Apex Book Company

Short Fiction: The Artemis Ascendancy, Part 3 (Orpheus Project)

13 October 2012

Beneath an evening sky both red and black the students slink from place to place. The hallowed halls of Rutherford University swell with night’s swift onset. The buildings loom and grasp at young men and women too frightened to admit their fear; they still attend their classes despite the spate of lurid murders visited upon the campus over recent weeks.

Police have found no lead to follow other than the mysterious disappearance of Professor John Grimm and the death of his invalid wife immediately preceding the onset of the ‘Campus Killings’, as the media now refer to them.

Not all the victims have yet been found.

And one is still alive.

Beneath an old building–tall and lightless with black windows staring out upon the night-time campus–shadows stream down broken stairs and wind their way toward the feeble light within the basement.

You’re not feeling yourssself.

‘No.’

Sweet decay.

You’ve been awake for sssuch a long time.

‘Yes.’

Velvet knives.

You ssshould let yourssself go to sssleep.

‘No.’

Black oil and hot coals.

John Grimm slumped on the dirt floor of the dark basement. His back ached where it touched the wooden boiler room door. He did not know how much longer he could stay awake, but he knew he would rather…

… die? You would rather die than go to sssleep? But we have had sssuch fun together. We have fed upon forbidden fruit and you have grown fond of the tassste, have you not?

‘No!’ John screamed at the voice oozing out between his own thoughts. ‘I’m sick! I can’t bear not knowing what you’ve done with me when I sleep! What you make me do. I don’t remember eating for weeks, yet my stomach is full. I don’t know if I’m more terrified that you’re real or that you’re not–and I don’t think it even matters any more.’

He staggered to his feet and held his bloody hands up in front of his face. In the basement’s watery yellow light his ragged fingernails seemed as black as the streaks covering his chest and stomach. But he knew they weren’t really black; they were the dark rust of old blood.

Her blood.

And as if responding to his thoughts, her dreadful sobbing came welling up from the dark place within him.

Reading minds.

Linking souls.

Merging his own mind with his dying wife’s in an attempt to rouse her from her five-year coma. His Orpheus Machine had drilled a tunnel into Kim’s mind, but he had not brought Kim back with him when he climbed out of that tunnel. He had brought her worst nightmare.

Or he had gone mad.

When he usssed the firssst machine, your great-grandfather could not anssswer that quessstion either, manling. How deliciousss that you ssshould be ssso concerned for your own ssstate of mind, your culpability or lack or it, and give ssso little regard for your actionsss. I sssussspect it mattersss little to thossse upon whom we feed, my little piglet. Do they care a whit whether their monssster is possesssed or a madman?

Grimm slumped against the door, and wiped his hands on jeans stiff with…

The sobbing wasn’t just in his head; it came from the other side of the door. Someone was alive in there. Grimm pushed the door and tried to open it. His fingers slipped off the slick handle and he realised it too was covered with blood. He banged at the door with his fist while trying to get a better grip.

‘I’m coming!’ he shouted. ‘I’m coming!’

Of courssse you are, my pig. And can’t you hear how glad ssshe isss to know her mere sssobs can bring you to sssatiation? Lisssten to her laughing now.

‘Shut up,’ Grimm said through gritted teeth. But it was true. He could hear a woman’s brittle laughter from the other side of the door.

On his third attempt, Grimm managed to turn the slippery handle. He threw himself at the door and pushed through into the boiler room. He gagged on warm wet air, rank with ordure and offal. Pale light streamed through the doorway from the basement behind him.

And despite the winged shadow he cast deep into that noisome hole, he saw the woman laughing quietly to herself. He could not make out the details of her body in the darkness, but she seemed to be strapped within an elaborate chair of wires and cables and brass and rivets.

Her face was in the dim light. Tears had cut many paths through the grime and blood on her cheeks. Despite the polished metal of a net-head’s jack-points dotting her shaved skull, she might have been pretty before she came here.

The moment he burst through the doorway she stopped laughing and looked him straight in the eye.

‘Are you him or are you yourself?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘I… I’m not sure,’ Grimm replied. ‘I haven’t slept. I think I’m sick.’ He took another step into the room, clearing the doorway and letting more light shine through to cast itself upon her body.

She was seated in a contraption that resembled an old barber’s chair made of brass. Grimm suddenly recognised the prototype Orpheus Machine he had built using his great-grandfather’s designs and plans.

Tubing fed into the chair from the boiler. Tangled wires and gleaming mirrors spilled from the base to cover the young woman in an industrial spider’s gothic web. Her arms were clamped to the arm-rests, and her ankles were clamped to the foot-plate. Connected to the tips of the wires, hundreds of gleaming needles all over her body pierced skin drawn taught by just as many clamps and pins. Her four breasts were bruised and punctured as if bitten by a large dog, and angry red welts criss-crossed her thighs and stomach. On a bench beside the apparatus, antique surgical instruments lay covered with spatters of black blood and gobbets and red gore.

‘Sweet Mary, what have I done to you?’

Her eyes wavered. ‘Then you remember my name?’

Don’t lisssten to her. Ssshe isss a whore.

‘And if I am a whore, what of it? You asked what you did to me, but you are too late,’ she said. ‘It has all been done to me a thousand times before.’

Grimm stepped closer, reaching out as if he were a supplicant. ‘You can hear him? You can hear the nightmare?’ he asked incredulously.

Desperately.

‘Of course I can,’ she said. ‘I was sent by my sisters to save you.’

Grimm felt a monstrous black shape explode from within him. Blazing pain ran through his body like molten lead, burning him and seizing his limbs with an intolerable power. His tongue and lips moved, and each movement drove splinters of glass into his mouth. The voice that issued was not his, but the nightmare’s:

‘It cannot be! I Dessstroyed the lassst of you generationsss ago!’

Grimm felt himself snatch up a long-bladed surgical knife and lunge forward. He screamed from a tiny island of consciousness as his hand jerked awkwardly down–a puppet under the control of an apoplectic puppeteer. The knife bit deep and in that single stroke opened the woman’s abdomen from between her second row of breasts down to her pubic bone, against which the sharp blade snapped.

The woman convulsed in the machine, arching her back, but she cried out, ‘Flesh is nothing! Men have penetrated our bodies throughout the ages, but you touch nothing if we choose not to let you touch our minds!’

And who are you to ssspeak with sssuch authority for your ssex?’

Grimm felt as though an unseen hand held his eyelids open, forcing his eyes to see the horror before him with surreal clarity. His own cruel hands held the woman’s entrails, and yet with what could only be an incomprehensible exercise of will, she forced a strength and power to her voice:

‘I am Mary. A Magdalene. My sisters have protected our sons and lovers from you and your kind since before the Christ first claimed us in ancient Ephesus. This man has let you make a victim of him, but you have no power over me.’

‘I have every power over you! I ssshall pierce your mind and rape your sssoul!’

So saying, the nightmare creature filling Grimm’s mind and body released Mary’s viscera and rammed a cable into one of the net-head jacks in her skull. It took a blind helmet connected to the Orpheus Machine by tubes and cables and pulled the helmet over Grimm’s head. Every movement battered at Grimm’s consciousness with molten agony, but it seemed to also affect the creature’s control. It seemed to be weakening.

And then it closed the master contact switch.

-ooOOOoo-

The immediate absence of pain came as such a relief that for a moment Grimm forgot everything else.

But rough ground under his bare feet impinged upon his awareness, and with that awareness sound and smell and sight came thundering back.

He found himself standing outside. For a moment he thought it must be night, for the sky was dark, but then he saw a pale ring of fire and realised the sun had been eclipsed.

In the eerie twilight, he saw a heavy-set man hanging naked and bleeding from a large wooden beam nailed to the top of an equally large post. Many shadowy figures formed a ring some distance from the man, but the only noise was the rustle of cloth and somewhere far off, a child crying.

At his feet, three cloaked women stood with a red-headed man who wore only a loin-cloth. Grimm could see one of the women was old, and one seemed young in an ageless way. The third woman turned towards him, and Grimm recognised Mary. She spoke, and although he was some distance away, her voice was as clear as if she were whispering in his ear. He could even feel the warmth of her breath against his cheek.

‘He charged us, here at the beginning. Three orders He created from among Artemis’s daughters: the Virgins, who have since been yoked by the priests of Rome even though His own mother Mary was the first; the Crones, the holders of lore who have since been persecuted and driven into hiding–Mary the wife of Clopas was the first of those; and the Magdalenes. I am one of their order. Your demon can not come here.’

‘You… you were here? At Golgotha?’ he asked. His voice caught in his throat, but she seemed to hear.

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not I. But I count the Mary Magdalene as my ascendant, just as she counted Artemis hers and served in the Great Temple at Ephesus. Our sisterhood is more ancient even than this, and we have since served the Christ faithfully despite the degradation and defilement heaped upon on us by men over the centuries. But what are those tortures of ours to His? He knows. He took our agonies on Himself this day as well as the rest of the world’s besides. And so we serve throughout the ages, passing lore from one generation to the next. And sometimes we are called to fight against the demons loosed by men upon an unsuspecting world.

Demons like yours, John.’

‘It wasn’t mine,’ he whispered. ‘It came unbidden. I only tried to save my wife.’

He blinked and Mary stood abruptly in front of him even though he didn’t see her move. Her head-cloth was now thrown back. The lumps from the sockets in her shaved skull were visible only in silhouette as she reached up and gently cupped his face in her cool hands.

‘You despaired, John. And in your arrogance you sought to storm the sanctity of your wife’s mind. To chain her to your own will, because you needed her alive to appease your own selfish loss. You tried to steal her soul from God, and in doing so you opened a doorway to Hell.’

Grimm felt tears streaming down his face. ‘How do I end it? How do I close the door?’

‘You end it by asking forgiveness,’ she whispered. ‘And I shall close the door for you. I know your demon’s name, because my great-grandmother Mary Kelly wrested it from him. He killed her for it, but not before she passed it on to one other. And the demon did not know she had a daughter. And her grand-daughter is dying now by your hand. By her death… by my death, you shall be freed.’

The sun moved from behind the moon, and light flooded the world. Grimm was struck blind by roaring white and clashing brass.

-ooOOOoo-

I ssshall rape your soul! The voice filled his very being, and he felt a vast and ancient presence rushing with heat and flame to pour itself into the cool pool he sensed was Mary’s mind. He had been in that pool, and for a moment he felt her–he felt being her–but the demon left no room for him as it howled and defiled her with its own ancient lust and rage.

Grimm fell to the floor, blinded by the helmet still over his head. But then, against the hissing tumult of the Orpheus Machine, he heard Mary say: ‘You cannot invade when the invitation is freely given. And you cannot escape when you are named. Lodoxael, you are bound to me.’

Grimm pulled the helmet from his head. The Orpheus Machine writhed and shuddered, tearing itself apart. Steam poured from burst tubes and the dim basement light flickered off and on in time to flashes of electricity exploding the hundred mirrors of the machine’s entrails.

And Mary’s broken body formed the heart of the machine.

Grimm staggered to his feet and tried to release her. He could not tell if she were alive or dead, the wound to her belly was so deep. So vital. The machine buckled and bent her back so far her spine snapped with an audible snap.

And still, her arms and legs bound her to the machine and Grimm wept as he struggled to free her.

But the scalding steam and arcing electric cables forced him back. The pressure gauge on the boiler began a shrill whistle that quickly climbed in pitch.

Grimm turned and ran towards the night without a backward look.

The explosion, when it came, blew out three floors of the old building.

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Bryn Sparks lives in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, with his wife Christine and their three daughters. He owns no sheep. Bryn is CEO of a medical device manufacturing company, and is completing a PhD in Medicine at the Otago University, Christchurch School of Medicine.

Bryn’s previous publications include Wing and a Prayer in the February 2004 issue of Frothing at the Mouth, Seven Wives in the 2004 volume of the award winning Agog! anthology: Smashing Stories, and Whiskey in the Jar in the December 2004 issue of Aoife’s Kiss. They’re all worth getting from outstanding online vendors such as ProjectPulp or The Genre Mall.

His work, “Not For Children” is schedule to appear in the summer issue of Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest

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Bryn Sparks’s short story “On the Shoulder of Giants” appears in the Apex Publications anthology Aegri Somnia. Order your copy today.

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