Today’s story is, “Signs and Wonders,” the third in Kindling’s first ever short story collection, Lights Out. Inspired by folk horror and mythology, this collection of short stories will explore the unknown, the consequences of touching the forbidden, and the mysteries that lurk in the dark, unexplored places of the world.
Inspired by my early exposure to horror, dark sci-fi and dark fantasy through anthologies and collections such as, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Illustrated Man, The Twilight Zone, and Tales From the Crypt.
So far, giving the tour was the hardest part of the gig. It wasn’t just memorizing all the history and inserting the scripted punchlines at appropriate places. It was having to walk those halls with a smile plastered across your face. Seeing the animals, if that’s what you could call them, was horrible.
She had gone to Harry to put in her two weeks, sign whatever she needed to make her departure official, when he had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“Your name came up in this morning’s meeting.”
His eyes looked hollow, dark puffy circles the only blemish to his otherwise perfect, olive skin. Had he lost weight in the last few weeks?
“Good things I hope?”
She was leaving, but she needed a recommendation. Her work history was spotty, but she always got the job done. Usually without any questions. That quiet didn’t always work to her advantage. After all, that was what had gotten her hired here.
“Great,” he was already flipping through paperwork as he spoke, looking down at his desk instead of at her. “Want to give you a job offer actually.”
“Really?”
She hadn’t been expecting this. She was quiet and liked to keep to herself, which meant she didn’t get offers to climb any corporate ladders. This job, working with tour groups, had been a stretch. She didn’t think she was that great at it. Especially the smiling part...
“Don’t sound so surprised. Not everyone is cut out for the type of work we do.”
We. She was part of some group she wasn’t aware of. He must have seen the question on her face. He leaned on his elbows and looked at her.
“Your discretion has not gone unnoticed.” He pounded the papers into a single, unified pile. “Besides, your tours have gotten rave reviews. People really feel like you care about the animals.”
“I do,” she said, a smile slipping in against her will.
“We all do,” he said, and he looked at her with a hint of a smirk. “But there’s more to this facility than just A through D.” Now his eyes sparkled conspiratorially. “If you have the right credentials, you get access to the real work going on here.”
She could feel him watching her, gauging her reaction. It was a test.
“Is the position still leading tours?”
“Yes,” he said matter of factly, the sparkle gone. “But for a very select group of people. Our donors.”
Her smile faded. Still a public position, something she had been hoping to avoid.
“We have a lot of high profile people, but they don’t want their names out there. Discretion is the name of the game.”
There was that word again. “High profile?”
He could hear the worry in her question, though her face was like a stone.
“They’re real salt of the earth people,” he chuckled, then, leaning like he was telling a secret. “Extra-terrestrial mineral miners, most of them. After the tech crash, a lot of them sold out for something more,” he looked up, mock searching for a word, “tangible.”
“I’m not sure—”
He sighed, “I thought you might say that. You seem like a girl who doesn’t know their worth.” He placed a hand on the desk and she noticed how long his fingers were for the first time, alien and strange against the smooth white of the desk. “Look at the contract before you decide.”
She nodded, and he sat back and began looking through papers again, obviously done with her. She turned and walked out of the office. The clock read 4:59. Her tour would start in fifteen minutes. She waited as long as she could, then started towards A-Hall, heels clacking against the cold tile as she went.
“It was in 2037 that the Ambrosia Project was officially shut down by Congress. Photos of these magnificent creatures, deemed “throwaways” by Olympian Bionics, hit the front page of The New York Times. The public outrage was immense.”
She waited, her mouth serious for this part of the tour. She was grateful. Her cheeks were aching from smiling, and that part was coming again soon. They were all wide-eyed, staring at her, a few holding back shimmers of tears reflected in the harsh overhead glare of white light.
“Nearly all of them were terminated. Some had even been fitted with serpent chips, and were able to voice, for the first time in any animal studies, a fear of death as the squads came in to euthanize them.”
One little woman, hair silver and pulled back tightly in a bun let out a shaking sigh. A younger woman, pregnant, probably in her third trimester, started to sob. One man, neatly dressed and tightly wound—he had asked how long this thing was going to take at the start—couldn’t stop the flow of tears that dripped silently down his otherwise impenetrable face.
Vi smiled again, pushing through the strange tingling ache in her jaw.
“That was before Lewis Creton stepped in.”
She started walking and they followed, gasping audibly when she pressed the little black button on the remote she carried. Windows lit up, revealing dozens of creatures of all shapes and sizes. Some stared out with lolling tongues and teeth made of silver metal, mouths no longer able to close.
Others had deformities, gouges and scars along their heads where chip inserts had been attempted, failed, then attempted again. There were ungulates missing limbs, metal in place of their legs, strange and twisted in a way that made the prosthetics look like they were a part of them, growing into the bone and around the skin.
They limped towards the glass, and one, a small doe, peered out with strange robotic eyes. A red laser was set in the center, a sensor that allowed her to perceive objects, but not really see color.
“Was this one born without eyes?”
Vi’s smile faltered. She could see the old women looking at her hopefully, not wanting the truth, but needing it in spite of herself. She corrected the twitching frown and breathed.
“No. They were surgically removed.”
Another gasp. A few lingered and watched the mechanical eyes, a look of disgust there, but most followed, eager to get away from the strangely demonic pupils.
“Lewis Creton was a fan of Jane Goodall ever since he was young boy. It is rumored that by the time he turned fifteen, he had read every book and study, watched every documentary and interview available to him. He has always believed in the sentience of these creatures you see around you. Creatures that have been abused by science, bred and born to be experimented on, forced into subjugation by those who are smart enough to know better.”
Their heads nodded now. Some looked down at the floor in shame.
“Lewis knew the answer was not to end precious lives to save face. He singlehandedly rescued these animals. He bought all the remaining castoffs, and used this facility here to house and care for them. But he didn’t stop there.”
She pushed open the doors and they entered the final part of the tour, D-Hall.
“He invested in a treatment program, to help return these creatures to their natural state.”
She pressed another button, and lights turned on, revealing another set of windows with creatures behind them. There was a gorilla to the left, a couple of chimpanzees to the right.
“Using the best veterinary medicine and research has to offer, Lewis has funded the successful reversal of bionic implants in over twenty animals over the last five years. These creatures no longer have to be subject to the painful overgrowth of bioengineered titanium in their bones. They can interact with the world without the buzzing pulse of electricity in their brains. They can be what they were always meant to be.”
She clicked the final button, and the rest of the hall lit up, revealing 18 windows. In them were apes and monkeys, some small, some enormous. They came to the windows and peered out. Some were missing ears and eyes, results of various stages of the serpent chip implantation.
The people murmured in awe, and put their hands up to the window. Some of the apes were missing feet, and they hobbled around on stumps. Others were blind, eyes milky and wandering the ceiling. Some signed, others stayed with their backs to the windows, refusing to interact with another set of gawkers. Vi always felt worst about these ones. Like they knew what was happening.
“And this little guy,” she said as they approached the final set of doors, the ones that would lead the group outside and away from this place, “is having his serpent chip removed tomorrow.”
She pressed the final button, and a soft light lit up in a window, revealing a Capuchin monkey. He was curled up on the floor, and Vi noticed some clumps of hair littered around him.
“He really has a serpent chip?” the old man with his stony face asked, pushing past a couple to get a better look. The monkey’s eyes opened.
“He does for now, but tomorrow, he’ll be free of that.”
The monkey sat up, and Vi noticed a smudge of brown under his head.
“What is that?” the young woman asked.
Vi fought the urge to crinkle her brow, and smiled bigger instead.
“Well you know, they aren’t the cleanest animals.”
A thump made them all jump. Vi looked at the glass. A smear of blood was there, a lined pattern of hair like the underside of a mushroom breaking up the red. The monkey moved back, then ran at the glass again, smashing his teeth into the window.
“Oh my god!” the old woman jumped back and covered her mouth.
“Don’t take it out!” the monkey shouted. “Don’t let them take it out!”
“Everyone stay calm,” Vi said, holding her hands up as if to hold off a flood. “He’s nervous.”
She turned to him.
“I know it’s scary. But it’ll be okay.”
The monkey began to tear at the fur around his head, breaking it off in great clumps. He screamed, first in a high pitched howl, and then in strange garbled words.
“First me, then you!”
A woman in the back, quiet for the entire tour, started to scream.
Her apartment was quiet and dark until her phone dinged. An email from CySequencing. It looked like an ad but she opened it anyway, scanning the message below.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR DNA BACKGROUND CHECK HAS BEEN APPROVED BY: Facility 18. To view your results, please click the link to create an account.
She swiped to delete the message, then turned on a side lamp by her reading chair and clenched her eyes shut. She was fighting a bad headache. The contract sat in her purse, carefully protected and still unopened in the manilla envelope it had come in. The entire bus ride the thing had called to her, but she couldn’t bring herself to read it. Not there, with the tired faces of the skeleton crew on their way into the various labs and manufacturing plants that dotted this side of town.
Before she was born, the city was a tech hub, home to some of the giants who invented the search engine, and introduced smart phones and social media. Those days were long past now. Bionics promised to be the next leap in innovation. Early chip implants like Neuralink showed promise. A wave of products hit the market, approved by FDA regulators who were later shown to be pocketing hush money from the failed experiments that littered the road of progress.
Still, the blind could see and the lame could walk. They were doing signs and wonders, God’s work, until some of them started to fail. Mysterious deaths started cropping up, the warning signs all pointing to failed implants. Spinal fluid on a pillow, strange brown liquid leaking from an ear. Those were the clues, but the autopsy records always left the cause of death mysteriously, as unknown.
Journalists started to get curious. They looked through records, social media posts. They tried to talk to scared relatives and friends who had signed NDAs, and were nervous about what might happen to them if they spoke up. There were rumors about how far these companies would go to keep a secret. Then, Sabrina Martinez, the famous investigative journalist from The Washington Post went missing. When they found her, her arms had been cut off, replaced by the yet unapproved bionic steel being tested for growing bones in patients with missing limbs.
There was only one company in Chicago that could have been responsible for that. Olympian Bionics. They had killed her, but not her story. An anonymous colleague had leaked it, spreading images of mutilated animals in dark dirty cages that set the internet on fire. A congressional hearing was ordered. The mysterious CEO of Olympian was called in to answer, and when they heard his response?
“We’re doing God’s work, but even God makes mistakes.”
They were under pressure to shut him down. Evangelical groups began to protest, joined for the first time by animal rights activists and environmentalists who strapped themselves to the gates guarding Olympian Labs and demanded they let the animals go free. Investors grew gun-shy. They pulled funding, the venture capitalists backing away from a portfolio blemish that could tank their other tech investments. That was when Olympian surrendered their facilities to government inspection.
What they found was diabolical. Animals in all stages of healing. Bones broken, eyes removed, brains open to allow for easy chip access and examination. Hardened agents were sent home after investigating the case. Some cracked from the trauma of such blatant disregard for life. Still, there was only one answer on the table. They would have to be eliminated.
Lewis Creton had saved their lives.
Vi stopped massaging her temples and reached for the contract. It felt thinner than what she expected, and indeed, when she opened it, there was only a single page. A sentence, with a number below.
FOR YOUR DISCRETION
$250,000/yr
Vi stared at the paper for a long time, looked around at her drooping apartment, and laughed.
Her supervisor was gone when she came in on Monday. His stuff, the dumb vintage Thor bobblehead and the picture of him with Mr. Creton, gone, a dark dustless imprint left on the desk. In place of his name on the door, was Ms. Liesel Cranston, some blonde tour guide that Vi tried to avoid. She was one of those people who really believed in their shitty corporation and didn’t have to practice smiling so big.
She greeted her without explanation. “Vi! You’re just the person I was looking for! I heard you accepted?”
Before Vi could answer Liesel was on to the next thing.
“Wonderful! We’re going to set you up with Trini for your training. Trini, training, isn’t that fun? Anyway, we’ll get you set up with her, and then we’ll have some paperwork for you to go over.”
Vi forced a smile.
Trini was more subdued. She was older than Liesel, close to fifty Vi thought, and less enthused about the job than Vi herself. She guessed she would be too, when she got used to the money. Like that could ever happen.
The halls here were markedly nicer, the lighting in the cages more elegant. But the animals were not what Vi was expecting. She had imagined, wrongly, that the wealthier patrons of Lewis Creton would want to be spared the horrors of the castoffs. She imagined that there may be a few success stories, animals who took to the chips without issue and made full recoveries.
She had heard that they got to interact with the animals in E-Hall, which she assumed meant they were at least spared the horrors of scars and titanium steel prosthetics. She was wrong.
“This one, is our serpent specimen,” Trini was looking at the script, while Vi stared at an Orangutan mother and son behind glass. “She tries to talk with him, but he can’t understand her.”
The two looked at her, the mother with an empty socket, not even a glass eye to make her look normal. The son, smaller than her but not by much now, lay in a corner, unmoving.
“He spends most of his time like that. They think it’s due to depression of some kind.”
“Can’t they give him anything for it?”
Trini looked up. “Why would they do that?”
“To help?”
“They’ve induced it. That’s why they put them together.”
“Why?” Vi asked.
“For testing of course.”
“Wait—”
“Lewis Creton is relaunching the Signs and Wonders bionics line. That’s why he purchased all these animals. To learn from Olympian Labs. To do better this time.”
“But—”
“Look, the Nazi’s ran some of the worst human experimentation campaigns in recent history. But look at all we learned. If this work stops, it won’t stop people from losing their limbs or going blind.”
A voice came in over Trini’s walkie. It was Liesel.
“Be right there,” Trini sighed and looked at Vi. “You go ahead and read through the script. It’s easy to tell which one they’re talking about based on the deformity. I’ll be right back.”
But she walked so slowly that Vi didn’t think she would be. She wandered from window to window, looking in at animals that didn’t bother to come to the glass. They stayed despondent in their sterile corners of the world, the smallness of their existence limited to this lab, E-Hall, Signs and Wonders Bionics. When she reached the end, she peered through a glass door, in what was oddly named G-Hall. Where had the ‘F’ gone?
She couldn’t see if the specimens continued down that way. It was pitch black, not a sliver of natural light to illuminate the shadows beyond. She turned, and seeing that Trini had disappeared behind the slick aluminum door, pushed on the double doors in front of her.
They opened with a gasp. She held the doors open, allowing the light from E-Hall to fall on either side of the hallway. Another identical set of rooms with windows reflected for a moment. Those closest to her were empty, but the ones at the end weren’t. Dark shadowy forms moved against glass.
“Hello?”
She waited, then allowed the door to E-Hall to close. A little knock rapped on the glass at the very end of the hall. She went towards it. She could see now that there were other animals here, their species and impairment hidden by the darkness. She hadn’t seen anything mentioned in the script.
She approached the tinny rapping, muffled by what must have been thick glass, similar to the kind she remembered from the gorilla enclosure at the zoo her grandmother used to take her to. Maybe there was a silverback here, or a violent creature, so strong and prone to outbursts that it had to be contained behind an impenetrable barrier, instead of the simpler glass used in the other halls.
Unlike E-Hall, where the animals were withdrawn, these ones moved towards her as she approached, their dark shapes pressing against each window as she made her way to the sound. Some of them tapped claws and teeth against the glass. One leaned against the window, mouth open. A grotesque tongue, black and heavy against the glass, licked up and down. She looked away and thought about going back, but she was too curious to turn around.
To run.
When she reached the end she could see the outline of a creature, crouched down and looking at her through a set of bionic eyes, the red laser sensors glowing in the dark. She moved forward, squinting, trying to make out what it was. An ape of some kind, arms long and thin, head enlarged by what was probably an injury due to the serpent implant.
A hand, she could see it was a hand, reached toward her, and planted on the glass. The bionic eyes shifted and looked at her, waiting. She raised her own hand in the dark and took another step toward the glass, placing her hand over the creature’s, their fingers matching one another in the darkness—two hands praying.
She laughed a little. The creature laid its head against the glass with a tiny thunk. Vi’s breath quickened. As she laid her own forehead against the window, she could hear her heartbeat in her ears. She closed her eyes, and could almost feel the warmth of its body.
“Let me out.”
She raised her head, a little startled, then placed her ear to the glass.
“Let me out, please.”
It must have been a serpent chip, though clearer and more pristine than any other she had heard. Usually they struggled to make the voice human. The animal’s vocal cords caught and growled out human language, or squeaked out syllables in a voice that was alien. Not right.
Vi took a step back, her hand falling to her side. The doors clambered open, revealing a worried Trini.
“Vi? You’re not supposed to be in here!”
Vi heard a tapping again, and in the spilling light from E-Hall, she could see a light switch on the wall, just to the right of the double doors that led to whatever the next hellish hallway would be. She reached, and flipped it on, her eyes shut tight against the blinding white light. Then, slowly, she saw.
A woman was pressed against the glass, naked behind the window. Her body bore the pocks and scars of the serpent chip along her temples, one ear missing, eyes replaced by bionic sensors. She did not shy away from the light, but looked up at the canned bulbs, her tongue out like she was catching raindrops there.
Vi looked around and saw that they were humans, all of them. Some missing tongues, others limbs. Metal sprouted like tree limbs in place of hands and feet. Bionic eyes, implants for ears, strange pieces of metal that seemed to jut like crystals from heads and rib cages and shins, titanium bone shards. An Olympian bionic experiment gone wrong.
“No—” Vi said stumbling back.
“Vi?” Liesel appeared, and she was smiling bigger than she ever had.
Vi ran from her, pressing against the double doors that led deeper into the building, away from the people behind the glass. Liesel and Trini were close behind, the click-clack of their heels closing in behind her.
“It isn’t easy finding suitable test subjects Vi. We had almost given up on that last serpent chip, and then, viola. Here you come with the exact sequencing we’ve been looking for. What are the chances? It’s like fate. Destiny.”
Vi reached the next set of double doors and slammed her body against them. They were locked. She grabbed at the handle and pulled, then kicked. They were closing in. On every side, animal and human screams mingled like some insane monkey house.
“And then you take the job. Hell, you even impress Lewis Creton.”
“What?” she asked, letting her legs go, sliding down to the floor.
“Oh yes. He’s been on several of your tours. Thought you would make an incredible poster child for the relaunch.”
The words of the little monkey echoed in her head: first me, then you. She shut her eyes and raised her arms as if to block the edge of a knife, cutting apart what her life was before, and what it would be after.
“I promise, you will be a sign and a wonder.”
Absolutely creepy. Enjoyed this horror story!
Dark. I loved it!