The Man From Taured (36 page)

"Hello," Whitten said and bowed.

The woman just looked terrified. The two guards were staring at the equipment, the stirrups on the table and the instruments laid out. Both guards were nearly as terrified as the prisoner looked.

"You can go," Whitten told the guards.

Both of the guards nodded and turned and walked briskly out of the room. The rumors about what happened in this room were spreading fast. That was always the case in these camps. Whitten didn't care because it allowed him to continue working alone.

"Now, my dear, what is your name?" Whitten asked, speaking in his perfect German.

"Margaret," she said, quietly. "Margaret Hoeffner."

"Margaret, what a lovely name," Whitten replied. "How old are you, Margaret?"

"Twenty-nine," she replied. She looked three times that age. Whitten never quite got used to the way this place aged people.

"Have you had children?"

She shook her head.

Good, Whitten thought. Perhaps that was what was needed. They had tried to impregnate several women who had already had children, under the assumption that those who had already had them would have a womb prepared to birth a child sired by the Void. All of the women had died. Now it was thought that maybe the Void required a new place, untouched and never used.

"I need you to disrobe and lay down on the table," Whitten said.

The prisoner, having been broken, utterly terrified, began doing what she was told. To Whitten there was nothing sexual about this. He had never found any woman particularly attractive in that way. He had no need for it and this was all just part of an experiment. He had heard rumors of the guards raping the young women around here, but how anyone could find the skinny, wasted and destroyed young women at this camp attractive for such activities were beyond him.

Margaret climbed onto the table and lay back. Whitten turned and put her legs up in the stirrups.

"This may hurt, but it will mostly be pressure," Whitten said. It was a lie, of course. So far every single woman who had undergone this procedure ended up screaming in pain before crumbling to pieces. "Please try to relax."

Whitten set to work. He was soon lost in the process. He grabbed his instruments by instinct. Margaret made noises of surprise and discomfort, but they blended into the background. When things were ready, he brought the mirror out. Margaret lay on the table, tears on her face, eyes closed and didn't see him remove the blanket.

The surface of the mirror shimmered like the surface of a pond. Whitten saw the reflection of the room and the black doppelganger of himself inside of it. The black version of himself looked at the test subject eagerly and extended a hand. A moment later a large tentacle of black substance emerged from the surface of the mirror. In seconds it was between Margaret's legs and inside of her.

Margaret gasped. Her eyes flew open and she gripped the sides of the table. Her body thrashed against the straps that Whitten had affixed to her torso. Then her mouth opened and she began that screaming. Her head rocked side to side in increasingly rapid motions. She bit down hard and blood spurted from her mouth as she bit down on her tongue.

"No!" She screamed. "Nonononononononono!"

It didn't take very long. A moment later the black tentacle removed itself from her. There was a trickle of black substance and this was followed by blood. The tentacle retreated back into the mirror and Whitten quickly covered the mirror and put it away. Then he sat down between Margaret's legs and conducted an examination.

Margaret had stopped screaming. She just lay there staring up into the ceiling. As Whitten worked between her legs, cursing, finding that the womb had been destroyed, the walls of it crumbling at his touch, and then he looked up to see Margaret's eyes turn black. Her head turned slowly and she stared accusingly at him.

Her body shook again, but this time it was entirely involuntary. Her chest heaved and one of the straps snapped. Her body quivered, spasmed, and it became more and more violent. Something inside of her, some bone, snapped loudly. Her mouth opened and black substance exploded from her mouth, shooting up to the ceiling and spattering there.

Then it happened.

First her feet turned gray, and then up her legs. Then they turned black. Her entire body heaved once more and the rest of her turned into that black substance and spattered to the floor. A few seconds after that the black substance was gone too.

Whitten sighed and pounded his fist on the table.

"Again," Whitten said. "It happened again."

"I can see," the Void replied. "I need you to bring me a child."

Whitten screwed up his face in confusion. The idea of doing something like this to a child made even him sick.

"Not for this," the Void said, once again reading his mind. "I have another idea. I think that maybe I need an avatar in your world. I cannot just enter the world as I am and touch a human. Your minds and bodies cannot handle it. Perhaps I can construct a human of my own, something that I can control, and then perhaps I can impregnate a woman."

Whitten sighed. Now it was children.

"I can do that," Whitten said. "I can bring you pretty much anything you want. I can get you a child."

"Good," the Void replied. "Bring it to me today."

Whitten nodded, but did not reply. Moments later he was on the phone with the commandant of the camp. The man had looked into the mirror not long after he had arrived. He agreed and there would be a child in his lab within the hour.

Whitten stood back in the middle of the room and waited.

Like a spider.

***

The child arrived an hour later. As if he posed some kind of threat or had a chance of escaping, he was flanked by guards. Children this young were rare in the camp. Most of them were unable to work, or were sick, and ended up taken directly to the gas chambers. Somehow this one had slipped through, or perhaps a new train had arrived. Whitten didn't care. If things worked the way the Void thought, perhaps he would require more children. That would mean speaking to the camp commander and making some changes around here.

The child had dark hair and wide blue eyes. He was scared, obviously, but somehow not as scared-looking as the adults that had been brought to him. The child, a young boy, wearing rags, was looking around at the walls and ceiling and up at the guards in their crisp uniforms.

"Hello there, young man," Whitten said. He was nervous. This was something new and it excited him. "Please come in."

The guards put their hands on the child's shoulders and pushed him forward. They stepped back and waited to be dismissed.

"Please, go," Whitten replied, waving his hands in an annoyed manner.

They turned and left, hurriedly. Whitten waited until their footfalls faded, then he folded his hands in front of himself and smiled at the young man. The child recoiled and Whitten quickly removed the smile.

"Hello, young man," Whitten repeated. "What is your name?"

"Eli," he said.

"Well, Eli, my name is Augustus," Whitten replied. "I am a doctor. I am here to examine you. Have you been to a doctor before?"

Eli nodded slowly. His eyes were even wider than they had been when he entered the room. His breathing was ragged.

"I promise that you will not have to get a shot," Whitten said and smiled. Then he reached into his pocket and removed a bar of chocolate. "Do you like chocolate?"

Eli actually let a hint of a smile cross his face. He nodded enthusiastically.

"Before we get started you may have this bar of chocolate," Whitten said. "We got it off an American soldier. I believe it is from the Hershey's chocolate people. Do you like Hershey's chocolate?"

Another nod and this time Eli held out his hands. Whitten put the chocolate bar into the young man's hand. He looked back up at him, tilting his head as if questioning whether or not it was real.

"Go ahead," Whitten said.

Eli could contain himself no longer. He ripped the wrapper off of the bar and began devouring the chocolate. He broke off pieces of the bar and shoved them into his mouth as fast as he could make his fingers work. Whitten had seen this from time to time. They were all so hungry, so desperate. One thing he knew for sure was that once the Void had taken over this sphere, this kind of thing would be stopped. It would never happen again if everyone was part of it.

The child began making delighted noises, gasping as he shoved the pieces of candy into his mouth. The chocolate was all over his face and fingers. He licked the wrapper when he was done with the bar and then licked his fingertips. His mouth was still full of the last remnants of the chocolate when he looked back up and Whitten with a smile all over his face.

"Bring him to me."

At first Whitten thought that the Void had spoken out loud. Then he realized he had heard the voice in his head.

"Are you ready now?" Whitten asked.

The boy was still smiling. He shrugged. Whitten smiled and patted him on the head.

"Come over here," he indicated a spot in the middle of the room.

Eli, his mouth still filled with chocolate, walked to where he pointed. His smile had faded and he dropped the candy bar wrapper on the floor. The boy looked on curiously as Whitten walked to the back of the room and pulled the mirror out of its spot.

"Now, stay right here and look into the mirror," Whitten said.

Eli licked more chocolate off of his face and stared at the blanket covering the mirror. Whitten whipped the blanket away and turned his head so he caught none of whatever was in there. He did not want to see his doppelganger at the moment.

Eli let out a gasp of delight. Whitten turned his head to watch the child. Eli's smile was three times bigger than when he had been eating the Hershey bar. He actually giggled.

"Come here."

Once again Whitten heard this from the Void inside his head. However, he realized that it was directed not at him, but the child. Whitten had become so connected to the Void that he heard its thoughts all the time now. The thought disturbed and delighted him.

Eli held out both hands and approached the mirror. There was little to no hesitation like Whitten had found with adults who stared at the reflective surface. The child rushed forward, his fingers grasping at things that only he could see. Soon his tiny fingers reached the surface of the mirror and they vanished from within it. Eli laughed harder.

Then the blackness reached out for him.

It swarmed up over Eli's arms and over his shoulder. The child's smile faded just as the blackness covered his head and he was lifted off the ground and vanished through the surface of the mirror.

No scream.

Nothing.

Just a strange humming sound inside Whitten's head. After a moment he realized it was the sound of the Void.

Pleased with itself.

Whitten wanted to run. He had a room in the back with a cot and it had never seemed more inviting than right now. His feet would not move. The Void, using its invisible strings buried so far into his mind, held him where he was. It wanted a witness.

It took about half an hour. Whitten's bladder felt like it was going to burst, but finally something happened. The familiar thick black substance oozed from the mirror where it formed into a puddle. The top of it was shiny and reflective and Whitten could see the lights overhead and his own dim reflection. When the pool was just a few feet across, it stopped flowing outward and began to extend upward.

As Whitten watched, the blackness stretched up and began to form features: hands, eyes, nose, face. The blackness changed to flesh-color and he saw individual hair forming over the head. In seconds there was Eli, his head down, formed entirely out of Void-substance.

The skin shimmered and changed, became
more and more real-looking. When it was virtually identical to the young man who had been standing here, this new Eli raised his head.

Whitten gasped.

The child had no eyes. There were just black pits where the eyes should have been. This new Eli smiled and the smile grew and grew, past the nose and up the sides of his face. It was the most disturbing thing that Whitten had seen.

"What do you think?" Eli asked, but in the Void's voice.

"It's remarkable," Whitten replied, hoping that his voice sounded a bit more steady than he felt. "The eyes are not quite right. Nor the smile."

The smile faded. He looked at himself in the mirror. Eli's face changed to one of frustration and then total concentration. The eyes flickered and flowed as if they were constructed out of water. No matter how hard it tried, the eyes remained black pits with tiny swirls of red near the center.

"I cannot get the eyes right," Eli/Void said.

Then it heaved his hand back and smashed it into the mirror. The surface shook and quaked, but did not shatter.

"No matter what I do, I cannot get the eyes right," it repeated.

Whitten watched as the Void/Eli creature stormed around the lab, smashing the table, throwing instruments, smashing anything and everything that it could find. Then it stormed back to the mirror and tried to get the eyes right again. When that failed, the Eli/Void form collapsed into black goo and snaked back into the mirror.