“Emily, stop!”
“We can’t let them take us!” she shrieked, tugging at him, desperate to pull him back.
“Get off of me!”
He pushed her angrily, hard enough to make her let go of his arm, hard enough to make her fall. She stared up at him from the floor, tears streaming down her face. Up and down the hallway, students came out of their rooms to see what was happening.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you’re acting crazy!” Sean noticed the other students watching and put up his hands. “You know what? I just can’t deal with this right now.” He walked away.
“Sean!” she screamed after him. “Sean, promise me you won’t go to Professor Vaughan’s office tomorrow! Promise me!”
He didn’t turn around. She collapsed against the wall, sobbing. She could feel the other students staring, but she didn’t care. She’d failed again. Sean would still report to Vaughan’s office in the morning. He would still wind up on that surgical table.
She couldn’t save him, but maybe she could still save herself. She grabbed her car keys and ran to the student parking lot. Half the lamps were out, leaving wide, dark pools of shadow across the lot. She glanced nervously at Professor Vaughan’s stone cottage, but no lights came through the windows. He wasn’t there. She hit the unlock button on the key fob, and her car gave a comforting chirp. Just as she reached for the driver’s side door, someone grabbed her from behind, putting a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream, and pushed her against the car so she couldn’t turn around.
Professor Vaughan’s voice hissed in her ear, “That was some stunt you pulled in class today, Miss Bannerman. But I promise you, whatever you think you know, the truth is far more extraordinary than you can imagine.” She struggled as she felt a hypodermic needle pierce her neck. “Stop fighting, I’m doing you a favor. You have no idea what a unique opportunity I’m giving you. To see an alien world. Experience an alien culture. You should be thanking me.”
It’s bad enough I’m a victim of Professor Vaughan’s obsession and an unwilling subject of the Mi-Go’s studies, but to be given the power to change the past and still not save myself from this fate is maddening. It’s as though every choice I make brings me to the same end. Every path leads to the Mi-Go. What’s the point of being given a second chance if nothing changes?
I miss Sean, whose cylinder is being kept somewhere else. Occasionally, I hear the mechanical voices of other brains speaking in other rooms and wonder if one of them is him. I haven’t spoken to him or heard his voice — his real voice — since we were last together at Middlewood.
I wish I’d never gone through that damn anomaly. I wish I’d never been tormented with this useless ability to reshape the past.
Maybe that, at least, is something I can change for the better. One last time, I reach through the white.
She didn’t have a plan. She couldn’t stop the Mi-Go who carried her brain cylinder from flying through the anomaly. But if she tried hard enough, could she reject the splintering of her mind? If she were prepared for it, could she force her consciousness not to scatter back through her timeline?
She was back in the darkness of the cylinder when she felt the Mi-Go pass through the anomaly again, but she was powerless against it. Her mind was already splintered, and this time the anomaly only splintered it further, supernova upon supernova, fracture upon fracture, thrusting her backward through her past again, but also forward into a jumbled patchwork of horrific imagery that her mind couldn’t — dared not — collate. Each of these splinters fractured again and again, a mosaic of moments from the entirety of her life, until she was everywhere and everywhen, past and future, on Earth and on Yuggoth and then finally—
Somewhere else.
Emily stood upon an arid plain of sand. Before her, a stone structure sat half-buried, its timeworn walls decorated with strange, angular carvings. What remained of its massive spires rose toward an alien yellow sky where three moons hung like staring eyes. In the distance she saw enormous towers, the remains of an ancient, deserted city. Scattered among the crumbling buildings were huge, soaring monoliths of black stone, rising high above the towers and emanating a peculiar sense of dread. She found she couldn’t look at them long before her discomfort became overwhelming and she had to look away.
She was surprised to discover she was back in her body. Or a body. It couldn’t be hers. Hers was wherever Professor Vaughan and the Mi-Go had left it on Earth, after pillaging her skull. Or maybe her body was gone, burned or dissolved in acid so there would be no evidence. The body she wore now was solid, real, but it was clearly artificial, something the Mi-Go had constructed to house her brain. She patted her arms, her stomach. It didn’t feel like metal or plastic, it felt like flesh, or something close to it.
She didn’t know where she was in her timeline. Her future, it seemed. But what was this place?
There was no door in the half-buried structure before her, only an immense archway leading inside, built for someone much bigger than her. If she wanted answers, this looked like a good place to start. She stepped through the archway and found herself in a passage whose walls had been carved with the same strange designs as the exterior. The passage opened onto a titanic chamber, its soaring, vaulted ceiling rising so high that it disappeared into the shadows. At the center of the chamber was a circular dais surrounded by five stalagmites, each a dozen feet tall, bending inward like enormous ribs, and made of the same black stone as the monoliths outside. Atop the dais was an immense throne, hewn from ancient rock, and upon it sat a colossal skeleton. Its massive skull, brown and cracked with the passage of time, resembled a large, smooth boulder. It had no mouth, no eye sockets, no ear holes, just a flat expanse of bone.
A dark, oblong object rested on the throne beside the dead giant. Curious, she pulled herself up onto the throne and sat beside the giant’s huge, elongated femur and oddly spiked patella. The object seemed to be a long sliver of that same black stone, and while the giant could have easily held it in one hand, she had to lay it across her lap to examine it. But the moment she touched it, a web of energy burst to life between the five black stalagmites, surrounding her. It took the form of thousands upon thousands of strands, crossing each other to form a grid, and within the countless squares of the grid were moving images. She saw an Earth occupied by lumbering dinosaurs. She saw the raising of the pyramids, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the continents drowning under massive floods as long-lost islands rose from the ocean’s depths. She saw other worlds, too, other forms of life that weren’t human or Mi-Go — barrel-shaped creatures with wings like fans, coneshaped entities with snaking limbs, polyp-like monstrosities that phased in and out of the material plane. She saw civilizations rise and fall on countless worlds. All of time played out before her.
She put it together then. All the clues were there. This was Arneth-Zin, the temple at the center of the universe where all the timelines converged. This was where Professor Vaughan had wanted to go so desperately that he’d sold her and Sean to the Mi-Go like lab rats. The dead giant beside her had to be the sentry he’d spoken of. The watcher of Arneth-Zin — blind, deaf, dumb, and long dead. She almost laughed at the irony. It had seen and heard nothing of the timelines that played out in the grid. It couldn’t tell anyone its secrets. It couldn’t send Professor Vaughan back in time to save his family. Vaughan had destroyed Emily’s life, put her through unimaginable horror, for nothing.
She discovered that if she concentrated while touching the shard, she could guide what she saw within the grid. At her command, the grid filled with images from her own life. The choices she’d made. Every path she’d taken. She saw a group of six Mi-Go winging through space, carrying two cylinders, Sean’s brain in one, hers in the other. She watched as a burning red ribbon streaked and twisted across space until it struck the Mi-Go carrying her cylinder. The spatial anomaly. The moment that had untethered her consciousness from linear time and ultimately brought her here. She couldn’t bring herself to look beyond that. She didn’t want to relive her time on Yuggoth. If the Mi-Go had given her a new body, it meant at some point she’d stopped resisting and had cooperated with them. She couldn’t watch herself do that.