Authors: Terry Farricker
Chapter Twenty-Three
At first Andrews felt as if he was tumbling through the air, plummeting slowly towards an unknown fate. He slowly completed turn after turn in a vast nothingness. Although he could not see anything in any direction, he sensed the only limitations to the void were his perceptions of distance. There was no smell, no sound and no taste. It was the absence of things, the sum of what is left when everything is taken away. Andrews reached out and he noted there was not even the passage of air around his fingertips as he fell.
Then the preconceptions he held, based on, and created by, physical sciences, melted away and he realized there was no direction, no gravity, no pull or attraction and he was merely turning. Or everything else was turning and he was motionless? His mind seemed electrified and the inside of his head felt like it was being inflated, his consciousness rushing to occupy the expanding space. It felt to Andrews like his brain had been subject to a twenty miles per hour speed restriction and now it was racing forward at tremendous velocities. Concepts, ideas, thoughts, dreams, imaginings, notions and beliefs crowded in on his awareness, like a busy station platform, each pushing and shouting to board the last train out of reality.
Then Andrews realized he held his eyes shut tight. He endured in the brief fragment of time that exists before you have to open your eyes and face the monsters. The little piece of eternity that allows you one last piece of solace before you look under your bed and come face to face with the demon clown with a six-inch blade and bloody intent. But when his eyes opened nothing changed.
Andrews remembered swimming in a warm and placid sea. He had swum too far from the beach and had turned and begun his return journey when a current grabbed him. He remembered the panic rising from the pit of his stomach, a sudden rush of cold adrenaline fuelling his muscles and alerting his nervous system. The surge of water flowing beneath him had begun to take him further out to sea, as he fought against its pull. He had realized he was being led further and further out to sea, like a small child taken by the hand, and powerless against the wicked old witch that was stealing it.
The swirling undercurrent had eventually thrown a lasso around Andrews’ ankles and dragged him down and he had given up struggling as he sank through the water. He recalled a sudden rush of calm as the antagonizing eddies stabilized his body and held him fast in a vortex eight feet below the water’s surface. Then his eyes had closed as his lungs had begun to fill. And as the water level rose within his lungs, all the panic and fear were simultaneously forced from his body, leaving him bereft of all negativity.
Back then, Andrews had lost consciousness, but had somehow been pulled from the water by a rescue team that had been alerted to his situation. But that feeling of sheer contentment and resignation had stayed below the surface. But unlike back then, he had never been able to pull it from his own depths, as he had been pulled from the sea. He remembered the sensation as gratifying at an intensely and immensely spiritual level. A feeling of pure acceptance of fate and where it had taken you. And above that even, a feeling of security, the water buoying and supporting him in a womb of protection, as his core began ascension.
All those thoughts and memories hit Andrews now and that never forgotten but always inaccessible bundle of emotions suddenly began to suffuse and saturate his senses. Andrews became increasingly aware of his surroundings acquiring substance, of the nothingness transforming into warm, tranquil waters that he drifted through, some way below the surface. The water was heated from above by shafts of sunlight that pierced the water in broad beams, like the wakes of bullets. Shoals of many colored fish rushed past him now, as he turned and gently rolled through the pale blue liquid.
There was no bitter taste when Andrews let the water swim into his mouth and he found he did not require oxygen once his lungs were full of the fluid. Then as his senses flooded with a contentment that would have verged on sexual in another time and place, Andrews opened his arms wide and gave over completely to the phenomenon. His mind now seemed to be distancing itself from his body. Was this the reverse of the birthing process? Was this event the essence of an individual detaching itself from the physical state?
Andrews could distinguish two paths before him. His body seemed to be retreating, or was his mind moving forward? The entrances to the paths were both spherical gateways of water, within the water Andrews floated in. They were constituted of a more excited film of water. One was light blue with splashes of white creasing the surface and one was incredibly black and swirled in small whirlpools that looked like hundreds of swirling storm clouds. Andrews looked back at his body one more time and it was spinning slowly, as if adrift in space. Its hand reached out towards him imploringly, but Andrews could see the eyes were empty now.
Andrews marveled at how sight without eyes seemed almost identical to vision with them. But layers appeared to present themselves above and beneath the definition of things. Auras and subtle fields of color existed around outlines. And Andrews was strangely aware of interpreting his surroundings in unique ways, of seeing their sounds and the feel of their surfaces. It was if he were temporarily interfaced with the things he saw and was communicating with their core rather than observing them.
Andrews looked back towards the two gateways. Slender tendrils of black water were now snaking from the black entrance. They slipped through the water but remained separated from it and like ghostly fingers they reached for him. Voices filled his head, voices that cajoled, promised, comforted and pleaded. As he found himself magnetized by the dark gateway, the black strands of liquid closed around Andrews. And although he was almost certain he did not possess a physical body now, the sensation was of being clasped in a giant iron fist. The positive emotions that had proliferated in Andrews’ being now seemed to be souring and were injected with moods as black as the strands.
The voices became shriller, as if afraid they would not be heard or comprehended. ‘Come to us, Martin, come into us. Let us swallow you and erase all the pain and confusion. In us, you will find oblivion. In us, is the meaning of all things, Martin. All uncertainty will dissolve. We will fill your soul with silence and you will fear no more. Let it all go, Martin, let life fall from you now. Time will leave but you will always remember the way you feel now. Regret can be cleansed, Martin, you only need the memory of how life feels, and you will be defined by its absence. Come to us, Martin.
‘It must be your choice, Martin; it must be your choice! Come to us.’
Martin felt a slowing of his momentum. The black emotions washed over him, disorientating him. The second gateway seemed too far away now. He experienced the distance between himself and that bright ring of water and it was measured in loss, not in its span. And now something was emerging from the black gateway. Something shaped like a man, but malformed and twisted. There was a brief taste of panic somewhere in what now constituted Andrews and he peered back at what had been his body.
The form had vanished now and the distorted form pushing out of the black gateway again confronted Andrews. And now Andrews could discern features and detail. It was a version of him. A corrupt, distorted and altered image of his earthly body. It looked no more than a husk, a shell or a vessel awaiting occupancy, and Andrews realized it was being offered up as a receptacle for his essence now.
Then there was activity around the second gateway. The bright ring of water there was agitated now, as its mass was churned into swirling galaxies of whitened water. Andrews’ forward momentum was halted as his attention was drawn to the disturbance and he hung motionless, wrapped in the blackness that spewed from the dark gateway.
‘Come to us, Martin. It must be your choice, Martin, it must be your choice! Come to us!’ The words became frantic and the black strands of nothingness tightened their grip. But they quivered with a latent energy that was ultimately fuelled by nothing more dynamic than their own potential. Andrews resisted their will, as the disruption along the surface of the bright gateway increased. Andrews could now see shapes breaking from the roiling waters of the bright ring and these forms were indistinct and ill defined as they began to travel towards him.
The black strands began to loosen their grip and Andrews felt himself moving away from both gateways now, as if he were in a vacuum and the slightest touch had instigated a propulsion that would carrying him halfway across a universe. The black threads were converging now and had snatched the vessel that had emerged from the dark gateway.
With this action, the malign and malefic emotions that poured from the dark gateway and that had seemed subliminal in their efforts to persuade Andrews, now became desperate. The vessel was thrust at Andrews, and although he had no perception of touch, he sensed the weight of the shell as it was forced upon his being.
The thing had seemed lifeless before, but now the black threads were infiltrating its body and imbuing animation. Its eyes flickered open and its mouth yawned wide, as if in pain. And the blackness of the threads filled these orifices so that the shell appeared even more vacant.
Then it spoke to Andrews with a labored, straining voice and the imploring and beseeching tone had vanished, replaced by loathing and hatred. ‘You fucking weak little bastard. I will suck your fucking soul out of your rotting carcass and swallow it whole. I will rip your spirit apart and piss in the shreds of your being. Come into us! Come into us now, you fucking maggot!’
And Andrews felt as if he was being smothered by the thing’s malevolence, as if he could drown in the disease of its outpourings and he looked to the bright gateway in desperation. There was a shove or a pull, it was hard to distinguish and Andrews was propelled towards the form that had issued from the tumult that was the gateway surface. It had separated into two distinct figures, one smaller than the other, although they were still joined in some way reminiscent of hand holding, thought Andrews.
The dark vessel moved behind Andrews, but its tethers were stretching now and one by one they snapped, leaving it stranded like an astronaut devoid of the tubes attaching it to the mother craft.
The two figures shimmered and their nature leaped from nebulous to solid and back to hazy outlines again. But as Andrews approached, a feeling of remembrance and recognition tugged at his consciousness. The further this feeling matured the more concrete the figures became, and congealed into definite shapes until Andrew knew them.
Andrews stopped his forward motion very close to the surface of the bright gateway, which had now calmed. The two figures faced him and they were holding hands. They were mother and child. They were his wife and son and they were smiling.
Then slivers of light began to worm their way slowly from the luminous edges of the figures. They were not the imposing and aggressive threads that leaped from the dark gateway, but vibrant, vital versions of this phenomenon. They pulsated with an irresistible force that made Andrews want them entwined around his being. And want them to push into him, as the dark threads had pushed into the wasted shell. And moments later they did envelope him. But he was moving too quickly, shooting past his wife and son, and he tried to reach for them and tried to call out. But he could not, his speed was increasing beyond all plausible boundaries, hurtling him forward, so that he was sure his very essence would have ripped asunder, were it not for the cocoon of the bright threads. And everything outside the cocoon, his wife and child and the bright gateway, blurred into one stream of color and light. The crescendo of noise and motion compounded until, without warning, he stopped dead.
Then newly formed tear ducts opened and sent glistening droplets over cheeks, barely keeping pace with the creation of flesh and bone as Andrews was reassembled in the afterlife. Sunlight flooded across his face and Andrews found he could lift and perceive his hands.
And the first sound that formed and stuttered from his newly formed voice box was, ‘Rachel, Joseph.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
2036. October, Sunday. 11.10 a.m.
The gunshots were a distant echo as Robert was lifted into the chair and he was vaguely aware of hands, moist and spongy, arranging his insensible limbs into a seated position. His vision began to impose itself again and shapes and outlines became clearer, although there was no absolute clarity as yet. He knew that some of the beasts he had seen materialize in the corridor were here now. He could hear their whispered pants, their salivating and the splatter of tissue on the stone floor from their loose bodies. As his sight returned he recognized the small anti-room where the chair was housed. The same room he had previously visited with his grandfather’s key. He was seated in the chair now and everything was grey and old.
Robert recalled the events of the last time he entered this room as his hands traced the contours of the chair. The creatures had dragged the cables out of the inmates’ cells in the adjoining chamber and were now holding the ends that accommodated the electrodes. These were the implements that were inserted in the wretches’ skulls over a century before and spliced with their living brain tissue in an attempt to power the chair’s energy. Now Robert could distinguish the individual creatures and they were driving the clawed cables into the soft mass of their temples, frenziedly hammering the electrodes home, fine sprays of red, green and yellow spurting from the wounds as the connection was made with the matter of their brains.