Darwinia

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 cannot die!” Sullivan insisted.

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.