Nothing changed. Apparently the luminous thing was a kind of resonator in its own right and could hold us in this reality if it saw fit.
“Get in the Humvee!” I cried.
Firing as we went, we all retreated in that direction. Morrissey made it through the door. Then the entity focused on the vehicle. The Humvee somersaulted slowly upward and broke apart into nothing as it rose, along with the two men inside.
“Run!” I screamed. “Scatter!” Maybe that way, someone could escape.
No, wrong again. Changing position for the first time, the entity shot over the corpse-littered asphalt like a bishop sliding across a chessboard, and it gave chase faster than any man could run. Wailing and thrashing, the Ranger it was pursuing drifted upward.
As he disintegrated, I could only think of one thing left to try. I dropped my rifle, threw away my helmet, and pulled my Beretta M9 from its holster. I reached around behind my head, pressed the pistol’s muzzle against the lower portion of my skull, and put my thumb on the trigger.
I knew where the pineal gland was, tucked away in a groove between the two halves of the thalamus in the center of the brain. I knew where surgeons go in when they have to biopsy it or excise a tumor. Still, what I was intending was crazy, suicidal, and I froze until the last Ranger was gone. But when the shining thing focused on me, and my feet left the ground, I screamed and fired.
The next thing I knew, I was here in the hospital.
I’ve learned that while the bullet didn’t kill me, it pretty well ruined me. I can’t walk or see, either. But my memory’s all right. I know I’ve already told this story a dozen times. Still, I keep repeating it even when I doubt anybody’s listening. Because everyone needs to understand what I saw and what I’ve figured out.
The mathematicians say T-space is infinite, and we’ve only explored the nearest parts of it. I think that when we killed so many of the monsters in the bit that’s right next door, we opened up that territory for creatures deeper in to colonize, and now that they’ve moved in, they’re not going to let us put things back the way they were without a fight.
I want to believe we can beat them. But the hospital’s quiet. I’ve been pushing the call button for a while now, and the nurse hasn’t come.
It makes me wonder who’s left to go to war.
PROGRAMMED TO RECEIVE
Orrin Grey
1. The Tower
When Kelly is a little girl, the Tower is right next to her bedroom window. With the purple curtains open, it becomes her nightlight, and she lies in bed staring up at it and the stars beyond.
Her dad was one of the men who helped build it, and now he watches over it. That’s what he says, the words he uses. He likes to tell her about the Tower, to point up at it and explain that it’s one of the most powerful broadcast towers this side of the Mississippi. When she asks him what it broadcasts, he just says, “Honey, this thing could send a signal all the way to outer space!”
Kelly has an imaginary friend who lives at the top of the tower. At least, that’s what her mother says, “imaginary.” Her mother says that when she was a little girl, she had imaginary friends, too, but they were always other little girls like her, girls she could have tea parties with. Kelly’s imaginary friend isn’t a girl like her. He’s kind of like a bug and kind of like a flower, and he glows with his own light. He lives at the top of the Tower, but sometimes he comes down, and Kelly can always hear him, his voice a drone, like the TV on in the other room.
Kelly calls him Lenny, but she doesn’t know why. On the wide-lined paper that they give her in school to practice penmanship, she writes: Sumday I’ll clime up the Tower an get on Lennys back an he’ll take me to see his frends. He says the signul isn’t strong enugh yet. He wants me to help make the Tower bigger, but I don’t know how.
2. The Moon
When Kelly is twelve, she and her dad move away from the Tower. Her mother has already left by then. Kelly remembers her parents standing in the front door, the sound of the trucks passing on the highway outside, punctuating their conversation. She remembers her mother saying to her dad, “This is your fault. You did this.”
Kelly and her dad move to a lake where Kelly’s dad is building a dam. The lake is big and flat, the color of the slate tiles that Kelly sees in Home Depot. They live in a trailer park near the dam site. It’s a lot smaller than their old house, and the Tower is too far away to see. The sky here is always gray, like the lake, and Kelly never remembers seeing the sun. It’s cold and her breath comes out as steam in the air as she gathers with the other kids to wait for a bus that takes them to school in a cinderblock building surrounded by evergreens. The bus isn’t yellow, like her old one was, but gray, like everything else here, with green letters.
With the Tower so far away, Kelly doesn’t hear Lenny anymore. She doesn’t have any friends now. There are kids in the trailer park, but they feel temporary. She knows that soon enough she’ll be moving on. That her dad doesn’t watch over the dam, like he did the Tower. Kelly feels different from the other kids, but she also knows enough to know that all kids feel that way, so maybe it’s nothing.
She spends a lot of time down by the side of the lake, looking out across the water. There’s something that lives at the bottom of the lake, something that glows like the moon. She thinks that maybe it’s like Lenny, but she never sees it, never hears it. She just knows that it’s there.
3. The Magician
When Kelly is old enough, she moves away from her dad and goes to the University of Kansas. She cuts her hair boy-short and dies it bright pink and wears a faded black T-shirt with the letters T.S.O.L. stenciled on it in purple. By now the headaches have started, stabbing pain across the inside of her skull, along the back of her forehead. Like a railroad spike, working its way out between her eyes. Her dad took her to the doctor the first time it happened, and they called them migraines, gave her yellow-and-red pills which she dutifully takes whenever she feels a headache building.
She majors in art history with a minor in chemistry, which is where she learns how to make the bombs that blow up part of the KLMB television studio. She watches on the little TV in her dorm room as the police drag away the members of the campus protest group who set the bombs, their faces blurred out in a storm of pixels. They shout about television, calling it the “brainwashing tool of the oligarchy.”
Kelly recognizes one of them as the boy who sat next to her in ethics, the one she slept with a few times before he finally got up the nerve to ask her about the movement, about bombs. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of one of the aliens from They Live, posed to look like Uncle Sam.
She expects the police to knock on her door, to show up in one of her classes. Every day for weeks she waits, but they never come. She claimed no affiliation with the group, and she was nowhere near the blast, and she guesses that the boy didn’t rat her out, that the police, having found their culprits, didn’t probe too deep. In a way, she’s disappointed.
The boy never asked her why she was willing to help. He just assumed that she had the same goals he did. She never tells anyone about the bombs, never has anyone to talk to about why she made them. She doesn’t keep a diary or a journal of her thoughts, but that night she draws a picture of the Tower on the inside cover of her notebook, surrounded by flames.
4. The Hanged Man
When Kelly’s dad hangs himself, men from his work come and take the papers out of the big four-drawer filing cabinet that has always stood in his office, wherever they lived. But they don’t know what Kelly knows, about the papers that her dad keeps in an old boot box at the top of his closet, next to the pistol that Kelly was never allowed to touch.
By then Kelly is out of school, and doing nothing to help her alma mater’s reputation by working as a custodian. She remembers the custodians at her various schools, pushing brooms and running floor buffers, seemingly lost in their own solitary orbits. That feels right to her, safe. She stays away from people when she can, and sta
ys isolated from them when she can’t. She knows by now that she sees things other people don’t, and she’s beginning to learn why.
When the funeral is over and everyone is gone, Kelly takes down the boot box and looks through it, sitting cross-legged—what they used to call “Indian-style” in her elementary school—on her dad’s bed. That’s where she learns about the machine.
They found it at a crime scene back in the 30s, half-destroyed by a bullet from a revolver. They put it back together, bit by bit over the years, shuttling it from secret bunker to secret bunker, making it the provenance of first one bureau and then another through the Cold War, until it ended up in a repurposed missile silo in Kansas, where they built a Tower over it and attached it to a transmitter, just to see what would happen.
When she’s done reading, she burns most of her father’s papers in the fireplace, and the others she takes back to her room, placing them in a pile atop books on Jungian archetypes and the pineal gland, schizophrenia and the Tarot.
5. The Hierophant
When Kelly is ready, she takes two weeks off work, gets in her car and drives south and west. She leaves her dad’s house burning behind her, all her books and papers inside. In the car she listens to the radio, the irony not lost on her. Franz Ferdinand admonishes her to “Turn It On,” though she intends to do just the opposite.
A mile from their old house she hits the first roadblock. Night has fallen outside, and she can already see the Tower’s lights in the distance, blinking to warn off planes. Blue and red lights pulse in the darkness at the roadblock, the SUVs stopped at forty-five degree angles, sawhorses up across the road. She coasts to a stop, turns off the radio, rolls her window down.
The guy in the sheriff’s department jacket walks up to the car, his gun unsnapped in its holster. His hair is cropped military-short, and there’s a hole in his forehead the size of a nickel, a single black line of blood running down his face, along the right side of his nose, around his lip. The hole looks just like the one a bullet would make in a movie, like a trephination wound. Kelly figures that’s not far off. The deputy looks at her. His eyes are that blue they call “cornflower,” but they don’t focus on her, they’re looking past her. Something else is looking at her through him, and it’s not using his eyes. She looks at the hole, at the darkness on the other side of it. He nods and moves aside, and others like him move the sawhorses, pull one of the SUVs to the side of the road so she can drive past.
She leaves her window rolled down, the radio off. She can hear it now, the static in the air, the sound, musical and familiar, like a TV on in the next room. The air outside is too cold, and there’s a breeze that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. What her dad used to call “wind from Pluto.”
There are cars parked everywhere at her old house. More police cars and an ambulance, their lights strobing the darkness, a station wagon, pickup trucks. News and television vans are clustered at the base of the Tower, their own satellite dishes and broadcast arrays extended. Everywhere, people are milling around, and Kelly doesn’t have to look to see the holes in their foreheads, all of them identical.
All the lights are on in her old house, and the wall nearest the Tower has been torn down. There’s the room that was her bedroom, stripped now of anything that could identify it except geography. Everywhere she sees piles of equipment. Car stereos, TVs, speakers, those small satellite dishes that go on the sides of houses. The zombies are carrying it from the cars to the house, where it’s sorted into piles, and then from the house to the Tower.
The top of the Tower isn’t where Lenny lives. Kelly knows that now. She had it wrong as a little girl.
The door of the maintenance hatch at the base of the Tower—the one that her dad used to go down once every few months—stands open now, so that the zombies can carry in their supplies of old transistors and copper wire. She waits for a gap in the procession, and then she follows it down.
6. Judgment
When Kelly gets to the bottom, she finds a massive room, like an airplane hangar made of vaulted concrete. Left over from the missile silo days, or something else. Now, it houses a jumble of electronic equipment. Amps and old radios and TV tubes, all cobbled together with a jungle of cables that run everywhere like spilled intestines. And in the center of the chaos, what her dad’s papers called the Resonator, a machine like a tuning fork that emits—or maybe inhabits—a purple glow that Kelly knows she doesn’t see with her eyes.
Coiled around the Resonator, through it, a part of it, is Lenny. He no longer looks much like a bug or a flower, though still a bit of both. He’s partially transparent, like a special effect in an old movie super-imposed on the film of reality. His tendrils or roots or hyphae extend out, reach through the walls of the chamber into the earth and the Tower above. Claws like the pincers of an enormous crayfish manipulate wires and knobs. Everywhere, luminous eyes turn on truncated stalks. His mouth—if that’s what it is—opens and closes, emitting a light that sets Kelly’s brain on fire.
No, not her whole brain. The pineal gland, the third eye. She can feel it growing, pressing against her skull, threatening to break through. And she knows that when it does she won’t be Kelly anymore—whatever that means. A transmission is no good without a receiver, after all. But she won’t just be a receiver, either. That’s what the zombies are. She’ll be something else, like a cellphone tower, something for the signal to ping off of and go further. That’s what she’s always been, and she can remember her mother standing in the doorway, telling her dad, “You did this,” and her dad hanging from the beam in his workshop, an extension cord coiled tight round his neck.
Lenny’s eyes turn toward her, his mouth is open, she remembers his voice, which she knows now she never heard with anything that could be called hearing. She remembers his promises to her when she was a girl, that he would show her where his friends lived. She looks up, and she can no longer see the roof of the hangar. She is in the center of a living darkness, shot through with something that is not light, illuminated by stars that are not stars. They are drawing nearer. Her dad is telling her that the Tower is one of the strongest transmitters this side of the Mississippi, that it can send a signal all the way to outer space. She can make out their shapes now, and her throat is making a sound that she can’t hear over the music of the spheres.
Lenny reaches out with a pseudopod to embrace her, maybe, lift her up, and she activates the charges that are concealed under her jacket. The moment before the blast stretches out forever, becomes multifaceted, and she can see into the past and the future. A little girl lies in bed and stares up at the Tower, watching as the bomb she’ll set in twenty years rips apart its foundation and brings it tumbling down into fire and smoke.
MACHINE WILL START
WHEN YOU ARE START
Matthew M. Bartlett
The “Our Secret” adult novelty and video emporium (100 booths! No waiting!) inhabited a sprawling warehouse building at the far end of the Leeds Industrial Park. Marshall loathed the long walk from the lot to the front door. He imagined every driver glancing to his or her left and thinking, “Hey, it’s the pimply guy who works at Staples.” Of course, this never stopped him. A guy has to do what a guy has to do.
He had selected his videos (“Big Jugg Mistresses” and “What Are You Doing to My Daughter 5”) and was heading to the register when he saw the table with a sign that read CLEARANCE in accusatory capital letters. Among the dildos and the lubricants and the used videocassettes was a big box, faded pink and leaning like an old house. The box depicted a man with a gelled ‘80s coiffure and paper-white teeth, head tilted back in ecstasy, ghostly images of naked women swimming around him like miniature mermaids. TILLINGHAST MASTURBATOR, the box read. A PRODUCT OF ANNELID INDUSTRIES, INC. There was no picture of the item itself, but the ad copy promised “otherworldly ejaculations” and “prolonged pleasure.” It was eight bucks.
Marshall considered. Then he grabbed it and brought it to the register along with the vide
otapes. The clerk, a skinny kid with long hair obscuring half his face, not the half with the nose-ring, rang him up indifferently, without either speaking a word.
Back at his apartment, he pried off the top (it was held on with Scotch Tape) and pulled from the nest of cashew-curled Styrofoam pieces the Tillinghast Masturbator. It was a wooden box, no bigger than the cigar box in which he kept his dope. There was a small proliferation of glass bulbs on the top that reminded him of a cluster of blisters. Where, Marshall thought, are you supposed to stick it?
Underneath was a folded instruction sheet. It read,
connect battery pak onto machine at bottoms
machine will start when you are start
it is ill advice to use in conshunshion with pornography
use only in dark ness
Marshall dug into the box and found a small package wrapped in bubble-wrap, all the bubbles long ago flattened. He peeled it and found inside two double-a batteries cocooned in black plastic with a tail of intertwined black and red wires capped with a miniature white plug. It looked ancient, but uncorroded. Marshall found a corresponding spot on the bottom of the masturbator and plugged it in.
There was a sinister hum and the bulbs went purple as though the machine had spit grape juice into them from inside. He drew the blinds and hit the light switch, leaving the living room in almost complete darkness.
machine will start when you are start
The fuck does that mean? Marshall shrugged, undid his belt, shoved his pants to his ankles. The machine’s hum grew louder and began to pulse. Suddenly the air around him swum, coalesced. Images began to crowd the corners of his vision.
They were unlike anything he had ever seen, feminine, with fingerlike breasts capped with pincers for nipples; elongated mouths that swum like streams, white globes of teeth rolling in them like lottery balls; pink, labia-lined caves that stretched and contracted and pursed. Their shapes pulsed erotically. They came closer, wound around his groin, under his balls, squeezing them gently, and then lower, then back up. It was wonderful, sensual, almost unbearable...but the visuals were too alien, too strange. He needed to see white skin, black skin...human skin.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 10
