Dark Hall Press Techno-Horror Anthology

by Oliver Smith

  The attendant’s eyes were half shut as he rang Zach out. He was staring at the television above the door. There was a breaking news story about a body that had been found two towns over. It was so badly beaten officials had to consult the dental records, though most of the molars and incisors had been shattered.

  It cut to a commercial for Planet Ruination.

  Zach told the attendant to keep the change and began to jog home.

  His parents would be probably getting ready for bed. They’d want to know why he was skipping school. He didn’t care if they grounded him, so long as he didn’t have to be alone right now. Normally the distance he felt between them since Bethany’s death was overwhelming, enough to make him scream, but today he would welcome it.

  He reached the house and stepped inside, ready to invent an excuse.

  But he could not speak, save for the groan that sounded in the back of his throat. His father sat on the couch, leaning forward and concentrating as he played Planet Ruination. He was walking through what looked like a foundry, not all that different from the one where he worked. He held a pistol and shot everybody he passed.

  His father laughed. “Zach, where’d you get this game? I’ve got to tell you, normally I think these things will rot your brain, but this one… this one’s something special.”

  It took Zach a long time to find his voice. “Where’s mom?”

  His father’s eyes did not leave the screen. “Hell if I know. She played for a while and then I think she went for a walk or something.”

  More sirens sounded in the distance, one or two streets over.

  He spent the rest of the day in the library. It was quiet for the most part. A man had knocked over one of the computers and tried to bite some of the staff before running off. Other than that, you wouldn’t have known the world was falling apart.

  Zach pretended to read a mystery novel while he thought. He wished Bethany were around. She would have known what to do. Though she had been a bit high and mighty with her yoga, earthy-crunchy diet, her flower power outlook on life, she had always seemed one step ahead of everyone. But now she was dead because she had stopped for a coffee on her way home from school. It used to bother him to think how random the world could be, how any moment things could collapse.

  What was happening out there, though, through the rain-soaked windows—there was nothing random about it. He knew it was the game, he knew. Some signal or code or something. It was affecting them, getting under their skin.

  He thought again of the symbol from the loading screen. It had been in the back of his mind all day, sitting there like a tumor, until he finally realized why it seemed so familiar.

  He’d seen it once, on the side of an office building in the industrial park. Now he had a hunch what business lay within its walls.

  He tossed the book onto the chair next to him and went back outside, where the sirens still rang and the smoke still wafted.

  There were no words on the building or its sign. It was tall and windowless and it made Zach feel faint.

  There was nothing but the giant symbol: an upside down triangle within a square within a circle, surrounded by other randomized circles. It was hard to look away from.

  There were no cars in the parking lot, no signs of life. He was drawn toward the door, no plan in mind, only certain that he wanted to burn as many copies of the game as he could. Or better yet, perhaps he could find the machinery that created the discs. Perhaps he could shut it down before it was too late.

  Some part of him was not surprised to find the door unlocked. It opened easily, as if inviting him. The front hall was dark, lit only by small emergency lights that lined the way. He followed them as the hall wound to the left and ended at an elevator. The doors were already open, waiting for him. He chose a button at random, riding the elevator up.

  When it came to a halt and the doors slid open, he expected to see rows of computers and cubicles but instead there was only an empty room with a large monitor on the wall.

  It was the loading screen. For a moment the symbol resembled a mouth, wide open and ready to chew. From behind him the elevator doors closed and began to descend.

  The game finished loading and began. It was Zach on screen, so lifelike. He held a knife as he walked past the movie theatre on Main Street. No one seemed to notice the blade. They went about their daily lives and he had only to choose which of them to kill. A few blocks down, in front of the coffee shop, a girl with a tie-dye backpack curled one of her dreadlocks as she walked. There was something about her, something so innocent it was unbearable.

  He sped up, looking around until he was sure no one saw him, then he pulled her into an alley and threw her to the ground.

  She fell face down then rolled over, holding her bag out like a shield.

  Bethany’s eyes grew wide. She looked too scared to scream.

  In reality he shook his head. He did not want to see this, had already imagined it an infinite amount of times instead of sleeping or studying or doing normal teenager things. He had become obsessed with what it must have been like for her, the sounds and smells of her death. But that had been coping, trying to work through how terrible the world could be. This was something entirely different.

  This was Planet Ruination.

  He ran toward the monitor and tried to pull the plug from the wall but it wouldn’t budge. He looked around the room for a chair or keyboard or something to toss at the screen. Zach’s avatar was raising the blade.

  He took off his shoe and began to smash the screen. The image faded and cracks formed.

  Eventually his arms grew tired and he fell back, trying to catch his breath. His head felt clearer somehow, as if the monitor had been a transmitter of sorts. He wondered if he’d beaten it, if he’d outsmarted Planet Ruination.

  Though he’d not been able to stop Bethany’s death in reality, he’d stopped it in his own way. He wondered if the sirens had ceased or if the fires had gone out. He wondered if the world had begun to turn back to normal.

  He wondered all these things as the room suddenly filled with blinding light. Every surface, the walls, floor, and ceiling, became a monitor, and every screen displayed the same thing.

  Zach’s avatar finished what he had started in the alley near the coffee shop.

  When he woke he thought for a moment that it had been a bad dream, but he knew better as he saw his parents and Jesse standing around him in his living room, cheering and clapping as he controlled his character around the neighborhood, slicing everyone they disliked in reality and even some they held dear.

  Zach’s eyelids were stuck open, his thumbs bleeding and moving of their own accord. He’d been playing long enough to piss his pants and lose all feeling in his legs.

  The smell of rot, of things left to decay, drifted in through the open windows. Outside it was pitch black and rain poured down from a starless sky.

  He tried to move, to plead, but his body remained in place as Planet Ruination went on. His avatar had leveled up, and was now nearly invincible. He was powerful beyond comprehension.

  Though the symbol was fresh in his mind, he knew he would never see it again. There would never be another loading screen. He would continue on, leveling and powering up, collecting points, using blood as currency.

  “They were true,” Jesse said. “The rumors were true.”

  Zach nodded, trapped in his own body. “It goes on forever.”

  Descent

  By Joseph Sale

  “Now approaching 13,000 ft. Entering the abyssopelagic zone.”

  Nicholas nodded. Flickering on the grainy screens set into the wall of the observation pod, a gulf of darkness seethed as if each atom moved of its own free will. It was so strange. Even after twelve years studying under one of the top marine biologists in the world, and a further eight leading some of the world’s most advanced—and dangerous—expeditions to the ocean’s bottom, it still made him uneasy. Everything in the upper world drew life from the sun. But down
here it didn’t matter. There were countless, countless creatures that’d gone their entire lives having never once felt so much as a degree of the sun’s heat. How alien must the ultra-charged searchlights scanning the darkness be to them? The lights were designed to detect any potential dangers that might dent the craft: rocks, debris, even larger fish or whales. The slightest dint in the craft would cause the whole thing to cave under the pressure. The observation pod gave them a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the underwater world around them: filled with eight screens showing the feeds of the tiny cameras built into the top, bottom and sides of the craft.

  “Copy that,” he answered on the intercom. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. The air tasted stale as if he was breathing in an Egyptian tomb that hadn’t been opened for thousands of years. “Keep your eyes out for any giant squid,” he said with a grin. He heard an answering laugh from Laura’s end.

  For hours he watched the darkness on the screens. Occasionally he saw a blip skirt across the screen; the light of angler-fish or a luminous gelatinous creature. Fifty years ago when David Attenborough’s documentary Blue Planet had aired for the first time, people had decried the images of the deep-sea creatures they found as fake. Other nut-jobs had seized on the footage as evidence of aliens. One party had even gone so far as to photo-shop a huge yellow eye opening in one of the ravines, like one of Lovecraft’s colossal gods of the deep. This was all old hat now. The ravines Attenborough’s team had been unable to access due to their volcanic temperatures were now accessible to them because of the special metallurgy of the ship’s hull and the nitrogen cooling system stored in the four feet thick exterior exoskeleton. Dr. Nicholas Pinter would go deeper and further than anybody before.

  Well, you and your team. Don’t forget them now, you glory hungry fool.

  He could almost hear the words in Rochelle’s voice—see her finger wagging like an upside down pendulum. A soft smile came to his lips, though his eyes did not reflect it. That pain was deeper than any gulf in the earth. Rochelle was gone and never coming back. It maddened him to think of all the times he’d risked his neck going on these journeys into the deep and yet she’d been the one the universe saw fit to take; that was, if the universe was sentient. It’d been a Saturday morning. He remembered it well because every Saturday morning he and Rochelle treated themselves to a lie in and a little treat—breakfast in bed they called it, with a wink. Just after, she popped off to the shop. Ten minutes later a car had run her down barely a hundred feet from the driveway.

  He stared at the darkness blinking back from the eight screens.

  “Dr. Pinter, I’ve got something to show you,” Zend’s voice cracked on the intercom. Always Dr. Pinter. Never familiar. There was something strangely cold about Zend. He was undoubtedly the most enthusiastic member of the team—a specialist in invertebrates and their habits. But Nicholas had realized his passion didn’t stretch much beyond the creatures he studied. He knows what he’s talking about though.

  “On my way,” he said.

  As he left the observation pod he turned back once to look at the black screens.

  Zend wasn’t the name he’d been born with. He was half-Japanese, and his family name came from his father’s side. He told Nicholas he’d changed it when turned twenty-one. He didn’t get on well with his father. When Nicholas had asked Zend what the name meant he told him it was the name of a character from a fantasy novel. The only one that makes a single right decision in the whole damn book. At that point Nicholas lost interest. He had no love of fiction. Who wanted to read about made up worlds when there was an ocean full of things more surreal than any imagination?

  Zend was pouring over a diagram he’d hand-drawn when Nicholas came in. There was a bottle of water on the table and a bunch of pencils and mathematical compasses.

  Nicholas stopped.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Zend pointed at three points on the diagram labeled A, B, and C. The diagram depicted a rough sketch of the sea bed, and each labeled point showed a crevasse shooting down to the lower hadopelagic levels – the levels Nicholas hoped to reach. Above each of the crevasses were clouds of crudely drawn jelly-fish.

  “You remember my Cluster Theorem, Dr. Pinter?” Zend asked, talking as though he was on speed. Every word was a blur. He wrung his hands as if washing them as he talked.

  “That invertebrates are moving in shoals like fish?”

  “Exactly. Well, I think I have discovered the method behind the madness, so to speak. It’s clear from Laura’s radar scans that these ‘clouds’ or ‘clusters’ center around the hydrothermal vents—they move perhaps one or two miles away, sometimes more if the current pulls them, but then return to their original location. It might be they are drawn to the heat, or are even feeding off some kind of microbial life. It’s an amazing finding, Dr. Pinter. It’s the first hint of a ‘home’ instinct we’ve ever seen in this type of life-form.”

  “Fascinating,” Nicholas said, “But I’m certain that’s not the only reason you called me up here.”

  Zend’s smile flickered.

  “Always to the point, eh doctor?” He pointed at label B on the diagram. “The most recent radar scans have revealed more of the vents. It’s clear that point A and C eventually narrow too close for us to explore much of it. They’re too hot even for this craft at around six-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. However, the other vent—Point B— that’s only at sixty-eight degrees—more than manageable.” He moved his finger across the paper until it reached a far wider crevasse. This one did not narrow to a V like the others but dropped down in a straight line until it reached the end of the page. Nicholas noticed Zend had squiggled a tiny question-mark at the very lip of the page. He smiled. It might as well have read: Here be monsters. “Point B is also about five times wider than the others. This diagram is not to scale. I think this is our way forward... or down, rather.”

  “Ok. We’ll head for that one. Good work, Zend.” Nicholas always felt tired talking to him, like he was being sapped. He felt like he needed a lie down. It’s probably just the heat. Despite the sophisticated cooling system, the air in the craft was always warm. He found himself yearning for a sea breeze to blow into the grimy corners of his face. Strange, we haven’t even got to the hot bit yet.

  Zend grinned.

  “Thank you, Dr. Pinter! It’s so exciting, isn’t it? I’d be bouncing on my heels if I were you. On the verge of making such an important find...” Nicholas caught his expression and saw he was being scrutinized; Zend’s beetle-black eyes fixed on him as if in hunger. Is he angry? Testing me?

  “I’m bouncing on the inside,” he said. “But I don’t want to work myself up too much. It may be we find nothing.”

  “Come now. We’re not investing all this money, going to such lengths, building this craft, for nothing are we? You know there’s something down there. We already see life in the fissures. Who knows what else we might find?”

  The craft jolted beneath them. Zend’s diagram slid off the table. Nicholas hit the wall and scraped a gash from elbow to shoulder on one of the metal beams. He waited for a second jolt to come. The craft remained still. He felt his heart beating so hard in his chest his legs felt weak. He breathed a shaking sigh. Zend grinned as he hung onto the frame of his bed, as though they were on an exciting fairground ride. Hatred rose in Nicholas like a rearing snake at that smile, he wanted to lash out at Zend, to bite. Calm down.

  He reached up and clicked the red intercom button.

  “Laura, report. What was that?”

  “Come and see. It’s quite spectacular really.”

  Nicholas growled. Why were they both suddenly so blasé? That jolt could have caused damage to the craft and resulted in them being crushed to a pulp by a million tons of water. But you’re not dead. It’s ok.

  “Coming up now,” he said.

  At thirty-five, Laura was the youngest of the team; an expert engineer as well as biological scientist and advanced systems operator.
She’d been ear-marked by NASA for piloting before Nicholas had won her over to the dark side with the classic adage: we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the sea. It’s time the sea had its turn, don’t you think? She was pretty, by any standards, and had long sleek hair as smooth as polished wood and a warm chestnut color.

  She had her own set of three screens—the left screen showed one of the feeds from the bottom of the craft, the middle showed the water directly ahead of them, and the third showed a split-screen of the side-view of the craft. He could immediately see what she meant. Unfurling itself on the central screen was a glistening gunmetal-coloured squid, about three times the size of the craft and with an eye the size of a human head. Its tentacles knotted and tangled themselves, moving with a disturbing autonomy, scraping at the darkness like a blind-man’s hands. Who needs science fiction when these bloody things are around? The squid drifted away from them. Its flesh transformed as the craft’s light fell on different parts of it – flecks of yellow and purple shimmering like an aurora borealis across the sheen of silver. Like a ghost it melted into the blackness, until only a few trails of ethereal colour remained imprinted on their retinas.

  “They’re beautiful, don’t you think?” Laura said, watching the screen. “And this is only the second one to be caught on film.”

  Nicholas put a hand on her shoulder.

  “We’ve got even bigger fish to fry.” He realized what he’d just said and put his hand to his face. “Sorry, bad pun.”

  “Gigantism is perhaps the ocean’s biggest mystery,” Zend said. “One would think in such adverse conditions that not even bacterial life could survive, but here we have monsters!” His eyes shone—not unlike the squid’s eerie flesh. Nicholas felt his hair rising on end despite the heat.

  “How far down are we, Laura?”

  “Currently at 26,000 ft. We’re expecting to encounter the ocean bed soon, at around 30,000 ft.”