Tympans of Temples Held

August 16th, 1958

Audio Transcript – 'Rest'

[So, he's found his way back to Rapture. When Songbird destroyed the Siphon, I brought us here. For me, it was a long time ago. For Rapture, it hasn't happened yet. We keep coming back to these same places. The great serpent eats its own tail and destruction begets creation, I suppose, going around and around in circles. Perhaps, just as energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so too does time and destiny have a tendency of recurring, never created anew, but simply existent in a new form. The Luteces tell me that here is where I will find the final iteration of Comstock, and I desperately want to believe them. I want to rest. It's time to break the circle.]

Elizabeth, dressed in a black skirt and button-down shirt, her brooch pinned to a red necktie, wandered through the empty department store. Beyond the windows, the ocean was impossibly black. Shadows flickered along the walls as luminescent fish flashed through the murk. Dawn seemed a long way away –– not that anyone in Rapture would ever see the sunlight. It was a small wonder, Elizabeth thought, that the whole city hadn't gone completely insane.

As she moved past the haberdashery and the jewelry store, the security cameras and turrets became more numerous. Elizabeth kept to the corridor peripheries, staying just outside the searchlights of the automated security. Elizabeth had considered opening a new Tear to another part of Rapture, away from Fontaine's Department Store –– simply materialize through spacetime like the Luteces. But she couldn't risk entering a world without Comstock. There was a debt to be repaid, and Elizabeth was prepared to take the long way around to collect.

Unlike the rest of the department store, the Rapture Metro station in the pavilion was not completely deserted. Elizabeth froze in the entryway. Two women –– at least, Elizabeth assumed they were women –– milled around one of the anchored bathyspheres. They hammered on the sides of the spherical submersible with basin wrenches and pipes. Their appearances were repulsive. Black hair fell out in matted clumps. Their eyes glowed yellow, and their faces were pockmarked with blisters. The skin on their knuckles had been scraped clean, exposing the necrotic flesh and sinew underneath. They wore ragged scraps of clothing held together by clothespins. In some places, Elizabeth noted queasily, the pins went straight through their skirts and were buried in their legs, right down to the bone.

... there have been side effects: blindness, insanity, death...

Elizabeth took a step backwards, towards a ventilation duct set into the wall. She heard the man's breath in her ear before she saw him, standing right behind her...

"Cat lick your heart," he rasped.

Elizabeth screamed.

The misshapen lump of his face leered, pulsing with weeping sores. He gnashed his black and broken teeth. Elizabeth staggered towards the center of the pavilion. The two women looked up from the bathysphere, and their pupils narrowed to slits.

"Painted whore!" they shrieked. Their lips split and blood dripped down their chins.

Elizabeth searched for a weapon, but the department store floor was spotless. The displays were locked behind thick panes of glass. As Elizabeth skirted the edges of the pavilion, the disfigured creatures barred down on her, hefting their wrenches and gutting knives and icepicks. Elizabeth looked back towards the department store complex. When the deformed man circled around to join his two companions, Elizabeth bolted for the Prêt-à-Porter boutique.

"Pretend you're not interested!" the creatures snarled. "They like that!"

As Elizabeth drew closer to the shop, she saw the security turret's light darken from green to red. The stocky machine swiveled, aiming its double-barreled gun straight at Elizabeth. She dove behind a rack of clothing, and the turret fired several rounds into the assailants, daubing the far wall in scarlet. The man died instantly, a bullet burying in his exposed brain cavity. Several more sliced through the women's throats. They fell to their knees, grasping at their necks, gurgling in agony as blood pooled on the glossy hardwood floors.