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I thought about that. They were talking about the Sight: the ability of specially trained people to See the whole of the world, and not just the limited part most people live in. (Just as well, really; if most people knew who and what they were sharing their world with, they’d shit themselves.) But though the Sight had shown me many strange and wonderful and dangerous things, it had never once shown me anything like a god.
I said some of this to the others, and Walker nodded slowly.
“There are things very like gods, in the Nightside. They have a whole street set aside for them, so they can show off for the tourists. But I am here to tell you that most of them are just supernatural creatures with delusions of grandeur and not worth the breath it takes to damn them. Godly pretenders and wa
“I talked with the Wizard of Northampton once,” Peter said diffidently. “He said gods and demons are just artificial constructs of the deeper recesses of the human mind. We create these subpersonalities so that the conscious mind can communicate more easily with the subconscious. Or maybe . . . so that an individual could make contact with the human mass mind, Jung’s collective unconscious. The wizard said gods and demons were just two sides of the same superluminal coin.”
“Yeah, well, writing comic books for twenty years will do that to you,” growled Walker.
“I’m picking up all kinds of information from this room,” Honey said abruptly. “I know things I have no way of knowing. It’s like . . . suddenly remembering a book I read long ago that I know for a fact I never read. My head hurts.”
“It’s the psychic imprinting,” I said. “What happened here was so powerful, so traumatic, it literally soaked into its surroundings. Genius loci, and all that. A stone tape. And now, just by being here, we’ve started the tape playing again. I know things too. The man in the chair is mentally ill. His name is Grigor, and he hears voices in his head. Almost certainly paranoid schizophrenic, though no one’s bothered to accurately diagnose him. Apparently Sergei and Ludmilla there believed that people who hear voices and speak to people who aren’t actually there are being dominated by ancient DNA that’s been accidentally reactivated. So they’ve been experimenting exclusively on the mentally ill to try to locate and control that particular part of human DNA. Just in case they are seeing gods and devils . . .”
“That’s crazy,” said Peter.
“Bastards,” Walker said succinctly.
“Bad idea either way,” said Honey, staring fascinated at the flickering black-and-white images on the television screen. “If the old gods and monsters really are just projections from the subconscious, they might not take kindly to being forced out into the light. We keep things locked away in our heads for a reason.”
“Let sleeping gods lie,” said Peter.
“Well, quite,” said Walker.
“This conversation is getting seriously strange,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with what happened out in the city?”
“It’s something to do with the man in the chair,” Honey said flatly. “With Grigor. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“Could we be talking about Jungian archetypes here?” said Walker. “They were all the rage in my young days. Ideas and concepts given shape and form and even identities. Dark dreams from the depths of the human mass mind, driving people in directions they would never have chosen otherwise . . . Fads and fancies, politics and religions . . . Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Pardon me; I’m rambling, I know. But we are on very dangerous ground here, and I think it behooves us to tread carefully. Remember that film Forbidden Planet? Monsters from the id? Unbeatable and unstoppable, rage and horror and all our most unspeakable lusts, given form and let loose on the world? Like the Hyde, only more so. Is that what happened here, in X37?”
“You’re right, Walker,” said Honey. “You are rambling.”
I was still studying the man in the chair and the two scientists. Grigor and Sergei and Ludmilla. Whatever information I was picking up, it wasn’t coming from the video recording. It was coming from the other room. Haunted, stained by what these people had done in it. The scientists had wanted to access the old DNA so they could learn to talk with gods again and bend them to the State’s will.
Children, playing with nuclear weapons.
Grigor suddenly convulsed, his scrawny naked body fighting the leather straps that held him in place. The chair creaked and groaned, but the straps held. (I was right there with them now. I could hear and see everything. Smell Grigor’s sweat, feel the static charge building on the air.) Sergei checked the readings on his instruments, and Ludmilla scribbled frantic notes on her clipboard. The cameras recorded everything. Grigor’s face writhed, his eyes bulged, his breathing grew faster and faster. The cables leading from his shaven head lashed back and forth.
And then he stopped moving. He held himself u
I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t see it. Information was pouring into my head, forcing its way in despite everything I could do to keep it out.
The scientists had done it. The old DNA was awake again on-line and up and ru
His mind broke, leaping up and out, his artificially augmented thoughts tapping into the human mass mind, the shared unconscious that linked all the people of X37. He drew upon the power he found there, took it and shaped it and sent it out to destroy every living thing in the city. So that the vile experiments would finally stop, and the awful knowledge Grigor had stumbled across would die with him.
Let them all die, he said. They’re all guilty. They all knew what was happening.
Grigor called up nightmares. All the things we’re really afraid of. Monstrous shapes, terrible archetypes, all the private and personal horrors that have power over us in the dark, in the early hours of the morning, when we dream awful dreams, of things we can only escape from by waking up and leaving them behind. Grigor summoned them up from the mass mind, gave them material shape and form, and turned them loose on the people of X37.
And the city screamed.
The scientists realised something had gone terribly wrong with their experiment. Grigor wasn’t crying out or straining against his straps anymore. He sat perfectly still. Sergei and Ludmilla approached him cautiously. He slowly turned his tortured head to look at them. Blood ran in endless tears from his unblinking eyes. Having finally Seen the truth, he could not look away, even though it was killing him. But he still managed a smile for his tormentors.
They’re coming, he said. They’re coming for you. Every single one of them, and they all want a piece . . .