In the Shadow of a Monolith -- Horror at its best!

Orignal artwork by Thao Le Designs (@Thaothao)

In the Shadow of a Monolith

5 March 2022, 5:36PM

           

Special Agent Ivan Faust pushed through the doors and locked eyes with Kensky across the ICU waiting room. Staffers sat hunched against the walls with their faces down, looking at their phones, at the news. God, the news. None but Kensky seemed aware of him, and not for the first time in that hellish six hours Faust found himself wondering if he was being erased by some existential engine whose fuel was human trauma. If he would soon pass a mirror to find he had no reflection left.

Faust shook his head at Kensky. Figured the blood on his dress shirt was answer enough.

“Shit.” Kensky hissed it before approaching, the word an electric current that made every spine in the room draw tight. It was, Faust thought, like watching blades of wheat stiffen before a lightning strike.

Kensky dropped his voice to a whisper. “Who did this?”

“They’ve got him detained.”

“What can you tell me?”

“He’s a nobody,” Faust said. “But that’s about to change.”

“Let me come with you. Carpenter meant more to me than—”

“You don’t have the clearance.”

           

“Fuck clearance, Ivan. I’ve been here since Alabama. That’s got to count for something.”

           

“The only man it counted for is dead.” Faust gave him a moment to let that sink in. “I’ll call you when I know more.”  

           

Faust pushed back into the long hall lined with his men. At the surgery room, he hesitated. The First Lady stood immobile, staring at the sheet covering her husband’s ravaged face. The once Cavalier Senator from Mobile, Alabama, now just another bloody smudge in the pages of American History. 

           

“Can I get you anything, Mag?”

           

“Yes.” Maggie Carpenter curled her lip like a jackal and appraised him with naked malice. “His fucking head. On a spike.”

           

Faust took the stairwell, passed curious agents at each floor, Faust only able to bring himself to shake his head and look down to the place he imagined a man like Carpenter was likely headed.

           

Outside, the night presaged another hellish D.C. winter. His bones hurt. Across the street, a couple was walking their dog. Faust studied the wagging tail until his chest began to sink. He should have known then, should have read the omens congealing in his gut. Regrets wouldn’t come until much later. And by then, the world would no longer be the world.

5 March 2022, 11:03PM

The President had died on National Television, addressing families whose loved ones had been stolen by the wars. News correspondents made artful delays, dragging out the official hammerfall long enough for the White House to get their story straight. But anyone watching at home knew the shit had hit the fan. If JFK couldn’t live with half his skull, Norman Carpenter couldn’t live without a face. The entire anterior quadrant, including a sizeable piece of the mandible, had detached in a mist of blood and gristle to cover the front row.

Cruel pundits would come to refer to this as the splash zone. And even those pundits less cruel would recount the regrettable details with a thespian grief unfit for a middle school play. Norman Carpenter had been a monster. At the time the bullet was discharged from the deer rifle of one Leonard Alan Lynch, there were four warfronts being waged in Venezuela, Korea, Syria, and Ukraine. The US had sanctioned almost everyone, and the economy’s inevitable collapse was only being forestalled by the Fed.

Vice President Brady would be shotgunned into the driver’s seat of a burning freight truck with no brakes. A sheepish man by nature, and former governor of Rhode Island, Brady had been little more than a yes-man on the Carpenter campaign. His press conference to announce the death of Norman Carpenter was like watching a chess-whiz with social anxiety give his first high school book report.

           

Faust lasted two minutes before he muted the coroner’s television. The hospital attendants dissented but Faust pulled the cord from the back of the panel TV and shoved it in his pocket. “We’re fucked,” he told them. “Pull your money out of the banks. All of it.”

           

The night nurse was big and ugly and, judging by his countenance, artfully placed on the nightshift by his superiors to limit his interactions with other people. He appraised Faust with the dispassionate violence of a lion eyeing something slow and weak. “I was watching that.”

           

“You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube within ten minutes.”

           

“Turn it back on.” He pushed open the hinged partition and stepped out into the room. “Now.”

           

Faust rolled his neck; felt incredible pressure in the occipital region of his skull; wondered if the information divulged during the interrogation had congealed into some kind of mass. “I’m not turning the fucking TV back on, Goliath.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, sir,” The big man said. “If you don’t remove yourself from this vicinity immediately, I’ll be forced to—”

           

“Use the energy to call your lawyer.” Faust flashed his Secret Service badge and watched the man’s violent hunger spoil on his face. “Clear the offices. I’m expecting company.”

           

The big night nurse looked at the other two, both smaller and apparently incapable of speaking. “Call security and see if this guy’s legit.”

           

The smaller one pulled down his cotton mask, revealing a pocked, sunburnt face—not a hit with the ladies, Faust concluded. “He’s legit.” He turned to Faust. “You were on stage with him when it happened.”

           

Faust nodded.

           

The third musketeer, a tall and skinny twenty-something with a build of a scarecrow, shook his head. “We all saw it, man. Jesus. It was like something out of a movie.”

           

“Carpenter was a piece of shit,” the big one said, still fuming. “Everyone knows it. His approval rating was 23%.”

           

“He was,” Faust agreed, surprising all of them. “And now he’s left the country in the middle of four wars. Pull your money out of the banks. This morning. Right now. Do one of you have a number I can call when I’m done here?”

           

He of the acne trauma scribbled his cell on a post-it. “We’ll be in the cafeteria.”

           

“I’m off in two hours, anyway,” the big one said, and pulled his gloves off, dropping them in the middle of the floor. “If Gomez asks, this asshole kicked me out. Got it?”

           

The two nodded, falling into their tribal roles.

           

Goliath tried to throw a shoulder that Faust sidestepped without bothering to counter. Had Faust’s authority died with Carpenter? He was emotionally incapable of considering that. There were flies buzzing in his head. Mutant offspring, half-crustacean, with the head of Leonard Alan Lynch. He imagined their eggs folded into the meninges of his brain, dark and heavy, like clustered grapes.

           

That Lynch was insane, he had no doubts. But insanity did not preclude sincerity, even love. He envisioned Aubrey’s face then, and wondered if he was verging on psychosis. They were still technically married, though no one asked about her. It was common knowledge in the ranks that some event had left the marriage in limbo. That they were separated, and that he, Ivan Faust, head of the Secret Service, was under no circumstances to be questioned on that account, were so well known they might as well have been part of the field manual.

But that had never stopped Carpenter.

           

“How’s the missus?” He’d asked once, lining up his shot for the Florida green, an embargoed cigar pinched in the side of his bulldog jowls. “I hear things are on the mend.”

           

Faust had gone cold and white in the 90-degree humidity, inclining his head to be sure the President had just said what he thought he had. “Pardon, Mr. President?”

           

“Your woman. The nutjob. I hear that thorazine is helping her stay away from ovens.” He’d smiled then, a weasel narrowing its eyes. “I’m just tugging on ya. Jesus. No need to piss your pants on the fairway.”

           

When the buzzing stopped and the memory cleared, the three morgue attendants were gone. Had they said goodbye or asked any questions? Had they studied him staring up into the blank TV screen the way he was staring now, and shared uneasy glances behind his back? They would likely write it off as national grief. They had no way of knowing the pain in his chest was for Aubrey; and worse:

           

How being in the room with Lynch had been like seeing her again.    

5 March 2022 7:32PM

“He hasn’t said a word,” Jeffreys told Faust, when he entered. The FBI director was no boyscout. He’d left the DOJ decades previous to blaze a path in the private sector that had stolen most of his soul. Although, Faust concluded, being paid for a commodity wasn’t quite the same as stealing. A New York Times reporter had once referred to Jeffreys as Hoover’s taller doppelganger, a despot more concerned with stacking power than defending the Constitution. This was evidenced in the bruises on his knuckles. He lifted them from the Ziplock of ice and flexed them in his other hand. “Hick’s got a steel jaw.”

           

There were others there, too, the Vice President among them, though Brady sat against the wall, looking up into the corner of the interrogation bunker like some lost child.

           

“I just came from the hospital,” Faust said. “The First Lady wants his head.”

           

Jeffreys nodded. “Poor bastard didn’t even have the dignity of getting iced in an opera booth. And you…” he shook his head. “You know they’re going to hang you for this. Have you prepared a statement?”

           

Faust flustered. “Since when do we clear AC vents? When’s the last time your men swept a three-by-three aluminum tunnel for a routine speech?”

           

“This city isn’t fair,” Jeffreys said. “I might have a job for you, if you survive the fallout. That’s a big if.”

           

Faust rolled his eyes. “What can you tell me?”

           

Jeffreys inclined a hand, and as if by some deviltry, Burdock Chalmers, standing Nosferatu of the Central Intelligence Agency, materialized from an alcove with a file in his hands. The man’s face was too smooth for his age, and some of the foot soldiers joked that hematophagy was his secret.

           

“You remember Director Chalmers,” Jeffreys said, clearly uneasy with the man.

           

Chalmers opened the file on the table and got straight to business, speaking in a soft, sibilant voice. “Leonard Alan Lynch, born September 5^th, 1986, in Mobile, Alabama. He attended college at Dartmouth, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics. Another PhD in particle physics from Cambridge, where he reigned as Assistant Chairman of the High Energy Physics Group. He taught at MIT and Virginia Tech for a time, but didn’t claim tenure. There were rumors of a book, something to rival string theory, but nothing ever came of it. For the last four years no one’s heard from him. No tax returns filed. No active bank accounts. Completely off the grid. We removed a 30 ought six from his person, along with an unknown apparatus our ballistics analysts are still trying to understand. It looks like a gun, but has no magazine.”

           

“That hick’s a doctor?” It was Jeffreys, who looked down at his knuckles as if they’d made a mistake. “Fucking MIT?”

           

“Are you thinking Islamist?” Faust asked Chalmers. “A Russian asset?”

           

“He could be anyone’s, but we found this in his car.” Chalmers flattened a fake passport of one Eustice Hamberg across the table. There was only one stamp in it.

           

“Switzerland?” Jeffreys eyes confused. “Switzerland apologizes when we fart.”

           

Faust considered. “It’s neutral territory.”

           

“And plenty of unmonitored bank transfers.” Jeffreys turned to Chalmers. “Do you have any theories?”

           

“I prefer facts. I’ve spent the better part of an hour on him.” Chalmers looked at Jeffreys. “And you wasted it sharpening your stiff jab. I think we should give Ivan a try before we crank up the temperature.”  

           

A coldness colonized him, and for a moment, it felt the way it had when Faust had stood at the threshold of his home all those years ago, a soft orange light flickering behind the white lace curtains, smoke sifting in thick gray tongues from beneath the door, giving his stoop the appearance of some Dantaen gateway.

           

“Ivan?” Chalmers was staring with wet reptile eyes. “We already have one village idiot.”  

           

Jeffreys sidled his eyes at Brady, who was hugging his knees and rocking. “Disgraceful.”

           

“I’m thinking,” Faust said. “What’s his demeanor?”

           

“He’s a goddamn machine,” Jeffreys said. “He didn’t say a word.”

           

“We’ve been rough,” Chalmers said. “Perhaps you should be gentle.”

           

Faust swallowed and approached the steel door, wondering if it was possible to gently fix a head upon a spike.

5 March 2022, 11:47PM

The smell of the morgue brought memories of Aubrey, of the long, tiled day room basted in a thousand coats of lemon-scented cleaner. He used to make the hike into Vermont at least once a week, but had been persuaded by her doctors to visit less. Giving the treatments more time to take hold. As if what she had become could be treated.

           

Faust looked back over his shoulder at the double doors, at the flickering fluorescents beyond them. He wondered if the hospital maintenance crew shunned this place or just felt it was beneath them. The former seemed a better fit. A palpable residue clung to the air. The olfactory sense was, in predators, more important than sight or hearing. The prehistoric brain bridled at the aroma of such places, not because death reminded the living of mortality, but because the living sensed the hunger of what waited beyond. A body canceled of its electrical signal. A dreaming machine reduced to meat.

           

Lynch’s voice flapped across his mind and circled there. You can’t kill anything. It’s the first law of thermodynamics, Agent Faust.

           

Faust pulled away from the hallway wall and its sudden holes, looked down to see grape-peals of skin clumped around his knuckles. Blood welled in the jagged grooves, struggling to impart some cryptic wisdom.  

           

Leave. You haven’t done anything you can’t undo yet. You haven’t—

           

But he had. He had, goddammit. And now he was blanking out before dead TVs and coming to, mid-memory, to the sight of his own fists destroying plaster. He wiped the white dust from his jacket, saw the browning spray of dried blood on his lapel. Carpenter’s blood. The President’s blood.

           

The memory of his burning home, the flickering orange windows and laughter like something from a Celtic myth, crested in dark waves between his ribs. By some miracle, he swallowed it. Pushed it far and out of sight. There would be no more lapses. A man’s memories were his property, and he could burn them if he wanted to.

           

He turned and saw his distorted reflection in the unplugged TV screen.

           

“Don’t rattle,” he told himself. “You came here for something. Now prove yourself wrong.”

5 March 2022 7:32PM

Faust barely heard the door close behind him. It was, he thought, the sound of some tectonic shift registered through miles of stone. The air seemed to resist his movement. At least, that’s why he’d later tell himself it took so long to move forward or even look up.

           

“So now they’ve sent you,” said a raspy southern voice. Whether the rasp was inherent or some resultant damage from Jeffreys, Faust had no way of telling—only that it filled his stomach with a kind of poison. “What’s behind door number three?”

           

Faust ticked his eyes up and felt his breath catch before he pulled it in.

Lynch’s left eye orbit was a swollen purple bulge. Both lips had split the way hot dogs will when set too long to boil. An imperfect bull’s ring of blood stretched from both nostrils, soaking into the white collar of his t-shirt. Between that and the black dust from the AC vent from which he’d changed a nation, Leonard Alan Lynch appeared every inch some pagan fresh from battle.

Faust cleared the breath from his throat. “Are you in pain?”

           

“I’ve long since mastered the A-delta and C fibres of my body.” Lynch smiled. “The pain which ails me now is cultural.”

           

Faust stepped toward the chair, and hesitated again at that peculiar tension in the air. “I can get you something to drink.”

           

“I believe you, sir, are thirstier than I.” The rolling sequence of his thick yellow fingernails on the steel table made Faust envision prehistoric insects clittering over stones. “Alas, I have only hemlock left to offer.”

           

Faust lifted the file and unclasped his hand robotically. He had forgotten he was holding it. He had forgotten, too, that this man was only human. “You didn’t speak with the others.”

           

“Their ears weren’t open.”

           

“How can you be sure mine are open now?”

           

“You have a mistrustful presence about you.” Lynch’s green eye sparkled with good humor. “I value that.”

           

“You understand why you’re being detained?”

           

“Detained? Is that what you call this? You lack information.”

           

Faust ignored that. “Why did you kill Norman Carpenter?”

           

“For all of mankind.”

           

“So says every crackpot driven by a purpose only he can ascertain.”

           

Lynch smiled. “Are you going to hit me now, daddy?”

           

Faust looked at the file for show; he’d already memorized most of it. “Cambridge. Dartmouth. MIT. You set the bar pretty high. Then knocked it right into a pile of dog shit.”

           

Lynch sighed. “The life of the academic is spent with books in rooms like this. Dead rooms. Studying dead men. Arguing with dead critics about dead concepts.”

           

“Like Norman Carpenter?”

           

“Norman Carpenter might once have been a senator from my home state. But what I killed wore Norman Carpenter like a skin.”

           

“Oh, I see.” Faust pumped his brows. “You're Don Sutherland … just trying to warn us about the body-snatchers.”

           

“I am erasing the encroachment of a supradimensional parasite who sees the world as its meat market. Protein, Mr. Secret Agent Man—that’s all you are. All I am. All the academics with their dead books. Sustenance.”

           

“So you’re telling me the reason Norman Carpenter is dead, and subsequently, the reason I’m about to be tarred and feathered for not crawling in a fucking tube to find you, is because my boss was, what, a little green man?” Faust clenched his fist to squelch the fire there, felt it die before it could travel through his veins. “Who do you work for, Leonard?”

           

“I work for the people of earth. I work for the hunter-gatherer doomed to evolve into the briefcase-wielding salesman. I work for the two-million years in which the brain of the high primate tripled in size. I work, Mr. Secret Agent Man, for the 85-billion neurons in my brain that are MORE THAN JUST A FUCKING MEAL!”

           

Lynch wiped spit from his swollen lips, and smiled gently. “I am known to be impassioned from time to time.”

           

“Is that why you left Virginia Tech?” Faust asked. “Or were you asked to leave?”

           

“I was begged to stay. But I was working on a theory that required all my attention. I had no energy to remedialize universal constants for indebted young adults.”

           

“So you resented them. The culture. Science. America. You did this to destabilize a system you despise.”

           

Lynch shook his head. “No, no, no. You’re seeing it from their eyes. You’re seeing it the way they want you to. I do not like people in the emotional sense. In the ecological sense I like them even less. But neither am I a murderer. Not until a mother is forced to watch her child’s tears lapped by the beast that means to devour it does she discover in herself the magnificent finality of violence. The race as a collective is my child. I will not let the wolf devour it. I refuse.”

           

Faust felt a strange emotion worm through him then. Empathy. Not in any condoning sense of the monstrousness of what this man had done—only in that it was obvious Lynch was capable of reason, hefted his words with emotional weight.

That he should feel anything for this man beyond moral disgust made him pull into himself, examine things, be sure that all of him was here for this. What would they say upon discovering the head of the secret service had ‘shared a moment’ with Norman Carpenter’s murderer?  

The thought stacked itself into the skyline of Faust’s mind, top-heavy, falling forward. In the span of a single breath, it was tipping toward the dark waves in his chest. Tipping with enough mass to collide with all that water and split it open. And he knew what lived down there, what breathed in that black ocean.

Lynch’s voice pulled him back. “I’ll take your silence as concession to my point. Even cogs and errant missiles can find common ground.”

Faust flattened his hands on the table to keep them from trembling. “I’m observing you, Leonard.”

Lynch shook his head slowly and pointed a trollish fingernail toward the camera. “Wrong. That’s what they’re doing.”  

“Was the deer rifle yours?”

“It was. My father taught me to shoot.”

“And the other weapon?”

“Oh that?” Lynch smiled. “I built it.”

“How did you get to the Convention Hall?”

“I drove.”

“You’d been planning this for some time. Why today? Why now? Someone or something pushed you to do this, Leonard.”

“I pushed myself.”

“If we’re going to talk straight, let’s talk straight. I won’t bullshit you. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Establishing trust.” Lynch’s single eye clouded over with an emotion Faust thought might be condescension. “There were others, but not in substance. Online contacts with whom dialogues could be woven. You won’t discover their identities because I, myself, don’t have them. I can only tell you they were likeminded.”

“Willing to assassinate world leaders?”

“Willing to assassinate newborn children, if those things occupied the soft tissue.”

“Thing is a vague noun, Leonard.”

“The parasite.” Lynch said it as if this should by now be obvious. “You’re a hunter. I impeded one but there are more. We’re wasting time here.”

Faust chuckled. “Are you trying to recruit me?”

“I would teach you. Even if I hated you, I would teach you. They must be hunted.”

“Then tell me why you did it.”

Lynch’s demeanor changed; it was like watching a truck drop gears in preparation for a hellish climb. “I already have, Agent Faust.”

Faust’s blood reversed itself, flooded backwards, and barreled up into his throat.

“Don’t look so surprised. You think I’d shoot Norman Carpenter without knowing who guarded him?” Lynch actually laughed, and it was a merry laugh, indeed. “Without knowing about everyone within a ten-mile radius of a communicable aberration? Oh yes, I know everything about you. About Edmund Jeffreys. About Burdock Chalmers. About Clarence Brady and his cuckolding wife. You and your echelon hold no secrets from us.”

Faust cocked an eyebrow, buying time as the blood redistributed to his heart. “Us?”

“The collective us. Guardians of the light.”

“Is that what this online organization calls itself? Dark web sounding boards? Some kind of lunatic consortium.”

“You are an ape who dawdles in the shadow of a monolith. Think bigger.”

Faust felt the fire in his fists return. Millions of dollars and centuries of infrastructure saw to it that most political dirt never breached the surface. Yet this pencil-pushing physicist knew that Brady’s wife had fucked her personal trainer? “Cut the shit. Who fed you your information?”

“Not whom, but what. That’s too complex. You would not understand the math.”

“My guess? You have a few shreds, and the rest is theatre. The only reason you’d do that is for leverage, and let’s get one thing straight—you have no fucking leverage. If I don’t leave with what I want, they’re going to throw you down a fucking hole that makes Guantanamo look like Disneyland. You ever had your fingernails replaced with copper wires? Had those wires fixed to tractor batteries? That’s just how they’ll start.”

“Spoken like a spirited violator of the Geneva Conventions,” Lynch said, with mock applause. “Pain is of no consequence to me. I have mastered my biology.”

“Is that right?”

“Have you mastered yours?” There was a challenge there. “Is everything all right at home, Agent Faust?”   

Faust lunged across the table and grabbed Lynch’s finger before he could stop himself. He wrenched it back, hard, and when Lynch maintained his smugness, his absolute composure, Faust began to twist. He was staring into that green good-humored eye when he felt the joint snap.

Lynch didn’t even twitch.   

5 March 2022, 11:59PM

Faust pushed open the double doors marked Autopsy Room, couldn’t feel the wood beneath the throbbing of his hands. Blood ran in traceries down to this wristwatch. Seeing it made him think of opening the polished black box that had contained it seven Christmases ago. Made him think of Aubrey’s coy smile beneath its crush of auburn hair. Her face had been her own then.

And what face are you wearing? He thought, though he knew it was another snatch from Lynch, the man’s voice a kind of virus now, chewing things, rearranging them with a minted seal that Faust was confusing for himself. He wondered if this was the way Aubrey had felt before things began to change. If some errant power had breached her social immune system and infected it.

The body was on the Autopsy crib, sealed in a black rubber bag. It’s silver zipper was industrial grade; the kind of engineering a little blood or gristle wouldn’t stop. Faust wondered if tipping it would fill the silent room with sloshing. Would it sound like the ocean in his chest?

The radio in his ear crackled, coming in patchy waves: “Faust, there’s … don’t know what … blood … can’t find … he’s gone … Where are … emergency.”

He fingered it out of his ear and let it dangle there on its coiled rubber cord.

“Hello, Norman, you evil son of a bitch,” he said to the body bag.

Then waited for it to talk back.       

5 March 2022 7:45PM

Faust sat back in his chair and said nothing, shaken by his sudden rage, but shaken more by the casual disinterest with which Lynch reset the bones of his finger above the table. It sounded like an armored beetle being squashed. He held it up and wiggled it at Faust, then folded his hands like some contented magician. “Do you require a further demonstration? Perhaps I could pull out my own eye. A little souvenir for Aubrey.”

Faust’s shoulder blades braced to the metal chair, as if by magnetic suction. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fucking breathe.  

“Oh yes,” Lynch said. “What is it they claim she has? Dissociative Personality Disorder; a prolonged somatic psychotic episode, with a peppering of high-bizarre delusions and violent outbursts. That doctor is a deviant, Ivan. What’s his name? Morales? Jonathan Morales, there it is. You know he pled out of two alleged sexual assaults in Rhode Island? One of the girls even committed suicide. I’d check on her, Ivan. I’d—”

But by then Faust was striking him in the face, feeling none of it, sinking far and fast into an ocean so black and total it devoured all memory of light.

But there was light. A sliver of it hung suspended beneath the sunset purpling on its shoulders. He had flowers in his hand, pink roses, Aubrey’s favorite. There was no occasion, per se, just a simple hello, I love you, I’ve been working so long and hard I’ve forgotten how beautiful you are, so I thought I’d remind you, dear, I thought I’d say I know you’ve been under pressure, I know you’ve been upset, but we can start over, we can—

He smelled smoke then, and the smell set off a chain of instinctual alarms.

Faust began to run, on some deeper level had already drawn the signs from her posture, her long pauses before answering, the way she stared and stared at their schnauzer Winston pawing at the glass back door. Faust had noticed these things the way he noticed when a man was too tense in a crowd, or a presidential exit path had too many bottlenecks. But mostly, he’d think much later, it was in the way she’d spoken to him about the world, how it was changing; not in the reflective tones of a disillusioned traditionalist, but in the sinister whispers of a doomsdayer.

The monsters don’t look like monsters anymore, Ivan. The monsters look like us.

“HELP! HELP ME” He turned mid-sprint to see who’d screamed, and realized it was his own voice echoing against the brick facades. These century-old houses with their regal sweeping lawns. And then it was his lawn, his wrought-iron gate, four colossal steps marching up into a darkened porch acrawl with roiling smoke.  

Faust halted on the cobbled walk, holding his arm up against the wall of heat. Paint blisters rose on the front door and popped before his eyes. He read their pattern with a kind of desperation, probing for answers to the questions onto which all thoughts now alighted like a murder of restless crows.

Is my wife still alive? Is Aubrey still alive? Is—

And then her laugh, imbued with an almost supernatural force, carved itself into the silence of the night.

He dropped the roses to the lawn.

Pink pedals scattered in the wind.

By the time he kicked the door in and dragged her out, he could hear sirens out front. He was met by a vanguard of firemen in reflective yellow suits, EMTs in blue canvas jumpers, a DCPD cruiser with a detective he knew by name but in this moment could not place. He surrendered his wife to these men, unable to do anything but cough, as they pumped her with a ventilator, as they gurneyed and rolled her up and up beneath a sky all dark but for the pulsing, cycling lights.

And much later, at the hospital, the same detective entered, sitting him down before the bed on which Aubrey now slept with the veneer of placidity. The detective with his lean and earnest face. A sad face, Faust would think, when he could think again. He brought up their schnauzer Winston with sunbursts of conflict in his eyes, this same man who had functioned as a buffer between the populace and the horrors of that populace, this same man who had seen murder and rape and dead children. And speaking now about the dog was somehow harder.

“Does your wife have a history of mental illness?”

“Aubrey? Of course not.”

“You’re sure about that?”

Faust nodded.  

“Why else would she put a dog in the oven?” The detective searched his face. “We believe that’s what caused the fire.”

Faust shot Aubrey a startled glance over his shoulder. “You can’t expect me to believe—”

“There was blood all over her hands. Under her fingernails. On her dress. Her shoes. Everywhere.”

“No.” Faust shook his head, then said it with more strength. “NO.”

“You were distressed. You couldn’t notice. But we noticed, Mr. Faust. It was difficult not to.” Something hard entered the topography of his face then. He leaned so close Faust could smell his woodsy aftershave. “She didn’t just put it in the oven. First she stabbed it with a steak knife. Forty-seven times.”

A cold wind blew through his center, which could only mean he was hollow. Faust swallowed. “Winston?”

“Winston.” The detective shook his head. “That poor fucking dog.”

  5 March 2022 7:57PM

Faust breached the black waves, gasping, felt the water become fabric in his hands, felt the gravity of a cold dead earth crush his feet into the concrete. His fist ratcheted forward again, and again, Lynch’s head snapping back, then bobbing up, snapping back, bobbing up. Faust buried all four knuckles into the bridge of his nose and felt the cartilage reform around them.

Lynch opened his mouth.

“Whatthehellisthat!” It came out so fast that on the review tapes it would sound like a single syllable.

Faust stumbled back into the table and hip rolled to the side, his feet slipping out behind him, his hand coming down to break the fall, so in the end, he resembled some sloppy sprinter on the starting block. He craned his neck up to see Lynch grinning down at him through sheets of blood. Sheets. But he could still see what had appeared at the back of Lynch’s throat, too, where the tonsils should have been.

Faust’s brain began to appropriate conclusions. Trauma, suppressed memories, and rage coalescing to form a temporary delusion. Poor fluorescent lighting and shadows thrown my Lynch’s teeth against the wet wall of his throat.

No, a voice was saying in the same earnest tone the detective had used in Aubrey’s hospital room. What you saw was black. What you saw had a fucking mouth.

“It seems the cat is out of the bag,” Lynch said, and laughed.

Faust turned for the door.

“Not so quick.” Lynch stood, chains ratcheting through their anchors beneath the table. “I wasn’t being poetic when I told you I’ve mastered my biology.”

As Faust watched, the bones in Lynch’s wrists flexed outward. The skin around his forearms went shiny with pressure. They buckled against the cuffs.

Then snapped each metal ring in half.

           

6 March 2022 12:01 AM

Faust waited for the bag to move.

Waited and was rewarded with the thunder of his heart.

He exhaled with such relief it became difficult to stand. He leaned against the wall with both elbows, let it build in his throat until he was laughing with a hysteria that blurred his vision. He was cracking, that was all. He had let the death of his superior shatter the window of his reserve like some errant rock. His wife was sick. The man he’d interviewed had been intelligent and manipulative. What he’d seen in the interrogation room had been some kind of sleight of hand. Lynch had picked the locks while he was sitting there.

And what about his arms? The bones flowering like pincers?

That, he had imagined. Lynch had suggested things subtly through his conversational technique. The CIA had done speculative research into hypnotism, autosuggestion, all sorts of other parlor tricks.

And that thing in his throat? The light flickering, when he told you he was interrupting the signal?

“Shadows,” Faust said, nodding to the silent room in which a dead president lay decomposing. “Shadows and some well-timed but ultimately coincidental power surge. We were in a fucking basement, for God’s sake.”

And saying it, finally explaining it to himself, he didn’t even feel regret. An ember of self-compassion was throwing light somewhere in all that darkness. Would anyone else do better? Would anyone else have survived so long in the turbid hurricane that was his life?

“No,” he said, and shook his head. “You didn’t do anything that can’t be undone. You can fix this.”

He grabbed the coiled earpiece and slid it home. “This is Faust. I have Carpenter.”

“Faust?” It was Jeffreys. “Where the hell have you been?”

He thought quickly, his pupils shifting rapidly. “I thought Leonard might be working with someone else. Carpenter’s body was in danger. I had it moved. I’m guarding it now.”

“What?” A pause. “Where are you?”

“In the coroner’s morgue across the street. A tunnel connects both structures.”

“Who’s with you?”

“I’m alone.”

“Chalmers and I are on our way.”      

5 March 2022 8:03PM

The cuffs fell rattling to the concrete.

“They can’t see us anymore,” Lynch said, and something in his face had changed, was no longer playing the illumined mad man. The familiarity of the expression took three full seconds to impress itself upon Faust’s short term memory. Kensky in the ICU waiting room. Kensky begging him to let him tag along. “Listen, and listen quickly. They’ll be coming through that door within five minutes. The loop won’t hold for any longer than that.”

Faust was still kneeling. He slid his shoes under him and stood slowly, flicking his eyes to the camera.

“I told you they can’t hear us. I’ve interrupted the frequency.” As Lynch spoke, the light hanging between them began to flicker, the strobes reducing his face to some cannibal mask. “The only reason I let you apprehend me—”

“Let me?” Faust shouted.

“—was to corroborate my suspicions. Yes, let you. I have evaded agencies far more advanced than the United States.”

“Switzerland is hardly more advanced.”

“Shut up and listen!” Lynch stepped forward, and Faust stepped closer to the door, making him raise his hands in an okay, I’ll play at your pace gesture. “Do you know what’s in Switzerland? The European Organization of Nuclear Research.”

“Why is that important?”

“It’s where this all began. In the largest particle accelerator ever built. 2011. The suspension of antihydrogen was maintained for fifteen minutes. 2018. Anticarbon was achieved for the first time in human history.”

“What does this have to do with—”

Lynch raised his voice. “2019. Anticarbon was maintained for more than twenty-three minutes. That’s when it happened. The echo of our presence was thrown across a stacked dimensional plane like a dinner bell. They were unaware of us until then. This world of ripe little primates who have yet to conquer their self-importance, let alone the flexible framework of the universe. We tore something open, and when we did, a few slipped through. They have gone to work destroying the ecology like a weed.”

“A few what?”

“Dimensional apex predators. A world parasite. Your president had one nested into his cerebral cortex. They wrap the spinal column like ivy, dual headed, one suckling to the brain stem while the other draws energy from the heart. Think of it as a jumper cable, though one with circumspect intelligence to rival our best tactical minds. Did you ever wonder how Carpenter was able to launch four warfronts with congressional support? Why the Russians, with less men and less money, were able to absorb China into a single currency? Why would Iran and North Korea ever concede to nuclear disarmament? Why would we, gun-crazed nation of the world?”

Faust had asked himself these questions, though no answer had ever satisfied. He had written it off as the ultimate strangeness of the world.

“Radiation is their weakness. In low levels—ultra violet, microwave—they can sustain themselves for short periods. But they must nest. Our bodies act as both shield and vehicle. But stick one into an X-ray, or in a field of nuclear fallout, and they shrivel up and die. Don’t you see? They’re preparing the world for an assault en masse. Removing all recourse for resistance. In the end, we will kneel. We will fold. Unless we stop them.”

Faust held his eyes for as long as he could. Then laughed. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“Check the body.” Lynch nodded. “It’s there.”

Faust looked at the door again, but didn’t move.

“When switching from host to host, the detachment process is easy. But once having coupled for a significant amount of time—six months, a year—they must be driven out. They begin to forget themselves. They begin to merge. If the body dies, decomposition will open an exit path, but slowly. What I’m telling you is that the parasite will still be there when you leave.” He sat back down. “Now keep hitting me.”

Faust cocked his head. “What?”

“Keep hitting me.” Lynch motioned him forward. “They’re coming.”

6 March 2022 12:23AM

Chalmers was through the door first, three Agency suits behind him. Jeffreys came next. Both men were shifting their eyes, not looking at Faust. Faust stood still, the body wheeled beneath the X-ray machine, where he’d left it before he’d lost his nerve.

Chalmers studied the arrangement, then looked at him. “Are you all right?”

“Peachy.”

“You’re pale,” Jeffreys said, as the other three men stormed up and down the halls with guns drawn, clearing rooms and calling out to each other. “Why didn’t you answer your radio?”

Faust ticked his eyes to the ceiling. “Must be the hundred thousand tons of concrete and steel. When I made contact, I was in the stairwell.”

“The stairwell is locked,” Chalmers said.

Faust looked at him. “How do you think it got that way?”

Chalmers’ beady eyes ticked back to the body back, the machinery surrounding it. “This all looks very strange, Ivan.”

Jeffreys crossed his arms, walking to the body, unclasping his arms to rest a hand upon its chest. “You said Lynch was working with someone?”

Faust studied him and said, “Yes. He made it seem as if he’d been apprehended purposefully. I thought it was likely bluster, textbook narcissism, but I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“You didn’t want to tell us, either.” Jeffreys seemed satisfied, and removed his hand from the body bag. “My feelings are hurt.”

“I’m under a lot of stress.”

“We’re all under a lot of stress, Ivan.” Then Jeffreys smiled.

A tall man with hollow cheekbones entered, his gun pointed at the floor. He spoke to Chalmers. “He’s not here, sir.”

“Who’s not here?” Faust asked.

“Lynch escaped two hours ago,” Chalmers said, moving slowly as he talked. “You can see why we were distressed when we couldn’t reach you. You were the only one he talked to.” A few more steps to the left.  “What did you two discuss?”

“You were listening, Chalmers. You tell me.”

He raised a finger in objection. “A malfunction interfered with the equipment in the last five minutes. When upon we entered shortly thereafter to find you striking him.”

“You weren’t hitting very hard, Ivan.” Jeffreys held up his purple hand, stepping to the right. “I can’t even fucking squeeze this thing.”

Faust saw too late that they had him covered on three sides.

The lights began to flicker—there and gone so quickly Faust might have imagined it.

“What did you talk about?” Chalmers asked again.

“He was going on about some kind of infestation. He called it a,” Faust cleared his throat, watching the man with the gun carefully now, “Dimensional Apex Predator.”

“Horseshit,” Jeffreys said and laughed.

Chalmers began to laugh, too.

Even the man in the doorway was laughing now.

The lights flickered, deeper this time, and when they swelled back to life, there was something bulging in the hollow of Chalmers’ throat.  Faust looked at Jeffreys and saw the same thing, a fleshy knuckle, probing slowly beneath the skin.

Faust tried to clear his gun but something killed the power. He dropped to his knees, saw muzzle-flashes alight the perfect darkness, and heard now heavy footsteps, the screams of men, a sizzling noise like bacon in a hot pan.

A mallet of fire struck his shoulder. The force of it smashed his head into the corner of the autopsy crib. He saw Lynch in the flash of gunfire standing in the doorway, aiming the weapon that had so mystified Chalmers and his ballistics analysts, before the room went black again.

Faust felt hot blood pouring down the back of his scalp, the back of his neck, imagined it welling to create a new ocean even blacker than the last. An ocean to consume him.

A final shot erupted in the darkness.

And the scream at what Faust saw followed him down into unconsciousness.

Jeffreys and Chalmers and the man in the doorway were on their knees. They were shaking as if in the throes of electrocution. And shaking, too, were thick ropes of unknown tissue depending from their chests.  

6 March 2022 TIME UNKNOWN

Faust came alive in pulses. The pulses were made of pain. His shoulder felt packed with molten glass. When he tried to move it, the scream tore his eyes open.

To see Lynch’s swollen face above him. Faust looked at his shoulder to see the sutures knotted, clipped, and dark with iodine. Lynch taped it carefully with gauze, humming to himself. Something classical. Something a man would listen to when writing equations to explain the damnation of the world. Faust didn’t want to speak, was afraid saying anything would materialize the horrific vision of what he’d saw. Somehow imagining it as a hallucination served him better.

“A simple thank you will suffice.” Lynch rose from the stool on the side of the autopsy crib. The autopsy crib Carpenter had been laying on.  

Faust turned his head and froze.

The President’s corpse was on the floor, his face and even the shape of his skull unrecognizable. Someone had split the ribs open. Spread the lungs with forceps. The other bodies had been dragged into the hall. The man with the hollow cheekbones was currently functioning as a doorstop.

“They can be overridden,” Lynch said, when he saw Faust staring. “Imagine the horror of a puppet master upon discovering the strings in his own hands.”

Faust looked at him, then at Carpenter, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

“Don’t pretend like you didn’t see it, Ivan. I opened my mouth, and you—”

“That wasn’t real!” Faust shook his head and tried to rise, but the pain slammed him back down. His skin felt loose, his bones like iron anchors. “I hallucinated all of that.”

“You did no such thing. You saw my satellite. I think of them that way, you know. An uplink into the parasitic hivemind. They store information beyond imagining. Galactic cartography, cultural analysis, alien technologies.” Lynch ticked his eyes to the rifle-like weapon fixed with a parabolic dish. “How do you think I constructed that? The blade of knowledge has two edges.”

“Jeffreys?” Faust whispered. “Chalmers and his men?”

“All dead.”

Faust felt the itch then. In the center of his chest. He felt a spark and then a light and then a tunnel mouth seemed to be within him, a tunnel mouth wide enough to swallow any ocean. He looked up into it, up into the ceiling’s lights, both of them superimposing, giving the world impossible depth, impossible width.

“You’re seeing it.” Lynch smiled.

“What am I seeing?” Faust felt the tears cascade his cheeks. “What is this?”

“The savior of the human race.” Lynch helped sit him up, and when he did, Faust felt something flex beneath his ribs. He made a surprised face, and Lynch said. “You get used to it. Soon it will become a part of you”

Faust couldn’t breathe. He clawed for Lynch but missed. Tried to reach for his gun and found his holster empty. He was screaming. He was grunting like an ape. “Why, you fucking lunatic?”

Faust slammed his fists into the steel until he was sure the bones would snap.

“WHYYYYY?”

Lynch waited in silence until the weeping subsided. He nodded solemnly and spread his hands, as if to say what’s done is done, my friend. Then he sat Faust up again and dabbed his tears with more gauze and asked, “Can you walk?”

Faust squinted, when they broke into the predawn light of an alleyway. “Where are we going?”

Lynch led him to a van parked by a dumpster, and opened the passenger door.

Faust hesitated at the door. “Where are we going?”  

Lynch studied the strange rifle in his hand. “To hunt.”

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