[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 9

^{Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8}

“NO!” James grabbed the umbilical and yanked. It was surprisingly easy to tear and the instant he did so, the shambling flesh pile connected to it collapsed. A piercing screech rang down the tunnel, originating from the shadow portal.

He could not reach it before the remainder of the umbilical withdrew into it and it vanished. He clawed at the rusting metal wall where it had been a moment earlier. “You can’t have Olivia. I have nobody else. Take anything, but leave me Olivia.”

“She is perfect. From these materials, my finest work....” James started off down the pipe, pumping his legs, struggling not to imagine where Olivia was and what might be happening to her. His endurance was gone by the time he made it to the ladder.

It was as rusty and ice cold as the tunnel. Hand over hand he hauled himself up, grunting from a mixture of exertion and anguish. Memories of the dream, or the vision, whatever had happened to him before surged to the forefront of his consciousness.

“You want me, don’t you? That’s who the cage was for. You don’t need Olivia. I’m coming straight to you. Please, release her.” No reply. He shifted focus to remembering the directions. Finally James arrived at a sealed hatch and for a moment considered with dread the possibility that he’d gotten something wrong and wouldn’t leave the tunnels alive. Until, with a familiar groan, the hatch swung open. Hank stood aside it, one hand on the lever and the other holding a pen light. “Where’s Olivia?”

James teared up and searched for words. “Whatever’s causing all of this has her now. It took her in the tunnels. Something came out of the shadows, it was...an insult to God. It cannot have been alive. Another one I didn’t see took Olivia into the shadow. I have to speak to it, I can still get her back.”

Enough of it resonated with Hank that he didn’t waste time asking questions. The dingy one seater repair sub, robotic arms folded away against the spherical cockpit while docked, sat readied for departure in the bay ahead.

It was quick work for James to strap himself in while Hank sealed the hatch. A long, low grinding sound followed as a winch lifted the sub and slid it into the cylindrical lockout chamber. The chamber rang like a bell when the inner door slammed shut.

Three clangs confirmed that the latches securing it were in place and flooding could begin. Inside, James held his head in his hands. She couldn’t be there. If she was, then what? Would it harm her? It had never harmed him.

“I’ve been monitoring the security feeds since I snuck out of my room. Remer’s men figured out I was gone two minutes ago. They’re rushing back to the tunnel entry. I’m sure they’ll know you two are gone shortly, and that I helped you escape. I don’t fully understand what you hope to accomplish down there, but make it count. This may be the last you hear from me.” Hank’s voice faded into garbled static as the little sub pulled away from the massive metal hulk behind it.

The station slowly rotated, garishly self illuminated, a defiant instantiation of something amid the great expanse of nothing surrounding it. A few hundred distant points of light tethered to it by supply hoses seemed less numerous than before.

James thought back on Cray’s final moments and wondered how long the remaining prisoners could last. Something from Hell, or the closest approximation in reality, had developed a fascination with them. Little dolls to be played with. Parts to build from.

The flickering red LED displays indicated a descent of a thousand feet since departure from Tartarus. James peered around the dim, cramped cockpit and finally found the max depth rating engraved into a small metal plate above the CO2 scrubber intake. 35,000 feet.

Remer’s phantom, or devil, or whatever lay at the bottom of the trench was within reach but only barely. For the first time he wondered if it would permit him to die. Was it within the thing’s power to prevent the sub from collapsing on itself?

Finally, James hung over the yawning chasm in his precarious little bubble of steel and glass. What awaited him at the bottom survived a direct hit by a nuclear tipped torpedo. Nothing like that existed in traditional biology, that he knew of.

It was difficult at this point to discount a supernatural origin, or nature of the thing. What it had put him through satisfied any definition of that word he could come up with. There was no prayer, or mantra, or breathing exercise to prepare. A blast of bubbles escaped the sub as the ballast tanks admitted frigid seawater. The sub began to descend.

The ride down took most of an hour. For that time James huddled, knees to his chest, going over possibilities in his mind. The heater failed at some point and the cabin grew unbearably cold as the temperature inside equalized with the ocean.

Lights were the next to fail, leaving him cowering in a dark, freezing titanium sphere which now began to drip. The depth gauge read 33,000 feet. He checked the metal plate again to make sure it said operating depth, and not crush depth.

“I wasn’t supposed to remember anything after I passed through, and became this. But I remembered you.” It sounded like it came from within the cockpit. The more he tried to place it the more it seemed as if someone was standing just behind his right shoulder and whispering directly into his ear.

When next it spoke, he felt what might’ve been breath on his neck, except that it was colder even than the already frigid cabin. “You were the one I thought of when it happened. Nobody else. I felt such regret. I wanted to return, to dry your tears and be with you. But I could not do it as I was. I needed physical form.” James beat his head. As it reached into his mind it felt like a thousand pinpricks throughout his brain.

Radiation readings increased as the bottom drew near. The mouth of a tremendous cavern appeared on sonar. “The little ones scattered me with their weapons, but I am never fully destroyed. I withdrew into these caves, and regrew.” The voice had some hypnotic quality. Without considering what might be inside, James pivoted the sub’s thrusters and accelerated towards the cavern entrance. It became apparent before long that the walls were not made from rock.

Moving the sub’s lights across the cave wall revealed a billowing sheet of milky white flesh. Pulsating black veins snaked across it. Nothing like what Remer described. “As I grew, I took the shape of these caverns. Used them for structure. As I speak to you, you are within me.” James fought the impulse to turn the sub around. Some sense that what he was looking for laid further in compelled him to press on.

He dead-ended into the largest cavern yet. A throbbing mass of organs hung from the cavern ceiling. Gargantuan ribs lined the walls. From within the cluster of entrails, a pair of misshapen black eyes descended. Each was a flimsy transparent sac of black jelly, formed improperly outside of a skull. Weakened by still-fresh memories of the patchwork umbilical puppet from the waste tunnels, this creature of fractal anatomy exceeded what his mind could cope with.

He began muttering profanities, crying and laughing at the same time as he took it in. Nothing like this could exist. Nature would never allow it. Nonetheless it gently swayed before him as he stared, veins pulsing, oily black blood coursing throughout veins in the cavern’s living walls and returning to the elephant sized, six chambered heart that beat powerfully just a few yards from his vessel. Sanity abandoned him. The more he tried to look away from it the more his body refused.

“You…do not feel love when you look upon me.” Waves of the pinprick sensation passed over his brain. “Why do you not feel love?” A bundled mass of pale veiny flesh emerged from the mess of an organism. It split open to reveal another inky black eye. “I made myself beautiful for you.” The dizziness intensified until James collapsed, unconscious, against the viewing dome.

The sunflower field. He’d almost forgotten it. Where was the foundry? Could it be over? James stood and traced his usual path towards the little cottage. Along the way something about the way the grass brushed his feet caught his attention.

It was dry, stiff, and sharp. Kneeling to inspect it, he found each blade to be made from a brittle, aged paper. Endless fields of brittle brown paper grass. The sun beating down on the field was different as well. Everywhere it shone a sickly dark yellow light. It felt not so different from darkness. Not real sunlight, at least. Even so, a welcome change of scenery.

“Hello?” James peered into the cabin’s unlit interior, eyes slowly adjusting. That strange tungsten yellow light poured through the windows and played across the floor. Sure enough, the familiar slender silhouette sat in a rocking chair in the far corner. His heart began to pound. “Lisa?” The silhouette stood, and took a step into the light.

The form before him was as close to Lisa as it could manage, using parts from Olivia. He recognized her face stretched over someone else’s skull. The hair was dark and long like Lisa’s, but didn’t quite sit on the scalp correctly. It stood at a crooked angle, as one of the legs was visibly shorter than the other, and badly bruised everywhere.

From the belly button trailed a long, damp, coiling umbilical. The puppet wheezed with each breath, lungs made to move only to simulate life by the thing that the umbilical led to. It did not really need air. It was alive only as an appendage of the cavern. “I made myself beautiful for you”, it gurgled. “Now we can be together.”

James ran from the cottage, accumulating small cuts to his feet from the false grass as he strove to put distance between himself and the pile of parts pretending to be Lisa. Whoever came close enough to it before that it could touch their mind must’ve worked in an industrial facility.

Nothing else fit. That was all it knew of how humans lived, until James came within reach. But it couldn’t replicate the field. It could create the appearance of it, but none of it was alive. All of it was dry, fragile, decomposing matter held in that shape by the one who animated it. For what reason?

James slowed as the realization dawned on him that he was quickly running out of field. As he came to the edge of the grass he placed his hands on the cold concrete of what he now understood to be a massive dome, painted like the sky, in which the field was enclosed.

Of course. It couldn’t make a planet. He fell to his knees and rested his head against the dome wall. “What do you want from me?” The ground began to rumble, and a low pitched voice boomed from all directions “Love me.”

“Why do you not create people to love you?” The rumbling started in again. “I can be Lisa for you, if you let me.” James covered his ears, as there was a sharp pain whenever it spoke. “Is it that you can’t? You can capture real life, you can tear it down and build puppets from it, but they aren’t alive. They need you to move their limbs, to make them speak. They are only extensions of you.”

The shaking grew stronger. All around him the paper grass began to wilt. The discolored sun faltered, its light dimming several times before returning to normal. The grass around him had likewise regenerated. “There is nothing left for you out there. Stay with me. Love me, and I will make you happy.” In the distance he saw the false Lisa slowly approaching from the cabin, step by labored step. “Where is Olivia?”

The puppet stopped. Then began to fall to pieces. The grass decomposed as before until it was dust. Above him the dome began to disintegrate, until he stood in the abattoir from his waking dreams. A twisted black iron medical table hung from the ceiling. Suspended from it, by wrist and ankle restraints, were Olivia’s remains.

She’d been partly skinned, and her ribcage hung open. Veins and entrails were strung from hooks, leading from within her chest cavity to a number of dirty glass jars hanging from the iron structure by cord. Each jar contained one of her organs. It wasn’t until he identified the one holding her heart that he figured out she was still alive. The heart was beating furiously. In another set of jars her lungs weakly inflated and deflated. Before he could say anything, her eyes opened.

“Olivia, I’m going to get you down from there.” She cried out, writhing in pain, struggling with her restraints. “James, no! Don’t touch anything! Oh god James it hurts, you can’t imagine. Don’t touch any of it, he’s not done putting it back in. He’s going to put it back in, isn’t he? He’ll put me back together, then we can go home.”

James fought back convulsions. At the far end of the chamber he spotted a little pale thing hobbling past wooden racks piled high with intestines. It was only the crudest approximation of a person. It had arms and legs but the joints seemed to appear in a different place with each step. The skin was milky white and shiny with moisture. Black veins were faintly visible beneath. In each hand it held small, sharp medical tools.

James withdrew as it approached. It halted as well and held out one of the tools. Cautiously, James inched towards the bulbous, featureless humanoid and took what he could now see was a scalpel. It hissed, and spittle sprayed forth as the head split open where a mouth should be. As he watched, sharp little teeth formed. All so that it could begin to speak. “Peel the skin.”

He looked at the blade, then before he could second guess the decision, plunged it into the eyeless monster’s chest. It hissed again but otherwise did not react. It became clear why when he noticed the umbilical hanging from its midsection. Of course, he thought. Only an appendage. It pulled the scalpel from its chest. The wound neither healed, nor bled.

It once again offered him the scalpel. With the other limb, it gestured at Olivia. “The flesh and blood of innocence. If I cannot go to them, you will bring them to me. So that they might know me. So that I might perfect them.”

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 10!}