Scarsdale patted me on the arm. “My fault! I have perhaps overstepped the mark, for which I beg your forgiveness. You are one of the most hypnotically suggestive people I have ever met. I hypnotised you back in the office, planting a suggestion that you should wait thirty minutes and then try to kill me—don’t ever believe the myth that an individual can’t be hypnotised to do things that are morally repugnant to them!
“However I had an ulterior motive. I need to have a highly suggestible test subject for my most intricate experiment yet. Somebody whose mind I can lay completely bare to the machine, with their personality utterly suppressed. I have booked a press conference for the beginning of next week in the Royal Cambridge Hotel to unveil my research to the world and as part of the presentation I thought I would do something melodramatic, something more universally relevant than an old Doctor Who recording. My grand idea is to furnish the assembled gentlemen of the press with a record of an individual’s birthdays, right back to the moment of his squalling entry into the bright lights of the maternity ward.”
“I’m not sure.” I muttered, still reeling slightly and wondering if he would merely hypnotise me again into compliance with his scheme.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirty-seven.”
He clapped his hands in satisfaction.
“Ideal. Just enough material for a short presentation. I know how limited the attention span of these Fleet Street types can be.”
And so, prostrated on a gurney, with my head firmly confined into a solid plastic framework with Velcro straps, I allowed myself to be conveyed into the vast, humming, porcelain-white circumference of the MRI coil. Scarsdale appeared beside me.
“Just a small injection of a hypnotic” he said. Then he proceeded to mutter some incantation which had the effect of placing me into an immediate trance. I awoke to a beaming Scarsdale waving a series of printed screenshots at me which fell out of his grasp as he helped me off the gurney and fluttered to the floor.
“A triumph! An utter triumph!” he chortled. “Just look!” He gathered the papers together and handed them to me. I saw a bland expanse of kitchen table and remembered my lonely thirty-seventh birthday celebrations with a microwave meal-for-one after my divorce. Then came happier times: the smiling faces of my wife and children as I bent to blow out the candles on my thirty-fifth. I became emotional at the sudden onrush of recollection. Here was my dear old granddad helping me build a model plane at my twelfth birthday party. There was Scouser and Hardy my two best friends from primary school, running riot, giddy on fizzy pop and crisps in our back garden when I turned seven.
I paused leafing and turned to Scarsdale. “You are a genius,” I said. “This is a discovery of Nobel Prize significance!”
“There is more,” he said, “What is the earliest you can remember?” I closed my eyes and delved into the depths. Disjointed images of my third birthday swam back and forth. I had seen photos of a ridiculously happy little fool dressed in a cowboy outfit riding rodeo on a battered rocking horse, but how much was memory and how much was simply an interpolation from my mother’s photo album?
Scarsdale dealt out some more images. My third birthday, complete with rodeo chaps, my second, and then my first birthday, with images of my mother and father looming frighteningly over me and a monstrous cake which threatened to engulf my tiny world. Then, as if seen through a rose-red prism, the final image was an out-of-focus panorama of a group of individuals in surgical gowns.
“The origin of you sir!” crowed Scarsdale. “The moment of birth! Did you realize you were a caesarean baby? No? Well I’m sure you mother will confirm.”
We spent the next few hours reviewing the live recordings on a monitor. I offered to use my skills to edit the footage into something more concise which would wow the assembled critics.
“Finished!” I cried out in exultation several hours later as the final scene slotted into the sequence. It was past midnight.
“We are far from finished.” Scarsdale said quietly, in a tone of high seriousness. “Indeed, I believe we have barely begun.”
I looked at him to elaborate on this cryptic statement, but he remained strangely silent. Several times he launched forwards as if to blurt out some secret, but each time the movement resolved itself into a bout of introspective muttering and shoe-gazing. I was acutely aware that I was being assessed for a moment of confidence. Finally, he motioned for me to follow him back up the stairs to his office where we stood at the open window gazing out into the night.
“Now my dear archivist, before we proceed I have a rather philosophical question for you to ponder—do you have a soul?”
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” I replied, bemused at this unscientific tack, “not what you see in the mirror perhaps, but that which you see when you look into another person’s eyes, because the eyes are windows of the... well, you know. You can X-ray me all you want Mr Scarsdale, but I’m afraid you won’t find any ghostly aura lurking in a forgotten cranny at the back of my brain.”
“A hardened sceptic, I see. Rather than attempting some fruitless argumentation, let me instead illustrate my own reasoning. Remember I am a man of science, only the facts of my research have swayed my disbelief.
“It has never been fully understood why memories of early childhood are repressed—most individuals, including yourself, find it impossible to recall anything earlier than the second or third year. Why? Perhaps the faculty of long-term memory is not fully developed as some say, yet are not infants perfectly capable of remembering familiar faces and voices? Why then, this global amnesia? It is only now that I realise, with an utter clarity born from my many years of inquiry into the human brain, that it is simply a case of hypnotic suggestion—we have been programmed to forget. Programmed, hypnotised if you will—by a higher power.
We stood in silence, watching the starry night revolve above us as I pondered his bizarre outburst.
“The immortal Wordsworth,” he resumed, “wrote a very curious poem, with a ponderous title: ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.”
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”
Scarsdale finished this impromptu recital with a graceful bow and we were both suddenly illuminated by the beam of a questing torchlight as a bemused security guard arrived and checked our passes.
“Wordsworth noted the terrible melancholia that haunts our adult lives,” said Scarsdale as the guard continued on his rounds. “The lingering sense of a paradise lost in our childhood—as if we have forgotten our true birthright. If we look to an earlier age; Origen of Alexandria, one of the first theologians of the Catholic Church, was condemned as a terrible heretic—why? He taught of the pre-existence of souls. He taught that the human soul is not created by God at the moment of conception, but is rather the pre-existing spiritual peg upon which the fleshly body is hung. Yet millions today ignorantly profess, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Holy Father entreat us, that the soul is some sort of infused spiritual essence; that somehow in Heaven, God is operating a 24/7 factory for souls, like one of those production-line machines for filling milk bottles?
“As spiritual creatures we are not born. We reincarnate, or perhaps more specifically, we transmigrate. Perhaps we are all fallen angels. What if we call the soul is merely a portal? What if we are both the door and what comes through it?”
“This all belongs to the realm of faith, not science.” I replied, “A place where your writ does not run, I’m afraid.”
“I beg to disagree,” said Scarsdale. “For with my discoveries, science will become the new theology! To put it simply, I believe like Wordswor
th, that some memory-trace of our incorporeal pre-birth existence survives in the most primitive part of our brain. With your agreement, I propose to regress you to a point before your birth. And there, on our little video screen, we shall record something far beyond the poetry of Dante, surpassing even the most esoteric reveries of the mystical saints. The Beatific Vision will be unveiled before us. Just imagine, if you will, our beholding the gardens of Paradise, the shimmering glory of our angelic brethren, perhaps even the very face of God himself!”
His eyes were shining and I realised that he had passed beyond legitimate enthusiasm, that forty years of straining to realise his scientific dream in this airless basement had unhinged him. I saw the chances of winning a Nobel Prize evaporating into nothingness and his inevitable relegation by the scientific community to the lonely ranks of those heretical prophets of cold fusion, homeopathy and ESP.
“I’m afraid, Mr Scarsdale, that I cannot follow you in your idle flights of speculation.” I said. “But for the sake of science I will humour your request if only to disabuse you of this ridiculous notion.”
I returned to Cambridge the following day and met Scarsdale at his laboratory. After some desultory small talk, I lay back on the gurney and allowed him to strap my head firmly into the rigid framework which was designed to keep it as still as possible during the MRI acquisition.
“You know,” said Scarsdale, once I was tightly secured, “I’ve been pondering if there is not an ulterior purpose our photographic memory-record? The mystical Swedenborg said that when we die our souls undergo a dreaming back: an enforced recollection where every minute of our lives is judged on the scales of eternal justice. Well, we shall soon see, shan’t we!”
He rigged a cannula in the back of my hand.
“I’m just going to give you a short infusion of Haloperidol, it will probably make you feel slightly woozy.”
I lay back and his soothing voice purred from the speakers above my head.
“When I count to zero you will sleep. Three, two, one—and relax.”
My pliable mind must have obeyed his instruction for the next thing I remember is coming-to with a start, screaming at the top of my voice. My head was straining against the straps of the headpiece and my throat and tongue had adopted a twisted and unnatural conformation in order to utter the unintelligible guttural shrieks which were from no earthly language I had ever heard.
My hand reached up blindly and tore the straps away. Sweat poured from my brow and the tunnel felt impossibly claustrophobic. The gurney was moving outwards and I emerged blinking into the harsh fluorescent light where a wild screaming figure was waiting for me.
“The eyes! The eyes!”
Scarsdale was swinging a fire extinguisher around his head with the clear object of bringing it down murderously upon my skull and I managed to wriggle myself free just in time to stay his desperate blow. The metal extinguisher was caught by flux of the magnetic field and ripped from his grasp where it thundered violently past my head and embedded itself into the depths of the apparatus. A crimson sparking of short circuits caught light and a brown column of smoke began to pour forth around me, soon followed by the dull heat of a gathering flame.
Scarsdale grabbed my collar and pulled me towards him, his demented face racked by a raw unformed terror that seemed to be born of something internal, some dreadful landscape within his skull that he alone could see.
“The eyes!” he groaned. “The eyes!”
He staggered back and worming his fingers into his eye-sockets he pulled both eyeballs outwards until they were stretched to the end of their quivering stalks and then, with a flourish of blood, he yanked them free. A flux of crimson tears poured from the raw, sightless cavities as he groped his way and began to blindly smash the remaining computer equipment with his fists. The fire in the MRI unit was burning out of control and the curtain of brown choking smoke started rapidly descending towards floor level. It was then, with a mad onrush of fear, that I realised Scarsdale had locked the door.
I wrapped my sleeve over my mouth and dived beneath the smoke. I grappled desperately with him at the console as I attempted to wrestle the keychain from his bloody fingers. For a man of seventy he was impossibly strong and it was only after I had repeatedly slammed his pitiful face several times into the monitor that he finally became still. Scattered beneath him were the screenshots of our final MRI session: my arrival at home from the hospital, the kindly faces of the midwives from the birth suite, the untimely ripping from the womb. Scrawled across the next image: birth minus 6 months, it showed nothing except a warm roseate glow from inside the womb. Then followed birth minus 10 months: a formless darkness, no shapes or images, maybe just textures of obscurity, surely revealing nothing untoward except to the promptings of a deranged mind. Then Scarsdale’s unconscious body slumped down from the console monitor, revealing the last image replaying in a loop, the image that had been recording as I awoke—my minus first birthday.
It was impossible; a monstrous cyclopean eye was filling the screen; somehow its dimensions seemed beyond measure—galaxies-wide. An eye which was not that of any wholesome Christian deity, but rather of some lower organism: bestial and profane. The horizontal slit of a goat-like pupil rhythmically dilating and contracting at the centre of a mottled and cadaverous iris: an inhuman gaze that pierced into the very depths of my newly-discovered soul. I had been seen. Impulsively, I stabbed the keyboard to take a copy and ripping the emerging paper from the teeth of the printer I frantically scrabbled Scarsdale’s keys into the lock on the laboratory doors until they swung open.
A fireman in full breathing apparatus and Hazmat gear was standing outside the lab and I stumbled into his arms. We danced in this unlikely embrace for several seconds, then without warning, he hurled me down the steps of the stairwell. A split-second later, a massive backdraft exploded from the MRI suite with a deafening, thunderous roar, incinerating everything inside and blasting us both to the bottom of the stairs. I was bruised and burnt, but I survived.
Even in the ambulance they could not pry the smouldering picture from my fingers and once I was patched-up I evaded the police and retreated back to the comfortable darkness of my editing suite at the Institute where I could study it in more detail.
Scarsdale had seen further, deeper, into my memories, but memories of what? Or perhaps it was something else’s memories. Was my trivial personality just a telescope, a lens for some alien consciousness beyond time and space which wore me like a coat?
I stared dumbly for hours at the picture of the eye, feeling its baleful gaze burn though me. And it was then, just as in the Doctor Who footage, that I noticed a small fleck of light in the corner of the eye—a reflection.
Using the same techniques as before, I scanned-in the picture and waited as my painfully slow computer ran the image-intensifying software. The swirling sea of grey dots gradually resolved themselves and I fell to the floor, choking-off the screams with my fist.
For the reflection was a face. And to my horror, despite its utter removal from all that was recognisably human, it bore a certain familiarity. In the deepest reaches of my brain a whispering, primordial recollection bore witness to the appalling implications of this obscene simulacrum and I realised, with the sure, cold knowledge born of despair, that there was no hope of holy redemption after death for myself or any other part of the human race—for our petty lives were merely the excrescence into the material world of an infinite and eternal abomination.
I was not the innocent victim of an ancient cosmic evil. Instead I bore the essence of that evil genetically within my soul and had done so throughout countless incarnations. My cries on waking were merely echoes of the insensate ululations of a foul and bestial monstrosity from timeless aeons beyond the visible universe.
Scarsdale had realized this too late and yet what had he achieved except merely to hasten his return to the fathomless horror that had birthed his tortured consciousness into this hostile and pitiless world in the f
irst place?
I raised my eyes to the face again—refracted, anamorphic, frozen in a rictus of guttural, blasphemous voicings—and I felt its sovereign darkness rise within my soul. I no longer needed Scarsdale’s machine to prompt me, for I knew the face reflected in the eye was my own face.
The face I had before the world was made.
Derek John grew up in Dublin where, on the shelves of Fred Hanna's bookshop, he first discovered the works of LeFanu and Stoker which sowed the seeds of a lifelong passion for weird fiction. His stories have recently appeared in 'Supernatural Tales' and 'The Ghost and Scholars Book of Shadows'.
Story illustration by Peter Szmer.
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The Eye
by Justin Munro
I'm not crazy.
Mike wasn't either.
The police said we were both nuts, but I know they're wrong.
In the beginning, all I was trying to do was help a friend.
I met Mike in a freshman computer science class in college. Our jockeying for the highest grade quickly developed into a fast, if competitive, friendship. We were always racing to be the first to solve some new mind bender, or find the flaw in some hot new encryption algorithm. And the odds were, if one of us couldn't do it, the other one could. Being the more practical of the pair, I'd studied computer engineering, while Mike had gone straight for theoretical mathematics.
I'd graduated and found my niche working as a contractor for a three-letter-acronym agency in DC's Maryland suburbs, doing things you couldn't legally do anywhere else. Mike had ended up in Maryland too, pursuing his doctorate at Allegany University, in the state's mountainous panhandle. Its math department was eclectic and small, but prestigious, and he fit right in.
So when he e-mailed me about how his graphing software kept choking on an equation he was researching, and asking if I could debug it for him, I had to say yes. I wanted to help him out; the bragging rights were just a bonus.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 38
