And so did Fabrini.
He stumbled out of the flow… except he didn’t stumble, he drifted. Like a balloon he drifted out of the flow. He was seized up tight, arms at his sides, frozen stiff as meat in a freezer. His face was locked in some frightening, inanimate cataleptic sort of stupor like Bela Lugosi’s trademark catatonic stare.
That’s when George noticed — as they all did — that Fabrini was transparent. They could see right through him. It wasn’t Fabrini, not really, but more like a reflection of Fabrini. Like he had been replaced by this empyreal, extradimensional wraith.
Menhaus muttered something under his breath and reached out, touched Fabrini. He instantly cried out, his fingers frostbitten as if he’d touched dry ice. Where his fingertips had made contact, Fabrini’s image fluttered, trembled, then began to dissolve and was suddenly not there at all. The rope shuddered in midair, looped around nothing that anyone could see. Then it fell limply to the floor.
Menhaus made a choking, gagging sound, trying to catch his breath. “He was solid, but he was gas… he was solid… I could feel him… but cold, so very cold…”
And then, from the other side of the field, they could hear Fabrini crying out for help. No, he was not just crying, but screaming, begging, pleading to be pulled out of there. Just shrieking his mind away and it was almost too much for anyone standing there. Even Saks looked like he was about to faint.
Cushing, knowing full well the futility of it all, took up a gaff and waded right into the flow, Elizabeth shouting at him to get out of there. He reached through the buzzing blue field with it, reaching around in there for something, anything. But the gaff wasn’t long enough to grab anything if there was indeed anything to grab.
Menhaus took up the rope, cut the loop off it. Then he unscrewed the hook off the end of one of the gaffs and tied it firmly on there. He stepped into the flow with it and, whipping it around over his head like a cowboy about to rope a stray doggie, he tossed it through the field. Then pulled it back. Tossed it and pulled it back. Kept doing it.
“He’s gone,” Saks said.
And he was… yet he wasn’t. You could still hear him from time to time screaming out there for help. That voice would get so loud it would pull your guts out, then so quiet it was like a cry for help coming from a house several streets away in the dead of night.
And George thought: It’s like they’re dragging a river for a corpse.
And that’s exactly what they were doing.
Cushing stayed in the flow with Menhaus and they took turns. Kept at it for maybe ten minutes until they caught a hold of something. They looked at each other with jerky motions in the flow. Whatever they had, they were reeling it in. They stepped from the flow and George helped them land it.
“Maybe… maybe you guys better not do that,” Saks said.
And he was probably right.
But they kept pulling until they dragged something through the field and out of the flow, something like a pile of dusty, filthy rags.
“Jesus,” Menhaus said, turning away.
It was Fabrini.
Or what was left of Fabrini.
Something shriveled and desiccated, dusty and shrunken like a mummy pulled from an Egyptian tomb. That’s what they were seeing. It was a man, but petrified like prehistoric wood. His flesh had gone to a wrinkled, parched leather, seamed and fissured and ancient. Two spidery hands were held out before the face in brown skeletal claws as if to ward off a blow. And the face… distorted, grotesque, almost clownish in its gruesome exaggeration. It no longer had eyes, just blackened hollows that were wide and shocked. The mouth was open as if frozen in a contorted scream… the left side of it pulled up nearly to the corner of the left eye like maybe that cadaverous face had been soft putty that was molded into a fright mask to scare the kiddies with.
Truth was, it scared everyone that looked at it.
But they kept looking and kept seeing it and kept feeling the absolute, almost cosmic horror of Fabrini’s degeneration. That grinning mouth of peg-teeth… gray, crumbling teeth like old headstones; the body that was more rags and bones and worm-holed oak than man; those eyes which were just hollow, mocking pits like maybe Fabrini had clawed his own eyes out rather than look at what and who was around him. Yeah, they kept looking and the reality, the truth of this particular nightmare covered them, drowned them, invaded secret places and defiled their very souls. For what they saw and what they knew, it had… weight. The sort of weight that would crush them, squeeze the pulp right out of them.
About then, they turned away.
Cushing was trying hard not to cry, not to rage, not to turn on one of them… maybe Saks, probably Saks… and take it out on them. George was feeling the same thing: like a dozen uncontainable emotions had suddenly burst in him like a shower of black sparks, and he was burning, just burning up inside, the heat turning his mind to sauce.
And they all had to wonder what awful set of circumstances could have mummified Fabrini like that and what… dear God… what had he looked upon to wrench and warp and buckle his face like that? To turn that handsome, swarthy face of his to something like a twisted tribal fetish mask carved from deadwood?
“No, no, no,” Menhaus was saying. “That ain’t Fabrini. No fucking way that’s Fabrini… this, this thing it’s been dead longer than Christ…”
“It’s him, all right,” Saks said.
And there really was no doubt of that.
Because they could see the tarnished chain around its neck that had once been gold and knew that this collection of rags and threadbare hides was Fabrini. But to look at him, at that scarecrow body and grisly deathmask, you could not get past the fact that he looked like he had been physically dead thousands of years like that Neolithic iceman pulled out of the Swiss Alps.
Physically dead… yet his voice raged on beyond the ionized field. Discorporeal, insane, and bleak, yet pathetically aware and alive. A disembodied voice screaming its sanity away in a buzzing, silent blizzard of nothingness: “Help me… help me… help me… oh dear God somebody please help me help me-”
Saks went over to the alien machine and kicked it. It made a popping, crackling sound and the flow instantly cut out. The generator fading to a low hum and then nothing at all.
And George was trying to pull his mind together, trying to hold it tight in his fist before it flew apart into fragments. He was not a physicist, but he understood enough of Greenberg’s theories now to formulate one of his own. Fabrini had jumped into some dimension where time was not what it was here. In that terrible place, time was subverted, bent, blown all out of sane proportions. Fabrini had died over there. Starved to death or suffocated, an insane and gibbering thing thousands of years before. Yet his mind had not died. His consciousness did not particulate and dissolve. It was eternal and aware. While minutes passed here, thousands of years passed there in a place where time had no true meaning. Imagine that, George thought, alone in that void for countless millennia with nothing but crawling alien geometries for company, things that could not probably even see you or know you were there. Alone, alone, alone… alone with the barren geography of your own mind for ten thousand years or a million. Jesus.
And Fabrini would always be alive in that black, godless dimension.
A stream of atoms forever drifting and dissipating, but alive and aware and insane beyond any insanity ever known or conceived of. A tormented consciousness fading into eternity, alone, always alone, undying.
Nobody said anything for a time.
Nobody could say anything.
At least Saks had had the sense to turn that awful machine off so they didn’t have to listen to Fabrini, to the blasphemy of his endless, bodiless agony. A tactile creature in a world of shadows and anti-matter and non-existence.