The Compound: Part Two – Scattered - a Hallowe’en story for the Parodyverse
The Compound is now substantially complete, with the final electronics being fitted as we speak and the necessary engravings due to be finished before the end of the month. Initial tests indicate that the site is sufficiently close to the Nexus of Unreality to allow proper use of the interface generator, although full scale tests will obviously be impossible until all the apparatus is properly installed.
Staff recruitment is also well advanced. The slump in the Georgia labour market has drawn forth a substantial pool of likely candidates, and the aptitude testing has helped narrow down the applicants to the ones that best suit the necessary profile. Senior staff will be brought in from other projects, of course, but will also need to pass the tests. Suitable waiver documents have been provided by Legal Services.
Finally, the exotic materials are being acquired. The first of them was flown in today, and is already under analysis. I am confident that the project will be able to proceed on time and that there will be significant results after our first full operational run.
Excerpt from a Project Progress Analysis by Dr Ludovick Trenchcoat
***
Ulrich Chainsawhands came straight for Vinny. Vinny yelped and scrambled backwards. Liu Xi raised her hands and began to pull heat from the surroundings to sear the attacker with flame. Captain Harker reacted fastest of all though, raising his sub-machine gun and spraying the horror with a full clip of Teflon-point bullets.
Chainsawhands was jerked backwards, the steel-jacketed slugs slicing through him in a gory spray of meat. He laughed out loud, the blood bubbling from his lips as he sat up. And then he melted away.
“What the hell was that?” demanded Liu Xi, breathing hard. She’d seen some unpleasant things in her few years but this one was right up there. “Was that a ghost?”
“Well, yes,” admitted Vinny, climbing to his feet and examining the spot where Chainsawhands had vanished. “It pretty much was.”
“An ambient psychoform manifestation,” Letitia Gahagan corrected him. “A standing wave in the ectoplasmic field retaining semblances of human consciousness and interacting on the general and specific continuum.”
Vincent De Soth looked over at the genius scientist. “Are you making words up so you don’t have to say ‘ghost’?” he asked her.
“Of course not,” the Idiom snorted disdainfully. She put her scanner away so her trembling hands wouldn’t betray her. “I’m merely remarking that the unusual dimensional conditions in this area appear to have caused transient metapsychometric imbalances of a catastrophic nature.”
“It looked real to me,” Captain Harker admitted. “Until I shot it. Those slugs looked to rip it up good. But then…”
“It just vanished,” Liu Xi admitted. She hadn’t sensed any disturbance in the elemental planes she was familiar with. “Did we kill it?”
“It’s a ghost,” Vinny persisted. “It’s already dead.”
“It did resemble Ulrich Svensonson, an early cyborg experiment of the Devil Doctor’s,” Letitia admitted, checking her portable database. “But Chainsawhands, as he imaginatively called himself, died battling Hollywood V almost decade ago.”
“That’s why he’s a ghost now,” argued Vinny. “A lot of ghosts are. It’s the fashion.”
“This place is all screwed up, man,” worried Stankey, the helicopter pilot. He and the other two security men Harker had brought along were clinging to their weapons rather urgently. “We’ve got to get out. Now.”
The Idiom checked the sealed blast doors on the exit. “No power and an internal dead bolt,” she noted. “Not a good combination. But there has to be an emergency escape exit. No mad scientist is going to build a bunker like this without installing at least one emergency escape exit.”
“Was Dr Trenchcoat a mad scientist?” Liu Xi wondered. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s definitely on the border,” Letitia answered. “I heard he got thrown out of last years WeirdSciCon for projectile ectoplasm vomiting.”
“That can happen to anyone,” Vinny said defensively. “But yeah, he’s published a few odd articles in his time. And he wrote a couple of pretty odd books. The Ghoul I Brought To Dinner, for example, and Lycanthropy, Our Hairy Friend.”
“So ghosts aren’t completely unlikely where he’s been involved,” Liu Xi concluded.
“Transient metapsychometric imbalances,” Letitia corrected the elementalist.
The power remained down so the soldiers unshipped big torches and shone them around the reception area of the deserted silo building. “Do you know the way out?” Harker asked the Idiom.
“Not as such,” she conceded. “But if I can find the computer core I might be able to get something working there so I can download schematics.”
“We’d better explore,” suggested Liu Xi.
“I know,” Vinny called out. “Why don’t we not split up and go in different directions. Let’s all stick together and not get picked off one by one?”
There was general agreement. Captain Harker gestured to his men and had them kick open the door to the service stairwell.
“We have the choice of down or down,” noted Letitia.
***
It was a rotting hulk of a timber ship, and it was propped on a metal gantry and partially dissected.
“Why?” asked Liu Xi, moving over to touch the worm-eaten mouldy decking. “Why would they want a galleon or whatever it is down here?”
“I’m more interested in how they got it down here,” Leticia Gahagan countered. “It looks like that roof section there operates on a hydraulic pump.” She checked in vain to see if there was an independent power supply for the mechanism.
“This is the hulk of the Amber Crow,” Vinnie told them. “It sank in 1789 in a storm off the shore of Willingham with all hands. For years afterwards mariners claimed to still see it riding the seas round there in thick mists or other bad weather, doomed to sail for eternity.”
Liu Xi looked more carefully at the young exorcist. “You worked all that out psychically?” she asked, impressed.
“It’s written here on the sign,” Vinny pointed out.
“Why bring it here?” demanded Harker, a slight note of panic in his professional tones. “Why the hell bring a shipwreck all the way to Georgia and then cut it up?”
The Idiom had moved on. “Why bring any of these things?” she demanded. She pointed to a compacted square of crushed car, to a disassembled wicker rocking chair, to a broken full-length mirror.
Vinny checked the notes in the folders beside each one. “Okay, the mirror was the one that pre-talkies movie starlet Helga Walton broke when her career ended with the advent of sound,” he briefed them. “She took a fragment and carved up her perfect face before slitting her throat. The rocker belonged to Granny Heatherow, that old lady who cooked and ate her grandchildren in the 50’s. This is where the cops found her when they burst in, finishing her sandwich.”
“Do we want to know about the compacted car?” Liu Xi ventured.
“Not really,” Vinny admitted. “Except it was crushed like that for Boss Deadeyes back in the great depression, and they say the owner of the car didn’t get the chance to get out of it first.”
“So Trenchcoat was continuing his obsession with occult trivia,” Letitia concluded. “How did he ever sell this programme to ZOXXON?”
“I don’t know,” Vinny admitted. “But if he was hoping to get some genuine occult artefacts he was badly gypped. There’s not a single trace of supernatural activity between the lot of them.”
“So you could tell if there was?” Liu Xi checked more cautiously. “Or is there a label somewhere marked ‘not haunted’?”
“Of course I could tell,” Vinny answered in an offended tone. “I may be the white sheep of the De Soth family but I am psychic. Well, quite psychic. Fairly psychic. I could tell. Almost definitely.”
“Really,” Liu Xi challenged him. “What number am I thinking of?”
The young man blushed. “It doesn’t work like that,” he answered. “It’s more… I don’t read people’s minds. It’s not nice. And you can’t always close them off afterwards. It’s not like looking at a newspaper. And there’s, you know, ethics. And stuff.”
“So what can you do?”
Vinny shrugged defensively. “I brew a mean herbal tea,” he promised. “Good for aura cleansing.”
The conversation was broken up by Stankey loosing a spray of gunfire into the shadows. The other soldiers reacted automatically and followed his lead.
“What is it?” demanded Liu Xi. “What’s there?” She gestured and the corner was filled with luminosity.
It was empty.
“I saw something,” Stankey shouted. “Something hairy and bloody. Kind of like a turned-inside-out Wookie.”
“Then where is it now?” demanded Turner harshly. He didn’t like being scared. “Keep a grip, people.”
“But not on the triggers of your machine guns,” the Idiom added caustically. “Just what we need, to be trapped in a house of horrors with a bunch of lethally-armed establishment rent-a-fascists with nervous dispositions.”
“We’re going to need these guns, lady,” Captain Turner warned her.
“Because the investigators you sent in before didn’t have them?” Letitia asked.
There was no answer to that.
***
“I’ve been watching you,” Vinny told Liu Xi.
“Really?” asked the Chinese girl coolly.
“Well, when I say watching you I don’t mean watching you in the watching you sense, like watching your butt or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with your butt. It’s a great butt. Er, not great in the huge sense, more in the really tight and firm, er, in a good way, I mean, but that’s not the topic right now. I’ve not been watching your butt, is what I’m saying. Not that it’s not worth watching, but…”
“You might want to stop now,” Liu Xi recommended.
“I wish I could,” Vinny cringed. “Sorry. Sometimes the ends of sentences don’t seem to go quite where I’d expected them to.”
“Why have you been watching me?” Liu Xi enquired. “Whatever part you were watching?”
“I’ve been watching what you do,” Vinny explained. “With the elements.”
“Have you now?”
“Well, a little bit,” he admitted. “You seem to have this natural empathy for them. You sort of bend them around you, like some kind of tight-fitting pair of jean… er, like a cloak. That’s quite a talent.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I see every day.”
“You’re still referring to my elemental gifts here,” Liu Xi clarified.
“Yes. Honestly. I wouldn’t want you to think I was some kind of girl-obsessed pervert, thinking about your body all the time or anything. Not that there’s anything…”
“Yes, I get the idea.” Liu Xi had to fight to suppress a smile. “We might want to make sure that the Idiom and the others don’t get too far ahead of us in this big storage room.”
“Oh, sure. Absolutely.” Vinny looked around. “Er, which way did they go exactly?”
***
“What do you mean, we’ve lost Xian and De Soth?” demanded Letitia Gahagan irritably. “They were right behind us, jabbering in a futile and irritating manner.”
“We just turned the corner,” Captain Turner answered. “You were just examining that old electric chair and that operating table and I looked round to check my six and keep an eye on the others and… they weren’t round the corner any more.”
The Idiom checked her wrist monitor, but it was still throwing up useless sensor snow. “Fine. I suppose we’d better go back and look for them,” she conceded. “By the way, the electric chair is where Logan Rudyard, the serial rapist, was executed back in the sixties. The operating table was taken from the Devil Doctor’s secret base in Limehouse, London, by Project: Pendragon just a couple of years ago.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it’s probably where Ulrich Chainsawhands picked up his nickname.”
Turner looked around the shadowed warehouse uneasily. “What the hell is happening here?” he demanded. “That thing upstairs, whatever it was that Stankey saw, all this weird stuff…”
“You’re asking me?” the Idiom asked him. “You elected to sell out and work for an evil megacorp.”
Turner sneered at her. “For all your high talk, so did you. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Letitia Gahagan sighed. “I’m here to steal things, you moron,” she told him. “I’m hoping to discover whatever exciting new energy source the planet-raping ZOXXON board financed in this dingy hole, derive its principles, then hand it free to the planet, thus breaking the stranglehold energy monopoly that greedy patriarchal Western multinationals have over the planet.”
Harker levelled his weapon at the Idiom. “And you’re admitting this to me?”
“Of course I am,” Letitia told him. “I already infected you and your soldiers with a time-delayed flesh-eating bacterium. It won’t gestate for around twelve hours and I’ll let you have the antidote when I’m safe and sound clear away from here. In the meantime I want you motivated to keep me protected as your number one priority.”
“You poisoned us?” Stankey understood. “And what stops us just torturing the cure out of you right here and now?”
The Idiom stared at him. “Because I’m extremely smart and you’re you. Do you really believe that you can come up with any way of stopping me that I haven’t already thought about and planned for? Do you?”
“And you expected to get trapped with us in a haunted house, did you?” Turner asked.
“I didn’t expect the ghosts,” Letitia conceded. “I mean the ambient psychoform manifestations.”
She stopped walking forward then because she’d just felt her foot sink into something. She looked down and saw she’d trodden in another ambient psychoform manifestation. It crunched beneath her, blood and pus squirting across the floor like a squashed bug. Half a dozen eyes opened and goggled up at the Idiom. And it giggled.
***
“What are these big glass tanks for?” asked Liu Xi. She and Vinny had managed to find their way to the lower level, where the labs were situated. There were a few signs of disruption here; papers strewn from desks, an overturned chair, a coffee pot boiled dry. And there was the big room full of man-sized bell jars. Broken man-sized bell jars.
“A very large pickling plant?” ventured the young exorcist, shining his torch into the room. He wasn’t comforted by the fact that the glass from the tubes had shattered outwards.
“I’ve been doing this adventuring thing for a little while now,” Liu Xi told him. “One thing I’ve learned is that big glass tanks are never very good news. Broken big glass tanks are less good news still.”
Vinny hesitated, then touched one of the jars. “It’s psychically neutral,” he assured her, sounding relieved. “Nothing bad happened here. Nothing at all.”
Liu Xi really wasn’t sure how much she could rely on her companion-in-spookiness. “We need to work out what these did,” she insisted. “Why would somebody place thirteen lead-glass containers around the edges of a circular room, then engrave the floor with these unusual circuit patterns?”
Vinny shone his torch downwards. If somebody had crossed a summoning circle with a solid state microchip it would look a lot like this. “I’m right with you on assessing this as Very Bad News,” he agreed. “And I think it’s fair to say that something went wrong here. But what?”
“And why?”
Vincent De Soth scratched his head. The answer felt to be in there, somehow, if only he could put everything together.
“There’s a power generator in the next room,” Liu Xi said. “I don’t like it. When I go near it, it makes me feel dizzy.”
Vinny’s eyes narrowed. “Really?” he said. “Would you mind doing it again. Just so I can see.”
“See what?”
“Please?”
Liu Xi moved to the threshold of the other chamber. Once again a slight nausea overcame her.
“Whoa,” whoaed Vinny. “That’s nasty.”
Liu Xi deliberately placed half a room between herself and the generator. “What’s nasty? What did you see?”
Vinny rubbed his temples again. “Comeonecomeonecomeon,” he urged himself. “Put it together, De Soth.”
“What did you see, Vinny?” Liu Xi couldn’t believe she was asking a dubious psychic about his dubious visions.
“Well, when you go near there something in that mechanism seems to suck just a little bit of your psionic energy,” Vinny admitted. “I mean, whatever it is you generate that allows you to align yourself with the elements and get them to listen to you. The bit of your mind that triggers the things you can do physically.” He shook his head. “I can’t really explain it. We don’t have words.”
“I can follow you,” the elementalist admitted. “Go on.”
“I think… that machine in there is… it’s designed to absorb psionic energy,” Vinny reasoned. “I think it converts it. To electricity.”
Liu Xi refined her own senses, even though concentrating on the machine made her feel weak and sick. “It’s true,” she agreed. “That machine is doing a little bit of what I can do. It’s shifting my thoughts into power.”
“That’s the new power source that Dr Trenchcoat was looking for!” Vinny realised. “Something to change psionic energy to conventional energy!”
Liu Xi nodded. It felt right. The machine was hungry.
“And these…” Vinny went on, pointing to the bell jars. “These were fuel dumps.”
“Fuel dumps?” Liu Xi puzzled. “What fuel?”
“Ever since I came here I’ve been wondering why I wasn’t sensing anything,” Vinny said, pacing up and down as he worked it out. “Except for that brief moment when we saw that Chainsawhands ghost I’ve not picked up anything. Not from the haunted ship wreckage, not from the rocking chair, not from any of the things that are supposedly linked to nasty event and people. It’s as if they’ve been wiped clean.”
Liu Xi began to follow him. “As if any psychic residue – or haunting – was peeled away from them. Moved elsewhere.”
“Shifted down here, to these jars,” Vinny agreed. “To be used as fuel, converted to electrical power. Ghosts as raw material for the national grid.”
“But there’s nothing here now, you said,” Liu Xi reminded him. “Did they all get used up or what?”
“There’s nothing here now,” Vinny answered, swallowing hard, “because the ghosts are loose.”
***
“I’m not upset,” Letitia Gahagan told Captain Turner. “It’s just that those were new boots.”
“What was that thing?” demanded the ZOXXON security chief. “All those eyes…”
“I think it’s what you get when you run an animal testing laboratory on a psychic hot spot for thirty years then have a lab assistant go insane and kill herself in the hutch we saw broken down in the warehouse back there,” the Idiom suggested. “Why do you think I threw my nail polish onto its eyes?”
“And we’re trying to break through this steel door because…?”
“Because behind it is the computer core, and that’s how I’ll be able to find out what’s really happened in this compound and possibly take control of it and set things straight,” Letitia snapped. “Now the chemicals and microwave parts from the staff kitchen have made a reasonably effective explosive and the alarm clock batteries will trigger it, so I suggest you stand back and cover your ears now.”
There was a loud explosion and the steel door embedded itself in the wall opposite.
“Hmm. Next time less cheese strings,” the Idiom decided. “And maybe a touch more mayo. Right, let’s see what’s waiting to kill us inside the computer core.”
The soldiers edged into the dark space nervously. When nothing immediately pounced on them Letitia followed them in.
“All this junk looks dead,” Stankey pointed out. “How can we get it working while the power’s out?”
Leticia touched a stud on her wristband. There was a flicker of molecular transformation energies and her casualwear suddenly morphed into a green bodysuit with black text screeding up and down it. The Idiom jacked her outfit into the nearest computer port and the monitor screen lit up. “Easy as pi,” she said.
Captain Harker watched her uneasily. Even her body language seemed to have changed with her new wardrobe.
“Hmm,” the Idiom said. “Hacking and slashing now. Let’s find out how badly up the creek we are, and where the paddle needs to be applied.”
Stankey pointed over the villainess’ shoulder. “Pretty far up the creek?” he suggested.
Leticia and Harker turned round. Ulrich Chainsawhands was in the doorway. Behind him was a rotting sea captain, a disfigured scarlet starlet, an old lady with a meat cleaver, a zombie with electrode burns on his temples and wrists, a pulped gangster, a hairy thing trailing its entrails, and more and worse, vanishing back into the shadows.
“Aha,” said Dr Trenchcoat, “New meat.”
***
Next Time: The truth behind the psionic energy interface, more on Liu Xi’s rear end, the Idiom takes arms against a sea of troubles, and we finally get to the body count.
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
Funny and scary is a tough combination but I think you got there. (no text) - Dancer. - Mon Nov 12, 2007 at 08:55:50 am EST