How did this happen?
August 24th 2002
I'm not sleeping. Still having nightmares since that field job. I figure writing this all down might help me work through it... and I have a nearly-empty Rite in the Rain notebook. Confiding here because I sure as hell can't get satisfaction screaming it into a pit in the earth.
Think I'll start with why I even ended up going out there, and another day I'll get to the actual field trip—the nightmare part.
It was late and I was alone in the chemistry lab at Mines U, which I had hoped would help me focus. I was a little behind on the labwork for my master's project, and I had gotten into the doubtful habit of doing things later in the day with huge mugs of coffee. The coffee wasn't just a pick-me-up. I knew even then that it was a manifestation of symptoms, but I was still busy ignoring my body in those days.
It was the February before last, so not only was it cold outside but dark by 4pm. The light at my bench was the only one on. Everything else was just little LEDs on some of the equipment and the emergency exit sign above the back doors, which were visible just around a corner. I was really focused on writing up some results, finally getting into the zone, when at some point I realised there were lights and noises coming from outside, and had been for some time. One of the lights looked like the blue strobe of an emergency vehicle, but as I squinted at the windows of the double doors, I saw what looked like flashlights being waved around, way on the other side of campus grounds. There were voices calling out, but far enough away that I couldn't make anything out. As I tried to listen harder, I noticed a scratching sound. On the doors themselves.
Lemme remind myself that I'm a complete coward. Like, the last person to do something like go check out a noise, in the dark, at night. I'm scared of damn near everything. Maybe that's why I'm so pissy and swear all the time. Being afraid is like a default state of my very being. Afraid of monsters getting into the city. Afraid of getting found out. Afraid of the future, afraid that civilisation will get swallowed by the slowly expanding Desolate Areas, afraid of the diseases going around and the increasing levels of surveillance, the wars and unrest. I was afraid of not finishing my thesis or getting my degree. But definitely terrified of monsters, which live outside in the dark, so fuck knows why I actually walked towards the doors. Or any of the other things I did that night.
With my bench light hidden behind me, I could almost see outside, as there was just enough snow on the ground to make out shapes silhouetted against it. Again, some scratching. I stood on the large grey weather mat laying in front of the doors and peered through those windows, when I realised something large was right there looking back at me and I jumped. Some kind of creature was pressed up against the door, and a pale jointed arm with a claw like a lobster's but much more slender was scraping against the window, while what looked like a tentacle was brushing to the left and right against it. Two tentacles.
Why didn't I run to campus security right then, or at least hide under my bench until the thing went away? Everything was on alert, my body tensing, preparing to get the hell out of there. And a part of my brain seemed to—it's hard to explain—click into place. A symptom manifesting, triggered by fear. When I thought I could see the entire shape of the thing against the door clearly, I realised I wasn't seeing it with my eyes, but feeling it. Feeling all the surfaces, in all directions. And surfaces below surfaces. Not just the inner mechanics of the doors' panic bars—a name that felt appropriate at the moment—but the details of the thing outside. All of its segments. The jointed legs sticking out of each one, the larger legs waving about like a crab's. The insect-like head with serrated mandibles, the large eyes, above each of which sprouted the very long wavy antennae. Not tentacles. One of them was curling at the end like a monkey's prehensile tail. My whole everything recoiled in fear and disgust, and I shook my head hard, forced my brain to stop doing that weird thing, and found myself several steps away from the doors.
The creature kept scrabbling at the door. It's looking for a handle, I thought with a chill. Outside, a man's voice yelled out, not sounding close but much closer than the voices had been so far. They're professionals, I told myself. They would catch this thing, set it on fire or throw salts on it or something, and everyone would be okay. Monsters, as most people called the dangerous and usually large creatures that roamed and waited in the places between habitable areas, aren't all terrible or even really predators of humans, but enough are and they scare the hell out of me. They appeared around the same time people began describing what're now called Desolate Areas, hundreds of years ago, but sometimes it seems like they're in the news more often recently. Maybe because of the shifters, able to sneak around amongst us. But again, I'm not entirely sure why I dared do the things I did.
Like stepping towards the door again and pushing it open a little. Maybe because I recognised this thing.
I had seen it before, years ago. While hiding in the dark, I had seen it shift into the shape of a man. And later, when I went for more schooling at Mines and saw that same man wandering around, I was pretty sure that if I ever saw an almost three meter long lobster-centipede abomination again, it would be him. Of course he was dangerous, but for some reason I couldn't really put my finger on at the time, I didn't want professional monster exterminators to kill him.
Pushing the door open was also pushing against the weight of the creature, so I only got it a little open and jumped back once pale and jointed chitinous appendages snaked around the edge and gripped the door to pull it further open. I ended up several steps away by the time the whole pale shape slid through the door and flopped rather clumsily onto the mat, wet snow plopping down with it, and the door eventually bumped shut behind it, once all of its leggy segments had crawled their way in.
What the hell are you doing!? my Smarter Inner Me cursed at Stupid Me. My heart rate somehow managed to spike even though it was already high, but the thing only moved to curl almost into a spiral, its antennae moving lazily. Now I could just see in the dim light that the large, black eyes were not quite like an insect's, but had silver rings about the size of my hand which pointed at me like pupils. What seemed like eyelids half-covered the eyes, but instead of coming from the top of the eyes, they moved from the inner corners. Its long tail end, or abdomen, or whatever it is, was expanding and shrinking irregularly. I wondered if that was it breathing. Since it was moving so little, I inched towards it. The silver rings followed me.
Another beam of light swept back and forth outside. "Shit!" I stilled as I looked up. If anyone approached the door, there was probably enough light on in the lab to see the hulking creature from outside. It wasn't walking around on its own, so I needed to move it. I started using the wonderful swear terms I'd nicked from an undergrad from the UK, muttering them under my breath almost like a mantra for courage as I forced myself to approach the slow-moving creature, crouch down, and grab the edges of the mat. Dragging it cost less effort than I expected, and I had it around the corner and out of sight of the windows of the double doors within about thirty seconds, leaving a wet trail on the floor.
After letting go and quickly stepping back, I stood catching my breath and stared at what I could see of the pale shape in front of me. A fucking Surgeon. A creature that hadn't been seen in, like, twenty years, but nobody forgot the news stories and the low-budget horror films made afterwards. Back then, some people—campers or fishermen, I forget—were somewhere in northern Florida, walking through woods or something and heard a noise. They found a small cave and made a gruesome discovery: three people, all half-eaten but still alive.
Various limbs and eyes and even one person's tongue had been carefully sliced off, but the wounds had been sealed, with no infections. One of them died in hospital from dehydration I think, and the other two weren't too mentally stable, but at least one woman could recall what had happened. She had been hiking and was attacked by something large. It bit and paralysed her, then dragged her to the cave. She could breathe, but couldn't move to scream as a large, tan-coloured arthropod creature sliced her leg off at the knee and ate it. The creature left and came back multiple times over several days, keeping her and other people full of paralytic spit and either eating pieces of her or one of the others. The horror of being slowly eaten alive only ended because someone managed to moan and the campers followed the sound.
State rangers and monster trophy hunters went looking for the creature, but they never found it. It was as if it had faded completely into the Florida cave system. The media enjoyed blowing the story as large as they could, always showing a drawing made by one of those police artist types based on the survivors' descriptions. The thing looked like a tawny clawed lobstrosity with an insect-like head sprouting two long antennae, and the rest like a centipede with jointed legs and with two long spikey bits at the end. Scientists ended up giving it the name jaekelotherium, but that's not what anyone calls them.
One of the ER docs who had treated the victims was interviewed on the news, and said their wounds had amazed her. "It's like they were amputated by an excellent surgeon. The cuts are perfectly straight and the tissue was sealed with some kind of adhesive. I've never seen anything like it!" After that, people began referring to the new monsters as "Surgeons."
And now there was a Surgeon, this one grey instead of brown, lying on a large doormat right in front of me in a dark, otherwise empty school chemistry lab, moving very little. It looked huge. Not behind glass or in a cage. What to do? I couldn't drag the thing out of the lab. It was late, but not so late that there weren't people walking the hallways. Someone could even still walk into the lab, although I knew from the past several months that few people did. I was equally weighing just running the hell out of there.
Instead, I went back to my bench and worried and squirmed and fidgeted, trying to think of a solution and really craving more caffeine, or cigarettes. I couldn't concentrate very well, since I kept throwing glances over my shoulder to make sure the thing hadn't moved. I found myself checking the shape of the creature without looking, my brain having started feeling the edges of the room again, and I forced it to stop. I tried to focus on calm thoughts instead, but I suck at meditative breathing. Zen-fu is hard.
After almost twenty minutes, the Surgeon did begin to stir. I gingerly crept back up to it. The eyes were more open now, the lids having mostly retracted to the inner corners of the large black eyes.
I wondered if I should try to explain where it was and let it know I wasn't about to kill it, before it got more mobile and tried to defend itself or just attack me anyway. I had no idea if it could understand my speech.
"Hey. Uh, you're in the chemistry lab right now. There's nobody else here, so you're okay for a bit, but... you can't stay here. You've got to find your way out."
There was no reaction. What if I tried its name? "Um... Marcus? Are you Marcus Stetz?" I said to it, though my voice caught.
The creature still didn't move. I cleared my throat and tried again, a little louder. "You are Marcus, right? I'm Sanne de Winter." I paused, and moved a little closer, ready to jump back if the thing so much as twitched. "I um, was one of the students that worked on a mapping trip you ran, a few years ago."
Suddenly there were feather dusters in my face. I shrieked, squeezing my eyes shut and batted them away.
"Ick! Yuck! Ew, ew," I spat, nearly falling backwards, and as suddenly as they appeared, they were gone and my hands were swatting at air. I carefully opened my eyes to see that the antennae, which had been long segmented whips, were now fluffy like little white Christmas trees, and an instant later the little branches folded like an umbrella being turned inside-out, pressed against the main stalks, and the antennae were whiplike again. Only now I noticed they were a little bit hairy looking, rather than scaley. That reminded me of moths, which use their fuzzy antennae to smell chemicals in the air. I blinked, trying to figure out what had happened.
"You... smelled me?!" I coughed indignantly, sweating and panting from the thought of creepy bug appendages being on my face. And then I almost missed it—the antennae, positioned above each eye, raised up in such a way that immediately made me recall Dr Stetz raising his eyebrows when he was amused. It was exactly that.
"Holy mother... duck. It is you..." I whispered in amazement.
Of course, I kept the little nagging doubt that I could not be certain, but at least imagining that a large predatory scorpisectipede had some kind of rational mind and maybe wouldn't act too unpredictable helped me keep my shit together. I'm not a kill-it-with-fire type, but insects and spiders and things give me the creeps, so a giant one is pretty much nightmare fuel.
I noticed something on the mat, wet with the melted snow and dark stuff that had pooled next to the thing's pale body. The item looked like a little throwing dart. Maybe the creature had been so still because it had been hit with tranquiliser. And the dark stuff... maybe it was blood. There was a lot. It was bleeding from somewhere in its middle.
"Uuuuuh, so. Do you need, like... medical attention?" I asked it, and then immediately felt stupid. What was I going to do, call the monster veterinarian? "Or, is there something I can..." I thought a moment. "Something I can get?" The half-closed eyes just kept looking at me. "Hm, I don't know if you can even understand me." The antennae shifted at that, so maybe it did. I thought some more.
"Okay, if you can understand me... you can't talk, um. Maybe we can try... can you tap the floor? Make a noise or something?"
To my surprise, after a moment one of the large slender claws did just that—clamped together and made a clear "click" noise. I tensed, thinking again. That was deliberate. It understood me.
"Okay, okay. So... okay, how about... one time for 'yes', two times for 'no'... and, um, three times for a 'maybe' or an 'I don't know'," I ventured. After a short pause, there was another click.
I ran my hands through my hair. What was this game called? Twenty Questions? So what would an injured monster need that I could actually get? Hell, what do monsters need? Ridiculous. This was ridiculous. The fuck was I doing?
"Do you need something, uuuuuh, to stop the bleeding?" I began. All that blood, it probably couldn't get up and walk around like that. But I got two clear clicks in response. No. Okay, next thing.
"What about food? I know where I can get a bunch of cheap food," I tried next. Healing takes energy, as does shifting if this thing sometimes walks around like a man. And this time I did get a single click. Yes.
"Okay. It doesn't matter what it is? Does it have to be, uh, meat?" I held my breath, because I imagined myself trying to buy a whole pig or something in the evening in a university town. Luckily, I got a no in response. "Okay, Chinese it is," I replied, relieved, and got another enthusiastic click from the large creature. How much Chinese food would I need to order? I walked back to my bench to grab my backpack, thinking I'd just order lots of everything. And also that this was so un-fucking-believable.
I've never gotten lost, not once, nor have I ever lost something, like a toy or my keys. My laundry has never migrated to Lost Sockia. I've always made a beeline to the right car in large crowded parking lots. I've never stepped into the wrong bus, wandered confusedly through hallways of an unknown building searching for the right door, or gone to knock at a friend's house when they weren't home. It's a subtle thing, and it's hard to notice mistakes you don't make, but when the once-dormant signs and symptoms of Weston's syndrome were triggered in me as an adult, I starting thinking back on my life and wondered how I managed not to realise that I "find" things.
Unconsciously, at least. If I want to find something and think real hard on it, nothing special comes up in my head. I think this is one reason why I've always passed the tests for Weston's they give when you're a kid starting school, and again in high school. But if I'm walking around and not really paying a whole lot of attention, I end up at the right place, or an item I need seems to be right where I think it should be.
So as I walked back through the halls of my school with six large stinking bags of Chinese food, and then past the chemistry lab doors and on to a small meeting/conference room, my brain explained to me that of course I couldn't bring that stuff into the lab. We had a strict no-food policy, and for good reason. And while I was never in the lab when his students were there, we all knew that if anyone was a strong enforcer of this policy, it was Marcus Stetz. There were stories. He could smell an open sack of gummie bears in your bag, supposedly. He let nothing in. It seemed a little strange since he was otherwise the most disgusting slob. But so it was, my head telling me to set the food down elsewhere and only then check back at the lab. Maybe my brain's been rationalising why I went certain places my whole life.
I knew better the moment I took a few steps into the room, which had a single set of fluorescent lights on, and saw a man sitting at one of the long conference tables. I continued walking up to the end of the table nearest the door and began calmly setting the bags down, as if he wasn't freaking the hell out of me.
He was a tall, skinny, somewhere above middle-aged looking white guy, with messed grey hair and fuzzy grey eyebrows. One hand pushed wire-rim glasses back up his straight nose, while the other drummed on the tabletop with long, spidery fingers, and he was staring at a point somewhere in front of him on the table.
"You said my name," he said quietly. His voice sounded loud in the small room once the food bags stopped rustling. Then he looked up and stared right at me. I could see that while his hair was grey and his skin pale, his eyes were so dark they looked black. Just like when he was a Surgeon. "You let me in. Why?"
"I—I uh, wasn't certain it was you, actually," I stammered. He continued staring at me, no expression on his face and his eyes unblinking.
"You thought I might be," he replied. "Why?"
"Um," I said, and thought fast. Could monsters smell lies? I wasn't clever enough to think up good lies quickly anyway. "Uh, a few years ago I needed some field time but I couldn't afford camp, and, uh, my lab prof gave me your email and... you had a couple of students helping you map an area. Y-you called it a prospect. Old Twin? And uh, one night I went for a walk away from camp and I uh... saw you. Saw something." I wiped my sweaty palms onto my jeans. "So I ran back to my tent and later that night I saw the same thing come to camp and it, um, changed. Shifted. Shifted to a man... and it was you."
It was all true, just lacking a lot of details. There were seven of us students, all undergrads in the earth sciences or environmental, helping a researcher, geochemist Dr Marcus Stetz, map a large area on the other side of the mountains and collect rock samples. It was the first time I'd been so far away from buildings, roads, lights. Civilisation. I'll never forget how bright the sky was, with just stars. No moon.
The creature disguised as a man just stared silently at me some more. Then he sighed and winced.
"Uh, do you need... a doctor?" I asked. He looked back at me, then stood up. It was an inhumanly quick action, making me tense. He looked down at his hands, which pulled up the bottom of his blood-stained flannel and the dirty t-shirt underneath, and I swore with a gasp. Not just because of how large the long angry red cut was, stretching from above his navel to his side, but more at how it looked as if it had been healing a week or so.
"Nope," he replied softly.
"Holy. Fuck. You did that?" I asked, staring. I assumed he had done whatever that Florida creature had done to its victims, and sealed his own wound.
"Yep." He let his shirts drop, and his eyes flickered back and forth. "Difficult. They managed to dart me. Somehow."
"Oh," I said. "Yeah I saw that."
He stared at me again. "Lucky for you."
I froze. There was a whole long table between us, but I was certain that if he wanted, he could vault it in a single movement and kill me. "You would've... eaten me?" I squeaked.
He kept staring a moment. "I'm hurt. Exhausted." Then lowered his tone. "Hungry," he said slowly. Still staring at me without blinking.
I pushed a few of the bags of food towards him, feeling the bitch-snark coming up in my throat like it does when I'm scared enough to piss myself. "Yeah well, I didn't get all this shit for nothing. How about you eat this instead?"
He looked down at the bags on the table. Six large bags, filling the room with the heavy stench of grease. I heard him breathe in through his nose. "These are all... mine?" he asked with a tinge of surprise in his voice.
I acted as business-like as possible. Showing fear makes predators pounce, I thought. "Everything except this," I pulled out one box of chow mein, "and these." I moved the three large wax paper cups of coffee I'd bought closer to my edge of the table.
He raised his chin and peered at the cups. "Coffee?" He looked back at me. "Sure is a lot of caffeine," he remarked like it meant something. A pause. "For just one person."
"Uh..." The cups were large, and it was late. I could survive with just two. "You want one?"
"Yes please," he said expectantly, like a little kid.
One of the stories going around campus was that he often sounded a little like a cartoon, with over-exaggerated tones, especially of excitement and delight. Theories varied; maybe he was just very enthusiastic about certain topics, or maybe he was mocking his students.
I slid one of the coffees towards him but kept myself out of arm's reach. Then I deliberately pulled out one of the plastic chairs, sat down heavily, and grabbed the disposable bamboo chopsticks, stabbing them into my noodles as if I wasn't ready to sprint out of the room at any moment. I was also hungry, though it was actually my third supper that day. I'm a tiny woman, so I spread my eating times around so people don't notice. Another shitty symptom of my medical condition is a runaway metabolism which will kill me early, and I was still getting used to it.
I heard him eating, and kept my eyes on my own food, trying not to listen. For a skinny guy, he ate a lot, even more than I did. I could guess why, of course: shifting costs a lot of energy. But still, that's no excuse to pluck things out of the garbage, or eat someone's forgotten three-week-old science experiment mouldering in the back of the faculty fridges.
People said he would eat anything, even "floor fruits," and he didn't seem to care if anyone saw him do it. Coupled with the way his clothes looked like he slept in them for days and he often seemed like he'd forgotten to shave, campus police had cornered him a few times, to many students' entertainment.
Still, I was surprised how by the time I was done with my one little box of noodles and started on my coffees, he was finishing the last of the rest. I think he didn't chew any of it. Where the hell did he find room for it all?
When he took a big drink of his coffee, he looked like he had just finished a long day of hard labour. He sighed, shoulders sagged, eyes closed, and then put the cup down and looked at me. His gaze seemed less intense than it had earlier.
"Never answered my question."
I accidentally breathed in a bit of coffee and went into a short coughing fit. "Sorry?" I spluttered.
"You let me in," he said to me slowly. "Why."
I had to think for a bit, still choking out some coffee, and I had the feeling that I had to get this right. Why had I let him in?
"I didn't want you killed off by the state," I said finally. I thought some more. Why not? I wasn't sure.
"When you first saw me," he began after a moment, "At Old Twin. You never reported?" I shook my head. He tilted his head with a twitch, in a way that reminded me more of a bird, or a reptile.
"I mean, I considered it," I said quickly. "But at first, it was like... it was just seven of us, with you, in the middle of nowhere. I was too scared to say anything to anyone." I had also been just as scared that if I stayed quiet I would wake up one morning, crawl out of my tent and find someone had gone missing. That one of the other students would be hidden just a little ways away, being eaten bit by bit while the rest of us called for them, searching. But that didn't happen. "We all made it back, and you seemed to be really doing the work, really knowledgeable, you know? Like... it wasn't a ruse."
He took a sip of coffee, and kept staring. Waiting patiently.
"You..." I stopped, remembering that summer. I had learned so much. The guy I had gotten a lift from, because he was the only other student from UBC and had a car, had agreed enthusiastically. We'd excitedly discussed all the cool stuff we'd done the whole trip back.
Marcus had explained what he needed us to do, but also made us do many things manually, purely for the experience even though it wasn't a really a school field camp. He had answered many questions with a cheery "I have no idea! Go find out for me," and yet also explained complex things in a way that made sense to us.
He told several good stories. Stories about old jobs he'd had: the time he was chased across a field by a gun-toting homeowner who hadn't realised his realtor had hired a geological surveying company, or harrowing trips to inhospitable mountains with fancy equipment but forgotten batteries, that kind of thing. I wonder if he made them up, to make us think he was a person.
He also helped us see the stories in the landscapes around us. Waving his hands around, trying to get us to see deep time. Admonishing us that the solid rock under our feet was moving, right at that moment. Rising, falling, deforming, blowing away in the wind, riding along and under the river we crossed. And he did it all peppered with the most horrid, eye-rollingly bad geology jokes, with as expressionless a face as when he was telling us important stuff like how not to get electrocuted or bitten by the snakes out there.
"You're the real deal. You really are curious about everything, but you also... you like seeing us be curious too. You like watching people learn stuff, as much as you like learning stuff." I paused to think. "It just seems like more work than necessary if you just wanted access to people meat."
"Hm." He was staring hard at me again. "So I'm harmless?" It was lightly said, but I knew it was a deeply serious question.
"Oh hell no. I'm scared as shit of you. Didn't you just fucking say you would've eaten me if you hadn't been doped up? You're an eating machine. I'm not even sure how you walk around campus here with all this human food wandering around, unarmed and completely oblivious." I paused, wondering if in fact he maybe did snatch people now and then. That gave me a chill and I frowned. "Maybe by being really gross and eating all the garbage everywhere instead." I made a face of disgust to go with my insult.
His eyebrows went up, even while his face remained impassive. I've since gotten to know what that means better, because his smiles are completely fake. They are large, toothy, and overdone. Imitations of grins. In fact, most of his facial expressions seem to be bad acting with timing that doesn't quite work, used purely for communication with the humans around him. Somehow everyone falls for it, though the smiles always creeped me out. But when he's truly amused, it's his eyebrows that move.
"So," he started, holding up a finger. "I'm terrifying." He held up another finger. "And revolting." He held up a third, but looked at his hand as if he wasn't sure it was his. "And... some kind of role model?" His voice sounded like that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard of, and maybe the funniest. His eyes shot back at me, serious again. "Not an academic role model." Pause. "An illegal one. Yes?"
I stared back. The hell? I'm not a shifting monster...
"Not registered," he continued. He leaned forward, like a hawk staring at a mouse. Even from across and down the table, I shrank back automatically.
He did another predator-bird head tilt. "At the camp. Old Twin. You simply... let's see." He looked up at the ceiling. "Walked out into the wilderness. Unfamiliar terrain. In darkness. No moon. No flashlight." There were pauses a bit too long between each sentence. He looked back at me.
"It was a short walk," I started, but he began shaking his head.
"Kilometres away. At least two," he shot back.
I sighed. "Oh, maybe, I dunno..." Before that field job, I'd never really camped anywhere. My family isn't exactly the camping type, heh. And certainly never anywhere so far away from everything. Two years earlier, my symptoms had started, including that strange thing where my brain sorta feels the stuff around me. I've spent nights lying in my bed, exploring my room and just being confused and awed by it. I'm not sure even now how exactly it works, only that it doesn't seem to be restricted to outside surfaces and that there's a limit of, I dunno, several meters out, but in all directions. I've even accidentally felt my own guts moving, which is super gross and I try to avoid noticing anyone's internal organs like that. Ew.
And that night there I was, a geology student in my tent camped amongst this volcanic-then-glacial rock story, unable to sleep. It occurred to me to try feeling the landscape around me, especially the ground. Could I feel all those layers I'd been looking at in rock outcrops and roadcuts, the grains and textures, the flows and directions, the cracks and the tensions? So I'd set out, without a light because I don't really need one, and indeed I could feel differences in the ground. I just didn't know what was what, exactly.
"I am careful. Very careful!" Marcus hissed, holding up an index finger. "Kilometres away from that camp. Every night." He squinted at me. "Then you ran back. In darkness. No moon. No flashlight. And saw me later. Hmmm."
"Uh..." I hadn't seen him, really. I'd felt him. I'd felt a frightening shape, something huge. Lots of segments, lots of legs. I didn't recognise at the time what it was, and it was both too dark and too far away for me to see it, really. But as soon as I realised it was a moving creature and unlike anything I knew, I'd ran. I don't know how I knew my way back. My feet just seemed to know where to step, and he was correct, it was pretty far. I remember diving into my tent, gasping for breath and trying to make as little noise as possible.
I'd sat in the tent, trying to calm my breathing and wondering whether I should wake anyone up, or let them stay sleeping and hopefully quiet. Meanwhile, that thing in my brain, not the feeling stuff thing but the little semi-conscious directional compass thing was on high alert, keeping track of the monster I was certain I'd just narrowly escaped. It's not really like a compass; I have a vague sense of distance with it as well. The crawly thing was far away but... it was getting closer. And while sitting there, I remembered Surgeons. They had claws and lots of legs. I almost hyperventilated when I realised that's what I had seen. Did I mention I am a total wuss? I stayed huddled in my tent, shivering and swinging wildly between the ideas of running outside and banging a cooking pan, hollering at the top of my lungs or staying quiet and hoping the thing would change direction.
It hadn't. But it did something; I wasn't sure what at the time. It became... different. But this was hours later, I was emptied of adrenaline and tired as fuck. Wrung out. Even though my brain had kept pinging me with fearful updates, I was also half falling asleep and having strange dreamlike thoughts. So I'd missed when exactly the human-shaped thing walking on two legs entered the camping area, but I was certain it had come from outside the camp, rather than someone in camp just walking around. This was confusing, but the person walked up to a tent, which I noticed only then was empty. I checked around, and found people-shapes inside all the other tents. The person entered the tent, and nothing else happened the rest of the night. I fell asleep eventually, but the whole time my brain-compass, which had been keeping track of the whatever it was I'd run into out in the open wilderness, kept screaming at me about that tent. Marcus' tent.
"Not registered," he repeated. "Otherwise... Civil Service."
Wait, Civil Service? Shit. He knew what I was, and I felt stupid for not following it all right away. And I guess he saw when I realised that, because from across the table he gave me one of those large, scary fake grins.
"You drink... interesting amounts of coffee. And... can't tell now but," he cleared his throat. "When I'm myself. Westies have a distinctive odour."
I blinked at him, then glared, remembering the feather dusters in my face. "You smelled me!" I growled at him for the second time. His creepy grin remained. It stretched so wide, I could really see a lot of teeth.
"I still do not have to worry about... being reported, yes?" he said in an overly pleasant voice. The creepy grin was mocking me.
I stood up with clenched teeth. "I let you in! I got Chinese! I gave you one of my coffees! Mother of Christ—why would I even fucking bother when I could have just sat back and enjoyed the lightshow as those state guys turned you into a smoking crater of bug toast? You—you... invertebrate trash panda!" I spluttered. I shoved my thumb at my chest. "I shouldn't have to worry about becoming lunch. Fucking gratitude, show some." Then I stabbed my finger in his direction. "And I fucking swear, if some shitweasels in suits show up at my door to drag me off to the wanksock-washing Service, I will know exactly where you are, I will absolutely hunt you down, and I will fucking drown you in a goddamn pool of Raid, light a match, and walk away, no regrets!"
He was still giving me the smile as I stalked out of the room and back to the lab, where I still had some of my stuff. I noticed while there that the mat was gone and the floor was clean. Must have been him, I thought. Let him clean up all the trash in the other room, then. Or eat it, I dunno. Yeah, he probably ate it.
After that night, we managed to stay so far away from each other that I rarely even saw him. I had to check the news to see how the monster search was reported; nobody had seen a Surgeon, but someone had called university services after seeing "something large" getting into the garbage bins behind a dorm house.
It took me several days to get back into my thesis groove, but whatever. I clawed my way through it, despite my own advisor being rather meh about working with me. Nyquist isn't completely absent from the students he advises, but goddamn, he didn't ever really seem to have any useful advice for me, or good feedback on my writing.
I don't blame that on my being a woman, or brown, but I don't think it helped. Most likely, people don't like the mobile home world I come from. Anyway, I managed to avoid the actually creepy people by staying far from anyone considered a superstar. Those guys are so often full of themselves, drunk on power and pulling nasty shit on people, especially young women in private. I listened to what older students said about faculty. And the racist comments that flew around campus sometimes, they were never directed at me. Mostly bad jokes, and I didn't have energy to waste. I just ignored them. Assholes can fuck right off. Back at UBC where I got my bachelor's, it seemed better; there was a lot of support.
But anyway, I can say that at Mines I did make it through, with the mental support and camaraderie of fellow students and my research partner Jen of course: a whole report on the sedimentary structures of the Liard basin, and successfully defended. I can be so fucking stubborn, moreso when everyone keeps asking out loud if I'm good enough.
It was sometime between finishing school and actually getting my degree awarded that I saw Marcus again. This was more than a year after the incident in the chem lab. I had been wondering what my next steps were, and was really not looking forward to more schooling. Getting a PhD was out, I thought. Did I want to work in academia? I wasn't sure. After getting my bachelor's, the job market had been pretty bad. I went back to school after a year of testing old gas station pits, grunt CMT work and five boredom-filled months of identifying asbestos in a lab. A whole slew of jobs was out of my reach due to my medical condition, because for whatever reason they do testing on the applicants. A record showing normal test results from high school wasn't good enough. But a master's in geology doesn't necessarily get you anywhere either. Sometimes I wonder about Marcus' timing.
I was on campus for a meeting, eating a second lunch—a calorie-dense "heart attack" shroomburger—outside at a wooden picnic-style table. There were a few students scattered about the other tables, but the area was mostly empty despite the fairly nice weather. I was spacing off about something, I dunno what, when someone walked up to the other side of the table and stopped abruptly. I looked up and jumped like a cat, then glared.
"Hallo!" Marcus said brightly. "Sanne de Winter," he added after a moment, which of course seemed really weird. He didn't look too homeless that day. A few days' worth of grey stubble and his hair stuck up in places, as if he'd just woken up. His plaid collar shirt was only covered with orange dust, and open showing a stained t-shirt underneath. I could just read the text on it.
Chemists will drink anything distilled
Geologists will drink anything fermented
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Huh. What do you want?"
He gave me a fake grin. "I'm doing wonderful! So glad you asked!" He leaned his long frame over the table towards me. I held still, not allowing myself to lean back. "I must ask you a favour," he whispered conspiratorially. I looked around. There was nobody anywhere near us. Ridiculous.
I blinked. "A what now?"
The smile vanished, unnaturally quickly. "Hm. Three, actually. Three favours."
"Three?" I immediately suspected it had to do with finding something. That's what happens if people find out you have Weston's and aren't concerned with alerting the fuzz. They ask you to find stuff, usually illegal stuff. Or their keys, keys are a popular one. Luckily, very few people know I'm sick.
He seemed to think a moment, adjusted his wire-rim glasses, then nodded. "Yep. Three." I just sat there, holding my burger possessively in my hands, and stared at him. After a moment of being spider-still, he suddenly moved his lower half to a sitting position opposite me, without moving his upper part much. I wasn't used to his freaky abrupt movements yet and so at that moment I did lean back, clutching my lunch. He sighed.
"I ask that you hear me out." He looked at me with black eyes, but not with any particular intensity or anything. "My first favour." He placed his palms together in prayer style. "Listen to my story. No deciding. No judging. No speaking. Until I finish. Please?"
"Uh. Okay," I said. This was pretty bizarre and out of the blue, but mostly it unnerved me because it was coming from a Surgeon that walked around disguised as a man. One that had admitted it would have eaten me if the chance hadn't been spoiled.
"You grant me this favour?"
"Sure," I said, frowning at his off-sounding wording. I couldn't help it—freaked out or not, I was a bit too curious to do the smart thing and tell him to go away. He looked at me a moment longer, as if to make sure I was really agreeing.
"I am looking for something."
I tensed. Mother fuck. I knew it. I fucking knew it. But he immediately held up his hand.
"You agreed! You agreed. I am not asking you to find this thing." He looked down at the worn wood of the table, and wiggled the fingers of one hand. Like, instead of playing air-guitar, it was air-piano. "You couldn't, even if you wished. I'm... not sure what it is."
I frowned. What?
"In fact, it's worse, really," he continued. He leaned a bit forward in excitement. "I'm not entirely sure it even exists!" His voice sounded comically delighted. Then he went silent and looked at me expectantly.
"Uh. Okay," I said again. I set my burger down, confused. And now I was even more curious. Stupid me.
He took a big breath in, and then launched into the weirdest fucking pitch talk I think I've ever heard. Basically he admitted that the research he was doing, like the one wrapping up at Mines, was ultimately in service of a larger research question: the nature of the Desolate Areas.
It made sense to me that he wouldn't be so public about that; I've never really understood why, but most governments and institutions really play down the dangers of the Areas other than warning people to avoid entering them. And whenever some egghead points out that they're growing or affecting some farming area or waterway or whatever, the public is encouraged to label it "fear-mongering" and ignore it.
But despite the refusal of institutions to even fund anything related to Areas, there are scientists studying them: how they formed, what caused them, why are they growing, and can they be shrunk or removed? A few people are bravely open about it, and get plenty of shit—sometimes even threats, but more are just working diligently behind the scenes.
Apparently, according to Marcus, they all have a strange sort of cross-discipline group where they actively connect with each other, publish for each other, and sometimes meet in person. The "thing that may not exist" seemed to refer to the ultimate cause of the Areas, though he didn't explicitly say that.
But that's not why the little speech was so strange. It was because it was punctuated with questions in another tone of voice... representing me. Which was irritating both because he was basically having an entire made-up conversation with a... a fake me, but also annoying because most of the questions were indeed probably what I would have asked had I not agreed to stay quiet and listen until he was finished. For example, why he was shifting to a human form to do any of this. At that point of the pitch, he wriggled his spidery fingers in front of my face.
"My people do not build things," he was saying. "Yes, we're curious and we enjoy learning of the world, but human people really go all out. If they cannot see small enough, they build microscopes. Cannot run fast enough, they engineer powered vehicles. Cannot hear gravitational waves moving through the universe? They've now got two interfere-o-meter centres, like kilometres-long cat's whiskers! You know LIGO?"
I nodded carefully, though all I knew about it was that a lot of money was used to build something and it hadn't even started running yet.
"I need fingers to use that equipment. I need eyes sensitive to these light frequencies to read what others have learned. I need to be able to communicate with other researchers. Mostly, I need access." Then he raised his voice a little, imitating me. "'But they don't know that you're a shifter?' Well. Very few. My access is important! Nor do I wish to spend time and energy evading the state." I wondered if remaining undiscovered was the only thing preventing him from feeding on people.
He went on to say that, while a couple of other Areas researchers reacted positively to some greater theory he'd come up with, he did not entirely trust those very smart opinions from very smart people. The group has been falling into a nearly formal despair, he said, with some even calling what they do "the real dismal science," and hope for answers was so strong that even professionals showed bias. Everyone was too eager to see some progress. This was his second favour: that I would agree to inspect at least some of his samples, consider his theory and tell him my impressions, in my professional opinion.
"But I'm nowhere near as experienced and competent as many of the researchers you've been working with are," he had Fake Me say. I gritted my teeth, since it was both a bit of an insult and also completely true. I am definitely considered relatively new to the geosciences. Some people have been working for decades in it. They could glance at some rock thrown under their nose and they'd start listing its component minerals, along with how old it was and probably where it was found. "So why ask me?" Fake Me continued.
He paused, and gave me a sort of overacted look of excitement, like a shady salesman, fingers wriggling. "So glad you asked! Since you are of course not working in the Areas field, you have a fresh gaze. You lack experience, but do have the correct knowledge and training." He leaned forward at this point, and lowered his voice a bit and suddenly sounded very serious. "If you look at my work, and believe that I am indeed onto something, then I will need help. Help finding more."
His third favour. I must have unconsciously frowned even harder, because he held up his hand. "You wonder why I perhaps don't simply... hire Westies from any of the smaller companies that, erm, offer such services, yes?"
While all people diagnosed with Weston's syndrome are required to register with Civil Service, not all of them actually work for the main official Services. Public and private institutions often have their own Weston's people. Some of them basically offer a "rent-a-freak" service, which is popular for short-term gigs. I scowled at Marcus, though he seemed to ignore that completely.
"Those people have no idea what to look for," he said, shaking his head at me. "They can't read rocks. They can't see deep time. I could wander around with some GPR equipment and get similar results." He threw his hands in the air. He gestured an awful lot while he spoke. "Low-value results!" He pointed a finger at me. "You are one of us. You know how to do research, and read research. You know how to work in a lab and how to work in the field. You speak our language. And more specifically, you are a geologist. There are not so many of us working on the Areas."
I felt weird hearing those words. Nobody'd ever said I belonged to anything, really.
He paused, and looked a little uncomfortable. "And also... while I manage, barely, when dealing with groups of human people during extended field work." Pause. "It is very difficult. Exhausting. But, hm. You already know what I am. Don't have to waste energy hiding from you." He raised his shoulders and spread his hands wide. "And as a bonus, you can find things. Yes?" At this point, he went silent and looked at me expectantly. He reminded me of a dog waiting for someone to throw a frisbee for it.
"You done?" I finally asked him.
"Yep."
I took a huge bite of my heart attack burger, to give myself a moment to think. Checking out some samples and giving an opinion on them seemed simple enough. It was a pretty normal kind of request of a grad student, to be honest, even if it was related to Areas research. Like most people schooled in the geosciences, I did not wave away the seriousness of the Desolate Areas and what they mean to human civilisation, or all life on Earth even. Also, as he mentioned, most of the other researchers aren't geologists. Probably the biggest group studying the Areas are biologists. I thought that made it even more sensible that even someone like me could offer useful feedback.
But the other thing... I took a sip of my coffee, wondering whether this was a job offer. "You live in your car. You don't have any money. If your samples show a pattern, and I were to agree to go into Areas work, how would I get paid?"
He shook his head. "I live outside, Sanne de Winter," he corrected me. He waved his hand around, gesturing to a nearby parking lot. "The car is my tool," pause, "for certain kinds of work." He looked down at my burger while his wavey hand started playing air-piano again. I've since gotten used to the constant drumming and air-piano he does, but back then it was something between irritating and disconcerting. "If you are interested in the Areas," a pause, "then I would inform the various working groups. My work goes from place to place. Places which hire me for a research project," pause, "would be hiring you as well. Research assistant."
I took another bite, and thought about it. Really, I would rather have a real job, something stable. But at that time, I had no idea what my prospects were. And well... the thought of working with a large predatory arthropod was unnerving, to say the least. "Can I think about this?" I asked.
He stared at me with his total lack of expression. "My current project is ending. I have rented a room. To store my things, temporarily. Preferably the samples are examined... within the next week or so. Third favour has more time, if you need. Depends on your findings anyway."
I nodded. "Okay. Well, I'm interested in looking at those. They all rocks?"
His eyebrows raised a little. "Mostly." I noticed he was staring at the remains of my burger again, so I quickly finished it. I dunno, I think I imagined him just grabbing it from me, and I didn't like the feeling of something sitting so close to me while looking so hungry.
I had noticed the change in his speech. During his explanation, it was smooth and a little like he was trying to get me to switch car insurance, but when answering my questions he had these shorter sentences, with pauses in the middle of them. This reminded me that he was only playing human, so when I agreed to visit his rented space the following Saturday morning, it was with more than a bit of unease and trepidation. I had thought of bringing some kind of weapon but, well, I don't have any weapons. I had some dog spray in my pocket just in case.
The room ended up being in a run-down apartment complex at the edge of the industrial district of the city. It looked like most of its tenants were itinerant drug users and gang members hiding out or something, which didn't instill any confidence in me, but I made myself wait outside in the weedy parking lot. I didn't waste all that bus money for nothing, I told myself, and sucked down a cigarette to relax. I saw his dog-brown, dirt-covered sedan there, what I later learned was a heavily modified late-80's Oldsmobile. Oh yeah, I gotta write about that fucking car. Later.
Eventually he came outside, looking quite dishevelled, and waved me through one of the damaged apartment doors. I wondered if he'd just crawled out of a dumpster. I took a big breath before stepping into the dark room, which ended up being almost entirely empty. A matress sat in the corner of the large combination kitchen and living room, but I think it had been left there by the previous occupant. There were otherwise just very large squares of cardboard, like from boxes for refrigerators or something, laid out on the floor, with various rock piles sitting on it. Luckily it was a very sunny day so the bright outdoor light even managed to get in through the windows after Marcus pulled the smoke-stale blinds up, and I saw that the cardboard was covered in written scribbles, with lines drawn between the items.
The whole floor setup made me think of those detective series on tv, where the heroes are trying to piece together the evidence—except those were always cork boards on a wall with the clues pinned.
He waved me over to one area. "Oh wait," he said suddenly. "First here." He gestured for me to follow him to another dim room. I poked my head in to see piles of books and a diamond wire saw, all on the floor, but there was also a desk with one leg covered in duct tape. That had two microscopes sitting on it, a desk lamp, and a recognisable set of mineral investigation stuff: little bottles of HCL and red stain, knives, a polisher, a ceramic plate, a magnifying glass, a box of slides. Marcus turned on the lamp and a petrographic microscope, popped the box open with curiously nimble fingers and pulled out a slide, setting it under the scope. Bending his long frame over it, he fiddled with the adjustment wheels, then looked up at me and gestured for me to take a look.
I stood in the doorway for a moment. I was very uncomfortable with the idea of walking into a dark room and staring down a microscope while a man-eating creature was behind me. He saw me hesitating and sighed.
"Sanne de Winter." I looked at him. "I am being... so very serious. Please." He stepped quite a ways away from the desk, and gestured again.
He could have just devoured me the moment I stepped in, I told myself. Quit being such a goddamn pussy. I made myself enter the room and bent down over the scope, experiencing my brain's feeling sensation bloom around me. I let it. Peering in, I saw a thin section, which is a microns-wide polished slice of rock which often looks like unordered kaleidoscope images. On this one though, the forms, the shapes of the different minerals, were nearly regular. Crosshatched, almost Widmanstättenian. "This one is really beautiful," I murmured.
"It is," he replied from behind. The comment surprised me.
"I have no idea what I'm looking at, though," I told him, looking up and stepping away from the scope while forcing my brain to close up. Out of nowhere, I wondered where he got the money for a microscope like that. Petrographic scopes aren't cheap.
"Recovered in the Oaxaca Area," he replied. That was a large Desolate Area which encroached a small town in Mexico about ten years ago. "And I've found this in host rock," he said as he stepped forward and swapped to another slide.
This one had more crystalline shapes, like the arm of a snowflake, or a nerve cell. A large spike jutted out to one side, with smaller spikes coming off it. "Okay, what's this one?"
"Shocked zircon. So far only found in marine sediments otherwise. But specifically..." air-piano, "at impact sites." He adjusted his glasses and did more finger-wiggling in excitement. "A paper is on the way. Specifying a new name," pause, "for this structure." He pointed back at the first slide. "Let me tell you of this stuff."
He crouched like a spring to open a shoebox on the floor and took out a light-coloured stone, then uncoiled his body in a way that made me hold my breath. He acted as though he didn't notice as he brought the stone to the table. It looked a little like a quartz. He showed me one flat side where he had sawed into it. That side was a cloudy grey colour.
"This discolouration," he said, pointing to the flat end. Then he pointed to the scope. "I don't understand what happened. When this was cut, both pieces darkened. At the cut edge." He shook his head and pushed his glasses back up his nose, and held the stone near the lamp. "Also. These allow light to pass through. But not the darkened ends. It... becomes more opaque. Cannot explain how it is doing this. Happens each time it is cut." More agitated air-piano. "Not anything like... oxidation. Something causes the internal structures to... rotate." He walked back to the main room, motioning me to follow him.
"And it does so quickly. Takes about an hour. Every sample." He pointed to some smaller stones sitting on one corner of his cardboard. "Those are from an Area here. Up north. They do the same thing."
I spent the next half hour or so going through the various rock samples laying on the cardboard and reading the notes. It seemed that he had collected the same type of strange rock from several Areas, and he had dated them and analysed their constituent elements: iridium, platinum, iron, nickel, titanium sulfide... He wasn't the only collector, and his observations had been replicated by teams at other labs.
This was when he started showing me his other notes. Where these samples were found, any loose stones laying on the ground seemed almost oriented lengthwise radially from the samples. Where animal trails existed, they worked their way around the places the sample stones were found, as if creatures in the Areas were consciously avoiding them. At least twice, a sample had spontaneously warmed in his hands, which was why their lack of measured radioactivity was odd, nor was there any evidence for any exothermic reactions which could take place with the material present. Due to the iron, though, they were fairly magnetic.
I think the dating was the more interesting thing: the samples themselves seemed to be around three billion years old, while the metamorphic host rocks, mostly gneiss and schists, were dated closer to two billion years.
I stepped back from the cardboard and was looking at everything as a whole. Marcus peered at me over the rims of his glasses. "Your thoughts?"
I let my gaze wander around the various arrows, diagrams and scribbled notes on the cardboard on the floor. Many of the elements inside these rocks are not very common on Earth. They were very old, but embedded into younger rock which had gone at least once through the tribulations of the rock cycle. Finally, not all their properties were explainable.
"Over a billion years ago, maybe these things landed on our planet... from somewhere else... and some became metamorphised," I ventured. I looked at him. "And you think that every Desolate Area has some of these and that they're somehow linked to the, um, phenomena we see in them."
He only stared at me a moment, then pushed up his glasses. "Perhaps." He stared at his cardboard setup. "They have been moving... over time as well." Of course.
"You would have to show how some of the bizarre effects of the Areas are caused by a bunch of rocks, and not that the Areas are maybe somehow making them," I told him. "Also, I think it would be hard to prove that every Area has these, and nowhere else. I mean, if you didn't find them, that wouldn't mean they weren't there, especially if they were kinda deep."
"Still trying to get ahold of a sample type. Ones they have found inside living tissue," he said. "On my list to collect. Bernadette Michaels offers her lab and expertise." Bern is one of the biologists working on Areas research. Marcus air-piano'd and looked at me again. "Help such as yours would assist in... your second point," he said cautiously. He meant, finding these rocks in each visited Area, and checking places with similar climates, geology, age, flora and fauna which did not have any evidence of these things. The latter wouldn't be fully accepted as evidence of absence, but at least a tantilising correlation.
I shrugged, shaking my head. "I—I think you're onto something, yeah." I took a deep breath. "Honestly, this is all really, really interesting. I've never read a whole lot on the Desolate Areas, except the news stories."
The news stories were the stranger things, stuff that sells subscriptions mostly. People going mad in the Areas, the strange monsters, people's loss of time, equipment acting bizarrely, people reporting sightings of things like random items in the wilderness, like doors in door frames standing up. In some places, special Engineer Corps built safety conduits between habitable areas which go through a Desolate Area, and those require constant maintenance. But the idea that I could help, in a small way at least, in answering the greater questions about these... I felt a little excited about that.
I just didn't know if I wanted to try it as a job.
"I'll have to see if I'm available when you enter the field again," I said tactfully. If I had some good employment by then, he was out of luck. While Marcus' face remained expressionless, I got the feeling that he was satisfied with my answers.
I left the grotty building and thought about all the stuff I'd seen, and the opportunity, as I rode the buses home. I did not expect that I would get dead ends from all my contacts in the months afterwards.
So many great opportunities were suggested to me. Several of them were so interesting that it made my guts hurt, but I could not go through with the application process, or go beyond a phone call, because of those damn testing requirements. Apparently, more places than I'd thought require extensive testing, and not just for Weston's, but a variety of diseases and syndromes. Weston's is congenital, you can't catch it or spread it, but I guess a lot of places don't want to invest in hiring someone and then have that person taken away by some De Real Civil Service thugs, or given a fine for not ensuring everyone's registered. I dunno, but it's depressing.
Since I know my next entry'll be about my recent near-death in an Area, it's obvious that I was still sitting around a few months later, broke and jobless—well, that's not really true; I was still doing the barista thing at the coffee shop—when I heard a "shave and a haircut" knock on my door, and something which looked like a crusty old geologist was standing on my rental's porch.