We caught our train. Tamara went to sleep with a hat over her eyes. Gunther slipped into our traincar at the last minute and sat beside Tamara. He nodded to me as he set his bag down. As the sun set, Gunther pulled a book from his bag, and leaned against the window. His eyes scanned the book, but every so often I caught him scouring the train car, his eyes on each door, each window. Sometimes he seemed to be looking far away.
Gunther keeping watch like that, I let my mind wander. In the fading light, we sped past a yellow sign. It flickered past us, by a brick building, a dumpster. I couldn’t see what it said. But the sign was diamond-shaped. But when the lights of the train hit the sign, it bounced back all wrong. The color was incorrect. The light bouncing off the sign was entirely different from the light that came out of the train. As if the light-waves and light-particles of the train were all vanishing into the sign, and passing to a different place, and the light that came off the sign—the light I could see—was from that place, and it glowed like an aura around the sign.
The glowing aura around the street sign stayed with me, even as it vanished into the distance. Made me think of how each person has their own model of the world, which they have built subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) in their mind. And that people who are visually impaired, or impaired in other senses, their world, their model of the world, which only exists only in their imagination anyway, just like the rest of us, would be so different from another person’s model who isn’t visually impaired. But it’s supposed to be the same world. And it made me wonder. Are there some things that only one person has seen? A person’s world might contain things that very few people have seen, and therefore very few people have taken into consideration. And so much of that model is built on memories, it is possible that some people place enormous emphasis on certain things they remember and not others, and that would affect their model of the world too, so that these models of the world would revolve around concepts, objects, or interactions that no one else would notice or bestow any importance upon. I had to accept that maybe other people could see the moon, because I wasn’t hallucinating. It was just that this particular change in the moon, from their point of view—the view of the general public, maybe—this changed moon might seem of so little importance as to escape their notice entirely. It was possible that I, and perhaps a few others, were the only people in the world who knew about the moon changing. No one else noticed, so no one could think about its significance.
I know it sounded crazy, all this talk about the moon. But I couldn’t help what I was thinning. Maybe if I had left well-enough alone, I wouldn’t have wound up in this mess. But no, I took this job with Tamara before I saw the moon, and was already in the thick of things.
Tamara had woken up at some point. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“You aren’t old enough to remember the moon landing, are you?”
“I watched it with my parents.”
“When Buzz, you know Buzz Aldrin? When he got sick, everyone thought they might need to use the backup crew. This was before the moon landing obviously, but not long before. So, a kind of backup plan went into motion and the folks at Nasa immediately set about constructing and training a backup for the backup team. They had planned for such an occasion and had selected several likely candidates. I was one.”
My eyes must have gone wide because she laughed.
“It isn’t all that crazy, is it? Our training was intensive, and I enjoyed it. But in the end, Buzz was perfectly fine and the backup team was not used, so our team became a redundancy. I never went up. But it turned out someone had a use for us anyway. One of the leaders at Nasa asked the backups’ backup to dinner one day, and introduced to Sergio Hutchinson. Sergio was a civilian, but I believed from the very start that he something else too. Possibly he was some kind of informant or a freelancer for the CIA—they must have those. But again he claimed he was a civilian, and that he was a diving instructor, and his company was hiring a team of divers, but they couldn’t find anyone qualified, partly because the location of their dive was under certain environmental conditions that were entirely beyond the training of most divers. But he believed our Nasa training made us well-equipped to handle the kind of environmental difficulties of his dive site. He avoided telling us the purpose of this dive, beyond saying that we would carry a piece of equipment from one submarine to another. He said it was part of a test. A simple transfer. But the transfer was set to occur off the western coast of Australia. We flew to Perth and then drove nine hours north to Carnarvon. Then we took a seaplane to Bernier island. From there we took a boat into the Indian ocean. We sailed for about 30 hours, 200 miles toward our destination.
This location is the antipode of the bermuda triangle, not inside the bermuda triangle, but just on the cusp of it.
When we got to the site and tried to perform the transfer, I first became aware that I was not alone in my suit, or perhaps in my mind.
I could feel it urging me, urging me and speaking also to something else, or someone else I couldn’t see, then urging me again, more desperately, more violently to let myself sink into the water, to lose consciousness. And all the while he was talking to me, trying to convince me that both of us were better off dying here. “They won’t find you here. It would be better to die now and save yourself the suffering. If you don’t die now, you will have to choose whether to kill yourself or to go away with those men, and they will not kill you but. At least if you die here, they shall not find and defile your warm body after death. A gunshot would draw them like flies, and if you failed to kill yourself, then what? You would die from their defilement. If you let yourself fall asleep now, your death is guaranteed, and you need not fear for your suffering or dignity, but can die peacefully.
There was a silhouette at the window. Our floodlights barely illuminated his face. An old man, sickly thin, pale, wrinkled skin. He had watched the transfer unmoving. Now his eyes followed the diver who returned to his submarine.
When I returned to our submarine, I stepped into the airlock, undressed
When I came above deck, Cain was speaking quickly into the radio. But someone kept interrupting him from the other side. When I climbed up the cramped stairs he shot a guilty look towards me.
Covering the receiver, he swallowed and said, “They want me to send you back out.”
“Is something wrong?” I said.
“Don’t think so,” he said.
Marco looked at me, but he spoke to Cain. “We delivered their package. What do they need her for?”
Cain’s face twitched.
“Why don’t you go,” Marco said.
Fear flashed across Cain’s face, but he hid it quickly. Not quickly enough. Marco took a slow step toward Cain.
“No. Nobody’s going out there.” Marco shook his head.
“You refuse?” Cain looked at me.
“Tell me why they need me.”
He shrugged. “They wouldn’t say. Honestly.”
“You think they might hurt her.” Marco stated this as fact.
Cain nodded slowly. “It’s possible.”
“You should go, you bastard.” Marco spat on the grated floor. “After all she’s done for you.”
“I don’t know if—” Cain flinched as the comms went off again. Looking hard at both of us he took the call. “Yes? This is Kappa.”
[Th—poison in my cup. C—n. Cain, you should have never come here. I am going to wake them. The water is ice cold, and they dream of warm blood.]
The color had drained from Cain’s face.
Then the submarine lurched. My knees turned to jelly. But it was Marco, not… not whatever the man was going to wake up. Marco gunned the engines. Bubble’s erupted outside every window. The bubbles enveloped the submarine. Slowly, haltingly, our metal vessel began to move. Bubble jets rocketed behind us and slowly we gained speed. The voice in the radio continued like an incantation, but soon it lost coherence, and it went away entirely. When we made it to the surface, I threw up, again and again. The pressure wasn’t right. Marco had rushed everything. He had lowered the pressure too fast, and my body could not adjust, through the rest of the crew seemed fine.
Cain spoke little on the return journey. He looked like a man who saw a ghost, or looked into the jaws of death. That day on the bottom of the ocean—I never came closer to death.
Now Tamara sat back in her chair and began to speak in a low voice. Her story was over, but the heat of it lingered between us.
“I believe most living people have a certain thing inside them,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s born with it, but maybe they’re born with the raw, primordial goop to form this thing inside them. It exists inside their mind and just at the edges of their nerves and other physical senses.
Just like how the human body requires sustenance, this thing inside requires sustenance, but each one requires different sustenance. Often the thing will communicate its hunger through desire or impulse. Have you ever wanted something but it made no sense why you wanted it? Maybe you knew it was a bad idea, and might even hurt you, or hurt other people, but you felt that you wanted it anyway. That’s the thing inside you.
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Some people are lucky, and they only need to do random, harmless things once in awhile. Other people find that they are happily drawn to one another in some way, and those people might become friends or lovers, not because their friendship evolved organically, but because they had compatible desires deep within them, not necessarily the desire to be friendship, but what else could they call this relationship of mutual exchange. But some people have to do hard things, serious and dangerous things that no person would do for any reason under ordinary circumstances.
And something happens when the thing isn’t nourished. It grows hungrier. Sometimes, it simply dies, and the person lives the rest of their life with a hollow place inside them. In other instances, the unnourished thing grows violent and begins to consume other parts of the mind, or begins to gnaw at the edge of the nerves and physical senses. Some of them die, and some of them are carnivores. Carnivorous variants are more common I think. People begin to forget things. Their eyesight goes. Some people lose their sense of smell. Or their sense of time.
Mostly these processes are gradual. Most people never notice the presence of this thing until it is gone, and then all they can sense is its absence. Sometimes the relationship between this thing and the person is more violent. The unnourished thing becomes twisted, and it begins to consume things that it wasn’t meant to consume. It nourishes itself on things which are also toxic to its very core, like a person who smokes. One of the symptoms in the human being might be a feeling of impending doom. They might be in perfectly good health. They eat well, exercise, have a healthy social life, but something at their core is sick, and getting sicker, and all because of minor changes, from one healthy set of habits to another for the human being. They have done nothing discernibly wrong, but for the thing inside them, it is like an allergy, like changing from sunbutter to peanut butter and slowly killing itself with a very mild allergy, until one day it cannot breath, or it develops a kind of psychic necrosis, and rots alive inside the human shell. That is a horrible way for it to go, because the human did nothing wrong as far as they can tell. They tried to take care of themself, and yet parts of them died as a result. It’s so unfair the way it can happen. These people are so sensitive to change.”
“Have you learned anything about yours?” I asked.
She nodded. Her eyes ran this way and that as if she were enduring some struggle inside. Then she said in a shaking voice, “Always thinking about death. I think it wants me to die.”
“That’s why you think about death.” I stated this as a fact, but she shrugged again as if considering an open ended question.
“It’s not so much that I think about death. I specifically wonder what happens when I die? Would that thing die too? Or if I die, would it get to live, grow stronger?”
“But surely it must be twisted in some way. Its desires have grown toxic and harmful rather than nourishing.”
“Don’t forget. The nourishment doesn’t need to nourish me. It only needs to satisfy the thing inside of me.”
“You really think your death might satisfy that thing, and it would live on somehow.”
“I really think it might. But I don’t know—how could I know? But yes, it makes me wonder.”
“You said before that when the thing requires something for its nourishment, it will manifest in some kind of impulse or desire.”
She nodded again, and seemed to prepare herself, as if she knew exactly what I was about to ask, and had been delaying this moment, pushing it back and perhaps hoping we might avoid this thread among so many other questions and so much discussion. I hesitated, my eyes lingering on hers, which were downcast.
“I know what you’re thinking. But don’t worry. I’m not any danger to myself, not for now. But yes, I do feel the desire. I do want to kill myself. I feel the impulse.”
“How often?”
“It’s pretty much every day.”
“I see.” I didn't know what else to say.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said, wiggling her velcroed shoe.
“Yes, I guess I figured. You’re here so you don’t try anything.”
“Yes. You must think I’m insane, Liza.”
“You’re going to try and get close to dying, some kind of ritual death with the mossmen, and not actually cross the threshold, but get close enough that the thing reveals itself, and she can squash it somehow, or take hold of it.
“I won’t cross the threshold. But I want to put a foot across, and see what they do.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I need someone to anchor me. Someone who knows what I am trying to do. If you stay with me, and hold my hand, and speak to me, we can tow the line. And if I try to go across all the way, you can pull me back.”
“How would I do that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just hope you can figure it out when the time comes. I will be close to biological death, but my mind will make the final decision I think. So maybe I won’t need you except to remind me of the purpose of my death, fake but almost real. But I need to get close, and if I decide in the moment to let myself go entirely, I will need someone to convince me to stay. And if I succeed, and my near death draws out the thing that haunts my mind, I will not have the will.”
“The will to destroy it.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to destroy it then.”
“Yes.”
“How could I destroy something which only exists in your mind?”
“I think that, if I draw it out, it might exist for a brief moment in both of our minds. Out in the open.”
“You think I could perceive it then, if I felt for it.”
She nodded. “But there’s another reason. I went back to Perth years after, and the sights and sounds and smells of that place reminded me sharply of my journey to the bottom of the sea. But I remembered things differently this time. The memory was evil. I believe that only through my new memories, I saw things as they really happened. When I was there, my eyes were deceived. But looking back years later, I could recall things clearly for some reason.
“What was different?”
“Well I was camping with some friends in Perth, who didn’t know about my day in the submarine. We had gotten lost, in a harmless way. As I drifted off to sleep beside the fire, I went over the events of that night, one at a time. I sank into a state of deep contemplation, where the awareness of myself intensified in an odd way. Here is what I’m trying to say: Perhaps the combined exhaustion and anxiety at being stranded in the middle of nowhere, alone, I began to dream while awake, I thought, but I still gazed at the fire before me, and at times I stood up and paced, but as I filed through my memories and reached the part of the story where our submarine sank towards bottom of the sea. That was the initial descent. But I perceived the events differently in hindsight. Most of the events were just as I thought, but in some cases, the events split. I could remember two different versions of the same events. The story I told you so far is the first version. We sank to around 2000 meters below sea-level, and then performed an exchange with a foreign submarine, but if you remember, I thought the events were derived from some kind of hidden logic, like a behavioral cypher, to keep the crew from understanding the real meaning behind this exchange. In the second version of that memory, we sank to 2000 meters below sea level and received the first transmission from the foreign submarine. Then the captain ordered us deeper. At first the crew protested. Our sub wasn’t built for depths far below 2200 meters, and the buffer zone only took us to 2250 meters. These were figures that the crew had memorized. But the captain reassured them it was safe. The buffer is guaranteed down to 2250 meters. In reality, he said, the submarine could travel deeper without suffering structural damage. 2300 meters would be reasonable, for instance. 2500 meters was probably safe as well. At a certain depth, the pressure increases more slowly. The captain told us he only planned to visit 2250 for a brief moment. Satisfied, the crew took us down. Here the captain ordered the crew to hold our position, while he took myself and the first mate into the lab. The lights were dim, here, at the bottom of the sea. The captain closed the door, and the sound of the crew went away. The lab was located far away from the engines, so the silence was almost complete except for the thwacking sound that echoed through the miles of water. I was suddenly viscerally aware of how fast sound traveled underwater. Without a word the first mate walked toward the back wall of the lab. He passed the shelves and stainless steel table, all crammed together, and came to specimen airlock. Standing in front of the airlock, the first mate pulled its lever. The lever was stuck. Placing both hands against the lever, he strained against the stainless steel. Finally, it screeched open. The first mate gasped and bent double for a moment, hands on knees. Then he stood lifted one foot up onto the lip of the stainless steel table. His face turned toward us as he clambered onto the table. The blood had drained completely from his face. Next his knee got up on the table, and he began to crawl backwards into the airlock. First one leg, searching blindly for the back of the airlock. Then his other leg. He bent at the knee, and pushed himself backwards using only his hands. His legs were now completely trapped in the stainless steel cylinder. Last, he stuck both arms into the cylinder and gripped the ribbed sides, pulled his torso into the airlock, until only curly hair stuck out the top. At this point, the captain made a move toward the airlock. I snatched at his arm, but he caught my wrist. My other first hooked him in the jaw. Blood oozed from his lip, but he pushed me and I sat down hard on the steel bench. Two of the crew sat down with me, and held my arms by my sides. My head leaned against the metal wall. Sweat poured down my back and neck. Lights blinked overhead, dimmer than ever. I could do nothing but watch. I closed my eyes and saw the man trapped inside the airlock: The captain walked to the airlock and closed the door. The door was two inches thick, of solid steel. Just shy of closing, the door swung into the man’s head, stretching his cramped neck to the side. The captain gathered his strength and pushed the door closed. A muffled cry escaped the airlock. I imagined myself cramped in that airlock. I needed the first mate to force the door back open, but his arms and legs were pinned. Then the captain turned his lever. The lever turned slowly. The captain was breathing hard. Another cry escaped the airlock, but sounded like it was coming from underground. Then another, higher in pitch. The man’s heart was beating faster. His stomach churned. Fear rose in his throat like bile, like a bot boiling over. Once the fear took hold, it strangled him. The screams didn’t stop after that. They were so quiet, but impossible to ignore. The captain made a gesture and two sailors pulled me to my feet, and led me to the airlock. I shivered. The remaining sailors stood by, watching me impassively. The captain withdrew a black leather bag. Inside were a number of medical devices. He pulled a stethoscope from inside, and put it on me. The sailors held my arms. Then he held the stethoscope up to the airlock. My heart sank. A hiss like boiling water filled my ears. The screams were clear now but still quiet. SOmething banged against the inside of the airlock, again and again, over and over. Each bang, the scream cut out. Then it picked up again. I shivered. I felt my stomach rise. The men held my arms tight. I couldn’t get free. I shook my head from side to side. The captain gripped my head, four fingers on each wide, splayed above my ears. He was careful not to cover my ears, or to disrupt in any way the placement of the stethoscope in them. I don’t know how long they held me. I vomited. Then I vomited again, all over the captain. But he didn’t move. His boots turned to a blur before my eyes. The smell faded into nothing. The banging faded after a while, quieter, but the screams would not end. He choked inside the airlock, his screaming cut short. I heard the sound of vomit. My own stomach heaved, but I had nothing. Bile pushed halfway up my throat and stayed there. My eyes and nose stung. When they removed the stethoscope, I went limp. The sounds of the submarine returned to my ears, but I couldn’t comprehend them. Random beeping and whirring, like white noise to me. I realized it was silent. With a great effort, the captain moved the lever on the airlock, and pulled the door. His boots were sticky vomit. The door swung open, and the first mate’s head lolled out. His forehead was red all over. His eyes were red. Half-congealed blood dropped from his palms. The fingernails on his right hand were ripped partway off. His eyes were open, unblinking.
I must have fallen asleep at some point. I didn’t remember all of Tamara’s story until much later. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, stretched my neck and looked at Gunther, just as the lights flickered on. He sat in a relaxed position, but there was nothing relaxed about him.