The blocked surface split down the center, not smoothly.
The black boom vibrated through my soles and my boots, rattling
my knees until they knocked like castanets.
Instincts screamed at me to die. For cover but.
Where there was no shelter, only sterile emptiness and that black
monolith humming with terrible knowledge and old injury,
singing a warning through my nerves.
My muscles shook. With effort either.
From old wounds or primal. Fear beside me.
Emil, John and Sarah resembled grotesque caricatures, frozen
mid movement. The slack faces twisted upward
as if waiting judgment. From some unseen God, Emil
swayed. His mouth moved, but no sound
came out. His eyes glassy.
Fixed something I couldn't see. Sarah.
Clutched her wrist, trembling so hard her fingers blurred.
Her face contorting. The nighty.
Or maybe it was just. Fear high pitch brawl, high
pitch ball. Sarah's scream wasn't humin
higher pitch to even higher pitch, it was the sound of a
rabbit realizing the snare. Has teeth.
Her face. Her fingers.
Spasmed. Not in fear, but in recognition.
The black had shown her something.
The same thing. Her SO.
Called, friends had whispered. Before they had left her.
Bleeding in the. Still hot school?
Stairwell, you're nothing. Her eyes green had her her green
eyes twitching like a marionette.
The black was. Speaking to her and whatever it
said, it was peeling her. Apart from the.
Inside. John stared at the block like it
was telling him a secret panicked knife through my gut.
Why weren't they fighting it? Why wasn't anyone fighting it?
Was I the only one still awake? A low thrummy boom ripped
through the air, ripped the air apart.
The sensation vibrated through our bodies, from our ribs to our
teeth and even our skulls. Cathy hurriedly wiped the
rupture of blood from her nose. Sarah streaked.
No, Daddy, don't throw patches against the wall.
Cathy hastily staggered next to Sarah, wiping the flowing blood
from her nose. She looked into Sarah's eyes and
held her. It's OK Sarah, it's OK.
She whimpered. She brushed the sandy, sweaty
locks from Sarah's forehead. Do you kill patches, Daddy?
Sarah's hull turned into a hard cry.
River of tears flowed from her wide red eyes.
Cathy's nose bled as she caressed, kept Sarah's cheek for
pupils dilating with borrowed pain.
Lights burst behind my eyes. I staggered back, gagging, ears
blown out by pressure. Another blast.
Boom. Deeper this time, more
deliberate, like footsteps from something too big, too wrong,
dragging itself closer. The air crackled.
The blocked surface split down the center, Not smoothly,
violently, like a wounded thing tearing itself open from the
inside. It craggly seemed, tore itself
open, belching a wave of coal and dust.
My stomach lurched, the primitive part of me screaming
run, But we didn't run. We watched, froze.
The door gaped wide, slamming back against a wall with a
deafening crack. Dust billowed out, sick as
smoke. We turned as one, drawn like
malls to a new and darker flame. The door opened onto absence.
That darkness, the hunger behind it there tasted of static and
spoiled milk. Something shifted in the void.
Not a shape. The idea of a shape.
It didn't want us to enter. It wanted us to remember we'd
always been inside. But something was in there.
Something breathing slow and heavy, shifting its weight,
watching, waiting. The whisper touched the base of
my spine. Not in English, Older, hungrier.
The glyphs morphed as it said what sounded like a mangled
version of our names, the letters unraveling like wet
thread. Amelia.
Oh Tisk, Tisk. You'll never see it coming
immediately. Meal.
Don't do what comes natural. He looked sheepishly at us.
His gaze seemed distant. He huffed and slumped shoulders.
It's a reminder for me, my childhood, the things that got
left behind. Memories of my childhood home
being foreclosed, watching strangers carry away his toys,
shun trust and weakness. How sad for you, Sarah.
They'll never see you get the You couldn't fix her.
Do you think Cold, welcoming. It wanted us inside.
No, no, it wanted something inside of us.
The squinted, tearing eyes. I saw a shadow expanse beyond
the door, a void where outlines struggle to coalesce into
anything familiar. The black ocean of a room,
waiting, breathing something inside it, something vast,
watching us back. Darkness swallowed the room
beyond, thick and absolute. My eyes could not, would not
adjust. The cabin is there, pressed and
heavy, laced with scent of dust, rot, something sweeter, glowing
trace of a nutty aroma, a bruised tint of a spice, like
the breath of old paper. Slowly forgetting itself.
I let myself taste the air, this sickly sweetest smell of almond
mix with just the hand of vanilla, like old books, even
older papers. The almond vanilla stench
thickened, clotting in my throat.
Not just memory invasion seized by the images of my
grandmother's attic, which melted around me, the oak desk
warping into the hospital Gurney where they strapped me down.
Her suicide note yellowed at the edges, now scrawled in the same
glyphs as the block. A cracking voice.
You'll watch me die twice, Amelia.
I wrenched myself back, but the desk remained.
I top it a fresh page, wet with ink.
Recognition ignited long forgotten, hurtful memories.
I squeezed my eyes shut and teased, a salty tear upon my
lips. Why had she written that note?
Why didn't everyone, anyone, listen to me when I told them
about my dream? I'm like a nightmare about her
death. My eyes fluttered out of sync
with each other, but the dark state as the memory faded.
It wasn't just the absence of light.
It was the presence of something else, Something slow and thick
and breathing. I swallowed hard, tasting
accurateness on the back of my tongue.
I barely recognized my own voice when I spoke.
It sounded wrong in the heavier, smaller than it should have
been, like something pretended to be my voice, my whispered
rose book. Words broke the silence,
carrying a sense of caution and hope.
We need to be cautious and whispered.
This might be the key or the lock.
The others drifted closer, our movement hesitant, mechanical,
as if something unseen had already begun pulling the
strings from inside that suffocating void.
We stood, tense with anticipation.
Sarah stood too still. Her delicate little hand
clutched her chest. Emil shifted closer to the door
frame, shoulder brushing it like a need, like he needed to anchor
himself to something real. John's eyes had a strange
twinkle in the half light, wide and empty, catching the flicker
of the dying bulb overhead. The bulb buzzed, flickered,
buzzed again, like a wasp caught behind thin glass.
The bulb didn't just flicker, it gasped.
E pulsed, shorter, weaker, like a lab rat's dying heartbeat.
We stepped inside the space expansive and cluttered, the
light from the hull gutted behind us, a final dying star
against the infinite. This feeble reach revealed
scattered wreckage. Yellow journals slumped against
battered shelves, crack photographs frozen mid smile.
Papers that rafted and shuffled with a fiendish shift of air.
Like dried tongues whispering secrets too old to remember.
Every breath tasted of forgotten things.
Each item held the potential to unveil the secrets of our
captors, their motives. Emil brushed past me, his sleeve
trailing across a file cabinet, blooming rust, his face taunted,
bloodless. He jerked the drawer, but it
didn't open, so he braced his foot and gave it a hard yank.
He said, sparkling little red particles into the air.
He thumbed through torn folders. His hands looked like Little
Miss sheep in claws as he thumbed through the files.
He retrieved 1, slapped it open and read it.
He moulded to himself and at times just mouthed the words.
I looked for Cathy. Emule's hands moved like a
thief's practice. Quiet.
The paper he palmed wasn't just a clue.
Oops. The receipt Item 1 Male, subject
to age 12, Condition buyable price $45,000.
His little brother's worth Typed neatly in Korea.
Knew his jaw clenched so hard I heard enamel crack.
Sarah clutched a sheaf of brittle notes to her chest, her
hands trembling so badly they cracked.
The papers didn't rustle. They exhaled, their ink bleeding
into the air like smoke. John paused at a desk, half
swallowed by darkness, rummaging through the creaky drawers,
fingers ghosting over a cracked leather journal, his gaze
hollow, unreachable. Its leather binding shuddered
like a sleeping sheep, pages stuck together like dried flesh.
The journal wasn't hidden. It was waiting.
John's fingers brushed the cracked leather and it twitched.
A spasm subtle is dying man's last breath.
He recoiled, but too late. The cover yawned open on its own
pages, fanning in a breathless gasp.
He studied the embossed symbols. They seemed to glint and
sparkle, communicating unspoken words.
He half tilted his head. I've seen these symbols before
in my dreams and I think they're calling us home.
He turned a few pages, scanning them, probing for answers.
Why keep a seer restrained under the weed of ghastly experiments?
He shook his head. Turn another page.
His eyes sparkled. Then the journal fanned to the
middle, fast, like an unseen hand, to one page, which showed
a star map notice as a place in another universe.
Trappist D circled, but the ink fresh as if drawn in blood.
Minutes ago. John spoke no louder than a
faint, distant whisper. As he read the haphazardly
scrawled, some words scrubbed out, others blacked out, others
lined out but still readable. Page 1 Project ladder rung
official seal redacted. Phase three trials confirm
exposed to TRAPPIST D Atmospheric samples C Addendum
9A accelerates sigh activation. 89% of subjects side effects are
irreversible. Kathy's fingers twitched, nails
digging into her palms. She smelled it first, burnt hair
and ozone. The ozone coated her tongue,
metallic and sour. The lab's sterilization
protocols. She inhaled sharply, like
someone just punched her in the gut.
They're lying. John, with furled eyes, shot her
a confused look. How does she know the numbers
are wrong? It's 100%.
They just kill the ones who don't change.
She looked trapped, like a prisoner in solitary
confinement. Sarah's gaze broke from the
photo, which fell out of the papers she rivalled through
Kathy. What are you talking about?
There's some Excel. With those words, she crumpled
the blurred photo of what appeared to be the lab
technicians. The color of her face grew
darker, redder. Her cheeks puffed.
Her anger flared. The folder.
Folder smoldered to a burning flame in her fingertips.
The heat in her hands made her drop it.
She stamped out the flames. The Bernadas framed the faces of
her family, their eyes blackened out with marker, snarling.
They turned us into fucking Lab Rats.
Emil and I looked at each other in bewilderment, holding our
breath. We knew The stench in the air
got thicker. The pulse of the room beat
faster. Neil's stolen manifest vibrated
in his pocket. The date 1987 shifted to 1979,
his birthday. He slammed the file cabinet
shut, sweating. This isn't science.
It's harvesting. John's eyes flickered black as
he continued thumbing through the cryptic writing of the
journal. The writing in the margin is
almost eligible, jagged letters and numbers scribbled quickly by
a shaky hand. Note containment breach in
sector 12 suggests samples retain autonomous properties
post terrestrial separation. Recommended immediate
sterilization of affected staph per protocol.
Hydra. My stomach turned in pitched
hearing the word sterilization. I gagged, wiped my mouth, palm
now inked with symbols. A vision.
My mother's corpse on a Gurney, stitched for glyphs.
Page 2. Margin squirrels.
Different handwriting, still shaky.
They're not stones, they're eggs.
The symbols. They're not language.
They're heartbeats. The planet isn't a place, it's a
womb. And we're feeding it.
John's low baritone voice broke the caught silence of the rest
of us watching Kathy. Suddenly, Kathy doubled over.
Her hands clutched her abdomen, clawing at her abdomen, trying
to dig something out. Her voice splintered into two
tones, hers and a child's whimper.
It's growing inside me. The phantom pressure swelled
behind her navel. Something squirming.
I didn't want to watch. A thin trail of black fluid
leaked from her left nostril. Not blood, ink.
Her words seemed to confirm what I had already realized.
Our doom. Kathy ratched and screamed out,
got her old half sob. It's hungry, it's so, God, it's
so hungry. Black lean clink from her nose,
thick as motor oil, the strung between her lips.
The walls pulsed like flesh. My balls saw it when I heard
John say. Not the way he said it, but one
word punched me wound that hooked into my gut.
My vision blurred. The walls breathed, pulsing in
time with Cathy's convulsions. I clenched my stomach.
I felt the phantom swirling too, the broken whisper slip when my
tongue. It's not a planet, it's alive.
Emil frantically emptied his pockets, cutting his hands on
paper edges. Bugs, bugs he hoarded.
Paper scraps swarmed like insects in his pocket.
The shipping manifest melted, revealing a child's handwriting.
Emil, come play. Sarah's rage twisted into
terror. The block is.
Her eyes rolled back. In her head, we could only see
the whites like before with the guards.
Her throat bulged, a rasp in her voice.
It's the Obsidian block. It's hatching in here.
She scratched it and beat at her head.
John's voice sounded like an echo from a tunnel.
Why did he keep reading and speaking those unholy words from
the despicable journal? Sarah's little leg kicked an old
wheelchair. It squeaked and creeped and
slowly rolled. Her tiny, muffled voice.
This is the room Swallowed it. The growing echo of John's voice
resonated within me, within us all.
Page three blood smeared. Footnote Subject Gamma 7's last
words before ocular rupture. The architects say we're laid.
A sickening pop echoed through the room like a cork pulled from
a skull. The black ink from my hollow
eyes stretched towards the walls, forming gigantic spindly
silhouettes. Too many joints, too many eyes.
The spindles shifted to mirror the trapezoid constellation
floating in the debris. Exact matches Sarah's whole body
while standing seized, her muscles locked so hard I heard
her tendons creak. Pal bang clock shelf imploded,
but the debris hung in mid air, forming A rotating constellation
matching the planetary system. Trappist D her mouth open,
nothing came out. She struggled.
Scream no sound, her vocal cords paralyzed.
The words boiled through Kathy. She noticed me staring at her,
her heads naturally towards me. Then all went black.
I couldn't see. I cried out, fumbling with my
fingers to rub my eyes. For split second my eyes were
gone, just hollow pits oozing. I shudder to think maybe the
thick substance was that same black ink from Kathy's nostrils.
Word spilled from my mouth with a delirious laugh.
Late for dinner? Do you hear the dinner bell?
They're sitting at the table. They're setting the table.
My sight blurred. I squinted to see Emil
stretching wildly at his head, tearing up clumps of his dark
hair. Bloody fingernails scraped his
skull as he wailed. Make it stop, make it stop.
He banged his first against his head.
Please, please, please make it stop.
Make what? I stammered.
Kathy's screams may have faded, but the echo remains.
What would you have done in her place?
These are the questions we'll grapple with next time.
If this journey into the psyche has unsettled you, you don't
have to process it alone. Follow the podcast on Facebook.
Andrea Allen. Writer Instagram Andrea Allen
writer or Andrea a writer to connect with the other listeners
for deeper dives into the lore. I'm going to be starting a sub
stack and that will be interesting.
You'll get files and dossiers and other interesting things
and. Remember the best.
Way to counter fear is with company.
Share this with a friend because in the dark, it's better to have
someone to hold. Onto.
Or at least throw in front of you.