Dome. Follow me.”

  She guided them across the floor past grease-stained hydraulic arms. Behind the spine of a gargantuan clamp running up the side of the wall they found a service panel. Erys lifted the panel from the wall.

  “The architects built passages between all the domes and rooms in the Museum,” she explained. “There are secret passages above and below the corridors. Not even the Builder knows about most of them. They are hundreds of years old.”

  “How did you find them?” asked Sian.

  “We spend a lot of time exploring. All the attendants. There are so few visitors these days.”

  Erys crouched and peered into the dark tunnel. Ismet pushed past him and crawled in on her hands and knees.

  “Follow me.”

  Sian crawled in after her and Erys came behind. With hands and Dark Matter he lifted the panel and rested it over the opening.

  The clanking sounds of the engine room receded as they progressed slowly along the tunnel. The tunnel curved then continued straigh
t for hundreds of feet.

  At a junction the tunnel branched to the left and right. The floor and ceiling opened to reveal a flue running up and down into shadows. Ladder rungs were set into the wall of the flue.

  “We are at the mid-point of the Museum,” said Ismet. “The left tunnel leads to the Nature Dome. The right to the Science Dome. The chimney goes up through the length of the tower. The elevator runs on the other side of this wall.”

  “It goes right to the top?” Erys peered up into darkness.

  “To the Director’s chambers.”

  “You’ve climbed up there?” asked Sian.

  “Not all the way. But I’ve used it often, to get between levels. This way,” she said, shuffling across the rungs to the tunnel on the right.

  Sian passed across the drop. Erys paused as he stepped onto the rungs. He looked up and down the flue into impenetrable shadow. He looked up and felt a presence, something just beyond the curtain of darkness. Something in the shadows.

  He thrust a hand into the darkness. Dark Matter blasted from the palm of his hand. It speared upwards, a tendril of smoke, swooping and climbing. An eye for Erys, climbing higher, searching for something – this impression on the edge of his perception.

  But with height, his eye weakened. There was a limit to his power.

  “Erys! Come on,” called Sian.

  With a puff the tendril dissipated.

  And the eyes in the shadows watched him move away. They blinked and were quickly distracted. Erys was only a minor thing. He would never amount to a serious threat.

  They climbed from a hatch into the Science Dome. Above them the hologram of the galaxy wheeled slowly in space. They paused for a few moments to listen for sounds of soldiers in the gallery.

  “Be careful,” whispered Ismet. “The fittings can be difficult to see.”

  Light fittings covered the floor. Each bulb projected light into the gallery. As they moved gingerly across the floor, patches of the galaxy above dimmed and disappeared as their bodies interfered with the projected light.

  Galaxies were projected onto their bodies, their figures composed of millions of stars.

  The group picked its way across the floor of the dome. The visitor walkway was suspended halfway up the wall above them. Without pause Ismet approached the wall and began to climb a set of rungs up to the walkway. Erys and Sian followed.

  At the top of the climb they rested for a brief moment by the doorway to the gallery.

  “This way,” said Ismet, leading them along the platform away from the exit. “We take a hovercar.”

  Two hovercars were parked at the edge of the walkway. Ismet climbed into one and sat at the controls. After her companions were safely aboard she powered it away from the walkway. The car lifted up and glided towards the ceiling of the dome. They passed through the outer spiral arm of the galaxy, stars and gas clouds glancing off their faces.

  Ismet flew the car up to the highest point of the ceiling.

  “There is a trapdoor, just there,” said the attendant.

  Erys spied the outline of a trapdoor in the black surface. He unfastened a catch and gently pulled the trapdoor open. The lid levered down, revealing rungs that continued up into a flue in the ceiling.

  “It opens out onto the top of the Science Dome,” said Ismet. “From there you can make your way down the side.”

  She looked at him meekly, wondering if it was good enough.

  Erys examined the flue. Twenty feet above, sunlight filtered from an upper hatch.

  “I don’t know any other way,” apologised Ismet.

  “It’s good,” said Erys, turning to the girl. “It is very good. You have done well.” He smiled with gratitude. “Return the hover car and stay hidden for a few hours. Then return to your room.”

  Ignoring the drop beneath him, Erys stood on the side of the hovercar and gripped a rung.

  Sian hugged the girl briefly then took Erys’ extended hand. She reached the rung and hoisted herself up into the flue. Once she was inside Erys followed. He leant down and gripped the hatch. Ismet stood alone on the hovercar, watching them leave.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Don’t get caught.”

  And he pulled the hatch upwards until it snapped shut.

  Sunlight blinded them as they emerged into daylight. With watering eyes Erys hoisted himself up onto the roof of the Science Dome. Waves of heat and light shimmered over the red tiles that covered the vast surface of the dome. Erys shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon.

  Wind, hot from the desert, tugged at his robes. His dark hair unfurled behind him like a flag.

  Sian stepped up beside him.

  “How do we get down?” she asked, her words torn away by the ferocious wind.

  They stood partway down the southern side of the dome. To the east lay the city and the desert. To the west the ocean, partly obscured behind the blue arc of the Nature Dome. The administration tower rose like a spear into the sky behind them. The sky groaned as the wind roared across the domes and the tower.

  Erys glanced over his shoulder.

  “We can’t stay here. Anyone at the windows can see us.”

  Gulls wheeled in the sky above the Museum.

  Where they stood the gradient of the roof was slight. But closer towards the edge the gradient increased. At its edge the roof inclined steeply before dropping vertical from a lip, two hundred feet to the ground.

  Sian, what have I done? thought Erys.

  “I can’t see a way down,” he cried.

  He crouched and tested the surface. The tiles were made of hard ceramic glass polished smooth by the endless rubbing of the wind. They gleamed in the sunlight. The mortar between the tiles was cracked and crumbling. He forced his fingers into a crack and tested its purchase.

  “We have to climb down.”

  Sian disagreed. “It gets too steep. What about back towards the tower?”

  “There is no way down that way.”

  He saw movement behind the windows a few levels up. Soldiers!

  “Come on,” he cried, taking her hand.

  They scampered across the tiles. The gradient increased gently. Erys’ foot slipped on one of the tiles and he skidded a few feet. They slowed to a careful walk.

  The drop at the edge crept closer. Soon they were shuffling sideways down the increasing incline. Erys went first, kicking mortar from between the tiles to maximise toe and finger holds. The wind blew across their bodies, knotting the fabric of their robes around their legs.

  The gradient increased. Still they were hundreds of feet above the ground. Erys slipped as he kicked at some loose mortar and skidded slowly down the slope until his fingers caught a tile. He paused to catch his breath and to slow his heart. Dark Matter spilled from his body across the tiles, attempting to glue him to the surface.

  The rim of the dome was close. He examined the edge for a way down. Thick pillars of granite supported the dome every fifty feet around the rim, stretching from the rim to the ground. The granite stone was cracked and weathered from decades of sun and wind. There should be enough holds to climb down, he hoped.

  “We will make for that pillar,” he cried.

  Sian was a good climber, but she eyed the pillar with distrust. It was a long way down. She looked at the city beyond the drop, the broken buildings, the beach and the sea. She breathed deeply and a sense of foreboding settled through her.

  Sian scanned the blinding landscape. The howling wind drew from her the desire to live. It screamed in her ears: The animals are dead! The animals are dead!

  And Xia Tsang was gone.

  “Come on!” cried Erys.

  She looked at Erys, her man riddled with Dark Matter.

  What lies beyond all this? she thought. Nothing! This horror is all that is left.

  And she knew she was going to die.

  She absorbed as much of the world as she could in these last moments. Sadness filled her heart, and the wind pulled at that sadness, feeding it out as if it were
a streamer, into the sky. And not even Erys could save her from what she felt. Her soul was scattered on the wind.

  “Come on!”

  She reluctantly followed as Erys shimmied carefully down the ever-increasing slope. No more were they pushing forward. The incline was so steep now that gravity had them in its grasp. They struggled to stop themselves from sliding to the edge.

  The angle tipped further and they clung to the roof of the dome, only fifty feet from the rim. They were hit by a violent surge of wind. Suddenly the red tile Sian held tore away in her hands. The tile tumbled down the roof and disappeared over the edge. Her hands scrambled for grip as her body began to slide with a steady momentum down the slope.

  She cried out. Her body slid past Erys. He reached out but she was already beyond his reach.

  He had no time to consider. He released his hold and slid down the dome behind her towards the drop.

  Sian’s scrabbling hands slowed her momentum, but not enough to save her.

  Erys gained speed. The drop approached. As she tipped over the edge, he reached and grasped her flailing hands. Her fingers wrapped tightly around his wrist.

  Then his body too pitched over. His free hand searched frantically ... and found a cornice tile, projecting out from the rim. His fingers gripped and held, arresting their fall.

  They hung in space. The wind gripped Sian’s legs and swung her furiously back and forth. The muscles along Erys’ arms and neck pulled tight. Tendons taught under his skin. His grips on her wrist and the cornice were weakening.

  The wind howled through his mind. Where am I? he roared. Is this the great wind? Am I between worlds?

  “Can you climb up?” he cried.

  Sian lifted her legs against the wall, trying to find a hold. It was smooth like polished marble. Her movements tugged on Erys, and his grip on the stone slipped.

  “Don’t move! I can’t ...”

  The tendons in his arms screamed for release.

  Sian looked up.

  “Erys!”

  Black feelers emerged from his body, like hundreds of thin worms wriggling towards the wall. They glanced against the stone, searching for cracks they could feed into. Tendrils swept from his arms around the cornice stone. Others wrapped around Sian’s arms.