“Okay, Frank. Maybe we can get together for lunch over the weekend.”
“No. This is serious. Right now. Tonight.”
“Daddy?” came a new voice from the top of the stairs. I glanced up. There was Jane, my daughter, thumb in her mouth, teddy bear under one arm.
“What if I can’t?” I whispered angrily into the phone.
“It’s life and death. Yours and mine both, my friend.”
I sighed. It was still impossible to contradict Frank Bellini. “Can you at least wait until ten, when everybody’s in bed? My wife has to get up and teach tomorrow.”
“All right. Ten. I know where you are.”
“You make that sound like a threat, Frank. I’m in the phone book, remember?”
“Leotfatu.” He hung up.
My head was left spinning with the impact of that particular circumstantial brick, but duty called. I flicked off the TV, leaving Homer Simpson on his way to India, on a quest for the meaning of life. If he achieved enlightenment, I was sure, he could explain it to me someday.
But now it was time to go upstairs, pull Jane’s thumb out of her mouth and scold her for sucking it (“You wanna grow up to look like a walrus?”), then tuck her in and tell her a bedtime story, the kind I write for a living. (“Arnold!” “Okay, an adventure of Arnold the Vacuum Cleaner. What if he takes up body-building? We’ll call it Sucking Iron!”
Once I got her to sleep and checked on baby Charlie, then explained to Marjorie that an old school friend was stopping by (“He must be quite some friend if you let him come over at this time of night just because he calls you up.”) it was surprisingly close to ten o’clock. All I could do was sit down in front of the silent TV and wait.
The doorbell rang at precisely ten.
Frank Bellini, when I admitted him, was not his old self. He looked like he needed a shave and a bath, and seemed…I grasp for the right word…shrunken, tall as ever, but stooped over, skeletally thin, his hairline back past his ears, his face beginning to sag.
I kid myself that my own preternaturally adolescent appearance gives me the excuse to go on thinking in terms of What am I going to be when I grow up? instead of What have I become? But Frank had become a scarecrow left too long out in the wind and rain. There was no room for kidding around. He looked terrible.
“Leotfatu,” he said softly.
“Hello, Frank. Come in.”
It took a while to get him settled. He wandered aimlessly around the living room. I had to ask him several times before he handed me his hat and coat. When I came back from hanging them in the closet, he was still standing, paging through a copy of Arnold on the Moon. He held it up quizzically.
“Yep, my latest masterpiece. I’m afraid I’ve become disconcertingly normal over the years. I write kiddie books for a living.”
When I finally got him settled into a chair, awkwardly, his knees and elbows jutting hugely, brought him coffee (into which he added something from a silver flask when he thought I wasn’t looking), and pleasantly began the conversation by telling him a little about what I’d done with my life since college, it took only a couple of minutes for him to convince me that my old classmate was now hopelessly and totally insane.
He launched into a raging, literally frothing tirade about the CIA, the KGB, something called Tristero, men in black, deros from the Earth’s core, the blood-drinking Erlikanoi, the Cyber-Magi, the Cult of the Dancing Flayed God, Great Old Ones from Yuggoth, the Virtual Brotherhood, not to mention the assassinations of everybody from Abel onward. It was all part of a secret war going on all around us for awesomely high stakes, everything devolving into one grand Conspiracy whereby the entire history of the human race had been shaped and manipulated by forces we cannot control toward ends we cannot imagine.
“Have you ever heard of the Nekatu?” That name seemed to mean something special to him, beyond all the rest. He spoke it with obvious dread and something resembling reverence.
“Uh, no.”
“`Uh, no.’ Of course not. They’re very good at concealing their existence. But they do exist. Make no mistake about it. They are agents of corruption and despair, servants of the Black Worm…about which, even now, I don’t dare tell you more.”
Several minutes of silence followed. I swallowed hard, unable to find something to reply.
“You know,” he said finally, with a sigh, “a skeptic once argued that if you substitute Divine Providence for the Conspiracy and God for the Owners, it works out pretty much the same. I suppose it does. They’ve been around nearly as long.”
It seemed that he’d embarked on a writing career of his own after getting out of school, but with far less success than mine: a book linking the Kennedy Assassination with the Jupiter Effect; another about Lemurian adepts living secretly among us, working for good; several more exposing the “dirty secrets” of the Owners: how they had crippled FDR and finally killed him with an electronic beam, and later framed Nixon with Watergate when he caught on to their scheming. But Frank’s magnum opus was something called The New Liberty, which actually contained a plan for freeing mankind. (“I wrote it when I discovered that the Libertarians had sold out, like everybody else.”) None of these efforts had ever found a publisher. (“Suppressed, of course, by agents of the Conspiracy.”) Somehow he’d scraped together enough to print a few hundred copies of The New Liberty himself, then hoofed to every bookstore in the Philadelphia area, more often laughed at than selling copies. But, still, the Conspiracy had been quick to act. The public storage facility where he kept the remaining copies promptly burned down.
“That’s why I came to you, Tom,” he said, for the first time in all the years I’d known him, pleading. For once, he wasn’t in control, but still I could only listen. “Tom, I came to you in desperation, because I may not have a lot of time. I can see them now.”
“Wait,” I said, waving my hand in the air, plunging into the mirrored funhouse of amateur psychology, sub-section Dealing With Lunatics. “Let me get this straight. You’re seeing invisible men? Doesn’t that make them, ah, not invisible anymore?”
“God damn you!” he screamed, pounding on the arm of his chair. “Don’t make fun of me!”
Marjorie called down from the top of the stairs. I went halfway up and assured her that everything was all right.
“You sure?” she said.
“Yeah. Maybe we’ll go out for a little while.”
Frank had already retrieved his hat and coat from the closet.
“Good idea. I can’t stay here very long. It wouldn’t be safe for your wife or kids. I’ve been on the run for days. I’ve been sleeping out like a bum. I can’t go to a hotel, or even a bank machine—those cameras, you know.”
I got my own coat. “How about I treat you to a late supper at Denny’s?”
“No time. We have to go to my apartment. I want to see if you can find it. I can’t anymore.”
I let that pass until we were in the car. He hunched down in the seat. In the closed-in space of the car I could tell that he did indeed need a bath.
I drove for several minutes in silence before it occurred to me that I didn’t know where we were going.
“You can’t find it? You mean you’ve forgotten where you live?” I was beginning to feel a certain compassion for the man, but the sort that would make me drop him off at the nearest mental hospital.
“Sure, I know the address.” He gave it to me. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that I’d already been driving in precisely the right direction. “They’ve made my apartment invisible. To me at least. Some kind of force field, which tunes me out. But maybe you can get in. Reality, as you know, is relative. It’s like a stage-set to them. They can take away pieces any time they want.”
We came to a less-than-prosperous neighborhood. “But they—the little men—have become visible in the meantime.”
“They’re of quite normal stature. Otherwise you’re right. The night of the fire, I happened to be pulling into the public storage l
ot just then. I don’t know if it was a trick of the sodium-vapor lights on my windshield or what…maybe they want me to see them now. I can, anywhere. No, it can’t be the windshield, because I still see them, and the car disappeared almost as soon as I got out of it that night. They’re everywhere. And they really do wear black jumpsuits, and goggles of some kind, which let them see while they’re invisible. Otherwise they’d be blind. The light would pass right through their retinas without reflecting.”
I just let the tide of words wash over me, interrupting only for directions as I wove the car between derelict hulks, down an unlighted alley, all the while increasingly convinced that this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
But somehow Frank rallied some of the old magic. He commanded. I obeyed.
When we parked and got out, he stood up straight, holding his hand up for silence as he listened to something I couldn’t hear. It was almost like old times. He led me into the darkness, then began to talk again. “The other day President Clinton was on TV, and there were no less than five guys in black suits with goggles standing behind him, mixed in with the Secret Service agents, which only figures, I guess. But I got a picture of that. I’ve been working on a new photographic technique for a long time. I can’t explain now. Rays beyond the spectrum. It’s got ’em really rattled. I can photograph them, even off the television. I’ve got proof. I can bring down the entire stinking operation by letting the world know what they are and where they are and how they may be destroyed. Their struggle with their enemies is reaching a climax, now. What they call the Great Crisis will soon be upon them—”
Just then something scurried across out path. Metal clanged. My heart jumped. I thought back to what I’d seen under Mendel Hall. What, if anything?
This time it was only a cat knocking over a trash can.
He paused at the base of a fire-escape.
“Not very luxurious accommodations, I’m afraid. The only way you can get in this time of night is go up to the top and in through the outside door. Here’s the key.” He pressed it into my hand.
I peered up at the dark windows.
“So, what’s the problem?”
“For you, I hope, nothing. But every time I try to go up, everything starts to twist around and I end up on the ground again. Like a Moebius strip. But if you can get the door open, that might stabilize the place long enough for me to get in and retrieve things I need, or at least for you to get the microfilm.”
“What microfilm?” I put one foot on the bottom step.
“The pictures. Like I told you. If something happens to me, I need you to send copies of those photos to every newspaper in the world. It’s the only protection I have now. Because of the crisis, they’re vulnerable. They know it. I know it. They know I know it.”
And he told me where to find the strip of microfilm.
“Right.” I started up the fire-escape, then turned back to him suddenly. “Is this dangerous? Aren’t they up there searching your apartment right now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think you’ll be able to see them. So you should be okay. I need you to do this for me, Tom. Please?”
At that moment I felt as if I’d stepped through the Looking Glass with Frank Bellini as a kid, spent some years in Ga-Ga Land, then emerged into Reality after graduation, lived my life, begun a family and a career, only to discover now that I was still inside the Looking Glass, or had maybe even stepped through a second one. But I couldn’t refuse. Not now. Not after we had come so far.
I climbed the stairs slowly, glancing down at Frank once or twice. He eagerly nodded, and motioned me on. I passed one dark, probably empty apartment, then another. On the third-floor landing, the fire-escape seemed to shift and wobble a bit, and for one terrifying instant I almost lost Frank’s key. It slipped from my hand and rattled on the grating. Somehow I was certain that if it fell through, I’d be caught in the Moebius strip too, and never find my way back.
Very carefully, I picked up the key, slipped it into the lock, and entered Frank Bellini’s apartment.
I flicked on the light.
The place was a mess, much as I’d expected, heaps of newspapers, books, and dirty laundry everywhere, a half-eaten meal grown bearded with mold on the table. The most prominent decorations in what must have once been the living room were two posters thumbtacked to the walls, promos for books or movies, one with flying saucers descending over the Capitol in Washington, and lurid lettering: THEY ARE ALREADY HERE. The second poster showed the planet Earth in the crosshairs of a rifle-sight: THE ULTIMATE ASSASSINATION.
The bookshelves were stuffed with paperbacks on conspiracies, ancient mysteries, flying saucers, witchcraft, and the like. Incongruously, among the paperbacks, exactly where Frank had described it, was a much older, fat book in crumbling leather. I opened it. Black-letter text, in Latin, something translated from the Arabic. I turned to page 725, as he’d told me, and right there, in the middle of a diagram for something called the ‘Dhole Liturgy’ was a tiny wax-paper envelope with an even tinier black strip inside.
Something stirred in the kitchen. Quickly I snapped the book shut and dropped it on the junk-strewn couch. I slipped the envelope with the film into my coat pocket.
A cupboard door had come open in the kitchen. A dish lay broken on the floor.
Behind me, footsteps pattered across the living room.
“Hey! Who’s there? Frank, is that you?”
It occurred to me that the footsteps had been entirely too light and nimble to be Frank’s, and I had no business trying to confront burglars.
I made my way gingerly to the door, placing my hand stealthily on the doorknob. Just then the entire apartment shifted, jerking to one side in the periphery of my vision, the way the room starts to spin when you get suddenly and overwhelmingly drunk. But I wasn’t drunk, and I saw clearly, distinctly, that the outlines of walls and ceiling, the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, where all twisting like something made out of rubber.
Then the lights went out.
“Daddy!” It was my daughter’s voice, Jane, screaming. “Help me! Daddy!”
But she was safe at home, a good ten miles away.
“Daddy!”
I blundered into the darkened living room, crashing into and upsetting I didn’t know or care what. Things fell, broke. “Let her go! Leave her out of this, for God’s sake!”
Once again, footsteps pattered in the dark, a lot of them. And someone grabbed me by my coat collar and whirled me around, and many hands shoved me out onto the landing, slamming the door behind me. I nearly tumbled over the railing, and hung there, gasping for breath, gazing down at the alley and my parked car.
There was no sign of Frank.
I pounded on the door. “Hey!”
But I couldn’t get back in. I had no idea what had become of the key. The apartment remained dark and silent. I stood there for several minutes, helplessly, until all I could do was go meekly down the fire-escape and get into my car. I found my way out onto the Roosevelt Boulevard and just drove, trying to think, trying to convince myself that the easiest, safest explanation of all was that I was the one who was mad, that the return of Frank Bellini had occurred only in my own mind.
But by the time I got home, the police were already there. Marjorie rushed into my arms and explained, barely able to hold back tears, that Jane had been kidnapped. She’d called out once to me in the night, but by the time Marjorie had gotten into the kids’ bedroom, Jane was gone, the window open, curtains billowing in the breeze. I went upstairs like a man going to his own execution, defeated and resigned.
The bedroom was swarming with chattering cops, their radios squawking. Charlie, the baby, lay safe in his crib, screaming at the intruders. Marjorie hurried in and picked him up, but that didn’t quiet him.
The police had a lot of questions, which resolved nothing. The best we could hope for was that my daughter would turn up somewhere, abandoned but unhurt, which sometimes happens particularl
y with smaller children, if the kidnapper loses his nerve. Otherwise, we’d wait for a ransom demand.
I wanted to tell them what I thought. Morons. Imbeciles. But I held my peace, and it only figured that I discovered, as soon as they finally left, that they’d managed to overlook the most obvious clue of all.
On my daughter’s nightstand was a copy of Arnold and the Crocodile, a mutilated shell of a book, all the pages cut out, leaving only margins. Inside was Frank Bellini’s apartment key, and drawn on the back board was the symbol of a lantern.
Light-bearer. Leotfatu.
* * * *
Now this is the part of the story where the protagonist returns the brick to sender.
Let me tell you how it ends:
Marjorie wept in my arms for the longest time. She was afraid to go back upstairs, and eventually, fitfully, went to sleep in the chair in front of the TV downstairs, her hand resting on the baby’s crib at her side.
The phone rang, once. I grabbed it before it could wake her and whispered.
“Frank.” Not a question. I knew it would be him.
“Tom? What happened?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
I had already thought long and hard about where I stood in all this, what was real, what was important, and what wasn’t. Frank had a lot of nerve barging into my life like this, imposing such terror. If I accepted his paranoid world on its own terms, there was one and only one course left open to me.
I got out the microfilm and held it up to the light.
“I’ve figured it all out, Frank. Everything is going to be fine.”
“Just like that?”
“No, not just like that. There are…certain things…that have to be done yet. Things I can’t explain over the phone, if you catch my meaning. Look, I want you to come to your apartment this morning at five-thirty. You’ll be able to get in. The door will be unlocked and I’ll be waiting. We can beat this thing together, you and I.”
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 24
