A Latent Dark (57 page)

“Skyla,” Father Thomas said. His voice was raspier than she remembered. He lifted his head and looked at her. He looked sad, broken and disillusioned.

“What are you
doing
here?” She asked, her lip trembling.

“I’m saving you,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

She laughed in spite of herself. “You’re doing a crappy job,” she said as tears rolled down her cheeks underneath the goggles. There had to be a way to free him, but his arms and legs were strapped to the chair.

“There isn’t much time,” he said. “I can hear the walls. I’m pretty sure I won’t even know who you are afterwards. If you get free, you have to stop them. This is all wrong.”

Without warning, the lights overhead went out. A klaxon sounded somewhere deep in the corridors, joined by the shuffling of panicked footsteps. Voices yelled in the distance.

“What’s happening?” she said.

But Ostermann was ignoring her. He was looking at the control panels, perplexed. He toggled a switch impotently, his brow furrowed. “It won’t stop,” he said to himself and placed a hand under his chin.

She turned her gaze back to Father Thomas just in time to see the wall panel closing over him. “No!” She yelled at the Tinkerer in the room. “Get him back! Get him back!”

“I can’t,” Ostermann said. “When the power went out, it killed a lot of the facility
failsafes
.” He hammered on more switches.

The shuffling of feet grew louder as Laura appeared in the doorway. “There’s been a breach,” she said. “We have to get Skyla—”

A black armored hand shoved her out of the way and slammed Laura into the wall. Two guards stormed past, their rifles armed with brilliant floodlights, blinding her. Skyla looked away, back to where Father Thomas had been, but he was gone, hidden behind a wall of interlaced light and shadow.

Her shadow. It danced in front of her, thrown against the panel like a dozen shifting doors, doors Skyla could open. She braced her foot against her chair like a sprinter. She heard someone from the observation room yell, “Stop her! She’s getting up!”

She launched herself from the chair, running full stop at her shadow as it danced on the wall. She passed through it like a waterfall. Claws and slimy, wet, indescribable things grasped at her thighs and arms as she traveled between the atoms of the wall, through the spaces in between.

And then she was through. She heard a gunshot and a loud slap as a bullet lodged in the wall where her chest would have been. She stood in the target room, a horrified Father Thomas staring at her, his eyes wild with surprise.

“You just…” he said. “You just…”

“I know,” she said, panting. “Listen, Father, I know how to save you.”

There was a combination of terrifying sounds from outside as klaxons squawked, people yelled—and something else. Something roared, causing Father Thomas to jump in his chair.

“Open it!” someone yelled. The wall panel began to slide back.

Father Thomas wrestled with the straps. “No go on, Skyla. Run and don’t let them catch you.” He looked at her, his eyes pained.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You came this far for me, it’s the least I can do. But…” She looked back at the panel as it slid to the side, the light streamed in, painting a white square along the floor.

She turned back to face the priest. “It might be difficult.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, shaking his head. Everything he had imagined he would say when he finally found her, all poured out of him. “I believe in you Skyla. I never told you this when you and your mother went to my parish, but I always thought you were very bright. The brightest. I think you got the short end of the stick in Bollingbrook. People tend to hate or ignore what they don’t understand, but that’s beside the point…”

His words were becoming a panicked stream of consciousness, the last lucid moments of a dying mind.

She moved to the side with the panel as it slid open again. The square of shifting white light flooded the room, making John flinch. His shadow was stark on the wall behind him.

“What I’m trying to say, Skyla,” he said, “I think The Church is scared of you, of what you can do, because you can see the truth. You see what really exists beyond death and it scares them. It threatens them at the core of their power. But it saves them! Don’t you see? It forces them to grow!”

The buzzing was beginning to vibrate the back of his skull and he could feel tiny spider legs crawling up the inside of his scalp. A cold hand held a tuning fork to his teeth. John grimaced.

“So… don’t sell yourself short,” he squinted into the light. “Difficult or not…”

She focused on one of the shadows behind Father Thomas, locking her eyes on it the way a hawk chooses its prey. A landscape danced somewhere beneath it.

“Father Thomas, I think you misunderstood me,” she said, bracing her foot against the wall, just out of sight of the guards.

“What? How—”

“I meant difficult for you,” she said, lunging at the startled man.

She tackled the priest in his chair, knocking it backwards and into the shadows behind him. They fell through together as she clutched him to her. All around them the machine howled with metallic rage.

This time, John really did scream.

*

Laura stared at the backs of confused guards as they all peered into an empty room. It had to be an illusion, she thought. The wall panel must have been opened just enough for her to squeeze through. But the chamber… the chamber was empty now.

Nobody walks through walls
. She then thought about what Skyla had said about the girl-shaped doorway, the severed finger.

Laura gasped. “I’m an idiot,” she said aloud.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Pall stumbled over to her. “The mains are all offline. The machine is a loose cannon now.”

She shook herself out of her stupor and looked at the man. “All of them?”

He nodded. “All the safeguards went down. It’s acting on its own now.”

“But without the controls it will just consume all the available fuel at once. It—” She cut herself off with a gasp. “It’ll consume fuel too fast. The true vacuum will—”

“Relax,” he said. “They were only down for a second. I’m trying to bring them up now.” Pall smirked.

God, how she wanted to slap that smirk off his face.

Her sudden anger at the man was interrupted when one of the guards shuddered. She turned just in time to see him implode, the hydrogen atoms in his body collapsing simultaneously. It wasn’t a clean burn either; the man’s chest caved in, crumpling him from the inside out, like a tin can. He flickered as his body compressed into a singular point, containing the mass of a two hundred pound man in armor.

The singularity, composed of mostly hydrogen atoms fusing together, emitted a light so intense it seemed to engulf her entire universe. She screamed as her retinas burned with the heat of a star. A hand grabbed her arm. Laura was being pulled backwards, out of the room. All she saw was darkness.

“I’m blind,” she said matter-of-factly. “I… I’m blind… Pall?” She reached out and felt his hands met hers.

“I know,” Pall said in her ear. “I guess it finally paid off for me to look at you when you talk.”

She wanted to simultaneously slap and hug the man. They shuffled down the corridor as klaxons, gunshots and screams echoed through the lab. Something brushed past her leg. It had the feel of wet fur. She froze.

“Pall what was that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The emergency lights are faulty… making crazy shadows everywhere.”

Laura thought of the other thing Skyla said before they forced her into the theater to kill a priest.

At least nothing got in this time.

“Oh dear,” she said.

*

Harold heard chaos. Blind and scared, the urge to open his eyes was unbearable. He turned towards his daughter’s voice.
Just one look,
he thought.

“Don’t,” she said. “You can’t look at them. Do you understand?”

“I want to see you.”

“No, Daddy,” she said, her voice small and shy. “Trust me. You don’t.”

Outside in the dark pink light of the hall, something crashed and splintered. There was more yelling and Harold thought he heard a scream pass from left to right as if the person were being thrown. A low wet gurgle flowed through the hallway, a sound that no human could make.

“Why can’t I see you?” he found himself speaking with his dad-voice. “I’m your father, Melissa. I—”

“You won’t see me the way you remember me,” she said. It was coming from the back of his skull. “You’ll see me as I was when they found me. Please, Daddy, if you want to remember me, don’t look at me.”

Harold squeezed his eyes shut. Gansworth was sobbing in long gasps nearby.

“Grab my arm Arthur.”

A shaky hand gripped his sleeve.
He’s just a kid
, thought Harold.
God, I’ve gone and made a mess.

Had Harold been the same man he was a month ago, he would have found a way to dismiss everything he was experiencing as his imagination: the voice, the sounds of chittering insects coming from the hallway, the rattle of violence, and footsteps that weren’t human in the dark. All of it fell well outside his field of belief.

But then there was his daughter, Melissa, drifting through his mind like a warm breath. It was unmistakably her. Or perhaps he had finally gone over the edge. Harold considered the possibility for an instant and then decided that he no longer cared.

“Melissa, can you lead us out?”

“Put your hand on the wall,” she said, her voice as close as it was when he was once tucking her into bed. “Now follow.”

He did as he was told and something gripped his other sleeve, small and fragile. Images of walking Melissa to school flooded his mind, how that tiny hand would disappear in his own. Wetness bled through the cloth. It was cold.

“Who are you talking to?” Gansworth asked.

“My daughter,” he said.

“I thought she was dead.”

“She is,” he said. “Now just stay with me, and don’t open your eyes.”

“Umm… sir,” said the boy. “What if I have already?”

Harold froze. “Then close them again and try to just forget everything you’ve seen.”

Gansworth’s
trembling hand squeezed his sleeve tighter.

He reached the door and realized the table had been moved completely out of the way. Small gasps from Gansworth told him that the boy was stealing glances at what was going on.

“Don’t look at any of it,” he said again.

They were led down a hallway. Harold kicked something soft. Afterward, he would remember it as a body. Cool, wet air swirled around his ankles like wet reeds as shouts and dull thumps echoed through the dim halls. A gunshot made him jump, followed by a rasping cry from somewhere behind him.

“Sir, I think—”

“Not now Gansworth.”

“But sir!”

“What is it?”

“Isn’t that the Reverend Summers?”

Harold’s eyes flew open, red with rage. He caught a glimpse of a white pant leg as someone ducked around a corner and down a hallway. He released Melissa’s hand, but she didn’t release his. It was a soft, wet vice.