3. Jorge the Mystic
Jorge the Mystic, the white haired Mexican with the serape, sat before a cook fire and talked. A large group of residents of the camp were gathered around him. They did not show any signs of disbelief at the crazy-sounding things he said. There were two new arrivals, one of them a well-dressed young Mexican woman who the residents recognized as Marta. She was the older, college-educated sister of the girl Maria who had disappeared over a month ago. She was accompanied by a tall, powerfully built young man with blonde hair that almost glowed in the light of the declining sun. His name was Edwin Brock, the future heir to his father’s large marine construction company. Detective Demetrious Johnson, along with Detective Hanson, was also among the listeners. The detectives did not share the apparent credulity of the Mexicans at old Jorge’s strange words, often looking at each other and smiling significantly.
Jorge was a Yaqui Indian mystic, a medicine man who often indulged in peyote to broaden his understanding of the workings of reality. His neighbors in the camp had reason to respect him. Wild as his ideas often appeared, the residents had never known him to be wrong. Jorge did not work; the residents pooled their meager earnings to support him as their counselor, advisor, judge, and spiritual leader.
“I know we have Othello detectives with us,” Jorge said. “You are welcome; we all want the same thing. You will think this story of mine strange. And it is strange to men of this world, because our enemy is not of this world. It is a sending of the Outer Ones that fell to earth in a meteor over a hundred years ago. It came first as a dormant spore, a dried up thing like a mummy with no life in it. Like a butterfly, this creature’s life has three stages. It will be ending its middle stage, the caterpillar stage, in a very short time. But what will blossom out of that thing, friends, will not be a butterfly. It will be something powerful, horrible, deadly. It must be stopped before the change.”
“Why?” said Demetrious. “Why did your Outer Ones send it? Who’s the woman in the blue dress?” He looked at Detective Hanson and shook his head to assure him he did not believe the story.
“The Outer Ones once possessed the earth, and they wish to return. Mankind is in their way. I don’t know whether this demon was sent to test our strength, or worse. The woman! Oh, that poor woman.” Jorge the mystic wiped his eyes, in which tears had gathered.
Edwin Brock tapped Marta’s arm and gave her a cockeyed smile. “Your Jorge is insane,” he whispered.
Marta’s beautiful face did not smile. “This demon who killed Maria, who is about to change into something that will threaten us all, lives at the bottom of the Potholes Lakes. The police will never get close to it with their scuba divers and drag lines. That means we have to do it, Edwin.”
“We?” said Edwin. “We? But how?”
“Think!” said Marta. And she kissed him on the lips.
4. The Horror of the Lake
The boat floated very still in the tranquil water of the Pothole Lakes. The full moon shed enough light to illuminate the logo that read “Brock Marine Construction.”
Two tenders were in radio contact with the divers who were at the bottom of the deep lake. They were ready at a moment’s notice to winch them up. Something wasn’t right about this midnight mission. While the tenders were steady hands and wouldn’t complain, both felt anxious.
The pitch-blackness at the bottom of the lake was broken by the intense illumination from the helmet lights of the two divers. Marta and Edwin were in constant radio communication with each other. It was terrifying down here. Marta expected to be attacked any second by a demon in the guise of a lady in blue, and her near-panic infected Edwin. The bottom of the lake was a series of flat shelves with occasional two or three-foot elevation changes that needed to be negotiated. The landscape was empty: no fish, no vegetation of any kind, and very few rocks. It was like walking on a bedrock table. Marta noticed it first, up ahead, some protuberant thing that rose from the endless flatness. As they got closer they saw it was a box or chest.
“That’s it,” said Marta. “That’s where it lives! I’m sure of it!”
Marta carried the spear gun, and Edwin had the net. They approached the chest slowly until they were nearly within touching distance. The chest was full of holes, and it looked ancient.
“We’re going to have to open it,” said Edwin. “I was thinking of throwing my net over it and winching it up, but it will fall apart. Give it a prod with your spear gun, but don’t release the spear!”
Marta very tentatively extended the tip of the spear. She tapped the side of the chest. Nothing. Then she placed the tip beneath the edge of the lid and began to lift. Suddenly, the lid flew open and the woman in blue emerged at great speed. She flashed through the illumination from their helmet lights and was gone.
“Where? Where?” they both shouted. Marta saw the inside of the chest: it was filled with the clean-picked bones of the victims. One set of bones caught her attention, because it had manacles attached to the wrists and ankles.
“It’s on me!” Edwin suddenly shouted. “Quick, Marta, get an angle and shoot it!”
Marta turned; it seemed to take forever in her cumbersome diving suit. The gyrating beams of light from her and Edwin’s helmet lamps made her dizzy and disoriented. She finally had Edwin in her vision. The woman in blue clung to his diving suit and clawed and scratched as if trying to get at him. She dipped her head and bit the suit repeatedly just beneath the helmet.
“I can’t shoot, it’s a woman,” Marta cried.
“It’s not; it’s a hideous dwarf-thing! If it rips my suit or gets my air hose, I’m dead.”
Marta aimed the spear gun carefully, her arms trembling. If she missed it was probably all over for both of them, and she couldn’t risk hitting Edwin.
“We’re winching you up,” said the tenders from above. A moment later there was tension on the lift line. The sudden jerk caused the woman in blue’s feet to lose hold and fan out, momentarily giving Marta a good shot. The spear flew through the water, transfixing the woman’s chest, below her heart.
“Oh my God!” screamed Marta, feeling she had just center-shot a woman.
The woman did not slow down in her motions. She let go of Edwin and prepared to launch herself at Marta. Both divers were ten feet above the lake bottom now and continuing to rise. Edwin enwrapped the woman with his weighted net before she could attack Marta. She leaped forward, but the weighted net dragged her down.
“Clip your gun,” Edwin said. Marta clipped her gun to the dive suit just before the weight of the sinking woman tightened the spear line. The net was attached to Edwin’s dive suit as well. The creature thrashed and floundered below them, but could not overcome the ballast provided by the weights on the net. It hung ten feet below and was winched up with them. Marta and Edwin could not see it because it was below the beams of their helmet lights. There was no way to know whether it was climbing up the lines to attack them. They could feel its continued struggles through the vibrations in the lines.
Marta could not recall time ever seeming to pass more slowly than that long, slow ascent to the surface of the lake.
5. The Passing of the Horror
The flames of the roaring fire on the shore leapt ten or twelve feet into the night sky. All the residents of the migrant worker camp were ranged around the fire. The woman, demon, or what ever it was crouched next to the fire, still entangled in the net. The shaft of the fishing spear protruded from the mesh of the net. A viscous purple ichor that was not blood oozed out of the wound. Marta stood, with Edwin’s arm around her, at the edge of the crowd. They were both happy to let Jorge take over managing the next steps.
It was 2:00 a.m., and there was no sign of the Othello Police or the detectives. They would be back later, after the sun had risen. The residents of the migrant worker camp, the ones who had sustained most of the suffering, were now in a position to be judge, jury and executioner of this monstrosity.
“By fire,” Jorge had said. “Fire will
not kill it. But it will turn it back into a spore, a mummy, with no power to harm. And it will release the poor girl.” Eyes averted, he gestured at the female form. Jorge could not bring himself to even think of the woman in blue.
As angry as the members of the crowd were, especially the ones who had lost children, they had a difficult time summoning the will to drag the demon into the fire. It still resembled an attractive woman, the woman in blue.
“Any of you who think this is a woman, step close and take a look,” said Jorge. “Not too close; the thing will get you if it can.”
Many of them did. When they approached to within three or four feet of the demon, the image of the woman in blue began to dissipate like a fading mirage. That’s when the hideous dwarf could be seen.
“Into the fire with it,” the family members of the victims cried, and they were the ones who actually pitched the enmeshed creature into the flames. An unearthly whistling scream rang out into the night. The creature writhed and redoubled its struggles. At first it looked like a woman burning, and many of the witnesses had to turn away, sickened. Then a remarkable thing happened. A ghost-like, translucent figure stepped out of the fire—the spirit of the woman in blue. She turned her gaze first on Jorge, then on Marta and Edwin, and many who saw her felt there was gratitude in that look. Then her form dissolved, and she was gone.
“Thank God,” said Jorge. “Her spirit is free from that captivity—free from that awful servitude that was worse than hell.”
It was the alien dwarf that twisted and suffered in the flames. There was little pity to be seen on the faces in the crowd now. At last, the dwarf was reduced to a dry, motionless mummy—a scorched version of the conversation piece that Captain Frazier bought from the Tamil witch doctor one hundred and twenty years earlier.
“Is it dead?” asked Pedro as the desiccated body was pulled from the flames. Pedro’s only daughter had been one of the first victims.
“No,” said Jorge. “It has returned to its spore state. It could still be brought back to life.”
“We’re not done then! I’ll take care of it!” Pedro grabbed the thing by a leg, carried it back to the camp, and threw it into the bed of his pickup. Several other bereaved parents accompanied him as he drove out of the camp in the direction of Othello.
Jorge hosted Marta, who was a favorite of his, and her boyfriend Edwin in his mobile home until the dawn light began to break. Marta and Edwin plied him with questions, which he answered as best he could. Suddenly, he sat straight up in his seat.
“It’s done,” Jorge said. “The demon no longer exists. Pedro and the others found a way to destroy it. Good for them! The thing would have always presented a threat, even in its spore state. It was not enjoying its forced existence here on earth either. In a way, that thing was also a victim of the Outer Ones. I hope they’ve learned something. If they do return, mankind will not be so very easy to conquer.”
It was later learned that Pedro had taken the mummy to the tool shop in Othello where he worked and cut it into strips with a band saw. When the head had come off, something that resembled a green gemstone fell out of a cavity in the neck. Pedro smashed the thing on the floor with a sledgehammer. That was the moment when the Potholes Horror went out of existence.
G. Zimmerman has been writing stories since he was ten years old, most of them in the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres. His supernatural/nature fantasy novel ‘Verdure’ is available at Amazon, and his post-apocalyptic horror novel The Queen of Bones has been released by J. Ellington Ashton Press. He has short stories published, or pending publication in such anthologies as Rejected for Content 3, Rejected for Content 4, and A to Z. A half dozen of his stories have appeared in small circulation and e-magazines. G. Zimmerman is married and has three adult children, a dog and three cats. He lives in the Seattle area, and works as a professional civil engineer in his day job.
A VISAGE OF GREAT TRUTHS
BRIAN BARR
“Oscar to Epic 7, come in. I repeat, come in. Have you found more wreckage?”
“Looks like an entire wreckage of various crafts, Oscar.” Deborah moved calmly through the alien landscape with her colleague, suited up in their protective ivory suits. She was fascinated with the strange lavender hues on the towering rocks, waves of dried lakebeds, and what looked to be devastated dome buildings and crashed extraterrestrial space ships. “Would take a lot of crews to come up here and bring them home for research.”
“And do they bear that weird symbol?”
“The squiggly yellow thing? Yeah, it’s all over the place. Not just on the interiors of broken shells like we found before. We see it on the outside of ships as well. What the hell does it mean?”
“Top secret. You just report what you see, and keep your cameras on.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Everything was top secret. Ground control never shared anything with their subordinate astronauts, lackies they sent to and fro to investigate far off terrains. Finding these weird ships with that strange symbol on them seemed pretty important to the American Space Program. If the ships were really top secret, maybe they had made a mistake in letting the damned space vehicles get shown on the news.
Ever since that one broadcast, however, they had been careful not to let any other footage of the strange symbol get out in public. They just wanted Deborah, Will, and all their other astros to find, document, and gather whatever they could, then bring it back to base.
“We’ll really need a big team to gather all of this, Oscar,” Will reminded ground control as he picked up a lightweight metal, stained with yellow on its shell. “Unbelievable how much stuff is up here. Like some lost empire.”
The first people to reach an exoplanet, and no one would hear about it. Deborah wouldn’t be paraded on broadcasts, or honored as one of the first humans, or the first woman astronaut, who walked along the surface of a planet outside of the Solar System. No—Oscar wanted everything secret. Private. No one was to know of their feat, of how they came here, or why. Why this planet, exactly, of all the various exoplanets ASP had discovered through telescopic research? Why here?
Deborah glanced up from the wreckage, her mouth dropping inside of her bulky helmet. “Will, look up.”
A light was shining, perhaps twelve feet overhead. A brilliant, yellow light, almost golden, yet so anemic and pallid. No feelings of warmth or happiness came from it. Instead, the light was accompanied with a strong wave of dread, an absolute tinge of chaos.
“My God,” Will whispered into his helmet’s microphone.
In a circle, eleven other pale yellow lights appeared at a circumference of eight to ten feet, each bringing an aroma and presence of doom and despair. They were a little taller than a natural human, perhaps twelve to thirteen feet tall, so intimidating. Powerful winds began to glow, dust rising from the planet’s surface as Will and Deborah began to back up.
“What the hell is going on up there?” Oscar asked frantically. “Epic 7? Epic 7?”
On the shrapnel of fallen spacecraft, the yellow markings all began to glow. Whether they glowed on their own or by the brilliance of the overhead lights, neither Deborah nor Will knew for certain, or even thought to question. The lights were descending, and they were taking shapes, forming faces, gaining limbs, at times humanoid, at times not.
As if a fist had closed around it, Deborah and Will’s own shuttle, parked a quarter of a mile away, was suddenly crushed. It shattered into pieces as stealth glass, wires, and metal broke, gas chambers exploding in wild blazes. Fire shot upwards as Will and Deborah looked behind them, eyes wide, mouths agape. Even the heat radiating from the destroyed vessels couldn’t penetrate the eerie dread of the yellow lights, lacking any sense of temperature, warm or cold.
Deborah and Will screamed for ground control, their connection lost.
The lights stood at ground level now, their descent finished. Cold stares exuded from the morphing faces they wore.
The strangers advanced towards them. Both astronauts
stopped screaming as their suits imploded against their helpless flesh, yellow enveloping them.
***
“Does he ever show his face?”
Maddie glanced up from the picture of The Yellow Sign sprawled upon the cold basement floor in chalk, five cadavers encircling the cryptic symbol with fresh gore and blood. Crimson sanguine fluid linked the corpses in their circle, pouring in long, interconnected lines.
How could Maddie answer Raymond’s simple question? In ways, yes, The King in Yellow did show his grand, magnificent face, but not as obviously as new, ignorant initiates may have expected. There was the Pallid Mask, and there was the Golden Woman, the Worshipping Apparitions, many more representations of The King. They were all reflections or angels, ambassadors, possibly even avatars, of his most high brilliance.
But the face? Who was to say. The King was a mystery beyond mysteries. He was eternal decadence and destruction. Destruction was creation, and creation was destruction.
“He reveals himself in a variety of ways,” Maddie finally answered to his apprentice, “but we are not to question, or even wonder, how He presents Himself. We must always remember He is beyond our comprehension or understanding, and always beyond our humanity, lest we end up as fools like Hildred and all the others. He is King and we are not. Do not forget our task, Raymond. Our task is to go wild, to obey the madness The King has bestowed upon us, and to work our art in His name.”
Within Stranger Aeons Page 16
