by Mark Cassell
What the hell was all this? Why had the three of them been spared? Parker had those marks on his arms, and her own red welts didn’t look good. This was some kind of nasty infection, certainly. It was simply a matter of time. She hoped Kat would somehow be immune.
The doors on the other side of the room swung closed with a double slap. Alone. Judy’s heart twisted and she threw herself at them. She entered a wide room and an overpowering smell of paint washed over her. Although familiar throughout the institute, in here it poured down her throat.
Kat stood beside her father, watching him pick up a crowbar.
Overturned paint tins littered the floor, their contents puddled from wall to wall. White, glistening, and fresh. A stepladder lay on its side, and footprints headed off beneath an archway and round a corner.
Parker lifted Kat with his free arm as Judy reached his side. Creating footprints of their own, they followed the other set to the corner.
And stopped.
Judy’s breath snatched and she coughed.
“Don’t look,” Parker said to his daughter.
The body of a decorator huddled against the wall; his legs trapped by a mound of grey-black filth, his neck a ragged mess. Bloody handprints smeared the wall. Above, more filth—fungus—drooped from a hole. Finding a larger amount of that black matter, Judy now saw that it was indeed a type of fungus. Exposed wires coiled through its sweaty skin. They sparked.
That music again; a distant sound, crackling.
The strip lights buzzed, then surged and went out.
Kat screamed.
The yellow glow of emergency lights flooded the corridor.
The fungal growth above seethed, the shadows deepened, and the black mass rushed downward. Tendrils burst from its surface, flexing dozens of skinny fingers. One extended and with a wet slap, coiled around the decorator’s leg to yank the body towards the ever-widening darkness. It was as though the shadows had opened up like a gaping mouth. The light dimmed further as the fungus clawed across the ceiling, the walls, the floor.
Parker held Kat away from the expanding darkness. A slithering tentacle whipped out, lashing for him. He swung the crowbar and the thing recoiled like a snake.
He shoved Kat into Judy’s arms. “Take her!”
Judy hugged the child to her breast. More darkness splayed across the tiles, blending with the paint, the blood. Reaching out. This fungus had a life of its own. Impossible.
Again Parker swung the crowbar and his leg shot sideways. He crashed to the floor and scrambled to his knees, slid, and smacked the wall. The tendrils drew back, ready to strike a second time.
“Come on!” Judy shouted and with one arm, yanked him upright.
Deep furrows creased his forehead. “Run!”
Judy fled down the corridor and in seconds reached an intersection.
From close behind, Parker yelled, “Go left!”
More fungus coated the walls and encased the occasional strip light. Sprinting beneath it, heading along that stretch, the darker the corridors became. Judy waited for the darkness to thrash at her. How was this happening? What they’d witnessed back there had been impossible.
After what seemed like a hundred corridors, they reached the elevators. The strip lights were all dead and the emergency lights pushed through deep shadows.
“What—” Parker began to say, and he staggered to a halt. One hand pressed against a wall, his chest heaving.
Kat’s tears soaked into Judy’s shirt. Her lungs burned and when she stepped closer to the elevators her stomach lurched. The fungus had stitched the doors together. Black fibres entwined like stubborn roots.
“Bloody hell!” Parker’s knuckles whitened as he twisted the crowbar.
“The stairs?” she demanded. Kat was starting to feel heavy.
“There aren’t any.” His eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“We’re far below ground. Only the lifts.”
Lifts. She loved the British.
“There’s another lift…on the other side.” He pushed past her. “But I don’t fancy the walk.”
He raised the crowbar.
For a moment he paused, and again Judy heard the faint crackle of music from somewhere. As before, she couldn’t quite make out the tune.
“Parker…” She breathed out, not realising she’d held her breath. It was as though she waited for that black stuff to come alive and grab him. She stepped further back.
He stabbed the crowbar between the elevator doors, leaned against it, and heaved. They didn’t budge, nor made any difference to that fungal growth. He heaved again.
And the doors burst open.
A dark expanse of simply nothing lay beyond. A kind of liquid darkness shimmered like a diesel spill defying gravity. Parker tumbled headfirst into the yawning void. This time the blackness didn’t look like fungus, it looked like the shadows themselves had opened up.
The doors slammed closed. Black threads crept inward and with a sound like dry leaves, stitched the doors together.
“Parker!” Judy backed up, turning Kat’s head away and hugged her tighter. The weight of the girl brought the darkness closer. No stairs.
Judy turned and ran, heading back towards the intersection. She had to find the other elevator, wherever the hell it was. The fungus already crawled over the tiles, along the walls. Sure, there were scuffs from the gurneys, but the new flooring, the bright white walls, the brilliant glow of those strip lights, all highlighted the creeping spores.
She shoulder-barged a set of double doors and lurched into another room. Her heartbeat seemed to echo in the emptiness. From an archway at the far end, music drifted towards her. Recognition. It was a Beatles tune: Hey Jude… John Lennon was dead. Shot dead—she still couldn’t believe it. So many thoughts crashed through her brain. Her arms ached and her legs felt like jello. She slowed her pace and stopped before the archway. On the other side, another corridor; bright, white, and no darkness. There didn’t appear to be any spore patches, either.
She placed Kat down.
Hey Jude…
The girl looked up at her and then around the room. Wide eyed, red face, puffy. Her cheeks glistened. “Where’s daddy?”
Judy swallowed, her mouth and lips dry. “He’s… He’ll be with us soon.” She hated herself for saying that.
The music seemed not too far away. Jude, Judy… Her father used to call her that, before alcohol made him call her other things, before alcohol forced his hand against her mother. She recalled how once she’d had to clean up blood from the kitchen floor. That slap and swish creating pink arcs, the radio playing in the background as she wiped away Mother’s agony. Slap, swish.
Judy lifted Kat and headed off, praying she’d find the elevator soon. As she rounded a corner…
Slap, swish.
Diluted blood smeared in an arc. And that sound: slap, swish. Beside a bucket overspilling with pink froth was the janitor, mop in hand. His blue uniform flapped around him. Blood splashed his shoes.
The strip light overhead flickered, and in a burst of static the music faded.
Slap, swish.
Judy’s pace slowed. Finally someone else was here, someone else to help.
Kat’s tiny arms looped Judy’s neck, and in a muffled voice she said, “I want to walk.”
“No,” Judy whispered. They were only a few paces away from the janitor. She hoped he wasn’t contagious and moved closer to the wall. “Help us,” she said to him.
Still he kept his head down. His voice croaked as he said, “I must clean this up.”
“Help us!”
“It’s that damned harvest.”
“What?”
The blood left little room for them to pass.
“Such a mess,” he said and raised his head. White teeth shone through a bushy beard, his hair just as unkempt. “Stevenson and his damned harvest.”
She had no time for this. “Which way—”
“Stevenson. The boss. Not the boss-b
oss, but the boss down here.” Sweat dotted his brow.
“What are you talking about?” she snapped.
He pushed his hand against the wall. Spores bloomed from the surface, approaching his fingers. His flesh darkened and a greyness crept under his sleeve, up his neck and into his face. His mouth went slack and his eyes moistened, then blackened. They shone like black marbles. No white, just solid black orbs bulging in hollow sockets. Between pale lips, his teeth flashed again.
She pressed against the opposite wall, praying that the spores wouldn’t reach for her.
He removed his hand from the wall and gripped the mop. Slap, swish.
She squeezed past.
“Such a mess.” He continued to mop the floor, but only succeeded in slopping the blood around. His efforts hastened. Pink water splashed the walls, consumed by the spores.
Slap, swish… Swish, swish.
The sound of the man’s frantic cleaning faded behind her and the music crackled into play again.
Hey Jude.
By now, Judy’s throat pulsed with its own heartbeat. Her arms were killing her—putting Kat down seemed like a good idea but she couldn’t. She had to find the other elevator.
The music increased in volume, the notes sharper, the vocals more defined.
Mind reeling, she reluctantly placed Kat down. The girl’s feet tiptoed and then she stood on her own. The square tiles warped and shrank. They seemed miles away and vertigo tugged at Judy’s legs, her stomach. Kat peered up from far away, her eyes wide, just as Judy closed her own into a welcome darkness, albeit brief, private. Paul McCartney’s vocals floated towards her in waves. She straightened, eyes remaining closed. This was crazy. And someone was playing with her, playing that Beatles tune over and over.
“What’s your name?” Kat’s voice leaked through the darkness, nudging aside Paul’s chorus.
Inhaling the smell of paint, she opened her eyes. Kat’s hair, waves of orange and red, burned through the threatening darkness.
“I’m called Kat,” she said.
“I know.” Judy’s voice sounded weird. “I’m Judy.”
The little girl nodded. “Where are we going?”
“Getting out of here.” She stroked Kat’s cheek—clammy—and then lifted her up. The girl somehow weighed more than she had earlier.
Still that tune crackled from invisible speakers.
Kat fidgeted in Judy’s arms as she jogged through more rooms. All empty save for the odd gurney or two, all showed signs of that black stuff coating the wall. The music swept along with them, sometimes soft, sometimes loud. Always crackling, as though played from scratched vinyl. Perhaps it was from a record player. High in the corners, she saw several brackets and wire coiling from holes. No speakers.
The smell of damp, of foliage, eventually overtook the paint smell, and the strip lights seemed to be either off or not working. Only the emergency lights guided them. It appeared this was where they were still building the place. Some walls were just plasterboard panels and the ground was simply bare concrete. A wheelbarrow contained three paint tins and a bucket of paintbrushes. Perhaps given time, they’d build that staircase. She guessed—she hoped—the elevator would be somewhere near.
Then the lights went out. Deep, dark, suffocating.
Not even any emergency lights.
Kat screamed. It echoed, shrill. Her fingers dug into Judy’s neck.
“It’s okay,” she told the girl, stroking her hair. She didn’t know if she reassured Kat or herself.
The music had stopped, and so had they.
Something creaked—a door?—from beside them. A vertical strip of light speared the darkness; a pathetic illumination.
Kat made a mewling sound like an animal.
The door swung wide and smacked the wall. The echo died as the music resumed, this time from within the room and no longer crackling. A miasma of damp, decay, and that heavy stink of vegetation forced itself down into her lungs.
Beyond the doorway, a vortex of yellows and browns churned and filled the room from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Sweat prickled Judy’s forehead as she struggled to comprehend what she faced. Kat clamped to her neck. Even though Judy thought of how the elevator doors had jerked open and swallowed Parker, she couldn’t move. She had to, but couldn’t. Whatever this was it curdled like mud and oil, milk and gravy. It hurt to look at, yet was mesmerising.
Still the music washed over her.
Judy squinted, knowing she must run. Amid the roiling chaos, the colours merged and twisted like teasing shadows, like phantoms in a sickly mist. Contours formed, sharpened; outlines of something…of furniture? Yes, a table and chairs, walls and picture frames. The haze thinned out, the browns becoming yellows and spiralling into cleaner colours, pleasant, soothing, normal. Sharp, three-dimensional and familiar.
Way too familiar.
Hey Jude…
She licked her lips. This was a dining room, her dining room—or at least, her parents’ dining room.
A remaining coil of shadow swooped down and around the turntable of the stereo system. Darkness spinning, coiling with the rotating vinyl. Faint wisps joined it and vanished into the stylus.
Her heart felt like a brick. What was this? And the music filled her up, stormed her ears.
The doorframe seemed to buckle, swept up into the surrounding shadows, torn apart silently. She stood in the centre of the dining room. The tune rose in volume, rumbling from the twin speakers either side of the record player. From the direction of the kitchen she heard Mother preparing dinner.
Judy realised she was holding her breath and mouthed, No.
Kat released her leg. “Where are we?”
Judy blinked. When had she set Kat down? She didn’t recall letting her go. She stepped forward. “Kat…”
The girl stood beside the oak table, its scuffed surface still marked by the red paint Judy had spilled—oh, how father had struck her hard.
She threw glances around the room.
Kat walked further forward and looked around. She passed straight through a chair as though it wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there, none of this was real. Everything was a cruel phantom, a tease from Judy’s past, a taunt of a childhood she so desperately wanted to leave in New York. This all had to be due to the clinical trial. Some bad trip, a hallucination triggered perhaps by the chemicals she’d abused in her teens and now the ones the doctors had given her.
She lifted her arm and looked at the welts and blood-bruises. What happened to her?
The little girl continued to walk and passed through the table. Her hair seemed to glow in contrast to the illusion. Through the table, passing the red stain that was now fading—wisps of shadow rose like smoke. Kat turned and lowered herself to sit on something Judy couldn’t see. Whatever it was, it made her bounce. Perhaps it was a cushion under the table—but this was all an illusion. The now-shimmering mirage of the table almost obscured the girl.
Judy moved, her eyes darting to the left and right, over to the fading archway. The clatter of cutlery, of dishes, reverberated from beyond. Her mother was there.
Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
Hey Jude…
Kat looked up as a shadow emerged from the kitchen. Someone approached. It wasn’t Judy’s mother, couldn’t be. Her mother was dead, killed by her father. Could it be her father? No, impossible, his suicide had closely followed.
Judy felt as small as Kat. The drugs they’d fed her were really playing with her, dragging up unwanted memories.
The bulk of shadow filled the archway and finally someone emerged. She couldn’t see the face. A white smock, stained dark, somehow pushed aside the wispy shadows, the image, the illusion. Lights flickered around the figure—candles, there were candles. No longer lampshades, and not even strip lights. Just candles.
Her phantom past, the music, all shrank and dropped back to where it belonged: the past. None of this should be here. The room faded, and in its place the rocky ex
panse of a cavern stretched out, its gloom lit only by the candles. Moisture dampened the air, ammonia stung her nostrils. Where was she? As the final wisps of shadow lifted, the false room completely vanished. This appeared to be the end of the labyrinth of rooms and corridors beneath the institute. Rock and masonry heaped the floor, and a number of concrete pillars reached into the darkness overhead. A stretch of unpainted wall lined one end of this great chamber. The blank-faced plaster looked out of place, foreign next to the curved, dark hulks of rock. The candles flickered, their haloes offering little comfort.
“Hello.” The man’s voice pierced the gloom. Deep, commanding. She recognised it. It belonged to Stevenson, the boss, the man in charge of the trials. This was the second time she’d met Stevenson. The first was when she’d sat in the room with the other candidates, when she’d signed the consent forms thinking only of the money.
Judy raked her fingers through her hair. Her head ached.
“Did the darkness make you see something?” he asked.
Judy glared at him. She didn’t know what to say. None of this made sense. Earlier the janitor had said something about Stevenson’s harvest. What had he meant?
“Hello, Kat.” He smiled and slid his hands into his pockets.
Kat said, “Hi.” Her back was twisted as she peered behind her and stared up at the man. She sat on a stained mattress. Leather straps, like serpents, coiled next to her. The buckles glinted with a dull wink from the candles lining an outcrop of rock. The archway behind Stevenson—no longer the archway to the phantom kitchen—framed him. It made his presence even larger, made him loom over Kat. Over them both.
The man approached. His moustache twitched.
“You’re Judy,” he said.
She nodded. “What’s going on? What have you done to us? Everyone else is dead. Are my hallucinations anything to do with you? The trial?”
“What did you see?”
“We have to get out of here!”
Something clanked.
Kat had reached behind her and now dragged something over the mattress. “What’s this?” She pulled an hourglass into view. Scuffed wood, scratched bulbs; the thing looked ancient. What appeared to be a wrist harness swung from it. Its buckles clanked again.
