Dark Designs

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  With a clanking screech, the Project charged.

  Miss Chesterfield skipped backwards and tried to yank the entrance shut, but the door-closer slowed the portal’s movement, fighting the teacher’s efforts. Two metal limbs burst from the gap, writhing and thrusting like pistons. One snagged Miss Chesterfield’s arm as she struggled to seal the door, slashing a deep furrow through her sleeve and into the flesh below.

  She gasped, clutching her wrist, releasing the door and stumbling away.

  The Project slammed the door wide, its scowling heads staring their blue gazes at Miss Chesterfield. The baby’s head was now as tall as her chest, and the rod that protruded from its forehead flexed backwards and forwards threateningly. Miss Chesterfield was more horrified by the prospect of the harm it could do to the students than to her.

  “Please,” she breathed, unsure which part of the flesh-and-metal form she was addressing.

  She was about to dash to her left to the nearest classroom door when the Project lunged. She cried out as it collided with her, toppling beneath it. The Project’s new legs hit the floor with a violent clank. Pain registered in her arms and spine, but it was Peter’s tortured face, inches from hers, that filled her with terror. The boy, apparently a mere puppet to the metal within, stretched open his mouth. Blood ran in streams from the lips as two rods, narrower and more intricate than the baby’s, emerged from Peter’s throat, unfurling as they stretched out to meet her.

  Though the Project had knocked Miss Chesterfield over it had not pinned her as it had Peter. She wriggled on her back, desperate to evade the thing’s glinting, robot proboscises.

  The doors to her left and right opened in unison and the Project lurched mercifully back. It spun and faced the other wall, giving Miss Chesterfield the chance to move out of its reach. She saw baby Shannon’s head rise higher, snakelike, its neck elongating a few inches to sweep between the two newly opened doors.

  Mr Graves, a pot-bellied History teacher with a wisp of cotton candy for hair stood gaping to its left, while Mr Ahmad, a stern but caring Maths teacher back-stepped the room to the right and closed the door.

  The Project shifted left with a pummel of heavy legs. Mr Graves’ double chin shook in dumbstruck horror. The Project rose onto its back legs and loped towards him, running him through with its forelegs. The class behind him filled with students’ cries as the Project’s limbs thrust wide apart, effortlessly splitting the teacher from shoulder to waist. He fell through what appeared to be a crimson mist, ribcage and shoulder joints exposed to the air. The Project trampled him as it bulldozed inside.

  Miss Chesterfield bellowed, “Get out! Everyone, out!”

  She turned to the wall behind her, ignoring the class’s chaotic howls, slamming of desks and wet sounds of impact. She slammed her knuckles into the fire alarm.

  The siren sounded, rattling her eardrums. Classroom doors opened and bored-looking students began to file out, the sounds of chaos from Mr Graves’ class having been muffled by the sealed door. Upon seeing Miss Chesterfield, her eyes wet with tears and her front wet with blood, the children soon recognised that the alarm was not a drill and the school was no longer a haven. While at first some stopped and stared at her curiously, it only took the scream of one girl with a blue-tipped bob to turn the queues into an unruly mob.

  One tall boy pushed the boy in front, who collided with the ginger girl ahead. She turned and hit him on the arm, and the students across the hall who watched began to emulate the violence. Some saw Miss Chesterfield and tried to run or pushed their friends, while others still were hit by the those who jostled with their peers.

  In moments the hallway became a bellowing commotion, children’s cries competing with the howling fire alarm, whose own volume was challenged by shouting teachers and assistants fighting to regain control over the pupils. Miss Chesterfield’s mind was in chaos, each alternative battling for dominance. The classrooms emptied and the corridor filled and swiftly bottle-necked with frightened, struggling kids.

  “Stop fighting!” Miss Chesterfield heard a teacher–probably Mr Jackson–yell, but the students were already lost to their panic.

  Amidst the bobbing heads and thrusting arms, Miss Chesterfield saw a tall, freckled girl drop. Another nearby child tripped a second later, this one unidentifiable, but judging by the movements of the school-uniform-clad bodies they were both stepped upon without regard.

  The shoulder-high mob moved like a churning tide and Miss Chesterfield felt herself dragged along. She was ploughed forwards, ears shrieking with the siren and the yelling of children and bewildered teachers. Realising her priority, she managed to haul herself through the packed bodies and grasp the handle of Mr Graves’ classroom to keep it closed.

  There could only have been 200 students there in the junior end, but it was a marvel how full a school corridor could become once hysteria took hold.

  Tugging the door back against the jamb, Miss Chesterfield saw through the portal’s glass strip that the violent energy of the children in the corridor seemed tranquil compared with what was taking place in the classroom. Inside, she saw a thrashing maelstrom of raw red flesh and undulating metal. She almost fell, but her determination to guard those she had been employed to protect kept her head clear.

  She turned back to the corridor. The initial rush had slowed and the crowd of children and teachers had become less dense. Many had already filtered through to the main hall.

  The window in the door burst open behind her and a lacerating pain ripped through her upper arm. She kept the door pulled to the frame and avoided allowing whatever the Project had become to escape.

  An arm, slick with spilled blood and perhaps motor oil, had broken through the window. All that stopped it emerging entirely was the pair of children’s heads that jutted from where its shoulder should have been, which had lodged in the space between the broken glass and the door. Their blue eyes blazed yet appeared somehow numb, defeated by whatever horrendous force throbbed and pulsed through the Project’s gore-soaked machinery. Stubby fingers gripped Miss Chesterfield’s hair and yanked her forwards. She was flung sprawling from the door, which broke open and revealed the Project’s newly contorted form.

  Finally, the children’s screams overwhelmed the still-shrieking fire alarm.

  The Project no longer appeared arachnid, but more like a vast, blood-streaked caterpillar of metal and distended flesh. Its highest point, still the upward-facing shape of Ross’s baby sister, reached the height of the door frame. Behind it, Miss Chesterfield saw taut skin scatter-shot with small limbs and grimacing children’s features, while its ragged metal sections shuddered and flexed like steampunk nightmares.

  The Project reared and the assembly of children seemed to halt, like a collective drawn breath.

  The beast thundered forwards like a living freight train.

  The deafening noise of the Project cut through both the fire alarm and the subsequent screams. Something burning hot ploughed into Miss Chesterfield and she was thrown into the crowd. She landed on the floor on her back, surrounded by pupils who had begun to flee pell-mell.

  The world became a cacophony of shearing flesh and earthquake-like tremors. At last her mind switched to self-preservation and she spun onto her front and began to crawl. Grey coils and mutant once-human formations flashed above her, the Project’s lethal mandibles clattering on all sides as she pulled herself along between children’s stomping feet.

  Gore slopped the ground like slaughterhouse debris.

  A child’s scalp, trailing a braided blonde pigtail, landed on her shoulder before sliding to the floor in her wake.

  A boy with red hair huddled before Miss Chesterfield, crying inconsolably. She saw a serpentine strip of metal noose his throat. The boy’s reddened eyes bulged as the Project lifted and impaled him with a metal lance that extended from its flank; one more organic addition to the writhing metal mass.

  A bloody trainer crushed Miss Chesterfield’s hand just as a lightning bolt
of pain tore into her calf. She tried to keep crawling but found she could not move. She swung her head back: her calf was nailed to the floor by the point of one of the Project’s countless legs.

  Above her, a child’s face mounted within a pulsating metal underbelly screamed. Miss Chesterfield screamed in return, lost to the madness.

  The Project’s leg rose, unsheathing itself from her calf, and unconsciousness swallowed her.

  When Miss Chesterfield awoke, she was first hit by the silence.

  Gore and discarded limbs littered the ground.

  The Project was nowhere to be seen.

  “They told the truth.”

  She felt drained and her vision was a blur, but even in her daze she knew who had spoken.

  Ross sounded smug: “They said I’d win, and I reckon I did.”

  The ground shook suddenly beneath her spine, and something far-off rumbled.

  “It’s an experiment, they said,” Ross continued. “It wants the young people, but they promised that it wouldn’t touch me. I put the marble in Shannon’s mouth to find out what would happen, so that makes me a scientist.”

  Miss Chesterfield squinted up into the light. Ross leered. She wanted to move, but it felt as though the world was lying on top of her.

  From the corners of her vision she saw a row of tall, looming figures lining the corridor. Each seemed to wear a long black trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat, and each face seemed composed entirely of shadow.

  The men you can’t see, she remembered. The lights above the farm.

  “Don’t ask who they are,” Ross said. “They started visiting ages ago, and they always said I don’t need to know who they are. They said I don’t need to go to school anymore, because they’d teach me everything I need to know. They said that nothing else matters”

  Something distant beyond the school walls surged and bellowed.

  “Let’s call my project, ‘Can It Be Stopped?’” Ross said, with a sunken twinkle in his eyes. “My hypothesis is No.”

  THE HIDDEN WAR ON TERROR

  G. H. Finn

  If you asked me the most useful thing I learnt while working as a part-time library assistant, my answer might surprise you. I suppose you could call it an arcane secret but it's not the kind you're probably expecting. It's just this...

  There's a simple way to find out about people, and all it'll cost you is a large pizza and the time it takes to play a game of Scrabble.

  If you're lucky, someone else might buy the pizza.

  I've met people who will attempt to use an individual’s choice of pizza-toppings as a method of divination and character reading. In my opinion that's baloney. Unless they've chosen mozzarella, sacrificial goat entrails and anchovies. Never trust anyone who orders anchovies.

  Actually, the pizza is virtually irrelevant. It's the Scrabble that matters.

  We used to play sometimes, during lunch-breaks or after hours when the Miskatonic University library was closed. Almost all the people who worked part-time in the library were students of some kind. I say almost all, because some were only pretending to be students. And a few were only pretending to be people. But let's not get into that just now.

  Most of the part-timers were undergraduates, but others, like me, were post-grads trying to earn a little extra cash while we continued our studies. We played Scrabble because it was quiet. We avoided talking loudly. In fact we didn't talk much at all, even in the staff-room, because the old Head Librarian was very strict about keeping silence in the library at all times. So I watched more than listened. That's how I found that you can tell what people study and what they are thinking about by the words they play in Scrabble.

  If your opponents put down words like “cliteratures” and “marginocentricism” or keep word-building to make terms like “preretropostfuturism” (the precise meaning of which they will happily explain, no matter how many times you whisper pointedly, asking them not to) then you are dealing with Arts-and-Humanities geeks. Of the worst kind.

  If they play words like “aliter,” “integer,” “fractal,” “mandelbrot” and “noneuclidean,” you've hooked up with mathematics nerds. You are in for a long, boring evening and have little chance of getting away with some “creative accountancy” when adding up scores. Unless (like me) you carry a supply of tranquillizers and (like me) your moral compass is so demagnetised that you'll spike someone's drink just to win a board game...

  If you think I have a troubled conscience about such things, you're wrong. I'm not into self-loathing. There are far more horrible things that deserve to be loathed infinitely more than I do. This level of ambivalence toward conventional standards of ethical behaviour is very useful—or so my boss tells me. But I digress...

  If your fellow Scrabble players keep spelling out words like “ichor,” “eldritch,” “miasmal,” “necrophagous,” “eidolon,” “blasphemous,” “unhal-lowed,” “squamous,” “cyclopean,” and “gibbous” then it is time to edge toward the door. Forget your jacket. Just get out. Now.

  That's exactly what I should have done, on that eldritch, miasmal, unhallowed, ichorous night, back when I was still a (relatively) innocent student at Miskatonic Uni. Except I didn't know then what I know now. And the words my new “friends” were spelling out weren't ones I recognised; “necrotechnological,” “thanatomical,” “pseudocyber-mancy,” “cthulhoidoplasm” and “thaumaturgodynamics” meant nothing to me (other than that playing one on a triple-word score got you an unreasonable number of points).

  In retrospect, I was a fool to trust them. It should have been obvious they were all shifty, low-down cheats. Otherwise, how could they keep spelling all those words? You're only supposed have seven letters at a time in Scrabble.

  I only twigged what was going on later, when I saw some very specific groups of three letters appear in front of me.

  FBI. CIA. MIB.

  Turned out a few of my fellow Scrabble players were looking for new recruits... I should have realised... But it's easy to be wise after the event. Back then I was just another half-drunk, three-quarters stoned, post-grad student working on a Ph.D. and hoping someone would pay me lots of money for my research. Which would have been fairly likely if, like many of my other fellow Scrabble players, I'd been focussing on genetic-engineering or nano-tech or crystal-cryptography.

  But I'd been financially dim enough to study literature. Not even the popular stuff.

  I specialised in ancient Middle-eastern esoteric verse, particularly Arabic magico-poetic sorcery from around 300 BC to 900 AD. It was why I came to Miskatonic in the first place. It might sound a bit big-headed, but I could have taken my pick of Harvard, Princeton, Oxford or Cambridge. I had the grades for it. But Miskatonic has always been the place to come if your interests lie in certain very specific areas of study. And, I thought, surely with such unusual expertise in so rarefied an academic field, I'd end up making a fortune and be totally set up for life.

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  To my surprise (and the disappointment of my creditors), my employment offers so far could be counted on the fingers of one foot. But as it turned out, it was due to my academic expertise that I was about to be head-hunted. I wish that was a metaphor. But that's another story.

  I suppose I could tell you the whole thing. Describe the Scrabble game, and the pizza with its anchovies and its stuffed-crust full of cheese and what I thought was salami but turned out to be goat-entrails. And the whispered conversations that carefully flattered my “amazing knowledge” of ancient poetry. I could tell you how, over the next few weeks, I was groomed, chatted-up and finally offered a chance to get a huge, ahem, “research grant,” if I did some translation work for “A Government Department.” A department that no-one ever names.

  This is the point where I'm supposed to say “I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.”

  Don't worry, I'm not going to say that. I don't kill people (at least, not deliberately) and no-one would shoot you, even if you found out what passes
for the truth. Contrary to popular belief, mysterious Men in Black do not hide with sniper-rifles waiting to assassinate inquisitive civilians.

  No, they'd lock you in a cellar somewhere, say a few words, and leave you until your soul had been eaten. It's less messy. And good luck with finding any proof of a missing soul during subsequent psychiatric evaluations. Or the eventual, inevitable, autopsy.

  Anyway, I won't tell you the boring details because you've probably already guessed the important bit. These days, now that I have my Ph.D., when I'm not giving the odd lecture at MU to keep up my cover (and it is an odd lecture), I spend the rest of my time working in what people like to call “Black Ops.”

  They just don't know how black they really are. When people say one of our operations is “off the books” for some reason no-one ever asks exactly which books are we talking about?

  Yes, you guessed it. The kind of books that are kept in the restricted section of MU library...

  I deal with some very “off” books. Amongst others, the Liber Mutatis-Mortis-Mundi, The Edda of Ergi and Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten (but I never speak about that one, because I can't pronounce the names of half the cults it describes).

  It all really began when I was asked to translate the original manuscript of “Kitab al-Azif” by Abdul Alhazred. Miskatonic University Library is one of the very few places that has any of Abdul's handwritten work (and they've never been keen on admitting it publicly). My exalted status as a Ph.D. student allowed me perfectly legitimate access to quite a bit of the restricted section of the library. And my new... “friends” ...felt that my part-time job might help me access any materials for which I didn't have the Head Librarian's blessing...