Free Space 1999 #5 - Lunar Attack by John Rankine Page B

electrode tipped lead that ran to his reconstructed console. Small leafy plants in pots completed the company.
    Outside lighting was low key. They could have been in a clearing in a forest with a pagan ritual of blood on the manifest. Following Mateo’s example each one fixed the adhesive electrode to a wrist.
    Mateo himself was forcing himself to play it cool, but there was no disguising the strain in his voice as he said, ‘I have told you what to do. Please follow my instructions and do not break the circle.’
    Mateo was between Carter and Sandra and held out his hands. They took hold and the others joined up until the circle was complete. There was silence. Carter and Morrow exchanged glances. For their money it was strictly for the birds.
    Mateo’s breathing began to change. Eye movements were going out of control. He was trembling. The small plants were quivering. Koenig looked at the panel of the console. The red pointer was in a spasm.
    Mateo moaned. He was shaking. Carter gave his hand a tug and got a silent negative from Koenig.
    The stems and leaves of the plants were trembling more violently, an aureole of light was building round the console. Mateo was moaning constantly. A slight wind was stirring in the room enough to shift a swathe of blonde hair on Helena’s forehead.
    She looked up, away out of the circle, past Sandra’s frightened face to the shadows outside the ring of light. Her fearful whisper had them all turning to look.
    ‘John!’
    A shape was materialising out of the gloom on the perimeter.
    Mateo was in pain, twisting and turning and crying out as though something was being wrenched out of his living being.
    The wind became stronger. The plants were in a self-destructive frenzy. Metering dials on the console were in a crazy spin. The shape was becoming clearer, it was moving forward into the circle. The plants passed the edge of tolerance, withered to the root and fell as their tissue collapsed.
    Now the figure was close, out in the open, clear to see. It was Helena’s nightmare attacker, but now she could see it plain. There was the scarred and mutilated face and the dangling claw hand, but now the other side was in vision and in the conjunction it compounded horror with horror.
    It was smooth and unmarked like a death mask. And it was Mateo. It was a spirit Mateo, a zombie Mateo.
    All were making the same judgement, looking from the moaning, squirming Mateo by the table to the lurching monster that was his spirit doppelgänger and met their stares with the eyes of the living dead.
    The silence in the small lighted island was broken by a long moan from Mateo. His spirit self came nearer and Sandra Benes was almost at breaking point. Desperately she looked across the circle to Koenig and he tried to mime to her to hold on.
    The figure circled the group, came to Helena Russell, paused and extended its shrivelled hand towards her hair.
    Koenig felt her terror and broke the silence. ‘What do you want from us?’
    The hand fell heavily to the side and the figure lurched on until it was positioned behind Mateo.
    Mateo himself had gone rigid. He was staring fixedly straight ahead and his face was a mask of sweat. His grip on Carter and Sandra increased.
    Victor Bergman asked quietly, ‘Can you communicate with us?’
    The twisted mouth opened and a chilling voice that seemed to have no precise location said, ‘Yes . . .’
    Koenig asked, ‘Are you Dan Mateo?’
    ‘I was once who you say.’
    Any disbelief was long gone. Carter and Morrow who had gone along with the experiment expecting a nil return were as near to simple panic as their neighbours.
    Bergman spoke, trying to keep his voice calm and factual, ‘Dan Mateo is one of us. He lives. But you—you have no existence here.’
    The dead eyes focused on the speaker, ‘You took my existence from me.’
    To make the point, the figure lifted its shrivelled arm and held it out in mute testimony.
    ‘See your legacy.’
    The arm lifted