Nocturnal Emissions (18 page)

But what also surprised him about this Caucasian intruder was that hers was obviously the face of a dead woman.

He touched a button to pause the image.

The source of her injuries—assuming she hadn’t died of disease—was not apparent, but there was no mistaking the milky emptiness of the staring eyes, the slack but frozen gape of her mouth. The photograph was a poor one, the color dull, the focus a touch off, unlike the clarity of the ones he had been viewing. All those almond eyes gazing directly at him. These eyes looked off to the side, to an oblivion just over his shoulder.

It was misfiled, that was all. A clerical mistake.

Prague
glanced furtively over his shoulder, as if to see what the young, pretty dead woman was staring at. He then faced forward again, darted his hand out and flicked a metal toggle. The photograph of the dead woman was deleted from the file, and replaced with the next solemn Oriental face.

««—»»

He was dreaming. The banners were dark, but he was still being watched…

In the dream, he was naked, and much thinner than he should be—nearly skeletal. He was trudging across a desert of endless flatness, a desert of fine black glittering powder, with no ocean in sight. He was pulling something heavy behind him. The hissing of this burden across the sand was deafening.

He was pulling an entire city behind him, as if it were built upon a vast sled. And this black, jagged city was connected to his head, as if it were an immense tumor that had emanated from his very body. It was tethered to the back of his head by a thick cord of flesh, pulled taut but not tearing. He leaned his whole body forward with the effort, dragging the city onward…onward…

He couldn’t turn his head to see the city behind him. Or perhaps he was simply forbidden to do so. Or afraid. But somehow he knew that there was a figure standing in every doorway, a face pressed to each and every window in every tottering tower. He sensed infinite sets of eyes, all staring directly at him.

And he pulled all these eyes along behind him…across the barren landscape…

««—»»

When the bus pulled up to the curb this morning, the banner that ran the length of it said YOU’LL BE SORRY.

Sorry, if what?
Prague
wondered. He had missed the start of the message…either that, or a glitch prevented the rest of it from playing. The banner went dark after that. If the message resumed, he was already on the bus by then.

Sorry if he didn’t buy this product? Subscribe to that service? Take this pharmaceutical?

As the bus jolted into movement once more, and
Prague
was rocked in his seat, he noticed that he hadn’t seen that couple again, who were either roman-tically involved or co-workers or both—the young man, and the girl with the frayed suit and hair.

A peripheral movement caught his eye. It looked like snow, or a drift of dandelion seeds. He looked out his smeared, blurred window and saw the insect-like swarm of free-floating ads for Star Pest Control again. They were outdistanced so quickly that he couldn’t tell if the “P” had been restored in them. He found himself sinking down in his seat a bit, as if afraid they would see him in the bus, and give chase.

««—»»

Today it was a succession of children’s faces. Some looked ready to laugh, others to cry. Most looked serious and resigned. Then, suddenly in their midst, the face of a man with his eyes gouged out.

His face had been washed afterwards, so there was no blood. Perhaps that made it worse. Yawning eyes contrasting horribly with the calm, close-lipped mouth. He was young, had apparently been good-looking.

How could anyone be so careless as to allow these files to become improperly inserted this way? Perhaps it was the red-nailed ninny in the neighboring booth.

His heart still trotted from the shock. Prague flicked a look over his shoulder, then up at the vertical stack of cubicles above him, then hunched over the monitor as if to blot it with his body and flipped the toggle to erase the image…but even as it vanished, replaced by the glum features of a little red-haired boy, he regretted not studying the photo a moment or two longer.

Maybe it was only because he had been thinking about the man that very morning, but in that last second he had imagined the murdered man and the young man he had seen at the bus stop were one and the same.

And if so, did that make the woman…

He wouldn’t allow himself to complete the thought. It was not them. Why would it be?

But for the rest of the afternoon, Prague had to slow the rate of faces down from ten seconds to thirty seconds each, thus getting behind in his work—which he had never done before—because he found it hard to focus on the countenances passing before him. He kept seeing two other faces, superimposed by his memory.

««—»»

He stood at the counter that partially divided the one large room of his flat into the illusion of two. He was slicing the end off a loaf of bread, but found its crust hard and flaking, the interior crunchy. Stale. He set down the knife beside the bread, and for a moment lost himself in the way a luminous banner was reflected in the bright metal. Backwards words advertised a new lipstick.

Gray and blue were the hues in fashion. A woman’s blue lips parted on the surface of the blade.

Abruptly, as if he had peripherally sensed a change, he thrust his gaze up at the one large billboard that advertised Rantac. A new advertisement showed there instead. He was so accustomed to the old ad that the new image before him blanked his mind and transfixed his eyes, like an animal caught in headlights.

On the huge banner there was a red wall, and in the center of this red—metal—wall was an opening. A dark doorway. It appeared as if a metal panel had been dented and twisted and wrenched away from that doorway, but in fact it was simply that a red-colored tarp had been hung across the opening, and it sagged down in the middle, showing just the top of the black recess behind it.

There was no text. No movement. Just this. But no…was there a dim white glow, after all, moving in the blackness behind the drooping tarpaulin?

Yes…yes, there was. A vague pale figure. And it drew nearer to the opening.

It peered out at him from over the top of the curtain, yet he couldn’t make out the shadowed face, the dark—too dark—eyes. But a hand emerged, and curled its fingers around the top edge of the tarp. The fingernails of this hand were lacquered a dark brown.

Prague
clapped his palms over his eyes, as if to press those gelatinous orbs all the way into his skull. As if to flatten them against the wall of his brain.

But it was the soundlessness that made him look again. If there had been an accompanying sound or noise, even just a rustle of plastic tarp, he would know if it were all over or still looming before him. But the silence…that could go on forever.

When he lowered his palms several inches, he saw the young couple high on love and Rantac racing toward him naked, hands linked, arms and legs lithe and long, smooth and lubricated in perspiration.

Prague
lowered his arms the rest of the way, and then noticed a smaller banner off to his right, lodged between a diminutive window and the much-locked door to his flat. The rectangular, horizontal display showed a woman’s leg. An ad for pantyhose? Hair removal? He found himself scuffing in his slippers closer to the banner to see it more clearly, his hands now tucked in the pockets of the white robe he wore over his neat white pajamas against his apartment’s constant chill.

Yes, it was a woman’s leg. Sleek and snowy and perfect as alabaster. The leg of a statue. A leg broken off a statue. Because the leg ended at the upper thigh, in a ragged wound that had been washed so that the blood would not mar the perfection of that smooth, silken white skin. The neatly trimmed nails of the delicate, child-like toes had been meticulously painted a deep shade of brown.

Prague
turned his head. Most of the banners were normal. Bland. Almost reassuring where once they had harassed him, tugged and prodded at him.

Across the room, however, he thought he saw a man’s hand and forearm on a small banner between two kitchen cupboards. This time he didn’t want to approach it. But a screen very close to his face when he whirled around showed a glistening formless mass on a shiny kitchen counter top. This image had text where the others hadn’t. Red letters scrolled down from the top of the banner and read: THIS IS NOT YOUR KIDNEY.

Stumbling away from the wall, out into the center of the room,
Prague
whipped his head this way and then that, but when he looked again at each of the terrible banners, they had changed to advertise a shoe store, a jewelry store, a new dieting book.

Was that a tiny scratch or tap at the window behind him? How could it be, up here, above ground level? There were no tree branches near to the building.

Prague
confronted the glass, and through his ghost-white reflection he saw a glowing, writhing eel-like shape hovering at the pane. The rippling words read STAR EST CONTROL.

He rushed to the window and drew down its ragged shade like an eyelid.

««—»»

On his fold-out sofa-bed, M. Prague lay curled in a fetus-like position…naked and pale as a worm, his damp flesh pimpled and doughy—but his finger and toenails were meticulously, freshly painted.

The smell of the polish made his head scream with pain.

He peeked over his arm, and saw the one large screen for Rantac. The inviting beach now looked forbidding. The sun was setting, nearly extinguished. A breeze that he imagined to be cool, chilly, blew the black sand about like the ash of a crematorium.

The young couple were gone.

Prague
would not peek at the many smaller banners all around him, but from each and every one of them he sensed a face staring at him. Some staring accusingly without eyes.

He closed his own eyes, wet with tears.

If he could only fall asleep…

If he could just fall asleep, the sensor would know, and those faces might go away.

Channel 8:

the possessed

- One: Three Creatures -

The ocean was viscous, gelatinous—its swells slow and ponderous, its waves low and thick, like the limbs of a dreaming giant shifting under a blanket. This sea did not have the rustling susurrus of water, the waves did not pound or roar at the edge of the land. Their drooling contact there was more like the slurp of mud, their withdrawal a drawn-out sucking noise. The ocean’s body was green in color, the opaque and vibrant green of algae instead of the translucent green-gray of sea water…though not merely filmed as if with scum, but green all throughout. It was as glossy as plastic, and had a dim bioluminescence, so that in the misted horizon it glowed more than did the ashen dusk of the sky.

Perhaps, the three explorers suggested in muted exchanges of awe, the ocean was even one vast, living thing. A semi-liquid plant…animal…or being.

They could see three of the immense hemispheres, floating on its surface.

How much of these enormous shapes lay hidden beneath that surface they could not judge. One of the great domes was ghostly on the horizon. Another was closer, in the middle distance. The nearest of the hemispheres seemed quite close and loomed against the sky, blocking out much of it, so that the explorers had to cock their heads back to gaze up at it…but the hemisphere was in fact not close at hand, was still a good distance out to sea.

The nearest of the domes had a pearly white, glistening surface that looked more like a mushroom to the touch than bone, though they speculated as to the firmness of the shell, or membrane, of the huge drifting animal. For this was what they took these forms to be. One was scudding like an iceberg, like an unmoored island, along from left to right…another from right to left…and the one in the middle distance was moving away from the direction of shore, further out to sea. It was Golding who suggested that they appeared to be describing a circle, more or less equidistant to each other. There were no paddling limbs, no eyes, no features of any kind, though all three explorers imagined that streamers of tentacles of impossible length trailed beneath the jellyfish-like bells. Then again, all three knew better than to try too hard to limit themselves to earthly analogies. This was, after all, not Earth.

The trio of titanic animals were dotted, at their rounded summits, with moving black specks that sometimes sprinkled up into the sky to resettle atop them. On the nearest of the apparent creatures, these peppered flecks were more identifiable as infinitely smaller creatures, looking at a distance like dark birds…though a few of these animals had flown over the three explorers’

heads not long ago, and up close they had looked like flapping and gliding sting rays with segmented black crab legs curled beneath them. But again, they fought against analogies derived from the life forms of their own oceans.

Former life forms, that is; there was not much left alive in the seas of their home world. They had only ever seen jellyfish, sting rays and crabs in museums, as holograms, in books. Had they been looking now at three sperm whales, and flocks of gulls, they would have been only a little less awed.

Those animals were extinct, and hence, almost as difficult to fathom as these.

One of the three humans trudged several steps across the glittering, crunching black sand of the beach, black as obsidian worn to a rough powder.

He stooped, his body bulky and primarily colored a fire engine red, and gathered a washed-up bundle of bright yellow string in his hands, which were strong but as slim as a mannequin’s. Rising again, he dragged more of the tangle into his hands, balling it up, watching strands slither out of the volcanic ash of the beach, seeing a few long streamers come sliding out of the undulating surf. Were these tentacles shed by the floating animal or plant leviathans, or a kind of vegetable life uprooted from the floor of the ocean?

He did not photograph the specimen, because there was no need to. What he could see was being seen simultaneously by scientists, researchers, government agents back home, was being recorded by them for further analysis later.

And he did not bag the specimen, because he could not physically take it home with him…organic materials did not maintain their integrity in transit. He himself was a mere astral projection, a ghostly doppleganger. What passed for his body was a not entirely anthropomorphic homunculus, a lumbering golem.

This mock body was moved about by the consciousness—or rather subcon-sciousness—of his dreaming form so many infinities away. A watery vapor of air hovered over the two tubes projecting up from the back of his fish bowl helmet, like heat rippling above asphalt. Steam hissed out of vents in his bulky backpack. Tubes thick and thin, a plumbing of artificial veins and arteries, wound over his exterior, was threaded throughout the suit’s interior. However, this suit contained and protected not a body but a consciousness, was more accurately a machine… a robot, an automaton, with a human mind as its program.

Human beings could not survive the jump through such immense distances of space. Even cadavers did not come through at the other end of the tunnel drilled through space, time and dimension in an intact state. But machines, inanimate objects, could. Not with human bodies packaged inside them…that didn’t work, either. But human thoughts could survive that leap, those yawning empty fathoms between, if embedded inside the walking suits of armor.

Thoughts projected by three slumbering subjects, lying naked now in a dark room, with discs pasted across their bodies, with their heads buried in complex helmets wired into hulking machinery. Their faces were obscured within these devices. As if in compensation, their faces were the only part of their projected essences that the three explorers could physically perceive. These faces were realistic holograms, recreated inside the crystal balls of their helmets so as to give the explorers a sense of their partners’, and their own, reality. They blinked, their lips moved when they spoke, and emotions registered there as if muscles moved, as if blood flowed beneath the ectoplasmic skin.

Letting the stringy wrack or tendrils drop from his delicately articulated hands, the man named Kubin willed his form to turn in the sand, and face away from the surf. There before him, rearing against the fossil-gray of sky in silhouette, was a wall that spread from one horizon to the other, dwindling into opposite vanishing points. Black sand was pushed up against this perhaps-bar-rier in dunes; in some places, hills of sand reached nearly to its towering upper limits. Here and there, windows either shuttered or gaping blackly appeared along the wall. Here and there were doors that the blown sand hadn’t covered.

“Are you ready to look inside?” his voice said into the helmets of the other two, the man Golding and the woman Morrow. And into the ears of those voyeurs who watched them so very far away, who could listen but not speak to these explorers without projecting themselves as well.

The others said that they were indeed ready. And so the trio shuffled forward, toward one of the doors in that seemingly infinite wall.

- Two: The Long Room -

The first door they tried was stuck—or locked.

The doors were spaced at irregular intervals, and seemed to vary slightly in height and width. They turned to the left to walk for the next one. As they did, Golding came up alongside Kubin. In the jump, Golding must have sustained some slight damage to his suit: a band of static cut across the forehead of his holographic face like a scar swarming with feeding microorganisms. Otherwise, his face was replicated right down to the moisture glinting on his lips, the tongue that unconsciously seemed to wet them, anxiously, before he spoke.

“It looks like wood,” he said, as he ran his hand along the surface, its palm and fingertip sensors relaying tactile impressions to him. “But I don’t see any individual planks, any divisions, no breaks except for the doors and windows.” His eyes were wide beneath the band of snowy static. “Maybe…this building was
grown
.”

“There are chimneys up top,” Morrow mused aloud, craning her neck back as she walked. They had noticed them before, from further back, but no one had as yet remarked on them in particular. Again, the chimneys varied in height and thickness, perhaps even in material, and seemed spaced at random.

“I wonder how far it spreads,” Golding said, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Looks like it goes on forever,” said Kubin in a kind of solemn reverence.

They had reached the next door. Its bottom portion was blocked by sand, so the three knelt down as one to scoop it away with their hands. Looking up, Morrow took in the door’s surface, which was painted a bright red like her suit, though the paint was old and blistered, chipping away. The first door had not been painted, or else the paint was entirely blasted away by the wind and blown grit of sand. It had been the same washed-out, driftwood gray as the wall itself.

The trio stood, and Golding tried the simple metal latch bolted into the door at an all too familiar, all too human level.

The door grated open, inward. Its hinges creaked, years of corrosion flaking as if a wax seal on a letter had been broken.

At a simple thought command, a search lamp came on atop his helmet.

His right hand dipped to a container on the outside of his right leg, and from it withdrew a handgun the same red as his suit. He led the way, stepped through the dark threshold. Morrow threw a look back at Kubin, meant to convey her displeasure at the gun. Kubin either missed the look’s meaning or ignored it, as he passed through the portal after her.

“They have spiders, here,” observed Golding, with a touch of excited humor in his voice. With his free hand, he swept aside a great caul of dusty web that blocked his way just inside the interior. With the curtain torn and falling slowly away, floods of motes swam like plankton in his search light’s beam. “Apparently there are no maids here, though.”

“This place is abandoned,” Morrow guessed aloud. “A ruin…”

“We don’t know that,” Kubin said softly.

All three directed their beams left, right, upwards…across the whorled grain of the interior walls (which were as denuded of paint as the exterior), across the cobblestones that surprisingly made up the floor as if they had entered into a narrow alley. The beams could not fully reach the ceiling, however, it was so high up…merely hinted at rafters amid thick drapes and sheets of cobweb.

As far as they could tell, the interior of the wall was all one immense room…with no separate units, no partitioned smaller rooms. Much higher than it was wide. The three of them, with outstretched arms, could have touched the opposite walls if they had stood in a line.

“Left or right?” Kubin asked. There was no leader designated amongst them, though Golding had jumped to more worlds than had the other two combined.

“Left,” said Golding, pointing with his gun. There was a window down that way, open, letting in a dim ray of diffused sunlight. And so they headed that way, across the bed of cobblestones, uneven against the sensors on the soles of their boots.

“Look,” said Morrow, stopping along the way. She had spotted a rusting metal wall sconce, which held in a bowl a hard brown resin. “This must have been a candle or lamp of some kind.” She reached up to finger inside the bowl.

“They were about our height. The windows…the doors…”

“Were?” Kubin said. “Or are?”

Morrow withdrew her hand from the sconce, looking into Kubin’s face.

She had long been attracted to her coworker, her fellow jumper, and had suspected for a long time that he was aware of the fact. But he had a wife back there, so far away, in that world where their bodies lay together intimately nude but as unmoving as corpses in a sepulcher. She was divorced, and eighteen years older than he. She considered cosmetic surgery undignified, rather pathetic, and so her seemingly solid golem’s face had the same wrinkles forming around her eyes and the corners of her mouth as her actual flesh had.

Her short hair here was more gray than not, as it was back there. Yet her friends told her she was attractive; she had hoped that he would find her so.

She had hoped that he might not be happy in his marriage, as she had not been happy in hers…

Still, he had never expressed any romantic interest in her. Even his friend-ship was polite, removed. If he were aware of her attraction to him, as she believed he was, then he had chosen not to act upon it. This made her increasingly embarrassed around him, and increasingly angry with herself for being so vulnerable, so unprofessional.

She found a hard edge had crept into her voice. “This place looks more than a little deserted to me, Kay. I’m not saying there aren’t sentient beings on this world…I’m just suggesting that they aren’t around here.”