Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

The last thing I wanted to do was walk among those shifting forms. The floor beneath my feet was clouded. In its depths more shapes lay, their forms distorted.

I came again to the door that would not open. I placed a thumb in the scanner. Light welled up blood-red in my thumb and the door swung open.

Cold flowed out like a river. Tires squealed across concrete, glass shattered: a sudden blow to the chest but I was untouched and the place was silent, dark, and terribly cold. This, I thought, must be how equilibrium feels.

Another door. This also opened to my thumb, burning it white where it touched metal.

Light hollowed a room out of darkness, cavernous and still, the very air gelid. I pushed through the cold as I imagined the figures within the walls must force themselves, pushed through until I stood before what I had known I would find.

Seventy-two silver coffins stacked to the ceiling, their silver dulled by frost.

I stood before them, my thoughts empty, not even flickering: only the thin wailing reached here, a fly buzzing in my skull.

I realized irritably the fly was counting: Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. And one.

The buzzing stopped. I hung as well, waiting for the clock’s last tick.

It never came. The count stopped short. There should have been seventy-two.

The buzzing returned, strident against the silence. Insects crawled blindly over hexagonal cells, sealing them with restless palps. Behind the seals, dark shapes were twitching. The buzzing swelled.

I told it to stop.

And it stopped.

In the corridor walls the shapes still moved. Their motions quickened. I saw a face push to the surface as I passed.

Go away, I said, the words falling like stones.

It vanished.

I know how to make these visions disappear.

I know so much now.

I know where I am. I almost know what happened. I still cannot recall the moment when they reached T-zero on the count, and the device they had built out in the dark, on the methane ice the surveys name Eleusis, went terribly awry. Ten kilometers away, huddled in their shielded modules, they waited for something terrible to happen.

But what?

I could not recall. I remember only one of the senior scientists muttering blasphemy , and as the count descended past the 60-mark another raised his eyes to the light and I could see his lips begin to move.

Do I not recall this? Was this memory or dream? I know that I awoke, and when I woke I knew only something terrible had happened.

I must have functioned, somehow. No one but myself could have dragged those crates into the cold room. I tried, briefly, to recall this but the memory wasn’t there. I know this now as well: some things are never coming back.

And one of them is me.

A sudden flickering: the lights dimmed all the way to darkness, then flared. Shapes scattered and fled, as if sensing disaster. It no longer mattered. Rescue would arrive, but not for me. From the wall at my shoulder a face leered. “Go away,” I said again. I’ll be there soon enough.

The floor shook. For a moment I thought my voice might have shaken it, but it was just the ice below the station shifting. Nothing more, I told myself as I looked down.

Just below my feet, pale limbs lay locked in ice, faces grimacing as if in their last moments they cried out for mercy. Just below me two clutched each other close, their faces turned away as if in shame. Farther down and darker, two more still grappled, one tearing at the other with its teeth.

I was falling. In a moment I would find myself among them, and there was nothing I could do to save myself.

When I looked again the corridor was empty.

I knew what I could do to save myself.

Along another corridor, a very heavy, colder, darker door. No automatic functions here: I had to grip the lever, pull out and down, the frosted metal taking the skin off my palms. Pain adhered where skin had peeled away slipped off, hissing. In a few minutes it would stop.

I felt my way around the walls in darkness, my hands insensate, but when I reached the dual levers for the outer door I knew them.

I wondered if I would have the strength to get them both down fully and be blown free, or if the hatch would simply crack and trap me there, in an airlock not much larger than a coffin, evacuated, frozen: dead.

I wanted the door to open fully before I died. I wanted to see, on the narrow limits of this world, what we had made there.

Who made it? I shook my head. I realized I did not know. I knew there was something I wanted, something outside on the ice. But as I tried to fasten my thoughts on what I might want of it, what I might know, it veered away all askew.

I knew why I had gathered the bodies: it was the only apology I could imagine.

I shook my head again: apologize for what? I stood in a frigid, stygian airlock, my hands dripping blood onto the floor (I could hear it freezing as it struck), and could not remember what I had done. Or failed to do.

Questions came whirring out of the darkness, droning like flies drawn to blood.

Why are there so many coffins?

And:

Who brings coffins on a trip like this?

I was on my knees, shaking with something that forced its way out against all my efforts to contain it.

I knew what had become of the seventy-second body.

I stumbled back through light to the infirmary, where I seemed to have left a mess. There were bandages unfurled across the table and the instrument tray, and a puddle of something putrefying by the door. I took a bolt of gauze and wound it into clumsy mittens. Red soaked through and the loose ends trailed, but they would hold.

I was breathing heavily as I left the infirmary; as I passed, the figures in the walls seemed to heave as well. Irrelevant images kept offering themselves to me: shapes of light, of air; voices, voices everywhere, light touches on the back of my neck. Some of the voices were real: the crew of the rescue mission, still three million miles away. I ignored them, faces, voices, all.

I came to myself at the end of yet another corridor. My heart had broken loose in my chest. Breath was hard to draw. I stood at a small, blank door and felt myself afraid: it frightened me to find that I could still feel fear.

With a gesture that might have been a supplication, I opened the door. A longer passageway the floor dull and solid, with marks in the frost of something dragged. A final door, a small room, a single crate.

When I thumbed the latch it let out a gasp that filled the room.

The body lay as I had left it. Cold: the features marble, the eyes, half-open, ice.

I had tried to compose them, her lips. There had been an expression I did not want to remember.

Hadn’t there been?

I could not recall.

And gazing on what death had made of her, I realized that there is always worse to come.

I could not remember her. I remembered only pain, worse than the flaying cold, worse than everything until this moment. I gazed upon the marble shape that had at one time graven itself on my own flesh, and though the emptiness seemed to draw my entrails out when I gazed upon her features I remembered nothing.

This was what was taken from me. This was what I had lost here in Eleusis. This was what I could never find again no matter how far I pursued her. Everything of our lives together, gone. Only emptiness cutting into everything. I faltered, I fell, but the cold shape in the coffin refused me.

In another time, another place, I might have dragged the body-from its coffin, carried it back to the infirmary, tried to warm it, tried to shock life back into it, tried everything again.

Time is running out. I have no time left for empty gestures.

I left the crate as I had found it, swinging back the lid until it rested lightly on its frame. I could not bring myself to latch it, knowing how the sound would fall in that small room. I left the lid unlatched, and without looking back I made my way here to this room with the bed that I cannot bear to look at. Though the gauze trails red over the keys and tangles with them I have been hours here setting down what I know, thinking this might be the gesture I can make.