D

by George Right

  It seemed that she (she, the amnesiac understood; it was a woman) was silently examining the uninvited intruder, smiling under a curtain of hair with a grin promising nothing good. He would have cried under this inscrutable look, but a spasm seized his throat. His fingers began to fumble convulsively on the floor in search of the tablet left somewhere abouts. But the next moment he had already realized that his horror and shock were caused only by unexpectedness. This woman was not likely the one who had struck him. He realized this because he had, at last, noticed the pipes, which had in several places ripped through her coat into her breast and solar plexus. She was punctured by these pipes, like an insect specimen pierced by several pins at once.

  At the same moment the man understood that nobody had beaten him on a head. He had struck against these pipes himself when he sprang to his feet, being directly under them. He stood up and approached the dead woman. The free ends of the pipes, brown with blood, stuck out of her back no less than a meter. A pool has accumulated on a floor under them. From behind, the coat had been soaked red much more deeply than in the front, and the man rejected the idea of putting on these blood-stained rags (for, of course, he would at first have to remove the corpse from the pipes). He did, however, have the logical thought of searching the coat pockets.

  There were only two of them. The right one was empty, but in the left he found a folded sheet of paper. The man unfolded it and brought to the flashlight. It was a list, written by hand (fortunately, this time not in blood):

  Dr. Kalkrin - s-e

  Dr. Hart - heart attack

  Prof. Poplavska - madness

  Dr. Silberschmied - s-e

  Dr. Nakamura - s-e

  Dr. Lebrun - coma

  Prof. Ward - fire in lab, supp. s-e

  Prof. Streicher - killed h-self in ment. clinic

  Dr. Giroldini - death in road accident, supp. s-e

  Dr. Wong - stroke

  Prof. Kovaleva - took the veil, silence vow

  The amnesiac twirled the paper in a hand. The mysterious "s-e" probably meant suicide ("Kill yourself now!"). But what does this list of the lost scientists mean? Not all of them, in fact, have died physically, but, anyway, all were lost for science. Whether is it possible, that all these corpses, which he saw in this place, are the people on this list? And he, in that case, is one of the survivors? For example, professor Poplavska... But no, it is, apparently, a female surname (he looked again at the dead woman standing near him). Then maybe, Lebrun, who had regained consciousness after a coma... Though this place was hardly similar to a functioning hospital... Yes, yes, he already thought of it... But whether a certain hybrid of coma and lethargy were possible, where a patient forsaken without any help for several months would not be capable of just surviving, but would also come round without aid? It seemed to be something out of pure fiction, though he, after all, still did not know what the experiment was essentially, even if it actually were an experiment.

  And the others–a fire in the laboratory, a road accident–all this was not very similar to that, to what he saw here. However, he saw only four–more precisely, three, because on the fourth he had only stepped. But, if it were known about the deaths of the scientists, why were the bodies left here? Maybe the list on this piece of paper reflected merely the official version?

  Or maybe all of them were left here simply because all those who knew about this place have died, gone mad, or fallen into a coma? No, that would be nonsense, such a huge building cannot be the initiative of a small group, something not reflected in governmental or corporate documents. But what could he tell for certain? He, who cannot remember even his name?

  He moved the beam around on the floor, searching for his missing tablet, found it, and stood for a while, without knowing what to do with the paper. He lacked pockets, and carrying three objects was inconvenient. Perhaps he should learn this list by heart? Was it valuable? It was the only item in the pocket of a woman who died a terrible death. Perhaps, this information cost her her life? On the other hand, the murderer had not touched this paper.

  But was there actually a murderer? It didn't look like the victim has resisted. Her feet stood on the floor, her legs not bent back as they would have been had she–already dying–been pushed forward, further and further on to the impaling pipes. And the main point: How could the murderer position himself so that the pipes would not hinder him to do what he did? They would bear against his own chest.

  But it is was even more difficult to imagine that she had done it to herself. She, applying considerable force, would have impaled her stomach and breast pressing on the pipes pushing forward, sliding on the metal piercing her body, while she still could. What an excruciating pain she must have felt! Is there truly something in this world capable of making a person do such a thing? Even the worm in your guts didn't seem a sufficient cause.

  This flashlight–was she the one who had dropped it? After all, the murderer very unlikely would have thrown it here, so far from the exit!

  But the dead body made nothing clear. Maybe if he were–what is it called?–a pathologist–and he had the proper tools... But, though he still did not know who he was, he was, for some reason, quite confident that he was definitely not a physician.

  At last he wound the sheet around the handle of the flashlight and picked up the tablet from the floor, then continued to search for the exit.

  The flashlight shone dimly. Apparently its accumulator was almost discharged, so he definitely had to hurry. But with at least this light source the warehouse didn't seem something like a haunted dungeon anymore. The containers were not specially placed in order to confuse the person who appeared here, so he quickly enough found the exit back to the staircase. This, however, did not suit him already, and he moved along a wall in search of an exit to the outside. But, to his surprise, having gone around the whole warehouse on its perimeter, he had not found any more doors. For some time he stood there perplexed. Some containers were obviously too large to drag them down the spiral staircase already familiar to him. How could they get here? He looked with doubt at the waning flashlight and nevertheless moved deeper into the warehouse.

  The thought which had flashed through his mind proved true and after a while he found them: the big square hatches in the floor–more exactly, not really hatches, but the platforms of lifts by which cargo was hoisted from below. So, this was not yet the bottom level of a vault? There are probably tunnels under the building. Anyhow, he couldn't go there. He had not found any buttons to activate the lifts. Any attempts to open some of the containers had also failed. He had to return to the staircase.

  As he had planned to do before, he ascended to the next level and entered the passage leading into the cylinder. Here it was also absolutely dark. But no sooner had he taken a pair of steps than light switched on with a strained click, and brighter than before, so that he shuddered unexpectedly, but understood at the next moment that in some places the automatics still worked. He turned off the flashlight to save the battery charge.

  Having rounded the lift shaft, he found himself in a corridor. Here something clicked too, but light did not come on. Perhaps, it will work in the next section, the man thought and made some careful steps forward. There was clearly a reason to move cautiously. The floor underfoot was not simply dirty. It was somehow greasy, in places slippery. It was not blood–neither dried up nor even fresh. It was something different. And the smell. To the general atmosphere of mustiness and desolation something else was added here. Something heavy and unpleasant. Not the odor of decay, no. More likely such an odor came from something alive–something even the most excited fans of nature would not care to have as a pet. More precisely, they would not want to encounter at all.

  The man stopped in indecision. Now he also heard sounds–muted sounds, hardly distinguishable, wet, rasping and stirring.

  He lifted the flashlight, holding it like a sword hilt. But he didn’t switch it on. He took one more step, knowing (from where did this knowl
edge come?) that he would enter the radius of a sensor responsible for illuminating the next section. This hope proved true. It clicked, and then light was turned on.

  The light illuminated a corridor looking completely different from the other premises of this strange building, while initially, obviously, it had been built and finished in the same manner. But while in other places only dust and rubbish had accumulated, here everything looked much worse. From the ceiling here and there hung some sort of fringe, disheveled rags of something like a dusty web, with stalactites of pale flesh hanged down. On the walls jellylike stains fatly shone and mold blots shagged. On the floor, covered with dead insects in some places, having swelled and broken through an artificial covering, slimy ugly mushrooms, similar to pieces of aborted embryos, puffed up. But this was not the nastiest. Oh no, it was only a background which was almost not borne in the mind of the amnesiac. Because he, paralysed by horror and disgust, stared at what he had nearly nestled against in the dark.

  Just a meter from his face, across a corridor, hung a crucified corpse. Certainly, this was not the first dead person he had seen this day, but all the previous, however terrible their end had been, were really lucky compared to this unfortunate person–more precisely, unfortunate woman. Though there were no clothes on the body, the amnesiac could not immediately recognize its gender. Her skin was almost completely grazed. Only on the lower body did semi-torn off scraps of skin hang down from the scarlet flesh. Maybe the torturer did not have enough time, or something has distracted him. But especially gruesome was the look of the round head, with rolled out balls of lidsless eyes and, grinning in a final shout, lipless jaws. She had no legs, only a medley of blood-stained tatters of flesh, from which yellowish bones stuck out, was left from her hips, and everything below, seemingly, was not even chopped off, but simply broken out from knee joints. The belly of the martyr has been ripped, and entrails, having fallen out through the cut, hung down like an ugly knobby utter. Thin but obviously strong wire dug into her outstretched arms, tearing the wrists almost to the bone, the left arm tied this way to a bracket on which, probably, an observation camera had once been established, and the right arm to ventilating lattice in the opposite wall. (The ventilation was not working here as seemed to be the case for the whole building.)

  It was hard to say how long her agony lasted, but now within this tormented and mutilated body life could be found again. The purple-shining peeled flesh was already accreting in places with some spongy rubbish, but more to the point, the whole body was pitted and corroded by small gnawed holes. Numerous creatures similar to a hybrid of a worm and an insect crawled out of these holes, crept on the dead body and disappeared inside again. They had triangular heads, articulated fore-chelas–only one pair–and soft twisted bodies. Their length did not surpass three centimeters, but on the corpse (and the more so, obviously, in it) there were plenty of them, and their swarming made that sound which the amnesiac heard. Unlike ants or termites, they moved slowly and clumsily, quite often slipping from the dead flesh and plopping down to the floor. Under their awful nest, a whole pile of dead creatures had already accumulated. Those still alive were scraping and wriggling among the corpses of their companions.

  The corridor was not too narrow to bypass the crucified corpse, still it was hard to imagine a more daunting obstacle to moving further. The amnesiac moved back. Some arthropodic worms fell out of the open mouth of the dead woman and, as if sensing material for a new nest, began crawling towards him as fast as their ugly constitution allowed. This became the final straw, he turned and quickly rushed away. The passionless automatics recognized that the light was no longer necessary and the darkness again hid the horror that was now behind him.

  But for an instant before the light had gone out, he had time to see something else. On a lift door–situated just so the crucified woman could have seen it and, quite possibly, written in her own blood–was one more message, a phrase least of all corresponding to all seen in this corridor and in this damned building in general: "NO DEATH."

  He regained self-control only when he had almost lost his breath from running so quickly up the staircase. He dropped to his knees and rested his hands against the step before him, panting noisily. His heart pounded so hard it felt as though it would break through his ribs, tear through the skin and plop down on the dirty platform as a wet gob of meat, making the same sound with which the quasi-worms had slipped from a corpse and plopped to the floor.

  He tried again to pull out of the sticky whirlpool of panic and to reason logically. Whatever it was that he had just seen, there was one thing quite clear: She had in no way committed suicide. And the one who had killed her–the one who enjoyed killing people IN SUCH A WAY–was, quite probably, still alive and somewhere in this building. And for that matter who is to say that he was only one.

  At last, having recovered his breath (and with surprise at having understood that he didn't sweat at all), he raised his head and stumbled across the inscription "DO NOT GO THERE." Aha, here he was already. That meant that he had run again to his initial level. But now this time he was not going to take these inscriptions seriously. Kill yourself now. No death. That was madness. That was it, most likely, it was simply madness. Probably, it was indeed written by the murderer, by a balmy maniac, with a screw loose. Anyway, a person who was the least bit sane could hardly do what had been done to that woman. Person or persons, he thought to himself, considering the possibilities. There would be still a chance to deal with one maniac barehanded, but if...

  He looked at his hands. Oh yeah. The flashlight which was still wrapped up in a piece of paper, lay on a stair nearby, but the tablet was not there. Now he remembered, how during his run the "skirt" began to fall down, and he had mechanically seized it. Yes, of course, he thought gloomily, the civilized man in all his glory–dropping his only weapon to obey the useless conventions of decency. It would be necessary to go back down to look for the tablet. But he could not force himself. It seemed to him that the ugly worms with legs had already crawled up the staircase following him from below. And all the same, what could he do with this pitiful tablet? It was in no way comparable even to the most unpretentious knife. It could not inflict a deep wound, and even a surface wound would be possible only if the enemy did not resist. All was hopeless–all. He will never get out of here. He felt a sudden desire to write directly on the floor, "NO EXIT.” If he had been bleeding at that very moment, he, perhaps, would do just that.

  He shook his head. No, it is necessary to struggle with these attacks of despair. It is necessary... to struggle... He took the flashlight and stood up. Upwards on the staircase? Or first to investigate the rest of the ring on this level, where he has regained consciousness? He had found three corpses here, yes. But now he was convinced that danger could await anywhere. And he recalled that the first corpse had been found in a bathroom on the other side of a door where he had lain insensible and helpless. Arguing in this manner, he should have been finished off already there, at the same time as the other victim. Or may it be that he was the chosen one? Perhaps he would not suffer the same fate that the others had suffered and that was why he was still alive. Even if it were so, however, he might have been chosen for something even worse?

  He heaved a deep sigh. Speculating was useless. He stepped into the aperture leading into the cylinder, without any idea why he had made this particular choice. Maybe it was just because he had no desire to clamber up an abrupt staircase again. This time he bypassed the lift shaft from the other direction and moved along a corridor which he had not explored yet.

  Here he saw no corpses–aside from several dead cockroaches on the floor (or spiders or whatever they actually were). Suddenly it came to him that, perhaps, in the beginning of his exploration, that he would not have discerned these tiny bodies in the twilight on the dirty floor. It was not less dirty here, but... So did it mean that the light, yet still flickering painfully, became slightly more bright and stable? Only in this corridor, or on t
he whole level? For some reason this discover did not make him happy at all. Perhaps, somewhere the big sections of light fixtures, or other equipment, zoned out–and at the expense of them more energy began to supplement what remained? Then all this illumination is only for a short while. But even such variant was not the worst. Maybe... maybe, this whole place was awaking–not as a patient recovering from a coma, but as a vampire rolling in his tomb.

  He reached the end of a corridor and found himself in an external ring again. He stopped dead.

  From the left the sounds of bumps arose.

  He stood still, again with a sharp regret that he remained without a weapon (the flashlight did not suit this role in any way). But now he wanted to go back for the tablet even less. Thinking a little, he came to the conclusion that there was a barrier between him and the source of these sounds. Otherwise the blows would have been heard more clearly. Having put a hand on an internal wall of the ring corridor, he felt how it shuddered slightly in time with the blows. However, the vibration obviously came from elsewhere. It was hardly probable that someone would be beating his own head against the wall, though now he would not be surprised even by this. More likely someone or something was breaking to the outside through a closed door. But what would happen when it escaped?

  Nevertheless the man went to the left, towards to sounds. Any direct danger would be better than uncertainty. If another victim was breaking to freedom, as was he, he would help. If, on the contrary, it was the murderer who had gotten himself into a trap... or any other creature, for example, the next mutant, but far from insect size already, then he would try to strengthen the door or whatever contained this thing. But how would he understand it? Talking through a door? And what if the murderer, however mad he was, could convincingly pretend to be a victim?

  Meanwhile the blows grew closer and closer. He took some more steps and saw a door. It did not differ from the one which he had gone out not so long ago, except for the mutilated and, probably, tightly jammed lock. Obviously, someone had tried successfully to jam it because he concluded that this door should not be opened. And that someone had probably tried for a good reason?