[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 16

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 13, 14, 15}

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.”

James’ brain once again rippled agonizingly as it spoke to him in the language it found most natural. He saw a figure, easily a mile high, emerging from the sea. He watched it taking great strides across the land as people panicked, looted and cowered below.

The great monstrosity formed six tightly shut eyes, then split them open. Beams of hazy red light burst forth and swept over the land. Wherever this spotlight fell on a fleeing mother, child, looter or soldier, they froze. As if suffering epilepsy their bodies quaked, and then a calm came over them. The giant bellowed in a long, low, droning cadence like an earth horn. The fresh converts began to sing.

They milled about his feet as he stalked the Earth, dancing while singing his praises in a language never before spoken by man. Acolytes of the new God. However dirty their faces from hiding, however ragged their clothing, all were deliriously happy. It was a happiness James found himself craving as he watched.

When the vision faded, for a few moments James could not make sense of what he was seeing through the viewing dome. The floor of the Foundry was familiar enough, but it took opening the hatch for James to make himself believe that he’d somehow arrived here. Salt water trickled down the sides of the hull and gathered in a pool underneath the stout vessel as he cautiously made his way to a ladder at the back and clambered down it.

The dripping metal hulk, at home in ice cold seawater under incomprehensible pressures, looked now like something from another world. Stranger still, but somehow expected, was the pale woman’s hand beckoning to James from the darkened doorway to the stairwell. James inspected the sub for damage, planning to return to it soon although unsure of whether or not that was even necessary to return. Finding nothing, he headed for the door.

Several times on the way, he second guessed his inspection. Excuses, reasons to turn back and waste more time in a familiar space. It was clear now that the mind responsible for the Foundry meant him no direct harm, but even so he dreaded what it might be leading him to.

The tremendous concrete shaft returned echoes of every footstep as he descended the stairs. There were echoes of dripping water as well, something he didn’t remember from any of his other explorations. The further he went, the more these echoes intensified. He soon discovered that the railing was wet to the touch. Cold water trickled down the entire structure of the spiral staircase. A few droplets struck his forehead, ran down between his eyes and met his lips. It tasted of salt.

Finally James arrived at the circular room lined with cages. The dark yellow light illuminated the walkway around the stairwell but seemed to halt at the entry of each cage. Beyond that was shadow. Not like the shadow cast by an object but a hazy, nebulous black fog. It did not move like smoke, it had no visible substance, light simply was not there. The same impossible absence of being that he’d seen it come into the Tartarus through many times now.

Except this time, it receded. He’d seen that happen before only where natural light struck it or where several looked upon it at once, but this time it happened of the creature’s own will. “You must have been curious. See for yourself what is within”. James felt ready to witness horrors beyond imagination. Tortures, grisly dissections, clumsily assembled human remains walking about as the creature pulled its invisible strings.

What he saw instead was Rodney. James choked. “Rod! Holy hell, you’re alive. Thank God, I thought you’d be next after Cray. How did you…” He trailed off. Rod was either ignoring him or could not hear his cries of relief. He lay cradled in the hairy, muscular arms of a man who looked to be in his sixties, a look of absolute adulation and contentment plastered across his face.

“The demons who made me hurt you are gone from my mind. The man who did those things wasn’t me. I’m back now, I will never leave my beautiful baby boy alone again.” Rod buried his face in the bloated, hirsute old man’s shoulder. The smile on his face was unreal. The happiest he’d ever seen Rodney, likely the happiest he’d ever been.

Feelings of confusion and disgust took hold as James realized that even if he could tell Rod the true nature of the entity that rescued him from the prison cell, the thing now pretending to be his father, he wouldn’t. Rodney needed it so desperately that if it could be real enough to fill that need, James was content to allow it. The more he wrestled with the perversity of it the more he concluded that it was the best of many bad options, that there was nothing here that Rod needed to be rescued from.

It was a short leap from that realization to what came next. All around him the shadow receded. He saw countless members of the Tartarus crew, each lost in some activity with the same rapturous grin he’d seen on Rodney.

One man was helping his son get back onto a bicycle after he’d fallen. “I’ll look out for cars this time Dad!” The man wiped away a tear and patted the boy on the back. “There are no cars here. You can ride forever. I will still pick you up when you fall.”

A woman in the next cage over softly sang a lullaby as she rocked a faded sky blue cradle. There were no clear signs as to what parted them originally but James could guess. The next cage from hers housed a lean muscular man in fatigues. He sat on a stump with a circle of small black haired children around him, dressed in rags.

As I moved closer to hear what he was saying, it turned out that he was teaching them to read. When one of the children asked a question, she spoke in Arabic. The man also answered in Arabic, and pulled her up onto his knee to go over the passage in her book that she struggled with. Whatever he’d done in some far flung theatre of war gutted him so completely that this was what he most wanted to do for eternity.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 17!}