Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  Nate could tell a threat when he heard one. He also managed to glean one nugget of information, a name to call this place.

  “HEREWORLDMANHOME”

  Manhome.

  “EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS ARRIVALENTRANCEINVA-SION YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  “I’m not an invasion. I’m not a spy. I was just minding my own business—” running from the cops, “—everything blacks out, and I end up here. I don’t want to do anything to you guys. I can cooperate, but I’m sick. I need medical attention.”

  It was probably too much to hope for. They conferred a while, probably deciphering his compound sentences. Then Scarface yielded the floor. The new speaker had a feminine voice and wore a mask with a very human face—though it was a face frozen in the midst of screaming.

  “EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  Nate felt a little uneasy about the question. He didn’t want to tell anything about the alien presence in the void. Not only did he have a bad feeling about the thing, @, itself, but he had a gut sense that the folks here might react badly to it.

  “I don’t remember exactly what happened.”

  “EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK.”

  No shit.

  Well, if anything, these guys would be the last ones to accuse him of being nuts. Nate shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything you want—” Nate started coughing. His voice wasn’t up to a speech. The coughs shook his ribs until they ached. When it was over, he wiped his mouth and saw traces of blood. “But you’re killing me right now, holding me in that cesspit.” Nate shook his head. He was feeling a little light-headed and wasn’t exactly sure what he was saying. “I was a bad boy in high school, guys. Caused enough server problems to give me a nice long stretch in the Federal pen—which compares real well with this place, so if you have extradition to the United States please use it—you guys really have no idea what I’m talking about. . . .”

  “CONTINUERESUME TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  “Sure,” Nate coughed into his hand again. “I reformed, put on a white hat. MS in Comp Sci and a 60K job running net security. That was the plan. Then this @ guy—whose handle would take too long to explain to computer illiterates—starts threatening to blow Azrael’s cover. A Fed shows up, I book, and fall into this spaceless black that doesn’t have anything in it but me and this alien whatsis. Tells me to choose. One side was the Fed, so I went the other way. My mistake, sorry.”

  Nate broke off with another coughing fit. The more he spoke, the worse it was getting. When he was through trying to hack a lung up his throat, he hyper-ventilated and decided that he would stick to one-sentence answers for the rest of the interview.

  Fortunately, he had a reprieve as the masked contingent conferred over his latest revelation.

  Nate put his head in his hands. The dizziness was getting worse, and he didn’t want to pass out. The fact was, he relished every moment he was out of that hole they were keeping him in. He was actually more afraid of going back to that pit than he was of them killing him.

  Hang on to the slim hope that when they understand what happened to you that they won’t treat you as a foreign trespasser or a spy. It’s not your fault you’re here.

  “IDENTITYNATURE NAMEAZRAEL TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” This speaker wore one of the animal masks. It was something like an Egyptian jackal head.

  “It’s the alias I used when I was doing the black-hat hacking, viruses, back doors, that sort of thing . . .” Nate wondered if any of this was translating at all. These guys looked as if their only concept of a server was the guy who brought the wine to your table. It certainly looked as if he’d confused them. Their conferring lasted almost as long as it had the last time.

  “IDENTITYEQUIVALENCE NAMEAZRAEL YOUNATEBLACK.”

  Nate nodded weakly. “Yeah, you got it.” Parsing their questions was almost as fatiguing as answering them.

  “IDENTITYNATURE BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  Huh? “I don’t understand.”

  “IDENTITYNATURE BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK.”

  Nate straightened up. “I told you, I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “IDENTITYNATURE BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH THISINSTANTNOW YOUNATEBLACK.”

  The pair of robed men who had dragged him from his cell were approaching him again.

  “I’m cooperating! What do you want? I don’t know what the name of the blackness was. I don’t know the name of the thing that lived in it. All it did was tell me it was time to choose a road.”

  Scarface gestured and the pair stopped approaching Nate.

  “WORDSLANGUAGECOMMUNICATION BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  Nate shook his head. He was having trouble thinking. The panic hadn’t helped his equilibrium. “What?”

  “WORDSLANGUAGECOMMUNICATION BLACKDARK NESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  Scarface was nice enough to leave off the threat of execution. Nate guessed at this point it went without saying. . . .

  What did it say?

  “Oh, yeah. It called me Azrael. It said ‘Azrael, it is time. Choose. Choose which road.’ That was basically it.”

  “DECISIONSELECTION YOUNATEBLACK HEREWORLDMANHOME.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “DECISIONSELECTION YOUNATEBLACK HEREWORLDMANHOME.”

  Nate sighed. “Yes, I chose this place. It was a snap decision, a mistake.”

  More conferencing. Nate wished he had some clue what he was on trial for here. If he had some idea what these freaks wanted . . .

  Nate looked down at the sphere and wondered exactly what it was and how it worked. The translation was bizarre, unlike any translation software he had ever seen. Almost as if the thing was translating context-sensitive meanings—and if they knew English that well, then why couldn’t they get a better translation?

  Why couldn’t they get someone who spoke English?

  If they could program something that sophisticated, then why hadn’t Nate seen anything electric since he had arrived here? Why did they react so oddly to his clothes? To him?

  He kept coming back to the conclusion that he was not on the same planet anymore. However, if that was the case, then what the hell were human beings doing on it? And how was this metal ball speaking English?

  Most important, how the hell did he get here?

  “WORDSLANGUAGECOMMUNICATION YOUNATEBLACK YOUOTHERS HEREWORLDMANHOME TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” The new questioner wore a mask that was an abstract pattern that flowed across his face reminiscent of a Dali painting.

  The question made Nate’s head hurt. “If you’re asking what I’ve told people since I got here, I don’t speak the language. What could I tell anyone?”

  Someone somewhere chuckled.

  Score one for the prisoner.

  Nate realized the gibe was not a good idea. His head was messed up with fever. It kept him from thinking clearly.

  “IDENTITYNATURE MEETCONTACT YOUOTHERS HEREWORLDMANHOME TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” Scarface clarified the previous question.

  “That’s different,” Nate said. He sucked in a breath and went down the list slowly, starting with Grandpa and the Stooges, through the guards who bought him from Grandpa to Scarface.

  “WORDSLANGUAGECOMMUNICATION YOUNATEBLACK COMPLETETOTALALL.”

  “That’s everyone except the folks we passed on the way up here.”

  Strangely, the reaction from the gallery seemed to be one of relief. Why? Why do they look so relieved I haven’t had contact with anyone . . . ?

  “Oh, shit,” Nate whispered as the implication began sinking in. These bastards
didn’t want Nate in contact with anyone outside their little circle. That meant that they must have no intention of letting him go.

  “Hey, I’m sure we can work something out. Come to some sort of understanding. Just don’t throw me back in that hole.”

  “IDENTITYNATURE OBJECTTHING TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” Clown mask this time.

  “Please, just say you’ll work something out. Keep me prisoner if you want, just give me a bed, some light—”

  The masked gallery was passing his wallet around, looking at it. Scarface decided to emphasize Clown’s question.

  “IDENTITYNATURE OBJECTTHING TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  “I don’t want to die down there.”

  “ANSWERRESPOND YOUUSME.”

  “It’s a wallet. Money, ID, credit cards, and you can’t even pretend you’re understanding what I’m saying.”

  Scarface flipped it open and showed it to Nate, it was open to one of the photographs he carried.

  “It’s a picture of my ex-girlfriend, Sarah Green. What do you want?”

  “OBSERVEPERCEIVE OBJECTTHING OTHERS IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

  Who else saw this?

  “The guard who kept hitting me. Come on, I’m helping you out. You don’t have to stick me back—”

  “OBSERVELEARN YOUNATEBLACK.”

  Scarface’s pair of masked goons flanked Nate and grabbed his arms. Nate tried to struggle, but he didn’t have the strength to stand, much less fight off these guys.

  Scarface stood and said something that was untranslated. What? It only works when they’re talking to me? It seemed so. Up to now Nate had thought it hadn’t picked up the whispered conferences in the gallery because they weren’t spoken loud enough.

  Two more masked men walked into the chamber, dragging a man between them. The clothes were ragged and torn, but still Nate could see the scarlet and black under the filth. The new prisoner cast a look of pure hate back toward Nate.

  It was the guard who had been too fascinated by Nate’s wallet. The one who had backhanded him repeatedly. Now he looked as malnourished and sickly as Nate felt.

  Scarface started talking, a long speech. The sphere didn’t pick up a word. However, Nate could sense the gist by the way Scarface gestured, displayed the wallet, and pointed at Nate and then at the guard.

  The gist was, You shouldn’t have looked in the wallet. VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER.

  Scarface addressed his comrades in the gallery, apparently asking a question. Then he turned to each member in turn, looking for a response.

  From Clown, a monosyllabic “Jin.”

  Dali, “Jin.”

  Screamer, “Jin.”

  To the apparent growing dismay of the ex-guardsman, the verdict was a unanimous, “Jin.” From the reaction, Nate figured he had learned the meaning of his first word in their language.

  “Jin,” meant “fry the bastard.”

  With great ceremony, Scarface descended to the floor of the chamber, to stand in front of the ex-guardsman. More of his goons emerged from the shadows to help hold the prisoner down. Another masked goon tore open the guardsman’s shirt as Scarface removed a dagger from his robe.

  Nate didn’t want to see, but he couldn’t turn away from the scene.

  Scarface carefully, with a delicate hand, started to cut the skin of the guardsman’s chest. Five other men were holding the man down as he bucked against their grip. Scarface’s hand was steady, despite the movement. He sliced lines into the man’s chest. The same kind of glyphs that Nate had seen cut into Scarface’s flesh. . . .

  What is he doing?

  Scarface carved about two handbreadths’ worth of glyphs across the guardsman’s pectorals. And the instant Scarface finished, the guardsman screamed. It was a piercing, almost feminine wail of agony. The bucking of his body wasn’t a struggle to escape anymore, it was a full-blown seizure.

  Scarface backed away and gestured his goons to do likewise.

  The guardsman dropped to the stone floor, his back arched above the stone so only his heels and shoulder blades touched the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his mouth opened in a scream so wide that it took up half his face. He flopped and jerked, slamming his head repeatedly into the floor so hard that blood began marking where it hit the stones.

  The agonized wail died for lack of air.

  The air became sour with the smell of something burning, and wisps of smoke emerged from the guardsman’s mouth and nostrils. The thrashing became more frantic as the skin began to blister and turn dark.

  The extremities caught first, hands and feet erupting in a sickly green flame. The flame snaked up the body in branching patterns that seemed to follow the paths of the major arteries. When the flames met across the chest, where Scarface’s glyphs were carved above the heart, the body froze, erupting in a pillar of foul green fire.

  Nate looked across to Scarface, who was busy putting his dagger away.

  “What did you do?”

  “CLEANSEPURIFYREPAIR,” the sphere responded.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MATE WAS shaking when they threw him back in the hole. It wasn’t from the fever.

  Nothing had prepared him for what happened to the guardsman. He had never seen a man die before. He couldn’t stop thinking of the flame, and the smell of charred flesh so thick he could taste it.

  These were the choices they were giving him—darkness, or the fire. Perhaps Nate would be lucky, and the dehydration would kill him before they were through.

  He dreamed of going home for Thanksgiving dinner. Mom asked how his midterms went and he couldn’t speak. When the turkey erupted into screaming green fire, she spoke in the sphere’s voice.

  “CLEANSEPURIFYREPAIR.”

  The interviews repeated. The same questions. Who was he? Why was he here? What is the thing in the darkness?

  In Nate’s mind, his answers were becoming less comprehensible with each iteration. Sometimes, in his fevered state, he would parrot back the pidgin that the sphere spoke to him. Other times he babbled pleas for a lawyer, or a bottle of Mountain Dew, or a clean pair of jockeys.

  He lost count of the times they interviewed him.

  Sometimes he would disassemble the events of his life in his mind, string them together like pseudocode, and try to debug it.

  Nate felt someone slap his face and he blinked his eyes into consciousness. He sat in the interview chamber, on the chair, without knowing how he got there.

  The only one here this time was Scarface. The light came from only a single candelabrum. He was the one who had smacked him awake. In his hand he held the translation sphere.

  “OBSERVEPERCEIVE OBJECTTHING OTHERS IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUME.”

  “What?” Nate slurred.

  That earned him another blow.

  “OBSERVEPERCEIVE OBJECTTHING OTHERS IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUME.”

  Scarface stared at Nate, and Nate realized that this was the first time he had seen the man maskless since he’d been brought here. The guy was seriously pissed.

  “OBSERVEPERCEIVE OBJECTTHING OTHERS IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUME,” he repeated, adding, “TELLCOMMUNICATE IDENTITYNATURE OBJECTTHING OTHERS IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUME.”

  “Holy Christ, we’ve been through this. You know everyone who saw me, spoke to me—the only people on this planet who know me are you and your masked friends.”

  That earned a blow that knocked Nate clear off the chair. He fell to the stone floor with a choking gasp. Scarface stood over him, the candlelight picking out the lines carved in his face.

  “TAKEREMOVESTEAL OTHERS OBJECTTHING IDENTITYNATURE TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUME.”

  Nate rolled over and grabbed the neck of his robe and tore at it. “Do it. You want to cut me? Do it now! Because I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”

  Nate waited, certain that the end had come. But Scarface just stood there, looking at Nate, then at the sphere. After a few long moments, he turned
away and called his goons to carry Nate back to the hole.

  Nate lost consciousness before they got halfway back.

  There was a lucid moment, in the darkness, when Nate realized what Scarface was trying to say.

  TAKEREMOVESTEAL . . .

  OBJECTTHING . . .

  Someone must have taken Scarface’s little chest of Nate’s stuff.

  Nate blinked the fuzz from his eyes and realized that the alien didn’t have a bucket this time.

  “What?”

  The alien, as always, didn’t speak or acknowledge Nate’s words. Instead, it walked into the cell. Instead of Scarface’s demon-masked acolytes, the torches out in the hall were borne by two more aliens.

  Nate sat up, making his head swim.

  “What the?”

  The alien in the room with him was carrying something in lieu of a bucket—a rough burlap sack. It opened the bag as it approached, and Nate tried to scoot backward.

  He held up his hands to ward the thing away. “Wait—”

  His words were smothered as the bag came down over his head. He choked, mouth filled with the musty remnants of the bag’s prior contents.

  He grappled with the thing, and he felt inhuman joints wrap around him and lift him off the floor. The thing was stronger than its spindly-bendy arms and legs made it look. Not that it took much to overpower Nate.

  Other hands, with fingers too long and too many, gripped Nate’s wrists and ankles. Nate could feel rope binding him.

  Nate tried to shout at the things, but every time he opened his mouth, he ended with a coughing fit. The last one was so violent, he passed out.

  Fade in.

  Alien hands supporting him under the armpits and by the ankles. He could hear a torch burn. He could feel his butt swinging over empty space. He smelled sewage, and heard footsteps walking through shallow water.