[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 11

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

For whatever reason thinking, feeling humans who imagined themselves to be morally upright designed what Hank felt certain was the closest possible approximation of Hell, and Rod had just endured several round trips. The possibility dawned on Hank that the quivering, demented creature they hoped to rescue from his cell would not be the man who went in. His stomach gurgled with either hunger or nausea. It was the unsettling feeling that could be either one, difficult to put into words but which everyone’s experienced at some point.

Across the room Hank noticed James slumped over the console. Slightly aggravating. But he thought back on the trauma of crossing that expanse of frigid water and impossible pressure and decided James could sleep as much as he liked for the next few days. Unconsciousness was a sort of brief escape from the hopelessness of their situation, more cause for envy than irritation.

James rubbed his eyes and sat up. Soon after he registered and accepted that he was neither aboard the Tartarus, nor in the familiar rusted confines of the foundry. Instead he found himself back inside of his cell. Laughter issued forth uncontrollably, wavering at times, threatening to turn into sobbing but never making good on it. Was it really possible he hadn’t escaped?

His neck was sore from the last injection. Rubbing it and withdrawing his hand produced a tiny red blotch where residual blood from the puncture soaked into his finger. Waves of anxiety impacted his mind, gripped it for a moment and then passed one after the next. It was a reality he could not accept but which confronted his senses every second his eyes remained open.

He got up and spent a few minutes pacing around the perimeter of the cell, touching things, smelling them, challenging what he still hoped was a cruel illusion to keep it’s seams hidden. Just as he felt ready to conclude there were none, he looked in the mirror and saw Rodney’s battered face looking back.

He tried several things following that discovery. The first was to lay back down and try to get some sleep. The same principle where one reboots a computer to fix some serious operating system malfunction, he hoped would apply here as well, against all odds. When he sat up an hour later and still saw Rodney in the mirror his next recourse was to smash his head into the sink over and over until blood ran down his face, mixing with equally salty tears.

He wasn’t confused, exactly. He knew what he saw, but felt frustrated because it was something he knew couldn’t be so and yet his eyes kept telling him it was. Poking, pulling at and otherwise deforming his face did nothing to change it back. Curling up in the entry/exit hatch and shouting that he wasn’t fooled by whoever was doing this likewise accomplished nothing, as Rodney’s now bloody face still greeted him every time he checked the mirror.

Soon he was seriously entertaining the thought of fashioning a sharp implement and cutting this false face off of his skull. The state of medical technology permitted full recovery from this and even improvement, while the pain of being forced to witness and accept an impossibility exceeded the pain that he imagined slicing off his own face would entail.

He wouldn’t get the chance. At first, the only sign anything was happening was a subtle change in temperature and a buildup of pressure on his eardrums. It soon became obvious that waking up as Rodney was only the beginning, and that his perception would continue to betray him in increasingly perverse ways. Logically it all had to be coming from his own mind, and he knew that, but as it grew worse he struggled to believe that his own brain could torment itself this effectively.

The first symptoms were visual distortion. The dated floral pattern on his foam mattress began to move. Not going anyplace but rather visibly animating, the small flowers closing and opening, the vines they grew from writhing as if alive. This animation played out over the whole surface of the bed. It was the sort of illusion he expected would halt if he looked directly at it but it defied him and just kept on doing the impossible.

He resolved, then, to look at something else only to find that every surface in the habitat was undergoing continuous visual mutation. The hexagonal raised reinforcing pattern on the door of the small cabinet to one side of the sink reduced itself inwardly to smaller and smaller sub-hexagons. The closer he looked, the smaller the tiniest indivisible hexagonal unit became.

Some comfort came from the recognition that these effects were medically understood to be typical of certain types of hallucinatory experience. Whatever was happening, it was because the conditions of the cell were acting on parts of his brain responsible for interpreting vision and recognizing patterns. This helped slow his racing heart somewhat but it did not give him the control over his perception he hoped for.

As if to punish him for trying to understand it, the vision grew suddenly more severe. Patterns of rust along one of the steel pole safety grips next to the toilet slid up and down it carelessly, not concerned with the fact that rust is normally stationary.

Visual confusion he’d already noticed in the hexagonal ribbing of the cabinet door grew so strong that he became lost in it. Variations on hexagons, triangles and squares filled his vision and struggled to integrate smoothly with one another despite their different number of sides..

Hours might’ve passed before he broke free. There was no longer any reliable perception of time passing. The closest thing was the eventual realization that he was starving. But in this state, navigating to where the liquid food substitute was dispensed seemed impossible. Every nook and crevice he became immersed in was a whole universe unto itself and anything even slightly complex in a geometric sense exploded into a web of complexity he couldn’t look away from.

It was all taken from elements of objects within his vision but distorted so much that the best he could do was to infer where he must be in the small spherical room by which objects the currently visible fractal distortions were based on. He made the mistake of looking at his arm and fell over babbling in fright. It was a pulsating meat stalk. Every individual hair was distinguishable from the rest and they were waving like the cilia of a microorganism.

The color of his scrapes and blemishes was also amplified so that instead of being barely visible against Rod’s naturally reddish skin tone they were a bright angry red and looked infected. The spots on his finger joints where skin scrunched up as his fingers straightened were “breathing”, as were his largest pores when he thought to check them. The weathered skin on his hands looked elephantine, and when he made the even more foolish mistake of looking in the mirror again he couldn’t comprehend what type of animal he was.

There was an intensity and prominence of his eyes that made them seem to glow and pulsate. Every little facial hair was especially visible and gently waving like grass in a sustained wind. Blemishes and scratches glowed red and he went through several second stretches where he forgot who Rod was and instead wondered frantically who the stranger in the mirror could possibly be.

His heart was once again racing and threatened to burst. The furthest parts of the room were writhing, twisting, and pulsating in neon relief. He resigned himself to helpless weeping and prayer that it would end, but as the air pressure increased and forced him to keep yawning to equalize reality just continued to collapse around him.

It was relentless, and indifferent to his fear. The more he wished it would plateau the more the change accelerated to spite him. Compared to this, the foundry was a familiar comfort. He found himself wishing he could will himself asleep and return there. Anything to escape the false body he’d woken up in and the horrifying disruption of his senses that followed.

Faces began appearing in objects. Recognizably humanoid but elongated and gaunt, as if starved. Their eyes were closed until, wondering if they were alive, he looked directly at one. The eyes snapped open and it shrieked. James cried out too, stumbled backwards and resumed weeping. It was the most visceral fear he’d ever felt.

But every surface had one or more faces, so there was no corner he could hide in where he did not eventually notice at least a small one which was dormant until he became aware of it, after which it sprang to life and screamed at him with wide, empty eyes. He was ready to die if that would make it stop. But before he could take inventory of the methods available in the tiny cell to hang or stab himself, every element of the hallucination began to unify.

The distortions on every surface now had a definite direction to them, all of which flowed towards a single spot on the wall above his bed. The fractal web bent towards it as though being pulled into a black hole. And soon that spot did begin to grow dark. There was no logical reason, given the lighting, why a shadow should appear there but like everything else he’d witnessed over the past hour it had no regard for what ought to be, only continued to grow even as he willed it to stop.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 12!}