Indescribable: Book Two of the Primordial Read online

  “I didn’t expect it to be open,” she said as she looked at Meghan. “Just wishful thinking is all,” she shrugged her shoulders. She was already walking away from the door. “C’mon,” she motioned for Meghan to follow. “I know for a fact that one of the windows on the other side doesn’t catch.” She led Meghan around the building.

  “How do you know it doesn’t catch?”

  “I just know. Old windows like the ones on this building,” she motioned toward one that they were just passing by, “there’s always at least one of them that is a problem.”

  After they walked the length of the building and rounded the corner, they were standing in front of a window. The one that doesn’t catch, Meghan presumed. The overgrown shrubs were closer to this side of the building than they had been on the front. Valerie reached her hands out and pushed up on the window. The window slid up and Meghan could hear the old, counter weights rattling within the frame. She was surprised that those kinds of windows had been put in the more modern construction of the building. A bleach-like, antiseptic smell pummeled out from the interior of the room that loomed before them. Valerie turned to look at her. “See. I told you so.”

  Meghan smiled. “How did you know that this was the one?”

  “I might have been snooping in here before,” Valerie said and hoisted herself up and through the window.

  Meghan followed behind her. Except for the sunlight, the room that they stood in was dark. The sunlight that came through the one window cast an orange tint over the four walls. A cold, metal table stood in the center of the room, reflecting the glare of the sun. A large, framed poster was hanging on the wall. The picture was a hand drawn sketch of a nude man. His chest was open. All around him were various symbols that had lines connecting them to the corresponding parts of his body. From the distance, Meghan couldn’t make out what the symbols were. Or was she able to read any of the words that were on the poster. It occurred to her then, in a faraway, distant memory, that she had seen the same type of diagram before in a famer’s almanac that she had been fanning through at an antique store. The sight of the table along with the poster was unnerving. It was proof that weird experiments and surgeries had happened there. Meghan was studying the table, imagining Embry lying on it. In her imagination, like the sketched man on the poster, he was naked. His chest had been cut open and the ribcage was splayed to each side. A figure stood over him. The figure’s hands were covered in blood all the way up to the wrists. The figure was nothing but shadow. Meghan saw that something was being taken out of Embry’s chest cavity. No, she realized, something was being put in him.

  Overhead, there was a flicker of light and then the light became steady. The room was filled with nauseating fluorescent. The steady hum of the bulb was unsettling. In front of Meghan, the vision had disappeared into nothing. The table was empty. Meghan realized that Valerie had gone across the room and had flipped on the light.

  “C’mon,” Valerie said. “What I really wanted you to see’s further down the hall. We’ve got to be quick though, before someone else gets here.” Valerie turned her back to the room that they were standing in and stepped into the hallway. She flipped on the light on the other side of the door frame, and just like the room that Meghan was stepping out of, the light flickered and came on with the same horrid glow.

  As they walked the length of the hallway, they passed by several open doors. Meghan peaked inside each of them. There were other rooms like the one that they had climbed into, but what caused Meghan to stop in her steps was a room that was full of cages. Each of the metal cages that lined the floor held a red fox. All of the animals were looking through the metal grating at Meghan. Some where standing, some were sitting, and others were lying flat as if they had given up any hope of freedom. Her heart ached at the sight of them. She could see the hurt in their eyes of being entrapped. Even though Valerie had mentioned the experiments with the foxes before, seeing them firsthand was too much. Meghan felt her eyes fill with tears.

  When her attention returned to Valerie, she realized that the other woman was well ahead of her and already at the end of the hallway. Meghan tore her attention away from the caged animals and walked quickly down the length of the tile floor.

  Valerie walked into the room first and flipped on the light. The room was full of metal shelves that held rows of old books and glass canisters. Meghan followed Valerie to a section of shelves that was lined with clear, glass jars. A handwritten, framed sign was on the lip of the shelf at eyelevel. REMOVED, the sign stated. Meghan’s eyes went to the contents of the shelf and saw that in each of the jars, there was what looked like some type of bodily organ. She leaned in to look at one closer. The object behind the glass was a fleshy, deep red, almost purple. She had seen cow liver before in the meat department of the grocery store and that was the color that she saw in front of her now. The shape of the meaty object was even more troubling than the simple fact of it being there in the first place. It looked like a honeycomb. Meghan’s brow scrunched together and her eyes scanned over the shelf and saw that every jar held the same thing.

  “And over here, we have the opposite,” Valerie said.

  Meghan turned her attention to the right, where Valerie stood. The woman’s hand was motioning to reveal the display behind her. Like the jars of what looked like meaty honeycombs, the shelf behind Valerie was lined with more glass that held globular looking objects inside. This set of shelves also had a sign attached. IMPLANTS, it read. Meghan stepped closer and it became evident that these, like the others, also had a shape to them.

  “Are those mosquitoes?” She asked. Within each of the glass jars in front of her, there was a similar meaty, organ-like object that was the same color and texture of the honeycombs that she had seen before, but these were undeniably mosquito-like. They weren’t moving. They were just there. Each of the objects was nearly as large as her hand. “What do they do with them? Where do they come from?” Meghan leaned back from what she was looking at. Her nose was crinkled with disgust.

  “This is what I’ve understood of this whole thing so far,” Valerie spoke from behind her.

  Upon hearing her friend’s voice, Meghan turned around to see that Valerie was standing behind her, holding a book. Valerie held the book up so that Meghan could see the cover, LABORATORY JOURNAL.

  “It doesn’t say much in here about the how or the why, but what I can understand from the scribbling is that they use magic to transform the part of the man that would feel remorse into a tangible thing.” Valerie held the book with one hand, and with the other, pointed toward Meghan’s right. “The honeycomb,” she said, “a symbol of goodness. Without that part of their being no longer inside of them they feel no remorse for their actions; they’re able to go along with The Master’s plans of hurting others without feeling even the slightest bit of guilt over what they’ve done. They see it as their reason for existing. Then, after the honeycomb is removed, they put the mosquito, which has also been created with magic, into their body, attaching it to the veins and arteries that run to the heart. According to this,” she tapped the open pages of the book, “mosquitoes are a symbol of irritation. Of course the real versions of the insects feed off of blood. In this case, instead of blood, it is pain and heartbreak that they live for. They drive the Durori. The Master made is so that those things are what the Durori need to survive, just like a mosquito needs blood.”

  Meghan’s mind was churning with thought. She once again imagined Embry lying on the table in the other room and having the mosquito-like piece of meat placed into his chest cavity before being sewn back up. “So if we can remove the, the mosquito part of them, then we would take away the driving force of why they are so capable and willing to go along with The Master’s intentions.”

  “You’ve got it, girl.” Valerie closed the book. The sound echoed against the walls.

  Meghan turned her attention back to the shelves. She couldn’t help but imagine the mosquito-like thing inside of Embry. Her eye
s scanned over the glass jars of honeycombs and she wondered which one of them had belonged to him.

  “Darren said that he was starting to remember his previous life,” Valerie abruptly stated from behind her.

  Meghan spun around. “What?” She had just asked Embry the day before about his past. She recalled how he had told her that he couldn’t remember any of it.

  Valerie nodded. “He said that it just started out of the blue. At first he thought that it was a dream, but then he realized that no,” she nodded her head, “they were memories. He was an acrobat in a circus.” She laughed.

  “Embry hasn’t said anything about it. Do you think that he is remembering too?” Meghan felt betrayed at the idea that he may be hiding something from her. “Are you? Remembering?”

  Valerie nodded her head. “The first thing that I remembered was being in a movie theater with a boy named Josh, high school sweetheart. This is actually his jacket,” she looked down at the loose fitting letter jacket that hung off her thin frame. “Anyway, that night we were seeing some slasher flick. Those kinds of movies were way popular back in 80’s. This one was called Cemetery of Blood.”

  “I’ve seen that,” Meghan said. “Actually, they’re still making sequels to it.”

  “Darren thinks that the reason that we are all starting to remember is somehow associated with the sound that we’ve been hearing. He thinks that the first things that we remember are the events that are closest to the day that we were brought here.”

  Meghan was itching to get out of there and back to Embry.

  “For both of us, it started with a horrible headache and then the memory slammed into us,” Valerie said.

  “You know, Embry was complaining of a headache last night. I just thought it was that lame, age old way of saying he wasn’t in the mood for sex.”

  Valerie laughed. “Even a headache won’t stop Darren.”

  Outside of the room, in the hallway, there was a sound. It was unmistakably the front door of the building opening and closing. The sound caused Meghan’s heart to skip a beat. The two women leaned their backs against the wall, quiet, out of sight. Meghan peered around the corner. Valerie’s head hovered above hers. What they saw outside of the room, in the hallway, was a woman that was wearing a long, blue ball gown that dragged behind her on the floor. Her black hair was pulled up in ringlets. They couldn’t see her face as she was walking into the room across the hall.

  Valerie jerked her head back. “It’s The Mistress,” she said in a barely audible whisper. Meghan could hear the worry in her voice.

  “What is she doing here?” Meghan asked. She had never seen the woman, but had heard the stories about her and knew that just like The Master she was someone to be cautious of. She was, after all, the second in command.

  Valerie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  Then there was the sound of clanging metal. A moment later they heard shuffling feet in the hallway. Meghan peeked around the door frame again and saw the steady line of foxes emerging from the room. The Mistress had set them free, she realized with surprise. She could actually see the happiness and relief of freedom in their faces as they made their way down the hall. Valerie had told her that the fox was a symbol of evil, one of deceit, but looking at the mammals now, she couldn’t see anything but the beauty of them. A few of the foxes went to the front door and were pawing at the metal, wanting to be let out, while several more made their way down the hall, toward Meghan and Valerie. Meghan realized that the animals could smell them and that they were coming to check things out. It wasn’t the foxes themselves that scared her; it was the possibility of being discovered by The Mistress. Just then, she saw the woman’s blue dress emerge from around the corner. Meghan jerked back and leaned flat against the wall beside Valerie.

  “She’s coming this way,” she said.

  Valerie exhaled a silent, deep breath.

  Once again, the loud rumble came from somewhere in the distance. This time it was so loud that it shook the building. The glass jars wobbled on the shelves, teetering close to the edge until one fell off, shattering on impact. Glass scattered out. The smell of the contents was horrendous. It was like raw steak had been marinating in formaldehyde. Meghan covered her mouth with her trembling hand. I memory of high school biology class came to her. She remembered the disgust that she had felt way back then as she had been forced to dissect an unborn pig. The rumble came again and several more of the jars fell to the floor. Everything around them was shaking. By the time that The Mistress emerged from around the corner of the door, the room was a nerve shattering chamber of breaking glass and trembling sight. The vision of The Mistress approaching was like a scene from a horror movie, one that had been shot with a shaky camera.

  When the rumble stopped and everything around them began to ease, Meghan could finally, fully see and comprehend the woman that had entered the room. She wasn’t wearing the mask that Meghan had been told about and had pictured in her imagination. Instead, her face was half covered with a large, purple birthmark that Meghan immediately recognized as being in close similarity to the shape of South Carolina. Several of the red foxes circled around The Mistress’s feet. One of them came over and sniffed at Meghan. The Mistress looked at Meghan and Valerie. She smiled at them and turned around.

  When Meghan heard the front door open again she felt her nerves begin to ease. It seemed as if The Mistress didn’t intend to do them any harm. She built up enough courage to peek around the doorframe again and saw the tail of the blue dress as it disappeared through the front door and into the outside. A single fox followed behind the woman. Meghan looked over at Valerie who, like her, had a spread of relief over her face. She could tell that she was also shaken by the encounter. Meghan began to get to her feet. As she was doing so, her eyes scanned around the disastrous room. Glass and the meaty objects were scattered across the floor. Books had fallen from the shelves and some were fanned out across the tile. It was one book that grabbed Meghan’s attention. The cover held a name that she recognized. She stepped across the floor, careful not to step on anything icky, and lifted the book. Like the one that Valerie had held moments before, this one was a handwritten journal. PROCEDURES - DR. THOMAS RILEY. She fanned through the pages. The inside was filled with diagrams and instructions.

  “Thomas Riley,” Meghan said, lowering the book to look at Valerie who was still sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. “Isn’t he the one that I was reading about on the wedding announcement? The legend of the one that created the Era of Love, that’s him, right?”

  Valerie nodded and was getting to her feet. “That’s him. What’s up?”

  “It appears that he is the doctor that does all of this. We’ve got to go talk to him. He would know how to change them back to their human form.”

  “If he’s the one that did it in the first place, what makes you think that he would be so willing to go back on his creations?”

  “If he really is the one that started the Era of Love, he has to have some amount of good in him. It did say that it is believed that the love he had for his wife was the truest love possible.”

  Valerie nodded again. “If Darren’s theory is correct then Thomas would be the one to talk to.”

  “His theory?” Meghan asked.

  “Yeah, he thinks that memory is coming back to the Durori in the order that they were created. The older ones remember more, in greater detail, and the newer ones will only so far remember bits and pieces. And Thomas Riley was the first. He is The Primordial, with a capital T. If the theory of my hubby is correct, then the one Mr. Thomas Riley will remember everything.”

  So many questions were churning through Meghan’s mind. The strange behavior of The Mistress; why had the woman not been wearing her mask and why had she freed the foxes? What was the horrible rumble that they had all been hearing and was it really connected to the Durori beginning to remember their previous life? What is The Indescribable? Would she really be able to turn Embry?<
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  She felt more confident in her intentions than she had since the whole ordeal had started. She led the way through the laboratory, across the grass, and into the woods.

  JUST LIKE before, they emerged from the woods at exactly where they wanted to be. Thomas Riley’s house stood in front of them. The structure of the home was the same as the other plantation houses around Fractus, but this one was ancient; besides the one that Meghan shared with Embry, Valerie, and Darren, it was the oldest of them all. But unlike their house, Thomas’s was showing signs of its age. The yard was overgrown with tall grass and weeds. There were several, bright red hummingbird feeders that were hanging from metal stakes that had been placed randomly throughout the yard. Countless green hummers zipped away from the feeders and buzzed off into the sky. The camellia trees that stood out front were enormous and hadn’t been trimmed back in decades. Wilted, brown flowers littered the ground underneath the canopy of each of them. The shutters on the house were lopsided and covered in spider webs. Vines crept up the front of the house and weaved their way in and out of the porch’s wobbly and chipped railing. The roof was made of rusted tin. There was a carved pumpkin on each side of the front door. Candlelight shone through the eyes and mouths. Behind the house, there was a stretch of autumn trees. The scene looked haunted.

  When they stepped onto the porch, the floorboards creaked under their feet. Colorful, brittle leaves were scattered across the wooden slats. Meghan looked toward the floor at the jack-o-lanterns. The pumpkins weren’t the perfect, bright orange ones that could be bought at grocery stores or farmer’s markets. These were a deeper shade, almost brown, and their shape was bulbous and imperfect. The jack-o-lanterns had been cut into a simple face with two triangular eyes and a narrow, horizontal slit of a mouth.

  “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” Valerie said. “And to be quite honest with you, it feels good to even remember that I have ever seen one before today.”