Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He lowered his gaze to the card that accompanied drawing No. 2. It was a translation of Narik Guul’s own intended caption. It read: “Having aroused the notice of Ugghiutu, yet without fully waking Him from the slumber that binds the Dreaming One, the maidens are then willingly sacrificed to gather their nourishing blood.”

  On then to drawing No. 3, and here was that circular pool again into which the virgins’ blood had been drained. The four corpses were gone, but a smooth humped shape was rising up from the inky fluid, like the top of a huge skull slimed in gore. The title: The Emergence of the Seed .

  Maxim’s footfalls up the next steps were like the heavy tramping of his heart.

  Drawing No. 4: The Removal of the Seed . Here, four males in the conical turbans of high holy men encircled the pool, each helping support what appeared to be a large black pod, egg-shaped but tapering to a blunt point at both ends.

  Next, drawing No. 5: The Planting of the Seed. The holy men were seen standing the cocoon-like pod on one end in a little depression in the ground, outside the high stone wall of a city. Arrows and lances were flying down at them from warriors atop the wall, but the holy men carried on despite being multiply pierced.

  “A god as a weapon,” Maxim said. As familiar as these pictures were, somehow it was as though he were seeing them through new eyes, in some truer or fuller context. Maybe he had only concentrated on them individually before, and only as art, instead of absorbing the story they told.

  He ascended further. The tropical garden looked much smaller already, a tiny oasis. The two lovers had gone. The gurgling fountain sounded like mocking chuckles from someone hiding among the fronds.

  No. 6 was The Temple Is Born . It might seem like a strange title to one who had never seen the next two images or knew nothing of the lore of Ugghiutu. The four holy men lay slain, their bodies and heads bristling with arrows. Rooted at the center of their circle of dead bodies, the pod had risen into the air on a black stalk or trunk like a smooth column, looking like the glans of a giant phallus or the club-shaped cap of certain mushrooms.

  Maxim was nearing the top of the dome’s interior. The steps were not as wide as they had been. The wall curving lower over his head and the steps becoming narrower made him feel as though he were growing larger himself, like Alice. Wet with perspiration, his palm slid along the railing.

  No. 7: The Temple of Ugghiutu . Now the earlier reference to a temple was made clearer. Somehow, since the developments detailed in illustration No. 6 that black pillar had become a great tower, with the former pod bulging like an onion dome at its summit. Furthermore, the black substance from which this structure had grown had spread out to either side of the central tower, having risen into smooth black walls perforated by circular windows without glass, which had the organic shape and puckered rims of orifices in a living body. It was as though a new city—as black as the icy void between stars—was growing just outside the wall of the stone city.

  This, Maxim knew, was the classical form Ugghiutu took in numerous ancient myths and in relatively more modern folktales. From the deep sleep in which he was said to have been imprisoned by a race of enemy gods, the dreaming Ugghiutu would transmit (was that the right word?) this corporeal avatar or aspect of himself, masquerading as one of the countless temples that had been erected across Kali by his faithful. Either tricked into entering this living temple or perhaps even giving themselves over to it as willing sacrifices, Kalians would venture inside such an edifice only to be consumed. Their life force would feed Ugghiutu himself, in whatever unknowable dimension he resided. Later, such a mock temple would dissolve or vanish somehow, as mysteriously as it had appeared.

  Maxim read the caption to No. 7. It simply stated: “The Temple blooms outside the stronghold of the faithless enemies of His worshippers.”

  He climbed toward the final piece in the display. One could proceed up the narrowing staircase no further than that. His scuffing footfalls echoed back from the great bowl just over his head.

  Only one more drawing in the series remained, and it had been destroyed by fire. But in its place hung a scan or photographic replica in the original frame, with an accompanying notice describing succinctly what had transpired. Yet Maxim studied this image as closely as the others; more closely, since this was the drawing he had already been paid twenty thousand munits to re-create, with another twenty thousand promised upon delivery.

  Drawing No. 8 had been named The Outsider Triumphant .

  The black temple had indeed grown fully to the size of a city. Ebony towers of various sizes and shapes soared into the sky, with that central tower seeming to disappear into the clouds like a pillar upholding the heavens. The temple’s swollen bulk had pushed against the stone wall of the conquered city, toppling it and crushing the buildings the wall had formerly protected. Furthermore, root-like growths, tentacles perhaps, had sprouted from the base of the temple, and many of these had snaked up over the broken wall, spreading throughout the decimated city beyond, branching off into innumerable smaller tendrils. Some of these had coiled around survivors, holding their squirming bodies aloft in the air. This black web had spread over the faces of buildings, over statues, across squares and rooftops, looking like dense parasitic vines that ultimately threatened to overrun every surface of the enemy city . . . cover every last block and brick . . . so as to smother and replace it utterly.

  In every one of the illustrations, that same black orb hung in the same spot in the sky. But with each successive picture, the writhing limbs that formed its halo grew longer, more sinuous, beginning to coil. The spiral at the center expanded and expanded, until in the last drawing—its reproduction, at least—the whorl extended to the disk’s outer edge.

  Slowly leaning back from the drawing—he hadn’t realized how close he had brought his face to the glass—Maxim felt exhausted, overwhelmed, as if he’d just woken from an unsettling nightmare that had had him tossing and turning. His heart still thudded. He supposed that was from climbing these steps and the excitement of the commission, comingled with the strange coincidence of his seemingly prescient dream.

  “I guess that just means this was all meant to be,” he said aloud.

  “Sir?”

  Maxim hadn’t realized that the Kalian guard stood just a few steps below him. How long had he been there? Had he been shadowing him all this time, while he had lost himself in these artworks?

  Well, as long as the Kalian was right here, Maxim decided to utilize him. He asked, “The man who hired me for this job, Mr. Nhil, said the interior of Kalian temples to Ugghiutu are configured a lot like this Nautilus Chamber here, correct? And Mrs. Garavito took her inspiration partially from that, so she could display these drawings in the way the artist intended.”

  “That was part of Mrs. Garavito’s inspiration for this design, yes, but not all chambers in a Kalian temple are circular such as this.”

  “No? I’ve never been in a Kalian temple.”

  The guard’s smile was a bit forced. “Nor would you—forgive me for saying so, sir—be permitted to do so. Only worshippers of Ugghiutu are granted entrance to one of our temples. But to return to your question: no, different chambers are configured differently depending on their usage. When Ugghiutu is to be consulted or communed with in his dreams—as one would be doing if one were to view these drawings in sequence while reciting, inwardly or outwardly, certain prayers—it might be best to do so in a circular chamber, because Ugghiutu and his brethren Outsiders move more easily through angles than through curves.”

  Maxim’s brow rumpled. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me. If the Outsiders move best through angles, and you want to commune with them, wouldn’t it be better to summon them in a room with corners? Wouldn’t summoning them in a curved room be more difficult?”

  “Precisely, Mr. Komaroff. You see, I didn’t lose you. One must be careful, when communing with Ugghiutu, to arouse his dreaming mind only enough to interact with him, without fully awakening him . . . and hence
calling forth a material manifestation one does not truly desire.”

  “Why wouldn’t you desire that?”

  The guard smiled again, with serene patience, as if explaining a commonsense notion to a child. “We worship the unimaginable power, the force of creation and destruction, that is Ugghiutu, who in his unthinkable superiority is an embodiment of the cold and infinite universe. The universe does not love us, any more than Ugghiutu loves his faithful. We do not expect it of him. He finds us useful, as you and I find yeast useful in the making of leavened bread. When we tear bread with our teeth and consume it to nourish ourselves, we may at best be grateful to yeast in some distant, unconscious way. But we do not love yeast. Do you understand this?”

  Maxim nodded. “So . . . you keep Ugghiutu at arm’s length. You’re very afraid of him.”

  “Shouldn’t we be afraid of a god, Mr. Komaroff?”

  “So if one were to believe in all this stuff—uh, that is to say . . .” Maxim flushed red, afraid to insult the man’s beliefs.

  “Go on, please.”

  “Well, it sounds to me as if your people would actually be grateful that other gods imprisoned Ugghiutu and the rest of the Outsiders. And keep them that way.”

  “It would be blasphemous for us to be pleased that Ugghiutu is imprisoned,” the man said very slowly, obviously choosing his words with care. “But the conflict that resulted in his imprisonment is beyond us . . . outside our humble human scope and experience. We cannot truly understand it nor judge it. Things are as they are. And as they are, Ugghiutu resides in a tomb of sleep from which it would be unwise for humans to wake him completely.”

  “But . . . physical extensions of him are believed to be conjured up sometimes,” Maxim said, waving his arm toward drawing No. 8. “Either by himself—those simulated temples that pop up—or by his followers. As weapons, for example, like in these illustrations.”

  “Yes. Avatars of varying material presence, and hence potency, can be summoned by holy men of the highest order. But it is not done lightly. And even then, it would most likely be desirable to undertake such a conjuring in a circular chamber such as this, to ensure that only the required avatar is summoned . . . and not something very much more powerful, and impossible to control.”

  “So,” Maxim summarized, his head feeling swollen with all it was absorbing, “the bottom line is, it’s better to worship Ugghiutu than to liberate him.”

  “To use another analogy, sir, a person might worship the sun for its greatness . . . without wanting that sun to descend upon his world and burn it all to ash.”

  Maxim nodded again. That analogy was easily enough digested.

  “Well,” he said, “Mrs. Garavito was obviously intrigued with your culture, but wanted to follow her own vision in the design of this courtyard, too. She must have been horrified when that young woman burned the original of this drawing.”

  “Yes, it was a terrible blow. Just because she left her Punktown collection behind doesn’t mean that she didn’t still hold it in her heart. It was almost a mercy that she didn’t live much longer after the incident.”

  “Excuse me?” Maxim stammered. “Are you saying . . . has Mrs. Garavito passed away?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Komaroff.” The guard affected a pained expression, as if breaking the news to next of kin. “Only a few days after that precious drawing was vandalized, Mrs. Garavito was killed during a robbery attempt at her home on Earth.”

  “She was murdered?” Maxim said, astonished that he had missed hearing of this. But one could scarcely keep up with the overabundance of crime reports in Punktown, let alone those on Earth as well.

  The Kalian guard nodded solemnly. “One might venture so far as to say it was divine punishment for having acquired these important artifacts that never should have come into her possession. That is to say, if one believes in such things.” He smiled his polite smile again. “Which I know you do not.”

  5

  At first Maxim had thought he might trace at least a basic outline, in pencil, from the original drawing (a copy he’d printed from the net), using his light table. Then he would ink in that tracing. He figured it was permissible, if his patrons wanted as exact a replica as possible. But ultimately he had felt that would still be a cheat—not to the Kalians and the museum, but to his own ability. So he rose fully to the challenge and started sketching out the framework of his construction purely by observing the original, taped alongside his sheet of nine-by-twelve-inch drawing paper.

  There was much erasing of this pencil work with a kneaded eraser. Adjusting slight angles of line, sometimes only by a sixteenth of an inch, he felt like a necromancer toiling over the precise geometric design of a magic formula.

  Occasionally he would sit back to observe his work in progress from a bit of distance, trying to imagine it through Mr. Nhil’s midnight eyes, the heel of his right hand silvery-black from leaning against graphite. The color was almost the same as Nhil’s skin.

  It took him most of the first day to finish the pencil outline that would underlie the ink drawing. But by that night, when he poured himself a congratulatory glass of expensive whiskey purchased with his advance, he was quite satisfied with the results.

  The glow of pride, and of whiskey, made him feel lustful. Filling his shot glass a second time, he thought of calling Famuu. She was a Choom, the indigenous people of Oasis, who like the Kalians were one of the few truly humanoid races in the Colonial Network. The only obvious feature that would distinguish Famuu’s people from Maxim’s was that her mouth was cut back to her cute little ears, her pugnacious lower jaw heavy with compound rows of molars. But with her broad, distinct cheekbones and wide-spaced, ice-gray eyes, the overall effect was very pleasing to Maxim’s artistic sensibilities. She always wore neon-glowing red lipstick on those wraparound lips—even when she wore nothing else—and her hair, chopped short as a boy’s, was usually dyed neon red to boot. The red glow had lit their lovemaking in her cave-dark basement apartment. Yes, Famuu’s legs usually bristled unshaven, and her smell was a bit musky, but he had never really decided if those were drawbacks or excitements. She owned a tattoo parlor on Morpha Street and had bought rights to several of his drawings to use as designs. She had offered to tattoo his own artwork on him, for free, using perhaps ink that glowed like neon, too, but she had stopped seeing him before he could take her up on that. She had been seeing another, younger artist at the same time she was involved with him. It hadn’t hurt Maxim so much that Famuu had stopped returning his calls, since he had never felt as engaged emotionally as he was physically, but the hurt came from knowing that the other man was an artist. As one will wonder if a replacement lover is better in bed, Maxim had tormented himself wondering if this younger man was the better artist.

  He turned from his drawing table to sit at his little computer desk, gesturing in the air to call up several overlapping holographic screens. He scrolled through his address book in search of Famuu’s forgotten number. When he tried to connect to it, though, he found it was no longer in service; it had been changed and the new number was unlisted. For a moment he took this development bitterly, as if she had changed her number specifically to elude him . . . though he knew that this was illogical. There had been no animosity between them, only a fundamental indifference. He did a search for the number of her tattoo parlor, though it was probably too late to catch her there still working.

  It was. He got a recorded vid of Famuu smiling hugely back at him without seeing him, as she gave her establishment’s hours of operation and seductively invited him to come by her place to be transformed into a walking work of art. Her own body was a miniature museum of her craft, though she herself favored only works in black ink—no color, no glowing, nothing animated or holographic. In the vid, her lips and hair were a luminous blue. New number, new hair, new lover. Maxim broke off before her message was finished.

  No matter. Maxim sipped his whiskey. He felt majestic with patience, replacing the desperation that
had been his roommate for much of this past decade. New lovers would come. New showings of his art in better venues, new and better commissions. With that hovering vid screen banished, he found himself staring at his blank, default search screen. Curiosity crept in, like the insinuating warmth of alcohol, and he decided to do a search on the obituary of Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito.

  It was as the guard at Alfreda’s museum had told him. Over two months ago, just shortly after the act of vandalism at her museum in Punktown (though that incident wasn’t mentioned in the news story he found), Alfreda had been attacked in her expensive home on Earth, despite the mansion’s security system. Various pieces of art had been stolen—some Coleopteroid mechanical sculptures several hundred years old, and rare carvings connected to an ancient Tikkihotto religious group—but apparently Mrs. Garavito had disturbed the burglars and they’d fled. But not before they had slashed her throat, half decapitating her.

  “Worthless punks,” Maxim muttered. He raised his shot glass in a toast to Alfreda.

  Thoughts of the former fashion model turned patron of the arts led him to think of the destruction of the artwork that he was in the process of reproducing; specifically, to the woman who had committed that crime. He started a new net search, wanting to learn more about this person who was responsible for his turn of good fortune. He should be toasting her, too.

  Her name, he learned, had been Kaleet Dukenna-Ir. There was a picture of her, a college ID photo: smiling whitely, her black eyes shimmering with intelligence. Almost as shocking as the fact that she didn’t cover her head with a blue turban was that her hair was buzzed down to black stubble. She must have given traditional Kalians in Punktown fits just walking down the street. On Kali, she wouldn’t have made two steps without being assaulted with acid or bricks.