Dark Rising

by Greig Beck

  His hand tingled against the stone and he realised he could sense vibration – some kind of life presence inside the ancient structure. It was a swirling, chaotic storm of emotions – the lingering remnants of human pain and suffering. The living had been rapidly extinguished here, but he couldn’t tell if it was by violent death or by some other force.

  The pain behind his eyes subsided and he removed his fingers from the stone, curling his hand briefly into a fist as if it had been burnt. He turned to the group, pointed at himself with one finger, at Sam with two, then Adira with three and at Zach, four. Then he pushed open the steel door and silently disappeared into the darkness, his small team following in the order he’d indicated.

  TWENTY

  Ahmad Al Janaddi looked with a critical eye through the four-inch-thick lead-plated glass window at the Jamshid II facility’s main testing floor. Images from every section of the room were displayed on multiple screens, the recordings taken in a continuous loop. Sophisticated computer programs allowed him to pass much of the control of the experiment over to the electronic equipment, and the high-speed drives would capture images of the event down to the micro-millisecond. Further data on atmospheric density, thermal, infrared and other spectrum wavelengths would also be collected. Nothing would be missed this time.

  The reinforced concrete chamber with its lead-lined panelling was both awe-inspiring and intimidating. The sleek and gleaming silver globe sat at its centre, surrounded by walls studded and spiked by hundreds of different sensors and lenses that would observe the creation of a perforation into the very matter of the universe. It could have been a small spaceship that had landed and was preparing to disgorge creatures from another planet.

  A thick white line circled the floor around the unearthly shimmering sphere. This was where the president’s ‘volunteers’ would stand during the event – the ‘opening of Allah’s Gateway’ as he liked to call it. Al Janaddi remembered the screams of anguish that had shrieked from the speakers the last time the sphere had been activated. These men and women may as well be stepping into a furnace, he thought. He just hoped the waist-high black steel cylinders covered in lenses and sensitive recording equipment that also stood on the line would be able to withstand whatever occurred; at least then they would obtain a basic understanding of how, when and where the subjects went. The sooner they knew that, the less likely the president would demand that more people ‘volunteer’.

  With the current design, the experiment could be repeated as many times as they wished. But it took time: the concrete had to dry, the lead panelling had to be moulded into place and the sphere repositioned. The president was growing more impatient by the day, and it was not uncommon for Al Janaddi to receive calls in the morning and the evening to discuss progress.

  He looked up as the volunteers were led in – eight villagers, a few local clerics, and a young couple, a man and a woman, who looked out of place amongst the elderly group. This small gathering was the ‘lucky’ pious – men and women who had begged to be given the opportunity to stand before their God.

  Al Janaddi studied the youthful couple for a moment. They both wore the uniform of the young conservative: he, a cheaply cut blue suit with stiff white shirt and no tie; and the girl, a black manteau – the heavy overcoat that buttoned from the collar to below the knee. Her only personal touch – whether as a small sign of individuality or rebellion – was her scarf, which was royal blue with small golden tulips and intricate crimson scrolling reminiscent of Persian calligraphy. It framed her beautiful face with its perfect milk and honey complexion.

  The couple turned to each other, their hands clasped in prayer, just the tips of their small fingers touching. What are they doing here? Al Janaddi thought as he watched the attending technicians prepare them for the event.

  The head-to-toe, fully lead-impregnated protective suits, each weighing around one hundred pounds, were finished with regular sunglasses. The president had suggested that each martyr should have an automated homing beacon with global satellite positioning implanted under the skin, which would act like a mini black box device. As he had said to Al Janaddi: ‘As long as we get one of the boxes back, then the surrounding flesh doesn’t matter.’

  Once the volunteers were in place, one of the clerics led them in prayer. The haunting sound stretched and bounced around the enormous chamber and it was hard not to feel touched by the melodious chanting. The cleric explained that some of them would be martyred, that they would stand before God to be judged and, if they were pure, would be exalted and given eternal sanctuary in Jannah for themselves and all their relatives.

  The young couple looked at each other and their hands met. She took hold of his fingertips and smiled shyly. Al Janaddi looked down at his slightly scuffed shoes and wondered what it was like to have such an unwavering faith. Perhaps if these poor, brave, foolish souls knew they had little chance of surviving, they may have prayed for something very different.

  He gave the order for all the technicians to exit the chamber, then, over the speaker, bade the volunteers to go with God. He noticed a puddle of urine at the feet of one of the older villagers and felt a pang of sympathy for the ragged little carpet weaver – perhaps not all of them expected to find heaven after all. Allah keep you all safe, he thought.

  He turned to his command centre, where every scientist and technician was hunched over the banks of monitoring equipment. He raised his voice slightly: ‘Green light in sixty seconds.’ He was greeted by an array of thumbs ups and a few Allahu Akbars.

  ‘Countdown in ten seconds,’ he said. His heart sped up in anticipation and he continued the count: ‘Five… four… three

  … two… one…’ He switched on the homing beacons and initiated the particle acceleration lasers. The lights dimmed.

  They were all returning now. Al Janaddi thought it like a conjuror’s trick – one minute the international grid screen showed all twelve of the beacons clustered around the sphere in the Arak facility, then in the next moment they disappeared. Then, almost magically, they began to reappear on the grid, scattered all over the globe – some high in mountains or below the ground, some deep beneath the oceans. Al Janaddi counted: Five… eight… eleven… one short.

  Many of the beacons faded quickly, perhaps crushed by deep-sea pressure or melted by volcanic flow beneath a mountain range. But a few continued to deliver their electronic signal loud and clear. Now Al Janaddi needed to retrieve those bodies before anyone else.

  He reached for the phone and spoke quickly to Commander Bhakazarri, who would mobilise the recovery forces, retrieval teams for the bodies still in the Middle East and using agents or local sympathisers when the ‘packages’ were in less accessible countries.

  While Al Janaddi was providing the exact longitude and latitude locations of the homing beacons, his eyes widened. One of the beacons was on the move – slowly, but definitely shifting from where it had first arrived.

  One of the test subjects had returned alive.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The darkness was thick and absolute; and the smell of fresh-cut rock was sharp in the dry atmosphere. Normal human night vision was poor in near total darkness, but the changes to Alex’s brain had increased the level of rhodopsin in the rods of his eyes, giving him vision more like that of a hunting animal or nocturnal bird of prey. But even his amplified vision picked up little more than shapes and angles in a tunnel devoid of even the faintest starlight.

  Luckily, Alex had more than night vision to rely on. His rewired brain was able to receive temperature differentials that delivered thermal images – and, recently, other senses had been opening to him as well. He was able to perceive an impression of living things – literally, to sense the proximity of another life force. The ability was growing, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before those impressions turned to shapes, then to an exact mental picture. It was these new senses he relied on as he led his team forward in the blackness of the Persepolis catacombs.

  A slig
ht whistling came from Zach’s nostrils as they moved silently down the tunnel and Alex was tempted to turn around and pinch the scientist’s nose.

  After a few seconds, they came to a pool of absolute blackness in the gloom – the empty elevator shaft down to the main facility. Alex looked back over his shoulder and could just make out a line of single bulbs strung along the ceiling. No juice left here, he thought. He stared down into the dark pit – he couldn’t detect any form of electronic hum or power at all. Good, no juice down there either. Presumably that meant the electronic locks had disengaged to ensure personnel weren’t trapped inside by generator failures.

  The shaft was deep and the cage was at the bottom. Whoever had last entered had never left. Persepolis is hanging onto its ghosts, he thought.

  He put one leg over the edge of the pit, and Sam and Adira lined up behind him.

  ‘Should I stay here?’ Zach whispered. The sound of his voice in the tomb-like silence was a jarring intrusion.

  Alex looked at Zach and held his finger to his lips. Then he pointed at Zach’s chest, then down into the pit – Zach was going.

  Zach’s teeth chattered. The nightscope he wore made everything around him a ghostly green, and the absolute silence meant that all he heard in his helmet was his own breathing and an intermittent dry swallowing.

  When the American captain pointed at him and then down into the pit, he felt his stomach roll. The sensitive nightscope failed to pick up even the faintest fragment of light down there. For all he could tell, that hole descended all the way to the centre of the Earth.

  Captain Hunter looked back at him and placed his fingers to his lips again. It’s his eyes, he thought, they look strange; they shine unnaturally, like a wolf.

  They’re all so calm. I should never have said I needed to come with them, he thought, as Captain Hunter disappeared into the hole. Zach willed his legs to move, but instead they threatened to collapse. Adira grabbed him by the arm and led him to the edge of the pit. For once she looked taller than he did. I’m crouching, why am I crouching? he thought, and dry-swallowed once more.

  *

  It took them twenty minutes – a half-mile climb down the side railings, then a small drop into the open cage of the elevator. Alex noticed Zach was breathing heavily; he knew the kid would suffer even more on the way back up.

  The blackness was all-consuming at this level. The night-vision goggles only delivered faint green outlines. Unless they could switch to white light soon, much of the investigation from here would be done by feeling around with their hands.

  Alex’s enhanced abilities told him they were standing in a corridor facing a fortified steel door that was slightly ajar a few inches. A black tunnel stretched both to the left and right, into the unknown depths of the Persepolis ruins. Alex put two fingers into the gap at the door and rolled the heavy steel back with ease. He was thankful it was open – judging by its density and thickness, they didn’t have enough ordnance to break through if it had been sealed shut.

  He felt the emptiness as soon as he stepped through the doorway. Where once had stood an enormous laboratory with walls of computers and electronic monitoring equipment, now there was nothing but scoured ground leading to a large circular pit that smelled of cut rock, ozone and something repellent.

  ‘What happened here? Go to torchlight,’ Alex ordered. He pressed a stud inside his helmet rim, and a coin-sized disc covered his left eye. It was one of nature’s little secrets, discovered by English pirates hundreds of years before and adopted by the US military. It took up to thirty minutes to recover full night vision after being exposed to light, but night blindness affected the eyes independently. Covering one eye ensured it remained night-ready when the lights went back out.

  In the light of their helmet torches, the Blue team could appreciate the magnitude of the devastation. The ground where they stood looked to have been rubbed raw then somehow liquefied. Strangely coloured streaks and swellings ran across the floor like the gristle and arteries of some great beast’s innards.

  Zach’s helmet torch beam swung rapidly back and forth across the strange mosaic under his feet. ‘What happened?’ he replied to Alex. ‘Not exactly sure, but I can tell you what I think happened. These marks are the effects of an enormous gravitational tide. I believe a black hole existed here – perhaps for only a millionth of a second – and it swallowed the entire facility. Whatever was here before – men, machinery, rock – has simply ceased to exist in our universe.’

  The team backed up and formed a circle, their combined torchlight brightly illuminating the strange melange under their feet.

  ‘What’s that in there?’ Sam knelt down and removed a glove so he could feel the texture of the surface. ‘Wood, metal, plastic… is that a pencil, part of a chair? It’s all fused together – like it’s been melted and then solidified. But not by heat.’ He ran his hand over the small lumps and depressions. ‘Dr Shomron, is this an example of your spaghettification?’ he asked without looking up.

  Zach was staring at the ground as if in a trance and it took him a moment to register his name and the question. ‘Yes. Yes, this is theoretically what happens when the molecular structure of physical matter is stretched within an enormous gravitational tidal surge – an attractive force so impossibly strong it bends and elongates time and space. Anything this close to it gets turned to taffy as it’s drawn in and consumed. My guess is that the gamma rays irradiated this entire site and bleached it of every living organism, right down to the virus level. Everything that was here is either gone, dead, or ended up like this.’

  Alex nodded. ‘Other than validating what we suspected, there’s nothing here for us. Go to dark, let’s go.’

  He was about to switch off his torch, when something on the ground caught his eye. Embedded in the confused mess, deformed but still recognisable, was a human tooth. Gone, dead… or ended up like this.

  Alex switched off his torch and headed for the steel door. Sam, Adira and Zach followed. The discs slid back off their left eyes, and all except Alex went back to nightscopes.

  At the door, Alex had the urge to turn – he could sense something in the blackness around him. Perhaps there were such things as ghosts, he thought, trapped in some kind of tormented limbo by the trauma that had occurred here. He shook his head to clear it of the morbid idea.

  Tavira, Portugal

  The smell of diesel fuel and dried fish wafted across the deck as the three de Macieira brothers prepared to pull in the nets. It would take all three of them. The new green cord-nylon was much lighter than the older rope twine, but the men’s years added weight to the drag; every pull took longer, was heavier, and hurt a little more.

  The hatch was off the fish freezer and chill air spread from the dark interior, even though Paulo rarely bothered to load much ice these days. The men pulled fish from the mesh of the nets and threw them into the hold. Rarely did anything go back unless they were really merda pescado, shit fish.

  Carlos, the eldest brother, smiled to himself; he could feel good weight in the final net and couldn’t resist peeking over the side. The water was jade green and almost milky – the high algae content in the cold Atlantic Ocean robbed it of any transparency below ten feet. The net came up slowly and now all three men felt the weight. Paulo, the youngest at sixty-one, joked that perhaps they had finally found the ocean’s plug and would need to walk home if they pulled it free.

  They could see the mass in the net now, large, about ten feet long, and a light colour; it was not struggling so it must have already drowned in the mesh on its way to the surface. The water here was deep – around 150 feet – and they had heard of fishermen catching strange fish and crabs that had been whipped up from the seabed to mid-water by strong deep-ocean currents. The thing flopped onto the deck; at first glance it looked like a body, although perhaps not a human body.

  Paulo gasped, let go of the net and clutched the small pewter crucifix around his neck with both hands. Santo muttered, ‘O meu Deu
s,’ and crossed himself. Even Carlos, the oldest and most practical of the brothers, felt a wave of fear ripple through him.

  ‘Sereia; mermaido!’ he said. A girl brought up from the depths – it could be nothing else. Her beautiful face was the colour of honey and milk, though her skin looked hardened, like stone or ice. Her dark eyes were open and unclouded; strange for a body brought up from such deep water. The brothers could feel the cold coming off her – perhaps the freezing Atlantic depths had preserved her for a while. But even the cold would not have protected her eyes and angelic face from the normal ravages of the fish and crabs.

  Carlos looked around at the horizon – no boats large or small anywhere. He looked back down at the girl. Maybe she hadn’t fallen overboard and into the depths; maybe she had fallen ‘up’ to them. His eyes traced her perfect face, her small rounded breasts and tiny waist

  … but from there things got crazy. From the hips down, her body stretched and elongated into a twisted rope-like mass; to Carlos, it looked like a long flowing tail – a mermaid’s tail. A scarf was tangled in her long hair – it was royal blue with small golden tulips and crimson Arabic-looking writing.

  Santo leaned over the girl to pull back some of the fish netting – as he did, blood ran thickly from his nose.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ahmad Al Janaddi was standing at the door of the containment cell when the president’s call was transferred through to him. He listened for a few minutes and gathered his strength; there were tears flowing down his cheeks. Looking back into the cell he felt the gorge rise in his throat once more. He turned quickly away as the thing started to howl again.