Folie à Deux
A Short Story
By the time any of us had noticed the leak, we’d already drained too much gas to reroute back to Earth. There’d been some kind of fault with the docking procedure, the tanks had been just a fraction too loose during takeoff, and suddenly Artemis IX had found itself half way to the moon without enough fuel to make it home in one piece. Landing on the surface was quite the opposite of the simple process we’d trained for, but thanks to Murphy’s last-minute rewiring of the emergency thrust protocols and Cohen’s extra hours in steering practice, the ship made it onto the ground in one piece.
That was four months ago, presuming my tallies in the gravel were up to date. Ground Control had claimed the rescue would take six, but we’d both heard Cohen on the radio and knew they’d fallen behind to at least double that. That left eight more months of laborious work, emergency rations, and nothing but the sound of our own voices and the warmth of our suits to keep us company. They always say that nobody can hear you scream in space, but they often fail to mention that any sound at all, even the most gut-wrenching of screams, would be a welcome reminder that there’s more to the universe than three stranded astronauts and endless fields of grey dust.
The first couple of months passed fairly quick once the initial dismay of being stuck almost 400,000 kilometers away from our families had sunk in. The mission was simple — the Artemis Project had been established to gather information about the moon’s topography to help the smarter ones among us back home figure out how we could migrate the species to another planet one day. We studied the rocks, looked for any signs of mineral growth or natural formations; we’re scouts to see if there’s anything here that we could use back home.
By some miracle, it didn’t take long for us to find the Artemis Base where the previous missions had left all their workings and supplies. It was only a few kilometers from the shuttle, so we’d been able to transfer all our tools and get started right away. For a while it almost seemed easy. We picked up where the previous workers had finished, using their discoveries to set up plenty of excavation sites in the nearby area where we could work. As the Mission Commander, Cohen usually stayed behind at the base while I made the trips onto the surface with Murphy.
Except one day, Murphy stayed behind too. Some kind of stomach bug, if I remember correctly. So I went out to the excavation site on my own.
That was the first time I saw him.
The excavation equipment had been brought to the base over a series of test journeys a few decades ago, so by the time we’d arrived, the sites were already well-equipped with enormous gas pumps, thick metal piping, and elaborate wiring systems that kept the drills moving during our days off. It was a complicated process to say the least; every time I arrived I found myself struck with a deeper amazement at the work that had preceded us.
But that one day, the first time any of us had led a solo mission, I arrived to find that the wiring had all been disconnected at the source. Sockets had been torn from their place on the walls, bulbs had shattered under the force of pressurized oxygen without anywhere to go, and the transport pipes had become clogged with thick clumps of dust and gravel. The entire operation stood completely still.
I’d spent hours walking through the darkened corridors trying to repair the structures that had been destroyed — they’d warned us about debris storms during our training, and that’s exactly what Cohen ultimately put this incident down to, but the precision of these breakages was unlike anything that could’ve come about by chance. Still, I might’ve bought into the debris storm theory if I hadn’t seen him there.
It was his eyes that first caught my attention, staring down at me from the other end of an empty corridor. The bright red pupils stood out like beacons against a sea of darkness, and once my own eyes adjusted to the absence of light after a few moments, the rest of his features became clear. A pale white face, devoid of all emotion, with jagged bones pushing against the flesh in random directions. He wore no spacesuit, exposing his tall, lean form entirely to the elements of space. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds before I turned and ran, but those bright red eyes didn’t divert from their targets for a single moment.
I don’t know how far he followed me — I kept running until the sounds of his heavy footsteps began to fade away into the distance. Eventually, the silhouette of the research camp rose over the horizon, and I knew I was safe again. I’d considered keeping the encounter to myself, entirely aware that Cohen and Murphy wouldn’t have any reason to believe me, but my behavior must’ve given away that something had happened because just hours later, they’d cornered me in the cabin.
Neither of them believed me at first — why would they? As far as we knew, the three of us were the only living creatures on this floating chunk of rock and I’d started wailing about visions of a tall, dark creature destroying the excavation sites. It was prime ammunition for Cohen to flex his positional superiority and confine me to ‘remote work’ in the shuttle until my ‘hallucinations’ ceased.
But if the immense pressure of the zero-oxygen atmosphere wasn’t going to stop him, the aluminum walls of our ship weren’t either. It was barely two days before he appeared to me again — conveniently in the late hours of night so that Cohen could chalk this encounter down to ‘sleep paralysis’. I’d awoken from a terrible dream, which were becoming uncomfortably common since our first meeting, to see his monstrous features peering through the darkness at me from the other side of the room. I’d tried screaming for help, but found myself unable to make any noise.
This time, however, the creature didn’t come towards me. He didn’t even seem to make any threat; he stood there for what must’ve been an hour just smiling. I was frozen in fear — which didn’t help my argument against sleep paralysis — and couldn’t do anything to stop him, but instead of claiming me as an easy target, the monster just watched.
I started to think it was the devil. Or at least, some creature that existed long before mankind and inspired all those ancient folk tales that eventually became our modern concept of the devil. Any natural creature, at least with similar survival instincts to our own, would’ve surely taken either of these chances to kill me or run away — the same way humans work with their ‘fight or flight’ reflex. But there was nothing natural about this creature’s intentions.
I saw him three more times after that, each time with the same paralyzed observation as the last. He never made any kind of threat, never followed me like the first time, just stood in the corner of whatever darkened room I found myself in and watched with a silent grin. It was this exact inaction that ultimately persuaded me of Cohen’s accuracy in diagnosing these simply as hallucinations. It must’ve been some trick of the mind. If the devil was really stalking me, surely he would’ve actually done something by now.
Not to mention, he isn’t real.
A few days later, some two weeks after I’d originally burdened my copilots with visions of Satan, Murphy asked for my help carrying supplies back from one of the sites. As always, Cohen happily stayed behind and worked on his ever-vague ‘research’ while the pair of us made the three-mile journey to Delta Site 3; it wasn’t until we reached our destination that Murphy felt safe disclosing the true reason he’d asked for my company.
“I saw the devil.”
He told me that it happened the night after I’d first mentioned the visions to them both. My first instinct, still operating under the conclusion that I was having some kind of hallucinatory breakdown, was to demand that Murphy describes the creature in as much detail as possible. I’d given the others a brief outline of what I’d seen, but always stayed clear of going into the exact features that still haunted my dreams.
Murphy obliged, removing a piece of scrap paper from his pocket and turning it over to reveal an almost photorealistic drawing of the creature. It was exactly the same, complete with the jagged bone structure and cracked pale skin — but what sent the biggest chill down my spine was the expression that he’d captured on his face. The exact same nothingness that had initially led to me to believe that such a passive creature couldn’t possibly be the devil. It now gave me the complete opposite impression.
Knowing our Mission Commander’s stance on the subject, we decided not to mention anything in the days that passed. The creature still visited me every other night (and Murphy on the others), and each time, I remained entirely paralyzed in my bed — each time, he did nothing but smile.
Eventually, I had to tell Cohen what had been happening. The tension within the camp was becoming too much to bear, and if I’m completely honest with myself, I desperately needed somebody else to shed some rational thinking on the situation. His answer, rooted in much-needed logic as it was, seemed to solve very little.
“Did you ever hear about the Miracle of the Sun?”
We hadn’t.
“Early 1900's, tens of thousands of pilgrims turn up in Portugal looking for a religious experience. Funny thing is, almost every one of them claims to have seen visions of the sky collapsing, the sun exploding, and the Virgin Mary in the middle of it all. It’s a shared delusion, just like yours — a folie à deux.”
He addressed his next question at Murphy, lacing his words with a condescending tone that was all-too natural with Cohen.
“Did the devil ever appear to you before he planted the idea in your mind earlier this month?”
Murphy shook his head sheepishly. Cohen had a point, but it didn’t explain the details — how were we seeing the exact same creature, and why was it behaving exactly the same for both of us?
“We’ve been here for the best part of six months without anybody else to talk to,” he continued, “it’s not surprising your brains are looking for company — I just wouldn’t go finding it in the devil.”
Cohen was dead four days later.
It happened in the middle of the night. The creature had been continuing to visit every other night, meaning that sleep was a luxury that Murphy and I could only afford on alternate days, but this was the first time in several weeks that the creature hadn’t appeared when I’d been expecting him. The anticipation of his arrival kept me awake longer than I would’ve liked, but sleep eventually came.
By the time Murphy and I woke up, it was already too late. The main water valves had all burst in the kitchen, flooding the room and frying the electricals that Cohen must’ve been using when it happened. His singed corpse was lying in a pool of flowing water. Sparks were still dancing on his clothes.
We reported the incident just like they’d instructed us to. Luckily most of the satellites remained untouched by the flood, so we managed to send a message back home and let them know what had happened. They replied quickly with their condolences and assured us that the extraction team were almost ready to begin the journey to pick us up. It gave neither of us much confidence.
The case was a clear-cut accident: there’d been some kind of blockage in the pipes that had been caused by the same lunar storm from two weeks back, which had caused them to burst under the immense pressure. It was a freak accident, but the scientists back home were confident that it wouldn’t happen again. The only part that facts were unable to explain was why Cohen’s death happened on the single night that neither Murphy nor I had been visited by the creature. We didn’t dare question what this could’ve meant until it was too late.
Three months passed.
Visions of the devil continued to plague every other night, but in the time since Cohen’s death, one thing had started to change. Each night, when my eyes adjusted to the darkness and saw him watching over me, he was one step closer to my bed. On several occasions, I tried reaching out to touch him, mostly just to confirm that he was really there. The paralysis of fear stopped me every time.
As much as the thought of it had been consuming all my waking hours, I’d been keeping this particular development quiet, thinking about what Cohen had suggested on his last day. If Murphy and I were genuinely having some kind of shared delusion, then mentioning the creature’s changes would probably trigger the same thing to happen for him. Even today, I never told him how close the devil started reaching for me in the night — and he never mentioned anything to me.
Murphy died two days before the rescue shuttle was due to arrive.
It happened during our final visit to the excavation sites; since Cohen’s death, we’d always ensured that one person stayed behind at camp while the other went out to work on-site, but we’d needed two pairs of hands to carry the equipment back on that final day.
The final two sites were about a quarter of a mile apart, so in order to save some time, we agreed to clear them out separately and meet back at the main camp. I was half way back when I heard the deafening crash of his oxygen tank imploding and tearing him apart instantly.
Another freak accident, if you believe the working theory. The scientists back home claimed that it can happen in extremely rare cases whenever the tank is struck with another sharp object, which could’ve been any number of things after the damage caused by the storm all those months ago. I might’ve accepted that conclusion if I hadn’t heard Murphy’s ear-piercing scream just moments before the implosion.
What had he seen? The pressure would’ve killed him before he’d even known he was in any danger, so what could’ve possibly caused him to scream with such primal fear in those final moments? There was only one conclusion to be drawn — it was the same thing that burst the pipes and killed Cohen, the same thing that was stalking me in the depths of the night.
Something was hunting us, and I wasn’t going to be its prey.
There were two days left before the rescue shuttle was supposed to arrive and take us home. That was more than enough time for the creature to make his next move. I needed to get away before that. We’d been hesitant to use it previously because ground control claimed there wasn’t enough fuel to reach Earth, but the previous Artemis squads had left an emergency shuttle in one of the excavation sites for travelling across the moon — now, it was the only escape.
It wouldn’t take me home, but it would get me away from here. From the safety of space, I could radio home and direct the rescue team to my location.
Working against the clock, I collected Murphy’s body from the site of the accident and left it covered in the rescue tent alongside Cohen’s — they deserved at least to be found. Thankfully I didn’t need to waste any time affixing a new spacesuit, so I gathered a few tins of food and made my way to the emergency vessel.
The controls were unlike anything we’d been prepped for back home, but it seemed simple enough. Ignite the thrust and steer toward the big blue rock on the horizon. There was an 8-bit monitor, the kind that hasn’t been used since the ’90s, displaying my coordinates that I could relay to the rescue team once I was safe.
I looked out the window as the shuttle began its gradual descent into the vast expanse of space, the empty wasteland of the past few months slowly morphing into a gray speck in the distance. I thought of Cohen and Murphy’s bodies, resting forever atop the research desk, and wondered how history would remember them. Lonely workers driven insane by visions of Satan? Or brave martyrs killed by a beast they’d never understand?
I doubt it matters. The rescue team should be landing on the moon within the next day, faced with a missing escape shuttle and two dead bodies on the table. It shouldn’t take them too long to realize what’s happened and find me out here.
I think of the creature, waiting patiently for them to arrive with an empty smile on his face, and pray they’re stronger than we were.
Jack Walters 2023
