The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

makes the door flash green and he enters the cool artificial air with the smile of one entering a sanctum. He wants to see again the familiar sights of the graduate student making a midnight dinner, the postdoc mid-experiment listening to music, the long rows of waiting workstations, the nocturnal mice now up to play while the scientists sleep.

But in the dim lobby everything is silent, and his fingers linger on the handle, the glass, the empty lobby desk. Where is the guard? Kierk had thought entry to the building was constantly monitored, even this late. He goes to drink at the water fountain but bending down the water never touches his mouth. The metal under his hand is vibrating subtly but forcefully. He puts his palm on the cold tile of the wall. There it is stronger, almost a hum, and he can feel it moving through his entire arm now. Moving a few steps, hand still on the wall, he finds it increasing in intensity. There’s some sort of incredibly loud droning vibrating through the entire building’s foundation. Maybe there’s construction in the basement?

Following the hum through the dark corridors, he passes no sign of anyone else on his way to the stairwell. As he descends, the metal railing shudders perceptibly under his hand. At the very bottom he finds himself back at the door to the primate labs, the annex of which is illuminated only by red light. The hum is no longer just a hum but has become an alien sound vibrating through his skeleton like an ocean of white noise. The locus is beyond the annex. Above it he can now hear what sounds like a jungle of screams and cries, howling, shrieks, the clatter of cages as the monkeys inside go mad.

Fighting the urge to clamp his hands to his ears in the dim red light Kierk gropes wildly for the light switches beside the glass door. On finding it the main primate room beyond blinks into medical brightness, and at the same time it is as if all the sound in the world shuts off. The overpowering sound is gone. The vibration is gone. Everything is still. His heartbeat now the only sound.

Kierk walks cautiously into the long room. In the stacked cages on either side the monkeys all stare at him. As he moves forward they track him, silent and totem-like. Around him the various stations of scientific equipment have been trashed. Something is so wrong but he keeps moving like a dream to the other end, past the broken glass, the shattered slides, the twisted monitoring equipment, the lab chairs that seem violently torn by some immense and impossible strength. It is as if a great force has destroyed everything. The normal musk of the animal room is present but also something sickly sweet like rotten flowers.

At the end of the area is the closed door to the cage-cleaning room, its glass portal pitch-black. The lights are still off inside. In the eerie silence he hears movement, as if some great bulk is shifting inside the darkness. There is some kind of grunt, or exhalation, but at a monstrous register, and then a low drawn-out hiss that ends abruptly, followed by a slithering of something being withdrawn. Then there is a clanging so loud it makes Kierk startle. A distant sound recedes. Slowly, extremely slowly, he reaches out to flip on the light switch outside the door. With a click he finds himself staring through the portal into the bright cage-cleaning room, which has only rubber hoses and overturned empty cages on the floor, bare walls on all sides. In the center, with the floors sloping toward it, a gigantic metal drain glistens and drips.

THURSDAY

Kierk wakes up to an echo of sound abandoning him—knock knock—before his eyes blink open. Only a hint of the dream comes back to him. Kierk had been sitting at an ornate dinner and opposite him, so tall in the dark he could not make out its head, some giant being had been seated. It had rapped one of its human hands against the table. Knock knock.

Body slick with night sweats, he brushes his teeth vigorously, as if he could purge himself of last night’s events via thorough oral hygiene. After discovering what had happened in the primate lab, staying to talk with the security guards who eventually showed up, giving a statement, and then walking back home in the early morning, Kierk is exhausted. And his forearm aches. Unwrapping the gauze he sees a decent-size scab from the shallow excision.

Breakfast comes from a baker’s cart, hot dough on a hot day, a scone to munch as he walks. But a chill washes over him when he sees what’s written in spray paint on the blank concrete wall he’s passing. In great dripping red letters it reads: DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS. Recalling the director’s anecdote about the bomb materials and his own experiences last night he’s at first surprised this hasn’t been taken down, but then, looking around at the nonchalant students, he realizes tags like this must be common in NYU territory.

At the CNS he’s scheduled for a tour of the lab, and he finds Karen bent over a computer talking quietly to a graduate student. While waiting he surveys the graduate students working at their computers, and watches as a group of researchers wearing lab coats slip booties on their feet and peel on gloves and head to the doors marked ANIMAL ELEVATOR. Carmen waves briefly to him from the far side of the lab. She gestures—one second—so Kierk prepares himself. Yesterday Kierk had noticed the effects of Carmen’s looks, both on himself and also in the obvious paralyzation of others. He too had felt mesmerized by those impossibly blue eyes, that perfect grin. Instinctively he knew he would have to approach Carmen from sideways on, never for too long or too directly, like she was a monster he could look