[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 12

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11}

---

There was an indeterminate feeling somewhere between exhilaration and anxiety, watching the Belusarius being overrun. Privy to knowledge of a rapidly spreading contagion which she had no reason to fear as she’d succumbed to and become a part of it long ago. This creeping sickness which would have horrified her when she was healthy now comforted her instead. The more it spread, the safer she would be once discovered.

If any healthy part of her mind survived that might’ve recoiled in disgust, witnessing this perverse corruption propagate among the crew, it was more or less resigned to it now. There was no longer a voice which pleaded with her to work against it, that she was still human, that the immense creature plodding about just outside the reach of Belusarius’ external lights might still be stopped.

All she felt capable of saving from it now was Violet. The one sweet, unspoiled thing she could still pluck from this unfolding nightmare before it consumed everything. As she made her way to her room, she caught herself studying the figure of a girl in her early twenties as she tightened a terminal contact in some sort of electrical box. “I’d kill for her legs”, she thought.

Rounding the corner, her path was blocked by a pair of men in blue mechanic’s coveralls. “I told you, shithead. Do you think I’m high now? Drunk? Making things up? There’s one, right in front of you, just like I said.” They both wore some bizarre sort of headgear, black metal with lenses for eyes, held to their faces by elastic straps. When she approached to ask if she knew either of them, the two turned tail and fled down the corridor into darkness. It troubled her but only briefly, as there was sleeping to do.

Her room grew increasingly messy with time as she’d done little else besides sleep and the bare minimum her position aboard the Belusarius required of her. More and more of her life was spent unconscious lately. If she were her own patient, Olivia thought, she’d peg it as escapism. But even in sleep, there was no escape from it.

She sat down in front of the mirror, turned on the lights and scrutinized her face. Wrinkles at the corners of her eyes were turning into noticeable cracks. Possible to conceal with makeup for now but she would need at least a partial face transplant soon. Olivia resolved to minimize her expressions so as to stress the skin as little as possible, until a donor could be found.

She rolled her head, then flexed her arms searching for telltale clicks and pops indicating something was amiss inside. Nothing. Vivian had really done a bang up job. No doubt she was getting quite a bit of practice recently. “I’ll have to get her to teach me how she does it” Olivia muttered. Moving on to her midsection, abdomen and legs, she noticed a growing crease where her dress pinched her waist. If left alone the skin would eventually wear out and split. Easy enough to take a belt shaped strip of skin from the same donor as the facial tissue.

She stared into the mirror and blinked a few times, revisiting her thoughts. She knew it to be perverse. But as if the strangeness were slowly enveloping her, it became more and more difficult over time to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with any of it. The part of her which once recoiled at human suffering was being replaced, piecemeal, by reinforced memories of the torments she’d endured as a girl.

“People are fundamentally rotten. They deserve much worse than what I’ve done.” she thought. Yet her heart wrestled with it. It seemed a distorted view of things. As far from the truth as a child’s naive belief in the inherent goodness of all people. The truth should be somewhere in the middle, shouldn’t it? But whenever she tried to steer her mind in that direction, it was somehow diverted back to thoughts of her youth. Of the group of girls she’d earnestly tried to befriend day after day, though they would mock her, steal her things and on one occasion had held her down in a field outside the school to force-feed her dirt and leaves.

The more she fought it, the more these pathways in her brain were reinforced. For the first time she felt aware of something tampering with her conscious mind. So subtly before that she’d not suspected it, but the faint outline of it was now visible to her, in a manner of speaking. Her eyes widened. She stood up and paced frantically, unsure whether to shout threats at whatever it was. In what direction? And what to call it?

Memories of the immense eye outside the porthole returned. And Dietrich’s tall tales of what he’d seen out in the open sea. This, too, she refused. Not by her own volition. Something diverted her from it, however hard she tried to focus. Sudden nausea washed over her and she struggled briefly to remain upright. The same feeling you get when you’re being watched, magnified a billion times.

The feeling had never been this intense, but she knew, or suspected very strongly that it was the sensation of the creature’s focus brought to bear on her. As it could see her, so too could she glimpse in her mind the nature of the thing which studied her now. No human language sufficed to describe it. It was vast, like a skeletal web spreading out before her. But delicate, dry. Leather and hair. Paper, string and wood. Dust. Preserved tissue stretched over the gaps. Gently waving, pulsating, and whispering to her so quietly she couldn’t make out the words.

“The real you”, she muttered. “Behind the puppets. At the end of every umbilical.” She felt the reflection of deep satisfaction, that she might look upon it knowingly. But also intense desperation. Longing for the only thing that could make it complete.

“I no longer want James. I understand now. He’s exactly where he needs to be. If I were to remove him, this world would be agony by contrast with the perfect bliss he’s enveloped in. I thought...I don’t know. I thought I could replace Lisa. The secret fantasies of a childish heart. I know now that there’s nothing he needs to be rescued from. But there is another. A girl, Violet. She was taken from the hospital.”

Long, raspy breaths followed. Then more whispering, but this time loud enough to hear. There was a stilted rhythm to it, neither poetry nor song. “I am well pleased with you, heirophant. You deliver them so willingly. As you wish, but one remains.” It took a moment to work it out. Vivian and the doctor. One more would make three

“One more thing” Olivia pleaded, “release your grip on my mind. That was part of the deal.” Only silence. The heavy presence in the room then seemed to evaporate. Withdrawing in all directions like wispy tendrils of nothing, finally settling into the corners as shadows which looked as if they belonged there.

It left her feeling intensely violated. But as she searched for reasons why, she came up with very little that would stick. She was after all remade by it, from flesh animated by its own energy. There was no real degree of separation anymore, and so, nothing for it to violate which was not simply another of its appendages. It had crept into her, becoming her, so gradually that there was no definitive point of transition she could pin down.

This epiphany struck through her chest and pierced her silent, leathery heart. The whole time on some level she’d clung to the hope of disentangling herself from all of this and returning to her life on the surface. Only now could she fully accept that there was nothing to escape that she was not one in the same with. Its interests were indirectly, and in some cases directly consonant with her own.

If somehow she could kill it, she too would die. As would Violet. If she could escape with her to the surface, what then? It would drag itself out of the sea, every weapon tried against it would fail, and in time the whole of humanity would be remade, consumed or entranced by it. With none left alive to cannibalize for parts, Olivia realized, they would all slowly wear down and fall apart. It could only sustain itself by spreading beyond the Earth in search of new life, outrunning the decay.

Reason afforded her no hope. Only a glimpse of a dead universe, rendered so by a sort of perverse necrotizing contagion. Down that path lies madness. So her hindbrain took over. To Hell with reason. The fate of the universe was not her immediate problem. She knew very well how small and feeble she was, and that her goals should be proportionate.

The wound from finally giving up on James had not yet closed, the thought of his indignant misery if removed from the fantasy world constructed for him still pained her. But Violet was not yet so lost as that. For however long it allowed, Violet might still be saved from all of this. It was something Olivia felt bound to, a promise she’d made and could yet fulfill. Redemption.

She was yanked from her reflection by a growing commotion outside. The peephole revealed very little except the opposite door, and someone running or briskly walking past every couple of seconds. Whatever it was, only one way to find out.

As she trekked down the long corridor past sections intermittently lit by flickering lights, others passed to her left or right in apparent excitement to reach that cylinder’s common area. But it turned out to be empty save for listless sub pilots and engineers milling about. The real action, whatever it was, appeared to be happening in the central sphere.

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 13!}