Mindwarp

by James Follett

  Another five minutes passed, and Ewen admitted that Jenine had a point. She rummaged in the holdall and switched on a discharge tube at a low level so that they could take stock of their surroundings without being dazzled. They were in a narrow tunnel at the very apex of the ride. The passenger pods behind them were hanging down into the tunnel at an alarmingly steep angle. The view in front was equally disturbing, as they discovered when they wriggled out of the padded restraints and peered into the gloom. All the cars seemed to be defying gravity until they saw the pulleys and notched plastic guide cables that held the cars firmly against the tubular rails.

  “Similar to the rides we used to fix,” said Jenine. She gestured to one side where there was a wide recess cut into the rock. It led to a door marked:

  EMERGENCY EXIT.

  “Well at least we’re by the rescue point if they never get this thing moving again,” Ewen commented. “Notice anything odd?”

  She glanced around, holding the discharge tube high. “What?”

  “Rock. We must be right through the top of the dome.”

  Jenine touched the roof of the tunnel. “Good point. So what does that prove?”

  Ewen stood and vaulted onto the ledge. He held his hand out to Jenine. “Come on.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Ewen. Get in. If this thing starts moving-”

  “It’s not going to start moving so long as we stay on it.”

  “Ah. Suddenly you can predict the future?”

  “I think I can in this case,” said Ewen evenly. “Why do you think the car, this particular pod, stopped right here, beside an emergency exit?”

  “Because it’s a trap!”

  “If it is, we could have been trapped long ago in the elevator or on the train. Maybe we’re being steered. If so, these cars will stay here as long as we do. You’ve always been the one to jump in feet first without looking. Now it’s my turn, so come on.”

  Jenine opened her mouth to argue but saw the hopelessness of their situation. She relented, passed Ewen the holdall and rope, and accepted his hand. The moment her weight was out of the car, the power came on and it moved off. The entire train of ten cars hissed smoothly passed the ledge where they were standing and vanished into the darkness.

  Jenine held a threatening fist under Ewen’s nose. “Don’t even think of saying, “I told you so”.”

  “Now would I do that?”

  Jenine’s smile changed to a puzzled frown. She wrinkled her nose. “What an odd smell.”

  Ewen inhaled. “Smells like something decomposing. A chemical reaction somewhere.” He turned his attention to the door.

  “Now we discover that it’s locked,” Jenine muttered.

  “It won’t be.”

  But it was locked. Ewen pulled, pushed, and even threw his weight against the door, but it refused to budge.

  “Obviously we’re not meant to use the door,” he commented ruefully.

  Jenine said nothing. They both saw the grille above the door at the same time. Ewen made a stirrup of his hands for Jenine to stand on as she shone the discharge tube through the bars.

  “Can’t see much,” she reported. “It’s a sort of rectangular vent. It goes up at a shallow angle of about twenty degrees. And this is where the smell’s coming from. And the air’s quite cold too.”

  “See if the grille can be pulled out or something,” Ewen suggested.

  “It looks solid.”

  “If we’re meant to use it, there must be a way of opening it,” he reasoned.

  Jenine tugged at the grille, and gasped when it disappeared noisily by grating sideways into a recess. “Your lateral thinking’s doing the business,” she commented.

  “Is it big enough to crawl through?”

  “Yes. But I don’t think I could-”

  Ewen cut off her argument by bracing his back against the door and lifting her higher so that she could scramble through the opening.

  “Ewen - I can’t.”

  “You said that it was wide enough.”

  “Yes, I know.” Jenine was unable to hide the tremor in her voice. “You don’t understand. I just can’t.”

  “I do understand, Jenine. And I know you can. Close your eyes and climb in. Or would you rather I went first?”

  Hating herself for showing her weakness, Jenine scrambled through the opening. She twisted around. Ewen’s encouraging smile made her feel better. He passed her the holdall and the heavy coils of rope, and grabbed her hand. Once he had a grip on the edge of the opening, he was able to haul himself up.

  The ventilation duct, if that was what it was, had a rectangular cross-section that had been cut through the rock. At this point it was just wide enough to accommodate them side by side. As Jenine had reported, it sloped gently upwards and there was a chill draught that bore the strange smell.

  Ewen sniffed hard. “It’s like the smell that you get when gardeners cut back the palm fronds, or when the grass is mown,” he remarked.

  “Before we do anything,” said Jenine firmly, “we ought to jam that grille open. It slid open by itself, therefore it can slide closed by itself.”

  As if to demonstrate the truth of her statement, the grille chose that moment to rumble closed behind them. Ewen twisted around in the confined space and wrestled frantically with the steel bars, but the heavy grille was firmly locked into its grooves.

  He looked ruefully at Jenine. The cold light of the discharge tube she was holding caught the jade green chill in her eyes.

  “Well… That’s done away very neatly with the need for a debate about our options, hasn’t it?” she said caustically.

  “It would seem so,” Ewen admitted.

  “There’s no “seem” about it. If there’s another grille ahead, then we’re sunk.” There was suppressed panic in her voice at the prospect of being trapped in the duct.

  “Let’s worry about that if we find one,” Ewen suggested. “If it makes you happier, I don’t mind going first.”

  Jenine’s reaction was as Ewen expected: she rolled onto her stomach without a word and began crawling up the rough-hewn slope, holding the light before her. Ewen draped the coils of rope around his neck and followed, dragging the holdall behind him. He knew that for Jenine, crawling along a narrow, dark tunnel with grilles slamming shut had to be the worst manifestation of her fears. Her remarkable courage caused his love for her to overflow.

  They rested after ten-minutes. Their tough trousers could cope with the floor’s rough surface, but it was hard on their hands. The smell of decay was stronger. And now that they weren’t exerting themselves, they realised that the air temperature was noticeably lower. They resumed their long, slow climb.

  “Groove in the sides and floor!” Jenine warned. She scrambled forward to give Ewen room, and twisted around, her face tight with concern when she heard the click of relay-switches. “Quickly!”

  The grille slammed down behind Ewen, narrowly missing his foot but trapping the holdall on the far side.

  “Now we’ve lost everything!” Jenine snapped angrily. “I told you to be quick!”

  “We haven’t lost everything,” said Ewen patiently. “Hold the light still for a minute.”

  He reached through the bars and unpacked the holdall, pulling their food and tools through the grille one by one. The only item that was too large to pass through the bars was the datapad which he was forced to abandon. Once the holdall was empty, he crushed it flat and wriggled it through the grille. “Lateral thinking,” he commented, repacking the bag. “Okay. Let’s get moving.”

  Jenine smiled. She slipped her hand in his hand and squeezed it briefly. “Sorry,” she said.

  The gradient of the long duct gradually flattened out. Ewen stayed close behind Jenine. She suddenly gave a little exclamation of annoyance and stopped.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Something buzzed against my face. A fly.”

  “It won’t hurt you.”

  “I hate them,” Jenine retorted.

>   “Just ignore it.”

  They crawled along the strange duct for a further ten minutes, not speaking until Jenine stopped again.

  “The tunnel has come to end,” she reported with immense relief. “It opens into a sort of small cavern.”

  Ewen squeezed alongside her and studied the cave with the aid of the discharge tube. They were both reluctant to leave the duct until they realised that they were kneeling across another groove. They both heard the faint click of hidden switches and scrambled into the cavern. A grille slid down, solid and immoveable, barring their return route. They climbed stiffly to their feet and looked around the narrow cave. Jenine held the discharge tube high and moved it about to throw light into the shadows around the walls and roof. Her grip on Ewen’s hand was almost painful. A recess at the back of the cave defied the light by remaining dark and forbidding. They crept towards it and saw that the cave turned through ninety degrees for two paces before coming to a dead end. The light spilled onto someone asleep at the far end of the turning. The still figure, wearing a grey one-piece work suit, was lying with its back to them, knees drawn up in the foetal position.

  “Hallo,” said Ewen tentatively.

  The sleeping form didn’t stir.

  “Hallo! Wake up. Company!”

  The sleeper slept on.

  Ewen knelt. He put his hand on the sleeper’s shoulder and was about to give a gentle shake when he realised that there no substance beneath his hand: no shoulder; no flesh; only a knobby, alien hardness. There was a creaking rustle as figure rolled onto its back and a skull, wearing a mask of drum-tight, desiccated skin, grinned up at them.

  Ewen grabbed the discharge tube from Jenine just as she was about to drop it. He pushed her away from the apparition, not so much to protect her, but because it was narrow in the cave; he had actually touched the thing and wanted to get away from it even more than she did.

  For a moment they stood in silence, breathing hard, not sure what do, their unspoken fear that further exploring would lead to more grisly discoveries.

  The icy, uneven draught was now very strong. It was coming from the darkened opposite end of the cavern, where the light was swallowed by blackness. More than anything else, it was the biting cold on her face that caused Jenine’s courage to desert her. She had never known real cold. She clung to Ewen as they advanced towards the unknown.

  “What’s wrong with the air-conditioning?” she whispered. “Why does it blow in such strong gusts?”

  Ewen was about to answer, but the words were frozen in his throat by a low moaning noise that rose in pitch to a ghastly siren shriek of torment. The couple gripped each other in mutual terror, their hearts pounding in unison as the terrible noise rose and fell in harmony with the gusts of winds that scoured the cavern. Despite his terror, Ewen kept a sufficiently tight on his reason to deduce that the noise was coming from a long way away. Gradually the eerie sound died away to the low moaning, and then ceased altogether. He eased Jenine’s grip on him.

  “All over,” he whispered.

  Ewen dropped the rope, glad to be relieved of its weight, and moved towards the source of the wind. Jenine was loathe to let go of him; she didn’t want to be alone. Their feet crunched on gravel. He looked down. It was like the loose, broken ground he had seen in the battle caverns. They stopped, sensing an awesome abyss yawning before them. There was a strange hissing and dragging sound far below that rose and fell. This was interspersed with echoing booms that reached up through the darkness. Close to their left something unseen and frightening thrashed dementedly in harmony with the wind. The sounds were like no other that they had ever heard before.

  “Turn out the light!”

  Jenine did so. The darkness that closed in on the couple was terrifying in its intensity. She shivered, this time more from fear than the cold. “Ewen… I’m really frightened now. Everything’s wrong… Even our voices sound wrong. We must be in a huge dome.”

  Ewen looked up. In that terrifying moment he knew where they were. His senses reeled as the awesome realization swamped his reason. “This is it,” he said hoarsely.

  “The outdoors?”

  “Yes.”

  Jenine couldn’t see where he was staring. “But it’s black! Everything’s in darkness! This can’t be the outdoors!”

  “Look up,” said Ewen. “But slowly…”

  Jenine looked up. Despite the protective closeness of Ewen’s arm around her, she gave a little cry of terror. What she saw was the very reversal of her phobia. That fear was always present although she had learned to contain it, but what lay before her now stirred a sick panic of a strength that she knew was unconquerable.

  She saw stars.

  PART 8. Outdoors.

  1.

  As their eyes adjusted to the dark, so more and more stars appeared until the rash of millions of shining points of light filled the sky and cowed their reason. Although there was no reference point or parallax movement to enable Ewen to judge the distances involved, he instinctively sensed that he was looking out on a void that was totally beyond his comprehension. In the clear night air, the myriads of constellations and star clusters raining down light, bore a gift - the faintest glimmer of understanding, although the collective brilliance of the stars did nothing to alleviate the terrors of the enveloping darkness. The icy wind beat against the couple, forcing them back into the shelter of the cave where they crouched behind an outcrop, huddled together to keep warm, too scared to venture any deeper where the mummified corpse lay.

  For a while they were silent, each alone in the turmoil of their thoughts as the incomprehensible cold seeped insidiously into their bones.

  “It’ll be easier when daylight comes,” Ewen whispered as Jenine pressed herself tightly against him.

  “It’s the wrong time now for darkness,” she answered, struggling desperately to make her voice sound steady. “It should be light now, Ewen. There are no zargon lights here. There’s nothing here except darkness.” She shivered and tried to bury her face in her collar.

  “There must be a system that projects those lights onto the dome,” Ewen reasoned. “If that works, the zargon lights should work too.”

  But Jenine would not be placated. “This place isn’t like any other dome. It’s not meant for people to see. It’s the afterworld for the dead.” Her misery fed on itself and she started to cry. “Maybe we are dead. The nursery rhymes are right after all. This is our punishment for rejecting the GoD.”

  Ewen shifted his body to give her a little more protection from the freezing blasts that sought out every corner of the cave. “I’m sorry, Jenine… I should never have involved you in all this.”

  An hour passed. The wind gradually dropped, eventually dying away altogether. The respite from the freezing gusts restored a small measure of their flagging spirits. The strange hiss and booming noise became quieter, but perhaps that was because they were getting used to it. They tried eating biscuits but their lack of water aggravated their thirst. After a while Jenine’s regular breathing told Ewen that she was asleep. He eased his body into a more comfortable position, moving with great care to avoid waking her, and eventually dozed off.

  A painful cramp in his calf woke him with a start. As he leaned forward to massage his leg, he saw that there was a faint, barely discernible flush of light in the darkness at the cave’s opening. Perhaps it was his eyes playing tricks. He closed them, counted slowly to one hundred, and opened them again. The light had brightened noticeably so that the faint grey of the sky was framed by the blackness of the cave.

  “Jenine!” He shook her awake. “Look! Zargon lights! They’re coming on!”

  She was awake in an instant, staring at the stain of light. Together they crept to the opening and gazed out of the cave. The world before them was divided into two halves. The upper half was becoming lighter and the stars were going out while the lower half remained shrouded in darkness. The boundary between the two was a hard, horizontal line. Like the stars, Ewen sense
d that the boundary was at a great distance. Something flitted across the sky and disappeared below the dividing line into the blackness.

  “A bird!” Jenine gasped in horror. “Did you see it?”

  “It didn’t look right,” said Ewen. “It looked like those kids’ glider things.”

  Jenine shook her head vehemently. She was badly frightened. The only machines that flew in Arama were children’s toys - mostly fixed wing gliders or balloons. “That thing had wings that flapped! Surely you saw that?”

  “I saw it them,” Ewen admitted.

  Another bat wheeled swiftly against the sky and vanished. Jenine gave a little moan deep in her throat.

  “They don’t look like birds,” said Ewen, taking her hand and squeezing it. “And they’re not giant flies. I don’t think they could harm us.”

  “Whatever they are, they look real enough to me,” said Jenine grimly, watching another bat glide towards the cliff face.

  A line of golden light spread along the horizon. For the first time they saw that the opening of their cave was set into a cliff face. Ewen looked down and saw a frightening flash of white-flecked water swirling and booming against the rocks far below. Jenine’s nails were digging painfully into his arm. She was breathing irregularly, as though the drawing of each breath required a conscious effort.

  The fuzzy outline of the mysterious, shadowy shape to their left that had thrashed in the wind, hardened slightly to that of a tree, although it was nothing like the graceful palms of Arama. As the light brightened, they drew instinctively back from the awesome drop before them. Ewen preferred not to think about what would have happened had he gone blundering out of the cave. A seagull wheeled past them and uttered a shrill cry.

  “That’s a bird!” Jenine cried. “That’s definitely a bird! So huge! Oh, Ewen - this is a terrible place!”