Dark Planet: What the Eyes Behold

Mike lives in California where he writes horror and works as a writer/graphic designer for the San Diego Daily Transcript. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Random Realities and Dark RegionsThis story was originally published in the Spring 1994 issue of After Hours and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award.

I wake and open my eyes.

I am lying on a stiff bed. I can move nothing from the neck down. Plastic tubes are stuffed in my mouth, down my throat. I can taste them. The ceiling is all I can see, a boring mass of grey cottage cheese. If I were lying in piss I wouldn't have known. If my feet were on fire I wouldn't have known. But I can't smell flesh burning.

My eyes roll and my throat is thick with tubes, constricting. I do not have strength to speak. If I were to try, I have a chilling fear that I would not be able.

I am helpless and numb as my eyes close.

This continues for days ....

I am in an airplane, gripping the sides of an open hatch and looking down on a tiny 'X' marked in chalk on the ground five thousand six hundred and sixty five feet below.

This is my dream.

But I have come to believe that my dreams are only memories of a past I have forgotten.

Forgotten by choice ... or by fate.

I wake and a young nurse is pushing a silver tray of food over my dead chest.

"Immeee ooh eeat." She smiles, her voice a rolling fog of incomprehensible sounds.

I close my eyes against the strangeness. I feel that something, a wet hulking creature, has taken my body and left me only a head on a pillow. "Immeee ee oohh ahh," she drones.

My head is rising. I hear the gears of the cot propping up my torso like a puppet. I open my eyes.

Now the nurse is old, her skin tight like leather over brittle bone. A black thing (an octopus) is pulsing on her forehead, its dark body throbbing as spiny tentacles worm into the pupils of her grey eyes.

"Blind" I managed to whisper.

She is smiling through rotted teeth as the slimy creature sucks and pulses with her dying heart. "Eeeaaatah," she groans, pushing the spoon to my dry lips.

This goes on for days ....

Have you ever had a dream that stayed with you until noon of the next day?

At about eleven o'clock you actually start to think that the dream is just a memory of something that happened a long time ago. Something so horrible that your mind, as a safeguard against combustion, prevents you from recalling as a reality because the truth might just be to much to bear. I feel that this has happened to me.

A doctor is standing over me, his hair chrome, his eyes dark and cold. There is a blackened hole, like a shotgun blast, in his chest, over his heart.

He is smiling.

"How are we feeling today?" His voice is clear, yet harsh.

"You're dying," I tell him as I watch the hole grow wider, burned slowly by an invisible ball of acid.

"You're speech is improving," he says, smiling unaware of the charred nothing enveloping his chest.

"You're dying," I tell him again.

"On the contrary, Peter. I am quite alive, as are you."

For a moment I see him as he is: a handsome man in his late thirties with a jovial smile. His skin is flushed with life, his eyes violent with healing vigor. But the moment passes as moments do. And my vision turns to yellow, fades to rust. His skin turns gray, the hole expands, his bones curl and grow old.

I close my eyes against the death.

And the dream begins again ....

The wind pulls at my hair as I lean form the open hatch. My stomach knots with adrenaline. The howl of blood in my ears is invigorating ... erotic.
I can feel everything.

My hand gripping the cold metal sides of the plane.

The light bristle of material as the wind shreds at my pants.

The heavy weight of the parachute tucked away lightly in my pack.

I am ready to jump.

Five...Four...Three...Two...

A hand pats my shoulder.

I feel it!

One ....

"Now, Peter!": someone screams in my ear.

And I leap into the visible unknown.

My name is Peter Lanta and I am twenty-seven years old. This much I know. The rest is very much a colorless blur.

At 6:00 in the evening, a beautiful woman comes to my bedside. She is escorted by the doctor.

"Peter," he says to me, the hole wide, gaping, disturbing. "This is Barbara. Do you remember her?"

Her hair is strawberry. Her body eloquently formed. Her lips full, red. Her green eyes are swollen and wet with fresh tears. She tries to smile but it is only a sad twitch.

I shake my head slowly. I do not remember her.

"Barbara is you fiance," the doctor reminds me. "She's come to see you."

"Oh Peter..." She burst into tears and takes my hand in hers. Her eyes widen at the touch of my cold, dead flesh.

"He's paralyzed," the doctor reminds her. "The blood there flows slower."

"Oh Peter...." Her head falls on my numb chest and she weeps.

I do not remember her.

Three time a day the nurse with the octopus on her face comes in to drain my urine bag. She comes once during the night to collect my excrement.. I thank her from a web of sleep and medication.

I am falling.

Logically I know this having just jumped from an airplane. But I imagine I am flying, wings outstretched as I soar with the wind, high above my Brothers and Sisters on stable ground. The rip cord of my chute dangles against my chest, but for now I will not touch it ... I am flying ... I am immortal ... I am a God.

Tumbling. Spiraling. Gliding. Flying.

I have a view like no other. The mountains. The trees ... the plains...they are mine ... all mine ....

I open my eyes to darkness. Orderlies, nurses and faceless doctors pass by as blurs in the hall outside of my room.

A shadow stands to the right of my bed.

"Barbara?" I call, turning my head.

"No" the shadow speaks through no mouth. "You have work to do, Young Peter. A child in room 45D is calling on us."

I know the voice. "But I can't move."

"Go," it says. "Time has a pattern."

I am walking through walls, through occupied halls. I am invisible. There is a boy on the bed in room 45D. Clear tubes run from holes in his flesh and hook up to complex machines that beep and hum and breathe. I can see his soul beneath his skin, glowing blue and beating at the confines of its shell.

I reach out to the soul, penetrate the flesh like an insignificant veil, take its hand, take its pain. White hot light envelopes me, blinds my eyes. I feel fear, the boy's fear. Through the pain that bleeds my nerves I tell him that everything is all right.

Then the shadow comes, guiding my hand, forcing me to stuff the glowing soul into a small, black bag.

There is no end the voice whispers as I lie in bed.

You shall be immortal, forever alone and numb

"Why?" I ask the darkness.

Life for death was the agreement. Life for death is what you shall receive.

"I can't remember," I beg.

And so it shall always be.

"What?" The shadow is melting in to the gray.

Death shall become your life.

An old man shares the room with me now. His TV is always on, always too loud.

"Could you turn that down a bit?" I ask him the second night.

"Bad ears, Kid!" he screams back at me. Shell blast in the war knocked the shit outta my drums. If I--"

He begins to ramble about things that probably make perfect sense but do not interest me.

"Time to go, Peter." It is the voice again, deep in my ear.

"Wh-where?" I feel I am wearing glasses with amber lenses.

"Out and about," the shadow whispers.

Everything is the color of rust.

"We've got some soul-catching to do, Pete."

I am rising from the bed...

...Drifting.

Pushing through walls and cots and bodies.

A bright light in room 32F.

"There," the shadow points. "Grab that one before they do."

I reach out with something more than hands and take the light from the twitching body.

"What am I doing?" I ask the shadow.

The voice laughs as I move through rooms, plucking bright lights and stuffing them into black bags.

"Catching fireflies, Pete."

Blue light doused in velvet darkness.

"Catching fireflies for the toads."

Its laughter sends me grabbing and clutching into the dream ... into the memory.

Mine all mine. The great wide open below me.

I pull the rip cord, saddened that my trip will soon be--

The chute doesn't open!

I tug again ... pull again ... falling fast.

My heart hammers in my throat as I jerk the emergency cord ... and it snaps away, flaps useless between my pale fingers.

The ground is coming.

In my face now full speed rushing shitcomingrushing--

I see grey and flickering amoebas of light ... dancing.

A warm hand guides me, asks me, tells me.

"Yes," I say through no mouth. "Help me and I'll help you."

We go to a freeway tonight where a greyhound bus has done brutal somersaults and crushed several cars. The shadow guides me as I catch twenty fireflies, most of them from the bus. The bright souls beat against mangled shells.

The shadow is laughing and smiling and praising...

...but I am thinking and realizing who he is.

My time in the hospital bed is spent hiding my medication from the octopus and trying in vain to move my dead legs.

I am at the bottom of a wooden stairway that an old woman is climbing with the support of a sturdy cane.

The cold shadow whispers: "Two more steps and her cane will fail."

I see the light beneath her flesh and clench my teeth.
"Catch this one quick," the shadow breathes. "The others will be fast to gather her."

...help me and I'll help you....

I take the hand.

Reaching up at the shadow from a broken body, I take its fists in mine.

Do my deeds and you shall walk again, Young Peter.

With those words of hope, my shattered body, imprinted six feet below the earth, driven by the fall, screams "YES!"

The hand pulls me up like roots. "You shall live again," it whispers. "And know death."

"I won't take the old woman!" I scream at the shadow.

"You must," it says without doubt.

"You take her!" I scream, knowing his name.

Silence.

Then the cane snaps.

"You shall live again," the voice echoes, spiraling, spinning. "And know death."

Life for death sounded fair when I was lying shattered in the dirt. One more time around seemed feasible with Death's shadow offering my broken face a second chance.

But waking every day to the paralyzing rust, to acid holes in healthy flesh, to diseases that take form and breathe ... waking to the dying, my vision the color or tarnished silver ... no ... no ....

Life for death seemed fair.

Every death in life has made letting go so much easier.

The cane snaps.

After tumbling, the body twitches at my feet, soul beating at transparent flesh.

I refuse to catch any more flies.

Death points its finger. "Quickly," he repeats. A wind begins to howl. "The Others are coming."

I refuse.

"Our deal was set." The bones of its skull flex and grin. "Life ... for death."

"Catch your own fireflies." I feel my legs growing weak, growing numb. It is working.

Smiling, I follow the golden sparks that have come to take the old woman away.

I wake and open my eyes.

The flowers beside the bed wilt as I watch.

Upstairs in surgery someone is screaming silently because the anesthesia put her to sleep but left her nerves wide awake as the scalpel cuts and latex fingers pull ....

This continues for days ....

At the eleventh hour, Death comes to my bed, smiling through its skull. My body follows the creature through sterile walls as my soul begs to be stuffed in my small black bag.

Back to the Planet's surface.