Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

“It’s something to do with the man in the chair,” Honey said flatly. “With Grigor. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

“Could we be talking about Jungian archetypes here?” said Walker. “They were all the rage in my young days. Ideas and concepts given shape and form and even identities. Dark dreams from the depths of the human mass mind, driving people in directions they would never have chosen otherwise . . . Fads and fancies, politics and religions . . . Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Pardon me; I’m rambling, I know. But we are on very dangerous ground here, and I think it behooves us to tread carefully. Remember that film Forbidden Planet ? Monsters from the id? Unbeatable and unstoppable, rage and horror and all our most unspeakable lusts, given form and let loose on the world? Like the Hyde, only more so. Is that what happened here, in X37?”

“You’re right, Walker,” said Honey. “You are rambling.”

I was still studying the man in the chair and the two scientists. Grigor and Sergei and Ludmilla. Whatever information I was picking up, it wasn’t coming from the video recording. It was coming from the other room. Haunted, stained by what these people had done in it. The scientists had wanted to access the old DNA so they could learn to talk with gods again and bend them to the State’s will.

Children, playing with nuclear weapons.

Grigor suddenly convulsed, his scrawny naked body fighting the leather straps that held him in place. The chair creaked and groaned, but the straps held. (I was right there with them now. I could hear and see everything. Smell Grigor’s sweat, feel the static charge building on the air.) Sergei checked the readings on his instruments, and Ludmilla scribbled frantic notes on her clipboard. The cameras recorded everything. Grigor’s face writhed, his eyes bulged, his breathing grew faster and faster. The cables leading from his shaven head lashed back and forth.

And then he stopped moving. He held himself unnaturally still, as though afraid of drawing something’s attention. Sweat ran down skin flushed bright pink from exertion. Grigor was barely breathing now, his expression set and fixed. He was Seeing something; I could sense it. Something not present or evident to normal human senses. He Saw it, and I think it Saw him. His face twisted with horror and revulsion, racked by a terror beyond bearing. He screamed like a small child, like a wounded animal, like a soul newly damned to Hell.

I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t see it. Information was pouring into my head, forcing its way in despite everything I could do to keep it out.

The scientists had done it. The old DNA was awake again on-line and up and running. Grigor’s eyes were full of the Sight. But he hadn’t looked outward, as intended, beyond the fields we know into other worlds and dimensions or the many overlapping layers of our complicated reality. Instead, his Sight had turned away from the world that had hurt him so very much, turned away and turned inward. He looked deep into himself, into humanity, into all the hidden secrets of our DNA. And he found something there, something buried deep in the genetic material of us all, something so awful in its significance that he couldn’t stand it.

His mind broke, leaping up and out, his artificially augmented thoughts tapping into the human mass mind, the shared unconscious that linked all the people of X37. He drew upon the power he found there, took it and shaped it and sent it out to destroy every living thing in the city. So that the vile experiments would finally stop, and the awful knowledge Grigor had stumbled across would die with him.

Let them all die, he said. They’re all guilty. They all knew what was happening.

Grigor called up nightmares. All the things we’re really afraid of. Monstrous shapes, terrible archetypes, all the private and personal horrors that have power over us in the dark, in the early hours of the morning, when we dream awful dreams, of things we can only escape from by waking up and leaving them behind. Grigor summoned them up from the mass mind, gave them material shape and form, and turned them loose on the people of X37.

And the city screamed.

The scientists realised something had gone terribly wrong with their experiment. Grigor wasn’t crying out or straining against his straps anymore. He sat perfectly still. Sergei and Ludmilla approached him cautiously. He slowly turned his tortured head to look at them. Blood ran in endless tears from his unblinking eyes. Having finally Seen the truth, he could not look away, even though it was killing him. But he still managed a smile for his tormentors.

They’re coming, he said. They’re coming for you. Every single one of them, and they all want a piece . . .

He sounded like a dead man speaking. A man who can speak unbearable truths because he has nothing left to lose. Sergei backed away, calling hysterically for help. Ludmilla threw her clipboard aside, ran to the control board, and hit the abort button. It should have killed Grigor instantly, frying him with a massive electrical charge, but he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Huge sparks spat and sputtered on the air, discharging into the surrounding equipment. Ludmilla grabbed a fire ax from the wall and chopped at Grigor in his chair with hysterical strength. The heavy steel blade bit into his flesh again and again, but he didn’t cry out, and he wouldn’t die.

Sergei tried to escape, but the door wouldn’t open. Security guards were pounding on it from the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. Ludmilla backed away from the bloody mess in the chair that was still smiling at her, and she laughed shrilly past the dishevelled hair falling into her stark white face. The ax head trailed a bloody path across the floor, as though it had grown too heavy for her to hold up.

They came through the walls, and up through the floor, and down from the ceiling. Real and solid, not alive, still bearing the wounds that had killed them. All the subjects who’d been experimented on, who’d suffered and died in the chair, screaming for help and mercy and simple compassion that never came. They came for Sergei and Ludmilla, who died slowly and who died screaming at the hands of those they’d wronged. And when the dead were finally finished with them, they left the bloody messes behind on the floor and went out of the room and into the city to do even worse things.

The tape stopped. I looked around, startled. I’d forgotten who and when I was. The room, what had happened in it, had filled my head. I took a deep breath and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my hand. Honey had shut the tape machine down. She was breathing hard. I wondered if she’d seen all the things I had. Walker was looking at the floor. Peter had his back to us. I looked through the one-way mirror into the next room. It was empty, and so was the chair.

“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.

“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”

“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”

“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.

“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”

“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”

“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.”