Published at the Treasures of Thundera Group May 24, 2003
:taken from my original author's notes:
This is the ninth installment of my ten-part horror anthology. It's about tygra and certain friends he meets...heh heh heh...and no...it's not quite...well...it's truly twisted (I hope) enjoy!
"What have you Done?" by RD Rivero (2003-05-24)
It is warm; far, far too warm. It is summer now and the upper portions of my crypt are inhospitable. I must retreat, deeper and deeper still, into the tomb's yawning abyss. I shut my eyes and shudder at the prospect. Despite the dread and foreboding, it is imperative and unstoppable – unavoidable – I simply have no choice, I must again return to its inscrutable, unfathomable pits. To those damp and murky labyrinths of forgotten ages. To those catacombs of the unspeakable too grotesque and hideous to describe further. Straight and headlong into those depths I must trod to hibernate through the season for that is my lot in life.
How I wish it were not so – yet – it is not the mystery of this world but what waits beyond true and final death that I fear.
In the future, if fate so permits me to have a future, I should like to move southward. Southward to the Polar Regions. It would be easier on my nerves in that barren expanse of ice and snow. For at least there the temperatures do not rise. But, alas, I am cabined, cribbed, for the moment, forever. Forgive me my melancholy – I have, it seems, adopted the cold and lifeless demeanor of the stones of this demonic charnel house.
I descend with mixed feelings. I despise the crypt yet count myself fortunate to have found it. Of its original purpose I do not know. Its intent, like its creators, has long since been lost. Odd, is it not, that one so expressly alive reside perpetually in a tomb? All of the universe is but stubbornly persistent illusion. It is will – all that ever was and will be is but an act of inexhaustible will.
I descend. I need no torchlight, for my cat-senses are highly attuned. Highly and unnaturally. I need no companionship, for I have so trained myself. The rest who were once of my kind are surely dead. Food and water, those needs of entrenched biology, are sated by the fresh, underground streams and the base 'life' of the bowels of Third Earth that now forms the staple of my diet.
I thank the gods my organism is intact or indeed –
The nature of my present curse, as I am wont to call it, baffles me to wit's end with its particulars. How it happened? How it continues? It frightens me and that I do not admit freely. Darkness and shadow is all – but I was not always so acutely afflicted. In a former life I was Tygra. I was a Thundercat. How time has so destroyed the very meaning of those words!
The memories are dormant yet as fresh as yesterday. Bengali – another Thundercat – and I were returning from the scattered remains of our home planet, Thundera, to the quiet solitude of our adopted Third Earth. A cluster of asteroids amid interstellar space had aroused our curiosity on our way to the demised ruins. Now, with our work complete, we endeavored to explore the rare formation a bit closer.
Such a conglomeration of matter in the otherwise vacuous void of space was indeed unusual. Immediately I furnished two theories to explain its existence and ran them by my fellow tiger. First: a star had attempted to form in that vicinity but the process stalled and instead the various planetoids were produced. Second: a star had formed unimaginable eons ago and the object exploded – as such are oft to do upon their deaths – the dormant asteroids were all that remained of once luminous material. I concluded that it would be impossible to distinguish the one correct of the two – but to my surprise Bengali corrected me.
If the rocks had formed from novae, the star's core must remain; one need only look for it.
I smiled and maneuvered the vessel through the pool of those eerily-still objects. It was exciting but dangerous, for although the bulk of the visible matter was obscenely large and avoidable, the vast majority of the pre-historic debris was small and untraceable by the vehicle's radar. It was that particular fact that prematurely ended our adventure: a stone the size of a fruit smashed crucial portions of the engine and into that parade of iron and nickel spheres we were sent out of control, helpless and impotent.
We were at the mercy of the indifferent laws of motion and the ravenous whims of universal gravitation. As we rounded an excessively large planetoid, for the first time since we had diverged into that cluster, we were facing the stellar system of Third Earth. An idea occurred to us simultaneously: if we excised the greater bulk of the spaceship's mass, we might, just might, gain enough speed to escape the impressive asteroid's tidal pull. At the most opportune moment, the cabin compartment was detached, its native rocketry, feeble and all, accelerated us away from what moments before had been the remainder of the vehicle.
But our last-minute efforts were in vain: the acceleration became deceleration. We slowed, stopped and fell back to the jagged, pitted rock. We were doomed and braced ourselves for impact – somehow, somehow in that confusion I sent out a distress call –
Of what followed I recall nothing. The crash, the explosion – and the pain – the experience was not permanently recoded in my memory and remains lost to me forever.
I opened my eyes to a flood of incandescence. I thought, I truly thought I was dead. But gradually my senses – what I perceived to be my senses – returned and I realized quite distinctly I was not dead.
I was alone in a chamber that was neither too large, neither too small. Its walls were of aged, withered plaster. Its ceiling was an intricate web of fixtures and piles through which exceedingly cold fluids passed and upon which frost formed. Its floor was a solid slab of plaster, dusty and dotted with puddles of water.
I stood, examining my body as best I could in my weary state. I was tired and so my senses were slow and deliberate. A peculiar smell of alcohol and oil clung to my fur but as I had no visible scars, no broken bones, I dismissed the foul effect to the medical arts that had saved me from destruction. Alien and unknown as those arts were to me then and now. Indeed, it was simply my nakedness that disturbed me for then and only then did I notice bitter, cold draft.
A door at the distant corner opened – a pair of footsteps and shadows entered.
I rubbed my eyes that I swore deceived me when I saw the creatures responsible for my rescue. The heads were large; the faces were expressionless: brows unknotted, eyes unblinked and lips, curiously pale and bloodless, stiff and immoveable. The arms and legs were disproportionately long and thin. The torso, to which the limbs were attached, was unnaturally flat. The waist impossibly thin. The abdomen weirdly bloated, distended. Hairless and naked, the shiny, earth-toned things were indistinguishable between the sexes.
The two, Kra and Kranos, spoke in a dialect of the galaxy's standard language that was remotely familiar. We communicated well, nevertheless and I learned that they were doctors who understood that I had many questions but that felt I was too weak yet to receive answers. They led me to a second chamber larger and better lit than the first. And there – I was assured – I would not be alone for attendants, nurses I supposed, were stationed to observe me regularly.
My mentality and sensibility were charted by a bizarre array of photoelectric devices. My temperature was not taken. My blood was not drawn. Tests as trivial as measuring pulse or gauging blood pressure did not exist in their medical vocabulary. Strange and unusual, but as I studied my hosts – the self-named Ia – I gathered reasons for the peculiarities.
Their pale colors, I theorized, was the result of their clear, thin blood. I do not know what exactly led me to believe that except analogy. Their apparent oneness with the temperature of the environment pointed to cold-blooded metabolism. On Thundera and on Third Earth alike cold-blooded invertebrates tended to have clear blood. They spoke without drawing breath. They lectured without pausing. And that, too, supported my theory. If my cold-blooded, invertebrate analogy was extended, the Ia did not have lungs – they breathed through holes along their abdominal skin. And that thus explained the widespread nudity.
My hypothesis appeared superficially to be self-consistent but I needed proof, solid proof. I needed to know just how far evolutionary analogy could be stretched. So casually, very casually, I drew near a nurse and, as I passed from one behemoth instrument to another, I pretended to slip through one of the floor's many soft puddles. To break the fall, I touched the thing's abdomen – all very natural-like – to feel for any internal structure and function but to my horror I felt nothing. Nothing! The very spot I had touched became partially sunken in and remained so for breathless eternities until the doctors Kra and Kranos returned and relieved my minders.
The three of us walked form that room to a hall leading deeper and deeper into the planetoid's hive-like labyrinth of tunnels and interconnected chambers. The insect-like, organic architecture sparked my innate curiosity and, as we conversed, I learned that the vessel had crashed by their lair's main hatch, a portal long unused for the creatures were extraordinarily reclusive and self-sufficient enough to withstand the perpetual isolation. I learned, too, that I had been rescued from the wreckage and the asteroid's thin atmosphere of noxious gasses by a team of specially trained doctors – all Ia were doctors, nurses and patients routinely and in that order. And then, in the most peculiar language that I took to be a corrupt translation of their own tongue, I was told that I had been 'revived' by their advanced and unparalleled methods.
"What about Bengali?" I asked, stopping under the glare of naked bulbs that hung precariously from the ceiling. "You've told me nothing about Bengali."
Kra and Kranos stood in the shadows, looking at each other quite nervously. Nervously! At last, betrayed emotion scattered their knotted, contorted features.
"You were alone," one said – I honestly could not tell the pair apart.
"No one else was found," the other continued.
"The ship, is it in one piece? We must look for him!"
I was so sure that the tacit object of my endeavor was to reunite me with Bengali – but in response to the news I grew panicked and terrified. Bengali – oh, Bengali – what could have happened to him those maddened moments I lacked distinct impressions of. Had he jettisoned at the last moment? Or had he – was he? Buried, hidden within the wreckage, destroyed and disfigured by the hostility of outer space into a detestable abomination beyond recognition of something that had once been alive.
"You are still weak – you –"
Indeed I was – and as the terrible thoughts reeled in my head I nearly fainted.
Nothing remained of the vehicle but shattered, twisted metal. The static atmosphere was too contaminated by the ashes of the spaceship's destruction to allow a further search to be performed. I was further assured that anything in that mixture of vapors would not live long.
I sighed and bowed my head. What would Liono say? It was unutterable folly that had led to the tragedy. The fault was mine – I confessed it aloud – and I proceeded to tell the friendly Ia how it was that Bengali and I had come to the rocky cluster.
"The distress signal will reach the Thundercats," I said – and again the doctors looked on worriedly. "I'll be rescued."
Once more I was told I was too weak and too unprepared – and as they spoke I sensed in their tone that my hosts thought my hope of going home all illusionary.
I was led to a lobby: on the left was a door of glass and foam, on the right was a darkened passage. I was told I was free to explore the facility at my leisure, but at all times I was expressly forbidden to enter beyond those two appointed areas. The air was warmer there than in the rest of the hive and in particular, about the door, I heard a dull, electrical noise. I was not uncomfortable, for being ignorant of their customs and society I had no reason whatsoever to fear the area. Yet I heeded their warning and steered away from the place.
Time was measured by the Ia merely as relative durations. Clocks and timers lacked the symbols to distinguish numerals. Only ticks that alternately appeared and disappeared marked the passage of 'time' for various processes. Calendars, even the notion of days were alien to my equally alien hosts. I suspected the creatures absolutely did not understand the passage of prolonged periods of time until I received a rather vague statement by a nurse in answer to my queries: for it seemed that they did enumerate the duration of their existence by how many times they submerged – and even that I was told was an orderly affair.
Food and drink were wanting and my pleas for sustenance were met with confounded curiosity or dismissed by the more sympathetic of the hive's queer inhabitants as a phantom memory of the past. Truth be told, with the devastating loss of Bengali, I was in no mood to eat. And, so, I fancied the urge was indeed more a memory of biological need than a real desire to restore my digestion.
To bide my time before my rescue, I explored Ia society. It was a cooperative system built upon units of two or multiples of two. They worked in labs, mixing and preparing chemicals. They tended the sick. They mended the hive. Every so often they stopped to rest within chambers apparently built for that sort of 'nocturnal' activity. It reminded me of an ant's nest without queen and I was surprised indeed by the decentralized structure. I saw no leadership of any kind. Certainly doctors had an air of authority but only in medical matters.
As I passed from level to lever, I became aware that I was being watched – but not in an oppressing or menacing way. Rather, it was an express concern for my health and well-being. I was peppered with questions regarding the state of my senses, my faculties. Otherwise, no one paid me attention, no one cared that I – a total stranger – was deep within their clandestine world. They only appeared to mind – or at the very least fain concern – when I expounded what I had earlier implied – that I would be rescued by my Thundercat friends. Gradually, ever so gradually, I realized why tremors of muted fear and worry subtly overcame their otherwise distant and indifferent demeanor: it dawned on me that I was intended to remain their prisoner forever.
Time – seconds, minutes, hours – what a dreadful thing it was. Days would pass before my friends received my distress signal. Days more before they blasted into space to come for me. Days to locate the cluster. Hours to find the planetoid. Minutes to secure the asteroid's hatch. Seconds for me to run into their awaiting arms. And yet I was oblivious to the passing of nanoseconds.
My rescue would be soon, but how soon? How soon?
I had no weapon but my wits and suitably armed, I resolved to determine the truth of what the Ia were and why they were so determined to be alone.
I suffer from an acute mind. A scientific mind, keenly trained. Days – so I assumed – passed through my observation. I noticed the forbidden territory was totally avoided and as I stood in the lobby, I pondered which of the two evils to explore first: the doorway or the passageway. I opted for the corridor and set off at once. It led upward curiously for at that uppermost lever all things led downward. At the terminus I was confronted by three, locked doors. It took only the slightest effort of my strength to break them open – a fact that revealed the creature's inherent physical weakness.
I preceded one door at a time.
The first opened to an immense chamber, cold and dark. The tall, vaulted ceiling was either glass or non-existent for the multitude of creation's starry landscape was in full and unblocked view. But that was not all that took my breath away – for within the skeletal buttresses that supported the upper walls was the vessel expertly, painstakingly reconstructed. It was not intact: damaged and destroyed by the crash and explosion, it had the overall appearance of a jigsaw puzzle and very, very eerie.
I inspected the carcass: discovering the location of the initial, accidental bombardment and not discovering a single trace of Bengali.
The second opened to a smaller, somewhat more familiar chamber. A switch by the door powered its incandescent lights that were considerably brighter and hotter than any I had seen or felt in the entire hive-labyrinth. I was, I realized, an emergency room, with operating tables covered by white cloth and walls adorned by cabinets of medical supplies.
I uncovered a table to utter revulsion for under its cover were mangled organs distinctly Thunderian. Nauseous and just simply caught off-guard, I re-covered the table and tried to escape that room of horror – tried, until a sound, a moan of inhuman quality assaulted my ears. Turning for one, last view, I saw another, covered table, a table whose draped and obscured contents vaguely but distinctly moved. Fighting all common sense impulses to run away, I neared. Ignoring the dangers to my sanity, I pulled back the canvas sheet.
The dreadful shriek returned – only it was mine. Or was it mine all along?
It was Bengali – those parts of him that survived the wreckage. Head attached to the neck, neck attached to the chest – everything below the ribs gone severed. The left arm, too, was missing and only part of the right arm remained intact. Yet it was not that – that mangled corpse – that made my blood run cold. It was that it lived. It angled its head. It focused its eyes upon me.
Clamoring into the passage, I crashed into Kranos – who was uncharacteristically alone – and, enraged, I seized him with a grip he was powerless to resist and together we smashed through that third door that anticlimactically opened to a utility closet.
"What sort of depraved, inhuman fiends are you?" I demanded. "What have you done?"
"Be not upset," the doctor answered, feebly. "You have seen very little."
"What have you done?"
"Your companion – we tried to revive him but we did not know he would not be fully functional."
"Fully functional? He's a corpse!"
"Yes."
I let go of my hold around its neck – it had no effect other than to muffle its voice.
"Have you not noticed? Has it not occurred to you? Our world was destroyed and we had to adapt – evolve. But with the loss of the environment that sustained us our doom was certain and indeed ultimately unavoidable. Yet in the meanwhile we experimented and perfected the science that sustains us – forever."
Nothing was forever, I insisted. All things must die – oh, how I wish. And as I uttered that statement I fancied that it laughed. It laughed – yes – and confessed they were already dead.
What I had mistaken for cold-blooded nature was, in fact, cold death. No blood coursed through collapsed veins, only lymph of molecular wastes. No breath, inhaled or exhaled, filled withered lungs, only weak sorts of oxygen diffusion through thin, silky hides.
"How was it possible?" I asked, weakly.
"By will," it answered, sternly. "Nothing else but will exists. We willed ourselves to live and with the aid of our refined knowledge we kept the function of our minds intact."
Reluctantly, I allowed it to lead me from that passageway to that door. That forbidden door of glass and foam. Having seen what I had seen, having learned what I had learned, I suppose it felt it was safe to show me the remainder of the planetoid's secrets. A scented, stale air, as hot as a mild, rainy spring, vented behind the door – a door whose materials were common insulators.
The air, I gasped, was too hot. Kranos nodded, saying, breathlessly, that I should not stay within for too long and that it would not follow. I nodded, crawling into that dark and tight corridor.
It was a tunnel through which hot air circulated, fanned, I supposed. The hum, that I recognized to be that of electric motors, confirmed my suspicion that I trekked about the exhaust port of an immense freezer-device. Yellowish gas oozed from the ancient, corroded joints of pipes that were quite large and uncomfortably hot. I was reminded of pipes with frost and it all indeed seemed to come together. The whole of the asteroid's interior was kept controllably cold by the workings of that infernal machine.
I was overheating and to my immediate distress I noticed I did not sweat. But I had little time to be distressed for at once I found that I had entered into a chamber so immense it dwarfed every single artificial construction I had ever seen. Its pipes, ducts and bulkheads reached through the rock's core and formed a vast chasm many miles deep. Above it was a fan proportionately large whose swift blades obscured the ceiling and its vistas of starry space. Orifices along the underside of the fan circulated what I had been led to believe was thin and foul atmosphere.
I was about ready to retreat, to return to the awaiting doctor, but a peak of flickering light from a hole in the distant bulkhead caught my attention. Passing catwalks and rickety bridges, I came to the source of that light – a window as it were – and peered into another collection of hidden secrets.
I knew then what submergence was.
Grotesque vats of gold and ebony, connected to one another by an almost organic myriad of viaducts, were filled to the rim with a concoction of alcohol and oil. Dissolved air, amino acids and carbohydrates – essential and fundamental nutrients – broken into their most basic forms rounded out the ingredients of that fortified goop. One by one the Ia entered the tubs and submerged such prolonged moments so intense the living could not ever duplicate. It was, sadly, how the creatures replenished the vital substances of animation that the method of their death deprived. Without their organs it was impossible for them to be sustained for long.
A race of secretive, paranoid corpses. A race quick to admit me among their number – why? Slivers of humanity? Or reasons too unmentionable for me to contemplate? For it then occurred to me that perhaps they tired of the undead life and wanted to return to normalcy – I, somehow, being the instrument of that possibility. Bengali, with his mangled, gutted body was useless to them, but I – all intact – remained a hope –
I had seen enough.
Service ladders took me from the catwalks to the edge of the orifices just under the omnipresent sweep of the fan. The currents were strong and I feared either falling through the abyss or into the instant death of the swiftly-turning blades. But my weight and the forces of friction conspired to keep me safe. And without backward glance I ventured out of the rock's interior onto its surface – its free and barren surface.
The planetoid's atmosphere: of its composition, it was unfathomable, of its toxicity all fears were extinguished by the fact that I lived. Dense and lukewarm. Dominated, as it was, by the opposite tendencies of the exhaust of hot air and the expanse of outer space, its weather was a mix of similarly dissimilar fronts.
It was evident to me that only a small portion of the cooling mechanism was devoted to keeping their bodies, already at a depraved metabolic state, from decaying altogether. But a large portion existed entirely to keep them safe from the heat-generating processes that produced the concoction of the vats – the very processes that sustained their unnatural existence. It was still a mystery to me just where they got the power but I assumed – and let it rest in my mind – that a civilization, even a dead one, would have enough time and opportunity to unlock the arcana of the cosmos and from there exploit what secrets it needed.
I shuddered, half in terror, half in awe, at the starlight that testified with such quiet dignity the vastness of creation. I was alone and at peace – calm and collected. I reached the crater where the vessel had crashed, lay across its gentle slope and fell soundly asleep.
Oh, nightmare of nightmares! If but only the flutter of eyelids could un-do what had been done. But, alas, it was not to be. I was not to be granted respite of the cruel, inhuman torture that ever since consumed my life.
A Thundercat vessel arrived – it was Liono and Cheetara. They found me, weak and disconcerted yet alive and alert. I told them Bengali was dead and implored to leave the cluster as soon as possible. Once aboard – safely aboard – and away, I unweaved the sorry tale's bitter narrative.
I recovered at the Tower of Omens. It was summertime and as the heat gathered strength my favorite place to be was in a tub of cold, frigid water. Pumyra examined me – but left hastily and without explanation. Secret communications followed – and Lynxo and the twins tactfully retired to Cat's Lair. I was left alone – the unheralded start of my crude exile – and for several days I paced about those murky, somber premises, trying, quite desperately trying to make sense of what had happened to the world.
Although I was home, I relied less and less on the watch until it seemed day and night had merged into one, degenerate entity, vague and formless. By degrees I noticed I needed little food and water and it occurred to me the ideas of hunger and thirst were but entrenched reflexes of disconnected memories. I sought nourishment when and only when my well-being was debilitated. Dreams, too, were extinct – Kra, Kranos and their kind existed only within my daytime fantasies.
I awoke one midnight to the glorious vista of a full moon – and a fuller realization of absolute dread. Tremors of horror befell me. Then and only then, in perfect reflection, in solemn comfort, did I notice. As I lay quietly, I realized a new and terrible abnormality of the most singular, earth-shattering consequence – consequence that destroyed my life as a Thundercat and created my current vocation as an outcast – I cannot blame the Ia, they practiced the only medicine they knew – for, you see, I did not breathe.