Free Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer Page A

coming from the right-hand passage. William looked to
the left and had second thoughts about his escape plan, seeing a
hall even darker and spookier than where he'd just been, but there
were lights and people the other direction and it was still much
too early to get caught out. He swallowed back his fear, took one
last look down the forbidding passage and stepped deeper into the
dark. There wasn't anything to see for a long while; the passage
had running lights up along the ceiling, but otherwise everything
was shadowed and there were no doors or other exits or anything to
make it interesting. William was about to turn back when the voices
behind him suddenly got louder and a bright light shone on his
backside, casting his long shadow before him. He had just enough
time to consider running away, when they shouted harshly at him and
footfalls closed the distance between them.
    A hand seized him by the shoulder. "Hey kid,
shouldn't you be in school?"
    When he answered, "I'm here with my parents,"
one of them struck him across the face and flashed a bright light
in his eyes. He wouldn't have remembered even that much if it
hadn't been for what happened later.
    They'd led him by the hand back to his
robot-like parents, who by now had stopped fighting and moved on to
the next viewing area. This room was also set with a giant metal
plate in the floor on which William was made to stand; there was a
'click!' that was followed by a buzzing hum and then a creeping
sensation layering some kind of sticky heat on top of him. Whatever
it was that crawled up from the floor and crept over his skin, it
was bad, like a swarm of insects threatening to bite. The crawling
rose above his neck and started to invade his nose and ears. And
something in William shut down and turned off.
    With nothing of his conscious mind butting in
to tell him that it couldn't be done, William adjusted the fine
contours of his electrical body; wherever the creeping field of
static charge issuing from the floor tried to overtake his own
natural fields, William's body defended itself and repulsed the
attack. The mechanism hadn't been designed to handle such
conditions, and the oscillating inductance fields caused an
imbalanced cascade of dirty electricity that fried the guts of the
terrible device. William was entirely unaware of what he'd
done.
    When he snapped out of his daze, it was to
find the rest of the aquarium similarly disoriented, his parents
calling to him across the chaos of adults trying to assemble and
herd the schoolkids out of the room. Sirens were going off
everywhere and the interiors were all lit up with blinding
floodlights; heavy metal plates slid down on rollers and covered
the glass walls of the tanks, and it was obvious that the field
trip was over. The men in suits ran around busily; William couldn't
understand why they looked so angrily at him, or why they didn't
seem to notice the invisible person standing in the middle of the
room. They all ran around it, avoiding the space where it was, but
showed no other sign of recognition. It was too weird.
    The invisible man looked exactly like it was
staring at him; William watched the hulking outline stand
motionless and then disappear all of a sudden with a quick sideways
movement. Once it was gone, something in the atmosphere of the
place changed, and the men in suits quickly seemed very interested
in the area where it had just been. One of them went over and waved
something around that looked kind of like a phone, but then
William's mother moved him along with a firm, guiding grip on his
shoulder and the last of the spell of confusion was broken.
    Something terrible had been barely avoided,
and now it was time to go back to boring.
    The rest of the year went by and everyone
else around him seemed a little more dead inside, slightly more
accustomed to things getting worse, a little more ready for
whatever disaster would be next to strike.
     
    He was in a train yard; it was dark, and he
was not