Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Man,” breathed Bell to himself.

  The forcer flipped through more stations. On a number of the many channels, there was only static. Programs from Earth, Bell realized, the transmissions now blocked. Or eradicated.

  -2-

  At his precinct station, Bell had to decide between interviewing the boy Kaddish had taken with him when he fled the apartment of his victims, or Kaddish himself. Perhaps wanting to delay confronting his old friend, Bell chose the boy.

  “He’s six, our med scan says,” Bell was told by Irene, the officer who had been ordered to look after the boy until it could be decided what to do with him. “No medical problems, no signs of physical abuse from either the family he was with or from the perpetrator. He does have a tattoo, though, in the middle of his chest...”

  “Silver ink. Circles inside circles, with rays coming out from the middle of it.”

  “Right. You know what it means?”

  “One of the victims had the same thing on his arm. Has he told you what happened?”

  “No. He won’t talk. Hasn’t said a word. He must be terribly traumatized, but he smiles, at least. I gave him a sandwich and he ate a few bites.”

  There was a bank of monitors near them, and Bell watched the boy on one of these. He looked calm enough, sitting there coloring with markers Irene had given him. His hair was so closely shorn that he looked bald, but no haircut or style was unusual in Punktown.

  “So Kaddish was dropping the boy off outside Central Hospital...”

  “Right,” said Irene. “He was letting the kid out of his car, outside the front doors. But he’d been followed by Ferrara and Woo, who responded to the reports of a vehicle fleeing from a gunfire scene. They pinned his car in with theirs and he took off on foot, but Woo brought him down with a dart. Kaddish had a gun on him but he made no attempt to fire on Ferrara and Woo at any time, luckily. He’s a very dangerous guy, so it’s funny. Unless he’s selectively dangerous. Must be, because he was obviously trying to leave the child in a safe place, even at risk to himself. Strange.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Bell. “I think I'll go try my luck with the boy.”

  “Good luck.”

  Irene let the detective into the room where the child was being kept, pending a search for surviving relatives and a psych appraisal from a Child Services worker on her way over.

  When the door slid open, the boy looked up and crumpled the drawing he’d been working on into a tight ball in his fist. Bell smiled at him and chose to ignore this act for the moment, though he did take note of the color of the marker the child had selected to draw with from all those Irene had supplied him. Not black, as he would have guessed, but a metallic silver one. Irene left them alone together, and Bell seated himself opposite the boy.

  “Hi there, pal. My name’s John. What’s yours?”

  The child gave the detective a great big smile, the winning but unusual quality of which confirmed to Bell beyond any doubt that this was the same child who had drawn those obsessive geometrical designs. The boy replied, “Yog Sothoth.”

  He had spoken readily enough. Maybe he trusted men more so than women. Encouraged, Bell repeated, “Yog? You’re Yog?”

  The boy began to giggle wildly, rocked back on his rump. Bell tried on a smile but it didn’t fit well. Despite his concern for the boy’s welfare, he wasn’t in the mood for children’s games. And how could this boy be in the mood? Hadn’t he seen his parents slaughtered this afternoon, assuming the Pugmires were his family? Hadn’t he been kidnapped by their murderer? Had the experience shattered his uncomprehending mind?

  “Is Yog your name, pal, or are you just kidding with me?”

  “I am the gate,” the boy replied sweetly, rocking forward and back, hands on his knees. “Yog Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate.”

  Bell’s smile was losing its hold on his skin. “What does that mean, buddy? Is that something your parents taught you? Were Willy and Ingrid your mom and dad?”

  The boy stopped rocking but his smile, at least, didn’t falter. He said, “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bell said. He straightened up, thinking the boy was really taunting him now. Nonsensical jibber-jabber. Unless...he was speaking in tongues. And then Bell remembered the alien language translated to English on that roll of papers from the altar. Yes; it had to be that. The Pugmires had given the boy a strong religious foundation, like mothers and fathers were expected to do. “Can I see what you were drawing there, mate? I saw your drawings back at the apartment; you’re quite an imaginative artist, there. C’mon, let me see.” He extended his hand.

  The boy’s smile remained but his eyes narrowed slightly. He looked wary or cunning, and the effect on his young features wasn’t pleasant. Bell switched to a sterner tone of voice, wiggled his fingers. He was prepared to pry the ball loose if he had to.

  “Give me the picture, buddy.”

  The boy giggled, and relented. He passed the crumpled drawing to Bell, who smoothed the crinkled paper on the table top.

  Like those at the apartment, it was a perplexing pattern of lines, angles and curves like some mathematical equation, but rendered in silver ink so that it resembled the web of a deranged spider. In some respects it bore a resemblance to the tattoo that Irene had told Bell the boy wore on his chest. “Very nice. Interesting. What is this design, guy? Does this mean something?”

  “A gate,” the boy replied.

  “A gate. Is this Yog...whatever?”

  “This is Yog Sothoth.” The boy touched his sternum. “The spheres within spheres. Gate, key, and guardian in one. I am Yog Sothoth.”

  Bell said nothing for several moments. It was sad. Whether his family had made him this way, or Kaddish had frightened him to madness, the six year old was deeply in need of psychological help. He hoped C. S. got here soon to tend to him. He hoped the kid could be salvaged.

  “May I keep this picture, pal?” The child said nothing. Only stared, and smiled. Bell folded the drawing and tucked it into his shirt pocket, rose from the table. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll come back and see you later, okay?” Then he turned, and moved to the door.

  He was glad to leave.

  “I knew you’d come in to see me,” said Joshua Kaddish.

  “This is my precinct. I’m homicide.” Bell drew closer to the softly humming barrier of the jail cell, a field of magnetic force, transparent but illuminated a soft blue so that it would be immediately evident it was activated. “Did you kill those people just as an excuse to see me again?”

  Seated on a chair directly facing the barrier, Kaddish snorted softly at the joke. “A coincidence, Johnny. Then again, there’s no such thing. Maybe we were meant to meet up again, huh? Who knows the blueprint of the universe?” At this last question he gave an odd little smile.

  It was a common enough expression for him, all too familiar to Bell. Kaddish’s gray eyes were at least as sly and mysteriously amused as his cat-curl smile. His ears were almost impish and nearly pointed, lending him more of a darkly mischievous look. His short, dark auburn hair was gelled and brushed back and he wore a light- colored beard of several days. He was trim, dressed neatly for an alleged psychopath in a crisp white shirt with the cuffs rolled back and black trousers. His voice was calm, its accent British. He seemed composed enough considering his situation, but Bell knew his smiles could conceal a lot. He knew the man was volatile...but capable of the carnage he had seen back at the apartment complex?

  “Can you get me a cigarette, Johnny? I know you don’t smoke, yourself...”

  Bell ignored the request. “Why did you do it, Josh?”

  “She was beautiful. She wanted me. And she wasn’t a good choice of wife for you.”

  Bell drew in a long breath, reining in his control over his emotions. Barely. “I mean why did you murder those people, not why did you fuck my wife.”

  “Well, don’t you think we should get that out of the way before we move on to the othe
r? It’s obviously been what’s stood between the two of us talking, these past years.”

  “Who were you to judge that she wasn’t a good wife for me?”

  “She slept with me, didn’t she? She was sleeping with another man, too. I forget his name now. I followed them, took vids to show you. A little freebie detective job. I wanted you to know what she was really like, pal. She wasn’t the wife you wanted her to be. You were blinded by her looks.”

  “So you were doing me a favor. You didn’t want to sleep with her for your own sake...”

  “Of course I did, Johnny. She was lovely. But I wouldn’t have seduced her if she’d been really right for you. I killed two birds with one stone. I was going to show you those vids, but then...well, I employed another method of showing you her true colors. But I did send you those vids. Did you ever look at them?”

  “No. I tossed them in the zapper. I thought they were vids of you and her.”

  “Me and her? Christ, man, you think I would gloat like that?’

  “You’re gloating now.”

  “I’m not gloating, Johnny.” The feline smile was gone, and Kaddish nearly looked sincere. “I didn’t want to hurt you. But you wouldn’t listen. I warned you about her. I knew her better than you did, in the beginning.”

  “It was none of your business, no matter what she was capable of. It was my marriage. My wife. My life. My decision to make, my problem to deal with.”

  “You were crazy marrying her.”

  “I was crazy ever having a friend like you. I guess I’m not a good judge of character.”

  “Just a wee naive, is all. And where is she now, Johnny? I haven’t seen her around, either.”

  “We’re divorced.”

  “Good.” Kaddish held Bell’s gaze without blinking, waiting to see what came next.

  “Why did you kill those people?”

  Kaddish rose from the chair, half turned away from his visitor. He had been given a marker to do a crossword puzzle in a hard copy of the morning news, and he tapped the capped pen against the bare white wall of the tiny holding cell as if testing it for weak spots.

  “I met another lovely woman, Johnny. Her name is Kate Redgrove. She’s an archaeologist...”

  “I don’t think she sounds good enough for you, Josh. Maybe I should sleep with her.”

  “We’ve already broken up, I’m afraid. But I learned a lot from her. There’s a bad time coming, Johnny. It’s already begun. There are people who’ve been waiting a long time for this. Some dreading it...and others, like those cultists I -- that you saw ... those people have been trying to make this thing come about.”

  “What thing?”

  “There are beings outside our reality. Outside our space, time and dimension. They’ve been worshiped as gods, because we’re amebas to then -- dogs at best, when they need us. I can’t believe there are those who try to help them come through. Do they really think they’ll reward them? Give them power? When they don’t need these fools anymore, they’ll squash them like bugs.”

  My God, Bell thought, he is insane.

  “They’re known as the Old Ones, the Great Old Ones, the Outsiders. By other names in other cultures and religions on a hundred planets. They once ruled everything...long before us. They may have seeded humans throughout many systems, like we’d plant crops. Sometimes for labor. Sometimes for food...not for the Old Ones themselves; they don’t need to eat to survive. For all intents and purposes, they’re immortal. But there are lesser beings. Spawn. Minions. More corporeal in the way we understand it. They seem to feast on us sometimes...though I don’t know if it’s blood they feed on, or the essence of life itself. Anyway, I think the Old Ones also might have seeded us because they wanted us around to help them come back through if they ever got locked out. Because that’s exactly what happened. Another powerful amalgamation of beings -- the Elder Gods -- came and overpowered them. Locked them up, locked them out.”

  “This...girlfriend of yours told you all this?”

  Kaddish turned back to face the police inspector, smiling, tapping the pen against his own chest now. “I know it sounds crazy, pal, but there’s no way to make it sound sane. No one with influence has ever wanted to believe it. It’s too big, too scary to believe. There’s always been a few eccentrics and geniuses who uncovered some hints, investigated. More often than not, they didn’t survive to pass on to the masses what they’d learned. Or else, they were considered too mad to believe. And sometimes they were mad, though they didn’t start out that way.”

  “Is this Kate Redgrove mad, then?”

  “Kate? She’s as cool as gun metal, Johnny. She’s quite a woman. I think you’d better go talk to her yourself.”

  “I intend to. But why do you think I should?”

  “Because you don’t believe any of what I’m saying.”

  “What do these, ah, god-like entities have to do with what you did? Are you saying those people you killed...”

  “They worshiped the Old Ones. And worse than that, these idiots were trying to pick the locks on their cells. Open the gates and the windows. In every way they could. Chants, rituals. It’s always been said that the Old Ones would return when ‘the stars were right’. That means, when the conditions of space and time were optimum for them to break free of the prisons the Elder Gods left them in. ‘In strange eons’, the dead gods are supposed to be resurrected. Well, it’s time, Johnny. The stars are right. The strange eons are now.”

  “Says Kate.”

  “Yes. But I knew it was getting very close from watching the cult, too. I’d been watching them for a while. They were stepping up their activity. I had to stop them.” The smug smile drained out of Kaddish’s face; even from his eyes. “Believe me, I had to do it. Before they could do more damage. But they’re not the only cult in Punktown. There are even more cults on Earth...”

  “Does Kate intend to kill any of these cult people?”

  “No. I can’t see her doing that.”

  “Well, you messed up, Josh. You got caught. Now it looks like those other cults will just go on chanting and opening the doors for these super-aliens.”

  “That’s just what they’ll do, John. They have to be stopped. You have to get me out of here.”

  “You murdered...”

  “I was truth-scanned when your people took my confession. I told them my story then. Go look at the scan. You’ll see I'm not lying.”

  “Maybe you aren’t, but the scan will only prove that you believe in what you’re saying. It doesn’t mean it really happened, except in the mind of a madman suffering some very paranoid delusions.”

  “Then you have to take a memory recording. Play it back, Johnny. You’ll see for yourself that it’s no delusion...the thing I saw in that apartment. I shot it, for Chrissakes.”

  “What thing?”

  “A few days ago I smuggled a bug into the cult’s apartment in their mail. I heard them summoning something up, so I moved in on them...and when I busted in, they were calling up a creature. I don’t know what it was, exactly. Some lesser being. A hound, some call them. It’s easier to let the minions in, the ones that are more material in the way we understand. This thing was being manifested right in the middle of the living room when I burst in on them. I shot at the thing, and it disappeared into the corner...”

  The corner. Bell had seen the bullet holes there. “It just walked into the wall, huh?”

  “It passed out of this dimension. There’s a kind of geometry involved in opening some of the portals. Certain signs and patterns can open them up...”

  “Is that what that red symbol was you painted in the corner, and on the door to their apartment? A portal?”

  “No -- that was the sign of the Elder Gods. Kate showed it to me. The Elder Gods used it to seal up the Old Ones. It has great power against them.”

  “Like, oh, a crucifix against vampires, huh?”

  “I sprayed the sign on the door to keep out other beings or agents that might try to come to th
e apartment later. Even if it gets painted over, it’s still there. And I painted the symbol in the corner to keep the hound from coming back out of the wall. They like corners. Something about the angles. The geometry...”

  Bell tossed his head far back and let out a weary laugh. “The hounds like comers. Ohh...this is steaming dung, you know that? Do you think my chief will spend the money and time to have your memories recorded and played back, the way you’re talking?”

  Kaddish came very close to the blue-tinted barrier, so that its glow gave him a chill, corpse-like appearance. “I’ll tone down my talk around everyone else but you. But you have to get that recording made, pal. You have to see for yourself. And show them, too, afterwards. Time is running out. The cults have to be stopped. Their books, their relics, it all has to be destroyed. At least get them to record the last day of my memories. How difficult can that be? Just one day, tell them. Just today.”

  Bell was wagging his head. “What happened to you, Josh?”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “I’ll ask them to do the recording, yes -- okay?”

  Kaddish seemed to relax slightly, found a shred of his smile again. “How’s the kid?” he asked a little sheepishly.

  “We can’t get through to him. I think he’s traumatized by what he saw.”

  Kaddish seemed almost to wince, looked away. “I was trying to drop him off someplace where he’d be taken care of...”

  “All he can do is babble a bunch of gibberish and talk nonsense like what you’re telling me.”

  Kaddish looked warily back at his old friend. “Gibberish? What’s he been telling you? Things about the cult?”