Who Heard the Sound
Iatrophobia Horror
34 Hours: Post-Exposure
A heart monitor sits in the corner of the sterile room, a thin, banal line stretched straight across its screen like a horizon. There are a variety of other machines populating the brightly lit room. Each machine has tubes and wires attached to a bare male body. The wires trail across the ground in indecipherable patterns, an alien calligraphy bleeding forth from the body of the man. There are thick leather straps restraining the arms, torso, and legs, with restraints on the forehead as well. The head is wrapped in bandages that leave only a slit where the eyes are. The flatline of the heart monitor has been adapted to remove the flatline beep, giving off only its pale green light and no sound at all. The other machines beep and whir, and expel air in soft hisses, like the sighs of the overworked. Now comes the protracted sound of a zipper being undone, and then a doctor steps into the room through the white zipper door. She steps through and then reseals the decontamination chamber behind her.
She is wearing what looks like a beekeeper's outfit, concealing every inch of skin, and is carrying a bag of implements. She walks over to the body strapped to the bed, crinkling and lumbering the whole way. She has no peripheral vision, and moves her whole upper body to look around. She positions herself in front of the open eyes of the body, then she waves her hand slowly back and forth in front of the glassy eyes, a careful and almost hypnotic gesture. From within the bandages, the open eyes track the movements of her hand like soulless cameras, and then fix on her clear face mask with an empty gaze. The eyes are bleary and red, irritated from remaining open so long. While the doctor checks the machines and monitors, the unblinking and reddened eyes carefully follow her every move. The flatline indicative of death continues to rest idly on the monitor, and the eyes still follow. The doctor returns to the side of the bed and begins to very carefully unwrap the bandages from around the man’s head.
The gauze comes away white at first, then it slowly starts to turn a yellow color, then a deep rust color. As the doctor unwraps the binding, it begins to cling slightly to itself, then more heavily to the wounds underneath. After all the bindings are removed, there is left a patchwork of spidery fabric that renders the man a scarecrow in disrepair. The doctor throws the gauze away in a red biohazard container, then removes eye drops from her bag. She carefully empties a full dropper of liquid into each eye, all while the eyes stare at her without blinking or flinching. When she is finished, the man strikes a ghastly image: like a rag doll crying tears of blood down its shredded face. The doctor takes a fresh roll of gauze from her bag and begins the careful process of rewrapping the man’s head, save for the eyes. When she finishes the wrap, she places the remaining roll in her bag and brings out a small board for writing on. The doctor writes in chicken-scratch handwriting, the words, “Hello, Mr. Ward”. The eyes watch the board without reaction.
1 Hour: Pre-Exposure
The top results displayed on the web browser show rocks of all varieties and colors, each strange and unique. Ward closes his laptop, removes his glasses and places them on top of the computer, and rubs his tired eyes. He doesn’t want to look over at the rock, but he cannot help himself. It possesses a certain magnetism that he cannot account for. His eyes dart over to where the strange stone hunk sits on his desk, no larger than a fist, like an overzealous paperweight. He feels as though it pulls his gaze toward itself, exerting some primeval power over his own will. The strange etchings on the front are completely foreign to him and he has found nothing in his searches online. He slides his desk chair over to where the rock sits, and stares at it intently. He gazes at it intimately, searching out its every crevice, and he can’t help but feel that it is gazing back. He has hardly let it out of his sight, and finds it hard to tear his gaze away once it is fixed there. It is a pitch-black obsidian with a few strange spots of a muted gray color, like industrial cement. The front is smooth, while the remainder is raw edged. It features three perfect right angles, all meeting in a point. But there is something strange in the behavior of those angles, they appear warped from afar, and razor straight up close. The rest of it resembles raw and natural rock, though not a rock he has ever seen before. He rubs his thumb along one of the edges, and when he looks at the ridges of his finger print, he finds it is bleeding. He stares, bewildered, and fails to notice the gray spots of the stone grow. As he stares at his thumb, he feels a creeping sensation in his muscle, almost tingly. The strange shiver runs up the length of his arm and then he is hit with a sudden pang of pain in his right temple. The shiver subsides and he feels nothing strange, except… there’s a different sensation. Like something lurking in his mind that does not belong.
He looks to the rock and finds it entirely gray, seemingly drained. He begins to regard the rock not just with suspicion, but with tinges of fear. Almost as if in response to this, he feels sinister tendrils begin to writhe in his mind. They seem to pulse and thrash with inimical intent and his head begins to hurt terribly. It is more than a headache, it feels like something physically inside him. He backs away from the stone in pain and fear, never shifting his gaze away. As he backs away, he notices with trepidation that the rock appears to grow in size. His back makes abrupt contact with his office wall and the rock stops growing - no, not growing… but rather, appearing the same size, no matter its distance. Like a malevolent blotch on Euclidean geometry. Suddenly, he feels those terrible undulating tendrils in his mind cease to move, poised. A preternatural calm falls over him like a morning fog. Ward stares at the strange stone with an intense longing and revulsion, mixed together unnaturally like some horrible concoction contrived in a laboratory.
Slowly, he takes halting steps toward the rock, still keenly aware of those black tendrils gripping his mental faculties. They remain frozen, poised to attack at the slightest provocation. The rock retains its fist-like size, despite his increase in proximity. He can feel something impressing itself onto his mind; words, or thoughts perhaps. Are these his own thoughts, or are they foreign in origin? He grasps, through inlaid images, the founding of this universe, like the building of an intricate puzzle and the placing of each piece; an explosion, or more like an unfolding, of light and matter and energy. And he knows, somehow, that in this account of all the matter in the universe, the strange stone is not a factor. It is an unaccounted piece from another puzzle entirely: it does not belong here. A mote that has gone untallied in the great conservation of energy, stowing away in this universe. As these facts take shape in his mind, he becomes aware of himself again, and he is holding his face very near to the stone. He can hear a very faint sound emanating from it, unrecognizable and complex: like the sound of wailing, spirited away on a cold breeze from some far away place.
34 Hours: Post-Exposure
The small board reads, “Hello, Mr. Ward” and is then erased. The doctor in the strange hazmat suit then begins writing on the board again. When she flips the board around it says, “ We’re going to run some tests”. She stares at Ward’s eyes, searching them out for any sign of complicity in this plan, but they appear devoid of all will. Yet she has a strange unaccountable feeling that they are pleading with her, screaming mutely for some sort of intercession. The long zipping sound indicative of entry calls the attention of the doctor. Two men in white hazmat suits enter the room and seal it off with the zipper. All three doctors confer away from the body of Mr. Ward, whose unblinking eyes watch on undaunted. The female doctor returns and writes on her board, “Understand?” Then the eyes dart to the left and to the right, then back to the doctor. She looks quizzically at this new motion of the glassy eyes, which are typically content to stay trained on her at all times.
Intrigued, she writes something new on her board while the other two doctors prepare tests to the side. When she shows the board again it has a double headed arrow pointed up and down and another arrow pointed left and right. The word “yes?” is written next to the vertical arrow, and the word “no?” is written beside the horizontal arrow. The eyes dart rapidly to the ceiling and to the floor several times, then train back onto the doctor's face shield. The female doctor calls out to the other two, who stop what they are doing and move over to where she is and watch: silent spectators to the strange exhibit. She speaks and shows them the board, then faces it toward Mr. Ward’s beady eyes. Again, they oscillate upward and downward like a child’s yo-yo, and then retrain on the female doctor's face. The other two doctors step away and converse, but the female doctor stays and begins writing something new on her board. She feverishly scribbles and the eyes stay fixated on her, as if looking upon her soul.
As she turns the board around, her face betrays a certain level of disguised excitement at this breakthrough. The eyes look to the board and seem to pause, staring at the question that is written there: “May we perform tests?” Then they dart to the left and then to the right, but it appears to be a hesitant movement. The doctor’s excitement lapses and she sits in thought. She then begins writing something new on the board with a scrunched face. When she turns it around, the eyes focus on it and read, “Answer questions?” This time the response is quick and sure, a glance to the ceiling and a glance to the floor, repeated several times. The doctor turns the board and thinks for a short time before scrawling her next question. She appears to pour great care into the inquisition and when the board is turned this time, the handwriting is neat and stiff. She looks searchingly at the eyes of Mr. Ward as they read the thin phrase, “Did you hurt yourself?”
Exposure
The thin tendrils maintain a hold on his mind, but then he hears something. A soft arterial pulse flowing from the rock, seeming to pour out like a liquid. It’s a sound unlike anything he has ever heard, low and conspiring, like the whispers of children in church. Yet, it is faint. It is so ethereal that he lowers his ear toward the rock, attempting to discern those ancient secrets which it wishes to tell. It is in the act of lowering his ear to the rock when everything happens. One moment he is sitting at his desk, and the next sensation is that of an unfurling. The closest thing he has felt to this is the act of floating parallel to water, and then standing vertically out of it. The sensation of looking into one world and then folding backward out of it, but still able to view it, only slightly distorted. He sees his desk somewhere in front of him, but it appears somehow far away and below him, and not at the same time. Everything is dark and colorless, drained of every hue and outlined in white. The only things not reduced to dull variations of gray are the shadows. They are the very absence of material existence: a blackness so complete, it looks cut away from reality.
Ward turns to look around and everything seems to whirl by and bend its shape. He attempts to cower away in fear, but when he takes a step backward, he is suddenly and inexplicably outside of his office and underground. He is inside the void of shadows now and looking out at the underside of his basement. Yet, he can still see his desk and the contents of his office. He feels a queasy sensation and bends over with his hands on his knees. This terrible darkness threatens to overwhelm him, but then he hears the sound. A whisper. No longer the inference of sound, but the full presence. It is like the sound of dead branches in a cold wind. There is a creaking quality, but it drones and varies in pitch in a way only living things can. Those malicious tendrils in his mind actually cower back and release their horrid grip there. He turns just slightly to the left and sees… something. It is moving, almost swimming, through this liminal darkness. His mouth slackens and his eyes widen and eventually, he screams.
The noise of that horrible dweller of the void feels like a tangible thing, reverberating through the black space. The sound waves ripple toward him, visible to the naked eye, yet immaterial. He sees them slither to him and then he feels them. They feel alive and physical, like sharp writhing worms. They are incorporeal blades, slicing down his auditory canal and stabbing at his ear drum. He screams in horror and pain, then he feels the trickle of blood run down the sides of his head.
The sight of that thing is near enough to drive him mad, but the sound. That unbearable sound. It is omnipotent and omnipresent and terrifying. He feels his sanity splinter and his eardrums nearly burst completely. Suddenly he feels his arms rushing toward his head and he can’t say if he is the one moving them. His fingers jab into his ears so deep that it proves detrimental to his eardrums. He feels pain yet, relief. No longer able to hear, yet still in shock at the things his eyes behold, he stumbles backward in sheer terror. Despite the inimitable sensation of falling back, he never hits the solid surface he was standing on. Instead, everything shifts again as he stumbles backward. Endless black emptiness folds inward like a wave crashing on top of him as he falls. He seems to fall through an eternity and for eons of time unreckoned. He watches the world shrink and shift and blur, until the folding of those impossible angles finally resolves.
34 Hours: Post-Exposure
The board reads, “Did you hurt yourself?” and the doctor watches the eyes. They look to the left, to the right, and then back to her own eyes. She appears vindicated then, as she erases and writes a new question. As she writes, she fails to notice one of Mr. Ward’s eyes seem to be pulled down to the left, only to jerk back to the position of its twin. When the board is turned this time, it reads, “Did someone else hurt you?” The eyes of Mr. Ward consider and then look to the ceiling, to the floor, and back to the doctor. The doctor turns the board and appears frustrated for a moment. She writes something, but reconsiders and starts over. As she turns the board around, her face takes on a very analytical look. She probes and searches out the response of the eyes as they read, “Are your injuries self-inflicted?” The eyes stare at the question, then stare at the doctor. Finally, the eyes look to the ceiling, then to the floor, but only one looks back up to the doctor.
Seeing the eyes dart upward and then downward, the doctor seems satisfied. Then, the left eye appears to meet resistance, like something is tugging on it. As the doctor watches, the eye is pulled down and the iris disappears completely below the socket, a horrid mock sunset. She is shocked and scared, so she calls out to the other doctors. All three of them witness, or think they witness, thin dark tendrils emerge ever-so-slightly above the lower eyelid, like the needly spines of some hidden fish. Beads of sweat begin to form on Mr. Ward’s forehead. Then, with great effort it would seem, the iris begins to surface, emerging from the grips of whatever sinister thing held it captive. Both eyes stare at the doctor, and then the eyelids slowly begin to close, like the sealing of two vault doors. The doctors watch as the face remains expressionless and placid, while the eyes seem to plead in terror. There is no subtle wince or minute shifting of facial muscles, yet the eyes themselves convey pure and unadulterated fear.
The eyelids clamp closed with all the slow finality of ancient temple doors, barring the world from entering. As they close for the first time in 34 hours, the doctors try to shake off their unease. The two men return to the final preparations of their tests, and the woman stares at the closed eyes. She is certain that the eyes were afraid, but of what, she cannot determine. The other doctors return and after a pause, they undo the lower strap across the body’s right wrist. No movement. The first doctor begins to treat the few injuries the right hand sustained, meanwhile the other doctor begins to draw blood from the left arm. The right hand is missing some of the fingernails and appears to have a few broken fingers. The doctor at the left arm inserts the syringe into the vein, and the right arm twitches. The female doctor notices this with a growing sense of dread and unease. When the syringe penetrates the vein, the doctor pulls the stopper to draw blood. Instead a black ropey thing is pulled slightly into the clear syringe. The doctor isn’t certain, but she thinks she sees it move inside the syringe.
First Hour: Post-Exposure
The world knits itself back together out of the darkness, and Ward falls into it. He is dropped out of thin air onto a cafeteria table inside a shopping mall. The security feeds show a spectral shade that seems to un-dissipate into a solid being and fall onto a table. Several patrons scream, though Ward hears nothing. He can feel himself screaming in his throat and his head, but it is only the dull vibration of soundless fear. The vivid memory of that grotesque noise plays like a broken record in his mind, the last thing his ears ever heard. The beast of that liminal space still swims across his vision, seared onto his mind’s eye like a hot brand. He is unaware of the commotion around him. As he screams silently, he instead becomes aware of the tendrils in his mind. They crawl back across his mind, glorying in the absence of that which laid in the void. They begin to grip more tightly and delve into his brain. He feels his throat vibrating with the raw exertion of horror-filled screams, and then it ceases abruptly.
He can feel his face and arms slacken, despite his increasing dread that the horrors are only just beginning. The thing in his mind pulses with halting and maladroit movements until it seizes upon the desired sections of his brain. Fine, sharp, fingers bore into his gray matter and insert themselves in his mind like knives into raw meat. He sees, in a dreamlike haze of pain and confusion, a pair of hands rising up in front of him. They are his own hands. He realizes this as they turn their open palms toward his eyes, fingers curled like prehensile claws. He can’t believe they are his own hands, yet he feels them, even as they move of their own volition. He tries to back away from the claw-like hands - his hands - but he takes a few jarring steps and then his legs cease to move. He realizes with abject terror that he is slowly losing control of each part of his own body. Yet, he can feel everything. It’s as if he has become a marionette in the clutches of a sadistic force.
He watches his own hands claw at his face, the fingernails sinking deep into the flesh - his flesh - like the skin of an orange, and then pulling down in tearing motions. He can feel the unbelievable pain of his own hands peeling back layers of skin in rigid clawing actions. He wants nothing more than to scream, but cannot control his own body. He feels a fingernail tear off as it gets caught on his cheek bone. He cannot blink or wince or cry. He sees people screaming soundlessly and fleeing from him in horror, yet he cannot move: he is a captive audience to the play, a tragic maiming of his own self. The hands rip and tear at his face with alacritous movements, eager to end any vestigial control he has over his body. He watches a hand covered in detritus and blood approach his right eye in slow, determined motion. As the fingernails bite into the skin above his eyebrow, he feels a heavy impact that sprawls his body out horizontally. He can just barely see in his peripheral vision, several people holding his body down and mercifully restraining the claw-like hands - his hands. An eternity later, first responders are on the scene, sedating him.
He feels the surreal sensation of drifting away from his corporeal form, despite exacting no control over it. His eyelids shutter and the denouement of that horrible scene is finally enacted. His mind enters a deep sleep that is punctuated with strange dreams and accented with moments where reality bleeds through. He finds himself looking out at a vast expanse of green and gray. An ocean, so still it appears impermeable, stretches to the zenith of his vision. A dull gray sky, with clouds that portend a nascent storm, looms overhead and reaches down with a cumulus hand to meet the glass ocean at the pinnacle of sight. This primordial sea is all there is, and it bears up only one omnifarious thing: ahead lays a towering obelisk. It is an obsidian black with pock marks of a pale gray alabaster. It is beautiful and massive and unsettling. It stretches upward so far beyond his discernment that it does not seem to end in its ascent. He knows, in some inexplicable way, that his own strange stone came from this monolith. And he is aware in the same way that it ought not be broken: that the strange and featureless monolith must remain whole, at all costs.
He looks down at his feet and sees that he is standing on a narrow slat-like pedestal, only four or five feet long, and six inches below the surface. Ahead of him there are dozens more of these slat-like steps, leading directly to the monolith. Things move and swim below, immense and ancient things. He knows that beneath him lies that terrible space, the place in which he heard that unforgettable sound, like the groaning of a celestial body. He knows that if he moves, he will disturb this antediluvian water irrevocably, yet he yearns to draw nearer - or perhaps it yearns for him. He stands perfectly still and simply gazes at the monolith, with the longing eyes of a lover scorned, not daring to move. Hours pass by as he stands there in awe of the alien pillar in the sea. It towers so high it appears to hold up the firmament itself. The hours accrete into an entire day that quietly slips by unnoticed. Still he stares at the obelisk. Stars and galaxies and worlds pass by overhead, all of them foreign and uncharted by mankind. But he pays them no mind, instead watching the obelisk. Things move below his feet, and he heeds them not. The thin line of horizon stretches across his vision like a razor and the monolith rises, unending, in the center. In the fluctuating time of dreams, he stares in an unwavering gaze. Six days and six nights pass by, and he only moves to breath - perhaps not even for that. Then on the seventh day, the horizon splits and begins to yawn open slowly, revealing another world behind it. It opens with his eyelids and reveals a sterile room; the shape of the monolith, replaced by the attentive form of a female doctor in something like a bee-keepers suit.
35 Hours: Post-Exposure
The dark sinewy shape in the syringe begins writhing and retracting itself back inside the man’s arm. All three doctors gasp and recoil in shock as the dendritic ebony snake recedes, like some serpent of old, reluctantly forced to rear its terrible head. The right hand jerks upward in a paroxysm of force, snapping the small metal pin that held the leather strap across the bicep. The arm flails and claws at the doctors, then begins to beat heavily at the patient's head. The doctors hesitate for only a moment, then they restrain the hand and latch the wrist strap tight against it. It convulses and writhes with inhuman undulations, as if it were some deep sea invertebrate. But the wrist strap holds, until the arm finally ceases it’s thrashing. One of the doctors locates the sedative and approaches with the syringe. The moment the doctor lays a hand on the arm however, all hell breaks loose. The head of Mr. Ward appears to fold itself back and down, audibly snapping the neck to escape the strap across the forehead. In the process, the bandages around the head are loosened and begin dropping away. Within an instant, nearly all 32 ivory blades of Ward’s mouth are embedded into the doctor's arm under 200 pounds of pressure. The jaw seems to latch like a vice and the doctor howls in pain, beating at the head with his free hand.
The other man rushes to his side, but the woman rushes away, over to the devices and tools on the counter. She returns within moments and inserts a syringe into the body’s restrained left arm, depressing the plunger completely. A lethal dose of potassium chloride floods the veins of the body, but this does little to deter the hold the teeth have on the doctor. The head begins to thrash like a large reptile with hapless prey in its maw. It appears spineless and fluid as it swishes aggressively this way and that. The doctor screams and cries and pleads as several inches of his arm are mutilated horribly. The female doctor freezes for a moment, then acts on an impulse and bolts to the corner of the room. The male doctor continues to unsuccessfully pry at the impenetrable jaws. The female doctor returns with a fist-sized stone that was found with Ward in the food court. It looks pale gray and drained. When the stone is brought near, the head ceases its thrashing. The doctor continues crying, holding his captive limb. Then the jaws snap open, leaving the dislocated lower half hanging in a broken and terrible gasp. The jowls are torn away and drip with a dark liquid. The stone begins to darken slightly with its increasing proximity, until the female doctor finally touches it to the thigh of the body.
There is a strange whispering sound that floods the room, seeming to exude from every object and surface. Though the content and meanings are indiscernible, the doctors tremble at the words. Then the body seems to almost deflate, losing some aspect or substance that filled it and gave it form. The stone blackens steadily with contact until it is a pitch-black obsidian color, like the embers of some ancient sacrificial fire long gone cold. The head lolls to the side in a grotesque and impossible position, the gauze wrappings hanging loosely around the skull. The gaps in the bandages reveal glistening white bone and strips of flesh dripping crimson life. Then the seemingly lifeless eyelids slowly open, revealing those mysterious twin blackholes. They stare at the doctor holding the stone. She stares back into those small voids of unplumbed depth and she thinks, perhaps, they appear relieved. The eyes never close again.
Almost no feature of the rock can be visibly discerned now and no part of Ward’s body moves anymore. The doctor is afraid to remove the stone from the thigh, for fear that some arcane spell will be broken - yet, reluctantly she does so. Nothing happens. She hastily deposits the stone into her bag and it makes no sound as it lands, then she tends to the wounded doctor. She calmly sits him down and forcefully tells the other doctor to mind the body of Ward. She reaches into her bag in search of gauze, without thinking. She recoils slightly but then in horror she feels around more thoroughly. When she pulls the bag to herself and looks inside, there is only gauze, no stone. She looks around for a moment, but the cries of the wounded doctor require her attention. The stone falls out of this spatial dimension and through the liminal void of that dark interior space. It lands in another place entirely and begins to thrum with intent as it sits patiently.
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