Dean Coxwell looked again at the photographs of the glass rock and its scratches on the table before him. They were from different angles, different resolutions, but he saw nothing abnormal in them. Was there something he was missing that Randal wasn’t?
“You aren’t saying anything. Don’t worry: it took me some time to see it, too, and only because I’d read Markowitz’s and Olivia’s notes beforehand. Skip to the last section.
My eyes are getting bleary from lack of sleep, and I think I’ve had too much coffee—I’m jittery, my skin won’t keep still—but I know there’s something in the these photos.
LATER: Oh my God I cracked it. It’s a code of some sort. A language, maybe. These striations, those tiny creatures. It’s a language! I don’t know how but these things are intelligent!
Dean Coxwell read the short passage over multiple times, trying to ensure it was saying what he thought it was. He could see where Randal had circled some of the markings, but to him they looked like nothing more than scratches.
“What is she talking about?”
“If you look closely, you’ll see the patterns in those scratches. I had a friend run them through linguistic software to confirm it. She was right: it’s some sort of language. And these scratches are too small for even the most precise tool to have made. But it gets worse. And it gets much worse.
“I was exposed when I visited Olivia, just as she was exposed when she opened the samples Markowitz sent back, just as he and Linden were exposed on the
Oregon
when they brought the rock to the surface—the rock that, as far as I can ascertain, came from the impact point of a meteor roughly three billion years ago. Whatever came on that rock lay dormant under the ocean until Markowitz dredged it up. On the table over there, just outside the door? There’s dissecting microscope with a piece of silverware on it. Go take a look through the viewfinder.”
Dean Coxwell stood, hesitantly, and followed Randal’s instruction. He didn’t know what else to do. Everything he was being told . . . it seemed impossible.
“Do you see it? Are you there yet? Look at the knife. What do you see?”
Dean Coxwell had to adjust the lenses and move the focus to account for his own eyes, but when the twin lenses sharpened and joined, he stopped breathing.
“Do you see it? Do you see it?”
“It looks like— It can’t be, but it looks like—”
“Those scratches . . . line after line after line of them. Dulling the silver, but words carved out over and over. Give it enough time, and these things will eat through that knife, just as they’ll eat through everything else in here. I went to Olivia’s a few days ago, when I still could, and the building was locked, but I could tell the entire structure looked worse than it had when I was last there. Whatever emerged, it destroyed everything—carved words into every surface, weakening it for who knows what reason. Look at this,” he said, holding up his bandaged hand. “I didn’t hurt myself; I was hurt.” He peeled away his bandages and showed Dean Cowxell the black-bloodied scratches along his fingers and palm. They looked the same as those on the rock.
“These things, they’ve infected me, carved their words into me, their language. I’m going to die by it, by these wounds, by this micro-organic parasite from elsewhere. It’s funny: I spent so much time hating Linden for what he had, and that hatred blinded me to what Olivia needed until it was too late. I was blind to what Markowitz was doing, too; why he went out into the ocean, what his hopes were. He saw what was coming and held out hope for humanity. But what he found at the bottom of that crater had been patiently waiting for him for billions of years. He was right: they are the ultimate survivors. And the irony is they will survive us all.
“I’ve had the same dream ever since I became infected. In it, I see a long stretch of highway in the middle of a snowstorm. The snow is falling so heavily that the entire sky is clouded over, so thick buildings in the distance are only shadows. Snow spins in eddies against the brick structures, curls along the sides of the road, lies inches thick over everything. The world is silent in the middle of this storm, not a single car is in sight. I look closer in my dream, somehow able to clearly see even the smallest details, and I realize it’s not snow that is falling to the ground, blanketing the world; it’s these things, these micro-organic spores, and they are writing their way across everything, disassembling all our works, every trace of our existence on this planet. And then? And then I wonder what will be left of us anywhere. What price has posterity then?”
Randal lifted the blanket shakily from his lap and coughed into it, but it could not cover the blood that flowed from his mouth, over his arm. Randal stepped away and raised his sleeve to cover his nose and mouth. Something was happening to Randal, something horrible, and though the dean wanted to be far away he could not move.
Randal’s body shook, arms jittering, head moving side to side. He continued to struggle against it, contortions of pain across his face as he attempted to swallow the worst of his reaction. He was fighting against the inevitable, and clearly losing.
“I’m—I’m sorry I brought you brought you here,” he managed to choke loose. “Sorry for everything. Something like— I should have known.” Blood ran down from his nose, from his eyes, as he strained to maintain control. “I deserved so much better. Deserve has nothing to do with it anymore. No one does. No one gets. Can finally see—”
He stopped, eyes pulled wide, glaring forward as the veins in his face, his head, engorged, standing out so far they pulsed. Hands clenched the arms of the chair, fingers turning white as his body spasmed. Coxwell took another step back, his curiosity replaced with terror. He glanced at Randal’s notes, regretting not taking them by the fistful, but he was too far away and could no longer remove his eyes from the horror before him. Randal’s head was thrown back, lolling as he attempted to stand. The bloodied blanket dropped to the floor, revealing twisted emaciated legs and the odor of evacuation. Every muscle in Randal seemed to be reacting out of sync with the rest, and awkwardly he staggered, drooling and unbalanced, blindly toward the dean. Coxwell’s breath solidified in his lungs. The world shrank to the size of a pinhole filled with the crumbling Randal’s approach. Another mindless step, a gurgling voice trying to speak Olivia’s name, and the discarded blanket tangling Randal’s legs. Without effort to protect himself, Randal fell forward like a lumbered tree, and when he connected with the floor, there was a soft sound like a hollow fruit popping, and the expulsion into the air of blood and flesh in a cloud full of white spores.
Coxwell stumbled backward on his squat legs and spun himself forward as quickly as he was able. The front door was less than ten feet away, yet it felt a thousand. He scratched his flesh, convinced he was too late, even as he dashed, praying somehow he might be wrong. Hands on the knob, he threw the door open and fell out into the hallway, yanking the door closed behind him.
He didn’t stop moving until he ran into the wall ahead of him, at which point he sank to the ground and breathlessly watched the door he’d come through. In those last instants before impact he had seen Randal’s face, seen the crack that had spread over his skull, across his brow to the bridge of his nose, then travelled down past a milky eye and to the right. It may have been imagination, but it seemed the entire quarter of his face dislodged, something inside pushing to be free. But the discarded body of Randal was safely locked behind the apartment door, and that and the walls of the building stood between it and Dean Coxwell.
The dean worked to catch his breath, his limbs too exhausted to move as the adrenaline dissipated, and contemplated his next course of action. Public Health would have to be contacted, informed what was behind that locked door. There would have to be further investigation under quarantine until what the creatures were could be determined. Even though he’d seen the result, Dean Coxwell had trouble believing any of it, but his difficultly would not stop him, stop Sandstone University, from exploring the discovery. Under the right control, the information could be game-changing, could put the school—and Dean Coxwell’s department—on the international map. Randal’s files were the key. Randal’s files, trapped behind a locked apartment door. All Coxwell had to do was find the energy to move his arm, retrieve his cell phone, and make a call. But he couldn’t. Even when he saw something glisten beneath Randal’s locked door, he couldn’t. Even though it was something wet, something from the depths of history that oozed outward, a stream of white that crept toward Dean Coxwell as he lay immobile, terrified. Something that moved as though it had all the time in the world.
Thistle’s Find
I’d called Dr. Thistle because I was tight on cash and because the place I’d been staying had just been flipped by the police again. It was getting old, to be honest, but I was used to it. The police and I didn’t get along—not after what happened when Mrs. Mulroney died, at any rate—so I did my best to avoid them. They were bad for business, and it didn’t help that Detective McCray still had his crooked eye on me, along with the rest of his mustache gang.
But I thought I could trust Dr. Thistle to help, or at least hide me out for a while. I’d known him for nearly my entire life—ever since I was a weird little kid and he was my weirder neighbor. My parents had warned me to keep away from him, but even then I knew they were full of shit and didn’t know what they were talking about. Dr. Thistle treated me like an adult, which is all any kid really wants.
He wasn’t a regular doctor. I’m not even sure he ever went to medical school. When he first told me to call him “Doctor” I did and never questioned it. He had all the credentials: his house was full of all that equipment only a doctor could afford. It all seemed legit to me, and I’d seen enough doctors on TV to know what I was talking about.
I eventually figured out he didn’t treat people, and that he was a bit of a quack, but that only made him more interesting. His thoughts were crazy, and the mumbo-jumbo he talked about when I first met him only made marginally more sense once I was a teenager and had some school behind me. Some of the words he used went right over my head. So far over, I think a plane might have hit them. Eventually, I got bored of going over there all the time to deal with his craziness, but I kept it up because my asshole of a father forbade it, and because I’d read a book once where a crazy old man gave a fortune to the one kid dumb enough to stick around and talk to him. It was a gamble, sure, but no one else ever visited and those machines couldn’t have been cheap to buy.
When the bus let me off at Thistle’s I barely even looked at the house I grew up in. My parents still lived there as far as I knew, but if they did I knew they’d never let me back in. They believed everything Detective McCray told them about me, and that was that. There was nothing more to do. If they saw me get off the bus in front of Thistle’s house they didn’t open the door or come to the window. I was like a ghost to my own flesh and blood, which was kind of ironic when you think about it.
Thistle’s house had an aura around it. The feeling was palpable as I stood there, staring at the two levels of dilapidation, my skin slick and clammy. The air smelled of ozone, as though reality had been bent, something I was far more familiar with than I would have liked, thanks to Mrs. Mulroney. Still, it left me feeling nauseated.
Whatever Thistle was up to inside, it was clearly a bad idea. My gut knew it, even if my head thought different. Still, I couldn’t help but be curious, so instead of running I climbed the uneven concrete steps to the porch and swung the front door’s tarnished brass knocker. Flakes of paint fluttered like dead leaves to the ground.
The old man that answered the door must have been Thistle, but it was hard to tell under all those grey wrinkles. He was dressed only in an old undershirt and boxer shorts, and both were stained so severely I wondered if they’d ever been washed. He was sweating and out of breath, and the putrid smell that hit me took me off guard. It burned my eyes.
“Owen! It’s good to see you. Your timing is perfect. Now, inside. Quickly!”
I kicked the dirt off my feet, even though they were probably cleaner than his carpet. Doctor Thistle was, quite simply, a hoarder, and over the years since I’d been in his house it had only grown worse. When I was a kid, visiting was like going on a treasure hunt, and I think all the things I discovered there beneath the piles and stacks taught me that there was always something interesting to find if I just looked hard enough. It also taught me that other people’s stuff was unimportant next to finding those things. Thistle complained, but he never kicked me out for tearing his stacks apart, which is another reason I stuck by him for so long.
He led me down a narrow path between stacks of old science journals and newspapers. The further into the house we got, the sicker I felt.
“I need some help, Doc. I’m a bit light on cash and—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, waving my predicament away. “I need to show you something. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, so just follow me; I haven’t written everything down yet and I don’t want to get confused.”
I don’t know how old he was when I first met him, but after so many years Dr. Thistle had to have been ancient. You could see it in the cataracts in his jaundiced eyes. The smell in the house hadn’t eased, but I’d become acclimated to it somewhat and was able to stop cupping my mouth in my hand. I wondered what Thistle had been cooking and whether I could pry one of the painted-over windows open enough for some fresh air. It was like breathing in a room full of rotten meat. The flies were legion.
Thistle’s old heavy feet clomped on the bare wooden staircase into the basement. I’d never been allowed down there before, and as we descended I felt the old tingle of childhood fear creeping up on me. I hadn’t been afraid of anything in so long that part of me was amused by the sensation, but there was another that wondered why it had occurred at all, especially considering all the horrible things I’d witnessed since. I suppose we’re all just an amalgamation of our childhood fears and instincts; no matter what our brains know, sometimes old fear runs much deeper than logic can dam.