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

meet with them—stupid Carmen, overconfident Carmen—she mentally berates herself, picking her way through the corridors.

She stops because of a low sound, like a moan, and is momentarily frozen in place listening before she recognizes it as the change in air pressure between rooms. She realizes that the door is resting just an inch from being closed with wind whistling through it. She’s never noticed the doors in this structure do that before. At first she’s relieved for this explanation but then disconcerted. The building is whistling at her. It was just like her dream of the building being alive this morning, wasn’t it?

She’s halfway down a long corridor when the footsteps begin. At first she doesn’t identify them as such, they are so loud and heavy in the silence. But they are indeed footsteps. And they’re on the floor above her, walking down what must be a similar corridor, booming each step. The ceiling above her echoes as the sounds approach Carmen’s position where she has stopped, looking up. There’s something wrong, the footsteps cover too much space between them, like it’s a giant walking. They come to a stop directly above her. Carmen’s hand goes to her mouth to quiet her breathing. Her mind spins. What if it’s the same person who left the mannequin? Or the same . . . She wonders if there’s some kind of entrance in the basement of the building to the subway system . . . maybe in the animal rooms, the large drains by the monkey cages leading down into cylindrical pits that connected to forgotten sewage tunnels. Something could definitely come up through those tunnels, something that had been moving under the city unseen . . .

When the footsteps start up again Carmen jumps. They keep going past her, down to the end of the corridor in just a few strides, and then turn the corner and all goes quiet again.

Breathing hard, Carmen becomes something slinking, primitive in her movements, like she is hunting or being hunted. And she’s thinking that maybe it could come back, summoned by something being done here . . . absurd thoughts . . . She knows that she’s freaking herself out but can’t stop—every time she turns a corner of a hallway she expects to find some huge thing panting in the dark, crouched and monstrous and snuffling about before noticing her and turning toward her . . .

Listening and proceeding slowly, creeping through corridors and up stairwells, Carmen finally arrives at the lab. Approaching the door, Carmen hears shuffling within, something being overturned, and a small clang like something impacting. Pausing before the entrance she lets out a long breath before slowly peeking inside.

In the middle of the empty lab Kierk is jump-shooting balled-up pieces of paper into a trash barrel. There is an incredible rush of relief. Walking up she grabs a piece of paper off the desk and crumpling it up she wings it at his face.

“You haven’t been answering your phone!”

Smiling, he shrugs. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I’ve been working. I turned it off. But I saw your email this morning. So here I am, what’s the plan?”

“Do you know what I’ve been doing? Do you know anything?” Carmen yells.

“Whoa! What’s wrong?”

Carmen briefly breaks down, sinks to her knees. Kierk stares at her for a moment, then rushes over.

“I thought you were dead!” she says, and hits at his chest with her fists.

“What? What are you even talking about?”

“I thought . . .”

After a moment Carmen recovers herself. Then she’s filling him in on everything from her experiences in the subway to the mannequin like she’s giving a research report. Hypothesis, speculation, her own conclusions, are all laid out. Kierk listens closely, asking questions when appropriate, until he’s heard everything. They go back and forth on the possibilities.

“So are we just going to speculate all day or are we going to interrogate Skylar?” Carmen finally says, exhausted in the telling. “Because we also need to find her.”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t exactly specify where we should meet. I mean, she’s probably in Williams’ lab . . .”

“Alright. Let’s go find our spy.”

The two quickly debate how to approach the situation while heading to Williams’ lab. In the darkened and silent hallways Carmen is still kind of freaked out in the back of her mind, but Kierk’s presence comforts her—he’s this big loud force moving down through the silence of the CNS, opening doors and talking as if he doesn’t notice the creeping feeling that the building itself is aware of them. She had told him of the footsteps she’d heard but Kierk had just waved it away, saying it was probably just some scientist running experiments on the weekend, clomping around.

Closing in on their destination they finish discussing their strategy, which turns out to be, as Carmen, finally feeling like herself, says—“Elementary.”

She goes first while Kierk waits just around the corner to listen for his cue. On entering Carmen finds Skylar, who she recognizes from photos online, sitting at one of the computer terminals in the bright glow of a monitor. She’s a frizzy and dark-haired girl, plump, and much shorter than Carmen. Only sections of the room are lit. And the lab is empty except for the two of them, which simplifies things.

Skylar had clearly looked up Carmen as well.

“Hi. Carmen, right? You’re a postdoc in Karen’s lab?”

“Hello, Skylar,” Carmen says, outwardly calm and quiet. But she could barely hear her words over the beat of her own heart. “I’m sorry I had to call you in on the weekend. Thank you for meeting with me.”

“You said in your email it was about the macaques and the fMRI scanner? Because I was told—”

“It’s not exactly about that.”

“Is it about the scheduling or, like, the equipment? Because if I like, scheduled something in the fMRI over you I’m really sorry—”

Carmen waves away the concern. She sits down in a neighboring chair. “Let’s start with the macaques. How long have you been working with them?”

The