Alder-King by Zary Fekete
Based on the poem “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The father and the child walked together, arm in arm, through the great vaulted halls of the Interspace Headquarters. They passed many a portal to the left and to the right which bore signs such as “Virtual Training” and “Online Constabulary” and the like, yet their steps took them resolutely, without tarry or distraction, toward one particular destination which loomed large ahead of them as they drew close. Finally, the two pods came into view over which a largish sign was affixed which read, “Child Interspace Imprinting”.
Upon reaching the twin pods, the father carefully eased the small boy into the smaller of the two machines. His large hands installed the headset upon the child and soon the small, blond head was crowned with a device out of which many wires ran this way and that. Having ascertained the secure placement of his son in the pod, soon the father too was seated in his own machine with a larger headset. The doors on the pods closed with a click and somewhere high above in the firmament of the chamber a technician pressed a few codes through on a keyboard. The lights in the pods darkened and both father and child closed their eyes and opened their inner views on a new world. A digital forest lay before them.
Programmed as it was for the education of the young, the digital forest comprised within it all variety of visual illusion and optical confection. Within the inner world the father and son saw themselves represented by a larger and smaller pixelated figure respectively. The two figures walked forward toward the forest together. The father figure pointed from time to time at some distant configuration and the son’s small form responded to the prompts with cautious but not clumsy movements of his own.
After a moment or two the father pressed through an arranged sequence and soon, his son with dutiful precision, followed his father’s keystrokes on his own smaller HUD. Then, before the two minds, twinned in pods though they were bodily, in the reflexive space of both minds, moved the two figures, a larger and a smaller, representing them both, to grasp one another’s hands. These two figures strode forward through the inner space toward the deeper forest ahead, and as they did, the figures crossed beneath a banner held aloft as though in the nanobytes of the digital air and read, “Who goes so late through night and wind?”
The first moments of training passed with no ill report. The father continued to call forth his son’s attention to either side, to small brambles or tugging vines of distraction, and, prompted as he was, the son responded truly, avoiding the underbrush and stepping free of dark hollows and black regresses. Near soon the introductory sequences were logged and bound, and the father proceeded with the longer code. A darker section of the forest opened itself to them and soon they walked together into the blackened path, and when the child figure looked back he saw the path had closed soundly behind them and no glimpse of the entry portal from where their journey began could be seen.
The son began to turn back toward the path ahead, but, in the split second before he lost sight of the way behind him, his attention was caught by a sudden flash of movement in the trees. A figure appeared behind him in the forest. The body was dark, but the face had a silvery shine. The face of the figure held still a moment, and then, horribly, a largish smile widened across the white face, as though it were a crack in the surface of the world. Though it was a smile it was somehow ghastly and the upturned lips suggested malevolent interest. The father felt the son twitch. He looked down at the small figure and saw a flicker of interference in the small body. At that same moment the father heard the crack of thunder and felt a subtle shift in the grounding of the program that governed the inner world. He perceived something change in the root code. When he bent his gaze down toward the child again he observed how the small one was resisting some outside force. He bent toward his son and quickly pressed out a message for his son to observe. “My son, wherefore tremblest thou?”
The boy was still held in terrible and rapt attention to the dark figure behind him in the forest, but when he was able to seize control of his senses he sent back to his father an urgent message of his own. “Look, father, the Alder-King crouches behind! Dost see not it? Its crown and serrated smile?”
The father, proven as he was with his own memories of the first digital steps he once took with his own father, mused to himself what his son must be seeing, unaccustomed as the young one’s eyes must be to the inner digital terrain. Often, he recalled, these digital educational pathways contained within themselves purposeful stations where caution was advised so as to better prepare the young for their future travels. This must be the cause of the thunder and the shift in the terrain, he mused to himself. He sent back a message of mollification to the child, “My son, tis merely the wraithlike mist of distraction rising up from the forest’s floor. Give it no further glance and fix thine eyes forward.”
However, in spite of the father’s message no such calm could the child find, for a moment after the father’s words arrived, they were cast aside by the strangely pitched voice of the silvery figure behind him in the forest. The child shook as he heard the words unfold, both on his screen and also, somehow, within his ears and, indeed, in his very mind. The being spoke with a terrible firmness, “Come, thou dear infant! Oh, come thou with me! Many a game I have for thy mind."
With a terrified sob the son tore himself free from the silvery words and rushed toward the figure of his father who had turned away and was continuing ahead into the woods. The child felt the Alder-Being behind him reaching for him as he ran. He stumbled in an ungainly fashion toward the father, and, reaching high up toward his father’s hand, he tried to grasp it while earnestly crying out a new message, “My father, my father, and dost thou not hear the words the silvery one breathes in mine ear?
Thinking perhaps folly and childish mischief was afoot, the father made not to stop, but briefly checked his step. He looked down at the face of his son and allowed only the briefest of messages, “Be calm, dearest child, 'tis but thy fancy. 'Tis the sad wind that sighs through withering leaves.”
By now the figure of the child was juttering, detaching from the main signal. His body was half in one place and half split into another. Nothing in the father’s words could bring respite to the child for in the very moment when the father’s message faded from his vision he saw with awful clarity behind him the marked shapes of, not one, but several silvery shadows trailing behind him. The boy’s steps betrayed him, for no matter how he tried to dash toward the distant figure of his father, his feet felt trapped as though in glue. He reached down to free his foot, but at that moment the awful smiling shapes behind grew monstrously and in each face was another and another of the gaping serrated mouths. The Alder-One was writhed and encircled with many more of its kind, each with their own smaller mouth, but each one snapping and smiling with intense interest. A high, frightful song came from the murmuring, silvery crowd of figures behind the boy, and, clearest of all above the terrible words came the voice of the Being, “Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there, my love? My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care. They have a bed prepared for thee. They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."
The child was now so terrified he could move his feet no further. He stood and felt his sight dwarfed by the rising figures as they approached. The figures were now close enough for him to see saliva and some kind of wet excretion dripping from their jaws. Unable to move but still with enough sense to cry out, the child pitched his message to the highest possible alert and sent it toward his father, “My father, my father, and dost thou not see how the Alder-One his daughters has brought here for me?”
The father stopped. He felt the hairs upon his neck rise. He turned and no sooner did his vision fall upon his son when he, too, heard now, with terrifying finality and utter conviction, the somehow simultaneously high and low harmonic voice of a being from the inner world. The father, now with his eyes opened from the adult-world of benevolence, heard with his own ears a thudding convicted voice of awful sentence. He saw the Alder-King touch his son and heard the black words, “I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy! I’m taking thee now."
A high-pitched cry now filled the writhing forest as the son felt his arms pulled from his body. He felt claws enter his mouth and eyes and feverishly dig therein. He vacantly marveled that the cry he heard was his own. The father rushed back toward the horrible scene. He stretched out his arms and caught up the tortured body of his son and ripped it from the silvery shapes. He then turned and ran full force back in the direction of the entrance portal. As he ran he felt a violent shudder wrack through the body of the child and with each jerk of the entrails he heard, echoing in his mind, his child’s relentless message, pounding through his ears and out into the distant trees, “My father, my father, the teeth! They hurt me!”
In what seemed like an eternity of frantic struggle though in what may have only been a matter of seconds, the father saw, finally, the entry portal rising up before him. He clutched his child to his breast as he plunged himself forward and dove out of the aperture. Immediately he was back in his physical space within the pod. The sequence ended. He tore the headset from his head. He kicked repeatedly at the door of his pod. There was splintering and breaking and finally he was out. He lunged out and scrabbled frantically at the pod door of the smaller unit where his son still lay within. Finally, with a breaking of plastic and a shattering of screens and circuitry, the father wrenched the final hinge from its mooring. Smoke and the high smell of acid poured out. He reached in to the twisted interior of the pod. The smoke cleared and he saw pale skin and wide eyes.
The boy was dead.