The Triumvirate

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Streaks of heavy crimson and sickly pink arced across a sky which reminded Erik of the underside of something rather than its upper dome. The air was thin and tasted greasy—that was the only way he could think to describe it—and fighting to get the oxygen he needed from it was already giving him a slight headache. They appeared to be on some kind of dirt plain in a valley. Rough pink and gray striated cliffs rose to their left and continued around to and across the distant horizon. They blocked off further view in those directions. The ground beneath his feet was a hard-packed red clay that kicked up in little puffs of dust if he kicked at it with his sneaker. Low-growing white plants with jagged, purple-tipped leaves grew sporadically in little clumps. Even more sporadically and much taller, spiky fractal things reached upward, their thin limbs baring bunches of flat white triangles that jingled in the tepid breeze. Erik would have thought they were trees except that they moved infinitesimally across the landscape. A fairly sizable lake of indigo whose slight tidal movement frothed pink like fermenting grapes, lay to the right. Its surface remained perfectly unbroken by life beneath. If anything swam in its depths, no evidence rippled up and out.

  In the distance were geometrically distorted structures that hurt his eyes if he looked at any one part of them too long. He supposed they could be buildings, although he shivered inwardly to imagine what might live or work inside them. They seemed to shift, too, at odd intervals but so slightly, Erik couldn’t really be sure.

  “What now?” Bennie came up alongside Erik.

  Erik shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. They’ve never done something like this before.”

  “Are we stuck here?” Lauren stepped over one of the small plants, which had shifted just a little too close toward her feet, and joined them. “Wherever ‘here’ is?”

  Erik remembered the carvings on that long-ago cave wall half in and half out of his home universe. There were other places. Other creatures tormented. And other creatures who brought widespread pain and death....

  “This isn’t anywhere from our universe,” Ian said from behind her. “I know that. We all do. We all feel it, I’m sure.” He was holding a shiny deep blue stone that was rocking back and forth in his palm and cooing. When an eye opened up on the top surface plane, Ian cried out and dropped the rock. Spider-legs sprouted along two of its sides and spirited it over the cool red clay and away from them.

  “Oh, God, what do we do?” Lauren’s eyes shone with tears.

  “What can we do but look around?” Ian shrugged. “Maybe we can find another rip.”

  “What if we can’t?” Lauren’s voice was soft but insistent. “Something’s not right here. The air, the ground. Everything here is slightly stale, or...or slightly spoiled, somehow.”

  Erik thought of Casey, her beautiful eyes, her tea-and-honey hair, the smell of her skin. He thought of the baby she wanted, the one he wouldn’t give her because such things as Hollowers existed and were too often poisoning the world. He thought of kissing her good-bye earlier that evening, and how yet again he’d promised to return even though they both knew it was a promise he might not be able to keep.

  “Not even Hell could stop me from coming back to you.”

  He loved her—simply, completely, and unconditionally. He would find a way home to her. He had to.

  “We’re going to find a way out,” he said. His tone indicated there could be no argument about it. The others looked at him. Finally, Bennie scratched his cheek and said, “How?”

  Erik nodded toward the buildings. “We start there. The Hollowers’ rips always seem to coincide with a building in our world. Maybe it works the same way here.”

  Bennie nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  ***

  In the Convergence, the Triumvirate watched and waited. The black holes inside them were nearly unbearable when in sync, their ferocity matching the power of those who sought to contain them, fill them with the Emotions of others.

  The meats would not survive that world. To such fragile physical creatures, it was largely inhospitable. There was no sustenance. The air they sucked into those disgusting sacs in their chests they would find unsatisfying and unclean. And there were lesser beasts who would tear them apart as they had torn apart the three other meats when dragged through to the place called Earth.

  They hovered near that dimension, content to let those others kill, but close enough to feed off the Fear and Confusion.

  The Likekind was unique in its ability to not only survive crossing between dimensions and through the Convergence, but also in its ability to manipulate the environments in those dimensions. Beyond the ordinary abilities of the Likekind, the Triumvirate could use their extra senses to manipulate multiple worlds at once, and draw creatures, even those beyond their scope of perception, toward them and each other across those multiple worlds. These extra senses they employed now to track those from the place called Earth.

  If the beasts of this world couldn’t destroy them, there were others. There were many. The insane hinshing in their world of chaos and wild abandon, or the ancient Ones Without Names from the worlds in starless space. Or the cunning shades from the place the Earth beings called Hell. The Triumvirate were not alarmed. They would feed and they would evaluate—they were, among them, fairly certain that whatever threat the beings from the Earth world posed would be taken care of, here or elsewhere.

  There were many.

  ***

  Erik, whose job naturally required a need to be in relatively good shape, found himself winded as they made their way across the relatively flat landscape. The air had grown even thinner, and had taken on a waxy, sour smell in addition to the greasiness it left in his nose and throat as he breathed. They hadn’t come across anything else living yet—no animal life, big or small—and for that, Erik was glad. He couldn’t get those carvings of others worlds out of his head. There they were on another planet in another universe entirely, the kind of thing that even wild dreams couldn’t hold up to. And while that initial awe lingered, it was undercut by a sense of impatient unease, as if their time was limited, and that time would prove to be difficult and unpleasant at best, deadly at the worst.

  He kept waiting, in a sense, for the other shoe to drop, for something right out of a Godzilla movie to come crashing across the arid landscape in frenzied clouds of red dust, or careening through the crime-scene sky with its blood-streak clouds, hell-bent on cutting him down and devouring him in easy pieces.

  No animal life yet—but he figured it was only a matter of time before they did come across living inhabitants of this place. The longer they could avoid it, the better. They had no weapons, exertion in this thin air might possibly prove toxic over time, and just moving in this environment felt a little like moving through water. Fighting monsters on the front lawn of a suburban home or in the dark tunnels beneath an assisted living facility, even if they were halfway in and halfway out of familiar reality, were one thing; they had had something of the home field advantage. But here, they were mightily screwed, by Erik’s estimation.

  “I keep thinking of her.” Mendez’s voice, soft, was suddenly by his side. He was breathing a little harder, too, but keeping up with Erik. “Keep hoping if she’s anywhere, we can find her here.”

  It was the first time he’d mentioned Anita since the night she’d disappeared. Erik knew he had to be going crazy with worry; he would have been if it had been Casey. Mendez looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. Erik knew the feeling.

  “We’ll find her, Mendez.”

  Mendez didn’t answer right away. His gaze alternated between the alien landscape underfoot and the structures, now looming with proximity, on the horizon. As they drew closer, they could see the buildings were indeed rotating, and shuffling an inch or so from time to time across the land on which they were grouped. Finally, Mendez said, “Don’t know what I’d ever tell Cora.”

  Erik glanced at him. The dark bags under his eyes made him look unusually pale. More than that, he was beginning to t
ake on that haunted, shadowed look in his eyes that he was sure he, as well as Dave and Steve and all the others, had carried around since their first experiences. He told the detective, “You’ll tell her all about how you traveled to exotic locations and rescued her mother from dragons and evil wizards.”

  Mendez returned a small smile. “That’s not too far from the truth.”

  “Exactly. All great stories work that way.”

  They reached an area where irregular brownish stones set in the clay formed geometric patterns. Erik thought it looked like some kind of courtyard. He saw a jumble of larger stones forming a crumbling wall corner at the far back of the set stones and wondered how, having let that wall around them fall apart, the beings who owned these structures kept them from wandering off. The moving buildings shuffled a half inch or so in random directions every few minutes. There were, by Erik’s estimation, about ten of them, grouped in no discernible way. Most of the buildings looked like long inverted pyramids, balanced and occasionally rotating on smaller rectangular bases with the groan of grinding rock. Some looked to be just the bases now; maybe their buildings had gone spinning and shuffling off into the dust. He didn’t think they were made of any recognizable version of metal or stone, but seemed to have qualities of both, varying shades of matte grays and browns with spidery black and red veins like marble. The way the buildings leaned and bowed, though, whatever they were made of had to be flexible. Also, there were no divisions of individual bricks. There were no windows that Erik could see and no doors, nor were there any adornments or embellishments of any kind except on one building, the largest. On that one, symbols, both carved and in bas-relief, wrapped around it from the point on the bottom toward the wide, flat base. Erik recognized some of the symbols from that long-ago cave wall, and found he couldn’t look at them for long without feeling cold all over.

  “Hot damn,” Ian said. Erik saw recognition in his eyes as well, and wondered what his mother had somehow seen and replicated in that bedroom.

  The building nearest to them leaned toward them as if eavesdropping, then leaned away. Erik heard the faint sound like laughter, boisterous at its source but eerily tinny; it reminded Erik of the recordings they played at the local summer firemen’s carnival fun house.

  “So which one?” Lauren shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. She gazed up at the laughing building with wariness.

  “Not sure,” Erik said. He frankly didn’t relish the thought of entering any of those buildings, especially ones that laughed at him.

  “How about that one?” Mendez pointed to one just off center of the group. It was the one that had gotten Erik’s attention as well, the largest one, with the symbols spiraling up its sides. “Seems to me that one might be important. Question is, how do we get in?”

  No one answered. They stood huddled together, their breathing ragged, their faces thoughtful. Finally, Ian spoke what Erik had been thinking.

  “What if they aren’t buildings? What if we try to get inside one of them and it swallows us up?”

  As if the structures had heard them, they stopped moving completely. Above them, the skies bellowed distant thunder. The structure that Mendez pointed out seemed to solidify. Its exterior darkened, grew pock-marked and cracked like aged stone. A diamond-shaped hole opened in between the spiral of symbols like an irregular mouth, receding into a dark interior. From their distance, Erik thought he could see the base of a stone staircase.

  “Is that an invitation?” Ian chuckled, but the sound was small and humorless in the silence around them.

  “It’s a door, I think,” Lauren said. “Do we go in?”

  He didn’t like being the one to make the group’s decisions, the default “expert” on the Hollowers and the horrors they twisted around people like personal nooses. He realized Dave must have felt much the same way, trying to navigate the Hollowers’ mind games while keeping them all alive. Erik understood the weight of being responsible for these other lives, these trusting lives, and the fear of failing them. It made him acutely aware of the potential consequences of each decision.

  Erik and Mendez exchanged glances. Mendez gave him a slight nod, and he was glad for it; he needed the encouragement. It made him feel less alone in shouldering the responsibility of the others’ lives.

  “It’s worth exploring,” Erik said. He led them forward.

  As they moved across the stone courtyard, the other buildings inched out of their way, one or the other of them occasionally rotating just once on its base, drawing out a groan, then stopping. Erik could hear echoed sounds, high and excited like children’s voices, from the interiors of the flanking structures, though he couldn’t make out individual words.

  The structure with the door stood still. It didn’t twitch. No sound came from its dim interior.

  When he reached the doorway, Erik turned back to look at the group behind him. He saw wide-eyed, expectant expressions on the faces of Ian and Lauren. Mendez held onto a stoic kind of calm. He had clicked the safety off his gun and his right hand rested on it, waiting too—not for Erik’s decision, but for anything to spring itself on them that might impede that decision. That gave Erik another much-needed boost of courage. He exhaled, nodded affirmatively, and plunged through the opening in the building.

  What Erik had initially thought to be the base of a staircase turned out to be a series of stone-like blocks so white that they gave off a kind of luminescence of their own. They created a kind of central altar, a rough ring inside of which were a number of small rectangular objects wrapped in a smooth kind of cloth, half rotted now. What the rectangles were beneath the cloth, Erik couldn’t begin to guess, but they were lined up neatly in stacked rings around the interior of the rock altar like books on a shelf. They gave off a phosphorescence that ate into the gloom of the chamber. In fact, from their soft glow, Erik could see the room’s cavernous interior fairly well, with shelves at periodic and varying heights. On these shelves were irregular and transparent objects which could have been anything from vases and jars to organs of some kind. The air smelled musty, like dust and rotting paper, and the way it curled around his arms and the back of his neck made him shiver. He felt touched by something unpleasantly foreign, something he didn’t think he’d be able to get off his skin.

  “It’s cold in here,” Lauren said, and her voice, magnified by the alien air, echoed up above their heads among the strange trinkets.

  “What is this place? Some kind of a museum?” Ian reached for a pale blue decanter on a nearby low shelf, seemed to think better of it, and pulled his hand back.

  “Who knows?” Mendez gave a twinkling clear bauble a wary glance. “I wouldn’t touch anything you don’t have to, though. We don’t know what anything here is made of. The air is wrong. The ground is wrong. This place is una locura de una mala manera. Crazy-bad.”

  “Not that I can be sure, but uh, I don’t see anything inside here that looks like a portal, or...or the makings of a portal. Do you guys?” Lauren leaned against the altar, peering into its center for herself.

  “Not me,” Erik said. “What do you think these things are?”

  “They look a little like canopic jars,” Ian said.

  “What?”

  “Canopic jars. The, uh, ancient Egyptians used them during the, uh, burial process. They kept the important organs, the ones they believed would be needed by the deceased in the afterlife, in the jars. The rest of the body was then carefully preserved as well.”

  “So...you think these jars have...like, alien organs in them?”

  “God, I hope not,” Erik said.

  “All the more reason not to touch them.” Mendez stepped toward the rock altar in the center of the room. “So what’s this?”

  “Not sure,” Erik said, “but this glow is coming from those things on the shelves under there.”

  “This might be a stupid question, but, could this be a portal? I mean, they don’t all have to look like the ones the Hollowers do on Earth, right?”


  Erik heaved himself up onto the altar ring’s edge, then dropped to the center inside. He waited a moment, but nothing happened.

  Mendez shrugged. “Maybe it needs to be activated somehow?”

  “Like, with these glowing packages?”

  “Maybe.” Mendez peered over the side. “No way to know.”

  Erik crouched down to get a better look at the glowing parcels. Up close, he could see that what he mistook for cloth was more like a kind of skin, not quite as dry as leather, but possessed of an organic smoothness and infinitesimal movement lines. The glow seemed to come from those lines, and the nearly invisible pores, though whether that was a natural property of the skin or part of the treatment process, he didn’t know. What he did know was that he wanted even less to do with whatever was inside those packages, and he was not too keen on touching them, even if it meant juicing up a portal home.

  He glanced up at the objects on the shelves. Canopic jars. If this was a museum, it had some pretty grisly objects on display. A burial chamber then, where the body had been neatly divided into glowing parcels and pretty jars? Or was it a flat-out butcher shop?

  “So what do you think?” Mendez asked, leaning casually on the stone edge above him.

  He stood up. “Well, I don’t see....” Erik’s voice trailed off. Behind Ian, the wall was breathing. That’s what it looked like to Erik, that the wall was expanding and receding, stretching and shrinking. Erik hopped out of the altar’s center, moving quickly toward Ian. The wall behind him twisted in on itself in the center and then shot outward. Erik grabbed Ian’s arm and yanked him out of the way.

  “What the—?” Ian yelped, and when Erik lifted a chin toward the hardening spike of wall that had occupied the space where Ian had just been, the kid paled. “Whoa. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Now, let’s get the fuck out of here, huh?”

  Erik moved toward the doorway but it shot upward, the substance of the walls filling in the space where the doorway had been, while the space leading to the outside reopened fifteen feet or so above their heads.