The Evil Stone

The ceremony kicked off, and I was invited to rise to the podium where Professor Cornelius awaited me. The bitter bags under his eyes seemed all the more baggy that day.

I had been nominated to become head researcher of the properties of the exceptional Taurus stone. Eight years prior, in a remote corner of the empire, a planet had been discovered that contained deposits of a new material not liable to any proper chemical or physical classification. What was most interesting about it was that, depending on the stone variety, it was possible for a subject, upon skin contact, to experience a flurry of visions, sensations, and smells.

I had been a junior researcher at the Imperial Institute working on pedestrian topics and wondering whether any discoveries were even done anymore in those days, when the news reached us. For the longest time, established interests avoided extending “the franchise” on Taurus stones to anyone but the officially appointed circles, and much of the research took place under great secrecy. Eventually, a small set of Taurus stones was approved to be made publicly available, and I eagerly forked over a fortune to get my hands on some.

The effects I experienced were certainly mild, but there was no question in my mind that it was something special. I saw flickering lights, melodious humming, and glimmering objects floating around me. It was, finally, the thing I had been looking for to make my name in the scientific community – the great theoretical frontier of our time!

Professor Cornelius, being heir to an academic dynasty well-rooted in the Institute, immediately began formulating his own dinosauric hypotheses, which began gaining traction among other establishmentarians. His theory suggested that the stones, owning to their completely unconventional nature, ought to have been withheld from the public entirely and to have been handled by experts only. He furthermore asserted – and this was public knowledge – that only certain individuals with genetically determined cerebral qualities could handle a wider variety of stones without risk of permanent brain damage.

Neither I nor most of the student body interested in the subject gave much credence to such assertions. It seemed to us plain and simple – a fickle attempt of an aristocrat to retain his academic privileges in the face of a new frontier of knowledge that would see the most capable – not the most noble – rise to the top. 

Very often, during his lectures, I would interrupt and contradict some of the claims he made, which on a few occasions resulted in shouting matches. I was reading all the literature that was being released on the subject voraciously, and this allowed me to get the better of him on quite a few occasions. He would often get livid, especially at my claims that an individual of any degree of cerebral development should be theoretically capable of interacting with Taurus stones safely. On one occasion he shouted:

‘Do you even understand, Mr Horus, the profundity of this discovery? That we have undermined millennia of knowledge about the universe seems to not register with you properly, does it? You seem to believe these stones to be some form of recreational drug!’

This was an obvious straw man argument, which I did not even want to address. Of course I understood that a stone capable of very specifically affecting chemical process in the brain would have a multitude of applications in industry and war. He seemed to be going on about something else though – on one occasion he’d even made the utterly unscientific claim that the stones were not affecting the brain. If they were not affecting the brain, then where were the visions coming from? Duh.

In any case, through my jousting with Cornelius and his supporters at the Institute I quickly became the face of ‘the resistance' and a bit of a celebrity within the university. Eventually, a coalition of supportive establishment academics pushed for me to be admitted to actually interact with the less safe stones.

What I saw seemed to completely confirm my hypothesis. Although the visions caused by certain stones were indeed orders of magnitude intenser than those available to the public, they could still, I found, be handled after a sufficient amount of mental training. I was familiar with ancient texts on psychology, and this allowed me to overcome and navigate even the effects of the heaviest Taurus stone that was available. The visions, shapes, and voices I heard were extremely powerful, but not overwhelming. 

Indeed, two years into this whole ordeal the Taurus stones showed a pattern of intensity that could be simply and conveniently plotted on a bell curve, with visions that evoked impressions including aesthetic beauty, peace, fear, sexual arousal, and a couple others. 

Cornelius only retained a handful of supporters, and, by the time the question of seeking practical applications for the stones was raised, his protest was in the minority. An old friend of mine from the applied physics department started exploring the possibilities of uses in interrogations and interviews. Institutions within the Intergalactic League began reaching out for collaboration and guest lectures from our professionals. I had remained a somewhat local figure, so I was not yet at the point of being invited personally. My popularity was about to see an unforeseen uptick though, when an unusually large Taurus stone was exhumed and transported to the Institute for examination.

The stone was exceptional for a number of reasons: it was unusually large, its hue was considerably darker than the usual shade of grey that most stones had, and it was apparently capable of slightly altering the state of mind of a person not even in physical contact with it. The digging team reported harrowing screams, shaking earth, and occasional sudden images of darkness or inexplicable rooms. This was all very interesting and exciting. 

The position of head researcher of this particular stone was open, and I eagerly submitted my application. Upon hearing about that, Cornelius woke up from his slumber and began a concentrated campaign to snap the position out of my hands. That led him one day to submit my private medical information to the nominating body, highlighting the fact that the specific areas of my brain most suited for Taurus stone handling were genetically underdeveloped. Such an act of impropriety and indiscretion was so outrageous, that even his remaining supporters had no option but to turn on him. In righteous anger, the body decided not only to have me take the place as head researcher but to have Cornelius, being an established ceremonial master of the Institute, award me personally and pronounce the traditional speech of nomination.

I was overjoyed and, in between the countless congratulations I received from my peers and superiors, began imagining a future of developed Taurus stone technology with my name figuring prominently in the textbooks. I imagined how I would tame the anomalous stone and watch Cornelius and his dinosaurs shamefully admit that I had been correct all along.

On the eve of my nomination, as I was strolling down a corridor I suddenly saw Cornelius walking towards me. I could see his eyes more lifeless than ever, but, more than anything, there seemed to be a clear note of angst in them. We had never previously spoken in private, and I was most surprised when he stopped before me and said:

‘Mr Horus. Allow me to have five minutes of your time.’

‘Of course, Professor Cornelius.’

‘Mr Horus,’ he cleared his throat, ‘I congratulate you on your nomination. However, I must ask you, privately, when there are no audiences you or I ought to pander to: are you willing to take this risk?’

I was dumbfounded. He was really trying to scam me or beg me out of my nomination. 

‘Not at all, Professor Cornelius.’

‘Have you seen the studies supporting the cerebral hypothesis? There have been-‘

‘Yes, Professor, I have seen them and addressed them before you countless times. You seem to think that I say what I say to impress an audience. Not at all. I say what I say because it is the truth.’

I could see him visibly aggravated. 

‘Mr Horus, you seem to think that your bell curve model for the intensity of the stones can prevent unforeseen anomalies or outliers-‘

‘Not at all, Professor. Bell curves naturally include outliers in the tail ends.’

‘But what I mean is that, so long as the only means of testing the stones is direct skin contact, in the eventuality that a stone’s effect is more… devastating than seen before, the effects would be known immediately and would not be possible to mediate.’

‘Risks must be taken in the name of science. And I am willing to take them.’

It seemed like he was now regretting having entered this conversation. He politely excused himself, and we went our separate ways. 

I was now standing before him at the podium, beaming faces of young academics watching as the vanquished titan read me my olympian praises:

‘…and hereby, I, Professor Malcolm Cornelius, in the name of the Empire, Our Eternal Mother, and the Gods, declare you, Sir Jonathan Horus, the Head Researcher on the forthcoming work of discerning the secrets of the anomalous Taurus stone. May You Be Kept Safe.’

There was a burst of applause. One could read mortification on Cornelius’s face, and I, by that point, was feeling sorry for the old man.

That being what it was, I knew I had to exclude him from participating in the project. He had his dusty ancestral tenure to be pleased with, and I had my exciting new frontier.

We were all set with a variety of measuring devices hooked up to my body and seven specialists waiting in the adjacent room, observing my experience in the measurements. I wanted to be the first to see what effect the stone yielded and had assured my assistants that there was no need for a test subject. I had done all the necessary calculations, and the stone’s intensity was supposed to be on the upper end of the curve – very intense, but nothing I couldn’t handle. In addition to that, I’d had two years of proper mental training necessary to withstand a very intense stone’s effects and finding another such individual would’ve been pointlessly time-consuming.

As I moved my hand closer and closer to the stone, I could begin to hear the harrowing voices the diggers had spoken of. The was a ringing in my ears that got increasingly louder, and a drowning discomfort in my chest, as though something unspeakable was staring at me.

It took me a few moments to become accustomed to that sensation, but finally, bit by bit, I began moving my fingers closer and closer. The feeling became more and more powerful, but so did my tolerance to it.

Finally, I moved my fingers right to the very surface of the stone and heard a loud crack.

I was suddenly in another place; the ringing noises subsided; a strange coldness whirled around me; and a morbid, slow, recurring knock, like a beating of a machine at a factory, resounded somewhere in the distance. I found myself crouched on the ground, my face buried in my hands.

I lifted my eyes. Where was I? These illusory effects… I could not think analytically of any illusory effects. It was all too real. I was literally, physically in another place.

There was barely any light around me. I could see that I was at the corner of some cavelike space, reminiscent of an underground train station, only wrought in impure, unrefined stone and lacking any electrical or engineering elements. What caught my sight most strikingly was the 'station' elevated above my 'train tracks' area. It was lit in a dim red light the exact source of which I could not identify.

In the smooth wall there were poorly-shaped tunnel openings, some small ones leading to shallow dead ends, other larger ones going to some unknown places.

On the floor I could make out the outlines of a mysterious shape facing straight towards the wall of the 'train tracks'. It was a rectangular pillar, with two long arms growing out of the peak of the pillar, shaped like scythes, with the blades extending down to the floor. At the top of the pillar was a head, featureless like that of a worn-out statue.

All of a sudden I became aware, horribly, acutely aware, that this being, this entity, was conscious. A horror gripped me so hard that I felt a coalescing scream mounting in my throat.

Knock, knock, the machine tolled in the distance. I heard a quiet yelp come out of my mouth. The ringing noise had returned, and my hands were shaking.

‘It’s awake, it’s awake, it’s awake,’ my mind intoned with the distant noise, ‘it’s awake, it’s awake, it’s awake.’

It seemed perfectly motionless until I realised that the head was turning slowly in my direction.

The head continued turning and turning, and I, in a cascade of helplessness and desperation, screamed in absolute horror. There were tears filling my eyes, there was blood trying to escape through my fingers. 

‘It has found me! It has found me! It has found me!’

The being locked eyes with me.

‘I AM FOUND.’

I issued another scream, this time from the floor of the laboratory as two assistants were pulling me away and trying to hold me down. The blinding horror did not relent for what seemed like an eternity, and I screamed, screamed, and screamed, seeking some source of consolation and finding none, the humanity of my friends removed a million miles away from me. 

As the horror wore off, I became aware of foam issuing out of my mouth and of a disgusting wetness in my groin area. I was rushed to an emergency unit to be reviewed by medical professionals. Apart from an unstable heartbeat and an excess of stress hormones in my body, they found evidence of marked brain damage. I was quarantined for a number of weeks, barely cognisant of either time or space.

I could see that figure, so real and awful, standing in that tunnel, waiting for me.

I could not sleep well. The visits paid to me by my assistants were often unrewarding to them, as they could not get me to speak of what it was that I saw. On a few occasions, while trying to recollect for them what had happened, I developed palpitations and sweating, and the doctors demanded that I be left alone.

One day, I could perceive Professor Cornelius sitting beside me.

‘Mr Horus,’ I could hear him saying, ‘how are you feeling?’

‘I’m horrid, Professor,’ I said, ‘it looks like you were right.’

‘I’m afraid I was, Mr Horus.’ There was not a note of celebration in his voice, ‘I am sorry that I couldn’t do anything to stop it.’ 

‘It was outside the bell curve, wasn’t it?’

‘The intensity readings were ten thousand times above the highest in our records.’

I chuckled. I had been very wrong, very publicly, and I had paid the price. My brain was fried, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything anymore.

‘You may not have been as wrong as you think, Mr Horus,’ Cornelius arose and walked up to the exit, ‘there is indeed no cause for us to be worried about the more common Taurus stones yet. All I asked for, was for us to proceed with caution. Once again, I’m sorry that you paid the price for my incompetence as public debater.’

He left the room.

I tried to think for a moment of all the ramifications of my public failure, of the extent to which the story may have spread, and how it will have affected the discourse surrounding Taurus stone research, but my mind could not bring into focus any of these thoughts, and they floated languidly like leaves in a puddle.

I was tortured by having to keep myself from falling asleep in order to avoid its presence. Yet, in my waking hours my mind presented no sharp outlines to me, like a suddenly myopic pair of eyes. Nothing real seemed to be real anymore. 

I was alone with the sinister being.