by Ryan Notch
THE ABYSS ABOVE US: BOOK 2
by
Ryan Notch
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Copyright © 2010 by Ryan Notch
Cover art by Kyle Notch
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Thank you for purchasing The Abyss Above Us. I hope you enjoy it. Well actually I hope it scares the hell out of you. If you did enjoy it, please consider posting a review at the site you downloaded it from. It's the best way to ensure you keep getting access to indie books, instead of just what big house publishers think you should be reading.
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Book 2
Part 1
Chapter 17
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Collin slept deeply, having spent the afternoon with Noel. Alex had been off with his cousins, so Noel had helped Collin work on his Chevelle. Nothing special, just an afternoon spent with the women he loved, which was kind of wonderful.
When he got home he slept deeply, having been up for almost twenty-four hours. He had a dream, the most wonderful dream of his life. He dreamt he and Noel were driving in a winter storm in the mountains. The car slid off the road and got caught in a snow embankment. For some reason the car heater didn’t work, so they had to hold each other for warmth. Nothing more, just the two of them alone, holding each other tight.
Collin woke alone in the dark. He went from perfect happiness to perfect loneliness in one horrible second. He almost sobbed with the despair of it.
But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. Wouldn’t let himself. Couldn’t allow any weakness to creep in, weakness was for people who weren’t in control. Control with a capital C.
And so because his heart couldn’t break, his mind did. He’d effectively gone to sleep sane, and woke up otherwise. He could feel it. Feel he wasn’t sane anymore, and it felt awful. Not like how he thought it would. He always thought it would be an escape, that you broke down and didn’t have to worry about things anymore. That you laughed and lived in your dreams and weren’t touched by the real world.
But that wasn’t how he felt at all. He felt worse than ever. He’d tried to tell himself that things were getting better, that his success in his professional life would somehow spill over to his personal life. He couldn’t tell himself he wasn’t finding more and more excuses to spend time with her. That he wasn’t still obsessed with thoughts of touching her, being with her. He wanted her so bad that he wondered that even if they were together he could ever have her enough. Her smile that shined like the sun he wanted to shine only at him. Her smoky laugh he wanted to laugh only at his jokes. And her beautiful body he wanted her to share only with him.
Finally he wanted her so bad he wanted to die to end the pain of it. He wanted to bash his head in to stop thinking about her. He wanted to slit his wrists to bleed her out of him. He wanted to jam a gun into his mouth and blow his love for her out against the wall for jaded police officers to find later. To find and to interpret like tea leaves and say to each other, "You can tell by these bits of brain here that he did this for a girl named Noel. You've been on the job as long as I have you can tell these things. We'll have to let her know so she can realize he did it for her, and that no one else will ever love her as much as he did."
It had come to the point that Collin wanted to do these things as much as he wanted to be with her. He could never have her, but he could still have that.
One last act of control.
Collin slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen. He took a hammer out of the drawer and walked into the bathroom, almost shaking with nervousness. He didn’t let himself slow down, didn’t let himself think about what he planned to do. He swung the hammer into the mirror, shattering it into razored shards. He pulled one away from the others and held it to his wrist, pushing the edge into the veins. The thought of what came next made him nauseous, but he knew it wouldn’t hurt much. Just a little twitch of the wrist and he could sit in the bathtub and rest. Rest at last.
He looked up into the remains of the mirror, into the distorted and shattered reflection staring back at him. It seemed so oddly familiar somehow. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, was fascinated by this image of what he had become. So much more accurate than it had been when whole.
A long time later he looked down again at the blade against his wrist, and knew he’d lost his courage for it. He couldn’t do it, was at last a failure at this as well. He slid to the floor and closed his eyes, wondering if he was going to throw up.
As much as he wanted to sit there forever and wallow in his misery, his inexhaustible mind started thinking over an idea. Something about how it was funny that when he looked at that fractured image of himself in the shards of the mirror, his mind still had no trouble assembling it into a cohesive image. The processing power of the senses was unparalleled, and it wasn’t just vision. Maybe he could find the form in the dark matter if he experienced the math how humans were best at experiencing math, as music.
He already had the program, having blackmailed Joe into giving him an advance copy of what they’d been working on. He could plug the four dimensional impact points into it and have it translate them back into music notes. There were plenty of programs out there that could play music if you just put in the notes, most of them even had free trial versions to download. He was no computer genius, but he was pretty good. He could do it.
“OK,” he said to himself as he pulled himself off the floor and set the shard of mirror aside. “Fuck it. Better than sitting on a dirty floor in your underwear all night.”
It took six hours of annoying fiddling back and forth between various programs and worksheets, but at the tail end of the night he finally had it ready. The notes sat in front of him, ready for him to click play and listen. He paused for a moment, wondering if it would all be just senseless noise. If it had just been another night wasted. He was excited, but underneath was a sense of trepidation. As if something was wrong, that he’d committed some sin worse than the suicide he’d planned earlier. Even with all of the lights on, the room suddenly felt very dark, as if the night was creeping in through the windows from outside.
“You’re exhausted Collin,” he said, long past the point of thinking it strange to talk to himself.
“Your minds playing tricks on you. You know that math has a beat, now let’s see if it can sing.”
He clicked the button, and heard the sound of it pour forth from the speakers. He closed his eyes and let the darkness of it envelop him.
Such things he heard.
Chapter 18
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Shaw and Walter sat in the car in the parking lot of the mall, completely at a loss. They’d driven from the far outskirts of Boston until they began to find the first signs of suburbia, then stopped. Shaw had never planned things out this far. In fact he hadn’t planned anything whatsoever concerning an escape or what to do afterwards. He kept thinking Walter would says something like “Now what?” so he could reply “You tell me” and maybe get some kind of brainstorming going.
Shaw also kind of wanted to ask Walter exactly why he had been trying to kill himself, to better get an idea of why everyone had killed themselves. Or for that matter he could ask why he killed poor Valentine. But oddly enough, as important as some of those facts may have been long term, the whole conversation was just too awkward. Neither one of them had said a thing about the whole affair. It wasn’t like Walter didn’t say anything at all, wasn’t like he was catatonic or something. Just little snippets of ordinary conversation like “I think there is an on ramp on the right up here” or “Lets see what’s on the radio.”
What wasn’t on the radio yet, thank God, was word of their escape. Actually Shaw suspected that it would be quite a while before someone notic
ed exactly which two lunatics were missing from the carnage. But when they did, he was pretty certain there would be a fairly intensive search for the only man to survive two of the most mysterious mass suicides in history. Not to mention his sidekick, a lunatic responsible for at least two violent murders. Shaw made a mental note to throw away the straight jacket currently residing in the back seat as soon as possible.
“We need clothes,” Shaw said at last. “Maybe some other supplies. That lady’s credit cards should be good.” They had by now learned the woman’s name whose purse Shaw had taken, though neither seemed to want to speak it.
“Longer than that,” said Walter. “After someone kills themselves you don’t exactly go and cancel their cards first thing. As long as we don’t go on a spending spree, we should be fine.”
Shaw was surprised at the amount of thought put in to this, somehow expecting Walter to be desperately confused or spouting mad nonsense at best.
“They ought to hold us until I can get access to my offshore accounts anyway,” said Walter.
Well there goes the other shoe, thought Shaw.
“Right, well clothes first,” Shaw said.
“I’ll need a business suit too, for when we go see my accountant.”
“Yeah, of course you do.”
Heading into the mall, Shaw felt extremely self conscious about what he was wearing. The asylum outfits were more like pajamas than prison jumpsuits, but still he felt like anything they did to stand out would be a problem.
Walter walked with complete self confidence, though. No one gave him a second glance as they walked into Sears and began shopping.
“I’m gonna go find a suit,” said Walter. “Meet me in that department after you find something.”
“Yeah, OK.”
Twenty minutes later Shaw went looking for him, dressed and feeling almost human for a change. Purchasing the clothes with a stolen credit card had been an exercise in near-panic, but the bored looking cashier had barely glanced at it as she slid it through the machine.
He didn’t find Walter in the business suit section, and immediately got a bad feeling. He did a quick and clandestine tour of the store, trying to find him while not being seen by the security guards he felt sure were looking for him. After not finding him inside Shaw headed to the car with a sinking feeling.
Gone.
Shaw realized he didn’t have the keys, Walter having taken them at some point he couldn’t remember. He stood there in the parking lot for only a moment, trying to think fast but calmly. He walked to a pay phone and called 911, warning them of Walter’s escape and what he was driving. It made him feel like dirt to turn in his friend, and also was afraid of what Walter would tell them. But as much as he liked the guy, Walter was a homicidal maniac, and Shaw was responsible for him being free.
With that, Shaw took the first bus he could find heading into the city. All his friends were dead or gone. He could only think of one place in all the world he might find sanctuary.
When Shaw was younger his first computer job had been to set up a network for a school attached to a local Boston Catholic Church parish. The priest, an older man named Gabriel Mason, had seen hope for Shaw’s salvation. The idea that he might need salvation had never even occurred to Shaw up until that point, and didn’t often occur to him afterwards. Did it matter if there was a God if you couldn’t create a flowchart and map out the steps to find out for sure? It wasn’t a theory if you couldn’t prove or disprove it. And if it wasn’t a theory, then what was the point?
Still, Shaw had for some reason stayed in contact with the old Priest. He had pride in his first network and volunteered his services to keep it running and update it from time to time. Father Mason, despite not being your typical Boston Irish priest, was very much of the old school. Whether because of or in spite of his African upbringing, he still believed in true and supernatural evil. And while Shaw didn’t believe in that, he thought somehow Father Mason might be the only person who would believe his story. The idea of seeking sanctuary in a church wasn’t really that far fetched, when you thought about it.
After all, Shaw didn’t just need a place to stay. He needed a place to work.
Chapter 19
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Things had been going well for Collin. Ever since he’d started listening to the music of his work, he had a sense of organization and purpose he hadn’t had in a long time. A sense of clarity he hadn’t had in a long time.
The sound of the work had let him see it in a whole new way. What had once been only achieved through complex equations, now he could understand naturally. He could dive into the four-dimensional framework as easily as a fish into water. And best of all, when he listened to the looped recording he had programmed in, he could almost forget about Noel.
He could breathe again. A respite at last from the terrible longing for her. He listened to it constantly, even if it did start to make him feel a little strange. As if he was changing into something subtly but importantly different than what he had been.
His transformation was such that he even began to dream in four dimensions. Falling asleep to the now constant sound of the shape of the bubble chamber impacts, he would at first dream of a place he couldn’t recognize yet felt he had been before. He wandered this location for two nights of dreaming before he realized that it was actually his apartment seen in four dimensions. After that he dreamt of other locations as well. Ones he now recognized as places he had been but had seen in a limited way. He knew he saw them as one sees a square on the top of a Rubik's Cube, knowing that there is more below, only hidden from one’s limited perception.
As his dreams progressed he began to realize he was not alone. Something else was there with him. Something alive, and familiar. Something dark in a way he’d never imagined before. And as he progressively became more aware of it, it became more aware of him. Began to notice him, then to search for him. He made no effort to hide.
While awake he wondered at these dreams. It was of course possible he was just putting them together from the stress of the work, of his life and lies. And yet he found himself in a strangely Zen state of not questioning whether they were real or not, only waiting to see what would happen.
When finally through sleep It found him, It rushed upon him as a spider who has finally captured a fly in its net. For the first time in a long time Collin knew fear, though the pain of living had left him with no fear of dying. Whatever that thing was, Its attention was worse than the simple death of a bullet to the brain or a slit wrist.
But just when It was almost upon him, It stopped. It looked at him, if “looked” can describe the way it perceived, as if it was disappointed. As if it had been expecting someone else.
Though it did not recognize him, he recognized it. From a part here, a part there. It was massive beyond imagining, but yes he recognized it. Its nature was nothing a human could comprehend, and even his sleeping mind almost ruptured to behold it. He averted his eyes to the ground and fell to his knees.
So there is such thing as a God, he thought.
And then It spoke.
Chapter 20
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After a few weeks of living secretly in the basement of the church, Shaw was almost to the point where he missed the asylum. Sure the church was big, especially when you included the attached building. The building itself was rather like a cross between a schoolhouse and an old office building, the basement of which was where his room actually was. But it was still as much of a prison as before, just with less company.
He longed to go for coffee somewhere, or maybe a movie. Anything more than wandering around the empty building at night just to stretch his legs. Looking around at things and out the windows. He felt like nothing so much as a prowler. Or maybe a ghost. Even a walk around the block at night would have been great.
But he knew he couldn’t risk it. He was pretty sure that the only survivor of not one but two major unexplained disasters was high on
everyone’s watch list. The FBI had in fact come to the church itself, searching the grounds. Father Mason had hidden him in a storage room down a secret tunnel, one which Shaw was surprised and a bit dismayed to learn had been built for bootlegging purposes during prohibition.
On the other hand, the secret storage room was perfect for his computer setup. Well “perfect” would have meant not running power cable and Ethernet lines down an old damp tunnel, but it was pretty good. Down here he didn’t have to worry about someone stumbling in on him and possibly reveal his location, a fear he dwelled on quite a bit. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of jail, though he was, but that if he was locked up there would be no one to continue the work.
No one to figure out what it was. No one to try and make it go away. Because it was still here. That was obvious now. And he doubted it minded consecrated ground any more than it minded asylum grounds.
He’d been lucky to be granted such a perfect place to live and work. He still wasn’t sure what convinced Father Mason to let him stay.
He smiled slightly as he remembered the conversation.
Father Mason had moved to America almost fifty years ago, as a young man. A black man from Africa, he still carried his accent with him after all this time. He was a caring man, though his kindness was tempered with a strength born of apartheid and the civil rights movement. He was a man who embraced the modern world as best he could, but considered the supernatural events in the Bible to be every bit literal.
Shaw had shown up with nothing more than the clothes on his back, practically jumping out of the bushes at the poor old Father. Explaining to him how “yes” he had been in the mental institution and “no” he didn’t blame the Father for not being able to visit. He then watched the man’s face fall as he explained that “no” he hadn’t been released, he had escaped while everyone in the asylum killed themselves horribly and it would probably be on the news soon. Father Mason had nodded sadly while Shaw told him all about how he had summoned it on accident, just as he had done at the University. It was clear to Shaw that he was nodding sadly not because he believed Shaw but because he believed him to be insane.
