Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I’ve got to get back there. I have to fill the chief in now. And you’re coming with me, Josh, I’m sorry. I can’t let you go off killing more people. There has to be another way to handle this. You can tell my chief your story, and the Headquarters agents when they get there.”

  Bell fully expected Kaddish to put up an argument, given the strength of his obsession. He was surprised, then, when Kaddish dropped his eyes and slowly nodded in agreement. “All right,” he said quietly, “I’ll go back there with you.”

  Outside Precinct House 15, lions cast in a pale blue resin flanked the front steps. These terrestrial creatures, no matter how fearsome in aspect, were a weak and ridiculous symbol of protection in the face of the threats Bell had learned of.

  Bell was handing over to another officer the two pistols Kaddish had acquired for Kate Redgrove when Chief Bellioc, having heard that Bell had brought his quarry in, came hurriedly into the room. The private detective looked calmly up at the police chief and gave him a pleasant nod.

  “So, it’s the magician who performed that disappearing act in his cell,” Bellioc grumbled.

  “You must be Chief Bellyache.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, you sleazy little piece of dung. I should put you in a nice safe stasis field right now. Tell me what’s happening here. What kind of threat is this to the city?”

  “The city?” Kaddish snorted a bitter laugh. On the ride here, Bell had filled him in on the loss of contact with Earth, its moon, the Mars colonies and now, according to the news they had listened to on the Edsel’s radio, outposts on the moons of Jupiter. When asked what he thought the spreading cloud might be, Kaddish had only said under his breath, in a tone of awful reverence, “Azathoth.”

  “Sir, the whole Coalition...the whole universe...is under threat,” Bell told him. “There are cults still here in Punktown, cults on Earth, that are working to make this happen.”

  “John, do you expect me to believe in Satan worshipers calling up demons?”

  “Demons, gods, aliens, call them what you want.”

  “And what are we supposed to do about it? Go and murder all these cults like your friend here did?”

  “We have to see the boy,” Kaddish said. “There’s no more time to argue.”

  “He’s under observation,” Bellioc assured him harshly.

  “Let me talk to him. I can get him to open up about this. What he has to show us...you might find enlightening.”

  Bellioc looked to Bell, who nodded. “We’ve got to trust him. He knows more about this than we do, and it doesn’t look like we have much time to learn.”

  The precinct commander gestured roughly. “Okay, okay, let’s go.”

  As they moved down the corridor toward the holding room where the orphan was being kept, a guard visible outside its force barrier, Kaddish asked Bell, “What became of the Shining Trapezohedron?”

  “The what?”

  “The black crystal Pugmire had in his apartment.”

  “We have that here, in the vault. Why? What’s it do?”

  “Not sure, but some say it can be used to view other worlds. Other realms. It may also be a battery of power, a focal point of power...or a door in itself. Whatever it is, it should be destroyed. I never should have left there without it.”

  “Like I say, we have it. No one’s gonna touch it.”

  They had reached the barrier, and the uniformed forcer stepped aside. The barrier was deactivated, and the boy with the shaven head lifted his head from his arms, crossed before him on the table. He was smiling, and his eyes had locked on Kaddish.

  “I’m going to show him something,” Kaddish said, slipping a hand into his pocket.

  Bellioc seized his wrist. “What is it? Has he been scanned for weapons, John?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just this, I want to show him.” Kaddish withdrew the stone disc with the carven eye, and held it out for the chief to see.

  Bell saw the boy crane his neck, trying to get a look at what the object was. His smug smile had became less sure, more concerned.

  Kaddish turned, and held the seal of the Elder Gods aloft in his left hand for the boy to plainly see.

  The boy let out a cry of rage, bolted up from his chair and backed into the wall. He turned his eyes away and tore at the front of his shirt, scattering buttons, revealing pale skin and bony ribs and a silver symbol tattooed on his chest: concentric circles, one inside the next, with lines or rays radiating out from the center.

  “What is that?” Bellioc demanded. “What are you doing to him?”

  The boy’s cry had turned to a rattle, and the rattle to another kind of cry that made Bell shudder. The child began to scream gibberish in a weirdly altered voice, at once sounding both full of phlegm and full of gravel...

  “Ygnaiih...ygnaiih...thflthkh’ngha...”

  “Jesus!” Bellioc gasped.

  The tattoo on the boy’s chest was splitting along its radiating lines. The skin of his chest began to peel open of its own accord, like a flower blooming in stop motion photography. The petals of this flower folded back, curled in upon themselves, opening up a black maw within the boy. A great cavity that showed no organs inside. Too deep for the shallow confines of his slight child’s body. It was as though all space itself resided inside his frame.

  “Yog-Sothoth,” the boy shrieked, still hiding his gaze from that dreaded seal. “Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah -- e’yayayayaaaa...”

  “Look!” Bell yelled, pointing at the void in the boy’s flesh. In that empty blackness of space they could see distant stars shining. But the stars were drawing nearer. They were like a shower of comets coming toward them, a fleet of glowing spheres or globes, iridescent, but the colors of that iridescence alien to their human eyes. As they neared, the spheres began to join with each other, become a great mass made of these glowing bubbles, like cells linking to form one immense body. And yet some few smaller, faster spheres shot on ahead, still seeking to reach the hole in the boy’s chest. To shoot through it...

  And still the boy went on screaming, “Ngh’aaaaa...ngh’aaa...h’yuh...h’yuh...”

  “Yog-Sothoth,” Kaddish breathed, and lunged into the room. No one tried to hold him back. Not even Bellioc.

  Into that void, Kaddish tossed the stone disc in his hand.

  The boy lifted his head at last, his eyes wide in horror and a rage that could show in no human child’s face, however deranged the mind behind it. The boy threw out his hands to grab a hold of Kaddish, but he danced back out of his reach.

  The wide wound now began closing, the petals folding inward, once again concealing the infinity beyond. But one small glowing sphere was still hurtling at the portal, as if it thought it could make it through before the door of flesh closed completely...

  Kaddish collided against Bell in his retreat. Bell staggered back a step, and when he recognized his own pistol rising in both of Kaddish’s hands, realized what his friend had done.

  Kaddish fired at the boy’s head even as the globe impacted against the nearly closed flaps of skin. The dark purple energy bolt plummeted into the boy’s forehead just above one eyebrow, snapping his head back. His small skull was shattered, the wall behind him becoming splashed with a black mulch that couldn’t possibly be human brain matter.

  The closing flaps of skin opened again briefly at the impact of the globe, letting in a blast of weirdly colored light. A single wide ray or beam, which struck Joshua Kaddish squarely in the chest and hurled him backwards out of the room, against the opposite wall of the corridor. And then the petals in the boy’s chest sealed completely, as if they had never existed, and his corpse slid into a sitting position against the wall, his open eyes fixed with that expression of malice that no child -- no human -- should be able to manifest.

  Bell and the others went to Kaddish, but stopped themselves. Bellioc withdrew in horror. The uniformed officer whispered some half-prayer under his breath.

  Kaddish was also slumped in a seated position, propped
against the corridor wall. His entire front, his face, had been charred black, his eyes empty sockets steaming -- as if the horror of what he had seen in that last moment had burned his eyes away utterly. And yet his lips had burned away also, and his blackened skeletal grin seemed hideously full of a sardonic humor. It seemed an apt expression for the man, in death.

  Bell retrieved his gun from where it had been dropped by his friend, and carrying it in his fist, walked off down the corridor.

  He asked to be let into the station’s vault, and was told by the officer on duty that he needed clearance. He pointed his gun at the young man’s eyes and softly repeated his request. It was granted.

  John Bell took two steps into the vault of Precinct House 15, leveled his sidearm at the Shining Trapezohedron, and squeezed the trigger.

  Black shards of crystal were scattered across the room.

  A transmission, weak and uncertain, was at last received from a colony on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Contact had been lost with the colony over a half hour before.

  Bell watched the transmission live on VT, a drink in his hand. A man filled the vidtank. His image was shot with static, but Bell could see that the man’s face was horribly swollen, covered in great blisters with a weirdly metallic sheen. He barely looked human, his eyes were fused shut, but the man was smiling nonetheless. And he was greeting his viewers with the words, “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

  The newscaster returned to report that more transmissions were now being received, one by one, from the colonies on Jupiter’s icy moons, from Mars and from Earth. Bell was torn between hope and utter despair. He was tempted to turn the VT off before he saw what those transmissions contained.

  He wondered if he and Kaddish by themselves had been responsible for blocking the Old Ones from coming, or if there had been other men and women, like themselves and Kate Redgrove, here on Oasis and on the Earth, who had been fighting their own desperate battles to prevent the dead, defeated gods from rising anew from their cosmic sepulchers. Were the doors now locked again -- or merely shut? He watched, and waited for the news.

  Even now Bell didn’t know if his mutant companion was elderly or a youth, male or female. It pointed a scrawny arm through the rubble of the ruined structure in which the two of them hid, its great lidless eyes filled with fear at the sight of what it pointed at.

  Across a lot heaped in junk and the exoskeletons of hovercars, a low flat-roofed building stood, its windows long since gone. The building was painted white, and thus, with its many gaping windows, resembled the fossil skull of some vast creature, with rows of black sockets. And an evil ghost of a brain, whispering inside.

  Bell paid the mutant, barely noticed it as it crept away. The poor blighted creature would have elicited more interest and concern from him, if such beings weren’t so abundant here in the slum of Tin Town.

  In his hands, Bell gripped a sawed-off pump shotgun with a banana clip full of crystal shot. In a shoulder holster was a ray blaster, in a hip holster a pistol loaded with solid projectiles, and in an ankle holster a little palm piece loaded with plasma capsules.

  And in one of the pockets of his leather jacket he carried a small spray gun, loaded with a tube of blood red paint.

  The Avatars of the Old Ones

  -1-

  H'anna was used to having others stand before her artwork in attitudes of confusion and even discomfort as they attempted to interpret it, to understand it...but now, she found herself in a similar pose as she regarded her new creation, "Headless Angel."

  Other pieces crowded her apartment in a kind of personal museum. It was all she had by way of a permanent exhibit; only several pieces had ever been accepted into a few small gallery shows, and she had yet to sell anything. But then, it mattered more to express herself than to sell herself. Not that she wouldn't have minded a bit more appreciation. Or to quit her day job.

  Outside her high apartment window, a string of helicars hovered at a stoplight, and then hummed onwards again. On the roof of the building opposite, a gigantic holographic Indian woman in traditional garb sang in a cheery high-pitched voice like that of a dwarf child on helium about the virtues of a new netlink service. The summer sun shone through the woman's chest like a molten heart within her. Inside H'anna's livingroom/studio it was stifling; only the climate control in the bedroom was functional. At least she could sleep at night. Right now she wore only her panties and the t-shirt she had slept in, her long dark hair in sweaty snarls.

  Not only had her inspiration for "Headless Angel" come to her in dreams, but even now with it finished she had still dreamt about it last night...as if the thing were still not out of her system. It was work, she felt, that was doing this to her. Giving her these nightmares. Work was a recurring daily nightmare...

  Her sculptures up to now had been nothing like this piece, even when they were born of anger and meant to shock, like "Precious Knickers", which hung in her bedroom. That piece had found its origins in an annoyingly tiny pair of bikini underwear she had stolen from her ex-boyfriend's apartment when she let herself in to gather up the last of her belongings; needless to say, they were not her own panties. Filling the underpants were two pigs' hearts. The hearts were stitched together like conjoined twins, and she had taken the wings from a dead pigeon and stitched one to each of the hearts. The whole piece had been spray-painted a lurid red and spray-sealed with a hard preserving plastic.

  So, it might not be so difficult for someone else to imagine that "Headless Angel" was nothing out of the ordinary. But H'anna felt the difference...even if she couldn't understand it.

  She had completed it last night; perhaps the morning would give her fresh perspective. And so she took it in as if someone else had created it (and it felt that way, didn't it?). The sculpture was entirely composed of sheets of thin scrap metal, jaggedly cut and torched together into an entirely black-painted figure as large as herself, which resembled a suit of armor one moment and a chitinous exoskeleton the next. This latter effect was heightened by the wings of the being, which looked like they'd been charred when this angel had fallen. Its crouching body was both anthropomorphic yet dog-like. One hand was raised as if in a perverse blessing. And it had no head. But rising up from the stump of the neck was a thin rod, which branched off to support three black metal discs with edges so sharp she'd sliced her flesh while snipping them. These were the headless angel's triple halos. H'anna wondered if subconsciously she had meant for the triple halos to represent the Holy Trinity. Thus, the lack of a head might represent - what? The death of God? The emptiness of blind faith? Or might this creature not even be anything affiliated with Christianity? It had the aspect of a sphinx. Some mythological creature...some other, older God.

  And in standing nearly stripped before it, H'anna felt either like a worshipper to it...or a sacrifice.

  -2-

  The man's face was horribly swollen, covered in great blisters with a weirdly metallic sheen. He barely looked human, his eyes were fused shut, but the man was smiling nonetheless. He greeted H'anna with the words, "Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"

  "Same to you," H'anna replied pleasantly, walking on quickly by the man. She cast a look over her shoulder to be certain he hadn't turned to follow after her, but he kept on strolling - shambling, rather - along the sidewalk in the opposite direction. She had heard that precise gibberish repeated so many times over the past four years that she could almost recite it herself, maybe with the help of a mouth full of marbles.

  The summer air was compacted in the narrow chasms of the looming city, so that the squalid smells of garbage and piss and sweat were more potent than ever, densely concentrated into a nearly solid miasma. Up-town, with its better quality shopping district and higher-class office blocks, was climate-controlled, but a combination of a troubled economy and the terrible calamity of four years ago had left much of the city in a blighted state. The sun was directly overhead, in what little of the sky could be see
n, but even when the streets were entombed in the shadows of the towers that soared impossibly on all sides, there would be little respite. Helicars whirred far overhead like agitated hornets, and closer to the streets, hovercars whisked impatiently, all as if maddened by the hellish atmosphere. Was it just her imagination, or had the summers become hotter since the incident of four years ago? Had everyone just taken it for granted now, as they had all the people like that blister-faced man? Taken it for granted because they didn't want to confront the implications?

  H'anna wore a sleeveless vest-like garment unbuttoned at the bottom to reveal the sly depression of her navel, and similarly dark brown cloned-leather pants. These were a tad tight and heavy in this sweltering heat, but she was a bit self-conscious about baring the muscular thickness of her thighs and calves, not being as cadaverously thin as was once again the fashion. Her scuffed boots looked too large for her feet. H'anna Chabert was twenty-one, shortish and pale, her brown hair parted down the center and falling to below her breasts in greased tangles and tendrils. Her brows were heavy, her eyes dropping down at the corners, hazel in color and intelligent in aspect. Her lips were full, and her smiles showed a broad expanse of bright teeth. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but someone of more refined taste would appreciate its various effects taken singly and in their very human whole.

  H'anna had taken a hoverbus from her neighborhood to this sector, and now was coming up on the Ambuehl Building, where she worked; a sleek tower with a rounded top, pale sea-green in color and trimmed in lines of bright chrome. It housed a number of Social Services offices, including the local welfare branch. It was the welfare office that had established the soup kitchen in the basement, and this was H'anna's destination.

  In the lobby with its high vaulted ceiling and glitter and glass, there was a tiny mall of sorts: a hair dresser's, a haberdashery and a little cafe with scattered tables that offered a limited luncheon menu. H'anna stood behind a woman in line, glanced around with boredom, grateful for the cool of the building's interior. Her eyes returned to the woman ahead of her. It was her turn at the counter, but the girl behind the counter looked irritated and nervous.