by Robert Price
“Top secret stuff, I’m afraid,” he continued. “And the Colonel will have me shot if I say too much. But let’s just say that inside all that concrete there’s an atomic facility. We’re testing the effect of different doses of radiation on a variety of materials.”
“Why?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
“You’re not that naive, Ballantine. You’ve seen the guards and the guns. This is, first and foremost, a military operation.”
I thought about that for a while as I got some of his, admittedly excellent, Scotch inside me.
“So, why me? And what did I just see?”
“One answers the other,” he said, somewhat cryptically. “You specialize in exotic forms of life, don’t you? Well this one seems to be as exotic as it gets.”
“That wasn’t life,” I said, but stopped when I saw the look in his eyes.
“It grows, it moves under its own volition and it shows signs of intelligence. You tell me what it is, Ballantine.”
He got up and poured more Scotch for the two of us. I wasn’t about to complain. He sighed deeply when he sat down again.
“It started when we got the reactor going,” he said. “My design, my baby, I had to be here for the big day, had to be the one hitting the switch. And so it was that I was the one who first noticed it…the only one that first time. I put it down to stress, but soon after that the night watch started to get twitchy and reports filtered through of badly scared men and ghoulies in the lab. I took to keeping watch myself, monitoring its behavior.
“Oh yes, Ballantine. It has behavior. I study it, and it studies us. It never strays far from the reactor core, and seems most interested in the control board. It has never done any damage, as far as can be seen. But, and here’s the thing that has the Top Brass worried, Ballantine…it is growing.”
So began the strangest week of my life. I spent most of it on the night shift in the lab, and my days on the hard dormitory bed, trying to grab some sleep while the installation worked on around me. The only booze to be had was what I could scrounge from Rankin and after several days of no progress in my investigation he cut me off.
It was on the first Saturday following my arrival that I decided to take a walk into town; I needed to clear my head after some peculiar events the previous night, and a long walk on the sea cliffs seemed the best solution. The guard at the gate refused to let me leave, showing me instead to the Colonel’s hut.
There I had to listen to a long lecture about the importance of secrecy, and I was left in no doubt that the Colonel believed our intruder to be a device of Russian origin.
“And I will have no hesitation of blowing it to Kingdom Come if it comes to that.”
With one final admonishment against talking to the locals, he gave me a daily pass, told me to be back by seven p.m., and I was finally allowed to leave.
It was one of those typically Scottish days where the sun only comes out sporadically between long periods of fog and drizzle. But I scarcely noticed. My mind was still reeling over the events of the night watch, and I let my feet follow the road while I tried to make sense of what I had seen.
I have said that Rankin was not pleased with the progress. That is because there had been none. I had observed the behavior of what we were now calling the entity, but had gleaned no new information.
Last night that had all changed.
As before I stood in front of the control panel and flicked the switch. And as before, the thing seemed to seep out of the concrete wall that housed the reactor core. What was different this time was the size. It had more than doubled, and seemed somehow more solid. Two long tendrils, like spectral arms, reached out towards me from the main mass and a chill seized the length of my spine. The squaddie who, until now, had stood quietly at the door let out a shriek and left at a run, but I was unable to move, frozen into immobility as something rifled through my mind as if it were little more than a filing cabinet. Memories I thought were long forgotten bubbled unbidden to the surface only to be tossed aside and discarded.
And so it went, for what seemed to be an eternity. Until we came to my holiday experiences in the Mediterranean. I relived hot days on the ocean in a succession of small boats, but when we came to my time spent snorkeling among tumbled ruins the rifling through my brain stopped, and I experienced, all over again, almost in slow motion, my descents into blue deeps.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the thing seemed to leave me. A thin mist hovered above the instrument board for several seconds then drifted off, once again soaking through the concrete until I was left quite alone. It was long minutes before I could bring myself to move, and even then all I could manage was to light a cigarette with a very shaky hand.
Now, out on the road in the cold light of day, I started to wonder whether I had imagined the whole thing…whether it was merely a spot of Delirium Tremens brought on by my relative abstinence of the past week.
I knew one thing for sure though.
I needed a drink.
It was a longish walk into Thurso, and my bad knee flared in pain with each step towards the end of it, but it was well worth it, as I immediately stumbled upon an open pub, and made myself comfortable on a tall stool at the bar.
For the first hour or so I managed to stick to some of their strong, malty beer, but the siren call of the Scotch was not long escaped. By mid afternoon I felt comfortably numb and finally started to forget the events of the night before.
That was all to change again when the singing started.
I hadn’t been aware that the place had filled up around me, being too preoccupied with my own thoughts and the booze. I was therefore rather surprised to turn around and find a busy bar, with a band setting up in the corner. Surprise turned to cold fear when they launched without preamble into their first song.
She sleeps in the spaces to be found in between,
She sleeps, and she dreams, of the sights she has seen.
I felt the cold chill seize my spine, and the entity was there again, looking out of my eyes, listening to what I was hearing. It wasn’t in control of me, for I was able to lift my glass and drain a stiff measure of Scotch. But this was no case of the DTs. It watched through me as the band continued, and the whole audience in the bar sang along.
She dreams of the lands she has ruled as a queen,
And the sleeping god is dreaming where she lies.
I felt a surge of emotion well up in me, something I might have described as joy if I’d had any experience of it. As the song reached its climax it became almost overwhelming in intensity.
She dreams of her lord in the space in between,
And the sleeping god is dreaming where she lies.
The bar fell silent, and I remembered to breathe. An old man turned and spoke to me.
“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
“Who?” I managed to say.
“The Cailleach, the old queen. Whatever it is you lot are doing up there, don’t stop. You’re bringing her back to us.”
He turned back in rapt attention as the band started up again.
In the fire, the queen will come.
The chill threatened to grip me again. I downed what was left of my Scotch in one hasty gulp and staggered out into the growing dusk.
I woke lying face up at the side of the road, staring at a star-filled sky overhead, with no memory of anything after leaving the bar. I will admit that, in itself, it wasn’t an unusual occurrence for me to have a blackout after drinking. But what was unusual was the sense of doubling I still felt in my mind, as if something squatted in there, watching my every move.
I got up, checked my bearings, and started a long trudge back to the installation. I knew I was in trouble. I had obviously passed the extent of the time covered by my pass, and I suspected that the Colonel was not a man given to leniency. It was with some surprise that I passed through the barricade at the gate with no further fuss, although I saw by a clock on the gatehouse wall that it w
as already past nine.
“Away in you go, sir,” the Scottish squaddie said. “There’s a big fuss on up at the block. I dinna think they’ll notice you’re a wee bit late.”
I fully intended to creep quietly into my billet and sleep the rest of the night away, but as I got closer I heard that there was indeed a fuss up at the block. An alarm sounded loud and clear in the seaside air. Soldiers stood, guns raised, in a jagged line near the front of the building. I checked myself for sobriety, decided I was just about okay, and headed for the lab.
Inside, the place was in turmoil. The Colonel and Rankin stood over three soldiers who lay on the floor, staring sightlessly upward; obviously alive, yet obviously somewhere else. I started to have an inkling of what might have happened. It quickly turned to understanding as the thing inside me surged again. It left me in a wave of cold and sudden sadness that felt like mourning. At the same time a white smoke rose from the three men on the ground and rose upward to join whatever it was that had been inside me. The men started to move, as if coming out of a dream, but my gaze was taken with what was going on overhead.
Rankin went white, and the Colonel let out a yelp that he managed to quell just before it turned into a scream. A gray-white mist, almost solid now, hung in the air above us. Once again it drifted over the instrument panel.
“Get away from there,” the Colonel shouted. He un-holstered his pistol, and fired three shots into the thickest part of the entity. The bullets had no effect, passing straight through and pinging off the corrugated iron roof above. The officer went to fire again, but Rankin put a hand on his arm.
“Wait,” he said.
As it happened, there was nothing to wait for. The thick mist rose up and away, drifted towards the concrete wall of the reactor chamber, and again sank through it.
“After it,” the Colonel shouted, but once again Rankin stayed his hand.
“You know as well as I do that we can’t get in there without suiting up. Proper procedure must be followed.”
“But that takes at least an hour,” the Colonel said. “Who knows what it might be up to in there?”
“Indeed,” Rankin replied. “And who knows what we might learn from it, given the chance?”
“Learn? There’ll be no more learning here. I think we’ve had quite enough of that.”
For once, I was in agreement with the Colonel, but that scarcely mattered, for several minutes later I found myself placed in handcuffs.
“Put him in a cell,” the Colonel said. “I’ll speak to him when he’s sober.”
“No sense in arguing,” Rankin said softly as they led me away. “We all saw where that thing came from. Now he’ll need to know where it has been.”
I spent the remainder of that night in a cold, draughty cell that sat perched on the cliff by the shore. Waves crashed on rocks, gulls cried…but no one came to talk to me. I ran out of tobacco sometime around midnight, and managed two hours of fitful sleep between then and dawn. My head hurt, I felt sick to my stomach, and my theory as to what happened the night before was threatening to throw me into the depths of despair. When the Colonel finally called on me the next morning, I was not in the best of moods.
And things did not improve when they led me to the interrogation room. At least they fed and watered me before the questioning started, but after that it was a long day of answering the same things, over and over as they attempted to pry a lie from me. I tried to tell them that I didn’t remember anything, but they were having none of it.
It was late afternoon before they relented. Over my first, most welcome, smoke of the day I tried to explain the theory I was forming to the Colonel, but he was too angry to even listen.
“The ravings of a drunk do not concern me,” he said. “You, sir, are a threat to National Security, and will be off this base as soon as we get to the bottom of whatever is going on.”
“Let me speak to Rankin,” I said finally. “I’ll tell him what I know.”
The Colonel was suspicious at that, but he had seen that his own tactics were getting him nowhere. Finally, just as dusk was settling in again, Rankin was allowed in to see me.
The Professor seemed almost embarrassed as he sat opposite me. He took out a hip flask and handed it across the table. Despite the fact that I wanted a drink more than I ever had before, I let it sit there. My first statement confused him further.
“Tell me about atomic theory,” I said. “Is it true that we’re mostly made up of empty space?”
“That’s a bit of a gross simplification of a lot of very complex science…” he started.
“But, in essence, I’m right?”
“In essence,” he agreed, grudgingly.
“And this reactor you have built here…it manipulates basic atomic structure at the lowest levels to get its results.”
“Again, that’s…”
“I know,” I said, and managed a smile, although I felt far from any sense of good humor. “A gross simplification. But still, essentially true?”
“Where is all this leading?” Rankin said. “The Colonel wants you on the next train out of Thurso, and I’m afraid I can’t help you unless you tell me what you know.”
So I told him everything, from the time the entity started rifling through my brain until I woke, face up in the ditch.
“I think it has to do with the line in the song,” I said softly. ‘She sleeps in the spaces to be found in between.’ I think that’s where this thing is from…the spaces between atoms; the part of the Universe we cannot see. Somehow, your experiments here have released it, woken it up from its long sleep.”
To his credit, Rankin took me seriously, at least partially.
“I can understand that we might be releasing some form of energy we haven’t seen before,” he said. “But I cannot countenance anything resembling intelligence arising from that source. As for all this guff about the folk song and a myth of a dreaming god? Really, Ballantine, I expected better of you.”
“And I expect the culture from where that folk song originally spread was rather more technically advanced than we have ever given them credit for,” I said. “I will stand by my hypothesis until it is proven false. It fits the facts as we currently understand them.”
“Let us say you are right,” Rankin replied. “What does this entity want?”
“I doubt it wants anything, not in the way we think in any case. It lives, it feeds, it grows, and it doesn’t give a damn about us. That’s what I believe.”
Rankin had a far away look in his eye.
“And if you are right, and it is indeed a form of intelligent life,” he said. “Think what we might learn from it. We could unlock the secrets of the Universe itself.”
I laughed, and I’m afraid I might have allowed some sarcasm to show through.
“As I said already…I don’t think it gives a damn.”
Rankin got no chance to answer.
Shots rang out across the installation, followed quickly by screams.
“Come on, Ballantine,” Rankin said. “If you’re right, you might be of some use.”
I paused only long enough to lift the hip flask from the table.
We left the room at a run. Nobody tried to stop me.
Once again the area around the reactor block was a scene of chaos. A dozen men lay on their backs, staring at the sky. The remainder of the guard seemed unsure where to aim their weapons, and the younger ones looked almost as pale as those stricken on the ground. The Colonel’s bellow could be heard at some distance as he shouted into a radio handset.
“I don’t care if he’s in bed with the Archbishop of bloody Canterbury. Get him up. I need a bomber, and I need it now.”
Rankin strode up and reached for the handset, but the Colonel swung to one side away from his grasp.
“You can’t stop me, Rankin. I have jurisdiction here. I’m leveling this place to the ground from the sky. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Rankin looked as if he might punch the officer,
but instead he turned back to me.
“I’m going in. We need to try to reason with it. Are you with me?”
Every fiber of my being told me to run. But Rankin was adamant, and I could not in all conscience allow him to face this thing alone. I drained the contents of the hip flask in one gulp, much to the Colonel’s disgust, and followed Rankin on the path towards the reactor.
“You’ve got ten minutes,” the Colonel shouted. “Then this place will be nothing but rubble.”
“Won’t that just spread radiation across the countryside?” I asked.
This time it was Rankin’s turn to laugh sarcastically, and echo my own words back to me.
“I don’t think he gives a damn.”
As we approached the door to the lab I heard singing waft in the air. I looked over to my right to see a crowd of townspeople gathered at the main gate. Three squaddies had stopped them entering. But they couldn’t stop them from singing. The song rang around us, echoing and seeming to amplify as it bounced off the concrete wall of the reactor building.
She sleeps in the spaces to be found in between,
She sleeps, and she dreams, of the sights she has seen.
The white mist seeped out of the wall; the first time I had seen it emerge anywhere other than the laboratory. It was larger now, and much denser. Discrete structures could be seen in its form, a slug-shaped body with long tentacle-like appendages that hung below the bulk, wafting in time with the singing, trailing almost to the ground.
She dreams of the lands she has ruled as a queen,
And the sleeping god is dreaming where she lies.
Rankin strode forward until he was close enough to the tentacles to touch them if he wished. I was more circumspect, standing further back and ready to flee at the slightest provocation.
“We mean you no harm,” Rankin shouted.
I don’t think it gives a damn.
The entity moved forward again.
Rankin shouted.
“I want to know you, to help you. Believe that.” The tentacles moved closer, wafting across Rankin’s shoulder, almost in a caress. “I’m not your enemy. I’m a scientist who’s trying…”
