"Those three little girls in the cafeteria said they remembered you," H'anna recalled now. "They said your name..."
"Yeah. I guess I should be flattered. We're just insects to the Old Ones, but I guess I got their attention when I fought them on Oasis. I closed the door on them, with my friend's help. But he knew more than I do. He knew how to close the portal. But this time, I'm not sure I do..."
She tried to assimilate all this as they rode on. In the close confines of the vehicle, H'anna caught the subtle scent of her own sweat, brought out by heat and exertion. She squeezed her arms closer to her body, and then felt ridiculous for it; here the world was crumbling about her ears, and she was afraid that her body odor might offend the man seated beside her. The Hummingbird was small and their knees lightly touched. She found that small human contact to be a vast source of security.
"That's my building, coming up," H'anna announced, pointing out a distant tower with a reddish sandstone color and texture, wedged between two taller and sleeker models.
"Here," John said, and reached across her knees to flip open a dash compartment. He withdrew another handgun, this one larger and composed of a matte gray ceramic, which he passed into her hands. "Keep it. It's loaded with blue plasma capsules, so be careful. It should melt anything living that gets in your way."
Not exactly flowers or candy, but their first date had been unconventional from the start. So much for her fears of John Bell being a boring companion. She turned the pistol over in her hands, both afraid of it and grateful for it.
"What's that?" John snapped, and H'anna's head jolted up in time to see the line strung across their airborne path a second before they struck it. It looked like a clothesline draped between skyscrapers; was no doubt some sort of power cable. But a cable running across an open airway? She immediately tensed for impact, expecting the cable to shear its way through the old craft, cutting its occupants in half. But the cable was cleaved, and its two halves dropped away like a severed vine. Throwing a look over her shoulder, H'anna thought she saw something like drops of glittering mercury falling from the hacked ends. And in addition to that, brief sputtering forks of a violet electricity. A connection had been broken...it was indeed a kind of power cable...and yet up close she had seen it was silvery in color, and organic-looking.
"Look," John said, calling her attention to the fore again as they neared her building and turned a corner to approach it more directly.
There were more of those silvery vines, stretched here and there between buildings quite distant from each other, like the strands of an immense spider web. In fact, they could see how the strands had got up here: crawling across the face of H'anna's building was a cluster of four or five Afflicted, merged into one creature that was appropriately very spider-like in appearance. As they drew closer, and stopped at a hover not far from it, the creature turned several of its heads and snarled silently at them. Black teeth, whipping black tongues. Faces like those of mummies half wrapped in metallic bandages - withered, as if they were draining their own fluids out of themselves in order to secrete this ooze. And inside a window of the reddish building, they could see others of the Afflicted moving about. One of those strands or cables actually passed through the open window into one of the building's apartments.
"John," H'anna said with a dreamy, entranced horror, "that's my apartment."
"What?" He then pushed the helicar ahead a few feet to get a better look inside. H'anna leaned across him to see.
The silvery organic web strand ran into her living room. Ran directly to her sculpture "Headless Angel", which was wrapped in veils of metallic secretion. Across these veils, miniature flashes of lightning fluttered like thoughts firing through the membranes of a gigantic brain.
"What is that thing?" John demanded.
"I'm an artist; it's a sculpture of mine. An angel, or a demon, with no head."
"No face? And a triple crown?"
"Triple halos."
He turned to her, his stare so intense it was accusatory, inquisitional. "Why did you design that?"
"I didn't design it! It came in a dream."
John gazed out again across the city at the other strands trailing away into the distance. "Do you have other artist friends who've been dreaming strange ideas for their art?"
"Yeah...yeah, you know, I have. My friend Todd has been going through what he calls his Mollusk Period. He keeps dreaming about giant squid...squid angels with wings..."
"They're connecting up their lines of power. It can't just be artwork, idols. It may be powerful books...archeological displays in private collections...anything else linked to their past that might focus their energy. They're weaving a web. Whatever's at its nexus has to be the portal they plan to come through." He faced her once more. "Our destinies converge, H'anna. But for a minute there I thought you were one of them. Anyway - I can't let you off here..."
"Thanks; I'd rather not."
"We have to tear down this web. Excuse me a minute." He tapped a button, and opened his side window. Now they could hear the hissing of that multi-limbed, multi-headed chimera. The head of an elderly man unhinged its jaw like a snake's and began an ear-splitting ululation.
John's gun bucked, spewed its solid projectiles, his arm stretched out the car window. Black brain matter spackled the reddish wall. The creature started to fall, half of it dead, half still hissing, gummed palms coming away from the wall it clung to. John drove more slugs into it, and at last it was peeled entirely away. They watched it tumble to its death in the street far below, the elderly man still howling, still lashing his tongue all the way down.
John emptied the rest of his clip into H'anna's apartment, but not at the Afflicted that skulked within. He sprayed the shrouded "Headless Angel". They heard its black metal skin ping and clang as the bullets punched through it. The triple halos were blasted away. The arm raised in cursed benediction was bent to another angle. The whole figure toppled from its base - and the lightning stopped flickering across it.
"Sorry," John told her.
"I've had worse reactions to my art."
He smiled at her. Closed the car window. And now the Hummingbird flew onwards again, tearing through the silver strand that was extruded through H'anna's open window. The other end of it passed right through the body of the giant dancing Indian woman who sang the praises of her net service on the opposite roof top. As her severed umbilical cord fluttered away she caterwauled cheerfully in their wake.
-4-
John took the helicar up higher, above the ceiling of the city. An alarm sounded in the car, and a stern female voice let him know he was out of the proper airways and that his violation was being recorded in central police files. Oh well.
They began to make out the pattern of the web below them. It glittered in the sun as if spun from thin lines of steel. The pattern had an almost geometric configuration to it, more like a gigantic hieroglyph than a spider's web. Yet it did appear to have a central point of convergence...
"That's FAM," said H'anna. The Fine Arts Museum.
"I know," John said. "I've been there. It makes sense. They have something there I should have destroyed before. I didn't know how to do it without being caught. And I guess I underestimated how dangerous it could be. But it's one of the reasons I decided to settle in this town."
"What is it?"
"Something you plagiarized, H'anna, without knowing..." He began to drop altitude again.
They could see more and more of those multi-limbed creatures crawling like flies across the faces of the buildings as they descended; some now seemed to be made from as many as a dozen bodies. H'anna saw a man dragged out of his apartment window by one of this swarm, but she also saw another man lean out of his window and fire an old pump-action shotgun into one of them. She watched another creature open one of its myriad mouths and fire a silver line out of it, which sailed amazingly far until it stuck to the building opposite, where another monstrosity took hold of it and scampered away out of si
ght with it, around the corner of the building. They were so like industrious insects, serving their unseen queens in their alien dimension. Preparing this world so that those queens might break free from their imprisoning chrysalises and fly free once more.
John lowered his car to the rooftop parking lot of the Fine Arts Museum. Even as they landed and floated under the covered section, two other crafts hastily departed. A man ran past them with his wife, both carrying young children in their arms. "Don't go in there!" the man yelled as they charged by. H'anna watched after them nervously until they were safely in the air, then turned to follow John to the elevators, where he had patiently waited for her, popping a fresh magazine into his pistol as he did so.
When she reached him, he asked, "Sure you want to go with me, H'anna? You could stay in the car. Take the car, if I don't come back..."
"I feel safer with you."
"Really? They have a grudge against me."
"I don't care. I don't want to be alone."
"Okay; but I'll be too busy to ask you again." Then he hit the button for the elevator.
The bell dinged, the door slid open, but the elevator was already crammed full. H'anna gave a cry and scrambled backwards, as a silvery tentacle lashed the air just inches from her face. There were as many as twenty Afflicted in the elevator, now so fused and shrouded in metallic webs that they had become an amorphous mass. John wheeled about and flicked the switch to chamber the first round off his fresh clip, but before he could aim his gun, H'anna extended hers in both fists and fired shot after shot. The blob howled from nearly two dozen toothless mouths as the blue-glowing plasma immediately began to spread, like fire across paper. The now inhuman limbs thrashed in agony, the flanks of the thing pitched and heaved as they blackened. John hit the door button again, and the sight and most of the stench of the liquefying creature were shut away.
He hit the button for the other elevator, hopefully with better results. They both stood with guns pointed, legs spread in firing stances. Ding. The door parted. Their fingers curled. Just a soft instrumental version of last year's cutting edge music hit. They boarded the lift.
"Floor eleven, I think - right?" John said. "For alien antiquities? Choom? Tikkihotto?"
"Yes," H'anna replied. She knew the museum well, had often wandered its halls while fantasizing about exhibiting her own work there one day. It seemed such a trivial dream, now, with a gateway to another dimension opening up somewhere below them. The elevator sped them downward toward that place. H'anna felt like it was lowering them into Hell.
"Floor eleven," a pleasant female voice announced, and the door opened. Before them stretched a wide, dim hallway with glossy floors. It was utterly, eerily silent. Warily, they disembarked.
"What display do you want?" H'anna whispered.
"Tikkihotto," John replied.
"Um, that way." She pointed with her gun, and so they headed down a narrower branching corridor. It was also gloomy, almost dark, but with recessed, lighted displays in the walls. These were holographic dioramas portraying the colonization of the Tikkihottos' planet by Earth people, nearly a hundred years ago now. The holograms, on a regular cycle, switched to ads for various museum sponsors - a sneaker company, a vidphone service, a mood adaptor implant. "Stress dominating your life?" asked a pleasant female voice.
The corridor opened into a series of interconnecting galleries of ancient Tikkihotto artifacts, beginning with a collection of intricately embroidered ceremonial robes spread across the walls like tapestries. The rooms were as still as a labyrinth of tombs.
Next, an exhibit of weapons; axe-like swords, lances, handsome early muskets. In this room, they began to hear a sound at last, somewhere ahead. Murmuring voices. A chorus of them. It sounded like a low monotonous chanting. They glanced at each other, crept forward more stealthily to listen.
"Iä...ngai...ygg..."
Waving his companion back, John ventured a bit further ahead, poked his head through the next doorway. H'anna held her breath - and nearly screamed when a gun started firing explosively. At first, she thought it was John, but he jolted back just as startled as she. He then lunged forward, however, and not wanting to be left behind, she plunged after him.
It was a wide, circular gallery, ringed with statues and busts on pedestals, with the colossal figure of a legendary Tikkihotto hero in the center, bronze tendrils curling from his sockets where a human's eyes would be. At the base of this figure, some of its tentacles wound around the bronze legs, was a great undulating bulk that could not have been less than thirty human beings at one time. One of its limbs had whipped out and circled the throat of a security guard, who had now dropped his gun, his eyes bulging in a blackening face.
John and H'anna skidded to a stop and opened fire wildly, in a desperate panic, as the beast turned several of its limbs in their direction.
H'anna's melting plasma did more good than John's solid projectiles. A tentacle was burned free and flopped at H'anna's feet like a dying snake. Black smoke began to billow, a vile fluid as shiny as quicksilver to spread in a pool. A third of the monster was able to surge away through the opposite doorway, but they could still hear it wailing away in agony, the plasma still diligently at work on it. The miasma it left behind caused H'anna to retch, but she clapped her free hand over her mouth. John had already rushed forward to one of the statues, and H'anna saw that there were numerous silvery lines affixed to it. Lifting her head, she followed them to a ring of windows near the concave ceiling of this domed projection of the museum. The windows - though bullet and ray-proof - had all been melted through somehow to permit the entry of the strands.
Still covering her nose and mouth though the putrid mists were dissipating, H'anna crossed the room to join John at the base of the statue.
"Yes," she said, lowering her hand. "Oh my God...yes. And I've seen this before...I have. Maybe, maybe subconsciously I remembered it, copied it..."
"No," John said. "You were right the first time. You saw it in your dreams. They were using you to make an idol for them. Another nodal point of power."
H'anna read aloud the translated title on the plaque. "The Black Messenger." She read more. "They don't know what kind of material it was carved from. A kind of resin, they think, 'perhaps secreted by insect colonies cultivated for such a purpose; the Tikkihotto were known to breed certain insect species for food and silk'." She again lifted her gaze to the sculpture.
Whatever it was made of, it was entirely ebon in color, the silvery black of hematite. It was a crouching, sphinx-like hybrid, with the longer forelimbs of a hyena, and stylized folded bird-like wings. Atop its head was a crown with three cones. And there was no face on the creature's head. No snarling demon's visage with mere eyes and fangs could have disturbed her more than this.
"Nyarlathotep," she breathed aloud.
John looked at her sharply. "How do you know?"
"I just know. From the dreams..."
Both front limbs rested on the ground, whereas her version had had one hand raised in a blessing.
But now, one of its front limbs did rise up, with a crackling sound like the crumbling of sanity.
-5-
Jerking up her pistol in both fists, H'anna let loose a shriek of madness and a volley of gel capsules, that broke against the statue's blank visage. Sizzling, black smoke, and corrosive blue glow. The sculpture toppled forward off its base, and the taloned fingers of its raised hand raked H'anna across the leg. She screamed and crumpled.
John caught her under the armpits, dragged her across the marble floor and knelt protectively over her, gun aimed toward the fallen statue.
H'anna expected it to convulse in seizures of pain, to see the vulture-like wings open up and beat at the floor madly...that the now headless monster would scrabble across the floor to tear them with it claws. But it lay still, the plasma slowly spreading down its shoulders now, a black pool beginning to grow under it. Had she only imagined the arm raising, then? Might it have been raised all along?
John clamped his palm over the young woman's furrowed thigh. Blood flowed between his fingers, but there was no arterial jetting.
"I thought blue plasma only worked on organic things...living things," she cried.
"It does," John muttered softly, watching the statue melt. Most of the strands had torn free of it, bleeding drops like mercury, a few tongues of violet electricity flashing from their ends, but then dying out.
H'anna clung to John and now, as if finally jarred out of some prolonged trance of numbing unreality, began to sob against his chest. He stroked her back reassuringly, but looking up at his face, she saw that his eyes appeared just as afraid, just as exhausted. He seemed to be glancing around the circular room at the other statues on their pedestals, as if he might be wondering what other horrors lay hidden behind quiet masks, on this world and others.
"We did good," he said at last, turning his attention back to her and helping her to her feet. "You did really good. But let's get you to a hospital, now, huh?"
She leaned against him, her arm around his shoulders, as they started across the chamber. She winced at the pain. But something distracted her from it momentarily, a glitter on the floor. She glanced toward the metallic pool where most of that tentacled monstrosity had melted away. Lying in that silver ichor was a gold wedding ring. She now saw, also, rags and bundles of clothing. A belt. Some shoes. She was reminded of the human loss, the tragedy behind the monster's face - or facelessness.
They took an elevator back to the roof. Because a tourniquet might do more harm than good, especially where arteries weren't severed, H'anna had simply stripped off her torn cloned-leather pants and put pressure on the lacerations in her thigh with the undershirt of the strangled security guard. While riding the elevator she saw John cast a guilty look at her bare bloody legs, and smile at her bashfully. She resisted the joke that he was welcome to wash her off later if he liked. Despite their intimacy of having been forced to take part in murder together, she wasn't sure if she were ready for sex yet.
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