WE WERE MEANT TO BE LOST

Winter, 1995.

The scent of pine hangs in the air.

A remote cabin buried in the snow, nestled away in the embrace of trees in the aftermath of a blizzard, kept hidden from the world by clandestine organizations who would rather their existence not be known. There is no birdsong, no wind rustling through the trees, nothing for company except the bite of the cold and the stillness of winter. Save for the trickle of a distant stream in the distance, there is only quiet, uneasy silence.

A trigger is pulled.

The gunshot is suppressed, and snow bursts away from the muzzle. The bullet travels two-hundred meters, carving a path through the cold air, flying between trees before piercing through a window with a surprisingly quiet tink as it races through the living room, down a hallway, and striking its target in the study on the far end of the cabin: the skull of Professor Anthony Marshall.

Through the scope, the Contractor watches the target fall. They would have no knowledge of their own death, no warning—even if they surely knew it was possible. No one that the Contractor was paid to eliminate thought they were living a good, clean life. No one they hunted lived without the expectation that someone might come for them. There’s was a world where the powerful kept horrors hidden, secrets buried as deep as bodies, and paid well to keep it that way. The Contractor cared not for the secrets or the bodies—they cared little for even the money—but they did enjoy the hunt. This one in particular had been challenging for the Contractor. Eighteen thousand miles of travel, sixty-seven countries, and every ocean crossed at least once. Professor Marshall was a hard man to track, unusual for a physicist, but in the end it had not mattered.

It has never mattered.

The Contractor pulls back the bolt of the rifle, the spent casing ejecting out and landing on the snow beside them. They pick up the spent casing and tuck it away in their pocket. They rise from the snow, from the prone position they had been patiently waiting in for sixteen hours, the remnants of the blizzard sloughing off their ivory camouflage. Carefully, and with no concern for the cold, they disassemble their rifle and stash it in their backpack. Once done, they unholster their sidearm and began walking towards the cabin.

Halfway there, the Contractor comes to an abrupt stop. They stand there, in the stillness, head lowered and turned to the side, ear turned toward the western edge of the forest. They hear nothing. They neither see nor smell anything. But something has changed. Something feels different. The air is thicker, perhaps. Or is it thinner? It should be thinner at this altitude, and yet. . .

. . .that something can wait.

The Contractor continues on, reaching the cabin with no other deviations.

Only the professor occupies the structure, but the Contractor is careful still—professional, too—and enters the cabin quietly, pistol drawn and leading the way as they move from room to room. The cabin is warm, enough to make even the Contractor think about taking a moment’s respite, but they resist the urge, moving from the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and finally to the study in the back where the body is.

Professor Marshall was struck in the side of the head. The entrance wound is clean, a small pulpy crater just above his ear. The exit wound is unkind, skull shattered and brain dispersed. The bookshelf has pieces of bone and brain both, and the thick carpet struggles to hold the ruby fluid pouring onto it. The Contractor kneels at the head of the professor’s body, holsters their sidearm and retrieves a camera from their backpack. They take a picture of the professor’s face, captured in his moment of death, eyes blank but expression absent—indifferent, even. Unknowing, the Contractor thinks.

Footsteps ascending.

Doorknob turning.

Hinges whining.

“Professor, I think we should hurry—”

The Contractor turns, pivoting on their heel and raising their sidearm, firing before this strange new invader can speak another syllable. The pistol emits a single metallic thud, more quiet than the rifle. The strange invader barely registers their killer’s presence before the bullet enters their mouth, bursting out the back of their head. They fall backward, arms outstretched, and collapse against the hallway floor with a thud, beside a door that should not be there.

The Contractor keeps their pistol leveled down the hallway, moves to the door and steps in front, ready to fire down the stairwell. Nothing but a descent into shadows. But there should not have been anyone else here; there should not have been a basement here, either.

The Contractor closes the door, realizing then it has been designed to stop flush with the wall. Smooth, no features, no handle on their side save for a recessed slot. As poorly made as it was hastily done, this was not on the blueprints the Contractor had. They had done this recently, but not since the professor had arrived. Most likely it had been done by this other person. The Contractor turns to regard their body—white male, mid 20s, 200lbs, six foot, and he called the target professor. A student, most likely, but from where? The professor had not been employed by any university since getting into the trouble that had eventually caused someone to hire the Contractor. A friend, then, from their days in academia.

An annoyance.

Nearly, the Contractor thought, a mistake.

The Contractor removes their backpack and sets it down in the hallway. They descend the stairs into the basement that should not exist, their sidearm leading the way as they keep their eyes trained down the length of its frame. At the bottom of the stairs, a turn, and a second set of stairs leading further down. They continue until they find another turn, and then another, spiraling inward a dozen times until the Contractor thinks there is no way one person could construct a stairwell this deep. The earth here is cold, unforgiving, and digging this deep would take more than shovels and pickaxes.

They continue downwards.

After five minutes of continuous, steady-paced descent, the Contractor halts at the next turn of the spiraling staircase and looks back up into the darkness from which they came.

Does it matter what’s down here? The target is dead. Contract complete.

As far as the client is concerned, the contract is complete. The Contractor, however, does not leave witnesses or loose ends. This is professionalism, they tell themselves, taking another breath and descending further.

A reputation to maintain.

Hundreds of feet into the earth later, the Contractor turns one more corner and sees light. A spine of sickly white cut in the darkness from a door left open and unlocked. They approach slowly, ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Their heart hasn’t beat like this since their first kill, it strikes their chest—not heavy, or fast—but steady and more eager than usual. The Contractor hasn’t had a heart rate above one-ten during a contract in years. Something is wrong.

Closer to the door, a smell fills the dark. Damp, thick, and heavy, it makes the Contractor think of mold. When they are near enough to push the door open, the temperature shift is immediately palpable—alarming, even—and the warmth that washes across the Contractor causes the first bead of sweat they’ve had in days to swell across their brow. They have seen a hundred secret rooms—buried inside walls, penthouses, the ground, underwater, inside mountains and even one in a lake; they have seen laboratories of all kinds before burning them down, seen R&D departments that companies thought no unauthorized eyes would ever see—and still this does not help the Contractor to understand what they look upon now.

More dungeon than a room—an oubliette in all but its’ entrance; more an abattoir than a basement and more a mortuary than it’d ever be sanctuary. The Contractor walks into a damp pit of blackness, walls of stone laced with virulent-green moss and ruby-stained vine. The ceiling was low, making the already suffocating dark feel more cramped and consuming. The Contractor turned on a light affixed beneath the barrel of their sidearm, but it did little to disperse the shadows, revealing only a depth that unsettled them, a depth that did not seem possible. Water dripped from somewhere in the dark, echoing so that its origin was everywhere and nowhere at once, and the smell from before had begun to intensify.

Mold. Rot. Decay.

Somewhere, further in the dark, machinery churns quietly.

No one could have built such a place recently—in the recent weeks, months, or years—not without it being widely known. Besides, the place did not smell new. It did not smell like it had been built by the hastened hands of two academics hiding for their lives. This place smelled of oil and dirt, of earth and grime, of rot and decay and growth and fungus; this place smelled old. As old as the mountains to the north or the ocean to the west. This place had been here for longer than the cabin built upon it.

The Contractor could not say why they continued. Professionalism no longer seemed a good reason, and neither did compulsion, desire, or even a need even to never leave a witness behind. Their actions had always been left to the shadows, the wake from their bullets never leading back to them. No, not even that justified the Contractor’s continued march into the dark. They had killed two men—and while they possessed no guilt for ending their lives—the Contractor did have curiosity. They had never needed to know before, never needed a why, a reason, or a justification for pulling the trigger.

Until today.

The whine of machinery turns to a dull grind. From the dark looms something new. An arch in the shadows, cutting an imposing presence before the Contractor. Its curve is irregular, carved from a warped mind deprived of a sense of symmetry. At the top of its arch, stricken into the stone, are symbols made of jagged lines, of misshapen circles and distorted triangles. Ecclesiastical zealotry made by zealous hands. The Contractor shines their light across the arch, studying the symbols. They mean nothing to them, and yet still those symbols stir something in their chest. A void made by the Contractor, where they had long ago excavated their capacity for empathy, for caring and fear and all things that made them weak, now bloomed with something cold and deep and uncertain.

The Contractor passes through the arch.

In such places the air might have been said to grow heavy, to be thick and oppressive, but the Contractor felt like they had entered a vacuum. The air they inhaled felt cold and thin, like the peak of a long-forgotten mountain whose name had never been safely documented. A place the Contractor had never been but somehow remembered. They shook their head, blinked their eyes and steadied themselves. Visions of a green valley and a still lake surrounded by forests blossomed in their mind; a vision of climbing up a mountainside through the force of a blizzard, where they saw through a rifle’s scope disfigured forms anchored in a circle atop the Man-Eater.

They had never done this.

They had done this.

They would do it again.

I am doing it now.

Blinking fast, and through motes of dust and dirt, the Contractor’s eyes blurred before finally coming back to clarity, this time seemingly in another room altogether—still made up of moss-covered stone—but with a faint light source that could not be placed. The dark was now filled with the hazy illumination of an azure-tinged fog, revealing the Contractor to be standing in a laboratory of some kind. But the equipment was old, stained and dripping with odd-colored liquids, vials full of things too thick to pour and tools held together with duct tape, wire nuts, and sheer luck. From the ceiling hung thick cabling, a kind which the Contractor had never seen before. Nothing that would carry air, or water; perhaps an oil or gas of some kind? They were certainly deep enough for such things. The whirring and grind of mechanical motions remains present—still distant but now discernibly nearer.

The Contractor exhales, tasting for the first time the acrid air, smelling through burning nostrils the stench of the offal of science. And if not science, then the madness that masqueraded as it. They move through the lab without hurry, heading towards where the light seemed strongest, where the cables hung from the ceiling seemed to congregate together and pour through another archway. The thrumming that had been growing closer felt nearer now, and the Contractor could feel a palpable rhythm in their chest.

They heard it breathe.

A breath, a whine; a gasp and a cry and a sob; a scream too silent to hear but a scream all the same. It bloomed in that adjacent room and washed through the dark, through the lab like the dying tremors of an earthquake. The Contractor felt it as much as they heard it, and their body did not like what came upon their flesh. Sandstone against the skin, gravel in the teeth. Saltwater in the eyes and fire in the veins. Nothing about what breathed like that could be good.

Passing through the second archway thinned the air further, and the Contractor’s breaths became more labored, needing to breathe more for the same amount of effort. Here the laboratory was absent, as were all its tools and devices, and now there was just the cabling hung from the ceiling, splitting out into thinner strands, like capillaries from their arteries. When the Contractor shone their light to either side, they could no longer see the walls, the darkness again feeling impossibly deep. They took a single step towards that darkness before stepping back. Their heart beat arrhythmic, heavy against their chest and feeling swollen and sore. Their throat tightened and their vision began to blur, and the same symptoms beset them just as quick when they tried to inspect the darkness on their opposite flank.

The only way to go was forward.

The only way they could go was forward, whether they had realized it yet or not.

The Contractor followed the bulk of the cables mass deeper into the room, where the azure-tinged fog grew thicker, and its source was finally revealed. Against the back wall, anchored a few feet from the ground, was a ghastly and hellish device of inscrutable origin. Metal pieces bolted hastily together, welded with seizure and specked with rust. Oils leaking from crevasses and tubes cracking with age and stress, the liquid inside them dark, thick, and sandy in texture. A cradle for the horrid, and nestled in its embrace an icon of things that were not meant to be seen.

The person—if such a thing could be said to be a person at all—was missing their arms and legs, stumps terminating into the steel of the cradle that held them to the wall. Their skin was taut against their emaciated frame, head hung low and face obscured by a mask bolted to their jaw. Their labored breaths came with the whine and whir of machinery, the swelling and contracting of tubes embedded into their chest and throat. Cabling pierced their skin at seemingly random spots, around each point of entry a symbol having been cut into the skin—marks like random, angular slashes. Across the rest of their skin there were many more symbols, some cut into the flesh and others drawn on with what the Contractor assumed was blood and oil. Or perhaps the smell of oil in the air made them think such things. Perhaps it was all blood.

A misplaced step, and the Contractor’s boot rolls over a small piece of rock. It is enough to betray their presence. The monstrosity anchored into the walls lifts it head as much as it is able. Against their better judgment, the Contractor lowers their pistol, afraid—did the Contractor feel afraid anymore?—that they might evoke a violent response. For once, the Contractor did not want to readily appear as a threat.

“Professor?”

Its voice is as sickly as its body, both of them hollow, distorted, and thin. From behind the mask the voice emanates, crackling through as if transmitted from a distant, broken radio. The eyes—burnt out into charred sockets, but possessing a faint, flickering blue light—gaze forward. The Contractor, somehow, feels watched. But not by the thing in the cradle.

A distant gaze shifts its focus.

“Professor?” It said again, sounding more afraid.

The Contractor did not know why they spoke. “I’m here,” they said. “What. . .what are you?”

A gasping breath inhaled through thick, unchanged filters. “I am the effigy,” it said. “The spillway for blasphemous knowledge, sight into unseen and body into stars. Is that not you. . .professor?”

The Contractor swallowed; a tremor reached their hand, a first in decades. “It is,” the Contractor lied. “Are you. . .”

Are you alive? Are you human? What the fuck are you?

“I have watched, professor,” the effigy said. “Sixteen years of gazing into the realm you discovered. I have stayed quiet, stayed hidden from ■■■■■■. . .I have been diligent, studious. I have reported all my eyes have seen. Did your pupil tell you? Did they?”

The Contractor exhaled uneasily. “Tell me what?”

The effigy sobbed, and the Contractor recoiled at the whine.

“Professor,” it said with a cry. “Professor, what have I given my life for? For this?”

Another sob, bordering on a wail. The effigy’s jaw seemed to stretch behind the mask affixed to its face, the skin around its eye sockets stretching, growing taut in terror and anguish. The Contractor took a step back, tightened their grip on the pistol.

“I saw what was behind them, Professor. We should not have looked. We were. . .We were meant to be lost professor. Never meant to know. . .what was behind ■■■■■■.”

The effigy dropped their head again, sobbing to themselves. Their limbs pulled at the restrains inside the cradled.

The Contractor’s next words were harder to speak than any trigger they had ever pulled. “What did you see? What. . .what is behind ■■■■■■?”

Why were they even humoring this tortured person? They should execute them, leave their body with the two upstairs and disappear from this state—no, this country—for good, and never return. But all that they had removed from themselves in order to pursue their craft, all the pain and fear and worry and doubt and wonder, had begun filling up the hollow inside themselves, the chamber of apathy that made them so good at what they do; that made them so good at the thing that brought them here.

They should leave.

“Nothing,” the effigy confessed. Another sob racked their fragile body. “They are where it begins, where it ends. I have given sixteen years only to reveal to you. . .nothing. I have failed, despite pushing through hell, I have seen only torment. We were never meant to see. . .to know. . .we were meant to be lost, always. Our aimlessness, our placement in a thing so vast as the universe. . .they keep us safe. The abyss is not for us to know. Only they can know it, dream it. . .only they should contemplate. Professor, we can’t. . .I can’t. . .”

The effigy’s sobs became violent, and they began thrashing against their restraints, yanking the stumps of their limbs despite the machinery holding them in place remaining unmoved, unbroken.

“KILL ME!” The effigy howled. “KILL ME, PROFESSOR. WHY HAVE I DONE THIS? I WANT TO FORGET. KILL ME, PLEASE! KILL ME! KILL ME NOW! PROFESSOR!”

The effigy howled and cried and screamed, thrashing harder and more violently than something in its state had any right to be capable of. It continued to beg for death, to scream and scream and scream, and for the first time in their life the Contractor hesitated to kill.

But only for a moment.

The Contractor raised their pistol and fired, the bullet striking the effigy in the head, gore bursting onto the wall behind them. They stood there, looking down the length of their pistol, seeing the effigy’s head just out of sight, hanging limp against its chest. The Contractor did not want to lower their weapon, for fear of seeing what it was obscuring. Maybe if the Contractor turned around, never looked back, and raced back to the surface, this would all feel like a nightmare that it surely was. Maybe, the Contractor thought, this wasn’t happening. Maybe, just maybe.

But nightmares were the things of people with at least a tangible conscience, a sense of fear, or a profound worry that something ill might befall them or their loved ones. The Contractor had none of these. Not until now.

The effigy lurched forward, fighting against its cradle, screaming and crying and howling in a pain beyond physical or emotional; beyond spiritual agony or worse, they wailed from the pain of existence, the burden of being.

“You are not the professor!” The effigy cried. “No! What have you done! Only the professor can end this! Only they know how to end me! NO! NO! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! I CANNOT BE DAMNED TO THIS FOR ETERNITY! NO! NO! NO!!”

The Contractor dropped their pistol to the ground and staggered back, nearly tripping. They gasped, breaths sharp and fast filling with miasmic air.

“I cannot remain open!” Te effigy screamed. “You don’t know what you’ve done! No! No! They will find me, they will find us! Our world is gone now! You’ve killed us all! Humanity is going to burn and melt and drown in the viscera of horrors you can’t imagine! You fool! NO! NO! I CANNOT LIVE THROUGH THIS! PROFESSOR, PLEASE!! PLEASE FIND HIM, FIND HIM NOW! I BEG YOU!”

The Contractor turned and ran, the banshee-like cries of the effigy echoing off the stone like pain bouncing off the nerves of flesh on fire. They ran and ran—ignoring the things they thought they saw in the shadows that were not there before but seemed present now—until they reached the stairs. Behind them, the terrified howls continued, chasing the Contractor as they raced up the stairs, tripping and falling over themselves, pulling at the cracks in the walls to make sure they were always going up, always moving, getting away as fast as possible. When they reached the stop of the stairs they fell back into the cabin, crashing to the floor before scrambling to their feet and slamming the door shut behind them. Their chest burned, eyes ached like nails had been driven into the back of them, and their hands were now taken with more than just simple tremors, and were shaking visibly. Fatigue crawled into their limbs, coiling around their muscles like a vine and threatening to pull them back to the ground. But they would not stop now.

Something was wrong.

Yes, something was most definitely wrong. But it wasn’t the hell the Contractor had just emerged from. It was the same feeling they had before, just after killing the Professor.

Only the Professor can end me.

Outside the cabin it was no longer morning. The sun had long gone.

You don’t know what you’ve done.

The Contractor shuffled more than walked, needing to see the world. Needing to see reality.

I cannot remain open.

The sun was gone, but there was light—of a kind.

They will find me.

Moonlight, or something like it. Cerulean and lavender, emeralds bleeding through. Clouds like streaks of paint, frozen in time. The Contractor looks up at this sky, unfamiliar with its beauty and newly afraid of its wonder. There are stars, they think, glittering beyond the sky; stars that were not there before or had never been there at all. As they gazed up into the terrifying new vista, something moved where the moon should be—no, where the sun should have still been. A mass, elongated and hidden behind the fog of the new sky, descending slowly.

The breaking of a branch pulls the Contractor’s gaze downward.

Approximately forty-five feet away, a figure stands at the edge of the treeline. A shadow, no more, but a shadow holding a rifle nevertheless.

A trigger is pulled.

The Contractor, much like their targets, does not register the bullet splitting their brain or smashing out the back of their skull. By the time their head is thrown back their consciousness has already been snuffed out, floating outwards and away into whatever there is after death—whatever it is the effigy could not be given. When their body hits the snow, there might be something like peace for them. As the blood begins to stain the ground, the figure at the treeline approaches the body, tapping the shoulder of the Contractor lightly with their boot.

The eyes, the Marksman realizes, the eyes are always the same. Those who have seen what the Contractor has seen. They have that look, like they’ve seen just a bit too much, and cannot unsee it. The Marksman had that look for months—maybe even years. Now, though, there was just resignation in their gaze. Acceptance for all that must be done—all that had been done and will be done.

The Marksman tosses their rifle to the snow, and turns to the sky the Contractor had been gazing upon. Could he not blame them? It was such a sight. A part of the Marksman wished to stay and see how it would change, but their soul was called elsewhere. The ■■■■■■ needed them, and they would not hesitate to do what was asked.

The scent of pine is gone.

Water across the Earth has ceased to move.

The Marksman’s radio emits a small burst of static, a slow voice speaks through the noise. “Is it done?” The voice asks at a glacial speed.

The Marksman holds his radio up to speak into it, still gazing at the sky. He almost smiles. “It is, madame. The Contractor executed their contract faithfully.”

“The Professor? Their student?”

“Dead,” the Marksman says curtly. “Clean kills. The effigy remains open, as intended.”

“But not as the Professor intended. . .”

The voice is not speaking to the Marksman, but to someone else in the room with them. Neither a boastful statement or regretful one, just an observation that everything they had set in motion had come to pass.

“Do you know what I ask of you now?” The voice asks the Marksman. “Do you know what ■■■■■■ asks of you?”

The radio can barely contain the mention of ■■■■■■, breaking into a static at the utterance.

“I do,” the Marksman says with reserved joy. “Do you wish me to execute the final target now, madame?”

“Yes.”

The Marksman drops the radio, pulls a pistol from a holster on the side of his leg and pushes the barrel into the roof of his mouth. He pulls the trigger without hesitation. The flash of the gunshot illuminates his mouth with golden light. The top of his head bursts open, with brain and blood and bone erupting from it as it had the Professor, their student, the effigy, and eventually the Contractor.

The Marksman’s body hits the snow beside the Contractor, neither of them able to appreciate the sky anymore.

The sky.

From where they descend, streaking through the sky with trails of cinder and ash in their wake. Three icons of ■■■■■■ and their thrones. The sky blooms and flowers and coils and unfurls, before falling back into itself, hiding the wound it bled through, and leaving the winter landscape as it had been that morning.

Under the light of an ignorant sun.

In the arms of a wintry forest.

The scent of pine in the air.

A distant stream, trickling with life.