Dead Space: Catalyst by Brian Evenson

should have done. But yes, he would listen to it. Slowly he pulled himself around and stood up, then went to the chair.
    “There, that’s better,” said the red-faced man.
    No, said the voice, it isn’t. But we will make it better.
    “Yes,” said Istvan. He was talking to the voice, but the red-faced man thought he was talking to him and so he nodded.
    “Good,” the man said. “Now are you ready to tell me what happened?”
    Tell him ‘yes,’ said the voice. And now the voice was no longer feeling like it was inside him exactly, it was more than that somehow. He was beginning to see now a shadowy shape forming there right next to the red-faced man. Not a body exactly, it would never be a body. But, he knew from past experience, eventually it would be like a body. It was like his vision was slowly adjusting so that it could begin to see what was really there. He smiled.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Good,” said the red-faced man. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who were you working for?”
    The shadowy shape was now more or less human, though still a little blurred around the edges. He watched as the shadow man put its hands around the red-faced man’s throat and pretend to choke him. The red-faced man didn’t seem to notice. Then the shape turned to Istvan and nodded encouragingly.
    Now you, it said.
    In an instant he had sprung out of his chair and thrown himself across the table, knocking both the red-faced man and his chair backward. The man gave a startled cry and then his head struck the cement floor and his body was suddenly loose. Istvan clamped his fingers around the man’s throat and squeezed.
    Yes , said the shadow man, now kneeling beside him, an awful smile on its blurry lips. Do it. Harder!
    And then the door burst open and other hands were on him tearing him off, dragging him away.

 
    10
    They bound his hands again. After a while, they brought him back into the interrogation room, unless it was a different room. Curious, he tried to look to see if there was blood on the floor that had leaked out of the man’s head but either this was a different room or they had cleaned the blood up. Then more questions, from several people this time, back and forth, none of them giving him a chance to do much. Where was the voice? Now that it had a shadow body, had it simply walked off? In any case, he couldn’t hear it. He kept listening for it but couldn’t hear it, but it was so hard sometimes to hear the inside voices when there were so many outside voices talking.
    Whatever he was saying to answer the questions didn’t seem to be satisfying them; they kept on asking him the same questions again and again as if he had another answer to give to them. So, he stopped answering. This didn’t seem to help any, though: they still kept on asking, and now they started acting like his body might have the answers as well. They kept yanking on his hair or pushing his head down or pushing his head up or edging him out of the chair. When he hit the ground he lay there, wondering if the inside voice would come back. But nothing happened. They were right there, all around them, but it felt to him like they were moving farther and farther away, like he was burrowing deeper and deeper into his own body where they couldn’t get at him.
    After a while, they took him away, down a hall and to a cell, and locked him in. Once he was alone, he felt himself slowly beginning to fill up his body again, until the things around him felt like they were real and there again. His body, he realized, hurt a lot, ached all over. There were bruises on his arms and legs where they had hit him, and probably bruises on his face, too, though there was no mirror or anything reflective he could use to examine it. There was the taste of blood in his mouth and he seemed to be missing a tooth.
    He groaned a little, pulled himself onto the narrow cot and lay there. How had this happened to him? Why were things always happening to him in ways that