by Brian Lumley
I asked my companion of the night watch for her thoughts on the subject.
“The lens?” She brought the object in its glass bubble into focus on one of the screens. “I find it…disturbing.”
“Its looks, shape, opacity?”
“Its presence.”
She meant its proximity, of course. “Do you feel in any way…confused?”
She smiled. “Tiredness, that’s all. Leading to a perfectly natural lack of concentration.” Which confirmed what I had suspected…
• • •
James, his eyes hollow, red-rimmed: “Well, we’ve slept on it—myself, badly. And frankly, I have had enough of this so-called experiment. I suggest we put our minds to it, see or experience what we see or experience, and however it goes we call it a day and demand to be out of here. As far as I am concerned they can keep their money. I know what I know, and that must suffice.”
Jason, cooking breakfast, his voice far-distant: “I dreamed of dinosaurs; herds of them, thousands of them, stampeding.”
James, with a start, his sore eyes blinking rapidly: “Why, so did I!” And then, recovering himself and rather more calmly, “What do you suppose it means?”
Jason, having apparently failed to hear, or having ignored James’ question: “I also dreamed of my mother and brother. They didn’t say anything and looked sad, but in any case I knew what they were thinking: that I wouldn’t be joining them.”
James: “That you are not going to die? A good omen, eh?”
Jason, shaking his head: “No, just that I won’t be joining them. I also heard a song or a chant…no, it was more properly a hymn or song of—I don’t know—thanksgiving? Possibly.” And giving himself a shake. “Breakfast is up. We might as well enjoy it.” Then, as they commence eating: “We always assumed it was a meteorite or comet that took out the dinosaurs, right?”
James: “So?”
Jason: “What if it was Them?”
James, nodding: “I know what you mean, but it just doesn’t fit the picture. You’re talking about prehistory. Who was there here to call them down from the stars? Man’s earliest ancestors hadn’t as yet crawled up out of the oceans, let alone come down from the trees!”‘
Jason, bringing the food—eggs and bacon—seating himself close to James and handing him a plate; then absentmindedly, or even fatalistically picking at his own food: “What if They were already here? Or maybe they just happened to be passing by, and saw how rich it was—the planet, I mean. Personally, I believe that one of them was here, alone in a crazily angled city maybe something like (R’xxxx). And he/she/it called through a lens to its friends in the stars. And the closest of them came—”
James: “—To the harvest? Is that what you are saying? But even if I thought you could be right, still it might have taken them millions of years to get here.”
Jason: “But the dinosaurs were here for millions of years—for a whole lot longer than we’ve been here, anyway.”
James: “And that cavern out in the Iraqi desert? You think it’s all that remains of that prehistoric city? Forget it! That cave is recent by comparison. A million, or perhaps two million years old, but no more than that.”
Jason: “I agree. No, I think who or whatever was there in the Iraqi cavern got called away long ago, perhaps to a harvesting somewhere out in the stars. But he had seen the beginnings of Homo sapiens, and he left the lens for us to find. Maybe old (Axxxx) was something of a dreamer—maybe he was gifted, that old Arab—like us, but he got it wrong. Maybe the stars don’t ‘come right’ until some intelligence finds them and takes them away! Because they aren’t stars in the sky after all but starstones buried deep in the earth! Too many maybes, I agree, but maybe, just maybe…”
James, scathingly: “And maybe, just maybe, you want to give in, quit right now—right?”
Jason: “Quit? On the contrary. I think we should go ahead, speak to them through the lens. Why? Because we can’t avoid the unavoidable. And I know you’ll do it anyway, because you’re ignorant, arrogant and pig-headed. And what the hell…Que sera, sera!” He shrugs, again fatalistically.
James, tight-lipped: “Putting insults such as that aside—if only because contact will probably be easier with your help—when do you propose we do it? Tonight?”
Jason, shrugging: “Tonight, tomorrow night, next Friday…what difference does it make down here? Why not right now?”
James, turning to stare at the lens in its glass globe, the lens that Jason has been staring at from the moment he sat down at the table: “Right now? Are you sure?”
Jason, putting his plate aside: “It’s all…all very confusing, isn’t it?”
James: “Do you feel you’re being lured?”
Jason: “Lured? Let me think about that.” And a brief moment later: “Yes, I believe I can feel that thing tugging at me. But mainly I just feel as I think you feel—that come what may we have to know. Or we have to know come what will.”
James, also pushing his plate of untouched food aside, and resting his chin in his cupped hands: “Very well then, let’s do it…”
• • •
NOTE: Following our night shift—myself and our good lady psychiatrist—we could by now have been asleep; but something had kept us at our stations, where we had been joined by our Military companions and my Foundation colleague. Our technician was drowsing in a room close by, but such were my feelings of—of what? Uncertainty, confusion, imminence—of interference with my thinking, that I had known I would be unable to sleep. Which was probably also true of my night’s companion.
I have mentioned my own somewhat shallow extrasensory perceptions; but now through the medium of this ESP I “perceived” a current that was almost electric, a faint tingle in my scalp. And I was aware that on my viewscreen the forms of the two men in the cell had taken on a kind of rigidity. Their eyes—and their sensitive minds, obviously—were now rapt upon the lens in its bowl atop the pedestal.
And that was when I fought back against my own feelings of almost hypnotic lethargy to send one of our Military number to wake the technician…
• • •
Jason, his eyes wide open, staring; his mouth agape; his voice little more than a whisper: “I can hear them singing. The same song or hymn I heard in my dream. It’s dark, yet somehow joyful…a strange dark joy.”
James, excitedly, but at the same time oddly dull or vacant of volume: “Then rejoice in the contact! Out there in the stars, they have heard us!”
Jason: “In the stars, or between the spaces we know? Is the lens a telepathic transmitter, or is it in fact a true Gateway? What if They…what if they’re extra-dimensional?”
James, a bubble of foam forming at the corner of his mouth: “How far away is an extra-dimension? ‘Beyond’ the universe?”
Jason, twitching, his knuckles turning white on the table’s rim: “But what…what if…what if it’s parallel?”
James, beginning to shudder violently: “I hear the singing, too! And although it’s alien, I believe there are parts that I recognise or at least understand.”
Jason, his body jerking, threatening to topple his chair: “Their thoughts are merging with ours; either that or they are translating them for us, making them recognisable. And the lens…it is a Gateway. And they’re using it! They’re coming!”
James, dead white, foaming at the mouth, his eyes bulging, entire body vibrating: “I think…I think we should stop now. I think we should…think we have to withdraw. I sense chaos. And the lens: it’s glowing, blazing, opening! Ah! Ahhh! Ahhhh!”
• • •
NOTE: It is difficult to describe what we saw happening on our screens from this point on. But I shall try.
The lens in its globe was shimmering, emitting lances and arcs of bright white light that came through the glass to dart around the cell like living things, like snakes of fire. These dozen or so streamers or coruscations were certainly sentient; they appeared to be searching, or perhaps surveying, the immedi
ate vicinity, but in something less than five or six seconds they converged into two main beams that struck unerringly home at the heads of our subjects. It happened that fast, literally with lightning speed, and “confused” as we four observers were (our technician and the Military man I had sent to awaken him were only now returning) there was nothing we could do to stop it. And on our screens—
—The pair appeared to be melting! Their faces were showing extraordinary agony; they glowed until their eyes and gaping mouths were black sockets in bright, luminous silhouettes; their shaking seemed to be tearing them apart, so that glowing bits were drifting from them like fiery snowflakes…and yet they were singing!
Over and above a high-pitched, alien keening—a blast of noise I can only describe as a battle of unknown elements, the sound of waves breaking on some cosmic shore—came the words of that song driven into their shattered minds and out through their mouths, that “hymn” translated from its original form by who or whatever they had contacted. And in my own mind I heard or sensed something of that original form—that hideous cacophony that human vocal chords could never hope to duplicate—and I knew its relevance!
“Stop it!” I cried then, to anyone who was listening—if anyone was listening. “Shut the thing down!”
My companions were reeling—shocked, numbed, made useless, by what they, too, were receiving from the lens, that now fully open portal. But as for the physical intruders, those shafts of alien light or sentient fire: they were only the vanguard. For what was coming through now was more properly the stuff of our most terrifying nightmares.
They moved too quickly, too strangely, to be viewed in any kind of clear detail. But in colour they were a pulsing yellow-veined or marbled purple and black, and in shape reminiscent of spiders, scorpions, octopi or dragons…all these things from moment to moment, and others utterly indescribable. Yet I knew that even these were only a squad of advance troops.
James and Jason: they were beginning to slump into themselves, like slowly collapsing columns or candles of intense white light; but even so, quite beyond pain as we understand it, they continued to sing their joyful song.
“Shut the damn thing down!” I yelled again, this time right in the ear of our technician, who was looking at his instrument panel as if he had never seen it in his life before! His confusion was apparent from his gaping mouth and bulging, stupefied eyes. While in the cell a nightmarish metamorphosis was taking place.
What was it James had said that time, of alien procreation? Something about, “A melding, a substitution, a flowing together and explosive multiplication”? Well, what was happening in the cell may not have been procreation—unless it was by assimilation and duplication—but it was certainly everything else he had spoken of. The scuttling insect-octopus-dragons were invading the radiance of our disintegrating guinea-pig subjects only to emerge in a stream of yet more fantastic shapes and figures; and as James and Jason melted to nothingness, so the star-spawn multiplied in number, bursting forth from those—consumed?—human remnants to come nosing, thrusting at the tiny cameras.
They bloated large on our screens; they knew we were looking at them, scrabbled to send hairy, spiked and multi-jointed legs right through the audio and visual systems—through the screens themselves—into our control room! While in the cell the globe containing the lens shivered to shards and something huge, black, bloated and baneful began to squeeze through from some Other Place, some other space, into ours.
One of our military men was leaning forward, his hands supporting him on the ledge in front of his screen, hypnotised by what he could see but scarcely believe was taking place in the cell. A vibrating black spider-leg eighteen inches long stabbed through the screen into his mouth and out the back of his skull—and he jerked like a puppet as he hung there suspended on it.
I cried out—a gurgled shriek, something quite inarticulate—and aimed a blow at the back of our technician, catching him between the shoulder blades. Driven forward, he flailed his arms; his hand came down on one of the controls…sheer luck!
Five pipes or shafts, pneumatic conduits descending at different angles to locations buried in the steel walls, hummed and pulsed. And from up above five star-stones hurtled under pressure down these channels to form the points of a pentagram surrounding the cell. With which it was over.
The alien insect things shrivelled to nothing; the cell exploded with such force that the walls were actually scarred and even buckled in several places; the gonging reverberations were such that my eardrums burst and I lost consciousness. But I was fortunate, for the others with me lost a lot more
than that…
• • •
From then until now I have kept mainly silent, and from time to time I’ve mimicked the conditions of my four surviving colleagues, which has meant spending time in various institutions. But I did not want anyone questioning me too deeply; I did not want to become any kind of guinea pig in my own right; I had no more interest in any facet of the Mythos Investigation.
You see, I know why I was the sole survivor—the only one to live through it with his person and sanity intact—for I, too, had heard their singing; They saw me as a possible future vessel, or as a radio signal, or a lighthouse to guide them in to harbour. Which is why it is only now, as my cancer kills me and I have mere days to live, that I’m able to report the occurrences of that time as they happened.
As for the lens Gateway: it was vaporised in the blast, of course. I can only hope no other device of that sort exists in our world. The star-stones were likewise destroyed; I hope and pray others have been discovered, or that you, my once colleagues in The Foundations are at least seeking them out.
And meanwhile:
I have come to believe in God and would even be a regular churchgoer…except I cannot bring myself to attend services in the harvest time. There is a certain hymn they’d be sure to sing, and I know I couldn’t abide it. Even now I find it difficult to think about it, and even harder to write the words of the song down. But since this is probably the best way to make you understand:
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Sometimes I dream of great lizards—dinosaurs stampeding in terror through tree-fern forests—and then I wonder about all the other mass extinctions our planet has known. But—
—I long ago retired to Dublin, Ireland, where I discovered that while white wine doesn’t help a lot with my sleeplessness, Guinness does the trick every time.
Synchronicity or Something
Back in the 1980s, a young man called Carl Ford published a multiple award-winning Cthulhu Mythos RPG (role-playing game) fan magazine called Dagon. Toward the end of that decade Carl contacted me and commissioned a Mythos story with an RPG theme which he intended to publish in the same format as his magazine. The story I eventually sent to him was “Synchronicity or Something”. It contains quite a few in-jokes—the somewhat skewed names of a small handful of contemporary horror writers, for example (not to mention that of a certain young publisher)—and like that, but it is also quite nasty. And with an ending that is suitably Cthulhu Mythosian, “Synchronicity” saw light of day as an excellently presented “Dagon Press Production”, in 1989.
Jim Slater sat glowering, nursing his pint, plainly annoyed. His drinking companion, Andrew Paynter, was a bit put off, especially since he’d just asked Slater to be his best man.
It was a Friday night and both men had just finished divorce cases; which is to say, they’d gathered sufficient evidence of adultery to satisfy any court of law in the land that their respective clients should be granted divorces, and compensation to boot. Tomorrow they would go into the office, put their reports in order and check their pigeonholes, then with a bit of luck take the rest of the weekend off. They worked for a detective agency specializing
in the usual dirt-digging, with no excuse except “somebody has to do it”.
“So…what’s eating you?” said Paynter. He was young, not yet thirty, lean and handsome in a colourless sort of way. After spending five years in the Intelligence Corps and two more in shiny boots on the Metropolitan beat, he’d finally taken his chances on private-eyeing. It was shitty work but it paid the bills, and so far it had been something of a not-so-private eye-opener. Infidelity-wise, the world was abustle! As for Phillip Marlow-type cases: forget it.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Slater answered. He was Paynter’s senior by maybe ten years, himself divorced for three of them, and wore his cynicism like armour. A big man, there was a touch of the early Robert Mitchum about him, the same sleepy eyes and deep, dull voice. But he looked so much the part that usually people didn’t think he could be what he was. A nice fellow when he was one hundred percent sober, but as often as not he was eighty percent proof. He had taken the younger man under his wing when Paynter joined the agency, and Paynter hadn’t forgotten it.
“Are you saying there’s something wrong with me?” Paynter grinned. “Or is it just the world in general?”
“Since you’ve asked,” Slater answered, “it’s you. See, I thought you had a brain in your head. I mean, how long have you been with us? A year…longer? How many days—or more properly nights—spent traipsing around checking out all the illicit screwing? Taking your sly little compromising pictures, listening to sobbing wives or husbands telling you their worst fears or suspicions, discovering them to be right and in the process finding out that the ‘innocent’ party is also balling or being balled? Son, it’s a cesspool!”
