by David Coy
“Yes. They told me it could . . . could keep . . . keep me alive for a very long time.”
“Umm . . . ”
“That’s all I know.”
“Really?”
He stared straight up. Rachel pursed her lips.
“I feel like I’ve been cheated here, Jacob,” she said. “I feel like you’re holding back on me.”
“I’ve . . . told you everything I know,” he said gently.
“Have you? What about the laboratory? What about that?”
“What laboratory?”
“You know, the one with all the really neat medical implements. Like the one that scared the shit out of you the other day. No idea what any of that is, huh?”
“I don’t remember,” he said kindly and closed his eyes.
“I see,” she said.
She was beginning to sound to herself like some incompetent Grand Inquisitor, and the feeling didn’t sit well. She could have sat there and ground away at him with questions for the next hour and was certain she wouldn’t have learned anything. He was doing a good job of hiding it, whatever it was. On a conscious level, she couldn’t understand why he’d want to hide a goddamned thing from her, but her intuition told her he was doing just that, and it was something very important—and threatening.
“Okay. You think about it, and I’ll check back with you later,” she said, plainly irritated. “Have a nice nap.”
She got up and left. The feeling of his eyes still on her, like the touch of sticky bug secretions, made her want to wash herself, over and over.
She went to her space and started to organize her things. She was going back into the structure again that morning to explore the antechambers adjacent to the lab. On the bed, John, propped up on one elbow, watched her.
“How’s your buddy?” he asked.
“I’m going to the lab today,” she said, avoiding the question. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Sure. You want to take the punk along, too?” John had grown fond of Eddie.
“Sure. If he wants to go. I don’t care.”
“He’s really under your skin, isn’t he?”
“Who? Eddie?”
“No, what’s-his-name, Jacob—whatever.”
“Oh, that. Yes, he does, if you really must know. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he said.
“Oh, how would you put it?” she asked.
He had to think about this. It was his business. He cared for her. She’d been acting so queer ever since she dragged the freak back from the chamber. He’d known she had turned strange ever since her encounter with the centipede. That he could understand—poison in her system he could understand. But the effect this skinny, wasted mutation was having on her was a real mystery.
“Well,” he said carefully. “I’d say you’re nuts over this—if I thought I could get away with it.”
“Fine,” she said. “You said it. Now can we get off the subject? I’d really like to.”
He nodded his head slowly. “Sure. I’d love to get off the subject. And go to the lab by yourself, or take the kid. Whatever.” He turned over and covered himself with the blanket. “Okay, whatever,” she said.
“You taking the kid?” he asked with an edge to his voice.
“Yeah,” she spat back.
“Good,” he said.
“Now, please. Shut up about it,” she said as she stomped off.
* * *
Rachel was too pissed off for company, even for that of mild-mannered Eddie, so she went off without him. She wasn’t supposed to. It was one of their rules, but this time she didn’t care.
Halfway down the tunnel, she nearly turned around, went back and apologized, then decided she’d do it later. He could wait. She hated what was happening to her. She hated it and she didn’t understand it, which made her hate it even more.
The aliens’ laboratory had become quite familiar to her. It was a vast open area filled with a baffling array of bizarre and fascinating stuff.
Umbilicals attached most of the tools to the structure itself, and a mass of these lines throughout the upper part of the chamber formed a thick web. Using a scope from the floor, she’d viewed the junctures where they made contact and could make out odd formations she presumed to be organs where some of the umbilicals attached.
The technology puzzled and captivated her, and most of the intense dread she’d originally felt about it all had largely—but not entirely—dissipated. There were times, though, when an especially horrific device gave her the absolute creeps, and she could do nothing to control it. Familiarity reduced the number of those incidents with each passing day. But today, being there alone, surrounded by the very implements of one’s worst nightmares, was getting to her and she felt edgy and alert. She’d learned from years of fieldwork to trust those feelings.
Today, she was going to check out one of the sub-chambers at the far end of the lab. It had held her attention for some time. From a distance, it looked smaller, and unfortunately darker, than some of the others.
She took a deep breath, shifted her pack, then went down the ramp and headed for the opening on the far side.
As she weaved her way through the jumble of benches and hanging instruments, the ghastly atmosphere of the place began to fill her, and she felt as if she were losing herself to the lab’s space. She felt that as she walked, the tools themselves were moving, not her. When she turned, they turned with her, tracking her with their knife blades and spiky tips. The thought began to grow that the lab itself was alive, had a mind of its own, and operated not at the hands of some alien technician, but of its own will. She began to see it as a living entity and the most alien of all alien things in the universe. It had waited patiently for her to come to it, willingly—exactly like a fly to the scent of a carnivorous flower. The lab-thing had waited to get her alone. It had been waiting, waiting to get to her and only her. The tools were waiting for her to get a little bit closer; and when she did, they would grab her and wrap her tight, the cords would strap her down to a bench, and then the tools would converge on her like spiders, clamoring toward her across the web. When they reached her, they would tear her and cut her and her screams would go unanswered.
By the time she was halfway across, she had to stop to get her breath. She put her invented fears behind her and leaned with both hands on one of the benches, making physical contact with the thing she most feared. It was either that or fall over. She was sure she was going to have a seizure at first and prepared herself for it, but it never came. Where her hands made contact with the surface, the stiff, rubbery texture gave just a little and revealed a hard substrate underneath it, like bones under the flesh of something dead.
Everything, every shape, sound and texture of the lab was evil to her. Even the scent, a thick and musky fog permeated everything and added its own brand of olfactory malevolence to the air.
This is not a good day to be here, she thought. I should not have come alone.
She went ahead and tried her best to tune out the fear.
Only when she was through the lab’s hideous gauntlet, and the last of the grotesque implements were behind her, did she sigh a deep sigh of relief.
The opening to the chamber was indeed darker than the others, and not just the result of some trick of light as she’d hoped. She’d brought a lamp with her just in case. She dug the lamp out of her pack, switched it on and proceeded inside. The lamp cut a thick swath of brightness to see by, but seemed to accentuate the darkness somehow.
She walked about twenty meters in before she saw the pit at the very end of the tunnel. It formed a perfectly black hole where the tunnel terminated. She was reluctant to approach it, and wished all the more that John, or even Eddie, had come with her. In spite of her fear, her professional dignity kept her moving slowly toward that black hollow.
She moved to the very edge and shined the light down into the pit.
Bones. Thousands of bo
nes were there, clean and white as if the flesh had been eaten from them by something—perhaps larva, worms or chemicals—and left spotless.
Rachel had studied thousands of life forms, dead and alive, on several planets. She knew each nuance of form and how the fickle nature of evolution could modify form for its own purpose, often at random or seemingly without intent. But a reason—a vindication—for the form was always hiding within the design, and the beauty that was the result of perfect function always came through eventually. The remains in the pit were so tangled and intertwined that it took her a moment to discern one thing, one part, from another. Trained in the anatomy of living things, she soon had several of the objects separated from the others in her mind’s eye. What she saw made her sick.
There was no evolution here. There was no natural beauty in that black hole. Here was unnatural design crafted by the minds of beings, mad and twisted.
She witnessed things joined at every juncture, things with two or three heads, or hand-like appendages protruding from thighbones or backbones. When she got better at discerning the shapes, she could see complete aliens beings fused together like Siamese twins, but in completely unnatural ways, as if the designer had been motivated by whimsy at making the monstrous combinations. Some of the unions seemed to be clearly sexual or erotic in nature.
This was the dumping ground for the experimentation in the lab, she was sure of it. This is where the failures—or the successes for all she knew—found themselves; dumped into a pit of something nasty or caustic to be stripped of flesh already ruined by maniacal manipulation.
The pit was deep, and she had no intention of going down into it. She fashioned a loop from a length of rope in her pack; and using it as a lasso, managed to pull up pieces of one of the more freakish constructions. It looked to her to have been a biped at one time, but had been modified into a quadruped. It was smallish, no larger than a child of six or seven years, and she was only a little relieved when a moment’s examination of the teeth and jaw showed it to be nonhuman in origin. That fact didn’t diminish the empathy she felt for a creature so abused and tortured. The limbs looked as if they had been stretched and curved into arcs, for no other reason than it was in the designer's power to do it. The head, too, looked to have been stretched and pushed and pulled here and there like so much clay. The entire skeleton was covered with attachments that made no sense to her. To Rachel’s trained eye, this couldn’t have been the work of a scientist, no matter how alien; it was the work of an unhuman—and unfeeling—artist, creating transmogrified organisms at will, and for the unfathomable, amoral sake of being able to.
The skeleton was fragile so she wrapped the rope around it to hold it together, then headed back to the shuttle. She’d had enough of these alien riddles for one day.
When she got back she was surprised to see Jacob sitting at their table with Donna and eating from a platter with a fork. The sight of him there, dressed in standard contractor’s cottons with his strange head drooped over the plate, made her want to vomit. Donna was sitting opposite him, watching him eat.
“Hey, Jacob,” she said. “Recognize this?” she held the skeleton out to him like a bundle of sticks. He acted like he’d heard nothing at all.
Donna turned around and looked.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, leaning away from it. “And where in hell did you get it?”
“Ask Jacob, there,” she said putting it gently down. “He can tell you more about it than I can. Oh, I can tell you what it is all right. I can describe the parts. What I can’t tell you is why it exists. That’s the mystery, isn’t it, Jacob? What about that? Care to comment?”
Jacob continued to eat, slowly, without looking up as if there were no one else in the room.
“What would he know about it?” Donna asked.
“I think he knows exactly why it exists, don’t you, Jacob?”
Donna looked over at Jacob. “Do you? Do you know?” she asked of him.
“Ask him why his entire external physiology is so strange,” Rachel said. “Ask him.”
Jacob continued to eat as if he were the only one in the chamber.
“Well, I’ll tell you why,” Rachel said. “This place is the sickest fucking place in the universe.”
“It’s bad, I know but . . . ” Donna began.
“No. It’s not just bad. This place is the center of evil in the universe. And Jacob knows all about it.”
“Rachel? What are you talking about?” Donna asked. She was beginning to worry about Rachel’s mental state. It was one thing to have seizures and another to babble incomprehensibly. In Rachel’s case the two often occurred in close proximity.
“Okay, it’s like this,” Rachel began. “The aliens who lived here had a way with living things. They didn’t just experiment for the sake of science. They were more interested in art, you know, the creation of things, like playing God.”
“I don’t get it,” Donna said.
“See this thing?” Rachel pointed at it. “This thing is a fabrication. They made this thing from parts of other fucking things. They violated natural laws and combined one animal with parts from another to get this, this abomination.”
“How?”
“All that shit in the lab is designed to do just that—to make goddamned things like this thing here.”
“Yikes,” Donna said, studying her patient for a response to Rachel’s rant.
“Yikes? Yeah, I’d say yikes to that,” Rachel said with a sneer. “How about you Jacob? Yikes? Doesn’t that say it all?”
No reply.
“Well, yikes to that,” Rachel mocked and walked away indignantly.
“He’s tired and obviously doesn’t know anything about what you’re talking about,” Donna said apologetically to Rachel’s back. As strange as Jacob was, he was still her patient. She did have an investment in him, if a somewhat reluctant one. She didn’t know if defending Jacob was entirely appropriate, but it seemed the thing to do.
Jacob put a slow forkful of food in his mouth.
He waited until Rachel was across the chamber before he spoke. “You said there was a settlement not too far from here?"
“Yes. It’s about two hundred kilometers away,” she replied. “Why?”
“I think I’d like to go there. I don’t feel welcome here.” Donna thought it over. Maybe it was best. He was having a very bad influence on Rachel. The problem for Jacob was that there was no guarantee he’d get a better reception at the settlement. He was too damned weird. “We’ll see in a few days,” she said. “Let’s see how you’re feeling then.”
“Can you tell me about it?” he asked. “Can you tell me about the people there?”
Donna thought about it, then began to tell him what she knew about The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance.
For the first time, she got the feeling Jacob was really paying attention to what someone was saying. She also got the sense that he didn’t want her to notice that fact. She talked for a long time.
* * *
Rachel unslung her pack and threw it down.
Her fascination with the structure and its contents had turned to something else entirely. She had stumbled upon something unique in the universe, found interesting evidence and unraveled it. She should have been happy about it.
It had been the tree’s sheer enormity and its organic perfection she’d admired. But the truth hiding inside it had finally revealed itself like a rotten corpse. It had come to her in the form of dreadful remnants of an alien science that was less science than the simple torture of living things.
When Rachel was ten years old, she’d plucked a few flowers from her mother’s little flower garden—a poppy, a rose and a purple morning glory—brought them inside and drew them with pencil on sheets of yellow paper. Thus began her journey into the realms of the living. A profound respect for the denizens of those worlds became her lifelong companion. In time, her love became suffused with reverence for all things living. But there was none o
f that within these strange walls; only some wicked, selfish desire to change, mold and modify for reasons which had nothing to do with natural attributes. Evolution shaped all perfectly, exquisitely over eons. Each limb was immaculate, each turn ideal. There was no better sculptor than time and tide. She tried to imagine what it would be like for some perfect but hapless entity to find itself in the hands of these beings—to wake up with its physiology painfully altered by them.
She wanted to cry, not out of sadness, but out of anger. No tears came, only rage.
It was Jacob who was the source of it, the rank nucleus, the filthy center. It was as if some feeble scent from him set her anger on fire like a pheromone in reverse. There was something about him that tugged on a raw nerve like a gnawing rat. She could feel it but just couldn’t think out the reason for it.
“What’d you find?” John’s voice said.
She turned, took a step toward him and leaned against him for a hug. “It’s there, over by the table. It’s there. The thing is there . . . ”
“You don’t sound happy,” he said.
“No,” she said weakly. “I’m not happy.”
“Okay,” he said, “maybe you’ll have better luck next time.”
“There won’t be a next time. I’m not going back in ever again.”
“That’s serious,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“How come?”
“Go look at it. Go see what this place was all about.”
* * *
Two days later, in darkness softened only by the light of twin moons, they flew in and dropped Jacob off within walking distance of the settlement. They watched him limp across the plain with his net suit hanging from his thin frame like a gossamer tent. His Bible, as requested, had been stored in an airtight case and hung down low from his longer arm. He looked to Rachel like some lopsided specter, stumbling across the field. He stopped and turned for a last look, and Rachel could feel his eyes on her.
