Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (7 page)

“
I pull the mass from someplace here ...
through dimensions I can’t see? Parts of my body transform into
parts of ... you?”
She shook her head.
“
I don’t understand how it’s
possible.”

“
Nor did we. Not until long after.”

She was distracted from her reply by a sound that rolled
through the thick air. It came from the Renaissance Center, of which
only the cylindrical central hotel tower was still standing.
Something massive moved behind it, spreading fine white-hair
tentacles all around the tower.

“Ammmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitaaaaaaaaa!”

“
No,”
she
groaned.

Craig’s new eye was still red, though it had
expanded to twelve feet wide. If teeth rimmed its eyelids, she could
not tell; he did not blink in any case. His body was something like
hers—hard, segmented, and insectile—though the
blackened meat billowing through the cracks told her he was on his
way to becoming something else. He was nearly a third of the tower’s
over seven hundred foot height, and halfway up it. His arms and legs
were smaller than they would have been had he stayed proportional to
his old self, and she wondered how much time remained before they
would be completely absorbed into his new frame.

“Ammmmiiiiitaaaa!”

The sound came from all of him. The red eye had not
swiveled to find her, but she nonetheless felt he knew where she was.
She drifted closer.

Faces and bodies swarmed the meat that bubbled through
the cracks in his frame. Not merely pieces and appendages, as with
the floating bubbles, but torsos and faces. They twisted into and
through one another, every visible eye open in agony, every mouth
wide in a silent scream. As far as she could tell, Craig had consumed
them so quickly they exhausted his new body’s ability to
process.

“
Typical,”
she
thought at him. “
You never did know how
to pace yourself.”

“Aaaaaaaaaammmmiiiiitaaaaa!”

Her name flowed from every visible mouth, a soft wave
that cut through her numb acceptance of her new reality. In the
depths of what she still considered her human remains, anger welled.

Craig’s red eye found her, at last. In it she saw
pain. He could not help what he was or what he was compelled to do.
Somewhere far beneath, she was sure a piece of the old Craig watched
in horror.

If what happened to Detroit and Windsor was happening
everywhere, the world was over. Everything would turn to ooze. A
little suffering should make no difference in the end.

But somehow ... it did.

Amita dove toward his eye, moving far faster than the
push she received from her swimming motions should have allowed. It
was as though she was even larger than the parts of herself she could
see, and could push herself to lethal speeds just by flexing in those
invisible dimensions.

Craig focused on her as she shot toward him, but she did
not slow down. Tentacles broke free from the building’s slimy
surface and lashed at her. Her former left leg whipped up and sliced,
severing the glistening two-foot-thick strands. One strand got
through and ripped away her left-breast-turned-jellyfish-sac. Black
and red ooze sprayed over her torso and burned where it landed.

She pierced his iris, not losing any speed on impact.
Craig roared with inchoate rage as she pushed deeper into his eye’s
hot toxic sludge. She spread her arms, opened her mouths, and drank.

In the moment before ecstasy overwhelmed her, she
crashed through something hard, and the roar abruptly stopped.

A time later, Amita Prasad woke. She tried to open her
eyes only to discover she didn’t have any. She had a body, as
she could feel its pieces move, but what it was moving in was no
longer anything she could say. It was warm, wet, thick and turbulent.

“
I’m trapped,”
she thought,“
aren’t I, Ken?”

The voice inside her did not answer.

“
Ken?”

“
We ... we are ... Craig.”

Amita was silent. Craig seemed content to wait.

“
What happened to Ken?”
she finally asked.

“
We are ... Ken.”

This clarified nothing. Amita turned her consideration
to the viscous material she was floating in. She had never tried
floating in a sensory deprivation tank, though Craig had once tried
to get her to do so. The sensation was remarkably like what he
claimed she would feel—suspended, surrounded, and unmoored
from her body’s senses.

“
I’m in your corpse, aren’t I?”
she asked. “
I pierced your skull and
just kept going ...”

“
That body is gone,”
Craig answered. “
As has Ken. As has
Detroit, and Earth. All this around us is your world. It has been
made soft by what moves above.”

“
What is
What Moves
Above?”

Amita didn’t think that should be a difficult
question, but Craig had no reply.

That everything she had ever known was gone should have
crushed her, she knew, but she could not work up the least emotion.
She tried to think of her friends and her parents, but nothing came.
She could no longer picture the niece whose children’s book had
supplied Craig’s first attempt at communication. She had
transformed inside, as well as out.

She tried to remember why, at the end, she had dove on
Craig. All she could recall was the three gray children who had fed
her. It had been a strange and arbitrary kind of mercy, but one she
knew she had to give Craig, despite what he had done that night and
before. Even monsters sometimes helped one another.

“
All our worlds were in what you call the
Goldilocks Zone,”
said Craig. “
The
ideal distance from a sun for a planet to sustain life. All the forms
you saw, which you called monsters, were pieces of us ... memories of
ourselves from long ago, jumbled, merged, and distorted. All of us
had experiences, such as yours, when we were taken by What Moves
Above.”

Amita noticed Craig’s voice had become softer as
he spoke, and somehow more familiar.

“Craig?”

“We are ... Amita.”

The wall between her and them was thin. Her identity
would blend with Craig’s, and Ken’s, and the countless
others before her. Once, she would have been filled with sadness and
anger from such a loss, as she had been earlier in the face of
Craig’s betrayal. Now, if she felt anything, it was relief.

There was a thousand trillion tons of liquefied earth
around her. She wondered if this, ultimately, was why no signal from
an alien world had ever been found ... because
What Moves Above
regarded Goldilocks Zone planets the same way the Three Bears
regarded Goldilocks in the early versions of her tale—warm,
wet, defenseless, and tasty.

No wonder monsters understood mercy
, she thought.
When they realized the implacable end had come, rendering their
appetites and rages meaningless, turning their loves and lives to
pain, mercy was all that was left to show before the long night
began.

Amita opened her mouths and drank in the Earth. The
others drank in her. Everything, for a time, became light.

***begin
recording***

If you think me insane, then you are as naïve as I
was … as most people in these end times are; blissfully
ignorant of what lies below.

Most of us labor on in smug complacency, secure in the
belief we are the uncontested masters of the earth and all that lives
on its surface or below. But, there are things … horrible
things … beyond our knowledge. Beyond even our imagination.

They hide in the dark places … waiting.

I woke to the sound of a muffled scream in the dead of
night. I gasped in the pitch black of my cabin, struggling to find my
clothes. I had little sense of time. It felt as though I’d only
just gotten to sleep after tossing and turning, on my miserably
uncomfortable bunk, for what had seemed like hours. I looked at my
digital watch, realizing it was barely 2:00 a.m. After hastily
dressing myself, I opened the hatch, letting in the cold, damp night
air. The sickly, rotted smell of the sea assailed my nostrils as mist
slid into my small cabin, illuminated by the meager, veiled electric
lights of the oil platform.

There before me, on the platform deck, I saw two of the
oil rig technicians supporting a third between them. They held him by
the arms as they half-dragged, half-carried him across the deck,
towards the elevator. The man was babbling incoherently, his head
bobbing up and down. My first thought was that an accident had
occurred. Perhaps the man had fallen while working on one of the
pumps. Then I thought, perhaps, he’d too much to drink. Against
regulations, of course, but it did happen. That’s, of course,
one reason the Energy Commission sends inspectors like myself to
oversee these deep sea rigs. You can’t always trust the oil
companies to police themselves.

But there was something about it that just didn’t
feel right. I’m a safety inspector not a security man; I’ve
no experience dealing with violence, but this one sent a chill
through my stomach. A voice in the back of my mind screamed that if
that man was taken down in that elevator it would be the last anyone
ever saw of him. I knew how insane the thought was even as it formed,
but the voice grew louder with each step they took. Something rose up
in me, spurring me to action. Heavy iron chains of fear pulled at me,
but I couldn’t keep still.

“Hold on there!” I yelled, my heart pounding
hard enough to break my chest even as I ran after them. “What’s
going on? Does that man need medical attention?”

“We’re handling it, Mister Corby,” one
of the techs, Johansen said, his voice dry and hollow. “Please
go back to your cabin, sir. This is a security area.”

“Now, look here … ” My breath was
white steam on the air as I ran up to them. “My job is to
inspect this rig. If there’s a safety issue—”

I started as the half-conscious man tore free
and lunged at me, grabbing me by the neck. I gasped, my eyes growing
wide and my stomach nearly turning as I saw his face. It was torn
open, half covered in blood. His eyes were wild in mortal terror. The
blood half covered the front of his work coverall, but I could just
make out his nametag:
Hastings.

“Help me,” he croaked out of a strangled
throat, his eyes wide as saucers. The lights on the elevator shaft
behind him flickered wildly. I felt someone or something grab me from
behind. A shock blasted through me, like a bolt of electricity.

I started as I awoke, finding myself on the bunk in my
cabin. My mind raced as I looked about in the pale gray light of
morning. I could hear the techs working on the platform outside my
door. Did I dare open it? I looked down, seeing I was undressed, my
clothes slumped on the floor where I’d left them the night
before. My muscles felt sore and stiff, and my head throbbed. Had I
dreamed it?

I must have,
I reasoned as I dressed. Still, I
felt an instinctive hesitancy, like a chill prickling its way up my
spine as I opened the hatch. The damp, chill morning air hit my face.
I bundled my jacket about myself as I made my way across the grubby
deck. The wind was clammy and raw, the sky its usual overcast, gray
pall. We lived in a dying world, the climatologists told us, even as
layers of pollution shrouded the sky. I think I was nineteen the last
time I actually saw the sun. In the naiveté of youth, I told
myself becoming an environmental impact inspector would make a
difference. The young are such arrogant fools.

My heart skipped a beat as I nearly bumped into a man. I
relaxed, exhaling deeply as I recognized Hastings. “Everything
okay, Mister Corby?” the chemical engineer asked, looking quite
normal.

“Yes, uh … everything’s fine. So far.
Can’t say I slept well, though. Uh … did you?” I
couldn’t help looking over his thick, chubby face. Not a mark
on it.

“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “Hard
work helps a man sleep.” He walked on by without another word.
I grumbled under my breath. My relief at seeing him alive and well
hadn’t masked the sarcasm in his remark. Running a hand through
my hair, I stepped to the rail and stared out over the flat,
slate-gray expanse of the sea. It stretched as far as the eye could
see, hiding its timeless mysteries. I longed for this assignment to
end so I could see civilization again. Cities. Bars. Creature
comforts. Yes, my chosen profession was based on the fact the world
was dying, but, like so many other people these days, I desperately
needed to live my life in crowded, brightly lit rooms, isolated from
the deathly pale of reality.

Hot water coursing over me, steam rising in the rusty
shower stall, made me feel better than I had in days. The cold touch
of emptiness and fear, which had hung over me, seemed to wash away
like a layer of soil. My skin was red and tingling as I twisted the
corroded metal wheel, shutting off the shower head. As I toweled off,
I actually began to feel normal and at ease for the first time since
setting foot on the rig. Not the most enticing of surroundings, a
public washroom filled with pale, sagging male posteriors and garish
tattoos, but it was welcome in its normalcy.

As I wiped the fogged surface of a mirror and unpacked
my shaving razor, I chanced to notice Hastings as he stepped out of
the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist. As I lathered my
face, I absently noticed he’d lost a bit of weight since the
first time I’d seen him. (Not surprising, considering swill
would almost be preferable to what they serve on these rigs.) As I
brought my razor to my cheek and felt the sharp edge of the blade
against my skin, that’s when it hit me. The appendectomy scar
I’d seen several times on Hastings’ left side wasn’t
there anymore. As he stepped up to the sink next to mine, I glanced
down sideways, afraid he might notice. Sure enough, not a mark on
him. I swallowed hard as I turned back to the mirror and slowly drew
the razor across my cheek.