Darkfall

by Stephen Laws

  Importantly for the Unit, Bissell was a ‘talker’.

  Three tapes of recordings existed, supervised by Gilbert. And Rohmer remembered those conversations almost by heart.

  Bissell sat in his chair/harness, grinning. He was pumped full of sedation, but none of it seemed to work and Gilbert had decided against more in case he died. A bib had been tied around Bissell’s neck to collect the raw, liquid plaster which oozed from his mouth where it congealed and hardened. The assistant putting that bib on him had foolishly come too close. Bissell had bitten him with teeth composed of white aluminium. He had chewed, swallowed and licked his lips while the man was taken away, screaming.

  Eventually, Gilbert had switched on the tape and asked, “Do you feel like talking, Bissell?”

  The thing that had once been Bissell laughed again, raw plaster splattering on the tiled floor.

  “Ever stood under an overhead power cable? Ever felt the electrical field? Listened to its hum?” His voice had a hollow echo to it, as if there was nothing inside him. “Ever felt the hairs on your skin stand up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aha . . . aha . . .And then, in agonised pain: “Christ, Gilbert! Do something to help me . . . do something to . . . Did you know that crops don’t grow so well next to pylons and power cables? Did you know that? Farms crossed by electricity cables have more calves still-born or deformed than those which don’t. That’s . . . that’s because chromosomes are affected by electric and magnetic fields. That’s why . . . why. . .” Bissell chuckled hideously. . I Yam What I Yam.” He chuckled again, this time like the Popeye cartoon character. Far from being funny or ludicrous, the sound was deeply chilling.

  “And what are you?” asked Gilbert. “Can you tell me that, Bissell?”

  Bissell looked hard at him with unblinking black hatred, then with pain. The overhead strip lights glinted in the blackness of his eyes.

  “I’ve . . . opened up. I can see behind the surface of matter. Almost a different realm. I don’t see you, Gilbert. I see . . . I see your shape and your vibration. I can sense your emotional state. You’re afraid of me. And you have a good right to be . . . because . . .

  “Because?”

  “You’re not a person to me anymore. There is no such thing as a ‘person’. When I look at you I see . . . I can only see . .

  “What can you see?”

  “You’re food, Gilbert. Just . . . food.” Bissell howled then, like some kind of demented animal. When he spoke again, it was as if he was fighting with something within; fighting to retain control of his humanity. “The body has a defence mechanism to protect it from invasion by foreign substances. Darkfall gives the inert material an ‘animate’ characteristic; it makes it react in the same way to a human absorption. Because this time . . . this time, . . it’s not a virus, or a pollen, or a transplanted organ . . . it’s human material. The inert material engulfs the foreign substance in contact with it. Then its own ‘white, cells’ surround it. Try to eat it. Remove it. But they can’t. Do you see, Gilbert? Do you see? It’s like the specific immune defence response in human bodies. The invading substance is not eliminated . . . but altered. By the building’s defence mechanism, just like antibodies.” Bissell began to laugh again, his voice choking on the liquid plaster. “I’m an antibody. I’m full of antibodies. Isn’t that funny, Gilbert? Antibody? Do you get it? Do you . . . OH, MY GOD, HELP ME, GILBERT!”

  Something inside Bissell seemed to crack and splinter, and even though there was no longer any recognisably human tissue, nerves or organs beneath that covering of skin, Gilbert knew that the scientist was in a mortal distress of agony. He winced, waiting for that skin to split. But it didn’t happen and Bissell’s cries choked away. The scientist sagged in his harness.

  “Bissell? Can you hear me? Can you . . .”

  “Feed me, Gilbert. Give me what I want. Give me something to eat.”

  “We’ve tried that, Bissell. We’ve tried to find the right combination of fluid proteins and . . .”

  “Fuck that! Try something raw. You know what I want. Don’t you? Come over here and . . . and . . . oh God, Gilbert. Don’t come near me. There are . . . Bissell fought against his own inner horror, biting down with aluminium teeth on a tongue of industrial rubber. He still felt human pain, and it made him retch. The purely animal function of retching brought him back again. “There are four forces operating in the . . . in the universe, Gilbert. You know that. Gravity, the nuclear force inside the nuclei of atoms, strong and weak . . . and electromagnetism. Can you tell me what an electric charge really is? No, of course you can’t. None of us can. Science can never deal with any questions about the essence of things. Isn’t . . . isn’t that true? Even though we believe we’re so . . . so . . . bloody CLEVER! God . . . God . . . Death isn’t defined by the absence of a heartbeat. It’s defined by the absence of electrical activity in the brain.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Did you know that life began on earth when lightning struck the sea? Did you know that?”

  “What . . . .?”

  “Electricity, Gilbert. That’s what this is all about. The nature of electricity. We think we’ve harnessed it. We think we understand it. But we haven’t and we don’t. It’s a fundamental property of nature, and we’ve reaped the advantages of its light side. .Bissell laughed again; an abominable liquid croaking. “But there is a dark side. And the Darkfall is the manifestation of that dark side. There’s more to Darkfall than science can explain. It’s bad now. But it’s going to get worse. Much worse. Because . . .

  And then Bissell had looked directly at Rohmer with those hellish, black eyes . . . and he had smiled.

  “Mr Rohmer? Why is your heart racing? What is exciting you so much?”

  God, can it read my mind? thought Rohmer. Can it really see what I’m . . . ?

  “Yes, of course I can,” continued Bissell. “And I’m not going to talk to you anymore, Gilbert. I have to eat. And you won’t let me. So if I can’t eat, I won’t talk.” Bissell’s eyes never left Rohmer as he spoke, and Rohmer knew what the thing meant when it said it wouldn’t talk to Gilbert anymore. But Rohmer had to know the answer to the questions that had fascinated and intrigued him for so long; the questions that bore down on him with ever-increasing force during the drug-induced hallucinatory periods that were now so frequent in his life. Now he knew that the Darkfall effect did have the answer to those questions and that Bissell could give him those answers. So while Gilbert tried to entice Bissell to talk further, and Bissell kept silent, still watching him across the room, Rohmer saw the promise in those night-black eyes and he began to lay his own plans.

  FOUR

  “. . . sick,” said Gilbert, in a hushed voice. The wind and the rain, and the hollow reverberation of the storm brought Rohmer back from his reverie. Gilbert was talking to the others in a quiet and urgent voice; his whispers like the quiet and urgent washing of the rain on those shuddering windows. Rohmer focused on the present again. Gilbert, with -the edge of terror still in his voice, was talking to keep himself sane; and the others were listening to try and make sense of the nightmare in which they found themselves.

  They were fools.

  Only Rohmer knew the real truth.

  “What do you mean?” whispered Cardiff, and Rohmer felt the cold chill of withdrawal gnawing at his soul. He looked at them with contempt, fumbled in his pocket and found the pill. Turning back to the storm-rinsed windows and the dangerous electrical crackle of Darkfall lightning on the glass, he popped the pill and watched the water running down the glass in ever-increasing and mysterious rivulets.

  “This building is sick,” continued Gilbert. “Surely you’ve heard of sick building syndrome?” He laughed. It was a fragile and unconvincing sound. “But it’s true. There was a German doctor, back in the 1950s. His name was Hubert Palm. And he propounded evidence that a great many of the ailments we have in modern society have to do with the way we construct our buildings. Buildings a
re our ‘third skin’. Modern construction technology, synthetic compounds and materials we use in constructing the buildings we live in or work in . . . and the suffusion by those structures of electricity . . . create electrostress, or ‘electrical diseases’.”

  “You talk as if this building was alive or something,” said Cardiff.

  “It is,” replied Gilbert. “But only in the sense that a tree is alive. Not sentient . . . just living. And the effects we’ve seen are caused when a Darkfall strike is absorbed by a building. There is a massive intake of electricity. And it’s electricity and our real lack of understanding of what it actually is that . . .”

  The pill took effect, and Rohmer tuned out again and into the storm. As Gilbert’s words faded, he was back at the Unit again, listening to the thing which had once been Dr Bissell as it said . . .

  FIVE

  “I knew you would come.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Did you bring me what I need?”

  “Yes, I have it here.”

  “And it’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then give it to me.”

  “Not before we talk.”

  “No! Give it to me now . . . or . . .” Bissell chuckled, and then whined, mimicking a spoiled child. The sound was hideous. “. . . or I won’t talk.”

  Rohmer controlled the squirming of it in his hands, held it still, feeling its heart race in the presence of the thing. Did it know?

  “Of course it knows,” said Bissell, reading his mind again. “Now, give it to me.”

  “The straitjacket stays on.”

  More of that hideous laughter: “Ohhh . . . you don’t trust me.”

  “That’s right.” Rohmer looked down at it, felt his gorge rise.

  “You want the real answers, don’t you?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Then do it!” Much later, when it was finished and after Rohmer had left the cell to be sick, the thing’s head had sagged forward on to its chest. Was it dead? No, it couldn’t be dead! Not after . . .

  “You’re very clever,” said Bissell, looking up at him again. “The way you contrived to he alone with me, despite the supervision and monitoring.”

  Bissell seemed so much calmer, now that he had fed. There were no spasms of grinding agony.

  “You think you’re different, don’t you, Rohmer? You’ve always felt that way. Ever since you raped and killed that cadet in military school . . . just to show yourself that you could do it. Weren’t sick then, were you?”

  Rohmer broke out into an immediate, drenching sweat. The thing felt his discomfort and laughed again.

  “Yes, I know you, Rohmer. I see the real you. And I see what you really want. And what you want is . . .”

  “To see as you do. I want to . . .”

  “Be more than human. You envy me, Rohmer. Do you envy my agony?”

  “I fed you.”

  “You want me to be your mentor, Rohmer? You want me to be your gateway to another world? You want your perceptions heightened . . . and you want to shirk off all notions of human morality. Isn’t that right?”

  “When you were talking to Gilbert. You said there was ‘more’ to the Darkfall than science could explain . . .”

  The thing laughed once more.

  “Talk to me, damn you!”

  “Alright, alright . . . I’ll tell you what you really want to know . . .”

  SIX

  “Come on, Rohmer? Are you just going to sit there and stare out of the bloody window?”

  Rohmer was back in the present again. Duvall was shaking him by the sleeve, bringing him back.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Well . . . are we just going to sit here waiting . . . or what?”

  “You’re welcome to go downstairs and see if that thing’s still about,” said Jimmy.

  “It’s dying,” said Barbara. It was clear that this knowledge was distressing her. “l can feel it.”

  “So we’ll take Mister Cardiff ‘s advice,” said Rohmer. “We’ll sit tight and wait for the storm to blow itself out.”

  “We could break one of those windows,” continued Duvall. “It can only be about thirty feet or so to the ground. Higher than from the back staircase like Cardiff said. But as there’s no bloody staircase left, it’s still our best option.”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” said Gilbert. “That Darkfall lightning out there on the windows, that electricity.”

  “Well?” snapped Duvall, a little too loudly; and enough to make him look nervously back in the direction of the office door.

  “If we break the glass, we might draw the energy to ourselves.”

  “Great. You mean we’ll be struck by lightning?”

  “Not your day, is it, Duvall?” said Jimmy, and Duvall glared hard at him again with a look that spoke again of reckonings to come after the nightmare was over. Jimmy returned the look, and then turned to Barbara. She was shuddering.

  “Nineteen sixty-four was a great year for music,” he said. She looked up at him. “Seriously, I mean it. Some of my favourite music came from 1964.”

  Barbara swallowed hard, trying to shrug off the feelings which were so distressing her. “The Beatles are my favourite . . .”

  “Yeah, The Beatles. Now there’s a group. Let’s see, 1964. They were just starting out. Had their first hit in 1963 with . . . ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. Great stuff. And just think, Barbara, you’ve got all of their other songs to catch up on.”

  “My friend Angela and I argue about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. She likes Paul best. I like John. Is he still . . . still writing songs?”

  “Well, John was . . . he was . . . Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Still writing songs. Still as good as ever. Let’s see, 1964. Cilla Black. What about her?”

  “‘You’re My World’. That’s a lovely song.”

  “Just think, all that music to catch up on . . .”

  “I wonder if my folks are still . . .”

  “Look, Barbara. Everything’s going to be fine. I promise you. Once we get out of here. I’ll help you to find them.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Cardiff.

  Thunder cracked again, stabbing at their ears. The spider-web lightning twitched and surged at the windows, as if hunting for some small crack in the glass through which it could get to them.

  Duvall turned back to Rohmer in disgust.

  “So we wait?”

  Rohmer did not answer. He was watching the storm again, and remembering.

  “Electricity,” said Gilbert again, and all except Rohmer turned to listen to him again, because there was nothing else any of them could do. “Invisible, silent. We generate it at will, turn it on or off by flicking a switch. If we didn’t have it, we couldn’t live. Everything would stop. Our society would be plunged into darkness. Offices, factories, industry, communications, transport . . . all of it grinding to a halt. We depend upon it completely . . . and our dependence makes us so vulnerable to its dark side. We really know so very little about it.”

  “Shut up, Gilbert!” hissed Duvall.

  “Let him talk,” said Cardiff.

  Gilbert continued, as if he hadn’t even heard the interruption. “The earth is a massively complicated network of patterns of electrical energy with that magnetic field made even more complex by the minerals, water, rocks . . . and mankind’s own addition of man-made structures. And that electrical energy also affects human beings. It affects us physically, emotionally, mentally . . .”

  And spiritually, thought Rohmer, again tuning back in to Gilbert’s words.

  “Inside of us all,” continued Gilbert, “there are extraordinarily complex and subtle electric fields, permeating every tissue, every bone, every muscle, every cell. And our own electrical fields interact with the electrical fields in the environment . . .”

  Gilbert’s eyes seemed glazed, and Jimmy looked at Cardiff in a way that seemed to say: We’ve got to shut him up, Cardiff. He’s crack
ing up or something. He thinks he’s back at college, giving a lecture. Cardiff quietened Jimmy with a gesture that meant: Let him talk. We might learn something.

  “. . . These fields in humans were discovered back in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only humans, of course, but also plants, animals, trees . . . even raw protoplasm. They’re called L-Fields: bioelectric and electrodynamic fields of life. And it’s the interaction of these electrical fields with the Darkfall electricity that causes these . . . things to happen.”

  You’re a fool, Gilbert, thought Rohmer, still listening, but watching the storm. All of this knowledge, and you still haven’t discovered the real truth behind it at all.

  “The Darkfall electricity . . . that Dark Energy . . . is drawn to electrical fields. Somehow there is a fusion of new, raw Dark Energy. We’re none of us safe. Think about it! Everywhere you look . . . cables, wires, pylons. It’s all around us. Radio, television, radar . . . all manner of electromagnetic transmissions in the air. How long before Darkfall starts to spread further afield? At present, we’ve identified the recurrence of ‘vile vortices’ where Darkfall happens with a certain regularity. Like here! But how long before it starts to . . .” Gilbert stopped, shuddering. He wiped a trembling hand across his face, and took several deep breaths to calm himself down.

  So near, Gilbert. And so far. Perhaps I will have the chance to be your Teacher. Perhaps I’ll be able to show you the Real Truth.

  “It’s dead,” said Barbara. “I can feel it.”

  “Can she know that, Gilbert?” asked Duvall urgently.

  “Yes, it’s possible. If she does have that telepathic link. We’ve known something like it before.”

  “Are you sure?” Duvall asked the girl.

  “I could feel . . . I could feel it before. Now I can’t feel anything at all. It just died away . . . now it’s gone.”