“Let’s go,” he said, grabbing my wrist and dragging me inside.
Milton’s office was neither smaller nor larger than the others on campus. If anything, it was quite average. A tad too cluttered and disorganized for my tastes, but no worse than the dozens of others I’d seen in my days at the school. There was perhaps less light there — more shadows clung to the walls and seeped behind the meager furniture, but that may have been only a trick of the empty night. The moon refused to show itself, and the world outside seemed darker and more portentous than usual.
Papers were stacked high around the Professor’s desk, and Pace began to drop them to the floor, looking for something. I did not know for what, he kept that secret, and when I offered my help, he refused it outright.
“This is my problem, Jess, not yours. You’ve already done too much.”
“It’s okay,” I argued, once it was clear my necessity had ended. “I want to help.”
Pace smiled at me and temporarily melted my hesitations. I grinned back as he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently.
“You’re true blue, Jess, and I can’t say that about most people.” I brushed the hair off of my brow, and pushed my heavy glasses above the crest of my nose. “I’m looking for a black leather book. Professor Milton stole it from me.”
“Stole it? Why would he do that? Who is he?”
“He’s a history professor. He’s usually off in some corner of the world, searching through old libraries for forgotten treasures. You know the type; always putting his nose where it doesn't belong.”
I was amazed. “Your book was a treasure?”
“Will you stop worrying?” he said, and I felt myself recoil an inch. “Right now we have to find it. It has to be here somewhere.” Pace returned to the drawers, opening them in rapid succession, his fingers ploughing through without a hint of subtlety, and suddenly I felt a chill as everything became clear. Pace was a bull: he barreled through life and didn’t consider the consequences of his actions, didn’t imagine what might happen if either of us was caught.
“Pace, I —” I didn’t finish my sentence. Instead, I started to back my way to the door. He didn’t really need me, no matter what I wanted to believe, and perhaps I didn’t really need him, either.
I reached the door and opened it, revealing not the hallway but Professor Milton’s puckered face.
He filled the frame, wooden cane in hand, a heavy black volume pinched under his arm. Tinted glasses were perched over the crook of his nose, hiding all but the shape and size of his tiny dark eyes. He glowered at me through them, then spit out, “Who are you?”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t stop looking at his lenses. They gleamed like liquid every time he spoke. “I asked you a question, young man. Who are you? Who sent you?”
My mouth failed, moving without the words emerging no matter how hard I tried. He didn't stop looking at me, looking into me. From the corner of my vision I spotted Pace moving along the wall, working to remain unseen by the Professor.
“You should not be in here,” the old man said.
“I —” I flustered. “I thought this was Professor Walsh’s office. I wanted —”
His laugh interrupted me, but the sound was not joyous. “You’re lying.” He tapped his cane hard against the ground, eyes scouring me. I could see Pace, hidden from the Professor by the open door and the shadows between them. He kept his finger to his lips as he moved, and I felt something cold curl tight inside my stomach.
“I know what you're doing here; I'm not an idiot. My office is in shambles and you stink of guilt.” His cane rapped harder, keeping time with the heart throbbing in my throat. He took a step closer. “Do you think I’m blinded by your lies? I can see. I can see it all quite clearly.” He advanced another step, his dark lenses glistening, his teeth rattling behind razor-thin lips. I wanted to retreat, but something had my legs. Shadows crept over him as he came closer, cane thumping with each step. “You were a fool to come here alone. Do you really think you will be missed?” He licked his lips. “Do you think anyone will care?” Professor Milton was so close I felt his breath upon me. I winced, afraid of what he might do, and when he raised his cane I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was sure to come.
There was a flutter of air, then a dull sickly thud and I opened my eyes to see the Professor fall to the floor, his head crumpled like a paper bag. Pace stood over him, panting, and in his hands were the loose remains of a heavy volume.
He looked at me, eyes half-crazed. It took forever before I could speak.
“What have you done?”
He said nothing, throwing the tattered book aside, and started searching the floor, kicking debris. I couldn’t look at him. My eyes were fixed upon the broken body of Professor Milton. His head was twisted unnaturally sideways, the dent deep and unsettling. He no longer looked real; instead, he was an object, a plastic doll left too long in the heat. His broken glasses hung off his face, and his exposed eyes were lifeless, like two black opals, reflecting nothing but pinpricks of light.
Then, those reflections moved.
I bent closer, horrified, wondering if somehow the Professor could still be alive, but I knew it was impossible. His skull was too severely crushed; blood, dark blood, had already spread across the floor, pooling around his twisted limbs. The reflections moved again, like a pond beneath a pebble, then, like a slip of leather, his eyes were gone. Behind me, Pace called out: “I found it!” but I did not yet turn to look at him.
In the air stretched black wings, the fluttering noises thumping in my ears.
“I found it,” he repeated. “Look, Jess! I found it!” In his hands he held aloft the book that was once beneath Professor Milton’s arm, as though the Professor's dead body was not lying a few feet away.
I shook my head, but he didn’t notice.
His eyes went to the ceiling, shadows circling the room in the light cast by the lamps. Pace watched them, book brought close to his chest.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Don’t! Believe me, you’d have done the same. All we need to do is read it, then we’ll —” He was distracted again by the scratching on the walls above him.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought the book was stolen from you.”
Pace said nothing, but the edges of his mouth curled with the hint of slyness. I was aghast. I didn't want to comprehend the sordid horror into which I'd stepped. I moved to the door, unable to look at Pace any longer. He was different, metamorphosing before my eyes, and the creature standing there was one I'd never seen before, one filled with hate and greed. I couldn't bear to watch as his eyes feasted upon his treasure. Suddenly, the air congealed again, and I felt I could not pull enough of it into my lungs to keep from passing out. I struggled to reach the door in time. Before I could escape, though, I heard a screech of pain behind me. Pace stood there, one arm clutching the book, the other one raised, trying to fight off a pair of dark winged shapes that flew at him, stripping the flesh from his wrist. I did not move to help. Instead, I got the narrow door closed behind me and ran out the way I had come in. My entire body felt cold, as though the night outside had penetrated the brick. I managed to make it down the elevator and out MacNaughton’s main entrance before being sick on the icy concrete steps. It froze there instantly.
• • •
I tried to explain what had happened, what Chris Pace and I had done, but no one believed me. Pace had disappeared, along with Professor Milton, and there was no evidence beyond my word that there was anything suspicious about it. The school was unimpressed by my story — Professor Milton was one of their more troubling, and absent, tenures, and news of his departure was met with knowing smiles or relieved laughter. Pace was a slightly different story. They believed he’d return eventually, but after only a few months his name had been all but erased from the university’s collective memory.
The incident disappeared into the mire of my past, and I never spoke
of it again to anyone, not even the small handful of women I became entangled with over the subsequent years. It was for the best; none of them wanted to stay. Each had her reasons, yet they all shared that same ineffable look in their eyes when they told me things were finished. There was never any real pain in those break-ups, and for a time I wondered if I would ever be happy. It was only after the last of these transient loves that I realized what I had known all along: I was better off without them. Love was a dream dreamed by the foolhardy. My only salvation lay within myself, and there was no room inside me for another.
School does not adequately prepare anyone for the hell of the world outside. I went from job to job, fruitlessly looking for something that might suit my talents, but there seemed to be no place in the world for me. The bulk of the years after my graduation were spent in a bearded funk, living off what little I had left of my parent’s inheritance. Things felt bleaker than I could have ever imagined, and there were nights I went to bed hoping I would not wake in the morning.
I was wandering the streets in a moment of respite from crushing despair, face raw and newly shaven, looking once more for work, when I found myself staring at Chris Pace. I recognized him instantly behind his dark glasses, even from a distance, though I refused to believe it. Like some vengeful spirit from my past, raised to torment and remind me of those years I tried so desperately to forget, he stood before me on the street, blocking my passage. He'd changed drastically since I'd seen him last, yet he was not the sort of man easily mistook. Hidden behind the rags of clothes and hair, beneath the gaunt skin pulled too close to bone, he could not disguise who he was from someone who had spent so long studying his every feature.
I hoped to sneak past him, rendered anonymous and invisible by the crowd of strangers on the street. Even though he didn’t look at me, I felt colder and weaker with each step I took toward him, and I feared I might somehow betray my presence. I held my breath until I passed him, and once he was behind me, I slowly exhaled, relieved I had made it across the coals unscathed.
I then heard my name called out, and for a moment I thought of running.
“Jess, I didn’t realize you were back,” he said, chuckling, creases peaking around the edges of his dark frames. “You’ve been gone a long time.” I nodded, but in truth I didn’t know where he thought I'd been, and I didn't want to ask.
“It’s been years,” I said.
He smiled and nodded as if taking me in. I didn’t believe I had changed much during that time, not as much as he had, and the intensity of his stare discomfited me. I found myself inexplicably drawn to his hands, watching them clench and unclench the loose canvas of the soiled bag at his side. Those hands, so deceptively hiding their true nature.
“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said. “You should come with me.”
“Listen,” I said, stepping back. “I ought to go. I have —" I struggled for an excuse; "— a job interview.”
“You have to come,” he said, resolute. “No one else could possibly understand but you. It’s the answer, Jess. It’s the answer, and I’ve been waiting years to show you.”
I don’t know quite why I relented. His affect on me was no longer strong — the years had not been kind to him, and he'd become just another random body for life to chew upon, lacking even a hint of his former charisma. I didn’t care why he'd done what he did to Professor Milton, didn’t want to hear any more lies that made me relive the days I'd worked so hard to forget. Chris Pace could offer me nothing I wanted, but I went with him anyway.
He took me away from the street, away from the meaningless faces that didn't give us a second look. We were invisible, and we melted into the shadows without leaving a trace of our presence. Pace said very little to me beyond the odd direction, clinging tightly to his bag, head in constant motion. We ended up in a tiny run-down apartment, hidden beneath the remains of the city’s condemned parkway.
It was little more than a room, and it smelled of unwashed clothes and mildew. Though the windows were open a crack, they would budge no further, and were too murky to let anything more than direct sunlight through. There was a flutter somewhere above me, but I couldn't get a fix on where it came from.
Pace offered me a seat and, hesitating, I found the corner of his bed. As he circled, I felt uneasy and anxious about what might happen. He took off his coat, revealing a thin pair of tracked arms partially wrapped in dirty gauze. His dark glasses revealed only a hint of his eyes.
“I’ve thought a lot about you,” Pace said, scratching at his bandages. “About how you must have felt that night with the Professor.” My feet would not stay still as he spoke, and I tried to look anywhere but at him. I was uncomfortable, and I longed to forget again the past he so casually brought up.
“Look at you,” he said, reaching toward me. “Are you really so agitated being here? Do you really wish you could leave?”
He touched my face with his dirty, calloused hand, and I pulled away. He did not react, but just as carefully as he raised his hand, he lowered it to his side.
“Professor Milton once told me that everything that exists has two dimensions and only two. Sometimes, they’re in perfect balance, but more often than not one is submerged in favor of the other. That’s why a rock, for instance, is a rock, and not something else.” He sat down on the bed and looked at me. I couldn’t move — it felt as though I was stuck far beneath the ocean, the pressure and weight of the air pinning me and slowing everything down. The thunder inside my head crawled, yet it pounded loudly in my ears. Pace’s hand fluttered in his lap, then he stood and turned away from me.
“It wasn’t for nothing, you know. Whatever you may think of me now, you should know that I had to do what I did. That book — that book opens things you can’t comprehend. I don’t even know if I can explain it. There are other places, other times —”
“A man died,” I interrupted. “For a book.”
He shook his head and turned. “No, he was just a vessel. The vessel is unimportant. The book is what matters. What it contains.”
He reached into his canvas bag, throwing unwashed clothes to the floor by the handful. Fumbling, he pulled out the black leather book of my nightmares, the skin worn and frayed, the pages buckling in too tight a grip.
“Here,” was all he said.
The covers of the book spread before me like leather wings, and I was powerlessly drawn forward into its brittle yellow pages.
The icy arctic waste that blinded me stretched on forever until it met jagged peaks on the horizon. The air blew cold, and yet I could not feel it though its howl chilled me through. Diffused light fed down from the wide and grey sky, and beneath it the world seemed dead and empty.
I felt so small, so insignificant in the face of that giant void.
It was not ground I stood upon but a bed of ice, so thick it was white, yet beneath it I could see hazy shadows, giant shapes moving slowly beneath the surface. I wrapped my arms around me and shivered, watching the pale sun hang in some eternal dusk, never moving below those distant mountains.
The howling wind was interrupted by a low moan, like pressure building, straining the illusionary world around me. The noise became more intense, filling the air with a frightful anticipatory hum. I covered my ears, afraid it would drive me mad, but my feeble hands were useless against the noise. Just when I could take no more, a large booming crack split the air with a violent force and from beneath the thick icy floor burst through an enormous creature.
Its body was wide and leathery, and it stretched perhaps a hundred feet out of the ice, yet I sensed more of it remained hidden beneath, confined to the freezing depths, unprepared to reveal itself to the light of the eternally dying day.
The behemoth rested upon the thick ice, and I could see within its surface the flicker of life though it had no eyes or mouth of which to speak, but I could not get nearer for fear the floor would give way. All around me, across the wind-blown surface, giant leathery leviathans began to push thou
gh, each resting its fearsome weight upon the further crumbling ice. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, trying to free myself from the vision in which I was stuck. I screamed across the white icy landscape, the noises an inchoate swarm in my ears, and prayed someone might hear the call.
There was another noise, sharp and sudden, and when I opened my eyes, Chris Pace was before me again, the black leather tome snapped shut in his hands. He laughed, dry and without mirth, and handed me a drink of some vile unknown liquor in a cheap discount-store mug.
“Well?” he said, his hands dancing upon the covers. "Did you see?"
“Yes,” I said. “I saw.”
He grinned. Then my fingers were tight around his throat. Pace struggled, surprise creasing his face, and he fought as hard as he could, but he had grown soft and weak in the intervening years whereas I had not. My fingers held tight to his slippery flesh, the stink of it filling my senses. He bucked as his body fought for air, and the dark glasses he had been wearing dislodged and fell from his face, revealing what lay beneath. Two eyes like tiny black pools of oil reflected the dying light. They squirmed, each moving over my body independent of the other, struggling to comprehend. The eyes writhed and pushed toward me from Pace’s swelling blue skin. Hands clawed at my own, trying to work their way between my fingers, but I could feel the air seething from me as the image of a vast emptiness filled with monoliths burned in my mind. I squeezed his throat as hard as I could until Pace’s legs flailed and his hands convulsed, and still, his eyes — his black leathery eyes — even when the rest of his body had stopped moving, those eyes pushed toward me. They slipped to the floor, too newly born, trying to spread their unfinished wings. I dropped Pace’s lifeless body and quickly brought my foot down on the two creatures, feeling them creak and burst beneath my heel.
The book lay open upon the floor, vulnerable, pages splayed wide, waiting for me. I picked it up, and despite what my body wanted most of all, I closed my tearing eyes and began to pull. The spine split easily, and I tore the pages into as many pieces as I could manage. I fed those pieces, handfuls at a time, into a small metal wastebasket and dropped a lit match onto them. They burned reluctantly, but they burned, staining the air with a foul greasy smoke. I kicked the wastebasket over, burning ashes spilling across Pace's crumpled body, and I left him there as the flames grew higher. Left him there to be consumed and I prayed forgotten.
Beneath The Surface Page 18
