Page 45 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

ASTRAL PLANES AND SHAMANIC JOURNEYS

[Historian of religion Mircea] Eliade … identified similarities in the practices and concepts of shamans the world over.

Wherever these “technicians of ecstasy” operate, they specialize in a trance during which their “soul is believed to leave their body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld. They all speak a secret language” which they learn directly from the spirits.

—JEREMY NARBY, PHD, ANTHROPOLOGIST

Finn led me through the giant hall and around the corner to an elevator.

“Where are we going?”

“The observatory.”

When we stepped inside, he used a key card and then pressed his thumb against a pad near the buttons. We started moving down and I could barely breathe.

“Shouldn’t we be going up? If we’re going to an observatory, don’t we need to see the sky?”

“It’s not that kind of an observatory.”

Soon we were stepping out into a brightly lit corridor, the end of which housed another bank of elevators.

Inside the next elevator, we followed the same procedure, Finn using his key card and pressing his thumb against the metal beside the buttons.

The elevator went down and down and down.

I had the feeling of traveling through time, traveling somewhere I was not supposed to go.

Something about the process made me feel like I was engaged in a kind of religious ceremony.

It wasn’t just me, though. Finn also had a solemn expression.

When the door opened, we walked down another dark hall to a large metal door. He took out a key card, then turned and looked at me.

“Do you have any memory of what’s behind this door?”

I strained to remember, but nothing came to me. “Did I work here?”

He nodded. “You didn’t just perform research on human test subjects.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I suggest you prepare yourself.”

I swallowed and nodded. He swiped his card and pressed his thumb. The door buzzed, and we stepped inside.

What I saw there defied logic. At first I almost thought I was looking at a painting—it was that unreal.

I was in a dark room, a control room of sorts, and on the opposite wall was a bank of windows looking out into a vast sea of dark blue.

In each window, floating in that bluer than blue liquid, was a monstrous creature, pinkish gray with shiny, almost translucent skin.

They resembled manatees, but they weren’t.

Long spindly ducts of flesh issued from their bodies like tentacles, and on their backs were terrible growths like stunted angel wings.

Next to them was what looked like an air lock.

I backed away, my hand covering my mouth. “What are they?”

“Call them what you want. Old gods, Nephilim, demons. They don’t have names. We still don’t know what they are. Not really.”

I tried to look away, but my eyes drifted back to the creatures. They were real. I knew they were real. And on some level, I recognized them. Their smashed, swollen white faces. Their long twisted clawlike appendages, horrid tentacles. I knew them much more than I wanted to.

“This is the nymph stage,” he said. “Practically newborns.”

“The water. They come from the water?” I asked, breathlessly trying to remember all those terrible things I’d blocked out, trying to piece together too much at once.

“Oh, that’s not water,” Finn said, and a chill traced up my spine. “That’s just one of the paths that connects our world to theirs.”

“How deep does it go?”

“All the way,” he said, and then he swallowed. “It goes all the way down.”

Leaning in, filled with a mixture of disgust and horror, I stared at them. I began to realize what I’d first thought were tentacles were actually tubes affixed to them, pumping something in. Or were they taking something out? I tried to see where the tubes were going, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Glancing around, I saw that I was in some kind of command center with various control panels scattered throughout the room, but they showed no activity.

It looked like the power had been shut down.

Against a far wall was a collection of protective gear and a display of unfamiliar-looking instruments.

Long, odd-shaped, and sharp-edged, the instruments appeared as though they were used on the creatures somehow.

I walked over to the wall and examined an instrument that looked like an old-fashioned harpoon, barely able to imagine what they might use such a horrible thing for.

“What is this place?” I asked, indicating the apparently nonfunctional control panels.

“This is where we observe them. It’s how we control the barrier that separates their world from ours.”

The barrier, Hildegard College’s own Hadrian’s Wall—this was what Aspen had been talking about?

I took a step toward the creatures, a horrifying thought flashing through my mind. “If these are nymphs, where is the mother?”

Finn swallowed. “She’s down there … somewhere.”

I shuddered. “And the father?”

“We’ve never seen him.”

Intrigued, still unable to believe my eyes, I took another step toward them. Suddenly the creatures all raised their heads as one. Finn startled. Enormous eyes shifted, and they all stared directly at me.

“What’s happening?” I whispered.

These things weren’t as harmless as they appeared. They were extremely dangerous.

“They know you’re here.”

“What do you mean? How do they know I’m here?”

“They recognize you.”

One began struggling, shifting around in its watery prison. Suddenly I remembered the water, how it had felt that day, strange and viscous. Only it wasn’t water. It never had been.

“We extract something from them, don’t we, some kind of substance?”

“You’re remembering now.”

It wasn’t so much a remembering as a deep understanding.

“Is that what we used to alter that device? Is that possible?”

“The harvest gives us many gifts” was all he said.

“What are we extracting?” I spoke with Isabelle’s cold self-assurance. In that moment, I had total confidence that I understood more about this than Finn did. I just didn’t remember. “Is it organic?”

“It’s a kind of ferromagnetic alloy. It has a number of biological and technological uses.”

“Like cobalt?” I asked. “That’s what everyone is after these days, isn’t it? The future of technology is supposed to depend on it.”

I remembered the images of the tech moguls on the website and began connecting the dots. How long had this been going on?

“Similar to cobalt. But not cobalt.”

I shook my head. “What does any of this have to do with alchemy?”

“We told you before. Alchemy is just the forefather of chemistry.”

“Not witchcraft, then?” I asked, thinking back to the strange room I’d found.

He gave me a sly smile. “Witchcraft and science aren’t as far apart as we’d all like to believe. Some say the supernatural is just natural phenomena for which we don’t yet have a scientific explanation.”

“So which is it that you do here?”

“Science,” he said flatly. “Now I want you to look at this.” He pointed to a complex keypad next to one of the control panels. “Does it look familiar?”

“Not in the slightest.” And then it dawned on me. “Wait, is this it? Is this the code I’m supposed to know?”

He nodded. “The entire system has been shut down, and we need the code to gain access. We just need you to remember the code and we can do the rest. We’ll be able to repair the breach remotely from here.”

“If this code is so important, why do only Charles and I know it?”

He closed his eyes momentarily, frustration showing in the lines around his mouth. “Because you changed it. Or Charles changed it. Now only you two know it.”

“How were we able to change the code?”

“Remember when we talked about systems theory? Those rarely used elements of a feedback loop that are important but can become easily neglected?”

A flashback to the conversation, and a sudden understanding of why he’d told me all that. He’d been preparing me for this moment. And I saw.

“The fire extinguisher.”

“Precisely. The security access is the fire in the building with no fire extinguisher. We rarely used the code, so no one thought to update it. No one except you and Charles.”

Shivering, I felt a rush of something sick move through me. “What’s down there, Finn? Is it … is it hell?”

He looked at me squarely, his expression barely changing.

“A kind of hell, I think, yes. There’s an evil beneath this place. Surely you can feel it. Think of it as a kind of volatile energy source. We need access to it, but we also have to control it. Since the breach, the things that are down there … they’ve started spilling out.”

“Like an oil spill,” I whispered, remembering his odd speech about Deepwater Horizon.

“The world is in chaos. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Man’s inhumanity to man is at an all-time high, and the banality of evil seems to be slipping into every crack and crevice, doesn’t it?”

I thought back to the way I’d been avoiding the news because the violence recently had seemed nightmarishly out of control. Brutally unhinged was the term that had come to mind.

“But if there is a breach and these things have been getting through, wouldn’t everyone know about it?”

He shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that.

The physical manifestations we can stop for the most part.

For now. But there is a slow leak. Call it energetic, call it spiritual.

It’s the incorporeal manifestations of evil.

Every religion has a name for them—demons, djinn, hungry ghosts—the invisible sources of suffering and the spirits that whisper in our ears, that seemingly inhuman drive to do the unthinkable.

Mankind is inherently good. Never forget that.

But we are impressionable, and we can be influenced to do horrific things to one another and even to ourselves. ”

“And that’s what we’re seeing now, that darkness that seems to be sweeping over the world? The ceaseless conflict and senseless brutality. It’s due to the leak here?”