Episode 2 - Between Stone and Sky

Narrator: Hello listener, I’m The Narrator and welcome to Tales Beneath the Surface, a serialised journey into the unknown. We have had quite the cascade of feedback for our first show, and I must say, it has been a joy to read your emails, letters, social media posts and other more… innovative ways of contacting us. First, to clear up some confusion, yes we are called Tales Beneath the Surface but we are not, as some listeners assumed, a show of bawdy miners stories or for that matter a treatise on fly fishing, to the eternal disappointment of one of our listeners, Mr JR Hartley. No! We deal in the unusual, the unspoken and the downright bizarre.

Though few are truly aware, in fact some are virtually blind to the visible world let alone the subtleties of the metaphysical. Their lives are work, money, sleep with no chance to dream, repeat. They stroll oblivious through life, the world muted and muffled by disinterest, self absorption or arrogance. Some turn these traits into an art form. Oh, if only life was that easy, in some ways it sounds like bliss, dear listener. But For every observant watcher, esoteric ponderer and windchime fondler, there will always, always be thousands upon thousands of Gary’s.

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Harvest

It had been an interesting evening. Gary had been at an axe throwing bar in the old meat market celebrating hitting his quarterly targets 3 weeks early. The plastic curtains separating each gallery were dusted with crimson - a cheap reminder of the building’s bloody past.

The food had been decent, faux meat sliders and vegan chicken strips doused in vinegary hot sauce surrounded by baskets of crisp cardboard fries, the generic house spice blend masking their taste. He’d been starving, stuffing his face with anything they brought out.

The place was stamped with logos for an imaginary mom and pop takeaway. A focus group hallucination of Americana bubbling up from B-grade Hollywood slop. He liked it, the nostalgia for a time that had never existed. Something recognisable he could find in any new development in any city everywhere in the world. It was home. A place for frictionless living, fully optimised.

He left his colleagues on the corner, turning down a lift in favour of the bus and a walk. Now and then he liked public transport. It connected him to the people living their parallel lives in the city around him. It grounded him. Brought him down to the street from his penthouse apartment’s panoramic views. He lived in the sky, at the top of a high rise built during the last flood of dirty money spilling out from the City of London’s washing machine.

His whisky overcoat and the bumps of CK from Steve’s bullet had him comfortably smeared. Each step through a streelight’s orange cone shook glittering dust free from its halo above. It settled on his suit in pinprick sequins. Well, that’s what he saw at least.

He reached the closest stop but its pixelled display showed a twenty minute wait. The bus took a meandering route through the tangled skein of streets around him and he knew there was a cut through over the road along the old city’s cobbled streets. It’d been a while since he’d explored and he could feel his feet’s restless itch fizzing up his spine.

SFX: DOPPLERED CAR HORN AND SHOUTING VOICES

He stepped off the curb, checking his phone’s map, missing the fast approaching car. The blare of the horn arrested his step, strangling his breath in his throat. It whipped past in a blur of tinted windows and matte paint, its passengers’ shouts dopplered out of coherency. Gary’s relieved gasp coated his throat with the rough acid tang of exhaust. He looked both ways and crossed. The uncomfortable little laugh choked out of him left to die in the light of the movie ad set in the bus stop’s wall.

Safe on the other side he wiped his sweat dewed face dry and picked out some bouncy poppy pap to calm his racing heart. He set off, a strengthening smile fixed to his cheeks. He forgot about the map. The journey was short anyway. He’d been round here before. It’d be nice to cut his own path, another achievement to cap the quarter’s early close.

The buildings drew in around him, swelling and stacking up on themselves like box hedges on a bankrupt estate left to grow new green blockages along the garden’s path. Gloom pooled and coagulated where their walls met the ground. The cheery orange glow of the streetlamps shaping it, giving it a gilt lustre rather than shining through to light up the leavings of the working day.

Gary hadn’t noticed that he was knee deep in shadow. His feet found their own blind path, kicking through cardboard coffee cups and scrunched up sandwich wrappers, sending them flying in time to the beat skittering through his skull. They crested up out of the dark like fish come to taste the dry air and spy the sun, stealing a lick of its heat.

From above it was evident that Gary was spiralling in towards a centre, his straight path crooked to fit a stranger’s destination. There were no buses here, the whole area had been pedestrianised a few centuries before, the city’s fabric resistant to anything broader than three men abreast. The gloom was up to his thigh now, his knees occasionally visible, pumping back and forth.

Shifting colour flashed across his face, the street lights slipping between petrol soaked neon, and the sooty guttering of gas lamps. None of it registered. His eyes were half closed, blissed out. He strode thoughtlessly on floating on the foamy music spilling from his ears.

The centre was a dead end. A cul de sac full with the smell of turned earth and old split rubbish bags. A curtain of darkness hung between the two buildings at its entrance, rippled by a wind that didn’t move the air. Gary was boxed in.

At its centre, ringed by cobbles, was a dry fountain crowned by a statue, green with verdigris and spattered with pigeon shit, holding out a hand in supplication.

SFX: BEATING WINGS AND CAWING

Two piebald ravens slid from its shoulders on heavy wings, their croaking voices rasping through the humid air. They swept past Gary, their feathers stirring a breeze that slapped across his face, bringing him back to earth.

He shook himself and blinked, looking all around, catching the birds as they dipped into the dark. This wasn’t anywhere he recognised, no, this wasn’t a place he’d even heard of and he was on the pulse, fully immersed.

A spider step of fear ran down his spine. Wait…wait..he didn’t recognise it. He’d walked all around here, he should’ve reached the main road, this was his corner of the city, but he didn’t know where he was.

He checked his phone but it wouldn’t change from the music, the map wouldn’t appear, he couldn’t call a ride. Then the light of the screen blinked out and all he could see was his sweaty face looking back.

On the far side of the courtyard there was a metal door just visible through the skirt of railings dressing the stairs that led down to it. It was the only opening in the blank brick walls surrounding him. Before he realised he’d started moving his hand was knocking out a desperate tattoo on the cold metal. A slot, above eye height, slid open for a moment then clicked back into place.

Gary: “Come on, come on” he stammered, raising his clenched white hand, ready to beat again, then “Oh thank god” spilled out as the door opened smoothly on silent hinges.

Inside was a reception room richly carpeted in scarlet, the smell of sandalwood and frankincense visible in the air. Off to the left was a chest high desk made from gleaming black wood inlaid with brass, a single word - ‘Concierge’ - acid etched on a metal plate hanging from the nearest edge. A man with a pencil moustache stood behind it, his top half wrapped in bottle green velvet crowned with a silver and gold pillbox hat, his mouth twisted in a wry smile.

Gary: “The-there’s something strange going on outside, I’ve never seen this place before”

Concierge: “Well how could you?” the concierge said with a titter, “it isn’t on any map and, well, it’s ever so exclusive, unless there’s an event this whole street’s tucked away quite out of sight” he said leaning over the desk, looking over Gary’s shoulders to check they were alone.

Gary: “An event? I hadn’t heard anything about that”

Concierge: “Sir?! Really?!” the concierge said, springing back, eyes wide “you’re the star attraction, the cherry on the cake, we’ve been waiting so long for you to arrive, and you act like you don’t know, I’m shocked, appalled”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m supposed to be here” Gary said, taking a hesitant step towards the desk.

Concierge: “And yet, here you are” the man said, cocking his head and spreading his arms.

“I’m sorry I think you’ve got the -” Gary started apologetically

Concierge: “Let me stop you there, my book will clear this up” the concierge interrupted, pulling an enormous black leather book onto the desk and flipping through its thick ivory pages.

Concierge: “See, right here, the first page, your name’s larger than anyone else’s” he continued, pointing to Gary’s name carved in red.

“Oh, well I guess my invite must’ve got lost somewhere along the way, exclusive you said?” Gary slurred, a glint of greed rising in his eyes.

Concierge: “The. Most. Exclusive” the concierge said, leaning closer and smiling with each word.

“Well I’d hate to ruin the evening” Gary said, looking up and meeting the concierge’s jaundiced gaze. The man’s mouth split apart in a hungry smile, his throat a black hole, two cups full of dark liquor appearing in his hands.

Concierge: “Now that calls for a drink, congratulations to us both! You’re in for the time of your life” he said, throwing back his measure in one.

Gary took a sip then a gulp and it burned all the way down, the smell of rich leather and honeyed smoke filling his mouth and pouring from his nose. The warmth banished the fear he’d felt at his dislocation, it brought a smile to his lips and a drunken chuckle laugh burbled out.

Concierge: “Ah, just the ticket, you’ve come back to yourself and just in time, my colleagues will show you down, enjoy yourself, I’m quite green with envy”

Two masked figures were standing at the head of a set of stairs opposite the desk, the curtain hiding it drawn back to one side. Gary was delighted to see them, that drink must have been strong, it felt like he was floating as he stepped across to clasp their outstretched hands.

Concierge: “Ah one more thing sire, don’t forget your crown” the concierge said, stepping out from behind the desk and placing a knotted ring of ivy and holly on Gary’s brow.

Gary turned back to thank him with a bleary smile and saw the concierge was wearing fur trousers, his knees bent backwards, each leg capped with a cleft hoof, but then he was swept away, round and down the stairs of dressed stone.

They walked hand in hand, the two masked figures leading him deeper, their eyes always turned towards him, never stumbling even as the stairs became more worn then turned to earth, still sloping down. The ceiling was wrapped in roots, spider silk tendrils stretching out to tousle the hair tufting through Gary’s crown. The air was warm and he could hear the sound of drumming coming up through the ground.

SFX: CHANTING AND CRACKLING FIRE

Ahead of them was an opening, its edges ringed with flint. It led into a large cavern full of smoke full of figures dancing into view as they moved slowly around a large fire pit. Behind it was a platform covered with garlands of flowers and sheaves of wheat and barley all woven together with looping vines.

Gary was given a bowl to drink from, full of a deep red liquid that tasted of iron and wine mixed with rich spices that filled his mouth and brought tears to his eyes. The effect was immediate. The room became indistinct. Layers of colour blurring out the hard edges between everything in it, pulsing in time to his heartbeat.

His companions led him to the platform and laid him on the bier then stepped down, throwing bundles onto the fire that kicked out thick sweet smelling smoke. The dance sped up, three rings of people weaving in and out as they circled the fire, chants of “GogMagog-GogMagog-gomagogogmagog” accompanying them.

Two colossal shadows pulled themselves up from the ground beyond the platform, rising till their tops brushed the ceiling. Each shape stretched out a limb and two hands engulfed Gary completely. The darkness and pressure barely registered, but then they began to pull.

SFX: WET TEARING THEN HEAVY SLOPPING ON THE GROUND

There was a moment of resistance before Gary split wetly in half, spilling viscera across the fire and platform. All the dancers broke into wild cheers and laughter, embracing each other, fucking right there on the floor. The sound of chewing was barely audible as the shadows sank back into the dark. The corn king was dead. London would last another year.

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Narrator: Well I suppose that’s one less Gary! I say good riddance to the bugger. HA! Is it me or am I sensing a pattern… ghastly, not so gentle men facing unfortunate ends? Yes, yes, it’s probably just me, I see patterns in everything.

But that’s part of my problem. I see too much. When your internal need for truth swells and overflows your boundaries it leaves you open…defenceless, armour chinked open to expose all that vulnerable flesh. Then the world can reach out and mark you, cutting a skein of traumatic lacerations that spool out across your skin to fester and never truly heal. They claw their way….through you.

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The Institute

The Scientist:

SFX: CLICK OF A TAPE RECORDER

I need to get something down, the work over the last two weeks has been the most engaging of my career, we’re breaking new ground. We’re on the cusp of something fantastic, a paradigm shift. Ah, uhmm I’m getting ahead of myself, I need to give an account of what led up to this and the event that changed everything.

It’s been a long winter. The days have been short and cold for a year’s worth of seasons. My bedroom windows are rimed with ice each morning - Jack Frost’s fractal doodlings. I have been sequestered here pursuing my research in the company of greater names than mine. Pearson alone made several of this generation’s key discoveries. Still, all of us are here to extend the boundaries of the known, delving into the depths, trying to resolve the contradictory foundations of reality itself.

The appearance of the phantom has shattered our shared assumptions about what is possible. It danced through our community, grossly fleshy and corporeal, before evaporating like morning mist. We are all familiar with strange, counter-intuitive behaviour at the microscopic level but this is world’s apart. None of us dreamt something like this could happen. It was like a fairy tale had broken free from the page to strut around the room.

Under other circumstances it could have been dismissed, too many late nights and a lack of rest conjuring up fancies and hallucinations - easy enough to laugh off after a full night’s sleep. No, not this time, there were too many of us. We all saw it and we all saw each other seeing.

For a long month we’ve been working like ants, feverishly toiling to meet the professor’s targets before his next fund-raising circuit. It has been a challenging time, rewarding and difficult in equal measure. The party was a welcome release, a celebration of another grind complete and an attempt to forestall the knowledge of the next push looming over us.

We gathered in the entrance hall - it’s the largest open space in the institute. Everyone brought something along, food and drink of course, and those who had the skill and temperament brought their instruments. Even though I had been working here for a number of years, the amount of happy accidents still surprises me. Once the party was underway an impromptu oom-pah band formed and my jollier colleagues led everyone present in a rousing and improvised sing along. Everyone shouted out verses in their mother tongues. The lyrics clattered together, winding in and out of each other, creating an unpredictable rhythm that contrasted marvellously with the regularity of the band. We marched together, lines weaving together then breaking apart into loose knots after the inevitable laughing collisions.

It was the people at the edges of the room who realised something was amiss first. It took a while longer for the rest of us to notice the change. I realised when I bounced off the person in front of me when everyone came to a halt.

The lights were flickering out in stuttered groups across the walls and ceiling, uneven patches of darkness jumping jerkily around the room. The light and dark danced, flashing off and on as if communicating. A few others shared my thought and hushed discussions broke out between us suggesting and discarding coding ciphers, trying to time the flashes down to binary or morse. The more sensible and sober among us went to check the corridors ringing the hall. The lights were still on, glaring bright antiseptic white, banishing shadows to distant corners of the building.

Then we drowned in darkness.

Shocked gasps leapt from many throats, mine included. Then a pale white figure appeared through the wall, moving backwards, facing away from us, lit like a floor lamp floating through the room. Its skin was luminescent and its head was crowned with a mop of fiery hair standing on end like kelp on the seafloor. As it turned we saw its eyes were black, split with a vertical green canine slit, sitting like a lost opal in a rocky cleft. A gashed smile full of broken tumble down teeth gnawed emptily at the air as a voice surrounded us, encased us in deafening softness. Alien syllables rang round, thundering through my mind, opaque and unknowable, breaking down doors deep within my psyche, speaking to something in a language not spoken for aeons of evolutionary divergence. Time passed and I came back to myself standing in the same room, surrounded by the same people, blinking in the same light, all of us looking to one another for explanation. We were all similarly affected, greyed out, smudged.

Small shaken groups formed and over the rest of the evening we pieced a collective memory together from the fragments of our individual experiences. The wraith had flitted around the room picking out some of us to stand in front and stare, its eyes drinking deep. Most who remembered holding that gaze were overwhelmed with the presence, the terrible attention. Some retained more, a sense of the spectre’s movement as it flickered away, appearing in front of someone else suddenly as if the movement was lit by a stuttering strobe. Others remembered the cold weight of its hand on their shoulders, its fingers hard as steel. It left the room through one of the doors on the upper gallery, shifting up a storey without touching the stairs.

All I remembered was the pressure of the words, if that’s what they were, crushing my sense of self. They left me a psychic husk trembling in resonance, bathed in an alien sea of sound. It wasn’t a comforting feeling, crushed below an indifferent attention immeasurably larger than myself. It was too much, far too much.

At that moment and on that evening none of us could discern any motive or emotion from the figure. Our work has focused on the how - I’m sure the why will reveal itself soon enough.

The next few days were overtaken with crazed industry fuelled by a unity of purpose that was intoxicating. Petty office disputes and personal quibbles have been set aside and all of us are too driven to rest. We are the finest minds of three generations attacking the same mystery, the same appearance and departure, the same baffling opacity. There was almost nothing to hold onto, nothing to guide our research. We were working in the dark. It is liberating. The insanity of our shared experience lets us entertain avenues of enquiry that would have seen us ejected from the institute and hounded out of respectable society before.

My personal investigation has coalesced around dream and hallucination. To me, the apparition had more in common with a figure from a nightmare than an interloper from some nearby dimension whisked here by some wonder of technology. Could the divide between dream and waking life be malleable? Is there some strange porosity between them? Can the imagination and its denizens cross over into this world independent of our creative acts? I need to know! The possibilities set my mind ablaze!

I believe that civilisation is dreamt into being and history is an endless procession of people playing out dreams they’ve seen projected on the inside of their skulls. How many horrors have been acted out in the world because of a population’s misguided faith in some perverse corrupted vision? How much of a stretch is it to assume that the traffic could be the other way? That all that bile could condense and manifest right here in its own body! As I figure it, the apparition is some sort of shared nightmare, manifested somehow from the intensity of our focus. I don’t know what it means but the implications are chilling.

My work remains largely theoretical and research led. I read everything, constructing a historiography of the oneiric trying to determine its role in shaping the material world. I need to know how a culture’s stories about itself, both those trumpeted and those told in whispers, determine the appearance of the unexplainable. Is there a cultural factor to how the supernatural manifests? I still need to know.

The practical experiments I’ve run are all concerned with altered states of consciousness. I did sleep studies and have begun fleshing out the procedures for tests with powerful intoxicants. I measure everything I can, every signal from the body and any change in the environment. The main obstacle is repeatability, people are too changeable moment to moment, let alone from night to night.

My colleagues are more concerned with the material fact of the spectre rather than its possible origin. Gormann’s was the most immediately useful. He’d been working on propagating synthflesh grown from stem cells harvested from their eventual donor. With this ready supply of malleable tissue he switched his focus to providing enough matter for the rest of our experiments. Together Bissett and Patel have been working to induce the liminality of the spectre, to allow flesh to pass through inert objects and still be recognisably alive on the other side. Chen, of course, is obsessed with its instant translocation. Her room is covered with the residue of samples smeared across the walls at high speed and their impacts and her laughter echoed down the corridor. None of us have produced anything worthwhile yet but it is an enjoyable respite.

SFX: EERIE SOUND IN THE BACKGROUND

What was that….wait..what was that??

Noise in the background

What was that? Wait….what was that?!

MUSIC BREAK

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The Scientist:

SFX: CLICK OF A TAPE RECORDER

The spectre returned, Jesus (choked sob) it came back. It ripped through the institute. The brutality of it has shown me how hollow my theoretical masturbation is. I need a practical edge. I need to stop it.

This time it picked out smaller audiences, a blessing for those of us left. We pieced together its dislocating work from the stuttering video captured by the lab’s security system. The end result was inhuman. 11 of us are dead.

It appeared from nowhere again, stepping from a hidden door. The air blurred like heat haze over tarmac then there it was, resplendent. In every video my colleagues remain unaware of their visitor. They continued their work diligently, oblivious that its inspiration is standing a few scant feet behind them. What happens next haunts me. I see it every time my eyes close, etched in shining crimson.

A trembling handful of moments pass as it observes their work. Then it’s in front of them, not a step taken to cover the distance. It placed a hand under each chin, tilting eleven gazes up to meet its eyes, then that terrible stare drank deep from each. A span of seconds pass before smoke pours from their mouths as their eyes turn into candles and burn holes in their skulls. There is no reaction from the spectre. It holds on, untroubled by the heat, watching the fiery ruin of my colleagues’ skulls before releasing its grip and letting them slump empty-headed to the floor. Each time it stayed a moment more then disappeared, leaving us to find its trace.

The bodies were discovered the following day, all the victims had been working late. We pieced together the timeline from the security footage. The timestamps show that the phantasm killed then went immediately to the next victim. The audio of their deaths is horrific. The sound of their cooking flesh and wet gurgling swallowing screams choked by the flames. It broke me. I’ll hear it till the day I die. After the first we watched the rest on mute, their deaths playing out in silence.

All eleven had been picked out for an appraisal at the party, none of us can think what it means. There was no pattern to the victims. Any of us could have traded places with them and there would be the same amount of connections and distinctions. Their bodies are in the morgue below us. I felt their empty stares accusing me as we rolled the drawers closed.

MUSIC BREAK

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The Scientist:

SFX: CLICK OF A TAPE RECORDER

It is a month later. My dead colleagues remain on ice. There hasn’t been a third visitation but the terrifying prospect hangs over us. It drives us all to keep working. A few of us cracked, they’re confined to their rooms, getting rest mandated by the professor. The rest of us keep pushing on despite the terrible dreams stalking our sleep.

I’ve been working closely with Gormann. We’ve been propagating brain and nerve matter from our colleagues in the morgue, trying to grow enough to create a simulacra of a nervous system. We need something that can dream, something that can respond to stimuli, something we can measure. I’m certain that there is some factor that links them all to that cursed spectre.

If we can create our chimeric dream subject then we can run simulated dreams through it constantly. A few colleagues have been creating a story generator. It creates narrative structures procedurally, something unique each time but drawing from the same source material, iterating on it. They’ve used everything we’ve all experienced since the spectre arrived and all the research I’ve done on imaginary horror. I’m certain that it will help bridge the gap to whatever plane it exists on. That or draw it back to us. Chen thinks she’s cracked the secret to its instant travel. She’s created snares to hold it in place. The more time passes the more convinced I am that it is a manifestation of some dark and suppressed horror shunted from our collective imagination. I will bridge this gap and pull it back. I will drag it through its invisible door and trap it here so we can exorcise it, burn it from reality completely.

I see the empty eyes of my colleagues everywhere I look. Gormann and I took samples of their spine and brains through the scorched cavities in their skulls, it seemed easiest. I’m sure they would understand, see the repurposing of their bodies as a fitting tribute. I know I would. They must do too. In a way we’re giving them a second life.

Tomorrow we are yoking together all our work. We will tear open a portal to whatever world it hides in. My colleagues will be the focus and bloodhound. We will find it. I must have my revenge.

MUSIC BREAK

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SFX: CLICK OF A TAPE RECORDER

SFX: SOUND OF ALARMS, FAINT SCREAMING, CRASHES AND BANGS

We were wrong, oh god we were so wrong. The experiment worked, we tore a hole through to somewhere else and so much horror came pouring out. It’s been slaughtering my colleagues, I barely got away. We’re hunted by personal nightmares, oh god.

This message is for anyone who comes after, you have to shut it off, the hole has to be closed, you have to…….

SFX: EXPLOSION CRASHING INTO THE ROOM

Oh GOD!

SFX: SCREMS, MONSTER ROARING, ELDRITCHY SOUNDS

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Narrator: …Hummm perhaps that place… the Institute seems so… No, just me and my silly patterns again. So there we have it, episode 2 in the proverbial can and catapulted into the ether for all of your hungry little ears to feast upon. Delicious! Now, do remember to tell us what you think. Drop us a review with as many stars as you can muster, say hello on social media, but if you see me on the street do not approach I have mace! The mediaeval kind! Ha… Extra spiky. We’ll see you next time. You know what they say, reality writes itself.