The Ethereal Vision

  ***

  Lucas found out about the attack on the Hong Kong facility later that night. He had been in his apartment when he received a call from Denton, one of the few people in Lucas’ life whose phone calls he was afraid to take. Denton informed Lucas about what had happened, and Lucas had left for the facility immediately. He hadn’t expected an attack to happen at all.

  The images of the burning building in Hong Kong were now emblazoned on the bank of extremely-high-definition monitors in his office. Every channel was reporting the incident, and details of the facilities and their operations were flooding into public awareness in an unstoppable torrent of information. The ethereals who had been housed at the Hong Kong facility were now gone—whether dead or captured, no one knew. One thing was clear, though: the New York facility was probably next, and it was too late to begin an evacuation procedure. Such a thing would require time, and the opportunity had long passed.

  When he could no longer tolerate the streams of news reports about the incident in Hong Kong, Lucas turned off every last monitor and fell asleep on the sofa in his office.

  He woke at eight, when the regular morning shift started, and consulted with the security staff who had arrived during the night and who now lined the external entrance of the facility. He was confident that they could hold off whatever force might come for them, and he ignored the nervous tremble in his hand as he had this thought.

  When he had done all he could to secure the facility, Lucas began once again to watch the ethereals on the bank of flat screens that fed high-definition video from everywhere inside the facility. He was most interested in the video from the cafeteria.

  Over the last few days, the initial group of three consisting of Jane, Morris and Michael had grown first to four, then to six. Now the main table was occupied not just by those six, but by the remaining two ethereals as well, who stood around them, looking down at the table and joining in the conversation. Previously, Lucas felt secure in the knowledge that the relationships between them were thin at best. Now, the image of them as a unit generated an unexpected fear in him, and his stomach churned.

  He watched as one of them, Morris, left the group and walked out of the cafeteria. The others watched him leave, then resumed their discussion at the table. After a moment, their conversation ceased, and they all seemed to fall silent. They sat there, merely staring at each other. His mouth slowly dropped as a channel of suspicion began to open in his mind.

  If what he suspected of Jane—that she could enhance the supernormal abilities of the others—was true, then all eight of them working together might be able to overcome the field. But would it be enough, he wondered, to get through the thick, metallic door that separated them from the outside world? He very much doubted it. The only device they would have any chance of accessing would be the one in the control room, and the lock was practically unbreakable. How would they even have that much information? He knew some of them had been documented as possessing the capacity to scan the physical environment around them, sometimes over great distances, but he dismissed this possibility.

  Still, with Jane among them, might they have already found the devices? Might they know where they were? He continued to stare at the ethereals as their silence continued. Now they were not even looking at each other; they were looking at the table, appearing to concentrate fiercely. Half of them had their eyes closed. Jane was sitting at the centre of the group, staring vacantly into space. She occupied most of the space on his screen.

  His attention was distracted by a slight movement on another monitor. He looked to this other screen and saw a thin white figure standing at the far end of the corridor that led to the control room. It was Morris, and he was standing in the far corner, motionless, staring down the hallway. Then Lucas understood. He began to move. Rapidly crossing his office, he picked up his weapon and walked into the hallway, holding it by his side.

  As Morris moved away from the group, he found that the minute trace of telepathic communication they could access through the heightened effect of the dampening field was diminishing quickly. It was no longer possible to contact anyone directly, and it now took a tremendous amount of concentration to be heard at all. If the plan was going to work, he would have to scream at the right moment and hope that they would hear him.

  He ran down the hallway, unconcerned now about being seen by any of the employees or on the security cameras that he now knew were well concealed. Luckily, nobody saw him, and as he reached the end of the corridor, he positioned himself against the wall in the corner and waited. After a few moments, one of the scientists walked by, looking down and working on a tablet. Morris held his breath as the man walked towards the door to the control room, but then the man turned and walked back towards the front section of the facility. Morris heard the sliding door shut behind him.

  Damn, Morris thought, trying to find patience as blood pumped through his veins. He had a slight headache but ignored it. After a few more minutes, another technician entered the corridor; this one walked straight towards the metallic door leading to the control room. Morris’ eyes grew wide as he screamed as loud as he could, sending a dagger of pain through the front of his face and into his eyes.

  NOW!

  He gasped and reached his hands to his face as blood began to pour from his nose.

  Jane looked to the others as they heard the muffled scream from Morris. In unison, they ran from the cafeteria, down the steps and into the secondary area towards the control room. When they reached the corridor, Jane gasped at what she saw down the length of the hallway. The metallic door was open in the background, and she could see a man staring out from it in shock. Twenty feet in front of this, Lucas was standing above Morris, who was crouched on the floor. Blood dripped from Morris’ nose, and Jane could see drops of it leading away to the left and down the hallway from where Morris had come. Lucas glared at her; she saw that he had a Taser in his hand.

  The rest of them fell in behind her and stopped. She didn’t take her eyes off Lucas as he reached down and grabbed the collar of Morris’ shirt. With one well-muscled arm, he lifted Morris’ six-foot frame to a standing position. Morris squinted as the fabric stretched over his neck, then gasped for air as it was released, but still Lucas did not let go of the garment. Other people began to appear at the door to the control room, their mouths open in shock. They were people Jane had never seen before—visitors from another world.

  Jane could do nothing but stare, her mouth gaping open as Lucas began tapping the Taser on his leg. Still staring at her, he swung his arm to and fro. Morris seemed oblivious to what was happening as he stared in the opposite direction, his eyes opening and closing against the glare of the bright corridor.

  Then Lucas’ torso surged forward, and he threw Morris to the ground. Morris fell to the floor in a lifeless heap, smacking his face on the tiled surface. He made no further sound, but closed his eyes and appeared to sleep. Lucas then raised his arm and pointed the gun directly at Jane. She began to quiver. She could no longer feel her hands, and her breath was shallow and ragged. She barely noticed the gasps from the group as they drew close together behind her. If only one lesson came from this confrontation (she already knew Lucas was a creep), it was that she was the group’s leader and always would be. Then Lucas began to speak.

  “Chris,” he called behind him. Chris took a step towards the narrow opening in the thick door frame. “Turn up the field again.”

  Chris didn’t respond.

  “Did you hear me? I said turn it up,” Lucas yelled gruffly.

  The other employees standing in the doorway began to leave. They ran away from the scene in the opposite direction. Jane saw past Lucas as the second doorway opened and they ran through it. The door closed behind them, and her chest tightened once more as she felt the space they were occupying close in around her.

  “That could damage them, Lucas. I mean…we’re talking serious damage here,” Chris said. Jane could detect the confrontational tone
in his voice. It revealed the truth of his warning. She looked from Morris to Lucas, trying to deal with both her fear for Morris and the new terror that was filling her body at what Lucas was suggesting.

  “I’m not going to tell you again, Chris. Turn it up or I’ll turn this weapon on you.”

  Chris finally moved in the room behind Lucas. A moment later, Jane began to wince in pain. Her hands automatically grasped her temples. The others followed, some covering their faces with their palms, yelping and gasping in pain. She listened to her friends squeal behind her as her gaze drifted to the glare of the white corridor. The light itself seemed to transform into pain, and she shut her eyes. She could barely hear Lucas as a loud ringing sound grew in her mind, like a slowly increasing cacophony of spinning blades.

  “Get back to your individual rooms now, all of you. If you attempt anything like this again, I will not be so lenient.”

  Jane turned to leave, staggering back down the hall behind her friends. Just as she entered the corridor beyond, she turned once more for Morris, who was still unconscious on the ground. She looked up at Lucas and, despite the pain, gritted her teeth, feeling a rage that had been—until that moment—totally unknown to her. She was scared of the depth of her anger as she turned back around, but this fear was clouded over by the guilt of leaving Morris there on the floor undefended. She clutched the walls as she left, and as the door closed behind her, tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Lucas watched as they disappeared down the side corridor leading to their quarters. He lowered his weapon and exhaled. He was happy for a moment; he had regained control. He looked down at Morris’ motionless body on the floor in front of him, and his lip turned upward in a careless expression. He turned back around, leaving Morris where he lay.

  Lucas walked back through the control room, giving Chris a horrific glare, then continued on to the employee section. He was watched by the frightened eyes of the other employees as he walked down the corridor. Once inside his office, he stood in front of the large bank of screens. He switched the display to the internal video feed, and saw that the ethereals were now lying on their beds, holding their heads in pain. A couple of them were vomiting. He was unaware of the fact that he had begun to smile just a little bit.

  After an hour of this, he paged Chris in the control room and told him to turn down the field again—not a lot, but just enough to let them breathe. It was still at a high level—the highest since it had been activated. Lucas had lost awareness of the fact that he was now acting in opposition to his highest goal: finding out about the strange object that had been discovered in the ocean.

  He glanced at the corner monitor that constantly displayed images of the exterior of the facility. The specialised security had arrived in the form of multiple armoured cars and a highly trained squad. The occupants of these vehicles had no idea what the facility contained, but they were under orders to protect it. A dozen of their vehicles were positioned outside the facility, and another fifteen or so armed members of the contingent lined the front gates and the area surrounding them on either side.

  Lucas was confident that this would be enough to contain the situation, though he felt a quake of panic in his chest as he thought of the burning building in Hong Kong. He had communicated with the committee regarding the Hong Kong building’s occupants, but they had no information about their whereabouts at this point in time; they were presumed to be either missing or dead.

  He thought of Jane again and the Atlantic Object. He turned around and looked at the file on his desk—it was always on his desk—and he realised that he had one more task to accomplish.

  Oddly, at that moment, a call came through from Denton. Lucas accepted the call after a few seconds of hesitation.

  “Mr. Denton,” he said as the call came through and Denton’s face filled the screen in front of him.

  “You still haven’t gotten what we need, Lucas.”

  “No, sir. She has not been cooperative in the slightest.”

  “Well, you’re running out of time.”

  “I know. I don’t know what else I can do to…”

  “Don’t give me that crap. Take her back into that room and do whatever it takes to get her to make the damn connection. If those freaks blow that place to pieces, we could lose our chance to get this information. Who knows what she represents or why she’s responding to it differently than the others, but for all we know it could be a century before someone like her shows up again, and then that thing could stay sitting on the ocean floor out of our reach until the day we die. So get into that room now and press her however hard you need to.”

  Lucas hesitated for a moment. Realising he hadn’t yet responded, he spat his reply into the air. “Yes sir.”

  The screen reverted to the internal network interface as Denton hung up. Lucas didn’t know Denton’s whereabouts, but in the hierarchy of the committee, he sat somewhere near the very top. It took Lucas a few moments to realise what scared him most about the call. Denton had seemed perfectly confident that Ethereal End was coming. It was Lucas’ first exposure to the truth that Denton didn’t care about anything—or anyone—except getting the information. He trembled at the realisation that things were spinning out of control.

  Just before he left his office, Lucas checked the monitors one last time and saw that Morris was still lying motionless on the floor in the corridor. He rolled his eyes and paged the infirmary to have him brought back to his room. He had been lying there for a full hour before Lucas took this action.

  Jane breathed a sigh of relief as she felt the field go back down again—not much, but enough to ease the weight that had been pressing down on her body and mind. The pain that had shot into her mind after Lucas gave the order to increase the output of the field had been tremendous. It lifted off her now, and the afterglow—the freedom of the pressure rising off her body—made her ecstatic.

  She tried to contact her friends, but found that she could not. She wasn’t too concerned about anything, though; for the moment, most of the pain was gone from her head, and that was all that mattered. The only desperate worry she had was for Morris, but about that, for the moment, she could do nothing. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  She turned onto her right side, facing the wall, the position in which she had found it so easy to stay in contact with Morris during those initial midnight conversations. Then she closed her eyes, and sleep came quickly.