Tim Curran - Dead Sea

“Listen,” he said to Fabrini. “You back out, nobody’s gonna think less of you. This isn’t worth the risk. Just stay here. We’ll go up to that ship and-”

“Ah, don’t let em dick you around,” Saks said. “They don’t have any guts, Fabrini. Not like you. You’re the only real man here.”

“Take up that rope,” Fabrini said. “Play it out slow.”

He turned to that glowing blue field.

George heard something like cymbals crash in his head. His heart skipped a beat and the flesh at the back of his neck got very, very tight.

Fabrini stepped into the beam. He instantly looked liked he’d been dyed blue, those particles in there making him look like a man in a sandstorm. “Funny,” he said, his voice oddly muffled by the energy flow. “Yeah… like it’s crawling all over you.” He was running his fingers through it and those effervescing particles cycled around him in a sort of loose helix like bubbles in a glass of champagne. “Weird

… feels like I’m in a storm of tiny snowflakes or something. They kind of tickle.”

“Do you feel all right?” Cushing asked him. “Not dizzy or nauseous or anything?”

He shook his head in the flow and his movements were jerky like he was caught in a strobe light. Flickering, irregular, not a solid and smooth motion like a person in normal space.

Fabrini stepped forward, put his hand through and pulled back out. “Feels okay, I guess. Kind of chilly or thick or something.”

Saks was standing just outside the flow, a few feet away from him.

George and Menhaus had taken up the rope. Were gripping it very tightly like they were hanging on for dear life. Except it wasn’t their life that they were worried about.

Fabrini put both arms through the field and just stood there, maybe waiting for something to happen. But there was nothing. He turned his head to look at them with that same jerking, surreal animation like a TV cartoon with every other frame cut out. “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Cushing was standing there, breathing very hard. His hands bunching in and out of fists, the knuckles popping white as moons. Under his breath, he said, “That flow cuts out, it cuts out and he’ll be trapped in that bulkhead, he’ll become part of it…”

George heard him, some crazy picture in his mind of the teleporter clicking off like a light switch and Fabrini trapped there, his atoms mixed with those of the bulkhead, arms stuck in one side of the wall and out the other.

Fabrini stuck his face through and kept it there for a few moments. “It’s dark on the other side… real dark… but I think I see some lights in the distance.”

“Go easy with it,” Cushing said between clenched teeth.

Fabrini nodded, stepped through that blue and thrumming field. He created black, ghostly ripples as he broached it. Then he was gone and they waited for him to say something, but there was only silence. Yet, he was there, somewhere… both George and Menhaus could feel the tension on the rope.

“Why doesn’t he say something?” Menhaus said, sounding alarmed.

“Sound… sound might not carry through the field,” Cushing said.

Then, out of the field, Fabrini’s voice: “I’m… all right, all right.” But that voice was odd and wavering, tinny like it was coming through a distant transistor radio and not a very good one. His words were drawn out, then compressed, echoing with an unearthly and spectral sound. “… okay… I… it’s dark… I can see the dark… lights ahead, funny lights and… and… weird. .. weird shapes… blobs and bubbles… no they’re square or triangles… no they’re blobs… crystals, building crystals blowing and shining and what’s that? The rope is cut! The rope is cut! I can’t see it!”

“We have the rope!” George called out. “We can feel you on it!”

That voice again, echoing, splintering, bouncing around like a ball. “No… it’s okay okay… the rope it ends just a few feet from me like… like it’s broken… then it starts up again above me or below me… I can’t be sure,” he called back to them. His voice sounded fragile, like it was shattering and full of static. As if the sound waves were vibrating madly, flying apart. “I… my hands… they’re wrong… my thumbs are on the wrong side… I can’t see my feet… I don’t have any feet… my thumbs are coming out of my palms… where is my body… where.. “

“Pull him out,” Cushing said frantically. “Pull him the hell out of there!”

George and Menhaus yanked on the line, but it would not come. It felt like it was tied off to a slab of concrete. Saks took hold of it and so did Cushing, burned and bandaged hands or not. But the rope was stuck. They pulled and tugged until sweat ran down their faces.

“Fabrini!” Cushing cried out. “Fabrini? Can you hear me? Can you feel the rope in your hands? Follow the rope back through…”

“Rope… rope… rope… it’s stuck through me… I have too many legs, too many legs… what is that… that pale green face… no not a face… a cube… a living cube and a worm and a face of crystal… a million crawling bubbles… get me out of here! White faces without bodies… without eyes… don’t let them touch me… don’t let them touch me! GET ME OUT OF

HERE!”

Again, they yanked on the rope, everyone shouting and panicked and just utterly beside themselves. But the rope was not budging. It was hooked to something or around something and George doubted that even a bulldozer could have pulled it free.

“C’mon!” Menhaus shouted. “Pull! Pull! We gotta get him out of there!”

“It’s no good,” Saks said, panting.

George and Cushing gave the rope a final tug. It went limp in their hands, then taut, then limp again. It began to flop first this way, then that as if they had landed the mother of all trout. The field began to shimmer and then they could feel Fabrini’s weight on the other end again, he was screaming now, screaming something about “inside-out faces melting into hungry bubbles.” They gave the rope a good yank and Fabrini came through for just a moment, part of him did anyway.

But it wasn’t right, whatever was on the other side, whatever void or dimension or fractal between, had changed him, mixed-up his atoms maybe. They saw his back and his neck and the gold chain he always wore around his throat lit up like it was electrified. But there didn’t seem to be a head on top of his neck and his left arm was detached, floating above his head. His right arm was connected, but instead of the arm facing forward at the crook of his elbow, it was facing backward like it had been put back on wrong. And the rope…

The rope was not looped around him, it had passed right through his back and out the other side.

And he was screaming. God, yes, he was screaming with what sounded like a hundred spectral voices just out of sync with one another.

Elizabeth screamed and so did George.

Then Fabrini was pulled back into whereever he had been, but his left arm was still disembodied and it was alive, working, not bleeding or damaged in any way. Like when Menhaus had passed his hand into the mirror and his fingers came out of the other mirror. It was like that. Somehow, some way, through some obscene perversion of matter, that arm was still connected. Everyone watched it. It was gripping something and pulling itself along it.

“The rope,” George said. “The rope… it’s pulling itself along the rope…”

Then it, too, was gone.

Fabrini was just shrieking on the other side and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it.

The rope came alive in their hands again. Something on the other side took it and with such force, it nearly pulled George and Menhaus right into the flow, too. The rope burned through their palms, whipping and snapping, jerking to the left, the right. Up, then down. Then it dropped slack in the flow, but did not fall, as if it was caught in some unbelievable stasis of antigravity. It just floated like a length of hose floating on the surface of a river.