Tom shook his head. “No, no, sir. I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. I have no idea . . . None whatsoever. Honestly, I don’t—”
The man raised his hand, cutting him off. “Spare me, will you?”
The well-dressed one leaned forward and pointed at the pc screen. (Topic realized that he didn’t know the man’s name yet; there wasn’t even a nameplate on the desk.) “I have looked at your file quite thoroughly, Mr. Topic, and until the death of Miss Cortez twelve hours ago I did not think you were anything more than a minor incident—a harmless night of sex, as so many before—but I no longer believe that to be the case.”
He slowly ran his fingers through his hair, showing puzzlement for the first time.
“But, as I said, I will be frank with you.” He gave Topic a sharp look. “Even if you won’t be frank with me.”
A raised finger stopped Topic’s protest.
“You see, I am a firm believer in telling the truth. That’s the only way to earn people’s trust. Always has, always will be. Even in our line of work. And if we’re ever to gain the trust of people like you, that, more than anything, is the way to go.
“Mr. Topic, I hope you realise you are lucky that it is us who know about your one-night stand, and not some other organ. Your luck lies in the fact that, although infidelity is a serious crime, we prefer not to include other parties in our work, and so we simply ignored it, back then, finding it of no importance. Others would not have been so kind to your misbehavior. Now, please look again, Mr. Topic.”
The picture zoomed out from her face, revealing more of her frame—face and neck; face, neck and shoulders; face, neck, shoulder and breasts . . . Until in the end her whole body was up there, magnified, all naked.
Her torso and legs all covered in strange symbols.
(“Do you like my tattoos, Tom?”
Her mischievous face looked at his staring eyes as she stepped out of her flowing dress.
“It has taken me years to complete them . . .”)
A strangled gasp escaped him.
“Something wrong, Mr. Topic?”
“Er . . . No, nothing. I don’t think so . . .”
What was that image? It had faded again. Was it ever really there?
He couldn’t remember. Now it was gone.
He shook his head, took off his glasses, fidgetted with them, and, having doned them again, looked back at the TV screen.
One of the man’s eyes squinted a little, wondering, but then he continued. “As you can see there are no marks on her—other than these, well, these mysterious tattoos. Nothing to indicate that she has been murdered, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Topic?”
“Well, er . . . Sounds plausible, yes, sir. But I wouldn’t know. I’m just an accountant . . .”
A brief smile on the other side of the table.
“Ah, yes. I forgot. However there are a few things that don’t add up—”
Away from Topic’s sight, the man typed on a keyboard and looked at whatever the monitor showed him.
“—First there is the obvious fact that no one from a true Cabale ever just dies. Normal people die all the time, sure, and very naturally, but members of Cabales don’t. If they die it is always under mysterious circumstances. That alone requires further investigation.
“Then there is the fact that those Miss Cortez has been in contact with over the last year have all died horrible deaths. All except you, of course. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?”
Clearly a hypothetical question; Topic didn’t answer.
“Last, but most certainly not least, there is the matter of the tattoos.”
The screen zoomed in on her torso and moved up and down her body to showcase the actual symbols and drawings.
“There is one very odd aspect about them that demands further attention. One that the camera just doesn’t reveal. Something suspect you already know.”
The eyes staring at him from the other side of the desk felt penetrating. A feeling of unease crept around Topic’s body.
Uncomfortable moments of silence followed, the only movement in the room the picture on the magnified screen as it surveyed the strange symbols on the body.
“There is only one way to prove to you what I say, Mr. Topic, and that is to show you exactly what the camera can’t show. Then you will understand why you can trust me and why there is something amiss.”
He stood up and walked to the wall, motioning Topic to come with him. As in a trance the accountant followed. He trembled. Something was wrong; he could feel it in the air around them. Very wrong.
He held the coat closer.
An almost invisible motion from a hand, and the panels before them moved aside without a sound, introducing a starkly lit room.
Squinting his eyes against the sharp light, Topic followed the man in the suit. In the middle of the white, otherwise empty room was a single hospital bed. Above it a state of the art camera, floating gently and moving back and forth over the body, recording the tattoos.
On the bed lay the nude body of the dead Mexican beauty.
The man turned around to look at him. “Now do you understand my trepidation, Mr. Topic?”
Swirling about her—strange, mystical symbols in layers of colors moving inside and outside each other—were yet more tattoos.
* * *
(“Huh? Did you say something?”
She looked up at him, a curious frown on her brow; her face an amazing map of beauty.
“Er . . . No . . . Just thought I saw something . . . The lights outside, I guess.” He waved at the blinking neon lights outside the hotel room’s windows; wanting her to continue what she was doing. He was quite drunk, he knew that, and the world had a way of tilting from time to time, but the sensations in his pelvis were very much present and steady.
She seemed to consider what he said for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Okay.”
Licking her lush lips, she returned down there.
For a second he had imagined he saw strange colors rippling above her scalp . . . Surely it was just some trick of the lights and liquors.
A low moaning of pleasure escaped his lips. He raised his hips to meet her orchestrations once more . . .)
A hand steadied him.
“Are you all right, Mr. Topic?”
“Yes . . . I’m all right, thank you . . . Just . . . dizzy . . .”
At least for the moment, satisfied with that answer, the man guided Topic closer to the body. They stopped only a few feet from the table. Mystical colors kept swirling lazily; some resembling drawings, some reminding him of letters or suchlike . . .
“You may be wondering why these . . . peculiar tattoos . . . do not show on the screen? The truth is, Mr. Topic, that we don’t know. We have theories, yes, but no solid evidence; no true knowledge. You see, we’ve actually never seen this before. If you’re a normal human being, you can’t. All we know for a fact is that they don’t show on any screen or recording device—and that they are a sort of magical field around her.
“We suspect that it’s some kind of warding magic. It has that—for lack of a better word—air about it.”
He looked at the accountant sweating heavily, his gaze more penetrating than ever.
“What do you think, Mr. Topic?”
“I . . . I . . . I don’t know . . . I . . . I really don’t know . . . I am just . . . just an accountant . . .”
The world swayed . . . The colors sped up their dance . . . So confusing . . .
(“What…?” At first sounding dazed, far away, as if his working of tongue between her legs hazed the comprehension faculties of her mind; then—“What did you just say?” then some realisation finally hitting home—“What did you just say?”
Her voice almost a scream now, she kicked and squirmed away from him, and in one quick motion she sat up against the wall, her eyes two dangerous slits. Confused, he bumped unceremoniously and naked to the cold floor.
“Ouch.”
He was about to say
that he had no idea what she was talking about—that while tasting her, he had only spoken some words that unexplainably came to mind, caught in the heat of the sacred moment, nothing to get all upset about—when he looked up again, seeing her in all her sweating beauty—
A gasp escaped his lips and he almost reeled back, hands up front defensively. Around her he saw colors of the most fantastic creation; some of wonder and beauty, some of horror and reeking of foulness only suppressed by the other colors binding them. All of them marking words and meaning in his mind—all of them incomprehensible to his intellect trying to make sense of the scenery before him.)
His body moving as if of its own accord, approaching her dead body, her aura, and he wondered, as if in a dream . . . What happened then? . . .
Something about almost fighting, and almost losing the battle with her, when he somehow managed to . . .
Managed to what?
His brow in close concentration, probing the labyrinthine darkness of his own mind, he didn’t even register the question from the man right behind him asking if he was all right; didn’t register that sweat had broken out all over him . . . Managed to . . . managed to . . .
Managed to convince her. That was it! He had managed to convince her that he knew nothing about what she was talking about—nor anything about those odd colors constantly moving about her. For some reason she finally believed him, at least enough for peace to settle between them. That this . . . experience . . . had happened to him in that moment of closeness seemed to make some curious sense to her.
In the end she had accepted his excuse, his feeble explanation. And she hadn’t retracted again when he reached out to stroke her leg, to soothe her.
Lost in his thoughts, his eyes focused slits of concentration, he wasn’t aware that he was now standing very close to the dead body. The colors were twinkling and rippling. He reached out a hand—touching the floating signs—
The world expanded in the flash of a second.
With a roar numbing his mind the mystical tattoos crawled up his arm, tingling every inch of his skin. Crying out in pain, Topic felt a sensation like never before; a sensation very unlike, but whose only relative resemblance was, that of a serious skin burn. A skin burn advancing up his fingers, enveloping the hand, speeding up the arm—
The smell of burned flesh and searing, melting metal (his watch! he dimly noticed) in his nostrils, he was jerked back:
“I—said—get BACK!”
Tumbling dazed to the floor, his arm still flickering and wild tendrils reaching down for him, he stared wide-eyed and unbelievingly at the almost lazy snaps of the colorful bonds around the dead woman’s body. As if someone was beginning to free himself . . . As if something was beginning to free itself . . .
A mumbling noise reached his ears, so low he hadn’t noticed it before. It sounded like some sort of . . . chanting . . . a chanting that emerged with the display before him, danced with it.
A mumbling noise that increased in volume and speed; the tendrils sang along—some of them in unison, some of them in crazy disharmony—all of them along with . . . with . . .
Himself!
This knowledge almost knocked him flat.
A strong slap across his face, and he could hear again.
“For god’s sake, man—snap out of it! You’re releasing it!”
Before them, a grotesque form was taking shape above the table.
(She looked him squarely in the eye. So unbelievably beautiful, so unbelievably firm and commanding.
“Tom, I hope you realise that if it wasn’t for your natural skills I wouldn’t have asked you this favour. Not in a million years. But seeing what I saw—hearingwhat you told me—it would have been stupid of me not to.”
The first smile since their melee touched her lips. “You truly are a Quishar. A rare one.”
That she considered that . . . term . . . something special, something to be proud of, was evident. Despite a few feeble attempts to understand her brief explanations he hadn’t grasped what it meant. But a warm feeling of pride hammered in his chest. If she was proud of him, then he certainly was proud of himself.
Maybe it was the heavy drinking, but he already found it hard to remember much of what they had been doing the last couple of hours. Probably it was the heavy drinking. She had told him strange things, that much he dimly remembered; she had told him something about how she was more than a human—she was a kind of guardian. A guardian destined to walk the earth lonesome and ever alert.
Longing and sadness had draped her words with this revelation. He had wanted to hold her close, to comfort her. “In a minute,” she had said, a tear falling. “This is even more important. Please trust me.”
Of course he trusted her. He would die for her.
She and others walked the earth and, apparently, other planes of existence as well. His foggy mind had a hard time wrestling with the things she had said. So thin the veil of reality suddenly appeared to be. ‘Guardian’ was really too simple a term for what she was. It was her body that guarded . . . imprisoned . . . well, the Thing that it was holding. What more precisely she meant by this, she didn’t say, but “some of us are trying to protect the world from dark creatures that most people don’t even know exist, Tom. We do it with body and mind.”
Then there were her tattoos, more than mere tattoos, far more. In essence they were, she said, Ancient Scripts of Warding. The symbols of Power that helped lock the trapped creature inside her.
To normal human eyes and perceptions all that showed were weird engravings on her skin.
Obviously Tom Topic was no normal human. He had suddenly seen beyond the standard perceptions, and seen the tattoo-symbols swirling about her . . . more than that: had seen them in color, and had been able to decipher and read them. Something which was closely connected to being a ‘Quishar,’ it seemed.
“Most remarkable,” she whispered.
A shudder ran through him. Half in pride, half in horror.
Apparently he had an ability to see through the veil of common reality when in a highly emotional state, when he was excited and succumbed unconditionally to the feeling. Evidently, that was what he had been doing when engaging in their physical act.
She had stroked his hair, a gentle look on her face.
“I’d like you to do me a favour, Tom Topic. A big one.”
He smiled and bent forward to kiss her. The kiss had turned ravenous and passionate.
Then they engaged in a renewed physical act of connecting. And he had helped. With something he could no longer quite remember . . . But it had drained him immensely . . .)
A sharp pain singed through his left shoulder. A hiss from the scowling lips of the man tumbling ahead of him told Topic that he was not the only one landing awkwardly. Behind them weird lights swam about, and a screeching sound cut through the air. Shadows cast about like playdolls in a mad girl’s pantomime. It was gnawing and screeching its way to freedom.
The frantic horror of the man’s face next to him—and the pain—shook Topic back to the present reality.
“What—what—what . . . ?” he managed to breathe.
“First we get the hell out of here!”
As the shadows moved forward, almost touching their backs, the two men lunged ahead. The man in the now ruffled suit pressed a button, and soundlessly there was an opening before them.
A sudden gush of wind and colors burst behind them, forcing them onward at uncontrollable speed. They crashed into the opposite, panelled wall. Topic’s face hit it at an odd angle, accidently biting his tongue, blood flooded his mouth with a taste of iron.
Topic heard the man’s hoarse cry of “Close!” Immediately a swooshing sound blocked out the high-pitched windy cries and odd colors. Tom began crawling around, feeling his way to and fro.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for my glasses. I can’t see anything without them.”
“Why don’t you use contact lenses?”
He paused his search, and looked up at the blurred man. “Because I hate poking fingers in my eyes.”
They exchanged nervous laughter. Then the man spotted the glasses, and handed them to Tom.
“What the hell were you doing in there?”
The accountant fumbled them on, and wiping a tiny drop of blood away from his lips he stood up against the wall.
“I honestly don’t know. I—”
A roaring thunder from the other side bumped against the wall where they had escaped. Cracks of darkness were spreading there. The screeching got louder.
“Can’t—can’t you do something about that? Aren’t you guys supposed to deal with this? It’s your office, right?”
“These rooms are normally quite safe. This is not supposed to happen, Mr. Topic.”
The man hurriedly looked around the room; the state-of-the-art TV still showed the beautiful, tattooed Mexican woman, as if nothing was happening in there. His glance continued, stopping at the wall behind Topic. His eyes widened.
“Get away! Now!” he gasped, pulling him away so roughly that Tom Topic tripped over his own feet, landing on the floor, almost losing his glasses again. He bit down on his tongue, sharp pain searing into his brain and eyes.
“Oh no. We’re trapped.”
The barely controlled horror in the voice turned Topic’s attention back to the situation. Where he stood only seconds ago tendrils of lazy, curling colors oozed from newly arrived dark cracks in the wall. The door to the corridor was webbed in these cracks, as were the rest of the walls. Looking up he saw that the ceiling was also fast shrouded in this cacaphonial madness. And the screeching cry from beyond was getting closer, and the entrance into the room where Salma Cortez lay was now breaking down with each crack’s march. It was coming.
A pained cursing from his companion in this dire room had Tom turn his gaze around. He had desperately tried to reach his desk, but now a hissing sound could be heard from there, and tiny, electrical sparks from the shadowy wood clearly told that no electrical installation worked properly any longer.
Holding his hand in the air, the man’s limb was now a sizzling blob of tissue and bones somehow connecting with the evilness around them in weblike strands.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 49
