Chapter 52: Particles

Violet blinked, then looked to the beast, suddenly filled with questions…and one burning realization.

“Beast,” she said. “That sigil, or symbol, or…It’s like the—” Before she could say anything more, the machine dropped from out of the beast’s fabric and clattered to the ground. It was mostly concrete here, thinly covered with grass and flowers. Upon the machine’s cracked screen the numbers had stopped in a curious pattern and were only blinking now. The urgent, frightening noise it emitted went on and on and on.

Violet stepped forward and collected the machine. Then she touched the basalt slab with one hand and traced the shape of the curious looped symbol…sigil…whatever it was.

“It’s like the one on my machine,” Violet finished, then looked up at her friend. “What’s a reactor? What does ‘atomic’ mean? What….” She trailed off, for the beast was staring past her and at the slab again. Upon its face and through the whole swirling length of its formless body she could see something close to agitation emerging. It was not directed at her, or anyone present, but for the first time in a long while Violet felt nearly frightened of the beast.

i -- r e m e m b e r -- t h i s .. .. place

I know where we are.

Suddenly, it sounded more solid, startlingly so. The beast’s voice, once fractured and vague, had acquired a new tone. For the very first time Violet felt that, even if she were to close her eyes and purge all remembrance of the beast’s form from her mind, she’d know now that it was another human speaking to her.

She stared at her friend as if through new eyes.

The beast rose up and brushed over the top of the slab, as casually as a person stepping over a curb. It was heading for the building now, the…reactor.

Violet hurried after it, nearly tripping over her own feet. She almost wanted to shout, to beg explanations. The cat squirmed where she held it against her chest and Violet realized that she could feel her companion’s heart going, a quick little patter that echoed against the thrum of her own.

“What just happened?” The cat demanded, voice quick and startled.

Violet had no answer to give. The reactor’s front door had once been wide and grand, barred by two white steel doors, but they had long since crumbled aside and lay like fallen soldiers upon the worn front steps. Violet navigated them, nearly slipping upon the red and blue moss that spangled their length, then she was into a broad front atrium and stood nearly stunned by what lay inside.

There had once been a skylight here, and straight, smooth columns done in marble and girded with geometric designs in brass. Through the hole where the skylight had been, the tiny black silhouettes of bats flickered in and out of the greater Glow, catching their fill of insects.

The beast had settled above the moldering ruins of a great front desk. The marble top had collapsed and lay broken into a few jagged pieces, veins of gold and sparkles of rosy quartz shimmering beneath a general coating of hybridized plants and feathery moss.

Violet’s fingers went to the chunk of pink stone at her throat. The beast was trembling even as it stood in the middle of the air, slowly turning around and around like the figure atop a half broken music box.

Her thoughts spun back to all of the many, disparate guesses she’d made as to what the beast had been in its previous life. None of them held any cohesion now, there was no comparison to this…whatever it was.

I know this place…. The beast repeated, almost desperately.

I know this place. I know this place.

“What’s it talking about?” The cat asked, voice still alight with tension.

Violet swallowed hard. Her mouth felt dry and her headache was beginning to become apparent again.

“You must have been here,” she said. “Before the Glow.”

And then, slowly, the beast descended, tracing the edges of the broken desk with its fabric. For the first time, Violet saw that the wall behind the desk, done up in stone like the rest of the reactor’s interior, was emblazoned with the faded remains of a bizarre picture: many interlocking loops all centered around a black circle. Another sigil? She could not say, and was far too distracted to think about recreating it in her notebook.

“We should go see the Glow,” Violet said at last. “It can help you. It can help all of us.”

She held out one hand and the beast stared at it for a moment before slowly drifting back over to her side.

I know the way. It said. Follow me.

Violet did.

They passed through a wide doorway to the left of the broken front desk and entered into a long corridor, the marble flooring of the atrium giving way to white linoleum, long since worn to splinters. Plants had grown up through the cracks in the floor, mossy thickets that looked like forests in miniature. Crickets sang from somewhere down the hall. Though there were no windows or skylights, somehow the darkness was kept at bay, the Glow ascendent even here. It flickered and pulsed in little arcs around metal light fixtures and coursed in faint lines along the walls and ceiling, behind which, Violet realized, wires and pipes had to be buried.

She began to reach out, halfway desperate to seek the true heart of the Glow and answer at least some of the innumerable questions she had, but just barely managed to hold the impulse back.

It would be better, more formal and polite, to wait until she was standing before it, perhaps even close enough to touch. The thought of that put a comfortable chill through her, but all the same she would still have to wait.

Her anticipation tasted like metal.

Then the beast stopped. It had been tracing a strange, zigzagging path down the hallway, but now had halted in front of an unassuming little door, steel framed and trimmed with the same geometric designs as had abounded in the atrium. They were nearly hidden beneath a fuzzy layer of reddish gold corrosion. A little frosted glass window that sat towards its top, clouded with scuff marks and grime. There had once been words painted upon it, tiny and neat. Now they were all gone but for a whisper of black paint.

This is where I liv…Lived? The beast hesitated for a strange, jittery moment, then took the door handle in its teeth and pulled. The door rattled but did not open. Sparks of Glow ran down the jamb like water. It seemed that the beast’s room was locked.

Violet watched this, and suddenly felt quite bad. She’d been so wrapped up in her own thoughts and excitement that the beast’s plight had faded into the background.

Whatever her distractions, though, the beast didn’t seem to have noticed. It gathered itself, fabric winding tight like the coils of a freshly tensed spring, and put the point of its nose through the window.

Glass fell to splinters with a resounding crash and Violet couldn’t help but jump in place. Moving briskly, the beast knocked the remaining shards from the window’s frame, then pushed its skull through the gap, fabric constricting to a point behind it.

Violet stood on the tips of her toes, trying to peer through, but she wasn’t quite tall enough to see more than a curious dim sliver of fungus mottled ceiling. A brief rustling commotion sounded from behind the door, and then it was swinging open upon groaning hinges. Violet stepped in, curious and faintly nervous all at once.

She was looking at a small, windowless office, the walls paneled with bookcases, a dark strip of fluorescent lights running along the center of the ceiling.

A little click sounded and Violet glanced over to see that the beast had tried a light switch next to the door.

Nothing happened.

Angled across the back corner of the office, where two floor to ceiling bookcases intersected, was a steel framed desk, drips and dangling stalactites of teal fungi leaking from the cracks in its laminated wooden surface. There had once been a thick, wooly rug laid out underneath the desk, but it was barely a memory now, blanketed with bell shaped mushrooms that gave off vines loaded with pale, gelatinous leaves.

Even the bookcases had been overtaken by nature, wood falling to flower, knotholes and cracks dripping with new life. The books themselves were in poor repair, spines thickly scaled with fungus and pages interlaced with delicate ivory roots, gardens of faintly luminous vines being tended to by orderly lines of winged black ants.

Despite all the years of neglect, Violet could still make out a few words, fragments of book titles written upon the spines of their tomes in large, important font.

Fission. Actinide. Exclusion Principle. She could not parse them. It reminded her of when the beast had attempted to explain an equation, there was simply no frame of reference on which to base a reaction.

“What is this place?” Violet asked, stepping back from the bookcase and the ants and the words. “What did you do here?”

The beast, which had drifted over to the lefthand side of the desk, glanced mournfully back at her, then returned its gaze to the floor. The cat, its nose twitching wildly and whiskers newly askew, shifted uncomfortably in Violet’s arms as she stepped closer, following the trajectory of her friend’s empty eyes.

There, close to the decaying bulk of an overturned office chair, a shapeless thing lay curled into the intersecting corner of the bookshelves. It had gone fuzzy with moss, and further obscuring it was a clump of luxuriantly blooming flowers with red petals and feathery blue stamens. They were so arrestingly similar to the flower the cat had brought her after she’d confronted the drainpipe demon that Violet lost all sense of what she was trying to ask.

Quietly, the beast leaned down and dug its jaws between the flowers, dispersing a few tiny puffs of cobalt shaded pollen. When it came back up, the beast had a slim steel wristwatch between its teeth, the metal badly stained and the crystal face scuffed and clouded beyond recognition. Before Violet could ask what it was, or how the beast had known it was even there, her friend tilted its head back and the watch was gone in an instant.

The beast sighed, and then slowly spoke.

I studied energy.

“Energy?” Violet asked. She wanted badly to look over the books again, but her eyes refused to leave the beast. “Like the…the….” She rubbed a thumb over the symbol embossed on the front of her machine, still vibrating with the frantic weight of its tiny cracklings. “Is that what the machine does? Why is it important? Why are you afraid of it?”

The dam was beginning to break, a hundred thousand questions crowding at the tip of her tongue. And yet the beast had gone silent again, staring down at the flowers, still and drab as an old pair of curtains.

“Beast!” Violet cried, and was unable to keep herself from stamping one foot. Almost immediately she felt bad; frustrated and and frightened by the beast’s sudden strangeness…but bad all the same. It made her feel small and unimportant, like the knowledge she’d gained and the experiences she’d had were being made immaterial.

Finally, the beast sighed.

I’m not afraid of the machine.

I’m afraid of what it senses.

Silently, Violet exchanged a small look with the cat. The beast brushed over the top of the desk and looked around the office, scanning across the faded books and sagging shelves. A faint, exhausted worry animated its motions, but the desperation was largely gone now. Then at last it continued.

There is something—particles past the air, like tiny suns shooting in every direction.

Violet’s eyes went down to the machine, practically abuzz with sound. Her fingers found the right button and she killed the volume, but the numbers on the screen continued to slowly flash, as though in silent terror.

The beast had not said anything specific about the particles, other than the fact that they existed, but its tone was grim. Violet could only think about the startling crimson streaks that occasionally shot across her vision; there one moment and gone the next.

A numb feeling had begun to gather in the pit of her stomach.

“What do they do?” She asked.

The beast spoke now, and at great length, but it spoke of numbers and functions, dark relations to arcane concepts and principles grounded upon impossibilities. Violet could only shiver, feeling as she had when newly washed up on the wrong side of the river from where home was, newly exposed to the eldritch possibilities of an unknown place.

When at last the beast’s explanation returned to sense, for it seemed to realize that she did not understand, its tone was even darker.

These particles pass through you, by their innumerable millions

and each one burns a little hole

Violet touched her own chest uncertainly, a tremble afflicting her fingers, but the beast’s jaws only jittered. It seemed to feel intensely sorry for her.

They are too small to see, but there are a lot of them, and..

.. and eventually the wounds they open will become apparent

“That’s not….” Violet began to shake her head, but the beast was still speaking.

You’re sick already, and will become sicker the longer you stay. Until there’s

nothing left of you at all.

Violet recoiled. The beast had floated out into the hallway as it spoke and stood crookedly about a foot off the ground, the ragged edges of its fabric lit through by gentle veils of blue light. There were plants here, insects and animals too. The thoughts and outlooks of mice trembled from underneath the floor, bright as match-flames. And all of it was filled with Glow, soaked in a totalizing radiance.

Could the beast not see any of that?

She forced herself to stay calm. To reason.

“Are the particles like demons, then? They take a part of you? Can’t I stop them? Reach out and—”

Already the beast was shaking its head.

There is nothing to reach out against.

“But we’re almost to the Glow.” Violet said uncomprehendingly.

The cat made a small, unhappy noise, and Violet realized that she’d begun to squeeze her companion, hugging it tight to her chest, more like a plush doll than a living thing. Quickly, she loosened her grip and tried to gather her thoughts. There had to be a solution to this. There always was.

“Then…what causes the particles? Where do they come from?” Violet asked.

Even as she spoke, her mind was whirring discordantly along, trying to make sense of all she had just heard. The beast’s jaws opened, then it hesitated and amended whatever unspoken thing it had been about to say.

There is a central source.

Like the fire that heat issues from.

The beast’s careful wording—‘a central source’—was clearly dancing around something else.

“You can’t think that it’s the Glow,” Violet’s voice had begun to tremble. “It can’t be that.” Then, no more words coming to mind, she hurried further down the hall.