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Across the Malachite Window

“I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen—the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.”

--H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator”

Tell me can you hear what father’s done

Cut this rope and let us run

Just when all seems fine and I’m pain-free

Jab another pin in me

-Metallica, “Fixxxer”

I

Each to His Own

Everything was on fire.

Flames blossomed into the air like a dystopian garden, lapping and suckling at nearly every surface of the desert fortification. Petrochemicals, plastics, and rubber-based synthetics throughout the base were releasing columns of thick, poisonous smoke into the air, coalescing at a point hundreds of feet above into a monstrous brown-black entity, its toxic presence blocking out the sun, casting a shadow across the rocky desert. The broken whirring of machinery could be heard every now and then, disconnected rattle-buzz breaking the roar of the flames and the scream of Cornerian jets in the sky. Every now and then an electrical discharge would spark a small explosion, identical in sound to a fired gun; the corpses of several great underground assembly lines were still active through central processing conductors that remained untouched by flames, the grinding of disabled and twisted machinery identical in sound to a woman’s scream.

A large robotic security drone lay on the collection of checkered plate sheet metal and steel grating that served as a terrace overlooking the vast, single desert that was the planet Venom. Behind it, the mouth of the cavern system yawned open like a massive geologic monstrosity, belching fire and smoke as what lay inside suffered damage no less than what lay outside. The light behind the drone’s three cybernetic eyes flickered as it fought to remain sentient, scratching and scrabbling with steel digits in an attempt to obey its first directive: survive. Its lower extremities were mangled in the third round of bombing, and as it dragged itself toward the open space of the terrace it left a slug-like trail of tiny metal pieces and a milky, viscous liquid.

The footfalls of heavy boots rattled the looser metal plates. The drone’s eyes circulated around in their placement, uselessly seeking the cause of the noise as it was unable to move the flexible gimbal-mounted steel column that served as its neck.

A face wove its way slowly into the drone’s view, its facial features angular and canine. Though the majority of the robot’s body was disabled, the collection of wires and microchips that served as its brain remained in service; the image of the canine face was sent into a database for recognition. This database, rather than being sorted for names or specific facial features, was sorted to reject or admit certain species as judged by visual keys. The face, being canine, was denied, and so its face appeared as a glowing, cherry red silhouette in the robot’s display. The robot’s directive instantly changed to “Eliminate target.”

The security drone gave a petulant, siren-like wail as it attempted to activate its primary gun, a high-caliber cannon mounted solidly on its back. The face in the drone’s display moved slightly, blocked by something dark and oblique.

The first bullet tore through the security drone’s central eye, shredding the connections within and blackening its display. The second bullet punched the robot’s ticket, ripping apart the membranous wires wrapped around its chrome spinal column. The mechanical whine petered away into a waspish hum.

Fox McCloud momentarily scanned the terrace to see if there were any other drones. Seeing none, he tapped a sequence of buttons on the bulky communicator he wore around his wrist. There was a brief burst of static, a thousand flies in the speaker, before a familiar, tired old voice cut through the dull rumble of fire, buzzy and insectile with the radio’s poor connection.

“Peppy here.” He sounded more tired and older than usual. Fox breathed shallowly, trying not to inhale smoke that rose up from the lower levels of the base, curling through the grating.

“This is McCloud. I’m at the objective.”

“Copy that, Fox. We, uh, we’re having some issues with communication. This cloud is getting thicker, and it’s blocking out our signals. Be advised that if you go any further, your radio will be useless.”

“I know, Mr. Hare. Hold position and await further orders.”

“You got it, Fox.” There was a short raspy sound over the speaker, a sound Fox knew was a non-committal sniff his uncle often made when remembering something fondly. “You know, you sound a lot like your—.”

“McCloud out.” Fox pressed the tiny red button on his communicator, ending the connection. He started walking toward the mouth of the cavern system, holding his gun the way they taught him at the academy, in both hands, the barrel aimed down to the ground. He found that as he got closer to the black and smoking entrance his heartbeat grew in speed and strength, hammering spoonfuls of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He breathed to steady himself, though that was an ineffective action.

Smoke rushed against his face as he headed into the cavern base, pulling up tears from his eyes, making his nose tickle. His lungs were hurting, not from the smoke, but from the harsh, sulfurous atmosphere of the planet. He knew he was ignoring protocol—and common sense—by not donning the gas mask he had strapped to his belt. It bumped roughly against his hip as he marched down the dark corridor, a due sense of caution and anxiety hovering over his mind.

There was a meager amount of light in the corridors; strings of light bulbs were strung on either side of him, following the corridor, doing little to assuage Fox’s sense of constriction. There was an explosion, a dull wham somewhere outside; the light bulbs flickered as clouds of dust and sand fell from above, adding to the fogginess already perpetrated by the smoke. He kept his body bent forward, keeping his head under the black-grey cloud.

He had no idea where he was going; he had been present at the briefing, had listened to the presentation about Dr. Andross’ desert base, had seen the structure’s schematics, but the moment he set foot into the structure everything was pushed away in favor of one overwhelming emotion, one darker shade of hatred.

Vengeance.

He wandered through the maze of hallways, encountering a door every now and then that would lead into a room possessing different arrangements of the same things; glass beakers, sometimes full with dark and ominous liquids, some empty but dirty with residue from some previous malign experiment; glass tubing snaking or spiraling from one curious device to another; machines the like of which Fox couldn’t understand even if he wanted to; large jars and clear containers filled mostly with milky fluid and things that could only be understood to be organic if one were to participate in prolonged study; highly detailed blueprints and diagrams involving complex equations and intense mathematical prowess.

Fox started to run, unaware that he was doing it. The window for him to do what he had to do—what he needed to do—was waning, fading. He coughed; the smoke was getting into his eyes, making them sting and water. With the tinny voice of the deepest corner of his mind, he wondered if he had in fact thought this one hundred percent through.

Then, he thought that it didn’t matter if he had or hadn’t; it had to be done, this way or another.

After what seemed too long, he reached an end to the corridors; a door larger and denser than its compatriots. A security panel was hanging broken at the side, periodically letting loose a burst of sparks. There was a red light above the door, flashing like a crimson eye either to show that the door was locked or that an emergency was in progress. The door itself, which should have been magnetically locked, stood ajar, bright fluorescent lighting spearing through the cloudy shadows.

Fox pushed the door open, squeezing himself through, gun aimed into the room. It was smoky in here, too, though much less so than the rooms behind. Racked as he was with discomfort, his purpose was set and nothing was going to deter him. He saw that the room unfolded into a wide and open space, with walls and floor made of lighter stone than the rest of the fortification. Artificial lights, white and biting, were hanging from the ceiling, all along the far walls, and at several points on the floor, eliminating any trace of darkness that might have been hiding. Fox squinted through the glare, forcing his eyes to adjust as he advanced further into the room, ruminating in his mind over all the rumors of Dr. Andross and his life lost in decades of collapsing sanity and burgeoning morbidity.

The room in its immensity was mostly empty, save for a grouping of big, empty wooden boxes and a curious conglomeration of mechanical apparatuses that lay scattered, in pieces or seemingly whole, around the base of the large contraption that stood near the far wall. The lower portion was a circular dais of the same light-colored igneous stone as the rest of the room, five feet high and five feet in circumference, its sides inscribed with blockish, angular characters. It was topped by a thin disc of strange stone, bands of black and dark, gleaming green spiraling toward its center. Fox walked toward it, quietly, his eyes darting into hidden places, imagining lurking targets as his heart continued to pound. He noticed that as he moved, the bands of green-and-black seemed to shift, to turn into itself as though it too were moving.

Above the dais some three feet was a similar protrusion hanging from the ceiling, wide at the base and tapering down to a slightly thinner circle, made of dense metal and thick plastic tubing rather than stone. Its lower portion, poised above the odd stone disc, seemed to be a flat, featureless surface of chrome. All around the hive-like object on all sides stretching up to the ceiling, were what appeared to be horizontal columns or thin ledges, though their geometry was curious and confounding; indeed, even their presence on the contraption seemed absolutely useless and perpendicular to sense and function.

Fox was breathing hard and fast through his nose, sweat beading on his brow. He tried to do as he was instructed in these situations, to breathe calmly and deeply, but part of him relished the adrenaline, mental orgy of fear and apprehension. Outside, something blew up; the mountain shook. There was a humming in the air here, a faint wasp-drone sound that made Fox’s ears twitch. Understanding that the room was devoid of anything other than the strange object, he let his handgun drop to his side.

Fox stepped cautiously up to the disc, watching how the stone glistened and whirled in the light. He could smell something different here, a breed of repulsion separate from the usual sulfurous rock of Venom. This scent was grim, organic, evoking images of natural rot and decay. He wiped his forehead, now beginning to feel the heat. There were no windows or vents in this room, only the door that led back into smoking corridors. Sand and dust fell slowly from the ceiling as though through water; dead air.

He peered into the disc, seeing his reflection looking back at him; brows hanging low over eyes the color of green beryl, sandy orange fur dark from the ash and sand of the desert, matted in spots into thickly tangled clumps, creamy white hair on his head wiry and unkempt; a tired red fox. Deep dark bags were hanging under his gemstone eyes, begging for tears that were threatening to break free from prison.

There was a clang up above him, a dull, reverberating metal-on-metal pounding; Fox quickly stepped backward, his boots scattering a meager collection of metal and plastic junk. He raised his gun, pulse increasing again.

The upper disc of the contraption split open, bisected down the middle, two panels sliding apart. Something large and dark was being lowered by a series of black cables and iron rings. Fox held his handgun up, pointing the barrel at the intruding object, keeping himself crouched low on bent knee.

The cables lowered the object down into the light, and Fox could now see by the limbs and tail that wavered akimbo in the air that the object was a body, canine, divest of any clothing. It did not move, save for the movement afforded by the cables. Fox held the gun upraised, his limbs feeling charged as though by electricity, coursing with a bottomless well of energy. The black cables lowered the body onto the stone disc and, with a grinding wail and clunking hammer of internal parts, the tentacle-like extremities unwound around the figure and slipped back up into the contraption.

Fox, still breathing heavily, sweat beginning to drip down and soak through his fur, slowly stood up, his handgun aimed at the figure. He stepped forward, up to the glistening black-and-green disc, eyes darting about his surroundings as images of traps and tricks filled his mind.

He looked down upon the body that rested, immobile and complacent in death. As he looked, his heart jerked in his stomach, seemed to reach upward into his throat and threaten to depart, for he recognized, with the horrified comprehension of memory, the features on the face and body, so like his own.

“Dad?” Fox’s voice was quiet and hollow in the mostly empty room, like an echo of sound rather than a source.

Fox McCloud stared down at his father’s closed eyelids. The hatred and panic-driven fury that filled him, that seemed to fuse with his will and fuel his body, paled, retreating as that of midday fog. He reached out to touch his father’s shoulder; it was cold, much colder than he imagined. He looked at his father’s face; apart from slight discoloration under the fur and the serenity that occurs in death, he was identical to all the photographs he kept with him, all the memories Fox had of when he was younger. No memory was coming to him at the moment, his mind filling with an infallible darkness with the dead face of James McCloud at its center.

The last shred of hope Fox had that his father was still alive was ripped apart, taught snap of broken chains. Sweat was getting into his eyes, salt-sting mixing with tears. He took back his hand, a hand that didn’t shake, didn’t twitch, didn’t seem to have any feeling in them at all, away from that cold that seemed far more oppressive than the heat.

Fsshh!

Fox jumped back as he heard a brief, rasping hiss, his feet sending a mess of metal and solid plastic pieces careening noisily across the floor. He raised his gun, one-handed, as he backed away from the curious device, stinging eyes darting around.

Flash of white, artificial and glaring, a hand with long bony fingers on the other side of the green-black disc.

Fsshh!

The sound of a sneeze being blown into the crook of an arm. The white thing moved around the dais, walking along its circumference. The sound of shoes, soft and expensive, tapping gently on the floor. Fox watched the hand, still on the stone disc, sliding coolly along its lustrous surface. Fingernails—thick, sharp, yellowed like an aged novel—clacked every now and then. The sound conjured up images of crawling spiders, of biting teeth and something metal tapping against bone.

The figure hove into Fox’s view, brightness filling the space around his pistol’s sights. White lab coat, scarecrow tall, a large and age-wrinkled head cradled on thin shoulders. There was a layer of something greenish-yellow, thickly crusted, staining the front of the coat, something that looked like decade-old vomit. Fox looked into another face he had only ever seen in photographs, on television, and in certain corners of academy records.

“Dr. Andross?”

The head tilted toward him, heavily wrinkled primate face, eyes large yet tired and sunken in their hollows, softballs in craters. A streamer of thick, greenish snot fell from his nose, diseased river bisecting the deep scarlet tan of his face. His face was framed by a shock of hair that looked like grey-white smoke. The face saw him, eyes turning slowly to Fox’s face and the gun he held. A grin parted thick lips, teeth dark and stained.

“Ah…ha-ha, I heard you knocking, boy.”

The voice was low, low, like something that belonged in the ground. The doctor took several steps toward Fox, extending his claw-like hand. Fox stiffened his arms, the gun held straight and flush with the ground as he shouted. “Don’t move! Don’t you fucking move!”

His voice was like an explosion in the large closed room, echoes upon echoes reverberating into each other. Andross stopped, frozen, his arm extended in open air. “No chance for a little civility, then. Oh well—.”

Andross bent as his chest was racked with spasms. He coughed hard, wet sounds into his elbow. Fox felt sick just listening to the noise. When he finished some long moments later, a streamer of mucus bridged his elbow and face to fall to the floor. “I apologize for my condition…Fsshh! Ugh, I doubt any medical doctor in this whole black universe knows what I’ve got, much less how to remove it.”

Fox took another step back. His heart was hammering in his ears; the heat made it feel like the walls were shrinking. Andross kept his tired opal-yellow eyes trained on him. Though he appeared outwardly exhausted there was a glow behind those eyes, glimmering with malignant intelligence.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, and smiled, as though that was the all-purpose answer for everything. He turned away—Fox felt a slight ping of relief having those eyes averted from his own—and stepped to the dais, tapping his nails on the stone. “You’re here to kill me.”

It was such a plain-sounding statement, so mundane, as though it was something he said every day. Fox sniffed, quickly wiping away sweat that had been pooling around his nose. “Yes,” he said. “You’re a danger, Andross, to Corneria, to the Lylat system, and if what I’ve heard is true, all life in general. Do you have any idea how many people you’re responsible for murdering? And for what? For what? Tell me why!”

Fox was unaware that his voice was rising consistently, his lips peeling back in anger. Andross only shrugged his inquiry away, staring at a point on the floor. “Each man to his own sin, boy. My sin always has been my hunger for knowledge.”

“Look at me!”

Sound explosion in the closed room. Andross turned his head up slowly, those malign eyes ignoring Fox’s handgun. Fox sniffed away a tickle in his nose, keeping his eyes on target, trying hard not to blink from the sweat that poured down his forehead. As the echoes faded, Fox spoke again, this time in a marginally softer tone.

“I said, tell me. Give me at least one reason to justify your killing countless people…and my parents. Tell me why before I put a bullet in your skull.”

“Is that why you’re here, child? To avenge your parents? To give them a proper burial by disposing of the one responsible?”

Fox smiled, relishing the power in being the one man out of two holding a firearm. “Not just them, you monster. Millions of them; millions of other families you’ve shattered, millions of survivors who’ll never see their mothers, fathers, and children ever again because of you—.”

“Don’t lie to me, boy, it’s not in your nature. The moment you beheld my face it was your parents you thought of, not the ‘countless people’ whose blood remains firmly caked on my hands. Their numbers might be exponential, they might have been mothers and fathers, but they weren’t your mother and father, were they? The children I left screaming in burning cities weren’t you, were they? Correct me if I’m wrong, boy.”

Fox growled, aiming the sights of the barrel between Andross’ eyes. “You still haven’t given me a reason.”

The doctor’s eyes seemed to tear into him, hatred cocktails. He stared long and hard, Fox mimicking the primate’s glare. Fox’s tail shook, fur bristling. Andross leaned against the dais, breathing slowly, his breath slick and wet. “The pursuit of science,” he began, pulling his eyes away from Fox long enough to wipe his nose, “is to understand base natures. In most cases, it is the basic nature of selected fields of study; in my case, the basic nature of everything. To understand everything in its immense entirety is a vast undertaking, McCloud, something that you in your youth cannot possibly ascertain. It requires study, funds, and equipment beyond scope, beyond the feeble militaries and governments of the cosmos. It requires patience and time, and, yes, a sense of savagery; science is a vicious world, boy, more than you know. I sought not to comprehend the comprehension of the universe, but the universe itself, all of its bits and pieces, the essence that makes up reality.

“What is a life, McCloud, when you’ve tasked yourself with trying to explain the fundamentals that make up existence itself? With billions of lives on one planet, and billions on billions of other planets, one life has no value. A thousand lives have no value. Every single individual that you hold me responsible for terminating, I treated as equally as the cosmos itself, without worth. They were stepping stones, a limitless collection of stepping stones in a great black river, and I used them to bridge the gap between ignorance and enlightenment. I stepped near that distant shore several days ago, boy, to some discomfort…Fsshh!”

Andross buried his mouth into the filthy elbow of his white coat, executing another series of hacking, wheezing coughing. Fox’s arms were tiring; the gun visibly shook in his hands.

“You can’t devalue people like that.” Fox spoke, quietly. Andross continued, ignoring Fox’s comment.

“Do you want to know the secret of reality, McCloud? The one infallible truth that encompasses both life and death? There is only one secret that all existence holds close to its dark breast. I was like you, boy, when I first learned what the shadows had to teach, I fought against understanding something so bleak, so devoid of sense, but I learned to accept it, to accept it for the absolute truth that it is. If all the immaculate knowledge of reality can be summed up in one cogent word, Fox, it is this: nothing.”

The word had no echo in the room, no whisper of its sound or significance. A word of power whose sole power lay in its meaning. Fox shook his head.

“Nothing? What—what is that supposed to mean? What’re you talking about?”

Andross smiled, nodding his head as though a question had been answered. “Nothing, boy, is what it is.” The doctor turned to look at the cold body of James McCloud, his eyes empty, devoid of emotion. He reached out a hand, brushing the orange fur on the fox’s shoulder.

“Hey—hey! Don’t touch him!” Fox kept his arms raised as he screamed, screamed so hard his voice cracked. The bastard fiend had no right, absolutely no right to even look at his father. The sight of Andross looking down on his father, running his fingers through his fur, relit the fires of hate in Fox’s chest. He raised the handgun—just a little bit—and fired off a round into the air. The sound was deafening, one blast copied a dozen times in the dead air. The bullet struck the igneous stone on the far wall, ricocheting in a metallic scream to penetrate the floor at an angle. Andross made no motion or show that he had acknowledged the sound, continuing to run his claw-like nails through his father’s fur.

“Do you think it would matter killing me, McCloud? Do you think my death would have some incredible planetary impact?”

“Yes, I do. If you died today, there wouldn’t be—.”

“It won’t bring your mother and father back.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about my parents!”

“It won’t give you the moments you dreamed of having had they been alive. It won’t make things any different, boy. Time is a black wheel rolling through life and death, trampling everything in its way. You might think you’re far and away from it now, but you’ll soon find yourself where I am now, where your mother and father were years ago; under the wheel.”

Fox shook his head, outright denial of what he was hearing. “You’re insane,” he said, shaking arms feeling like there was nothing holding them up anymore. Andross only stared down, empty windows looking in on closed ones, running a finger along the bridge of James McCloud’s muzzle.

“In death there is emptiness, and emptiness is purity. Life is that final step to reach the shore. The first step, McCloud…” Andross paused to turn and look directly at Fox, eyes like cold honey. “The first step is death.”

Fox felt his arms give out, the gun’s weight somehow multiplying as he held it. He let it drop to his side, finding himself just glaring, watching Andross with moist eyes.

“You really are batshit crazy,” Fox whispered, all his strength evaporated as the hatred that flared began to dwindle. “The only person who believes the bullshit coming out of your mouth is you. There’s no deep secret of the universe, no bliss in death, not one ounce of truth in what you’re saying. All these years of oppression and genocide were based on some feeble delusion. You’re shit.”

Andross shrugged and smiled. Fox felt more heat rising in his chest, angry at being consistently snubbed. He had fantasized about this scenario, for years imagining the place where he’d kill this one man, this one authoritarian abomination of a madman, acquisition of retribution over decades of fear and destruction.

“I suppose it would hurt you more if I said that your mother’s death was an accident.”

“Liar. It was your bomb, you set it up—.” Fox hissed through his teeth, anger rushing out of his throat.

“I had great admiration and compassion for your mother, boy. I loved her spirit, her vitality. Would it pain you to hear that I no longer think nor care about your mother?”

Fox clenched his fists, the gun in his hand quivering.

“A body is a body. It rots, decomposes, fades away into sand and dust, and the spirit eventually leaves its calcium prison into nothingness. Your mother’s spirit is still wasting in her maggot-holed box; I could’ve given it a better home.”

“You fucking monster.”

“Your damnable father…he was the monster, boy. He ruined so much of my work, all my progress shot up in flames because of him. Oh, I hated your father, I hated him so much, the grain of sand ruining the proverbial gears. But a grain of sand, even one as course as James, can become a pearl in time.”

He stroked the fur on his father’s muzzle again, making Fox wince. He raised the handgun.

“Shut up, just shut up.”

Andross looked at him and smiled, just smiled, an amused uncle watching the antics of an energetic nephew.

“Whatever happens will happen eventually. Doesn’t matter.”

Fox straightened his tired arm, white filling the sights. He didn’t think, didn’t allow one thought to fill his head, just the sound of his heart beating, the sweat stinging his eyes, the smells of rot in a volcano-hot room.

Fox pulled the trigger—

_ Snap!_

Hammer striking empty, quick metal scream echoing along the walls like an invisible bat. Andross smiled, taking his hand away from the corpse that Fox refused to see as a corpse. “It’s difficult to keep count in a warzone, isn’t it?”

Fox’s hand flew to his pockets, cleaning out every one from his pants to his vest for a spare clip, finding none, dismay enshrouding his thoughts. Andross stepped away from the dais, walking slowly toward Fox with assured steps that would have been regal had it not been for his swaying, disease-cloud dance.

“Your killing me wouldn’t matter, McCloud. Neither would my killing you. Had I never existed, your parents would have died in some other way, sooner or later, and you with them. We’re all forever under the inescapable wheel. Makes you want to figure out a way to step aside, doesn’t it?”

Andross’ hand reached into his coat—Fox could hear the rasp of thick skin brushing against the starched fabric—and when it withdrew it was wrapped around a black snub-nosed revolver, tiny but destructive as anything of its ilk. Fox, eyes widening, heart trying to dance out his throat, took a step back.

“If you are intending to avenge all those who you feel I am responsible for murdering, then I’m very sorry, child. I will not be giving you that satisfaction.”

Andross raised his hand, the barrel pointed to Fox’s chest—Fox’s limbs went numb as his legs jerked awkwardly backward—but the gun continued up, up, turned in the primate’s grip. The short black barrel nestled into his wispy white hair, just above and behind his right eye. Fox saw the way the little revolver shined in the artificial light, the glare catching in his eyes.

When Andross pulled the trigger, the thunderous explosion of pressurized gas seemed to echo longer than usual across the stone walls.