Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

  “Wiseman and Hendricks, on the other hand, show no physical symptoms of shock. While they are unresponsive to any stimuli, they do not have the physiological signs that could allow for that diagnosis. They are simply unresponsive, for no apparent reason.”

  “So neither one of them has said a single word?” Tasso broke in. It garnered her a look of consternation from the captain, but he did not step in. Perhaps he shared her concerns. “They watched Scott die down there and they don’t have a single thing to say about it?” She continued. “That doesn’t seem diagnosable to you?”

  “I do not mean to say there is nothing wrong with them,” the doctor countered. “I merely say that they are not in a diagnosable state of shock, and therefore, I do not see any evidence that their refusal to respond is physiologic in origin. Certainly, there is something wrong.” He looked as if he would continue, but the captain stopped him.

  “Then you don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

  “No, not precisely.”

  “Then speculate.”

  “I just don’t know,” he finally, fully admitted. “Some extreme reaction to stress, exacerbated by residual effects of the hibernation and the strain of being so far from Earth. That said, they fit the symptoms neither for a medical diagnosis of shock or for a psychological diagnosis of catatonia. In catatonia, people tend to stay in whatever position you place them in. I lifted Wiseman’s arm above his head. It dropped back to his side the second I released it. It simply doesn’t fit catatonia as in a case of schizophrenia.”

  “Ok. Let’s move on. Commander Oldham, what is our physical status?”

  “We’re in orbit, 2000 kilometers above our landing zone,” I replied. I looked back to the planet, just now noticing how often everyone else had been doing it. I stared for just a moment, and continued. “We are exactly where we are supposed to be …” I trailed off, taking a strange stock of the seemingly bizarre tone and pitch of each word I’d just used. Were we supposed to be here? Was anyone supposed to be in this horrible place that had killed one crewman and would soon kill four more? I pondered these things silently and stared down at that bright, immense yellow.

  “Oldham,” the captain barked, bringing me back around.

  “Everything is as planned. We arrived on time. The shuttle landed on the surface on schedule. There is nothing wrong with our orbit or anything else having to do with course, plotting, or timing.”

  “Tasso, what is the status of our communications? Can you tell me why we lost contact with the shuttle?” She’d been staring down, looking along the long, shapely curves of her body to her feet. She seemed to be doing anything to avoid looking at the planet, but her eyes slowly rose to meet the captain.

  “There is nothing wrong with our communications. I ran diagnostics, ran diagnostics on the diagnostics, and then partially disassembled whatever equipment I could get at without putting on a pressure suit.” Her voice was calm, but still forced. The ample, assertive volume that accompanied her voice prior to the landing, now about 10 hours past, had vanished. “It’s all normal,” she summed up, full well knowing she had just stated the exact opposite of the real situation.

  “What about long range?”

  “The systems work, but it doesn’t change the fact that the fastest communication will take months to reach Earth.” The abysmal tone of her voice and a further drop in volume only magnified the implications of her statement. We were alone out here. No one was coming to help us, and we didn’t even have the comfort of a distant human voice to help us this far into the depths of space. Everyone was silent for a moment, even the captain. It was as if we were all contemplating the unfathomable distances that separated us from a place where reason and order could still be asserted. But finally, the captain continued.

  “So the remaining members of the landing party, they are in no medical danger?” He turned to the doctor as he spoke, and both of them seemed to weigh the decision he was about to make.

  “None that I can find,” the doctor replied.

  The captain turned to Tasso and I. “And the ship is in perfect running order?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Tasso mumbled.

  “Oldham?” he questioned.

  I could stand it no longer. The situation was utter shit. Scott was dead, Leone in shambles. Wiseman and Hendricks we did not know. I suspected something, and my suspicions were somehow worse than what hard facts I did know.

  “Sir, I think we should put the landing party in hibernation immediately and make preparations to return to Europa Station. There is no need to take any unnecessary …”

  “The ship. It is in working order?” he asked bluntly, ignoring me.

  “Yes,” I reluctantly admitted. “Everything is perfectly fine,” I said with obvious, and patently unprofessional, sarcasm.

  “Then, for the time being, we will remain in orbit. We will wait for any developments in the condition of the landing party and continue with all scientific aspects of the mission that we can accomplish from up here. I want everyone to return to their bunks and get some sleep. I’m sure we’re all exhausted. We have a heavy schedule ahead of us. This is the closest anyone has been to this system, and we’re not about to waste a trip of this magnitude.”

  No one liked it, but no one protested. We left, weighed down by the massive pressure of the situation. But despite my reservations, and despite the ominous tone that now permeated my every thought, I was exhausted. My last thoughts as I lapsed into unconsciousness were nothing more than a mild surprise at how quickly I was falling asleep.

  I had a terrible nightmare that night. I do not know why I record this, other than the mounting suspicion that the planet, or whatever horror exists there, created, or at least magnified, the dream. Perhaps it was a portent of things to come, or something worse, some sickening call to join the madness that infects my remaining crewmates.

  When it began I was on the bridge, alone. I was watching the planet intently. It seemed to shift and move beneath my eyes, as if the surface were a pile of tiny insects rioting and coiling over one another as they struggled to reach the top. I stood there a long time, staring blankly. Suddenly, a voice called out from behind me. I did not hear what it said, or even discern enough to differentiate who spoke to me, but I turned to face whoever it was.

  Scott stood in the mouth of the hatch to the bridge. He would have been staring at me, save the fact that his eyes were closed tight. He was dead, his corpse exactly as it must have been, abandoned and alone on the surface of the planet. He was wearing his landing gear, save the helmet he had killed himself removing. It was covered in grainy, yellow dust. His skin was a rubbery, gray mask, dry but seeming disgustingly flexible. He spoke again.

  “Hello, Spence,” it said, addressing me with informality and traces of intimacy Scott never would have used. “Do you like the view?” He gestured over my shoulder, his eyes still shut. I did not turn. I did not dare, the terror that one can only truly feel in a dream creeping up my spine and filling the hollow cavity of my chest. “The color goes on forever. A perfect, endless ocean. Let me show you how deep the ocean goes.”

  The thing that was not Scott slowly opened its eyes. They glowed a disgusting, crawling yellow, like iridescent urine coiling as it circled an infinitely deep drain. I tried to look away, twisting under that horrible, glaring color that seemed both impossibly bright and endlessly deep. Mercifully, he turned away, beginning to move back out of the hatch.

  “We have more to show you,” it almost cooed at me, “so much more.”

  I followed him, though I wanted to do anything else. As I stepped through the hatch, I heard an ominous, synchronized pounding echoing through the halls. I could not locate the source of the sound. It seemed to come from every direction at once. The heavy, hammering noises portended some terrifying, ominous approach; something viscous and insane like what I had perceived staring down at the machinating, yellow surface of the planet. Something unspeakable made that noise, and though it had no discernible lo
cation, it seemed still to approach from every turn.

  I continued to follow the thing that was not Scott. We moved quickly toward the medical bay. There were questions I wanted to ask the corpse I followed, horrible permutations and disgusting nuances of his death and the ancient forces that existed on the surface of the planet. But I did not speak. I could not force the words from my mouth. I could only walk, stepping silently and listening to the huge, intoning sounds that I realized must be impossibly heavy footsteps.

  A hatch up ahead was opening. We walked into the room together. It was the medical bay, but at the same time it was not. It had a feeling of familiarity, the way a place in a dream seems to be a place you visit regularly even though it is clearly not. Doctor Peters stood with his back to me, partially obscuring a body spread across a surgical table before him. The room was tiered by thick, tinted glass above and all around us. Behind it sat rising rows of seats, occupied by darkened figures. They were obscured but clearly malformed. I could not make out exact details, but the figures seemed to be human, though mutated and misshapen. Some had a disgusting plethora of limbs, others multiple, lolling heads, still others different metamorphosed and modified forms. All were horrible, though none were brightly lit enough to determine the exact nature of their disturbing and varied shapes.

  Scott walked forward into the room. I remained just inside the hatch, frightened by the monstrous figures above, but even more scared to learn what atrocity awaited me on that table. Scott seemed intent on showing me. As he reached out and touched the doctor’s back, I turned my head to look away. An instant later, strong hands gripped my face, pulling it back toward the table by brute force. Soon, I stood above it, locked in Scott’s undeniable embrace, looking down at the horrors it held for me.

  Leone lay upon the table, his eyes open and staring up at me in that same luminous, endless yellow. He smiled and nodded, indicating toward the rest of his body. It was unbearably vivisected. His heart beat in his open chest, lungs filling and emptying around it. He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue had been cut out. The remains of it slithered about inside his mouth. I tried to turn away, only to find myself staring at the blank, empty canvas of the doctor’s face. Only a mask of darkness remained, the same amorphous blackness of the crowd of mutants above. Something opened inside the void above his neck, something like a mouth, but it only echoed the sound of those driving, damnable footsteps. Just as I recoiled from this new horror, I was flying out of the room, Scott’s now unseen form carrying me mightily along to the next horror.

  The stomping sound of marching continued, now much closer, getting closer by the second. They were just around the corner, two hammering, synchronized sets of inhumanly heavy boots. The sound was jarring, terrifying. I knew something unspeakable, something worse that the walking corpse that accompanied me, was beating its way quickly toward me. Just as they were about to round the corner and come upon us, the body of Scott turned me and slammed me against the wall of the corridor. In life he had been several inches shorter than me. But now he was huge, towering over me, taking up my entire field of view.

  “Not yet,” it said, its voice turned from hauntingly enticing to thick and croaking. It was a voice devoid of humanity, ancient and powerful, and still somehow beckoning in its mercilessness. The boots approached, stomping behind the huge form of my dead crewmate. They passed just as quickly, my terror diminishing by only a tiny measure.

  “You will meet them soon enough. You will join them in time, and at the place that has been determined,” it intoned, its voice somehow disembodied and still riveting in its detached, ancient madness.

  Scott did not release me. He pulled me away from the wall and carried me onward. Still massive, too large for the claustrophobic corridors of our actual ship, he carried me as easily as a baby. I realized with mounting horror that he was taking me toward the shuttle bay. I tried to fight, struggled madly against his huge form, but it was no use. I was utterly at his mercy, and nothing could have pried me free from his terrible, powerful hands.

  “I have such wonderful sights to show you,” he rasped and spat. “You will understand everything. All the secrets of the universe await you. Life and death are nothing before us. You will see. Scott will be there. Your parents, dead a decade or more, will be there. Everyone is waiting.” His voice had grown huge. It surrounded me, walls of sounds enclosing around me. He said more, thousands of words stampeding into my ears and filling my head with sound. I cannot remember most of it. I am sure my sanity depends on that very fact.

  I woke up just before we moved through the hatch that would have led to the shuttle bay. But I knew that the shuttle bay was not there. The surface of the planet, eldritch, powerful and possessive, waited for me on the other side. It waited, and despite my narrow escape to consciousness, it would not be denied.

  He was outside the hatch. Hendricks. I’d been hearing them moving about the corridors, making sounds that at first seem to be laughter and an instant later seem to be hysterical weeping. They stomp, they stomp just like the unnamed figures in my dreams. They bash things against the walls, maybe chairs, maybe something heavier. Deadlier.

  He pounded his way up to the hatch, making as much noise as possible. Then he just stopped. He was still outside, I was sure. Perhaps he was still looking for a way in, a way to get to me. A way to kill me before this dying ship loses the ability to preserve my life. We are in a metal can, light years from Earth, and broken as it is, it still creates some semblance of Earth, some poor but serviceable imitation. So I live, and this madmen tries to think of ways to kill me.

  Yet, I was drawn to him. I got up and walked toward the hatch, keeping my eyes straight forward. I tried to avoid seeing the corpse, the broken and bleeding remains of the Lieutenant. Stepping softly, I came closer. My footfalls were nearly silent in the diminished gravity, my breath quickened by the slow denial of oxygen. It flowed, a gaseous mist, into the air in front of me; condensed against the hatch itself. I said nothing. I simply stood there, waiting for something, I knew not what.

  A loud slam against the door startled me, but I did not step back. I felt the strangest sensation of being drawn further forward, as if by having been to the planet he was now somehow its harbinger, its emissary. As if the strange, tidal pull of the planet now lived within him and could exert itself upon me.

  “Oldham …” he said, speaking in some approximation of his real voice. It sounded tinny and almost harmless coming through the thick metal of the door. I had expected the horrid croaking sounds of Scott from my dream. It was as if I expected to still be dreaming, after relating my horrible nightmare to you only moments before. As if I wished I could still be in that dream, and could still awaken from the nightmare to a somewhat sane world. Awaken to a second chance to persuade my now dead captain to take us far, far away from the horrors of this ancient place.

  “Pay attention!” he barked through the door, as if he could read my wandering thoughts. “I have come to make an offer, Oldham. I have come to tell you that it is still not too late. You can pilot the shuttle. You can take us both to the surface. We can still be saved.”

  Saved, I thought. Saved like Scott had been saved? Or perhaps as Hendricks and Wiseman had been saved, made into the perfect, mindless killers the planet desired. I thought this but said nothing. There was no point in talking to this madman, so I simply waited for him to continue.

  “The things that we can show you. Ancient cities aflame with the light of cleansing. Peoples a billion years old, elevated to heights you could never understand. But you would. We would show you how to understand. Explain the sweet oblations and the delicacies invested within them.

  “Oldham. Are you listening?”

  I was. I was rapt with shock and the mounting terror felt by some tiny beast when the largest predator in the savanna caught him dead in its sights. I even caught myself thinking of different ways I might be able to repair the door. But somehow, by some force of will, I pulled myself back from the
horror and the growing twinges of insanity. I pulled myself back and turned, slowly, away from the door.

  He continued talking. I don’t remember most of it, more gibberish about ancients and revelations and visions soaked in the blood of the sacrificed. I took my shirt off, despite the mounting cold, and coiled it about my head. I tied it tight to drown out the disgusting rambling coming through the door, and for a time I was even able to persuade myself that I had no desire to open the door, and if I did and was not butchered, would not make straight for the shuttle bay and go down to meet whatever madness awaited on the yellow, swirling surface of the planet.

  After an unmarked period of time, I removed the shirt, mostly because the pain of the cold sinking into my joints was worse than the thought of having to hear the heinous voice floating through the door, and feel the terrible desire to join it. But it was gone. It was gone, and there is nothing left. Nothing but to finish the terrible story I have begun, and to wait for the darkness. To wait for it, and pray to the God I long ago lost faith in that whatever might be called my soul will not be sucked down to join whatever horrors live below.

  After the nightmare, I managed only a few short, fitful pockets of sleep. I was almost completely awake when general quarters sounded around what we called five AM. I quickly rose and slipped into my uniform. A sense of impending dread filled the thin, artificial atmosphere around me. The captain forcing us out of bed could not be good under any circumstances, but given the bizarre sequence of events that had already unfolded, the call to quarters was truly terrifying.

  I knew I would have to pass medbay on my way to the bridge. The thought sickened me, having to pass by those endless stares and seemingly vacant minds. A nagging thought had come over me in the sleepless hours of the night. Were Wiseman and Hendricks the two unseen demons stomping their way about the ship throughout my nightmare? The thought filled my gut with a deep, sinking feeling that was impossible to shake or rationally dismiss.