by H T G Hedges
Seaweed snared at my legs, thick chains biting into the flesh of my calves so that I was forced to strain against the pull. And suddenly it too was gone. Free of the weight I tumbled forwards onto my knees, grazing them on hard packed concrete - a city street, grey and unforgiving under a familiar early morning sun.
But that wasn’t quite right, the light was pulsing gently, keeping a rhythm with my thumping heart - every second pulse met with a brightening of the light, each between beat a dimming. The shifting pallor brought a stab of nausea to my stomach and I retched tasting bile and - maybe - blood.
Something smashed into my shoulder, sprawling me back onto the hard pavement. Stunned and exhausted, I lay still for a moment until a heavy foot descended on my outstretched hand, crunching knuckles under its weight.
Crying out, I went fetal, folding in on myself as more and more people hurried past, some missing me, others connecting - casual callous blows. I was going to be unintentionally trampled to death.
Through a cage of my fingers, I saw that every one of the people thronging the street, all of them dressed and hurrying like they were late for a formal ball, was topped off without the addition a face, like someone had been drawing them in and just got bored halfway to finishing. Each visage was a simple flat surface - an artist’s blank canvas. It was at once terrifying and mesmerizing, an echo from somewhere.
This was just one more test I realised, just like the beach and, armed with this knowledge, I rose smoothly to my feet, the faceless pedestrians sliding easily around me like ice round a heated knife.
And then they too were gone. For a few moments the street lay empty, then the pulsing, beating sun began to swell. It doubled in size, then trebled, turning round in a clear blue sky and as it rotated it cooled and hardened like ash forming on metal, until the whole thing had become a great, bulbous moon that filled the heavens.
It started to burn from within, fire eating it from the inside out - blue-green flames writhing and consuming the celestial body until the whole thing was aflame and capsizing in on itself.
Melting in complete eerie silence, it broke apart, the sky dissolving into birds once again, drowning me in the brightest of white, amazing light that left me awed and blind.
When my vision cleared the street was no more, replaced by a study, wood panelled and opulent, the tick of a clock sounding loud over the far off howling of a phantom wind. Everything in this room was a dark cherry maple polished wood or patent green leather. A great winged armchair - facing away - stood in front of a desk at one wall, on another an unusually large grandfather clock proved a source for the ticking - though it was irregular, a tick only with no balancing tock.
Tick. Tick. It set my teeth on edge.
With a sound like tearing velvet the chair slowly rotated to face into the room, a shape unfolding from its shadowed depths to fill it, long legs and long arms ending in hands with longer fingers, the figure draped in an ill fitting suit of black cloth. A gas lamp sprang in a moment to life, bathing the room in a soft amber light and casting long shadows over the occupant.
Tick.
I climbed slowly to my feet, shoes clumping heavily on the floorboards.
Tick.
The figure shifted in his chair, leaning forwards, eyes flashing yellow in the burning lamplight.
Tick.
There was a knife jutting handle up from one of the boards, softly vibrating as if it had been just that minute dropped there. Shadows were spreading where its tip bit into the wooden boards - the memory of pooling blood.
Tick.
The figure’s face cleared the swirling shadows, mouth stretching into a too big, too curved, wolf’s grin. His teeth glinted in the dirty light, his eyes swirled oddly. At the back of my mind something clicked with familiarity. The wind whispered, pulling through the cracks in the wooden walls, wailing throughout the stretching room.
Tick - this one elongated on for the longest time, the sound stretching out in an eternity as we stared at one another.
Tick. And the moment was over.
I fainted forward, plucking the knife from the boards. It settled into the palm of my hand like an extension of my arm, natural and organic. "No," the shadow man said, flowing to his feet, still half lost in the dark, raising one large white hand, palm out.
Tick.
Suddenly I was being pushed back, an intense and undeniable pressure forcing itself against me as the howling of the wind built and eddied, raging, battering the of-a-sudden thin walled room. With a crash one wall sheared away completely behind me. Beyond it there was nothing, just the gaping void.
The contents of the room were emptying into it now, the desk picked up and rattling past as I scrabbled at the smooth boards. The ticking clock followed, then another wall until at last it was just me and him as the tears streamed down my face and I screamed into the howling unearthly wind.
His grin stayed fixed, the pressure leaving him unmoved.
It was too much effort, too hard to hold on. I was picked up and cast, like a rag doll, into the dark.
I fell for the longest time, through tumbling dark nothing. Lights flickered and danced in the ether, willow the wisps floating through a sea of ceaseless night. I fell for so long that I lost all sense of self once more, until I couldn’t tell if I was truly falling down or floating upwards. Or static and without motion. With nothing to measure the flow against, my descent became inertia. I was becoming one with the void, no longer a single falling entity, I was the dark, lost in an ever expanding nothing. Cold, empty, ageless emptiness. If I let it, it would wash over and engulf me.
It took everything I could bring to bear to pull myself back together. And it hurt. I felt I was forming my body anew, forging bone and sinew and muscle through shear force of will alone. Flesh to cover functioning organs, blood to flow through arteries, air into lungs and life into shadow. I grew teeth, nails, hair, skin. Last of all, I think, I grew eyes anew and with them came substance to the blackness.
I was falling through cloud as snowflakes whipped past me, beautiful and stinging, their complex impossible shapes floating like cold white feathers through the mist. As I fell the flakes hardened into shards of ice, jagged as glass, that sliced at my face and hands. They shone amongst the translucent clinging cloud, ripping it to flowing, shredded strands.
And then I was out of the cloud and the ice was sloughing down, melting into cold, hard rain and I was falling with it. It seemed like the rain had always been falling, as far back as I could remember, turning streets into rivers and rivers into raging seas. Like an iron grey curtain it carried me down, soaking and shivering, through the frigid air.
Far below, now, I could see the beginning of land, growing up to stretch away in a vast green delta, impossibly huge and without end. It grew bigger and bigger as I raced towards it, arms open in an embrace that would dash me against its great surface. Wind whistled about my head and ice formed on my skin, my eyes streaming. The tears themselves were whipped away on the force of the billowing current.
Mountains passed by on all sides, their great bulk stabbing up from the land as the light glinted from their snow capped peaks. Blue-grey rivers swirled by as I raced past, gurgling their way from their hidden origins, foaming and swollen from the power of the rains that bore me ever downwards.
I was close now, still struggling to retain my sense of wholeness, aware of an insistent ache in my head, in my neck, about my wrists. I could almost work out what it meant, if only I had a little more time. But I was almost at the termination of my descent, falling through branches and red gold leaves that flew past my eyes, whipping at me as I passed.
And there was the ground racing up towards me, a great green expanse of root and grass and fallen leaves. I rushed to meet it.
Forest. Light dappling tranquil gold through the branches. For a moment I felt almost at peace, calm in the roiling sea of nightmare. But there were shadows among the trees, and suddenly the wood was full of figures.
Eve
rything was becoming corrupted. Gaps were appearing, big chunks of nothing were permeating the world. I was slipping away, the scene tearing into random grasped images. Clutching fingers, empty faces, pale skin stretched taut over sharp bones. Snarling mouths with rotten teeth, stained and dripping in scarlet gums.
Another moment of nothing, then a clearing - a great purple black bruise of a tree stabbing into the sky at its centre, bending back in on itself - a perfect unnaturally natural gallows birthed from the torn, dying grass.
A rope coiling about my neck, thick with a viscous slime, coppery and rotten.
More torn flashes, cold rain lashing at my face, thick paint pressed cruelly to my cheeks, burning, sweating, dying.
Another flash and when I came back into myself it was to a choking, thrashing panic - nothing beneath my feet but empty air - I was dancing the gallows jig and this was the final curtain call. Shadows encroaching from all around, looming with a terrifying, suffocating finality. Fear welled like bile in my gut, burning at bursting lungs.
"Cut him loose," said a voice and it seemed separate from the things that were happening around me, carried on the wind, detached from everything. There was a pain around my wrists, a dull, throbbing insistence that I only noticed from its sudden cessation.
The rope snapped, and I fell back to earth.
Back to my feet.
Back to the real world.
***
Wychelo paced the corridors at Control like a caged animal and brooded. Things were unravelling for him, he could sense it, but he wasn’t certain why. It was something to do with the man Hesker; something to do with his refusal to die.
Wychelo was good at one thing and that was ending life efficiently. Had he understood pride then he would pride himself on that one ability.
He smarted at being dismissed so summarily too. What was Horst planning, he wondered, and why doesn’t he tell him? And why didn’t Hesker stay dead?
There were a lot of unanswered questions and they buzzed around his head like flies. He wondered why they had brought the prisoners to Perry’s office instead of back to Control – a tailor made fortress prison - despite being on the underground line that led straight there and had, in fact, been designed for just such a purpose. Too many questions. The world used to be simple, he thought, when did I lose track of it?
This gave him an even greater pause: he had been a blunt instrument for a long time – point him at a target and he would kill it - when did he start thinking of himself as an I? What was Horst planning? He stopped dead in the empty corridor. There was a way to find out.
I awoke to Corg’s broken, empty stare.
"Corg?" I whispered, though it came out like a gasp from my raw throat. I felt like I hadn’t drunk in days. "Corg?" But he was gone. There was something wrong with his eyes - the iris seemed fractured, like his mind. My emotions were all skewed. There was anger, but it was a calm, patient kind of anger – a cold, abiding emotion.
With deliberate care I reached forwards across the table and closed Corg’s emptily staring eyes. "I’m sorry," I told him simply, matter of fact: there didn’t seem to be much else to say. It was only then that I realised that I was not longer restrained and that the two white plastic zip-locks were lying casually discarded on the floor.
I was still staring at them when the door opened and two men entered, sent, no doubt, to clear Corg and I from the room. Both seemed surprised to find me awake and, at a guess, alive.
I sprang from the chair which went over with a hollow clang, and grabbed the first through the door by the collar then smashed him into the wall, knocking the air and the consciousness from him. The second guy, showing more presence of mind, fumbled under his jacket for the weapon secreted there. But he was too slow and I grabbed his arm, twisting it upwards until I heard a loud crack. With a shriek he went limp and I was able to bounce him face first off the table, sending him the way of his companion. They could sleep it off and keep Corg company for a while.
Doing what the unconscious man could not and removing the gun from its holster I cast one last glance at Corg and then I was out the door and on my way.
The door opened into a white walled hallway of the type common to all parts of industry not usually traversed by the public, which led into a long white stairway with nothing in the way of signposting to offer any suggestion of which way to head. I picked a direction at random and set off, senses strained for the approaching footfalls of any unwelcome strangers I might meet down here.
It was hard going. My head was still swimming from the drugs and the long corridor seemed to bend and sway away from me, its too bright lights beating down on me like a desert sun as I limped on. Everything was painful from the beating I had received at the hands of the army of mindless drones on the platform. My limbs ached, my mind felt numb. I wanted to stop, to lie down, shut my throbbing eyes and descend into darkness. But I felt anger too, burning in my gut, and it superseded the fatigue and kept me going.
Somewhere behind and below me, I knew, Corg sat stiff and cold in a chair in a windowless room.
At last, my slow march ended in a barred security fire-door. The journey had been uneventful but I didn’t know if I was relieved by this or disappointed as I pressed down the release bar and the door swung open onto an expansive and lavishly bedecked reception area. I pushed through the frame, using both hands for a final steadying moment of support, and out into the open space, only a little unsteadily, dazzled by the bright light once more.
People were staring as I crossed an expanse of marble floor, passing the enormous pine and chrome reception desk as casually and quickly as possible. Water tinkled merrily in an ornate decorative water feature, flowing in intricate splashing fountains that sprinkled and danced their way into a deep carp pool. Somewhere, synthesized pan-pipe music drifted on the still, sweet, breathless air.
There were a lot of people in suits milling around and passing through the concourse, security personnel dotted among them though they seemed to be keeping their distance at present. It occurred to me that I must be pretty near to where Corg and I had performed our diversion before the news crew barely the day before. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
I walked straight towards the imposing grandeur of the elevator, a hideous gold beast of a contraption. The receptionist tried to catch my attention but I ignored her. My intention was simple: Allman Perry was on the top floor so that’s where I was going. What I was going to do if I got there could wait.
I’d made it into the elevator and the doors were just closing when security mustered up the courage to get in my way, getting a hand in the door before they could shut. The doors slid open once more with a little beep. I was drawing too many looks, I knew, but there was no subtlety left in me so I just took out the scavenged pistol and leveled it at him, pointing it at his gut.
"Take the next one," I croaked. It was stupid, but I was working on borrowed time by now anyway. He looked at me for a long moment, weighing up what cost stopping me was worth to him perhaps, then stepped back, watching me all the while the doors slid shut. I hammered the top button and we started to move. With nothing else to do I adjusted my tie and straightened my jacket, waiting for the queasy motion of the elevator to come to its end.
Was he really about to do this? It was a step off the end of the line if he did. Come too far to turn back now, he thought.
He stared at the row of terminals and coiled wires, cables, junction boxes, looking for the right one. One of the techs had shown him how to listen in on the phone conversations of those workers suspected of sharing secrets about the work they were doing. It was a simple procedure – using a bug called a spike - and one at which Wychelo had become quite adept. Idly he wondered how many hours he had spent in this specially chilled room, lit by blue panel lights, listening to others unknowingly signing their own death warrants.
He would have to be quick and pick his moment carefully. These lines were monitored for tampering but the levels were always peakin
g and dropping then evening out again. The equipment caused an unavoidable spike – hence the name - but as long as he was quick it should go unnoticed. Or so he hoped; he’d be taken out and shot if they caught him doing what he intended.
Luck was on his side it seemed: the line was lighting up, blinking green which meant that a call was coming in. Then the light changed, becoming a deep red, as the call was connected. Quickly, carefully, Wychelo took the short needle like contraption, thin as a strand of hair, from his jacket and threaded it into the cabling for the active line then wound some adhesive gum around the join to keep it in place. A cord ran from the needle to an ear bud which he popped into his ear.
"Sir," someone was saying, Wychelo thought from the bass rumble it must be Rift, "We might have a problem. Hesker hasn’t left the building as predicted."
"No?" said the voice of Control, Horst’s voice.
"No sir, he’s heading to the penthouse office."
Silence for a moment as Wychelo counted down the seconds in his mind, acutely aware that he needed to remove the spike any second now.
"So he’s gone to pay Perry a visit?" said Horst at last, slowly. He seemed to come to a decision. "So be it, Allman brought it on himself with his insistence on getting his hands dirty. Do nothing, let us wait, and see how this pans out."
Wychelo pulled the spike and sat back, staring at the blue mass of cables and bleeping lights, his breath clouding in the heat controlled atmosphere. So they had meant for Hesker to escape. That at least shed some light on why they had taken him to Perry, even though he was only the money man, and not the prison like walls of Control.
He stood and started to pace once more. For some reason the knowledge made him angry. Suddenly he was tired: tired of plots and being a pawn in other people’s plans. Everything had grown too big.
He thought back to the moment when he’d taken the first steps to set himself on the path he had trodden to reach this point. He thought about everything that had happened after he had stumbled out of the mountains, changed irrevocably by the power of his curiosity.
