Spawn of Man (7 page)

Chapter Seven

‘Hello?’ Alex called. She was terribly cold.

Although her body was dead, Alex was faintly aware of noise and colors around her, above her. She thought she might still have been floating. She had the sensation of movement without trying to move. Now the colors seemed to be behind her eyelids, shot from a projector deep inside her brain. Then the noises were far away, as if someone was calling to her repeatedly from the far shore of a great lake. She was mercifully unaware of the car crash.

Her memories were confused and entwined and they overlapped each other in murky, muddled layers. She had been drifting on a lake and she was being called from the distant shore? Warned. Her child Jake had been there. Then something had happened but she just couldn’t remember and now she was floating through this place of flickering, bouncing lights. She wanted to sleep but she felt she should fight against it, at least till the light display subsided and then she would find out what happened next. She felt that was important.

Alex had lost her left leg and right arm and even if she had lived her other two limbs would have been amputated. Her soul was tearing itself free from her body to begin its flight away from the corporeal state. The intangible essence of Alex was almost discorporate now and the play of lights on her eyelids had stopped. She thought her child was embracing her and she fell asleep with him safe and warm in her arms.

Chapter Eight

2036. October, Saturday. Midnight

Hope Hospital was a fifteen-minute drive from the town of Babel but Robert had to make the thirty-minute journey to Babel from the Douglas Institute first. Detective Inspector Andrews had phoned Robert to inform him of a car crash and now Robert sat in a small corridor within the hospital. The room was bare and felt cold. He had spoken to the doctor and had been told Alex and Jake were dead.

Robert assimilated the horror of the death of his wife and only child in the present, whilst simultaneously stepping into a bleak, colorless future where he had lost the two most important people in his life. A future that could not exist because it could have nothing to sustain its state of being; it was unimaginable by definition.

Robert’s head was bowed and he felt as if someone had erased his emotions. As if he was now just a caricature of a man with no real vitality. He looked down at the clean, tiled floor. A hollow and empty feeling reached up through the polished surface and began to creep slowly up through his legs, clawing his flesh with aching, numbing talons. A sterile smelling, disinfected phantom, emerging from the floor, howling its intent to choke Robert’s soul and leave him as cold and vacant as the little corridor he now occupied.

He was lost now within his awful mourning, being devoured by a spectral energy of sorrow that threatened to drag him down into a pool of dark hurting. He struggled not to succumb to the feeling of desolation but it weighed heavily on him. It was pulling deeper into senselessness, where something was waiting for him. Something that would feed on his torment. Something that was curious to taste his sadness. A base thing that was ultimately ruinous and malignant. It lived just below the fabric of his consciousness and it was lonely and hungry.

Robert found he wasn’t breathing. The air had stopped filling his lungs and he was choking on nothingness.

It was as if the invisible presence was depriving him of breath to facilitate his drowning in its world of blackness and wretched grief. Robert gasped, throwing his head back, staring wildly and gasping, ‘Alex! My God, help me, Alex!’

Then he was painfully aware of his chest expanding beyond its capacity in an attempt to get oxygen inside its walls. It seemed as if he fought on the crest of an airless vacuum for an eternity before he surmounted the pinnacle and his chest fell again in the relief of achieving a breath.

A doctor appeared, and even in his half aware state Robert was amazed that the man did not even pass comment. The white-coated man strolled past as if this was a dream and Robert’s behavior was normal, and the doctor’s reaction was fitting because he was merely a character in the dream. Robert looked at him and he continued for two more steps before stopping and turning slightly.

The man peered back over one shoulder of his white coat. But it wasn’t a man. Or a woman. The thing that now stood half-turned and gazing at Robert was inhuman. Something flawed and defiled. Something despicable. It was in the form, build, and attire of a man but in those only. There was the rough outline of a head, a general shape and size, but there was no definition of hair, features and skin. In their place there was an indescribably rapid sequence of violent, spasmodic imagery. An ill-defined, jerking blur of movement.

And an odor accompanied the spectacle; a slight burning or smoldering like the smell that emanates from an electrical appliance as it begins to overheat. It did not overpower or suffocate, but as the smell materialized, it instilled a sharp, metallic sensation in Robert’s mouth. Robert tasted his fingertips and his saliva had turned murky brown like the fluid that issued from a dead battery.

Amongst the accelerated vibrations of the thing in the corridor there was a face. The features could almost be glimpsed but only as one might discern an object that was massively out of alignment and viewed from behind a sheet of heat haze. The whole head seemed to be trying to adjust or tune itself into a frequency where it could sustain a stable condition. There was a whirring, buzzing noise accompanying the frenzied shifting of the head’s outline coupled with an eerie and strained gargling sound.

Through the mesmerizing, frantic shuddering of the head, Robert caught a glimpse of its true form. For one brief moment the movement slowed sufficiently for Robert to discern a malevolent, malformed, heinous lump of flesh sat atop the shoulders of the humanoid frame. Unseeing eyes slid in liquid rivulets of filth and oozed bubbling into a cavity that once may have housed a nose. Teeth sharp and dangerous were protruding at impossible angles from behind wet, engorged, purple lips that spilled a bile-like substance over a long, pointed chin. As the grotesque head slowed its vibrations, the whole body stooped into a crooked, bent pose. And its progress was now hampered by one leg having grown fully ten inches longer than its opposite limb. It dragged this cumbersome, heavy extremity behind it now, as it fixed its sunken, black, empty eye sockets on Robert.

And a thick, guttural voice escaped its quivering mouth, ‘You see me…’

Robert screamed in horror as the thing turned to continue on its way, head thrusting at fantastic speeds and moaning wetly as it shook. Robert realized he was now standing and he suddenly felt fully and acutely aware again of the corridor and his reason for being there. His face carried the pale, bleached pallor of gravestones, painted macabre white by a fluorescent moon.

His forehead was beaded with an icy cold sweat that seeped through his pores to give the porcelain texture of his skin a strange luminosity and he fell back into his chair, bent his head into his hands and sobbed, ‘I’m going mad, dear God that’s it, I’m going mad.’

Chapter Nine

Alex awoke. She did not know how long she had slept and had no means of marking the passage of time spent in that sweet delirium. And what wonderful, vivid dreams, lavishly colored with surreal imagery, somehow impossible yet strangely plausible. She seemed to sleep more these days but she did not know why or for how long that had been the case. Again she wondered, where were all the clocks? Had she not owned at least one or two at some time in the past? Recently the division between wakefulness and sleep seemed to have become blurred and sometimes she was unsure if she had actually woken or merely dreamed that event too. It was raining again. It was raining when she had driven to Babel. When was that? It seemed like it had been always been raining.

Thin films of sleep departed gradually and lucidity applied a tenuous grip on her awareness. The fog of slumber receded sufficiently for her senses to allow an awareness of her surroundings. Familiarity began to assert itself, pushing and prodding like the speculative jabs of a stick in the hand of an inquisitive child. Not yet invasive, but testing the sleeper with the outlines of forms that the adjusting eye was acquainted with. The fall of drawn curtains and the indistinct lines of a dressing table. The concavity of a wall made almost spherical by the bent shadows that were formed when the moonlight found opportunities to seep into the room.

Strange how these things possess a metamorphic ability in the brief interlude between sleep and wakefulness. Seemingly immutable objects, that during the hours of daylight do not exhibit the proclivity to transform into menacing shapes and forms, can assume sinister characteristics in the ill-defined half-light of dawn. As our eyes adjust to the shadows, familiar pieces of furniture can become figures, or worse still monsters in those moments. Alex remembered that once Jake had woken and tearfully described a monster standing by his door. An incredibly tall man dressed in black and wearing a hat. Alex had explained how the same mischievous entities that used to make shoes while the cobblers slept, before the advent of mass production, now found themselves unemployed and now busied themselves with creating these apparitions. Then working at incredible speeds they would re assemble everything to its original and rightful design as the sleeper woke.

Alex struggled to emerge from the dull, heaviness of her sleep, her eyelids peeling open mechanically, as if operated by the turning of a handle, attached to a series of cogs and wheels. She then became aware of something else. A figure sitting on her bed, bending slightly, peering through the thick gloom, the face maybe only six inches from her own face.

‘Jake? Is that you?’ she whispered.

Alex could feel the breath of the child on her cheek, icy cold.

‘Jake?’ she repeated, less inquisitively now and her voice laced with concern.

Alex laid one hand on the figure’s hand as it leaned away from her face and she pushed herself into a seated position with her free hand. The figure’s mouth opened and from it issued a high-pitched but soft sound. It reminded Alex of a flat electric, monotonous note. The sound was somehow mournful and Alex put her other hand to the face of the child. Jake placed one hand on Alex’s cheek and the soft whine dropped to a lower, almost purring note. Alex could not tell if this was the actual noise her son made, or if it was her own interpretation of the noise, how she was hearing it. It seemed that Jake could not speak coherent words and maybe that was part of the rules, part of the condition of whatever was happening.

‘Jake, are you sad? I don’t know why I feel so weak, so tired. Things seem jumbled up honey, Mummy feels strange, confused,’ whispered Alex and stroked the child’s hair.

To Alex, the touch of her son’s hand and hair was as tangible and real as ever and she touched the hand Jake rested on her cheek, breathing, ‘Jake, have you come to tell Mummy something? I wish I could understand. I wish I could help you speak to me.’

A lone, glistening tear made a serpentine path down Alex’s flushed cheek, before gathering into a single drop that fell onto Jake’s hand. And it sat there, etched through with a silvery shard of moonlight.

Alex regarded the tear, globular and shimmering on the back of Jake’s hand. Could one tear ever be sufficiently broken down, magnified and studied to reveal the sum of all the despair and sadness suffered by its donor?

Alex looked into Jake’s eyes again. ‘Jake, I miss you so much, if only you could tell me what makes you so sad. And why you keep leaving me. Why can’t you rest, honey?’

But Jake merely held Alex’s gaze, tears welling in his own eyes.

The tears were phantasmal and insubstantial in the real world but warm and sacred to Alex, as they swelled and splashed at her fingertip, accompanied by the baleful low wail of the child.

Jake’s attention focused on the door, which was almost lost in one corner of the room, then his eyes snapped back to face Alex.

‘What is it love, what do you hear, honey? Jake?’

‘I have to go, Mummy, back to the nice nurse. The bad nurse will be mean.’

Alex gasped and held Jake tight, ‘Jake, Jake you spoke, honey.’

But Jake insisted, a tremor of fear in his small voice, ‘I have to go, Mummy. The nurse with only one hand will be mean.’

‘Which nurse, Jake?’ asked Alex, hearing the shudder buried in his words and holding him slightly further away to study his face. ‘Which nurse, Jake? We’re not in a hospital.’

But then she looked around at the room and added, ‘Are we, honey?’

The dark was so impenetrable and she was so tired. She felt her grip on the boy weakening as lethargy overwhelmed her again, ‘Jake, don’t go sweetie. Mummy doesn’t want you to leave.’

But her voice sounded disconnected now and she was looking down on herself again, listening to that mouth speak, the noise seeming miles away, ‘No. No more sleep… Jake…’

Jake kissed his mother and touched her nose softly. Her breathing became shallow, as if the kiss had induced slumber and icy plumes began to tumble into the air above her mouth, colliding with Jake’s own frosted breath. Then he turned and left.