Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 11

  “Yeah, the ward’s got her now. I don’t know why I asked.”

  Oklahoma takes her hand off the cylinder and stares at it. “What do you think happened down there?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it, truth be fucking told.”

  Peter hasn’t taken his eyes off the tank. He counts the fingers and then the toes, none of which have nails. The skin is bare of even a trace of body hair, and the compounds in the flesh that repel cosmic rays give it the color and sheen of graphite. There are no nipples, no genitalia, no urethra, no anus, no ears. Where there should be a face, there’s only the Makroclear visor, tightly fused on a molecular level with the suit’s epidermis.

  “I checked, and her last psych profile was clean as the inside of that tube.”

  “If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t have been out there.”

  “I was just—”

  “Don’t sweat it, Oklahoma. I checked, too. I knew the results, but I checked, too.”

  She sat down beside Peter, then and took his right hand in her left. His palm was sweaty, and she wondered, briefly, if that was a side effect of the antibiotics or if it was anxiety. Obviously the latter. Obvious to anyone who’d been in the hole when they found the idols and Clay tried to kill him.

  “You think they’re ever going to let us see them again?”

  “The artifacts?” he asks, finally glancing at her. There’s something about her close-cropped auburn hair that always surprises him. There’s a clove cigarette tucked behind one ear.

  “I have a feeling the most we’re ever gonna get is holos. Probably damn decent holos, but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to chance another incident like Clay.”

  “But you believe they’re going to send us back down the shaft?” he asks.

  “I don’t think they have much of a choice. The Board’s not about to shut down the expedition, and they sure as hell aren’t going to settle for remotes. We’re dispensable, replaceable with only a minimum of inconvenience and expense. They’ve already named Clay’s replacement, right? I figure the only thing the tops are worrying about is that slice job and the PR mess back on Earth. But even that’s not going to stop them.”

  “You were always this cynical, weren’t you?”

  “Only since grade school,” she smiles, then uses her free hand to brush his greying bangs from his face. “You need a haircut.”

  “Just now, I need a lot of things.”

  “Including a haircut.”

  He reaches out with his free hand and lightly thumps the tank. “I’m making up for baldy in there, okay?”

  Since their last walkabout and that emergency extraction, the team’s hardly spoken to one another. There’s been nothing much but the debriefings, and of course those were one on one with the security officers. Still, Peter has no particular desire to discuss the subject, but he knows that’s Reason Number Two for Oklahoma’s visit, so he’s ready for the questions when they come.

  “From what I saw before she cut you, they weren’t all that different from the carvings outside the temple, those hideous fucking gargoyles on the columns and capitals and the doors and shit. Sure, the idols didn’t look like basalt, but they were the same style—I don’t know what an architect would say—but the same style.”

  “Why does everyone keep calling them idols?” he asks.

  Oklahoma frowns and stares at him a moment.

  “Well, what would you call them?”

  “I don’t know. But assuming they’re idols is as premature as calling that place a temple. For all we know, they were part of some sort of art collection. I don’t like all this assumption when we have almost no data to back it up.”

  She releases his hand and goes back to looking at the cylinder.

  Peter sighs and rubs gently at the itching wound beneath his pant leg. “Okie, I’m well aware we have entered the land of freaky shit. I know that. But no one’s going to benefit from speculation. My nightmares are bad enough as it is.”

  She shrugs, then apologizes. “Have you heard about Nzeogwu? She’s asked for a discharge.”

  “No one’s going to let us out of our contracts. The best any of this team can hope for from the Conglomerate is to wind up in the ward with Clay, plugged to the gills with haloperidol, chlorpromazine, whatever cocktail of neuroleptics they’ve decided will keep us quiet and docile. Or death on the next walkabout. I suppose that would work just as well, without the unpleasant side effects.”

  “Have you always been this optimistic?”

  “Only since we opened those goddamned doors.”

  Oklahoma takes out her lighter, takes the cigarette from behind her ear before she realizes what she’s doing and stops herself. “The skinbag should have protected her. When she touched it, the suit should have buffered crossover of any kind.”

  “How do you figure that?” Peter Sazerac asks her. “The axons in the suit’s fingertips, its entire peripheral nervous system, feeds straight back through the jack. There’s no reason to think whatever she felt when she—”

  “Doc, you’re about to make one of those assumptions you were just railing against. Bad science, and we can’t have that.”

  “Fuck you,” he says, and she laughs. Then they sit together for maybe another half hour, just staring up at the bio-suit floating, only seemingly lifeless, and neither says anything else that matters.

  01010011 01101001 01111000

  Chase Greco is what recruiters call a “hard red.” She arrived on the Tharsis two weeks after the Conglomerate’s R&D facility became habitable, led the detail that brought the HQ mainframe online after months of setbacks, and she’s never left, and so far as anyone’s heard, she has no intention of ever leaving. If asked, she usually responds with a curt, “What exactly would I be going back to?” After three years, she became Division Head of Systems Integration, which might seem more impressive—she’s said this, too—if her staff consisted of more than two people. Still, the Board and their doppelgängers back on Earth know she’s as crucial to their operations as any keystone in any archway ever built. Yank her out, it all goes tumbling down. More importantly, Chase Greco knows this, along with pretty much everyone else on the campus and all those Conglomerate stooges toiling away approximately 1.52 AU (± 0.14) across that inky hard vacuum. This has, she’s discovered, made her pretty much untouchable. Most would use the word indispensable, but she prefers untouchable. This is not to say she pushes her luck on a regular basis, but it is to say she rarely takes shit off anyone.

  Usually, Chase is a pretty happy little gremlin, perched there in her unlikely, and yet entirely logical, place at the top of HQs vicious trophic pyramid. But she’s a little less so today, because her domain has been invaded by someone a step or two below her de facto level on said pyramid. The Board—by recommendation of the Exped Division—has cast down upon her a nervous bureaucrat by the name of John Smith. She thought that was a joke at first, until she ran his creds, and sure as shit stinks, the son of a bitch’s name is indeed John Smith. John Mitchell Smith in full, but still. Anyway, making fun of his name gave her a leg up right from the start, and she’s taken every opportunity in the twelve minutes since to make John Mitchell Smith feel less and less qualified to be anywhere near her labs.

  So, here’s the scene: Chase and her two underlings—her on-again lover Dylan, and Maxwell, who annoys Chase, but is brilliant enough she endures him—sit together in the ASA sensory retrieval module. The module is a prefab resilience bowl, vacuum-molded from a static resistant titanium-epoxy alloy, seven meters across, three-and-a-half deep, every inch of its surface a lattice of state-of-the-art quantum hardware (augmented with intercalated gooware canisters), audio and video codec tackle, coolant lines, coaxial cables, power conduits, and optical fiber connecters. Access to the module is only afforded by an aluminum catwalk leading onto the operations platform suspended above the hive. Chase, Dylan, and Max sit in their chairs there on the platform and stare at Smith, and Smith mostly doesn’t stare back at th
em. Chase is sucking on a cucumber-flavored Chupa Chup.

  Intimidation accomplished, Chase thinks. So all we have to do is get through this as quickly and as painlessly as possible, with no casualties on our side.

  “There are some unsettling rumors—” Smith begins, but Chase interrupts him.

  “—trickling out to the alphas that there’s something amiss with the data gathered by the suits the day B Team chopped the temple.”

  “And you’re here, wasting our precious time, to ascertain the truth,” adds Max, tugging at a stray thread on the left sleeve of his black sweater.

  “Pretty much the case,” Smith nods.

  “Whatever we tell you, that’s going straight back upstairs, and never mind the usual protocol, or am I wrong, Mr. John Mitchell Smith?” Chase asks him.

  “You don’t have to be such an ass about this.”

  “We don’t like people looking over our shoulders,” says Dylan. Her sweater is identical to Max’s; both have the blue and yellow Conglomerate logo stitched over the right breast, and both have seen better days. They only wear the damned things because they’re free. “Especially not when the voyeurs in question are benighted snoops like yourself.”

  “But…” Smith begins, trails off, then starts again. “But you are aware that your report was due yesterday, and that was because Exped needed it yesterday.”

  “The Exped Four need to get laid more often,” chuckles Max, then rotates his chair towards one of the monitors.

  “Now, now,” says Chase. “Be a good drone and show Mr. Smith what he’s come to see.” Then she turns to Smith. “So that he will fully appreciate why we’ve not yet finished our report. And, by the way, Mr. Smith, when’s the last time we were tardy?”

  Smith scratches his forehead a moment, then replies, “I’ve no recollection of you ever having been late, Dr. Greco.”

  “Which ought to clue you in, right there. Max, punch up Yamashita’s feed, will you, and let’s get this inquisition off the pad. Oh, and keep it skeletal, and begin a few ticks before the incongruities register.”

  “I assure you, it’s no inquisition,” Mr. Smith says, sounding at least a little taken aback. “It’s only an informal visit.”

  “Whatever. Now, I’m assuming you might know the basics of how all this works, yeah? The skinbags are grown with an absolutely brilliant data acquisition and storage network, scooping up and saving—for us—almost every scrap of sensory and mental input experienced by the host. The network, it can read your mind, right? Plus, it sees what you see, hears what you hear, tastes what you taste, and so forth. Guy back in Canada thought this thing up, he’s a billion-trillionaire fifty times over, I’m sure.”

  “I know the basics,” says Smith.

  “Smart boy that you are,” Chase laughs and glances at Max. “Okay, so what you’re about to see on Max’s screen, that’s the visual and auditory skimmed off Dr. Yamashita’s ASA. He’s the team geologist. We’re cutting all the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and mnemonic stuff because, a, I don’t feel like rigging you up in the box, and b, you haven’t been conditioned, so that much charge would likely fry your brain like bacon. And we don’t want that, now do we?”

  “Hell, no. Not with budget reviews on the horizon,” Dylan says, watching as the laser grid on Max’s console sputters to life and projects a single beam of light towards the ceiling. In a few seconds it’s unfolded—a phenomenon that never fails to remind Chase of the blooming of a rose or some other flower—into a three-dimensional scene, as seen from Yamashita’s POV, recorded inside the temple. The scene hangs about half a meter above Max’s head, and a hoop of constantly changing data encircles the bottom of the image, running counterclockwise around the projection.

  “Now, you pay close attention, John Mitchell Smith,” says Chase, pulling the Chupa Chup from her mouth with a distinct pop.

  He doesn’t reply.

  The image clearly shows the anteroom, and Yamashita has just turned towards the niches set into one wall. Sazerac saw them first and has called everyone’s attention to them. Lights cut through the darkness and play across the smooth grey basalt walls. This is Smith’s first glimpse at the carvings tucked into each niche, and he immediately wishes his briefing had been just a bit more thorough. To say the things are grotesque is an understatement. Each one is clearly meant to represent some manner of organism, whether actual or imaginary, and all seem highly stylized in the same fashion as the bas-reliefs on the temple doorway and its surrounding columns and friezes. Yamashita’s light lingers on something that reminds Smith of a raven perched on a cube. A lizard-like reptile is frozen in the act of slithering from between its claws, attempting to escape down the side of the base facing the geologist. Yamashita then turns to the next niche on his right, and this time the carving resembles nothing so much as an octopus with the feet of a hippopotamus and the folded wings of a bat.

  “Ugly fucking shit,” says Chase Greco, then puts the lollipop back into her mouth.

  Yamashita and Sazerac are talking, and Smith also recognizes the voice of Morgan, the team’s wet link. Sazerac clearly says, “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, Clay. Let’s use the claw.” Clay has stepped into frame, and she’s ignoring Peter Sazerac, laying the palm of her bio-suit on the polished head of the raven creature.

  “Fine. Screw code,” grumbles Sazerac.

  “It feels odd,” Clay says, sounding as though she’s speaking more to herself than to the rest of her team. “Oily. It feels oily.”

  And then she pulls her hand away and steps back, and Yamashita’s recording shows Morgan squeezing in between Sazerac and Clay. He carefully uses the three-pronged collection claw to lift the raven from its niche and transfer it to a plastic container. He looks sternly at Morgan, admonishing her for deviating from procedure.

  “It felt oily,” is all she says.

  Sazerac, a moment later, sighs and says, “We’d best pull back. I want a sweeper in here before we go any further.”

  “You’re shittin’ me,” Mary Nzeogwu (archeologist) complains. “And wait a week for the results?”

  “Mary, we need to know what to expect up ahead, all right? We’re not going to argue about this.”

  There are a few more exchanges between team members, but nothing of consequence. And then Yamashita has another look at the bat-winged octopotamus before turning away from the niches and exiting the anteroom with the others.

  “She didn’t stab him,” Smith says, unable to take his eyes off the display. “What the fuck, Chase. Clay didn’t fucking stab him.”

  Chase removes the Chupa Chup from her mouth again, licks it once, and nods. “Not according to Yamashita’s feed, no, she did not.”

  “Then why the hell—?”

  “Oh, you haven’t seen nothing yet, John Mitchell Smith. Just you wait. Max, let’s have Morgan’s feed. Try not to foul your panties, Mr. Smith.”

  He watches as the scene plays out again, this time from Josiah Morgan’s perspective. A lot of what he sees is the same—the walls, the niches, the hideous carvings—but most of the dialogue is different, though only subtly so. When Morgan steps forward with the claw, Clay turns on him, plunging the five-inch shard of stone into his thigh, and the feed immediately ends.

  “No way,” Smith says. He opens his mouth to say something else, but Max is already playing Sazerac’s feed. Again, similarities. Again, differences. This time, the feed ends with Sazerac lifting the sculpture from its niche, holding it a moment while Morgan asks just what sort of idiot he is, and Yamashita curses in a mixture of Japanese and Spanish. Clay asks if she can hold the thing, but then Sazerac is depositing it safely in Morgan’s box. Sazerac holds a hand up in front of his face, and it gleams with a distinctly iridescent film.

  “What are you people playing at?” Smith asks.

  “Wanna keep going?” asks Dylan, trading him a question for a question.

  “But she stabbed him. Clay, she stabbed Sazerac. We know that. She’s even admitted doing i
t. Obviously, there were malfunctions in the suits.”

  Dylan shakes his head. “No, man. We ran diagnostics on the suits, combed them each five times over, nanometer by nanometer. The suits are up to spec.”

  “So,” says Chase, “you see how we do have a problem, now don’t we, Mr. John Mitchell Smith? And I assume, having witnessed this apparent paradox, you’ve come to grasp why we’ll be somewhat longer than we usually require to produce a coherent report for Exped.”

  “No,” he says, and, at first, Chase looks angry and confused.

  But then Smith adds, “Purge the files. Purge all of it. And I mean irrecoverable, spic and span, and no private copies for yourselves, you understand me? Nothing. Erase the whole goddamn mess. No one needs to see that. I didn’t need to see that.”

  Max looks even more baffled than Chase, and he peers over his shoulder at Smith. “You’re fucking kidding, right? Whatever happened down there, it’s going to fucking turn physics on its— ”

  “Purge the files,” Smith says again. “Are you deaf?” And then he stands and walks quickly back across the catwalk, leaving the three hanging above the sensory module. When Smith is gone, they stare silently at one another for a time, make backups for themselves, then begin the rigorous purge sequence.

  01000101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100

  BLACK SHIPS SOUTH OF HEAVEN

  Two hours, twelve minutes, and thirteen seconds after Mr. Smith exists the sterile dome housing SysIn and all of Chase Greco’s miraculous toys, and two hours, eleven minutes, and fifty-seven seconds after she and her three compatriots reluctantly begin more or less complying with their orders, Mary Nzeogwu awakens from a dream of a hellish procession across Martian plains. In the dream, the creatures comprising the westerly parade were as clear as day, but their fearful symmetries begin, almost immediately, to fade from her conscious mind. What lingers is only the dread of knowing what she witnessed, and a sort of existential shock at her certainty that the nightmare and the discovery just beyond the doors of the temple are intrinsically and undoubtedly linked, one to the other, even if she can’t see how. Her mind’s eye has seen things beyond her ability to fully comprehend and, she knows, beyond her ability to bear.