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I wake in the early hours and hear scratching, and moaning, and the secretive whisper of something brushing along walls. When this happened before, Margot and Ray were still my friends and staying with me, and I believed their lovemaking to be the cause of the sounds. Trying to keep quiet for my sake, the height of passion took away their caution. The scrape of fingernails against a wall. The steady touch of bedding shifting somewhere beyond my room. Their groans, low and long as if such ecstasy could last forever.
––––––––
This time, I know the noises aren’t caused by them, because Margot and Ray left three days ago. I suspect I’ll never see them again. They became worried about what we were attempting to do, though I think their fear is misplaced. I think they’re cowards.
I lie awake and listen, trying to place the sounds and figure out their source. They seem to be originating from inside my head as well as without, as if dreams can have echoes. I suppose they can. All this has happened because of a dream I had so many years before, a fervent desire that inspired and invigorated the three of us to try things never before imagined. That’s me: the dreamer. I was the driving force, the passion, though they were the ones with the knowledge. We all had to give something, and I was happy to be the guinea pig.
Another scratch. A deeper groan. I can’t yet understand what the noises mean, but in that cool, motionless darkness I realise that the time will soon come when I do understand. They’re clearer now than they were last time I heard them. Clearer, louder, and closer.
It’s working, I think, and the one thing I cannot do is open my eyes. Even in the dark, I fear that I will see.
––––––––
“Don’t mind him,” Margot said, “he’s just being a prick.” I saw the look she threw Ray when she said it, and the brief flicker of some complex expression on his face. Part of it was annoyance, part excitement. I knew some of what he was feeling. Margot and I had been engaged until three years before, and I understood more about her than he’d ever know.
That’s what I liked to think, at least. In truth, I believed our work was tearing us apart even on the day I slipped the ring on her finger. Ray wasn’t so invested. He was here, he was helping, but he wasn’t touched by what we were trying to do. For him, this was all about money and fame, his future and not anyone else’s.
“All I’m saying is, I think you need to be careful,” he said. He took another long swig of red wine. He drank it from half-pint glasses, and he’d already put away a bottle during dinner. “Your vitals always look weird after a dose, and that effect is growing.”
“Maybe the instruments are on the blink,” I said. “I’m feeling fine.”
“You sure?” Margot asked. She leaned forward in the armchair and touched my knee. Ray bristled at the contact, and I hoped I didn’t display the satisfaction I felt at his discomfort.
“Yeah. Fine. Better than ever.” I stood and paced the room. It was a big living room, far too large for just the three of us. Two sprawling L-shaped sofas, three armchairs, a slew of floor cushions, a massive TV affixed to one wall, and a fireplace I could walk into and stand up straight. The place slept twenty people in eight bedrooms, but we’d needed somewhere this big for all our kit and instruments.
Besides, it was out of the way and hidden from prying eyes. Grand House had its own mile-long driveway and couldn’t be seen from any neighbouring roads, yet the nearest town was an easy walk away.
“It can’t go on like this,” Ray said. “It’s not fair to us. We agreed right from the beginning, if something’s looking off, we pull back and reassess our methods.”
“Nothing’s looking off,” I say.
“What the fuck do you know?” Ray snapped. He shook his head, sighed. I was used to him playing the “what do you know?” card. “Neil, I can’t in all good conscience sit here and agree that nothing’s wrong.”
I leaned against the fireplace. I stared into the big mirror hanging above it, offering a wide vista of the room behind me. They were both staring back at me. Margot ran her finger around the top of her wine glass. I had a sudden, unbidden memory of making love with her, the noises she would make, and I looked away in case my eyes betrayed it.
Something whispered deep within the stones of the chimney stack. I froze, head to one side.
“Neil? Did you hear me?” Ray asked.
“Huh?”
“I said I think you should see a proper doctor. I’m not comfortable with this anymore. I never finished my training.”
“You’re an almost-doctor,” I said. “This is an almost-experiment. So what are you afraid of? Losing me, and losing your payday?” I turned around, daring a reply from them both.
Ray sighed. Margot shrugged and said nothing. The walls whispered in agreement.
––––––––
I sat back in the recliner while Margot prepared the next shot of our strange elixir.
She was the genius of this team. She knew it, I knew it, and Ray sure as hell knew it, too. Her work in nanotech medicines should have propelled her into the higher echelons of twenty-first century scientific achievement. When she and I were together, before Ray came along and our plans grew, she’d talked about it often. I understood some of it, but not much. Perhaps that was why we grew apart.
“More magic juice,” I said, wincing as the needle pricked my arm.
“It’s not magic.” She concentrated as she depressed the plunger, glancing up at the screen beside the chair and down again at the hypodermic. Ray sat in the next room monitoring my reactions to the injection, and there was a constantly open channel between us and him. I could hear him humming.
“When do you think it’ll start working?”
Margot withdrew the needle and dabbed the bubble of blood. She bent my arm back and patted it, telling me I should keep it there. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know. She’d put a hundred needles in me over the past twenty days.
I hated it when she was like this, so immersed in her work that she hardly heard me talking. It was just about the only time she and I were alone now, even though Ray could see us on his screens and hear every word. She acted like I wasn’t here.
“Margot,” I said. She wheeled her chair back to a table and tapped at her laptop.
“Soon,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. “Ten minutes and you can do the tests.”
I lay back in the seat and tried to feel the new stew of nano-bots streaming through my blood. There was nothing, even though several times I’d convinced myself that I could feel them pulsing towards my brain, implanting themselves there, setting to work. Margot would smile indulgently, and Ray would tut and shake his head.
I wasn’t stupid, but I wasn’t them. I was only here because I’d once loved Margot, and started us along a path I could not quit.
Who wouldn’t want to be a superhuman?
I listened and looked, and heard and saw nothing different.
And then Ray called me into another room, and he started running through the same test procedures we’d been using for weeks, and everything began to change.
––––––––
In the morning I open the back door and stand once again on the threshold.
It’s been three days since Ray and Margot left, and I have yet to go outside. The house is set in several acres of land on the shallow side of a valley. The landscape is beautiful and wild. I see the regular quilt-work of fields in the distance, but closer to the house there is woodland, expanses of heather and scrub, and a rocky slope leading up the valley’s opposite side. There is no sound of humanity. Even occasional vehicles passing along the narrow country lane a mile away are mere whispers, their engine sounds swallowed by the stone wall and hedge bordering the road.
And yet I hear. I hear more. Between breaths, something else comes in. It’s a distant whispering, scheming intelligences hidden in the sunlight, languages I cannot know riding the breeze across the countryside. On the day Margot and Ray left I tried to replicate what these strange noises were, and I saw Ray’s face as he recorded my impersonations. He looked cold in a warm room. He looked chilled.
They are much louder when the back door is open.
I take one step outside. My foot crunches on the gravel path, and the whispers instantly fade away to nothing. Even the breeze drops, a held breath. I hear my own breathing, and it’s not the comfort it should be.
I take another step and the whispering begins again, louder, closer. It’s an agitated babble, an excited susurration. I back up immediately and slam the door closed, and through the heavy old wood I can hear those noises joining the breeze, shushing through the house’s old eaves.
They sound disappointed.
I pace around the house, examining the detritus of our time here. I have been in limbo since they departed, trying to persuade myself that it’s all part of the experiment, an intentional abandonment to help advance the progress we’d been trying to make. But I can’t convince myself of that. I saw Margot’s fear when she left, although she seemed averse to telling me. Ray couldn’t even face me.
In one of the big house’s downstairs bedrooms, the two single beds are pushed aside to make room for a table bearing all manner of recording equipment. At its centre is the simple digital dictaphone I used.
––––––––
“You’re hearing more,” Margot said, and she was the most animated she’d been for several days.
“Well...”
“There’s nothing here. Ray? Is there anything here?” Ray sat at a desk weighted down with audio equipment, spectrographs, and frequency modulators.
“There’s always something here,” Ray said. “You know that. The air’s full of sound, we can only hear things in a narrow bandwidth. Above that, below, there’s always more.”
“Whole new worlds of sound!” Margot said, staring at me as if I was suddenly something new. “So describe it to us. Tell us what it is.”
Whispers, I thought. I was troubled by what I was hearing. “I’m not sure I can,” I said.
“Mimic,” Ray said. “Use a microphone and a recording device, listen, try to repeat the sounds you’re hearing.”
“Will that really work?” Margot asked.
“Surprisingly effective, sometimes.”
Margot nodded and turned back to me. “We’ll leave you alone. You listen, and record. We want to hear. I need to hear!”
I knew very well that if these experiments succeeded in opening my ranges of hearing and sight, Margot would be the next one to undertake the course of injections. I was pretty certain even then that Ray wanted nothing to do with it. When he was drunk he talked about fucking with nature, but the lure of crammed bank balances and fame was strong.
“I’m afraid,” I whispered. Beyond the room, something responded to my whisper. It sounded amused.
“Afraid of what?” Margot asked.
I wasn’t sure how I could tell her. It would have been like explaining fear of the colour red to a blind person.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the dictaphone against my chest. “We’ll wait in the kitchen.”
Margot and Ray left me in that room, alone with the whispers. I listened for a while, head tilted, brain struggling to decipher sounds it was never built or meant to hear.
Then I turned on the machine.
––––––––
Around midday I see the first of the shadows. I’ve been expecting it. In a way, the expectation has been worse than the reality. Margot would bemoan the fact that my vision seemed unchanged by the experiment.
Now, I wish she was here with me again.
I’m standing at the open back door in the cottage’s kitchen. The garden is large and nicely landscaped, with a climbing frame for kids, a barbecue area, and several paved patios for seating. The sun blazes down. The valley is deserted, save for me and the whispers that conspire to draw me out.
I see the shape dancing beneath a tree.
I blink, frown, shield my eyes from the sun, and look again. It’s like a smudge on my vision, a blot in my eye. The tree branches hang low, and although the air here is still, the branches move as if disturbed by a breeze. Birds take flight. Several dead leaves fall, or perhaps they’re shed by a squirrel hidden away in the tree. It’s too far away for me to make out clearly, but the dancing figure I saw has gone. Just branches. Shadows.
As I turn away the whispers come in again, louder and closer than ever before, and in their alien tongue I hear mockery at my disbelief.
I slam the door and run through the house, seeking the false solace of my room. On the way to the staircase I pass the small second kitchen where Margot kept her concoctions locked up in the fridge. I still haven’t cleaned up the mess. She smashed every container, poured the fluid into the sink, splashed it up the walls. She followed it down with a gallon of bleach, and the stink still burns my nostrils.
Perhaps I’m lucky they didn’t consider doing the same to me.
I reach my small bedroom and slam the door behind me, sitting on the edge of the bed and expecting the whispers to follow. They keep their distance. Even the silence is loaded now, and I imagine great things poised to shout so loud that their voices will crush me down.
I know I’ll have to leave soon. If I want to retain my sanity, I need to make it to the nearest town and ask for help.
The thought of walking along country lanes and hearing them all around drives me almost to tears, and I curl up on the bed. Even though for now they are silent once more, I wish the voices would let me sleep.
––––––––
“Hairy bastard.”
“I can’t help that. It’s natural.”
“Not for everyone. You’re less evolved.”
Margot rested her head on my chest. I could feel her heavy breath on my sweat-dampened chest, feel the dampness of her against my thigh. We’d made love twice, and I was already considering whether I could manage one more before we both fell asleep. She had that effect on me. It was love, but it was also a deep, passionate lust.
“Maybe you could evolve me a bigger cock.”
“I wish.” She propped herself up on her elbow and turned to look at me. “You have no idea, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“How it works.” I liked her when she was like this. Her cheeks and thighs ruddied from my stubble, long hair sweat-dampened against her forehead, pupils dilated, she was approximately fifteen times more intelligent than me, and I loved it. I knew a lot of men who’d shrivel beneath such intellect, metaphorically and literally, but I found it a massive turn-on. In truth I did understand a lot of what she said, just not to the depth and degrees that she did. Sometimes she lost me, and if that happened I’d go along for the sound of her voice, the denseness of her passion.
“I mean, we’ve essentially halted human evolution. There’s no survival of the fittest anymore, not for humanity. Imagine if we had to hunt food in the dark, and those with better eyesight survived and procreated more? But we have supermarkets and food dumped on our doorsteps. What if bats carried a deadly plague, and we had to listen out for their high-frequency calls and hide from them? Those with that hearing ability would survive and pass it on to their offspring. But we’re cosseted in our four walls. Given medicines to cure things that should really kill us. Weaklings are helped to survive, and—”
“Weaklings?”
She shrugged. “You know what I mean. There’s no natural selection anymore. We’re all selected. We’ve stopped evolving because we think ourselves already perfect.”
“And we’re not?”
She reached down and grabbed me. Grunted in disappointment. Arched an eyebrow.
“Give me time,” I said.
“We should do it. We’ve talked about it long enough. I’ve tried the formula on mice, rats, apes.”
“Apes? I don’t know—”
“Ray said he’ll help.”
“Ray? He’s a prick.”
“I like him,” she said. “And besides, he’s the best tech guy I know. He’s got more stolen equipment in his basement than NASA. Apple would pay for some of the shit he’s designed and developed just to amuse himself.”
“If they did, he’d have sold it to them.”
She started squeezing, kneading. “Yeah, he’s all about the money, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t brilliant.”
“He’s worth a fortune already. Why would he...do...this?”
Margot wasn’t answering anymore. She was smiling. “I do believe you’re ready to go again.”
I smiled. “Survival of the fittest.”
––––––––
I haven’t been injected for three days, but it seems that Margot’s theories on dosage and continuity were wrong. She always believed that my body’s natural defences would attack the alien compound, and that would necessitate introducing more on a daily basis. It targeted my hearing and sight, its pre-programmed purpose to open up my abilities, expand and broaden them. It worked on my sensory organs, nerve receptors, signal transference, and also the parts of my brain given to translating such information. An artificial evolution, she called it. In her eyes, she was allowing those two senses to achieve their full potential, but they would always revert. I would be given a glimpse at something greater, hear a wider spectrum of sound. The effect was never meant to be permanent.
She was so wrong. The abilities are expanding and strengthening, not fading away. I have never felt so alone, yet the more time goes by, the more I begin to understand that I am surrounded. The things that surround me, though...I have no wish to know them.
I have to leave this place. Perhaps closer to other people, the effect will wear off. Maybe I’ll even find Margot and Ray again.
I’ll try to tell them it was all a joke.
––––––––
It was as if the whispers I heard—those guttural, harsh croakings of things mostly unseen, in languages we were never meant to hear—channelled themselves through me. That was the only explanation I could give. Left alone in that room, I did my best to relay the things I was hearing in my own voice. At first it was like singing someone else’s song, and I felt quite ridiculous, trying to remember the sounds and cadences, the tones and feel of those strange voices. Speaking into the dictaphone, I sounded like a dog making strangling noises, or a child attempting to feign a deep voice.
Then something strange happened. As I spoke, I heard those real voices in my ears, muttering their strange tones as if coaching me. I continued for a couple of minutes, then hit ‘stop’ and dropped the dictaphone onto the table.
The voices receded, leaving behind the echo of a soft, knowing laugh. It took a while to fade, and even when Margot and Ray came back into the room, I could hear the dregs of those strange sounds.
“Done?” Margot asked.
I nodded down at the dictaphone. She picked it up and pocketed it.
“Mind if me and Ray...?” She gestured at the door, then the two of them left me there without waiting for a reply.
What happened next was the first instant I began to comprehend just how fractured my relationship with myself had become, now that I was hearing and seeing more. I began to realise that I was not only hearing higher and deeper tones, or seeing a wider band of the spectrum. I was hearing further. Seeing deeper. Something about what they’d done to me had shifted my reality, or moved reality around me.
More things were making themselves known to me.
A couple of minutes later I heard their raised voices. Ray was crying, wretched, wrenching sobs torn from the heart of him. Margot was shouting, sounding both startled and vulnerable. I knew what they had heard, and a perverse part of me was glad. I didn’t want to be the only one.
She stormed back into the room, kicking the door open as if ready to attack me, but then just standing there, staring, and it was the utter fear in her eyes—the fear of me—that upset me the most. She remained in the doorway, ready to run at any moment.
“What have we done?” she said.
That night they left. I thought perhaps they’d gone out to discuss the experiment, leaving the confines of the house, and that they’d return in a few hours. But they had abandoned me. I tried to follow, but couldn’t. Each time I left the building, those voices assailed me more, singing terrible songs that would drive me mad if I heard them a moment longer. They sang and sang.
Trapped with myself, I was becoming a stranger.
––––––––
I know now that I have no choice but to leave. They’re getting closer. If I lie down I hear their whispers, starting far along a wide, empty corridor and then drawing closer, louder. It’s only when I sit up that they dwindle away. I wonder what would happen if I didn’t sit up.
It’s dawn when I decide to leave. I stand inside the back door for a long while, peering through the side window and searching the landscape for shadows that are out of place. There are none that I can see, but even that disturbs me. It means that they’re hiding.
I close my eyes and press my hands to my ears. I wish I was the old me, I think. I wish I couldn’t see and hear more. I wish Margot had never been so clever, and Ray so cynically brilliant. In comparison I was merely their lab rat, and they’ve left me alone to suffer now that they’ve finished with me.
Now that they’re afraid of what they’ve done.
I wish like all the best lab rats, they’d put me down.
Opening my eyes, taking my hands from my ears, I see and hear them as soon as I open the door.
They can’t touch me, I think. They won’t hurt me. It is fair reasoning, because I am seeing and hearing things that are always there. The experiments have changed me, not my surroundings, giving me the ability to perceive realities that humans aren’t supposed to know. That does not mean that they will now hurt me. Maybe they’re pleased to be seen. Perhaps those whispers I hear are songs of joy.
I cross the gravelled area and approach the long driveway. In my determination to leave, my senses become unguarded, and the world opens up around me. Birdsong fills the air, and I hear the differing tones, the deeper meanings. A breeze rustles through the trees, carrying rumours from afar. Sunlight dapples the distant valley sides. Its journey is over, memories of deep space splashed like foam across a seashore. I see and hear new realities and despair at my inability to understand.
I am two hundred feet from the house and moving away. This might work, I think. If I find them again, perhaps they’ll see that their fear was misplaced.
I pass through the gate that borders the property and out onto moorland, following the rough lane up towards the road. That’s when the whispering begins.
A breeze first, then a more sibilant harshness, inside my head and beyond. My blood runs cold, my skin prickling with goosebumps, because I have never heard them sounding so angry. Yet I have done nothing wrong. If they dislike my new abilities, then let them come and tell me why. I cannot remain alone in that house forever.
I walk on, pressing my hands over my ears. That only serves to trap the voices inside. Their strange words echo around my mind, leaving a corrupt trace of themselves wherever they touch.
I see the first of the shadows as I round a corner in the road. It hunkers down in a field behind a hedge, defying the sun, pulsing like a living thing yet surely not. Surely.
I freeze, shifting from foot to foot as I try to make it out. It is difficult to discern properly. Whichever way I look, however much I shield my eyes, the shadow seeks to dazzle me with refracted sunlight. I move closer, and suddenly the whispering in my head changes from angry to mournful. Still tinged with darkness. Still alien.
I see Ray’s body splayed on the ground beneath the shifting shadow. My breath is stolen from me. He’s on his back, eyes open as if staring at the thing above him.
It is wan and grey, and other colours of dark infinity I cannot understand. It is connected to Ray in a dozen places by long, flexing limbs. It seems to be dead as well, although I’m not sure these things comply with any distinction between alive and dead.
Fifty feet beyond it, another shape sits beneath an old oak tree. It is a similar shape and colour. I don’t want to see what lies beneath it, because I already know.
“No,” I say. “Oh, no. No.” My voice seems to stir the attention of other things more distant and still unseen, because the whispering gathers pace and volume. I’m driven back by the words, stumbling over my feet and sprawling in the lane. I scrabble backwards, keeping my eyes on the things I should not see as they pulse and whimper above the bodies of my two dead friends.
I turn and run back to the house, herded by screams and screeches, shoved by shadows when I dare to glance back. I realise with a terrible finality that these things do not want to be known.
And now, I’m the only one who still knows.
––––––––
Back in the house with the doors shut and the curtains drawn, I stagger into the large living room and lean against the fireplace, head hung, tears spattering the old slate hearth.
Outside, they have gone quiet. They know they have me.
I look up into the big mirror and see movement, and for the briefest instant I think Ray and Margot have come back. Their deaths are a mistake, as is the experiment. I’ll get over it. With their help I’ll get better, and we’ll move on without ever revealing what we did here.
Then I see the thing standing close. I can feel it behind me, exerting a terrible gravity on my life and my soul as they surely do to every man, woman and child. Dark strings lead from around and within me, rising like quivering tentacles and meeting eventually in that monstrous puppeteer’s hands.
Though I close my eyes, I will always hear its dreadful, intimate voice.