Light Shaper (49 page)

He found himself on the porch of the house. He had not thought he would arrive so fast, but now that he was in front of the door, Rigel felt the irresistible urge to open it. Just a crack. Just to see what was inside. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, and when Rigel peered in, he was slightly disappointed to see nothing out of the ordinary. He stepped all the way in and closed the door carefully behind him. There was a completely normal living room just off to his left and a wooden staircase straight ahead leading to the upper floor. Nobody inside the house, though. Rigel’s careful footsteps creaked on the wooden floor.

A scream shattered the illusion of normalcy as quickly as if somebody had flipped a switch. Rigel gasped and crouched instinctively, half-expecting to see something terrible coming down the staircase. It had been a woman’s voice, the cry horribly drawn out and ragged as if she were screaming her throat raw. When a few seconds passed without another one, however, Rigel stood up and advanced cautiously in the direction of the stairs. The noise had come from above, right where the light was glowing. He did not want to head up, but again he felt that insistent pressure on his mind, like a wordless whisper to keep going, always forward. So he did.

He was almost at the top of the stairs when the horrible scream reached him again. It came from somewhere on the right, and it sounded muffled, muted somehow. As Rigel reached the landing with every sense on high alert, he also began hearing something else, much softer. The same voice that had shouted now whispered things. It was sobbing, choking over the words.

Oh God. Please. Please… oh God. Please—

“Hello?” Rigel called tentatively, walking into the room where the sound was coming from. The place was completely bare. It was just a polished floor, two white walls, with the third wall being a ceiling-to-floor window overlooking the grassy plain. The fourth wall was solid metal. The whispering was coming from behind the metal wall, as well as a bright red light. “Are you okay?”

Please… please, God….

Up close he saw that the wall was actually two distinct metal plates, one of them with a handle, like the door to a gigantic walk-in freezer. The light coming through the cracks was growing in intensity, almost painfully bright.

Rigel knocked on the metal. “Hello?”

Nooooooo!

The scream was immediate, even more horrible than the others. Rigel stumbled backward as something on the other side slammed itself against the wall, making the entire thing shake.

He could hear the person inside walking back and forth, back and forth. The sobbing intensified, and it began to hint at horror he did not want to see.

Rigel tried to turn around, to walk away from that awful room.

Instead he took a step forward.

He saw himself reach with both hands to grab hold of the heavy-looking handle on the metal door. He did not want to do it, did not want to open it, but at the same time, he realized he… did. As if something had planted the desire in his mind.

He pulled. The door was very heavy, and he instinctively flinched from pulling any harder with his hands so as to not injure himself. Then he realized that in this reality he was healthy, and he stiffened his hold and gave the door an even harder yank. The thing creaked. The incomprehensible muttering and sobbing on the other side stopped for an instant but resumed at once.

It’s the eyes. Those awful eyes, they….

Rigel strained against the door and felt it give. He braced his feet against the floor and pushed with all his strength.

The door swung open, revealing—

Noooooo!

Something pale launched itself at Rigel through the opening, screaming horribly, a blur of whipping hair and grasping fingers amid the blinding red light. Rigel cried out and raised his hands to protect himself from the attacker and only barely managed to grab her wrists.

He realized two things then. One, the attacker was a woman, completely naked and with the wild face of pure madness. Her skin was splattered with blood, and bits of her hair had been torn out. Two, in the glaring light that illuminated the chamber behind her, Rigel saw a couple of corpses. They looked like they had been clawed open by a rabid beast. There were still bits of bloody flesh clinging to the underside of the woman’s disturbingly long fingernails.

The woman seemed blinded by the bright light at first, but she blinked bloody tears out of her eyes and managed to focus on Rigel. Their eyes met.

No.

She struggled against Rigel with inhuman strength, wicked fingernails scratching at air less than a centimeter from his face. She was gaining. And judging from the corpses, she would gouge his eyes out first.

A fingernail found purchase on Rigel’s forehead and sliced through the skin like it was tissue paper. Rigel felt an all-too-real stab of hot pain and felt himself weaken. He panicked.

“Stop!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Back off!”

He spoke the words and felt their power, and there was a sizzling sound along with the disturbingly familiar smell of burning flesh. The woman stopped struggling and screamed again—but in pain this time.

The braces covering Rigel’s hands were glowing orange like the sun at dusk. And where his hands touched the woman, her flesh was melting.

Rigel let go of her with a cry of surprise. The woman backed off all the way inside the horrible room with corpses and slammed herself against the wall, staring at Rigel’s hands with complete terror, seemingly unable to look away. Then she started shaking. She glanced briefly to the side, appeared to see the corpses for the first time, and screamed again as she grabbed chunks of her hair and pulled hard enough to tear one clump in her right hand off by the root.

She rushed out of the room again, past Rigel, and sprinted straight at the gigantic window to the left. She did not even slow down. Her body hit the glass with terrible force, and the entire thing shattered in a shower of deadly slivers that fell out of the house, hitting the grass below at the same time the woman crumpled on the ground when her body slammed against it.

Rigel saw the others then. More people, men and women, most of them wearing uniforms he had seen before. They had come out of nowhere and were now approaching the house with inexorable slowness. Rigel counted twenty-seven of them before they stopped all around the corpse of the fallen woman.

They looked up, straight at the window where Rigel was still standing in motionless shock.

Their eyes….

Rigel wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. He felt the same compulsion he had already experienced before, fighting against what he wanted to do, forcing him to stand there and look.

He shivered in terror and stared. Their eyes were misty, the irises gray and sightless with no hint of a pupil but still strangely, incongruously fixed on him. He stared into their depths and saw that the gray in each of those eyes was swirling slowly, almost lazily, like thick fog disturbed by the passing of an animal. He felt the cold radiating from them. It was the unmistakable echo of the unnerving sensation he had already experienced in the darkness of the ancient compound as he had descended deep underground. It was the mark of that thing that he had half seen standing over Misha’s body in her bedroom. The shadow.

Then he recognized one of the figures standing there, as if in answer to his thought, one of the few not wearing a uniform, and a cry died in his throat.

“Misha?” he asked, but his voice was not even a whisper.

She did not react, but Rigel knew it was her. An emaciated, corpse-like version of his friend and flatmate was staring up at him with the same cold and swirling eyes as the rest of the people below. Something brushed against Rigel’s consciousness then, the faintest hint of an idea, and crushing certainty confirmed the fact that Misha was already dead.

All of them had grouped around the fallen woman in a perfectly neat semicircle, and none of them looked down or exhibited surprise when what Rigel supposed was already a corpse began to stir. And stand up.

It took her a while, but it didn’t matter. Rigel was rooted to the spot. When she finally looked up at Rigel, she had the same empty eyes as the rest of them. The air around her shimmered, and suddenly she was wearing skintight black clothes that Rigel recognized. He had seen her before, only he had not known her without them.

“Diana Herrera?”

The assassin gave no hint of having heard, simply stared up at him along with all the others, devoid of expression and yet somehow still conveying more than just that terrible cold. Their eyes were hatred. Emptiness. Hunger. And they were all of them dead.

There were now wet dragging noises coming from the awful room on Rigel’s right where Herrera had been trapped. Rigel could not look, but it sounded as if those two corpses were struggling to stand up.

He tried to move his lips. He couldn’t. And now those below and those in the house with him were moving closer. Rigel started to feel his mind fog up, growing numb like a naked hand holding snow for too long. He started to have trouble thinking. There was only the fear, the terrible cold. He could not hold on to a single thought, and if this meant he would be trapped in here unable to get out, then Steve would never know what had happened, and he—

Steve.
A memory of a gruff smile, the touch of a hand over his.

Rigel held on to the thought like a sinking man clutching a lifeline.

“Let me…,” he croaked. Struggling. “Let me….”

Something brushed tentatively against Rigel’s leg. Something that had not managed to stand up all the way.

“Let—me—go!”

He gestured upward with his right hand, and the orange glow from it was like a beacon of long-forgotten warmth. On his third spoken word, something broke, and Rigel stumbled forward, suddenly able to move.

He looked to his right and saw the two inhuman things reaching up with dead fingers, trying to grab his leg.

He bolted away from that awful house, that trap that had nearly killed his mind.

He stumbled down the stairs and was nearly frozen in place by the sight of more of the things shuffling into the open doorway. Rigel raced away from them and managed to find a back door in the kitchen. He crashed through it and fled out into the sea of waving grass.

He ran until his legs gave out under him. Then he fell down onto the grass, looked back apprehensively, and saw that the house had disappeared.

Help me, Rigel.

Rigel started violently, but there was nobody around. And the voice was different this time, a child’s voice, impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl.

Rigel stood up shakily and looked at the flawless blue sky.

“Who are you? What do you want from me?” he asked loudly.

I have waited for so very long
, the child said, with just a hint of a sob.
Help me, please.

“What is going on? What am I supposed to do?”

It has grown stronger with so many killings, so much death. Soon it will be able to interact with the world outside, permanently.

“You mean… that thing? That shadow?”

Please hurry, Rigel. I can’t…. It’s too strong…. It’s going to—

And suddenly the world was torn asunder.

A gigantic crack spread with explosive force across the plains, rushing in a jagged line at the place where Rigel was lying. He bolted upright. Boulders flew everywhere as if they weighed nothing. Grass died on a wide swath on either side of the crack as if a terrible blight were spreading with impossible speed. The sound was so deep and so loud that Rigel felt it in his bones. It looked almost like a cartoon, the quickly approaching fault spiderwebbing out in smaller branches that radiated from the main chasm as if somebody had taken a gigantic mallet and struck the brittle surface of the grassy plains. It was deadly, though. Rigel could feel it. The echo of mindless violence that rushed forth to batter Rigel’s mind even as the earth trembled was unmistakable.

Rigel threw himself to the right just as the crack reached him. The earth under his feet bucked like a wild beast, and he was thrown up in the air, arms and legs flailing in useless reflex. He fell back to the ground with the awful crunch of something breaking, and the pain that spiked up his left knee was so sharp he cried out, wondering how a virtual injury could hurt so much.

He tried to stand up, and the pain was unbelievable. He dropped back down and nearly passed out.

The ground trembled and shattered all around him, the chaos only growing in intensity, and it kept on going for so long Rigel began to think it would never stop. He could feel the earth giving way nearby, plummeting into the abyss in the depths of the crack.

You have to move.

“I can’t! My leg is broken!”

If you stay there, you will die.

Rigel stole a look to his left and saw that the gaping maw of the broken earth was less than a meter away and growing. He tried to crawl away, but his knee would not take any weight, and the agony that shot up his leg felt all too real.

“It’s broken!”

You are a Light Shaper. Bend the electron flow inside this virtual realm. Give your thought form.

Half blind and deafened by the sounds of the earthquake, Rigel reached for his wounded knee with both hands. He had no idea what he was supposed to do, but he had no doubt that if he fell into that abyss, his mind would be lost forever. So he touched the broken knee and spoke.

“Heal!”

His hands burned hot, almost painfully so, the glow coming from the metal that encased them brighter than a flashlight. Rigel felt something crack in his leg, but amazingly it felt right. Warmth surged around his knee, spread, and the glow in his hands appeared to weaken and die off.

He was not in pain anymore.

Run.

He did, stumbling up, racing frantically away from the growing chasm behind him. The earthquake went on and on, and still Rigel ran, fearing he would run out of breath and he would trip and fall into the darkness below. It seemed impossible that such a thing could last so long, and soon Rigel’s muscles were burning, struggling to keep going. He began to think it would never end, that it would continue until every bit of the world had been consumed by the disturbance.