Spawn of Man (17 page)

Chapter Eighteen

2036. October, Sunday. 6.04 a.m.

The connection was established at 6.04 a.m. in the Douglas Institute, in the room that housed the chair and generator. It was only a small beginning, but it was the start nonetheless. The previous tears had been triggered; one by Robert sitting in the chair designed by Daniel Douglas and two by impulses channeled through Robert’s and Andrews’ CCI implants. But the connection generated at 6.04 a.m. was the first pangs of a labor, as the machine began to rip a hole in the veil separating the two planes, unforced from Earth’s side of the divide.

The tear began as an infinitesimal speck of light, suspended in the air, four feet above ground level, in the chamber where the chair and generator were situated. Just as life teems at the microscopic level, an infinite amount of potential was breeding inside this concentrated point. And as it grew, expanded and blossomed it enveloped the space it filled and changed it forever. It was as if the color was being washed from an original painting to leave a cold, grey landscape behind. All vibrancy and vitality had been diluted from the room, to leave a black and white photograph of what was before.

The tear was drawing the potency from this world to feed its own existence, and then reconstituting the energy to fuel its growth. The rupture opened slowly, creeping into the corners of the room, crawling like long shadows and moving through the stonewalls into the cell chambers. The tear’s strength built and concurrently it flowed through the other three walls of the room. The soulless shells of the afterlife clamored to move through the link, but it was still too tenuous to facilitate a mass exodus into this world. Initially it would require the common denominator of electrical impulses, but in time, the dead would learn to pass through the tear at will and walk the Earth as soulless flesh.

***

Robert and Andrews helped each other to their feet and conducted a quick survey of the room.

The bodies were decaying before their eyes and the flesh that had moments before been wet, animate and pulsing with preternatural life was now blowing away as if it was no more than ash.

‘What the hell just happened?’ Andrews spoke first.

‘These were like the one I saw in the chair room downstairs,’ said Robert.

‘The chair room?’

‘Yes. It seems the man who built this place, my ancestor Daniel Douglas, was engaged in slightly more sinister research than I thought! The lines between fact and fiction seem a bit blurred, but I think he built a chair that was hooked up to a generator and acted as a kind of radio to the afterlife.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, I know, sounds crazy doesn’t it. From what I saw he was trying to punch a hole in… in whatever separates this world from the next and he was using the chair to do it,’ said Robert.

‘Using a chair?’ repeated Andrews.

‘Yeah. From what I saw it was probably feeding off impulses from the brains of the poor inmates kept in cells in the basement here.’

Andrews was aware he was methodically repeating segments of Robert’s sentences, but he could think of no other way to digest them, so again he repeated, ‘Impulses?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine what the chair was supposed to do. There are cables attached to the skulls of the remains of the inmates, fixed straight into their brains, deep inside. Maybe Daniel was just mad in the end. Maybe he found some kind of blueprint for opening up a doorway. God knows. All I know is that when I touched the chair I got a glimpse of something and then one of these things appeared. And then in the hospital I saw something else, you know the rest.’

‘Yeah,’ said Andrews. ‘Listen, we better push on. I don’t know what we’re gonna find, but I want some answers now and I can only think they’re in that cellar.’

Andrews moved to the open doorway. The door was left open from when Robert had looked beyond the room earlier and now Andrews checked the corridor outside and looked back at Robert. ‘Where does this corridor go?’

‘If we follow it to the left it will link us with the corridor that leads to the main reception hall. The basement is across from that.’

Andrews nodded and continued his reconnoiter of the area immediately outside of the room.

Robert spoke next. ‘Andrews?’

‘Yes, Robert?’

‘I’m a little concerned about what you expect to find.’ Robert sounded hesitant, though he tried to keep it out of his voice.

‘I’m not sure I understand, Robert?’

‘I’m not sure I understand either. At best this is an unexplained supernatural event and it will end in the cellar with the destruction of the equipment.’

‘And at worse?’

‘At worse, we will witness the beginning of the end of everything. But I don’t believe my wife and child will really be in that room waiting for me. Maybe that’s what I’m intended to believe, maybe that’s the bait. But my wife and child are dead and nothing can change that.’

The two men looked at each other for what seemed to Robert like a very long time before he continued, ‘And so are your wife and child my friend. Whatever we think is possible.’

Andrews looked away and went through the motions of checking the corridor again. ‘You mean whatever
I
think is possible don’t you? I’ve always been a pragmatist, Robert, and I won’t jeopardize what we have to do here, but if there is any chance, however small, that I can see my wife and child again, even for a second, then I’ll hold on to that. Okay?’

Robert realized he was not asking him, he was telling him, so he agreed, ‘Okay.’

The two men now moved into the corridor. Robert led the way holding the hunting knife, not feeling particularly well armed, and Andrews followed closely behind holding the gun. They were left alone now with their own thoughts in the dreadful quiet of the house, an absence of sound that seemed to be caused by the stripping down of every paradigm of normality, so that just the abnormal prevailed. Andrews knew Robert was lying. He knew the other man hoped for some kind of reconciliation in the basement, just as ardently as he did, for some contact with the loved ones they had so cruelly lost.

They had arrived at the main corridor that led into the reception hall. Andrews checked it first, peering around the corner and looking both ways, and then they moved into the passageway. Robert faced forward with Andrews behind, walking backwards and watching the sections they left behind, gun leveled and ready. As they progressed, they passed the large windows that ran the length of the left wall. Dawn was washing the main lawn area at the front of the asylum in a ghostly veil of grey light that made the scene look vaguely lunar, and in the distance were the commanding wrought iron gates, bearing the legend, “The Douglas Institute.”

Halfway down the corridor three of their senses alerted them to an alteration in the character of the place. The quality of air changed and was saturated with a metallic taste that made Robert shiver as the image of a rusted fork sliding across his tongue loomed. Then there was an indistinct heaviness to the air, like entering a room where gas has been allowed to build up. This was accompanied by a concentrated, oppressive smell of dead flowers, sickly sweet and suffocating. And this was in turn followed by a barely audible hum. A sound almost undetectable at first, but revealing itself gradually, as its volume fluctuated. It was the sound of the greyness that was proliferating and had now reached the expanse of the main hall, thirty feet ahead of them. Then there was laughter. Far away and tragic sounding.

The two men glanced at each other and Robert looked pale and edgy as he spoke. ‘Guess you get this kind of thing all the time, right?’

Andrews smiled slightly. ‘You wouldn’t believe how often I have to break into mad houses and repel the undead, it’s getting to be a regular weekend thing now.’

‘It’s an institute not a mad house,’ corrected Robert, his smile even weaker.

Abruptly, there was a distinct wavering in the perception of the objects that occupied the corridor. A chair, small table, paintings of hunting scenes, and the walls themselves, now seemed as viewed through dense convex glass or through heat haze off a road.

The two men instinctively crouched, and Andrews whispered, ‘It’s like what we saw in the other room.’

Robert backed up to Andrews’ side. ‘Yeah, but that was localized where the things appeared. This looks like some kind of wave, moving… moving this way!’

The flux they were observing, the making insubstantial of solid objects along the corridor, was coming closer. And the greyish hue that had originated in the chair room was swelling behind it, tainting everything it touched with its lifeless, lusterless fingers. Now it was decaying, defacing and changing the things it swarmed over, leaving them ancient and bent, soaked in time and dilapidation but also fundamentally different; changed on a molecular level into something deformed.

Robert and Andrews were disorientated by the spectacle but unable to avert their eyes. The chair legs had become sinewy in their design, wooden muscle fiber now flexed in the substance of the four limbs and the piece of furniture began to move. It stretched its new attachments and moved them as they were constituted of tissue and tendons. The paintings of hunting scenes became a washed out and bleak depiction of shocking malevolence. The paint swirling on the canvas, reforming the subject matter and reproducing a portrayal of deplorable savagery. Rabid dogs tearing the throat from a helpless fox pinned down by the red-coated huntsmen. A horse with its mouth foaming and eyes wild with abject terror, its guts spilled by the repeated raking assault of the claws and teeth of dogs and huntsmen alike. And the carnage in the painting moved as the scene played out, becoming three-dimensional and bulging from the canvas.

The walls, windows, floors and ceilings dripped a grey sludge, the texture of moist cement, which made surfaces irregular and alien. And as they watched the bizarre display at the head of the corridor, both men became aware of a nullifying of their senses. Whereas they had been keened to the point of razor sharpness only moments before, they now floundered in a quagmire of dulled responses. An oppressive weight instantly brought them to their knees, and when Andrews glanced at Robert, he saw that a thin line of blood was trickling from the other man’s ear.

Andrews quickly checked his own ears, probing lightly with his fingertips and smearing the blood he found there. As he stared blankly at his bloodstained fingers, a scorching pain blazed through Andrews’ skull, searing the area of his brain that recognized it and creasing his body. He screamed, rocking back and forth and holding his head in his hands, inadvertently spreading the blood onto his forehead, as the pain radiated downwards. Then the veins in his neck bulged, as if filled with shards of steel, and his screams were choked in his throat.

Robert’s face was now a mass of swollen blood vessels that rose from his flesh, like roots visible in shallow soil. He clawed at his face, trying to rip a path in his skin for the air to enter and fill the suffocating emptiness. Andrews made a shallow, desperate sound and his vision began to nip in at the edges as the mutable greyness pressed nearer and nearer. It flowed over a world of absolutes, of status quo and rigid laws of physics, and it brought chaos. The table knocked Andrews over as it scurried along like a wooden spider and behind it, from the grey, sprang changed things, fixtures and fittings imbued now with motor functions.

The pain rose in a steep crescendo, like white-hot blunt rods ramming against the insides of their craniums. And just when it seemed the only outlet left for the pressure was for their skulls to split open, their CCI Holographic Projection implants began to function. Not as they were intended to operate however, but at an accelerated rate, throwing dozens of beams directly into the advancing grey shroud. This caused multiple tears in the membrane of the new, altered world that was approaching. The beams jumped from one rip to the next, in a frantic, random pattern, like the light from a searchlight. Five breaches were created, then ten, then fifteen and then twenty were sliced into the oncoming transmutation of this little section of the world.

The two men pitched forward and vomited, disorientated as if a length of taut cable had been fixed inside each head, temple to temple, and had slowly began to tighten. But then, as their skulls were being crushed from within, the cable snapped and lashed at their brains as it whipped free. There was a silence for a few breathless seconds. Andrew and Robert exchanged looks, almost insensate as they waited, knowing the quiet was full of a building tension. The changing of things was now inches away from their outstretched legs, and both men knew it was hopeless to try and outrun it, though in their present state, it would be more of a crawl.

As the grey lapped around their feet, the sweet, corrupt smell, the metallic, shiny taste and the demented laughter and insecticide buzzing hit them like a head-on collision. Andrews grabbed Robert’s arm and felt the grey wave pass over him. It felt like stepping into someone else’s nightmare, like being in a place that did not exist, a place that was aware of him and of his fear. And the holes in the fabric of this new world, that replaced the old, began to bulge and stretch like cocoons being pushed and pressed from inside. Abruptly the implants in the two men’s brains burned out in a second of hurt that felt like the trauma of sharpened wood, puncturing the temple, and crushing the underlying bone.