SHE WASN’T THERE AGAIN TODAY, I WISH SHE’D GO AWAY

By Meriades Rai

“You understand that I am your master?” Griffin screamed, waving his gloved fists in fury. “You understand that your life, whatever manner of existence that might be, is mine to control; to end, if I see fit? And yet still you defy me?”

The madman’s cry reverberated about the coarsely lit cellar that had been converted into a private laboratory, but the only response was the customary hum of electrical current passing through the spools of copper wire that trailed about the walls and floor, concentrated upon the contraption at the heart of the room. The machine was enormous, some twenty feet in diameter, and was semi-spherical, resembling the lower half of a deep-sea-diving bathysphere sawn off at the mid-section. It was fashioned from copper and steel, its outer shell liberally tarnished and lumpen with blots of welding slag and blunt nubs of rivets. Inside the bowl of the half-sphere, the metal was more polished and glowed with the reflected light of two-dozen small, neon spot-lamps. About the serrated perimeter of the bowl there were six equidistant copper rods threaded with wire coils of varying thickness. Every now and then one of these rods would spark and sing, and that insistent hum would rise in pitch for a heartbeat or two.

The semi-sphere was empty. Or, at least, that was how it appeared.

Griffin, however, knew better…

The continued lack of response to his questioning infuriated him. “You will learn to respect me,” he breathed, his gloved hand dropping to the panel before him where two levers protruded from a steel plate, side-by-side. Nigh identical in appearance, but allocated with two entirely different purposes.

“When I’m done with you, you’ll beg me for release,” he cried. “But that will only come if you give me what I want!”

Griffin grasped the left-hand lever and ratcheted it forwards in its groove, and the immediate response was for the half-sphere to suddenly burn bright with electrical charge, dancing from one rod to another and then changing partners, back and forth, side to side, leaping arcs of smoking blue and white. The emptiness at the heart of the bowl shimmered. There was an odor, hot and sulphuric.

And, just for a moment, there was the hazy glimmer of a shape, the distinct outline of a body…

Griffin released the lever and stepped back, panting. The current abated, and once again all was still. Now, however, there was another noise overlaid with the general hum of power: a faint moan, like a gasp of surprise, or pain. Griffin inclined his head.

He wore a long brown coat, leather boots and a trilby. Tan trousers and a crisp white shirt. Leather gloves. A considerable length of scarf, wound copiously about the neck and shoulders. Beneath the brim of his hat, his face was swathed in bandages, forming the general cut of his nose and jaw but smothering any true sense of feature. Tinted spectacles over his eyes.

Not a scrap of flesh to be seen.

Not any more.

“I’ll return in one hour,” Griffin said, softly, but with the ever-present tremble of menace. “You will speak to me then. If you want to get back to wherever it is you came from… you’ll tell me what I want to know. Because otherwise, next time, I’ll keep cooking you until you fry. You just think on that.”

And then he turned and took his leave, scaling the flight of wooden steps in the back corner of the cellar and exiting through an oak door that he bolted behind him with a strangled, wordless oath of wrath.

In his wake, the semi-spherical machine hummed quietly, seemingly empty and alone.

It was only then that the woman standing across the room stepped forward, emerging from the shadows beyond a worktable littered with chemicals, experimental apparatus and sheaves of notepaper and journals. She was young and fair, and she’d been considered pretty, but recent sadness had robbed her of any true beauty. That, and the fact she was now so… overlooked.

“He forgot I was even here,” said Flora, gently. “There’s… a certain irony in that, isn’t there?”

The empty machine thrummed. Flora stared into the heart of it, her eyes dark and full.

“He wasn’t always like this,” she said. “I don’t just mean physically. I mean the man himself. Before… before the accident, he was kind. Gracious. Driven, yes, as anyone in his vocation must be to succeed, and there were times when he was so absorbed in the pursuit of some breakthrough or another he’d neglect me. But he never forgot. It was never a case that he couldn’t… see me.”

Flora smiled, bitterly. And desperately, with a tremble to her lower lip that rendered her face so fragile, as if it were about to crumble to dust.

“We’re made for each other, then,” she whispered. “The invisible man… and his invisible woman.”

She turned away, defeated.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Flora froze in her tracks, her eyes widening as she heard the disembodied whisper at her ear. She whirled, but saw nothing. She stared into the electrical machine.

“Your voice,” she breathed. “He said you’d have one. He knew. But… you sound human. How is that possible…?”

Your husband, he thought he was summoning some kind of demon, didn’t he? I don’t know exactly what year this is but I’m assuming it’s the age where the end of spiritualism coincided with the beginnings of industrial and scientific endeavor. Late nineteenth century, early twentieth? That’s when demonology and occultism was all the rage.

Flora merely stood, aghast.

Trust me, the voice in the ether murmured. I know what it’s like to live with a man consumed by the wonders of science. My husband has… had his fair share of accidents too. Setbacks. But he reacted in an entirely different way.

Flora reached out to steady herself against the control panel, careful not to dislodge either of the two levers.

“You’re a woman,” she said. “The way you talk about us… you’re from the future…?”

Yes.

“But that’s-”

Not impossible. Your husband constructed a device he believed would snare an otherworldly force as prescribed by a register of set parameters – and that’s exactly what he did. He just didn’t appreciate that time and dimensional space often overlap. ‘The past is another country’, as someone once said – or, in your case, is yet to say.

Flora straightened abruptly, her expression brightening. “My God, you’re real!” she declared. “It did work. And you can save him, reverse the process! You can turn him back into the man he was. You can give me my husband again…!”

The disembodied voice said nothing, and once again there was only the low thrum of power within the copper semi-sphere. Flora gripped the control panel tightly, her knuckles whitening.

“Say you can,” she pleaded. “Say you can! I-”

“What in God’s name are you doing, woman?”

Flora spun to see Griffin descending the stairs in the corner of the cellar, his gait awkward in his coat and boots and scarf. Flora flinched to see him, recoiling from the horror he’d become.

“Get away from there!” Griffin roared, his gloved fist raised. “Are you trying to release it? Are you trying to sabotage everything I’ve done?”

Flora stumbled backwards, wringing her hands.

“It’s a she, my darling,” she whispered. “Not a demon; a woman. She says she’s from-”

“Away!” Griffin screamed, grabbing his wife about the scruff and casting her bodily aside. He paid no attention to her cries, kicking out in fury when she reached for him where she lay and then turning towards his machine, reflected electrical charge gleaming in the lenses of his tinted spectacles.

“An hour’s grace be damned!” he seethed. “I’ve changed my mind. You speak to me now! You look on what I’ve become – an unholy beast, like you – and you tell me how to turn myself back!”

Griffin reached up and began to tug ferociously at his scarf, almost strangling himself in his haste to unwind it from his neck. He tossed it aside, followed by his trilby. His entire head was revealed now, swathed in bandages, although here and there the white strips were coming loose to reveal what lay beneath: nothing.

Nothing!

Griffin ripped away his coat and gloves. No hands protruded from the sleeves of his white shirt, at least not visibly; but the fingers were there all the same, invisible, yet nimble and frenzied as they went to work on his buttons and braces. He stripped the shirt away, revealing nothing once more. His bandaged head hovered in mid-air some two feet above the belted waist of his trousers, a true grotesquery of an image. Griffin removed his spectacles and began to laugh, a terrible sound, at once rich and shrill and utterly mad.

“Look at me!” he cackled. “Look at me – if you can!”

The invisible man cavorted, snatching and pulling at his bandages, laughing all the while. Flora whimpered, her knuckles pressed to her mouth in terror as she cowered upon the floor, but Griffin ignored her. No, more than ignored; he’d forgotten her, disregarded her utterly. To him, she didn’t exist.

We’re not the same, you and I.

Griffin paused, his hands dropping from his half-bandaged face. He cocked an unseen ear towards his machine, unsure that the voice he’d heard had been real.

“You are female…”

Your wife said you used set parameters to detect me then trap me.

Griffin leaned forward, suddenly rapt. “Yes. My serum – the formula I created – was based upon extensive research into the field of optical density. I theorized that the manipulation of light, and the subsequent reduction of the refractive density of physical objects could render those objects invisible to the naked eye. I tested the formula on myself and it worked. It worked! But I couldn’t reverse the process.

“That… was four years ago. Since then I’ve toiled, mapping my biological index and using it as a template for this machine, speculating that if I could arrest a genetic match from beyond the natural world then-”

You could force that entity, through threats and the administering of pain rather than through civility and empathy, to aid you.

Griffin sneered. “Your kind don’t respond to empathy.”

You speak as if from a position of authority. But I’m no demon. And I can’t help but wonder… this mechanism, with its ability to transverse time and space and to operate on principles otherwise unexplored in your era… is it all truly your own creation? I appreciate genius, believe me, but I’m also savvy enough to recognize a man illegitimately ahead of his time. Your knowledge of both advanced science and demonology reminds me of someone…

Griffin – or the lower, visible half of him at least – shuffled forward towards the control panel.

In my age, the disembodied voice continued, a man named Victor Von Doom utilized time-travel technology to create a functioning time platform that allowed him to revisit the past. Chronally displaced replicas of this machine have found their way into existence in all manner of times and places ever since. I’m thinking you managed to procure one of these devices, even though you likely didn’t know exactly what you had, and you incorporated its workings into your own design. You believed you were casting your net outside your own established reality… but you were scanning through time instead.

“None of this is relevant,” Griffin snarled, one invisible hand closing about the left-most lever on the panel.

It is if you don’t understand the technology. Your appliance locked on to my genetic template, but my… powers are different to your affliction. I can project a refractive field outward from by body, bending light waves around me with the barest amount of visible distortion. Your condition is internal. Your entire biology, every living cell, is infused with this formula you’ve concocted; every particle, surrounded with a refractive shell. Blood, bone, tissue. You can’t control it, you can’t reverse it. And I can’t help you. I’m no scientist, and certainly no magician. You-

“You’re trying to trick me!” Griffin screamed, ratcheting the lever to full strength and released a flood of electrical current into his machine.

Beneath the thrum of the power cells there came a low moan, and at the heart of the semi-sphere another flicker of a human body. Female. Agonized.

“Stop it!” Flora breathed. “You’re killing her! Oh, Griffin, for the love of God… weren’t you listening?”

“Help me!” Griffin roared, swatting at the control panel with invisible fists, tearing open his invisible skin and speckling the air with invisible blood. “Help me! I command you!”

I can’t… I can’t… please…

“Then you’ll die! Die, die!”

“Griffin… darling…”

Flora stood, her body trembling. The left lever on the panel remained stabbed forward, and the electrical current was building. The moan emanating from the ghostly woman at the heart of the machine was now rising in pitch, her suffering palpable.

“Griffin, stop it!”

But the invisible man wasn’t listening. His wife, the invisible woman, was of no consequence.

Please, the voice in the ether begged. Release me.

Griffin raged, ripping the last of his bandages from his unseen face. It was in that moment that Flora realized the woman in the semi-sphere wasn’t pleading with him – she was talking to her. One invisible woman to the other.

Please.

Flora stepped forward. She brushed against her husband without seeing him, and he absently shoved her aside. But, this time, she wasn’t for the moving. She reached out towards the control panel and grasped the second lever, the one on the right.

“No!” Griffin bellowed, suddenly noticing that his wife was still in his presence. “Get away from there! What are you doing, woman? What-”

“I’m existing, my darling,” Flora breathed.

And then she pulled the lever.

The copper contraption immediately began to shudder and pop with a shrill groan, then cracked and spat as electricity arced from the copper poles about its upper perimeter. Power surged and burned bright. Lights flashed. The air smoked and sparked with flicker-haze.

Griffin screamed.

“No. No!”

He lashed out with an invisible fist, bludgeoning his wife so fiercely about the head that she pitched forward into the clunking, quaking collapse of her husband’s machine. Electricity passed through her, and she spasmed and erupted in conflagration.

Behind her, arms outstretched, Griffin wailed and stumbled.

He might have been reaching for her.

In that moment, the old Griffin may have seen his wife clearly for the first time in four years – and in the next moment, when the electricity passed from her to him upon their last, desperate touch, there was a distinct flash of a man’s body.

Just for a second, the two of them not longer invisible to one other.

But then, tragically, it was done.

The machine splintered, and the power died.

The cellar laboratory burned, and the house above would follow.

No one would know what had happened here this night – at least, no one of this era.

In another time and place, however, when a woman released from her mysterious confinement was returned to her rightful state in time and space, she would remember, with sorrow as much as with pain. Back in the presence of her loved ones, she’d try to explain as best she could.

But, of course, she’d be greeted with quizzical expressions and a slightly embarrassed shuffling of the feet, especially from her husband, absorbed in his own latest experiment. Because, you see, no one had even noticed she’d been missing.

That was the misfortune of being an invisible woman.