It was twilight and the lights came on in the dead city.
As bluish clouds stretched long and a violet night stained the alien sky of Hesychia, a lone cry from the city depths echoed around the stony, silent buildings. The aimless wind stirred the foliage that had begun to reclaim the streets like a hand absently ruffling the hair of a small child.
On the far outskirts of the city, the multitude of trees grasped at the sky, their long fingers casting bony, arthritic shadows out over the edge of the plains. The limbs creaked in the wind, but otherwise, their silence was as thick as the dense underbrush of the forest floor.
Where the dirt was exposed, there was a new set of footprints, a marvel in and of itself for such a place. The soft, dark soil hadn’t held prints of any kind in millennia, not until the humans from beyond the gate had come, the Green Team of Paragon Corporation, and those footprints had been swept away over time by the shivering of tree roots beneath the soil and atavistic gales of wind.
The fairly recent set remained, though, in part because the trees had watched with genuine curiosity the desperate flight during which they were made, and in part because the prints had run so far out of reach—from city to woods, then back across the plains toward the mountains.
They stopped suddenly before the steep gray face of the rock, without evidence of backtracking or a scuffle. It was as if something from the sky had swooped down and carried away the maker of such prints. And yet, to those who had once roamed those plains, conversing with the trees and gazing at the mountains as if they were great stone gods long before the true gods came, that would not have been so strange an ending to the prints or their maker. Of course, those beings were long gone, as were the beings which ruled the air.
In the land of Hesychia, once called Xíonathymia, only the gods and demigods remained—them, and the silent trees.
Once the twin moons rose fully overhead, the trapezoidal crystals in the city center began to vibrate.
The Wraiths were awakening.
* * * *
Night was settling over the road. It seemed to Carl that it was still early to be getting so dark, but shadow had already gathered thick to either side of the road, definite shapes blurring into indefinite voids as Haversham gave way to the woods beyond.
“I think I should take you to the hospital,” Carl told Lefine. When the other man didn’t answer, Carl glanced away from the road. Lefine was slumped against the passenger side door, lightly clutching his arm, but his eyes were open and his chest was rising and falling.
“Lefine? You hear me?”
“I heard you,” Lefine muttered. “They don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What?” Carl frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Lefine said.
“Why not?”
“Because I—stop the car!” Lefine’s hand shot out to grab Carl’s arm, causing them to swerve. Carl cut the wheel to regain control and pulled over onto the side of the road.
“What the fuck, Lefine?”
“I—I’m sorry.” Lefine looked genuinely shaken. “I thought I…I saw…”
“What?”
“In the road…I thought I saw something.”
“What did you see?”
“A piece of fabric in the wind. Like a bed sheet, only thinner. And the way it moved…”
Carl stared at him. “You nearly wrecked us over someone’s old laundry?”
Lefine shook his head. “No, not laundry! It was a sheet. Like…a shroud. It melded into a shape with a face and hands, and it—” He dropped his face into his hands. “There’s something very, very wrong with me, Carl. I—”
Suddenly he looked up from his hands, evident alarm tightening his features. “Wait…is this the dream, or is it real?” He turned to Carl. “Are you real?”
“Lefine, what’re you talking about? What’s gotten into you?” Carl said.
“The million dollar question,” Lefine mumbled, then suddenly opened the car door and ran out into the darkness.
“Darryl! Wait! Where—” Grabbing a Maglite from the glove compartment, Carl tossed his door open and ran out into the dark after Lefine. For a moment, the robed figure loped ahead of him, and then the darkness swallowed them both.
“Lefine? Come back here!” Carl turned on the flashlight and ran in the direction that he’d seen his partner heading. The light pushed the darkness around, shoving it out of the way but only temporarily. Carl shined it over the ground, looking for footprints, but there were none. He searched the wooded area ahead of him. There was nothing but darkness and the occasional tree. And where, exactly, was he? He’d been by Lefine’s place hundreds of times, been up and down the very road he’d pulled off of, but none of this area looked familiar.
“Lefine! Goddammit!” A root caught his foot and he stumbled forward, sure for a second that he was going down face-first. He managed to balance himself, though, by catching hold of a nearby tree-trunk, but the Maglite was jarred out of his hand and rolled a little ways down a hill.
Carl was a big man, not exactly fat, but bigger than he would have liked and paunchy around the middle. He hadn’t realized though how out of shape he was until just then. For several moments while he caught his breath, he leaned against the rough bark of the tree. Total darkness enveloped him. The night had cooled, and when it stirred, it turned Carl’s sweat cold.
“Lefine!” he called when his breathing had returned to normal. “Where are you?”
“Help me, Carl.” Lefine’s voice came from somewhere several feet to the right of him. Beneath it was the low hiss of multiple whispering.
Carl swooped toward the glow of the Maglite and picked it up, then charged off in the direction of the voice.
“Lefine, come on, man. Tell me where you are.” As he jogged along, Carl swung the light around in front of him, cutting through the darkness. The beam of light fell then on a hideous, silently shrieking face of a beast and Carl cried out, skidding to a stop. He repositioned the beam and saw the face was nothing more than rough clumps of bark half-peeled away from their trunk.
The whispering had grown, if not louder, than fuller, surrounding his head, forcing its way into his ears, shoving its way down his throat and into his chest like a noxious smoke. He could almost taste it, taste the whispering, as crazy as it seemed, and it tasted bitter and faintly coppery.
It was like the dreams…
Carl turned, swinging the Maglite, and the beam came up so suddenly on Lefine’s back that Carl uttered a little cry of surprise. Lefine’s head was bent. He just stood there, swaying a little in the dark.
“Darryl?” Carl took a few steps closer. He couldn’t have explained what kept him from rushing to his friend, just that it was that gut instinct again, telling him something was wrong. “Hey, buddy,” he said softly. “It’s me. It’s Carl. Why don’t we go back to the car, huh?”
Lefine didn’t answer. If he heard Carl at all, he didn’t acknowledge it. He just swayed.
Carl took a few more steps forward, close enough to touch Lefine if he reached out, and frowned. His heart began to pound in his chest.
Lefine wasn’t there at all. It was only his robe, hanging from a nearby branch.
Carl looked around, confused. He’d been sure he’d seen Lefine, sure he’d made out the man’s head and legs in the darkness, or their silhouettes, at least. But how—
“Darryl?” He shined the light at the robe again stirring lightly in the breeze, swaying in the dark, and saw something else he hadn’t noticed before. The ground beneath was dark and wet with blood.
* * * *
The gateway on Paragon’s thirty-first subfloor rippled unsteadily from late afternoon into the night. Ravi Varma, the researcher on night shift, noted with some worry that the gateway had been doing that a lot lately. He marked it down in the electronic log on the company laptop as he had been instructed to do, then went back to watching the monitor. Ravi had been at it eleven hours already, with only two half-hour breaks to eat. He was developing a faint headache from the monitor’s screen light and his eyes were getting heavy. He hadn’t been sleeping well the last few nights—ever since the gateway had begun to ripple, in fact—and wasn’t used to working the night shift. If anyone asked after his well-being, Ravi chalked up his lack of sleep to being busy and a little stressed.
His real thoughts on the matter he kept to himself. When he could finally fall asleep, the bad dreams woke him right back up. He was forgetting simple things, like the names of people from college and movie titles, or where he’d put his car keys and his favorite pen. He’d developed a small but odd rash, a tiny patch of gray under one arm. Twice now, he thought he’d heard someone whispering his name when no one else was in the lab, and it had happened once at home as well. All day he’d felt watched, like someone was standing behind him. He’d noted that in the log as well; he’d been told to write it all down, every weird thing, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.
What he had yet to put into words, though, were the hands and the faces.
He’d heard Rachel and Corey mention them earlier in the cafeteria as they’d eaten their second meal of the night. Well, Ravi had eaten; the other two had just poked their food around their plates with their forks. Ravi thought maybe what they’d told him had gotten under his skin a little bit. It wasn’t what they had been saying; he’d stubbornly maintained that most of that was absurd. It was how they’d told it, how their eyes darted and their voices shook a little when they mentioned seeing faces in the toilet paper sheets in the rest rooms or in the cafeteria’s Formica tabletops. Both of them had been jumpy, too, like they were waiting for something bad to happen any minute. In fact, it had struck Ravi with near-ridiculous specificity that they were like two people blindfolded and left to navigate their way out of a room crowded with hypodermic needles and other sharp things tipped with corrosive poisons. It was a visual that sprang uncomfortably to mind as they’d told him about the faces, and even after they’d picked up their lunch trays and left, Ravi couldn’t get the image out of his head.
He had known Rachel for six years and Corey for almost as long. He’d never known them to be imaginative or nervous or to pull pranks. Neither was the type to partake in any of the drugs from Pharmaceuticals and Chemistry, one floor up. They genuinely seemed to believe what they were telling him, and also seemed earnestly upset about it. They asked about the gateway, if maybe it was leaking radiation or some chemical…but Ravi had assured them it was contained and carefully monitored, that he saw to maintaining the safety protocols himself, and besides, Rachel and Corey had never even been near the thing, not really, not without a thick pane of glass between them and the gate, so how could it have anything to do with the toilet paper in the ladies’ room?
The two junior researchers were a little younger than Ravi and a little less experienced at Paragon, so they had seemed to accept his logic and look a little less shaken. Before they’d gone back to work, though, they’d confided that now they were starting to see the faces everywhere, and thought they heard whispering too.
He’d nearly broken down and told them about the dreams then, about the whispering he’d been hearing himself, and about the strange vibes he’d been getting in the lab all afternoon and night, but he didn’t. Some underlying voice in his brain suggested that to admit to it out loud and compare notes would confirm the experiences were more than just stress-induced weirdness. They would fuel the notion that the wrongness they’d all been feeling lately was external…that perhaps it really was a symptom of prolonged exposure to the gateway…or a possible taste of what was on the other side. Rachel and Corey were scared enough, and didn’t need what was probably just coincidence making things worse and distracting them from their work.
Truth be told, Ravi didn’t think he could manage that kind of distraction just then, either.
Luckily, there weren’t many nuanced surfaces in the lab. Mostly, the instruments and equipment were smooth, sterile, and metallic and not conducive to imagining faces. Nonetheless, on his return to the lab after lunch, Ravi had thought for just a second that he’d seen an odd, distorted face in the reflective metal corner of the security doorway leading to the gate. When he’d looked again, there was, of course, nothing there. What he’d probably seen was his own reflection, or part of it, or some other part of the lab that, at just the right angle and with the right movement, had formed a kind of distortion his brain translated into a face.
That’s how he’d explained away the first face. The others were harder.
There was the one he thought he saw doodled on a napkin, half-hidden beneath his boss’s coffee mug, but when he’d lifted the cup, sloshing some of the cold liquid onto the desk, he’d seen the scribbles for what they were—scribbles. There was the one he thought he saw in the smudges of glass between the observation control room and the lab proper, though that, he’d insisted to himself, was just a trick of the overhead fluorescent lights. There were ones he’d seen at home, too, in the bedsheets and the shower curtains, scowling and sneering and growling. Usually, the faces were silent, just frozen masks of stiffened fabric. Sometimes they weren’t silent.
And of course, there were the ones he’d see from time to time in the substance of the gateway as it rippled and churned. That thick oily stuff had begun to pinch, stretch, or swell out toward the lab, just a little—that was new, and duly logged—and sometimes, those movements seemed to make a face. Even if he could dismiss the dreams, the whispering, and the glimpses of faces all over the lab, he knew he had to tell his superiors what the “gateway goo,” as the researchers had been calling it, was doing.
He’d heard rumors about John Van Houten and he’d seen the state the recon guy had been in when he’d come back through the gate. He didn’t want there to be anything more wrong than his just being tired, but he didn’t want to neglect a genuine potential problem, either. Ravi was not a brave man, but he was a responsible one.
He crossed the control room to the laptop and tapped a few keys to start a new entry in the log. He typed “is making faces, 4:47 a.m.,” looked at it, and then backspaced. The words looked insane. Worse, the words suggested insanity—his own. They suggested he wasn’t functioning at 100% mentally or professionally, and that worried him. He had worked really hard to get the position he held in the lab and to work so closely on the Ostium project. He couldn’t afford to look like he was cracking up.
Then again, if what he was seeing was true, it absolutely needed to be recorded. He couldn’t be the only shift researcher to see the faces, right? He had the brief sensation again of being watched, and his body tensed. The faces did that sometimes. They had no eyes, not really, but they watched. They watched and they judged and then whispered things into his brain until he wasn’t sure if the thoughts he was having about cutting Rachel and Corey with razors and sticking them with hypodermic needles were his thoughts, or those of the faces.
Rachel and Corey weren’t the only ones in the room of sharps, he supposed.
He leaned over to retype what he’d deleted. “Forming vaguely human facial features, possibly mimicking human face, 4:47 a.m.” The entry looked more scientific that way, he thought, and felt a little better about it.
He looked at the gateway over the computer screen. It had stopped rippling for the time being. In fact, it was just about as placid as he had ever seen it. As he stared at the dark burgundy, he thought he could hear a faint hum in the background, and for just a second, he thought it turned white, almost clear. The white engulfed his sight and he turned away, leaning on the desk for support and blinking heavily to clear his vision. He bowed his head and took several deep breaths, and by degrees, he felt clearer, more present.
Then he heard a cry from the lab. He looked up and gasped.
Something was trying to pull itself through the gate.
Ravi could see a head and torso up to the waist, with arms grasping at the air in front of it as if looking for something to hold onto. Whoever it was, the figure was covered in the gateway goo, sheathed in it, painted in its swirling oil-slick colors. Ravi couldn’t make out any of the facial features, but…
He hit the alarm. A woman’s voice announced in jarringly calm fashion that there was an Emergency, the senior staff needed to return to the lab at once, Emergency, and between each repeated announcement, a blaring wail like an air raid siren.
His shocked gaze fixed on the figure, Ravi crossed to the door of the observation control room and pushed it open. It seemed to be struggling, wiggling toward freedom from the substance of the gate. Jogging across the lab, Ravi called out to it. “Hello? Hey! Hey, there!”
The gateway rippled behind another glass enclosure about twelve feet square, jostling the figure like a rag doll. The door, a few feet out of the range of those flailing arms, rattled as if caught up by some unseen wind.
“Help me.” The voice coming from the bowed head of the figure was hoarse and deep. Ravi figured the gateway goo had slid down the poor guy’s throat, and he thought again of that room of syringes and sharp things.
Ravi could barely hear anything else but the blaring alarm. The figure’s head raised again, the arms gesturing, and its voice seemed to cut through the noise somehow.
“Please, help me,” the figure said again.
Ravi glanced back at the door. Where was the rest of the senior staff? What was taking so long? He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Uh, help is coming, buddy. Just hang in there—”
“No time! You need…to get me out of here.”
“Ah, I can’t. See, it’s against protocol. But help is on the way I swear! Just hold on one—”
“They’re coming! Please!”
Ravi hesitated. “Who’s coming?”
“There are things here, Ravi. Terrible things. And they don’t want to let me leave.”
Ravi frowned. The voice sounded familiar, now that it was shaking off some of its scratchiness. The eyes…he knew those eyes. “Do I know you?”
“It’s me, Rav. It’s Rodriguez,” the voice said. “Please, take my arms and pull. I’m stuck.”
“Dr. Rodriguez? Oh shit. Hold on,” Ravi said, and opened the glass door. “I’ll get you out of there.”
He took hold of one of the outstretched hands and pulled. He was so intent on getting Rodriguez out of the gateway that it took a few moments to realize his own hand was sinking into the dark burgundy goo. What had felt like flesh a moment before now felt like jets of liquid movement bundled into muscle. He looked up at the face and saw it wasn’t Rodriguez at all, that those eyes weren’t and couldn’t be familiar because it had no eyes, no real teeth or tongue. And it was grinning, just like the faces in the metal and glass—like the faces in the gateway. This thing with its iron grip on his wrist wasn’t trying to escape the gateway. It was the gateway.
The face of the figure imploded with a splash in reverse, returning to the rippling, swirling burgundy. Before Ravi could pull free, the hand holding onto him yanked him forward, throwing off his balance, while the opposite arm and torso melded back into the gateway like liquid silver.
Panicked, Ravi struggled against the strength in that one remaining arm, but it was dragging him toward the gate. He heard shouting and the frantic rush of feet pounding across the lab to him. He tried to look over his shoulder, but he couldn’t turn his head or neck enough to see whatever assistance might be coming.
“Help me!” he shouted, but was dismayed to find his own voice sounded hoarse like the figure’s had, nearly too weak to be heard over the alarm. He tried to lock his legs but another sudden yank pitched him forward. “No!” he shouted, and then that cold, almost-wet stuff was engulfing his face, his ears, his whole head. His arm shot out much like the figure’s had, trying to find something to hold onto to pull himself free. There was nothing to grab, though, and his arm plunged in after his head. All around him was an almost-wet darkness, cool and tingling against the skin, and then he felt like he was falling.
He thought maybe he felt someone try to grab his foot before all of him was gone—he was pretty sure one of his shoes slid off—and then Ravi Varma was pulled through the gateway.
* * * *
When the alarm went off, Kathy, Rodriguez, and Markham were still in the Plexiglas quarantine room on Subfloor 24. Greenwood had left them there to discuss their options after Rodriguez had retold his story. They’d gone around in circles for hours, discussing the pros and cons, with Kathy and Markham leaning toward going and Rodriguez still vehemently against. It was well after four in the morning, and the conversation had petered out to occasional mumblings some time before. Rodriguez had finally nodded off. Kathy was feeling sleepy herself, and had just closed her eyes when a blaring sound like an air raid siren sliced into the silence. They all jumped, Rodriguez sprawling out of his seat with a small cry.
In between bleats, a mechanical woman’s voice provided instructions. “Emergency. All relevant personnel, please return to subfloor 31. Emergency.”’
“What is that?” Kathy asked, rising. Markham was at the door in seconds, trying to force it open.
Rodriguez picked himself up off the floor with a wince and said, “That…sounds like an alarm. Or, you know, a steel knife through the head. Could be that.”
Kathy and Markham both cast him a glance. Markham replied, “It’s a security breach alarm. Subfloor 31, Rodriguez. It’s the gate.”
The other man’s eyes grew big. “Oh, right. Shit.”
Kathy joined Markham at the door. “We have to get out of here.”
“Working on it,” Markham said, feeling for an edge he could pry open.
“Move over,” Rodriguez said from behind them. They turned to see him with a chair raised.
“Dr. Rodriguez—” Markham began, backing away.
Rodriguez swung the chair at the Plexiglas gate, but it only bounced off, one of the metal legs clocking Rodriguez just above the right eye. It split the skin above his eyebrow, drawing blood.
“Ow! Fuck!” Rodriguez dropped the chair, cradling his eye with one hand. He stumbled to one of the other chairs and flopped into it. “You’re up, Sergeant. I’m out of ideas.”
Markham looked on the verge of saying something, but decided against it.
Kathy turned to the sergeant. “What else can we try? That won’t fail spectacularly like that, I mean?”
Markham was about to reply when the door swung open. For a moment, the three of them just stared at each other. In the next, they bolted from the glass enclosure before the door could close again.
“How…” Kathy watched the slow swing of the Plexiglas door behind them as it returned into position.
“Failsafe, maybe. More likely, another glitch Dr. Greenwood didn’t account for, since usually alarms cause quarantine lockdowns.” Markham shrugged. “As long as we’re out, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get moving.”
They took off for the elevator.
“Will the elevators work if the alarm is going off?” Kathy asked as Markham pushed the Down button.
“All the elevators keep working. They’re on separate circuits. They’re meant to protect and convey employees to safer floors in the event of a crisis,” Markham said.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. The three piled inside and Rodriguez hit the button for Subfloor 31.
“We’re…doing this, then?” Kathy said after a moment of silence. “We’re going through the gate?”
“Looks like it,” Markham said reluctantly.
“Guess so,” Rodriguez grumbled.
“Okay, then,” Kathy replied.