Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (27 page)

"And results will be immediate?"

"As I promised. With the techniques I've perfected, transfer can be effected virtually without discomfort."

"And should something go wrong…you can replace eyes a second time?"

Breame hesitated. "With difficulty. You aren't a young woman; the risks would be considerable; but it
could
be done. Again, probably by no other surgeon. And it would be extremely expensive. It would entail another pair of healthy eyes."

26 Krystabel Parsons smiled her terrible smile. "Do I perceive you feel underpaid, Dr. Breame?"

He did not answer. No answer was required.

Verna saw it all and understood it all. And had she been able to smile, she would have smiled; much more warmly than the Director. If she died, as she was certain she would, that was peace and release. If not, well...

Nothing was worse than life.

They were moving around the room now. Another table was unshipped from a wall cubicle and formed. The doctor undressed 26 Krystabel Parsons and one of two remaining Floridans lifted her like a tree branch and laid her on the table.

The last thing Verna saw was the faintly glowing, vibrating blade of the shining e-scalpel, descending toward her face. The finger of God, and she blessed it as her final thoughts were of her mother.

*****

26 Krystabel Parsons, undisputed owner of worlds and industries and entire races of living creatures, jaded observer of a universe that no longer held even a faint view of interest or originality, opened her eyes.

The first things she saw were the operating room, the Floridan guards standing at the foot of the table staring at her intensely, the Knoxdoctor dressing the girl who stood beside her own table, the smears of black where the girl's eyes had been.

There was a commotion in the passageway outside. One of the guards turned toward the iris, still open.

And in that moment all sense of
seeing
flooded in on the Director of Minet. Light, shade, smoke, shadow, glow, transparency, opacity, color, tint, hue, prismatics, sweet, delicate, subtle, harsh, vivid, bright, intense, serene, crystalline, kaleidoscopic, all and everything at once!

Something else. Something more. Something the girl had not mentioned, had not hinted at, had not wanted her to know! The shadows within shadows.

She
saw
the Floridan guards.
Saw
them for the first time. Saw the state of their existence at the moment of their death. It was as if a multiple image, a strobe portrait of each of them lived before her. The corporeal reality in the front, and behind--like endless auras radiating out from them but superimposed over them--the thousand images of their fut5ures. And the sight of them when they were dead, how they died. Not the action of the event, but the result. The hideous result of having life ripped from them. Rotting, corrupt, ugly beyond belief, and all the more ugly than imagination because it was
seen
with forever eyes that captured all the invisible-to-normal-eyes subtleties of containers intended to contain life, having been emptied of that life. She turned her head, unable to speak or scream or howl like a dog as she wished, and she
saw
the girl, and she
saw
the doctor.

It was a sight impossible to contain.

She jerked herself upright, the pain in her withered legs barely noticeable. And she opened her mouth and forced herself to scream as the commotion in the passageway grew louder, and something dragged itself through the iris.

She screamed with all the unleashed horror of a creature unable to bear itself, and the guards turned back to look at her with fear and wonder...as Berne dragged himself into the room. She
saw
him, and it was worse than
now
, the vessel was emptying
now
! Her scream became the howl of a dog. He could not speak, because he had no part left in his face that could make a formed sound come out. He could see only imperfectly; there was only one eye. If he had an expression, it was lost under the blood and crushed, hanging flesh that formed his face. The huge Floridan guard had not been malevolent, merely Floridan, and they were a race only lately up from barbarism. But he had taken a long time.

Breame's hands froze on the sealstrip of the girl's tunic and he looked around her, saw the pulped mass that pulled itself along the floor, leaving a trail of dark stain and viscous matter, and his eyes widened.

The Floridans raised their weapons almost simultaneously, but the thing on the floor gripped the weapon it had somehow--amazingly, unpredictably, impossibly--taken away from its assassin, and it fired. The head of the nearest Floridan caved in on itself and the body jerked sidewise, slamming into the other guard. Both of them hit the operating table on which the Director of Minet sat screaming, howling, savaging the air with mortal anguish. The table overturned, flinging the crippled old woman with the forever eyes to the floor.

Breame knew what had happened. Berne had not been sent away. It had been blindness for him to think she would leave
any
of them alive. He moved swiftly, as the remaining Floridan struggled to free himself of the corpse that pinned him to the floor. The Knoxdoctor had the e-scalpel in his hand in an instant, palmed it on, and threw himself atop the guard. The struggle took a moment, as Breame sliced away at the skull. There was a muffled sound of the guard's weapon, and Breame staggered to his feet, reeled backward, and crashed into a power bin. Its storage door fell open and Breame took two steps into the center of the room, clutching his chest. His hands went inside his body; he stared down at the ruin; then he fell forward.

There was a soft bubbling sound from the dying thing that had been the pronger, Berne, and then silence in the charnel house.

Silence, despite the continued howling of 26 Krystabel Parsons. The sounds she made were so overwhelming, so gigantic, so inhuman, that they became like the ticking of a clock in a silent room, the thrum of power in a sleeping city. Unheard.

Verna heard it all, but had no idea what had happened. She dropped to her knees, and crawled toward what she thought was the iris. She touched something wet and pulpy with the fingertips of her left hand. She kept crawling. She touching something still-warm but unmoving with the fingertips of her right hand, and felt along the thing till she came to hands imbedded in soft, rubbery ruin. To her right she could faintly hear the sound of something humming, and she the knew the sound: an e-scalpel, still slicing, even when it could do no more damage.

Then she crawled to an opening, and she felt with her hands and it seemed to be a bin, a large, bin, with its door open. She crawled inside and curled up, and pulled the door closed behind her, and lay there quietly.

And not much later there was the sound of movement in the operating room as others who had been detained for reasons Verna would never know, came and lifted 26 Krystabel Parsons, and carried her away, still howling like a dog, howling more intensely as she saw each new person, knowing eventually she would see the thing she feared seeing the most. The reflection of herself as she would be in the moment of her dying; and knowing she would still be sane enough to understand and appreciate it.

*****

From extreme long shot, establishing; trucking in to medium shot, it looks like this:

Viewed through the tracking devices of PIX's port authority clearance security system, the Long Drive vessel sits in its pit, then slowly begins to rise out of its berth. White mist, or possibly steam, or possibly ionized fog billows out of the pit as the vessel leaves. The great ship rises toward the sky as we moved in steadily on it. We continue forward, angle tilting up to hold the Long Driver in medium shot, then a fast zoom in on the glowing hide of the ship, and dissolve through to a medium shot, establishing the interior.

Everyone is comfortable. Everyone is watching the planet Earth drop away like a stained-glass window through a trapdoor. The fisheye-lens of the stateroom iris shows WorldsEnd and PIX and the polar emptiness and the mottled ball of the decaying Earth as they whirl away into the darkness.

Everyone sees. They see the ship around them, they see one another, they see the pages of the books they read, and they see the visions of their hopes for good things at the end of this voyage. They all see.

Moving in on one passenger, we see she is blind. She sits with her body formally erect, her hands at her sides. She wears her clothing well, and apart from the dark smudges that show beneath the edge of the stylish opaque band covering her eyes, she is a remarkably attractive woman. Into tight closeup. And we see that much of her grace and attractiveness comes from the sense of overwhelming peace and containment her features convey.

Hold the closeup as we study her face, and marvel at how relaxed she seems. we must pity her, because we know that blindness, not being able to see, is a terrible curse. And we decide she must be a remarkable woman to have reconciled such a tragic state with continued existence.

We think that if we were denied sight, we would certainly commit suicide. As the darkness of the universe surrounds the vessel bound for other places.

*****

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

William Blake,

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
1790.

A NICE TOWN WITH VERY CLEAN
STREETS

Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson is the editor of
Post Mortem Press’
Torn Realities
, which Lonnie Nadler of
Bloody Disgusting
called "a book that belongs in any horror fan's collection". A short story writer, Anderson's most recent work has appeared in
Denizens of the Dark
,
Title Goes Here
, and
The New Bedlam Project
.

The pilots screamed as Grimes watched the surfac
e
of Tartan-6 expand in the dead ship's windshield. He tried believing this wasn't happening to him, he was somewhere far away; it wasn't
him
rushing to crash into the surface of Hell.

And then FedShip UPF/14 slammed into the ground and what felt like the hand of God slammed into Grimes: an instant of breathless shock and then nothing but darkness.

He came back to find himself hanging upside down with vertigo warring with migraine and someone else's blood clogging his throat. More blood, hot and loathsome, coated his face, gummed his eyes closed, soaked his jumpsuit.

Stephens, the ship's Alpha rep, called, "Who's alive?"

Grimes retched blood, driving twin spikes of migraine and vertigo deeper into his skull, and pawed shakily for the catches of his spiderweb-mesh harness.

He unbuckled and slammed against the ship's ceiling. From the back, he heard Newby, the mining rep, try to respond to Stephens and wind up vomiting.

Grimes scraped blood from his eyes and stood. Every muscle in his body was one, low chorus of pain.

He looked towards the cockpit and was momentarily confused by the helter-skelter mechanical wall before him: the cockpit had been crushed like a can. Only gore-soaked spiderweb-mesh straps remained of Richmond and Moore. Grimes's stomach fluttered. Ten minutes ago, they'd been checking the holocube for a lock on Tartan-6's colony-dome, the last of the thirteen colonies UPF had lost contact with during the war.

Then the instrument panels--the
ship
--had gone dead a kilometer above the ground.

He turned. Stephens hung in his harness and stared at the destroyed cockpit.

Stephens flicked a glance at Grimes, then undid the buckles. Still holding the catches, he swung out of the harness in one smooth movement. He went to Newby, whose Buddha gut pressed against the spiderweb, and helped get him down without Newby falling face-first into his own puke.

"Nelson and Rocco?" Grimes asked as they approached.

They looked at the end of the cabin. The rear compartment hatch was almost completely unrecognizable.

Newby wiped his mouth and asked, "The beacon?" His body trembled, his round face cheesy and coated in sweat.

"Tripped when we crashed," Stephens said absently. He shouldered past Grimes and went to the cockpit. Newby shrugged at Grimes, a brief spasm of his shoulders, and started for the storage compartments which had been below the bench seats but were now overhead.

Grimes considered the blood-smeared outer-hatch, which resembled crinkled tinfoil someone had tried flattening smooth again. There was protocol here, but it escaped him completely. Mentally, he felt like he was punching against a soft, suffocating cushion. Shock from the crash, he supposed.

The last one,
he thought. He sensed he was pleading, but didn't know to whom. Not God. He'd stopped believing in God when the UPF sent him to the frontlines as a "morale booster".
The last goddam one before I got back to Janey.

He mentally shook himself. "What do we know of this place other than it's a mining colony?"

"Rocco was the know-it-all," Newby said, awkwardly carrying three of the opaque emergency helmets. "Tartan-6 went off the grid early, though, which is weird considering how far from the frontlines they were. Air's breathable but thin, hence the helmets."

Stephens stooped in front of the cockpit wreckage and pulled a palm-sized black square from a glob of grue. When he turned, Grimes saw it was a memory-chip from one of the pilot helmets.

He noticed Grimes and Newby watching. "I flew missions with Moore before," he said. "His people will want this." He put the chip in his pocket and took a helmet from Newby. "What's the equipment and weaponry look like?"

"Still locked down," Newby said. "The rifles are cracked, but the bolters look all right. One of Nelson's tech doodads looks messed up, but that might be how it looks normally."

"At least the
weapons
survived," Grimes said, staring at his exhausted reflection in his helmet faceplate. He tried again to shake the suffocating numbness and could manage only a vague bitterness.
The last one,
he half-pleaded to no one. "We all know how useful they've been thus far."

*****

They got the outer-hatch open and, helmets on, stumbled outside.

They'd crashed maybe a klick away from the colony, the transparent half-sphere nearly dominating the horizon. Mountains cut across the right and left. 

"Company," Stephens said. His helmet nodded towards a dune-buggy transport cresting a hill up ahead. The six men in the transport wore no Delta insignia.

Grimes stiffened. UPF protocol stated Deltas met all visitors.

"Quite a crash there, guys," the man in the passenger seat said as the transport stopped. His eyes were bright behind his clear face-plate. "Any casualties?"

"Three," Stephens said. "We're--"

"The UPF ship," the passenger finished. "I've been Station-hopping since you were kids. This isn't my first re-contact." He glanced at the ship and a pained expression crossed his face. "After all the UPF losses, any extra just seems tragic."

Grimes grimaced. The sentiment sounded robotic coming from this guy, canned somehow.

"I'm Station Supervisor Dugan. These folks are--" Dugan flashed a toothy grin. "--the Welcome Committee." He pulled a digipad from beside him and unclipped the stylus. "Okay. You said there were three casualties. They were...?"

Stephens said, "Can't we do this--"

"Quicker this way," Dugan interrupted. "The casualties...?"

Stephens said, "Pilots George Richmond and Brad Moore, Cultural Guide Mike Rocco, UPF Alpha Gregory Stephens."

Grimes jerked. He opened his mouth--

(--don't say a word i know what i'm doing.) 
             

The thought was as sharp as a knife-blade, as violating as a rape. Stephens's voice, loud and clear and
cold
. His brain felt like it'd plummeted into an icy lake.

Psi?
he thought.
Stephens's a Psi? But that was only rumor--

The jes-folks look left Dugan's bumpkin face. "No military survived?"

Stephens shook his helmeted head. "No."

Dugan's face softened. "Who're you folks, then?"

"I'm FedShip Tech Fred Nelson," Stephens said. He gestured at Grimes and Newby. "This is UPF representative Owen Grimes, and mining rep Phillip Newby."

Dugan scratched across the digipad with a stylus. "Was your distress beacon tripped?"

"The recorder was smashed upon impact."

"All right, then," Dugan said. His eyes were bright. "Hop in back and we'll take you to town."

"Why didn't the military come out?" Grimes asked.

Something shifted on Dugan's face and suddenly the thousand-watt smile appeared pasted on. "Mr. Grimes, our soldiers went to war."

A hollow suddenly opened in Grimes's chest. Colony-stationed soldiers
never
went to the front; it was UPF protocol, it was why there were
Deltas
. How could Dugan think Grimes wouldn't
know
this?

He thought of arguing, looked into Dugan's face, and thought again. The Supervisor's expression offered no answers; he was a true bureaucrat. You would never read Dugan's inner feelings on anything unless he allowed you to. He was a cipher, broadcasting only what his job specified.

You know your own,
Grimes thought and felt sick suddenly. The migraine in the back of his head tightened a notch.

Without a word, he climbed aboard with Stephens and Newby and the dune-buggy lurched into a U-turn. Grimes watched the ship, twisted and bent like a scorpion tail, disappear behind them.

Stephens nudged him and nodded towards the space under the opposite benches.

Grimes counted four military rifles clipped to the floor beneath the "Welcome Committee".

Cold air blew through the hollow in his chest. He'd shaken off the shock of the crash. Oh yes, indeed.

*****

Inside the dome's igloo-shaped Entrance Chamber, they stripped out of their bloodied jumpsuits, leaving them with only white T-shirts and gray trousers. Grimes eyed Stephens's muscular body warily. No one else on the ship had that type of honed form.

Dugan and his "Welcome Committee" stood near the hatch leading into the dome proper as three bored-looking men pulled the DeCon hoses off the wall.

"Don't bother," Dugan said. "We have places to be." He gestured for Grimes, Stephens, and Newby to follow him through the hatch.

It was at least ten degrees warmer under the dome. The Entrance Chamber led to the loading bay, an expansive field that took up a third of the entire station, where the colony's payout was kept for transport. Motorized dogcarts were parked around towering shipping containers. Beyond, the "town" began--a collection of short, stout buildings on either side of a wide dirt road connecting the Entrance Chamber to the mining crater at the far end. Emergency spotlights ringed the town.

"Welcome to Tartan-6, gentlemen," Dugan said.

An icepick shot into Grimes's mind:

(--ask where we're going.)

His jaw wanted to lock, more from the idea of talking than the sudden violence of Stephens's message. He had no helmet to hide his expression now. "Where are we going? I don't think any of us are up for our duties."

Dugan glanced behind him. "Off to see the Chaplain."

He wasn't able to hide his bewilderment. "Why--"

"Are you sure that's wise, Supervisor Dugan?" Newby asked suddenly.

"I don't see why not."

"Quarantine," Stephens said, almost absently.

That
stopped Dugan. "Quarantine?"

Grimes cleared his throat. "According to UPF protocol, all crash survivors must be quarantined for twenty-four hours or until the cause of the crash is known."

Dugan's bureaucratic facade cracked. "But our infirmary--"

"I can assure you we're perfectly healthy," Newby said, "and we thank you for allowing us to
skip
DeCon, but we can't speak for our pilots, or what
they
may have had."

"Are you familiar with Sparta-C, Supervisor?" Stephens asked.

The facade was gone and Dugan was nonplussed. "I--well, yes--"

"Then you're aware of their cholera epidemic," Grimes said. "That was our previous stop, and--"

"We have no medics!"
Dugan screamed.

"We're probably
perfectly
healthy," Newby said.

"Without a working infirmary," Grimes asked, "is there somewhere else we might stay?"

Dugan's shoulders slumped. "The Delta barracks."

Grimes smiled his best bureaucratic smile. His head ached--a galloping black horse across the soft meat of his brain. "Given the importance UPF has for Tartan-6, no one wants any unnecessary risks taken."

The Welcome Committee looked decidedly uneasy--this wasn't in the script. Their faces told Grimes that there very much
had
been a script, but to what? If Grimes hadn't asked a question, what would've happened?

Dugan looked at his watch. "Quarantine to begin at fifteen-thirty, per arrival at the barracks." He visibly struggled to regain his former posture. "This way, please."

The procession began without its previous urgency. They reminded Grimes of kids forced to do their chores.

They entered town. Gray, utilitarian buildings stared down at them, the windows and doors empty. Grimes could hear the syncopated chugging of the climate system. Where were the
people
? They might've been walking through forgotten stage-settings.

"Nice place," Newby said.

Dugan missed his tone. "We're strict about that. To be clean, to be orderly..." He trailed off. "It is of the utmost importance."

For what?
Grimes thought. He looked down at the road and saw the dirt had been raked.  The lines were the only things
on
the road. Not a single piece of trash anywhere.

He looked at Dugan. What
was
this? Keeping the colony clean was important, but this was taken to its extreme.