The Spy Who Haunted Me

He sounded like a dead man speaking. A man who can speak unbearable truths because he has nothing left to lose. Sergei backed away, calling hysterically for help. Ludmilla threw her clipboard aside, ran to the control board, and hit the abort button. It should have killed Grigor instantly, frying him with a massive electrical charge, but he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Huge sparks spat and sputtered on the air, discharging into the surrounding equipment. Ludmilla grabbed a fire ax from the wall and chopped at Grigor in his chair with hysterical strength. The heavy steel blade bit into his flesh again and again, but he didn’t cry out, and he wouldn’t die.

Sergei tried to escape, but the door wouldn’t open. Security guards were pounding on it from the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. Ludmilla backed away from the bloody mess in the chair that was still smiling at her, and she laughed shrilly past the dishevelled hair falling into her stark white face. The ax head trailed a bloody path across the floor, as though it had grown too heavy for her to hold up.

They came through the walls, and up through the floor, and down from the ceiling. Real and solid, not alive, still bearing the wounds that had killed them. All the subjects who’d been experimented on, who’d suffered and died in the chair, screaming for help and mercy and simple compassion that never came. They came for Sergei and Ludmilla, who died slowly and who died screaming at the hands of those they’d wronged. And when the dead were finally finished with them, they left the bloody messes behind on the floor and went out of the room and into the city to do even worse things.

The tape stopped. I looked around, startled. I’d forgotten who and when I was. The room, what had happened in it, had filled my head. I took a deep breath and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my hand. Honey had shut the tape machine down. She was breathing hard. I wondered if she’d seen all the things I had. Walker was looking at the floor. Peter had his back to us. I looked through the one-way mirror into the next room. It was empty, and so was the chair.

“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.

“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”

“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”

“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.

“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”

“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”

“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.”

“I can feel it,” said Walker. “Like the tension in the air before a storm breaks. Like the pause before the ax falls . . .”

“Will you shut up?” said Honey. “All of you: pull yourselves together! We’re professionals; we can handle this.”

“Are you crazy?” Peter’s voice was shrill, almost hysterical, all the colour gone from his face. It was the first time I’d seen him really scared. “We have to get out of here! The city’s coming alive, and the nightmares are coming back. All the bad dreams you ever had. There are things in dreams no man can face!”

“Get ahold of yourself, Peter,” said Walker, but his voice lacked its usual authority and conviction.

“Hush,” said Honey, and something in her voice stopped us all dead. “I think . . . it’s here.”

The video recorder turned itself back on. The television screen came to life again. We all turned unwillingly to look. Grigor was back sitting in his chair, hacked apart but still alive. The two bloody messes that had been Sergei and Ludmilla were spread out on the floor before him like sacrifices to an unforgiving god. From outside the room, from the surrounding streets, came terrible sounds. Screaming and shouting and the roaring of what might have been maddened animals. Grigor turned his bloody head and looked right through the one-way mirror at us. He smiled at us, and there was little humanity in that smile, and less compassion. It was the smile of a man who had looked beyond the gates of Hell and seen what they did there; what was waiting for him.

You have to die, he said. You all have to die.

“Why?” I said. “We never hurt you.”

Of course he couldn’t hear me. Grigor was dead, long dead. This was just a recording of his last message to mankind.

We’re not who we think we are, he said. We never were. You have to die. Because no one must ever know the truth.

“What truth?” said Honey.

“Why nightmares?” said Walker. “Why kill all the people of this city in such a terrible way?”

Because we deserve it.

The tape snapped to a halt, and the television screen went dead again.

“Well,” I said, putting a lot of effort into sounding calm and casual. “That was . . . worrying. And more than a bit spooky.”

“What did he See in our DNA?” said Honey.

“Probably best we don’t know,” I said.

“Could Grigor still be alive somewhere, do you think?” said Walker. “Hiding, perhaps, transmitting these . . . images to us?”

“No,” I said. “If there was anyone else alive in this whole damned city, I’d know. Nothing’s lived here for years. Even the animals have enough sense not to come in here. I don’t think anyone could live here for long, not after what happened here. This is a city of memories. Stored memories, gone feral.”

It was getting colder and darker. The room on the other side of the one-way mirror was almost gone now, consumed by shadows. The lights in our room were dimming, as though the power was being sucked out of them. Our breath began to steam on the air, and we all buttoned up our coats again. There was a growing atmosphere of imminence, of something about to happen. The four of us moved together, and then moved away again, driven by a need to be able to look in all directions at once. From outside the building there came noises. Voices . . . almost human. First as scattered individuals, then in growing numbers, until finally it was the voice of the crowd and the mob, driven mad by horror and bloody slaughter.

The sound of an entire city maddened and murdered by its fears.

“What is that?” said Honey, clapping her hands uselessly to her ears. “What’s making that noise? There’s no one here; this city is empty! It is! There can’t be anybody out there!”

“The dead don’t always stay dead,” said Walker. He looked confused, as though someone had just hit him.

“No,” I said quickly. “There’s no one out there. Not as such.

It’s . . . the memory of nightmares. When the people here died, when the city died, when all the men and women and children trapped in this place fell victim to their own nightmares, that out-pouring of emotion and trauma completed what Grigor started. Everything they experienced was psychically imprinted into the stone and brick and cement of X37. The whole place is one gigantic stone tape. And by entering the city, we’ve started it up again.”

“So, it’s not real?” said Peter.

“Real enough,” I said. “Real enough to kill us, if we let it.”

“But where’s the energy coming from to fuel that kind of manifestation?” said Walker. “What’s powering the playback?”