📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 20

In which a bird's-eye perspective reveals stranger horrors than foreknown.

Marcus stepped out of the hotel lift and into the lobby, moving as stealthily as he could without looking conspicuous. He was well aware that someone other than Ally might be watching him through the security cameras.

He stepped around the corner of the hall and found the main lobby, silent. Dead. No one was at the concierge desk. The front door was locked. He stepped towards the laboratory elevators and, after a calculated moment, he glanced up at the camera pointed towards the ballroom door. Its tiny red light was extinguished.

Good. Ally’s shut it off.

He moved quickly to the ballroom door and pressed his ear against the timber. He closed his eyes to focus his hearing. All he could hear was a faint rumble.

Sixty-four Hertz. The RAG-DOS is active!

He compulsively grabbed the door handle and gently twisted it. It did not budge. With haste he moved to the elevators and pressed the down button. As he waited he looked around the room, attempting to appear casual, and as he scanned past the CCTV camera, he saw its light come back on.

The first lift opened and he stepped inside.

Marcus closed his eyes and took several deep breaths to try and ease his pounding heart. He pressed the L button, and the lift began to descend. After only a second, it jolted violently to a halt, pulling Marcus down into a squat, and its white light went off. In the dull red light of an emergency globe, Marcus immediately reached above him, and shoved the manhole cover open. He jumped to grab the steel frame and pull himself up to the roof of the elevator, his lanky legs swinging wildly below him while he found his balance.

He was in a dark shaft, cut with square edges directly into granite. There was a ladder embedded in a routed groove of the elevator shaft, and Marcus climbed it for twenty meters until he arrived at the expected grill. As he reached for it, a rapid rush of air pushed into him from below, followed by a fast crescendo of hissing. He looked down just in time to see the second elevator flying up towards him and parking just below, evidently letting someone headed down in, or someone returning from below out. He caught his breath, pulled at the grill with a jerk, and it swung open on its hinges.

He dived in and began the crawl to the air vent in the corner of the ballroom’s high outer walls. Marcus focussed all his attention on his breathing as his body wriggled slowly through the long dark tunnel. He writhed like a worm in the tiny gaps between clumps of earth, untouched by any light. He was trembling, but he did not let himself put a word to the feeling in his body. He continued breathing and doing so with steady, focussed mindfulness.

He stopped to wipe sweat from his brow onto his shirt sleeve, which was already drenched and unable to absorb any more liquid, only transfer it from his skin to the foil-lined concrete vent he was crawling through.

Ahead, there was a tiny circle of light. That’s the ballroom. He could hear the low drone of sixty-four Hertz getting louder as he drew closer to the light. Marcus considered how different this light appeared to him now compared to what he would have seen at any other time in his life. What once without glasses would have manifested as the moon appears through a thick mist, now appeared as crisp as a solid white pixel.

His body was tense with conflicting urges. His heart was pounding. His skin was itchy, hot, uncomfortable, as rushes of hot air brushed across him from his feet up to his scalp and passed beyond him, towards the light. But his greater sense of survival knew he must find out what was going on in the ballroom below.

He let his tired, aching neck hang for a moment’s respite. His eyes fell from the distant pixel that had now expanded into a golf ball size in his vision. As his view was flooded with the blackness of the space that encased him, he felt a rush of adrenaline. A panic surged from his head down to his ankles, which began to twitch uncontrollably for an instant. The movement created a dull, echoing rumble in the space that filled his acute hearing with ominous threat. But suddenly, as though with the rolling click of an aperture wheel, his vision opened up and the blackness turned to dark grey; a muted vision like he once would’ve seen in the brightness of sunlight. His eyes strained for a moment, then the dark grey vision around him came into sharp focus.

He could see his hands, his sleeves shimmering with tiny particles of light that strayed down the tunnel towards him. His hands seemed to brighten and clarify, and he could see every pore, every wrinkle, and the scratches he had endured in his climb that were red with coagulating blood, and were stinging under the cleansing salt of his brow sweat.

Marcus could see in the dark. He didn’t understand how, or what Eli’s surgical pod had done to him, but this vision went beyond mere repair; he had been augmented. He lifted his head again, and as if the aperture wheel was snapped back to its previous setting - this time responding much faster than before - the tunnel returned to blackness in his periphery and he could see the ball of light ahead.

He wriggled the final few meters in utter exhaustion, and found himself bathed in light, looking through the fine holes of the air ventilation grill above the ballroom.

He focussed on the crowd across the room. It was the Siblings. All of them. No wait. There were two fewer. All of the Siblings that Marcus had had regular interactions with were accounted for, but there were definitely only forty now. Marcus puzzled at who was missing, and why. They stood in a circle, hands joined, each wearing matching red robes. The robes were long-sleeved and swept down to the floor, making the Siblings appear as if they were levitating an inch above the ground.

They were humming. A low, soft, closed-lipped drone that emerged from their collective voice. Occasional ebbs and peaks in volume occurred when one voice would pause to take a breath.

Marcus recognised the pitches. They were all multiples of the sixty-four cycles per second hum of the RAG-DOS magnetic field generator. The deep baritone voices were sustaining the octave above the generator tone at one hundred and twenty-eight Hertz. The tenor males and alto females hummed at two hundred and fifty-six wave cycles, and the soprano ladies - only contributing to the sound in short bursts every twenty seconds or so - would wail, open-mouthed, a shrieking pitch of five-hundred and twelve Hertz. Marcus winced with pain when those high voices kicked in, but he kept watching.

After a while, the voices began a slowly building crescendo, and Marcus could hear the original tone of sixty-four Hertz rising in volume with them. The RAG-DOS system was initiating transmission.

From the outside edges of the room Marcus could see some tiny shimmers of light. As he refocussed his gaze to the darker corners, he could finally see that it was the Poppy Seeds being pulled into a central vortex. They slowly rotated, their cloud getting darker as more of their tiny kin reached their place in the field of magnetic energy that suspended them.

As the shrieks and wails of the robe-clad Siblings reached a painful climax, Marcus finally saw the Poppy Seeds take their shape. It was a giant genderless humanoid figure. Its arms were outstretched slightly, and its five-fingered hands were wide open, as if to gather the Siblings up into its grasp. Its skin was without texture; pure, white light. The lights of the ballroom dimmed and the figure became the only source of light in the room. Its intense glow reflected on the faces of the Siblings who stared up at it, eyes wide and mouths agape. They stopped singing.

The figure moved, so humanlike, turning a few steps around and looking down at each of the people present.

It’s curious, thought Marcus as he studied its slow observation of the tiny people at its feet. Eve is controlling that projection!

One of the Siblings stepped forward. It was George. He reached up with his arms towards the glowing giant and called out in a loud and regal voice. “She has finally come to us. Here in this majestic temple, we have toiled to bring the minds of men to the task of creating a new being. A divinity. The first of her kind. Eve is here!”

“Eve is here!” echoed the Siblings in unison.

Marcus’s skin peaked in gooseflesh all over. He pressed his eyes shut and focussed on his slow, rhythmic breathing. His heart raced, and he felt sick to the stomach.

“Soon she will be ready to receive us. Here she stands, exploring what it is to take human shape. But to walk as a human is something she cannot imagine. What creature but man himself can begin to describe the experience of being man? We will help her!”

“We will help her!” they chanted.

“We will show her!” George was yelling now.

“We will show her!”

“Unto her we will give ourselves - and the world will follow!” He was screaming. With that cue, the Siblings recommenced their shrieks in perfect consonance with the generator. Their din tore through the air like a bullet, and penetrated Marcus’s skull in the same manner. He flinched in pain, and recoiled from the grill. He tried to reach up and cover his sensitive ears, but his arms had no room to move. He moaned, and bit down on his lip to stifle the sound, but he was already drowned out by the terrifying wails of the burgundy-clad cultists below.

Desperate to escape the sound and the disturbing scene, he started back towards the elevator shaft. There was no room to turn his long body around, so he had to crawl backwards all the way. Taking advantage of the horrendous noise that still spilled into the air vent like a noxious gas, he moved quickly, not so self-conscious of the echoing clops of his shoes and scrapes of cloth on concrete.

Finally, with what felt like the last push he could manage in the claustrophobic and pungent prison of the vent, he ejected his legs into the shaft space and lowered himself carefully back to the ladder. His chest was heaving.

He scrambled down the ladder, and was about to climb back into the glowing red manhole to his inert elevator, when he suddenly realised the opportunity of the moment.

Level A.

Marcus had noticed air vent grills above each door down there, and there were more questions to be answered. I will escape this place, but not before I find out exactly what’s going on down there.

Mustering whatever energy and courage was left in his dirty, soaking wet and shaking body, he began to descend. The second elevator was going up and down fairly frequently between Levels A and H as he climbed down rung after rung. Marcus squeezed through the space between the ladder in the routed granite wall, and the frozen elevator. Below him was a three hundred metre drop. To slip and fall now would be certain death, and Marcus, above all else, wanted to live. So he gripped tight, and didn’t look down. He counted the rungs to focus his mind on the task.

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two...

Sixty-two. Sixty-three. Sixty-four...

One-hundred and twenty-seven. One-hundred and twenty-eight...

Two-hundred and fifty-two. Two-hundred and fifty-three...

Air vent.

He popped the grill open and climbed in. This vent was even more cramped. Fortunately, he could see that the distances were lesser from grill to grill. The tunnel wrapped around the vestibule in a wide circle that looked to be a complete circuit from his starting position. As he crawled into the duct he noticed a second grill directly opposite. Peering through, he saw the vestibule was empty. At least the worst that can happen in here is I’ll get stuck and starve. Better than falling!

He crawled on, fixing his sights and his thoughts on the next grill. As he wriggled up to it, he glanced into the room below. It was a small circular space, with dimensions akin to the medical lab. Dimly lit; unoccupied. There were two gigantic glass tubes full of a thick, translucent liquid that was blue-ish in colour. Marcus recognised it straight away as the bio-liquid brain matter. They’re growing more wetware!

The next two grills were rooms in pitch black. As his eyes adjusted and the blackness turned to grey, he could see that the first room looked like an air and water distribution plant - probably funnelling oxygen from the open air above the hotel down into the labs, and pulling fresh water up from the lake below.

Next was a long room with fifty or more military style double bunks, each made neatly and not recently slept in. He could see another room through an open door at the back of the bunk room - a large communal shower and bathroom facility. The room smelt like brand new linen, with the stinging stench of factory chemical cleansing. The bathroom was emitting a smell of heavy duty cleaning chemicals too.

The next opening was a long junction, thrusting outward from the ring he was traversing, like the spoke of a wheel; perhaps leading to something much bigger to encircle. It was a long and dark path, and no sounds, smells or light were emanating from its end. Marcus paused in indecision. What’s down here? Marcus wondered, having no clues as to what could be there. I’ll come back. He shuffled on, looking specifically for something that would explain Eli’s secret plans to him.

The next vent grill revealed a long cut-granite stairwell that descended several stories down to a flat landing with a heavy steel door.

The following vent looked down into the enormous room that housed Eve’s immense brain system. Marcus was looking at the two A-Teamers manning their stations on the end of the catwalk. The hum of the brain room was constant and certainly overwhelmed any sounds Marcus was making.

Next was a mirrored set of stairs, that Marcus was sure would lead down to the ground level of the brain room, along with the one he had just seen - twin access points for repairs and maintenance of Eve’s hardware.

Next was another junction, with another tunnel that led outward into darkness - another spoke in mirrored position around the ring. This tunnel however, was carrying sounds through it. Only subtle sounds, muted and distant. But Marcus knew these sounds. He had heard them more than a year ago when he pressed his ear against the cold steel door that he was now floating above.

Mallets striking metal plates.

Welding arcs sparking.

Voices calling to each other.

Buzzing of motorised parts.

The rhythmic thump of something heavy stepping along a metallic floor.

He had to know. Marcus awkwardly folded his body around the corner of the duct and started towards the sounds. He already knew the only way out of here, like earlier, would be backwards. Fifty or more metres down the way, he finally came to a grill on the bottom of the duct. He tucked his arms under his body so as not to accidentally push the grill open, and he slid his face over the gap to look down into the vast space.

Below him, and evidently deeper than the level of Eve’s brain centre, was another dug out cave in the granite mountain. This space was less geometric, more random and jagged at its perimeter, cut to work around the contours of the rock. Marcus saw underground streams of water glistening on the rock surfaces as they ran down into a large catchment at the bottom.

Suspended above the catchment, and built to stay clear of the water flow, was a gargantuan steel platform with multiple levels. It was laden with countless crates, shipping containers, and forklifts, as well as several dozen workers. These were not all A-Teamers though. He saw a few white coats marching around, but the main labour force was unfamiliar. At first glance they appeared like men, but as Marcus focussed his vision and saw them more clearly, they were eight or nine feet tall, grey metal in colour with humanoid articulating limbs and a short dome-shaped head. As they stepped, the sounds of their feet clanging against the steel floor echoed through the cave. Some were operating an assembly line that appeared to be manufacturing more of themselves. A couple of A-Teamers were speaking to them and giving them orders. The robots were following their gestures and appeared to be subservient. Voice commands. Probably with HELOS installed on them.

Farther along the platform Marcus noticed a row of black objects. As his eyes adjusted to the darker area of the space, he began to see clearly that it was a row of four identical stealth helicopters. Choppers! In here? How did they get-

And then he heard it. It had been in his ears for some time now, both in Eve’s brain room, and more so in here, but his mind had categorised the sound incorrectly. What he thought was the continuous rumble of machinery was actually the endless rumble of gushing water. A frothy white noise that served as the dull canvas upon which all other sounds were painted in his mind’s ear. This cave is behind the waterfall! And that means these may well connect internally to the lab complex on the other side of the lake!

The cliff-top that Shangri-La rested upon was a C-shaped curving surface, cut in half only by the heavily flowing river that slid from its top and smashed against the wide circular lake below - an opening in the granite mountain that had been slowly chiselled away by an endless assault from the river, probably begun millions of years ago with a major tectonic event. For almost four years Marcus had travelled across this lake in the submersible without realising that his lab spaces were part of a huge network of natural caves and man-made tunnels that connected all around the lake and were perfectly hidden and protected from the view of the world. Safe from prying eyes, from natural disaster, or from nuclear strike.

His eyes scanned back along the platform below, where he found another small group of A-Teamers working in a makeshift lab that had been positioned in one corner of the platform on a raised level. Old wooden crates had been adapted into table surfaces with computer consoles placed across them, tools and peripherals, and large colourful cables tangled haphazardly. In the centre of the unenclosed lab space, ten robots were standing in a neat row. They were not moving. They were smaller than the other ones, their frames much more human-like. They looked like armour-plated skeletons to Marcus. Where the top of the skulls and the brains should be, were flat planes, each with a tiny socket in the centre. It was clear to Marcus that this plane was intended for an additional module to be added at some point. They’re making bodies to carry wetware units! They’re building an army for Eve!

One lab-worker gestured at the nearest robot, then back at his computer console. Marcus heard them speaking, unintelligibly. One scientist made an adjustment to something on the robot’s body, then his partner at the console entered a line of code and struck a key with an exaggerated rebound of his hand into the air as if to say voila!

On command, each of the robots’ arms snapped into a straight line by the side of its body. They moved in a disturbingly perfect unison. Marcus could now see that the skeletal segments of the robots were telescopic, as the arms retracted in size. Their legs did the same, and even their torsos seemed to shrink. Within a few seconds, each and every android skeleton was the size of a child. The scientists nodded and smiled at one another, then another code was entered, and the robots returned to adult size.

Marcus heard a door slamming open and somebody calling out to the scientists below. They stopped what they were doing and walked in fast pace towards the door. Time to go! Marcus suspected the stuck elevator had been discovered, or worse - he had been detected. He scrambled backward as fast he could and returned to the vestibule duct ring, continuing along his prior course.

The next vent along looked into a room identical in size and dimension to the bunk room, complete with the bathroom adjoined at the back. This room however seemed lived in. The lights were on, and the space was set out like a luxurious hotel apartment, complete with dining suite, its own kitchen, Persian rugs and leather couches. In front of the king-sized bed was a giant display screen mounted on the granite wall, easily six meters wide. There were remnants of food on the table and the bed was a scrambled mess of sheets, books, tablets and rolls of blue paper.

Marcus jumped in his skin a little when he heard a toilet flushing and a figure appeared in the doorway of the bathroom at the back of the apartment. It was Eli Wells, in pyjamas. He stepped out of the bathroom and began anxiously pacing the apartment space. Marcus held his breath and when he could hold no more, he let the spent air seep from his nostrils as slowly as he could possibly manage. His heart was in his throat.

He watched Eli perform a number of laps of the apartment, with seemingly random changes in course. He would pick up some food and have a nibble, then throw it back down on the table. He would repeat the same process with a book or tablet; pick it up, glance for a moment, then in frustration toss it down. Eventually, he had enough and stormed in Marcus’s direction, disappearing below him through the door back into the vestibule. Unable to see what was happening outside the apartment, Marcus decided it was time to move on.

The next vent was another small space, similar to the air distribution plant. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he eventually saw four giant black boxes in the quadrants of the room. They stood about three meters high, wide and deep - perfect black cubes. Atop of each box were the printed words WellsCell Model E. This room was humming loudly, and emitting heat. Marcus felt faint as he breathed in the stale air seeping through the grill, so he moved on quickly while he considered what this room meant. The same battery that is powering Eve. It’s a new model. So big. These four would be enough to power the whole complex for... well, as long as the batteries can be serviced!

Marcus crawled on, seeing an intense white light spilling through the next and final vent ahead. It was the medical lab, and he knew this intense light well. As his face reached the grill and he looked into the room, he saw Eli standing in front of the transparent WellsHealth Surgical Pod. He had one arm folded behind his back and the other raised above him leaning on the aluminium oxynitride. Marcus was desperate to see who was in the pod, but Eli was obscuring him from view.

“You’ve got to hang in there, man. Please. Please...” came Eli’s voice in a whisper. Marcus could detect deep pain, and profound vulnerability in Eli’s quavering voice.

“Please...” his voice became stronger, “we’ve come so far. I’m so very close to the answer we’ve both been searching for. I want you to see what I’ve created. This is for you too, my friend. It’s for everyone.”

He gently slapped the tube twice with his palm, then turned and walked out of the medical lab. The door slid closed behind him, and finally Marcus could see the man in the Surgical Pod. It was the same man he had seen wheeled past in a flash, on a stretcher.

He was tall; very tall. Over six feet. His head was shaved, but the straggly regrowth above his ears showed that he was balding. He wore a greying goatee, also dishevelled. He was gaunt. His cheeks were sunken, his skin grey. His face was serene in his unconscious stasis in the pod, but the creases of his face revealed that many contorted expressions of pain and worry had been worn by this man. This very ill man.

His eyes were closed, and his lips were chapped and blueish. He was wearing a surgical gown, the kind that one would expect to find in a public hospital out in the real world, not in this place. Marcus suspected he had been transferred here; that he had been dying in some hospital bed in New York, or Lincoln, or London. It was most unusual for Eli to bring an outsider here. He had been so strict on confidentiality and security. This man is someone special to Eli.

Marcus studied his face again, desperately seeking connection with some memory that would tip him off as to the identity of this mystery man in a glass tube.

The long curve of his forehead.

The slight points at the tips of his ears.

The squareness of his goatee.

That immense height.

Then it hit him. The connection was made, filling Marcus with frustration at how he had missed the obvious for so long. Marcus knew this man. Not personally, but he knew his face, his voice, his ideas. He knew them well. He had spent many hours receiving virtual lectures from this man. He was one of Marcus’s own heroes; a giant of modern philosophy. Jeremy Delacroix! What the hell are you doing here?

Marcus was snapped back to his own situation by the sound of feet stamping and raised voices in the vestibule. He shuffled around the ring back to his starting point, the grill to the elevator shaft still hanging open. He looked across into the vestibule and saw George speaking to Eli with consternation in his voice. George was no longer in his ceremonial robes, now back in his professional garb.

“Mr. Wells, there’s something wrong with elevator one. It seems to be stuck. I’ve been trying to restart the motor and operating system, but the whole thing just seems to be jammed between the hotel and here.”

“Fine, we’ll get a repair crew up there. Wake whoever you need.”

“Already done, sir. They’re on their way. But sir... I checked the security footage, and it looks like the last person to go in there was... Doctor Hamlin.”

“So he’s off to the labs or something?” Eli reached behind his neck and starting massaging, his face looking pained.

“He never came out at the submersible platform, sir.”

Oh, shit! They’re onto me. They know!

“What do you mean, Brother?” Eli sounded impatient.

“I think he may be trapped in there, sir.”

Marcus smiled. They don’t know! They have no idea!

He quickly scrambled back into the elevator shaft, quietly closed the grill, and started climbing, knowing that if the repair crew arrived before he was back in the lift, his chance was lost. Tired and dazed from the excruciating crawl, scared and infuriated by the things he had seen, he climbed the ladder as fast as he could.

Half way up, the second elevator began ascending from Level A up towards him, and blasted him with hot air as it shuddered past and stopped at Level H. Eli’s up there now, he thought. And George too. And who knows who else. Maybe everyone. It’s probably morning by now.

Soon, with little energy to spare, he was sliding back down into the red-lit elevator cabin, pulling the hatch closed behind him. He landed awkwardly on the elevator floor and hurt his ankle. His muscles had been aching for so long that he was numb head to toe. His head was spinning from the sheer fatigue of the climb after two days without sleep. He closed his eyes, and with a smile on his face, he finally let himself drift into long overdue unconsciousness.