by Kevin Lucia
One: He hadn’t seen the sign moments before. He felt sure of it.
Two: Unthinkable, something so odd, unique and strange . . .
exquisite
. . . would be free on a pawnshop’s rummage sale table. Unthinkable.
Impossible.
He clenched the pyramid, savoring how its cool edges pressed into his palm. How his hand throbbed with its wonderfully strange pressure.
A sudden moment of clarity.
If he returned the pyramid now, he’d never see it again. Even if he scoured Handy’s shelves for months or years, he’d never find it after today. All he had to do was return it—relinquish it—and he’d be free forever.
Free.
Forever.
Ridiculous. Free of what, exactly? A six-by-six-by-six black ceramic pyramid covered with odd etchings? What was there to be free of?
He squeezed the pyramid harder.
Its throb spread through his wrist, up his arm to his shoulder, mingling with his heartbeat. He glanced at the small sign on the table again.
Take What You Need!
“Well then,” he said, “today’s my lucky day.”
Thank heaven for that.
He’d enjoyed precious few of those, lately.
So, with the black pyramid clenched in his still-throbbing hand, Reverend Norman Akley moved on, whistling a jaunty tune, knowing even as he’d enjoy browsing the remaining tables he’d window-shop only, for he’d already found what he wanted.
Found what he needed.
He had to force himself not to sprint so he could take the black pyramid home where it so rightly belonged.
***
“Norman. Back from your expedition? And how were your precious little junk sales?”
Mildred’s quietly snide voice dissipated Norman’s pleasant fog. He stopped on the walk leading up to First Methodist’s modest parsonage (their home for the past seven years, though it had felt much longer) and glared at Mildred where she reclined on her haunches at the edge of the flower garden she devoted more time to than him these days.
“Fine, Mildred,” he replied. “And how’s the gardening? Those weeds of yours look so very healthy.”
Unfazed, Mildred brushed dirt from her thighs. “Well,” she said with an ironic smile, “at least something’s growing around here.”
Norman stiffened but offered no comeback. Clifton Heights First Methodist hadn’t shown any growth since the Utica-Rome Bishop had assigned him here seven years ago. Instead, its congregation had dwindled to a mere forty or so of the church’s most loyal (and most ancient) members.
He sighed. Things hadn’t worked out the way he and Mildred had dreamed. Instead of First Methodist’s congregation growing because of a combination of sound Biblical preaching and a seeker-friendly atmosphere, it had withered like the posies Mildred tried to plant every year. Their hopes of him impressing the Utica-Rome Bishop into assigning him to a larger church in Utica had died, and now Mildred found herself stuck in a sleepy Adirondack town with two other churches besides her husband’s, where she’d never be anything more than the wife of the pastor of “that small church hardly anyone goes to.”
When the Bishop indefinitely reconfirmed Norman’s assignment two years ago, whatever Christian love remaining in their marriage had hardened into a leaden ball of resentful discontent. This disheartening occurrence had not only disillusioned him but also weakened his faith, leaving it crippled and dry. He’d never thought he would dread every Sunday’s message, wanting nothing more than to give the whole thing up and walk away.
But this was his duty.
It was expected of him.
So he preached half-hearted messages on Sunday morning. Met Wednesday nights for prayer meeting with the First Methodist Prayer Warriors (terminally infirm POWs was more apt), listening with a poker face to prayer requests for relief from a dizzying array of physical ailments. He nodded in fake sympathy to lamentations for wayward children who’d committed the ultimate sin of deciding to pursue their futures elsewhere.
And he’d smiled dully through it all.
During monthly potluck dinners of burnt mac and cheese and rigatoni. On countless shut-in visits. He listened with distant compassion to stories of ill and woe, then lightly patted Mabel or Bertha or Willa May on their withered wrists, offering a “peace which passeth understanding.”
“Fred Savage called from The Farmer’s Market,” Mildred said as she bent down and began—fruitlessly—attacking the weeds choking the life from her posies. “Said he’s got a whole box of day-old pastries and bread for the Food Pantry tonight.”
Ah, yes.
How could he forget?
“Fine. When’s he bringing them over?”
Mildred spoke without raising her head as she dug into the dry soil which had proven as barren as her womb, yet another thing she’d blamed him for (not in so many words) the past few years. “I didn’t ask. The Food Pantry is one of your projects. Handle your own affairs. I’ll handle mine.”
Norman’s hand tightened around the black pyramid. It must’ve been an illusion, but it felt as it were throbbing along with his heartbeat.
Mildred’s sole duty had been the First Methodist Ladies Ministry Society. It ended after one-year when their only church-supported missionary (an eighty-year-old woman who distributed tracts around mobile home parks in Boca Raton, Florida) died in her sleep. Now, all she did was mess with her damned garden and sit around on her ever-widening ass all day drinking too much wine while reading Amish romances. Of course, it’d do no good to point that out.
He walked past her toward the church (which badly needed a new coat of paint and new roofing). “I’ll be in my office, working on tonight’s message, if anyone needs me.”
“I’m sure you’ll be safe from that.”
Norman didn’t respond. He walked away, barely suppressing the thought of how much he wanted to drive the black pyramid into the back of Mildred’s head, point first.
***
After setting the black pyramid on his desk next to a white ceramic statue of Jesus on the Cross, Norman seated himself behind the desk to compose a message about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and how everyone could enjoy new life through Christ’s eternal compassion.
It proved hard going.
He couldn’t focus. His mind was cluttered more than usual with cynical doubts about his faith (because Christ’s eternal compassion felt more like amicable neglect lately) and also the harsh reality of the Food Pantry ministry: He could deliver the greatest message ever spoken in a church and it wouldn’t make a difference.
At first, he’d approached this monthly ministry with as much zeal as he’d felt for everything else. It had been one of his ideas, after all. An effort to reach out and become an active member of the community, enriching people’s lives.
But the Food Pantry had failed miserably.
It had taken about two years for Norman to catch on. After contacting a charitable food distribution program in Utica and appealing locally to The Great American Grocery to donate produce, Norman had instituted a monthly Food Pantry on Friday Nights. The only two requirements were listening to a half-hour exhortation on the Godliness of Industry, Hard Work and Perseverance, and a private counseling session with him, so he could be aware of their needs and praying for them.
His intention?
By combining mercy and compassion with encouragement and exhortation, he’d make a difference in people’s lives. Eventually he’d see them make something of themselves. After a helping hand from him, they’d learn to stand on their own and move on, to be replaced by new faces in need.
However, instead of a ministry that picked people up and put them on their feet so they could walk on their own, he’d created a handout center which attracted the same group of people every month. When he’d finally understood this, he’d also realized discontinuing the Food Pantry was nearly impossible. Nearly twenty people a month had become accustomed to their free food. Irra
tionally, he actually feared their reaction to closing the Food Pantry.
He didn’t imagine a riot, exactly. Only a dreadfully disconcerting image of them clustered outside the church while he and Mildred cowered behind the church’s front doors. Them advancing up the walk. Reaching out, begging, like mindless zombies.
So the Food Pantry continued on. Norman delivered forced messages about faith, love and charity. One by one, the Food Pantry Regulars visited his office, sobbing about how their no-good spouse or boyfriend had been fired again, or how their daughter had gotten pregnant and was now living with them, or how their monthly welfare check was late, how they’d fallen off the wagon, gotten fired and they wanted to turn over a new leaf but the Good Lord knew how hard it was living in a bad old world which never gave the little folks a fighting chance.
Over and over again, world without end, amen.
Then of course he’d encourage them in the name of Jesus, Whose grace was eternal, because, “Blessed are the meek and the downtrodden.” They’d beg for forgiveness, promise to get right with God, quit the juice and stop throwing their relief check away at The Stumble Inn or The Golden Kitty, then they’d pray in weeping sighs.
The following transformations never ceased to amaze Norman. Once their prayers ended they became all business, ready to accept their handouts and return to their lives, with no intention of changing their ways whatsoever.
So it had gone on.
For the past four years. Tonight it’d be the same. Deep down, Norman again felt the urge to walk out of the church, down the street, never to return. He felt the urge to give up his ministry in exchange for something else, anything else.
Something rattled.
Several objects thumped onto the carpet, clinking.
Norman glanced up and saw the black pyramid had fallen from where he’d placed it on his desk, taking Jesus with it. Frowning, he stood, leaned over the desk and saw the black pyramid lying on its side among the remains of the broken ceramic Jesus.
Fallen?
Knocked over, jostled . . .
Or jittered off the desk, of their own accord?
Which was ridiculous, of course. He must’ve bumped the desk with his knee, lost in thoughts about the dreariness of his life and dead ministry. Certainly that was it.
Certainly.
Yet as he watched, a tremor shook the pyramid, and it quivered.
Rippling.
He was around his desk and bending over to pick it up without thinking, so shocked at what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, he reminded himself as he picked up the pyramid with trembling fingers. It wasn’t possible. He hadn’t seen the black pyramid ripple.
How had it fallen?
He was tired, frustrated and under stress.
He stood, turning the pyramid over in his fingers, tracing those strange swirling etchings. It felt warm. Warmer than when he’d picked it up at the Sidewalk Sales. It was probably an echo of his pounding pulse, but the black pyramid felt as if it was throbbing.
How had it fallen?
He held the pyramid tight. Something different about the etchings. Something carved into one side, though when he’d examined it earlier he’d seen no such thing.
There.
Turning it over once he saw it, where he’d swear no writing had been only an hour or two before. In a small rectangle below the strange spiraling-hooks design, he saw words which made no sense. He knew Latin—an elective he’d taken in college—but this wasn’t Latin, or any other language he recognized. Squinting, he peered closer, tapping each letter with his fingertip, intoning them in soft whispers, the words sounding strange and alien on his tongue.
He stopped.
Held the pyramid up, frowning, hefting it, thinking it certainly felt hollow now. Something shifted inside when he moved it.
An odd notion struck him. He raised the black pyramid to his ear, turned it upside down and heard it, the whisper of something sand-like.
Instantly, his rational mind scoffed at the muted dread the sound conjured. So it was a strange paperweight filled with sand, left for free by a pawnshop.
So what?
A strange paperweight with odd designs and incantations carved into it, his mind protested, which jumped off desks and broke neighboring knick-knacks on its own.
“Ridiculous,” he scoffed, holding the pyramid up so he could see the strange words better. “Absolutely ridiculous.”
As he stared at the strange words, rubbing them with his thumb, an acute sense of displacement fell over him. His office disappeared. His bookcases, framed divinity degrees, desk and his gigantic King James family Bible faded away, replaced by yellow stone walls depicting effigies of strange, unknown gods. In the far corner a great sarcophagus stood upright; its lid made of gleaming gold, fashioned into the arrogant visage of an Egyptian pharaoh long since laid to rest in layers of incensed wrappings.
All of this he only sensed peripherally as more words appeared on the obsidian stone. He whispered them reverently, the words now flowing from him, as if they were his native tongue.
The pyramid quivered in his hand, as if it was squirming to life. Its tip peeled open. Inside lurked darkness. But as Norman tilted the pyramid for a better angle, a sandy whispering filled the darkness.
Something exploded upward into his eyes, covering his face. As a child, Norman once blundered into an underground hornet’s nest in his backyard. The cloud of enraged insects which had briefly engulfed him had been like this, only this was worse because the grains were so much smaller, filling his throat, choking him, swarming up his nostrils into his sinus cavities to his brain, and all he could hear was the sand whispering and strange, alien voices screaming in the distance . . .
***
Screaming.
Alien voices, screaming, wailing, screeching.
Norman ran, clawing those buzzing black flies or gnats . . .
sand
ashes
. . . away from his face, his shoes crunching gritty sand; his earthen footsteps echoing down a long, dark corridor.
pyramid
inside the black pyramid
no, that’s impossible
A voice chanted over and over, thundering in the air and the rock around him, and he could hear it, now, a name . . .
Nyarlathotep!
Norman heard a scrambling rustle behind him. Chasing him. Something was chasing him.
In blind terror he stumbled forward, legs shaking and nearly giving out as he felt the corridor’s slight incline. Wherever he was; whatever this place was . . .
a dream, a nightmare
the pyramid, the black pyramid
. . . he was running slightly uphill toward a dim rectangle of light above, a room of some kind, perhaps somewhere he could hide.
The incline leveled out before turning a sharp left upward again. On the flat he indeed saw a dim rectangle, a doorway. Heart pounding and lungs aching, his mind trembling at the threshold of madness, he stumbled through the doorway and slid to a stop, gaping in bewildered horror.
Torches affixed to the walls guttered, flickering shadows across ancient paintings of Egyptian pharaohs and priestesses, like the ones he’d seen in textbooks as a child. Their faces sneered cruelly in a way he didn’t remember, however, with an inhuman arrogance. In the center of the room lay a rectangular stone coffin, a sarcophagus, and a name kept thundering in his mind . . .
Nyarlathotep!
. . . as he stumbled toward the tomb, legs beyond his control. When he drew near he gasped, recognizing the stone effigy adorning the sarcophagus’s lid. Wearing the garments and headdress of an ancient Egyptian priestess or queen, the face bore an unmistakable likeness to Mildred.
With a scraping groan, the sarcophagus’s lid began to slide open.
Norman screamed and fled the chamber, running further up the inclined corridor. As he did, he glimpsed something lumbering up from below. A twisted figure lurching on two bent and crooked inhuman legs with a coiling serpent for a
head. He stumbled on, the corner mercifully hiding the monstrosity as he scrambled toward yet another dim rectangle above. He wheezed, struggling to draw air into his tortured lungs; air which clogged his throat.
sand
ashes
The incline leveled again and the corridor once more angled sharply left and upward. On this level another dim rectangle beckoned. He didn’t want to go through it, didn’t want to see, wanting to keep running, but he heard something shambling up behind him, so he plunged through the doorway into another room whose walls depicted more scenes of ancient Egyptian pharaohs with cruel faces. In the middle of the room, waving snaky arms, wailing from mouths ringed with needle-point teeth, things shambled and swayed. Their naked, gray rubbery skin glistened in the torchlight. They bore only a passing resemblance to humanity but still he recognized them all.
The Food Pantry.
The loyal attendees of the Food Pantry. There was Willa May Zether, naked with gray leathery skin, sagging breasts, shuffling, hump-backed and stooped shouldered, lamprey-mouth wide and drooling. Behind it lumbered Cletus Smith, emaciated and gaunt, wide black eyes staring. Over there lurched Jed Sykes, wide fish-like mouth moaning, tentacle arms lashing the air.
They were all converging on two forms lying prone and naked in the middle of the room. Humans. As the foul and unclean things slowly shuffled closer, Norman caught glimpses between their gray, sickly bodies to see the faces of their victims.
His blood turned to ice water.
His heart slammed against his rib cage, bladder throbbing painfully, demanding release. Mildred. Mildred, lying naked and unconscious, next to him.
The things screeched as one loathsome collective mind, their tentacles whipping the air, then with unnatural speed they descended upon the prone forms. Blood sprayed to the sounds of fleshy crunching.
Bile churning in his stomach, Norman staggered away from the unholy communion through the doorway. As he limped up yet another incline, he caught in passing a shadowy hulk lurching up from below. Moaning, he shuffled up toward yet another shining rectangle. The sounds of gristle crunching in sharp teeth throbbed in his ears as he plunged through the doorway into another room whose walls also depicted the past. On the far side, another doorway flickered with a much brighter, pulsing light. Next to it, another sarcophagus leaned upright against the wall, bearing his face. Hanging on the wall next to it was a human-sized, marble effigy of Christ on the cross.
