Ian Hocking - Déjà Vu

As he stepped off the base of the ladder, he shielded his eyes from the spotlights, which put irregular shadows over ruptured cabinets, upside down chairs and blackened computer screens. Shredded paper lay like snow. He could hear the faraway put-put of a diesel generator. There was a rack of recharging torches next to the ladder. He took one and clipped himself to the safety line that disappeared into the darkness.

That darkness, when he entered it, was complete.

His torch beam reflected from the ashy airborne particles. Something had stirred the flakes and he didn’t know what. As he breathed, his spit evaporated in his respirator.

David remembered the corridor as a bright, air-conditioned expanse dotted with abstract art. Now there was just ongoing black. His feet settled feather-light, careful as an astronaut in moon dust, but the corridor sediment spilled nonetheless. His heavy-duty trousers snagged on cabinets, broken wood, and stalagmites of glass. He stopped to twist around one of the many cables that looped down. Occasionally, the ceiling purred.

He fought against the silence but the silence won. Its negative pressure drew out the memories. He pictured Helen, his wife, leading Bruce into the dining room of her and David’s new house, noting the layout of chairs, counting the paces between the kitchen door and the patio, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands resting on her swelling belly. He remembered the way Bruce laughed.

There was another purr from the ceiling.

His tears grew, unwipable, behind his visor.

Ten metres ahead, a light bobbed. David thumbed off his torch. The far light remained.

‘Bruce?’ he called, muffled.

He pressed forward. Cables snagged at his chin. He heard a sound from his teenage years. It was the tight creak of rigging when the sails took wind. He looked up and saw the ceiling distend. Dust fell, absurdly liquid. He scrambled clear but tripped. His head struck a rocky swelling of concrete. The world canted and he could not stand. He heard the ceiling collapse and felt it through his belly. In the stillness afterward, he understood that he had lost the torch. The corridor was black as burial. The collapse had missed him by centimetres.

The pip in his ear said, ‘Professor Proctor, you have lost your telemetric connection to the surface.’

‘There’s been a cave in. Looks blocked. Is there another way out?’

‘Not directly. But McWhirter’s team left an extremely low-frequency transmitter in your former laboratory. You could send a message.’

‘I think I broke the torch, Ego.’

‘Your visor is equipped with a zero-light mode. Would you like me to activate it?’

‘Please.’

Aboveground, McWhirter completed his nightly exercises with ten last press-ups on his knuckles. Sweat dewed his chest hair. He jumped into a crouch and pressed a towel against his forehead and each armpit. There were eight mirrors in his Victorian suite. The full-length glass in the living room showed him what he wanted. He walked through the French doors to a balcony set with hardy, dark green plants. McWhirter had such shrubs in his own garden, where they defined a pet labyrinth. He hung the towel around his neck and looked down the hotel’s gravel drive—footlights marked its edges—while his sweat dried in the wind.

His telephone rang.

‘McWhirter.’ He sat on the bed and rolled his head to treat a crick. ‘Go on.’ He removed the towel and sat on it. ‘What? Fuck.’

David stopped in the doorway of his former laboratory and studied the ceiling. False colour belied the dark ruin on which the visor’s zero light camera worked. Fire had taken the tiles. Exposed cables trailed. No doubt some of them carried power.

His first footfall crunched.

‘Ego, can you analyse the air?’

‘There are fine transition metals, some acids—chiefly sulphuric—and insoluble particles. The atmosphere is acutely carcinogenic.’

‘Remind me to give McWhirter a slap.’

‘When would you like this reminder?’

‘Forget the reminder.’

‘Very well.’

The liquid storage device had once prompted a joke about LSD, but David could not remember which of the team had cracked it. The transparent chamber was the size of a car, and the soup of liquid polymer, the tonnes of it, rolled in huge fronts of colour. Once it had reminded David of the surface of Jupiter. In contrast with the darkness, it was nova-bright.

‘Ego, I will place you beneath the forward stanchion of the device. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

David slid Ego into the drifts of dust.

Though the laboratory had never stored hazardous materials, it contained a decontamination room as standard. There was a shower, a bath, and a huge sink. The concrete floor sloped towards a drain on the far wall. The emergency lights were dead behind their grills. David walked across the broken tiles and burst pipework, and knelt in the corner, where a body lay in a sleeping bag. He peeled away the fabric.

Bruce might have been dead. His face was sunken and his mouth lopsided. His hands were drawn against the chest. There was a blanket over his legs. When David moved it aside, a writhing ball of blackness fragmented into rats—their hands pink, their eyes winking—and he checked the urge to scoop them away. Gently, he examined Bruce’s trousers. They were intact. The rats were in it for the warmth. If Bruce got some warmth in return, David was easy. He resettled the material.

Bruce lay on a mortuary headrest. David felt underneath. Sure enough, there was a neural bridging unit.

‘How long have you been inside, Bruce? Two days now? Soon after you broke in, I bet.’

His unconscious patient said nothing. David considered ripping the cable from his brain. He thought about the lab mice who had died when unplugged. Then he thought of Bruce moving around in the inkiness of this place, making his nest, his grave. The darkness of it. The same darkness that had fallen on Bruce at the age of ten. The blind man navigating by touch; coughing; hurting.

David thought, Cancel , and the rumination evaporated. He went about his work efficiently and calmly. He put a saline drip in the left arm and an antibiotic drip in the right. It was impossible not to think of former, better times. They had been inseparable. He found a note in Bruce’s trouser pocket. It was wet with urine. In handwriting frozen at ten years old, it read:

Well well well after all these years! Im looking forward to seeing an old friend. Come into my parlour said the spider to the etc.

David rocked back, hugged his knees and stared at his oldest friend.

Later, he left the room, crossed the main laboratory, and entered the suite of immersion chambers. There were six of them arranged either side of a walkway. Their transparent doors were blackened but otherwise intact. The first one opened easily. David put his head inside and tried to inspect the vents in ceiling of the cubicle, but his helmet was too cumbersome. The visor’s alarm whooped as David broke the seal. Perfect darkness slid up. When, finally, he took a breath, he gagged on the air. It stank like an old incinerator. He looked again at the cubicle vents. They were clear. He put the helmet on the floor, imagining the spill of dust, and removed his clothes. His bare feet stepped on silky sediment. The chamber was no larger than a shower stall.

‘Ego, has the computer finished the diagnostic program on the fines in this cubicle?’

‘Yes. The diagnostic has been passed. The machine is safe.’

Next to the vents in the cubicle ceiling was a full-face mask. It slid down like a periscope. David turned aside as two decades of dust hissed out. When the apparatus was producing good air, he attached it to his head, which was now locked in relation to the cubicle. The door closed automatically. Next he heard a whine from above. A warm, viscous liquid poured on his head. White droplets covered his mask, and then his vision was obscured entirely by the deluge.