Dead Sea

“You’re coming with us,” George said.

“No, no. That’s out of the question, I’m afraid.” He had a brief coughing spell, then wiped his mouth. “I’m too sick, you see. I wouldn’t have the strength for a trip through hyperspace… no, I’ll stay here. But you young people, you need to get out before it comes back and this machine should do nicely.”

“You saw what that contraption did to Fabrini,” Elizabeth said, “and you still want to use it?”

“We have to try, don’t we?” George said.

She just shook her head, disgusted by the idea.

Cushing explained what had happened to Fabrini in all its gruesome details. Greenberg listened, nodding the whole while.

“Well… I would hazard a guess that whatever vortex the alien opened was not a good one. This machine, its purpose, is no doubt to project matter between dimensions and across the void of stars… but we’ll never know what the alien was attempting. Maybe he had it trained on the fifth dimension or the twentieth for that matter. I can hazard a guess that this awful place your friend stepped into was alien both physically and vitally. A place where matter and energy are not as we understand them.”

He explained that Fabrini’s basic atomic structure was probably particulated, that he underwent something of an interdimensional metamorphosis. His molecules underwent a matter-energy transformation and then back again. A phase in matter, like water going from ice to liquid to steam, back to ice again. Fabrini dematerialized and then re-materialized, matter to energy and then energy back to matter. And probably in the blink of an eye. Except that when teleported to that other dimension, his atoms were re-assembled according to the physical laws of that nightmare dimension… a place where your limbs could be disconnected by miles, yet be connected. A place where your consciousness, through some freakish set of variables, could become disassociated from your body.

“But he was still alive,” Menhaus said, swallowing. “We could hear him… his mind was still alive.”

“Yes, yes, terrible. Again, we can only speculate. Unlike his body which was disorganized atomically… his mind must have remained intact. The energy of his thoughts, his consciousness, were somehow divorced from his physical self and will probably exist forever in one form or another.”

That just about took George’s breath away. Menhaus looked like he wanted to be sick. The idea of Fabrini existing until the end of time or beyond it as a conscious, aware, screaming cloud of atoms… it was unthinkable.

Greenberg said that time, as well as matter, must be horribly distorted in that place. While only moments passed here, thousands of years must have passed there. The best Greenberg could come up with for that ghostly image of Fabrini that drifted back out of the field was that it must have been some sort of reflection… one caught somewhere between the ethereal and the corporeal, but with a highly unstable molecular structure. Like a shadow, he said, the way shadows must be in that place of deranged physics.

“The Fog-Devil,” George said, plugging a cigarette in his mouth and giving it flame, “I’m guessing that it’s not native to this place, right? That maybe it slipped out of some other dimension, something like that.”

Greenberg nodded. “I suspect it to be of extradimensional origin. I can’t… no, I can’t even concieve of the sort of place where such a creature could be natural. Maybe that place your friend went. Regardless, it is a living and sentient being, I think. A sort of biological firmament of anti-matter that exists by ingesting or assimiliating fields of electrical energy. If you can imagine a nebulous, radioactive mass of cellular anti-matter that feeds on the raw, untapped electrical energy of thinking minds… actually sucks them dry, then you’d be close. Anti-matter with force, intellect, and direction… dear God, what an abomination.”

“It came today,” Menhaus said. “It got one of our friends and Elizabeth’s aunt… but it’ll come again, won’t it? I mean, you said in your letter that it cycles, that it builds up.”

“Yes, it’s cyclical in nature, I think. It’s pretty pointless to apply third-dimensional reason or rationale to something that technically cannot exist in the first place… but, yes, it seems to be cyclical.” Greenberg had to rest a moment. All the excitement and talking were taxing him. “If you know the stories of the Cyclops and the Korsund, then you understand the destructive, deadly power of this creature. I believe it shows irregularly, maybe not for ten years or fifty, but that when it does, it leaves nothing alive with a rational brain. It hones in on the electrical fields of these thinking minds and chews them down to the marrow, if you will.”

“You couldn’t hide from something like that,” Cushing said. “It could find you anywhere, anytime.”

Greenberg sighed. “Yes, exactly.”

“Something that eats minds,” George said. “Incredible.”