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The Black Queen, Part I |
| Written by Paul Vigg | |
| Thursday, 06 March 2008 | |
The Black Queen
Part I
Carl West awoke suddenly, violently pulled out of dreams by a deep and horrible foreboding. The first thing he knew was that he was not where he had been when he laid down to sleep. He couldn't see and there was only a suffocating blackness all around him which made his heart thrill at the numbing effect of one of his senses being blocked. He was naked; he could feel the air all over his body. That same air was filled with it a terrible stench, something that made images of corpses and rotting flesh come in to his mind. He was laid on something hard and cold, forcing his body to stretch painfully out to its full length. He tried to move but he found his arms and legs were bound. He wanted desperately to scream but a gut-deep horror was coming over him, bringing a sick frozen fear to his stomach and making every moment a long, dark panic. Carl couldn't tell how long he lay there, it could have been minutes, hours or even days, he had no way of telling. The terror didn't abate, he felt himself begin to sweat and his thoughts were sluggish, trapped by the thought of his own death. Suddenly, sending a shock of new fear through him, the surface that he lay on jerked in to life and began to tilt forward. Slowly it came up at his head until he was in a standing position, but his feet weren't touching the floor. Then he heard a sound, a faint whimper. There was someone else there near him. It was a long breathless pause before he could find the confidence to speak and when he did it was to utter just one word. ‘Hello?' he said. The sound of his own voice even sickened him, it was a strangled gasp, and who was he speaking to? There was a long wail then, a deep female cry of anguish and fear. It tore through Carl like a razor edged knife, making him judder with terror. There was a mechanical hum and whatever had been covering his eyes moved away. He clamped them shut and felt them fill with hot tears. He was about to see what hellish place he was in and who he was there with. Slowly, so painfully slowly he opened his eyes. At first he could see just a vague impression of what was around him. Fading in to view there was a wall of metal in front of him, perfectly clean and shining. In it he could see the distorted reflection of himself. He appeared to be encapsulated in a black semi-circle of metal with metal bonds over his arms and legs. Most terrible of all however was that he could see on either side of him the reflections of other people, similarly naked and similarly bound in tubes. ‘Hello?' he said again, his voice a hoarse sob this time. He couldn't turn his head enough to see any of them, but one of them had to be awake to have made the sound that he heard. ‘Where are we?' came the voice of a woman. Her tone reflected the thrilling horror and visceral fear that was gripping Carl. ‘I don't know,' he said. He was crying freely now, and silently, red hot tears running down his cheeks and off the end of his chin. ‘Who are you?' he asked, choking on his dreadful feelings. ‘My name is Rachel,' the woman said. It seemed like such a useless, futile question to ask in this evil situation. ‘Is there anyone else conscious?' Rachel asked louder then, she seemed to be gaining some sort of resolve. ‘Yeah, me,' said a deep male voice. Carl peered at the reflections and tried to guess which Rachel was and which the new speaker was. They were too vague however, but he managed to count ten people in all, including him. ‘Who are you?' Carl asked again. ‘Mike...Mike Brana,' the deep male voice said. He sounded resigned, as if he had been expecting to end up here his whole life. ‘Do you know what the **** is going on?' Rachel asked then, her voice cracking with fear. ‘Yes,' Mike said wearily. There was a long silence then as they waited to be told. The silence went on and Carl realized that Mike wasn't going to speak. ‘Tell us then for god sake!' another female voice cut in, she sounded older than Rachel, before Carl could ask. ‘If I tell you it won't make this any better,' Mike said. He sounded worn out, as if he had been in a long, hard battle, perhaps all of his life. ‘Let us be the judge of that,' Carl said. He strained again to move and look around. If he forced his head to the right enough he could see the person in the next tube. The other person looked back then and their eyes locked for a moment, exchanging the absolute horror of their situation in that one glance before it was too painful and Carl had to turn his head back. He saw in those eyes everything that he felt. ‘Rachel?' he asked. ‘Yes,' she replied. ‘Good to meet you,' Carl said and laughed maniacally. He felt a shudder run through the others in the room. ‘So Mike, where are we?' Rachel asked then, sounding almost nonchalant. A strange sort of camaraderie seemed to have crept over them, a sort of voluntary ignorance of their bizarre condition of awakening. ‘You're in a lab, that's all I'll say,' Mike said. ‘A lab?' Carl asked. ‘I said that's all I'll say,' Mike replied immediately. He sounded almost as if he had been in this situation before. ‘How do you know what's happening to us?' Rachel asked. There was no reply. Carl wished desperately that he could see their faces. He felt deeply that their situation wasn't going to get any better and he wanted to know the people he was going to face whatever came next with. Any chance of that was suddenly eclipsed as a forbidding noise made them all look up. Above them they could just see that the ceiling was slowly grinding back and opening on to a large, dark room above. It took several minutes for the ceiling to move back completely, and each agonizing moment was like a century of personal fear for each of the men and women trapped in the room below it. When the ceiling had finally stopped moving the tubes that held the ten men and women slowly rose up until they were hanging in the middle of the room above the one they had woken up in. The moment they stopped the ceiling which was now the floor from their altered point of view began to close again. ‘What the **** is this?' Carl heard Rachel say. She sounded far away and on the edge of hysterics. ‘She'll be here any second,' Mike said then. The words washed over them all as if they had been hit by a great weight. There was some inflection of doom in them, some tone that told them they were about to face something beyond their nightmares, beyond their imaginations. Carl saw in front of him in the wall opposite them a small window. It looked thick and heavy and behind it sat two vague shapes that seemed to be human beings. They wore white and appeared to be watching the ten people opposite. ‘Hello? Hey!' Carl yelled at them. Neither of them moved. ‘They won't answer; they're just there to take notes,' Mike said. An edge of the sick fear that was boiling inside Carl was creeping even in to Mike's world-weary voice now. Carl heard it then, the sound of the thing that he had been brought there for. It was a creeping, slithering sound of something large and viscous. The room he hung imprisoned in a tube inside was the container for something he couldn't yet see but knew immediately was the darkest and most terrible creature that he could ever witness. On the edge of his mind, and the minds of all the others there began a buzzing, a distance and strange harsh susurration like a million angry insects. As the slithering sound got closer so the buzzing grew. Purple wheals appeared in their vision and they felt a terrible headache begin to creep over them. Carl felt something then; something touched his foot and caressed it softly. It felt cold and flaccid, and as he tried to stop himself from bursting in to terror he felt it move up his leg like an exploratory hand. It brushed up his inner thigh and over his penis, up to his stomach and over his chest and around his neck before slipping away. It left a trail of freezing slime where it had touched him. ‘There She is,' Mike said. ‘Oh dear God,' cried the person that hung next to Mike as she saw what was approaching. She began to struggle violently, shaking all the other tubes attached to one she was enclosed in. Carl felt and heard all this happening and had no power to stop it. Then came the first tearing, ripping and rending sounds. Mike screamed an awful, animal scream of pain and the whole row of hanging tubes jerked violently. There was the sound of flesh ripping and blood splashing. The ten of them, including Carl, erupted in to struggles and screams. Something was consuming them and none of them would see it until it was their turn to be taken. ‘Carl, I...' Rachel yelled and then stopped. ‘What? What?' Carl yelled back, grasping at anything that would prevent him from going insane in that moment of terrible waiting. ‘I once stole five hundred pounds from a place I worked. And I ran over a cat two years ago and never told anyone, OK?' Rachel shouted desperately. At first Carl was stunned by how bizarre and irrelevant these words were, but then he realized what they were. Rachel was using her last moments to confess the things she had always kept secret and told no one. She was clearing her conscience before she died. ‘Rachel, no!' was all Carl could do to stop it, all he had was to scream defiance. ‘Oh **** Carl I see it!' Rachel screeched then, ‘Its...' she began to speak again but the words were changed in to a guttural cry of anguish as she was torn from her metal prison. Carl closed his eyes then and felt a strange ocean of calm inside him. Around him was the horror and screams of the others left alive, but for just those few seconds he felt more alive and content than he ever had before. The buzzing all at once became unbearable, it thrust in to him, it was an invasive mind, a terrible and horrific consciousness was raping him and his eyes were forced open. He knew at once what she was; The Black Queen hung in front him, closer than he knew she had come with his eyes closed. Two great, flat, emotionless and ancient eyes looked down at him; each was like a window in to an alien abyss. Below them were ranged six terrible pincers around a foul mouth that oozed sticky saliva. Her body was a great swollen black mass from which reached several huge, irregular limbs that held her in place, some going down to the floor, some to the ceiling. Her skin was like thick, clammy rubber full of notches and marks and blemishes. Besides Her main limbs, issuing from all sides of Her were a multitude of seething tentacles that seemed to stretch as long as She desired. Several of them brushed over Carl's chest then, making his muscles contract with loathing of Her touch. The Black Queen shifted closer then, and he could feel Her fetid hot breath over him. Images crept in to his mind of strange other worldly landscapes and of deep places in the far reaches of cold space. She was invading him, reading him and forcing Her mind and thoughts on him. ‘What are you?' he asked, his voice a thin whisper. She hung there, completely motionless, and silence enveloped Carl, the world was still. For a moment he saw a fathomless and cool intelligence in those eyes, those great black eyes, a mind that watched and understood and hated. The Black Queen reached forward a clawed and rank limb and wrenched Carl out of his tube, separating one of his arms from his body with ease, and devoured him.
By Paul Vigg, read more at www.freewebs.com/paulwhowrites Copyright 2008 Paul Vigg |
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