A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  But you had to trust somebody; and the fewer lies I had to keep straight the better. “Saving the world.”

  “You two? Nope. Shutting all the gates? There’s only one spell can do that. The Heracleion Chant takes between twelve and twenty trained adepts,” she said dismissively. “Most of whom would be expected to sacrifice themselves to finish it. And anyway, it’s not complete. Everybody knows that. Not even she could get around that. Only the Society could muster up enough brute manpower to do what was done there, and that assumes they had the missing parts t’ begin with.”

  “No, we found the… Look, Johnny said she modified it. Not just to like… brick up the gates. But take away their ability to be opened. Even if all their conditions were met, everything. As if they were gone.”

  “Which I don’t believe for a second; and even if I did, it doesn’t explain how the two of you managed. And lived.”

  “I don’t think she knows either.” I hesitated, and said slowly, “She blames herself for it happening in the first place.”

  “Nonsense,” Huxley snapped. “Typical ego. One person is never responsible for a disaster. You know that. There’s always dozens, hundreds of people behind everything, and you often don’t have to trace it back that far.” She paused, curiosity overtaking her face. “And why would she say that in the first place, hmm?”

  “Oh, uh. You know. Because we... because she didn’t do the spell in time. Because the Anomaly happened. And everything that happened afterwards...”

  “Mm.”

  Two minutes. Not quite. A hundred and eleven seconds. We had saved the world, we said; but we had only saved some of it. It had still ended. No part of me, not even the part that hated her for what she’d done to me specifically, could even acknowledge that she had accidentally had caused that many deaths. Or that the deaths were beginning again. Or that perhaps they had never ended.

  “Here,” said Huxley. “Hope he left the lights on.”

  ‘Here’ was an ordinary wooden door, set into the stone wall of a windowless one-storey cinderblock building. Ordinary in every respect, that was, except for not having a handle. She didn’t even bother pushing it, but knocked lightly in a strange rhythm till it swung open, outwards. Inside, small lights began to glow, incandescent bulbs in wire cages strung on a thick black cable along one side of a concrete staircase. Dust lay heavy on the steps, a thick silky layer, undisturbed. On the other side of the stairs was darkness: a sheer drop.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

  “Down you go.”

  I still hesitated. “How do I know we can trust you?”

  “Well, you don’t. And I happen to not trust you, either,” she added severely. “Why d’you think I’m still carrying the Equalizer? You two, and your dragon problem, have a lot of explaining to do. Get in there.”

  “If you don’t trust us, why are you helping us?”

  “Pretty personal question to ask a stranger, don’t you think? Now move.”

  We had to stop several times to cough, and after perhaps half an hour, with my thighs and knees screaming, I swung Johnny down and leaned her on the wall. At last she turned her head, drew a long rattling breath, and spat into the thick dust, the dark liquid refusing to disperse, sitting there obstinate and mounded as mud.

  “What the fuck.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Dr. Huxley said it was normal.”

  “I didn’t say it was normal,” Huxley corrected me. “I said it was fine. By which I meant, survivable. Come on.”

  “She can barely walk!”

  “Barely is still walking.”

  “I can’t see either.”

  “It’s just stairs. We’re not warded till we get into the bunker and shut the door behind us, you know.”

  Carefully, as if protecting the easier targets of my fingers from a dog I knew would bite, I put my forearm under Johnny’s chin and tilted her head up so I could see her face. Her eyes were cluttered with the stuff, drifting across the white in symmetrical strings, but where I could see her irises and pupils they looked about the same size, and sort of lucid, inasmuch as she ever did. Her teeth were the colour of charcoal, apparently still coated with the liquid. If she did bite me, I didn’t want to think about what would happen.

  “Can you manage stairs?” I said, as she irritably shook me off, sending the blobs darting across her eyes like the gloop in a lava lamp. “Hang onto my coat.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Prague,” I said. “If Dr. Huxley isn’t bullshitting us.”

  “Headed down into Sparrow’s place,” Huxley tossed over her shoulder. “If he’s still alive. He might be a mummy down there.”

  “Ew. What’s that noise?”

  “My knees,” I said.

  “I’ll buy you new knees.”

  The stairs went on and on, one bulb about every twenty steps. How deep were we going? I was so hungry and tired I felt a little caved-in, twisted even; my ears were ringing. I imagined fainting, rolling down the endless steps, which couldn’t be endless really, of course, but if everyone agreed that the laws of physics had been broken during the Anomaly, then maybe some of them were still broken and no one had noticed, maybe the steps knew that, and would just go on and on forever...

  Bunkers had become a big thing after the Anomaly, but this didn’t seem to be one of those. And I understood the impulse, I understood everybody’s impulses afterwards, I even understood the period where people just went absolutely numb for a couple of months and would do virtually anything they were told without resistance; I had felt it too. People had begun to hoard things, including guns and weapons, on a personal or household basis, as well as on a national basis: stocking their bunkers even if they didn’t have one. Mutual-aid and mutual-death societies sprang up everywhere. Everyone assembled a go-bag and a shelter-in-place bag, and rushed out to get first-aid training. Millions of people tried to get permanently sterilized, or did it themselves (gruesomely, in many cases), arguing that they did not want to bring children into this terrible new world in which we had discovered the worst thing about the universe.

  And cults, and miracle protection devices against the effects of witnessing future Anomalies like special sunglasses or contact lenses, personal orgone generators, the sightings of long-lost local saints, it all made sense to me. But especially bunkers. Because it had happened so fast that even the ultra-rich did not have time to get into theirs. So there was equality, finally, or maybe for the first time in human history: all you had had to do was look up at the wrong moment, no matter where you were or what you were.

  After about an hour, we reached a square landing a few yards across, and a door, also concrete. Johnny touched it tentatively, her hand small and pale on the dark, sooty surface, which was burned in a great curling leafy flare as if there had been a small explosion on the floor. I turned and looked up at the stairs rising into darkness behind us, a thin waterfall of fine dust falling from one to the next to the next as I watched. No way out.

  Well, one way out.

  The door was half-open, showing itself to be a couple of feet thick, and reinforced with rebar that gleamed through the dull gray like bone. “In we go,” said Huxley, brandishing the cricket bat. “You want answers? You go to the guy who’s watching all the questions.”

  “I don’t want answers any more,” I pointed out. “I want to go home.”

  “Must be nice to have one that wasn’t blown up.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Inside was concrete too, a short hallway leading to a large, low-ceilinged room full of plastic tables and chairs, lit with dull fluorescents. At the end, something like a large parking kiosk covered in faceted panels had been installed. Windows halfway up the concrete base framed a chair upholstered in orange vinyl or leather, and several consoles that looked interestingly like the ones in photos I’d seen of nuclear control rooms. Or no: more like the bridge of the starship Enterprise—the old version, not the newer ones. I despera
tely wanted to go in and flick all the switches.

  A man, tall and gangling, dressed in a thick white sweater and puffy blue vest, waved at us from the back of the kiosk. One of the panels swung open and he emerged.

  “Sparrow,” said Huxley.

  “Ah, Dr. Huxley! What a pleasant surprise, seeing you on the stair camera. It has been a long time since our last visit. Boston, was it not? The conference?”

  “Could be.”

  “So, you are reinstated with...?”

  “That’ll be the day,” she said pleasantly. “That’ll be the bright new dawn. We won’t be long. A few questions, that’s all, about what you’ve been seeing.”

  “Let me get you supper, at least. I am about to sit down myself.” He beamed at us, and held out a long, cold hand. “I do apologize, I am not permitted a human name any more; ‘Sparrow’ has so far not raised any objections.”

  We introduced ourselves, Johnny’s hand hesitating in the air for a moment a before he realized what was happening, captured and shook it. He was far blonder than her, his hair nearly white; he might have been in his mid-thirties. I couldn’t place his accent. “Come eat, please. And if there is any way I can help with what you are doing here, you must tell me.”

  “We will,” Johnny said, “but I gotta warn you, every time somebody says that, it ends super badly.”

  “It also ends badly if you don’t,” Huxley said. “Ask me how I know.”

  “...Come eat.”

  The bunker was in surprisingly good shape; I supposed it had never been used for what it was meant for, which I vaguely imagined as weeks of increasingly worried, smelly, and strung-out government officials packed in close quarters after a nuclear war. It showed tasteful traces of Sparrow’s habitation—neatly-framed posters and paintings; a full laundry hamper; a turquoise-framed mountain bike mounted on wall hooks, five helmets hanging next to it.

  After we washed our hands and tried to scrub some of the stains off Johnny’s face, he served us tea, then ham and pickle sandwiches on buns and thick potato soup reheated in a gigantic industrial microwave.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, sitting back down and pushing a huge blue-and-silver tin across the table. “Have a biscuit... It’s too bad, I mean, that you are here in my beautiful city, during mask season too, and we are all told to stay in our homes...”

  “Have there been attacks here?” Huxley dug into the tin, and put three cookies on Johnny’s plate.

  “Yes. So they say; I have not been above for weeks. Yesterday, we were in Phase Amber. Now, we are in Red. The appearance of creatures, and other...” He waved his hands. “I don’t know. Eccentricities.”

  “We’ve seen ’em,” Huxley said grimly.

  “I am very interested in your being here,” he said after a moment. “I watch the news, I watch the internet, even the radio. I make calls. No one is allowed in or out. They have put guards on the roads. When those are eaten, fresh guards. The airport is closed. Everywhere, street fighting against things of all sizes. If you go to Old Town, you will probably have a grenade in your face. And yet…”

  “I’ve got a lot of resources,” Johnny said chirpily.

  “And an official bull was issued,” he added, almost apologetically, dipping his head at Johnny. “It says...”

  “I know what it says,” Johnny said, picking up a cookie with reasonable accuracy and blinking furiously at it for a moment. “They let me read the draft wording.”

  “Just a damn minute,” I said. “You know, I never did find out why.”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Well, you made a good choice, coming here. We’re very safe,” Sparrow said. “Much safer than above. There’s been a volcanic eruption, you know, in America. And hurricanes, tornadoes. Landslides. Lots of things. They are saying the UN is working with Chambers Labs to rescue, they are using dogs, robots, helicopters...”

  “Yeah, we have a dedicated emergency response division,” Johnny said. “For natural disasters and stuff. They’re kept in reserve, but they can deploy quite a few units when they’re called up. Stabilization, then extraction, rescue, medical assistance, evacuations, shelters, and then food security, potable water, hygiene and waste management.”

  “Faster than local government, of course.”

  “Anything’s faster than government.”

  “And all for free.”

  “Crassus has never really been a role model of mine.”

  “Stay here until we are back in Phase Green,” Sparrow urged, leaning over the table. His eyes were very dark under the blond brows and lashes, earnest and fretful. “All the people out there, it’s hard to get them to comply with the rules! The older people remember life under... various regimes, and they become angry when it seems this new freedom will be taken, they want to go out and shop. The younger people think it’s a joke, because anything the elders fear is automatically funny... we’ve had drills, like everybody else. Nobody paid the penalties from being out during the drills, even though we were told to act as if they were real. The bureaucracy ate the fines. Offices eat things. That’s what happens if you don’t watch. So no one paid anything, and everyone laughed at them.”

  “It’s hard to convince people to take things seriously,” Johnny agreed, placidly buttering another roll. “The roof nearly needs to fall in on them.”

  “Around the world, too, there are things like... Crusades. They wander around, like the Middle Ages, like the engravings you see, in the last few days. Where do they all come from? They say they will worship the... invaders, they will... well, they don’t know the history, of course,” he added, hastily, as Huxley began to speak. “Anyway. Neither they, nor the invaders, can bother us here.”

  Something about his voice was setting me on edge, even though it was so pleasant, eager to help. I thought about the endless staircase, the faint but necessary glow of the lightbulbs. Going dark with a single flip of a switch in his control room. Imagined him keeping us, imagined dying down here, in the cool, constantly-moving, filtered air. Would you rot or mummify? Huxley seemed confident about the latter. The twins had just done a unit on it in social studies class: the conditions under which you would mummify, fossilize, decay. How you could rig it so you’d be more likely to last.

  “You wished to ask me...?” Sparrow said, delicately.

  Huxley gave him a look. “Look, I’m English,” she said. “I like the social niceties even more than you do. But I’m just gonna say: why the hell do you think we’re here? It ain’t for the soup.”

  “The soup was very good, though,” Johnny said.

  Sparrow stared between them with his round, dark eyes. Birdlike, I thought, and maybe that was how he had given himself the name. And had he said he wasn’t allowed a human name any more? That wasn’t something you could and couldn’t give permission to have. Was it?

  (Yeah? Who do we know that tries to dictate things like that?)

  (Shut up.)

  (It’s in the oath. It says your blood, your life, your whatever, anything, anything they want of yours, they can take it away to save the world.)

  (Shut up, I said.)

  And for a moment I almost felt sorry for Sparrow, an uncomfortable kinship manifesting itself in a pang of real pity as well as pain, somewhere under my ribs. Clearly he had been with the Society once, I thought, just like Huxley. Maybe they had even worked together. But unlike Huxley, who had escaped via some kind of formal arrangement—her archive guardianship less a reassignment than a prison sentence, I suspected now—he had been disgraced, ejected, had his name taken from him, was probably being monitored, like her, to stay within certain bounds, some kind of… of severance contract. But he still had value to them somehow, at least a little, and he wanted to use this scrap maybe not to get back in, but at least buy his way back into their good graces. And there was only one way to do that with the Society. With knowledge. No different from me. Not really. Not in any way it mattered.

  Huxley must have known all this, I th
ought, glancing at her stony, scorched face. Did Johnny? She clearly knew of Sparrow, but that didn’t mean much. As a contractor, she would have met or heard of a lot of Society members over the years. It didn’t mean she trusted him. But Huxley, I thought, whether she trusted him or not, would not have dragged us down here if it wasn’t useful, and if the books hadn’t suggested it to me, through me, for reasons that I hoped we could trust.

  Sparrow said, “I thought perhaps you wished to stay here for a little time. Because it is safe. And outside is not safe. No one knows what is happening or when it will stop.”

  “No one’s ever known that,” Huxley said, exasperated. “Stop dancin’ around it. We need to use the Seeing.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean, I am sure, the external monitoring system, the…”

  “No. The Seeing.” Huxley jerked a thumb at Johnny. “And right quick, too.” Johnny nodded; another droplet of dark liquid oozed out of her ear and soaked into her shirt. Sparrow stared at it in poorly-concealed horror.

  I got the feeling that while this was the question he had been afraid he’d be asked, he also knew there was really no other reason for Huxley, or indeed anyone, to show up on his doorstep. I watched his face writhe for a moment while he debated denying that whatever she was talking about even existed.

  “I’m afraid I cannot let anyone else use it,” he said. “Really, to be honest with you, it would be dangerous for them, it would be dangerous for the system… It is calibrated and tuned very carefully, and particularly at this… time, I think it’s important that its operation not be jeopardized. However, if you gave me a general idea of what it is you are looking for, I could retrieve…”

  “I don’t work in general ideas,” Johnny said. “Sparrow, listen, please. We were told to come here, and to use the Seeing to help us figure out what’s going on up there. I won’t take long. I promise. And I won’t change any of the settings. Your setup really will make a difference in what happens next for everybody, for the whole world.”

  “I truly cannot,” he said regretfully. “I hear what you are saying. And I appreciate you asking so nicely,” he added, raising his voice a little on the last word, as if Huxley would care. “But, as I said, if you tell me what you would like to use it for, I can do so on your behalf, and bring back the results. And then we will both be happy. No?”