Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (37 page)

"These humans, you love their music as well?"

Vornholt nodded.

"A curious species,
homo sapiens
," Ciprian continued. "From even their early history, they showed great interest in their thought centers, their brains. During the early part of the last century, this interest led them to develop a surgical procedure in which connections to and from the prefrontal cortex were severed in order to change an uncooperative or combative human's behavior. Quite barbaric. Primitive, as is all their medicine. I'm told that in later years, the procedure could be carried out with a kitchen implement, the icepick."

Vornholt swallowed. He was suddenly very nervous. "The lobotomy. I've heard of this."

"If carried too far or done too recklessly, the procedure reduces the human to a babbling idiot," Ciprian explained. "But the speech centers remain active even as the thought processes are radically altered. And, strangely enough, so does the capacity for the recognition of tone, pitch, and rhythm. Do you understand?"

Vornholt shook his head, dazed.

Ciprian laughed. "They can be made to sing! Even when reduced to gibbering idiots, they can still carry on with that warbling you love so much."

Ciprian withdrew a ring of keys from his pocket and clicked a button on the remote entry device. He put a hand on the vehicle's rear door then paused and looked at Vornholt. "Remember, this can only take place on a small scale. But think of it as a gift from a friend."

Ciprian opened the vehicle's rear door. Vornholt peered inside and saw a pair of adult
homo sapiens
, a male and female. Both were dressed only in plain white bathrobes. Both also had a small bandage affixed in the corner of their left eye sockets. At the sight of Ciprian, the two humans began to babble and coo in their strange, high-pitched voices, their nonsense syllables rising and falling melodically in the cold night air. 

Ciprian swept his hand expansively. "May I have the pleasure of introducing you to Sarah and Taylor Teagarden, unappreciated by their fellow humans, but I'm hoping, not so undervalued by a being with refined sensibilities such as yourself."

Vornholt stared.

"You are speechless?" Ciprian asked. He clapped his hands together. "I know. You cannot find a way to express your gratitude. Truth be told, I was somewhat uncertain as to what sort of creature you'd favor. As you well know, I'm no music lover. These two just looked so…now, what is the word…sincere."

The two humans continued to babble, randomly increasing or decreasing the tone and cadence of their warbling. They sounded like giant songbirds struggling to find their mating calls. They clutched clumsily at one another, whether in panic or affection, Vornholt could not tell. Ciprian took from his pocket some pieces of chocolate candy, which he unwrapped and fed to the two wretches. They smiled and smacked their lips before continuing their vocalizations.

"The singing is primitive and strange now, but I'm confident they can be trained," Ciprian proclaimed. "And if the Great Authority deems that training a success, perhaps the species can be preserved as an exhibit in one of our zoos."

Ciprian slammed the door shut, but the singing continued from within, muffled now.

Vornholt stared at the rough asphalt surface of the parking lot. His face burned red with embarrassment, and he was glad for the absence of street lights. Ciprian put an arm around Vornholt's shoulder and drew him close.

"Maybe they can even survive as more than an exhibit," Ciprian continued.  "Since we know that they can be domesticated through such a simple procedure…the possibilities for the survival of the species—in a controlled environment, of course--seem good. This is a matched pair, suitable for breeding. Both of them seem healthy enough and are of an age for reproduction. After all, they are cute in their own ugly sort of way, and in time, perhaps others of our race will come around to your point of view." He squeezed Vornholt's shoulder. "I must admit, those little creatures can be quite entertaining. And amazingly resilient. They still sing beautifully."

Andrew Nienaber

Andrew Nienaber has been an ice cream truck driver, a bartender, a teacher, a writer, a blogger, a director of operas and an all-around theater professional. He is one of the founders of FatalDownflaw.com and his short-lived blog about his experiences selling ice cream,
The Ill Humor Man
, drew hundreds of hits a day.
His first novel,
Truly Deeply Disturbed
, is said to make Dexter seem like Mr. Rogers.

I've had a lot of time barricaded in this librar
y
to review the last thousand years or so of theory and speculation--be it scientific or fictitious--and despite the direness of my circumstances it always manages to give me a chuckle thinking about how wrong, how very wrong we as a species were. There were those who said the end of humanity would come at the hand of a god, punishing the wicked and bringing the righteous home to paradise. There were those who theorized that our destruction would come from distant worlds, a multitude of warlike or misunderstanding beings blazing through our little blue planet in conquest or to eradicate a cosmic nuisance, or completely by accident. For a long time in the twentieth century, people thought we would be the agents of our own demise with overpowered weaponry capable of destroying the planet hundreds of times over in the hands of twitchy and ideologically opposed nations. But when you know the reality of the end of mankind, all of these theories seem as patently absurd as believing the vague ramblings of a 16
th
-century prognosticator, or that an ancient Meso-American culture could predict the apocalypse because of a calendar change.

I am recording this barricaded in the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
in Paris. As the world went mad around me I found the antidote, or at least a way to treat the symptoms, and sequestered myself away from the maelstrom that was the rest of my species. I'm recording these thoughts in hopes that someone else out there might someday read them, as I have been reading the thoughts of ages past. I am convinced by the relative silence outside the windows that Earth has succumbed fully to the Plague we unleashed, but without communication to the outlying colonies in other systems I can't be sure if I am the last living human or not. I know the news went out across the entire spread of our fledgling empire, but I still hold out hope that maybe living on a different planet would have insulated some from the worst of what happened here on the home world. Perhaps one day a colony will send a team back to investigate and find my record of the death of humanity here; perhaps they will learn from us. Or perhaps they too will become infected.

I am a historian by trade, not a scientist, so the details are at best a bit fuzzy to me, but I think the beginning of our problems was the Theory of Everything. It took centuries to finally reconcile Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, but three hundred years ago a team from Geneva, working in the world's most advanced physics lab, finally acquired experimental proof of unification. That led to a golden age of exponentially blooming discovery and technological advancement. By that time we had already terraformed most of the moon and large portions of Mars, but unification allowed us to finally harness physics as a toolbox rather than a mystery grab-bag. A hundred years ago we mastered faster-than-light travel via wormhole, and began sending probes to the farthest reaches of the universe. It was a giddy time, I understand; a time when it seemed that all of our questions about the cosmos would be answered. Would we find other sentient life out there? Would we find proof of God, or of monsters unimagined? Humanity was collectively glued to their seats, waiting for the next discovery.

For a while, every new day brought something exciting--a planet millions of light-years away that was made entirely of quartz and cast rainbows on the other bodies in its solar system, a cluster of twenty enormous and dying stars that were set to implode together and create the biggest known black hole in the universe, entire nebulae that were literally on fire. We wondered at the variety and glory of the universe.

The problem with a Theory of Everything, of course, is that it allows you to mathematically work out the very nature of existence. Within the first seventy-five years, scientists had proven the entire history of the universe back to the Big Bang and beyond. We finally understood the cyclical nature of creation and destruction and the forces that controlled it all. Religion was the first casualty of understanding. When you have irrefutable proof of the mechanics of the universe, faith in a deity becomes irrelevant. Granted, religious practice had already been in decline for nearly a millennium by the time the Theory was made public, but the erosion of faith accelerated each passing day from then out. There were pockets of zealots of each of the world's great religions that held on as long as they could, became even more radicalized, and even banded together to wage a sort of crusade on the scientific community, but it was the death throes of an antiquated way of life. The zealots were the first to succumb to the Plague.

At first we didn't have a clue as to what was happening. Recent cults and millennia-old faiths alike started losing their minds. Because the world was so secularized it was treated as an oddity when the zealots began wantonly rutting and tearing each other apart in their compounds. The footage was horrific: peacekeepers would be called in by a few mutilated survivors to find piles of carrion, shredded by human fingers and partially eaten. Bodies intertwined on the ground, their mouths full of each other's skin. The living were invariably ravening and violent by the time authorities reached the scene and attacked anyone who got near them. Most were killed by the police, usually after several more casualties.

One man--and we're getting into my lifetime now-- was taken into custody after a massacre at a Mormon enclave in Salt Lake City and brought to a hospital in Denver for study. He was kept sedated most of the time, and was unable to form a coherent thought. He continually babbled about the void, the "great empty" as he called it. This sort of behavior was casually dismissed as the rambling of a diseased mind, polluted by belief in a blatantly false mythology that had twisted his sense of reality to the point where he could not accept life outside of his safe theology. The masses shook their heads sadly and spoke in hushed tones around water coolers and on social media about the dangers of succumbing to a way of life so divorced from fact.

It was around this time that the Middle East exploded. The world's few remaining theocracies were all in the region, and masses of people were turning on each other daily. The borders between Islamic nations were initially fortified and no man's lands created to attempt to localize the outbreaks, but within a few years most of the cradle of civilization was in tatters. Footage from camera drones showed enormous masses of people in the streets, many in traditional robes and headgear, killing each other with utter abandon, their mouths smeared with blood and their fingers torn from scratching their way out of the locked and barred buildings that the governments used to isolate the afflicted. Piles of bodies writhing as the half-living tore at each other with tooth and finger. Daily we in the West watched as bearded imams and women in
hajabs
rent the flesh from each other and devoured it raw, bleeding and dead-eyed. Most of the nation of Israel was evacuated as a precaution, but it quickly became apparent that the infected were no longer interested in pursuing ancient grudges and hatreds. In fact, they seemed to have no agenda at all beyond their atrocities. And in what little sound we had from these riots, the same words echoed over and over: "the empty", "the void", "the nothing".

Pockets of Catholicism in central Italy and South America soon followed suit. Every place in the world where people still put a deity in charge of their lives fell into bedlam. During this entire time of upheaval, while the secular world watched and waited for the faithful to either come to their senses or kill themselves out, hundreds of probes were still being sent out every week, scouring the far reaches of the cosmos to complete our knowledge, to fill in the blank spots in our map of the universe. And every day more and more information came streaming back to Earth, more and more marvels, but with less and less impact. Sights that would have been glorious and unimaginable just a few generations earlier were becoming commonplace. Humanity as a species was rapidly losing its sense of wonder.

By the time of my birth--I am sixty-four years old, and sincerely hope I do not live to see sixty-five-- we had built colonies on planets hundreds of light-years away, connected to the hub of Earth by subatomic communications, but largely autonomous. They were mining colonies for the most part, communities built around extracting minerals from distant worlds that were vanishing at home. The initiative to mine other planets was at first driven by our desperate need for oil. Before it all fell apart, literally the final few drops of petroleum were wrung from the bowels of the planet, and innovation in alternative fuels had continually lagged behind other, seemingly more important matters. But no matter where we looked, we couldn't find oil off-planet. For oil to form, there needs to have been organic life, something which we never found.

As the probes illuminated the dark corners of the universe, scientists were also working feverishly back on Earth, plugging different variables into the Theory and making daily discoveries about the nature of the cosmos. I remember vividly the day they released the finding that ruined everything. It was three days after my fifty-eighth birthday and, the anniversary itself having fallen on a Wednesday, I waited until Friday night to celebrate. I watched Saturday morning, still hung over and in my pajamas, as a team of physicists, astronomers, biologists and mathematicians sat somberly at a long table with a podium in the center of it and one by one explained to the waiting, breathless world that we were alone.

Soon, the data coming from the probes offered corroborating proof--there was no life to be found anywhere in the universe other than our little, seemingly insignificant rock. For millennia mankind had looked to the stars and felt assured that there was something else waiting out there to greet us, to explain to us the mysteries of life, to show us the meaning in our existence, but there was nothing out there but rocks and gas clouds and endlessly spinning chunks of inorganic matter orbiting each other mindlessly. No Olympians, no bearded puppet master, no benevolent aliens awaited us out in the universe. Mankind was completely, utterly alone. Life was a fluke, a meaningless accident that had never been repeated. That is when the Plague began to spread like wildfire.

We watched in terror as probes were sent further and further from home. The breaking point came from a Singaporean space drone called TS942. It showed only a profound, complete blackness. No stars or planets. Nothing. It had reached the edge of the universe, and all that was out there was emptiness.

Void.

It was those whom most at the time considered ignorant or small-minded who succumbed first, people whose life experience was generally little more than a day of work followed by an evening in front of the feeds, whose brains were simply not wired to accommodate ideas on a cosmic scale; the ones who were the least prepared to deal with the truth. Those in every society who spent little time in original thought began to exhibit the symptoms of the Plague, turning on each other and becoming bestial and violent, rending their families' and neighbors' bodies. Neighborhoods that were once peaceful enclaves of like-minded people turned into charnel pits. Humans prowled about like animals, feeding. The epidemic was so wide-spread that there was nothing that we as a species could do about it. Those who were rich or powerful enough retreated into gated communities or high-security compounds. The rest of us tried to isolate ourselves and our loved ones from any other human contact. Within a year society had utterly fallen apart. With the farms failing produce food those without the wherewithal to stockpile were forced to subsist on whatever scraps and trash we could find from a decaying civilization. And every day the probes sent us back more blackness. Every day more and more people fell victim to the Plague.

When the first wave hit, while long-distance travel was still possible, I took my family out of Princeton, New Jersey--where I had been a professor at the University--and moved them to a small farm my parents had owned in the French countryside. I thought I could keep them safe if we were secluded and able to grow our own food. I shut down all of the info feeds into the farmhouse the day we moved in and thought I had inoculated us. But the Plague is not like a typical illness, borne by bacteria or viruses. The Plague is a sickness of ideas, and once an idea is planted it is impossible to kill. I have isolated myself here in the Bibliothèque to escape modern thought, to insulate myself. It has certainly lengthened my days, but no matter how hard I try to bury it, I cannot unknow the things I know. Even now I feel the void creeping up on me. I push the thought of it away, bury it in books and the dark, murky past, but at night when I close my eyes I still see that horrible emptiness at the end of everything. It gnaws on my sanity, more voracious every hour, and I fear I too will soon succumb.

My family and I--we numbered twelve with the grandchildren--lived adequately for a few months. We kept away from our neighbors in part by choice and in part due to the language barrier; none of us spoke more than halting French and the locals had very little English. To be honest, by that point everyone was extremely suspicious of everyone else so keeping isolated was the norm. We grew vegetables in the garden and tended the few animals we could acquire before closing ourselves off. Space was tight in the small farmhouse, but we were relatively happy. I spent my days on the farm and my evenings teaching the kids what I knew, mostly history. At first it seemed to stave off the plague, but every so often I would walk outside at night and see one of my kin staring up at the stars with a dead, vacant look in their eyes. I would hurry them in as quickly as possible, but I knew time was short.