Turning in that direction, I lurched to my feet and immediately became aware of a pale object a few paces away. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted properly to the darkness, but the object seemed to have human proportions. It was slumped against a discarded wooden box in much the same attitude as a rag doll would have assumed. I stared at it, trying not to cringe, as a terrible idea wormed into my mind followed by an equally terrible dawning of recognition.
Sharly!
I had found Sharly’s body.
Extraordinary situations, I have learned, elicit extraordinary human responses. I was already far too shocked by what had been happening to react to the ghastly discovery in a normal manner – instead I felt a pang of rage, resentment and hatred towards the so-called investigators from Icewell Exec who had been so careless, so anxious to get back to their warm offices on the mainland, that they had allowed a thing like this to happen. Had they done their job properly, Sharly would have been found three weeks earlier and given a decent burial. She wouldn’t have been left to bloat and rot down here in the oil well’s stinking black sump.
I think it was with some notion of determining the full extent of the investigators’ crime that I approached Sharly’s body and knelt down before it. My gaze hunted over the human wreckage, recording the sickening distortions of the broken legs, the multiple seepages of blood through her clothing, the lacerations which had disfigured that beautiful face…
Oddly, though, very oddly, Sharly’s head was upright, not touching the wooden box, apparently supported by a firm neck.
Stricken, bemused by new visions of horror, I slowly put out my hand and touched her cheek. The blackly contused eyelids snapped open.
“Hello, Jack,” she burbled. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I screamed. Throwing myself backwards from her, I screamed as only a person who has been totally betrayed by reality knows how. There are some things that simply never should happen to a person, and one of them had happened to me and my entire being protested about it until the moment when screaming was no longer enough. Eventually I had to look at Sharly again and try to cope with the situation.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Jack,” she said in a voice which seemed to force its way through a larynx filled with water. “I can’t harm you.”
“You… are… dead,” I accused, raising myself to a sprinter’s crouch in readiness for the flight which might become necessary at any second.
She smiled, and to this day I wish she hadn’t. “How can I be dead if I’m talking to you? Come on, Jack – take me out of here.” She extended her arms, begging for my help.
For a moment I wavered. I wanted Sharly to be miraculously alive, and I was in no condition to think rationally. Perhaps she had survived the fall – just as I had done. Perhaps she had somehow managed to cling on to life down here in spite of her awful injuries and the cold and the wet. Then I noticed that the effort of speaking, of expelling air, had caused black fluids to spill down her chin. I backed off a little further, shaking my head.
She must have been able to interpret the reaction because she lowered her arms and the ghastly caricature of a smile left her face. “I wanted to die,” she said. “I tried to die, but it was no use. I may have to live a very long time… but I don’t want it to be down here, Jack… not like this. You’ve got to help me.”
“I… I don’t understand.” That was true – and most of all I couldn’t understand what was keeping me from running. Perhaps it was just that my mind had reached its saturation point as far as horror and fear were concerned, enabling me to hold my ground and carry on something like a normal conversation.
“Perhaps you understand better than you realize…” Her throaty, bubbling voice was almost lost in the sound of the primary pump. “I was supposed to be the great warp engineer, but your instincts were better than mine, Jack. You said it was like… dangling a fishing line in a distant part of the universe. I laughed at that because I knew how empty space actually is… but we caught something… then it caught me.”
I nodded because it seemed the only thing to do. A black multi-legged nightmare was roaming the icewell above me, presumably in search of new victims, and I was crouching in the throbbing darkness at the bottom of the well beside the undead corpse of the woman I had loved. And all I could do was nod my head.
“Zeta-loci are highly visible objects as they drift about the galaxy… to certain kinds of senses, that is… I was being pursued…wrong word – a virus does not pursue its host… tried to escape through the zeta-locus, but found I was trapped… chose the most suitable instrument of change, but there was resistance…”
The hissing beat of the pump was obliterating many words, words whose import was totally bizarre, but I was oddly – almost telepathically – in tune with what was being said to me. My understanding was only partial, but it came quickly because I was preconditioned. I had believed all along that Sharly’s was not an ordinary suicide. She had been possessed by a disembodied life form that the icewell’s warp had somehow dredged from out of space, and rather than submit to it she had walked off the top rail of Level Nine. The tragedy was that her bravery had been in vain. The life force that had locked itself on and into her was so powerful and tenacious that it could compel a ruined body to go on living. Sharly was now Sharly-Plus, and her main preoccupations were those of an alien being…
“I can’t walk on these legs, Jack,” she was saying in her laboured gargling voice. “The bones are smashed… no longer work as levers… but the arms are all right… and you could get me to Field Control, Jack. You remember how I used to talk about reciprocity… the need for a two-way exchange… I know how to do it now … you can make it possible for me to escape…”
“You’re too late,” I said harshly, marvelling at my ability to think and speak. “The thing you’re running from – it’s already here.”
“But that’s impossible!” Her head turned jerkily. “I would have known… my senses can’t be so…”
“I jumped from Level Three to get away from it. They’re all dead up there.”
“So that’s why you’re here… I thought I had finally managed to get through to you…” Her eyelids closed, wavered and opened. “But you couldn’t have escaped from a Taker so easily… Did you see it?”
“I saw it, all right.” The memory made my present situation almost bearable. “Black thing. Legs.”
“How big?”
“It was the width of the gallery.”
“That means it’s still trying to emerge… still tied to the alpha-locus…” Her eyelids flickered again, interrupting her blind white stare like signal lamp shutters. “Jack, you’re going to carry me to Field Control…”
I still think there must have been some element of mental control involved, in spite of all she told me about the nature of the Takers and what it would mean to this planet if one of them were to be set free here. Otherwise, I don’t know how I could have borne to pick her up. She stank, my once-beloved Sharly did, and she was cold and the lower half of her body felt like pieces of miscellaneous junk in a plastic sack. Perhaps the worst thing of all was the way she slid her arm around my neck. The movement felt so natural it reminded me that Sharly wasn’t truly dead, that her own original personality was trapped in the decaying shell, being used by an alien creature which had no right to be on Earth. For an instant I almost squeezed her, to try communicating across the gulf that separated us, but commonsense reasserted itself just in time.