Jan took hold of Roger’s collar as Greg walked around the obelisks. He got down on his knees, careful not to scratch his suit on the gravel. “Roger, come boy!”
Jan let Roger go, but instead of running through the gate as Greg had intended, the Doberman ran completely around and jumped onto Greg, licking his facemask.
“No, through the gate, go through it!” Greg tried forcing the dog through, but the dog’s claws scraped against the ground. “Get through it!” Greg grabbed Roger’s collar and tail and heaved.
Roger growled. Greg swore and he pushed harder. Roger turned and snapped at Greg, his jaws clamped around the edge of Greg’s sleeve just as he was jumping back. Dog and man eyed each other for seconds, until finally Greg gave up and stepped back.
“See?” Jan said. “Even your dog knows! The gates are suicide.”
“That man went through—”
“We’re stranded, the PEV’s destroyed, and, and—God damnit to fucking hell!” Jan put Tara under one arm and pulled out her phone.
“Jan, just give it a try. You haven’t even tried—”
“They are just fucking rocks!” Jan slammed a number into the phone. Her phone clicked—“Second Class, code 10211—send a fucking evac!” She glared at the fog rising, and then she yelled: “Mara, get over here!”
Only silence answered.
“Mara!?” Jan called again. Worry tainted her voice.
A voice crackled on the phone, “Geolocations received. Extraction en-route.”
Greg sprinted the hill’s circumference, checking all the sides, even the way they had come. But by now, the Hagalaz was lapping at the top of the hill, like gentle waves upon a shore. He couldn’t see through the fog, and he was forced to step back as a few wisps of Hagalaz flowed onto the hilltop.
Greg flipped on his suit’s amplifier: “Mara!” He screamed as he ran another circuit around. She couldn’t be down there—she would never be that stupid. But she didn’t answer … Then he realized that Mara must have already gone through the thurisaz.
“Hurry!” Jan screamed into the phone. She stepped away from the Hagalaz reaching toward her.
“She went through the gate!” Greg shouted as he came back. The Hagalaz had almost reached the thurisaz. “We need to go through, now!”
“She’s dead—you killed her!” Jan screamed, her mascara running down her face. Even with a faceplate, she was still pretty, even without the layers of makeup.
Greg tried again, now desperate to convince his wife. “She’s alive. Jan, there’s a better world, just through those obelisks. Mara went through, and so will we.”
“She’s dead … oh God—she’s really dead …”
“Give me Tara.” Greg took a step toward Jan. “I’ll go through first.”
Jan jerked back, stepping into the fog, up to her shins. “Get away!”
A voice on the phone: “Ma’am, what’s happening.”
“He wants my baby to go through the gate—”
“Stay away from it! Christ, we try warning people … The Air-Vac is almost there.”
Hagalaz reached the very summit of the hill and covered the base of the thurisaz. Harsh vapors, including a potent form of sulfuric acid, pushed against everyone’s haz-suits, except for Roger, who was bare and exposed. Greg ran for him. He had to get Roger through the gate! But the vapors reached Roger before Greg did. Roger’s hair was singed off and his legs audibly sizzled. Hagalaz pushed against everything—Greg’s PTFE pants pressed into his legs, warm from the chemical reaction beginning to eat through his haz-suit. The heat sped the reaction, producing more heat.
“Through the gate!” Greg shouted, trying to push Roger through, but the dog wouldn’t listen.
Roger jumped up. His protective boots had already disintegrated. Claws raked Greg’s chest. Skin flapped loose around the dog’s thighs and black chunks sloughed off Roger’s legs.
“Go through the gate …” Greg whispered, thinking feebly of his plan to get Roger through the thurisaz, or back down into the PEV if the gate did not work. But the PEV was already dissolved by the acid.
The dog’s eyes dissolved into a gel. A white froth covered his muzzle and chest. His tail had completely disappeared. Roger—Greg’s eight-year-old Doberman, from before the Shattering, possibly one of the last Dobermans left on the continent, with whom Greg had shared his own rations, even when the Feds had started cutting down—gave one last shudder, a piteous whine, and he fell back, sliding off from Greg’s chest and down into the rising Hagalaz.
“Give me Tara!” Greg screamed.
“Stay back!” Jan stepped further into the fog, holding Tara above her head.
Tara reached for Greg, a pudgy gloved hand outstretched. “Dada?”
A helicopter approached. They heard it first: thu-thu-THU-THUWACK. Then they saw the orange helicopter flying toward them. The turbulence from its blades stirred the fog below. Jan screamed and waved Tara over her head. “HERE!”
Hagalaz reached chest height. Searing tendrils snaked across Greg’s chest. He smelled rotten eggs and screamed as he realized his suit was leaking. Roger must have ruined his suit! Greg fumbled to find the damage, and found shreds along the front. In vain, he groped for his Teflon tape, even though he knew that he could never repair the damage quickly enough. He gasped. His tongue burned—his nose—Oh, God—his eyes! Hagalaz enveloped him. His mask fogged. Pressure. Darkness. He keeled, hit the ground, but the pressure only worsened. Acid spread, following the seams inside his suit. Each second became agony, and he prayed for death.
Jan was screaming, and something shook his shoulders. He turned over and by some miracle saw the obelisks looming over him. To his right he found Roger’s skeleton, already crumbling apart. In an effort of great will, Greg rose to his feet. Every joint and sinew screamed, and his chest tightened until he thought his heart would explode. He couldn’t breathe. One of the rescuers hung down from a ladder nearby, reaching for him. Jan and Tara were already in the helicopter. The man grabbed Greg’s shoulders, and Greg almost let himself be rescued. But the thurisaz was only a step away. Greg yanked free and tumbled through the gateway.
When he opened his eyes, he was under a sky filled with odd stars. The softest grass tickled his cheeks. As he sat up, he found that his haz-suit was gone, along with the rest of his clothes. His skin was pink and fleshy and unscarred. The thurisaz was behind him, and in front of him was a great river of the purest water he’d ever seen. And on the other side of the river, waving for him to follow, was his daughter Mara.
***
IN THE HAUNTED DARKNESS
Michael R. Collings
I am not mad.
Note how calmly I can make that declaration. Listen to the evenness in my voice, the smoothness of my blood flowing through my veins as I repeat it:
I am not mad.
I know … I know. Others have made the same declamation, only to have their protests proved false by their ghastly aberrancies.
But I … I know … I know that the sounds I hear are safely locked within the thin-walled cabinet of my skull, that they cannot take on a frightful life, a horrifying tangibility. They are nothing more than the constant firing of nerve cells linking half-deaf ears to brain, a sea-storm of waving cilia.
And I know that there is nothing medicine can do to forestall the constant barrage of sounds.
To some degree, I have learned to live with my condition.
Right.
Severe deafness is bad enough.
Living with tinnitus is Hell.
Days are really not so difficult. I have private means, so I needn’t contend face-to-face with the mindless hordes of fast-tongued, slurring consumers who would make communicating unbearable. Nor do I have to listen to the endless riffle of pages turning as I make meaningless computations on a softly sputtering computer screen. I can seek out environments that generate sufficient noise that I don’t notice my internal cacophony ... almost.
My time is my own.
; I can take long walks. The wind—however slight, there seems always to be a breeze near where I live—fluttering against my ear-porches nearly masks the underlying crackles, sizzles, and staticky wheezes. Even the sounds of my heels on concrete walkways or asphalt pavements can help … and for that reason I wear distinctive high-heeled boots with arced steel taps affixed. Tap-tap-tap swissssssh tap-tap-tap.
And there are other options.
I spend long afternoons at a nearby fast-food joint, relishing dollar-a-cup refillable drinks and cheap food. I needn’t pay close attention to what anyone there says. I do not know them—indeed, I carefully refrain from cultivating even an all-too-casual howdy-de-do level of acquaintance. I do not know them. They do not know me, except perhaps as the frequent purchaser of a certain sandwich and an all-you-can-drink soda from their limited menu.
The bridge over the river sometimes invites me. There is a concrete railing just chest-high where I can rest my arms and lean over the balustrade to watch the infinitely changeable currents of light and shadow on the surface and listen to the subtle hiss-gurgle-slap as water swirls around the weathered marble pillars … at almost the same volume as my sounds. Almost.
And there are other distractions.
Colors. Shapes. Surfaces glinting and angling and casting eldritch shadows even at the height of noon.
So.
Days are not too difficult.
But nights. Ah, nights. The times of incipient madness, when it seems as if my head must burst and all the captured noise spill like clotted blood to spatter against walls and floor and ceiling. When it seems that I might lay on one side, ear flattened against the thin mattress—even though that accentuates rather than muffles the sounds. I close my eyes so tightly that tears start almost against my will; and half-pretend half-pray that my ear is but a conduit to some vast underground vault, lined with time-effaced bricks and fouled with the cast-off hopes and fears of negligent humanity, and that my sounds will trickle from my brain, through the ear, and dissipate among the noisome jetsam.
Darkness and loneliness and silence and despair press around me.
Those are the difficult times.
Tinnitus is Hell.
Or rather, those were the difficult times.
Because of late, I have made a rather startling discovery, one which even now I can barely comprehend.
It began on an otherwise nondescript night. The sounds were neither more intrusive nor less than usual. Indeed, I had almost grown used to them as they winnowed their way through the darkness with the treadless stealth of ghosts.
I recall that I had taken up another of my strategies for dealing with them … cataloging them, screwing my eyelids tight against the blackness, and constructing a mind-chart that would tell me where … and what … each sound might be.
The closest ones came first.
The hmmmmm-buzz-static just beneath the surface of my left ear. On my mind-chart, it would be represented by a fine red line, perhaps only half an inch long, midway between the pinna and the eardrum. It might, perhaps, vibrate slightly, just beneath the terminus of sight.
Almost touching the outer flesh of my left ear, the clatter-rattle-click of a dozen nuts and bolts being shaken violently in a fragile glass jar.
Then the electrical crackle that formed a tight sphere not more than nine inches from my left ear, hovering in the silent air, taking up a slightly more dorsal position than ventral.
Next, the frenetic tic-tic-tic, as of a hyperactive alarm clock nestled just where my neck met the pillowcase, a tic-tic-tic-tic so rapid that I felt my heartbeat hasten to make up for lost time.
I did not have an alarm clock in my bedroom. Even though I occasionally hear one ring, I do not own an alarm clock.
Somewhere a door closed with a muffled thump. Footsteps echoed on the carpeted stairway leading to my bedroom. From the doorway, someone whispered my name. Once.
I was alone in my house. I am always alone.
These sounds—and more—were part of my every moment. They were the standard of routine.
I finished my normal catalogue of the bangs, clatters, and rattles that surround my head like some insane diving helmet composed of fractured sound rather than clear, pure, crystalline glass. Then, for reasons I still do not comprehend, I reached outward, beyond the protective borders of my house.
First I found the sound of shovels—broad lips of sharpened steel grating against the concrete sidewalks, scraping away non-existent snow half-melting in the one-hundred-plus degree August night-time heat. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. As rhythmical as if I were observing some night watchman laboring at his task, struggling to remove the snowfall faster than it accumulated. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
(All of this time, of course, the nearer sounds continued unabated, if anything sharpened by my attention to sounds outside my window.)
Somewhere down the street, the whine of an electric garage-door opener. Up. Down. Up. Down. Whine-roar.
Just beyond the garage door, a motorcycle wailed into the night. Once. Twice. Three times, each time softer than the last until it disappeared. Almost.
Further yet, the muffled bellow of eighteen-wheeler caravans on the ten-mile-distant freeway, low and warm, smelling of exhausted ozone and overheated rubber tires. Almost—almost—could I hear the individual music of each tire, the hummm of each separate tread.
Usually, this was as far as I would go. On a good night, I would be asleep by this time. On a bad night, the susurration of the faraway traffic—not discernable by ears used only to more mundane sounds—would eventually lull me into dreams. Vivid dreams. Long, frantic dreams that would make me yearn to wake.
But tonight, for the first time, I ventured even—ever—further outward, beyond the flat and uninspiring landscapes of this Earth and into the vast regions of the unending space that surrounds this petty point of life.
I approached Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity. How I longed—yearned—to slow and refresh myself in the not-quite subliminal chaos of its storms, its gigantic eye peering up at me as I listened, unblinking, reassuring.
Then, with the nearly infinite speed of human thought, I passed beyond the orbit of Saturn, Bringer of Old Age, and felt myself bend beneath the weight of uncounted—uncountable—centuries. I would have paused, listened to the friction-hiss of its jeweled rings, but already my frenzied course had increased, catapulting me into the lifeless depths beyond.
But my speed allowed only for the briefest hint of something like music, something like static, something like the labored breathing of a monstrous beast before I was whisked beyond, arcing into frozen night with such rapidity that I felt I must soon reach the awesome maw of the great Black Hole that surely lies at the heart of this galaxy. Mentally I closed my eyes—they were open where my body lay, not yet asleep on the thin, lumpy mattress in my bedroom—and strained to feel … to feel, not see, limitless space as it flashed by.
If I had been travelling in a physical body at even an infinitesimal fraction of the speed I had attained, I would have been instantaneously crushed, if not utterly discorporated. Abruptly, I encountered a barrier at once definitely solid and yet so diaphanous that I could almost hear the remote stars whispering, “Come, come, come.” But I could not.
Instead, I began to hear colors, some familiar—viridian, cardinal, cobalt, xanthous—others such as the human eye has never seen, furious whirling and wheeling of light-not-darkness, of hues beyond description and recall; yet each, even those few for which I could find a name, seemed touched by something wild, something untamed and untamable, something ineffably dark and … dare I say it … evil.
Something eldritch.
Within the color-sounds and the sound-colors, I detected yet something more, something that seemed to come from behind me. A voice perhaps, or many speaking in the choral unison of legions, speaking in a language I did not, could not know, and still I understood: “Come back. What you seek awaits you on your own petty world, not in the regions of distant space. Your
resolution—my Restoration—awaits here. Come back …”
And a force as of huge tentacles, fibrous, muscular, irresistible and enormous, pulled against me, became tangible against my nothing-flesh, grasped harder with a deadly cold, and began to penetrate toward the center of my warmth and being.
It was a threat.
Return or die.
I heard the aggregation of millennia of miles unwind as I slipped backwards, through the spheres of Saturn, of Jupiter, and of Mars, and finally through the sphere of the Moon itself, careening backward into sublunar space until abruptly I hovered—hearing only, mind you, not seeing or feeling, bereft even of the sense of those cyclopean tentacles that had wrapped around my being—just above the surface of the ocean’s deepest abyss.
For an instant that lasted longer than my lifetime of memories, I heard only the almost soothing murmur of ocean waves as they roiled ceaselessly above unfathomable depths. They soothed, they smoothed, they smothered all sounds but themselves.
Then: “Welcome.”
I could hear the colossal size of its speaker, its frigid antiquity beyond all human history, beyond all human cares, its coldness, its utter alienness—these manifested themselves in the timbre of the sound, in the unbreathing, inorganic difference from anything I had ever heard before. I heard the meanings, not the words muttered in some pre-pre-Adamic language never meant to be articulated by a human tongue.
“Come closer.”
Beneath me, I heard the whispering waves draw nearer, close around me, and I sank deeper and deeper into the abyss until I heard something more: the wash of currents around monolithic stones, the hiss of Stygian dwellers directed even toward the phantom of an interloper.
“Come to me, o nugatory one, and I—even I the Chief of All—will give you what you wish for.”
“What I …?”
“What you wish for more than anything in this world or in the worlds beyond. I will give you this one great thing. All that you must do is to return once more, to the surface, and speak the words I will give you, words that will open the gateway between your world and mine. A simple thing … a choice, really. Refuse to speak, and you will live … and suffer … forever. Or open the gate, and die … along with all the Earth. But you will know quietude.”
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