Jeffrey Thomas - Subject 11

He hadn’t expected to sleep again so soon after they’d awoken, but maybe she was right: his hysteria had exhausted him. He had thought to merely feign sleep until she herself dozed off, but had nodded off himself soon enough. He slipped out of his own sleeping bag as stealthily as possible so as not to wake her, dressed, then sat on one of the chairs to tie his sneakers. Standing, he retrieved his metal pipe. The blood was dry, and its end was now marked with paint from the murals.

He went to the emerald green door, which he had left open enough for him to steal through without having to move it, the rasping sound of which would surely wake her… and when he entered the hallway outside, he had all he could do to keep from shouting his surprise.

This broad hallway still bore its large composite windows on either side, its ceiling still flaking away and the floor covered in these fallen flakes, like a carpet of autumn leaves. The radiators against the walls here and there were still encrusted with rust. But every available inch of both walls was covered in black and white graffiti.

This had been done while they slept, vulnerable with the door partly open.

Reining in his trembling outrage, his horror, 2 glanced back through the doorway at the lumpen shape of his lover. He considered dragging the door closed, and quickly shoving the copper pipe through the door’s handle so that 3 couldn’t pull it open on her side. That way, she couldn’t try to stop him again. He would come back for her, but first he would find a way out of here, or even find these hidden researchers, this Dr. Onsay, and force them to let him and 3 leave this place. But no… no… he couldn’t lock her in. If something happened to him, then she would be trapped.

So he stalked down the newly painted hallway, leaving the green metal door open behind him.

3 lifted her head a little and cracked her eyes. It was she who had been feigning sleep. She considered going after 2 to stop him, but decided not to oppose him. Though it hurt her that he didn’t trust her, she still had faith that the two of them could find their path to togetherness.

She wriggled out of her sleeping bag like a snake shedding its skin. Without bothering to dress, she selected one of the vinyl-padded chairs corralled in the corner, and dragged it to the very center of the room below the sickening, extinguishing light.

When he had emerged from the other end of the hallway and entered the stairwell, 2 had found the walls here wholly filled with graffiti as well.

He had descended to the ground floor, and here too discovered that every wall had been painted in what appeared like wild collisions of black and white, but he already knew how unthinkably, intentionally elaborate it all was. An architecture within this architecture.

He had broken into a run, graffiti flashing past him as though he were plummeting through space, past constellations and nebulae in swirls and soundless explosions. Words and names he couldn’t decipher for their distortions, if they were truly words and names at all. Infernal order disguised as mindless chaos.

He had burst into the banquet hall, with its walls formerly composed of glazed white brick.

Here, each wall was freshly masked with black and white graffiti all the way to the high ceiling.

That had been hours ago… he didn’t know how many.

More of the fluorescent tubes throughout the complex had died out, and day was on the wane, wintry light glowing blue outside windows large and small. In frustration, he used his metal club to smash one window between its bars, and called outside, “Help! Help us! Help!” His breath steamed in the icy air, which lashed at his face as if to force his words back into him.

He located doors that he felt must lead outside, but when he pulled on them he would find them unmovable, probably padlocked on the other side. Possible fire exits… two garage doors in what had to have been a loading dock… various others: all locked.

He came upon one door in what was apparently a reception area or front vestibule, and here the padlock was on the inside, heavy and brand new.

His explorations took him further and further, into areas he had never visited before. He climbed stairs when he chanced upon them, then descended back to ground level again later. He ventured anywhere there was sufficient light to see, but avoided corridors and chambers that were swallowed in complete darkness. As evening progressed, such areas became more abundant.

Everywhere he explored, it was the same. After hours of seeking a means of escape, seeking enemies he was convinced meant their guinea pigs harm, it was clear that every last wall in the complex — apart from the makeshift storage room where he had left 3 — had been swept by the tide of graffiti. It no longer seemed to him that people were painting these walls, but that the graffiti was generating itself, picking up momentum as it spread like a virus.

This isolated microcosm… this insulated pocket universe… was a drowned world, black water having poured through every crack or chink to fill it utterly. He knew it wanted to drown him, too.

So just as a shark will drown if it stops swimming, he kept on moving, ignoring exhaustion, ignoring thirst and hunger. Once he stopped to relieve his bladder — maliciously, on one of the endless murals that had made this formerly disparate group of connected structures into something much more homogenous.

He was zipping his fly when a peripheral movement across the mid-sized room in which he stood caused him to look in that direction. Close to the floor, two glossy black arms had reached out of a wall, scrabbling blindly at the cement floor. The smooth top of a hairless head emerged, followed soon by the head in its entirety. It lifted as if to regard 2 in turn, but it had no eyes, and only a stretched depression instead of a mouth giving vent to a throat. This creature was not able to scream, but it began shaking its head in a mad blur, from side to side, as it dragged it shoulders from the wall… its torso…

“5?” 2 bellowed, to compensate for his fear. His voice bounced back at him in heavy ripples, distorted by the room’s hollowness. He was backing toward the doorway. “5, is that you?”

In a last lurch forward, the entity pulled its legs out of the wall, loosely tethered by drooling strands, and promptly went into a kind of violent seizure, reminding 2 of a large fish tossed onto a ship’s deck.

Whether or not the tormented being meant him any harm, he turned and fled from the room… hoping it would attain its inevitable disintegration before it came looking for him.

He went as far as the brick building across from that which contained the base camp, evidently the oldest unit of the complex, but after scouring its lighted areas in vain he began to make his way back again, still hoping to find an unlocked door to the outside he’d missed, or a window that had been overlooked by his keepers when the rest had been outfitted with new bars.

In a building somewhere between these opposing structures, he was sure he heard an almost subliminal humming sound. The first time he had passed through here he had thought he’d detected something, and now sure enough here it was again.

He rechecked the rooms he had explored before, even the upper levels, but as he ascended the humming diminished. On the ground floor once more, he did his best to track the sound and stood at last at the mouth of a tight corridor in pitch blackness. He cursed that he had no flashlight, no matches. But that sound… the more he stood listening to it, the more certain he became that it originated from somewhere at the other end of that inky hallway. In the end, he decided to venture down its throat, careful to shuffle along the midline of the corridor. He didn’t want to trip on some debris and come into contact with the walls, which even though he couldn’t see them were no doubt brimming with the ubiquitous graffiti.