by John Pelan
After this my nerves could stand no more. I shoved the notebook far back into a drawer and for several days tried to forget that I had ever seen it. But its dark secrets were working their way inward, ever inward, toward my deepest self. My teaching and class schedules were mercifully light, but even the slight strain of conducting a freshman philosophy class was almost more than I could handle. More than one student gave me a strange look as I attempted to deliver a lecture with a quaver in my voice that I could not control. I felt a trembling all the way to my core, and when I realized I was getting worse instead of better, I began to think seriously of putting my entire graduate program on hold until I could sort things out.
My immediate intention was to talk with Marco. I knew I should see him again, should talk this all ojt before making any rash decisions, but when my decision to see him was fully set, it dawned on me that I had no way to get in contact with him short of physically making the trip to his dorm. I didn't even have a phone number. I had never had any need for one, because he and I usually encountered each other randomly on campus two or three times a week. Under normal circumstances I would have wondered why he had been so conspicuously absent for the past ten days, but I'd bee n so caught up in his notebook that I probably wouldn't have noticed if the sky fell on me. Now it occurred to me that I had neither seen him nor heard from him since my terrible experience with the mandala.
I had to force myself to go to his dorm. The memory of my nightmarish encounter in that little room cm the sixth floor pained me like a fresh, gaping wound, and [felt a mounting terror as I approached Marco's featureless brown door and knocked sharply. Predictably—why I should have found it predictable, I don't know, but it seemed entirely appropriate in a poetic sort of way—he wasn't home. I stood there in the hallway for a long time, staring alternately down at the faded gray carpet and then back up at the door, as I debated whether to try the knob. Every time I reached for it I felt a surge of panic, and finally, in a kind of daze at the depth of my own wretchedness, I had to give up and admit that for whatever eason, I couldn't doit.
But I was still determined to find him. I inquired of his professors and found that he hadn't attended classes since Monday of the previous week—the last day I had seen him. It was apparent from their attitudes when I spoke with them that his physics professors, at least, were not at all displeased with his absence.
Next I sought out a few of our mutual acquaintances and discovered that they had not seen him either. At a loss for what to do, I finally returned to his dorm to confront my fear. Once again, there was no answer to my knock, and before I could fall back into that awful state of panicked indecision, I grabbed the knob and wrenched it violently.
Much to my surprise, the knob turned easily and the door swung open on silent hinges. I quickly stepped inside like nothing was wrong, and indeed, nothing at all seemed to be out of order in the room. Marco's bed was made, his bookshelves were full, and upon opening his closet I found a rack full of clothes. For a moment I was perplexed; I had half expected to find an empty room, to find that he had disappeared and left no word. The other half of me had expected to be overwhelmed by some unspecified, ultimate horror.
I crossed over to the desk hoping to find a note or some other clue, and I saw that a layer of dust had settled on its surface. A quick run of my finger proved it to be rather deep, deep enough that I knew nothing had moved upon the desk for some time. Further inspection showed that the bookshelves, books, medicine cabinet, and bedside table were all covered with a layer of dust. It was obvious that nothing had moved in this room for some time, and I knew then, without knowing how, that Marco had left his room shortly after my own departure ten days ago and had not returned.
It was at that point that my last reserves of strength began to fail. I simply couldn't go on. I had been concealing it from myself, but now I admitted that I was worried as much for myself as for Marco. Far from explaining anything, his notebook had raised a host of new questions and given in return only a smattering of frightening and maddeningly obscure ideas. Nothing was clear except for the fact that I was suffering from something I can only describe as a sickness of the soul.
I sat down on his bed and felt a hot lump rise in my throat, and with something like humor I realized I was about to cry. Nothing made sense. When I tried to consider my future I saw nothing but an endless black tunnel lined with (Teeth) painful, meaningless events and encounters. All the purpose, all the meaning and significance, seemed to have drained out of my existence. How had I come to this n just a few short days? Up until ten days ago I had known the normal difficulties of college, work, family, and the occasional romance, but at least I had been capable of leading a life and laking pleasure in the small niceties it afforded. Now I just wanted to sink into oblivion, whether sleep or death did not matter. Was existence, was my life, nothing more than a short interval between one darkness and another, an amusing but ultimately vain respite from an underlying reality of—of what?
(Teeth)
At that moment my tenuous hold on sanity began to slip, and I felt that gaping hole in reality begin to open again, not on any page but within me. Then I felt the needle-teeth begin to sink in, and I am convinced that if I hadn't had a specific thought to engage my attention, I would have slipped off the precipice into madness.
But with an enormous effort of will I fought off the insanity and decided to do what I had put off for days: examine the rest of the notebook. I had a hunch that Marco Y adn't created the mandala of his own free will or in a normal state of mind. It would have been typical of him to write about it after creating it, to make some attempt to analyze what had happened. If this were true then I might gain some understanding of my own condition from his notes. At the very least, I might find a much-needed clue to the reason for his decis on to involve me in all this.
I didn't let myself consider what I would do if he had written nothing.
6
The trip back to my apartment was a scene from the darkest nightmare. The sun was shining and everyone around me seemed to be enjoying the mild spring day, but it was as if I saw these things through a dark-tinted glass. The light seemed shaded, muted, like night scenes from a movie that were obviously shot in bright daylight with a filter on the lens. I kept seeing movement out of the corners of my eyes wherever there were shadows or dark spots. In each shadow I thought I could see living forms crouched and waiting, but when I looked directly at them they disappeared. It gradually became apparent to me that I was seeing shadows more clearly than the objects that cast them.
I hurried on. Shaken, out of breath, and terrified, I finally made it back to my lonely apartment and collapsed on the couch. I knew I couldn't keep this up much longer. The strain on my nerves and body was wearing me down to the point that I feared for my bodily health as well as my sanity.
At length I dragged myself to my feet and went to fetch the notebook. It remained where I had left it, at the back of my desk drawer, and I felt a vague surprise. I had half expected it to have disappeared, like the memory of last night's dreams. Its nondescript red cover seemed to mock me, as if its very dullness represented its defiance of my understanding. I sat down at my desk and flipped through to page forty-seven, squeezing my eyes shut lest I catch a fatal glimpse of the mandala.
Sure enough, Marco had recorded his thoughts after he drew it. Writing that would normally have filled only half a page in his minute hand now sprawled across three pages. Evidently he had scrawled these notes immediately after his first experience with the mandala, while he was si ill in shock. That he could have written anything at all seemed a miracle to me, in light of my vivid memory of my own experience.
His thoughts were surprisingly coherent:
Almost sucked in. It almost pushed through. God, how? The perfect sequence of shapes, the perfect placement and size on the infinite continuum of distance between points. They forced my hand. Would it open the g^te for anyone, render all preparation unnecessary? Chance—purpos
e — meaning—God! What fools we are! Our damned desire for “truth.” The need is for illusion, fantasy, dreams. What price the true vision? What must we become? Lovecraft—correct about the vast conceit of those who babble of the malignant Ancient Ones. Not hostile to consciousness, indifferent to it. “Consciousness is a disease”—oh Miguel, if only you knew! The greatest horror reserved for minds, not bodies. Azathoth not conscious, pure Being. Consciousness, intelligence, mind the ultimate tragedy. To be somehow self-aware yet wholly incidental to the “purpose” of the universe. Conscious only to be aware of the utter horror of consciousness. Perfect intelligence negates itself.
I sat there, stunned. Much of what I had just read was obscure, but I understood enough. Somehow Marco had been offered a glimpse into the chaos at the center of Being. For reasons known only to Itself, some power had chosen him as a conduit for the revelation of what Lovecraft had rightly called “our frightful position in the universe,” and then Marco, for reasons known only to himself, had shared his madness with me.
For a brief moment I tried to gain some distance on the situation by reasoning with myself, by telling myself that this was insane, that Marco was obviously suffering a psychotic breakdown and so was I. But the speed with which my newly born intuitive faculty demolished these ratiocinations was dizzying. I simply could not deny the naked truth, the knowledge of which seemed to bubble up from somewhere deep in my gut.
I had to find him. I had to know what had become of him, for I feared that his fate, whatever it might be, would be mine. I had to know the end toward which my strange affliction was leading.
But how? I hadn't the slightest idea of where to begin looking. Marco had always been rather aloof and reclusive, and now the full depth of my ignorance sank in. I knew next to nothing about this man whom I had called friend for nearly a year.
Completely baffled, I unthinkingly reached down and turned one more page of the notebook, and what I saw triggered the final stage of this journey into madness. I froze and read the words three times while their significance slowly sank into my mind like hooks. Dropping the notebook from numb fingers, I lurched toward the door and fumbled with the knob for what seemed like an eternity before managing to turn it. Then I was outside and racing across campus, the front door still banging open against the wall and the notebook lying open on the living room floor.
What I had seen was an article Marco had clipped from the Terence Sun-Gazette and pasted carefully to one of the pages of the notebook.
WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTIST TO LECTURE AT TERENCE UNIVERSITY
British physicist and astronomer Nigel Williamson will deliver a lecture titled “Chance, Meaning, and the Hidden Variable in the Quantum Universe” next week at the Terence University campus. Williamson, a Cambridge professor who is visiting Terence as the first stop on a worldwide lecture tour, is known for his tendency to ruifle the feathers of his colleagues with his iconoclasm and unorthodox theories. His claim to have arrived at an explanation for “the seemingly causeless actions of subatomic particles” has aroused worldwide interest and much skepticism in the scientific community. He is scheduled to SDeak Thursday, May 2, at 7 P.M. in the Stockwell science building on the Terence University campus. The lecture is fee and open to the public.
7
I reached the Stockwell science building i:i eleven minutes, my scholar's body exhausted from running barely a mile and a half. As I leaned against the double doors, sucking in a huge lungful of air that seemed to do little to replenish my oxygen-starved tissues, I noticed a clock on the far wall inside. It read 7:06, and I let myself feel a moment's relief. The lecture would have started by now and there was no commotion. Perhaps my awful hunch had been wrong.
Still gasping like a fish out of water, I glanced up for a moment at the twilight sky and saw a half moon shining through the branches of a scraggly tree. The once-familiar moon was now the dead, decaying fetal carcass of some unimaginably monstrous creature, and as I looked on I saw it beginning to mutate into something more monstrous st 11. Dread washed back over me like ice water, and with a strangled cry of despair I flung myself through the door of the science building, as much to escape the awakening gaze of the moon as to stop the tragedy I feared might be occurring within.
I burst through the doors of the lecture hall to find a small group of middle-aged men and women checking their watches and waiting impatiently for the lecture to start. Most were seated, but a few had gathered around the lectern down front, where a nervous, balding man was trying to placate them. Several people looked up when I entered, and I saw their faces tighten into angry-worried lines. I recognized the expression. As a member of white, middle-class America I had worn it many times myself when confronted with scenes of economic squalor or ethnic unfamiharity. It was the look of a person who senses danger and withdraws into himself; the look of a woman who finds herself stranded alone in a bad part of town in the dead of night and notices a seedy-looking stranger edging down the sidewalk toward her; the look of a man who sees something alien and fears its strangeness. I knew the expression well, but I had never felt it directed at me until now.
Ignoring the stares as best I could, I made my way down to the man with glasses. He stammered when I approached, and the cluster of people turned to look at me.
“Where is Professor Williamson?” I demanded. My voice seemed to reach me from a distance, and I noticed that I didn't feel a part of the situation at all. I felt like a spectator watching a play in which I appeared.
“I was just explaining—” the man with glasses began. He was already flustered, and something about me seemed to aggravate it. Finally he gave up and gestured toward the door behind him. “He's in there.”
“Is he alone?”
The man was becoming more miserable with each passing second. “Well, no. There's a young man in there with him. He showed up a while ago and demanded to see the professor. I told him we were busy, but Nigel came out and decided to talk with him. They went into the conference room half an hour ago and haven't come out.”
“Have you knocked?” By this point I was almost yelling.
“Well, no,” the man said. “The young man was rather… passionate. His eyes were wild, like—” He cut himself short and shifted uncomfortably, but I could read the unspoken words on his face: like your eyes.
I opened my mouth to speak, but a sudden loud thump from the conference room silenced us all. It sounded like a chair or table falling over. This was followed by wild, incoherent shouting that froze the blood in my veins, for even through the thick door and the hysterical tone I recognized the voice and accent of Marco. I bolted past the stunr ed group of scientists and grabbed the door handle, only to find it locked. Now another voice, a voice so full of fear that it almost obscured the British accent, answered Marco's.
“What are you doing?”
“You mustn't! The madness, the chaos! The Gate is in the great and the small!”
I redoubled my efforts on the doorknob, but then froze with fear as there was a tremendous crash and a sound of shattering glass.
“What are you doing? You're mad!” There was a pounding on the door right in front of my face. “Rogei! Open the door!” The voice rose to a shriek. “No! Stop!” There was a noise like a knife ripping into a side of beef, and the voice turned to a gurgling, choking scream. This was followed by a sickening thud and the sound of something being dragged through glass. Then rang out the last coherent words I would ever hear Marco speak.
“The Gate above and below! The One in the many! Oh God, the teeth! The teeeeethl”
Silence.
The spectator feeling was gone. I was completely, horribly present. The others in the room were in various states of shock. One woman was weeping. A man had run halfway up the stairs toward the rear exit and then stopped, standing there blinking as if he had forgotten where he was going. The rest of the group either stood or sat in stunned silence.
Then the spell broke all at once and panic set in. Some ran for
the exit while others came toward me. Everyone seemed to shout something different, and finally someone ran out to the hallway, found a maintenance closet, and returned with an enormous hammer. I grabbed it from him and set to work on the door handle while someone else called the police.
The handle was strong, but it gave way after six stout blows. Clutching the hammer like a talisman, I pushed open the door and took a step forward while the assembled scientists clustered behind me like sheep.
The room I had entered was a standard conference room with a long wooden table and eight chairs. One of the chairs was lying on its back, and the floor was littered with shards of broken glass from the shattered doors of a bookcase that had been overturned. The glass was covered with what looked like gallons of blood. My gaze followed the trail of blood to the point where it disappeared behind the table, and I crunched through the glass to see what it was that I had come here to prevent.
Nigel Williamson, physicist, astronomer, Cambridge professor, would never have the chance to reveal to the world his grand theory concerning the inner purpose of the universe. He lay on his back behind the table where Marco had dragged him, the nine-inch piece of glass Marco had used to eviscerate him still protruding from his side. The expression of twisted horror on his face must have matched my own, but I didn't think about that at the time. My attention was riveted to the blood-spattered, empty-eyed face of my friend Marco as he crouched over the professor's body and mechanically devoured his innards.
8
The years since that night have blurred together until my memory has almost failed me. Shortly after the furor died down I quit my studies and moved to anotier town, where I now hold down an inconsequential job that provides me with just enough income to afford the squalid apartment where I hide from the world and pray for a merciful and to my own existence. From time to time I buy a newspaper or pull the television out of the closet to find out if the direction of events has changed, but I know it never will.
