Tiny Horror

Vane moved with a speed that defied the ability of Kaelen to track. Before Kaelen could react, Vane was across the room. His hand caught Kaelen by the throat with a grip that felt like iron bands.

The world of Kaelen exploded into a kaleidoscope of agony.

The physical contact was like being plugged into a high voltage line. Because Vane was a Faraday cage: a man who had trained his mind to be a hollow void: the contact created a psychic vacuum. The consciousness of Kaelen began to pour into the emptiness of the mind of Vane.

It was a landscape of razors. The thoughts of Vane were nothing but tactical assessments and kill orders. There was no love. There was no fear. There was no regret. Just a cold, grey expanse of efficiency that felt like walking on broken glass.

You want to see? The mind of Kaelen screamed. You want to know what I feel? You want to taste the rot?

Kaelen stopped fighting the vacuum. He opened the floodgates. He tore down the lead lined walls he had spent a lifetime building.

He stopped trying to be Kaelen Voss, the mentalist. He became the leaking vessel he'd always feared. He reached out into the city, beyond the walls of the Orthos facility. He grabbed the noise of the ten million souls living in the metropolis. He channeled it all through his own nervous system.

He projected the sensory overload of a thousand car crashes. He projected the copper taste of a million dying breaths. He took the jagged, unedited horror of human existence: the sound of bones snapping, the smell of gangrene, the wet heat of a killer's sweat: and shoved it into the sterile silence of the mind of Cassian Vane.

"Taste it!" Kaelen shrieked.

The eyes of Vane bulged. A thin line of black, viscous blood erupted from his left ear. The shielding of the killer didn't just crack. It shattered like a window hit by a sledgehammer. The Faraday cage was filled with the screaming, weeping, laughing, dying roar of the collective consciousness of a city. Vane was no longer a man. He was a vessel for the agony of millions.

Vane let go of Kaelen's throat. His hands flew to his head. He began to scream: a sound that wasn't human. It was the sound of a mind being shredded into wet ribbons by the sheer weight of too much truth. His body began to smoke as his neurons fired in a continuous, lethal loop.

Vane stumbled back. His shoes were sliding on the linoleum which was now slick with the sweat of his own terror. He hit the glass partition of the lab. His body convulsed as his nervous system misfired. Every muscle in his body jammed at once. He fell to the floor. His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, and then even the whites began to bleed.

Kaelen collapsed to his knees. His vision was going black. The noise was still there: a tidal wave of gore and light that threatened to sweep him away into permanent madness.

The tale continues...