by Edward Lee
“I will. Right now. But don’t exert yourself anymore.”
“Just keep in cell contact. I’ve come all this way, I can’t stop now.”
“Yes you can, damn it!”
“And—” A long pause stretched over the line. “Jesus...”
Hazel squeezed the phone to her ear till it hurt. “What?”
“This fog or mist or whatever...It’s really thick right now.” Her footsteps could be heard crunching. Then: They stopped.
“Oh my God...”
“Sonia, what is it!”
Sonia’s voice lowered to a hush. “I found it, Hazel. I found the Gray Cottage...”
“Don’t go in! Frank’s father said it’s about to collapse!”
“Doesn’t look like it, it looks solid.” Another pause. “I have to go in now, Hazel. If Frank really is in there, I have to confront him. And if he’s not...then I guess that means he’s been shacking up with some girl at a motel somewhere.” “Don’t go in the cottage!” Hazel kept yelling. “Wait till I get there!”
“No, no, Hazel. I have to go in. This has been making me sick.
I’ll call you back in a few minutes—”
“Don’t hang up! Don’t hang—”
The line severed.
Crazy! she thought. This whole thing’s crazy! She was out the door in seconds, back in the car, and then speeding off onto the road which would take her to the bottom of Whipple’s Peak...
5
What happened? Sonia thought. She lay in a muggy daze when she awoke. But... Awoke?
What was she awakening from?
She lay on a cold stone floor. Above her stretched a small ceiling that, like the walls, was composed of stone. She could remember nothing until...
The cottage. The Gray Cottage. She couldn’t move. Memories filtered back in the tiniest trickles. I was pissed at Frank so I hiked up Whipple’s Peak and—and...I found the cottage, didn’t I? I’d been talking to Hazel on the cell, and...
Nothing. Darkness.
Think! she ordered herself.
She was too disoriented. Nothing came back to her in sequence. A door...that opened into thin air. Scarlet heat. Strange words. Two eyeballs on the stone floor. Chuckling that was somehow like black slop. A mind-boggling orgasm. A sucking sound.
Her heart thudded in her chest.
After a few more groggy minutes, Sonia was able to incline herself up on her elbows. Immediately, she burst into a round of screams.
She saw that she lay there naked, but that’s not why she was screaming.
Naked, yes, but she also saw quite easily that she was no longer pregnant.
And then— then— she remembered everything:
Sonia hangs up with Hazel just as she sees the Gray Cottage emerge from rising smears of pale mist. It’s a strange building, indeed. Stone block walls, their seams tinged dark with fungus and mildew; an uneven slate roof over which pour festoons of ivy; narrow, iron framed windows whose glass is so dingy with age that its nearly black. But—
No front door.
She walks a circuit around the cottage, first the south wall, then the east, then the north, then—
Sonia shouts aloud when she sees that the building’s westerly wall has been built flush against a sheer cliff. Had she taken one more step—
Her hand comes up to her chest.
—she would’ve fallen a half-mile straight down.
But who would build such an odd structure? And why on earth would Henry have chosen it as a place to work?
These things don’t matter, though, for Sonia is intent only on one thing: finding Frank.
The prick. He’s probably got a woman in there with him right now, a YOUNG woman, a freshman probably. Making a monkey of me while I carry around his kid...
She begins to check the windows. A house with no door. It’s madness. All the windows are maddeningly locked—
Yes!
—save for one.
It creaks open, and a bewildering fresh-meat smell sifts out. For shit’s sake, she thinks, frustrated. Can I even do this? She gets one leg up and over, the window’s embrasure pressing her crotch. A grunt, then a deep breath, and she manages to shimmy herself through, the narrow frame barely clearing her gravid belly. Christ! But now...she’s inside.
Several candles light the stone-walled room. There’s no reason to call out for Frank for she instantly sees that the room—the entire cottage—is unoccupied. Her fury rises. It’s not just unoccupied, it’s empty. No furniture, no pictures, no lamps, no adornments of any kind. And furthermore—
No evidence of the additional papers, documents, and books regarding Henry’s “research.” In fact, there’s not a single book in the place, not a file cabinet nor folder. Nothing. Except...
She walks cautiously to the corner. She stares, leaning over. At first she thinks it’s a prank, some made-in-China rubber Halloween geegaw, but only a moment of observation shows her that it’s very real: two bloody eyeballs on the floor.
Sonia steps back, her skin crawling. Whose...eyes are they? the question whispers at the back of her mind. She knows that some mode of action must be taken—escape, most likely—but she’s unable to focus on that notion. Instead, she just keeps stepping backwards—
Thump
The wall stops her, then the faintest humming sound begins to waver about the room. She keeps still, keeps silent, as she sees tendrils of mist start to rise from the seams in the floor’s stone blocks, but unlike the pale mist outside, this mist is black.
Very slowly, Sonia turns around.
It’s not a wall she’s facing, it’s a door, and she quickly calculates that the door exists on the western wall, the wall built flush with the precipice outside...
It’s a Colonial-style door: heavy, nine panels, an oval brass doorknob, ornately flared hinges. A sheet of yellowed paper that she thinks must actually be vellum has been tacked to the center panel.
Sonia reads the vellum aloud...
“‘The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. Yog-Sothoth is the gate whereby the spheres do meet...’”
Numbed by her own confusion, Sonia lifts the paper and reads more archaic scrawl on the other side.
“‘The earth gibbers with their Voices; the earth mutters with their Consciousness; where reverence to their Word lingers, and upon where their Totems are blessed, they come. They come and they roil the seas. They smash the forests. They crush the cities...’”
Sonia takes a breath, then reads a final line:
“‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.’”
Sonia gulps. The words bring pressure to her head; there’s an awful taste on her tongue. She looks closer at the door and sees that its panels are covered with glyphs that hadn’t been there before, glyphs like:
v><<^ ~
The markings on the metal box, she knows, but as she stares, the rows of glyphs multiply until they’re swarming all over the wood, and they’re moving, they’re opening and closing, and that’s when the door knob begins to turn.
Sonia has every intention of turning tail and running but when she tries to—
She can barely move.
She shrieks when she looks down, sees those tendrils of black mist now crawling up her legs with a feeling like warm earthworms, then up and over her belly, then over her shoulders. They’re holding her there. Eventually some of the tendrils adhere to her sundress. They roll the dress down her body, and then they roll down her panties, and a second later she’s totally nude, shivering, and rooted in place. And then?
crrrrrreak
The door swings open, and Sonia sees only the sky and the vast landscape stretching for miles.
Her vocal cords are paralyzed now. Her lungs try to heave out screams but to no effect. She’s trying to scream because several robed and hooded figures seem to ooze out of the thin air just beyond the door, and with great slushing
sounds they step forward and enter the room.
Ropy arms reach out for her: tentacles of shiny, gray-pink flesh. The faces in the hoods seem inverted; they’re hardly faces at all but lumpen and brown like plops of excrement. Lips like boiled bratwursts turn up to monstrous smiles, to be licked by tongues like slabs of liver. Gold embroideries line the fringes of the maroon robes, and when the robes part, Sonia throws up at the sight. Stouter, vein-lined tentacles comprise their legs, and betwixt them hang curled-up snouts of meat for genitals. The feet they walk on are inverted funnels of unearthly flesh.
Sonia begins to lose consciousness, but the noxious mist holds her up like a harness. She thinks she can hear a mad sound—flutes?—something that sounds crazy like a record playing backwards. All the while, the tentacular things come forward; they are exuberant by the sight of her naked body; they squeal and titter and flail their boneless arms.
One’s great rotten mouth exists on what would be the forehead; it sucks down against Sonia’s mouth, the slimy liver for a tongue pushing through her lips and roving down her throat till she begins to gag. The others embrace her with their tentacles, molest her breasts, dabble at her pubis, churn over the bloated belly in delight. From behind, one of them inserts its morbid penis up into her rectum, chittering, and in only moments begins to ejaculate some form of sperm that feels hot and chunky, like bean and millet soup, while the others openly masturbate in place, the ends of their tentacles rolled around the ends of the horrid cocks, and then they titter in unison, ejaculating on her in gouts, spattering her belly, spattering her breasts. The netherworldly semen looks and smells like vomit.
When their revel is finished, one of them leans its abomination for a face toward her and says, “E uh shub nleb nbb lrrg glud blemmeb,” and then they all pick Sonia up and carry her through the door...
She doesn’t fall as she would expect or even hope at this point. Are they walking on clouds? But, no, they seem to dissolve into the air and prolapse—
—someplace else.
Uneven angular walls of shiny red rock striated with black compose the room she hovers in now. Yes, hovers. She seems to be levitating, her back parallel to the scarlet floor. The air here feels somehow like warm oil. When Sonia looks around she finds no sign of her appalling escorts: she’s alone.
And hovering.
An unseen force spreads her legs wide. She feels a pressure-drop. She tries to scream again but still no sound is permitted to escape her throat when a great bruise-colored hose of flesh six inches wide and dozens of feet long unravels from above. Snakelike, it roves around her, as if examining her, then rears its “head” which is actually no head at all but a rimmed, pulsating cone. Encircling the inside of the cone’s lips are scores of pink fleshy things like tongues from which clear drool dribbles. The cone rises, backs up, then lowers very slowly, homing in, and attaches itself to Sonia’s splayed crotch.
It begins to suck her sex.
In mid-air she goes rigid. The suction intensifies, and then the entirety of the hose begins to pulse. All those dozens of tiny tongues are slavering about the inside of her vulva, summoning the lewdest sensations. Several tend her clitoris simultaneously while others rove and slurp and lick deeper into her vaginal barrel. All the while, the suction increases, and even as an orgasm of incomprehensible tenor begins to impend, Sonia knows what this maleficent hose or tentacle or snake or whatever it is is trying to do:
It’s trying to suck out her baby.
Struggling is futile. All she can do is hover in the air and feel. Feel those tongues squirming over every inch of her sex inside and out, madly ministering to her clitoris, and stoking the most ecstatic sensations she’d ever known.
Her orgasms erupt. Her sex beats as it begins to give up one delirious climax after the next. Her eyes cross. Her entire body quakes with each potent spasm...
Then something snaps. She hears a tiny, muffled gush, and feels something escape her insides. She can’t imagine what is it, though, for she is still too lost in the throes of her climax. Nevertheless, that gush is the sensation of her water breaking.
Soon the climactic spasms transform to something else: contractions of labor.
Sonia knows now, yet all she can do is stare in ultimate horror as the hose pulsates harder and the suction escalates, and her body quivers and then—
She feels something huge...leaving her. Her swollen belly begins to shrink and her vagina gapes as her fetus and placental mass is sucked right out of her womb into the hose. Her jaw feels unhinged as her mouth hangs open at this most iniquitous theft.
She sees the lump of her baby slowly sliding up the hose like a snake swallowing an egg several times its own girth–
—and then she’s sucked out of the impossible scarlet room and–
Slam!
—jettisoned back into the Gray Cottage.
The door slams shut, and Sonia passes out.
Sonia lay nearly as paralyzed as she’d been in the recollection. Her hands ran desperately over her newly deflated stomach. My baby’s gone my baby’s gone my baby’s gone, the words siphoned round her head.
Yes, those monsters on the other side of that door had taken her baby. She rolled over, shrieking her outrage and no longer caring if she lived or died, and she began to crawl naked back toward the door. She would go back—yes! She’d open the door and go back and confront them and fight them, by God...
But before she could reach the door knob, the door began to open on its own. This time, however, it was not the robed abominations who crossed the threshold. It was Frank.
Well. THAT’S fucked up, Hazel thought of the oddity. The front door to the Gray Cottage was on the cliff-side wall. Just what kind of a house was this? Before pulling her head back, she chanced a momentary glance down the steep, stump-pocked precipice. She wobbled a moment in vertigo, then hauled herself back.
Jesus!
It had taken over four hours to mount Whipple’s Peak, an arduous uphill climb through dense forest, weblike vines, and fallen branches. She could see, though, where someone had half-blazed a trail with a machete–Frank, no doubt. The cottage sat in a cocoon of pallid mist.
Entirely made of stone. Hundreds of years ago? Isn’t that what Horace said? Each finely cut stone that comprised each wall was larger than a cinderblock; Hazel couldn’t imagine what they weighed apiece. Nor could she imagine how people so long ago had gotten the blocks all the way up here.
“Sonia!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs, banging on one of the narrow windows. She’d called repeatedly on her cell, but Sonia hadn’t picked up. She’d called Frank, too, for all the good that had done. Motherfucker. Whatever he’s up to, we’ll get to the bottom of it now. She circumscribed the huddled cottage and at last found a window that was open. Her lithe frame made it easy to slip inside, and once she did that . . .
All she could do was stand and stare.
It was not the vacant cottage interior that drew her shocked gaze, nor was it the antique door hung with a sheet of yellowed paper. It wasn’t even the two sloppy objects in the corner that appeared to be gouged-out eyes.
It was Sonia.
She lay naked, smudged, and very still. It occurred to Hazel that she might well be dead but instead of immediately rushing to her, she paused...
Is her...No, it couldn’t be...
It was either imagination or the angle, but momentarily Hazel thought that Sonia’s pregnant belly was slightly larger than it should be.
But that was impossible.
At once, Hazel knelt before her friend. She patted Sonia’s face, praying, Please, don’t be dead! and felt a crushing relief when Sonia’s eyes fluttered. Her gaze looked skewed, half-insane; her mouth was a tiny “O” as she gazed upward.
“Hazel,” she murmured.
“Don’t worry, I’m here—”
Sonia began to shudder where she lay. “They—they took my baby!”
She’s in shock, Hazel determined. “Sonia, calm down. I don’t know
what happened here but no one took your baby.”
“Can’t you see! I’m not pregnant anymore! I—” but then Sonia leaned up enough to see that she was indeed still very pregnant.
She screamed for a full minute. “That’s impossible! Hazel, I went through the door, they took me through that door—”
Hazel tried to control the hysterics. “You had a nightmare or something, Sonia. You couldn’t have gone through that door; it opens to the cliff. If you’d gone through that door you would’ve fallen all the way down to the bottom of Whipple’s Peak—”
“No! No! You don’t understand! We went through but it turned into another place. These things, these monsters! They had tentacles for arms and legs and rotten, upside-down faces and they wore robes, and they—they took me to this room that was black and red like the crystal, and then a giant tentacle with a sucker at the end came down and sucked out my baby!”
What am I going to do? Hazel fretted. She’s delirious. The only question was why? And why was she naked?
Sonia cradled the bloated abdomen, her eyes lidless in turmoil. “But then-then...Shit, I can’t remember!”
“Try to, Sonia. Take your time.”
Sonia stared into space, then, instantly, her face turned white.
“Frank,” she croaked.
“What about him?” Hazel rushed. “Where is he?”
“I—I...Hazel, I know it sounds crazy but after those things took my baby, they threw me back in here and I wasn’t pregnant anymore!”
“Fine, fine,” Hazel tried to humor her. “But you were saying something about Frank? Where is Frank? ”
“Then the door opened again and Frank came out! And he dragged me back through the door but this time I went to another place, and—and—”
“And, what, Sonia?”
Sonia’s screams made Hazel clack her teeth.
“They put another baby in me, a different baby,” Sonia was suddenly whispering. “One minute I wasn’t pregnant anymore, then the next...I was.”
She’s had a psychotic episode, that’s got to be it. “Sonia, listen to what you’re saying. You believe that you’re carrying a different baby in your womb now?”
