Episode 10 Oubliette

  He did not recall the impact. Strangely he did after have a distinct memory of the snap of glass as his headlamp shattered, leaving him in darkness, and blood running down his brow.

  For a moment, he thought he was awake. He thought he saw something. But no.

  There was nothing before his real eyes. Before his inner eye memories flipped past as rapidly as the facecards glimpsed in a deck ruffled by a thumb.

  Wartime made for rapid advancement, and he was among the youngest to achieve the rank of colonel. The peace that followed seemed final, with no further enemies on the horizon. Preston Lost found him unable to return to civilian life. His parents before their passing away had amassed a fabulous fortune several times over, so work was not a necessity.

  He was a man born at the wrong time. Chivalry was dead. There were no more crusades, no more mighty deeds to be done.

  Sport fishing and big game hunting became first a pastime, than an obsession. Here, for a while, he found his gnawing hunger sated. But the times were against him. For then first one nation and then another outlawed such sport. Even herds that were overpopulated and overgrazing their resources, private hunters were not allowed to cull. The turmoil of war had turned popular opinion against any private ownership of weapons. Perhaps against anything dangerous, rare, worthy of manhood.

  The aerospace plane had, at first, been merely another pastime. To go higher and faster than any civilian jet was an adventure, and, frankly, to elude regulations became sort of a game also.

  And then he saw an unidentified flying object.

  There it hung, high in the dark blue sky above the Rockies, flying too high and too fast to be real. At first, he had thought it some strange reflection in the canopy, or a trick of the eye. Ordinary radar returned no echo.

  But even that early prototype of the Shooting Star was able to gain altitude, keep the moving object in view. He broke off pursuit of the flying disk over the Great Salt Lake in Utah only when the local air traffic control ordered him away from airspace reserved for the international airport.

  He was curious. He investigated. He was wealthy; he could bring immense resources to bear. There seemed to be no unbiased sources of information about flying saucers. Everyone seemed either too skeptical or too gullible. More crackpot theories filled this field than any other. Nine tenths of what was written or filmed was rubbish, the eyewitnesses unreliable, the evidence ambiguous, and could be explained away.

  But the other tenth…

  There were also reports of abductions where victims were taken aboard the flying disks, manhandled with sadistic indifference, subjected to cruel experiments, and released. Then there were also reports of abductions where the victims were never seen again.

  Preston traveled to speak to witnesses and survivors in person. Most were eager to speak to any sympathetic ear. A large community of similar investigators, reaching back years, had trod this path before. There were books, magazines, even seminars. Some reports reached back to the Dark Ages, and spoke of elves on flying boats who bedeviled the people.

  Preston often lay awake at nights, brooding, poring over the reports of the small army of detectives, scientists and librarians he had hired to help him. It was real. The human race was being preyed upon.

  Then came the last interview. A family of Mormon ranchers, living on Yard Moose Mountain in Utah, had seen UFOs three times, hovering after midnight above the mountain peak. After the first two sightings, some cattle were mutilated, and black patches found burnt into the ground. After the third, their daughter was gone. Only her severed arm was found, engagement ring still on the finger.

  Preston recognized the date. This had been the same UFO he had seen and chased. The one that escaped.

  Staring at the diamond ring the sobbing mother brought down from the mantelpiece made something bend inside Preston's soul, and snap.

  It was as if a man-eating tiger he had failed to shoot had escaped to kill again. This had happened because he had not been ready.

  At what point did a hobby become an obsession? When was the final line crossed? Perhaps when he spent ungodly sums buying an aeronautical engineering company, designing and building a UFO-hunting aircraft capable of reaching above the atmosphere.

  Or when he bent, and then broke the laws, acquiring military-grade stealth technology and engine designs.

  Or perhaps when he sold his domestic holdings, and fled to an island in the Caribbean, whose local despot he bribed and befriended.

  Or when he began routinely crossing into airspace where he was not allowed, gambling that his detection gear could safely keep him away from traffic that could not see him.

  Or when he began running regular patrol flights in his dark plane, hour after hour, unseen by radar, haunting whatever spot on the globe from which came any report of UFO abductions, or strange lights in the sky.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  And then one night, a disk was seen over the Florida Keys, heading to sea. He did not think of himself as reckless man. But it was without any second thoughts that he followed the flying disk out into the ill-rumored waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and then down into the boiling clouds of a freakishly sudden storm.

  And now he was here. The air was stuffy, hot, and close. There was an aching in his right hand.

  With a groan, he tried to sit up, but banged his head on some unseen projection above.

  He turned his head, and saw the flap of his pack was glowing. One of his two chemical glowsticks was lit. It must have been struck or bent during his fall. In the narrow beam of dim light, he saw why his hand was aching. His fingers were clutching his rifle so fiercely that his knuckles were white. How long had he been unconscious? Less than twelve hours, assuming the glowstick had started to glow when first he fell.

  He fished the glowstick out. The fitful green light cast a tiny circle. Bones were piled under his back. He was in a tomb.

  The slanted and dank stone roof was only inches above his head. He craned his neck and held the glowstick out as far as he could reach. The angle of the shadows to one side hinted that there might be a broader space in that direction. There was not enough room to turn and get his hands and feet under him. Grunting, swearing, and squirming in an awkward, crablike motion, he pulled himself across the layer of bones. He found himself at the bottom of a chimney of rock. It led upward at a steep angle, and the surface was a slope of sand, small pebbles, and scree. It was unclimbable.

  He lit one of his two tub candles. He had one candle and forty-nine matches remaining. He rested the candle atop a skull that he nicknamed Johnson.

  He resisted the impulse to light the second one. He resisted the impulse to talk to Johnson.

  Groping, he explored the straights of the tomb. One by one, he picked up and moved bones, rib cages, skulls and white debris from one side of the crowded space to the other, examining the walls and floor. The bones were frail and snapped under the least pressure, filling the air with bone dust. He donned a balaclava to cover mouth and nose.

  The toil was painstaking and backbreaking.

  In one place, he caught a hint of odor. He picked up Johnson and held him aloft. The candle in its pool of wax atop the skull sent up a tiny trail of smoke. Preston held his breath. It did not rise straight up. There was a tiny motion of air in the enclosed place.

  Time passed. His candle died. He dug through the bones. He ate some of his rations bar and drank a 4 ounce packet of water (five remained). Once he fished the pocket sized Bible out of his survival kit. He did not want to waste a match reading it, and he did not remember it very well, but said such prayers as he recalled from his childhood. He wept angry tears, and asked why he had been brought to this freakish future world, if only to die here in the dark.

  More time passed. Eventually he found the source of the air: a square opening in the floor. It was blocked by what felt like a grating of metal bars. He smelled fresher air. This was not a natural cave. That gave him hope.

  He lit a match and looked. He shoved a femur through the crossed bars of the grate. There was a slight noise as it fell further, then a rhythm series of clicks as it bounced first from one wall then the other some unseen drop. No sound returned from the bottom.

  He tore a page out of his survival guide, crumpled it into a ball, and used another match. He ignited the paper wad and dropped it through the metal bars. It receded to a bright dot in the distance, but it came to rest on some flat surface far below before it flickered out.

  He heaved a sigh of relief. It looked like no more than twenty feet. He could reach that.

  The pocket chainsaw was meant to cut wood, not metal, but these bars were surprisingly soft. He saved his remaining candle and glowstick, and worked in the dark.

  Hours passed, and he had no way to count them in the dark. He nibbled from his rations and drank another packet of water (four remained) only when he felt himself going faint in the head.

  Finally the last bar was severed. He shook the final glowstick into cool, green light. He lashed his parachute cord securely to and through the stubs of the bars. He slung the rope around one of the bars he had left intact. One length of rope he held in his hand. It passed over the bar and came down again around his hips in a bowline. Slowly releasing the first length allowed him to lower himself into the darkness, keeping his feet on one wall.

  At twenty five feet down, he was out of rope. He had misestimated the distance.

  He lashed the free end in a slip knot to the line supporting his weight, clung to rough stones in the wall, and secured his pack in the bowline. The lower the pack weight went, the higher the slipknot climbed.

  At thirty feet down, the walls around him slanted sharply away. He lowered himself through an opening in a cavern roof.

  When the slipknot was against the bars twenty five feet above, he climbed down the rope hand over hand.

  At fifty feet own, at the end of the rope, he hung for a moment. Where was the floor? He dropped the green glowstick. It fell twelve feet and came to rest. It cast only the smallest circle of illumination. It was impossible to see any details.

  He sighed in relief, lowered himself to the very end of the rope where the pack was. He supported his weight by one strap, and hung by his hands. He was a six foot tall man, and his arms were half that, so the floor was at most four or five feet below the toes of his boots.

  With a savage motion of his knife, he cut the parachute cord where it was knotted to the pack strap.

  He fell. He landed and stumbled. The was a boom of metallic noise as he crashed to his side. The glowstick rolled. His arms and head were hanging over some brink. The glowstick went spinning into the abyss, and dwindled from sight.

  Carefully he sat up. He brought out his last candle, lit it.

  (No candles remained. Forty-six matches remained.)

  He was standing on the upper surface of a metal cube roughly two yards on a side. There was a sheer drop one pace away, whichever way he stepped. The scrap of burned paper was also resting here.

  The cube was hovering in midair with no means of support.

  Designs of raised trigrams, made of tiny straight or broken lines arranged in squares covered each face. Perhaps it was writing, perhaps ornament, perhaps circuitry of some sort.

  No matter how far over the edge he leaned, or where he held the candle, the shed light showed there was no pillar, no post, no floor, nothing underneath. There was nothing to any side.

  Trapped. There was no way off the cube, no way down, and no way to reach the rope left dangling above. All hope was gone. He uttered every curse he knew and invented new ones. He pounded the stubborn surface with his fists until his knuckles bled.

  The letters of the rectangular script lit up. A dispassionate, nonhuman voice spoke.

  "The speech centers of your brain have been adjusted to allow for total communication. What are your instructions?"