[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 8

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Olivia blinked, clearly stunned by the outpouring, then searched for a notepad. It was second nature as a therapist. “Why do you think it wanted you to know that about Rod?” Whether James intended for it or not, there was to be an impromptu session.

“Whatever it is, it’s been in my head too. It uses people and imagery, some of which comes from my life and the rest of which probably came from that prisoner. I think it wants to understand us. But, from the moment it felt the pain that Rod caused me, I think it also wanted me to understand him.” She nodded subtly and went to work furiously jotting down notes.

A loud clang caused everyone present to tense up. The hatch to their room was open. Remer and his men stood just outside. “Alright, everyone out. Except you James”. His idea of a joke. Olivia and Hank filed grimly out of the room, and were led down the adjacent corridor by Antonio and Bruce. Every time he spoke to Remer things seemed to get worse, so James stayed quiet as his captor went to work setting up some type of steel framework.

It sat between James and the far wall, and looked a bit like a loom with criscrossing wires cascading down the support beams to either side. The wires overlapped each at a slight additional angle to the next, forming a woven circle.

When Remer toggled a switch on a control box strapped to his chest, the wires pulled taut and the circle they formed constricted like an iris. Despite himself, and despite every reservation he had about giving Remer more ammunition, curiosity forced James to ask what the device was for. Remer chuckled. “It’s a monster trap. You’re the bait.”

An hour passed as Remer stood just outside the chamber, experimenting with different light levels. Finally he recalled the bony, pale arm’s convulsion when all three of them looked at it through the monitor. Taking a chance he shut the hatch, dimmed the lights and waited. Minutes ticked by and James wondered whether Remer would have any remaining use for him, should this experiment fail. Then he noticed a pool of shadow growing on the far wall.

The familiar nausea returned. In a cautious, almost coy fashion the pale woman’s hand emerged from the shadow and extended bit by bit towards James. Again, the shoulder was not attached to a torso but to another segment of arm. This room was substantially larger than the prison pod, forcing it to expose more of itself and of course to pass through the iris of thin steel cables erected by Remer.

James seriously considered warning it, but the abstract nature of the concept stopped him. What would he be warning? How could it understand him? As soon as the arm passed through the iris up to the elbow, the wires violently contracted. The long undulating centipede of human arm segments thrashed wildly, but in vain. The pool of shadow it originated from was too small to pull the trap through.

Remer burst in with Antonio and Bruce in tow. The deafening cacophony of excited shouts reverberated off the metal walls as they combined efforts to pull the trap away from the wall, forcibly exposing the arm a bit at a time. Once enough was clear of the shadow, Antonio and Bruce edged around the trap and began pulling the arm directly.

Some of the skin sloughed off in their hands but under strict orders barked by Remer they continued pulling it hand over hand out of the shadowy mass on the wall. Very soon, they ran out of recognizably human arm segments. The centipede like structure of the limb was superficially human for only about ten feet, after which it quickly became a tangled mass of deformities.

James strongly suspected that something was frantically building more of the arm on the other side of that shadow, but they were pulling it out faster than it could add to it. Or whatever was on the other end never resembled a human to begin with.

“Don’t either of you let go of it for even a second. We’ve got it now! Antonio for god’s sake stop crying.” The muscular six foot four Italian was obeying Remer’s admonition to keep pulling on the arm but also blubbering uncontrollably. It was, in fairness, difficult to wrap a human mind around.

The more they pulled free from the shadow the more abhorrent and incomprehensible it became. Throbbing black veins the diameter of a quarter snaked all along the now obviously inhuman extremity. Blotchy sores wept foul smelling pus. At various points along it, small jet black eyes frantically open and shut. Just as the insanity of the ordeal seemed to peak, the shadow abruptly closed, severing the arm.

The entire thing flopped around like the tail of a lizard left behind to confuse predators. Some residual nervous activity made it violently spasm, smashing the wire trap against the wall and throwing Bruce into the edge of the hatch. Slowly the life drained from it, as did the sticky black blood that now coated every surface.

The shouting subsided, the spray of foul black fluid died down and Remer was left standing in a pile of gore while Bruce lay unconscious and Antonio crouched in a corner gibbering. Remer wiped the oily substance from his face. “That went well.”

James scrubbed himself raw trying to get the black residue off his body. It was caked into his hair as well, which he solved by shaving his head. Olivia laughed upon seeing him this way but recovered by insisting that it was a good look for him. The idea of trying to look good was, for James, as alien as any other social concept. For now, it was enough to be clean. “Have a seat, I want to talk about your dream.”

It came out of the blue, but as their sessions were usually at least relaxing and they were locked in their room anyway he obliged. “I started interpreting it under the assumption that it was an actual dream. Now that we know, with some degree of certainty, that it’s...something else...” they exchanged and uncomfortable glance. “...I have an alternate interpretation I want to run by you.” He was by this point supine, sprawled across the spartan foam couch provided for each crew quarters and using a pile of clothes as his pillow.

Olivia turned the notepad so he could see it. On it was drawn a cylinder with a cutaway view inside. Stick figures stood in the interior. Outside, simple cartoon fish. “The Tartarus, and the Belusarius for that matter, are basically just very large and intricate underwater habitats. They artificially maintain interior conditions identical to the surface, or close enough that it is safe and healthy for human beings. Controlling the interior conditions and holding out the exterior conditions applies to every living space in a hostile environment, be it sea, space or the south pole.” She flipped the page. A charmingly crude space station and a sketch of the Amundsen Scott south pole research colony illustrated her meaning.

“I think the foundry you go to when you sleep is something like that.” Still on his back, he turned his head and shot her a confounded look. “Stay with me on this. It’s nothing like a normal dream space. It’s persistent, in that it’s the same every time and objects stay where you leave them. It’s internally consistent, in that you could use parts from one machine to fix another and all the writing had that strange morphing quality. Very different from standard dream logic, and dream physics. It’s a space constructed for you to inhabit which suppresses the instability of the normal dreamscape and instead replicates conditions that humans would find agreeable, as closely as the designer could manage given it’s limited knowledge of us.”

James butted in with “That also describes animal enclosures at the zoo.” She furrowed her brow, unsure whether to dismiss it as a joke or to explore that idea for potential merit. “Okay, well, a zoo enclosure is also a space created to meet the needs of a particular animal. In either case you don’t build something like that for an organism you intend to harm. But you might build it for one that you want to study.”

“So I’m a lab rat?” He realized after he said it that it came off as combative, and most likely stemmed from the depression relapse he’d experienced since Cray’s death. Even as she went on with her explanation, he dwelled on those final moments before Cray’s prison pod exploded into flaming bubbles of gas and shredded membrane.

“Possibly. Everything seemed to be set up to test you. Hidden tools, with which you could fix the generators, which turned on the lights, which made the staircase accessible and so on. Same applies to my dream with the clay. Whether this supposed intelligence down in the trench ultimately means us harm, I can’t say. But it does appear that it’s trying to understand us first.”

James stared at the ceiling quietly for a while. Just as Olivia was about to ask him whether the session was done, he turned back to her and said “Maybe we should be the ones trying to understand it. Remer said whatever this thing is, it’s down in the trench a few miles from here. We have nothing to lose by approaching it. We’re already infected with whatever the prisoner brought with him, or from Remer’s exposure to it. And if I approach it alone, I don’t think it will hurt me. It built me the foundry.”

“Peel the skin”. James looked over to Olivia. “Did you say something?” She looked confused and shook her head. The two walked in lockstep, herded down into the maintenance tunnel network by Remer and his men. “I thought I heard you whisper to me just now.”

Remer jabbed James in the ribs. “Talking ain’t part of the experiment. You can scream though.” Antonio and Bruce snickered as they worked at the giant steel hatch. With a groan and a rush of putrid smelling air the hatch slowly swung ajar. “In you go. If you make it for ten minutes you can come out. Get the footage I want and I won’t send you back in.”

He’d fitted both with headsets of the sort he and his men wore. Naval issue augmented reality glasses, in this case programmed to record until space ran out, for Remer’s review should the headsets be recoverable. James and Olivia looked forlorn and could only stand haplessly just inside the tunnel entrance as Bruce and Antonio swung the hatch back into place.

“First left, he said. Then straight, down a level...what’s after that?” The two had split the task of memorizing Hank’s directions so neither would have to remember all of it. “After that there should be a holding tank with a steel grate walkway across it and four tunnels coming off of it. We go right there, then at the next juncture there will be a ladder. Up one level, and if he hasn’t let us down the hatch into the maintenance bay should be open. We can jack a repair sub from there.”

The labyrinthine network of enormous pipes looked as if adapted for human access only as an afterthought. Grated walkways mounted to either side shook slightly with each step, threatening to give way and dump the pair into the river of waste below. “The skin is soft, and pliable. It pleases me.” James spun around. “Don’t tell me you didn’t whisper to me just now.” She looked startled. “I didn’t say anything”. A few taps to the side of the glasses turned on a lamp function. James swept it around the dim stretch of pipe ahead but saw nothing unusual.

“You kids having fun?” Remer’s scarred, smirking face appeared on the eyepiece. “Fuck off.” Olivia gestured rudely where the headset camera would pick it up. “I’ll take that as a no. Let’s see if we can’t fix that.” A second later, the lights shut off. Both cried out as the realization struck them. Nowhere was safe. It might emerge from any direction and at any moment. James’ first impulse was to run. “James don’t! We’ll get split up!”

With a bit of fiddling Olivia activated her own headset’s lamp. Both turned towards a rustling sound. A small shadowy patch on the wall immediately shrunk and then vanished as their lights hit it. “No James, no. Not this way. I want out of here. Where are we, do you remember the directions?”

Panic clouded his memory. “I think...I think it was left at this juncture.” Olivia’s light happened to sweep across another shadowy patch which had been quietly forming there, unseen, but which once again dissipated on contact with the light.

“With such perfect skin, I can make something wonderful.” The raspy whisper returned and now satisfied that it wasn’t Olivia, James flirted with the conclusion that the foundry builder was speaking to him. “Olivia, I’m...I hear voices.”

His light illuminated her dirty, sweaty face. She was breathing hard, a welcome reminder of her presence in the dark beside him when he was using the light to navigate. “All the time?” A therapist, even now. “No, for fuck’s sake. I mean it’s talking to me. Whatever’s doing this. I’ve been hearing it since Remer dragged us out of confinement.”

“What’s it saying?” They were now holding hands tightly enough to compromise circulation. “It’s talking about your skin. I think. It doesn’t make sense.” At the juncture the two ducked into the narrower pipe to the left which mercifully had a full grating across it. “Can you hear it too?” She shook her head. Then, realizing he couldn’t see her, spoke. “Don’t worry, I believe you. All of this seems to be tied to you somehow.”

The sound of rushing water became ever closer as they ran. They soon spilled out into a cavernous waste water chamber. “The flesh and blood of innocence. Only the finest materials will be used.” James halted for a moment. The raspy whispering conjured up memories of the prisoner he’d fought with back in the Belusarius holding cell. As if reading this thoughts, the whisper returned. “The one who watches for me is never far away.”

The rustling sound. This time discernibly closer. James swept his light around wildly until it came to rest on the source. The shadowy patch recoiled, shrunk and dissolved with a sizzling sound. Remer’s crackling voice cut in. “That’s enough of that. Light’s disrupting it somehow. Switching you over to night vision.”

With that, both headset lamps died and James found he could see a pale green video feed of the tunnel ahead through the eyepiece. He stood quietly for a moment adjusting to it, the sound of dripping echoing through the tunnels all around him.

“Olivia, is yours working?” When she didn’t answer he turned to where she’d been standing. What stared back was beyond his worst imaginings. An awkward, patchwork thing that struggled to stand before him without falling to pieces. The sunken eyes were of different colors, the mouth lined with teeth from a number of different animals.

It gurgled, and reached out to him. He recoiled, unable to scream. It moved clumsily, joints never intended to attach to one another clicking and popping as the limbs moved. A long, coiled umbilical trailed from its belly back into the shadowy patch. The patch into which Olivia was being pulled.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 9!}