Tenebrum

Disclaimer and content warning: This story contains depictions of violence and descriptions of events that may be distressing to some readers.

Age Rating: 17

“Elara, controls are yours,” spoke a man in a soft but confident voice, releasing the controls and leaning back.

“Roger that, Captain Kodas. Adjusting vector. Crew–buckle up, beginning decelerating burn in 5… 4…” she began the countdown. The screen lit up with a collision warning, sirens blared like a banshee in the night.

“Proximity warning,” the system announced on the intercom.

“I know,” Elara growled, yanking the control joystick to the left. The ship jerked instantaneously as it flung itself to the port side. Something rattled through the cockpit, a pair of pliers flung itself past her face.

“Jonas,” she called out.

“I see it, keep’er steady for a sec,” he requested. ‘Click’, echoed through the cockpit as he unbuckled. A moment later he had the pliers in hand.

“Got’em.”

“Buckle up, decelerating.”

The Airlock Hissed

The airlock hissed, the crew of five floated around it.

“Comms check,” Jonas called out.

“Check,” responded the man next to him.

“Check,” the call continued until all crew members verified their comms. Jonas quickly checked the vitals of his crew on his visor, one of them had an accelerated heartbeat. His gaze wandered over the crew.

“Alright, deep breath, everyone. We’re here to extract the data and find out what happened.”

Elara, noticing Mira’s accelerated heart rate, jumped right in.

“Cap? What’s planned for after the trip?”

Jonas grinned, pushing himself down into the docking collar.

“My baby girl is turning 12 by the time we get back, I promised her a trip to the Wondrous Land theme park.”

“Oh. Heard they got some great attractions,” commented one of the other men.

“Been there, Kenji?” Elara called out.

“Yes, twice in fact. My kids love it, you’ll have a blast Jonas, I assure you.”

A soft chuckle echoed through the comms as the crew pushed themselves through the docking collar in the weightlessness.

She came out of the collar, her breath fogging up her visor with each exhale, but the casual chatter had helped her calm down a little.

“Whooo boy, what a mess,” Kenji called out, glancing around.

“Mag-boots on,” Jonas commanded. There was a faint thud as their boots magnetized to the metallic floors, securing them to the ground.

“Mira, you good?” a private comms channel call came from one of the crew members. She turned, seeing Henrik’s soft smile.

“I’m okay, thank you.”

Mira’s gaze wandered through the airlock. A few loose helmets were floating around, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The visor HUD showed that oxygen presence in the air was extremely low.

“No breathable air, keep helmets on at all times. Life supports will last us a couple of hours,” Jonas gave the order in a humble, caring voice, as if every crew member were a child of his.

While Mira was gawking around, Elara was busy fiddling with the control panel of the airlock, or rather–the insides of it, as she had already torn the faceplate off the wall and was working through the mess of wires, searching for a manual unlock lever. A faint click echoed through the airlock.

“Got it.”

“Henrik, gimme a hand,” Jonas called out, stepping toward the airlock’s door.

“On it,” Henrik walked past Mira, planting his hand on her shoulder and turning to give her a wink, though in the glare of her helmet’s light in his, she could only assume that he winked at her. Though she chuckled at first, something felt off, his steps–they sounded wrong, delayed, or rather—they didn’t match his movement speed.

She felt as though someone was approaching her from behind. A bead of sweat formed on her brow, she gulped loudly, exhaling slowly. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears. She turned slowly, fear stiffening her body. Nothing. There was just the empty wall behind her. A muffled metallic clank made her jump.

“Fuck, ow,” Henrik groaned.

“You good?” Jonas asked, looking over Henrik’s suit.

The prybar slipped, impacting his wrist controller.

“Ugh, I think? The computer is busted though.”

“Oxygen levels? Any leaks?”

Henrik stood still for a moment while Elara hunted for a stray prybar that was floating through the room now.

“Uh, the visor’s HUD is glitching out, but I’m good, oxygen levels aren’t dropping.”

“Okay. Proceed, but keep an eye on it. If it starts to drop, return to our ship,” Jonas shoved the prybar in between the door’s seam and pulled hard on it. Henrik pressed his entire body weight against it. The door screeched, reluctant to open, but at last it gave in. On the other side was a long and dark hallway. Their lights only reached so far.

“Alright, quick in and out. Keep an eye on your life supports. No heroism, I plan to bring you all back to your families. Map up, and use UV markers to mark the path, if you get lost, just follow the markers.”

It was silent. Bar the sound of their mag-boots clanking on the floor as they walked in unison, there was unnerving silence in the hallway. Mira couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. No emergency lights, no blaring silence. Yes, the station had gone silent almost 2 years ago, and it took a while to prepare a mission and arrive here, but this was different, wrong. The stations had emergency power systems that could keep the essentials running for a decade.

As they passed the first junction, Mira couldn’t help but read every placard she came across. ‘Optical Research Division,’ to the left and ‘Artifact Containment’ to the right. Jonas paused for a second, drawing an arrow in the direction they came from, then shone a UV light on it. The arrow lit up.

“Continue onwards, 50 meters then left.”

The crew continued on, but Mira lingered behind a second too long, or perhaps a second too short. She heard a series of soft and barely audible ‘slaps’, as if bare skin on the tile floor in the dead of night. Each step was almost wet in sound, tacky as if the skin stuck to the floor before peeling off. And then—silence.

She stayed frozen in place. The sticky slapping sounds of those steps she heard, still echoing in her mind, when a low and pained groan crept in through the comms.

“Ughhh.”

Jonas, he suddenly slumped and leaned against the wall.

“Captain?” Elara pushed Kenji aside as she dashed toward Jonas.

“Head. My head. It’s—pounding. It feels like—”

Jonas mumbled before suddenly slamming his head against the wall.

A faint crackle of glass echoed through the otherwise silent hallway. His breathing was ragged and pained.

“Jonas, god damn it, talk to me,” Elara panicked, pulling him by the shoulders and turning him toward her.

“His blood pressure is through the roof,” Henrik reported.

The comms crackled, distorted by the pained scream that overwhelmed the microphone, cutting in and out as Jonas slumped down, clenching his helmet, screaming.

“Aaaaaaaggghh,” static and buzzing, interrupted by distressed shouts from Elara.

“Jonas, deep breaths, it’s—”

There was a pop. As if a wet balloon ruptured. His visor got covered in red from within. Elara stumbled backwards—Jonas’s body, remained seated on its knees—microgravity did not allow his corpse to collapse.

Elara, choking on her own breath, tried desperately to utter a command, but only gasps came through. Mira’s gaze wandered to the left, the direction where the tacky foot-steps retreated into the darkness.

“W-what—” uttered Henrik.

“Back. Back to the ship,” Elara managed at last.

“No, we-we can’t. What happened?”

Kenji uttered, nervously tapping at his wrist-mounted computer.

“I—I don’t know. His blood pressure skyrocketed and then, ugh, I’m gonna be sick.”

Henrik turned around, gagging.

Elara stumbled forward toward Jonas’s body, her vision blurred by the tears in her eyes.

“Jonas? Jonas please,” she whimpered softly as she grasped his limp body by the shoulder, trying to pull him up.

“Leave him,” Kenji snapped, grabbing her by the collar of her suit and pulling her back. Her mag-boots slipped. A hollow thud echoed through the hall, and her sniffles through the comms.

The Silence after

The silence after Jonas’s death stretched on for far too long, only their thoughts, emotions, and their own breathing to keep them company. Mira’s gaze was fixated on the direction where she had thought she had heard the footsteps go.

“I’ve parsed the logs, it makes no sense,” Henrik began.

“I, there’s nothing. No abnormalities in the suit, or the environment. He just… I don’t get it.”

Elara sighed.

“No. Stop it, no more. We’ll get his body back and think this through after some rest.”

“Think? Rest? How’s that going to help us? Here we are, 1 year and 2 months of travel time from home, after half a year of preparations, at an asteroid research station where god-only-knows what happened, and our captain’s head just popped like a popcorn kernel. We got a mission, we need those logs, I’m going through with this,” Kenji insisted.

“Kenji!” Elara called out.

“You saw what happened.”

He nodded, “Yes, all the more reasons to get to the bottom of it all. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

“To die for no reason? To leave our loved ones widowed?” Elara snapped back, storming toward him.

“We’re already dying—may as well finish the job,” Kenji glanced down the hallway, his light illuminating Jonas’s body.

“God damn it Kenji, how could you? He was your friend.”

Kenji slammed his fist into the wall, “AND THAT IS WHY I WILL FIND OUT WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED! I’m going, come with or stay behind, I don’t care.”

Silence befell the hallway once more as the crew processed his words and emotions.

“I—I’ll go,” Mira stuttered.

“Mira?” Elara exclaimed, surprised.

“It’s okay, he’s right.”

“I’ll, erhm, stay,” Henrik commented.

“Good, problem solved. Let’s get a move on,” Kenji spoke hastily.

Central Hub

‘Central Hub,’ the placard read.

“Yeah, we’re getting close, and our heads are still intact,” Kenji responded, pushing himself up the stairs to the hub. As soon as his head was through the hatch, the comms buzz, static interference, and then silence.

“Kenji? Kenji can you hear me?” Mira panicked, glancing up at him as he spun himself around to give her thumbs up, “Comms [static] up, all [static].”

Once up at the hub, Mira found the location almost homely. It had a few table-games set up around the location, a room labeled ‘Cinema’ and a mess hall, all in this centralized location. A few clothing items hovered in the air, as though worn by the invisible.

“Creepy,” Mira gulped.

“Head’s still intact, we’re good.”

As they made their way through the mess hall, Mira paused, a logging tablet caught her attention. It was magnetized to the table, but what stood out about it—was a box of helmet visors that hovered next to it. A thought surfaced on her mind, “Optics Research,” she mumbled.

“What was that?” Kenji queried, turning around to look at what she was focused on.

“Oh, uh, nothing. Just, weird.”

She reached up for the tablet. To her surprise, it had been in hibernation mode, and still had a bit of battery life left, enough for her to skim through the unfinished crew member’s log.

“Blah blah blah,” she continued to mumble.

“They discovered some kind of artifact while drilling for the base’s expansion, a chamber of sorts that had a pedestal, it says.”

“Pedestal chamber? Hah, in a random asteroid?”

Kenji shuddered, “Not creepy at all.”

“Right? It says here there’s been some anomalies throughout the base since the discovery, and—” she paused.

“And?” Kenji inquired, stepping closer.

She turned the tablet toward him. Before it turned off, he read the last phrase that was written in the log,

“It watches, now we can watch it back.”

“Whatever that means—sounds important. Take the pad, extra documents will help us figure out what happened here,” he said, turning to leave.

“And the visors?” Mira asked, stashing the pad away.

“Physical evidence, sounds like they may have been a part of some research, take them.”

Each equipped a single visor before moving on. Mira curiously lowered it.

“Anything?” Kenji asked.

She looked around, “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Weird, oh well.”

They moved on, toward their goal. The central lab’s server room, where the blackbox with all the data they would’ve needed, was stored.

While Kenji was extracting the blackbox, Mira was busy pulling the data-drives from the racks in hopes of them having recoverable data, when she noticed a glass containment unit.

“What’s that?” She called out. Kenji, having freed the blackbox at last, stashed it away and turned to see the aquarium-like structure with a black cube inside it.

Surrounding it were various probes, transmitters, and antennas, as if it was a data unit transmitting wirelessly and they were capturing it.

“Interesting,” Kenji commented, taking a step closer toward it. The moment he got within an arm’s reach of the glass case, a voice, sharp as a knife, echoed through his mind. It spoke in a tongue he had never heard before, something sinister and ancient, something that made his instincts flare up in an instant.

He shrieked, stumbling backward fast—his magnetic boots screeched across the floor, until his back hit a server rack. He was out of breath, sweat beading on his brow.

A moment later, he clenched his helmet, groaning out of pain, “Ughhh,” it was as though a thousand voices all shouted at him at once, each in its own language, each shouting pure hatred at him.

“Kenji!” Mira spun around instantly, rushing to his side.

“Please please please, no! Please no, not this,” she panicked, “Kenji please, are you okay? Speak to me.”

“It’s—ugh, it’s in my head.”

His knees buckled as his body slumped, weakened by the sheer terror he had just heard. He collapsed to all fours, gasping for air—echo of the voices slowly fading. Mira’s gaze wandered up to the cube-like object.

“NO!” Kenji shouted, “Don’t look at it, don’t think about it. NO! No, no, no, no!”

Mira swallowed hard, “Okay, okay. Relax. We’re not touching it, it’s okay. Come on, we’ve got what we needed, we should leave.”

She yanked on his arm, pulling him up until he was upright.

“Don’t look at it,” he groaned, voices still echoing through his mind like a thousand needles piercing through his skull.

“I’m not,” Mira assured him, pulling on his arm, walking toward the exit, making sure not to even look at the object.

Once out of the server room, she took a deep breath, “Kenji? You okay?”

He shook his head, “No? But, I’m alive—”

She tapped him on the back, “Come on. We’ve gotta get back to the ship,” she switched the crew-wide comms on.

“Elara? We’ve got the data box and drives, heading back, prepare for extraction.”

Silence.

“Elara?” she tried again, but he call was met only by silence again. Kenji, having regained his footing a little, toggled the crew status window on his visor’s HUD. ‘ [Elara: No Signal] [Henrik: No Signal]’ he gulped.

“I, uh, they must’ve taken the helmets off in the ship, let’s go.”

They moved swiftly

They moved swiftly through the claustrophobic corridors of the research station—Mira half-dragging Kenji by the arm as he stumbled behind her. The voices still occasionally sparked in his mind, disorientating him like a jolt of electricity.

“Kenji, we’re at the central hub, almost there—” she started, but then stopped abruptly. The lights in the central hub flickered for a brief moment, as if acknowledging a presence that wasn’t there before.

Their comms crackled, and then, a low, barely audible, staticky hiss came through

“Watch.”

Mira froze as every cell in her body screamed for her to run. Her skin crawled with unease.

Kenji gulped, “D-did you hear that too?”

It repeated again, this time on a private comms channel that was encrypted.

“Yes—” Mira replied, fear audible in her voice.

“It’s following us,” Kenji gasped, too afraid to turn his head, to look around. His gaze fixated firmly on Mira, whose gaze, in turn, was fixated on the floor.

“N-no, it-it can’t… don’t say that. Deep breaths. We’re okay. It’s just… static—” she tried to reassure herself more than Kenji.

The visors of their helmets buzzed, as if an invisible force was undulating through them. The HUD glitched, the lights inside the helmets flickered. Shapes became apparent within their peripheral vision. Too tall to fit in the room, too distorted to be real, yet too close to be a hallucination, and too crisp to be a mirage. Mira shut her eyes, “No, no! NO! Stop, No! This can’t be happening.”

Kenji’s hand tapped her on the helmet, then again—the filter slid down over her faceplate at last.

Mira heard it, didn’t see it. The familiar, barely audible grind of a filter going over the visor, the same kind of filter they use to block out the solar radiation when on spacewalks.

“No,” Mira shook her head, “Don’t.”

“Kenji, don’t, don’t look,” she gasped into the comms, but it was apparently too late, as there was nought but silence. She felt pressure change outside, so much so that her ears popped inside the helmet, ringing was all she could hear for a few long moments, and when at last, she could no longer feel Kenji’s hand on her suit, she slowly opened her eyes.

The lights were out. Not a single light on her suit worked, nor Kenji’s. There was darkness, pitch-black darkness, and inside it—a shape. Not a figure. It had no distinct features, just a shape, in the darkness. It was a thing, made of the absence of all and everything. Its edges crawled like smoke, as if reality itself refused its existence, but it did not care; it was here.

Her instincts didn’t so much as have a chance to flare up, they instantly surrendered. Whatever it was, it sent her body into a lockdown. Her thoughts didn’t even begin processing the idea of ‘running’. As if the reality itself ceased to exist—there was nowhere to run. Every fiber in her body screamed ‘submit’.

“You looked,” a voice spoke to her from the deepest corner of her mind. As if subconsciousness spoke to her, but it wasn’t hers anymore.

“You are mine.”

She wasn’t frightened anymore. She existed. Simply existed. Kenji’s voice crackled through the comms, “The key, we must, retrieve the key.”

Mira nodded in silence. Her thoughts were focused only on that now, ‘the key’.

In silence

In silence, they followed the corridor.

They no longer needed the lights. The visors showed them enough to navigate. There wasn’t light, but essence in the corridors, and said essence was all around. It was dark, but darker than the darkness, and that made it possible to see to an extent. Some cracks in the walls pulsed with life—life that wasn’t there before.

Their steps were out of sync, chaotic, some shorter and some longer, as if sleepwalkers stumbling through the dark of night.

The closer they got to their destination—the hallway where it had all begun, where Jonas died, the more unsettling the scenery became.

Walls looked fleshy, as if made of bio-matter rather than metal composite. The structural beams resembled bones, and the wires—like veins—pulsed with life.

They turned and headed down the other hallway, ‘Artifact Containment’ read the placard. The door hissed open as if welcoming them inside, a scene that plunged Mira’s mind into chaos unlike any she could have ever imagined. Faces of the research crew, half-blended into the walls, watched her. Empty sockets blinked at them, each blink accompanied by the flickering of the light. It was as if the entire containment room was alive—and it was, in a sense.

One of the faces seemed to scream in agony, but its voice was silent. Mira stopped breathing altogether, the gruesome sight broke what was left of her mind. From the ceiling, countless arms protruded, all reaching for the center of the room. At the center, inside a glass containment, inside a Faraday cage, stood an altar of indescribable nature.

The floor around it was made of human skin and bones, and at the center—the altar was a body wearing a suit much like their own. It was broken, twisted, and reformed. The arms, like two coiling snakes, reached out from the spine, holding aloft a smaller version of the cube they saw in the server room. The legs were twisted around the base, and the head was hanging off to the side.

“Henrik,” Mira uttered in a raspy, barely audible voice. Still, not a single breath was drawn.

“The key,” Kenji whispered, his voice empty, devoid of emotion or feelings.

As they approached it and reached for the smaller cube, the entire room shuddered. Voices screamed.

“Nooo,” the deck vibrated gnetly as the undulating thruster pulse reverberated through the station—a spaceship was about to take off.

Metal and flesh shrieked and creaked, as if an ancient beast awaking from its slumber, disturbed by something from the outside.

“Elara,” Mira uttered softly, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“She’ll bring more,” Kenji replied calmly, holding the smaller cube in his hand.

“Master will be freed with this.”

THE END