Here and There (Sci-fi / Horror Short Story)

"After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find."

Fifth of July, Lanford Wilson

"If I go crazy, then will you still call me Superman?"

Kryptonite, Three Doors Down

I wake up in a windowless white cube with silent, multicolored medical equipment arrayed around me. 

I sit up a little, waiting to remember why I’m not at home. When that doesn’t happen, I try to remember where home is, what it looks like. 

When that doesn’t happen, I glance down at my bronzed arms and struggle to remember if they are the proper shade, if their scars and freckles are placed properly. 

It smells like there has been hot food in here recently, but I can’t place the individual odors. 

There is a ripple in my vision, and the lights on the medical devices project outward like those grids of motion-detector beams that you see in action movies. 

It looks like there’s a digital clock on the wall to my left, but the numbers are distorted into a blurred, blue wave. The first is a flat, vertical plane - a “1”? 

There are no windows, but there is a sense of being very high up, or, perhaps more likely, very far underground or undersea.  

“You’re awake, Mr. Sonder,” a woman in a white lab coat says as she threads her way between various intersecting beams. 

“That’s not my name,” I reply. I am pretty sure that this is true.

“You’re awake, Mr. X,” she amends. “And we don’t have much time.” 

She is tall, with dyed-auburn hair and a heart-shaped face. She introduces herself as Agent Ness. 

Her brown eyes are bloodshot, and the bags under them are heavy, blue-black crescents that sag halfway down her face. 

She wears an expensive-looking, plum pantsuit beneath her lab coat, but I keep getting flashes of her completely nude. Her areolae are huge and dark. Bigger and more discolored than her undereye bags, even. 

“Doctor Short, will you please assist me?” She requests. 

A short man - small enough to be a little person - jumps out from the space beneath my bed. 

“We’ll get right to it,” he agrees. 

I expect his voice to be squeaky, but he has a beautiful, brassy baritone. I can’t believe that it’s coming from his squat little chest. I wonder, all of a sudden, if this is some reality TV nightmare. 

Dr. Short is wearing a charcoal suit with horizontal stripes. He begins to speak. 

“Mr. X, when you were a boy, you were enrolled in a clinical trial for a new medication, which we’ll refer to as STS-17. Our team has recently learned that this medication has some long-term effects that are troubling, and so we’ve brought you here to make sure that you’re safe and that you’re aware of what is happening to you.”

“I wasn’t given any medicine when I was young,” I reply. I am sure of it. 

“I wasn’t sick,” I confirm, “and so I didn’t take any medicine.”

“STS-17 was originally designed as an immunogenic booster, a medicine to avoid sickness,” Dr. Short clarifies. 

Every time he speaks, I have to lean forward so that I can look down. That’s if I want to avoid being rude, at least. I stifle a chortle.

I catch a flash of a mousy, fragrant woman who wears gloves as she scrubs a pristine counter. A collection of cleaning products are within reach, and all of the windows are closed despite the caustic fumes. 

I’m almost certain that she’s my mother. 

“Okay, so, let’s take this X-Files scenario and pretend that it’s real,” I respond, subtly searching for cameras. “I would still remember having taken the medicine,” I insist. 

“You would’ve been between the ages of seven and nine. It’s possible that you might not remember the administration of this medicine, which … might have been traumatic,” Agent Ness replies. 

“Traumatic?” I ask. 

“STS-17 was administered by bladder instillation, or, in some cases, by rectal infusion,” she clarifies. 

Dr. Short comments,“Dr. Now always said that he like a fresh, tight ho -”

“Not helpful right now,” Agent Ness interrupts. 

“Dr. Now was eventually relieved of his position after a series of indiscretions, the likes of which our department - or frankly any department - has rarely seen," she goes on. "He was, however, a brilliant scientist, and he did give you a powerful, experimental medicine that seems to have increased immune resiliency.”

“There were, however, unforeseen side effects,” Dr. Short adds, and his voice is regretful now. 

“What’s going to happen to me?” 

“The short answer is that we don’t know,” Dr. Short answers. He disappears to my left, and when he returns, he has a manila folder tucked under his arm. 

“We can only tell you what we’ve observed in other members of your cohort,” Agent Ness says. 

Dr. Short hands her a picture, and she brings it closer. On her way to the bed, she is bisected by beams of orange and purple, so that she appears to flicker in and out of existence. 

She places the photo on the bed next to me. It shows the rectangular face of a black man, maybe thirty or thirty-five years of age. 

About my age, I remember. The man has a nimbus of frizzy, flamboyant hair. 

The left side of his mouth is trapped in a grimace like the kind that people having strokes sometimes make. From the right side of his mouth, another mouth emerges at an oblique angle. Its lips are curved upward in a smile that betrays an irregular selection of molars, incisors, canines. The teeth are different sizes, and their spacing is random, too. 

“What the fuck,” I say. 

“What the fuck, indeed,” Dr. Short confirms.

“What is it?” I ask. 

“It’s a kind of cosmic cancer. That’s as close as we can get to describing it right now, at least,” he replies. 

I receive one brief, troubling flash of Dr. Short, completely naked. His abs and arms are impressively muscled, his disproportionately large member engorged in a Priapic salute. I zoom in on what I at first took to be his urethral opening, from which a small, clutched hand emerges. It looks like a baby’s, and instead of nails, it has tiny teeth. 

Suddenly, I am sure, absolutely sure, that the photo is not a fake. I reach my hand up to my throat, where it finds a little nub of flesh to the right of my windpipe, which I begin massaging. It feels soft, flexes a bit beneath my fingers.

“We do not recommend that you touch the protrusion,” Agent Ness machine-guns at me. 

I drop my hand. 

“At first, we thought they were teratomas,” Dr. Short continues. “Tumors that can grow hair and teeth. We thought that they might even be aberrant attempts at reproduction, that some kind of cloning process was responsible.”

“That was up until we tried to biopsy one for the first time,” Agent Ness explains.

They wait.

“What happened?” I ask. 

Dr. Short continues: “You can feel the protrusion; we can feel the protrusion. It changes over time, but it has distinct characteristics, a measurable temperature. It can, of course, be photographed, as you have seen.”

“But as soon as we try to cut into it, whether to take a small section or to remove it completely, it disappears,” Agent Ness chimes in. 

“We’ve lost two patients that way. It appeared to the surgeons that they were removing the mass, but as soon as the protrusions were cut away, we discovered fatal injury to the healthy tissue from which they were projecting. Specifically, a severed carotid artery in the first patient; a cut windpipe in the second. The tissue from the protrusions, as soon as they are excised, degrades rapidly, disappearing within a few seconds.”

I look down at my arms again. My right hand appears slightly larger than my left, and I wonder if it has always been that way. 

“What happened to the man in the photo?” 

I don’t know why it matters, but I ask anyway. 

“He elected not to have surgery. He died two months ago in this very room.” 

Dr. Short shuffles through his stack of photos. He hands another to Agent Ness, who sets it atop the first one. 

The man has aged eighty years since the first photo was taken. His face is turned to the side and his features are frozen in a rictus of disbelief and horror. His entire irises are visible, his sclera a bright red that gapes from the page. 

His mouth is open further than seems possible. He looks like he’s screaming or gagging on something or maybe both.

His skin has the grayish, molted appearance of dead wood. There are deep grooves and ridges running in every direction. 

I want to deny that it’s the same man, but I can’t. 

Even his proud hair has been devitalized. Only a few gray-white wisps remain. 

I retch a viscous, yellow-green solution onto my too-dark chest and arms. It seems to boil briefly when it comes into contact with my skin. 

***

Aw-yee-ahh-ohh-sonn

Ah-see-lone-ahh-sonn

I am shocked awake by screaming that extends beyond all reason or proportion or possible containment. The voice is female, and it is the wailing of a mother who has learned that her newborn has died on the way home from the hospital. 

“Where’s it coming from?” I shout, and Dr. Short and Agent Ness - who were huddled in the corner in conference as I slept for an hour or two - move back into my field of vision.

“You need to tell us what they’re saying,” Agent Ness urges. “Your life could depend upon it.”

“Aw-yee-ha-hoo-soon,” I mimic far too easily. 

There is no delay. It sounds like it’s coming from me, now. 

“Sa-nay,” I continue.

“Male or female?” Dr. Short asks. He is scribbling on the front cover of the manila folder with the pictures in it.

“Female, I’m sure of it.” 

“Approximate age?”

I tune in again to the demonic yodeling. 

“I don’t know, middle-aged? Early forties, maybe?”

“What emotion is she feeling?” Agent Ness follows up.

“She’s not very…” Another wail slashes across my consciousness. 

“She’s obviously not very happy. Despair, maybe? Anguish?”

“Very good,” Agent Ness returns. “See if you can get any sense of the language. Any syllables you recognize, maybe words that sound familiar.”

The strained symphony cuts off after several more seconds of tortured, torturous wailing. I am covered in sweat. 

The protrusion on the right side of my neck is throbbing. 

Growing? I wonder. I start to rub it again. 

“We recommend that you avoid touching the mass,” Agent Ness reminds me. “Also, that you avoid looking at or imagining certain patterns - concentric circles and trypophobic patterns, especially. Repetitive biopatterns like honeycombs, insect eggs, skin rashes.”

“Where the hell is that sound coming from?” I ask. 

“Hell is right,” Agent Ness answers. She is choosing her words carefully, as though they are footholds in a rock face. 

“Are you sure you want to know?” 

I think for a moment, and then I nod. 

“It is a place of single-minded pain and sorrow,” she explains. “We don’t know if it’s in another dimension or just very far away. I suppose, too, that it could simply be another time. Dr. Now had a hypothesis that it was the future.”

“Think of a collapsed point of the most pure pain that you can imagine,” Dr. Short follows up.

“And expand that point to an entire landscape, a whole ecosystem, of soul-severing suffering.” 

“Why am I hearing it?”

“It seems to be where the protrusions go,” Dr. Short answers. “And it’s possible that you’ll end up there, too.” 

“And for what little it’s worth,” Agent Ness brackets, “Dr. Short and I have visited there using milder STS-series substances, and for all we know, we’ll be drawn there, as well.” 

There follows a silence more bereft and leaden than I can wrap my head around. I retreat from it before it can extinguish me. 

I can feel them now, the cosmic strings tugging me toward that place. 

I return to the hospital room, or whatever it is, where the slurred lights continue their air dances. 

I flash back to a warehouse rave that I attended during my sophomore year of college. I’d taken X, but it was either dirty or the dose was too high. I’d wandered, lonely and confused, as the happy-faced heads of strangers floated along a sea of smoke, lasers, and shared euphoria. 

That night, I’d escaped out onto the riverwalk, where great gulps of stinging salt air had revived me. Today, tonight, wherever and whenever I am, there is no respite. 

Agent Ness withdraws a recording device from her pocket. 

“19:02: Early signs of interdimensional auditory phenomena. Source was female, early forties, perhaps, despairing or in anguish. No discernible syllables or language. The protrusion in our current patient has achieved late first-stage growth, although no morphology is identifiable yet.”

I’m confronted with a mounted slide of memory. An October run beneath a single streetlight in the predawn dark. Unseasonably warm wind swirling brown-red leaves beside me, and a valley below a bridge that feels vast and constricted at the same time.  

I wonder if there are leaves there, in the place where I’m going. 

“What is my name?” I ask them. 

They look at each other, and then they take two or three steps back, so that I can see them both fully. 

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Dr. Short says. 

“In agony,” Agent Ness elaborates, “We are all of us united.”

***

“Do they always grow from the head?” I ask Dr. Short and Agent Ness. 

They have brought me chicken noodle soup and buttered baguette slices. A Coca-Cola, which I requested, forgoing years of Diet Coke devotion for a regular. 

Dr. Short appraises me with his blue-green, penetrating eyes. 

“You’re starting to ask the right questions,” he answers. “The protrusions always come from the head. We don’t know why. It might be that there is a sentient component, which requires nervous tissue to germinate.” 

“You mean this thing growing out of me, it’s, like, aware?”

“We believe that when it’s finished growing, or rather, being pulled out of you, it will be,” Dr. Short says. “Although we have little to no idea about the nature or level of its consciousness.” 

“Then how do you know?”

“Well, we don’t; maybe ‘suspect’ would be better language. But think of it this way: Your own resources, including your sentience, are gradually being depleted. As they fade, the protrusion becomes bigger, stronger, more vital and more… individual.” 

A spinning blue beam from a dial on some machine or other arcs through the room like a laser-light apparition. 

I feel a swelling dread, and for the first time I wonder if my sanity will endure through the end of this process. 

“Will you stay with me?” I whine. 

I remember another scene with the mousy woman, probably my mother, who saw how scared I was on the first day of school. She turned the car around and took me back home, where, for all I know, she fed me chicken soup.

Agent Ness, her face full of pain and wonder, approaches the bed. She takes my right hand as, from down below, another, smaller hand grasps my left. 

“We will be with you until the very end,” they answer in unison. 

“What’s my name?” I beg. 

“It -”

“It doesn’t serve you anymore.”

Happy Halloween, fam!

Over twelve weeks of being stable on buprenorphine (no methadone / fent) for me. Beginning the process of tapering off of that, now, too.

As always, thanks for reading!