Into the Dark Read online

  I made my way further across the room. Here and there I could make out what appeared to be stone desks and counters, shrouded in that same translucent material. As I walked, the floor suddenly dropped away behind a stone railing. I attempted to reveal what lay beyond by sticking my light over the edge, but the moment it passed that railing I was plunged into blackness. Whatever was out there immediately drained my light maker and I felt it crumble to dust in my hand. With an oath I snatched it back, threw it to the ground and started fumbling through my pockets for the backup I’d snagged earlier. As I did so, however, I froze. I could see. Not the ethereal green light I’d taken into this place, and I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face, but I could suddenly make out in stark detail the pit in front of me. It was about ten metres deep, and about as wide, falling in stages just too narrow and deep to look like steps to form an unnaturally smooth crater in the centre. In the middle of the pit sat a pedestal, with something resting on the top. It looked like a small, black orb, no larger than my fist, and somehow despite the lack of light its edges shimmered. No, that’s not a mistake, the edges of the perfectly smooth orb shimmered in the darkness. Which I could see in. Believe me when I say I’m as baffled as you are, and staring at it for too long began to give me a headache.

  While my every instinct screamed at me to get the light, get out of the room and get as far from the city as humanly possible, I found myself climbing over the railing and clambering down the ridges of the crater. I can’t quite say if it was the artifact itself or my own curiosity, but it called to me, as though it were a waterskin in a barren wasteland and I were on the brink of dying from thirst. I needed to see what it was, I needed to touch it, to take it with me. In that moment it was everything I had ever desired, and everything I would ever desire. I just needed to take it.

  I took it.

  For a moment everything went black. Blacker. It was already pretty black. Immense pain washed over me like a huge wave, worse than any I had ever experienced. It felt like a team of torturers had gone to work on my every extremity while insects devoured my flesh from within. I was dimly aware of screaming, and had the faintest notion that it was my own, but the pain was such that I felt a total disconnect from my own body. Days seemed to pass in that torturous state, even weeks, I lost all sense of who I was in that dark nightmare of agony. Then abruptly it stopped. I found myself staring upwards at Clara’s face as she shook me. My face stung as though slapped, but the pain seemed so weak by comparison as to be a gentle caress.

  “Clara?” I asked hoarsely, my throat raw from screaming, “How long?”

  Clara looked confused. “Maybe a minute? I ran over when I heard you start screaming. What the hells is going on in here, and why doesn’t my light work?”

  I realised her pupils were completely dilated and she stared forwards, her eyes not resting on any spot in particular. She was completely blind in the darkness, and yet I could see even better than before, as if the room were lit with some inner light. I struggled to sit up and reached down to grab my waterskin so that I could drink deep in order to speak. Something about my body felt strange, but I was unable to grasp exactly what it was.

  “It’s because of-” I broke off as I looked towards the pedestal, still within arm’s reach if I were standing, yet conspicuously absent of any paradoxically attractive sinister orbs. “This crater.” I finished, lamely. Something inside me made me not want to tell her about the orb, or my experience, like a wounded dog just wanting to cower and lick his wounds mixed with the paranoia of a man in possession of a terrible secret. I had no idea why, at the time.

  “Then let’s get out of here, quickly, something feels wrong. Can you stand?” Clara jumped to her feet and started feeling around for the nearest ledge. It looked so odd to my perfect vision that I had to choke down a chuckle and ended up coughing.

  “Yes,” I eventually replied, climbing to my feet, “It’s this way.” I took her by the arm and led her to the correct surface and helped her to climb it. It felt effortless, like I could’ve hefted her up one handed. Climbing the steps to the top felt like a casual stroll rather than a climb. I passed it off as adrenaline from the pain that still echoed through my nerves, but something still felt off about how good I felt. Clara caught up to me up the top, breathing slightly more heavily but not out of breath due to her military training. A climb like that at that speed would normally have had me puffing, I’m no slouch when it comes to fitness, but I have my limits. Or apparently, I had my limits.

  -You were prey, and now you are a predator-

  “What?” I asked, in surprise.

  “What?” Clara replied, confused and still blinded, “Can I get my damned light on yet?”

  “Did you hear… never mind. I think it should be fine once we’re on the other side of the railing, follow my voice.” I hopped over and called to her. Clara hesitantly followed, hands ahead of her to feel her way.

  -It would be so easy to kill her, you know-

  I looked at her, so vulnerable in the darkness. So soft. One push and she might survive the fall but at best she’d suffer broken bones, which would make it easy to just head down and finish the job. It might even be more fun that way, her lying helpless before the kni- What was I thinking? I recoiled in horror from my own thoughts, or at least they felt like my own thoughts. The malevolence within them didn’t feel right but I struggled to regain my composure, to step away from her and take a breath.

  “Dav?” she called, fumbling her way forwards.

  “Here.” I finally called back, and she sighed with relief as she found the railing.

  “Do you have a light? Mine turned to dust when I came down here,” she said, somewhat bitterly. I knew I still had a backup light maker in my pockets, as well as an orb, but I felt somehow reluctant to get them out. I fought through it and passed her my light maker. She immediately activated it and it was like being down in the pit over again. Agony burst through me and I began to scream, I begged for it to stop, for her to shut off the light. An instant that felt like an eternity later, she did, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me back to lucidity. “Dav! What the hells is wrong with you?”

  -Kill her-

  “I-”

  -Make her suffer-

  “I don’t-”

  -Rip her flesh from her bones-

  “NO!” I shouted and pushed her away. Clara recoiled. I could hear mocking laughter from the voice inside of my head, but it receded back into the darkness. I took a breath, “Clara, something’s… wrong. With me,” I said haltingly. “I touched a device down there, and now I can see... but the light hurts so much, and something inside me wants to hurt you.” I looked at her and could see the fear clearly written on her face. She backed away and put a hand on her knife, but blinded I knew I could take her down with ease, even as I was before touching the umbral resonator. Wait what was that thing called? That was new, but there was time to think about that later.

  “So are you going to try it?” Clara asked, her firm voice undermined by the panic I could see on her face. There’s something about being blinded in the dark that makes it hard to control your facial expression, I don’t really know why.

  I forced the darkness back deeper within me and took another shuddering breath. “I think I can control it. I don’t want to hurt you, Clara. Just… keep the light dim, and take my knife.” I took it off and slid it across the ground to her. I figured if I was unarmed, with the pain her light gave me and no weapon she could at least have a chance to kill me before I could get to her. Deep inside me, the darkness laughed at that thought, but I forced myself not to listen to it. Pain ripped into me as she lit the light maker once more, but at a much dimmer setting. This time I could manage it; the pain was nothing compared to the agony I had already experienced. Clara looked at me, still with trepidation.

  “Dav what the hells is wrong with you? Your skin…” she trailed off, and I tried to examine myself. To my eyes in the dark I looked normal, but in the light of her dev
ice, my skin appeared black and smooth, like the orb I had touched. I pulled back, and my flesh returned to its normal pallid fleshy pink.

  “I don’t-” I started to say, but then I realised I did know. I knew a lot more than I should have. “I’ve somehow bonded with the umbral resonator- one of two prototype devices they were working on before they disappeared. They used to be on that pillar,” I gestured over in the direction of the pit, “but now one seems to be part of my body.”

  “You what?” she replied, rightfully thrown by the confidence with which I now spoke.

  “I seem to know a lot more than I should about it,” I replied, “I think when the device killed everyone who worked her it-” I broke off in shock. “...so apparently it killed everyone who worked here,” I noted, lamely. “It absorbed them when they couldn’t bond with it, and I seem to have gained a lot of their knowledge.”

  Clara studied me for a moment, then her pragmatism took over. “So what was this place? And why does the light hurt you?”

  I looked around, my mind filling in the gaps as I took in my surroundings. “This was an experimental lab, they were trying to work out what the umbral resonators did.” I could see them now, scurrying between stations, both the small Jeff-like figures whose names I now knew but had no way of expressing or translating and much taller beings working side by side for hours, discovering the secrets of the universe. The memory came with an overwhelming sadness and I felt myself shed a tear, but quickly brushed it away. “They tried all their usual tests,” which I now realised I knew, that could come in handy, “but it was resistant to everything they tried. Anyone who touched one of the orbs died, fed it more until eventually it reached out and…” I saw that horrible day in my head, darkness flooding out from the stone, seeping into everything, ripping the scholars apart, big and small alike, absorbing their minds, their very souls and consciousness and feasting a second time upon them.

  -They were weak, and delicious-

  I tried not to engage with the voice, the more real I let it feel the more likely I was to break down and lose control. Clara moved to comfort me but in doing so brought her light closer, so I backed off in a hurry. “The light is anathema to it. It simultaneously feeds off of it and is hurt by it,” I informed her, “it made the stone in this room do the same so that it was harder for them to hurt it.” I recalled with memories not my own as the next team of scholars put down the material that now lay beneath my feet while the darkness seethed, kept at bay by the light. “The next team tried to stop it, but eventually one of them got impatient and touched it.” I saw him now, one of the tall folk, clambering over the railing much the same way I had, but with greater ease, while a crowd of the little ones chattered at him, torn between dissuading him and wanting to make notes on the experiment. One of them even held up a device that I now knew could be used for recording images for playback, larger than the one I found earlier, which could only do sound. The part of me that remained myself made a note to try and find one of those later, that would’ve been enough to make my entire trip worthwhile before the whole evil orb entering my soul thing.

  The large figure in my memories made his way steadily down the pit, and after taking a deep breath he placed one massive hand around one of the orbs. His screams began and I couldn’t help but sympathise, having endured that same agony. He didn’t do as well as I did, however, or perhaps he did better, because his body immediately began to twist and expand, tearing away at his neutral clothes and flesh. He grew huge in size, wreathed in shadow, a mass of limbs, mouths and flesh that my mind rejected. “Gods, Clara,” I realised with a sharp intake of breath, “He became the beast from last night.” I looked into her eyes as despair began to fill me, “I’m like him. He is what I might become.”

  -Oh, you will be so much more.-

  My mind was filled with sinister laughter as we stood there trying to process the horror. With effortless ease the creature outside, who I now knew was once the tall being that made that same fatal mistake all those years ago, broke his way through the scholars, howling in pain from the lights but still killing them all where they stood. I dimly assessed that the pain the orb inflicted upon its host was designed to make the light tolerable by comparison, even as his foul flesh smoked. With time he eventually absorbed the light and the room stood in darkness. Newly empowered, he casually made his way out of the room, and I was dimly aware of myself following in his footsteps. Clara called after me and I beckoned for her to follow, recounting to her what I saw.

  The beast found the repository in full working condition. I saw scores of people moving with purpose about the halls, laden with devices or sitting around the fountains conversing lightly in that strange language of pops and whistles. The moment they saw the beast, howling with pain once more as the light beat down upon it, they began to run for the doors. The irony was they might’ve survived had they not, because all the beast knew was that it wanted to get away from the light, and that was in the direction they were fleeing. It swept into the crowd, killing every last one of them in a bloody massacre. I knew that had I seen this before, I would have been losing my stomach, but now I simply watched as my mind played the horrifying images back with a disturbing lack of empathy. As the beast killed it grew stronger. Some of its victims drew weaponised devices to try and defend themselves, but to no avail. The same energy they projected seemed to simply energise the beast further, driving it on the greater acts of slaughter. Finally it was done, the blood of its victims lining the walls, body parts flying asunder, their souls becoming a part of the screaming mass, and he slammed his way through the main doors, out into the central complex. Insane Jeff and his cannons were of no interest to the beast, and he smashed his way past them, damaging the glyph in the process, which explained Insane Jeff’s murderous streak. The beast didn’t need the elevator to escape, leaping from walkway to balcony, clawing his way up the central pillar itself, killing anyone who got in his way in his efforts to escape the light. He smashed his way out of the top, toppling the very spire that rested at its tip and made his way into the city, surely slaughtering thousands in his pained rampage. The memories grew dim the further from the lab we became, internally I theorised that the two devices were somehow linked, as the people slaughtered once leaving the lab were not absorbed into the one that was now a part of me.

  Clara regarded me with concern. “What happened to the rest?” she asked tentatively.

  I thought for a moment, and the information surfaced, courtesy of the mind of one of the scholars, a small man with a name I couldn’t begin to pronounce, father of three and wife to four? I shook my head as the concepts failed to translate before I got distracted. “The only protocol they had for that sort of thing would be to evacuate. Contact assistance, leave the city, flee to somewhere else. Pray that it didn’t follow.” I frowned, the plan seemed terrible to me.

  “That sounds… kind of stupid,” Clara echoed my unspoken sentiments, “run and pray? How does that solve anything?”

  “I agree, but think about it - their weapons don’t work, it only grew stronger from killing them, the lights hurt it but at the same time they made it more powerful still. The world gates were still broken, so they couldn’t just jump away, and as powerful as it was… is… it couldn’t be everywhere at- why are you looking at me like that?” To my surprise, Clara wasn’t looking at me with as much concern as shock.

  “World gates?” she simply asked. My mind spun as I thought of them. In my rush I had barely noticed my own words. I pieced together what I knew.

  “They didn’t even know that much about them in the time my memories now go back to,” I began, “but they knew that the people who lived here weren’t from here.” I saw in my mind years of futile study and experimentation. “The ones who lived here, who made this city and the other ruins, they were the descendents of people who came here and got stuck. From another world. They used the world gates to get here, but once here the gates powered down and couldn’t be started again” T
he implication staggered me. Some scholars used devices that let them look at the stars, and saw what they thought were other worlds, but many of them were dismissed as madmen who gazed into the abyss for too long. I guess they were owed an apology.

  “Hells…” Clara murmured as she likely came to a similar realisation. Not only were we not alone, but who knew how many worlds could exist out there? With a snap though, she became all business once more. “Well, I was thinking about inviting you back to Wusul once we were done, but now I’m certain.”

  “What?” That was a surprise. Hey Clara, I’m now possessed by some kind of evil entity who butchered most of a civilisation that it turns out came from another world… let’s go back to your place. “Er, did you not hear what I said? I’m like that… thing, I could kill you like that,” I snapped my fingers.

  -It would be oh so pleasurable.-

  "Shut up the fuck up, evil voice." I spat out aloud, and it receded. I was getting better at that, thankfully, but I still didn’t trust it or myself.