Rare Bits

He doesn’t think it has followed him. Sometimes, when the gasses in the cathode tubes flicker, the light does sometimes come perilously close to that terrible shade. But not quite, he tells himself. Not quite.

*     *     *

Archibald Lark was a brute of a man. Not particularly tall, mind you, nor particularly muscular, but there was something in the way he carried himself that evoked a looming quality. Archibald Lark was also a smart man, though not a man of letters nor worldly travel. An electrical engineer by trade, Lark was employed by the state at one of the hydroelectric plants that had sprung up in this modern age. And, while not a man of formal education, Lark’s particular expertise in the burgeoning field of electricity gave him the freedom to indulge in his tendency to tinker. At a time when the electric current and radio wave were a blazing future, the modest dwelling of one Archibald Lark tinkled like a galaxy with the glitter of glass and crystal, wire and fixture.

This displeased his wife.

Ingrid was an uncomplicated woman. The daughter of an Estonian swine herd, she had spent most of her life in rustic simplicity. She had no schooling to speak of and it was only by an unlikely turn of fate that she happened to find herself in the same San Franciscan library as Archibald those many years ago. At the time, the wife of an electronasist seemed a winning prospect. She had visions of a life of leisure and plenty; clockwork contraptions and radiographic machinations doing the work of a hundred Finns.

The reality proved far different. She lived in a shabby two-room apartment in the poorest district with a man who came home from work smelling of chemicals and ozone. And when she complained, which was often, he would bellow and rage about the house like a beast.

But he never hit her. Not only because it is an evil thing, morally corrupt and sinful. Lark never hit his wife because of the glass. Hand-blown tubes and glass bells hung from leather straps. Pipes bent at primal angles and into obscene curves and stained with all manor of fluids littered every available table surface and countertop. Dirty fistfuls of galena rock lay scattered in every conceivable location. And out of these many transparent things were protuberances of wire and antenna; cobbling together what would otherwise be mere detritus into machines of extreme fragility and indeterminate function.

And herein lay the problem for poor Archibald Lark. While his intelligence was profound, his formal education was lacking. He understood structure but not function. He could construct a cathode tube and make the light within it dance, but he could not control it. And the radio waves that he captured by running a current through his galena-crystal antenna seemed devoid of form or meaning. But he could capture them, all the same.

Indeed the flickering tubes and crackling static permeated the Lark dwelling. Even when powered down, there seemed at times to be a steady hum just beyond hearing. And when the machinations were activated, the collection of light and sound created such a cacophony as to drive Ingrid to exasperation.

But for Archibald, there was something soothing about these odd lights and sounds. Something calming that spoke to the most primitive parts of his brain. At first, when he passed current through the gasses in the tubes, it was only out of academic curiosity. The crystal radio radios were simply tools for divining the music of the spheres. He sat staring into his creations for hours, bathed in their strange lights and sounds. And the more he sat, watching and listening, the more it seemed to him that the random patterns of light and static were not random at all. While viewed independently they seemed to dance and tick at random, but together their appeared to be an interaction; a back and forth. Fascination took hold of Lark, and he found himself locked in observation for hours upon hours.

So entranced had Lark become that he took to leaving the machines running all day. That strange hum just beyond human recognition burned itself into the walls and floorboards. The radio signals swirled and chattered with an increasing intensity that visibly agitated Lark’s long-suffering wife. But Lark didn’t notice. There was something about the light he was producing amid the gasses of the cathode tubes that rippled the most sensitive cells of his mind. That was the key, he thought. The light. The flickering light. No longer did it seem an even give and take between the cathode tubes and the radio static. No, Lark began to realize that the wild arcs of static were a response to what he had summoned in his many glass bells. The radio signals, sounds of shape and form far removed from our experience, were frantic cries of alarm.

Thoughts of these strange interplays plagued him at work. During his free time he worked to construct a portable cathode tube, a glass bell contained in a copper and steel case that measured approximately the size of a dime novel. To the back of it he affixed a small crystal radio; a simple affair that consisted of a rudimentary receiver and iron aerial. He kept these at work with him always, periodically stealing glances into the shimmering blue light and watching it dance to the tune of the faint radio static.

That’s how it all started, really. It was that blue light; that damnadible blue light. Archibald Lark was not the first person to construct a cathode tube, yet no other person of science has reported the particular calamity that befell Lark. Lark was special. For reasons that no human being will likely comprehend, Lark was chosen by things that do not exist in material space. Long, sharp thing covered in eyes; like a moth’s eyes. Broad, curved eyes that reflect all the light they take in through bands of lifeless blue.

Lark looked into his device, and these things looked back; their terrible eyes pulling at the recessed parts of his brain.

They made him do things.

Little things, as first. At work Lark would find himself turning dials and adjusting levers unthinkingly, spending more and more time in the recesses of the generator building with little memory as to what he did. He would remember closing the large steel doors and staring blindly into his device; into the blue light that shined back.

At home things steadily worsened. That strange hum, just beyond the realm of human recognition, addled the subconscious mind of Ingrid Lark. Her annoyance with her husband’s troublesome hobby distilled itself into raw hatred. When she dusted their apartment, running the course cloth along the tubes and fixtures of Archibald’s work, she wished for the strength to smash them into a million parts. But she didn’t dare. She didn’t understand these things, and her fear of what she might unleash overtook her aversion.

While simple, she was not unaware of the uncanny interactions between the flickering shades in the cathode tubes and the snaps and ticks of the radio devices. But there was something more. When she dropped her dusting rag between the brass and steel of one of the larger cathode tubes, she noticed little electric jolts strike the particles of duct the rag had collected. It wasn’t dust at all; it was, she noted, a fine and nearly transparent blue powder. And it seemed to cover the apartment. She had to look very closely to see it; otherwise it could be mistaken for the natural grime and cast of particulate that one finds from normal day-to-day activity.

And she noticed something else. When the same rag was brought near the transmitter of the larger radio gear, the static that was transmitted became a painful tear of high-pitched noises. And when she dusted them clean, the static settled into a distant chatter.
Her husband had not noticed these things, because he was so entranced by the flicker of the lights as to render the rest of the world a whisper. And also because he spent more and more of his free time in the lower levels of his workplace. And finally because Archibald was covered in the same pale blue powder.

For three days Archibald Lark didn’t come home from work. Ingrid stopped by the electrical plant on the first day and asked after him. The plant manager told her that he had not checked in. By the second day she was truly worried, and contacted the police. They were dismissive. By the third day she was in a state of panic. As a desperate resort, she pounded on the door of her neighbor, a kindly writer of historical reportage named Jackson Elias. Elias did his very best to consol Ingrid and, when she was properly calm, he took her to Archibald’s place of employ. The plant manager once more insisted that Mr. Lark had not signed in for work, but Elias proved a smooth negotiator and convinced the manager to search the plant.

Into the very pit of the plant they searched. Through every riveted corridor and every dial and lever-lined utility room. And as they reached the very deepest level an unease spread amongst them. The plant manager, a thick and stocky fellow, twitched about like a rodent out at night. Ingrid felt it too, like a musical note that was being steadily played at an unnaturally high pitch; to high to hear but not too high to feel resonate in your bones.  But Elies, a man of reason and logic, felt no such thing. His unease was the unease of the present, the quite pedestrian sensation that accompanies any challenging task.

And so it was that these three came upon a room with a large steel door. A large metal wheel protruded from the door’s center; like the face of a vault. And from beneath the door drifted out the a soft blue glow of particular hue. The plant manager rapped on it loudly, inquiring in a quavering voice as to the room’s occupant. There was no response. Elies tried this time, speaking in measured, resonate tones and applying the lubricant of friendship to wrest a response. There was none. At an impasse, the two men grasped the wheel and gave a heroic struggle. Slowly, they succeeded in loosening the mechanism. With the added effort of Ingrid, they pulled the heavy door back.

Archibald Lark sat in a feral crouch at the far end of the room, wreathed in unearthly light. Vast tendrils of blue glow swam across the tar-black floor, sinking into cracks and fissures. And surrounding these blasphemous ropes of light was the mockery of a twinkling galaxy. Tiny blue stars blinked from within a hundred glass jars. Cathode tubes littered the floor, each one containing the twisted flicker of that blue light. And Lark, the poor beast, he was wan and sickly, his hands devoured by madness and starvation into skeletal claws. His eyes sat sunken and dull, his mouth drawn into a disquieting smile.

Ingrid rushed to her husband, embracing his ravaged form. A cloud of dust many days thick exploded from his clothes. Lark mumbled now and Ingrid tried to lift him to his feet. Elies ran to her aid, hefting Lark towards the door. Lark struggled, pathetically, trying to turn back; his withered feet scrabbling at the ground. With each cloud of dust that wafted away, the clearer his mind became.

The plant manager stayed rooted to the spot; his eyes transfixed by the tendrils of light as they seeped into the ground.

“The water!” He shouted. Elies and Ingrid stumbled. Lark wriggled free and mumbled louder.

On his hands lark crawled to the nearest tendril of blue light. He swiped at it, spreading the glowing powder but not destroying it. He swiped feebly at another tendril

The plant manager along the wall, throwing levers and readjusting dials in a frantic effort of divert the hydroelectric plant‘s flow. To prevent this strange thing from entering the river.

Elies and Ingrid looked at each other in alarm. Then without a word, they ran to the many bell jars and cathode tubs and began kicking them against the walls. They popped and crackled as they shattered, tiny electric arcs bursting from the dying lights within.

They had stopped up this strange thing’s source, but the tendrils continued to snake into the ground. Lark looked about in mad desperation. Ingrid gasped. From the recesses of Lark’s tattered jacket came a flash of brilliant blue. He looked down with a start, remembering his pocket cathode tube. Pulling it out, Lark’s face was lit by the glowing ball of gas. It filled the tube completely; seeming to press itself against the glass in an effort to escape its confines. And as the brilliant flicker writhed within it’s enclosures, the curvature of the glass revealed to Lark an unholy magnification; millions of small emerald eyes. Like moth’s eyes.

With a shriek Lark hurled the device to the ground. The simple crystal radio attached to the back crackled to life, jarred by the fall. In an instant the crackle whined into an ear-splitting wail. It was a sound as terrible and as old as the stars themselves and it’s strange ululations seemed to tormented the pale blue monstrosities. The blue tendrils on the ground rippled and contorted with desperate energy before exploding into mists of fine grey powder. The glowing gas in the portable cathode tube flickered to darker shades of blue, then green and yellow. The radio winked silent. Lark picked up the device carefully, and switched it off.

Ingrid has long since left Archibald. His strange and, fortunately temporary transformation rattled her to her very core. And while the strange dust and glittering light back at the apartment has dissipated upon their arrival, the memory of the events would forever stain her mind.

Lark lost his job as well. The plant manager did not understand the preternatural forces that compelled Lark to act in the way he did, and summarily dismissed.

It was Jackson Elies who turned out to be Archibald’s truest friend. While Elies saw only rational explanations for what had occurred; perhaps a dangerous mix of chemicals whose fumes had addled Lark’s faculties; Elies nonetheless helped Lark start a new life in New England. Elies didn’t approve when Lark told him he would become an investigator of the supernatural. But Elies didn’t understand the difficulties of getting work at another plant. Nor did he understand the fear that struggled in the most primitive parts of Lark’s mind.

Sure the paranormal trade was mostly bunk, but a clever sort, with a little know-how could eek out a dishonest living. And it was would be worth it, after all. It would be worth it to learn more, to find out what had happened to him.

After all, Elies hadn’t seen the eyes. The millions of pale blue eyes.

The End