Darwinia

He was afraid to sleep.

In the silence he was able to hear subtle sounds — a distant rumbling, unless that was the pulse of his own blood, amplified in the darkness. He remembered a novel by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, and its subterranean Morlocks, with their glowing eyes and terrible hungers. Not a welcome memory.

He talked to Sullivan to pass the time. Sullivan might be listening, Guilford thought, though his eyes were firmly closed and blood continued to ooze sluggishly from his nose. Periodically Guilford dipped the tail of his shirt into a trickle of meltwater and used it to wipe the blood from Sullivan’s face. He talked fondly about Caroline and Lily. He talked about his father, clubbed to death during the Boston food riots when he had doggedly tried to enter his print shop, as he had done every working day of his adult life. Dumb courage. Guilford wished he had some of that.

He wished Sullivan would wake up. Tell some stories of his own. Make his case for an ancient, evolved Darwinia; hammer the miraculous with the cold steel of reason. Hope you’re right about that, Guilford thought. Hope this continent is not some dream or, worse, a nightmare. Hope old and dead things remain old and dead.

He wished he had a hot meal and a bath to look forward to. And a bed, and Caroline in it, the warm contours of her body under a snowdrift of cotton sheet. He didn’t like these noises from the deeps, or the way the sound rose and ebbed like an impossible tide.

“I hope you don’t die, Dr. Sullivan. I know how you’d hate to give up without understanding any of this. No easy task, though, is it?”

Now Sullivan drew a deep, convulsive breath. Guilford looked down and was startled to see the botanist’s eyes spring open.

Sullivan looked hard at him — or through him — it was hard to tell which. One of his pupils was grotesquely dilated, the white rimmed with blood.

“We don’t die,” Sullivan gasped.

Guilford fought a sudden urge to back away. “Hey!” he said. “Dr. Sullivan, lie still! Don’t excite yourself. You’ll be all right, just relax. Help’s on the way.”

“Didn’t he tell you that? Guilford tell Guilford that Guilford won’t die?”

“Don’t try to talk.” Don’t talk, Guilford thought, because you’re frightening the crap out of me.

Sullivan’s lips curled into a one-sided frown, awful to behold. “You’ve seen them in your dreams…”

“Please don’t, Dr. Sullivan.”

“Green as old copper. Spines on their bellies… They eat dreams. Eat everything!”

In fact the words struck a chord, but Guilford pushed the memory away. The important thing now was not to panic.

“Guilford!” Sullivan’s left hand shot out to grasp Guilford’s wrist, while his right clutched reflexively at empty air. “This is one of the places where the world ends!”

“You’re not making sense, Dr. Sullivan. Please, try to sleep. Tom will be back soon.”

“You died in France. Died fighting the Boche. Of all things.”

“I don’t like to say it, but you’re scaring me, Dr. Sullivan.”

“I ca

Then he grunted, and all the breath sighed out of him at once.

After a time Guilford closed the corpse’s eyes.

He sat with Dr. Sullivan for several hours more, humming tunelessly, waiting for whatever might climb out of the dark to claim him.

Shortly before dawn, exhausted, he fell asleep.

They want so badly to come out!

Guilford can feel their anger, their frustration.

He has no name for them. They don’t quite exist. They are trapped between idea and creation, incomplete, half-sentient, longing for embodiment. Physical1y they are faint green shapes, larger than a man, armored, thorny, huge muzzles opening and closing in silent anger.

They were bound here after the battle.

The thought is not his own. Guilford turns, weightless. He is floating deep in the well, though not on water. The air itself is radiant around him. Somehow, this uncreated light is both air and rock and self.

The picket floats beside him. A spindly man in a U.S. Army uniform. Light flows through him, from him. He is the soldier from Guilford’s dreams, a man who might be his twin.

Who are you?

Yourself, the picket answers.

That’s not possible.

Seems not. But it is.

Even the voice is familiar. It’s the voice in which Guilford speaks to himself, the voice of his private thoughts.

And what are these? He means the bound creatures. Demons?

You may call them that. Call them monsters. They have no ambition but to become. Ultimately, to be everything that exists.

Guilford can see them more clearly now. Their scales and claws, their several arms, their snapping teeth.

Animals?

Much more than animals. But that, too, given a chance.

You bound them here?

I did. In part. With the help of others. But the binding is imperfect.

I don’t know what that means.

See how they tremble on the verge of incarnation? Soon, they’ll assume the physical once again. Unless we bind them forever.

Bind them? Guilford asks. He is afraid now. So much of this defies his comprehension. But he can sense the enormous pressure from below, the terrible desire thwarted and stored for eons, waiting to burst forth.

We will bind them, the picket says calmly.

We?

You and I.

The words are shocking. Guilford feels the impossible weight of the task, as immense as the moon. I don’t understand any of this!

Patience, little brother, the picket says, and lifts him up, up through the eerie light, through the fog and heat of almost-incarnation, like an angel in a ragged army uniform, and as he rises his flesh melts into air.

Tom Compton loomed over him, holding a torch.

I would get up, Guilford thought, if I could. If it weren’t so cold here. If his body hadn’t stiffened in a thousand places. If he could order his dizzying thoughts. He had some vital message to impart, a message about Dr. Sullivan.

“He died,” Guilford said. That was it. Sullivan’s body lay beside him, under a blanket. Sullivan’s face was pale and still in the lantern light. “I’m sorry, Tom.”

“I know,” Tom said. “You did a good job staying with him. Can you walk?”

Guilford tried to put his feet under him but only managed to bang his hip on a ridge of stone.

“Lean on me,” the frontiersman said.

Once again, he felt himself lifted.

It was hard to stay awake. His torpid body wanted him to close his eyes and rest. “We’ll build a fire when we’re out of his hole,” the frontiersman told him. “Step lively now.”

“How long has it been?”

“Three days.”

“Three?”

“There was trouble.”

“Who’s with you?”

They had reached the rim of the well. The interior of the dome was suffused with watery daylight. A gaunt figure waited, slouched against a slab of rock, canvas hood pulled over his face. The mist obscured his features.

“Finch,” Tom said. “Finch came with me.”

“Finch? Why Finch? What about Keck, what about Robertson?”

“They’re dead, Guilford. Keck, Robertson, Diggs, Do

Guilford moaned and shielded his eyes.