by David Coy
“I don’t know how I came to this place.”
“Okay. Tell me about yourself. How old are you?”
“I’m not sure. I was born in 1955.”
Rachel blinked.
“What was that? Did you say 1955?”
“Yes. I was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1955.”
She let it sink in, unsure whether or not to believe him. “That would make you over nine-hundred years old, Jacob.” Jacob just stared up at the empty ceiling, and Rachel thought she saw just the slightest hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth.
“God has delivered me," he said.
“Hmm . . . I see,” she said.
“God has brought me back from Hell for his purpose.”
“And just what might that be, then?”
“I do not have to know my God’s reasons.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“It does not matter.”
“Well, it might when I tell you. You’re on a jungle planet about 40 warp days from Earth. That’s a very, very long way from Toledo, Ohio.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re approximately forty light years from earth. I think they knew what light years were in 1955, didn’t they?” She watched him swallow with his mouth open. The way it looked made her want to slap him.
“Then they brought me here, for God’s purpose . . . I’ve passed through Hell and arrived in this place for His purpose.”
“Who are they?”
“The alien beings who . . .” his mouth just closed shut as if he’d turned it off.
“The alien beings who what?” she wanted to know. “The ones who lived in this place? Those alien beings?”
His eyes closed, and the stranger now known as Jacob seemed to sleep.
“Jacob? Are you awake there, Jacob?” she asked.
No response. She had the impression he had shut her out completely.
She felt cheated for the moment but was determined to find out what he’d been talking about, sooner rather than later.
She left him there and joined the others in the eating area where they were just finishing their dinner of meat and potatoes. Donna still had an attitude about her aggressiveness with the stranger, but tried to keep it down. It was dinnertime, after all, and they were family. Donna had never believed that bad feelings, no matter how major or minor, should be brought to the dinner table. That, too, was part of their budding culture.
“What’s he got to say?” John wanted to know. “Anything good?”
“He seems to have a lot to say,” Rachel replied. “The problem is he stopped saying it all of a sudden.”
“I think I suggested he was fatigued, if you recall,” Donna said politely.
“That’s not it. He just stopped talking, like he didn’t want to say anything more. He got real secretive. He did say he was born in Ohio in 1955, however. You might find that somewhat interesting.”
“Bullshit,” John said.
“That’s what he said, goddamn it,” Rachel said defensively.
“Hey, you two,” Donna piped in. “No arguing at the table.”
“How in the fu . . .” John began. “How is it, anyway, that he could be that old, Rachel dearest?”
Donna made a face at her food for the pointless, silly exchange she knew was coming. Trying to ignore it, she stuffed her mouth and looked away.
“I don’t know, John, my friend. Those were the words he used. He also said he doesn’t know his name so we gave him one out of his bible for now. Jacob. Call him Jacob.”
“Jacob?” Eddie said. “That’s a strange name.”
“Well, then it fits him, ‘cuz he’s one weird mother . . .” She stopped herself. “One strange fellow.”
“He certainly is turning out to be quite interesting, isn’t he?” Donna asked.
“Isn’t he?” Rachel agreed politely.
“Rather,” John said.
* * *
The next morning, Rachel headed for his bedside again. He was staring up at the ceiling, but when she entered the room, he turned to look at her. It was the first time he’d seen her head to toe. He swallowed. She pulled the chair close.
“Good morning, Jacob,” she almost chirped, “How are you feeling?”
He continued to stare at her, and his look felt like some strange touch to her face and neck she wanted to slap away.
“I feel as if I’ve known you,” he said. “These hearing aids distort your voice, but I think I’ve heard it before.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” she said, not believing it. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Perhaps not.”
“No perhaps, Jacob. We couldn’t have possibly met. What are you staring at?” she asked. “Is there something on my face? Did I leave some breakfast there?”
She wiped idly at her face and chin just to act like she was checking.
He swallowed.
“Now, tell me more about these aliens. How about it?” He turned away and stared up at the ceiling again, a look of smug tranquility on his face.
“No dice, huh?” Rachel asked.
She studied his face for a moment longer. He was implacable. There was no way he would give in, short of torture. She entertained the thought for just a second. It might be worth a try. She was sure she could think of something effective.
He turned and stared at her again. The look made her skin crawl. Thoughts of torture briefly returned.
“May I see your body?” he asked.
She blinked. “My body . . . ?” she replied, almost stuttering. “You want to see . . . my body?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” she said.
“You want to see my body . . . naked?”
“Yes.”
“If I show you my body naked, you’ll tell me about the aliens?”
“Perhaps.”
“No perhaps. I show you my body, and you tell me about the aliens and how you got here. That’s the deal.”
“I will tell you something about the aliens.”
She took a deep breath through her nose and studied the hideous thing in front of her. She wasn’t in the least bit shy about her anatomy and had shown it to men enough times to know how. But doing so now, as some ghastly trade with a freak she couldn’t fathom gave her nausea. She’d rather have shown her naked body to her ninety-year-old uncle Petros—gladly.
“Why are you so interested in my body all of a sudden?”
No answer.
But a reason was growing deep inside her. She couldn’t define it exactly, but it was there sure enough. Rachel could feel it as something evil. She wanted to vomit it up and spit it out at him. She wanted to strangle him where he lay.
She stood up and unzipped her suit from the neck down to her crotch. Staring straight ahead, she pulled one then the other arm free of the sleeves and worked her torso out of the top part. Then she slipped her hands inside at the waist and squirmed her full hips first to the right then the left and let the suit fall to her ankles. She reached behind and unclipped her bra, removed it and dropped it in the chair behind her. Her panties were next. Unceremoniously, she ran her thumbs along the inside and worked them down over her hips and down to her ankles.
She stood there naked, staring straight ahead. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, not out of excitement, but out of anger and humiliation.
He just stared. His eyes going from her head to her knees and back again. She could almost feel them like an unbearable, ashen touch.
“Seen enough?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“Good,” she replied curtly.
She had her clothes back on in no time.
She sat back down and crossed her legs tight. Jacob went back to staring straight up, the same self-satisfied, barely visible smile on his thin and crusty lips.
“Well? Now it’s your turn,” she said matter-of-factly.
“The aliens . . .” he starte
d.
“Yes?”
“The aliens came to earth in the year 2006. Perhaps sooner. I don’t know.”
“2006?”
“Yes. They came and took many people. Kidnapped them.”
“Then what? How did you get here?”
“They must have brought me here.”
“How did you stay alive for so long? Did it have something to do with the parasite attached to you?”
“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.
Umbilical’s 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.
&
nbsp; 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 bones 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.
