Quick Peek
Science Fiction Thriller | Genre
Mechanized horror, misadventure | Themes | Influences The work of John Murray Spear H. P. Lovecraft |
Age | Adult
Notes | Written for the first round of NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2021. Requirements included Genre (thriller), subject (fear of heights), character (bathroom attendant), and maximum length (2500 words) |
Julia had this idea to go hiking, so that’s what we decided to do yesterday. She’d picked the mountain there, you know, and we set off, and it wasn’t long before I realized there were some pretty steep drops next to the path we were taking. I expressed my concern to Julia about the height, and she kinda laughed it off, but ultimately agreed to go a bit slower. So we were taking our time about it, and stopping a lot, and that’s probably why we noticed the door.
It looked like just part of the rock face, with some moss on it, and I imagine anyone just walking by wouldn’t think twice about it. But as I was sitting there trying not to look down, and Julia was poking around trying to occupy herself, she noticed something that looked like a hinge hidden away. So we both tried prying at stuff until suddenly the thing came open, with this pop and hissing sound. When we opened the door there was a series of stone stairs going down and some ancient-looking light bulbs flicking on. They were slow, it took them a moment to really turn on, but Julia was so excited she insisted on getting in there before the light had reached the far end of the staircase. I wasn’t sure, but she convinced me that it was better than trekking along a cliff face, so in we went.
As we made our way down, the lights at the end of the stairs were finally on, and we could see there was another door. This one looked like solid metal, with a sort of bar that lifted up to let the door open. She opened it, and I checked to make sure it had a similar mechanism on the other side so we could get out again before entering the hallway that opened beyond it. All the same, I set the door carefully so it didn’t fully latch before taking it all in.
Here, the rough hewn stone of the stairway switched to smooth, straight lines. There were more lights here, embedded in the wall with tinted glass covering them that washed the chamber in brown and blue hues. It was warmer than it had been outside, and Julia and I stopped to remove our jackets before pressing on. We made it a few feet before we heard a scurrying noise and then the door behind us slam closed.
“I think we should go,” I said, after listening for a minute and not hearing any more noise except the hum of the lights. “I don’t like this.”
“Oh, come on. The heights thing I understand, but you’re the one with that secretive intelligence job. Is this really so wild for you?”
I straightened up and looked back at the door.
“I just don’t like how this is playing out, is all,” I said. “That door—”
“Which you made sure could be opened from this side.”
“Yes, but, what closed it?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t see any answer back that way. So I guess we better try the other way.” She shrugged and kept walking.
I sighed, cursed a bit under my breath, and then caught up to her.
It was probably another ten minutes or so before we came to a T intersection. We ended up going left, and after a curve in the path there was another set of stairs going further down. At the next intersection, I decided to start marking our way. I dug around in our bags for a bit until I found a candy bar, and I marked the way we’d come from by dragging the chocolate along the wall just enough to leave something visible. We tried a different hall, and then another, and soon enough we were far enough along that we were both thankful there would be marks to guide us back.
We were somewhere around an hour in when we heard the scurrying noise again. We stopped and looked around, but as soon as we did it stopped. After waiting a bit for that, we continued on, and then heard the sound again. We stopped, and it stopped, and in whispers we agreed to turn back and try a different hall. We made it back to the last intersection, chose another path, and sure enough the noise stopped. This hall had fewer lights, though, spread apart more, and some of them were flickering. Here we found metal doors set into the walls, and when I opened the first one I saw a modest bedroom. A single bed, a plain dresser, and a simple desk. The room looked completely unused, as if it was prepared for someone who never arrived.
We walked past a couple more before checking again, but the one we tried to open was locked. So we tried the next one, and Julia screamed and jumped back when she looked in. I looked and found the same arrangement of the same furniture, but this one had papers and books strewn about the room, an assortment of crystals and gears, and a skeleton laying on the bed. Having taken that in, I spent a moment reminding her that whoever that was, they were already dead, and none of our concern, before we agreed not to check any more rooms and pressed on.
At the end of the hall was a massive doorway, with two steps leading down into a circular chamber lined on one side with bookcases. In the center of the room was a round table, with ten chairs set around it, and what remained of a rug under the lot. The books were covered in thick dust and cobwebs, some of them visibly moldering away. The table was inlaid with runes and a large blue crystal sat embedded into the center. Opposite the door we entered was another door, hanging open. As I brushed aside some of the dust to look more closely at the etchings on the table, Julia went into the other room and then called for me.
I entered what was clearly some kind of office. Books were laid open across nearly every surface, a half-constructed object of gears and knobs occupying the prime spot on the desk. She wiped some dust off the walls and we were faced with a technical drawing, a design for some kind of steam-powered contraption. We set about clearing all of the designs tacked up on the walls, to find an assortment of plans including cities, some kind of calculator machine, and a number of geared devices of unknown function. They all had grand names, like The Eternal City or The Flame of Truth, but the largest one that hung directly over the desk was clearly the most important. It was labeled The New Power Motive or God-Machine, with a subtitle referring to it as the physical shell of the new God. It had a cylindrical body, apparently made of wood, with metal limbs to resemble a vaguely humanoid shape, and a domed glass head containing an array of moving parts. It looked like the drawing had a numb9er of markings on the body, similar to the ones on the table, but I needed a closer look to be sure.
I went to pull down the drawing, and the lights went out. I reached out and felt Julia, pulling her close as we heard a whirring sound and scuttling noises erupt around us. I could feel her breathing hard as we both tried to stay silent in the middle of the room, which was growing more difficult as dust was filling the air. I strained against coughing, until the lights came back on. We both collapsed and hacked up the dust, but no matter where I looked I could see no new occupant in the room. The drawings were all gone, and the dust from the rest of the room was heavily disturbed, but there was otherwise no change to the room.
“That was too close,” Julia said, weakly, as soon as we caught our breath enough to talk again. “I think you need to be more on guard.”
I grunted a general approval, coughed a few more times as I helped her out of the office, and we both sat at the table to recover.
Once we were ready, we left that room and retraced our steps back to the intersection. We decided to head back to what was likely a safer part of the tunnels, or perhaps to leave entirely, and followed my mark back to the four-way intersection before that. Here, however, there was no mark at all, and we couldn’t remember which way was the way back. We tried a hall at random, and found a dead end. The next one we tried was also a dead end, and the third, which we were certain couldn’t be right, one of them had to have been the way we came. We returned to the fourth, and when we got back to that next intersection we took the only hall we hadn’t seen yet.
We took that hall slowly, staying as close to one another as we could, and found another assortment of doors. I decided it was best to try one, despite Julia’s objections, and found another body slumped against the desk. The papers here were crumbling apart, and there were no books. I dug through the drawers, looking for something that would give us a clue as to what was going on down here, but found only moth-eaten clothes. I tried the next room, and the next, and in the fifth I found a revolver with three bullets in it. It looked like it would still work, so I tucked it into my pants before we continued. I searched the three remaining rooms and found nothing that gave us more information, but I felt better with the knowledge that we had some means of defending ourselves.
The end of this hall opened into a workshop, with gears and bits of metal and glass scattered all over the room. There was no organization to it, almost as if something had exploded or torn through the place. There were no bodies here, but there were dark spots on the walls and floor that looked like blood. There was a ticking noise echoing through the room, but I didn’t see anything moving. I pulled out the gun and we paced around the room investigating what we could, but nothing here made sense. None of the machines were complete enough to guess at what they were intended to be, or even which of the designs we’d seen they were trying to build.
“Alex?” Julia called.
I turned back, and she pointed to the wall above the door we’d entered through. There, etched into the wall, was the phrase “Born and reborn in blood and power”
“We need to go,” I said. “I don’t care how, we can check every single hall if we have to, but we can’t stay here.”
“Come on, you have to have a better idea than that! Use, I dunno, your training, or piece this puzzle together, or—”
“I don’t know how to do any of that, Jules!”
“But you work—”
“I’m a restroom attendant, okay? I don’t know how to do any of that stuff, I don’t know how to deal with any of this, I just, I just let people think what I do is interesting because where I work is interesting, but I spend almost all day handing out towels and holding doors for people!”
She stared at me for a moment, then looked to the gun.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” she asked.
“I...kinda? I mean, I get the basic idea. Are you better with it?”
She shrugged.
I lowered the gun and slumped against a console. “I just want to go home,” I said. “Can we please try to go home?”
She nodded and offered a weak smile, and I pushed off the console and started to walk toward the door before I realized the ticking had stopped, and a faint whirring sound had replaced it.
We both stopped and looked at each other, apparently making the same connection, and slowly turned back to face the piles of machinery. A large pile on the floor trembled for a moment, a spring falling to the ground just as the rest of the stuff stopped moving. I pointed the gun at the pile, and we both slowly backed toward the door. A long metal piece, with joints and pistons, lifted from the pile and rested a three-fingered hand on the console. The whirring sound grew louder, and a glass dome emerged from the pile. Inside of it were an array of moving parts, and I recognized it as the God-Machine. I fired, one shot missing entirely, the second bouncing harmlessly off the arm.
Before I could pull the trigger the third time, there was a blur of movement and I felt the wind knocked out of me and heard ribs crack. I fell to the floor, hitting my head on a table as I fell, and watched as the gun slid across the floor. The machine was past me now, blocking the doorway as Julia screamed at it. My vision was growing dim, and I tried to pull myself closer, but could barely move. I reached out, as the machine reached out for her, and then everything went dark.
I woke in the hospital. They said they’d found me on the side of the mountain, looking like I’d fallen off a trail further up. When I asked about Julia, they said I was found alone. I tried to tell them what happened, demand that they look for her, but the story was dismissed out of hand as being a result of my head injury. It wasn’t until her family filed a missing persons report that anyone even considered listening to the full story. They decided that I was certainly delusional, but probably had been with her when she went missing and I was injured, and continued their investigation on the assumption we were attacked. She still has not been found.
It looked like just part of the rock face, with some moss on it, and I imagine anyone just walking by wouldn’t think twice about it. But as I was sitting there trying not to look down, and Julia was poking around trying to occupy herself, she noticed something that looked like a hinge hidden away. So we both tried prying at stuff until suddenly the thing came open, with this pop and hissing sound. When we opened the door there was a series of stone stairs going down and some ancient-looking light bulbs flicking on. They were slow, it took them a moment to really turn on, but Julia was so excited she insisted on getting in there before the light had reached the far end of the staircase. I wasn’t sure, but she convinced me that it was better than trekking along a cliff face, so in we went.
As we made our way down, the lights at the end of the stairs were finally on, and we could see there was another door. This one looked like solid metal, with a sort of bar that lifted up to let the door open. She opened it, and I checked to make sure it had a similar mechanism on the other side so we could get out again before entering the hallway that opened beyond it. All the same, I set the door carefully so it didn’t fully latch before taking it all in.
Here, the rough hewn stone of the stairway switched to smooth, straight lines. There were more lights here, embedded in the wall with tinted glass covering them that washed the chamber in brown and blue hues. It was warmer than it had been outside, and Julia and I stopped to remove our jackets before pressing on. We made it a few feet before we heard a scurrying noise and then the door behind us slam closed.
“I think we should go,” I said, after listening for a minute and not hearing any more noise except the hum of the lights. “I don’t like this.”
“Oh, come on. The heights thing I understand, but you’re the one with that secretive intelligence job. Is this really so wild for you?”
I straightened up and looked back at the door.
“I just don’t like how this is playing out, is all,” I said. “That door—”
“Which you made sure could be opened from this side.”
“Yes, but, what closed it?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t see any answer back that way. So I guess we better try the other way.” She shrugged and kept walking.
I sighed, cursed a bit under my breath, and then caught up to her.
It was probably another ten minutes or so before we came to a T intersection. We ended up going left, and after a curve in the path there was another set of stairs going further down. At the next intersection, I decided to start marking our way. I dug around in our bags for a bit until I found a candy bar, and I marked the way we’d come from by dragging the chocolate along the wall just enough to leave something visible. We tried a different hall, and then another, and soon enough we were far enough along that we were both thankful there would be marks to guide us back.
We were somewhere around an hour in when we heard the scurrying noise again. We stopped and looked around, but as soon as we did it stopped. After waiting a bit for that, we continued on, and then heard the sound again. We stopped, and it stopped, and in whispers we agreed to turn back and try a different hall. We made it back to the last intersection, chose another path, and sure enough the noise stopped. This hall had fewer lights, though, spread apart more, and some of them were flickering. Here we found metal doors set into the walls, and when I opened the first one I saw a modest bedroom. A single bed, a plain dresser, and a simple desk. The room looked completely unused, as if it was prepared for someone who never arrived.
We walked past a couple more before checking again, but the one we tried to open was locked. So we tried the next one, and Julia screamed and jumped back when she looked in. I looked and found the same arrangement of the same furniture, but this one had papers and books strewn about the room, an assortment of crystals and gears, and a skeleton laying on the bed. Having taken that in, I spent a moment reminding her that whoever that was, they were already dead, and none of our concern, before we agreed not to check any more rooms and pressed on.
At the end of the hall was a massive doorway, with two steps leading down into a circular chamber lined on one side with bookcases. In the center of the room was a round table, with ten chairs set around it, and what remained of a rug under the lot. The books were covered in thick dust and cobwebs, some of them visibly moldering away. The table was inlaid with runes and a large blue crystal sat embedded into the center. Opposite the door we entered was another door, hanging open. As I brushed aside some of the dust to look more closely at the etchings on the table, Julia went into the other room and then called for me.
I entered what was clearly some kind of office. Books were laid open across nearly every surface, a half-constructed object of gears and knobs occupying the prime spot on the desk. She wiped some dust off the walls and we were faced with a technical drawing, a design for some kind of steam-powered contraption. We set about clearing all of the designs tacked up on the walls, to find an assortment of plans including cities, some kind of calculator machine, and a number of geared devices of unknown function. They all had grand names, like The Eternal City or The Flame of Truth, but the largest one that hung directly over the desk was clearly the most important. It was labeled The New Power Motive or God-Machine, with a subtitle referring to it as the physical shell of the new God. It had a cylindrical body, apparently made of wood, with metal limbs to resemble a vaguely humanoid shape, and a domed glass head containing an array of moving parts. It looked like the drawing had a numb9er of markings on the body, similar to the ones on the table, but I needed a closer look to be sure.
I went to pull down the drawing, and the lights went out. I reached out and felt Julia, pulling her close as we heard a whirring sound and scuttling noises erupt around us. I could feel her breathing hard as we both tried to stay silent in the middle of the room, which was growing more difficult as dust was filling the air. I strained against coughing, until the lights came back on. We both collapsed and hacked up the dust, but no matter where I looked I could see no new occupant in the room. The drawings were all gone, and the dust from the rest of the room was heavily disturbed, but there was otherwise no change to the room.
“That was too close,” Julia said, weakly, as soon as we caught our breath enough to talk again. “I think you need to be more on guard.”
I grunted a general approval, coughed a few more times as I helped her out of the office, and we both sat at the table to recover.
Once we were ready, we left that room and retraced our steps back to the intersection. We decided to head back to what was likely a safer part of the tunnels, or perhaps to leave entirely, and followed my mark back to the four-way intersection before that. Here, however, there was no mark at all, and we couldn’t remember which way was the way back. We tried a hall at random, and found a dead end. The next one we tried was also a dead end, and the third, which we were certain couldn’t be right, one of them had to have been the way we came. We returned to the fourth, and when we got back to that next intersection we took the only hall we hadn’t seen yet.
We took that hall slowly, staying as close to one another as we could, and found another assortment of doors. I decided it was best to try one, despite Julia’s objections, and found another body slumped against the desk. The papers here were crumbling apart, and there were no books. I dug through the drawers, looking for something that would give us a clue as to what was going on down here, but found only moth-eaten clothes. I tried the next room, and the next, and in the fifth I found a revolver with three bullets in it. It looked like it would still work, so I tucked it into my pants before we continued. I searched the three remaining rooms and found nothing that gave us more information, but I felt better with the knowledge that we had some means of defending ourselves.
The end of this hall opened into a workshop, with gears and bits of metal and glass scattered all over the room. There was no organization to it, almost as if something had exploded or torn through the place. There were no bodies here, but there were dark spots on the walls and floor that looked like blood. There was a ticking noise echoing through the room, but I didn’t see anything moving. I pulled out the gun and we paced around the room investigating what we could, but nothing here made sense. None of the machines were complete enough to guess at what they were intended to be, or even which of the designs we’d seen they were trying to build.
“Alex?” Julia called.
I turned back, and she pointed to the wall above the door we’d entered through. There, etched into the wall, was the phrase “Born and reborn in blood and power”
“We need to go,” I said. “I don’t care how, we can check every single hall if we have to, but we can’t stay here.”
“Come on, you have to have a better idea than that! Use, I dunno, your training, or piece this puzzle together, or—”
“I don’t know how to do any of that, Jules!”
“But you work—”
“I’m a restroom attendant, okay? I don’t know how to do any of that stuff, I don’t know how to deal with any of this, I just, I just let people think what I do is interesting because where I work is interesting, but I spend almost all day handing out towels and holding doors for people!”
She stared at me for a moment, then looked to the gun.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” she asked.
“I...kinda? I mean, I get the basic idea. Are you better with it?”
She shrugged.
I lowered the gun and slumped against a console. “I just want to go home,” I said. “Can we please try to go home?”
She nodded and offered a weak smile, and I pushed off the console and started to walk toward the door before I realized the ticking had stopped, and a faint whirring sound had replaced it.
We both stopped and looked at each other, apparently making the same connection, and slowly turned back to face the piles of machinery. A large pile on the floor trembled for a moment, a spring falling to the ground just as the rest of the stuff stopped moving. I pointed the gun at the pile, and we both slowly backed toward the door. A long metal piece, with joints and pistons, lifted from the pile and rested a three-fingered hand on the console. The whirring sound grew louder, and a glass dome emerged from the pile. Inside of it were an array of moving parts, and I recognized it as the God-Machine. I fired, one shot missing entirely, the second bouncing harmlessly off the arm.
Before I could pull the trigger the third time, there was a blur of movement and I felt the wind knocked out of me and heard ribs crack. I fell to the floor, hitting my head on a table as I fell, and watched as the gun slid across the floor. The machine was past me now, blocking the doorway as Julia screamed at it. My vision was growing dim, and I tried to pull myself closer, but could barely move. I reached out, as the machine reached out for her, and then everything went dark.
I woke in the hospital. They said they’d found me on the side of the mountain, looking like I’d fallen off a trail further up. When I asked about Julia, they said I was found alone. I tried to tell them what happened, demand that they look for her, but the story was dismissed out of hand as being a result of my head injury. It wasn’t until her family filed a missing persons report that anyone even considered listening to the full story. They decided that I was certainly delusional, but probably had been with her when she went missing and I was injured, and continued their investigation on the assumption we were attacked. She still has not been found.