I wrote this story about four years ago. It was originally titled Who Heard the Sound. The title was a line from a poem I wrote which linked five stories together. I rewrote the poem so that the stories had more interesting names. My intent was to rewrite each story, but I came to realize that rewriting old stories is a slippery slope. So here is the original.

34 Hours: Post-Exposure

A heart monitor sits in the corner of the sterile room, a thin, banal line stretched straight across its screen like a horizon. There are a variety of other machines populating the brightly lit room. Each machine has tubes and wires attached to a bare male body. The wires trail across the ground in indecipherable patterns, an alien calligraphy bleeding forth from the body of the man. There are thick leather straps restraining the arms, torso, and legs, with restraints on the forehead as well. The head is wrapped in bandages that leave only a slit where the eyes are. The flatline of the heart monitor has been adapted to remove the flatline beep, giving off only its pale green light and no sound at all. The other machines beep and whir, and expel air in soft hisses, like the sighs of the overworked. Now comes the protracted sound of a zipper being undone, and then a doctor steps into the room through the white zipper door. She steps through and then reseals the decontamination chamber behind her.

She is wearing what looks like a beekeeper’s outfit, concealing every inch of skin, and is carrying a bag of implements. She walks over to the body strapped to the bed, crinkling and lumbering the whole way. She has no peripheral vision, and moves her whole upper body to look around. She positions herself in front of the open eyes of the body, then she waves her hand slowly back and forth in front of the glassy eyes, a careful and almost hypnotic gesture. From within the bandages, the open eyes track the movements of her hand like soulless cameras, and then fix on her clear face mask with an empty gaze. The eyes are bleary and red, irritated from remaining open so long. While the doctor checks the machines and monitors, the unblinking and reddened eyes carefully follow her every move. The flatline indicative of death continues to rest idly on the monitor, and the eyes still follow. The doctor returns to the side of the bed and begins to very carefully unwrap the bandages from around the man’s head.

The gauze comes away white at first, then it slowly starts to turn a yellow color, then a deep rust color. As the doctor unwraps the binding, it begins to cling slightly to itself, then more heavily to the wounds underneath. After all the bindings are removed, there is left a patchwork of spidery fabric that renders the man a scarecrow in disrepair. The doctor throws the gauze away in a red biohazard container, then removes eye drops from her bag. She carefully empties a full dropper of liquid into each eye, all while the eyes stare at her without blinking or flinching. When she is finished, the man strikes a ghastly image: like a rag doll crying tears of blood down its shredded face. The doctor takes a fresh roll of gauze from her bag and begins the careful process of rewrapping the man’s head, save for the eyes. When she finishes the wrap, she places the remaining roll in her bag and brings out a small board for writing on. The doctor writes in chicken-scratch handwriting, the words, “Hello, Mr. Ward”. The eyes watch the board without reaction.

1 Hour: Pre-Exposure

The top results displayed on the web browser show rocks of all varieties and colors, each strange and unique. Ward closes his laptop, removes his glasses and places them on top of the computer, and rubs his tired eyes. He doesn’t want to look over at the rock, but he cannot help himself. It possesses a certain magnetism that he cannot account for. His eyes dart over to where the strange stone hunk sits on his desk, no larger than a fist, like an overzealous paperweight. He feels as though it pulls his gaze toward itself, exerting some primeval power over his own will. The strange etchings on the front are completely foreign to him and he has found nothing in his searches online. He slides his desk chair over to where the rock sits, and stares at it intently. He gazes at it intimately, searching out its every crevice, and he can’t help but feel that it is gazing back. He has hardly let it out of his sight, and finds it hard to tear his gaze away once it is fixed there. It is a pitch-black obsidian with a few strange spots of a muted gray color, like industrial cement. The front is smooth, while the remainder is raw edged. It features three perfect right angles, all meeting in a point. But there is something strange in the behavior of those angles, they appear warped from afar, and razor straight up close. The rest of it resembles raw and natural rock, though not a rock he has ever seen before. He rubs his thumb along one of the edges, and when he looks at the ridges of his finger print, he finds it is bleeding. He stares, bewildered, and fails to notice the gray spots of the stone grow. As he stares at his thumb, he feels a creeping sensation in his muscle, almost tingly. The strange shiver runs up the length of his arm and then he is hit with a sudden pang of pain in his right temple. The shiver subsides and he feels nothing strange, except… there’s a different sensation. Like something lurking in his mind that does not belong.

He looks to the rock and finds it entirely gray, seemingly drained. He begins to regard the rock not just with suspicion, but with tinges of fear. Almost as if in response to this, he feels sinister tendrils begin to writhe in his mind. They seem to pulse and thrash with inimical intent and his head begins to hurt terribly. It is more than a headache, it feels like something physically inside him. He backs away from the stone in pain and fear, never shifting his gaze away. As he backs away, he notices with trepidation that the rock appears to grow in size. His back makes abrupt contact with his office wall and the rock stops growing - no, not growing… but rather, appearing the same size, no matter its distance. Like a malevolent blotch on Euclidean geometry. Suddenly, he feels those terrible undulating tendrils in his mind cease to move, poised. A preternatural calm falls over him like a morning fog. Ward stares at the strange stone with an intense longing and revulsion, mixed together unnaturally like some horrible concoction contrived in a laboratory.

Slowly, he takes halting steps toward the rock, still keenly aware of those black tendrils gripping his mental faculties. They remain frozen, poised to attack at the slightest provocation. The rock retains its fist-like size, despite his increase in proximity. He can feel something impressing itself onto his mind; words, or thoughts perhaps. Are these his own thoughts, or are they foreign in origin? He grasps, through inlaid images, the founding of this universe, like the building of an intricate puzzle and the placing of each piece; an explosion, or more like an unfolding, of light and matter and energy. And he knows, somehow, that in this account of all the matter in the universe, the strange stone is not a factor. It is an unaccounted piece from another puzzle entirely: it does not belong here. A mote that has gone untallied in the great conservation of energy, stowing away in this universe. As these facts take shape in his mind, he becomes aware of himself again, and he is holding his face very near to the stone. He can hear a very faint sound emanating from it, unrecognizable and complex: like the sound of wailing, spirited away on a cold breeze from some far away place.

34 Hours: Post-Exposure

The small board reads, “Hello, Mr. Ward” and is then erased. The doctor in the strange hazmat suit then begins writing on the board again. When she flips the board around it says, “ We’re going to run some tests”. She stares at Ward’s eyes, searching them out for any sign of complicity in this plan, but they appear devoid of all will. Yet she has a strange unaccountable feeling that they are pleading with her, screaming mutely for some sort of intercession. The long zipping sound indicative of entry calls the attention of the doctor. Two men in white hazmat suits enter the room and seal it off with the zipper. All three doctors confer away from the body of Mr. Ward, whose unblinking eyes watch on undaunted. The female doctor returns and writes on her board, “Understand?” Then the eyes dart to the left and to the right, then back to the doctor. She looks quizzically at this new motion of the glassy eyes, which are typically content to stay trained on her at all times.

Intrigued, she writes something new on her board while the other two doctors prepare tests to the side. When she shows the board again it has a double headed arrow pointed up and down and another arrow pointed left and right. The word “yes?” is written next to the vertical arrow, and the word “no?” is written beside the horizontal arrow. The eyes dart rapidly to the ceiling and to the floor several times, then train back onto the doctor’s face shield. The female doctor calls out to the other two, who stop what they are doing and move over to where she is and watch: silent spectators to the strange exhibit. She speaks and shows them the board, then faces it toward Mr. Ward’s beady eyes. Again, they oscillate upward and downward like a child’s yo-yo, and then retrain on the female doctor’s face. The other two doctors step away and converse, but the female doctor stays and begins writing something new on her board. She feverishly scribbles and the eyes stay fixated on her, as if looking upon her soul.

As she turns the board around, her face betrays a certain level of disguised excitement at this break...