4:58
I’d been lying there for some time. I didn’t remember getting any sleep, but how would you remember that? I lay spread-eagled on the cool bed, the sheets twisted around my hands like they’d been trying to prevent me from escaping. My alarm clock blinked to 4:59, the bluish-green numerals firm and accusatory. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard the alarm actually sound. A parade of images of the past however many days sauntered through my mind as I lay there. The one consistent aspect was that of the waitress’s strange, three-pupiled symbol as it moved from cotton shirt to computer monitor to the magenta-limned clouds of another world. It hit me that the burning, steady gaze was not three eyes, but one. Its hideous gaze bore into my brain as I writhed again upon the bed.
I sat up, determined to resist my imagination. I looked around for something that would reassure me of the real world, and my presence in it, but nothing came. Yellowing moonlight coming through the window was a seeming assurance of normalcy... until the moonlight flickered, and I knew what had happened.
They had soared in front of it as they descended.
The creatures from the pyramids. They were out there. Waiting. I could hear their claws shuffling on the roof. Once, I’d believed it was just that the trees were too close to the building, but now I knew differently. The shadows were too obvious and regular to be branches. I could picture their blank faces, shrouded by their segmented, black wings. I’d seen them. I knew I had.
We had to be making progress. They were closing in because Dylath was starting to threaten their link to this world. Whatever they were. I had no idea how I’d stumbled to that conclusion, but it felt right. They’d been coming after me – the large woman, the creatures – because we were doing our jobs. We were building the wall between their home and ours. That had to be what the image of blocks on my screen had signified. That’s what Roger had meant. As the compiler ran, we were cutting them off, so they’d begun to threaten us. Threaten me! Trying to confuse me, and keep me from doing my job! I gripped the sheets.
But Jean seemed to think that Roger was doing something wrong. Was there something I didn’t understand? But if we were protecting the world from... well, from them, what could be wrong by comparison? I looked back to the clock.
6:47
The familiar, overlarge clock. I turned my attention to my usual black coffee, resting on the countertop. Identical, my mind whispered snidely. The same damn coffee. I ignored it. I figured that I had to gaze into my coffee quite a bit, which was why the waitress was so especially disinterested in me as a customer. She was leaning over the counter, reading a magazine, her back to me. I slowly looked the other way, toward the booths. They were empty. I let go the breath I’d been holding. She wasn’t here.
At the service window, the cook had his head down over his hissing grill. But the hissing was different, a series of sibilant words. I couldn’t hear them well, and wouldn’t have been able to pronounce them anyway, but they were there. His spatula’s scrapes on the metal surface became rhythmic and high-pitched. The sound stretched out, as if the tool was being forced to resonate, keeping time with the hissed chant like a musical accompaniment. Like a flute.
I wanted the man to raise his head. I wanted him to acknowledge what he was doing. He was interfering in government business, possibly threatening all of our efforts. I darted looks from side to side, searching for someone who might help me. The waitress was still completely oblivious to anything that wouldn’t increase her tip.
People moved outside, past the broad bay windows, but the brightness and condensation made them into phantoms, a crowd of shadows at a concert. The chanting and music continued, growing louder. I couldn’t believe the waitress wasn’t reacting. I turned back to the windows as one of the figures stepped forward, body flailing. Rage? Terror? I couldn’t tell. The movement was reminiscent of seizures. The face pressed to the glass and rolling from side to side was utterly blank, flesh melted like candle wax. His head shuddered, and his arms battered the window either side of him.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! He– I think he needs help!” My voice sounded distant. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of help the figure might need most urgently. Airways?
The cook had finally raised his head. His face was a sheet of flesh, just like the man outside – except that a crude star had been etched into it with the corner of his spatula. The wounds seeped blood and bacon grease in equal measure. The middle of the pentagram held three slashes, alight with flame.
I pushed back from the counter with a gasp. My coffee toppled over the edge to shatter on the floor, right in time with a high note from the flute-spatula. The waitress finally turned around. Her face was also a pulsating slab of flesh. Her button was pinned to the middle of it, simulating the cook’s wound. The three-lobed eye. Her limp hair radiated away from her face, whipping in seeming rage. Mouthless, she screamed directly into my mind at a volume that threatened to shatter me, but even that still couldn’t drown out the chant and its flautist.
I ran for the door, and pushed outside, desperate to escape. The man was still there, shuddering against the window. The whole crowd was like him – faceless, drone-like, swaying and shivering in time to music all their own. They seemed oblivious to the rain, and to the horrible chant and flute, which blasted out from the diner without any drop in volume. I froze in my tracks, aghast. I recognized the foreheads of some of these people. I’d seen them time and again, in shadow, over the edge of my own monitor. My colleagues.
A fluttering of wings pulled my attention to the roof of the building. One of the creatures was there, faceless and rubbery and vile. Rage boiled up inside me. I spotted a rock, snatched it up, and hurled it at the hideous creature. It did not react, and my throw went wide.
“You can’t stop us!” I shouted. “We’ll keep moving forward and you’ll be banned from here forever! We’ll –”
Someone grabbed my arm. I turned to look into a blank disk of pale skin surrounded by bright red hair. Jean. She shook her head violently from side to side, trying to speak, tugging furiously on my arm. Finally, she released me. She brought her hands up to where her mouth would have been, and dug her nails in. Her face ripped apart in a shower of gore that blended with the rain on the sidewalk.
“... uhhhauughhhh! Stephennn! The gaunts!” She pointed at the creature on the roof. “They’re not the enemy! We are! The gaunts are trying to warn us! Warn you!”
She fell to her knees, whimpering. I grabbed her shoulders, crouching on the rain-slicked concrete. Blood streamed from her chin. “They’re a warning.” Her voice was weakening. “Of the chaos. We’re opening the doorway. For Roger. For...” She coughed some impossible tangle of syllables that slid off my mind and vanished in the rain. The chant intensified, and she gagged, and began howling in time with it. The figures all around us stiffened in unison and started writhing, their faceless bodies joining a chorus of which they were incapable. The flute’s frenzied piping climbed higher and higher, to an impossible crescendo. The diner’s windows shattered. Glass ripped through the crowd. Many of the figures dropped, as if shot. I leapt to my feet and ran. Glancing fearfully back at the diner, I caught sight of the large digital clock.
11:57
The time was a stark banner across my monitor, rather than its usual gentle corner reminder. I could see Dylath still compiling behind it, and the magenta sky, riven with bolts of energy and roiling clouds, in the background. I felt a presence, beyond. The screen’s borders seemed to bend as it neared. No one else was in the office. Had I fallen asleep at my desk? I couldn’t remember ever being alone here before, but there seemed to be a lot I couldn’t remember these days. Just islands of memory in seas of dumb fog. A clicking noise echoed down the hallway.
“It’s almost finished, Stephen. You’ve done good work.” Roger stood in the entryway. The service lights were out, and behind him was
yawning blackness. But there was something in the shadows. Something huge. I could hear it slithering across the floor.
I stared at him. “You lied to me.”
He smiled, a bit more of a sneer this time. “Lied about what? You acted as you willed.” He stepped into the room. The shape behind him hovered there.
“I certainly have lied to people. I lied about my name. It’s not Roger.” He sniffed. “In Egypt, they called me ‘Lord and Master’, in a language that no living man still speaks, but outside my presence, they had another name for me. The modern equivalent would be ragil. Sawda ragil. ‘Black Man.’” He came into range of my monitor’s light. The glow reflected off his impossible, carbon-black skin. He looked like an ancient, haughty statue come to life.
“As I said, you have done good work, no matter how our little rivals –” He paused to smile, broadly this time, “– or your own mind might try to tell you otherwise.”
The loathsome chant began again, from my own computer this time. It sounded different now. More strident, desperate almost. The compiler was nearing completion. I looked back at him. “Jean... She called you a name I can’t really recall.”
He nodded. “Yes, well, some are more aware than others. It’s just one of many.” The thing in the hallway began swaying to the rhythm of the chant. Its tentacles were twisting out into our space. The air was throbbing.
Roger smiled again, and his eyes cleared. They were black, and matched the large woman’s somehow. Her face was soft and muted where his was hard and precise, white and pale where his was black and shining. It fit his like a mask, the eyes hooking it to whatever reality was at this moment.
I closed my own eyes, willing everything away. It was a dream. It had to be. Events were long past possibility. How did you normally wake up from a dream? By making things... stop? I turned to my machine.
“That won’t help you.” It was probably the darkest tone I’d ever heard him use. My hands dropped to my keyboard as I cocked my head at him. The tentacles were reaching all around the room now.
“It doesn’t have to help me It’s supposed to help us, right?” My finger rested on the F9 key. “And it has been us. Kleiner and I have been running the compiler. Kleiner and I have been executing the vision of all of these others. Of course, I haven’t seen Kleiner in a long time. Now that I think of it, I don’t even remember what he looks like. So maybe it’s always just been me. Maybe it is just my vision.”
Roger – the Black Man – glared at me. It was the most emotion I’d ever seen him show. “That won’t help you, Stephen. My father has already awoken.” He gestured backwards to the thing. It still hid in the shadows, but it was now splayed around the chamber, a forest of tendrils, trembling throughout. “The fact that there’s a flautist here, waiting to guide him, is evidence of that.” The chanting soared, and a flute burbled from the hallway, a tantalizing music that fell down through the ages, and seemed to dance along the edge of a power that I would never understand.
I looked down and smiled. “Even guides need a path.” I pressed the key. The compiler’s failsafe activated. The scrolling data stopped dead, and then blanked. A moment later, my monitor did the same.
The chanting dissolved into an anguished howl. Vast winds ripped through the room, scattering papers, desks, machines, me. There was a thundering presence overhead – a huge, pulsating force that spoke of ancient evils I could feel in the depths of my being. It hungered, as I did. It lusted, as I did. It yearned in a manner way beyond my tiny human perspective. When it howled, its voice filled the universe with dreams that defied thought.
Then it vanished, leaving me in darkness.
“Hey, man.” An uncertain grip shook my shoulder. “Dude. You OK?”
I opened one eye, and looked into the face of a probable college student. He had a little bit of acne, and a thatch of blond hair. I had to peel my face off the trash bag that it was bonded to before I could open the other eye. I was cold and wet, and the alley that I was lying in was a perfect funnel for the fall wind.
He smiled a little as he saw me registering my surroundings. “You OK? I saw you over here when I stopped to text somebody. You were shivering, man. You want me to call the cops? Did you get mugged? Or just an office bender?” His smile grew broader at that thought.
I shook my head and grunted. “No. No police. I’m... I’m fine.” I wasn’t about to ask him which city I was in.
He raised his eyebrows in obvious disbelief. “All right, man. You should get out of the cold, though. Gonna catch pneumonia or something.”
I nodded. “Or something.” It must have been late in the day, from the color of the sunlight in the alley mouth. “At least the sun’s out.”
He stood up and shifted his backpack. “Yeah, but it’s a bitchin’ weird sunset! Must be global warming. Take care, OK?” He walked off into the slight mist. I thought I could see other figures in the distance. Smudges.
I stood up, still shivering, and stepped into the street. The sun was setting to my left. I turned and looked into the deep magenta sky. There were scattered flashes of light from the sun as fast-moving clouds streaked across its face. Clouds with black shapes darting through them, too fast to see clearly. I shuddered, and far off, I distinctly heard the piping of a flute.
THE THING IN THE PRINTER
by Peter Tupper
Are we recording? Good. Thanks for letting me give my statement verbally. Believe me, this is a lot better than having me write it.
What organization did you say you were with?
Never heard of that one.
In answer to your first question, I don’t know where Conrad Delkirk is. I couldn’t even begin to guess what he’s doing now. But if you find him, don’t judge him too harshly. I don’t, even after what happened to me.
Anyway, I first met Conrad in a corridor in the basement of the Engineering Faculty building. I was in the hackspace set up for Engineering students, across the hall from the ceramics workshop, which had the pottery wheels and kilns and so on.
The door was open, and I heard breaking pottery, which wasn’t unusual, and a woman yelling, which was. Curious, I looked out into the hallway.
Millicent, the woman who ran the workshop, was shoving a guy out the workshop door. He clutched a cardboard box, and as she thumped him, he stumbled and lost his grip on the box. Curved ceramic shapes tumbled out and hit the floor, shattering. Millicent slammed the door shut behind him.
I got up to help. “You all right?” I asked. We exchanged names as I helped him pick up the broken stuff on the floor.
Conrad was an odd-looking guy. When we met, he was, wearing a T-shirt that read, ‘Why? Because the hamster told me to’. I could never quite decide whether he was an older man with an incongruous baby face, or a young man with an early receding hairline. He had a twitchy, distracted way about him. It always took him a fraction of a second longer than it should to answer a question, as if he was constantly thinking of something else.
He looked past me into the hackspace, specifically at the long table in the middle of the room. “What’s that?”
We’d only finished assembling the new printer a few days before, and I was still in the “mechanical bride” phase of my relationship with it, eager to show it off. “Come on in, I’ll show you.”
The Skulptomatic 400 3-D printer sat on the central table, with my laptop connected to the data port and a coil of blue ABS plastic 1.75mm filament feeding into the plastruder. The platform zigzagged back and forth, just finishing a print of the Stanford Bunny. It was a tricky shape, with a lot of fine details and overhangs, particularly the ears. This was my third attempt at it and I’d managed to tweak the printer right, so it looked like a bunny instead of a blue melted thing.
When I finished, Conrad said, “So you just give it the math, and it does the rest. Any possible shape.”
>
“With some limitations, but pretty close.”
Conrad looked at it like it was the most beautiful thing in the world. “Show me how.”
I let him sit in front of my laptop and brought up the design window. “Think of it like a–”
“Don’t use metaphors,” he snapped at me. Then he deliberately calmed himself. “They distort thinking. Mathematics isn’t a metaphor for anything. It is the thing itself.”
“Okay, you define solids like this...”
He figured it out a lot faster than I had. Within half an hour, he’d got his laptop out of his messenger bag, installed the design software and started designing shapes, abstract assemblies of curves and angles that didn’t make any sense to me.
“What are you trying to make?” I was shoulder-surfing. His laptop showed a screen full of MATLAB functions that were way beyond anything I could understand. The graphics window showed a surface plot of these blobs moving around each other and intersecting, like they were mating or eating or infecting each other.
“I will create something that has never existed in our universe before,” he explained, never taking his eyes off his work. “Woodworking and ceramics were unsatisfactory because of the limitations of the materials and the manual processes. This looks much more promising.”
I’d once spent a summer making a life-size statue of Yoda in Lego, so I decided this was some kind of artistic project. Sometimes you just need to do something, if only to see if it is possible.
I left to get a drink from the machine in the hallway, and on the way back I ran across Millicent as she locked up the ceramics workshop. She looked into the hackspace, saw Conrad working at the laptop connected to the printer, and frowned. “You really don’t want him in there.”
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 19
