“You wouldn’t be so cold,” I said, “if you bothered to wear a coat.”
Jonathan looked at himself. He dismissed my comment, as he did most matters of small consequence, with a lopsided grin.
“I want to show you something,” said Jonathan. I thought the device in his hands was a weapon, and I cringed when he lifted it and flipped the activator. The original incarnation was best described like a flamethrower: a brass backpack with extruded piping hung from wide leather straps, with a cylindrical ejector attached by a flexible hose. It wouldn’t be the first time Jonathan rushed through a presentation without considering his environment. The observatory lounge still bears the scars of his experiments refining cordite.
But nothing untoward happened. The end of the cylinder behaved like a flashlight, oddly focused. Jonathan swept this beam around the room, and I tried to duck out of the way for fear the device’s output was more than mere light. As the glow cut across my legs, I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Jonathan twisted a ring on the cylinder. The light lost its focus and became more like a cone, considerably dimmed. He scanned the room again, scowled in disappointment, and turned off the device.
“There’s nothing here,” he said, turning. “We should go outside.”
“Jonathan.” He stopped, his face displaying annoyance at the fact that I wasn’t hot on his heels. “May I dress first?”
“If you must. Oh, and perhaps I may borrow a jacket?”
I rushed, skipping the formalities of tie and closed cuffs. Jonathan fidgeted with manic energy, and I felt it best to get him out of my house before something was damaged beyond repair. In the street, he looked around then moved quickly away.
He ducked down a side street. I turned the corner and found him in a small courtyard.
“Perfect,” he said. “Now to see if anything is here.”
The courtyard itself was empty, an area used for ash cans; I doubt even children played in it. Perhaps a rat eyed us from a crack in one of the building’s foundations.
Jonathan activated the light. It was still set as a cone, which he moved swiftly around the courtyard, even into the air above us. He aimed it at a space over my left shoulder and tightened the beam.
“Observe,” he said with a smile. I turned and saw a monster.
In bright light, one can see ghostly images just out of focus of one’s vision. These are the microscopic organisms that travel in the lubricating fluids of the eye. As they pass over the lens, they become visible.
This was no microorganism. It was an amorphous mass, perhaps the size of a steamer trunk. Its borders were like the cell wall of a paramecium: thick with the appearance of being unable to hold back the protoplasmic ooze within. Ropy tendrils hung from one end. They flailed the air as an anemone would, searching for food. What seemed like a mouth but could have been an anus gaped at the center of these tendrils. It was abhorrent to gaze upon. Turning as I did and seeing it for the first time, I screamed and jumped backward, slipping on the snow and falling onto the cold, wet pavement of the courtyard.
“It cannot harm you,” Jonathan said as I scrambled backward.
It may seem like cowardice as I tell of it, yet this beast was frightful in a way that I find difficult to describe. When I say Jonathan told me it could do me no harm, I didn’t believe him. Even now, knowing what I do, I shudder at the first sighting of his lantern device.
“What is that thing?” I said, or at least I believe I phrased it that way. Perhaps I only blubbered, for I cannot recall the immediate moments following my flight from the creature. I remember sitting in the snow with my back against a wall, Jonathan on my right.
“I don’t know,” he said. Jonathan never spoke more terrifying words, for he knew a great deal. He advanced on it. I am ashamed to admit I did nothing to prevent him.
Jonathan held the beam of light on the blasphemous thing. He reached out a hand and passed it entirely through the creature’s body without disturbing it in the least. It was as if my psyche blinked, for rational thought returned in an instant. A core belief of every scientist is that an action results in a reaction. When the creature did nothing, I found this more unbelievable than its presence in the courtyard. I stood and joined Jonathan beside it, my mind whole once more.
A closer inspection revealed it to be less like a single-celled animal than I first thought. Yes, its innards seemed made of liquid, but there was a transparent structure underneath. I could make out organs, though they were unlike a digestive tract or respiratory system. I searched the thing for a mouth and found nothing, so whether it ate from the maw beside the tentacles and excreted by osmosis or ate by enveloping prey and passed solids and liquids from its singular orifice, I know not. Bumps and lesions covered its skin. Its structure enthralled and horrified me simultaneously, like stumbling upon a dead bird already beset by insects.
“It was my goal to study ultraviolet wavelengths through the big telescope,” Jonathan said. “As I configured the optics on a desktop model, I saw a multitude of airborne creatures. I rigged this harness with a portable power supply, which, unfortunately does not have the sustaining qualities I would like.”
“There are more of these things?”
“In a quantity that is hard to imagine. To be honest, the only place I haven’t seen one is in your home.”
“How do you know they are harmless?” I asked, my face no more than a foot from the thing.
“I don’t. But I can do this,” he said and placed his hand inside the body of the creature. Engulfed by its mass, Jonathan seemed to suffer no ill effects. He stood there, holding the cylinder with one hand while the creature hovered. He didn’t see it, and I’m not certain I did either, but when he withdrew his hand the thing curled slightly, as if it longed for the contact to continue. Maybe that’s just how I perceive it now.
“Can we go for a drive?” I asked. Jonathan switched off the light. The creature vanished, leaving us alone in the courtyard.
“Whatever for, Henry?”
“I believe we should go see someone.”
“Who?”
“It may be easier to show you.”
“Very well, Henry. Lead us on this mysterious voyage.”
Behind a high wall of adobe, with ornate gates reminiscent of Mexican barons, just on the fringes of city and desert, is a property that many landowners would envy. While there were no signs, it was impossible even for someone who had never been there, to mistake the Emily Prescott Facility for anything other than an asylum.
Uniformed attendants followed patients who wandered the grounds. This was no place for those who were merely “touched,” as my Appalachian grandmother would say. The patients at the Prescott were the kind that required full-time care. About half the patients needed an attendant to follow them and ensure they didn’t hurt themselves or anyone else. My uncle had been there for years and fell into that half.
We watched him through the window of his room, a jail cell with cushioned furniture bolted to the walls and floor. That must have been one of his bad days, for the staff had placed him in a restraining jacket. He sat twitching in the single chair, legs curled.
I opened the door. Jonathan gave me a strange look but followed.
“Hello, Uncle Adrian.” My uncle didn’t respond. A crusty trail of dried saliva lined his chin. A week’s worth of whiskers peppered his jaw. Apparently, he had been having more than just one bad day.
“Henry?” said Jonathan.
“I told you it was easier to show you.” I knelt in front of my uncle and lifted his head. His vacant eyes looked right through me. “Uncle?” He ignored me. “Uncle?”
With one hand under his chin to keep his head up, I slapped him hard across the cheek. Jonathan hissed with surprise, but my uncle’s focus returned to the room.
“Get them off me, Henry,” he said. “Get them off me.”
“Them?” asked Jonathan.
“He has complained of monsters attacking him for years.” I stood and went with a bew
ildered Jonathan outside. We retrieved his backpack device from the car. In what was only one of many strange happenings that day, not a single attendant asked us what we were doing. In fact, the director of the facility himself shook my hand and spoke with us at length. He barely glanced at the gleaming brass tank on Jonathan’s back. Perhaps they were accustomed to strange sights.
My uncle had returned to his catatonia, though he had slipped to the floor.
“Turn it on,” I said to Jonathan. He flipped the actuator and bathed the room in blue light.
There were four of them. Shaped like jellyfish, with tentacle-like appendages, they clung to my uncle. Their bodies were as shapeless as puddles, with the same transparent organs inside as the creature from the courtyard. Seeing more of them—and in a newly rational state of mind—I could tell they were smaller versions of the same creature. Rough hairs stuck out of the tentacles, which ended in tiny, three-clawed talons. Where the first thing had not interacted with us, these clearly fed upon my uncle. Their bodies pulled like they were sucking on him. A talon scraped against my uncle’s lip, and he twitched.
I walked across the room and swatted at the one attached to his temple. My hand moved through it as if it were made of smoke. But when I picked up my uncle and moved him back into the chair, the grotesque things remained where they were. My uncle shuddered, a deep sigh leaving his body. I watched as the creatures twisted in the air. Then, one by one, they drifted towards my uncle as if his gravity were slowly drawing them close.
The light shifted from blue to the more familiar yellow-white, and the creatures vanished.
“I must get back to my lab,” Jonathan said.
“I need a few minutes.”
“Swiftly, Henry. Swiftly.”
Jonathan returned the device to the car as I spent several minutes speaking with the facility administrator again. I requested that my uncle’s care take a new direction, that I wanted him active and mobile. When I asked what the most difficult time of day was for my uncle, I knew before the director spoke that it was mornings. I suggested that my uncle be heavily sedated at night, so that at least he would be consciously free from the touch of those things while he slept. The director studied me with a queer expression, but I persisted until he agreed.
After only a week of constant motion, my uncle’s health improved dramatically. He no longer raved, though mornings were still quite bad. But a few minutes walking proved most therapeutic. The doctors tried to convince me that it was a psychological dependency on motion that had stricken my uncle, and I let them believe that I believed them. With only a nurse’s assistance at the beginning of each day, my uncle was able to behave like the less-stricken half of the asylum.
Jonathan and I drove back to the university, and it was the last I saw of him for several days. Jonathan seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth. Graduate students took to teaching his classes. His reserved time on the big telescope went unfulfilled, but the vacancies were quickly snapped up by desperate colleagues, myself included.
I slept poorly, as could be expected, and became dependent on sleeping powders mixed into my evening tea. My skin constantly tingled with tiny itches, worse than when someone suggests ants may be crawling on you. I took to walking everywhere, even around my house. My exhaustion compounded, for I stopped resting. How could I, even though I felt nothing of their intrusion?
I fought to concentrate at work. Skills that had seemed so simple before proved impossible. I stared at photographic plates through the stereoscope, searching for the floating afterimage that signified an intrasystem object. The specks of light blurred so that all of them floated. Worse still, some seemed to sprout tentacles.
A tap on my shoulder caused me to jump. I lifted my eyes away from the stereoscope and stared into the face of someone who looked like Jonathan Hilliard’s insane twin.
My uncle’s hair had been unwashed and uncombed; Jonathan’s was wild. His eyes burned with fever, rimmed with red circles. The patches under his eyes were so dark they looked painted on his cheeks, which were hollow as if he had not eaten in days. His newly-grown beard was like a forgotten lawn, patches alternating in short and long whiskers. His breath stank. He wore dungaree overalls over a white lab shirt; both were filthy and wrinkled. Grease stained his hands, and dirt crusted beneath his fingernails.
“My God, Jonathan. What happened? Where have you been?”
“Come with me.” His voice held frantic tones I’d never before heard. It frightened me, more than the creature in the courtyard had.
We drove north out of Flagstaff. I asked Jonathan twice where we were going. Once I was given the cryptic answer “You will see.” The other time I was met with silence. When we stopped, nearly an hour later, it was in the middle of the forest.
“Why here?” I asked when Jonathan remained in the car staring straight ahead. My words broke his hypnotic state, and he exited the car and walked into the woods. I followed, but I admit again with no trace of embarrassment I felt unease.
“This is a young volcano,” he said eventually, “born nine hundred years ago.”
“I know, Jonathan. I did geological studies here as a freshman.”
On another day, he might have responded with a nod, a dismissive wave or perhaps something to the effect of “yes, yes” as if he’d momentarily forgotten I’d spent my whole life in Arizona. It gave me more pause that he did nothing other than follow the deep ruts of a heavy truck’s tires further into the woods.
The tower was enormous. At least twenty feet high, a steel skeleton supported a convex shell. Beside the tower squatted a diesel generator; two drums labeled as fuel sat nearby. Thin cables ran from the generator’s rear face, up the tower, and into the machinery underneath the shell. Welding equipment and tools, along with steel bars and scrap metal, littered the ground.
“I came out here after our trip to the asylum,” Jonathan said while I looked up at the tower. “I often come here. Something about this place, about the dormant peak, has always settled my mind. On a whim, I brought the illuminating device.” He laughed, a single bark that he strangled with a shake of his head. Without saying another word, he walked to the generator and turned it on.
The turbines spun amid black exhaust. Jonathan shouted over the sound of the pistons driving the spinning magnets.
“It must be the energy released from the magma layer,” he said, which meant nothing until the blue light from the tower poured out in all directions, shaded from blinding us by the shell.
Three of the grotesque monstrosities hovered above the slope, giant dirigible-like jellyfish. They pulsed, swimming through unknown currents opposite the direction of the wind. Protoplasmic fluid ebbed and flowed through tentacles thick as ancient trees. Directly overhead, I could see up into the cavity of one, its ringed maw open and puckering.
A fourth thing hugged the volcano in a grip obscenely sexual. It sucked on the mountain with a force that threatened to loosen it.
“They’re everywhere, Henry.” His voice cracked twice in that sentence. “It’s as if they don’t exist unless we turn on the device. That doesn’t stop them from driving your uncle mad. I’ve tested them with wavelengths of light, chemicals, physical contact. They have no effect. But there must be something. Why else would they be here, feeding on the volcano?”
Jonathan laughed then, a shrieking wail that was half sob. He stammered, unable to string together so much as two coherent syllables. I ran to the generator and switched it off. As the light faded and empty sky returned, I saw the feeding monster break free from the volcano while another moved in to replace it.
I grabbed Jonathan by the shoulders and shook him. The smile stayed on his face as he gibbered. The slap I gave him, stronger than the one I gave my uncle, silenced the laughter and erased the smile. I thought he would be angry. Instead, his face drained of all emotion. I led him back to the car, away from that dreadful place. He followed my directions like an automaton, my hand on his upper arm guiding him forward. Hi
s feet moved, but it seemed as if they held no volition of their own. If I had let go of him, I believe Jonathan would have stood in that forest until he simply fell down and died.
Jonathan came back to my house. He was still unresponsive. I sat him down on the living room couch, then took off his boots and loosened his shirt. Lastly, I did what I probably shouldn’t have, though there is no telling for certain that it was my actions that killed him: I mixed one of my sleeping powders into some water and forced it down his throat.
After I lay him down, his lids closed, and he slept. I tried to stay awake and found my mind hummed with too much confusion. One packet in tea didn’t feel like it would do the trick; the glass of whisky on top of it made the difference. It was barely after lunchtime when I too fell asleep.
I awoke groggily to what was obviously morning light. I stumbled down the stairs and found the living room couch empty. When I walked into the kitchen, I thought my house had been burgled in the night. Drawers and cabinets stood open. The table was covered with miscellanea. My tool box had been dumped out on the floor. But I saw spools of stripped wire and other parts that told me Jonathan had built something while I slept off my drug-induced state.
The car was gone. I found it parked crookedly in front of the observatory. Jonathan’s car and mine were the only ones in the small lot, so it was I who found him.
The police sergeant I spoke with later nodded wisely and gave me what I suppose he felt was sound advice. He said one should never handle a body that had been hanging, even to check it for vital signs. A swelling of the feet and legs as the blood settles down is all that’s needed to tell that the suicide victim is already dead.
I rushed to Jonathan. He had used his tie and the sturdy framework of the big telescope. I wrapped my arms around his middle and lifted him. Perhaps I was thinking to alleviate the strain of the fabric around his throat. The sergeant thought he had been hanging all night and half the previous day, a deduction confirmed by the coroner. It would take that long, they both said, to tenderize the flesh to the point that it stripped off in my arms when I tried to lift him.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 5
