“No, don’t!” Professor Vaughan yelled.
She pushed the door open and ran through, but only made it a few steps before the shock of what she saw rooted her in place.
It was a large, brightly lit room, but how could it be here? There was no space in the wall for it, no addition to the outside of the building. She saw an array of strange, humming machines linked by elaborate webs of cords and plugs. On the far wall, shelves were filled with gleaming metal cylinders in neat rows, each about a foot high, their faces marked with three strange, triangular sockets. A vacant space on one shelf marked where a cylinder was missing from the collection.
Sean’s naked body lay on a surgical table in the middle of the room. She nearly collapsed at the sight. The top of his head had been removed, his cranium neatly and bloodlessly opened by an instrument far more advanced than a simple bone saw. She let out a scream when she saw his skull was empty, like a hollowed-out fruit.
Behind her, the professor spoke. “I told you I would deliver the smartest minds in my class, and I’ve kept my end of the bargain. Now take me to Arneth-Zin!”
He wasn’t talking to her. There was someone else in the room. She turned slowly. A dark shape stood partially hidden in the shadows behind the open door. It was the size of a man, but nothing else about it resembled one. She saw a segmented, crustacean shell that sported numerous insectoid appendages, all of which ended in sharp, pointed pincers. On its back was a pair of thin, bat-like wings. Its head was a hideous fleshy mass covered in writhing antennae, which split open and let loose a piercing, angry shriek.
I remember reading about a professor at McGill University in the 1950s who experimented with sensory deprivation. He discovered that prolonged isolation led to anxiety, hallucinations, and madness. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, floating in the dark, but I’m starting to wonder how much time I have left before I lose my mind. Not much longer, I think. It’s already taking everything I’ve got just to stay focused, to keep reminding myself who I am.
But then…something happens.
I feel a collision of sorts. I’m jolted, my sense of balance knocked off-center. On instinct I put out my hands to brace my fall, but I have no hands and there is nothing to fall against.
The impact does more than send me reeling. It shatters my mind into a blazing white supernova, fracturing my consciousness into innumerable pieces and scattering them to the winds of time. I’m back in Professor Vaughan’s lecture hall. I’m back in his office. I’m back in Sean’s arms. I’m a little girl. I’m being born. I’m back in every moment of my past, every second of my history, all at once.
It’s overwhelming, all of it piling up to crush me under its weight. I’ll go mad if I don’t find some way to control it. The supernova is still there in my mind, like an anchor, and as I concentrate on the fiery white void, I discover I can focus on a single moment instead of all of them at once. I reach through the white, and like a miracle I find myself back in that moment, reliving it, but I still remember. I remember everything.
Emily stood before Professor Vaughan’s office door, listening to his voice inside and the harsh, buzzing whisper that came in reply. She understood what those sounds were now. The creature behind the door in the wall. That was how it communicated, making its promises to Professor Vaughan in return for handing over her and Sean. But she’d been given another chance, a do-over, and this time she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She could stop what had happened to her, make it so that it never happened at all. She just had to make sure things went differently this time.
She pounded on the door. She heard the professor whisper to the creature, give it time to disappear back into that impossible room off the side of the building, and then he opened the door.
“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”
“Oh. How did you know I was—?” She heard the words she’d spoken before, an echo reverberating through time, but this time would be different. This time she wouldn’t cry or freeze up. This time she’d have the upper hand.
Emily pushed past Professor Vaughan into his office and walked right to his desk.
“What are you doing?” Vaughan demanded, hurrying after her.
She opened the drawer, pulled out the gun, and pointed it at him. She wanted him dead for what he did to Sean, what he did — or was about to do — to her, but she hesitated. Her heart jackhammered in her chest. She’d never shot anyone before. Could she do it?
He put his hands up, his Adam’s apple bobbing at his throat. “Miss Bannerman, whatever it is you think you’re doing…”
At the sound of his voice, that pompous, condescending way he called her Miss Bannerman, she had her answer. She pulled the trigger, and the gun jumped in her hand with a loud bang. Professor Vaughan fell to the floor in a spray of red. She ran to the door in the wall and pushed it open.
The room beyond was just as it had been before, with its strange machinery and shelves full of cylinders, with one missing. She understood those cylinders’ dark purpose now. Sean’s body was on the surgical table, his head open and empty, his brain removed and housed in the missing cylinder. She thought of him floating in darkness, a bodiless consciousness just as she had been, or still was, and very nearly forgot the creature hiding behind the door. Emily turned just as it emerged from its hiding place, its head splitting open in that terrible shriek. She pulled the trigger, and the shot blew off a chunk of its eyeless, antennae-laden head, revealing spongy, fungoid flesh within. She screamed, not with terror this time but with righteous fury, and pulled the trigger again and again, blowing off more pieces.
She didn’t feel the sharp object piercing her from behind, so when the long, pointed tip of a pincer came out of her stomach, she stared at it in confusion. There was a harsh buzzing sound at her back, and she realized another creature was in the room, one she hadn’t seen. The gun dropped to the floor. She would have dropped, too, but the pincer through her middle held her upright. It would take a long time to die from this kind of wound, she knew. Long enough for them to harvest her brain, just as they’d done before. She’d failed.
I can see again, though not with my own eyes. Those were left behind on another world. These eyes are artificial, a device with two glass lenses that’s plugged into one of the sockets in my cylinder. Through these lenses, I can see the alien world that Professor Vaughan’s creatures have brought me to. Through a second attached device, one with a metal disc on top, I can hear them speak to each other. They call themselves Mi-Go, and this strange, technologically advanced planetoid at the edge of our solar system is called Yuggoth. Since I arrived, I’ve learned Yuggoth is merely an outpost, not their home world. I don’t know where their home world is, and I get the sense the Mi-Go haven’t seen it in a very long time. Some of them wonder if it still exists.
They communicate in insect-like buzzes and clicks, which the hearing device translates for me. There’s nothing poetic about their language. They speak with cold objective specificity, making no use of allegory or metaphor. Vaughan was right to call them scientists. They’re methodical and precise.