Project Blackwater: Kharis (Part 2 of 2)

Kharis descends further into the depths of her subconscious in an attempt to stop Dr Karasevdas before it's too late

In Part 1, Kharis was horrified to find herself revisiting a part of her past that she thought was burned and buried. Now she must try to stop Elysium from fully uncovering what she had hidden.

---

I blink. I see nothing but a hazy yellowish glow. I hear a soft crunching noise, and register the sound of someone nearby eating crisps, but I can’t move or turn my head. I’m distantly aware of the needles in my spine. Another noise cuts in, an insistent beeping.

“Oh, shit,” I hear someone say. A face looms over me, huge and pink. I smell the distinctive odour of Shrimp Crisps^TM, mingled with some kind of cologne that reminds me of Parma violets. I blink again, trying to focus. The face disappears, and at the same time there’s a racket in the corridor. I still can’t move. I hear a man’s voice.

“Get her under again now!” he barks at the orderly. There’s a bustle in the room, and I struggle, but it disappears with my next blink. I’m back in the lobby, and the door to the cobbled street outside has just clanged shut.

Zoe’s still there in the elevator. It’s still locked. I wrap my hand around hers where it’s pressed to the rhomboid lattice of the old brass scissor gate.

“I can’t get out,” I say.

She looks troubled. “Then there’s only one way. You have to deal with them in here. But it will be dangerous, and they will try to stop you.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. And in any case, remember they can see everything you see and hear everything you hear.”

I nod understanding.

“All I can say is, you have to go down. I’m afraid this is stuck—” she rattles the scissor gate — “so you’ll have to find the stairs.”

Zoe glances up in the direction of the elevator shaft, as if she can hear something.

“Now go,” she says. “And Godspeed!”

***

The stairwell is where I remember it, just inside the corridor that leads to the offices. I avoid looking at the other corridor. Just thinking about it stirs up a twinge of that terrible thirst. Instead, I look down the stairs. The first flight of steps is illuminated by the fluorescent strip lights in the corridor, but after the first landing the stairs descend into darkness. Looking at it fills me with a vague dread. I wish I had a torch.

There’s a soft noise from the lobby. The squeak of a door opening. They’re here. I abandon the idea of trying to plan any better — as if I knew what to plan for anyway — and start down the stairs.

At first, it seems important to keep as quiet as possible, so I creep from step to step like a child playing hide-and-seek in a house with too few hiding places. Then I remember that they can monitor me in the projection room anyway and are undoubtedly doing that. But I hear nothing from above. Why do they not just rush in and grab me? They need you to lead them to what they seek.

The stairs get darker at the next landing. The only light now is from the green Emergency Exit sign, pointing back up the way I’ve come. I take each step cautiously, running my hand along the smooth wood of the bannister. There’s still no sound from above, but I sense that there is someone there, hidden around the corners of the landings, following. Someone, or something.

***

I’m not sure how many turns the stairs have taken, corkscrewing into the dark, when I feel the wood of the bannister give way to something soft and wet. I shriek, involuntarily, and jerk my hand away. I’ve just reached another landing, and I see in horror that there are no more ghostly green Emergency Exit lights below me. This is the last one. In the light of the last sign, I examine my hand. It’s wet with a clear liquid. I sniff it cautiously. Just water. I nearly laugh out loud. When I look at the bannister again, I see that it’s been colonised by some species of moss. In fact, the whole stairwell seems to be giving way to moss and fungi. I pull a face. Zoe would have loved this. Her PhD had been in mycolinguistics, after all.

I edge cautiously onto the first of the mossy steps. My eyes have adapted to the dark, but I hate the thought of leaning on the bannister now, with its mossy tufts and drapes and spores and tangles of mycelium. A few more steps, and I notice that there’s a very faint glow from some of the fungi. Not much, but enough to give me some sense of orientation.

When Ciprian appears, he’s almost blinding. At first I see a slightly brighter light down below and I assume it’s a mushroom with stronger luminescence. Then it grows, and it looks like a white bird flying up towards me. Then for one terrifying moment I think it’s a ghost, and then I see his face. He lands gently on the next landing, folding his wings behind him, and looks up at me, holding out his hand. The gunshot wound has been healed or bandaged, hidden under the scruffy old Suff t-shirt he used to wear all the time. He’s glowing softly all over, not harshly like a flashlight or hollow like a jack-o-lantern, but just as if his life-force itself were part of the visible spectrum of light.

“Hold onto me,” he says. “Quick, we don’t have much time.”

“What’s happening?” I say. At the same time I hear a soft squelch from up above. My follower isn’t far behind.

He tells me to wrap my arms and legs around him, like a baby monkey with its mother. He wraps his arms around me then, and takes off from the landing, his wings flapping hard with the extra weight.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him as we descend through the dark.

“I know. I forgive you,” he says. “Now close your eyes. Makes it harder for them.”

I feel the wind rushing up as we descend, and then Ciprian veers sideways and up and back down and around until I’ve utterly lost my bearings. I cling onto him, savouring the warmth and the smell of him, that mixture of tobacco and the Old Spice aftershave he used to use and that I used to laugh at for being old-fashioned. And then, my head pressed against his collarbone, I feel the pulse of his blood and the unholy thirst swells in me. I push it back down. It swells again, stronger this time. I remember how it felt, the first time. I clench my teeth and push it away. It surges, stronger still. I open my mouth. Just to lick the line of his clavicle, not to bite, I tell myself.

We land, hard. Ciprian staggers and we both end up in a heap on the ground. It feels dry and somehow dusty. I involuntarily open my eyes.

“It’s alright,” he says. “You’ll have to see from here on anyway.”

I look around. It’s still dark, but the dark of night under a sky full of stars. We’re in an open place. A desert of some sort, as far as I can see.

“This is as far as I can take you,” he says. “Well done. I know that was hard.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I told you, I forgive you,” he says gently. “Now look.” He turns me around, but covers my eyes with his hands. “Look over there.”

“What are you doing?” I say.

A great white light splits the air. I see the bones of Ciprian’s fingers in front of my eyes. A couple of seconds later, the ground trembles. He releases my eyes.

“Was that—”

“Go that way,” he says. “You’ll find someone there to help you. Move quickly. It’ll take some time for them to find the way here, even though they can see what you’re seeing now. But they will find their way, so go.”

He stoops and gives me a kiss on the forehead, like a blessing, and disappears.

***

The desert makes hard walking. The stars wheel slowly above me, fiercely bright. I’ve got a fix on the Pole Star, so I can keep my bearings, but it seems that no matter how many gullies and dunes I scramble down and stagger up, I’m not getting anywhere. The stars are nearly back to where they were when I started, Orion striding along to the south, but the sky hasn’t got any lighter. A dry wind whispers through the dusty brush that scratches at my legs, and it sounds like the voice of the old man calling me. Somewhere in the distance, behind me, I hear the howl of an animal. A cold sweat beads the back of my neck.

I’m slogging my way up another ridge, weary but unable to stop, when I hear music. It’s faint at first, and fades in and out of the whispering wind. I drop lower and crawl to the top of the ridge. I recognise the music now, the ominous thunderheads of Sibelius’ Finlandia, interspersed with bursts of static. When I look over the edge, I see that the music is coming from the hollow below. There’s a couple of Army tents and an ancient Jeep, lit by a small campfire. A dark figure stands up and looks in my direction, holding a lantern. I freeze in fear. The height and build remind me of Karasevdas. But Ciprian told me to come this way. But what if Ciprian’s in league with them?

“It’s all right,” the man calls up to me. “Come on down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Something about him reassures me, and I slither my way to the bottom of the slope. The music is coming from a dusty radio sitting on a stool next to the campfire. The man lifts his lantern to look at me. His face is familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.

“Come over to the fire and warm up,” he says. “We can’t stay long.”

When we’re sitting down, he lights a cigarette and offers me one. He’s dressed in an old brown suit with a brown tie and a fedora hat, and then it comes to me. It was a long time ago, but it was one of the last movies that Ciprian and I saw together in the cinema.

“Are you... J. Robert Oppenheimer?”

“Something like that.”

“But…”

“But I look like the actor fella and not the real Oppenheimer? Look, I’m not the real Oppenheimer.” He takes a drag of his cigarette. “I’m just a construct of your subconscious, OK?”

“OK..”

He passes me a canteen of water, and I drink thirstily. Finlandia ends in a crash of triumphant static and now it’s Coldplay’s Viva La Vida blasting out of the radio. Oppenheimer turns the volume down and fiddles with the dial.

“I like that song,” I say.

“Worse luck for me,” he replies. “I’m stuck with whatever music you’ve got lodged in your head. What I wouldn’t give for…” He trails off.

“Anyway, that doesn’t matter,” he goes on gloomily. “My job is to help you through the next part. And to give you this.” He hands me a grenade-sized sphere on a chain. It feels much heavier than it looks.

“What is it?”

“I call it the Lodestar, for now.”

“What does it do?”

He hesitates, cigarette partway to his lips, and gives me a sombre look. “Did you see my test a little while ago?”

“It’s a bomb?”

“Yes and no. You may not need it. But better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it, don’t you think?”

I hang the Lodestar round my neck. Tucking it into the inside pocket of my jacket helps with the weight.

“Now let’s go,” he says, standing up and tossing away the end of his cigarette. He strides towards the Jeep. “Do you hear the wolves? They’re coming.”

***

The mountains are black at the end of the desert. The Jeep ran out of fuel a while ago. Oppenheimer doesn’t talk much, except to mutter things about Los Alamos and I didn’t know and the Pacific War of '35 and will they never learn? He smokes incessantly, carefully burying each cigarette butt in the dust “although they can track us by scent anyway, I’m sure.”

When we reach the foothills, he stands and looks up shaking his head doubtfully. We haven’t heard the howls in a while, but we know they’re coming.

“Going to be more difficult from here on out,” he says.

“Why?”

“These mountains are what your own mind has built to protect the you-know-what. It’s not just them tracking us. It’s you trying to keep you out too.”

We start climbing. It’s forested at first, a dark wood with eyes watching from the shadows and slippery things underfoot. Oppenheimer leads the way. He’s produced an old flashlight from somewhere and is pushing though the undergrowth humming the same few bars from Viva La Vida over and over.

The forest seems to get thicker, and there’s a constant stop-start of rustling in the shadows, though the beam of the flashlight shows nothing but the dark leafless trees. A large animal roars somewhere nearby. A branch cracks and falls, narrowly missing us. Oppenheimer swears.

We push through another thicket, every step a painful effort, and emerge only to face a yet more impenetrable hedge, tangles of black brambles with long thorns. Oppenheimer casts the narrow beam of the flashlight around in dismay. The whip-like runners of the thickets writhe in the light. Behind us, there’s a crashing of heavy hooves coming closer.

“Sing something,” he says finally. “Something soothing might help. Something your subconscious is so familiar with it’ll set your fears at rest. Maybe something from your childhood?”

My throat is dry and I’m not sure I can sing anything, but I open my mouth to try. For some reason the first song that comes to mind is Loch Lomond.

“By yon bonnie banks,” I croak, struggling to match my panicked breathing to the rhythm of the song, “and by yon bonnie braes..”

And somehow the brambles stop writhing and a narrow path opens in the hedge. We start forward tentatively.

“Keep singing!” shouts Oppenheimer.

“…where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond…”

I wish I could see the sun. It feels like it’s been night for years.

“…where me and my true love will never meet again…”

And with a final push we’re out and above the treeline. We turn and look back across the desert. There’s an odd rattling in the air.

“Helicopters!” says Oppenheimer quietly. “And now we’re out of cover.”

I look at the dark path ahead of us. The face of the mountain soars sheer, capped with ice. The wind that blows down from the peak chills me to the bone. The Lodestar around my neck weighs me down like Frodo’s Ring. Yet there’s no other way. We start up the narrow thread of path.

The helicopters are above the foothills, beams of light picking out the stones and bones of the desert and the dead forest, and now they’re at the wall of rock to left and right. The path has become almost vertical, and we’re straining for footholds and handholds.

“Surrender, Kharis! It’s for your own good!” Karasevdas’ voice booms from a megaphone.

Another song, an older one, rises unbidden to my lips. Gaelic, the language of my youth, though I haven’t had anyone to speak it with for years.

Mo shùilean togam suas a-chum 

Nam beann, on tig mo neart…

I see a door in the sheer face of rock just above the ledge where Oppenheimer is clinging. A plain wooden door with a brass doorknob and a letterbox. The door of my childhood home. Oppenheimer heaves himself up then turns to pull me onto the ledge. He grabs the doorknob and hauls it open and we stumble inside.

***

We’re on a pebbly beach by a dark sea. The stars are no longer visible, but are hidden by banks of thick cloud. Every few seconds there’s a crack and flicker of lightning, mostly up in the clouds but sometimes forking down to the surface. In the light of the flashes, I see an island out in the black water, with what looks like a tower reaching up. The water is heaving and foaming, spitting up froth onto the beach then hungrily sucking it back.

“I’m afraid this is where I must leave you,” says Oppenheimer gravely.

“What? Why?”

“This is as far as I’ve ever been able to go. My pride.. Do you know where this is?”

I know, somehow. This is the centre. This is where the language lives in me. This is where the fûlchr is hiding. This is what I had tried to lock away.

“In the centre of the sea,” Oppenheimer says, “do you see that island?”

“Yes.”

“That is where you must go. That is where you must confront it and destroy it. If necessary, use the Lodestar. But you must know..” He hesitates.

“Know what?”

“If you use the Lodestar, I’m not sure of the consequences exactly. I didn’t have time to test it as thoroughly as I’d have liked, to calibrate it exactly. It might destroy just you-know-what. It might destroy your ability to speak or even understand any language. Or…”

“It might kill me?”

He nods gravely. I take a deep breath, and look anxiously at the mountains behind us. I can already hear the roar of the choppers again.

“I understand,” I say. I turn towards the black water. When I look back to wave goodbye, Oppenheimer is gone.

There’s a shape by the water’s edge. A boat. I approach it cautiously. There’s a hooded figure hunched in the stern, and it takes all my courage to keep walking, still humming fragments of the psalm under my breath. The figure turns its head towards me, and for a fraction of a second I think there is no face, just emptiness. Then it lifts a small lantern and I see that there is flesh beneath the hood.

“Greetings,” he says.

“Hello,” I say. “Ah.. are you Charon?”

“No. Who’s Charon?” He pushes his hood back, and I see the face of a youngish man, dark-haired, his brown face marked by a terrible scar. “I’m Ged.” He gives a formal bow.

“Wait… Ged? Like Wizard of Earthsea Ged?”

“One and the same. At least, the version of Ged that you have constructed. Now, get in the boat. And try not to let the water touch you.”

Ged turns out to be even more silent and dour than Oppenheimer was, but he steers the little boat so that she seems to almost skim the black waves. As the island draws closer, the waves get higher and the lightning hits the water in jagged sulphurous spikes more and more frequently.

I begin to feel seasick, and lean over the bow in case I throw up. It’s then that I see the water is not truly black, not like the night sky or plain absence of light. It’s a blood-black. And below the surface there are faces and arms reaching out to me. There’s the old man, and his wife and the older son. There’s Ciprian, and Zoe, and my mother and father and everyone I’ve ever loved, their faces distorted and pale as death. And I feel the thirst come back stronger than ever, and I know that I only have to reach down and drink the black water.

“Stop that!”

Ged’s voice cuts through my daze like a sword. He drags me back from the bow of the boat and pushes me against the mast.

“Am I going to have to tie you to the mast?” he asks.

Behind, the choppers have got over the mountains and I can see their searchlights glancing back and forth. The waves have grown still higher, and I wonder if the little boat can make it.

“Ged, how about a little magewind?” I shout above the noise of thunder and water.

He looks up apprehensively.

“It’s dangerous to use magewind in a place like this!” he shouts back.

“Yeah, but why else did you show up here?”

He looks at me sadly. “Did you not think it might be because of my wisdom and past experience in navigating dark corners of the mind?”

Nevertheless, when a searchlight beam crosses our bow, he seems to relent. Standing up in the boat, he raises a carved wooden staff and shouts in a language I don’t recognise. The clouds above roil horribly but begin to churn their lightning more behind us than ahead of us. There’s a deafening crack, and somewhere to starboard I see one of the helicopters plunge into the black water. Ahead of us, the waves seem to be slackening, but Ged looks like a man under great strain, the arm holding his staff trembling with the effort.

Only when we’re almost at the island do I see that it’s not so much an island as the peak of a tower or ziggurat buried in the black water. It’s a decaying edifice of pale brick and mortar, and it seems astonishing that such a thing has not crumbled into the waves long ago. Ged brings us alongside and helps me jump from the boat onto the chalky surface before slumping back into the boat, gasping for breath.

“Go,” he says. “I will hold them off as long as I can. But the final task you must complete alone.”

***

I know I have to get to the top of the tower. The ziggurat is built with a carriageway winding all round the outside, wide enough for two horses. I recognise it now. The Tower of Babel. The product of my hubris and lust for knowledge. No, not just for knowledge, I correct myself. My desire to know more, to be better than everyone else. I start half-running, half-walking up the crumbling surface. Down below, I can hear the wind howling, mixed with Ged’s shouts of spell-weaving. There’s the sound of gunfire from the helicopters. I don’t dare stop to look.

I round the final corner and see the obelisk that crowns the tower like a fang. It’s jet black, and every inch of its surface is carved with curses and runes of power. It draws me to itself. The sounds of the thunder and lightning and gunfire fade. I walk around the obelisk, hungering. Now that I’m closer, I see that it oozes black blood, each drop coalescing with others and forming a trickle that spirals down the obelisk’s surface then drains into the heart of the ziggurat. I can’t quite remember why I’m here. I put my finger to the trickle and raise it to my mouth.

“No!” I head Ged’s call from far away. “Stop!”

A great spear of lightning stabs just a few yards away, and I instinctively throw my arms up to cover my face. As I bring them back down, someone grabs me from behind, pins my arms behind my back and puts a gun to my head.

“Well, well,” says Dr Robert Karasevdas, twisting me round and looking at me sardonically. “You led us quite the chase there, but you knew it was going to end up here, didn’t you? Because you want this to be released.”

“No.” I struggle and kick, desperate to get back to the obelisk. He jabs the handgun harder into my temple.

“I’m going to give you one last chance, Kharis. Or should I call you Perdita? One last chance. You can share what you know willingly — teach me this language, or tell me where I can learn it — and you will wake up with no recollection of this whole sordid, pathetic journey. You’ll be happy, and we’ll be happy. Or we will extract it from you manually, neuron by neuron, and you will wish you had never been born. Think about it! Immortality! For all! Why would you deny us that?”

“You’re wrong. This isn’t immortality. This is a path to hell.”

He shrugs. “Don’t say I don’t offer my patients a choice.” He forces me to the ground, face-down, and pinions me with a knee in the small of my back while he signals for backup. This is it, I think. I can feel the Lodestar as a hard lump against my abdomen, held there by Karasevdas’ weight on me. I hear him giving orders through his voxchip. I wriggle, trying to push him off, but he’s heavy and I’m exhausted. He pinions me harder. I hear the running footsteps of his security forces reach the top of the tower. Then I feel the cold chain of the Lodestar against my cheek, forced upward by my wriggling. This is it, I think again. I twist my head a little to get to the chain with my teeth. Oppenheimer had showed me what to do. Three sharp pulls.

There’s no sound. I feel, rather than see, Karasevdas crumble into dust. The obelisk shatters. The whole tower is atomised, scourged with the force of the Lodestar. The black water boils and evaporates. The darkness turns to light, and I hear someone in the distance call my name. Kharis. And then I know no more.

---

This story is part of Project Blackwater, a collaborative writing project initiated by The Chronicler. Read the other amazing stories in the collection here!