Chapter Twenty-Nine - Theory
'Exorcism,' said Darvad Paize, 'ever heard of it?'
'What?' said Fenton, distracted. He was standing by the window in Graeme's office, looking out. The shutters were open, the glass unbroken. Hell appeared tranquil and serene. The fracture was gone, closed. The lights were on, the power back. Communications had been restored, the strike called off.
He turned away from the window. He was still wearing the blue undersuit. He was reluctant to change it, it felt lucky, a magic talisman. Paize was reclining back in Graeme's chair, the Semaaser and a tablet lying on the desk in front of him.
'Exorcism,' Paize repeated.
'What about it?'
'It's the expulsion of an evil spirit from a possessed host. Don't you think it's appropriate? The only explanation?'
Fenton sat down wearily. He had just tried to grab some sleep but it had been impossible, his mind was racing. 'It's an explanation,' he agreed, 'but how? How did I exorcise that thing?'
'Ah,' smiled Paize, 'I have a theory about that but I think we should wait for the others.' There was a brief pause. 'I wouldn't worry about her, she's a professional.'
But he was worrying about her. She was performing an autopsy on the man she had loved. It was wrong, horrendously tactless and horribly inconsiderate but she was the only one here who could do it. Did she blame him for Graeme's death? Would she ever forgive him?
There was a hiss as the door opened. Alizen and Julia stepped through. Alizen looked a little lost, bewildered. They sat down on either side of Fenton, all three of them facing Paize across the desk.
'You okay?' Fenton instinctively whispered to Alizen.
'Yes,' she nodded slowly. She sounded slightly dazed.
'Verdict?' Paize asked.
Alizen swallowed nervously. 'His brain and central nervous system were completely burned out. I've never seen anything like it.'
'Consistent with possession?'
'What's that supposed to mean?' There was incredulity in her voice, an edge of hostility. 'Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't recall any case histories on that. What am I supposed to be matching it against?'
Paize smiled. 'I was just asking for your opinion, Alizen. Do you think he was possessed?' So, they were on first name terms. She'd been accepted.
She shrugged. 'Why not? It's as good an explanation as any.'
'We reran those tests you asked for,' said Julia.
'And?' queried Paize, excited.
'The body in the mortuary, Fenton's body. It wasn't him.'
Fenton gasped but Paize just smiled as if this was confirming something he had already suspected. 'And who was it?'
'Graeme Dezlin.'
'What?' exclaimed Fenton, shocked. 'It was me. I saw it. We all saw it. You took samples, matched them.'
'I just reran the tests on those samples we took from the body,' said Alizen quietly. 'It's not your DNA, it's Graeme's. I can't explain why we got a different match first time round. Central confirmed the original identification.'
'Central only matched the DNA data we sent them to what was in their library,' noted Paize, 'they didn't see the original sample, only our analysis of it. None of the systems here were playing on our team. It got into Pandemonium's computers and it must have got into ours too.'
'But we saw it,' said Alizen, 'we all did. It wasn't Graeme. It was Mark.'
'Do you believe everything you've seen here?' asked Paize, 'I think it's been playing games with our minds the whole time, making us see what it wanted us to. Look at Mr Fenton here.'
'Please, just call me Mark.' He'd finally had enough of the formality.
'Look at Mark here,' continued Paize, 'he saw this window smash, the whole room destroyed. It never happened, it couldn't have happened the way he described it. Look at the furniture, the pictures. We're on a space station. It moves. Everything here is safely bolted down.'
He was right. Above Paize's head Fenton could see the picture of Gadder was screwed to the wall.
'And the airlock he was trapped in, opening out onto a tunnel. I've been right over the station's specifications. There's nothing like that anywhere here.'
'So what are you trying to say?' asked Fenton, confused.
'The experiences you described to us, the things that happened to you during your brief disappearance...'
'I didn't disappear,' interjected Fenton.
'You did!' retorted Alizen. 'One moment I was holding you, the next you were gone.' There was an embarrassed pause. Alizen looked sheepish at the revelation.
'The experiences you described,' repeated Paize nonplussed, 'didn't happen. At least they didn't happen for real. They must have happened in your head, in your mind.'
He thought of the desperate hunt through the catacombs, the precarious journey along the skeletal tunnel, Alizen on the surface of Pandemonium. He shivered. 'It felt real. It was real.'
'What's real, Mark?' asked Julia, 'reality is only the brain's interpretation of data it receives. If someone could fake that information you'd never realise, you'd be none the wiser. We could all be disembodied brains in boxes for all we know, our experiences fed to us through straws.'
'So, it was all a dream, is that what you're saying? It's a bit of a cop out isn't it?' He was suddenly angry, it was if they were trying to play down and belittle all he had suffered, all he had endured.
'Not a dream, Mark,' soothed Julia, 'a battle of wills, of intellects, a mental duel to the death. You won, remember?' There was something approaching admiration in her voice. He liked the sound of that. Yes, he had won. He started to beam stupidly at the idea but then he caught Alizen's eye. He stopped smiling. He might have won but Graeme was still dead.
'Okay, so I won. How?'
'A good question, Mark,' answered Paize, 'we'll never have a full answer but I've constructed a theory around what we do know. Please stop me if anyone spots any inconsistencies, any flaws in my argument. First things first, I think we have to accept Dr Dezlin was possessed by something, some entity, something that came through that fracture. That story it told Mark about it coming from another dimension and being imprisoned by its own people makes sense. Let's take that as true. It's some kind of formless force, a spirit if you like, a daemon. We'll assume it needs a body to operate here so it takes Dr Dezlin's. It needs power so it drains as many of Pandemonium's systems as possible. It needs to keep his body alive so it maintains life support and the radiation shields. But it needs something else. What?'
There was silence around the table.
'Okay,' Paize sounded deflated, a professor let down by a class who weren't as bright as he'd hoped, 'Mark, tell us again how you turned the tables on it.'
'I stood up. Went for it. Tried to strangle it.'
'Why hadn't you done that before?'
'Because, because I was too afraid of it before.' He suddenly realised what he was getting at.
'Precisely. You weren't afraid of it anymore. You actively denied it your fear and that banished it, exorcised it, blasted it right out of him. Unfortunately he died in the process.'
So he had killed him.
'You're saying it needed my fear to survive?'
'Yes. You denied it the very thing it needed. It was like asphyxiating someone, cutting off their oxygen.'
'But why? Why would it need fear?'
'I don't know,' replied Paize, 'this is pure speculation but let's suppose it needed energy, an energy generated by the human mind, a by-product of emotion. But not just any emotion, it was after something very specific. Perhaps different emotions have different signatures, produce different kinds of energy. The energy it needed came from fear. It was a parasite, feeding off you, sucking away. There have always been legends about supernatural beings that feast off humanity. They're called vampires. Sometimes it's blood they're after, sometimes it's emotion. Myths like that are often rooted in some kind of truth if you trace them back far enough. Maybe mankind's encountered something like this before, a long time a
go.'
'It said it was the Devil. It said it had always been around,' whispered Fenton, alarmed.
'I find that very hard to believe, Mark. Think about it. If it was the Devil and it's gone for good then what's going to happen to us all? Are people going to change, suddenly start being nice to each other? Will strangers hug and kiss in the street in spontaneous displays of brotherly love? I don't think so. Do you?'
'No,' admitted Fenton.
'Good. So it's not the Devil, it's just some impish hobgoblin out to cause mischief. It's not been to the beginning of time and back again. It's had no influence on human history; it's only impact has been on us. It was here for about thirty-two hours before Mark sent it packing. That's the sum total of its existence in our dimension. If it had been around for eternity like it claimed do you really think Dr Dezlin's body could have played host to it for all that time? What do you think, Alizen?'
'It doesn't seem likely. Tissue analysis showed he was no older when he died than we'd expect him to be.'
'Hang on,' pressed Fenton, 'you're trying to apply logic here but we've already started with a wild assumption, you said it was a daemon, a hobgoblin, a vampire. That's hardly scientific. If it's supernatural it doesn't obey natural laws, so who's to say it couldn't cheat time like it said it could?'
'We're not saying it's supernatural,' Julia interjected, 'there's no such thing. An apparently supernatural phenomenon is just something we can't explain based on our current knowledge and experience. It doesn't mean it doesn't obey scientific laws, just that we haven't worked out how to slot it into our worldview, our model of reality isn't big enough.' She turned to Paize. 'But he's right, how do we know it couldn't control time in some way we don't understand?'
'Well, we'll come back to the time business in a moment,' said Paize giving Julia an arch look. Fenton guessed time was a pet subject of hers, a bone of contention between them. Paize had seemed doubtful before when she'd tried to use it to explain Bainz's death. 'Let's get back to the fear, exhaust that angle first.' He picked up the tablet off the desk. 'I got Central to send us fresh copies of the personnel files of the staff here. I've just been comparing them to the ones we had before. There are some important omissions from the psychological profiles in the earlier versions. I suspect our computer here did the editing, under its control. Oh, what a surprise, it turns out they all had very specific phobias, phobias that exactly matched the way they died. Central's also conducted interviews with next of kin and sent me transcripts. They confirm it. Some of them had nightmares about dying that way all their lives.'
'Premonition,' breathed Fenton, horrified. 'Just like the dream I had about Graeme and Alizen.'
'Not premonition, Mark.' Paize sounded disappointed, displeased at his superstition, at his lack of scientific objectivism. 'It exploited them just like it exploited you. It needed fear, as much fear as possible. It rooted round in your head, looking for things it could use against you. It found that paranoid dream and fed it back into the scenario it had created for you. It was the same with the staff here. It got into their minds, found out what they were most afraid of, found out how to generate the maximum amount of fear then killed them that way. It must have had elemental powers, like a poltergeist. It killed everyone except Dr Dezlin. It needed him, needed his living body. It must have got a huge intake of energy from them. But it wasn't enough.'
'So it kept on killing,' said Julia, 'it pushed Jemmie down that shaft. He hated heights. That would have been the most terrifying way for him to go. And it killed Paul.' There was a tiny hesitation, a slight tremble in her voice. 'But there's a flaw in your theory, Darvad. Paul loved spacewalking. He was never afraid of suit failure.'
'It may have been pure opportunism,' suggested Paize, 'it needed a quick top-up so it killed him when it had the chance. Phobia or not he must have been scared when he knew the suit had failed. But you know, I think it's more likely Paul's death was just to frighten Mark here. Both Paul and Darren were collateral damage, pawns sacrificed as part of its master plan to scare poor Mark to death.'
Things were suddenly becoming clearer to Fenton, making sense. 'That's what we thought back in the lab, after the computer quoted Breen at us. Everything was being arranged for me, to frighten me. But why did it choose me?'
'It needed fear, Mark,' said Paize, 'it needed someone who could give it terror in abundance. It had already taken over Dr Dezlin. Let's assume it had access to his mind, his memories. It found you there. He must have remembered you as someone who scared easily, someone who could be intimidated, someone who already had a persecution complex. But there was something else about you. The other people he knew were scientists, extreme rationalists. It must have realised they were the sort of people Central would send here to investigate. People like us. We'd never give it the sustained fear it needed. We're not afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins. We'd never swallow that story about it being the Devil, about it being the end of mankind. But it thought you might. And you did, didn't you? You still half believe it now. You had the imagination it needed. You can't be frightened without it. If you don't believe you're in danger you can't be afraid.'
Fenton nodded. 'It said that was why it had chosen me, because I was scared to begin with. And when I saw Graeme in the cage of fire he called me a ''credulous fool'', said I believed in every lost cause that came along.' He glanced to his side, to Alizen, the biggest lost cause of all. 'It's nice to know what your friends really think of you.'
'He was wrong though wasn't he?' said Julia. 'You fought back. The worm turned and the dog had its day.'
She was right. He found himself smiling again, his ego boosted.
'So,' continued Paize, 'it found you in Dezlin's mind. You seemed perfect. But it had to get you here so it could work on you. It hatched a plan to do it. It was a very efficient plot, it served a dual purpose. It guaranteed we would immediately deliver you here and it would scare you witless in the process. It used us all. It faked the recording,' Paize reacted to their gasps of surprise. 'I've had an analysis back from Central. It was very crudely done. Jemmie should have spotted it but it must have been playing with his head, fogging his mind, stopping him from seeing it. Perhaps that's why it killed him, to stop him doing further analysis on it. It was in the computer so it must have been able to access Central's records and get details of Mark's DNA and eye prints. It copied the eye prints and used them in the fake recording. Then it played possum, conserved energy until we got Mark here. We couldn't find Graeme Dezlin when we arrived because he was under our noses all the time. We hid him in the mortuary ourselves. He was still alive but it messed with our minds and convinced us it was a dead body, Mark's dead body. When we took samples and analysed them it got the computer to tell us we were looking at Mark's DNA. So we got Central to send Darren and Paul to fetch him. In the meantime we left it there in the mortuary unguarded. It slipped out whenever it needed to, making sure it was back by the time we took Mark along to see it. But then Danielle was going to slice it up so it was time for it to find a new den. It probably waited until she was just about to start work then sat up. That would have given her quite a fright. It killed her then made a break for it.'
'What about the timing, Darvad?' demanded Julia, 'Alizen said the gap between the scream and her finding the body wasn't long enough for her to have been strangled.'
'Do you really think Danielle would have screamed? That wasn't her style at all. I think the scream was another one of its mind games. Danielle was already dead, the body already gone when Alizen thought she heard the cry.'
'But what about the time echoes? Mark shooting at Darren and Paul. Mark killing Darren. Mark and Dezlin walking through the labyrinth?' Julia was not going to let this drop.
'They weren't echoes,' said Paize, 'echoes are a reflection of something that's happened or something that's going to happen. We only ever saw the mirror images. We never saw the source, the events themselves because they never actually happened. They all occurred during Mark's ord
eal and we've already established that none of that really happened. It was all a trick. From that I conclude the predictions we saw were all fakes, just like the recording.'
'It was Graeme all along,' said Fenton, excited, 'or rather that thing in his form. When we first arrived we saw two people down in the labyrinth but the sensors only picked up one. That must have been Graeme's life-form reading. The other person, the one that was supposed to be me was just an illusion. It must have been that thing that took the Semaaser from the armoury. It fired it at the window in the lab to convince us the recording was real. Then it used it to shoot at us when we first broke in and to kill Brozmam down in the catacombs. It wasn't me that shot him, it just made Julia think she saw me do it.'
'And the life-form in the airlock behind you?' asked Julia, 'just before the suits failed?'
'It obviously had control of the suits' systems,' noted Paize, 'it shut them down exactly when it wanted to. It played with the sensors so it seemed it was appearing and disappearing. If it could do that it could fake a life-form reading.'
'So, there was nothing at all strange happening with time, no anomalies, no echoes.' Julia sounded dejected. Fenton felt like squeezing her knee. He wanted to comfort her.
'I'm afraid not,' smirked Paize, relishing his little victory.
'So it was all a set-up, a plot to convince me I was going to die, that I had to die. It was all designed to terrify me, keep me terrified as long as it possibly could.'
'Yes, Mark,' agreed Paize, 'but I'm sure it would have killed you eventually if you hadn't fought back.'
With a shudder he remembered the discarded gun lying by Graeme's body.
'It still had the Semaaser. It was going to shoot me with it.'
'Yes, Mark, I rather think it was,' said Paize, picking up the heavy gun, 'you must have really surprised it, disorientated it before it had the chance to fire. A burst from this at close range would have taken your head off. You were very lucky.'
'But what about Graeme's antique pistol? That was what it was supposed to kill me with. What happened to that?'
Paize grinned and reached down behind the table. With a conjurer's flourish he produced a familiar backpack.
'That was the bag I found with the guns. Where was it?' gasped Fenton.
'You didn't find it, it did. It raided the armoury, not you, remember? It was guiding the plot, creating the mental landscape, using what Dr Dezlin knew. You were reliving its memories. I found the bag in this room, behind the desk. It wasn't here before so it must have brought it. It must have been walking around with it.'
'Of course,' said Fenton, 'the figure with the gun down in the labyrinth. I thought it had a hunchback, but it was just carrying that.'
'Exactly, would you like to see what's inside?' The question was rhetorical, Paize was already opening the bag, rummaging through, scattering the contents over the table's surface: four Semaaser magazines, all clearly full of bullets, an opened pack of food bars, a big bottle of water, half empty. 'It obviously still needed to eat and drink,' said Paize as he fished out an ancient pistol from the very bottom of the bag. He leaned forward, casually pointing the gun at Fenton who instinctively shrank back in his seat.
'Relax, Mark,' smiled Paize, 'it's rusted solid, it could never fire. It must have taken it as it knew it would add a nice detail to the plot, a little touch of verisimilitude to its story that it had been around for millennia. It's useless as a weapon so it could only have hung on to it to ensure we wouldn't find it.'
There was a pause as everyone digested the information. Alizen broke the silence.
'It's all a bit complicated, convoluted, excessively elaborate.'
'It was in Graeme's mind,' said Fenton. 'It must have ransacked it, absorbed some of his personality. It spoke like him, kept quoting things he'd have known.' He waved at the books on the shelves, 'I bet you if we went through those we'd find the quotations, and we'd find the inspiration for the story it spun. And that business with the name, Dezlin, it was just another piece of the jigsaw, just another idea to factor into the tale. You knew Graeme, he loved puzzles, he loved complexity, this whole thing is just the sort of Byzantine plot he would have dreamt up. He should have been a novelist.'
'He always wanted to be,' said Alizen softly. 'He had ideas, he just never got round to writing them up.' She paused for an instant. 'That phrase it used ''it's best for everyone it ends here.'' He said that to me once. He said that when we broke up.'
There was silence for a moment. Then she continued, 'everything that happened to Mark, the ordeal, the confrontation with that thing, seeing me out there on the surface. It wasn't real. So it couldn't have been Graeme in the cage of fire. That must have been part of the illusion too, a trick.' Her voice sounded strange. Of course. He'd already passed on Graeme's last message to her, the message he loved her. It was all she had left and they'd just stolen it from her.
'Obviously,' said Paize, innocently callous, ignorantly trampling all over her bruised soul. 'It was tempting Mark to get the gun so the events it had foretold could play out, so it could convince him the prophecy had fulfilled itself. Lead him to despair.'
'No,' said Mark Fenton, determined, 'it was Graeme I spoke to. It was definitely him. I'm certain of that. I knew him. It was all happening in our heads. It took possession of Graeme's body. Somehow, somewhere he must have been able to cling on, stay alive. It imprisoned him in his own mind. It let me talk to him because it knew he would tell me to get the gun. It used him the same way it used all of us.'
Paize grunted. 'That's possible, I suppose.'
Alizen exhaled an almost inaudible sigh of relief.
There was always room for hope.
'Just a couple of loose ends though,' added Fenton, 'just before it turned up for the first time I saw Alizen disappear, she thought I did. What happened?'
'More mind games,' said Julia, 'that must have been the moment the mental duel began. You stopped seeing the real world then. It must have done something to her mind too, convinced her you were gone, put her into a trance. It didn't want her disturbing things.'
'So why didn't it just kill her? And if it needed fear why didn't it kill you guys for real. I'm very pleased it didn't, but why?'
'Good question, Mark,' said Paize. 'Perhaps it was low on energy and it took less power to charm her than it would to kill her. Maybe it thought your disappearance would frighten her, give it some more energy. It didn't want to kill her too early. It was obviously saving her death till last. That was to be the final killer blow against you. By the time you got to that point though nothing was real anyway so she didn't actually need to die. Or it might have been running out of time. Perhaps the fracture was about to close anyway and it needed to set the main plan in motion. Maybe it needed the fear you were going to give it to break free of this place before it was sucked back in. It must have reckoned it would get more juice from concentrating on you than simply killing us. You're the imaginative one, remember.'
'It said my fear was its liberation, its freedom. You may be right. Perhaps it was still tethered to its prison and it was trying to break the leash.'
'It wouldn't have stopped at you, Mark,' added Julia. 'It would have killed us next and if it had got the power it needed to get away from here it would have gone on, right across The System killing as it went, an angel of death. Your self-assertion didn't just save us, it saved a lot of other people too.'
He was smiling again at the thought of it, a warm glow spreading through him.
'Well, I think that wraps everything up,' said Paize with some satisfaction. 'We can leave. This is still a Security Hazard Area, Central have merely suspended the demolition order. My recommendation is it goes ahead. Pandemonium should be destroyed. Humanity should stay clear of this place. It may not be dead. You may have just put it back in its bottle, temporarily. I don't want any other misguided geniuses with overreaching ambition to take a crowbar to that door.'
'Is that it?' demanded Fenton suddenly angry. 'N
o further enquiries? No second opinion? No public inquest?'
'No. I'm in charge of this Investigation and Central will accept my report. It's over. Finished.'
He'd been right all along. They were fascists.
'Just one thing,' said Alizen, 'it found Mark in Graeme's mind. It faked the evidence to get us to bring him here. But what about me? I knew Graeme and Mark. Graeme didn't know I was with the SSD. It couldn't have arranged to get me to Pandemonium. Isn't it a bit odd I ended up here as well?'
There was a long, ominous silence.
'Well,' said Paize, 'I suppose there's room for one coincidence.'