Spawn of Man (5 page)

Robert sank back into his chair and sighed, ‘Grandfather, I don’t know what to say.’

‘Then say, “thank you Grandfather,” and pour me a whiskey,’ said the old man.

Robert obliged and then sat studying the ornate key his grandfather had given him.

The old man smiled ruefully. ‘You do realize that isn’t the actual key to the front door, don’t you?’

Frank looked confused so his grandfather enlightened, ‘I don’t actually keep that in my pocket! That will be taken care of in the event of my demise! No, that key is for a door inside the institute.’

‘Inside?’ quizzed Robert.

‘Yes, inside. But I don’t know which room. I tried them all many years ago, as did my father, I imagine, but it fits none of them.’

‘Then why…?’ began Robert.

But his grandfather finished the sentence for him, ‘Then why give you that key?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Robert.

‘Because it is my duty to do so. The original will made by Daniel Douglas insisted on each heir to the institute having the key,’ replied his grandfather.

‘Does the will specify which door the key fits though?’ asked Robert.

‘No. Only that the key be passed on and I have now fulfilled that obligation. Upon my death the institute is yours, along with the money I have accrued during my lifetime.’

‘Grandfather, you will never die, I can promise you that!’ said Robert.

‘Yes, but you are a doctor of physiology, Robert, so you are not qualified to make that prognosis are you?’ chuckled his grandfather. ‘But still, I will drink to that sentiment!’

He raised his glass and for a second Robert thought he detected a weakness in his smile and a brief trace of fear clouding his eyes.

His grandfather died one month later. Robert wept at the funeral, feeling he had lost the final link to his past. His father had passed away ten years ago and his mother four years later due to cancer. So, at the age of thirty-six, Robert suddenly found himself a very wealthy man. But he was acutely aware that all he really had in the world was his wife Alex and their young boy, Jake. And although that was more than enough, he still felt isolated somehow. As usual, it was Alex that put everything into perspective for him. She pointed out that the Douglas Institute was his tangible connection to the past and that he could honor his grandfather’s memory by doing something wonderful with it.

Robert smiled at the thought of Alex. After his grandfather’s death, Robert and Alex decided to
have the institute renovated and had sold their own house. When the private quarters of the institute were re-built, they would all live there. Although still remote, the connections to Babel were much more established nowadays. Alex had transferred to the Fire Station that served Babel whilst Jake, at four years old, had been accepted into the local school.

Alex had only recently returned to work after nearly eight months recovering from injuries that she had sustained fighting the blaze in the disused factory complex. The physical scars had been repaired as far as they could be, with rehabilitation and grafts to her arms and legs. But the mental scars were still livid. Alex’s friend and colleague, Anthony, had died in the inferno and Alex had unjustly blamed herself for not being there for him.

Robert had wrestled with the decision to resign from his job as a psychologist initially. Leaving it behind to site manage the institute’s restoration seemed frivolous and irresponsible. But his grandfather’s words and the prospect of a fresh start for Alex had made the decision easy in the final analysis. And
four months later, days after Robert’s thirty-sixth birthday and weeks before Alex’s thirty-fifth, Robert had instructed the construction company to begin work on the Douglas Institute.

The reason for Robert’s visit today was in response to a message from the builders contracted to carry out the work on the institute. They had unearthed a false wall and when they had passed through it a small chamber had been revealed. This room displayed evidence of fire damage, which suggested the wall had been built after the events of the 1922 blaze. The chamber was walled with exposed brick but the far wall was obviously also false. The builders had contacted Robert at this point and asked if he wished this wall to be demolished too. Robert had instructed them to dismantle the second wall then advise him of their findings. And so the door had been discovered and Robert had been summoned. As soon as he had been alerted to the revelation, Robert had been convinced the door would solve the mystery of the ornate key.

Robert parked the car and began to collect a bundle of plans and documents from the passenger’s seat. From nowhere a head was thrust through the open window, filling the space between Robert and the windscreen.

‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Robert and his head rocked back, hitting the headrest hard.

‘Evening, Mr. Douglas,’ said the builder.

Robert closed his eyes and sighed, ‘You nearly gave me a bloody heart attack, Leonard!’

‘Sorry about that,’ conceded Leonard. Then he added, ‘Looks like the cabin fever’s got to you already and you haven’t even moved in yet!’

‘No, you creeping up scaring the crap out of me got to me, Leonard!’ corrected Robert.

Leonard Willis was a round, short man, ruddy faced with a flattened nose and clownish, curled, copper hair. He was smug, self-righteous, and absolutely convinced of his own importance but he was unequivocally the best builder within seventy miles.

‘Anyway,’ continued Leonard, ‘we got as far as breaking through the second wall after I spoke with you and found the door. You want me to come and take a look with you?’

‘No, it’s fine, Leonard. You get off and I’ll see you in the morning, thanks,’ replied Robert, glad to be rid of the man.

‘Fine.’ Leonard left without saying goodbye, seemingly oblivious to the oversight.

‘Yeah, bye,’ added Robert under his breath and with a note of sarcasm as the builder climbed into his van and began to drive down the long, narrow approach to the institute.

Robert entered the institute by the original, heavily decorative front door, with its twin marble pillars supporting a high stone roof. He fought his way through the plastic sheeting, abandoned tea mugs, and accumulated building paraphernalia. He assured himself that Leonard had a plan and that he had even let the rest of his building team in on it. He crouched to pass his tall frame through the rent the builders had created in the first false wall. As he brushed the plaster and dust from his thick blond hair, Robert scanned the unearthed room.

There was nothing noteworthy, simply a study with desk and chair, bureau, lamp stand, and no windows. Everything was partially destroyed by fire, so it was difficult to gauge whether walls, floor and ceiling had decayed or been incinerated. Directly in front of Robert was the second false wall, partly demolished by the builders. This wall served to conceal the door that Leonard had reported and Robert’s curiosity curled into a little knot in his stomach at the sight of it. There was something intrinsically disquieting about a bricked-up door and Robert’s imagination had already opened it and was exploring a gateway to Hell hidden on the other side! What struck Robert as particularly strange was the fact that the door was made of steel, faded by time, and stained with dull smears where flames had licked at the surface and found it impassable.

Robert withdrew the key from his jacket and stared at it intently before approaching the steel door. He held the key in front of the lock and his hand shook as if the thing was agitated in his grasp, almost animated by the proximity of the lock. Robert wondered how long it had been since the key and lock had last been joined. Foreboding stayed his hand and Robert felt a spasm of dread pass through his body, playing on his skin like an electric current, and he withdrew the key and touched the door instead.

Smiling at his own unwarranted trepidation Robert made to engage the lock again when a beep from his wrist made him start and he almost dropped the key.

‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me?’ he snapped, frustrated by his own jumpiness.

The small strip grafted just below the skin on the inside of his wrist flashed and purred softly. The band was a standard receiving-insert and when he rubbed his thumb over the blinking light a neural link was activated behind his ear, where the cellular communication device was implanted. This in turn allowed a connection to similar implants in other humans or other devices such as computers or cellular phones.

The implants had been introduced over a decade ago in the early 2020s and had been assimilated eagerly by a society hungry for advancement in all areas of technology. A massive publicity campaign was mobilized to assure the public that the advantages outweighed any possible adverse reactions to the interfaces. Potential advances in education, information protection, leisure pursuits, and health were cited as major pluses. However, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the coupling of the human brain with machines. Many people, especially in religious quarters, viewed the procedures as unholy or evidence of mankind’s manipulation by demonic agencies. They abhorred the readiness with which humanity allowed itself to be tagged like pets, in what they interpreted as an exercise in mass control, thinly disguised as gadgetry.

Robert had no such misgivings in becoming a ‘web head’ though. He believed it was an inevitable cog in the machinery of progression and his profession had caused him to embrace the applications. As a physiologist specializing in cybernetic organisms, he worked closely with victims of trauma who had received various implants. His particular field was studying the effects the implants had on human behavior, cognition and higher brain functions such as perception and the changes that occurred therein.

Conversely, Robert’s wife, Alex, loathed the cellular communication implants (CCIs) and she admonished Robert regularly for his use of one. Now the delicate pathways that merged the CCI and his brain waves in an organic, electronic fusion made him aware that Alex was contacting him. The intricacies of the cybernetic network’s interplay with the human brain were still not fully comprehended, even by Robert. It was precisely this vagueness that the non-conformists feared. Alex and Jake were due to travel to Babel today from their old house with the last of their personal possessions. Robert spoke to Alex whilst still scrutinizing the steel door. ‘Hi honey, what’s up?’

‘Hello sweetheart, you at the mad house?’

‘It’s not a mad house, it’s an institute, and yes, I’m there.’

‘No it’s a nut house and you’re its first inmate, honey!’ and she laughed out loud. ‘And I suppose I’m talking to you through that microwave oven in your head, yeah?’

‘If you mean my CCI, yes you are.’

‘I bought you a state of the art cellular phone Robert, why don’t you use it? Why don’t you have the implant reversed? If God had wanted us to communicate like that we would have been born with telephones sticking out of our ears.’

‘That’s like saying, why don’t you use the state of the art bicycle I bought you to get around, instead of the car you own!’

‘Yes, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, would it?’

‘Well, we can’t all be perfect specimens of fitness and health, like you, Alex!’

‘Hmm,’ she mused. ‘I don’t recall you rejecting my perfect specimens last night, lover!’

Robert traced his thumb across his wrist again and a holographic image projected from his eye to hang suspended in the air, eight inches in front of his face. There was his wife Alex’s face, slightly shimmering with the connection but unmistakably beautiful and Robert instinctively reached out to touch the representation.

‘Hello honey!’ and the image of Alex gave a little wave. ‘Me and Jake are setting off now. We’ll be at the house in about four hours. You gonna be home tonight? I got chicken, fresh vegetables and a bottle of wine.’

‘Yeah. The builders have knocked down that false wall and called me in. There was another false wall inside the chamber, with a door behind it…’

‘The key?’ Alex cut in.

‘Don’t know, gonna try now. Listen, it’ll be dark before you get to Babel and rain’s forecast, take care okay?’

‘Always honey, see you soon. Hello from Jake, our three year old prodigy who has just buried my keys in the garden!’

‘Bye, love. Bye to Jake and kisses,’ and the image was gone.

Robert thought he heard a sound from beyond the door. Impossible, nothing had been beyond this threshold in over a century. His grandfather’s renovations had not reached this section of the asylum and the second wall had only been breached that morning. But there it was again, a faint pulsing hum almost like the rhythmic intonation of a large car’s engine, a deep droning that could be felt as well as heard. Robert leaned closer to the door and put his ear to the steel. The whine definitely seemed mechanical and it appeared to be in the very fabric of the metal resonating through Robert’s head. If it was audible then it had not increased in volume but it thudded in Robert’s brain as a heavy and thick pounding. It shook through his body as if he was inside a free-falling elevator that had just crashed at the bottom of its shaft.

Robert peeled away from the door, shoved the key into the lock, and turned it with a grunt. Ancient apparatus labored inside the lock as it rotated for the first time in one hundred and fourteen years. There was a series of snaps as the innards aligned themselves. Robert turned and pulled the handle and the steel groaned as it left its frame, a rush of sighing air, dust, and time slipping past Robert to taste the world beyond. The blackness beyond the threshold of the door was absolute and preternatural. It did not flood into the room where Robert stood but instead reached out in soft gossamer threads that twisted and turned to embrace him in wispy talons of nothingness. As he stepped into the void, Robert felt like a fly, knowingly entering a web, and he fumbled for the familiarity of a light switch. He had the unnerving impression that he was about to touch something wet and breathing. Something standing in the shadows waiting for his hand to travel one inch, then it would close its rows of broken-glass teeth on his fingers and rip them from his hand. But all he found was a chunky switch. He flipped it and waited for the antiquated configuration of cables and wires to transmit the signal to the bulbs.