Spawn of Man (3 page)

Bartholomew again became restless; he now knelt and had again shuffled nearer to Daniel. He seemed eager now to impart more information and Daniel could see in more detail the extent of his self-mutilations. The man had removed his ear lobes and the skin was ragged and livid around the raw wounds.
But how had the patient managed to slice off his flesh without an implement
, thought Daniel?

‘And the entities you encountered gave you the plans and said they were a means to contact them, but you had already achieved this, why would you require the chair, for what other purpose?’

Bartholomew gave Daniel a grim smile, no suggestion of childishness now, and he spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘You know full well the answer to your question, good doctor. You play me for a fool sir. The chair enables the sitter to dissolve the barriers between our world and theirs. Allows them to enter our physical dimension. That’s what they want, that’s what they crave. They are mad with lust for a return to their corporeal state, to be human again and to indulge and satiate their carnal longings. To walk the Earth and to live again. And in return they would invest me with riches and reward beyond my dreams!’

And his voice rose to a shout, the other inmates howling in unison.

Daniel grabbed the bars, his eyes shining with the same ferocity as the inmate now, and the sound of the generator in the other room spiraled to a din, accompanying the wailing from the cells.

Daniel stared down at Bartholomew, the inmate having now dragged himself to the bars, and spoke frantically. ‘Then I shall open the portal and I shall rip asunder the barriers that keep my son trapped in that place and I will bring him back to this world!’

Daniel did not have time to realize something was wrong. The chain was still affixed to the wall at the rear of Bartholomew’s cell, and so restrained he should not have been permitted to reach as far as the bars. Then, too late, Daniel understood why the inmate’s mouth was so bloodied. He saw the manacle’s iron collar still fastened around the inmate’s foot, halfway across the stone floor. Bartholomew had chewed through his own ankle and the task must have taken days, yet Bartholomew had accomplished it secretively and without screaming or fainting. He had then pulled himself to the bars and reached through to grab Daniel’s shaving mirror, before returning to the back of his cell. Daniel gasped, but the noise was cut short as he glimpsed a glint of light reflect off the jagged sliver of glass in the inmate’s hand.              

Bartholomew lunged upwards, thrusting his arm through the bars and slicing Daniel’s throat in one, swift blow. Daniel sank to his knees, his mouth still open in shock, and he faced the demented glare of his assailant. His larynx was ruptured now and his cry issued as a breathless, wet gurgling sound. A thin, red spray coated the bars in front of Daniel, the blood forced from the torn artery at high pressure through the gaping hole in his neck.

Bartholomew’s face was coated by the discharge that was not intercepted by the bars and he grinned wildly as the thin jets covered him. Then he hacked the glass into the side of Daniel’s neck as Daniel toppled to the floor. Daniel’s vision blurred as he pushed himself away from the bars and he felt the warm liquid gushing from his neck in painful pulses. His ears rang as if a bell was being hammered close to the side of his head and he felt like there was a huge lump of stone forced into his throat, restricting his air supply. He scrambled through the open door a few feet away and into the room that held the chair. He felt weak and nauseous and red-hot jabs of pain burst in his temples as he slid and slipped in the blood spreading across the floor around him.

Daniel’s keys had become unhooked from their loop on his belt during the assault and Bartholomew strained to reach them through the bars of his cell. The keys were agonizingly near to his clawing fingers and he giggled impishly as his nails brushed the metal ring that held them, like a thick white spider scurrying after its prey.

As Bartholomew’s remaining index finger nudged the keys again, Mary’s slim hand dexterously plucked them from his grasp as she spat, ‘Imbecile! The doctor will be unable to complete his rounds now. I will have to continue his ministrations. You will be punished for your behavior, you see if you shan’t!’

Mary ripped the electrodes from her head, small geysers of blood springing from the holes left behind. Mary unlocked her cell and strode purposefully to the small table that served Daniel as a stand for his washbowl and where the shaving mirror had rested until recently. Opening the little central drawer, she withdrew the revolver and checked that it was loaded. She turned and aimed the weapon down towards the prostrate figure of Bartholomew.

He began to sob, ‘No, no, don’t kill me! I dare not go to their domain, I…’

Before he could finish the sentence, Mary fired, the shell hitting him squarely between the eyes and exploding a clump of his brain out through the back of his skull.

‘There now, all better.’ She smiled as she emptied five more rounds into his head at close range.

Daniel’s peripheral vision started to blur and he felt the walls of the small room edge closer to him, but with each effort he expended to gain the chair, the thing seemed to retreat further into the distance. The cables that cluttered the floor hindered him, but he managed to draw himself up into a kneeling position and swing onto the chair. He felt heavy now, as if his body had solidified, the muscles and ligaments denser and somewhat immobile. Then he seemed to be melting into the chair, his heartbeat like the pounding of artillery shells, each one finding its target in his chest. He tried to focus, but his mind was vague and it was with a supreme effort that he lifted a hand and threw the generator’s starting lever.

The generator hissed like it was producing steam and static charges flared, localizing around the seated figure of Daniel, and then dancing down the lengths of cables that fed the generator. Blue-green bursts scampered along the bundles of wires, branching off to visit each of the six cells and climbing to the electrodes attached directly to the inmates’ brains. Screams filled the air as tissue was probed, stimulated, and burnt. Nerve endings were ruptured and blood filled the spaces created and brainwave activity was provoked and began to travel in the opposite direction.

Inside the small room, Daniel was barely conscious now and barely aware of the wooden splinters piercing the muscles where his forearms touched the rests on the chair. The fragments adroitly avoided all major arteries, making deep connections within the flesh. The morbid tapestry of the chair’s engraving was now fed with Daniel’s blood, giving the scenes vivid color. The spindled backrest peeled into wooden shoots that penetrated Daniel’s back in small, precise punctures from nape to base, breaching the skin on either side of his spine and seeking the central nervous system. Synchronized arachnid legs of wood sprang from the top of the high back, splaying outwards to close around Daniel’s skull, and began to drill into the hard, dense tissue like medieval brain surgeons’ instruments.

Fingers of energy leaped from a single bronze dish mounted on the generator, crackling and fizzing as they hit Daniel’s skin. Charred patches of necrotic tissue were left in the wake of the bolts as they hurried like miniature tornadoes across his body and ignited his clothes where they lingered. The light fittings began to sway, rotating beams of light around the two rooms, turning the inmates’ agonies into the motion of characters drawn on the edges of a rapidly flicked sketchbook. The generator began to emit a high-pitched screech as the chair began to vibrate. Molecules were disassembled and Daniel seemed to be fused with the chair on an atomic level, the distinction between his flesh and the chair’s timber becoming less defined.

A brilliant, dazzling pure white light blinked into existence in front of Daniel’s face, but his eyes were closed now as the wooden fingers surveyed the matter of his brain. His face twisted into a grimace of pleasure, as his subconscious became responsive to levels of awareness beyond normal human experience and worlds beyond the physical plane. The light rippled like liquid sky in front of Daniel, the edges changing from blue to green to black as the centre began to shimmer silver and blossom outwards like the unfolding of a steel flower. The layers folded and peeled, to be replaced again and again, as the centre expanded until the dimensions of
the phenomenon paralleled the chair.

Although the floating, mushrooming shape was suspended, independent of the space around it, viewed from the front it seemed to possess depth and three dimensions. However, from the side aspect it was razor thin, almost invisible. The light radiating from the interior quivered as if the surface of a lake had been disturbed by something coming out of its depths. The immediate area surrounding the happening began to reek of the stench of deprivation, of the corruption of flesh in all its facets, blood, sex, waste; and Daniel’s eyes flickered as if smelling salts had been passed under his nostrils. An acrid, metallic taste filled his mouth and he heard the pitch of the generator, even though it was beyond the range of human hearing.

The opening at the heart of the distortion warped and buckled as something solid emerged, something stepping from the void into this world. Its tread was hesitant and unsure, like a wild animal testing unfamiliar territory. The limb was moist, dripping with a thick, gelatinous substance like mucus, and it issued a thin vapor as it came into contact with an environment markedly colder than its own. The skin was paper thin, almost invisible, so that the muscles and sinews were visible, working beneath the transparent film as the body parts moved. The remainder of the entity emerged from the opening, and as it did so, it trailed a wet jellied membrane that secreted from the rift and attached to the thing’s body like a placenta.

But the being was fighting to be free of the link and its internal organs and muscles were visibly stretching beneath its sheer skin, as if they were magnetized and resisting the strong attraction of the opening. The thing was seven feet in height and humanoid but it had the shape of something that had deviated from true human form. The torso was wide and powerful, a glistening barrel chest protruding below heavy, rounded shoulders. Its arms were long, lean, bony attachments with four slender talons that dripped the same thick slime that covered the rest of the body, wet and slithering. The legs resembled human limbs down to the knees, the thighs bulky and solid, but then the angle reversed into the contour of an ungulate, like skinned goat legs.

The thing’s head turned to survey its new surroundings and its eyes glowed hot and red, tainted with a fury that was not born of this world. Its mouth opened and stretched wide, as if exercised for the first time, and the bottom jaw dislocated and jutted outwards. The rows of small, pointed teeth glinted in the dimness and from the wide, flaring, flat nostrils came short, deep snorts. Daniel’s hand trembled as he raised it and through the fog of his failing eyesight it looked as if it belonged to someone else. His fingers made contact with the taut, damp flesh of the being, touching its arm as the thing regarded Daniel’s hand. Then Daniel’s hand began to fall limp again, threads of a silvery substance still connecting his fingers to the thing’s arm, hanging like a ghostly grey web, glittering with early morning dew.

The being lifted its glistening skull and tilted it to one side, more of the rheumy matter dripping to the floor like a clump of jellyfish. Its red eyes considered the slumped figure of Daniel and the lip-less mouth spread into the semblance of a cruel, wicked smile that showed vicious teeth like an open wound on its face. A scratchy, dry noise fell from the mouth, like the sound of dead leaves crushed between palms.

And then the thing found its voice for the first time in centuries on the physical plane, ‘You flesh walkers will have hell on Earth, and we will have your life.’

Daniel tried to move but he was dying from his legs up and all he could manage was an approximation of motion, as his head fell to his chest. He groaned and the sound was mournful and came from his soul. The elastic strands attaching the entity to the opening were beginning to shred as it forced itself forward and its arm snapped forward to grab Daniel. Daniel was lifted high into the air, until his face was inches from the thing and its foul breath filled his senses to the point of retching. But he did not possess the strength to empty his stomach and he lolled in the monster’s grip, his legs dangling like a puppet below him as blood still flowed from his neck in a steady stream.

The thing’s tongue unfurled from its gash mouth. It was long and seemed to have a life of its own as it squirmed and darted over the files of blade-edged teeth. The texture was leathery and it forked into a snake-like tip, quivering, as it tasted the blood smeared across Daniel’s throat. Slowly, as if he was lifting a great weight, Daniel’s hand rose to the side of his neck, to where the shard of glass jutted out like a bony protrusion. The thing’s head turned slowly to watch as Daniel grasped the fragment and wrenched it from his neck.

At first the removal of the object resulted in no perceptible change and the monster disregarded Daniel for a moment to look to its rear at the tentacles of slime disconnecting in its wake. Blood swelled at the open wound in Daniel’s neck, like water pushing at a dam, and then surged from the deep hole. It spilled over the entity’s hand where it still gripped Daniel and the thing howled in rage. The sinewy fibers holding the thing to the suspended opening grew taut and began to retract, pulling it and Daniel through the aperture.

Standing at the door to the small room and watching, Mary now moved towards the light, captivated by its beauty. She probed it with her fingers and the play of light became malleable under the pressure of her touch as she wriggled her fingers. She was mesmerized by the way the substance of the rift folded around her hand, like a mouse writhing in and out of her fingers. Small bolts of lightning jumped from the opening and produced an aura around her, a glowing halo that seemed to emit from her body. The aura changed from white, to yellow, to black, and then the opening began to chip and splinter like pieces of a shattered mirror.