Nightwalk
Page 31
The very next day I read about the death of one of those graduate students in a car accident, and thanked the heavens I had been paranoid enough to introduce myself to her with an alias. At that point I ended my investigation because to push it any further would simply be too dangerous. Besides, taking what I already knew and combining it with what I had learned gave me a skeleton framework I could build a theory around.
Chandra had been raised on the outer edge of the slums of Mumbai, and one step away from historical oblivion. But his parents had scraped to get him into a small private school where his genius had been noticed and brought to the attention of a wealthy patron. His academic career was thus launched. He carved a niche for himself in the world of physics, which gave him the funds and opportunity to explore his other passion…ancient religions and sects.
I guess it was only natural he combined the two pursuits into a theory of his own.
He immigrated to America, and initially took a job at Miskatonic University where he could pursue both his passions in physics and ancient cultures. It was while working there he first unified his pursuits and gave an informal talk on what he described as a fanciful daydream on his part.
He postulated that the gods, divas, daemons, and djinns of the ancient world were truly beings of other dimensions who had once crossed the divide between us to pass their wisdom on to mankind. But we had been too young and the wisdom had been lost. It had become distorted, reinterpreted, and then coated with superstition over the ages. Yet they were still out there in their garlanded Elysiums and golden Shangri Las, waiting to see if we could ever find our way back to them and join a greater universe.
It was probably a mere pet theory at the time, but a few years later his idle theory had become an obsession. He had his first bout with cancer.
After that, he had focused on his dimensional research to the exclusion of all others. He relocated south and got a new job at the much more technologically focused Rice, along with the aforementioned community college until his position there was secure. Then about eighteen months ago, the facts get slim. He accepted a position at Jet Propulsion Laboratories and drastically reduced his presence at Rice to little more than a seat on a few advisory boards who seldom met.
And there is where I enter the hell of speculation.
Chandra must have gotten funding to build some kind of prototype. Several of his notes mention a design he had come up with, and a few contain rough sketches of a couple of parts. JPL had the money and equipment to make it happen. He would finally get a chance to test his theories in a way like never before.
But then something had gone wrong.
Perhaps one of the tests had produced results that alarmed his superiors. Or perhaps one of his peers went over his math and didn’t like where it led them. Or maybe funding simply dried up. Whatever the reason, the project got shut down. I know this simply because if it hadn’t, then the catastrophe would have happened at JPL as opposed to Chandra’s second home clear across the city.
Which meant he had definitely reached the stage of a prototype. And since he had been forbidden to use it, he either stole it or reconstructed the device on the sly. I’m leaning toward the first option. It would explain why the police had his house surrounded that night. The federal government takes a dim view of people who steal classified equipment. And who knows? They may have even suspected it was dangerous.
Regardless, a little after midnight on July 3, Roger Chandra flipped the switch on his dimensional elevator…
…and discovered that, exactly as the man in white said, the universe wasn’t all that interested in his theories of what it should be.
Personally, I hope the stupid bastard suffered.
But now I turn my attention to the bastards of a different breed.
Like Darla asked that night, why didn’t thousands of cops pour in there “shooting the hell out of all this creepy bullshit?” The people of Coventry Woods had counted on them to come to their rescue. Instead they had been abandoned to their fates, with those very same police used to seal them in, and then whatever survivors remained had been murdered when they dropped that bomb.
Why? Why on earth not use the forces at your command to save your own people?
I carry no illusions our government is comprised of noble men and women who serve from pure altruism. I write noir for God’s sake. But at the same time, no matter how dim a view you have of the people who govern us, they don’t make a habit of nuking the suburbs of their own major cities. And that’s what bothers me the most. Even assuming whoever gave the order was a ruthless son-of-a-bitch of the highest degree, there could only be one possible motive for such a decision.
Fear.
They knew something, or suspected something, or maybe feared some possibility so much they couldn’t take the chance of it happening. They felt they didn’t have a choice. The event at Coventry Woods frightened them so badly they had to annihilate it, along with whatever witnesses had the misfortune to be involved.
And that’s the first reason my finger hasn’t descended. In an ideal universe, there would never be a good enough reason to murder so many people. But the lesson of this whole event is the universe really isn’t concerned with our ideals. And thus, however much I may want to deny it, there may have been all too good a reason for that bomb to fall.
The second reason is the man in white himself.
He saved my life, and Casey’s along with it. He saved at least one other, and maybe more. He denied having anything to do with what happened at Coventry Woods, and I believe him. But while I don’t think he ever lied, I never detected a hint of anything resembling human altruism in him. Quite the opposite, in fact.
As he told Casey, he hadn’t “concealed the shoggoth in the duck pond,” but that had been a bit of a dodge. As horrifying and powerful as the beast was, I saw nothing to suggest it possessed the ability to activate a dead security light at a playground. But the man who warned me to “think of spiders and moths” most assuredly did. And I think he did it for the exact same reason a group of boys held a flashlight to a dark window all those years ago.
Merely to laugh at the spider as it scurried around killing bugs.
Not to mention, he could have actually saved us as a group right there on Darla’s porch instead of waiting for whoever managed to reach him at the overpass. But he didn’t. He didn’t even give me a way to prove to the others he existed.
No, altruism had nothing to with his actions.
So why help us? Why a writer, and a photographer, and the other people he had specifically chosen? The only possible answer is he wanted the truth to get out, but he would only go so far to see that happen.
Einstein once said God doesn’t play dice, but in this case I think he was very, very wrong. The man in white loved setting things up, or giving them a little nudge, just to stand back and see how things fell out. And as he said, in this case he had been a mere passerby to an event which happened through no effort of his. So he had idly poked the ant bed on his way by. He might have a desired outcome, but it wasn’t in his nature to artificially impose it. Maybe he found it more fun that way. Or maybe we really weren’t interesting enough to put more effort into it. But in either case I think his desired outcome was for me to reveal the truth.
And I really have my doubts whether an outcome he finds desirable would look anything like mine.
Thus my finger has yet to fall.
But here’s the real kicker. The man in white mentioned others. Other people he had assisted, or nudged in the right direction, who had yet to succeed or fail at reaching him. Had one of them made it? Could it be somebody who knew Chandra? Or somebody with the skills or ability to figure things out? Or maybe somebody who could simply prove the official story to be a lie?
Did another finger hover over a keyboard out there, possibly about to render any decision I made moot?
I don’t know. And there’s no way I can find out.
All I know is I have nightmares.<
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I dream of those fanged jaws, grinning in the darkness under that headdress. I dream of them every night. They are laughing, and I can’t tell if they are laughing at me or at us all. But what I can tell is they are getting closer.
And I don’t know what that means.
“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
About the Author
D. Nathan Hilliard writes horror and fantasy from his desk in Spring, TX. He draws his inspiration from a wealth of experiences growing up in small towns, a childhood addiction to the Saturday Afternoon Matinee, and a life-long love of the written word.
He currently has two other horror novels, Spiderstalk and Dead Stop, available at Amazon.com…along with two collections of short stories and one dark fantasy novel, The Ways of Khrem.