The Withering Sky
conclusion to the sci-fi serial by Arthur H Manners
The conclusion to the science fiction story that placed in last year’s Writers of the Future award is finally here!
New to the story? Read the other sections: part 1 — part 2
This story originally appeared in Writers of the Future Volume 39. Due to length, it is serialized here.
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The Withering Sky
part 3 (conclusion)
by Arthur H. Manners
The stranger survived the night. He didn’t respond when I asked him if he had seen anything.
I realised I had been hoping Kitamura would come back. But she had gone native like the others. I knew I wouldn’t last on my own. There was no choice but try to get back to Bouvard.
I spent the morning checking over the shuttle. I didn’t know enough about flight controls to tell if it could make the trip back. I couldn’t even access the nav computer.
I spoke to the stranger over lunch. “The shuttle was programmed to take us here on autopilot. It must be able to find its way back. If we could just find the trigger, we could go for help.”
But I just didn’t know enough. No matter how I tried to think around it, I came to the same conclusion: I needed Rogers. Somehow I would have to convince her to help me.
“Come on, we’ve got to get her.”
Leaving the antechamber felt remarkably stupid. I took another length of pipe with me; it didn’t make me feel safer.
I spoke to the stranger nonstop, whistling in the dark. “Straight to the mural, grab Rogers, straight back. But we don’t look at the mural. If I blindfold us, we should—”
Two snarling figures careened from the room on my right and collided with the wall. Kitamura and M’Bele, locked together. M’Bele was larger by far, but something had happened to his arm, and Kitamura was fighting with the fury of a lion.
I moved to intervene, but scrambled away at the sight of something feral in Kitamura’s eyes. They roared like beasts, and I realised they would kill one another.
The pressure in my head pulsed and I lost my balance. I lurched from wall to wall until the spinning stopped. By then, there was no sign of Kitamura or M’Bele. The stranger was nearby, sitting cross-legged.
“How did this happen to us so fast?” I said. I looked at the stranger. “Is this how it happened for you?”
He blinked, gazing at things that weren’t there… I hoped.
“Come on.”
We passed several more rooms without incident, but my progress slowed. By the time the mural room came into sight, I was actually leaning forward and sweating. It was like walking uphill through treacle.
I checked—there was no discernible tilt to the floor. It was no easier than usual to walk back the other way.
I made it to the room preceding the mural, but could go no farther. My foot hung in midair, quivering. Sweat beaded on my forehead. I strained until I was almost horizontal.
“Damn it!” I yelled, collapsing to my knees.
The stranger stood beside me, showing no signs of difficulty. He simply waited, obedient as a dog.
“Go to her. Bring her back. You can do it,” I said.
His gaze continued to trace the walls. His lips moved silently, as though reading invisible words.
“Please,” I muttered, but it was no use.
I could hear Rogers, holding intense conversation with somebody. I called out to her, but she didn’t reply.
The overwhelming resistance grew, until I found it hard to even swallow or blink. I turned back, and at once the feeling vanished.
Time passed. I must have blanked from the exhaustion, because suddenly I was back at the antechamber. My radio was crackling.
M’Bele’s voice drifted out, “I killed the bitch for you. She is dead as all the others that you have taken into you. You crawl in my mind and steal pieces of me, but won’t show yourself. Why do you forsake me?”
More time passed. I ate rations, trying to spoon some into the stranger’s mouth without taking my eyes off the antechamber door. Then I woke in the sealed shuttle, banging my head, convinced that I saw shadow fingers retreating from my head and flying away along the wall. Then I was walking down the corridor again with the stranger in tow.
The mysterious force pushed me back still. I could even hang in place, leaning into it as though against a gale.
I wandered back aimlessly, and came across a tripod. On it was mounted a laser that Rogers had rigged for surveying. We had tried to use it to study the corridor, without success.
I didn’t remember passing it on the way out here. I hadn’t seen it for days.
There was a note on the pad tied to the tripod.
Distance to corridor’s end:
1 p.m.: 7 km
3:30 p.m.: 1.7 km
4:15 p.m.: 129 km
4:16 p.m.: Variable
5:30 p.m.: 7 km
6 p.m.: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I turned the laser beam towards the mural room. The scale maxed out. I turned it to point the other way: thirteen kilometres. Back again: maxed out. There were enough digits on the scale for a thousand kilometres.
I didn’t stick around to see if it changed. I returned to camp and found that more supplies were gone.
I sat down heavily. I couldn’t help the others—couldn’t even reach them. Nor could I leave. I had to figure out a way to get a message to Bouvard.
But I couldn’t focus enough to form a single thought.
I sealed myself and the stranger in the shuttle with food and water and rested there for two days. Sometimes I fruitlessly tried to get the shuttle working, but mostly I just lay still.
The idea of the research team coming to our rescue now seemed like a sick joke.
I tried to raise Rogers over and over. In the long sleepless hours, I scanned the other frequencies. Most of the time it was just static, but sometimes I heard M’Bele muttering.
When I emerged, Kitamura was there. One of her arms was bound in a self-made sling, the bandage crusted with old blood. We stared at one another across the partially-dismantled camp.
“Where have you been?” I said.
She didn’t respond, her face immobile.
“I lost Rogers. She’s stuck at…” I cleared my throat. “Stay. Rogers is the only one who can fix this. If we could just—”
Kitamura backed away. She stared at the stranger, who peered around the shuttle door, eyes wide in the shadows.
“He’s harmless. He’s been with me the whole time,” I said.
Kitamura’s gaze snapped to me, and her eyes narrowed. “Then he got to you too.”
“He’s mad as a bag of drowned cats, but he’s done nothing. It’s M’Bele I’m scared of.”
I bit down on the remaining words: And you. I’m scared of you too.
Kitamura shook her head, backing away. “I was wrong to come back.”
She was gone before I could say anything. Later, the worst of it wasn’t questioning whether she had really been there, but the memory of her lucid gaze. She had treated me and the stranger calmly and decisively, as threats.
###
Things happened in no particular order. A slideshow of washing, wandering, shitting, hiding in dark corners, eating, trying to sleep. Every time I tried to concentrate, the thumping between my ears overwhelmed me. I spent hours on the floor cradling my head—
“Not coming back. I have so much work to do,” said Rogers.
I blinked, looked over my shoulder. My heart leaped in my chest at the sight of the mural, only a few metres away from me.
It sleeps.
The thought rang unbidden through my mind, hammerhead upon anvil.
It sleeps but it may wake any moment, and when it does you must be gone.
Dark amorphous forms curled lazily on the wall. Forms that were of course not there, because the wall was blank.
I looked at Rogers, who was scribbling away on her tablet. Her face was haggard and her clothes rank, but her eyes were alert. “I can’t go. I have too much work to do. It has developed new complexities overnight; I need to know what triggered the change.”
I balked at how relaxed she seemed. I felt the mural’s presence as keenly as if a live tiger slumbered beside me.
“I…”
How did I get here? How much time had passed?
“I can’t go. I need your help.”
Rogers kept scribbling.
A sharp rod pierced my forehead. I gasped, “None of us are going to get out of here if you don’t—”
Rogers vanished. The mural was replaced by a stained wall. The stranger mewled at my feet. We stood in the room of burned bodies.
I had a half-eaten energy bar in my hand. A long bandage had appeared on my shin, which burned faintly.
A new silhouette had appeared on the wall. Looking at it more closely, I realised I recognised it, in a way. Sometimes such things happened close to nuclear blasts. The body was atomised, its last moment caught in shadow, seared onto the wall behind.
But there was no sign of any explosion here, nor was there a matching half-melted body. The shadow was stocky, caught in a moment of supplication. It could have been anyone, but the voice in my head said M’Bele.
The stranger let out a low warble, head up like a wolf howling at the moon.
I stared at the silhouette until it was burned onto my retinas. Any doubt it was M’Bele leaked away.
I wandered away into the corridor. I wanted to be sick, but I couldn’t feel my body. I made it back to the antechamber without blacking out, fell short of the shuttle and stumbled into one of the unused tents.
###
I woke alone. I went to wake the stranger, who was curled up nearby.
He was dead. Neck broken.
Kitamura stood by the doorway. She peered at me with the wary gaze of a cat.
“You?” I said.
She stared.
“Why?”
She withdrew, but spoke as she went away. “It was getting to you through him. It’s just us now.”
“Rogers is still alive. We need her if we’re going to get out of here. Help me!”
In the distance, her reply: “I’ll hold them off. Get the shuttle ready.”
“Hold off who?”
She was gone.
The day passed before the floor stopped spinning and I could stand up. I left the stranger’s body and made my way into the corridor, heading for the mural chamber. Even now, a part of me took sick pleasure in barreling onward with no hope of success.
The corridor smiled upon me and let me pass. Despite covering my eyes, I could feel the mural trying to worm its tendrils between my fingers and pry them away.
“You’ve been gone a long time.” Rogers sounded hoarse, but otherwise normal.
I wondered how she was still alive. If she had stayed here the whole time, she should have died of thirst by now. It had been days, maybe weeks.
“Damn it, Rogers. Fix the shuttle. We have to go.”
“I wanted to go, at first. I was afraid. I could feel it in my head. But it’s really not a bad trade, feeling a little discomfort to discover all this.”
“This place is killing us. It’s some kind of weapon.”
“Weapon? No, no. It’s an ark.”
“What?”
“M’Bele was right. Funny, isn’t it?” She giggled. “They tried so hard to get away, start afresh. They brought everything they’d need. Genius, really. What we could have learned from them…. But it didn’t work out. They couldn’t leave behind what was already a part of them. And through them, it spread through this place, like a coal seam burning for fifty years under the earth.”
The back of my neck prickled. “Are you talking about the mural?”
“That? Nothing but a beautiful mote in the eye of what the makers brought with them.”
How did she look at it without snapping? She sounded almost normal.
Almost.
“How do you know?” I said.
No reply.
“Rogers, you’ll die here. I can’t bring you food or water.”
She tittered. “No time to eat or drink. No time at all.”
The pounding in my head was growing again. “It’s not too late. We can go home. You remember home, don’t you?”
Her tone turned ponderous: “No. Do you?”
“I—” The pain sliced between my eyes. “Please, come.”
“Soon. Once the work is done.”
“Rogers!”
The world blurred. I did not move; the room shot away from me. I passed down the corridor, which stretched and bulged around me. I retched once, twice, got control, and by then I was flying at great speed. Kilometres of corridor passed by. I fell and fell, for so long that, somehow, I fell asleep.
###
You remember home, don’t you?
No. Do you?
I woke in the corridor.
I found a drawing beside me. I recognised my own sketching style: a house, a big yellow sun, a car. Three stick figures stood in the middle, two big, one small.
Home.
I gripped the drawing tight, clinging to it, to sanity.
But it was a lie. I knew Earth was nothing but another dead end. Before I even landed I would be restless, straining for freedom, for that nameless something I had never been able to find.
That flimsy shard of hope had been keeping me together. Now, it unraveled.
Even if I could find a way to alert the authorities, they would be no match for this place. Here, we were all baby birds in the hands of an insane child. The thought sent a surge of anger through me. I might not be going home, but I wasn’t going down like this.
I ignored the rod between my eyes and sprinted. Maybe I could trick the corridor into letting me pass, if I caught it by surprise. But almost at once the floor tilted. I was running uphill, reaching for the next doorway, which receded along an expanding length of wall. I tumbled backward, then fell, as the corridor veered toward vertical.
I landed hard, winded, and came to my feet in darkness. Somebody screamed nearby.
“Hello?” I called.
Another scream. “Get out!”
“Kitamura?”
“Get out of my head. Out!”
I groped around. “Find your way to me!”
“Get oooout!”
Kitamura collided with me and her hands closed around my neck. She squeezed, hard.
“You were all trying to kill me from the start. They sent us out here to watch us, like some kind of circus. Had you drive me mad while you hunted me? Huh?”
I choked, scrabbling at her neck and face.
“You almost fooled me. For a moment there, I actually thought you wanted to get out of here—”
She wrenched away from me, her shriek cut short. Something large passed me in the dark. Kitamura gave another yell, cut short by a flurry of sickening thuds.
I could sense things changing in the darkness. Walls squeezed close around me one moment and were gone the next. The floor undulated like the surface of the ocean.
Pain came sharp and sudden, a blade of ice thrust into my forehead. I cried out and staggered, falling to my knees.
It’s awake.
I looked up to see the mural.
I scrabbled away and got to my feet. If I got stuck here, then nobody was going to come to pull me away. I’d stay forever, just like Rogers.
Rogers.
I looked around the room. It was empty.
“Rogers?”
No body, no kit bag. Like she’d never been here.
I backed against the wall, but couldn’t feel it—denied even the simple reassurance of a solid surface to cower against.
I wept a little, gathered my strength, and took my hands away from my eyes.
Rogers was in the mural. At least, her silhouette was, standing amongst the swirling smoke. She stared in wonder at the titanic forms about her, like a child dwarfed by an ancient forest.
She had never been trying to figure anything out. She had just been waiting for this place to take her, so she could know what came next.
Eventually, I saw the others in there too, though they didn’t look delighted. Smoke-like tendrils billowed about them, forming and reforming structures to keep them apart, like a moving labyrinth.
There were monsters in the mural, too. Lurking in the darkest corners.
At last, I noticed a final figure standing off to one side, at the edge of the labyrinth. As I watched, new smoky tendrils began to reach for it. The further the tendrils advanced, the more numb I felt.
I didn’t have the strength to be afraid. I left, wandered back to the antechamber with no plan, and came across my pack on the way. I bent to take my water bottle.
My hand passed through it. I tried again. My hand closed on nothing.
By the time I returned to the antechamber, I had run a few tests. I could touch my own body or the walls and floors. But I passed straight through anything we had brought aboard.
My heart finally sank when I reached for the shuttle door, and failed to grasp it. I spent a long time standing there, grabbing at what was now beyond my reach.
A voice in my head, one I wasn’t sure was my own:
You never really expected to go home, anyway.
###
I waited in silence. Waited to starve, for thirst to take me. To die of exhaustion.
But I didn’t. I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty or tired. I felt nothing at all.
The lights eventually went out. I guessed it was because they now sensed no bodies moving around. After that, I waited in darkness.
My thoughts bounced around in my skull like panicked rabbits in a sack.
I’m dreaming.
It’s a mental break.
There’s something wrong with the air scrubbers. Hypoxia. I’m hallucinating.
Somebody released a chemical agent by accident, and it’s playing tricks.
I’m dead and this is purgatory.
Even that last one brought comfort. If I was dead, at least I wouldn’t have to fight anymore.
###
Eventually, the lights came back on. I had been floating in nothing for… a while.
I was still in the antechamber. People were standing around me, a few still disembarking from a shuttle. Not our shuttle, which had vanished, but a new one. My heart lurched with equal parts relief and panic.
“Get back! Get away,” I yelled.
None of them reacted. One of them walked through me. I bucked as an electric sizzle coursed along my limbs, the first sensation I’d felt since the mural.
The people spread out, speaking in low tones.
“Creepy place,” somebody said.
“We should check the air quality. I feel a headache coming on,” said the one who had walked through me.
I tried everything: waving, yelling, flapping my arms over the light panels. Nothing worked.
The people settled in, apparently under the impression that they were part of an investigation. I soon learned that they knew about my crew and our disappearance. So Bouvard wasn’t just churning through sacrificial offerings. They were changing the experimental conditions, trying to learn.
But that didn’t mean these people had been told anything about what this place really was. As they began to explore, it became clear that they had just been fed another sack of lies.
I followed them on their explorations, watched as their horror grew. They soon found Vezzin’s body, followed by the stranger’s. They also found other bodies I had never seen.
The electric sensation I felt was a direct result of “touching” them. They, in turn, complained of headaches. I recalled the sensation of icy shards slicing between my eyes.
Who had been trying to communicate with me all that time?
I knew the others were not gone. Not entirely, not even Vezzin, who had been smashed to pulp. I didn’t see them so much as feel them on the peripherals of a sixth sense. They were in here too, walled off from me, but in the same labyrinth.
The newcomers were already on their way to join us, passing through an entrance they couldn’t touch or see. I was just deeper in. If somebody had been trying to reach me before, causing my headaches, they were gone now—had moved onto whatever came next.
I visited the mural, and found that my transformation hadn’t made me immune to the object’s horrors. It twisted something inside me, opening a yawning precipice.
I began to realise that this place could only take you if part of you wanted it. Maybe that was the reason we had been chosen. Rogers had thrown herself at it. The stranger had gone mad before it could get him. It had broken Vezzin and Kitamura’s bodies to make them submit. Who knew about M’Bele. But I couldn’t hide the truth from myself anymore: I had wanted to know.
The knowledge broke me for a time, and I retreated into madness.
By the time I recovered, two of the newcomers were dead. The other five distrusted one another. One of them was on the brink of snapping.
I did what I could. I reached into their minds while they slept, ignoring the electric pulsing. I could speak to them sometimes, with effort. It hurt them. Their headaches grew worse until they barely slept. But I kept sharing, soothing. If I could hold them together long enough….
It didn’t work for long. Things deteriorated much faster than they had for my own crew. In three days, they were all dead. I waited, hoping they might join me in my corner of the labyrinth, but they never did.
Again, I stood at the shuttle door. I tried to decide whether I had really wanted to my plan to work. Already, the idea of going back Earth-side—or to Bouvard—seemed more frightening than staying here. What would my employers do if they found that I had escaped?
A silent fury rose in me at the thought of them. They had lined us up for slaughter. But they didn’t know that something remained—that I was still here.
All my life I had wandered the solar system, haunted by something that hungered for more and wouldn’t let me settle. But now that same force fueled me, when everyone else had been swallowed up by this place. I would get my answers, dig my way down to the bedrock of this freak show, and tear it a new orifice. And when I got out of here, I would bring the curse of this place down on those fucks at Bouvard like a dark hammer.
I started exploring again. I wandered until I didn’t need light and could feel my way around. I found new wonders and horrors, and caught more glimpses of the others. This place was strange, but not chaotic. I would navigate it once I learned enough.
As I delved ever further into the labyrinth, I couldn’t help but realise that I felt more whole, more alive, than I ever remembered being. The walls and rooms grew familiar, yet they shed endless layers of secrets. And now I didn’t have a mortal body to slow me down.
I would escape, eventually, but until then I would make a home unbound. Here, a place in which I could run and run, down and down. Somewhere beneath the roiling shadows, I might find what I was looking for.
Meet the author:
Arthur H. Manners is a British writer with a background in physics and data science. He recently encountered the underside of life when he ended up stranded for hours in Helsinki Airport, alone—except for a snack shop clerk who looked as bewildered to be there as he was. His short fiction is published/forthcoming in Dreamforge Anvil, Drabblecast and Writers of the Future Vol. 39. In 2023, "The Withering Sky" received the Writers of the Future award. Arthur sometimes fails at social media on Twitter (@a_h_manners) and Instagram (docmanners). Find his newsletter over at arthurmanners.com.
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