The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 18

  “Sir,” Hind inquired, holding up the object, “what is this?”

  Preoccupied, Tweed glanced over his shoulder and stated, “Transmission amplifier.” He focused on his repairs again for a few moments, abruptly stopped, and looked around at Hind more lingeringly. “You’re not quite ready for that, Mr. Hind. All in good time.”

  Not that again. Hind sighed inwardly, his pride a bit wounded; did Tweed and Quince think he was dense? But he said, “Very well, sir,” and replaced the so-called transmission amplifier into its niche as if slotting it into a machine, the function of which he couldn’t comprehend.

  Tweed shut the panel in the base of the telescope and secured it place with a screw. “Here…have a look through for yourself. It gives one quite another perspective.”

  Tweed shifted aside, sweeping an arm toward the upholstered chair. Hind bent forward and slipped into the seat, positioning himself behind the eyepiece of the telescope. Tweed leaned in close beside him to show what knobs and levers Hind could use to adjust the magnification and focus of the image, and when Hind announced his readiness Tweed turned several cranks to bring Hind in his chair more in alignment with the eyepiece.

  “Good God,” Hind said involuntarily. The focus was already perfect, and he had all he could do to prevent himself from recoiling from the lens with a jolt.

  From afar, he had compared the weave of Those Above to earthworms, intestines, the convolutions of a brain…but up close, earthly analogies failed him. One section of a single tubular extrusion filled his view, unthinkably enormous. Through its gray tissue he could see pale branches like petrified veins, some moving in erratic scrambling spasms. A few of these many-limbed growths had even escaped from within, somehow, and clung to the outside. And a portion of the extrusion within his view was slowly tearing away, would ultimately plummet to the earth below. Already one end of the peeling wedge of flesh was merely tethered by long gummy strings.

  Aware of Hind’s awe, Tweed reflected, “They define us now, Those Above. They have impacted our world, my boy. Redefined our age. Our culture, society – even, for many, our religious beliefs. There is the time Before They Came, and the time After They Came. There is no denying or undoing it – we are too small, too inconsequential, incapable. And so we have learned how to live in the world they have reconfigured for us. But we aren’t to hate them, Hind, are we? Any more than we are to hate other forces greater than ourselves. A mountain, an ocean. Weather. The sun we still revolve around.”

  “What would they really have done to us if we hadn’t stopped their materialization?” Hind asked, not taking his eye from the lens, even though he was leaning into it with such intensity that it hurt the skin across his cheekbone.

  “We can’t be wholly sure,” Tweed said, glancing behind him at the door as if afraid to find it open, with the Brothers Stoke standing just outside glowering in at him. “It’s safe to assume most humans would be destroyed…that is to say, absorbed. But be assured they would not do away with all of us. They are not corporeal in the same sense we are. On our plane, they would still need a trusted minority as useful servants. That doesn’t mean they would love us, but they would take care of us, as a mechanic cares for his tools.”

  “How do you know all that?” Hind asked, removing his eye from the lens at last and turning toward Tweed in his creaking leather seat. There was a pink depression on his cheek like the mark of a giant suction cup.

  Tweed only blinked back at him, his lips in a smile that flickered spasmodically.

  The brass bell awoke his sons, so loud that it roused Hind and his wife as well. They rushed to the boys’ bedroom to find them awake and wide-eyed, but as if they lay paralyzed the brothers hadn’t withdrawn their heads from their blocks of gelatin, afraid to ruin them needlessly and be scolded. Yet Netty helped pull the boys out of the gelatin and smoothed their moist hair, while Hind bent over the dream suppressor on its wheeled cart.

  “Netty,” he said, “let’s switch our cart with theirs so they can go back to sleep. Fetch them new cubes. I’ll take this into our room and make whatever adjustment it needs.”

  “A good idea, dear.”

  And so, while Netty helped the boys prepare to return to bed, Hind sat on the edge of the bed in his own room, hunched forward with a side panel of the brass machine removed, exposing its clockwork innards. He turned a few knobs inside, hoping that would rectify the problem. If not, then he and Netty would have no choice but to sleep that night with their heads in new blocks of gelatin but without a connection to the machine. It was frowned upon to do so, but sometimes unavoidable until a trained repairman could have a look.

  Lately Hind’s own mechanical skills had been broadened, however, so instead of screwing the panel back in place he looked more closely inside the device, curious to see if he could detect a problem that might still prevent the dream suppressor from working properly. If the warning bell rang again, and they once more had to withdraw from the gelatin to make further adjustments, he knew they would have exhausted the last of their gelatin cubes until they could acquire more in the morning.

  Toward the back of the case, mostly obscured by a number of large meshed gears, Hind spied something curious. He tried to squeeze his hand in past the gears but only succeeded in scraping his wrist and smudging grease on his knuckles. Rather than give up, however, he used his tools to unfasten and remove those gears that blocked his way…exposing the object he had glimpsed, and confirming his suspicion. Not that he was any less confused for that confirmation.

  He unscrewed the threaded end of the object from its base, withdrew it and held it before his eyes. It was smaller than the version he had found in Tweed’s tool box, but otherwise identical.

  “Transmission amplifier,” Hind echoed in a barely audible voice.

  The observation and charting room had determined that a fragment of Those Above would drop into a crowded slum that day, and so constables had been alerted to go into that impoverished neighborhood and advise people to leave their homes until the threat was over. Despite this, when the dray horses hauled their load to the factory that afternoon, there was a woman imbedded inside the blubber. Two more horses followed, pulling an ambulance carriage. And catching up behind that was a funeral director in black top hat astride a black horse, breathless from having rushed to join the procession.

  Though he no longer took part in the dismantling and treating of the blubber, Hind had still wandered out onto the loading dock to smoke his pipe and watch. He had caught word of the trapped victim before the wagon drew up flush against the loading dock.

  “Is she alive?” people were either murmuring to each other or else shouting over the heads of others.

  Workers in black rubber overalls moved forward with their cutting implements and set to work. Hind moved closer in an attempt to see, but for now the harvesters blocked his view. Two men in white uniforms from the ambulance passed a stretcher up to the dock, and Hind rushed over to help hoist it up.

  He had just set down his end of the stretcher when the crew of workers parted and several of them surged toward him, carrying a figure between them. Hind looked up, sprang to his feet and backed away a few steps to make room for the ambulance men as they vaulted up onto the dock. But more than that, he had recoiled out of revulsion.

  The woman’s arms were extended and stiff as if with rigor mortis, fingers gnarled as though she had been trying to claw her way out of the membrane that had swallowed her. Both her dress and her skin had been bleached as white as paper, and all her hair had slid out of her scalp, leaving her head agleam like an ivory doorknob. Her eyes, too, had gone entirely white. And yet she was talking…gurgling a stream of words in a liquid voice.

  “…still coming…still coming…closer every day…you’ll see…”

  “Shh,” one of the ambulance men tried to calm her, as he lifted one end of the stretcher upon which the harvesters had rested her rigid form. “We’ll put you in a special bath, dear…we’ll wash this stuff off y
ou soon enough.”

  “Too late for a counter-solution,” snorted a coworker standing close to Hind. “Within the hour she’ll be a statue.”

  “Calcified,” said another worker nearby. “Just like those coral things that grow inside them.”

  But the woman could still roll her head from side-to-side, and she had not stopped babbling.

  “…they’re far away yet, so you can’t tell so much…but you’ll see…you’ll see…every day just a little bit closer…”

  The woman’s head suddenly stopped whipping and her empty orbs seemed to lock right onto Hind. Without realizing he’d made the decision to speak, he raised his voice above the clamor and asked her, “How do you know they’re still coming?”

  She had not stopped thrashing her head because she had met his particular gaze, however, but because the paralysis had spread upward. And yet, hearing his words, she still managed to croak one last utterance.

  “Inside them…we are one.”

  “Why don’t you come to bed, dear?” Netty said, dressed in her nightgown with her long hair hanging loose as she stood framed in the threshold to their small parlor. Hind sat in his worn leather chair smoking his pipe, staring across the room at its twin windows. He had drawn the curtains of them both, however, against the blackness that curtained the heavens.

  “You go without me,” Hind mumbled without looking around. “I’ll join you soon.”

  He sensed her reluctance as she turned away.

  Some time later he crept in to stare down at his sons, their heads submerged in blocks of gray jelly, before creeping into his own bedroom to stand over his slumbering wife. He watched her a long time, saw that her eyes shifted back and forth in an almost regular rhythm beneath their thin lids, like a restless sleeper tossing beneath her blankets.

  “You’re dreaming,” he whispered to her. “What are you dreaming, my love?”

  In the morning, after discovering his gelatin cube undisturbed beside her own, Netty found her husband in his chair in the parlor. “Darling!” she cried, her pretty face alarmed, thinking that he had dozed off here although he hadn’t slumbered for a minute. “Darling, you slept here all night! You know you can’t do that!”

  But he only gazed up at her mutely, his face as pale and unshaven as one of those poor blighted madmen who lived in the city’s streets begging passersby for change.

  “My dear boy,” Tweed said when Hind entered his office that morning. “Look at you – are you ill?”

  After closing the door Hind stood silently for a few moments, unable to formulate words, but then his eyes wandered from the Chief Engineer seated behind his cluttered desk to his mobile tool cart nearby. Hind moved toward this, opened its hinged lid roughly, and withdrew the porcelain-insulated object he had recently handled. Holding it aloft, shaking it, in a hoarse voice he said, “Transmission amplifier? Transmitting what?”

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Hind?” Tweed said, leaning back warily in his chair.

  “Transmitting what, Tweed?” Hind took a step nearer to the desk. “Dreams, isn’t it? Dream amplification. Dream enhancement. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it? That flesh we stick our heads into each night…that unholy communion…those cubes aren’t suppressing our dreams at all! It’s exactly the opposite!” His eyes bulged in their purple hollows. “Every night we’re calling them down!”

  “Hind,” Tweed sighed, smiling tiredly, lower lip shivering, “I told you, you weren’t ready to know everything just yet.”

  “Oh no…none of us are ready to know the truth, are we? How could I possibly ever be ready to know that Those Above are being summoned down here to extinguish us all? Oh…but not all, right Tweed? That’s what you said – that they’ll still need their servants when they come.”

  “Yes, Hind!” Tweed said brightly, as if seeing an opportunity to calm the younger man. “Precisely! The ones who were loyal, who were faithful and helpful, will be spared and utilized!”

  “And I’m to believe I will be one of them?” Hind shouted, his whole frame shaking. “Or the question is, do you really believe you will be one of them? One engineer in one city in the whole of this world? How many of us do you really expect they’ll need? Wake up, Tweed – this is madness! It has to be stopped, for all of us!”

  “Hind,” Tweed said, rising and coming out from behind his desk, “please keep your voice down. Panicking others will do no one any good.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s all about keeping the sheep ignorant. But that can’t go on any longer! We need to do what we thought we were doing all along – we need to suppress our dreams to stop them from coming!”

  “My boy,” Tweed sighed again, wagging his head sadly as if talking to a child, “that was just a story. Don’t you see, now? It’s never been possible for us to keep them out of our dreams.”

  Hind stood gaping. “Good God,” he hissed.

  “Why do you think our leaders cooperate? Because we have no choice…we have no power against them. It is inevitable that ultimately they will fully materialize. Therefore, the best we can hope for is to curry their favor, so that at least some of us will be saved.”

  “We must still try to fight them!”

  “I tell you, it’s impossible.” Tweed shuffled closer, extended a hand with the palm turned up – either asking Hind to give him the transmission amplifier, or to take his hand both literally and figuratively. “Look at it this way, my friend. It will take so long for them to fully manifest in our realm that it probably won’t even happen in our lifetime.”

  “But it will in my children’s lifetime, won’t it?” Hind bellowed.

  “There’s nothing that can be done about that. If it’s any consolation, those who are assimilated become part of their essence. It might even be a blessing…to become one with something infinitely greater than ourselves.”

  “My children would be blessed to be absorbed by those things?”

  “Let me ask you, what kind of life would they live in any other world? Toiling like insects for a handful of decades before they return to clay? At least now they’ll have a kind of immortality.”

  “No!” Hind roared, lunging forward. He swung the clenched transmission amplifier in an overhead arc as if plunging a dagger.

  Tweed staggered backwards, howling, his dislodged spectacles hanging off one ear. The transmission amplifier protruded from his left eye socket, a red wave flowing down half his face. The imbedded mechanical part looked like a miniature telescope, implanted in his skull to enable him to view a new universe of pain.

  The two tall constables who had hold of Hind’s arms – his wrists shackled behind him – walked him down a series of narrow metal staircases, in a brick-walled back stairwell of the factory he had never seen before. Along the way from Tweed’s office to the locked door of the stairwell, through a string of hallways and open rooms, he had shouted to a number of other workers that Those Above were still descending…that the dream suppressors did not prohibit dreaming, but magnified it…and so he guessed they were removing him from the building by an obscure route so that he might not be exposed to any more of the factory’s employees than was necessary.

  The pair of constables who had been summoned to the factory (along with an ambulance to cart Tweed away) did not speak to Hind no matter how much he ranted to them. He told them, too, about the dream suppressors summoning Those Above. About the truth behind the twelve towers atop the House of Parliament. They did not respond. Nor did they answer when he demanded, “What will you do with me? Where is the prison you’ll be taking me?” His rage crumbled into grief and he sobbed, “I have a family! I want to see my family, damn you!”

  But there was still no reaction from the masked peacekeepers. Only the clanging of their boots on the metal steps. The hissing of the gas jets that fed the lamps set into the stairwell’s walls. The deep, ominous rumbling of boilers and external combustion engines on the other side of the brick walls, like the laboring organs of a titanic mechanical entity.

 
; At the bottom of the stairwell he noted two identical metal doors. Just as the three of them descended the last of the steps, one of these doors was loudly unlocked, squealed open, and through it into the stairwell stepped the brothers Alastair and Abraham Stoke. Against the stairwell’s chilly air, for Hind could see his breath misting, the factory’s Masters wore their long black overcoats, though they were without their customary top hats.

  “Tsk tsk, Mr. Hind,” said one of them. As usual, Hind could not tell which. “And you had showed such promise.”

  “Promise for what? Furthering your lies?” he cried, starting toward the twins. The constables gripped his arms more tightly. “Promise for bringing about the annihilation of life on our world that much faster?”

  “This is what has always stood in the way of any kind of progress,” the Stoke brother said, with the philosophical weariness of the enlightened. “Little men who fail to see the big picture. What are you, in whole of the black cosmos?”

  “And what are you?”

  “Part of it, Mr. Hind.” The man smiled, and at the same time so did his double. “Part of it. But there may yet be hope for you in that regard. Hope for you whether you welcome and understand it, or not.”

  This Stoke turned to the other of the pair of metal doors, and slipped a key into its lock. The resounding clunk of a bolt being withdrawn, and then he pulled the door open and stepped over its threshold. After his brother had followed, the constables pushed Hind through.

  When he saw what lay beyond, he said, “No.” But that tiny word was inadequate in expressing his awe. His horror…and terror.

  They were in a basement level, well below the factory. In fact, its subterranean area was so great that he realized it must extend beyond the borders of the factory property. It spread away as far as the eye could see, its limits lost in the darkness of distance. A great cavern, partly natural and partly man-made, its ceiling supported by countless columns – some shaped from stone or built with bricks, others being iron girders. And this cavern contained a sea…a sea of gray, gelatinous flesh, more or less level in a convoluted topography, though composed of knotted coils thicker in girth than the greatest whale. The flesh shined glossily where the meager glow of gas lamps reached it. If one stared long enough, one might detect that the gargantuan extrusions slithered across each other. This accounted for the almost subliminal hissing or rasping sound that filled the cavern, like the rustling of a distant surf.