It felt like something was on the back of his neck.
Jeb kept scratching at it, his rough gloves rubbing the skin raw. But there was nothing there to rub away.
Moments after he stopped, he felt it again.
It was the goddamned witch in the other room, he knew it. She’d done something to him, something that would only stop when the Governor finally spaced the bitch.
He wanted to be there to see it, but he also was terrified that she would curse them all with her last breath. Spacing a person killed them, sure, but it didn’t kill their everlasting soul. It would just continue to be out in the Dark, looking for a way back in.
He’d always heard the stories of the monsters in the vacuum, of the lost and angry spirits of the killers and cannibals who’d been spaced. He’d never believed them, not truly believed them, until he’d seen the witch.
With her strange eye that seemed to glow with its own light, to be an unnatural shade of violet when every camera failed to capture it, he was sure she was one of the curse-born. A baby whose soul had been replaced by one of those vengeful spirits of the Dark that slipped in and found a new body to inhabit . . .
The door in front of him opened, and he snapped to attention.
“Sir!” Jeb barked, straightening as best he could. He was holding his rifle wrong, he realized, and fumbled to hold it properly.
Governor Tede didn’t chew him out, though, only staring at him with an intensity Jeb had never seen before. “Leave,” the Governor ordered.
A dumbfounded expression went over his face. “Sir?”
“I need to speak to the Seer. Come back later.”
“Uh . . . yes sir.”
His heart was pounding; was the Governor going to kill her now? Jeb wasn’t sure why he felt so alarmed, he’d met the Governor a dozen times. Well, at least been in the same room with him. But this time he felt terrified and he couldn’t even say why. His stomach was doing flips and he wasn’t even the one in danger.
He just obeyed. Hell if he was gonna cross the man. That’s how one got spaced, and more than dying in the Dark he feared those spirits that would come for him.
Once Jeb was gone, the Governor opened the door and stepped into the small cellblock, opening the last door to the Seer’s cell.
He stood there, waiting for her to acknowledge him.
“My god,” she breathed. “You’re real.”
“No matter what shape I take, you can see what I truly am,” Kell spoke.
The woman was quiet for a long moment. She stepped closer.
“All my life I’ve seen things in my dreams,” she said, her voice soft.
Carefully, slowly, she reached up a hand.
“Things that called to me.”
Her had jerked back as if she’d been burned.
“Things in the Dark. I never wanted them to be real.”
Kell’s shape barely even registered to her, and the Shoggoth was not even sure if the woman saw it at all, or only saw what was beyond it.
“I exist,” Kell said. To her ears it was not the voice of the Governor, but a chorus of soft voices speaking together.
“Why are you here?” Apollonia demanded. “I’ll be spaced soon. Couldn’t you just take me then?” She jerked her gaze away. “Is it necessary to torture me more? I just wanted it to be peaceful before the end.”
“It will never be peaceful for you,” Kell said. But its voices lacked poison, and her gaze was drawn back to it.
“Not while I’m alive. It’s why I want to stay here and die,” she replied.
“Even then, you will not know peace,” Kell replied. Curiosity sparked it to speak again; “What is it that you see that is so terrible?”
Something changed in the woman. The Dark encroached on them, and even Kell felt stirrings in it that it had never encountered before. Strange formations that a human mind shouldn’t be able to conceive, yet she was the cause of them existing, even if she did not realize it.
Her hair seemed to meld smoothly into that Darkness, and Kell could not tell where she ended and the Dark began.
“I have seen an ocean of blood crashing,” she spoke.
Her voice had a new tenor, and Kell could see the shapes that ensued. Her words alone affected the underlying reality; did she know? Did she know just what she was?
Because Kell was unsure.
Her voice came again, and reality blurred more in a way that Kell at once found foreign and familiar. “I have seen lives beyond counting drowned in it.”
She seemed to deflate; the shadows became mundane once more, something Kell found curious.
“And I can’t bear to see it,” she finished.
“Your death does not mean they will not die,” Kell said. “All things die.”
“Except your kind,” she replied. Bitterness crept into her voice.
“My kind are like the things of which you think. But they are not the same. We may not die easily, but we can die.” Kell shook its head. “There used to be so many more of us.”
“I’ve never seen Earth,” she said, correctly divining his origins. “So I don’t know.”
“Perhaps one day you will,” Kell replied.
Her eyes narrowed. “If I keep living.”
“If you keep living,” Kell repeated.
A pall started to form between them, but Kell broke it. “Do not choose to die here. You only need to say yes to Brooks.”
She closed her eyes. “And face what may come.”
“Yes,” Kell replied.
Her eyes opened, and in the violet glow Kell saw a hole to depths of reality that even his kind had never ventured to.
“All right,” she said.
“I will inform him.” Kell turned to the door and left.
Other Terrestrial 