The lab’s under lockdown.
It’s been under lockdown for the last three hours. I’m in here alone. It’s just me, the broken vial of the last thing they injected me with, and the corpse of Dr. Blaise. I know what you’re thinking– how can he be a corpse if he’s standing there and pointing at me, eyes wide open?
Well, I know because he doesn’t have a pulse.
He’s doing his best impression of a manikin, but he’s definitely dead. Believe me. They’ve been killing me over and over. Bringing me back again and again. I’ve become pretty familiar with the process of death, the signs, but it’s never looked like this.
Never.
The alarms are blaring outside the steel door. I can see the lights flashing red through the tiny window with the crosshatched glass, see the labcoats running by and the lab rats running through them. Screams fill my eardrums alongside snarls and pleas. I don’t know what’s happening out there, but it’s violent. Bloody.
People are dying.
I prefer it in here by far, but if the smell wafting through the air vent is any indication, I don’t get a choice in the matter. It smells acrid. Like fire. There’s a gentle haze settling across the room, and it’s giving me an ultimatum– stay in here and wait for the smoke and flames, or run out there and risk the madhouse.
I try the door.
Locked. Next I give the window a glance, but the steel bars covering it tell me it isn’t worth the effort. The tiny room doesn’t leave me a lot of options. I’ve got a steel gurdy, a metal cabinet, Dr Blaise’s corpse, and the vent in the corner that’s six sizes too small for an adult. Maybe if I was four years old I could make it work.
Maybe.
The lights flicker, going from white to red to dead. The tiny room is suddenly pitch black and I’ve become aware that the commotion outside– the screaming the snarling the fighting– has stopped. Something else has replaced it.
Something slow.
Methodical.
It’s like footsteps but heavier, like if a bulldozer grew a couple legs and decided to take a stroll down the Experimental Research ward. There’s another sound alongside it. Quieter. Coarse. It’s the sound of something being dragged across the dirty linoleum.
A voice.
“Come to see the one to be…” it mutters, skipping like a broken record. “Ask and ask and you shall see…” The voice is distorted, like something run through a digital blender and each word it speaks is delivered in a monotonous drone.
I take a step backward on instinct. It occurs to me that the footsteps in the dark are growing closer, approaching my little cell at the end of the hallway. My back bumps into the cabinet, and I feel about it in the darkness, sliding open the door and shoving my body inside. It’s cramped, but I manage. The door closes with a thunk.
Thunder rings around the room. Thunder and thunder and thunder. Something is pounding against the door and I can hear the three-inch steel barrier squealing as it gives way beneath the force of the blows. “You cut and snipped and tore at me… And now you’ll wear my agony….”
The door offers one last shriek of dying steel. It falls to the floor with a clang that wakes up half the county and a quarter of the next. The bulldozer walks into the room and I hold my breath and close my eyes and even think about praying before remembering that people like me, people with my track record– we don’t get the luxury.
Called to us, didn’t he? Called to us to make us be. Now he hides from all he sees, now he hates this tragedy…
I don’t open the cabinet door. I don’t even slide it an inch to take a peek and satisfy my curiosity because the truth is I don’t need to. I can hear just fine. I can hear Dr. Blaise’s stomach being split open, hear the sound of his intestines hitting the floor and the desperate gulps as something makes his inside’s their own.
I do a good job of keeping quiet. Keeping still. I do a good job of avoiding the death and the blood and the horror, but what I am is human, and that means I need to breathe. And right now there’s smoke filling the room. It’s wafting in from the air vent, and it’s nestling in my lungs. Burning. Scratching.
I cough.
I cough and before I can stop myself, I cough again.
Jesus.
Like I said: only human.
There’s a dull thump and a wet splash. It’s what I imagine the doctor’s corpse sounds like when it’s dropped into a puddle of its own blood. What follows are heavy footsteps that tell me I’m going to die. They’re slow. Plodding. Something snaps in my brain, and in the span of a moment, six million years of human evolution decide it’s time to flip a coin.
Fight.
Or flight?
I tear open the cabinet door and my eyes find a room that doesn’t exist. Darkness. It doesn’t matter because my memories are acting as my GPS, guiding my bare feet across the cold linoleum, through the warm blood and past the monster I cannot see. My shoulder strikes the edge of the doorway and that’s fine because at least I know I’m out of the room. Out of reach.
I keep moving. I keep moving down the pitch black hallway that I’ve walked down every day for the last sixteen years. The same hallway that’s painted my dreams. My nightmares. I trip and stumble over dead bodies that are strewn about like discarded litter, and I wonder what happened here. If the experiments went too far.
If anybody deserved this.
Behind me, the bulldozer resumes its pursuit. It’s still dragging something behind it, but I’m not wasting my time turning around to gawk because I know full well that not all deaths are equal. Some are worse than others. This one could be the worst of all.
It takes me six heartbeats to reach the end of the corridor, and by the time I do I’m greeted with a bittersweet surprise: my assailant’s done my work for me. The exit door’s been torn to pieces, and so have the guards in front of it. Their corpses are everywhere. A little here, a little there. I try not to think about their fractured skulls cutting into my bare feet, try not to think about whose intestines I’m slipping over as I stumble out of the demolished doorway.
I try not to think, and then I don’t need to try anymore.
Because I’m free.
Sixteen years locked in a cage, and now I’m free.
I stumble onto the courtyard grass, panting and wheezing like a man who’s spent his whole life strapped to a chair or walked like a dog. My chest is heaving. My legs are trembling. I gaze back at the research lab, and it’s lit up like a funeral pyre and burning twice as bright, courtesy of a chemical cocktail potent enough to light the flames of hell. Chemicals I’ve tasted. Felt coursing through my veins.
Some I’ve even helped design.
Wants to see what he can be and wants to know… Where he can go…
The footsteps grow closer, echoing from inside of the facility and there’s the sound of something being lifted. Swung. Bodies fly from the shadow of the doorway. They crash around me, tumbling through the grass in a shower of blood and viscera. Each more awful than the last. Among them are faces I recognize; soldiers who coerced me into dying, day in and day out. Others are doctors.
Old colleagues of mine.
Cast about beyond the veil, sought to find the Holy Grail…
I can’t see it, but I can hear it. I know the creature is standing at the wreckage of the door, painted in the dark of the hallway and I know that it’s watching me. Waiting. My instincts are begging me to keep running, to jump the gate and disappear down the mountain and hope against hope that all of this goes away if I just run fast enough, but I know better.
The smoke in the sky shifts. Moonlight finds the wreckage of the door. It finds the silhouette standing in the dark– the phantom with the footfalls of a goliath and the voice of a skipping record. But the goliath is thin. Thinner than it has any right to be. It looks emaciated, bent over in the passage with two eyes of gleaming gold and a mouthful of broken teeth.
Questions, questions, asked of me… Answers, answers, never free…
I see it now. I see it and my stomach drops, my jaw trembles and my mind begins to race for a way out. Memories lurch from dusty corners of my psyche. I do everything I can to strangle them, but it isn’t enough. They’re multiplying inside of my mind, infesting me with decades of regret. Agony.
I had no choice.
I say the words again and again, and each time I do they become more meaningless. The truth is, the only thing I ever had was a choice. The choice to become a monster or remain a man, and I chose to throw away everything to get one step closer to playing god. One step closer to seeing her again: Vanessa.
Paid the price to see this through, but now he knows he knows not what to do…
I try to explain to the creature that the military approached me. That they knew about my background in neurology and chemistry. That they knew I’d been attempting to bridge the gap between life and death. I try and I try to tell this monster that I only wanted the opportunity to say goodbye to my wife, but the creature doesn’t care.
It laughs.
It stands in the shadows with its cold dim eyes, and it laughs as it heaves a sack from the dark of the doorway, tossing it onto the courtyard grass. The sack shifts. Squirms. It’s as though there’s something inside of it fighting to get free.
The excuses spill from my lips before I ever formulate a thought, more explanations, more reasoning attempting to justify what cannot be justified. “I wanted to help people,” I sputter. “I wanted to help but the military wanted to use the project as a weapon. They made me push the patients too far. They made me hurt them, but it was never what I intended…”
The last words draw out a choking sob. Flashbacks ignite in my mind. Relics long since buried and stuffed beneath sixteen years of trauma and psychological torment.
I remember strapping patients to the chair, aided by my assistant, the younger, and still living Dr. Blaise. I remember stuffing their mouths with wood so they wouldn’t bite their tongues as we attached diodes to their skin and pumped their veins with my proprietary compound.
We told them they were going to die.
Yes, they said. We know.
We told them they’d see a bright light, something coaxing them into the afterlife. This could last anywhere from several minutes to hours. Then, death would take them fully. At this, the question was always the same: what happens after the light?
The answer never changed.
Across a hundred separate subjects we observed that they would find themselves inside of a room. Somewhere familiar. The room would commonly be their childhood bedroom, or a place holding similar nostalgia. In there, they would feel limitless euphoria. Patients described the sensation as an overwhelming sense of spiritual openness, a deep peace that bordered on nirvana. This feeling would be strongest in the room, but would also extend to the rest of the structure– most commonly a house.
We called this place their Sanctum.
Inside of the Sanctum, dreams became reality. Dead pets would return to life,tails wagging and eyes beaming. Subjects would see lost relatives, visit with distant friends and even reunite with departed loved ones.
The Sanctum was everything we’d been looking for. Everything I’d been looking for.
At that point, I deemed the project a success, citing that we’d learned all that we needed. Death held nothing we should fear. My final request before shutting the operation down was to undergo the procedure myself. To see Vanessa one last time and say goodbye.
But the military refused.
They wouldn’t allow me to stop the project, nor would they allow me to undergo my own procedure. Their reasoning? A concern that without my expertise to guide the experiment, my team could lose me when I went under. That I might never return from my Sanctum.
We still need to go a little deeper, they told me. And we need you for that.
How much deeper, I’d asked.
What happens if the subjects leave their Sanctum?
I didn’t know. I hadn’t the faintest idea but I also couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to. They all described feeling boundless joy in that place, and I wanted to experience that too. I wanted to see Vanessa, to hold her in my arms again and tell her how badly I’d missed her, how sorry I was for never getting a chance to say goodbye.
So I agreed. I agreed because the procedure was complex, and not something I could perform on my own without the assistance of my team. I agreed because it was the only way I could hope to find closure in my life. After all, I still had so much to do before I checked out for good.
It was at that point, however, that things became difficult.
Unsurprisingly, Subjects didn’t want to leave their Sanctums. Even after multiple rebirths and extensive coaching, the impulse to remain within the hallowed home proved too powerful to overcome. It was though some fundamental force of the afterlife was exerting its will. It did not want them to leave.
And yet, we needed them to. I went back to the drawing board, theorizing multiple solutions, but each one proved a dead end. Until Blaise cracked the code.
The theory was simple. Just as we used chemical mixtures to therapeutically kill the subjects, he designed one to overcome the Sanctum’s pull. It would transform the Sanctum from a hallowed hall into a regular structure. Nothing special. Nothing capable of locking people within its orbit.
Just a house. Nothing more.
The results were theorized to be temporary, that just like the chemicals we used to resurrect and kill the patients, they would cycle out of their systems in time. Harmless, is the word he used. And he was right, at least about one thing. Removing the Sanctum proved successful at encouraging Subjects to venture into the void of the afterlife, a place we came to know as the Beyond.
They described the Beyond as a place not so different from our world. It possessed similar trappings of modern life– cars, skyscrapers, people and birds, but there was something decidedly off about the whole experience. Subjects reported feeling disturbed in the Beyond. Uneasy and unwell.
One subject described the experience as a creeping dread. “With each step I take, I feel shadows falling across my soul. It’s like a darkness is swallowing me up, eating all of the light inside of me and leaving only misery.”
But just what was causing this couldn’t be exactly identified. On the contrary, it seemed to be caused by a great many things at once. For one, the buildings were filled with broken windows, glass littering the ground beneath them. The denizens of this place didn’t seem to mind, though. They’d wander everywhere naked, wide smiles plastered across their faces, their feet mindlessly moving across the glass and leaving trails of blood in their wake.
But perhaps most unnerving of all was the fact that these smiling people never spoke a word. Never. Not in any Subject we observed did these phantoms appear to possess the ability or desire to engage in conversation– instead, they communicated entirely through a single vocal action: screaming.
The Beyond, it seemed, was full of the sort of abject horror we all feared when discussing death. It was enough for me to give the military an ultimatum: cease this madness or lose my expertise. I was ready to leave. What began as a means to help people find closure had turned into a method of traumatizing individuals.
One more week, they told me. One more week of experiments, and then you can undergo the procedure. At that point we’ll have the data we need, and we can shut down the project for good. Deal?
At that point, I still believed the Subjects weren’t suffering anything more than the equivalent of a bad acid trip. That sure, their experience was traumatizing… but fundamentally unable to harm them. In a word, I believed everything was treatable with proper therapy. That the results were impermanent.
God forgive me.
Lost within his memories… Oh, how I wonder what he sees…
The voice of the goliath brings me back. The creature’s decrepit fingers work at the sack, untying the drawstring. It’s humming. Singing to itself. Somehow, the song feels familiar. It occurs to me that it’s the song that Vanessa and I shared, the one we played on our wedding day and the one I played when I stood alone, weeping at her grave.
“I know you…” I say to the giant, realization dawning upon me. “I saw you… in the afterlife…”
A new memory spins in my mind. I’m back in front of the General running the research facility, only this time I’m explaining that I can’t finish the week.
Why not? he asks.
They aren’t coming back anymore, I tell him.
The Subjects, I meant. Half of them had died after venturing into the Beyond. The second part of the chemical cocktail designed to revive our dead patients had no effect on these individuals, and more curiously, their brain’s also showed signs of significant damage. It was as though portions had been burned away.
Those who did return were somehow even worse. They described horrors that I still shudder to imagine, the sort of nightmares that crawl into your memories and refuse to leave. Each and every one of them would come back in tears, or gasping for breath. They’d throw themselves from their chairs. Rush for the door.
No, they’d beg. Never again. There’s something out there. Something twisted, and it wants me to suffer its pain.
The description was haunting, but it also presented a question: what was out there, and why did it want these subjects to bear its pain? It was a question I was happy to leave unanswered. We’d already lost dozens and traumatized the rest– there was no need to pursue this madness any further. But the academic part of me did ponder what lurked in the Beyond.
And sadly, so did the academic part of Blaise.
He became enthralled at the idea of discovering this creature, this devil that seemed to live in the forbidden wastelands of the afterlife. He became obsessed with it. I told the General in charge of the project that we needed to close this down before we let the genie out of the bottle, before we pushed too far and found something we could no longer deal with.
But he liked Blaise’s idea more than mine. He liked the idea of the military wielding this monster for themselves, of using the destruction of a person’s Sanctum as a means of psychological coercion– after all, if you can convince an enemy that you’ll not only take their lives, but their salvation too, wouldn’t they submit near-instantly?
Yes, it proved too tantalizing an advantage for the military to lose.
That was around the time we discovered another horrifying reality: that Blaise’s method of temporarily removing a Subjects access to their Sanctum wasn’t temporary at all. Each and every Subject who had undergone his procedure was permanently cut off from their slice of heaven.
That meant we weren’t just traumatizing people, we weren’t even just killing them. We were butchering their souls.
I put my foot down. Flat out refused to continue this insanity. I told the General that he could do what he wanted with my paperwork because I wouldn’t be coming back for it– I’d never step foot in this awful place again. As much as I yearned to see Vanessa again, I could never do it at the cost of so many.
No, I’d find my closure a different way. A healthier way. And then, when I was ready to pass on, I’d see her in my Sanctum when life saw fit.
I made to leave, but two soldiers stopped me. The General told me he couldn’t let me go, that if he did I’d just go squealing to the press and put a damper on all the exciting discoveries we’d made. He wasn’t wrong. I planned on blowing the whistle the second I walked out the door.
Our current crop of Subjects have become difficult to gather data from, the General explained to me. I’ve got a list of drug addicts on skid row that’d jump at the chance to receive free doses of chemical nirvana, and I’m inclined to give them a call. Fill our stable all over again.
Fuck you, I told him. Don’t you dare drag more innocent lives into this.
Or maybe we could investigate using children? Their minds are far more malleable. Perhaps… uniquely equipped to deal with the mental stress of navigating the Beyond. What do you think, doctor?
I think I tried to attack him at that point. The memory is hazy because one of the two guards bashed me over the head with the grip of their sidearm, but I do remember begging him not to. I’ll do anything, I said. Use me instead. I know what we’re looking for. I know enough about the Beyond to navigate it… to tell you exactly what you want to know. There’s no need for children.
The General agreed.
So it was that I became the military’s guinea pig. Every morning I’d be marched into the room I came to call the Death Chamber, and Blaise would fill me with my own compound, spiked with his Sanctum-Destroying addition. Every day I would die. I’d wander the Beyond for what felt like weeks at a time, only to be reborn hours later gasping and crying. And I’d tell them what I knew they wanted to hear. Nothing more.
I did that for sixteen years. When I began, I was a young man, or at least younger– now, my hair has greyed. My body is frail. My memory has become a mess of disparate ideas and characters, a puzzle whose pieces don’t quite seem to fit. But this goliath… this monster made flesh is somehow stringing those pieces together again.
It’s making sense of the senseless.
Did for me just what I asked… Now I give what he wants back…
Inside the sack, something squirms. A hand reaches out of the opening, followed by a mess of auburn hair. Then, freckled shoulders. A woman tumbles onto the courtyard grass, lying amidst slain researchers and soldiers. She’s pale. Shivering.
She’s my everything.
I scramble across the courtyard, hardly believing my eyes as I take Vanessa into my trembling arms. I squeeze her, weeping. My lips find her forehead and pepper it with kisses. I whisper into her ear how much she means to me, how much I’ve wanted to see her and how hard it’s been without her.
The goliath leans in, and now that it’s closer I see so many features I missed in the dark. The scar upon its cheek. The crooked nose and the thick patch of hair upon its head. It’s like looking in a funhouse mirror, one stretched and distorted.
“Thank you,” I whisper. My cheek presses against Vanessa’s, and her flesh is cold enough that it feels like pins and needles on my skin but somehow, I’ve never felt warmer. Even now, as I sit amidst a circle of dead bodies, I find myself at peace. I did what I could.
I did everything I could.
In the wake of my imprisonment, the military ordered me to type up field reports each time I ventured in the Beyond. These reports were vetted by Blaise. The logic was that he had known me for years and would easily be able to determine if I was lying about any of my statements. If my information became unreliable, then the military would enact its contingency plan: using children as Subjects. This was something I did not want, and therefore I would comply with their requests. That was what they believed. Indeed, it was what I believed too– at least initially.
But somewhere along the line, the situation changed, and I realized that I could have my cake and eat it too. I could put an end to this project, destroy every last person associated with it, and I could do it all while getting my closure.
I learned early on that the previous Subjects had been telling the truth. That they were correct to be afraid of the Beyond. It wasn’t just that it was unnerving, it was that it was twisted. Demented. Inside of the Beyond, nothing seemed to make sense, with reality being replaced by a sort of Twilight Zone equivalent. There, birds didn’t fly. They crawled. They used their wings to shuffle across the ground, their broken legs dragging behind them.
Cars were everywhere. They drove in haphazard loops, crashing into walls and street lights and even plowing through the screaming denizens of the Beyond. But nobody was behind the wheel. The cars were phantoms, moving on their own volition. These things were all uncomfortable. Disconcerting. But they were nothing compared to the real nightmare of the afterlife.
A being I came to know as the Shadow.
It was a creature of misery and loathing. It seemed to exist in a cloud of negativity, a miasma that stretched across the afterlife like an inescapable plague. The first time I encountered the Shadow, I’d been recording details on the Denizens. I pondered why they were all naked. Why they moved in such drone-like ways, marching forward incessantly, never stopping to eat or drink, or even rest. And why did they scream? Why were they always smiling and screaming?
While pondering these questions, something strange occured. The Beyond began to shake. The buildings surrounding me, the tall skyscrapers absent of life began to tilt and groan, swaying on their foundations. What little glass remained in their windows shattered, raining around me like a blizzard. The Denizens stopped marching and began running– sprinting from some unseen threat. Some of them crashed into walls, leaving bloody marks from their broken bodies, while others impaled themselves scrambling through the jagged edges of broken windows.
I did not know what to do, so I merely stood and waited.
And the Shadow found me. A tall, thin goliath that was almost unmistakable: it was me. A grotesque approximation, but fundamentally, this creature was me. It took me into its hands and my limbs screamed with pain as it began to crush my very bones to dust. Pain… that was something that one rarely felt in the afterlife. All aspects of it seemed so dulled, like distant memories… But the pain this creature imparted was more real and more agonizing than anything I’d felt in life.
When I returned from that expedition, I begged Blaise not to send me back. I wept and pleaded, but both he and the General found my discovery to be too remarkable to abandon. They couldn’t wait to strap me down again, to pump me full of the afterlife compound and send me back into hell itself. I think they believed the Shadow to be some sort of angel. A sort of reaper that wrote the laws of the Beyond, and perhaps our Sanctums, but even then I knew better.
Still, they wanted it for themselves. The idea of wielding such an entity, of manipulating it and turning it against their enemies likely proved too tempting a prospect to ignore.
Before I knew it, I was back in the Beyond, back in that fractured wasteland where hope goes to die. Again and again. For years.
I spent my time there running from the Shadow. I’d scramble with the Denizens whenever its thunderous footsteps approached, I’d hide under tables, in closets or even dash into still-driving cars. But it was never enough.
Sooner or later, the Shadow would always find me. And when it did, it would torture me. The torture would be unique during each encounter, never allowing me the comfort of predicting the pain, acclimating to it. Once, it snapped my bones one by one. Another time it filled my eyes with broken glass.
Each time it hurt me, I pleaded for mercy. I begged and I begged not to suffer its twisted delights, but it never cared to answer me. It merely conducted its business with a silent determination that bordered on robotic. For a long time, I wondered if it was capable of proper communication at all, or if it was merely serving some predetermined function.
Until the day it answered me. I asked why it had dedicated its existence to torturing me, and it told me why: because I had spent my life torturing it.
It was then that I learned our Shadows are more than devils. They’re guardians. Gatekeepers of our own personal Valhalla. They exist to keep order, to act as shepherds to the actors that play the parts in our Sanctum-induced fantasies. I discovered that each Denizen was a person from our memory, that they wandered aimlessly until called upon, and then they’d don the identity of whoever we desired.
Perhaps they’d become a cherished teacher from childhood. Maybe an old friend.
Maybe even a lost lover.
And the Shadow is the maestro that makes the play go on. It does this because it has no choice– when you suffer, it suffers. It seeks to fulfill the whims of your Sanctum because to do otherwise means personal pain. The Shadow and Sanctums are sort of batteries, you see. They each receive a charge throughout your life, with the Sanctum being charged by your positive experiences– your moments of hope, joy, and love, and the Shadow being charged by the negative, those moments of self-loathing and grief.
It’s why our emotions are fleeting. Why once they come, they seem to vanish in minutes or hours. They’re being fed into our own personal reserve– a reserve that exists inside of billions of individual pocket dimensions. Where these dimensions come from and how they first came to exist isn’t something I know, but I do know one thing.
They’re real.
I know this because I’ve helped people travel to them. Every time I injected my serum into their veins and allowed them to die and return again, I was sending them to an entirely new dimension independent of our own. But I didn’t stop there. No. I also helped something travel from that dimension to our own. A creature born of negativity and hatred.
A Shadow.
Bottled up your misery, and now you take your leave from me…
I gaze up at the goliath and I say my own name. “Yes, Andrew. The link should be broken… you are free from my pain.” Even as the words leave my mouth, I have no idea what the consequences will be. When I die, having no Sanctum and no Shadow, where will it leave me? The wasteland of the Beyond? Or will even that be gone, without its caretaker? I do not know.
All I know is that the horror of my experiments have been laid to rest. The worlds of life and death are once again separate as they were always meant to be. I write this now not to encourage others to follow in my footsteps and take up my research, but rather to heed my warning: some mysteries are better left unsolved.
Goodbye.
“Goodbye.”
I watch the goliath rise up to its full height, and with a single spring of its legs, it leaps into the dark of the woods. Gone. I do not know what it intends to do here in our world, but it is my hope that without the torment of my own negativity, it will find its own sort of peace. In the meantime, I look down at the peace that I’ve found. Vanessa.
She’s just the same as I remember her, the same as the day she died. I run a finger along her pale jaw, and her eyelids flutter. I watch her limbs twitch and her body shift as she awakes from her slumber. It takes me back to lazy Sundays in bed. It reminds me of those mornings we’d sleep in, where I’d wipe the sleep from her eyes and hold her close, wondering how my life could possibly be so perfect.
“Hello again, darling,” I say.
Vanessa looks up at me for the first time in sixteen years. She smiles.
She smiles, and then she screams.