Artifact Read Free Page B

“Is anybody there…?”
    And out of the darkness, “In here, Lance.”
    I spun around, tracking the voice through the opposite hallway.
    A woman said, “You’re alive.” The voice drifted through the hall, leading to the room with the blinking light. “Come in here, please.”
    I dragged my stand along, moving carefully toward the half opened door. I wasn’t able to distinguish individual shapes inside that unsettling strobe, because everything seemed to melt together into a crawling veil of fog. After a moment’s hesitation, I continued forward.
    “It’s okay,” she breathed. “I won’t bite.”
    “Where are you?”
    I moved toward the door just as the light finally went out for good. Her breath released slowly, as if she were letting go a deep pull of air. “Don’t be afraid.”
    I slid into the darkness, and the door closed behind me.
    A musical hum drifted from somewhere beyond a hospital bed that I could barely see, and I realized that the woman was laughing under her breath. I wasn’t certain at first, but then her voice separated from the mechanical ambience until it was loud and constant, until it was finally cruel and vehement. I backed away from the sound, feeling the sharp sting of adrenaline.
    Ripping the intravenous drip out of my vein and shoving the pole toward the voice, I turned to run, but the door handle was missing. Metal folded behind the walls again, only this time the sound formed a crescendo, unbearable and endless. I collapsed against the door and pressed my ears, biting against the cramp that rose up the back of my neck. After a few moments of paralyzing noise, there was another wooden thok , and everything faded like the final note of a song.
    Very slowly, I opened my eyes to a landscape that had changed – and I somehow found myself back inside the Clean Roomat the labs. Still in my hospital gown, I rubbed the bloody crook of my elbow where the IV pulled free. I looked into the observation tank, but it was empty. The woman was gone. It was hard at first to grasp why everything seemed wrong. There wasn’t any light in the room, for example, when it should have been as bright as day. The observation tank was dark as well, save for the stark line of glowing wall–screens.
    There suddenly came a hum from the examination platform, and when I turned my head to look, the artifact rose out of the darkness. I watched as the platform spun, noticing again a darkening spot on the wall. Everything melted and bulged like before, like a giant bubble in a tar pit. The artifact thrummed with intense blue light, like the pulsating heat of a jet engine. The sound grew, and I wiped a dark liquid away from my nose. My ears bled a tight line along my jaw before dripping onto the floor. The hum grew more sonorous until I couldn’t hear anything except a scream. It was my scream, and that sudden truth scared me more than anything. When the concussion finally stopped, everything once again went dark.
    6.
    –Sometime later, I was well enough to move around. I really didn’t feel any pain – more like the ghost of pain – like the faint memory of a bad burn, or a broken limb. I stepped out of the wheelchair, moving away from the hospital entrance, glad to be under the power of my own legs again. The strange weight of the gauze on my chest snagged the shirt above my beltline. I stood for a moment, blinking into the sunlight. Joseph gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and nodded for me to follow. While he was wheeling me out, he wanted to know how I was feeling. I didn’t know what to tell him.
    I remembered indistinct tremors of the experiment, but then I would recoil. I figured the memories were still too raw to deal with. My problem was that not only couldn’t I remember anything before the hospital, but I was afraid to say anything about it. Whatever work I was into, I got the impression that the inconvenience of my recent memory loss would have upset a lot of people. I was hoping that things