Terrifying Tales

The Art of Suffering

This was my first trip to The Consortium building, which I had not even visited as a boy on a class trip. Few children of Earth in the space era had not been. But, I had always refused: repulsed by a strong, nonspecific sense that within the walls of that place lay my deepest fears. Even passing it by on the street engendered a sort of tingling along my spine. There was no particular reason for this eerie feeling, and I could give you no specific explanation for its origin. Yet, intense disquiet always accompanied the mental picture of The Consortium's multicolored walls and shimmering, iridescent security dome.

Schoolyard gossip swirled around the most secretive elements of The Consortium, and imbued it with something approaching a legendary status.

"They've got animals locked up in cages in the basement. A friend of my dad's seen them pulling out eye gunk with a syringe to do tests on it and shit!" a self-appointed, sixth grade expert told me once, years ago.

"No, no, you've got it all wrong," an intellectual challenger imperiously corrected. "They do radio testing, and try to find ways of getting people's heads to explode. I saw it myself a few years ago. I slipped off from a tour and caught a glimpse through a door in a restricted area. They popped a rabbit's head like a balloon." Several days of rabbit-head nightmares followed that exchange. I was not, in the end, a particularly brave boy.

A moment of premonition and, strangely, of distant memory accompanied the first rays of light hitting my cornea as I rounded the corner and caught my first glimpse of The Consortium in 30 years. It had not changed. The city around it had twisted and changed shape, but The Consortium was like an oak: solid, timeless, forever. How many people had lived and died in its austere shadow?

When I arrived at the edge of the dome, a small group of uniformed men ushered me through: the force field parting around me as they held up small, round devices to facilitate my entrance. I raised my hands, at their direction, as I was subjected to a thorough patdown. Even the quarter in my breast pocket which I had all but forgotten about did not escape their notice. After what felt like an absurd length of time, I was finally deemed not a threat, and allowed to pass. I held my identification card up to the fat man at the reception desk, who waved me through without much interest.

He seemed totally dull to the outside world: as if his body had become a kind of sensory deprivation tank for the mind. I shuddered at the not-so-impossible future which momentarily flashed before my eyes in which I shared his fate.

We moved from the lobby to the elevator, which became incredibly claustrophobic with the accompanying uniformed men. I made a few weak attempts at casual conversation which they returned with only stony silence. It was just as well. I imagine small talk with them would have been more intense than any conversation I had previously experienced.

As we descended into the lower levels of the building, my claustrophobia intensified. I pulled the small, yellowed slip of paper which I had been mindlessly rubbing between my thumb and forefinger in my pocket out to look at once again. It was a vaguely frightening summons which induced dread not so much because of what it said but because of the implicit blankness of its brevity:

"June 3, 2 pm, don't be late." It was printed on a piece of Consortium stationery. The blues and golds of its elaborate crest were dazzling under the right light. There were few good things I had to say about that place as an institution, but its graphic design was beyond reproach.

The light "ding" of the elevator reaching its destination startled my somewhat frayed nerves. This was not how I had intended to spend my weekend. As the doors opened, I braced myself for what I might see. Were the stories of torture and brutality true? Would I be scarred for life by images of medical malpractice and cruelty?