Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  I thought to offer a familial hug before retiring, but instead I found Karolina returning my gesture with a fierce embrace and another of her incredible kisses. I broke away in confusion and made my way to my room without speaking another word. I locked the door and placed a chair beneath the doorknob before disrobing, then climbed gratefully into bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  I do not know how much later it was that I was awakened by—by what, I asked myself. Was it a careful rattling of the doorknob of my room? Was it a voice calling to me? And in words of what language—the familiar tongue which Americans and Britons have shared for centuries, or that other, stranger language that I had heard in the streets of Severnford and had myself spoken, almost involuntarily, as I struggled to decipher the peculiar printouts of the Zeta/Zed System at the Fuchs Institute?

  Whatever it was—whoever it was—quickly departed from my ken, and I sought to return to sleep, but, alas, I was now too thoroughly wakened to do so easily. I did not wish to leave my room; I cannot tell you why, I simply felt that there were things, or might be things, in that pleasant, comfortable house that I would rather not encounter.

  So instead I seated myself in a comfortable chair near the window of my room and gazed over the Severn landscape. I could see but little of the village of Old Severnford, for this was a community where the residents retired early and stayed in their homes, the doors securely locked and the lights turned low, perhaps for fear that they attract visitors not welcome.

  Raising my eyes to the hills above, I saw their rounded forms as of ancient, sleeping beings, silhouetted in absolute blackness against the midnight blue sky. The clouds that had obscured the moon and stars earlier had dissipated and the heavens were punctuated by a magnificent scattering of stars and galaxies such as the city lights that blazed all night in the Silicon Valley could never reveal.

  I permitted my gaze to drift lower, to the Severn Hills, when I was startled to perceive what appeared to be an artificial construct. This structure was in the form of a tower surmounted by a peculiarly made battlement or turret. I had thought the Severn Hills uninhabited save for a few examples of sparse and ill-nourished wildlife, hunted on occasion by locals seeking to add to their meagre larders.

  Even more surprising, the turret appeared to be illuminated from within. I strained my eyes to see clearly that which was before me. Yes, there were lights blazing from within the turret—if blazing is a word which may be applied to these dim, flickering, tantalizing lights. If I permitted my fancy to roam, the lights would almost form themselves into a face. Two great, hollow eyes staring blindly into the darkness, a central light like a nasal orifice, and beneath that a wide, narrow mouth grinning wickedly with teeth—surely they must be vertical dividers or braces—eager to invite … or to devour.

  I stared at the turret for a long time. How long, I do not know, but eventually the night sky began to lighten, the moon and stars to fade. Were the lights in the turret extinguished, or was it the brightness of morning that made them fade?

  A chill wracked my body, and I realized that I had sat for hours before the open window, clad only in thin pyjamas. I climbed hastily back into bed and managed to catch a few winks before the voice of Karolina penetrated the door, summoning me to a lavish breakfast of bacon and eggs, freshly squeezed orange juice and a rich, hot mocha concoction that offered both the satisfying flavor of chocolate and the stimulation of freshly-brewed coffee.

  In Karolina’s car, on the way to the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute, I sought to gain information about my peculiar experience of the night before. I realized that my suspicion of my dear, multiply-distant cousin (for as such I had chosen to identify her, for my own satisfaction) had been the unjustified product of my own fatigue and depression, and the strangeness and newness of my surroundings.

  Almost as if the turret had been the figment of a dream, I grappled mentally in hopes of regaining my impression of it. To a large degree it eluded me, but I was able at length to blurt some question about a turreted tower in the hills.

  Karolina’s answer was vague and evasive. She admitted that there were some very old structures in the region, dangerous and long-abandoned. In response to my mention of the flickering lights and the face-like arrangement in the turret, Karolina became peculiarly agitated, insisting that this was utterly impossible.

  I averred that I would like to visit the tower and see for myself if it were inhabited, even if only by squatters.

  To this, Karolina replied that there had been an earthquake in the Severn Valley some years before. A fissure had opened in the earth, and the row of hills in which the tower was located was now totally unreachable from Old Severnford. I would have to abandon my plan and give up on my hopes of learning about the turret and its lights.

  I spent the day at the Fuchs Institute working diligently on the Zeta/Zed System. Since my attempts of the day before had led me only to frustration, on this day I determined to take the problem on a smaller, more intensive basis. I powered down the entire system, disconnected all of its components from one another, and began running the most exhaustive diagnostic programs on the circuitry of the central processor.

  During a luncheon break I thought to ask another employee of the Institute—not Karolina Parker—about my experience of the previous night. But strangely, I was unable to recall just what I had experienced, that I wished to inquire about.

  This was by far the most peculiar phenomenon I had ever encountered. I knew that something odd had happened to me, I knew that I wanted to seek an explanation for it, but I was absolutely and maddeningly unable to remember just what it was that I wanted to ask about.

  Humiliated, I terminated the conversation and returned to my assigned cubicle to study manuals and circuit diagrams associated with Zeta/Zed.

  That night Karolina furnished another delicious repast, and we shared another delightful evening of conversation, coffee-and-brandy, and music. Karolina had attired herself in a shimmering hostess gown tonight, and I could barely draw my eyes from her own flowing, raven hair, her deep blue orbs, her pale English skin and her red, generous lips.

  When the time came for us to part to our rooms and retire for the night, I no longer recoiled from my cousin’s ardent kiss, but luxuriated in it. As I held her, our faces close together, I saw that she, too, carried the familiar Parker mark on her chin. I placed my lips against the mark, and she sighed as if I had touched her deeply and erotically. Images and fantasies raced through my mind, but I banished them and bade her good-night, and climbed the flagstone staircase to my quarters.

  I wondered whether I really wanted to lock my door tonight, whether I really wanted to place a chair against it, but I finally did so, and climbed into bed, but this time I was not able to sleep, so I attired myself more warmly than I had the previous night, and placed myself in the comfortable chair before the window.

  In the darkness of the Severn Valley my eyes soon adjusted themselves, and the utterly murky vista that greeted me at first once more resolved itself into rows of hills, clearly old hills smoothed and rounded by the passage of millennia, silhouetted against the star-dotted heavens. And as I simultaneously relaxed my body and my concentration, yet focussed my eyes on the area where I had seen the turret rising the night before, once again I beheld its shape, and once again I beheld what appeared to be faint, flickering lights in its windows, making the suggestion of a face that seemed to speak to me in the peculiar tongue of the night-prowlers of Severnford and of the enigmatic computer printout.

  I did not fall asleep. I wish to make this very clear. What next transpired may have been a vision, a case of astral travel, a supernatural or at least supernormal experience of the most unusual and remarkable sort, but it was absolutely not a dream.

  Some force drew me from my chair in my room in my distant cousin Karolina Parker’s home. That which was drawn was my soul.

  Now you may think this is a very peculiar statement for me to make. I, Parker Lorentzen, am a thorough
ly modern man. I hold degrees in mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science. I could, if I chose to do so, insist upon being addressed as Dr. Lorentzen, but I prefer not to flaunt my education before others.

  I opt philosophically for the kind of scientific materialism that seeks explanations for all phenomena in the world of physical reality. I know that there are great mysteries in the universe, but I think of them as the unknown rather than the unknowable. Research, careful observation and precise measurement, computation and rigorous logic will eventually deliver to inquisitive intelligence the final secrets of the universe.

  Such is my philosophy. Or such it was until I visited the turret which my cousin Karolina claimed was unreachable.

  At first I was frightened. I thought that I was being summoned to hurl myself from an upper-story window, from whence I would fall to the garden below and injure myself. I looked down and the weird topiary beasts seemed to be gesturing, urging me to fly from the house. I knew that this was impossible—in my physical being—but by relaxing ever more fully into my chair, while concentrating my vision, my mind, my whole psychic being on the distant turret in the Severn Hills, I felt my soul gradually separating from my body.

  Why do I use the word, “soul,” you may ask. Did I not mean my mind, my consciousness? Was I not having an out-of-body experience, a controversial but nevertheless real and not necessarily supernatural phenomenon?

  But no, it was more than my mind, more than my consciousness that was leaving my body. It was my whole self, which I choose to refer to as my soul. For all my scientific skepticism, I have been forced to the conclusion that there is some part of us that is neither material nor mortal. Just what it is, just how it came into being, I do not pretend to know. I have heard every argument, faced every scoffing comment—have made them myself, or did so when I was a younger man—but I cannot now deny the reality of this thing that I call the soul.

  For a moment I was able to look back at my own body, comfortably ensconced in the chair. Then I was off, drifting at first languorously through the open window, hovering briefly above the topiary figures in my cousin’s garden, then rising as if on wings of my own, high above the town of Old Severnford, and then speeding into the black night, soaring toward the hills to the west of town.

  I did see the fissure that Karolina had described, a horrid rent that seemed to penetrate deep into the earth. Its walls were strewn with boulders, and brushy vegetation had made its way down the sides of the fissure, attracted, perhaps, by the heat that seemed to radiate from its depths, or from the water that I surmised would gather in its depths.

  As I approached the turret I had seen from my window, I could again perceive the flickering lights within, and the facelike formation of the illumination. From the distance of my cousin’s house, and against the blackness of the Severn Hills, the tower had been of uncertain shape. Seen from a lesser distance, it assumed a clear shape and a surprisingly modern architectural aspect. It seemed to rise almost organically from its surroundings, a concept which I had come across more than once while browsing architectural journals.

  Entering the largest and most brightly illuminated window, I found myself in a large room. It was unlike any I had ever seen before. As familiar as I am with every sort of modern device and scientific equipment, still I could not comprehend, or even describe, the titanic machinery that I beheld.

  Figures utterly dwarfed by the machines tended them, tapping at control panels, reading indicators, adjusting conduits. Lights flashed on the machinery, and occasionally parts moved. Just as the building itself had exhibited an almost organic quality of architecture, so the machines within it seemed, in addition to their other characteristics, to be, in some subtle and incomprehensible way, alive.

  Strangest of all was a gigantic, rectangular plane that filled an entire section of the monstrous room. Its surface was of a matte gray finish and had a peculiar look to it as if it were somehow tacky, as sticky as if a thin coating of honey had been spread on it, and let to stand in the sunlight until it was mostly but not entirely dry.

  I approached the gray rectangle by that peculiar sort of disembodied flight that I had used since leaving my body in my cousin’s house in Old Severnford, and hovered effortlessly above the gray plane. From my first vantage point at the window of the turret room, the plane had looked large, but was still contained within the single, large room. If I had been forced to make an estimate of its dimensions, I would have described it as three to four yards in width, and as much as forty yards in length.

  But as I hovered above it, I realized that it was incredibly larger than I had first estimated. That, or perhaps it was merely my change of perspective that gave it the appearance of great size.

  Have you ever played with one of those optical illusions, in which you are asked to look at two curved rectangles, or sections of arc cut from the perimeter of a circle or torus? One may appear far larger than the other, yet the instructions that come with such games always urge you to measure the rectangles and see that they are exactly the same size.

  Maybe something like that is what happened to me. I cannot testify with any degree of certainty.

  But I can tell you that, as I hovered above the gray plane (perhaps I should refer to it, now, as a gray plain) it was gigantic. It was miles in width and hundreds of miles in length—or perhaps it was thousands or even millions of miles in each dimension. I felt myself being drawn down toward it, and feared that if I approached too close to it I would be caught in its gravity—or in the tackiness of its surface—and be unable to escape.

  With a huge effort I managed to halt my descent, but already I was so close to the plain that I had lost sight of its termini. Grayness stretched to infinity in all directions. I could turn, and above me I saw only star-studded blackness. Was the turret room open to the Severn sky, I wondered.

  Beneath me I thought I saw stirrings in the gray. At this range it was not a smooth and stationary surface, but seemed textured, as if it were of wet concrete, and tiny specks that at first seemed to be merely part of this texture, could be seen to move. They reminded me of insects caught in the sweet, tacky covering of a roll of old-fashioned fly-paper.

  I descended farther, and realized that the moving specks were alive, and in some inexplicable way I realized just what they were: they were the souls of human beings, trapped in the hold of the gray plain, struggling futilely for their release.

  How could such a thing be, I wondered. Whose souls were these? Were they the immortal parts of residents of the Severn Valley, the souls perhaps of local residents who had died, and been trapped here in this bizarre limbo, neither attaining heaven nor being consigned to hell? Had they been summoned by the shapes tending the titanic machines? And if such was the case, what mad motive had moved these weird scientists to set such a trap?

  A sudden fear overcame me, lest I be drawn down into the gray plain and be trapped with the other souls, and I beat my ethereal wings with all my strength, struggling to rise above that horrid gray surface. For a time the struggle seemed hopeless, but I persevered to the limits of my strength and beyond, forcing myself as great athletes are said to do, to find and call upon unknown reservoirs of determination. And at last my efforts were rewarded, for I found myself rising with painful slowness above the gray plain.

  In time the laboratory, if that is what it was, reappeared around me. The gray plain was reduced to a rectangular area in the great room. The shadowy figures continued to tend their titanic machines, either unknowing or uncaring of my presence.

  I struggled to the window and darted back toward my cousin’s house. Despite the great distance, I could see myself, that is my body, seated before the window in my bedroom. My eyes were hooded, my chin rested on my chest as if I had fallen asleep.

  The turret fell behind me. I passed over the fissure in the Severn Hills, down their lower slopes and the darkling meadows that separated them from Old Severnford. I passed over the modernistic buildings o
f the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute, flashed over the topiary garden that surrounded by cousin’s house, and entered my bedroom.

  I was able to circle the room once, gazing down with a peculiar detachment at the body that had been my residence for so many years, then slipped back into it. I rose, yawned, and climbed into my bed.

  In the morning I tried to discuss the matter with my cousin as we motored to the Institute, but I found myself able to speak only in vague and indefinite terms about that which had been so concrete and specific when I experienced it during the night. Once within the confines of the Institute, even more strangely, I found that my memory of the experience deserted me altogether. I knew only that I had seen and done something odd during the night. Twice I fell asleep over my work, which conduct would certainly not help the standing of Myshkin Associates with this, its most valued account.

  Progress on the problems with the Zeta/Zed System were small or nil. I found myself wondering if the cause of the system’s failures were not external to the system itself. The old computer slogan, GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out—suggested itself to me. But one does well to tread carefully before suggesting such an explanation to the customer. It can be offensive, and can alienate an important executive even if it is true.

  I spoke with Alexander Myshkin by telephone. He was disheartened by my lack of progress on the Zeta/Zed System problem, but urged me to pursue my theory of external sources for the failure of the system. “You’re a diplomat, Park, my boy. You can handle these Brits. Be honest with ’em, be tactful but be firm.”

  Following another frustrating day, Karolina Parker and I returned to her house. Once away from the Institute, I was able to recall something of my strange experience. Karolina suggested that we repair to a local restaurant for dinner rather than return directly home. Astonished to learn that an establishment existed in Old Severnford which Karolina considered worth visiting, I agreed with alacrity.