FICTION BY JAMIE TONER

Jamey Toner is a co-founder of urd-thlol.blogspot.com. He lives in Massachusetts with his lovely wife, four children, and a fluctuating number of chickens. Toner wishes to thank Aaron Thorgi for providing the motivation for this story.

 

THE ABYSS GAZES ALSO
by Jamey Toner

 

Sunshine, like everything else, lost its way in the swamp. Nothing dappled those waters; nothing lanced radiantly through the boughs. The gloom was black by night and gray by day. The flutter of the birds and the rustle of the fish were muffled and furtive in the stillness, as though permanently holding their breath. The air was like a wet dog—too muted to be foul, but redolent of weeds piled up too long in silent water, a mildewed dampness that was almost a taste in the mouth. One could feel the shadows like a sodden weight.

Dr. Louise Heckler stood on the concrete platform outside the metal door, not thinking. She studied the swampy land that was surrounded by the most secure fence that money could buy. Without heavy-duty bolt cutters, nothing could travel into this small patch of marshland, and nothing could get out of it either.

Even this dank world was a healing reprieve, but only if she left her mind in the office down below—so she floated in the mental emptiness, staring through the razor wire at nothing. The only words were the lie on the sign behind her: Atavistic Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Today, however, she’d stayed topside too long. The locks thudded, and the door swung open. Now she’d have to interact with humans.

She traveled down the stairs to the man-made rooms that were built beneath the swamp. No one outside of her inner circle knew the rooms existed. She was conducting her work in complete secrecy from the outside world.

“Yeah, my daughter just started soccer,” one of the guards was saying as they stood in the hallway for their cigarette break. “Last month I actually made it back in time for a game.”

“She any good?” one of the others asked.

“God no, she’s awful, but she loves it to bits.”

The third fellow, Jerry something-or-other, nodded respectfully to her. “Dr. Heckler.”

Recollecting her courtesy, she nodded back. “Gentlemen.”

There—enough social activity for one day. She headed to a specific area before the door’s hydraulic hinges swung shut, and the elevator dropped her into the massive hush of the lowest level. Down here was the anti-swamp: sharp bright whiteness and surgical cleanliness, long steel corridors radically incongruous in this Massachusetts backwater full of old wooden fishing trawlers and dark superstitions.

The metal door of her office showed the dim reflection of a tall, thin woman in her late thirties with her hair in a tight, neat bun. She offered her eye to the retinal scanner and uttered the phrase, “Into the deep,” and the door slid open.

Her office was almost radically unadorned. Beside the door to her Spartan sleeping quarters was a small stovetop. Louise made herself a cup of tea and sat down at her desk. Her eyes traveled to a broken mirror on the floor. She wondered how that had happened. Lately, there were gaps in her memory and there were things she couldn’t explain.

Along with her notes and calculations, and several other views of the facility, her monitor showed a steady view of the laboratory. That bright, antiseptic chamber, lit with gelid LEDs, housed $800 million worth of gen-after-next technology. Shelves and tables lined its walls, leaving the central space uncluttered; large, fibrous arrays of probes and sensors, quivering like nine-foot-long spider-legs, clustered around the translucent circular water-filled tank in the middle of the room. And within that tank—was The Occupant.

The Occupant.

Her little doorbell dinged, and she jumped like a jack-in-the-box. Frowning, she clicked over to the view outside her office door. It was Davids, the head of security. She buzzed him in.

Jeffrey Davids, ex-Marine, was 6’6” and looked as if he’d been carved from a solid slab of muscle to which someone later went back and added eyes. Today his scowl was even deeper than usual. He began without preamble, “Dr. Heckler, we’ve got—” Then he noticed the shattered mirror on the floor. “Uh, is everything all right?”

She motioned for him to continue.

“Well—we’ve got a problem. I just heard from our guy in the Bureau, and we’ve been infiltrated. It’s Jerry O’Grady: he’s a goddamn fed.”

“There’s no need for that kind of language, Mr. Davids.”

She saw him start to roll his eyes and catch himself. “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered.

“Now, why don’t you ask Mr. O’Grady to join us in my office. I’d like to hear what he has to say for himself.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He turned on his heel and strode from the office.

Louise tapped her fingers on the desk, feeling vaguely annoyed at this interruption. Perhaps it should have made her angry or fearful, but it seemed distinctly secondary compared to the image of the creature on the laboratory camera. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” Dr. Heckler murmured, quoting T. S. Eliot.

Then the left side of her face twitched violently, and Ms. Koch added, “Spineless fucks.”

She was aware of Ms. Koch. Heckler figured it was a manifestation of her need for an explanation as to her own dark side. Lately she had been separating her emotions so that she could live with her actions. It helped her sleep at night.

She turned her thoughts to the present. A federal investigation could be problematic. For one thing, the team that had captured The Occupant of the lab had suffered two or three deaths in the process, depending on how you counted: one strangling, one drowning, and one suicide by gunshot two days later. If the cover-up was discovered, it would obviously lead to legal inconveniences.

But more to the point, if the authorities found out what those men had given their lives to capture—what the half-sane inhabitants of Atavistic called The Occupant—there was no telling what the fallout might be.

She gazed without blinking at the creature in its tank. It was blue. Dread and fascination coiled and slithered over one another in her stomach. If there were no God, this thing would cast Him as a shadow just so it could blaspheme, she thought. Those webbed hands could kill, but it was the fate of the suicide victim that made the creature so potentially valuable: the aura that drove men mad. Harnessing that would be the true dawn of the pioneering science of Numinotronics—the quantification of the numinous.

The doorbell dinged again. Davids entered, followed by two armed guards dragging Jerry O’Grady between them. He was a nondescript fellow—lean, average in height, sandy blond, pleasant but not especially striking—tactically forgettable. His wrists were zip-tied together.

The only chair in the office was hers—it was not a space designed to encourage visitors—so O’Grady stood before the desk and Davids stood off to the side, his .45 at the ready. The two guards were dismissed.

She leaned back in her chair, projecting a sense of ease. “Mr. O’Grady—”

“Vanning,” Davids growled. “His real name’s Vanning.”

She let the interruption pass, for now. “Is that true?”

Sudden confidence replaced O’Grady’s air of quiet deference. “Special Agent Ignatius Vanning, FBI. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

With that touch of swagger, a piece of his forgettability broke off to reveal the true personality underneath, like the corner of a jigsaw puzzle. Louise smiled, very slightly. “Likewise, I’m sure. And what exactly is your purpose here?”

“We know you have something in your lab. Something inhuman, something that could change everything we know about the nature of the world. But your company is notoriously bad about sharing their intel.”

“And we have no intention of altering that general policy.”

“You can play ball with me, Dr. Heckler, or I can shut down your entire operation.”

Davids flushed. “Ma’am, let’s say this is off topic, but we do have an excellent incinerator downstairs.”

“Calm down, Mr. Davids,” she said, her tone sharpening. But this time, she wasn’t angry at his butting in; she was angry at Vanning’s threat.

“Are you sure you want to be associated with men like this?” Vanning asked.

“One goes where the funding is, Agent Vanning.”

“No matter what strings come with it? Let me tell you something: tampering with cosmic forces takes a toll on your psyche. Especially when you know they’re being used to kill.”

Enough! He had threatened her operation and questioned her character, but she could handle that. With this last remark, however, he put his finger directly on the secret vein of dread that pulsed inside of her, and that brought her shadow-self to the surface. She usually resisted the takeover, but not this time.

“I tell you what,” Ms. Koch said in a voice that effortlessly blended the ease and sharpness between which Dr. Heckler tended to vacillate. “Davids, you want to take care of our friend here. Vanning, you want to see what’s in our lab. I can give you both what you want.”

Davids looked trepidatious. “Ma’am—if The Occupant gets loose—I mean, it’s something right out of a Lovecraft nightmare.”

“Relax, Jeff, nothing’s getting loose. We just leave our pal Ignatius alone in the room overnight.” Even with the creature sealed in its hermetic tube, the horror of its mere existence was unendurable for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

Vanning was staring at her. “Dr. Heckler, you don’t want to do this.”

“Turns out I do.”

“Listen to me. I suspected you bastards were getting close, so I put my team on high alert. If I’m not topside for my next smoke break, they’ll move in.”

“That’s the lamest bluff I ever heard,” Davids scoffed.

“I have to agree,” she said. “See you in the morning.” She pressed the button to bring the guards back into the room.

Davids pointed. “Take this scumbag downstairs. We’re locking him in with The Occupant.”

They hesitated, shocked. Then the one with the soccer daughter swallowed hard and said, “Sir—I’ll shoot him and take the fall. No one deserves—”

“Shut up, Tomlinson,” Davids snarled. “You know what happens if you disobey orders around here.”

Tomlinson dropped his gaze. “Sorry, Jer,” he mumbled.

Vanning moved abruptly, lunging at the second guard, but Davids was ready. The butt of his pistol came down on the back of Vanning’s head, and the agent went limp.  They carried him out of the room, and the door closed quietly behind them.

Louise fell back into rumination. What she had just done was, potentially, a form of murder in the cruelest way. What would the creature do to Vanning? It was something she would never have considered in the old days, before this assignment had brought her into touch with her dark side. This was the side of herself which—jokingly, at first—she had begun to call Ms. Koch.

But the more time she spent around the creature, the more she justified the ever-increasing emergence of Ms. Koch.

*****

Davids’ blow had stunned Vanning momentarily, but he was already shaking it off when they shoved him into the lab. Still unsteady, he leaned against the wall and rubbed his head as the door locked behind him. Then he looked around the lab—walked over and examined the equipment—but avoided looking at the tank.

There it was, watching him through the glass. It was scaled and gilled and man-shaped, eight feet tall and horrible. Vanning paced the floor, rubbing his hands together and slapping his thighs. Even without looking at it, he was feeling its presence in the room. Even through the faint smell of bleach and air scrubbers, he seemed to become saturated with an odor of decay.

But the creature was in a tank, not on the floor next to him. That meant he would be safe as long as the creature stayed where it was. Yet he was not unaware that Dr. Heckler seemed to believe the creature could somehow harm him.

Was it capable of getting out of the tank?

He began to steal glances. Flicking his eyes at its feet, only to turn rapidly away and pace even faster. A slightly longer glimpse of its hands as they pressed against the glass. Pacing, pacing. Then, slowly—very, very slowly—he raised his face and stared into the creature’s eyes…the hollow cores at the center of the universe.

He backed away, trembling, till he hit the wall of the lab. Stood there for a long moment. And then, his supreme achievement: peeling himself away from the wall, he forced himself to walk back toward the tank and meet its stare.

There was no name for the twisting depth of terror it sent forth. When you gaze into the abyss, he recalled, the abyss gazes also into you.

He only looked for a moment, proving to himself that he could do it, then he turned quickly away. Another hour, he thought. Just another hour till Eliza comes. But the memory of its eyes, the sound of water sloshing in the tank, the smell of the rotting cosmos, pressed in on his consciousness from every side. If I can last that long.

Then, all of a sudden, the floor was doused in gallons of reeking slime. He understood instantly what it meant. The creature was emerging from the tank! It was spilling waves of befouled water that cascaded onto the floor.

His mind wouldn’t let him face reality. Vanning turned and crouched toward the wall in an effort to make himself appear smaller. He remained hunched over, frozen, his eyes shut with fear, until he heard the first squelching footstep behind him, and a shriek began to well up inside.

Despite his terror, Vanning could not stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. Slowly, like a pufferfish, the creature was filling itself with air. It paid no heed to Vanning but kept inflating until its whole torso was freakishly distended. Then, opening the snakelike jaws that unhinged its entire head, it blared out a keening wail of unimaginable misery.

At that sound, all rationality and self-control deserted him. Vanning flung himself into a corner and went fetal.

*****

When Vanning was first left alone in the room, Dr. Heckler sat quietly, ruminating, watching him on the monitor. She couldn’t help but feel admiration. He had held up well—as long as The Occupant remained in the tank.

My God, what am I doing? she thought distantly. This isn’t me.

“Yes it is,”the voice of Ms. Koch whispered in her mind. “We’re doing what we have to.”

I have to let that man out of the room. I have to stop this.

“No! We’ve already come too far.”

More time had passed than she’d realized. When she looked back at the many monitors, in one, she saw the guards heading up for their next cigarette break. Absorbed in her inner struggle, she thought nothing of it.

All at once, the cameras that monitored the outside were filled with bright lights. There were speedboats converging on the facility containing twelve men and women in flak jackets. Bolt cutters glinting in the dimness as they cut through the fence.

A tall, stern woman with gray-shot hair strode up to the door and brandished her badge at the camera. “Ahoy in there! I’m Senior Field Agent Eliza Stone, FBI. If you don’t release our agent immediately, I am authorized to breach this door with explosives. And I love explosives.”

“Well, shit,”Ms. Koch said. “I guess Vanning wasn’t bluffing.”

“I’ll give you till the count of five,” Stone proclaimed. “One!”

“Enough,” Heckler said aloud. “No more of this insanity. I’m letting that man go and turning myself in.”

“Two!”

She reached for the keyboard, but her hand stopped in midair as Ms. Koch told her, “Forget those feds. Davids has a dozen guys downstairs. He can handle them.”

“Three!”

Dr. Heckler grabbed her wrist with her other hand, forcing it closer to the keyboard. “This is over! Let me go, damn you!”

“Four!”

Ms. Koch shouted at the top of her voice, “I won’t let them ruin our work!”

“Five!”

Two agents ran up to the heavy outer door with a roll of cord. Working quickly, they adhered the cord along the seams of the door from top to bottom. Then the whole team backed away, spooling out the cord behind them.

“They want a fight?” Ms. Koch snarled. “They’re gonna get one.”

Dr. Heckler clutched the arms of her chair so tightly that her fingernails splintered. “No,” she groaned. “No, please, no!”

But her head snapped to the left, then to the right, and she felt a grin spread across her face. “All right, you sons of bitches,” she said through her teeth. “Here comes your agent—and here comes mine.”

She seized the keyboard and slammed in her commands. First, just as Agent Stone had requested, she opened up the outer door. Then she lowered a glass panel of the creature’s tank and watched how its emergence spilled waves of befouled water that cascaded onto the floor. .

And before she could change her mind, she entered the duress code that made it impossible for anyone—including her—to override these commands until co-authorized by off-site officials higher up the chain.

On the lab camera, she saw the creature step slowly out of its tank. But inside of attacking Vanning, it began fill itself with air, swelling up grotesquely. Then it issued forth the most horrible sound she had ever heard—ever dared to imagine.

Dr. Heckler clapped her hands over her ears as that cry echoed through the facility. Davids and his men forgot about the photon tasers and gravitonic mesh deployers with which they had caught the creature in the first place, and simply stampeded up the emergency stairs with their sidearms in their hands.

Outside, the federal agents were blasted by that ungodly sound as well. They crouched down, crying out in shock and fear, and waved their guns like children. As the security force came charging out through the open door, desperately waving guns of their own, the maddening effect of the creature’s wail did the rest to produce a form of mass madness. There was no telling who fired first.

She sat in her chair. The howls and gunfire washed over her. Numbness set in. Silence fell.

Then, out in the hall, through the open door of her office, there was a squelching footstep.

Another.

Snapping out of her paralysis, Heckler bolted from her desk, knocking over the chair, and fled down the hallway toward the stairs. The elevator wouldn’t run with the doors jammed open, but there was no time for that anyway. Up the steps, faster than she’d ever run in her life, her breath scorching her throat, yearning for the fetid air of the swamp.

She gasped as she stumbled into the still-twitching heap of corpses on the doorstep. She saw Davids and Stone, both riddled with bullet-holes, lying barely a foot from each other on the concrete. She saw the ghastly white face of Tomlinson, the soccer dad, sinking into the red froth of the water.

There: the boats. Time for horror later. She was about to leap into the nearest one—

but then

Bubbles on the water’s surface. Three dark blue domes broke up through the stillness. Three domes—six eyes.

The creature’s wail, she realized: neither sonic attack nor battle cry, but the distress call it hadn’t had time to make when the team ambushed it in the swamp. Up till now, she had thought it was the only one of its kind.

They rose. All of creation was a wound on the face of nothingness, and they were the mirror of that face. They stepped onto the concrete. Inside them, it was waiting: the dark before and after everything. They came toward her. Agony and despair were merely the bubbles on the surface of their abyss.

As she backed away from the three encroaching forms, she suddenly sensed the fourth one behind her, emerging from the facility into the freedom of its shadowed world. She turned and looked into its eyes as the Deep Ones closed in around her, and she began to scream.