Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I can’t believe I let her talk me into painting that thing,” the spindly humanoid sighed, nervously drumming together pale fingers twice as long as the detective’s. “Her neighbors are not happy with it. But she was so set on it, and she’s been a fine tenant except for that. She teaches over at P. U., you know...”

  Bell rang her again. “Damn,” he whispered.

  “Maybe she’s out. Over at the school. Or she might not want to be disturbed, you know; she’s always been extremely insistent that I never let anyone up here unless she knows about it in advance.”

  “Open it.”

  “I...well, do you have a warrant, Inspector?”

  “No, but you’re the manager, right? You can voluntarily open it for me.” If the being refused, there was always the lock-cutter device in an inner pocket of his leather jacket.

  L’Vesk sighed, and moved past Bell to tap out a code on the keypad by the door frame. The apartment manager held open the door, stuck his tiny head in, and promptly withdrew it with a rattling gasp of horror.

  Bell pushed past him, drawing his pistol from its holster under his jacket. “Go call Precinct House 15. Tell them to send some people over here, quick!”

  Once inside, Bell shut the door behind him.

  Kate Redgrove sat on a sofa at the far end of the parlor, slumped to one side with her chin resting on her chest. She was as white as a cave dwelling animal. She wore a suit of comfortable, loose-fitting men’s pajamas, the front unbuttoned. Or torn open. In the center of her chest, above her heart, there was a large circular wound, so deep that the blackness within her seemed an awful void.

  As Bell moved closer to her, wondering if the wound had been caused by a bolt from a ray pistol, he noticed the tear marks on the lovely white carpet.

  He swung around with his chunky black pistol held out before him, eyes large and flicking in their sockets. Before he examined the corpse more closely, he stealthily moved through the rest of the apartment. He found no lurking intruders, human or otherwise. Only slightly at ease, he returned to the body propped on the living room couch.

  He knelt down to gaze up into her face. As Kaddish had told his ex-friend, his ex-lover was beautiful, her short dark hair hanging softly around a delicate face with large, dark brown eyes that were now half-veiled by their lids in death. Bell took his eyes quickly from her face, switched his study to the wound in her chest, between her slight breasts. Her skin looked like wax. There was no blood around the wound, on her clothing or the sofa or the immaculate carpet. Bell knew from the look of her that no blood would be found inside her body, either. But there was another fluid along the rim of the great puncture wound. It was thick, syrupy, and a ghastly blue color that was almost luminous. Bell remembered the memory of a thrashing tentacle. Or tongue.

  The Elder Sign might have repelled intruders from her front door, but they had found another way to send an assassin. And Bell didn’t doubt that the assassin was the same being or creature that Pugmire had summoned up, perhaps for this very purpose. Kaddish had not wounded it enough to kill it, if it could be killed.

  Bell rose, still holding his gun by his side, and glanced around at the woman’s things. A series of shelves along one wall drew him for a closer inspection. There were framed photographs of Kate Redgrove with friends and colleagues at various digs, apparently on various worlds. On one planet they had worked inside a giant bubble, it seemed, Bell guessing that the atmosphere had been unsuitable for humans. In fact, what he could see of the landscape through the transparent wall behind them had a lunar appearance, though Bell didn’t know what ancient civilization might be excavated on an airless moon.

  More notable than the photos, however, were the artifacts on display behind the glass cabinets of the shelves. They were lit and labeled with cards as if exhibited in a museum. There were vases in whole or part, a row of crude iron chisels that might be weapons or tools, a human bust with white eyes and its nose and lips broken away, as if all of its senses had been robbed. A bowl with the painting of a naked Choom warrior inside it. A small stone tablet with carven lines in some unfathomable language, and above that portraying in bas-relief a sphinx or griffin-like creature with wings somewhat like a bat’s and the head of an octopus, with a nest of tentacles in place of a mouth. Bell looked at the card for this piece.

  “Oasis. Choom. Irezk Island Tribe. 19th Cent. Cthulhu.”

  Bell frowned, disturbed by the strange, abstracted image and feeling that he should understand or recognize that last word on the card. Unable to, he shifted his attention to another artifact.

  This looked to be more of organic origin than shaped by the hands of an artisan or craft-maker. It was a large fossil that he had at first thought was a great shallow bowl carved from stone, standing on its end inside the cabinet. Ringing the bowl were thick spines or spikes, some little more than blunt bumps and others long and sharp like the horns of a dinosaur. Bell couldn’t imagine what sort of animal it might have come from, or even what part of the body of an animal it might be from. Was it a shell or carapace? A portion of skull? A half of a pelvis? A lower jaw, a scoop-like hand? Some fragment of anatomy for which there was no terrestrial counterpart? Again, he read its card, standing on his toes to see it.

  “Oasis. Irezk Island. 225,000,000 B.C. Fragment Old One? Spawn?”

  “Jesus,” Bell breathed.

  The sharp barking cry behind him made him spin around. The thing was rushing at him, flopping madly from side to side like a man with his legs bound, and his arms too, for it had none. Just that tongue or tentacle, whipping out of the opening atop its body. Its claws tore up the carpet as it flung itself toward him.

  Bell thrust his gun at the thing as if the action of his arm alone would make the bolts of energy fly from it. Bell’s beam weapon fired short lances of a dark violet light. They pierced the creature, bored round holes from which drooled that blue blood or mucus. Bell backed into the shelves. He cried out in terror and rage. The creature barked in rage and maybe pain. But it kept coming.

  Behind the creature, Josh Kaddish leapt out of the walls where they joined together in the corner. He fell to his knees, looked up at Bell, his eyes crazed in a squirming black mask. There were black leeches half covering his face, his white shirt, some as big as lampreys or remoras with primitive flippered tails thrashing, their mouths fixed to his skin.

  Bell nearly quit firing into the creature, so shocked was he by this manifestation. He was confounded even more when Kaddish got to his feet and bolted from the room as if running for his life.

  “Help me!” Bell roared, and aimed higher up, at the tongue and its five-lobed mouth. Several beams tore through the base of the tentacle and out the other side, spattering bits of rubbery flesh. Bell heard glass shatter somewhere as his beams passed through. The limb’s frenzied whipping only became more violent.

  He darted sideways as the creature reached the shelves, smashing into them blindly. Perhaps it was blind in this dimension, and followed the smell of his blood or the hum of his life force inside him.

  Dancing sideways, putting more space between him and the being, he whirled and fired into it again. And now Josh Kaddish had returned, came to his side. Most of the slugs were gone from him, Bell saw peripherally, the rest dropping off him and writhing in the fibers of the pristine carpet.

  Kaddish had a pistol in each fist, and began adding his onslaught to Bell’s. One bucking handgun fired solid projectiles with a deafening report, the other launched gel caps filled with a corrosive green plasma. Where these hit, larger wounds began to open in the shiny, dolphin-like hide of the being, the uneven edges of the wounds bubbling and sizzling. One wound joined with the next, making yet larger wounds. Inside, the creature was all slick pulsing blackness. Bell now aimed his beams into that blackness. Under this fusillade, the creature finally toppled, and began a terrible flopping on its side like a fish drowning in the air. Bell and Kaddish had to fast-shuffle backwards to give it more room in which to convulse, but they
didn’t relent in their conjoined attack.

  The creature, much torn and melted through the middle, split into two large pieces. To Bell’s horror, both began to make their way back toward the corner of the room from which it had appeared -- the upper half pulling itself along with its serpentine limb, the lower pulling itself along with the talons which had served as toes, before.

  “Keep shooting!” Kaddish bellowed. “Here!” He passed Bell the gun loaded with plasma capsules, then rushed to the shelves of artifacts. Out of the corner of his eye, firing both pistols at the ends of his extended arms, Bell saw Kaddish sliding open one of the cabinets and withdrawing some small item.

  “All right!” Kaddish yelled. “Hold fire!” Bell did, and saw the private detective lunge after the hideous crawling shapes. He was holding out the item he had taken from the shelf, and actually pushed it into one of the holes Bell’s rays had punched into its flesh. He then leapt away, and covered his face as if expecting an explosion.

  It was apparent why a second later, as a smoke or vapor as black as squid’s ink and just as slow -- as if it were spreading under water rather than in the air -- billowed from both portions of the bisected animal or entity. The foulness of the vapor’s stench was so intense that Bell immediately dropped to his knees and vomited. Nothing he had ever smelled at any crime scene, however long the victim had waited to be discovered, could hint at this.

  But moments later, the air was clean of both smoke and stench. Lifting his head with a groan, Bell saw that the broken thing had vanished, leaving behind not so much as a drop of its blue fluids on the soft white carpet. Kaddish was crouching close by, cupping one hand over his mouth. When he removed the hand, he was smiling that cat-curl smile.

  “We killed it. We killed one of their bloody hounds!”

  Bell gestured with his gun toward the couch. Kaddish started to look around, but stopped himself. His smile dissipated. “I know. I saw her there. Fucking demons. They’ll pay for that.” He stood, held up his remaining pistol. “I bought these for Kate, to protect herself. They caught her off guard.”

  Bell slowly got to his feet, fighting to hold onto what little else his stomach contained. Adrenalin crackled through the wires of his nerves. He realized that all the slugs had dropped off Kaddish now, and dissolved from the carpet, also leaving no trace. “How the Christ did you get here?” he asked.

  “Same way that thing did. Through the wall. But I went through the lines, and it went through the curves. I picked up some stowaways on the way, but they didn’t last.” He rubbed at his neck, looked at his palm as if for blood, but he was unmarked.

  “Have you done that before?”

  “No. Never. But your friends left me no choice. I knew I could chance it if I had to. I kept a diagram in my pocket, and I copied the formula into the corner of my cell back at your precinct house. You can thank your friends for giving me that marker. You should have remembered, Johnny, that I’ve never done a crossword puzzle in my life.”

  “Are you crazy? Huh? How did you think you could survive that? How did you find your way?”

  “I was lost a few minutes, I admit. I suppose it was a few minutes. You can’t tell time in there. It’s...not something I can describe. I was disoriented. I started to panic, especially when those things started swarming onto me. The diagram was supposed to get me back to my apartment in an emergency...if I ever got cornered or trapped. Kate drew it up for me. But then I saw or sensed the beastie, and I followed it here. Good for you, huh? I really do think some force, at least, is an our side. Fate, or maybe even -- Them.” He walked to the spot where the being had dissolved, bent, picked up something from the carpet. He came to Bell and showed him a stone disc resting in the palm of his hand. It bore an etched star, and at the center of the star was an eye-like design, with a band of fire for its pupil if indeed it were an eye.

  “The sign of the Elder Gods,” Bell said.

  “Like a crucifix against a vampire. Remember? Do you believe me, now, pal?”

  Bell’s communication device beeped on his belt. He unclipped it, brought up before his face. “Bell here.”

  It was the commander of P.H. 15, Chief Bellioc. His face was like a living postage stamp on the device’s tiny screen. “John, your friend Kaddish is gone.”

  Bell almost said, “I know.” Instead, he said, “Gone?”

  “Check this out. We had a camera on him the whole time he was in his cell -- standard procedure. I’m going to run you the end of the vid.” Bellioc’s face was replaced by a scene of Kaddish in his cell, shot from a corner of the ceiling. Kaddish was finishing up a drawing in the corner, a black web of lines and angles. He was using the edge of the folded newspaper he’d requested to make them as straight as he could.

  He finished a last line, stepped back to admire his handiwork for several moments while capping the marker and slipping it into his breast pocket. Then, he extended an arm -- which vanished into the white wall as if it were a pool of milk.

  “Unbelievable,” Bell said, even as he watched Kaddish walk into the wall and disappear, leaving only that web of black lines to mark his passage.

  Bellioc returned. “I saw the memory recording of that creature, too. Do you know what the hell is going on, here?”

  “Ah. I think...I’m not entirely sure. But...”

  “I’m putting a call into Colonial Headquarters. I think they should send some of their security force in here. We’re dealing with some uncatalogued life forms here. And God knows about these portals...these dimensional...”

  “I think that’s a good idea, chief. Get them in on this. And keep everybody out of that cell.

  Keep the barrier up. There’s no telling what might come out of that opening, now.”

  “The boy!” Kaddish hissed. “The kid!”

  “That boy,” Bell said into the device. “Chief, don’t let anyone take him. Trust me. Don’t let C. S.

  have him. We have to keep him in custody. Under guard...”

  “What do you know about all this, John? You obviously know a lot more than you’re telling me.”

  “I’ll fill you in, chief, but I have to get my head together first. I’m not sure what I’ve seen or how to describe it. Just trust me for a little while. I’m on this. I’m trying to find out what it’s about. In the mean time, all I can ask you is to keep that boy under lock and key.”

  Bellioc’s diminutive features did not look pleased, but Bell was his best homicide investigator, not some impulsive rookie. “All right, do whatever it is you’re doing...but when I get the Headquarters to send somebody over, I’m going to call you back, and I’m going to want you to be here and tell them -- and me -- everything you know.”

  “I will, chief. But until then? Play back the part of the surveillance vid when I went in to interview Kaddish. Listen to what he says. All that crazy dung about an ancient, god-like race? I’m afraid it might be true.”

  Over the top of the communication device, Bell saw Kaddish smiling at him, and nodding in a weary kind of satisfaction.

  -5-

  “We’d better get out of here before the uniforms arrive,” Bell told the other man, handing him back the borrowed gun.

  “Are we going together?”

  “Yes,” Bell answered, sounding disgusted at himself for saying it. “You’re the expert, apparently, so you tell me where it is we should go.”

  “I know of another especially dangerous cult in Tin Town.” Tin Town was one of the least friendly sectors of a generally unfriendly city. Bell had never ventured there, nor did any peace officers, unless pushed into it. “We have to stop them, pal. I don’t know how much time we have left before the doors really come off the hinges, but...”

  “You mean kill them, don’t you?”

  Kaddish paused, drew in a breath. “Yes. Kill them. We can’t lock them up. They can still perform rituals to a lesser extent, even in custody. You saw what I did...and they know more than I.”

  “I won’t be murdering any cults
tonight, Josh. And neither will you.”

  “You’ve seen the truth, man! Jesus, what does it take? I just walked out of that fucking wall, there!”

  “Shit!” Bell hissed, whipping his head around as if someone had whispered in his ear, reminding him of something. Something about walking into walls. Webs that could bend the walls between dimensions. “The kid...”

  “What about him?”

  Bell unfolded the boy’s drawing he had taken from him. Lines and angles in silver ink like the symbol of silver ink tattooed on his chest. He passed it to Kaddish. “The boy was drawing things like that in the holding room. Formulas. Like the one you used...”

  Kaddish’s eyes leapt up from the paper. “If I escaped that way, he can, too!”

  Bell brought his communication device back up to his face, beeped his precinct house. He didn’t want to have to talk to Bellioc again, however. Bellioc might change his mind, order him back right now. “Put Graf on!” he snapped at the dispatcher. Several moments later, the Choom was there. “Graf -- you have to do me a favor, man. Don’t ask why. Go in and take that marker away from the kid from the cult. Make sure he has nothing at all to draw with, understand?”

  “Sure. But...”

  “Is he being guarded, now?”

  “Yes. The chief said you called, and...”

  “Tell them to watch him! He might even try to draw in his shit or his blood. Watch him! Keep him at the table. Don’t let him near the corners of the room!”

  “The corners? John, look...”

  “Do it!” And Bell cut him off, lowered the device.

  “He has to be drugged, John. Or put suspended animation. I’m telling you. He was born and raised to be an extension of Yog-Sothoth. And of all the gates of the Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth is the biggest. The rest are just cracks. Yog-Sothoth is the fucking dam, Johnny, and this kid’s finger is all that’s holding back the flood. Understand? Yog-Sothoth is the gate and the guardian of the gate and the key to the gate, all in one.”