The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  They couldn’t afford to rest long; the sun hung low, with twilight brief in the tropics. Ivo led them round the shore of the lake, crunching grey sand underfoot. Ahead stood a small hut, built from mortarless stones and roofed with reeds.

  “I scouted out a few places,” Ivo explained. “When the nanocams began their final push, I didn’t know exactly where the last Blind Spot would be, but I thought the lake was a likely spot.” He paused. “Urn . . . you might want to wait here for a minute.”

  Ivo approached the doorway cautiously, and Susanna remembered that terrorists might be hiding beyond. But he gave her a reassuring wave, and she joined him inside.

  A few folding chairs surrounded a picnic table full of mouldy styrofoam cups and empty Rizla packets. “Some of the hippies used to come up here for the fishing,” Ivo said. “They had lots of stories about the things that got away.”

  Susanna thought he referred to drug-inspired tales, until she realized that he meant weird things. What monsters might be wandering outside the stone walls? Was it safe up here?

  The hell with it, she thought. Bigfoot could scare off the terrorists – or vice versa. She was too tired to worry. She looked for a bed, but saw only a pile of dry reeds. From her holdall she took some spare clothes for a pillow.

  “Good thinking,” said Ivo. “We need to start early tomorrow, to beat the helicopters.”

  If he said anything else, Susanna didn’t hear it before she fell asleep.

  In the morning they walked further round the lake to a stretch of tall reeds growing in the shallows. A thin layer of cloud veiled the sun, but did little to restrain its heat from baking the landscape.

  Ivo splashed through the reeds until he shouted in triumph. Susanna stepped into the water – finding it colder than she expected – and joined Ivo as he heaved aside a faded tarpaulin. Underneath bobbed a motor-boat, its off-white interior colonized by nesting spiders. Susanna threw in her holdall and clambered onto a bench, brushing arachnids aside. Oh, the joys of location reporting. She towelled off her wet feet while Ivo struggled to start the engine.

  The boat roared into the lake, flattening reeds on its way. Ivo throttled back to a gentler pace. He kept glancing from port to starboard, bow to stern. Susanna saw only birds wading near the shore, taking to the air when the boat came too close.

  She looked away from the shore, out into the lake. Beyond the boat’s wake, the still water reflected the sky. She barely saw any boundary between them. No farther shore darkened the horizon.

  Susanna blinked, and peered into the distance. She still couldn’t see anything.

  “How big is this lake?” she asked.

  Ivo shrugged. “I haven’t been round it.”

  “I thought we were in a volcano crater. Shouldn’t we be able to see the other side?”

  “I’ll check the map.” Ivo delved into his rucksack. But when he tried to boot up the laptop, nothing happened. He shook his head. “Batteries must have run out. They don’t last long out here.”

  “You don’t have any spares?”

  “Sure, back in the Land Rover.”

  Ivo looked more excited than concerned. “Let’s get across and have a look,” he said, revving the boat like a boy racer.

  Susanna glanced back and watched the hut dwindle into an imperceptible speck. The loss of her only landmark disturbed her on a visceral level.

  You wanted to chase a story, she reminded herself. In the old days she’d survived dozens of disturbing moments. Back then she had almost relished being scared, because the most uncomfortable stories sometimes turned out to be the best.

  In those days, of course, she didn’t have a family waiting back home.

  The engine cut out.

  “Shit!” said Ivo. He yanked the starter. The engine coughed and grunted, but wouldn’t fire. “We must be out of gas. Stupid hippies! They promised me there was loads left.”

  Susanna bent down to peer under her bench. She rejoiced at the sight of a red canister, but when she grabbed it, she could feel it was empty.

  Below the other bench, Ivo retrieved two long paddles. “I guess this is the emergency engine.”

  “It’s a long time since I did any canoeing,” said Susanna. Or anything much, she thought.

  The motor-boat was no canoe. Susanna found the benches uncomfortably placed for paddling, as did Ivo. Nevertheless, after several minutes of splashing and swearing, they found they could move the boat if they had to. This made Susanna feel a little better, though she reflected that the few minutes the engine had driven them out would take a whole lot longer to paddle back.

  And where was “back”, exactly? In struggling to co-ordinate their paddling, they’d spun the boat so many times that Susanna had no idea which way they’d come.

  All directions looked the same, an expanse of water stretching to the hazy sky. The heat made her scalp itch with sweat. She opened a Coke and swigged the whole can.

  “Laptop down; engine stopped,” she said. “Do you reckon gremlins did it? Are they part of the weird?” She wanted to bait him, to get him to talk about what he was looking for.

  “If gremlins existed, they’d sabotage the nanocams. They haven’t managed that yet,” said Ivo.

  He raised an ancient pair of binoculars to his eyes. For long minutes he slowly turned, scanning all angles. He peered into the depths of the lake, then shrugged and sat down.

  For a few minutes, no one spoke. The occasional call of a faraway bird sounded as distant as if it came from another world.

  Susanna decided to test her backup system. She fixed her gaze upon Ivo and asked, “What made you start chasing the weird? Did you once have an encounter with it?”

  “No,” said Ivo. “Quite the opposite.” He paused to put on more suncream, then continued, “When I was a child, I used to lie a lot. I would make up stories, tell people I’d seen strange things. My parents thought I just wanted attention, that I’d say anything to make people listen to me. Maybe it started out that way.

  “But I didn’t want to lie. I really wanted to have stories to tell, true stories of marvellous things, inexplicable sights, strange meetings. I hated living in a suburb where nothing ever happened except bikes disappearing and pets being run over. I made up stories about bicycle-napping aliens, and monsters who emerged from the woods to gnaw the corpses of roadkill.”

  Susanna nodded sympathetically. Ivo went on, “To get ideas, I read old books about strange phenomena. And I began to wonder why those things didn’t happen any more – not in the suburbs, anyway. That’s when I realized that maybe all the surveillance was pushing back the unexplained, driving it away.”

  When he halted for a moment, Susanna rewound the last few seconds in her eyes. She saw Ivo speaking; she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t have an ear implant. But her camera-eyes included a tiny microphone to capture sound. When she uploaded the footage, she’d have full sound and vision.

  She remembered the day she’d finally topped Pink-Slip Pete, when she told him how she’d persuaded the network to pay for cyber-eyes as a covert backup for her glasses. The expense claim was so huge, it had to be authorized by a vice-president. But her eyes had secretly captured some great stories.

  Then the nanocams came along, and left her with a head full of obsolete hardware. This would be the last time she’d ever use it.

  She filmed Ivo talking about all the years he’d spent in ever more remote parts of the world. The oppressive heat made his Arctic adventures sound almost cosy. They both splashed themselves with water from the lake to cool down.

  “What about you?” Ivo asked at last. “Is this the story you anticipated when you came to Zaire?”

  Susanna shrugged. “I was just looking for someone to take me into the Blind Spot. I didn’t know what the story would be, and I still don’t. Yours isn’t the only theory about what’s out here, you know. I’ve heard conspiracy types claim there’s a secret government base beyond the cameras. There’s plenty of other theories, too. W
hatever people want to believe in, they find a place for. And this is the only hidden place left.”

  Ivo scanned the horizon yet again. “The occupants are staying hidden so far.” He took a monogrammed snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket, extracted a mint and ate it.

  “What are you expecting, the last UFO to turn up and beam you away?”

  “I already said, I’m not telling you what I’m expecting. You’re the independent witness – just keep watching.”

  Susanna wondered if Ivo refused to specify his goal because he didn’t know what it was, and only had a blind faith in something out there.

  Years of failing to find it, of being narrowed down to this one final spot, must have shaken that faith. Maybe he knew in his heart that he’d been chasing a mirage. Why invite a journalist, then forbid her to bring cameras? Was he planning a hoax?

  She didn’t see how he could manage it, unless he had an accomplice somewhere out on the lake. Susanna sighed. Professional paranoia was all very well – Pete’s journalistic motto had been “Why is this bastard lying to me?” – but Ivo’s sincerity had convinced her that he believed in what he searched for. She admired his commitment, his unwavering pursuit. He’d spent years in the field, chasing his goal, while she’d stayed home with the Teletubbies.

  Ivo gazed at the lake like a patient fisherman, absently twiddling with his cufflinks. “‘Once by men and angels to be seen,’” he muttered to himself. “‘In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.’”

  Susanna recognized the cadence of poetry, but without a Net connection she couldn’t identify it. Who memorized verse nowadays?

  A breath of wind blew across the lake, a welcome breeze in the furnace of the volcano crater. Susanna stared at the water, waiting for Atlantis to appear or Nessie to start frolicking, or whatever might manifest in front of her recording eyes. To pass the time, she mentally rehearsed voiceovers. For the Nostalgia Channel, “Remember Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster? You don’t hear so much about them these days, but one man reckons he can track them down . . .” For the Conspiracy Channel, “The government captured Bigfoot and friends, and is holding them in a secret reserve in remotest Africa. What sinister experiments are they performing on harmless yetis?”

  The searing heat had given her a headache. She swallowed an aspirin along with her lunch of a low-fat cereal bar. “Should we make a move?” she asked at last. “We’re not seeing a damned thing sitting here.”

  “We’re certainly not,” said Ivo, frowning. “The weird flees from cameras. Yet here we are, in a camera-free zone – the only camera-free zone on Earth – and it still hasn’t showed up. I wonder why that is? You left the glasses behind, but you wouldn’t happen to have brought any other cameras, would you?”

  Susanna stared at him, her cyber-eyes filming twenty-four frames per second. A surge of fear made her tremble. If she admitted that her eyes were cameras, what would he do? Ivo’s single-minded quest might make him do anything to reach his goal, anything to someone who threatened it. She felt acutely vulnerable, alone on the lake with this burly stranger. Years of living under the nanocams had made her feel safe; crime had plummeted under their surveillance. And now she had abandoned their protection for someone with a weird obsession.

  She pondered whether to lie to him, to say she had no other cameras. And yet as a journalist, she hated being lied to. She was committed to finding the truth. So how could she lie?

  All these thoughts whirled through her mind while Ivo waited for her to answer. At last, she nodded. “Yes, I’ve been using a backup camera. I’ll turn it off if I have to, I promise.”

  Ivo stared at her. Susanna realized that he wanted to see her turn off the camera, so he knew she’d done it, so he knew where it was. She couldn’t bear to tell him that the cameras were her eyes. He might rip them out of her head.

  “Look! Out there!” she shouted.

  He turned round and squinted at the calm surface of the lake. “What?” he demanded. “What did you see?”

  “I’m not telling you,” she replied. “The power of suggestion, remember? We’re making independent observations.”

  “Indeed we are,” said Ivo, his voice full of scepticism.

  By not claiming to see anything in particular, Susanna hadn’t actually lied. She’d heard so much spin as a journalist, she could spin herself when she had to.

  And yet . . . “Look,” she said again. This time she pointed.

  A faint patch of mist hung over the water.

  “‘The game’s afoot,’” Ivo said. “We need to get over there. You ready to paddle?”

  “Er . . . yeah.” Susanna didn’t feel quite as much enthusiasm as the prospect ought to inspire. The fog seemed to thicken as she gazed at it. What was out there anyway – the Flying Dutchman?

  “Then let’s go,” Ivo said impatiently.

  Susanna sat port and aft, with Ivo diagonally opposite. Together they slowly paddled across the lake. The mist approached faster than their paddling speed, as if the fitful wind blew it toward them. Now a whole bank of fog stretched across the water, like a cloud fallen from the sky.

  Just before they reached the whiteness, Susanna shipped her paddle. Ivo swore as his strokes, now unbalanced, sent the boat spinning. They slipped sideways into the fog.

  The cool mist made Susanna grateful for a respite from the heat. Inside the fog, visibility fell to a few metres. They floated in a cotton-wool cocoon, silence pressing down upon them.

  Susanna peered around to see what might be looming in the mist. The minutes passed slowly. Ivo drummed his fingers on the side of the boat, then stopped. Susanna saw nothing, heard nothing. She sniffed the air, but smelled only their own sweat.

  She remembered her promise to turn off her backup camera. But she hadn’t filmed with her eyes for years, and had forgotten exactly how they worked. Now she recalled that they recorded continuously on a seven-day loop. Was her gaze repelling weirdness? Ivo certainly thought so.

  There was probably nothing out there, she thought. But if there was, right now it didn’t even have a chance to show up. She felt sorry for Ivo, about to have his dreams shattered when the nanocams finally covered the whole Earth. All his years of dedication would be wasted – all those years he’d spent out in the field, while she sat at home spouting punditry and interviewing spin doctors. Didn’t Ivo deserve a chance at his story? Didn’t he deserve it more than she, who had abandoned journalism for a decade and even now hadn’t fulfilled the promise she’d just made?

  Her cameras had been staring for hours and not seen a damned thing anyway.

  Susanna took two deep breaths. Then she closed her eyes.

  Immediately, the silence developed texture. She heard the faint swish of water around the boat, the quiet creak of her bench as tension made her muscles twitch. She smelled dampness in the air, tasted moisture on her tongue. Her skin crawled; or maybe it was just the spiders. After barely a minute, the urge to open her eyes grew so strong that she had to clap her hands over her face. She began counting seconds under her breath, trying to calm down. But she kept imagining the fog closing in, crushing the boat.

  When I get to a hundred, she promised herself, I’ll do something.

  At a hundred, she set herself the goal of reaching 200.

  At 157, she couldn’t stand it any more. “Can you see anything?” she asked, trying not to sound like a gibbering wreck. “Ivo?”

  He didn’t answer. Susanna counted more rapidly, gabbling through the rest of the numbers. At 200 she opened her eyes.

  Her companion had vanished.

  “Ivo?” she shouted. Her voice sounded thin and muffled. The mist had surged – no, it had only thickened, Susanna told herself desperately – so that she could barely see past the end of the boat. She peered over the side, wondering if Ivo had fallen into the lake, though she would surely have heard a splash. Frantically, she scoured the water with the paddle, half-hoping and half-fearing to prod his body. But all around as far as she could rea
ch, she only disturbed the smooth dark depths of the lake.

  “Ivo!”

  She strained her ears for any reply. Ripples slapped the boat with a whispery susurration.

  “Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life – ”

  Was that Ivo’s voice, or just her remembrance of his dusty quotations?

  “Where are you?” she cried.

  The fog swallowed her voice, as it had swallowed him. He had found the weird at last. Maybe they had fled to another world, and he had managed to follow them. Or maybe they had resented his long chase, and dealt with him.

  As the mist swirled around the boat, Susanna felt that if it came any closer, it would envelop her and take her away. If it touched her, she would disappear like Ivo.

  No! Her eyes would protect her. Hadn’t Ivo said that the weird couldn’t appear on camera? All she had to do was keep looking, and she’d be safe.

  And yet – she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head. The fog could creep up behind her. Something could reach out and grab her.

  She whirled round. Nothing there, of course. Just more fog. Was it closer? She turned her head from side to side, trying to cover all angles. She heard the harsh sound of her own panting breath.

  Then she heard something else, a muffled roar high in the sky. A monster was –

  And then she recognized the sound of a distant helicopter. She had never been happier to hear any noise in her life. She waited for it to come closer, for the nanocams to save her.

  The drone faded. The fog was growing stronger, swallowing all sound, swallowing everything within it.

  Susanna started paddling frantically, chasing the faint whirr of the helicopter. The boat moved, but kept slewing to port. “Ivo!” she shouted again. Yet she knew he had gone.

  She struggled to recall her canoeing lessons, to remember how a single person could steer a straight line, even paddling on one side of a boat. How? How?

  J-shaped strokes. Susanna paused, took two deep breaths, and paddled furiously but with more effect. She followed the helicopter’s siren song. Tendrils of fog brushed across her face, then dissipated. She could see further ahead. Looking up to the sky, she thought she glimpsed the copter. Or maybe something else was out there – Susanna paddled faster, gasping with exertion. A noise inside the boat made her heart skip. Then she realized it was her comp, beeping to indicate Net access.