In the end, we just took a video from the pile at random and stuck it in the nearest machine. The old television set took a while to warm up, and when the picture finally arrived it was only black-and-white. The recording showed exactly what the scientists had been doing in the other room. Experimenting on unwilling human subjects, and testing them to destruction. We watched as the subjects yelled and screamed and shouted obscenities, straining desperately against the heavy restraining straps while blank-faced men and women in grubby lab coats stuck them with needles, or exposed them to radiation, or just cut them open, to see what was happening inside.
It was bad enough in black-and-white. In colour, it would have been unbearable.
We ran quickly through the tapes, just checking a few minutes from each. A few minutes was all we could stand. They were all pretty much the same. Cold-blooded glimpses of Hell.
One man’s head exploded, quite suddenly, blood and brains showering wetly over the attending scientists. Another man melted right out of the chair, his body losing all shape and cohesion, his flesh running through the restraining straps like thick pink mud. He screamed as long as he could, until his vocal cords fell apart and his jaw dropped away from his face. He ended up a pink frothing mess on the floor. One of the scientists stepped in it by accident, had hysterics, and had to be led away.
A middle-aged woman sat on the floor, wearing nothing but a stained oversized nappy. She had a huge bulging forehead held together with heavy black stitches and crude metal staples. She was assembling a strange machine, whose shape and function made no sense at all. When the scientists expressed displeasure at what she’d built and gestured at the chair, the woman calmly picked up a sharp piece of metal and stuck it repeatedly into her left eye, until she died.
And one man, with a Y-shaped autopsy scar still vivid on his chest and rows of steel nozzles protruding from his abdomen from implanted technology, burst all the straps holding him to the chair and killed three scientists and seven of the soldiers sent in to restrain him before one of them got close enough to shoot him repeatedly in the head.
We watched as much of it as we could stand, and then I told Honey to check the dates and find us the tape from the last experiment. The very last thing the scientists were working on before it all went wrong.
“Whatever happened here,” said Walker, “they deserved it. This isn’t a scientific laboratory; it’s a torture chamber.”
“What did they think they were doing?” said Peter. “What were they trying to achieve?”
“I think they were all quite mad,” said Honey. “If they weren’t when they started out, what they did here drove them mad.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they had that excuse. I think . . . they just did what they were told. Perhaps because if they didn’t, they’d end up in the chair themselves.”
“We should burn this city to the ground,” said Walker. “And seed the earth with salt.”
“Play the tape,” said Peter. “The sooner we’re out of here the better.”
We stood before the television screen, standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual comfort and support. For a long time there was just static, as though an attempt had been made to wipe the tape, and then the picture cleared to show a man sitting in the chair. He was naked, the leather straps cutting deeply into his flesh. He sat stiffly upright, unable to move a muscle. He looked tired, and hard used, and severely undernourished, but there was nothing visibly unusual about him. Except for what they’d done to his head.
Two scientists, a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman, watched the man in the chair from a safe distance. They looked tired too, and from the way they kept glancing at the one-way mirror, I sensed they were under pressure to get results. The woman had a clipboard and a pen and ugly heavy-framed glasses. The man was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous puffs and dictating something to the woman. He didn’t even look at the man in the chair. They had a job to do, and they were getting on with it. The man in the chair was of no importance to them except as the subject of their current experiment.
I wondered who he was, what he did, what his life had been like before they brought him here and took away his name in favour of an experiment number. I wondered if they tattooed the number on his forearm.
The man’s head had been shaved, and there were signs of recent surgical scars. Holes had been drilled through his skull at regular intervals so electrical cables could be plugged directly into his brain. Recently clotted blood showed darkly around the holes. The cables, carefully colour-coded, trailed away to a bunch of machines on the far side of the room. I didn’t recognise any of them.
Without quite knowing how or why, I began to understand what was happening. I just . . . seemed to know. The scientists were sweating, nervous, under intense pressure to produce results, to justify all the money that had been spent so far. Practical results that the military overseers could present to the Party to ensure further funding and preserve their own precious skins. So . . . certain shortcuts had been taken.
X37’s scientists had been studying the mysteries of human DNA for eleven years now and had nothing useful to show for it. Just a hell of a lot of dead ends and almost as many dead experimental subjects. Not that that mattered; they could always get more. Still, everyone was getting just a bit desperate. This particular experiment involved exposing selected genetic material to certain radioactive elements, and then grafting the new material directly onto the brain of the test subject. So far, so good. The subject had survived the operation. Now the scientists were electrically stimulating certain areas of the brain to see if they could make something happen.
The two scientists, the man and the woman, talked nervously together; sometimes clearly for the record, and sometimes talking across each other as they studied the monitor displays and argued over what was happening. I seemed to understand what they were saying, even though I knew only a handful of words in Russian.
(What was going on? Where was all this information coming from? Was the past sunk so deeply into its surroundings that just playing the tape was enough to evoke it all again, in all its details? Was the laboratory . . . waking up?)
The male scientist spoke of those parts of human DNA that resisted explanation. Whole areas whose purpose and function remained a mystery. Both scientists were convinced hidden talents lay buried in human DNA, just waiting to be forced to the surface. Old talents, long forgotten by civilised man. The male scientist’s name was Sergei. He spoke of old DNA, ancient genetic material, from before man was really human. He talked about the earliest civilisations, where men talked directly with their gods. They saw this as an ordinary, everyday thing: quite commonplace and not remarkable at all. Gods and devils, monsters and angels walked openly among mankind, their conversations described in great detail in all the oldest written records. Gods walked and talked with men. No big deal at all; just the way things were, back then. If you believed the written records, said the female scientist, whose name was Ludmilla. If these records were accurate, said Sergei, as accurate as everything else they described, who or what were these early humans talking to? Not gods, obviously; both scientists were good Party members and did not believe in such things. But . . . something powerful, certainly. Could it be that these gods and devils still walked among us, but we had lost the ability to see them?
I thought about that. They were talking about the Sight: the ability of specially trained people to See the whole of the world, and not just the limited part most people live in. (Just as well, really; if most people knew who and what they were sharing their world with, they’d shit themselves.) But though the Sight had shown me many strange and wonderful and dangerous things, it had never once shown me anything like a god.
I said some of this to the others, and Walker nodded slowly.
“There are things very like gods, in the Nightside. They have a whole street set aside for them, so they can show off for the tourists. But I am here to tell you that most of them are jus
t supernatural creatures with delusions of grandeur and not worth the breath it takes to damn them. Godly pretenders and wannabes are one of the oldest con tricks humanity has had to endure.”
“I talked with the Wizard of Northampton once,” Peter said diffidently. “He said gods and demons are just artificial constructs of the deeper recesses of the human mind. We create these subpersonalities so that the conscious mind can communicate more easily with the subconscious. Or maybe . . . so that an individual could make contact with the human mass mind, Jung’s collective unconscious. The wizard said gods and demons were just two sides of the same superluminal coin.”
“Yeah, well, writing comic books for twenty years will do that to you,” growled Walker.
“I’m picking up all kinds of information from this room,” Honey said abruptly. “I know things I have no way of knowing. It’s like . . . suddenly remembering a book I read long ago that I know for a fact I never read. My head hurts.”
“It’s the psychic imprinting,” I said. “What happened here was so powerful, so traumatic, it literally soaked into its surroundings. Genius loci, and all that. A stone tape. And now, just by being here, we’ve started the tape playing again. I know things too. The man in the chair is mentally ill. His name is Grigor, and he hears voices in his head. Almost certainly paranoid schizophrenic, though no one’s bothered to accurately diagnose him. Apparently Sergei and Ludmilla there believed that people who hear voices and speak to people who aren’t actually there are being dominated by ancient DNA that’s been accidentally reactivated. So they’ve been experimenting exclusively on the mentally ill to try to locate and control that particular part of human DNA. Just in case they are seeing gods and devils . . .”
“That’s crazy,” said Peter.
“Bastards,” Walker said succinctly.
“Bad idea either way,” said Honey, staring fascinated at the flickering black-and-white images on the television screen. “If the old gods and monsters really are just projections from the subconscious, they might not take kindly to being forced out into the light. We keep things locked away in our heads for a reason.”
“Let sleeping gods lie,” said Peter.
“Well, quite,” said Walker.
“This conversation is getting seriously strange,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with what happened out in the city?”
“It’s something to do with the man in the chair,” Honey said flatly. “With Grigor. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“Could we be talking about Jungian archetypes here?” said Walker. “They were all the rage in my young days. Ideas and concepts given shape and form and even identities. Dark dreams from the depths of the human mass mind, driving people in directions they would never have chosen otherwise . . . Fads and fancies, politics and religions . . . Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Pardon me; I’m rambling, I know. But we are on very dangerous ground here, and I think it behooves us to tread carefully. Remember that film Forbidden Planet? Monsters from the id? Unbeatable and unstoppable, rage and horror and all our most unspeakable lusts, given form and let loose on the world? Like the Hyde, only more so. Is that what happened here, in X37?”
“You’re right, Walker,” said Honey. “You are rambling.”
I was still studying the man in the chair and the two scientists. Grigor and Sergei and Ludmilla. Whatever information I was picking up, it wasn’t coming from the video recording. It was coming from the other room. Haunted, stained by what these people had done in it. The scientists had wanted to access the old DNA so they could learn to talk with gods again and bend them to the State’s will.
Children, playing with nuclear weapons.
Grigor suddenly convulsed, his scrawny naked body fighting the leather straps that held him in place. The chair creaked and groaned, but the straps held. (I was right there with them now. I could hear and see everything. Smell Grigor’s sweat, feel the static charge building on the air.) Sergei checked the readings on his instruments, and Ludmilla scribbled frantic notes on her clipboard. The cameras recorded everything. Grigor’s face writhed, his eyes bulged, his breathing grew faster and faster. The cables leading from his shaven head lashed back and forth.
And then he stopped moving. He held himself unnaturally still, as though afraid of drawing something’s attention. Sweat ran down skin flushed bright pink from exertion. Grigor was barely breathing now, his expression set and fixed. He was Seeing something; I could sense it. Something not present or evident to normal human senses. He Saw it, and I think it Saw him. His face twisted with horror and revulsion, racked by a terror beyond bearing. He screamed like a small child, like a wounded animal, like a soul newly damned to Hell.
I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t see it. Information was pouring into my head, forcing its way in despite everything I could do to keep it out.
The scientists had done it. The old DNA was awake again on-line and up and running. Grigor’s eyes were full of the Sight. But he hadn’t looked outward, as intended, beyond the fields we know into other worlds and dimensions or the many overlapping layers of our complicated reality. Instead, his Sight had turned away from the world that had hurt him so very much, turned away and turned inward. He looked deep into himself, into humanity, into all the hidden secrets of our DNA. And he found something there, something buried deep in the genetic material of us all, something so awful in its significance that he couldn’t stand it.
His mind broke, leaping up and out, his artificially augmented thoughts tapping into the human mass mind, the shared unconscious that linked all the people of X37. He drew upon the power he found there, took it and shaped it and sent it out to destroy every living thing in the city. So that the vile experiments would finally stop, and the awful knowledge Grigor had stumbled across would die with him.
Let them all die, he said. They’re all guilty. They all knew what was happening.
Grigor called up nightmares. All the things we’re really afraid of. Monstrous shapes, terrible archetypes, all the private and personal horrors that have power over us in the dark, in the early hours of the morning, when we dream awful dreams, of things we can only escape from by waking up and leaving them behind. Grigor summoned them up from the mass mind, gave them material shape and form, and turned them loose on the people of X37.
And the city screamed.
The scientists realised something had gone terribly wrong with their experiment. Grigor wasn’t crying out or straining against his straps anymore. He sat perfectly still. Sergei and Ludmilla approached him cautiously. He slowly turned his tortured head to look at them. Blood ran in endless tears from his unblinking eyes. Having finally Seen the truth, he could not look away, even though it was killing him. But he still managed a smile for his tormentors.
They’re coming, he said. They’re coming for you. Every single one of them, and they all want a piece . . .
He sounded like a dead man speaking. A man who can speak unbearable truths because he has nothing left to lose. Sergei backed away, calling hysterically for help. Ludmilla threw her clipboard aside, ran to the control board, and hit the abort button. It should have killed Grigor instantly, frying him with a massive electrical charge, but he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Huge sparks spat and sputtered on the air, discharging into the surrounding equipment. Ludmilla grabbed a fire ax from the wall and chopped at Grigor in his chair with hysterical strength. The heavy steel blade bit into his flesh again and again, but he didn’t cry out, and he wouldn’t die.
Sergei tried to escape, but the door wouldn’t open. Security guards were pounding on it from the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. Ludmilla backed away from the bloody mess in the chair that was still smiling at her, and she laughed shrilly past the dishevelled hair falling into her stark white face. The ax head trailed a bloody path across the floor, as though it had grown too heavy for her to hold up.
They came through the walls, and up through the floor, and down from the ceiling. Real a
nd solid, not alive, still bearing the wounds that had killed them. All the subjects who’d been experimented on, who’d suffered and died in the chair, screaming for help and mercy and simple compassion that never came. They came for Sergei and Ludmilla, who died slowly and who died screaming at the hands of those they’d wronged. And when the dead were finally finished with them, they left the bloody messes behind on the floor and went out of the room and into the city to do even worse things.
The tape stopped. I looked around, startled. I’d forgotten who and when I was. The room, what had happened in it, had filled my head. I took a deep breath and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my hand. Honey had shut the tape machine down. She was breathing hard. I wondered if she’d seen all the things I had. Walker was looking at the floor. Peter had his back to us. I looked through the one-way mirror into the next room. It was empty, and so was the chair.
“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.
“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”
“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”
“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.
“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”
“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”
“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.”
The Spy Who Haunted Me sh-3 Page 23
