Dead Space: Catalyst (17 page)

Istvan could never tell when the world was going to change for him. Most of the time that other world was there but deep in the background, a dull whispery rumbling like a voice talking to him from very, very far away. But then, unexpectedly, pain would bloom in his head and the veil would descend again and then it was the world of the penal colony that was almost lost in the background and the whirr and rush of this other place that took over. Which was the real world? Or were they both real? Or neither? Each time that inversion took place, when things reverted to normal, that other world was just slightly less in the background, just slightly louder, just slightly more noisy.

He could tell that the other prisoners were beginning to feel it, too, though they didn’t know that they felt it. Whatever was making the pain in his head and throwing up or tearing down the veil was simply tickling their hindbrain a little or scratching it enough to slowly rub it raw. They felt it, but didn’t always know they were feeling it. They were more jumpy than they had been, and some of them seemed at times to have difficulty with their heads. They became angry, said things they not only didn’t mean but didn’t understand. For once, Istvan felt like he wasn’t the one who was behind; he could see things that the others couldn’t, and he could see its effect on them, even if they couldn’t.

He tried to remain calm. He slept in his cell at night. When the alarm went off and the door automatically slid open, he went out with the rest of them, did his best to talk and converse and pretend like he was a person just like the rest of them. But he had never been very good at that, and soon he’d lose the thread. He knew he was different. The three who he’d first sat by at the table—Bill, Michael, and Waldron—seemed to tolerate him best and he found himself drawn to them as well, maybe because of that, or maybe just because he had sat by them first. He could see it affecting them as well, whatever it was, but differently. When the world began to recede for Istvan, it made Michael simply withdraw into himself. Waldron became manic, overexcited. Bill began to mumble to himself, his face slowly taking on a smile, until the world came back and they all became more or less like they’d been before. Though not quite. Each time, they had a little farther to come back, and each time they stopped a hair or two shorter.

Maybe it was partly the penal colony itself that made it worse. There they were, free in a manner of speaking, but with their world limited to a circle with another circle around it, knowing that there was a third circle that they could not enter and that from there people were watching them. Istvan had always felt watched, had felt there was, just out of his line of vision, someone observing him, but in the past nobody else around him had seemed to feel that way. It was reassuring in a way to know that now he was feeling something that everyone else was feeling, that as far as they were concerned he was right.

Over the course of several weeks the veil became more and more prominent for Istvan, fading away into a burst of light out of which came figures from his past who spoke to him. It was, though he did not know why, either always the dead or people that were dead to him: at first he might see the face of his brother, even the face of one of his fellow prisoners, done over in white lines and in light like an inverted self, but something about that seemed to trouble him and whatever was sending him these visions seemed to sense this, adjusted itself slightly to fit what his mind would bear. Why was it reassuring for him to see the faces of the dead rather than the living? He didn’t know. He suspected that it wouldn’t be reassuring for most people, might even make some of them lose their minds. But for him perhaps it simply helped him to distinguish between the world of the penal colony and this other, newer world.

As time went on, the light slowly faded, this new world took on color and depth, and had it not been for the pain that filled his head when it came and the fact that he could recognize the faces as the faces of the dead, he might not have known which world he was seeing.
But why,
he wondered,
do I see my mother?
She might be dead, but he didn’t know for certain whether she was or not; maybe it was as he had thought before, that she was simply dead to him. Or maybe she really was dead and the vision was telling him this by dressing itself up in her face and speaking in her voice.

But more and more often the face that came to him, the face that slowly gelled and came out of the light and created a world around it, was the councilman he had killed, Tim Fischer. The man came to him with a broken head and a strange clomping stride. He spoke in the same voice Fischer himself had used, though how this might be possible Istvan could not say. For a long time the voice remained strange, simply repeating what Istvan himself said but in a fashion that ran all the words together, as if it were repeating something it didn’t understand.

“You’re dead,” Istvan might say.

“Yourdead,” Fischer’s voice would echo back, the head slowly oozing blood.

“What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and the voice repeated it back. It was a little like being in a nightmare, but fascinating too.
How can I understand it?
he wondered.
How can I make it understand me?

*   *   *

The bursts of power were coming more frequently, and the faces when they appeared seemed more and more attentive, as if they were paying close attention just to him. He found they looked closest at him when he turned numbers about in his head, built structures and patterns with them, as he’d been doing since he was a boy. What interested them about that, he didn’t know. Were any of the others feeling it? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t tell for certain, but each of the several dozen other prisoners seemed to take in the bursts in a different way. And as these bursts increased, people changed in a way that Istvan thought of as their true selves bubbling further out. They became rawer, more erratic, in a way that he understood. And for him, despite his visions being all the more intense, he felt like his true self was already closer to the surface. He could cope with it better than they could.

One of the prisoners, a man named Brian Conn, couldn’t cope with it at all. It was after lunch. Several prisoners walked the perimeter of the inner circle, a few of them worked out on exercise machines, a few others were still sitting at the tables and reading. Bill and Waldron were talking, mumbling away, their conversation getting more heated as Istvan felt the pressure in his head increasing, the burst of energy starting to come. The veil sprang up again, then the world it contained, and Istvan stayed there as silent as he could, not wanting to speak to the face belonging to Councilman Fischer in front of the others but also not able to see or even really hear the two men sitting next to him. He stayed there with his jaw clenched, staring into the bloody face that stared mercilessly back at him, feeling at a far distance the touch of someone, either Bill or Waldron, he couldn’t tell which. Seconds passed, or minutes, and then the face bleached out again and fell into the void of blankness and the veil became tattered again and he could see the real world again, through the veil, and could hear, too, a sound that sounded like screaming, but was quickly cut off. Waldron was gripping his shoulder hard, not—as he might have thought—because he had noticed that Istvan was having one of his visions, but rather because of what he was seeing in front of him. “What the hell?” Waldron said. He was staring straight ahead of him, and Bill, too, had turned around and was staring, so Istvan stared as well. Conn was there, a few tables over, and for a second, perhaps two, Istvan had no idea what he should be looking at. And then he saw the handle of the fork rising from Conn’s forearm where he had plunged it in.

Conn opened his mouth and screamed again. He reached down and tugged the fork free and blood began to pump up from the wound, quicker than Istvan would have thought possible. He plunged it in again, a little farther up the arm but just as deep, and screamed yet again.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him?” asked Bill.

But Istvan couldn’t think of a way to answer this question that would make sense to Bill. There was too much to explain, and Istvan never knew what words to use. It was as if Conn had touched the other world and he had brought some of it back with him and it had lodged inside his brain. And then it had turned that part of his brain inside out and made it into something else. He didn’t think it meant any harm, that it was just trying to figure out a way to speak with them. But even if it didn’t mean harm, it did not understand how much it could do with a brain without breaking it.

“We have to stop him,” said Waldron, and started toward Conn.

But by this time, the fork was out again, and plunged deep into his throat, slicing open his carotid artery and puncturing his windpipe. Waldron reached Conn as he wavered and fell off the bench. He pressed his hand to Conn’s neck as the blood spurted through his fingers and as the man sucked for air and quickly died.

Waldron kept holding his hand there, staring at Conn as if he were looking at a ghost. The others had to come and pull him away and make him stand back. But after doing that, they didn’t know what else to do. They all just stood there, a few yards away from the body, motionless, not knowing what to do next.

Conn,
thought Istvan, staring at the man, memorizing his face. There would be a new face that would come to him now in the other world, he knew. He would now have a visit from the freshly dead.

*   *   *

They must have been there only a few more seconds when the alarm sounded, calling them back to their cells. A few of them went back immediately, but most of them just milled about until an echoing voice issued from the loudspeaker attached to one of the struts of the dome.

“Return to your cells,” the voice said. “You have thirty seconds. This is your only warning.”

With that, most of the rest began to move, though one or two remained. Bill led both Istvan and the still-stunned and bloody Waldron back to their cells. Istvan sat on his bed until the cell door clanged shut, and then approached the bars, holding on to them and staring out. He caught, down the hall, a fluid flash of black as four or five guards in riot gear rushed from the normally closed security door that led to the next ring through their ring and into the central circle. Then there was the sound of cries; Istvan could not see them, but imagined them setting upon the prisoners who had disobeyed with their truncheons. And indeed, a few moments later two guards rounded the corner dragging an unconscious and bloody prisoner between them. They let him flop down on the hallway, not far from Istvan’s cell. Their faces were covered with plastic shields, the light bouncing off them, which almost—Istvan thought, a little astonished—made them look like they had no faces at all. Or like their faces were made of light. Just like the faces of the other world! One of the guards kicked the prisoner once and then both turned and went back around the corridor and into the inner circle. A few moments later, all the guards went through again, carrying Conn’s corpse out of the penal colony and into the outer ring. The door closed and then there was nothing but silence.

Or almost nothing but silence. Through it, just below it, below even the beating of his own heart, Istvan could hear the whispering of voices, very difficult to hear, almost impossible. But he heard them. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he tried to listen to them nonetheless.

22

Henry Wandrei was unfortunate enough to be on monitoring duty when the convict went crazy. He was there before the monitor, watching Istvan, making sure once again that yes, he had been right, it really was Jensi’s brother, when suddenly his head began to hurt.
Goddamn migraines,
he thought. Must be something to do with the artificial atmosphere in the dome—he’d never suffered from migraines before. He closed his eyes tight, pinched the bridge of his nose, and waited for the pain to subside. After a few seconds it did, even if only just slightly, and he opened his eyes to see suddenly a strange flicker on one of the monitors. He adjusted that camera slightly and at first couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He focused in and then thought
Oh shit
when he realized what he was seeing was a man’s arm with a fork sticking out of it.

And then he watched the man’s hand close around the fork and tug it out of the arm, which in some ways seemed like a very sensible thing to do, even if the arm did start bleeding profusely. What was less sensible was the fact that he immediately stuck it in again, even deeper this time. Henry had never seen anything like it. There hadn’t been a single disturbance since he had arrived: no real fights, almost no suicides, and very little violence except the rare times when the guards were sent in to retrieve one of the inmates and bring him to the interrogation chamber. Since Hell was the last stop, most of the convicts had already been pretty thoroughly wrung out before arriving here, and most were political prisoners rather than hardened cons.

He was reaching for the button to alert the guards, watching one of the other prisoners rushing toward the man who was stabbing himself with the fork, when the man tugged the fork out again and buried it in his neck this time, and then pitched backward off the bench.

After that, he could see very little; a man was leaning over the injured prisoner, perhaps trying to give him first aid, and was blocking the camera’s view of him. He did not remember having pushed the button for the guards but he must have for there was a voice in his earpiece now, talking to him, asking him what was up. Stuttering, he tried to explain what he had just seen—prisoner inflicting violence on himself for no discernable reason and having collapsed, probably gravely injured—and then the man who had been administering first aid moved back and the camera could see again and there was no question in his mind but that the man who had stabbed himself was dead.

Henry sat there, a little shocked or perhaps a lot shocked—hard to say. He stared numbly at the body, just as all the prisoners were staring, standing in a circle around it. There was Istvan again, he could see him. He didn’t look traumatized or stressed, seemed hardly surprised, just stood there with his face expressionless, staring on. And then, suddenly, he thought he caught the flicker of a smile.