Tantalus Depths by Evan Graham

Author:Evan Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkshares
Published: 2022-08-17T15:33:55+00:00

Thirty-Two

As Hertz, Gorrister, and Becky continued to postulate about the social and ecological systems of the surreal nightmare figures around them, something else sank a hook into the corner of Mary’s eye, drawing her gaze away from the gargoyle gallery and toward the thing in the far wall.

Mary’s listless legs carried her past the statues in a slow, somnambular gait. One after another, the grotesqueries slipped into her peripheral vision, carrying their worrying connotations with them as they fell away from her present mind. The far wall grew closer, its psychotropic mélange of fractal grooves seeming to undulate as she approached, swelling and contracting in her sight like the throat muscles of a swallowing snake. Everything in the design of this chamber eventually, inevitably, drove the eye to the hole in the wall, and Mary could no longer resist the compulsion to take a closer look.

It was egg-shaped, a meter high, set into the wall at eye level. The curved contours of the wall warped around the aperture, lending it an organic look that contrasted with the pervasive geometrical designs everywhere else in the room. Around the lip of the hole were a number of emphatic, unidentifiable pentagonal glyphs.

As Mary looked into the ovoid portal, she began to feel even more unsettled than she’d been when looking at the statues. It was bottomless, fading to utter blackness immediately within the lip. It wasn’t like the void of superluminal space after all. It was darker. Impossible as that should have been, it was nonetheless true. This was not merely an absence of light, this was the active presence of darkness: as if the light that would have been illuminating it had been forcibly stripped away. It was so dark, Mary saw afterimages on her eyelids when she blinked. The impossible depth of that void was chillingly seductive. It was hypnotic, horrifying, and offensive to cognition.

Once again, that eerily alluring call of the void tugged at her, drawing her inexorably toward a thing she knew could be a phenomenal threat. Primal portions of her brain were repulsed by the thing, but other subconscious impulses just as prehistoric felt a need to reach for it, to embrace it. It was a mystery her instincts told her was both deadly and momentous. Primitive man must have once looked at fire with the same kind of dread-infused awe.

She held out a hesitant hand a few inches away from the mouth of the hole. A strange, static tingle ran through her arm, a sort of pins-and-needles feeling. More than that, though, was the cold. A chilling draft emanated steadily from that orifice, but without a single sound of wind. It was tempting to think these effects were imaginary; the simple machinations of an anxious mind, but the gauges on her outstretched arm told a story that was far less easy to dismiss.

Mary had once gone scuba diving with her family in the ruins of Old Orleans as a teenager. She’d had a similar sense of

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