The Attention Farm — Part 6

Series — ARC Director Neil Lurk is tasked with an act of unlikely sabotage that could thwart Willow’s return, or doom humanity

Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash

Earlier…

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Director Neil Lurk knew he was alone in his office — air gapped and encased in six foot thick concrete walls — just like he knew the men pounding on the steel-alloy door would never manage to breach the room without a few well-placed bricks of C4.

Yet despite his higher reasoning, Neil couldn't shake the feeling someone — or something — stood behind him. His neck hair bristled against the collar of a well-starched shirt as he looked over his shoulder for the umpteenth time. Neil recognized the signs from years of reports and experiments: something profane had made its way into the premises.

A Sigil, he thought. He shuddered, and turned his attention back to the security console.

"Can you feel it?" Josiah asked. His voice sounded tinny through the receiver of Niel's phone, propped against one of the control panels.

"Like a splinter in my spine," the director answered through gritted teeth. 

"Then they have the Confinium with them. Can you still see Winston?"

Neil squinted at the wall of security feeds, flipping through dozens of camera angles throughout the facility. Every cubicle studio in the seemingly endless content creation room stood empty, save for a few dozen bodies. These were strewn about from the brief but bloody struggle between the Group E security personnel, and everyone else.

An almost religious procession now packed the wide corridors of the sub basements, all leading to one blast-proof door in the bowels of the facility. Not his own, but that of the ARC vault.

He settled on a feed from outside the entrance to this sanctum, to get a better look at the group. Near the front, a small Mikoshi rose above the crowd, borne on the shoulders of two dozen robbed figures. Behind a pair of pulled-back curtains, Winston sat in an ornate chair. He had been stripped of his shirt, and the Sigil of Willow had been painted across his chest.

"Found him," Neil said. "They're carrying him like he's their god or something." 

"In a manner of speaking, he is," Cal chirped.

"Do you have a camera feed on the archway?" Josiah asked.

Another few button presses.  "Yep," Neil confirmed.

“If I send you a symbol, can you burn it in as a watermark over that feed?”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s see it.”

“Already on its way.”

Neil’s phone chimed with a new message notification. The image he received was a near-identical copy of the Willow Sigil, surrounded by a shield-shaped line.

“Hang on. Let me get this into the system.” Keys clacked beneath the director's fingers. Then: "There we go, yeah. Now what?"

"You're going to broadcast that feed on every possible channel, open the doors, and let those bastards in for whatever ritual they have planned.”

In the background of the call, Cal gasped.

"Are you insane?" Neil demanded. "If I do that, they'll—"

"I know exactly what they'll try to do. I'm just betting that those freaks don't understand the Confinium as well as they think."

"All due respect, this is a lot to stake on the word of a stranger. What if you're wrong?"

"Then the Sigil returns. The world gets plunged into the kind of darkness humanity forgot even existed," Josiah said in a flat, even tone. "You could try calling for backup to clear out the cultists. But 19 out of every 20 people who get to the scene will fall under Willow’s influence, and you’ll have an even bigger army outside your door. Do you have a kill switch? Self destruct? Anything to vaporize ARC?”

“Like an on-site nuke? Of course not, we’re in the middle of a city!”

“Then eventually, they’ll make it in. Same result. Open the doors, Director. Have faith.”

Neil’s hand hovered over the door release button, and hesitated. “Have mercy,” he muttered, and brought down his palm on the console.

An alarm buzzer blared.

The crowd of cultists cheered silently on the video feeds, before flooding through the still-opening vault door, like water through a cracked dam.

“It’s done. Check your feeds. I’m streaming the archway everywhere; Sigil burned in, just like you asked.”

“It’s trending,” Cal confirmed. “Quarter million active viewers and growing.”

“The memetic effect will take over from here; almost everyone watching now will share it with everyone they know,” Josiah said.

Neil watched the cultist procession as they filled the room, forming a circle at a respectful distance from the arch.

The structure itself looked like it had been plucked directly from the Utah desert, easily standing three stories tall. Glyphs and symbols covered every inch of it; symbols the ARC team believed were linked to the object's apparent indestructibility. Neil remembered the herculean task of building the vault around the damn thing, and shook his head.

Was all of it for nothing?

The robed figures brought the Mikoshi to the edge of the circle, lowering it before the archway. Winston stepped out, barefoot, onto a blanketing of linens laid before him by his followers. The crowd parted to make way for a second group bearing an ornate reliquary, which they brought directly to Winston. He reached inside and withdrew an enormous tome, bound in hide and bearing glyphs matching those on the archway.

Winston raised the book overhead and stepped toward the rock structure. 

The crowd of cultists joined arms and began to sway, giving the tightly packed ring the appearance of some undulating life form . As Winston stepped closer, the carvings of the archway and book began to burn with a brilliant blue glow.

"Are you two seeing this?"

"The whole world is seeing it," Josiah said. “Someone from the White House, or the DOD—”

A harsh emergency tone cut him off. The call ended, replaced by the kind of warning pop-up typically reserved for Amber Alerts and imminent severe weather:

WATCH NOW — IMPORTANT ADDRESS FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Without his input, a video clip began playing on his phone screen; the same stream of the occult ceremony he had been broadcasting, beneath the watermark of the modified sigil.

Anyone in the same room as a cell phone would now be forced to bear witness.

A low frequency hum filled Neil’s ears, producing an uncomfortable vibration in his back teeth. He would've sworn the sound included murmured chanting in an unrecognizable language.

Winston stood squarely beneath the archway, clutching the Signum Confinium against his chest. He turned to face the camera, winced, and opened the book.

The instant the pages parted it was no longer a book, but a doorway to an abyssal void beyond Neil's comprehension. The aperture spread like an inkstain to fill the arch, offering a better look at the skittering shadows and impossible colors that lay beyond. 

The vibration intensified until Neil feared his teeth would crack. The hum swelled, the chanting stopped, and the room was still.

Black smoke — not a dark or ashen gray, but a true lightless mass — erupted from the opening like a geyser.

Tremors shook the building as each security feed grew dark, choked out by the rapidly spreading mass. A crack from within the room caught his attention. Neil tore himself away from the monitors just in time to see his phone screen shatter, breaking in the shape of the modified sigil.

“No!” Neil dove for the device, but was too slow.

Black smoke billowed from the fractured phone, filling the room until it blotted the light. Neil screamed, only to find tendrils of the darkness slithering down his throat, burning as it went. The sensation felt the way he would have imagined retching, sped up and in reverse.

He choked, blinked, realized the smoke was thinning as it filled his body.

When the last particle of the noxious air had burrowed into his lungs, Neil collapsed against the security station, head swimming. He gripped the edge of the console with clammy hands, steadying himself until his vision cleared. 

The director forced his eyes to focus, turning his gaze to the display. Corpses — and he was sure they were dead from the impossible contortions some force had wrought on their bodies — lined every corridor from the lobby to the vault.

The vibration, the hum, it had all stopped. The facility fell silent. 

Winston himself had fallen to his knees beneath the archway, cradling the now closed book. He appeared to be exhausted, but moving.

Neil’s phone rang once. He snapped it up before it could ring again. “What the hell did you do?” He demanded of the caller. “The smoke, the Sigil—it’s inside me!”

“Inside of everyone,” Josiah corrected him. “Everyone who watched that broadcast is now containing a small, torn piece of Willow.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Back in Gorham, Winston opened the door to let that thing out. But he had a change of heart. At the last second, he sabotaged the ritual and stepped in front of the doorway. He managed to trap enough of Willow in his own body to keep it from fully spreading its influence,” Josiah explained. “Of course, that thing was eating away at him for years, pushing him back toward Gorham to finish what he started.”

“So that’s it? That’s the end of it?”

“Doubtful. Willow may be split apart, but even a small piece of a force like that could play with the wrong head. The strong willed folk, ones you call Class E’s—they’ll be fine. But the more impressionable… I’d expect the Sigil to bring out their most vapid, attention-seeking and self-destructive behaviors.”

“A tough burden for weak shoulders,” Cal remarked.

A sinking realization came to him: “Then all we’ve really done is slow the bleeding, or diminish the impact. Willow is still here with us, in our world, just trapped, somehow.”

“And that’s the difference between all of us having a devil on our shoulder, and the legions of hell laying waste to the Earth,” Josiah said. “But yeah, that thing is here, biding it’s time.”

In the silence that followed, Neil felt something moving in the deepest recesses of his mind. It was the same place that always prickled against the presence of a Sigil. Only now it wasn’t a prickling sensation, but the slow uncoiling of an alien presence, making itself comfortable in its new home.

Thank You for Reading!

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