by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith
"And what of the others?"
"What others?" Dodd asked.
"The other specimens in the laboratory. It brims with them."
Dodd smirked as if having been made the butt of a joke, but then his eyes cleared and he pushed himself upward. "What day is this?"
"Day?"
"What is the date?"
"It is the Sixteenth of November."
Dodd's face slackened as if the muscles there could no longer sustain the weight of his skin. "November?" he asked.
"Yes."
"For the love of God, I've been in thrall for a fortnight? Maureen must have cared for me until she lost all hope for my recovery."
Samuel thought about the coarse Irish woman and couldn't imagine her caring for anyone, let alone the man she'd described in such callous terms, but perhaps she'd endured so much in the last two weeks that her harsher instincts had surfaced. Still, if her master had been so ill, why had she not summoned a physician for his care?
"What of the weather?" Dodd asked, attempting to drag himself from the bed.
"Is that really relevant?" Samuel replied.
"Has it stormed frequently?" Dodd demanded.
And then Samuel took his meaning. If Dodd's contrivance operated on lightning, nothing could be more important than the weather. The news on that front was quite bad. "Storm most days."
"And lightning?" Dodd asked.
"And lightning," Samuel confirmed.
"God help us. My contrivance lacks only the convenience of predictability. The rifts in fabric shift away from its hold and mend themselves, which is to say that the device may hold back the curtain for a moment or an hour or a day at a time, but cannot do so indefinitely. Had the weather been calm, my worries would be few, but with each fresh bolt that strikes my conductor a new tear occurs."
Dodd struggled to his feet, but his legs were not sufficiently recuperated for the task of sustaining his weight and the bearish man collapsed on the floor amid a great Whush! of air. Samuel and Ruby rushed to the fallen man. The dog hoped to soothe the tumble with licks to the man's face, while Samuel took the more practical approach of grabbing him under the arms and assisting Dodd back onto the sofa.
"What can we do?" Samuel asked.
"The device's controls are in the laboratory. If you could get there it is simply a matter of withdrawing the coupling rod from the lightning rod on the roof, or disengaging the coils from the base. Either would take no more than moments, but if the laboratory is as infested as you claim…"
Samuel considered wading into the writhing mass of exotic monstrosities and knew his courage fell well short of the task. The very notion of approaching that building raised gooseflesh on his neck.
"It must be burned," Dodd said. "There's no alternative."
The pronouncement startled Samuel. Much of Dodd's life and a considerable portion of his estate must have gone into the creation of the contrivance, and the sheer miracle of its existence contended a casual approach to its destruction. What might be discovered should the wonder of the device be controlled and utilized in the pursuit of knowledge? What existed beyond these folds? Surely they all didn't contain unsavory beasts. It seemed wrong to do away with such opportunity, and yet, Samuel knew such a dangerous machine could not continue to function unchecked.
A roar of thunder shook the house and Samuel looked to Ruby, who cowered at the edge of the sofa. Then he looked at the weak and sickly man.
"It must be burned," Dodd told him earnestly. "You'll find tins of kerosene in the cellar."
* * * * *
But simply setting fire to Dodd's laboratory proved no easy task. There was the possibility of the fire spreading to the house or to other homes on the block. Considering Dodd's incapacitation, the man would never be able to flee in time, so his evacuation of the property would have to precede Samuel's arson. A carriage had to be summoned, and the debilitated man packed into it. And so he was. Though Dodd continued to refuse the attentions of a physician, Samuel told the carriage driver to help Mr. Dodd into his house on Walnut Street and once having done so, fetch Doctor Meriwether with due haste.
He placed Ruby in the carriage next to a blanket-wrapped Dodd. She whimpered and tried on more than one occasion to leap from the coach, but Samuel was forceful, and though the dog never settled, she ceased her attempts at flight.
"As for you, young miss," Samuel said to his pet, "you keep an eye on our guest until I return. You're the lady of the house, and it's your duty to make visitors feel welcome."
She whined and leaned out to lick his face, tongue swiping and darting with affection. He chuckled, tickled by the wet tongue, and gave her a good scratch behind the ear before closing the carriage door and rapping the back, sending it on its way.
Then Samuel returned to the house. The first order of business was to locate Dodd's stock of kerosene.
He followed the man's directions, found the door to the basement, and after a deep breath, again reminding himself that the wonderful device could not survive, he pulled open the door and was immediately accosted with a stench not unlike sulfur. The foulness of odor clotted in his throat and Samuel removed a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his nose and mouth. With a lantern firmly clutched in the other hand he began down the stairs.
The atmosphere here was cold and damp and worked quickly through the wool and cotton of his garb to latch onto his bones. The meager light of the lantern only revealed four steps at a time, while the rest of the chamber swirled, shadows upon shadows.
A clicking sound deep within the basement startled him. Too fast to be a clock mechanism and too sharp to be dripping water, Samuel felt tremendous unease as he attempted to identify the sound. A number of possibilities occurred to him: a draft sending a bit of wood against a beam or window jamb; a rat gnawing its way into a wooden storage crate; but again he felt the noise was too rapid, too precise to fit into any scenario of which he could conceive. Another sound, like the throaty belch of a toad rose from beneath the stairs.
Samuel froze in place, waiting for the noise to come again, but only the tick-ticking in the corner sounded. Could some of the creatures from Dodd's laboratory have slipped into the house? Made their way to his basement? It struck Samuel as wholly unlikely, as the door above had been secured upon his entry, so he continued his descent until he stood on the hard packed dirt of Dodd's basement. The smell here was dreadful, working through the cloth of his kerchief like maggots digging in flesh.
Dodd had told him the canisters were lined against the wall directly ahead of the staircase. Samuel walked forward and lifted the lantern high. A wall of crates, tattooed with stencils rose to the left, but the light could not reach deeply enough into the room to reveal the casks he sought.
Another great belching filled the chamber. Samuel turned to it, and something skittered across the floor just ahead of his light. His heart leapt into his throat and panic cascaded down his spine like water from a melting glacier. The clicking multiplied until it sounded as if the entire basement were chock-a-block with racing metronomes. Motion displaced the air at his back, and Samuel spun around, swinging the lantern like a club, but it passed through the air harmlessly.
Upon completing this pirouette, Samuel found himself facing a hole in the wall of Dodd's basement. Its diameter spanned a good meter, more than enough room for a small man to have squirmed through, certainly large enough to accommodate any of a number of creatures. The dawning realization brought a fresh stream of icy tingles to his back.
Some faction of the hellish bestiary had managed to escape. A burrowing species had taken the initiative, and now shared the same dismal void in which Samuel found himself. The panic became too much for him to bear. The lantern clacked in his trembling hand. He begged his feet to move, wanting nothing more than to vanish from the
hideous gloom and to reappear on the street or even in front of the mantle at his home, and though his mind screamed for his legs to take action, they resoundingly denied his pleas.
Only when the air again felt displaced very near his left ear did Samuel manage to turn away from the gap in the wall of Dodd's cellar. Samuel whipped around in a reflexive jerk. The lantern flew from his fingers, sailing into the darkness like a comet. It glanced off the side of a rapidly fleeing specimen, which was clearly of the same clan as the savage stick-men he'd viewed in the laboratory. Amid a crash of brass and the cracking of glass, a window of flame opened on the far wall, and in this sudden illumination Samuel noticed two things simultaneously: his lantern had made impact above a row of cans he recognized as kerosene containers; the other revelation came in the form of dozens of tiny specs hanging like fireflies about the back wall and ceiling. Moist eyes from innumerable heads reflected the spreading flames, and faces bathed in the orange light cast by the conflagration pushed tightly together like blossoms in an unholy garden.
A scream escaped his lips, and Samuel fled for the stairs. An unknowable appendage reached through the gap between the steps in an attempt to trip him up, but Samuel sprang past the terrible limb with a yelp of terror and continued to scrabble toward the dull light above.
He attained the landing and the room beyond and slammed the door. He searched for a lock but finding none, he backed away and quickly surveyed his immediate surrounding for something with which to secure the panel. Finding nothing, he chose flight, but instead of racing through the house, he made his way to the kitchen and the door to the alley, which remained open.
Another of the cat-like creatures had joined the first in the dim corridor. They groomed one another, only pausing long enough to eye Samuel curiously before setting their foul tongues back to task.
He thought to flee this block entirely, to run and keep running until he was again secure in his own rooms where the unspeakable creations of some alien god did not prowl with malicious intent. But his rational mind – sorely tested to be sure – screamed at him to finish the task, to destroy Dodd's device and bring an end to this grotesque invasion. All he need do was cripple the contrivance so that it could no longer brace open the panels of veil separating his world from the others. A single lantern, well-thrown, could fulfill his duty. Perhaps the bulk of the mechanism would go unharmed but it could be disassembled at some future time, just so long as Samuel sabotaged it sufficiently to make it ineffective.
Lightning flashed directly above his head, thunder immediately accompanying the bath of light. He heard its crackle and pop. A brilliant glow of light rose from behind the banister beyond the door, and he knew that Dodd's contraption was again in use.
A small body with skittering claws struck his leg, and Samuel recoiled to the jamb of the laboratory door. He searched for the source of the attack and was shocked to find it came from a familiar face.
Ruby, his fine pet, raced in for another pounce, her tail whipping the air and her eyes glittering with happiness, unaware of the horrible spectacle surrounding her. She must have escaped the carriage and sprinted back to him – her unconditional affection drawing her like moth to killing flame.
"Beautiful dog," Samuel said. "Foolish beast."
Scooping her into his arms, he hurried onto the walkway above Dodd's laboratory. He followed it to the place where he'd spoken with the awful Maureen and continued to the stairs where he found the lantern she'd left behind. Balancing Ruby, Samuel lifted the lamp free of its hook, and dashed back to the walkway near the door.
Dodd's contrivance continued to fill the space below with light. The floor positively swarmed with unclean creatures, fleeing from and feeding on one another with abandon. A soft dove-gray animal appeared near the glass column, encasing the glowing coils. Much like a deer but very short and very plump, the animal gazed on in paralytic horror until a creature like a massive limbless scorpion dropped onto its back and buried its stinger in the unfortunate animal's haunches. Then both predator and prey fell beneath the swatting claws of one of the porridge colored stick-men.
Great washes of blood sprayed from the monster's claws, dappling the glass column and misting the surrounding beasts. The stick-man cast aside the stinging creature and fell on the soft body of the plump deer. Its teeth tore away at the pink belly, releasing a cascade of glistening organs and a wash of dark fluids that spread across the floor.
Ruby wriggled and whimpered in his arms, and Samuel attempted comforting words but what might be said to alleviate the terror of the abattoir below?
He considered where to attack the device, and felt certain the glass and gears would prove impervious to the minor threat of his lantern. Instead, he decided his greatest luck would come if he could set alight the wooden platform with its numerous locking plates. If the oil sufficiently set blaze to the structure it would cease function.
With no further thought on the matter, Samuel launched the lantern and waited, breath held, until it cracked open upon the upper deck of the device. Flames dripped down like brilliant wax, showering the menagerie below and causing a chorus of fearful screeches and chirps.
"Have that," he said triumphantly, observing the slowly spreading sheet of fire atop the platform. Pride welled in him as he heard wood pop with the burning, knowing it signified the likelihood that once the fire had fed in earnest the planks would collapse and with fortune, completely destroy the mechanisms below.
Confident in his success, Samuel nuzzled Ruby's neck and turned from the laboratory to face the alley…
And the abominations that looked back at him.
Two of the stick-men stood beyond the door, rain pasting their crimson hair to the gleaming skin of their brows. This was Samuel's first unobstructed view of the things' faces, and he wished to have never seen it. Eyes like shattered emeralds, faceted with ridges and fissures, glared hungrily at him, and beneath these horrible ocular configurations three narrow slits rippled like the gills of a fish. But the mouths were worst of all. The stick-man on the left yanked something forcefully from its jaws and tossed the hindquarter of one of the odd cat-like animals to the mud. Then its face opened. Oh that terrible gaping chasm, with hundreds of pin sharp teeth lining the roof and jaw, bits of prey still snagged on the barbs.
Behind Samuel, the laboratory glowed ominously with flame and the device's still-radiant coils. Something about the light had changed, but he daren't look back to observe the anomaly. The stick-men came forward cautiously, assessing the strength of their quarry.
A great explosion sounded in Dodd's house. The fire had made its way into the kerosene stock to create a firebomb that blew through the flooring and sent shards of glass flying across the alley amid enormous gouts of flame. Samuel thought he and Ruby's luck had shifted for the better, as the tumult distracted the stick-men, bent them low to cower from the tremendous force behind them. For a moment, as the hot wash of air blew over his face, he even allowed himself to hope the blast would send fragments of ruins at his assailants like shot from a rifle, cutting them down in the mud, but the hope lasted only a moment. Though distracted, the stick-men had not fled from the conflagration; it had simply pushed them over the threshold, blocking any chance for Samuel's escape.
Refusing to serve as repast for these terrible creatures, and horrified that Ruby might meet the same fate, Samuel clutched his dog tightly and backed to the railing. The stick-men recovered and righted themselves at the doorway, and Ruby greeted them with a fierce growl, but Samuel knew she would prove no match for the barbaric and perverse species.
Instead, he closed his eyes, holding the dog so tightly to his chest it made her whine painfully, and Samuel launched them backward over the railing. It was better to break apart on the floor below than to suffer the bloody intentions of the stick-men. Ruby would forgive him this cowardly end.
As they dropped, Rub
y turned in his arms, scraping his cheeks and waistcoat with her paws. She yelped in terror and the sound cut clean to Samuel's heart, but this was better for them. Better than teeth. Better than claws. Better than…
* * * * *
Grass bends in the wind along a great plain, pointing at a hillock upon which leafless trees stand as straight as columns, jutting toward the gathering clouds. Amid the trunks is a small shack with refined lines and a tower of stones through which smoke pours, like a daughter of the accumulation above, racing skyward to rejoin her parents. As the storm rolls in, announced by the first rumbles of thunder, a panel opens at the front of the shack and two creatures – no longer strangers to this place – emerge onto the hilltop. One of these odd beasts walks on two legs and the other on four.
Their names are Samuel and Ruby, and today as with all inclement days, they run down the hillside and into the field. They dash through the countryside, calling out to one another excitedly as if playing a game. Both seem to enjoy the rain and the wind, and when the sky splits with jagged light, they race toward the bolt, chasing the lightning as if they could catch it and keep it as a precious souvenir.
«-ô-»
Before You Go
By Lee Thomas
You never listened to me.
I warned you about the cigarettes, begged you to stop a hundred times. You insisted it didn't matter – just like the steaks and the cakes and the flood of whiskey served neat in your favorite glass. You said these things made life worth living, these simple pleasures.
You were cold when I woke this morning. With your back to me, I saw the thread-thin scars on your neck, just below your freshly trimmed hair; I saw them every morning before I rose to make your breakfast, and I found them comforting. They were so particular to you. Today, I trace them lightly with my fingernails, knowing my touch won't tickle or disturb.
