A World Long Since Dead

Chapter 7: “The GreyMen”

She let him to a squat-house on the corner of a dilapidated building. It’s red-brick facade leaning dangerously like a drunk trying to make his way home.

“Up here” She called. Jade climbed the rusty metal fire escape like a cat, favouring her injured left arm only slightly, and was soon peering impatiently from the second floor.

“Mason, Come on!” She said in a loud whisper.

Mace, gingerly grasped the ladder, feeling it give in his hands.

“Jade, are you sure this is safe?” He said, but she was gone, already inside.

By the time Mason had crept up the ladder and into the second floor window, Jade was already sitting behind an makeshift table made from an oil barrel, and dressing her wounds.

It was dark inside the boarded up squat. She was lit by the faint dim yellow glow of a gas lantern next to her. The musty stench of decay hung heavy in the air, and flecks of dust shone like fireflies as they floated through the narrow shafts of light coming through the edges of the boarded up windows.

“What kept you?” She said with a smirk.

“Here, Mace, help me, would you?” She continued.

Mace made his way to her, and in the lamplight, he noticed that she was bleeding.

Beneath her neon red hair was a rivulet of blood streaming from a 4-inch gash in the side of her head.

“Looks pretty bad” Mason said.

“Nah, it’s alright. Head wounds bleed a lot. It’s my arm I’m more worried about.”

She removed her jacket, revealing a long laceration to her left arm, gushing bright red blood.

“I need you to stitch it up, it won’t stop on its own”.

“Uh, yeah, ok…”

“There’s an aid kit in that cabinet. It’s old, but it should still be good.

Mason quickly found the faded green first aid kit and opened it.

It had been ransacked. Most of the items inside were torn open and soiled, or missing entirely.

“Fucking skags!” Jade raged. “They must have been after the alcohol”.

“The needle and thread is still in there, I got half a bottle of Jack stashed around here, I hope they didn’t get that too”.

Jade retrieved a clear bottle of brown liquid while Mace threaded the needle with difficulty, his hands shaking nervously.

“It’s not for drinking” he said, as she took a swig.

“For the pain” she replied.

Mason sat in front of her.

He could smell the faint scent of perfume mixed with sweat and the metallic aroma of blood.

Jade winced as he gently moved her long red tresses out of the way and poured the alcohol on the wound.

“Sorry” he whispered.

“No probs.” She replied cavalierly.

Mason carefully stitched up her arm, dousing the needle with alcohol to disinfect it.

“It looks gnarly, but the bleeding’s stopped” he said honestly.

“I guess my dreams of being a model are over” She grinned.

Mason was trying to think of a witty comeback when she kissed him.

Her lips tasted of blood and strawberry lipstick.

It was glorious.

“Thanks” She said, breaking her kiss.

“Any… Any time…” Mason replied, red-faced with barely subdued passion.

“So… What happened back there?” Jade asked.

“You… You won’t believe me…”

“You’d be surprised.” Jade hinted. “So, Spill”.

“Before he died, my grandfather gave me this” Mason produced the watch, held in his left hand, and stared at it so intently that he completely missed Jades look of wide-eyed desire.

“I didn’t realise it at the time… But… I can use it to turn myself invisible… All I have to do is press this button here” Mason pointed to the silver extrusion at the top of the watch.

Mace waited for her to laugh, to scoff, anything, but instead, she simply replied:

“Oh, you don’t even know what you have, do you? It doesn’t make you invisible, dufus, it… It’s much more than that…”

“What? How… How do you know…”

“Mason… I work for an organisation called the Syndicate. We have been watching you for a long time. Waiting for the right moment to make contact.

That watch you have? It’s… very special…

You’re wrong about how it works. It doesn’t make you invisible. It transports the holder to another dimension, parallel to ours, but displaced in time and space.”

“What? But, I can see people, I can touch things…”

“Yes. Because the parallel dimension is identical to ours, but out of phase. It’s like tuning a radio station: By simply adjusting the dial you can listen to one station, or another, or even both at the same time if you tune it just right. That’s what the watch does, it lets you travel between dimensions and back. Once you phase out of one dimension, you become invisible, but if the other dimension is close enough in phase, you can still interact”.

“Wow. How do you know all this?” Mason replied, incredulously.

“Like I said. I work for the Syndicate. This is what we do. We are fighting a war, Mason. A war against a race of extra-dimensional beings.”

“What, you mean aliens?”

“You could call them that, yes.”

“They are energy seekers. Leeches.” Jade spat her words with disgust, as if choking on them. Their home world is old, ancient. It has exhausted the energy of it’s star. So, they travel between dimensions searching for sources of energy, then siphon them off to sustain their planet.”

“Why not just travel to another planet? They must have the technology to do that?”

Jade smiled.

“Doesn’t work like that. You can’t travel faster than the speed of light, so says physics. There’s no such thing as warp speed. However, you can shift into other dimensions that are close to your phase frequency.”

“It was the atom bombs back in the 40’s and 50’s that led them to us. Damn things were like dimensional flares, they lit us up like a damn Christmas tree. That’s when it started. Ever since then they’ve been crossing over into our dimension more and more. That’s why the Syndicate exists, to stop them.”

“You’ve seen them, haven’t you?” Jade said, after a pause.

“I… I think so… The last time, when I used the watch, I saw some kind of creature, with a long face and no eyes…”

“Yep. That’s them. The grey men, we call them. They can phase between dimensions too, like you did, but they can’t cross over. Not completely anyway. You were lucky. They could have killed you. The watch attracts them, you should be careful how you use it.”

“Why can’t they, you know, “cross over” into our world?” He asked.

“We’re not sure, but our best guess is that the dimensional barriers are too strong. They can see us, and they can interact with our world, but they can’t yet enter it. That means there’s still time. That’s what they’re trying to do, to weaken those barriers so that they can enter our world.”

“They can see us? Like, all the time?”

“No, not all the time. They need a beacon, something to home in on. Like the watch. Every time you use it, you go out of phase, you radiate dimensional energy through the barrier. They can sense that”.

“Where did it come from? The watch, I mean.” Mason said, once again staring at the ornate brass timepiece.

“That we don’t know” Jade admitted. “There are more of them, we know that, but they seem to just keep cropping up at random. Near as we can tell? They are being made in another timeline and being sent here to help us. Time and space are relative, y’see? So, the present, and the future… are kind of the same, once the dimensional barriers break down. It’s complicated”.

Jade took another swig of whiskey, and Mason felt like he needed one too.

“So, if you were watching me for so long… You must have known I had one of these watches… Why not just take it?”

“That’s what Tyran wanted to do. You met him when you arrived at Elysium, tall, dark-skinned, well dressed?”

“Yeah, I saw him… Dangerous looking dude?”

“You don’t know the half of it”.

“Tyran believes that the watch is a tool. He who wields the watch, controls its power.”

“But we have in our possession certain other artifacts that were… liberated from their owners, and they never worked. They are useless trinkets.

We believe that these artifacts are somehow linked to their owners, and only they can use their power.”

“So, only I can use the watch? But… why? I mean it was my grandfathers, I never even heard of it before he gave it to me!”

“There is still a lot that we don’t know Mason. But I do know this: You can trust me.

I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you before, I should have told you, that was wrong. But I won’t lie to you again.”

“I… I trust you Jade. I feel like… we have some kind of connection together…”

“Don’t get all soppy” She grinned.

“But yeah, I feel it too.”

“So… What the hell do we do now?” Mason asked.

“Well, since the cat is out of the bag, I think it’s time to sit down with Tyran and have a pow-wow, and… What was that?”

“What?”

“Mason, that door, did you open it?”

“What? I don’t know, maybe?”

“Mace, this is really important, think: Did you open that door?”

“I… I don’t… No, No, I didn’t it was closed…”

Jade stood and walked to the corner of the room, and crouched beneath the old cast-iron stove that stood rusting there.

She reached her arm inside the firebox, and withdrew a tattered cloth-covered object, which she quickly began to unwrap.

“Holy shit… Jade! Is that a gun??”

“Sssh, Mason, not now!”

Jade withdrew a small, silver, snub-nose “Stellar-Patterson” hammerless revolver and expertly popped open the cylinder, glanced at the six rounds loaded inside, and snapped it shut again.

“Stay here” she said.

“Don’t use the watch!”.

She danced into the hall, clutching the Patterson.

Mason waited, fearful, but mindful of her warning.

Suddenly, he heard the splintering of wood and the deafening sound of a single gunshot.

Acting on instinct, he rushed through the open door of the apartment and into the hall.

Jade was standing at the top of the stairs, revolver in hand.

She fired another shot at something, then turned to Mason.

“Run! She shouted. The fire escape, go!”

“Not without you!” His words belied his fear.

“Fuck Mason!” She blasted off a third shot and ran toward him, grabbing him by the arm and leading him toward the fire escape.

“Come on!” She yelled.

He couldn’t see what Jade was shooting at, but he didn’t need to. He turned and followed her.

“You first!” She said, beckoning to the rickety ladder with the revolver.

This time, he sailed down it like an acrobat, and Jade landed with a thud, moments behind him.

“What the fuck is going on Jade?” Mason shouted, as they ran from the red-brick building.

“They’ve found a way… some way… Into our world” She panted, out of breath.

Jade led him down another side street, then an alleyway, still with the revolver in her hand.

Mason struggled to keep up, but adrenaline pushed him forward.

Jade turned once more, and froze.

Before her was a… figure.

It was humanlike, but, not human.

It was wearing the same black longcoat that Mason’s saw on Tyran, Jade’s partner.

It’s face looked like a badly drawn caricature, or a jigsaw made with human skin.

It’s teeth were clenched in an alien gurning grin, and as it walked the face twitched and shuddered like the figures Mason had seen the first time he used the watch.

It was as if each movement was a different moment in time, spliced together crudely, with no regard to the laws of reality.

“It’s a greyman” Jade said, fear filling her voice.

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