“And would you be willing to sacrifice yourself if it also meant ensuring that Prisoner 2663 never escapes this place, nor poses a threat to your species, ever again?”
“Yes.”
The Sentinel looked at me.
Then the slightest of smiles touched his lips.
“So be it,” was all he said, before he rushed at me, enveloping me with his arms and kissing my forehead.
• • •
The Gossamer’s return module is gone now. She left precisely 25 days after the last known contact with the descent module. Which I handily sank to a depth of about five hundred meters after melting the ice at the base.
The ice has re-frozen again. The remnant of Prisoner 2663 that Captain Bednar freed, has been neutralized. Along with Captain Bednar herself, who has become a permanent guest of the pyramid over which I now stand watch. If there is any trace of her left within herself, I hope Bednar understands. And Majack and Kendelsen too. There wasn’t any choice. Accident or no, deliberate or no, once they became an active spreader of the contagion, their ultimate fate was sealed.
I know, I checked. The Sentinel confirms that no organism so infected by Prisoner 2663 has ever been cured.
As for me, I can’t yet say for certain what the Sentinel has done to me. In many ways it feels as if he is part of me, or that I am part of him. I’ve only begun to test the limits of my power. I’ve spent a lot of time recording my thoughts: on all that’s happened, so that when men return to Titan they will find the disc. I left it in the rover. Which now sits atop the ice, alone. Because I re-sank the pyramid to a sufficient depth too. Along with all the others. And there are many. The longer I can keep those pyramids out of human reach, the better.
Maybe by the time mankind is capable of raising and investigating them, mankind will no longer see the need?
I can’t say I understand the ethos that prevents the Sentinel from destroying the nanocyborgs. He seems very old, and very unwilling to dispense information at anything more than a trickle. For my own good, he tells me.
But I suppose I’ve got time. Enough to last for centuries. Or longer? Whatever it takes to keep Earth and the other uninhabited worlds of the Milky Way safe—from the nanocyborgs at least.
Prisoner 2663. The shadows of Titan. My charge.
They never really sleep. Not entirely.
Even now, they’re calling for you too.
Can you hear them?
Horror really isn’t my thing. But when a group of local Utah guys said they were putting together an anthology of Lovecraft-themed space opera science fiction stories, I knew I wanted in. But I needed a guide. Someone who not only knew Lovecraft, but knew horror tropes the way I knew science fiction tropes. Carter Reid is the author of The Zombie Nation, a web comic that’s been doing rather well of late. He’s also a personal friend, lives on my street, his kids play with my daughter, and I’ve contracted him in the past to do freelance artwork. He’s also a raging H.P. Lovecraft fan. Like, raging.
Well, you know the old saying, about chocolate and peanut butter …
I didn’t think I’d like the results as much as I do, but “The Shadows of Titan” would seem to satisfy both my tendencies (for science fiction) and the overall theme of the anthology into which the story first went. Space Eldritch has been a hit. With horror fans and space opera fans alike. So much so, publisher and editor Nathan Shumate went back for another round, in the form of Space Eldritch 2. There is presently talk of Space Eldritch 3? If so, I have to think Carter and I might be teaming up again.
“The Shadows of Titan” is not, of course, a perfect horror tale, mainly because there is a distinctly un-horrific ending. The monsters and bad guys do not, in fact, spring out of the proverbial closet in the last frame of the film; letting us know that the mayhem is about to start all over again. In fact, the menace seems to be well-contained. Which is precisely the way I wanted it. Because the microscopic plague-like machine entity that wants to take over Earth and turn us all into drones for its own use … is just too nasty for me to let loose in the universe of my imagination. Somebody’s got to damned well keep an eye on that thing, or else!
***
The Nechronomator
The mausoleum was silent as I waited quietly at the end of the east corridor. Sodium lamps on the street outside cast a ghastly light through the stained glass windows that ringed the corridor above the crypts. I smelled flowers and floor wax, plus a hint of decades-old cigarette smoke. It had been six hours since I’d wheeled myself to my current spot. Nobody on the mortuary staff had thought to check before locking the doors. I was alone, and not quite believing what I was doing.
Until I heard the scrape of marble on marble.
The air suddenly came alive. A sickening stench of formaldehyde and ethanol, mixed with ozone.
My hands shook, but I gripped the arms of my chair tightly and waited, breathing deeply and slowly, not moving an inch.
Footsteps. The sound of someone taking a seat.
More marble scraping on marble.
I almost screamed when I saw the woman trudge past the open end of the corridor. She walked as if compelled from without. Halting, pained steps. Joints and tissue which hadn’t moved in years made an indescribable sound as the woman went up the central hall. She never even looked in my direction.
There was muffled talk—whispery and hollow.
When it became apparent the conversation would be lengthy, I set myself into motion. Gently, with practiced tension, I rotated the wheels on my chair and began a slow, noiseless progression towards the central hall. It took minutes, during which I listened intently, but couldn’t quite make out the words. Each yard drew me closer to the source of the stench, and the air was almost alive with static.
Eventually I reached the intersection, and was able to lean forward just enough to peek around the corner, my chair snug against the wall.
The Nechronomator was hideous. His flesh hung limply on his tallish skeleton, sagging and gray. He sat cross-legged on a marble bench that sat at the top of the cross-shaped mausoleum. Liver spots had darkened to black and his mouth looked dry as he moved it. The woman stood before him, motionless in her Sunday finest. The only breaths either of them took were the ones they used to move air across stale vocal chords.
I still couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Suddenly the Nechronomator stood—a surprisingly swift movement for someone who’d been dead for three years—and slapped the base of his palm on the woman’s forehead. She spasmed and gave a quick, hoarse cry, then flashed into nothingness—like the bulb of a camera had gone off, erasing her from existence.
I reflexively sat back in my chair, teeth clenched. What had I just seen?
One thought—impossible—returned again and again to my mind. But I was a scientist, fully in command of my faculties, even if my body was succumbing to age. There were explanations to everything that was occurring. Rational explanations. I would have them.
I wheeled myself boldly into the intersection and spun to confront the Nechronomator. The undead. A monster.
My friend.
“Christopher,” I said loudly, hoping to cover my fear with bravado.
He remained standing, arm still outstretched and palm forward, exactly where he had touched the woman.
Slowly, his arm dropped back to his side.
“You should not have come, Matthew.”
His voice was like a bellows.
“If you remember anything about me, then you know I would have come eventually. I was here when they sealed you away, after all. I gave the eulogy. I never expected I’d be seeing you again.”
“Nor I. What do you want?”
I paused for a moment, then said, “I want to know if it’s true.”
The Nechronomator laughed. A hard, coughing sound.
“I told you it was possible. We used to argue about it after hours, in the staff room. I couldn’t ever make it work in the lab, but that didn’t mean it
wasn’t feasible. Now, I have the power.”
“Power derived from what?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“From God?”
“You never believed in Him.”
“Neither did you. I still have the photo I took of you shaking hands with Dawkins.”
“Dawkins was wrong. We were all wrong.”
“So, God sent you back?”
“No, I am here by my own choice. God’s got nothing to do with it.”
I was sweating profusely under my topcoat and scarf. The moisture was beginning to cloud my glasses, but my hand would be shaking so badly I didn’t dare reach to take them off. To cover my instinctual fear of the unreal creature before me, I held fast to my belief that this could be pursued as an intellectual problem.
“How does the math work out? On the other side, I mean.”
“The math was never the issue,” said the Nechronomator. “I always had the math right. It was the energy source that was the problem. Trying to do everything with mere electricity. Even the big colliders can’t touch what’s available in the After.”
“So you can do it?”
“I just did.”
“The woman?”
“That was it.”
“Show me,” I said.
My old, dead friend seemed to consider me for a long moment.
“Not just yet, Matthew. First things first.”
He walked almost as I remember him walking, during the final years of his natural life. Like the woman, his joints and tissues made an indescribable sound as he moved past me, the air becoming choked with chemical fumes and the overpowering crackle of an unreleased charge. Had he touched me, I fear I’d have been electrocuted. Or worse. I remembered the woman vanishing with a pop.
The Nechronomator proceeded down the central hall until he reached a crypt which had had its seal removed and discarded on the floor. I spun my chair slowly so as to always keep him in my sight.
“Janice Kawcak,” he said. “She was only 47 when the lymphoma got her. Left five kids and a husband. Husband turned to drinking. The kids to drugs. Two of them are in jail now, and the husband’s got liver issues. Janice begged me to help.”
“Begged you,” I said. “How?”
“After. It was all in the After. They came looking for me, almost as soon as I arrived. I guess word travels when they know someone is coming up. I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way. They were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. But they didn’t care. They just wanted me to help.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “But you of all people should understand that the timeline is changing. Not in big ways. Not yet. But I remember how it used to be, and that’s not the way it is now.”
“Of course it’s not,” he said as he picked the seal up from where it lay on the floor, then carefully replaced it over the empty crypt.
“Even now, Janice is working to undo things. I sent her back a few years before the diagnosis. She’s doubtless visited herself and tried to convince herself to go to the doctor. The cancer would be barely detectable, but it’s there. And treatable. Unlike before, when she was stage four.”
“You sent her back as a corpse?”
“More or less.”
“That’s hideous.”
“I can’t resurrect anyone,” he said, laughing again. “I don’t have the knowledge. Only He can do that. But I can give them temporary control of their bodies, and a power source. And I can send them back.”
“Then what the hell are you?”
“Same as them. Think of me as a remotely-operated vehicle.”
I pondered the implications, before I spoke again.
“And Janice Kawcak is about to come face to face with her dead self, controlled from beyond by her dead self?”
“What better way to convince people? I bet Janice showed herself the scars from surgery and everything. Very compelling.”
“Bullshit.”
“Tell you what, Matt. You go see. Go look up Janice tomorrow in the phone directory and give her a call. Then come back tomorrow night.”
I looked at the Nechronomator. He looked at me.
The unspoken message between us seemed to be this: when seeking to confirm a theory, first examine the proof.
• • •
It took some time to research Janice on the internet at the retirement home. Thankfully she hadn’t lived too far out of town, and I only had to pay the home’s driver a modest bribe to take me out without the nursing staff knowing my intentions. So far as they knew I was being driven to the beach. Instead we wound up in the suburbs, in an older development that looked like it had gone up in the mid-eighties.
Janice Kawcak didn’t know me from Adam, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say when she answered the door. If she answered the door. Part of me still wasn’t convinced.
Until the door swung open, and there she stood. Living and breathing.
“Yes,” she said, “Can I help you?”
“So sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kawcak. My name is Doctor Clayburn. I used to be with the university. Could you come out and speak with me for a moment? It’s very important.”
She looked at me, then at the driver next to the retirement home’s van, then up and down the street.
“What’s this about?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Kawcak. About someone who visited you perhaps a couple or more years ago.”
“You’re a physician?”
“No, a physicist. But I’m … Doing some post-retirement research as part of a program they’re starting at the university cancer center. Do you mind?”
“Honey?”
A man’s voice, from within the house.
She turned and shouted back, “I’ve got it, John. Just a survey. Be back with you in a minute.”
She closed the door quietly, her eyes suddenly wide and worried. She leaned over, bent at the waste so that she could be eye-level with me in my wheelchair.
“How did you know about my … The … The visitor?”
“I’m not able to discuss that, exactly,” I said. “I simply need to confirm whether or not you were, in fact, visited by someone claiming to be yourself.”
Janice stood up and took a second glance up and down the street, making sure there were no neighbors in any yards, then leaned back down and said, “Yes.”
“She claimed to be you?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Did you believe her?”
“She … She looked like me, only … God, it was so gross.”
“Like a corpse,” I said.
“But she walked and she talked and she … Showed me things.”
“She wanted you to go see an oncologist, right?”
“Yes!”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t want to. But like I said, she showed me … Things. I had to run back in the house and throw up.”
“She confronted you here? On your porch?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone else see her?”
“No. She said she knew exactly what time of day to come, when the kids would be at school and John would be at work. She didn’t want anyone else to know.”
“And did you do what she told you to do?”
Janice Kawcak looked like she almost couldn’t hear me. She had stuffed her hands in the pockets of her capris and her arms quivered slightly, as if shivering.
I could feel myself blushing at the temerity of my intrusion.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I have to know. Did you do what the dead woman told you to do?”
“Yes. I went to my doctor the next day, and he referred me. I was in treatment by the end of the month. I thought the night sweats were just menopause or something. But she was right. It was a lot worse than that.”
I looked at her full head of hair. Not a wig.
“Remission, then?”
“I’m in year two. They tell me I’ll be in the c
lear if I hit year five.”
“And the dead woman who claimed to be you?”
“I never saw her again.”
I stared intently at Janice Kawcak as she stood on her porch, eyes become far away and her mouth in a frown.
“Are you a religious woman?” I asked.
“I didn’t used to be. But … John and I go every Sunday now.”
“How old are you?”
“I turn 52 in November.”
“And your family? How have they been since the … Visitor … Came.”
“Fine.”
“No problems with drugs or alcohol?”
“Doctor Clayburn, what kind of question is that? No, of course not.”
“Yes ma’am. I think I have everything I came for. So terribly sorry to have troubled you.”
• • •
The reek of embalming chemicals and ozone slapped me awake. I’d dozed. My ability to stay up past dusk isn’t what it used to be. Christopher was standing over me when I looked up.
“Did you see her?”
“I did.”
“Is she healthy?”
“Remission. Or, at least, soon-to-be-remission.”
“Excellent,” he said, and began walking away from me down to where the western corridor branched.
I wheeled quickly after him.
“How many, old friend?”
“Only ten so far. But there are others.”
“I’d imagine they’re lined up to infinity.”
“Not that far.”
“And He doesn’t care, eh?”
The Nechronomator stopped short.
“As I said last night, God’s got nothing to do with this.”
“What about … The other guy.”
“Lucifer Morningstar? Can’t say I’ve made his acquaintance.”
“So you’re doing all of this under the noses of both the Lord and the Devil? That’s a neat trick, Christopher. Tell me, why are you the first? Surely Einstein and numerous others could have—should have—figured it out, too.”
“I asked the same question. To hear it told in the After, Einstein and the rest never had the notion. They were too puzzled, fearful, or awestruck by the After to care. And then, once they’d moved on from Limbo, it was too late for them to change their minds.”
Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Page 29
