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CodyLabs — The Bottomless Pit 3/3
#astronaut #sciencefiction #scifi #shortstory
Published: 2021-05-17 12:43:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 7780; Favourites: 21; Downloads: 0
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3“Show me?” Peter asked.
“Yeah…” Tom nodded. “Yeah, I could show you. All we gotta do is shine enough light down there, and we can see. Yeah? Yeah! We can see hell, we can… Yeah kid, we can see the natives. I’ll show you the natives. We just need light. Just enough light.”
“I mean.” Peter gestured to the spotlight he’d been using. “This is a pretty powerful light. And even this can’t shine all the way down there.”
“No…!” Tom snapped. “No, uh… No, we’ve got to get more lights! See, this ship has a half-dozen spotlights just itself! And some of the other ships around here have even more. Uh… You know your way around machines, don’t you boy? You can get things running again? Pull levers?”
“Yeah? Yeah.” Peter shrugged.
“Alright then.” Tom nodded. “Now I need you to head on over to some of the other ships around here. I need you to find a way to turn their lights on too. I’ll stay on this one, and get the lights on here.”
“Oh okay.” Peter looked around and selected out one of the nearest ships. It did indeed seem to have lights as well. “That sounds good. But how do I get over there? It’s kind of a long way…”
“Just uh… Oh, you’ll have to jump.” Tom told him. “There’s no gravity, you can jump as far as you want. That… Uh yeah, that’s how I do it. It’s the only way to move down here. No hassle whatsoever.”
“Alright then, cool.” As peter climbed back up to the walkway, he gauged the distance carefully. “That makes sense.”
“Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. It does.”
Peter planted his feet on the walkway, gripped a fist around both handrails, then threw himself forward, pulling himself along the handrails faster and faster, then putting both legs into the hardest jump he’d ever done, right as he reached the end.
Tom and the ship sped away beneath him, and now he was gliding above the blackness, with his tether trailing behind and below him, a great length of fluttering slack.
It turns out he’d planned his jump well, for he was able to grab onto the other ship’s antennae as he passed. “WOOHOO!” He let out a yelp of victory as soon as his purchase was secure, and pumped a fist in the air.
“Nice going, kid!” Old Tom waved back at him. “Now find a way inside, and get the lights on!”
“Alright!” He climbed around to the airlock, but it was either rusted tight or locked (hard to tell which) and he wasn’t strong enough to crack it. But fortunately, his search for an alternative airlock led him past the spotlight array, and he found they could be activated with a manual switch, same as the ones on Tom’s ship. He took a minute to flip them all on, then looked back to Tom. “Alright Tom, I got these ones on!”
“Good going, kid, I’ve almost got these ones!” Tom flicked on a second light on his own ship. “Now find another ship! I think there’s one over that way.”
“Hmm…? Oh yeah, I see it.” Peter agreed, and began to position himself for another jump. “Yeah, I can get right over there.” He planted his feet, pulled with his arms, sprang with his feet, and he was airborne again.
This was a longer jump, and despite himself, he looked down. Down at the inscrutible dark below. Despite all the spotlights they were now pointing at it, nothing could yet be seen down there. “Hey Tom, are you sure?” He asked. “Are you sure we can see ‘hell’ or the ‘natives’ or whatever? Because it still looks pretty black.” He surprised himself by the strength of his voice, and realized that he’d successfully dissociated himself from his own present danger. He realized he’d become so brave, so stalwart and level-headed, that he could think about these mysteries with a purely academic curiosity, rather than with fear. And he thought that must mean he was a very good boy scout.
“Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll see them.” Tom assured him. “Yeah, I’ve seen ‘em myself. Just have to get enough lights pointed at it.”
“But ‘natives’? Like, what are they? Like angels? Or demons?”
“Uh… Yeah, kinda like that.” Tom agreed.
“Or like alien beings?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean what do they look like?” Peter clarified. “What color? Are they humanoid?”
“Oh. Uh… They’re black.” Tom answered. “All black… And they’ve got. Uh. Eyes. Lots of eyes. All over their heads and their bodies. Their eyes are all black… I mean, their whole bodies are black too, of course, but their eyes are real black. Deep black.”
“Okay.” Peter nodded. He glanced forward again, and saw he was nearing the next ship. “How many eyes?”
“Lots… But the thing that really stands out is the hair.” Tom answered. “It’s not hair… Not like strings like people hair, it’s like… flat paper ribbons, like smoke… Drifting all over their body like a… Like a veil. And all black. The hair is all black, but it glints in the light… That’s how you can see them. By the light shining in their hair.”
“Got it.” Peter tried to imagine that, but didn’t have a whole lot of luck with it. The image his mind arrived at was something like a smoky elf with eyeballs all across its chest. Kind of silly image, really. It looked made-up.
He landed on the ship. This one was unlocked, but for some reason he didn’t want to go inside. The airlock was jammed half-open, and portions of the hull were warped and bent, as if by the work of huge fingers, or by a boarding crew armed with sledgehammers. Only one of its spotlights was working, and Peter turned it on. “Hey Tom!” He called. “Any of these other ships have lights?”
“Uh… Yeah, that one!” Tom pointed off in another direction. “There’s one over there, I think. Try that one.”
“Alright!” Another jump, and this one he almost missed. But he hit the pillar beyond the ship even though he missed the vehicle itself, and it was only a number of seconds to climb his way around back onto the hull. A slight vibration could be felt up through his feet, and he didn’t like it.
And these spotlights weren’t working. “Yep, yeah, the batteries must be dead.” Tom theorized. “You’ll have to go inside and get the reactor running again.”
“Okay.” Peter nodded, with no possible idea how to get a reactor working. At least the airlock wasn’t locked… But when he stepped through the darkened door, he found the hallways inside this tiny ship to be almost more scary than the expanse outside. Because although his mind was now accustomed to the idea of there being nothing at all out there, it was still intuitive to him that something could be moving through these hallways whenever his back was turned. He closed doors as he passed them, and his heart was racing by the time he got to the cockpit. “What… What buttons do I press?” He asked, with an eye over his shoulder.
“Uh… Green ones.” Tom had no idea how to operate a reactor either. “If you see any green buttons, give them a press.”
“Okay…?” Peter didn’t see any green buttons. But there was one that was marked with a spotlight symbol, and this one he pressed. Beyond the cockpit glass, the ship’s lights flared on. “Oh.” He said. “Okay, the batteries are still good. The lights were just turned off.”
“Exactly.” Tom said. “Just like I told you.”
“No, you said the batteries are dead.”
“No, that’s what you said.” Tom told him. “You’re confused. Just turn them on.”
“They are on.” Peter found his way back outside the ship, and looked back towards Tom’s ship. All the lights over there were off. “Hey Tom!” He called. “I think you might have messed up, you’re turning lights off instead of on.”
“I’ll worry about this!” Tom snapped with sudden ferocity. “I think I know how to operate my own ship, you just keep turning lights on like I told you!”
“Sorry! Sorry, I… Uh. I think I got all the nearby ships…?” Peter scratched his arm and looked around. “And I can’t really see any others. Especially without the lights from your ship shining on the pillars to show me where to go.”
“Oh. Right. Right yeah.” Tom muttered. “Uh… Okay. We’re gonna have to turn on the light ships, kid.”
“The light ships? What are those?”
“Entire ships that are built around one giant spotlight.” Tom explained. “Y’see, the people that built this place, they had to do everything in the dark. They had no sun, they had no stars to show them about, so to work, they needed dedicated light sources to illuminate the way. The light ships. Bright as the sun, bright as real, actual daylight. We need to turn them on.”
“Where are they?” Peter glanced about.
“Down lower.” Tom told him. “You’ve got to… To climb down the pillars. They’re in bays beneath there a little bit.”
“Won’t the time shift be an issue?”
“No!”
“Oh. Okay. Uh. I’ll start climbing then.”
Climbing down was just as easy as climbing in any other direction in this gravity, but he kept himself slow and steady and safe anyway, affixing pitons as he went. The power driver was having a difficult time pushing them into cracks in the metal in any way that stuck, but he figured it was better than nothing. Once when he drove one into a tank, it pierced a hole and released a jet of gas, which blew him away from the wall. He managed to catch on to handhold before he drifted away entirely, but it gave him quite a scare. He knew the cable would keep him safe even if he did come away, but still.
He was making good time.
And he wasn’t seeing a single one of the supposed ‘light ships’.
“Hey Tom?”
No answer.
“Tom, do you copy? Over.”
He wondered if the time shift was interfering with the radio, as it had been interfering between he and Louis. He began to cycle down through lower frequencies, and finally found Tom’s signal again. The old man seemed to be muttering to himself, and Peter heard it as slow-motion at a lower pitch, which was kind of funny. “Goootta geeet ouuut oof heeere caaan’t beee too muuuuch looonger theeeeey’rrre coooming the naaatives…”
“Heeeeyyyy Toooommm.” Peter spoke in slow motion to make himself easier to understand.
“HUUUH? Ooooh yeaaah kiiiid hoooow’s iiit goooing youuuu uuuuhhh you fooound the liiight shiiiips yeeet?”
“No I haven’t found anything. There’s one ship down here, but it looks like it has the ordinary number of spotlights. I’ll turn them on anyway, I guess.”
“Yeeah yeaah you doo thaaat. Gooood caaaaall kiiid. Uuuuhh… Cheeeck around baack oof the piiilllarr. Theeere’s goottta be sooome liiight shiiips sooomewheeere, yooou juuuust goootta look for ‘em…”
“Alright.” Peter glanced back up at Tom’s ship, and Tom still hadn’t turned the lights back on. Must be some kind of confused, incompetent old man. Maybe he really was crazy after all…
Peter found the deep ship’s spotlight switch, turned them on. He turned to continue making his way further down the pillar toward the supposed light ships, but before he passed out of sight, he paused, and looked back upwards.
“Hey Tom?” He asked. “What are you doing?”
Tom didn’t answer, and his radio signal cut off.
Peter found himself suddenly suspicious, and frightened for no good reason he could put a finger on. He rushed back to the spotlights of the most deep ship, and turned one upwards to focus on Tom’s ship.
And he saw Tom standing on the railing, reaching out into the darkness, grasping the slack in Peter’s cable. He had a blowtorch in his other hand.
And while Peter was too deep below, too far away to do anything to stop it, he cut the cable.
“Tom!”
Tom’s radio was off.
And around that time, (it may have been just that instant, or it may have started minutes ago and he hadn’t noticed) Peter saw that the line had finally reversed.
Louis was finally lining up.
The severed end of the cable drifted down toward Peter, and he saw Tom tie the live end to his own belt. And then, with a gleeful spring, he leapt off the catwalk, and let Louis reel him upwards. Up towards freedom. Up away from the dark, away from the pit, up to somewhere human, somewhere natural. Somewhere free and far from this bottomless waste.
Tom finally had his chance to be free from his black hell, and he’d taken it.
And he’d left Peter below.
“TOM!”
Forgetting safety, forgetting his pitons and the severed length of line trailing behind him, Peter leapt back upwards after him. “TOM GET BACK HERE!” The frayed end of the cable threaded out through the pitons, leaving him without any safety. “Why are you doing this? Tom! Tom you could have asked! You could have just asked, Tom…! Tom, don’t leave me down here please…!”
Tom was already up far enough that the gravity had started to increase, just slightly. So Peter’s jump didn’t bring him quite high enough to reach him. He came up short of his target by about 10 meters, and then slowly, slowly drifted back down.
With a sudden horror, he realized that on this trajectory, he would entirely miss everything. He’d miss the pillars, he’d miss Tom’s ship, he’d just pass right straight down into the black. The same thing that would’ve happened the first time he descended, only this time, he couldn’t use the cable to pull himself back up.
The cable!
He still had it!
It may have been cut, but he was still trailing a good 10 meters or so behind him. If he hurried, he could use it. If he hurried, if he remembered the right knot to tie…
Peter frantically pulled the cable toward him, found the frayed end, looped it loosely around itself, and tied a hasty knot. Beside him, the catwalk passed by. The knot came undone. Slow is steady. He told his shaking hands, and made them tie it again, right this time. Steady is fast. He pulled on the knot to tighten it, and it was a good knot.
Then he threw the whole looped cable upwards like a lasso, and it wrapped around a protrusion of the catwalk, and held fast. He jerked to a stop, then he gave a tug, and he was heading back toward Tom’s ship. Then he was standing on the walkway again, looking up at Tom, who was rapidly passing out of sight.
“Tom!” He tried again. “Tom do you copy! Tom please don’t hurt Louis, please… Tom… Oh you know what? Forget it. Forget you. I’ll… I’ll… Why, I’ll come up and get you myself, I’ll show you, I’ll get you, just you wait… Tom, you messed with the wrong boy scout! You creepy trickster, you dishonorable sack of greed and grime and stupid words! I’ll give you one last chance, and if you don’t take it… God help you, Tom. God help you… Over.”
As he talked himself up and his enemy down, he rushed down the catwalk toward the entrance to Tom’s ship, and wrenched the airlock open. A few dim lights winked on around him, and the tiny room flooded with air. He opened the inner hatch as soon as the controls would allow him, and now he was inside Tom’s home.
There wasn’t much to see, not much that the old man had to call his own. A small sort of kitchen, a closet crammed full of garbage, a pantry stacked with cans. Peter noticed a striking lack of the previously-promised coffee. Not that he even liked coffee, but it irked him that there had been none. The vacuum toilet was also leaky and filthy. Not that he could smell anything with his helmet on, but that irked him too.
He didn’t hang around to find anything else to be irked by, because he was in a hurry. From room to room, locker to locker to storage crate and cranny, he searched frantically for anything that could be of use to him in his long vertical pursuit.
The controls of the ship? Could he fly it after him? No; he didn’t know how to undock the ship from the wall, and that’s to say nothing of actually steering the thing, or safely igniting its nuclear rockets.
A spare spool of cable? Not useful for climbing, especially since he didn’t intend to concern himself with safety, but he clipped it to his belt anyway.
A shovel? Useful as a weapon, but he already had a knife.
An extra pack of pitons? They weren’t the right size for his own driver, so he left them.
A Bible? Not useful for escape, but it confused him. Tom, if you were a believer this whole time, why did you fear for your life and your damnation? Where is your faith, and your hope, you scoundrel? We would have saved you! If you’d actually read that book, you would have learned what it said about selflessness and decency and love. And you wouldn’t have done as you did. We could have all had a happy ending.
His search of the ship brought him to what must have been the former captain’s quarters, back when this ship had had a crew. Tom had apparently been using it as both a sleeping and recreational area. Here was his bed, and console for some old video game, and a collection of books. The books were in a language Peter didn’t recognize, and most of their pages had been torn out and used as paper. Some of this paper Tom had scrawled over in his own lackluster handwriting, some of it he’d made into origami and cards, and on some of the paper, he’d drawn horrible, frightening things. Things with strange shapes, and many deep black eyes, and with hair like veils of smoke. These were not drawings of demons, or of angels, not in any popular, modern understanding of the terms, but they were alien indeed. The most alien things that Peter had ever seen.
And in the former Captain’s locker, there was a strongbox. It contained a small stash of gold and jewels, and a gun.
A gun.
Did it still work? Did it have any ammunition? Peter decided he didn’t care. In fact, he decided he wouldn’t take it. Wouldn’t kill Tom. Wouldn’t even consider it. Sure he wouldn’t let himself be stranded down here, but he also wouldn’t kill Tom to do it; it wasn’t what a good Christian boy would do. It wasn’t proper.
It took him 10 more precious minutes of searching before he found what he was looking for.
An EVA pack.
It wasn’t the best kind of jetpack to use in gravity, but it could build up some decent speed in 0-g, and at least he knew how to use it. It should hopefully have enough of a kick to catch him up to Tom. Peter buckled it over top of his suit, tightened the straps, and checked the fuel gauge. It read full.
Well.
Here goes nothing.
He got as much of a running start upwards as he could across the nose of the ship, jumped off with all his strength, and touched off the pack’s thrusters. The fluid pumps purred behind his back, the frame shook, and the walls raced past around him, the black receding behind him.
Up, up, up he flew, back out of the ghastly hellish pit, faster and faster as the thrusters pushed him onward. But not a minute later, around about the time the fuel was reading half-empty, he began to slow back down again; gravity was once again strong enough that the thrusters couldn’t quite overcome it. But all wasn’t lost, for he still had all the speed he’d built up below; he was slowing down, but he certainly wasn’t slow, and he certainly wasn’t falling. And he wasn’t slowing down as fast as he could have been, for the pack was getting lighter as its fuel drained.
It was an interesting balance of forces and weights and mathematics that Peter wouldn’t have been able to estimate in his head; all he could do was keep the throttle maxed, and hope against hope that he could make it high enough.
And he did.
Right as the pack was losing the last of its speed, right when the fuel had dropped past about a quarter, Tom appeared above. Peter sailed just past him, hit he cable, clenched both gloves around it, and held fast. He forgot to ease off the throttle on the EVA pack, and the thrusters burned until they were dry. He took a moment to make the cable fully secure into his belt, then loosened the buckles of the pack and let it drop.
He glanced down to watch it go, and saw it drop past Tom, who wasn’t more than 3 meters below, staring up at him with the most horrified and helpless expression in his jet-black pits of eyes. His mouth formed words that Peter couldn’t hear.
“You turned your radio off.” Peter reminded him, tapping his own transmitter by way of reminder. “You remember? Back when you betrayed me and left me to rot?”
With a shaking hand, Tom reactivated it. “Uh…! Uh-uh-I…! I didn’t mean to! I…! I swear I didn’t!” He was lying, though he didn’t know it. “I was gonna send the line back down, you just…! You don’t understand, you haven’t been where I’ve been, and seen what I’ve seen…!”
“Yeah, well, I would’ve saved you anyway! Look, I’m not cutting the line and letting you fall now, am I? Louis is a strong guy, both his parents moved here from a 1.5g planet! I’m 100% sure he can lift both of us up at once, all you had to do was ask! Even now, you can just ask, Tom!”
They stared at each other for a moment longer, thinking as hard as they could about the other, and about what to do next.
“Th-thank you, Pete.” Tom said. And he leaned forward and grabbed the line. “Thanks Pete, thanks for doing that.” Then he pulled himself up and grabbed a little higher with his other hand. “It… It means a lot.” And now he was climbing up toward Peter, hand over hand. “You… You repaying a good decent kindness to me even after all that misunderstanding and all that jumping around I had you doing to turn on the lights… I gotta thank you honest for-“
“Tom? Tom, stop climbing.”
“You’re a good kid-“
“Tom! Stop climbing, I don’t trust you, I’m gonna KICK you if you get high enough to reach me!”
“Good kid, Pete, I know you are. Help an old geezer like me-“
“Honest, I’m gonna kick you! Stay away!”
“You know there really were light ships down there. You just weren’t far enough down to see them. Honest! The lights they had could reach for kilometers… Hundreds of kilometers! I remember the day I first saw what those lights showed, deep down, deep where nobody could ever see-“
“ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!? STOP CLIMBING!”
“Nobody could ever see. But you wanted to see, right? Good kid like you, you believed me! You believed? You could see! You could see what came from beyond the light…!”
“Final warning! I really will kick you!”
Tom was high enough to reach Peter, and a bony old hand wrapped around his ankle with a fiercely strong grip.
And Peter really did kick him.
Tom let go of his ankle, and by some mistake of his own, let go of the line as well. He fell until the end of the line’s slack, and when he hit the shock of the end, the knot he’d tied around the buckle on his waist proved insufficient.
He came loose.
And he fell.
And from the old man’s throat, a shrill and despairing cry arose, a noise both unnervingly bestial and jarringly human, a wailing born of fully developed and fully informed panic. He screamed and he cried as he dropped, until the time-shift raised his radio off-frequency and he could no longer be heard.
And Peter cried for longer than that.
He watched his enemy go, watched straight downward through tear-filled eyes as the old man disappeared. Like the flares and the flashlight earlier, he saw the lights on the elder’s suit growing gradually blue and more blue, and then finally purple as they drifted off spectrum.
And then, perhaps it was a visual trick of the water pooling in his eyes, perhaps it was a brief imagination born from a panicked mind still hard at work convincing itself that it wasn’t a murderer, perhaps it was something else entirely, but at that moment, down there in the bottomless pit, Peter saw a thing that frightened him. Something black, moving in the blackness. Some impossible darkness inside an impossible darkness, a shine or a reflection or an even fuller shadow to delineate the border between them. Something strangely shaped, that met Tom as he fell. Something that stared back up at him with black-within-black eyes, as deep in shadow as a cosmic black hole or as the very pit of its birth; and its body seemed to be veiled in curling smoke.
God was still there with him, and Peter was still as brave as he ever had been. But he closed his eyes nevertheless, and he didn’t open them for some time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Peter! Peter can you hear me? What happened?!?”
His eyes finally opened again, slowly, and they brought into focus the sight of Louis’s helmet bending down over him. “Oh…” He smiled tiredly up at his friend. “H-hey ya big baby, it… Took ya long enough…”
“Yeah, well, I- Woah, what’s with your eyes?”
“What…?”
“They…! Oh… Huh… Just for a minute there, they looked like they were black. Like, all entirely black. I dunno.”
“Yeah, well…” Peter sat up, and found his hands were still locked around the cable. In fact, they had been clenched so tight that they were now stiff and sore to open. As he flexed them to try and bring back the blood flow, he glanced around at his surroundings, and saw the mineshaft, and the weird footprints, and the piton, and the yawning black bottomless crevice. “Man…” His head hurt. “I… I must’ve passed out, huh.”
“Yeah, man, you were out cold from oxygen deprivation!” Louis told him. “Your suit must have some serious leak somewhere, because you were down to dregs when I brought you back up! I had to refill you from my suit!”
“Yeah… Wow.”
“And the weird thing is, I couldn’t find the leak! Like 3 hours of your oxygen drained in like 10 minutes, and now it’s holding steady! You really should get that thing inspected.”
“Uh huh.”
“And also, we really need to be getting back. With your leak, we’re cutting it close just standing here talking. It’s still a half-hour hike out of the mines.”
“Yep.” Peter stood shakily to his feet and glanced back at the chasm. “Yeah, we probably… Yeah. We shouldn’t have come down here so far. Dangerous… Hey, help me roll this rock over the hole, huh? Somebody could fall down it.”
“Yeah! Yeah, sounds good.” Louis grasped the other side of the stone, and helped him lever it over top. “So anyway, do you remember what was down there? Did you find anything? I think I felt you reach the bottom. Then I reeled you back up when you didn’t respond to the radio.”
“Yeah… Yeah I remember. I remember everything.” Peter gave the rock a reassuring kick to make sure it would stay in place. “Vividly… And I don’t think I’ll forget in a hurry.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He turned to lead the way up out of the mines. “And Louis? You won’t believe what I found down there.”
“What did you find?” Louis sounded simultaneously worried and excited.
Peter smiled with a strange smile, and he reached a glove into his pocket. It came back out holding a small handful of gold and jewels. “I haven’t even the faintest idea.”
The End
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