Deeper Into the Void (16 page)

Chapter 16

Year 15, Day 41

F
og pervades every square meter of the dome, a nightly occurrence that everyone has almost become accustomed to. The fog infiltrates each building, and each room within the dormitory. As the morning sun strikes the gleaming glass exterior of the dome, the varying colors of the rainbow break apart and scatter through the morning mist and fog. The color-filled atmosphere is heavily laden with the malice of mornings past.

Ghent opens his eyes as his room is cast into deep-blue light. As he sits up, the movement of the air flowing around his body becomes obvious by the microscopic water droplets dancing through the blue light of morn. His heavy eyes close again as he flees before the morning light.

The movement of the morning sun shifts the color of the light as it is cast through his window. Upon reopening his eyes, he is greeted with a vibrant green mist. Outside the dormitory building, the warm sun begins to dissolve the fog. Ghent stumbles into his one-piece work suit. He hunches over his sink; sluggish hands splash cold water over his face. He drags his feet as he moves to the doorway, where he stands, and draws in a deep cleansing breath.

The condensation in the dome continues to collect on the ceiling, droplets begin to fall. The falling rain washes the air, giving it a fresh, crisp aroma. Ghent retrieves his tablet, and he sits down on the steps outside the building. A restful night seems to him more of a positive experience than the mysterious events of days past. These nightmarish episodes are relegated to the back of his conscious mind in this rare blissful peace.

Wandering eyes alert Ghent to an unexpected oddity. While seated on the steps of the dorm, he sets his tablet down beside him and stands up. In his customary and deliberate manner, Ghent steps carefully down through the plaza; placing each foot on the ground carefully to avoid any shuffling. Growing about 20 meters away from the plaza is a small forest of shrubs, vines and smaller trees. The greenery is so thick, it would prevent him from entering into it, or to even see through it. Flowers and blossoms of all shapes and colors decorate the facade of the instantly lush forest before him.

As Ghent draws closer to the flourishing oasis, the sound of small insect wings flapping prompts him to slow his stride; enough so that he can clearly distinguish what it is. Convinced that what he is hearing is, in fact, what he had suspected as being honeybees in flight, Ghent approaches more cautiously.

Ghent leans backward as the intensity of the sound, originating deep inside within the dense foliage, seems to increase steadily with his presence. Rising to stand erect again, Ghent then walks backward, slowly, as more and more of the honey bees start to collect on the foliage in front of him. Thousands upon thousands seem to be landing all around him.

Ghent’s mind settles upon one opportunity he has to get in closer without disturbing these bees any further. The growing agitation of the bees starts to concern Ghent. “What an odd behavior for such a simple animal”, he thinks to himself. Ghent carefully treads back onto the path and without making sudden movements, walks back up the path. All the while, he looks back over his left shoulder.

After attaining a seemingly safe distance between him and the bee colony, probably located within the foliage, Ghent comes to an excited sprint. His destination is the laboratory building, where he has left his pressure suit. Several meters before reaching the laboratory, Ghent stops quite suddenly. After a short pause, he walks very slowly toward the door. His hand, outstretched toward the door, begins to quiver and his resolve wanes. Ghent now focuses his attention on what appears to be a hand-print on the door.

What makes the hand-print noteworthy to Ghent is that it appears to be made with blood. The door is already ajar. Ghent gently pushes on the door to prop it open. Ghent now sees that all of the light bulbs inside the laboratory are flickering randomly, no two bulbs in unison. Walking no further in, Ghent calls out to anyone that might be inside the laboratory. No response can be heard. The distinct sound of Cardiff’s voice captures his intense focus momentarily, drawing his attention over his left shoulder, where she is standing.

The captain had already started jogging across the plaza, over to where Ghent is standing. Upon reaching Ghent, a concerned look crossed her face as she looked over his shoulder into the lab. Ghent turned his head back toward the laboratory as well. To his relief, and conversely his chagrin, the door is clean and the lights are all in perfect working condition.

Ghent points with his other hand, palm up, toward the lush foliage.

Ghent watches Cardiff jog back to the control room. After seeing her leave his immediate sight, he returns his gaze back to the door in front of him. Nothing appears out of the order, not in the least. All of the lights inside the room are working flawlessly, and the print that had been seen by him moments ago was nowhere to be seen; it had disappeared without a trace. He presses in on his temples with his thumb and finger, as if to hold his mind together, literally. Eyes shut firmly; a quick jerk of the head back and forth seems to rescind his feeling of madness.

Walking into the laboratory, Ghent reaches behind the door to grab his suit, and quickly jumps in it. He carefully loads his oxygen container onto his belt, and attaches the air hose to it. Finally, his helmet is twisted on to the neck of the suit, locking it firmly in place.

The rush of the fresh air across his face inside the helmet is a welcome feeling; there isn’t any wind inside the dome.

His black glove reaches for the door, and his boots tread back out of the laboratory. Standing in front of him is Cardiff, all suited up similarly, and ready to walk with him down toward the foliage. The sound of her voice in his earpiece announces to him what his eyes have already discovered; she is ready to get moving.

As the two reach the same point on the path that Ghent had previously reached moments ago, they can both see, in plain fashion, the bees flying around them. The suits obstruct much of the noise of the bees flying around outside the suit; the radios contained inside each of the suits clearly transmit a conversation that would have been difficult to hear without radio communication.

Cardiff takes stock in Ghent’s suggestion, and takes several steps backward to place some more space between her and the bees. She stops moving backward and sits on a rock behind her, watching Ghent work for a moment. Ghent returns to filling his vials with the specimens that he has come to collect.

He already has a bee; he finds a hive after stepping into the dense brush and places a small portion of it into his vial. The bees start to swarm with more vigor than before, and are covering his pressure suit from helmet to boot. His visor is so thickly coated with bees that he has to take his glove and wipe his visor off repeatedly as he steps out of the brush. He then tries to place some distance between himself and the bees, yet again.

A sharp shrill cry over his radio alerts him to the event that he was hoping to avoid by having Cardiff move up the path several meters away from him. Frantically wiping his visor of the bees, he can barely make out Cardiff running down the path toward the pond, trying to free herself from the suit. The suit that had once provided a barrier between her and the bees now traps them in with her. She cannot brush them off of her. As she stumbles over rocks and plants, she tries to free her head from her helmet. Ghent runs after her, dropping his sample vials on the ground as he does.

The shrieking of her pained voice is loud enough in his earpiece to deafen him somewhat. The thickness of the bees covering his suit is diminishing with his speed and distance from the hive behind him. He sees her running still, and passes her helmet on the ground, along with her gloves. A short moment later she manages to free herself from the rest of the suit, jumping out of the boots. After freeing herself, she trips on a rock in her frantic movement, and rolls into the pond with a splash.

Ghent arrives at the edge of the pond, and dives into the pond after her. His suit is airtight and watertight as well. He has never attempted swimming in his suit, but is currently not allowed the luxury of testing it in the water first.

The water closest to the surface is murky, at best. Through his clean visor Ghent can see the effect of the ripples on the surface of the water; the light seems to dance through the murk down to where he is. Ghent looks around him, his movements fraught with distress and panic. He calls out to her, but she is not wearing her suit, so her radio is lying on the beach above.

Above him, movement in a shadow alerts him that she is swimming on the surface, which is now a few meters above him. It looks as though he is sinking with the weight of his gear. Turning around, Ghent can see the edge of the rock face in the water, and he feverishly tries to swim over to it. After some difficult swimming, his glove touches the edge of the rock, no traction is given to his glove in the water, and he continues to slide down the wall slowly. The light above him thins and the rock face becomes less and less pronounced.

Chapter 17

D
rifting quietly through the cold murky depths of the pond, Ghent flings his arms out in front of him as he grasps at the underwater rock face futilely. His steady descent into the dark does not slow. His gloved fingers slide along the smooth rock face. The reverberating waves overhead faintly shimmer through the cloudy water. The sun’s rays penetrate less and less through the thick murky water to him; his black gloves are barely distinguishable against the rust-colored rock only a meter in front of him. In the cool darkness, his hand slips off of the edge of the rock face. Ghent feverishly waves his arms as he struggles against the thick water to swim closer to the wall, which seems to have disappeared altogether. The sensation of falling slowly in the depths is matched only by the sinking feeling in his stomach as he realizes the implications if he cannot return to the surface above within the next hour or so.

As the light above disappears completely, the rate of his descent is indiscernible. His boots come to rest, on what Ghent can only suppose as the bottom of the pond. In the darkness, Ghent realizes that he still has his lamp attached to his belt, and a dimmer light on his helmet. Ghent reaches up to his helmet and switches his head lamp on. The lamp casts light out in a tubular pattern in front of his helmet.

The pressure of what feels like a hand pressing through his suit shocks him, and he turns sluggishly to reach for the source of the pressure. His arms turn and twist in the cold dark depths. Panic surges through every particle in his body, his rapid breaths coat the inside of his helmet in a cloud of water vapor. A moment passes in the dark, a moment which feels to him immeasurable, an eternity of uncertainty. Something smooth rushes by his leg again, a large fish perhaps. The water feels so thick to him, like syrup. This viscous fluid feels like quite a contrast to the near absence of atmosphere outside.

His lamps produce just enough light to make out the rock surfaces in front of him. Lying only a few meters in front of him is a circularly-lit portion of rock. As his helmet moves with his shoulders, he aims his torso down toward the bottom. His boots appear, but are obscured by the sand, disturbed and drifting through the water. Ghent moves his helmet again, this time completely around; the only thing that he can see in front of him is the particles drifting aimlessly through the water. The void in front of him is revealed through in the same tubular fashion. As the light fades off into the distance, the scale of the size of the pond is completely indistinguishable to Ghent. He moves his helmet to his left, and he stops. Several meters in front of him appear what look sort of like fish swimming around in a large vortex, like an underwater tornado of fish.

Their scales reflect the light of the lamp back out around Ghent. Carefully, he looks from side to side in his helmet. Without moving his helmet, Ghent can now see that he is, in fact, standing on a ledge. The ledge upon which he stands overlooks a drop-off, without a bottom in sight. Above him and to his sides appear to be the opening of a tunnel. Presumably the space behind him, where he had been looking a moment ago, is a tunnel into the rock face.

As Ghent turns again to face the tunnel, the end cannot be distinguished in this abysmal darkness. Turning again to look into the void of the chasm in front of him, Ghent returns his gaze back out toward the swarm of fish. The light around him disappears; the fish have disappeared out of the light. Ghent grabs his utility light, which was mounted firmly on his belt, and switches it on as well. The hand-held light offers Ghent more liberty in movement than does his headlamp.

Initially, Ghent rotates the lamp to shine the bright light down into the depths of the pond below him. Once again, the only thing that can be readily seen in the light is just the floating particles in the murky water. Before moving into the tunnel or trying to swim or climb back up, Ghent checks his remaining oxygen pressure on the wrist-mounted gauge. Ghent can see that he still has time, but no good plan to get back up to the surface. Ghent carefully examines the edges of the tunnel, where he is standing, with the hand-held lantern in his right hand. Along the edge of the tunnel Ghent notices something that he did not see before; a single rope dangles down from above, hanging just along the edge of the tunnel.

The rope is well covered in all manner of aquatic life, as is generally the case after something is submerged for a while. After several moments of working toward getting at the rope, Ghent clasps the rope with his left hand and tugs firmly on it to test its steadfastness. The rope remains firmly attached to something far above him. His other hand reaches for the rope, yet something within him prevents this. His attention is inexplicably moved from the lifeline in front of him to the utter black depths below him.

He looks down from the submersed ledge into the abyss below. Intermittently, a bright, flashing light begins to pulse out of the darkness below, illuminating the condensed water on the inside of his helmet. Dozens of meters below, a sheet of white light, suspended perfectly in the depths, glows with an intensity that rivals that of the sun. Its light pierces through the murky mass of water to blind Ghent. Ghent pulls his arm to shelter his face from the blazing intensity below. Flashes of shadow and illumination pulsate across the expansive spaces in the submersed abyss. Several suspended objects become obvious as they cast their shadows through the cloudy water.

As the shimmering spectacle seems to drift aimlessly through the depths, the color from within it begins to change to a deep, blood-red. The decreased intensity of light allows Ghent to look on with perfect clarity. Before his eyes, a long, snake-like creature seems to erupt from one side of this anomaly. The long water-snake moves back and forth through the water. The head is difficult to see, but the overall direction of the snake’s course is not.

Ghent drags himself away from the edge by pulling himself along the outside of the smaller tunnel one handhold at a time. His legs resettle on the bottom and he presses through the thick resistant water.

His glove reaches out to the tunnel wall and rubs the smooth rock, forged long ago in the volcanic mountain upon which they now live. Minutes pass, and his legs continue to trudge through the silt-laden bottom. Ghent focuses intently on collecting every ounce of will and self-mastery in an effort to preclude any further sojourn down the passage, curiosity wins the day as he continues. The upward incline in the tunnel ahead of him seems to be slowing his pace, if only slightly. The light from his lantern strikes the surface above him; ripples on the surface diffract the light and reflect it onto the dry ceiling above. As Ghent ventures further, the surface of the water draws closer and closer to the floor of the tunnel.

Emerging slowly from the water within the tunnel, Ghent’s head lamp shines into the air-filled cavern ahead of him. Ghent pulls his hand-held lantern up above the surface, pointing it in every conceivable direction to determine the size of the cavernous opening.

Condensation inside his helmet obscures much of his view initially as he emerges from the water-laden tunnel. The walls are smooth and glisten in the light of his lantern. Small rocks litter the floor of the cavern. Larger rocks seem to have been arranged around the edges of the tunnel, as if placed there deliberately.

As Ghent pulls his hand-held lantern out of the water, the light shines through the sheet of water, displaced by the ascending lantern. As the light ascends, it scatters a luminescent pattern across the ceiling and walls of the air-filled cavern. After taking a moment to survey the surrounding area, Ghent shines his lantern down the tunnel, illuminating the unforeseen distance.

As the dim light scatters its light back to the flooded portion of the tunnel behind them, the shimmering on the wall attracts his focus. An odd grey substance on the wall attracts his gaze. As he begins to reach for the wall, a sound from his right, further up the tunnel, attracts his attention and he withdraws his outstretched hand.

As a reflex, Ghent shines the light down the tunnel in the direction of the source of the sound. A tumbling rock creates a loud raucous as it rolls down the stone laden incline toward him.

The small tumbling rock slowly comes to a stop in front of Ghent; where he promptly places his foot on it, which brings it to a stop. With the focus of his light fixed upon the rock, Ghent bends over to pick it up off of the stony floor. Just before touching the rock with his gloved hand, Ghent pauses, yet again. Through the top of his visor, a newly arrived figure stands before him.

A silent figure, all light gray and large in stature, stands about eight meters in front of Ghent. Ghent slowly moves his light upward toward the figure. The sound of air rushing in and out of Ghent’s flared nostrils precludes any other sound from outside of the suit from being heard. Malevolent and imposing in appearance, yet amiable in posture, the figure stands motionless. Ghent squeezes his eyelids together to better discern whether or not this figure is simply a rock formation that he had not noticed a moment ago.

Two perfectly rounded pillars appear first with the focus of the light as the focus moves from the floor. As the light continues to elevate in focus, a rounded torso finds the legs attached in a somewhat human form. Further up, two stub arms appear to protrude from the torso at the shoulders. A simple rounded head sits firmly atop the figure. No eyes, no nose, no ears or mouth are visible at all.

The first impression that Ghent has of the figure is that of the figures painted on bathroom signs. As his light remains fixated on the singular figure in front of him, his mind begins to compensate for the experiences of the past days. Ghent thinks back to yesterday; the creature among the rocks by the pond had a very similar appearance to what he is now staring at. Is this a figment of the imagination? Has hallucination claimed his reason? His hands quiver steadily despite his attempt at resolving his fear.

Ghent slowly stands upright, his eyes perfectly fixated upon what stands in front of him. A moment of silent observation shows Ghent absolutely no movement in the figure. Ghent begins to slide his left foot backward, preparing to walk away. Just before he begins to turn around, he notices an exact mirror of movement from the figure as it drags its left foot forward toward him.

No visible response is given to him at all. Motionless, Ghent watches carefully for any mirrored movement from the subject in front of him. Ghent begins the process of walking backward, slowly. His stride is matched exactly by his observer, step for step. Eight meters spacing is exactly maintained through this accurately choreographed mimicry.

The retreat back into the water is finally realized as Ghent’s boots splash through the surface of the rising water. Ghent quickly turns and dives headlong into what he hopes will be his liquid escape. Ghent returns his handheld lantern back to the fastener on the belt, to gain some speed in his swim back to the entrance of the tunnel. Through his helmet, he can hear the faint splashing sound behind him.

The experience is made infinitely more terrifying as it is had in utter black. A dimly lit column of water in front of him is the only indication that he is not about to collide with the edge of the tunnel and succumb to whatever fate might await him. His heavy breathing begins to fog his visor again, obscuring the view of walls and floating particles as Ghent struggles against an absolute fate.

A struggle within him to fight off the paralytic, yet energetic fear overwhelms Ghent increasingly. A hope beyond hope appears in the distance through the water droplets forming on the inside of his helmet, once again the rope dangles in front of him.

A single grasp of his hand secures Ghent’s ascent. A jolt of uncontrollable energy renews Ghent’s strength. Ghent climbs up the rope, hand over hand, never looking back down below. Above Ghent, the sight of small rays of sunlight seem to penetrate Ghent to his core, warming him with the prospect of escape from a terror, real or unreal as it may be, it is still terrifying. Coming up to the shallow end of the pond, Ghent grasps the end of the rope as it is anchored about two meters below the surface. The slope of the incline is welcoming enough for Ghent to climb up and emerge out of the depths of blackness below.

Crawling out of the pond, Ghent grabs his helmet with both hands and twists it off, and then he throws it off to the side, as if the helmet embodies the struggle which he had just overcome. Several full refreshing breaths are enough to reassure Ghent that he is not dreaming. He would prefer that he had been. Ghent’s increased pulse and increasing desire to vomit reminds him that he needs to invest some more time in exercise.

Ghent lies on the beach, on his back looking up at the mid-day sun, grateful as he had never supposed he might be, to be back on the surface of Mars again. The sun’s faint warming rays seem to press against his skin with the comfort of an utter relief. Large bubbles of air rip through the stilling water, rushing to the top. The surfacing of these bubbles once again compels Ghent to rise to his feet.