Dead Space™ Read online

  Field, who like any good bureaucrat quit promptly at five every day, had begun to transmit his data and to pack up.

  “You’re leaving?” asked Altman.

  Field smiled and heaved his pear-shaped bulk out of the chair. “Nothing left to do here today,” he said. “I’m not paid overtime,” he explained, and then walked out the door.

  Altman stayed on another few hours, going over the data and maps again, searching for precedents for shifts like this in records about the crater itself or about similar sites, records that stretched all the way back to the twentieth century. Nothing.

  He was just on the way out the door himself when his phone sounded.

  “Dr. Altman, please?” said a voice. It was barely louder than a whisper.

  “This is Altman,” he said.

  “Word has it you’ve been asking around about the crater,” said the voice.

  “That’s correct,” he said, “there’s this odd anomal—”

  “Not over the phone,” the voice whispered. “You’ve already said too much as it is. Eight o’clock, the bar near the quay. You know where that is?”

  “Of course I know,” said Altman. “Who is this?”

  But the caller had already hung up.

  5

  By the time Chava came back, dragging along his mother and a few of the other people from the nearby shantytown, the creature had changed again. The wet gray sacs on its back were larger now, each almost the size of a man when fully inflated. Its arms and legs had somehow joined, melding into one another. The flayed quality of the neck had changed, the flesh now looking as if it were swarming with ants.

  The air around it had taken on an acrid yellow sheen. It hung in a heavy cloud, and when they got too close, they found it difficult to breathe. One man, a small but dignified-looking old drunk, wandered into the cloud and, after staggering about coughing, collapsed. Two other villagers dragged him out by the feet and then began to slap him.

  Chava watched until the drunk was conscious again and groping for his bottle, then turned back to stare at the creature. “What is it?” Chava asked his mother.

  His mother consulted in whispers with her neighbors, watching the thing. It was hard for Chava to hear everything they were saying, but he heard one word over and over again: Ixtab. Ixtab. Finally his mother turned to him. “Who is Ixtab?” Chava asked nervously.

  “Go fetch the old bruja,” she told him. “She’ll know what to do.”

  The bruja was already heading toward the beach when he came across her. She was moving slowly, leaning on a staff. She was old and frail, most of her hair gone and her face a mass of wrinkles. His mother claimed that she had been alive when the Spaniards killed the Mayans, a thousand years before. “She is like a lost book,” his mother had said another time. “She knows everything that everyone else has forgotten.”

  She carried a pouch slung over one shoulder. He started to explain about the creature, but she silenced him with a gesture. “I already know,” she said. “I expected you sooner.”

  He took her arm and helped her along. Others from the shantytown were coming down the beach as well, some walking as if hypnotized. Some wept; some ran.

  “Who is Ixtab?” asked Chava suddenly.

  “Ah, Ixtab,” said the bruja. She stopped walking and turned to face him. “She is a goddess. She is the rope woman. She hangs in the tree, a rope around her neck, and her eyes are closed in death, and her body has begun to rot. But she is still a goddess.”

  “But is she dead?”

  “The goddess of suicide,” mused the bruja. “She is the hanged goddess, the goddess of the end. And she gathers to her those who are dead by uncertain means.” She stared at the boy intently. “She is a very harsh mistress,” she said.

  Chava nodded.

  “Tell me,” the bruja said to him, “did you dream last night?”

  Chava nodded.

  “Tell me your dream,” said the bruja, and then listened carefully as he recounted it confusedly, in bits and pieces.

  She gestured forward, at the people running in front of them, at the crowd of people around the strange creature up ahead. “These, too,” she said, “they have shared our dream.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Chava.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. She pointed a shaky finger at the creature ahead, its gray sacs now almost twice the size of the man, the cloud of noxious gas growing. “Here you see what it means.”

  “We dreamed it and we made it real?” asked Chava, amazed.

  She gave him a toothless smile and cackled. “You think you are so powerful?” she asked, and started shuffling forward again. “You think we are so powerful? No,” she said. “We could not make this. Our dream is a warning.”

  “A warning?”

  “The dream tells us there is something wrong,” she said. “We must set it right.”

  For a time they walked through the sand without speaking, the old woman breathing heavily. Chava could already hear the hissing from the creature, louder than the crash of the surf.

  “Have you begun to dream awake?” the bruja asked.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, frightened.

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “I can hear in your voice that you have. You must be careful. It found you first. It means to take you. Chicxulub: you know what this word means?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “And yet you have lived in this town all your life,” she scolded him. “You have lived within a word that you do not know.”

  He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Is that bad?”

  She made a noise with her lips but did not answer. Apparently it wasn’t a question worth answering.

  “What does Chicxulub mean?” he asked after another moment.

  She stopped briefly and with the tip of her stick drew a figure in the sand. It was two lines twisting around each other.

  He crossed his fingers and imitated it by making the sign of protection he had learned as a child. She nodded. “What is this?” he asked.

  She didn’t say anything. She spread her toothless mouth wide, which looked for a moment disconcertingly like the jawless maw of the creature on the beach.

  “Tail of the devil,” she said. “The devil has started to wake and thrash its tail. If we cannot coax it back to sleep, then this will be the end of us.”

  6

  There was no reason to go, Altman thought. It was silly, probably someone’s idea of a joke. You ask enough questions, and it was inevitable that someone would screw with you. The last thing he needed was to start thinking espionage and conspiracy. He needed to figure this out rationally and scientifically. So instead of going to the bar, he just went home.

  When he arrived, Ada was already there. She was sitting at the table, leaning back in the chair, asleep, her long dark hair tucked behind her ears and cascading over her shoulders. Altman kissed her neck and woke her up.

  She smiled and her dark eyes flashed. “You’re later than normal, Michael,” she said. “You haven’t been cheating on me, have you?” she teased.

  “Hey, I’m not the one who’s exhausted,” he said.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said. “Had the worst dreams.”

  “Me, too,” he said. He sat down and took a deep breath. “Something weird is going on,” he said. He told her about what he and Field had discovered, the calls he had made, the general sense that he felt, and that others seemed to share, that something was off.

  “That’s funny,” said Ada. “And not in a good way. It was the same with me today.”

  “You discovered a gravitational anomaly, did you?”

  “Kind of,” she said. “Or at least the anthropological equivalent. The stories are changing.”

  “What stories?”

  “The folktales, they’re starting to change, and quickly, too. That doesn’t happen, Michael. It never happens.”

  Altman was suddenly serious. “Never?”

  “Neve
r.”

  “Shit.”

  “They keep speaking of the devil’s tail,” she said, “a kind of twisted pronged thing. When they mention it, they cross their fingers, like this.” She raised her middle and index fingers, crossed them. “But when I try to get them to talk about it, they fall silent. They’ve never been like that with me before. It’s like they don’t trust me anymore.” She brushed the top of the table with her hand. “You want to know what’s strangest of all?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know how they say ‘tail of the devil’ in Yucatec Maya? Same name as the crater: Chicxulub.”

  Altman felt his throat go dry. He looked at the clock. A quarter to eight. Still time to make it to the bar after all.

  7

  For a while, nobody spoke. They just stood there, watching the bruja, who, in her turn, steadying herself on Chava’s shoulder, just watched the creature.

  “You see,” she said in a whisper that was nearly drowned out by the creature’s wheezing. “It is growing bigger.”

  She reached deep into her pouch and pulled out a handful of something. She began to dance, tracing a slow circle around the creature, just at the edge of the cloud the creature was creating for itself. She dragged Chava along with her, sprinkling something in the sand before her. It was a wandering dance, off-kilter, almost drunken. At first the others just watched; then slowly one or two began to follow, then a few more. Some shook their heads, as if breaking out of a trance.

  When she stood directly across from the creature’s head, she stopped and began turning in place. Soon everyone was doing this, watching the bruja, falling into place, slowly forming a complete circle. They turned around the creature, some of them standing knee deep in the surf.

  She swung her staff before her, stepped back, and stepped forward again. The others followed. Chava stepped too far and found himself coughing, having breathed some of the gas the creature was emitting. His eyes stung; his throat itched.

  The bruja lifted her hands, her index and middle fingers crossed. Chicxulub, she murmured, and turned again. The word went up mangled from the mouths of the others, like a groan.

  The bruja slowly turned and walked away, her back straighter and her stride firmer than on the walk over. She walked a few yards back from the circle and dug into the sand until she unearthed a piece of driftwood, then turned and rejoined the circle again. She nodded and gestured at Chava until he, too, left the circle and came back with driftwood. One by one the others followed, wandering out of the circle and coming slowly back.

  The skin that formed the gray sacs on the creature’s back had thinned and thinned as the sacs grew. Now it was almost transparent. The sacs slowly billowed up until they were taut and then deflated, going about halfway slack before swelling again. It was a terrible thing to watch. Chava kept expecting them to burst.

  The bruja was dancing again. She lifted her chunk of driftwood high, gave a toothless smile, and threw it at the creature.

  It struck the creature softly in the face and fell to the sand just below it. The creature didn’t react at all.

  “Now you,” said the bruja to Chava. “Higher. And harder.”

  He threw his piece of wood high and hard, at the leftmost sac. It struck the sac near the bottom and tore it just slightly. Air began to hiss out. The bruja raised her hands and brought them down and the others threw their pieces of wood as well. One or two missed, one or two bounced off, but more than a few tore the sacs, some quite deeply. Air rushed out of them; the acrid cloud slowly began to disperse.

  “Now, go,” the bruja said to Chava, her voice hoarse. “You see the nameless man there, stumbling drunk as usual. Run to him and take his bottle and bring it back to me.”

  He ran quickly around the circle and to the small but dignified dark-haired drunk who had gotten too close to the cloud earlier and almost died. The man turned and smiled at him. Before he could react, Chava grabbed the bottle he’d posted between his feet and fled back to the bruja.

  She took it from him and uncorked it. Behind them the drunk was protesting, some of the others holding him back. “Hold your breath,” she said to Chava as she gave him the bottle. “You must pour this on the wood and on the creature itself.”

  His heart pounding, Chava took a deep breath and rushed forward. The torn skin of the sacs had already begun to knit itself back together. The bags were still mostly deflated but were beginning to rise. He upended the bottle, splashing the creature and the wood around it, and then rushed back to the bruja, his eyes swollen and stinging.

  The bruja lit the top of her staff on fire and carefully moved forward, touching it to the creature’s head.

  Both the creature and the driftwood caught fire immediately. She dropped her staff, letting it burn, too. The creature hissed and thrashed, but never tried to escape from the flames. The gray sacs on its back turned to ash and blew away. Eventually it stopped moving altogether.

  The bruja, swaying, led them once again in a slow, stuttering dance. Chava found his feet naturally following it, adapting to it, almost as if someone else were moving his legs. He wondered how many of his fellow villagers felt the same way. The village drunk, he saw, wasn’t part of the circle; he stayed at a little distance, swaying slightly, staring at the fire, his brow furrowed. They kept on, tracing slow curving motions in the air, until all that was left of the creature was a charred, smoldering skeleton. Stripped of its flesh and burnt to a crisp, it looked almost human.

  8

  He ordered a bottled beer and made sure it came with the cap still sealed. As he waited on his change, he scanned the bar, trying to determine who might have telephoned him. The small bar’s only inhabitants were half a dozen scientists from the North American sector—it could have been any one of them.

  He sat down at a table. He’d just opened the beer and taken a sip when a man approached him. The man was pale skinned and thin, wearing a jumpsuit, his hair cropped short. Altman guessed he must be a technician of some sort.

  “You’re Altman,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s right,” said Altman. “And you are . .”

  “I only give my name out to friends,” he said. “Are you a friend?”

  Altman stared at him.

  “All right,” said the man. “Maybe you don’t make friends right off the bat. Okay, whatever you think of what I tell you, if anybody asks, you didn’t hear it from me.”

  Altman hesitated only a moment. “All right,” he said.

  “Shake on it?” the man suggested.

  The man extended a hand. Altman took it, shook. “Hammond,” the man said, “Charles Hammond.” He pulled out the table’s other chair and sat down.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Altman. “Now suppose you tell me what’s going on.”

  Hammond leaned in closer. “You’ve been noticing things,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”

  “No?” said Altman coolly.

  “I’m in communications. Freelance, mostly industrial installations.” He reached out and poked Altman’s chest lightly with a finger. “I’ve been noticing things, too.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “There’s a pulse,” Hammond said. “Slow and irregular, and very weak, but strong enough to fuzz up other signals just a little. I’m a perfectionist. When I set something up, I like it to be crystal clear. Things that don’t bother other people bother me. That’s why I noticed it.”

  He stopped. Altman waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, Altman took a sip of his beer and asked. “Noticed what?”

  Hammond nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “At first I thought it was a problem with the communications terminal I was installing for DredgerCorp.”

  “I didn’t know DredgerCorp had a place here,” interrupted Altman. That, as much as anything, was an indication to him that something odd was going on. DredgerCorp was one of the shadiest of the resource retrieval corporations, the sort of company willing to swoop quickly into an area under th
e radar of the local government, strip-mine or bore and take as much as they could before it was noticed, and then swoop quickly away again.

  “Officially they don’t. Just got here. Very hush-hush,” said Hammond. “I’m not supposed to know who they are. Anyway, at first I thought it was a loose connection, something off just enough to give a minor electrical discharge that gave the line an occasional slight hiss every so often. So I took the thing apart. Nothing wrong with it. So, I put the thing back together. The hiss still came. Sometimes once or twice a minute, lasting a few seconds, sometimes not even that. Maybe you missed something, I told myself. I was just about to take the fucker apart again when I thought maybe I better check another terminal in the same system. Same problem. I was just about to tear DredgerCorp’s whole system apart when something dawned on me: maybe it wasn’t just in this system but in other places as well.”

  “And?”

  Hammond nodded. “Everybody’s picking it up, but nobody’s noticing. It’s not a problem with one system. It’s an electromagnetic pulse, weak and irregular, broadcasting from somewhere.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I did some investigating,” said Hammond, ignoring Altman’s question. “I set up a few receivers, triangulated the pulse. It’s irregular enough that it took me a little while to figure out where it’s coming from. And when I did, I decided it couldn’t be right. So I moved the receivers, triangulated again, and this time I was sure of where it was coming from.”

  “Where?”

  Hammond leaned even farther in, putting his arm around Altman’s shoulders and bringing his lips close to Altman’s ear. “Remember,” he whispered. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

  Altman nodded.

  “From the crater,” whispered Hammond. “From the exact center of Chicxulub crater, under a kilometer or two of muck and rock. Right where you found your anomaly.”

  “Oh my God,” said Altman. He explained to Hammond what Ada had been hearing. “Three different things,” he said. “All of them leading back to Chicxulub crater.”