The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption (3 page)

                            Flax's  organisation  worked  tirelessly,  but  it  was

over two years before they found a dimension door that was both stable and predictable. Silus Flax was overjoyed, his belief that such a door existed out of control of the Tallmen seemingly justified. He hoped that now that world beyond the 'door' was what he desired to further his plans for power. His joy was short-lived.

                            On their first excursion through this tunnel of light to the dimension beyond, his exploratory party had suffered a similar fate as others had before in different 'doors', despite this one's supposed stability. It was no different from the rest in the initial effect it had on the first unfortunate High Hat explorers who ventured through it.

                            The transition through the gate had transformed the High Hat party into creatures almost unrecognisable as human beings. Some had lost limbs or whole parts of their bodies. For others their bodies intact were hideously deformed by the apparent loss of bone in limbs or facial structures. All were insane.

                            Flax slaughtered them all, partly out of frustration and partly to allay fears that all his expeditions into the 'doors' guaranteed a living death to his currently loyal High Hats. He did not need his organisation to decide that Tan employment  was   preferable   to   being   turned   into a vegetable. Why did this happen anyway  thought Flax? He searched desperately for a solution to this macabre puzzle and was soon to find it.

                            After  lengthy  and  subtle  investigations   into the transportation of work crews through the Tan controlled Great Gate, Flax discovered that  when workers entered or returned through it their rate of passage was strictly regulated to ensure that the denser parts of the human anatomy adjusted gradually to the vibratory rate of the gate  itself  and  the dimension beyond. The speed, he learned,  at  which human  beings  travelled  through  a  dimension door was critical if they were to survive. Flax's men had sprinted there and back fearing that the 'door' would collapse at any moment and consequently their bodies had not properly adjusted, leaving bones and limbs in suspension somewhere in between.

                            Whilst  Flax's  recently   discovered   'door' remained  open,  he  frantically  experimented.   Firstly, he tried the same rate of travel as the Great Gate demanded. His volunteer High Hats never returned. Again and again ignorant and newly  recruited volunteers, armed  with  stopwatches  and  plied  with the promise of incentives, trooped eagerly into the undulating  orifice  never  to  be  seen again.

                            Eventually, after much trial and error and a terrible drain on Flax's human resources, one volunteer returned unharmed and still relatively sane. One pace every two seconds had allowed this man to pass through to the other side of the 'door' without any major ill effects.

                            Flax celebrated, hugging his bemused, but terrified High Hats and shrieking unintelligibly. Now all he required was an answer to what lay behind this 'door'. The successful traveller held out his hands to an attentive Flax, displaying his blackened fingers.

“A  great  coldness  lies  beyond  and  a  great  blinding whiteness too, no man could ever live there for long." the survivor informed Flax through black, frost bitten lips.

                            Flax was angered that he had been again foiled by circumstances. The `door' opened into certain death! From his High Hats' meticulous records Flax knew that this portal would remain open for perhaps another twenty hours before it gradually began to close until only a thin and inaccessible crescent remained.

                            Donning              warm              clothing              and                            armed              with                            a stopwatch,              Flax                            decided              to              see              for              himself              the inhospitable, white and cold world beyond this particular dimension door. Once inside the door, Silus found  himself in a swirling, shifting, rainbow coloured tunnel  of light that wormed its way  through  the  fabric           of  space  and  time  from  one  dimension to another.

Flax nervously paced and counted out the seconds. "One AND two AND one AND two AND...."

                            Flax felt his body tingle slightly as he moved slowly along the tunnel. After several nervous minutes, counting out the seconds with a loud and savage accuracy, the coloured light faded and he found himself in a tunnel of blue-white ice. His breath frosted and billowed out into the bright whiteness of the tunnel. It was indeed cold he thought. The High Hat leader moved cautiously forward to where the tunnel opened into the vast empty spaces ice and snow beyond, devoid of anything at all except the viscous wind sculpted and curious monuments to itself in the snowdrifts and on the ice mountains.

                            Flax stared out into the bleak and forbidding arctic wastes which seemed to stretch out to infinity. This was not it, there was nothing that he needed  here.  He knew what he was looking for – a city  or  maybe a town; a place to seek what he needed, a place to prepare his High Hats and then return to Dubh to lead them against the Tans and then the Tallmen themselves.

                            Silus   Flax   despised    the    Tans'    dominance of  Dubh.  Although  he  took  from  them  it   was never enough,  he  desired  something  which  they could never give him. They had power and endured him, so long as he was useful. Eventually he would outgrow his usefulness to them, he knew, and then they would find someone else to fill their needs.

                            Flax was no fool. He had seen the signs already, the Tans no longer co-operated in the ways they had in the early days, now they questioned his requests and on the streets there was an ominous tension between his men and theirs.

                            If the Tans no longer needed him, he and his High Hats would become no more, become nothing, and he would die. Flax would not allow it to happen. He needed power, not just the power that the Tans had, but absolute power; that which the enigmatic Tallmen held in their blazing towers of light. He would take it from them and they  would  bow   to   Emperor   Silus   Flax,   master of Dubh. He would have god like powers like they had now. All this was powered by the yearning of a corrupted and perverse soul that demanded that Flax the rational animal use his intellect to fulfil its needs by any means. No morality or dogma, only the breadth and dark depth of his imagination bound him; and it was deep and boundless.

                            He was a slave to part of himself, that part gave him the  power when he demanded it and he did so by withdrawing from the pleasurable activities that  it  fed on. Then it screamed and  gave  Flax  the  power  to act and think beyond himself and towards the unspeakable pleasures he consciously imagined. It had given him the premonition to search for the dimension doors and to see in dreams that beyond one lay what he would need to destroy the Tans and wrench power from the Tallmen.

                            But It, this internal yearning, was not just part of him, It was part of most of the unshackled hedonists of  Dubh, It drove them all to consume pleasure in its vilest forms. It lived off them and It used Silus Flax. It, the malignant soul of the city which had its iniquitous tendrils in all of their souls, spoke to Flax now as he despaired at the  uselessness  of  the  desolate  world  in  which  this dimension door terminated.

“Patience, not this place, perhaps not now and not here, but soon, soon, you shall have what I have shown you in your dreams. Your crown still awaits you. Patience. You are close my beloved." It hissed in unison with the arctic blizzard. Silus Flax laughed quietly to himself and questioned the voice that resonated within his soul.

“Soon Emperor  Silus Flax will be rising, my dark soul becoming darker

until all and everything becomes one with my desire, my being?"

“Yes. "

“And I shall live in an eternity of pleasure? “he drooled.

“I already do, Silus. Do my bidding my beloved and you can join with me."

Silus Flax had no gods, but he had a dark, dark faith that gave him the will and the power, to pursue his deepest desires and deify his black soul.

Chapter Three

Under the cathedral like domes of Machine Hall Nine, Flax's domain, the monstrous internal combustion engines thundered on relentlessly and continued to prove to be the most productive in output to the Generator Halls of all the Machine Halls.

                            Flax's promotion to Hall Engineer and its increased responsibilities, in terms of numbers of men and machines, had done nothing to dent his impeccable production record.

                            So there was little to threaten Silus Flax's position or his activities in the city. Only the Grand Council of the Upper City could dictate to him, but never did, because they all regarded him with the utmost fear.

Fear, because his High Hats had demonstrated on more than one occasion that to oppose Flax was to sign one's own death warrant. But this was normally a last resort, dead men could do him no favours, bribery and blackmail were the Hall Engineer's usual course of action when voices were raised against him.

                            Flax's position in the Upper City was one from which he could dominate and manipulate all but the Tans and the Tallmen themselves.

The Tallmen asked for little but the energy the city provided them. Rarely were they seen outside of their blazing towers of light and when they did emerge it was to instruct the Council in very short, and normally one way, communications.

Messages were brief:- “We will vent the city at mid-day tomorrow " “More consistency on Hall Five's output "

“We you will rectify the output fluctuations of Hall Seven's immediately."

Flax had never had more than a fleeting glimpse of the Tallman messengers as they returned home across the great paved concourse between the Halls of Machines and their towers. Yet he despised them with an intensity which made him growl and snarl obscenities to himself.

                            He wanted and had sworn to usurp the power they possessed. He perceived that they held the ultimate power in the city, that of life or death for all. With one flick of some innocuous switch, or so he paradoxically presumed despite his own technical knowledge, they could collapse the Field Walls and destroy it all. In reality it required technically more than the flick of a switch and practically such an act was impossible for the Tallmen to exercise this absolute power as Silus Flax saw it.

                            Under ideal circumstances  the  Tallmen  could have collapsed the Field Walls of Dubh at will and moved on to another point in space and time. The reality of their situation here was that they depended exclusively upon the city and the energy from the Halls of Machines to survive.

The Tallmen had arrived where they were today in a desperate hurry, as renegades fleeing from their own Mother race, making an attempt to hide from their almost omniscient power in between the warp and weft of space and time.

                            Finally with their power  reserves  almost depleted the Tallmen of Dubh had been forced to inflate an artificial space-time continuum at  random; and  it  had  proved to be a disaster. They had calculated that they would annex the matter from some small uninhabited land mass within this bubble-like dimension and, once this had been achieved, renew their energy reserves. Their hasty calculations wrong. Instead they found themselves resting in the midst of some primitive human city, snatched from some other time and place, which completely filled the confines of their manufactured dimension.

So they had improvised.

                            Under their coercion, and with limited resources, the massive Halls of Machines had been constructed, employing the primitive technology of the inferior race that had been inadvertently and irreversibility ensnared in this dimension. The Halls of Machines and their huge internal combustion engines would supply the massive amounts of energy needed to sustain Dubh in space and time.

                            Soon they found it necessary to find a new source of raw materials and food to support the machines and the feed the burgeoning human population which, in turn, fed their own vital technology. Thus a huge dimension door was opened at random into various areas the Tallman guessed to be free of habitation and rich in raw materials and food reserves.

Eventually they found an era in Earth history prior to the evolution of modern man, which would supply all they needed. The opening of the Great Gate, as it was  known to the inhabitants of Dubh, was an enormous risk. Those  who  sought the  Tallmen  had  the ability to detect such an event, but did not. The Tallmen had been lucky.