1.
I was being torn apart. As soon as I touched the mirror-like surface, I could see my existence unraveling, leaving only the bright yellow light and the ache of having been destroyed on a subatomic level.
“Don't be such a baby, Yank,” James had told me, after my first time through.
Easy for him to say. He hasn't gone through since I joined the group. He probably forgot what it feels like.
Let me tell you.
All living things are supposed to have this sense called “haptic perception.” It's what allows you to know where your limbs are when you aren't looking at them.
That's the first thing to go away. Because your limbs aren't anywhere anymore.
Then, it's roughly like you've been flattened like a cartoon character going under a steam roller, and your body is then put through a paper shredder.
At this point, you're nowhere. Just this free-floating ball of self-perception and pain. And I think the pain might just be a place-holder. Part of the consciousness doesn't want to acknowledge that it's not conscious of anything outside of itself.
Then the world comes back, and it comes back in a horrible way, all drained of color, and twisted about, and full of snapping, angry monstrous things.
Which sounds a bit like London in early February, but this place is like it year round, and the monstrous things have the wrong number of limbs.
And you're just standing there, holding a walther and a flashlight, with only coveralls between your skin and things that look like the nightmares of a blind schizophrenic, and a gas mask between your eyes and things that would probably want to eat them, should they ever figure out how to actually want things.
I should back up, I guess.
The hole in time opened up somewhere shortly before 2AM, in the middle of a train departing Blackfriars on the District line. My colleagues arrived there around two fifteen, thanks to Ashley smelling the hole before it bored through.
I got there at two-thirty, having been in the middle of this thing called “sleep” which apparently only I ever did.
The soldiers showed up before any of us.
The ambulances weren't far behind.
Only one thing had come through. But it had eaten the people on the platforms before one of the staff managed to call the police, who took one look at it and decided “to hell with it, let's leave this to the Foundation people” before going off to the bar.
The thing looked like the upper half of a man's body, but ten feet from waist to the crown of its head. It had no skin, but a gelatinous surface through which solid matter could pass, and apparently a core made up almost entirely of stomach acid.
The soldiers showed up right-quick, and the transit authority shut down Blackfriars, despite the fact that hitting the otherworldly horror with a subway train—I still refuse to call it a “tube”— would've been a perfectly decent way of killing it without waking me up at two in the morning.
I got the call on my work phone around the time they brought out the flamethrowers to kill the Abomination. Of the dozen soldiers dispatched to make that bastard immobile, seven had been at least partially digested.
“This is a call from the Jacoby Foundation. An incident has occurred at BLACKFRIARS STATION. A taxi has been dispatched to your location. Please bring your work gear.”
Cursing, I got up. I sleep in my boxers and undershirt, but I pulled on some jeans and a t-shirt before putting on my coveralls and shouldering the neoprene bag that contained my sidearm, gasmask, flashlight, boom-box and extra clips.
The Cabbie was perfectly happy to leave me alone, and drove like he had an amphetamine habit. When we arrived at Blackfriars, I got out, and stood by the driver's side window. He held his hand out of it, palm up.
I sighed, opened up my neoprene bag, and rooted around for my wallet. In the process, I had to remove my sidearm and gas mask. He drove off before I could drop the quid in his hand.
Shrugging, I went down into the station.
“Yank, ye're late,” an irritated, masculine voice said from the bottom of the stair.
James stood there, wearing his coveralls and the anchor harness, an orange rubber affair that looks a little like that thing that Sean Connery wore in Zardoz.
Terrible movie.
“I know, I know,” I say, stepping around the column at the bottom of the stairs and looking over at the speculum.
Okay, maybe I should explain.
The Speculum is a hole. It goes through space-time. It looks like a stopped waterfall, or a mirror made out of the color brown. Or something.
Ashley says she can smell them. If she works as the anchor, we all can. Unfortunately, that puts a sound in our heads that makes me think that my head's going to shake apart. James normally does it, his effect is just the smell of almonds. Even Margaret can do it, provided we're prepared for the taste of charcoal.
I'm the worst, apparently, and I should know because I've always got it. Mine's a headache. Margaret said not to worry about it, she gets that, sometimes, too.
James just laughed at that comment.
I contemplated shooting him.
So we unpack our bags.
Walther in the belt, flashlight—not torch, dammit—in hand, gasmask over the face, and boombox on my back, stapped in place with a bungee cord.
We file past James.
“Goin' in,” Ashley says, slapping his hand. Every other psychic in the room can see the yellow tether going from his hand to hers.
“Crossing through,” Margaret said.
“Later,” I said, giving him the high five.
“Try not t' die,” he offered.
“Thanks,” I said, as I passed through the speculum, and my body was shredded into its component quarks.
I hope that doesn't count as dying.
Emerging beyond the hole was another thing altogether. You ever imagine what a bug hitting a windshield feels like? I like to think that emerging is like that, but on a more existential level.
The Other Side spread out before us. We stood in the bottom of a crater, and the gray sky spread above us. At the bottom of the hole was a pool of brackish water.
Ashley went left, Margaret went right, and I circled the Speculum.
“Got a fix?” Margaret asked.
“I've got the fix. It's just ayont the hill. Caw yer gird, Margie.”
Margaret silently stepped over to a girder embedded in the side of the crater, sticking out almost parallel to level ground, and sat on it.
“Come on, Yank,” she said.
I shrugged at Margaret, and followed Ashley.
I should make some things clear, probably.
We were all found by the Foundation, and we were all found by them. In order of strength, from most potent to least, it goes Ashley, James, Margaret, Me. In order of when they found us, flip the middle two.
I've been involved in three incursions. Ashley's been in almost twenty. James has been through eight, though he's gone through only four times. He tells me that, until that fourth time through, no one bothers to learn your name.
Foundation's got four of us in London. There's three in Rome, and another three to handle eastern Europe as a whole. All of them passed through London at some point, and it's probable that they'll send me back to the states as soon as they figure I've proven myself.
I don't really want to go back, honestly. Other than getting a chance to look at Ashley every now and then, and drinking with James every now and then, there are no good parts to this job.
But it pays better than my day job.
I feel like such a schmuck, sometimes, you know that?
“Make us quiet,” Ashley said. She was being bitchier than usual, I noticed. I made a mental note to compare it to my planner, and see if it was time for her period again. I know, I know. Creepy thing to keep track of. However, when you regularly deal with someone who gets temperamental at that time of the month, and who carries a firearm while on the job, I happen to feel it's prudent.
Don't judge me.
I matched the rhythm of my footsteps to hers, something I'd been practicing in public places and while watching television. Strength like the smell of almonds drifted across the field of yellow, narrowing and narrowing into a razor-sharp color/smell. A single, paper-thin line of power.
The sound-waves lined up. Phase. Antiphase. Problem solved. I don't really know how to explain it.
James gets Telekinesis and remote viewing. Ashley can reshape her body and sense Specula. Margaret can control the temperature and sense emotions.
I, on the other hand, just get the ability to influence things that come in waves, and can see things that happened at some point in the past. And the package comes with a migraine. Beautiful shit.
The Other Side is a weird place. We can't tell where it is, exactly, or what it represents.
“Maybe it's a representation of humanity's collective shadow manifesting as a sort of psychospatial mass hallucination?” A scientist suggested.
“Perhaps its hell,” one of the soldiers, a devout Anglican, had offered.
Hah!
“I think it's a place of psychic white noise, which explains why only we can go through,” one of the Rome team said, while I was on holiday last March.
I didn't really see how it explained anything.
“I think it's just plain fooked,” Ashley had growled.
Yeah. That seems like it.
Around us loomed these blackened skeletons of buildings, in roughly the same arrangement as London's streets. Sand blew through the streets. The sky was gray. Nothing grew. Nothing stirred.
Thank God, nothing stirred.
There was newer construction, but it was terrifying. Strange idols carved from concrete and rigged up on steel girders, great, bulky things with too many arms. Someone/thing had been carving black figures like six-armed octopi into the remaining asphalt, and white sand got caught in the cracks, like some kind of weird, cephalopod-obsessed postmodern Nazca thing.
An arch had been built over the wide road—a familiar construction, an arch was always between the specula and a gatecrasher.
Rebar was twisted up and rigged into an archway, and misshapen skulls, relieved of blood, but not muscle, dangled from it on ropes made of hair. Technicolor blood dripped from the stumps.
It's impossible to tell whether these things were made like this, or whether they came off of something. I'm not sure which is a more upsetting thought.