by Matt Cardin
These and other such events began to play on everyone’s lips, even those of the street-dwellers whose life I shared. They began congregating outside the entrance to my alley, first in twos and threes and then in a growing throng, and as I eavesdropped on them, I could hear that many of the saner among them had begun to sound like the crazies as they anxiously discussed the crisis that was unfolding, while the crazies themselves came to seem positively magisterial in the intensity and sincerity of their expressed delusions. Meanwhile, I continued to read the scraps of newspaper that came my way, and I found they had come to sound unhinged in a manner formerly reserved for the tabloids, as their pages were now filled with tales of impossible occurrences. In a hastily published pamphlet that circulated by hand and word of mouth throughout the city’s populace, and that was roundly denounced by religious and civil authorities, a putative and anonymous scholar who specialized in what he or she described as “an occult branch of philosophical theology” suggested that all these disruptions confirmed his or her thesis that “the godhead is insane, and the supernatural is its insanity.”
Over time, the scale of the events grew greater, surpassing their former status as mere news of the bizarre to reach heights of grotesquery and hallucinatory horror that led otherwise sober commentators to speculate in all seriousness that something had come unraveled at the heart of things.
A woman entering a clothing shop on a busy avenue was killed when the plate glass window above the door suddenly came loose from its frame and fell upon her with unnatural force like a guillotine, hitting the crown of her skull broadwise and cleaving her head cleanly in half before exploding on the floor in a cascade of crystalline fragments. Her face thus remained untouched, and when she fell to the floor, her eyes remained open, rolling wildly in their sockets with an expression of panic while her lips worked silently. Compounding the astonishment and horror of onlookers were the half-dozen clumps of pulsating feathers that came spilling out of the woman’s split cranium. These landed on the polished tile floor and whipped instantly into motion, unfurling to reveal themselves as enormous black birds that someone described as misshapen crows. They took flight and dashed madly about the interior of the store in a squawking hurricane of oily wings, crashing into light fixtures, knocking over clothing racks, and wounding a number of the store’s patrons with slashes and gouges from jagged beaks and black talons, and then, as if possessed by a single, demonic mind, they shot through the open front door and out into the street. A dozen witnesses saw the screeching black shapes flap high into the air and then out of sight past the edge of a skyscraper.
In another part of the city, a young woman was attacked in her apartment by her four-year-old daughter. Two college students who lived in the adjacent unit came running in response to the screams and found the girl buried neck-deep inside her mother’s torso, which was split open like a fish. She told the police later that she had been trying to “get back inside mama’s belly.” One of the students told a journalist that when he and his roommate arrived, the girl pulled her head out of the bloody vertical wound and turned to gaze at them with “black, burning eyes.”
As I walked silently through the city streets and byways in my ever-widening and constantly evolving circuit, and as I sat propped against the wall of my alley in pursuit of my demiurgic work of monstrous creation, my thoughts kept circling round to the inner state of those who had witnessed and participated in such prodigies. Again and again, I returned to meditate on the sense of unreality that must have overtaken them. Dwelling upon this for endless hours, I would frequently experience an inner upwelling of giddiness, like the onset of cosmic vertigo, which would, if I happened to be standing at the time, oblige me to reach out to steady myself against a wall or lamppost. My eyesight would flicker and grow dim, as if my surroundings were lit only by the glow of a guttering candle, and I would hear the faint sound of a muted, hollow roar, like the shrieking of some vast metallic gate swinging open. If this came over me while I sat in my alley pursuing my calling, I would stare curiously at the little unfinished creature in my hands, and at the others strewn about the alley floor. And all the repressed knowledge of my nature, of my origin and reason for being, would tremble at the far edge of consciousness.
I awoke in the dead of night with the buzzing awareness of some unknown visitation lying heavily upon me. The presence was receding even as I came to wakefulness and crawled out of my grotto. Something about my alley was different, and I stood blinking in the starlight for half a moment before realizing the nature of the change.
My little ones were gone. I had ended my day by setting out what was by far the largest array of them that I had ever assembled. The concentric curved rows had radiated outward from the entrance of my grotto like a veritable rainbow of deformity, reaching all the way to the facing wall. But now, several hours later, the alley floor was bare, swept clean even of its usual carpet of garbage, all of which I had used as the raw material for my creative act. Nothing remained but a thin coating of dirt.
Peering more closely, I saw a multitude of miniature indentations flowing in a path toward the alley’s entrance, which, I realized, had now become an exit. Even now the receding whisper of a collective scuttling tickled my ears.
The screams began to arrive a little later, as I sat against the wall in my usual spot. First were the voices of my fellow street people, barking out in terrified surprise. Then came the sounds of panic and horror riding the frigid night air from all over the city. Hundreds of thousands of voices shrieked in a collective nightmare, and continued to shriek even after their owners had met their doom.
I rose to my feet and peered intently upward at the strip of night sky between the abandoned buildings whose outer walls defined my world. It bristled with stars. As I watched, they seemed to take on the imprint of a vast and deformed human face—not looking down at me, but pressing outward, as if the entire glittering expanse were the inner surface of a cosmic mask. I reached up to touch my own face with a sense of quickening elation and dread.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Here the manuscript ends. It was discovered along with its anonymous preface, lying on the front porch of an abandoned Methodist rectory in the American Midwest.]
Prometheus Possessed
The scene opens on a vast city of spires and turrets. It gleams and sparkles metallic silver in the pale blaze of a high-noon sun, and its enveloping atmosphere, suffused with a dusky golden glow, winks with the lights of countless aerial vehicles carrying a similarly sunlit populace to and fro on myriad missions of recreation and consumption. Below, an epic and efficient grid of roads and walkways serves to channel foot-bound traffic through an endless round of work and play, and then back to wholesome homes each night for rest and rejuvenation, before commencing the whole round once again. In all, ninety million nominally happy, sane, and sanitized citizens inhabit this capital city of the New Society.
Gazing down silently from high above, arriving as an invisible visitor from some unknown origin, you might look upon this panorama of cold brightness and sharp beauty, and see in it the apotheosis of enlightened order and satisfied desire.
But then the presence of one particular building would cast doubt on this assessment. It calls attention to itself, out of all that immense assemblage of shining wonder, by its very lack of luster. Although it, like all the rest, sits illumined in the light streaming down from the fathomless sky, its surface fails to reflect as fully as the others. Its hue is duller, tending downward on the spectrum toward thunderhead gray. It is squat, square, and plain, a mere dwarf compared to its towering neighbors.
If you descended from the sky for a closer look, you would see the words “Ministry of Psychic Sanitation” announced in glowing gold letters on a holographic sign above the entrance. Descending still further and passing through the roof, you would discover a maze of hallways and offices with gray metallic walls and black burnished floors, and below that, stacked in strata descending far into the earth, more than three hundred
similar situations. This square building participating dully in the life of the otherwise resplendent city on the surface is the ten-percent tip of an architectural iceberg. Its dark depths mock (as you might be inclined to think of it) the upper city’s majestic height.
On the lowest level, where even the hot white light of ubiquitous illuminated strips set into floors and ceilings cannot dispel the impression of encroaching shadows, which seem to press inward from the outer walls like a luminous darkness, you would come upon the person of Brother Frank, one of the Ministry’s top-level Curers, a man of singular drive and brilliance, whose rise through the organization’s labyrinthine bureaucracy has recently been characterized as “meteoric” by his supervising Mentor, the legendary Brother Nam’d-Law, gray and grizzled of beard, white of hair, and possessed of a high, square, thoughtful forehead.
“Our dear Brother Frank,” the old man had said recently to an envoy of six members from the Ruling Council, “will one day be our Supreme Curate. Mark my words.” The envoy had come to observe and judge the latest enhancements and upgrades to the Ministry’s treatment techniques, which had been necessitated by the ferocious and seemingly unstoppable spread of a persistent psychic sickness throughout the Citizenry. Brother Frank had achieved more success in treating it than any other Curer, and he beamed at his Mentor’s praise. “I’m not alone in this opinion,” the old man said to the Council members. “Brother Frank is the very incarnation of enlightened rationality and psychic purity.” Then he fixed his Mentee with a cold, weary gaze that startled and confused the younger man, who had no time to think or reflect on it, for he was obligated to entertain the Council members and then return immediately to his never-ending battle against an ever-mounting caseload of psychic infectees. “The sickness,” he said to the envoy in parting, “never rests, and so neither will I.” The last thing he heard from them was their murmur of approval.
That was recently. Presently, Brother Frank is rushing down the long hallway of Ward 823 toward Treatment Room 23-Z in a profoundly agitated state. It is equal parts fury and panic, bound together by some unnamable emotion that he refuses to call terror. He has had no time to read the case file for Patient #231-7 in advance of the interview and evaluation, because his previous session with another Patient—#172-3, whose personal name, printed below the PsychID at the top of his file, is Milton Adamah—ran long and made him late when the man erupted into a sustained fit of frothing and shrieking in which he raved about a “burning man” who was haunting his dreams and speaking unintelligible words that “rape my mind.”
“He screams in a whisper!” Adamah had insisted, fairly screaming himself and thus drawing the presence of two green-clad Restrainers, who entered the treatment room and positioned themselves on either side of him. Brother Frank remained motionless in his chair, gazing at Adamah with a carefully maintained lack of facial expression and waiting to see which way the situation would tilt. If Adamah failed to calm down, if his fit escalated from a verbal to a physical outburst, the Restrainers would apply the minimum necessary force to subdue him. Brother Frank had seen situations tilt that way many times before, especially in recent weeks as the sickness has metastasized throughout the populace with exponentially increasing swiftness, and he was always strangely thrilled to witness the exquisitely precise calibration of the Restrainers’ responses to the Patients’ particular needs. Only once had he seen one of them actually use lethal force, when the Patient had tried to leap across the table and attack the Curer, and had then kept flailing and fighting with almost superhuman strength after they seized him, until he almost—an impossible thought—broke free of their grasp. The Restrainer on his left had moved with lightning swiftness, wrapping the man’s neck in the crook of a brawny arm and giving a quick, sharp, professional tug. The fracturing of the vertebrae had sounded strangely delicate, like a toothpick snapping underwater, and the Patient had instantly gone slack, hanging like a rag doll from the Restrainer’s arm and staring at Brother Frank with dead doll’s eyes to match.
Even though that had been over a month ago, the memory of it was still fresh when Milton Adamah started ranting about a burning man who screamed at him in his sleep. But mercifully, Adamah’s outburst remained a purely verbal manifestation of his pathology. But it also proved uncommonly long-lived, and the Restrainers stood in silence on both sides of him as he babbled about his nocturnal visitor, who, he said, was a “shadow man” who arrived at the same time each night to stand in silence at the foot of the bed and then burst into flames, after which “He eats me with his burning eyes!” Brother Frank was obligated by the treatment protocol to stay and witness the episode until it resolved one way or the other. But beyond that, Adamah’s words threw the Brother into an awful state of petrified panic that he was barely able to conceal from both the Patient and the restrainers. When Adamah finally exhausted himself and collapsed forward onto the gray tabletop, the time was irretrievably late, and the Brother bolted from the room and fled down the hallway toward 23-Z, neglecting in his haste to write down his closing notes on Adamah’s behavior and condition, and leaving the man to be removed and returned to his cell by the Retrievers.
And now, at this very moment, you observe Brother Frank approaching 23-Z’s bare metal door and allowing, for a moment only, his true emotions to erupt onto his face. His features twist into a grimace of unbearable conflict and horror. This cannot be happening, his thoughts tell him. None of it. Not possible. Not real. Before touching the ID-Reader to gain entrance, he calls up #231-7’s Patient file on his palmscreen and has just enough time to reflect before going in to meet and treat the Patient that this lack of preparedness, this unprofessional act of entering an initial diagnostic treatment session without proper advance preparation, is the way disasters are sown. “The sickness is contagious,” Brother Nam’d-Law had warned him only yesterday. “Don’t think that because of its mental nature it is not communicable. What is in and of the mind is all the more potent.” Brother Frank had sat up sharply at this whiff of heretical ideology from his mentor, who knew the nature of, and penalties for, this kind of disallowed thinking better than any other senior Mentor in the entire Ministry. And now Nam’d-Law’s words are haunting him
(screaming in a whisper? eating me with their burning eyes?)
[Purge the unreal thought. Employ standard principles of psychic hygiene.]
(no haunting, no screaming, just contact contamination, I am Brother Frank, PsychID OZ-29991)
as Brother Frank prepares to enter a proverbial lion’s den of possible psychic infectivity abetted by his own lack of preparation. He takes a breath, opens the door, and thrusts himself into the Treatment Room.
The hum of the hallway, its irregularly patterned chorus of visual and aural alerts and alarms, and the bustling background presence of his fellow Curers and other Ministry personnel—all of it clips off into utter silence with the slide-shut of the door, and now he is alone with Patient #231-7. Usually, this is his favorite part of the ritual: the moment when all extraneous vectors of contact and communication are eliminated, and it is just the three of them: the Curer, the Patient, and the Sickness. Brother Frank has never told anyone, not even Nam’d-Law, the true secret of his success as a Curer, but this, in fact, is it: he personifies the psychic sickness into Sickness, a singular, sentient entity that speaks with a consistent voice and lurks with a consistent nature inside a vast multitude of human hosts. Outwardly he follows the Ministry’s protocols to the letter, but the spirit of them he illuminates with greater depth, power, and effectiveness than any other Curer, precisely because of this unspoken attitude. “An eminently useful fiction,” he often describes it to himself with smugness and glee.
Milton Adamah’s outburst of a moment ago, however, has called the advisability of his master tactic into question. Or rather, it has done so by falling directly in line with the syndrome that Brother Frank himself has been suffering with increasing frequency over a span of months. “A burning man,” Adamah said. “He e
ats
(me with his burning eyes a shadow man screaming in a whisper)
[Purge the unreal thought.]
(I am Brother Frank, PsychID OZ-29991)
Patient #231-7 sits unmoving on the far side of the table and appears, upon first glance, to be an alarmingly deformed-looking man. He is positioned with his back to the door, facing one of the corners. This places him directly in the dark glow of a new phenomenon that Brother Frank has observed in recent weeks: the black shadow no longer presses in from the exterior walls alone, but from each angular intersection throughout the ministry’s layered subworld of Cells, Wards, and Treatment Rooms. The gloom of it is starkly evident in the room’s far corner, and thus the Patient’s face is plunged into total darkness. Even when Brother Frank approaches the table and leans sideways to peer around the man’s head, he can see nothing. Only the back of him is visible. The Patient’s stringy hair is oil-black and greasy, and his head is grossly misshapen. His shoulders are massive and somehow misaligned, and his clothing, instead of the usual pale blue Patient garb, is a shapeless, ratty, charcoal-colored cloak with an oddly textured weave.
Reestablishing his mask of apathy with some effort, Brother Frank notes down his initial subjective impressions. “Patient sits facing the corner upon my arrival,” he taps into the palmscreen. “Face not visible. Odd deformation of skull shape, neck, and shoulder structure, as if . . .” He pauses and struggles to find the right words. “. . . as if not fully formed. Patient is wearing non-standard, non-Ministry-issue clothing.” His eyes narrow as another fact becomes evident. He inhales through his nostrils, then types, “Odd scent pervades the Treatment Room. Unpleasant. Sour. Acrid. Stench of decay.”
