Dark Rising

TWENTY-TWO

Ahmad Al Janaddi was standing at the door of the containment cell when the president’s call was transferred through to him. He listened for a few minutes and gathered his strength; there were tears flowing down his cheeks. Looking back into the cell he felt the gorge rise in his throat once more. He turned quickly away as the thing started to howl again.

‘Yes, my President, we have recovered most of the bodies and also the special subject I mentioned. Yes, the lead lining of the suit seemed to give the man some physical protection and he still lives

… in a manner.’

The scientist compressed his lips and turned again to look through the cell window. It was true the creature lived, but it would never be a man again. When they tried to cut away the heavy lead-impregnated suit, they discovered that suit and man had somehow combined. The black hole had created a soup of flesh and lead, reformed it and delivered it back to them. Now the creature was contained in a large tub; spread out, its body covered nearly twenty feet, with tendrils and flaps of flesh splaying in all directions. It was able to move around and raise itself up. Al Janaddi knew this because a small square mirror on the wall above the tub had been smashed into sparkling splinters. He guessed the creature did not want to see its own image. He could not blame it.

He swallowed and moved his gaze up to its face. One eye was a milky white; the other, though still clear and brown, was over three feet long. Sickeningly, it still managed to fix on the scientist whenever he entered the room. That single eye held a plea – perhaps for a quick death and release from the permanent hell it was now trapped in.

The president was hungry for information about what the man had experienced. Where had he gone, what had he seen? Had he been judged and allowed to cross the bridge to Jannah, or did he fall to Jahannam?

Al Janaddi squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. ‘I think he was judged unworthy, my President; maybe even more so than Professor Shihab.’ The voice on the phone grew louder.

‘It will take us some time to prepare another event,’ Al Janaddi replied. ‘Even if we… Here? Yes, of course, my President; we would be delighted for you to observe our work first-hand.’

Al Janaddi sucked in a juddering breath as he listened. Please don’t ask me to take the phone in to… him, he thought.

He answered the final question as best he could. ‘I’m afraid we may never know what he saw, my President; all he does is scream.’

Something thumped wetly against the door. Al Janaddi turned to see that horrific face pressed up against the window. The screaming stopped for a moment and the giant lolling tongue writhed as if the creature were trying to speak.

Ahmad Al Janaddi wiped more tears from his eyes. ‘Allah forgive me,’ he cried, and sprinted away down the corridor.

Out in the Iranian desert, something lay motionless on the ground, disorientated. One minute it had been feeding with the others of its kind on the massive carcass of a plant-eater at the edge of a brackish swamp, warm blue sunlight bathing its back; the next it was here. It remained immobile as its senses slowly returned. The gravity was lighter here, giving its body more strength, but the air was thinner and drier. Though its exoskeleton contained a wax-like lubricant, the dry atmosphere was irritating and it needed liquids to survive – to feed on.

It raised its eyes on their cartilaginous stalks and surveyed the area. It had no idea what predators might stalk this strange barren land with its intense golden sun. Fan-like mouthparts extruded from between its bony mandibles and sampled the air, tasting the aromas. It could detect water, vegetation, salts and minerals, and strange fluids in creatures it had never known or sensed before.

It called – a subsonic sound that frightened a falcon overhead and woke a band of shivering bats sleeping in a cave miles to its south. To the rest of the animal kingdom, the sound was not perceptible, especially to any modern biped’s ears.

The creature compressed its gristly carapace plates against the heat – it needed to be away from the burning yellow sun. Articular membranes and muscle fibres pulled its chitinous exoskeleton segments together and it burrowed its pointed, armoured body a few feet below the surface of the sand. The going would be slower than above the ground, but it would retain more body fluid by staying out of the heat.

In the distance, the city of Arak was waking. Its inhabitants had no idea that the universe had delivered a little piece of hell to their doorstep.