Pal spotted a hoe, thought of snapping it in half and driving its end into the marionette’s throat...but his eyes fell on a knife on a sink counter. He snatched it up, surged forward. He didn’t know if Jule watched him or not, but he prayed that she closed her eyes as he rushed to murder the husband of the woman he loved.
Peter saw him coming. He lifted his arms as if to embrace him.
Pal cocked his arm back for a strike. He would bury the blade in the scientist’s forehead.
But as Pal was within reach of Peter, his stomach lurched, and he found himself unable to deal the killing blow. Peter’s outstretched fingers touched his sleeve. He batted the man’s hands aside, stepped behind him, and plunged the knife into the tentacle that was buried at the base of his skull.
The limb withdrew like an angry snake, whipping in the air, the knife still in it. And with the tentacle no longer inserted into his brain, Peter dropped bonelessly. He didn’t give so much as a twitch, and his eyes had rolled up white in his head. Pal crouched by him, felt at his neck. He only remained a moment, fearful of the limb thrashing in the air, but he didn’t detect a pulse. As the tentacle arched itself like a cobra to strike, he bolted.
Jule already had the door open, and they piled through it. He was sure she expected, as he did, to find another creature in the hall waiting for them – or at the very least, to be confronted by another marionette. But the hall was deserted in either direction. One direction would take them toward the many small apartments of the crew. The other would head them toward the transdimensional project. With no conscious reason why, Pal led Juliana in that direction.
-5-
At this moment, Pal Sexton assumed that Special Investigator John Bell – who had accompanied Peter Locklin to destroy the last of the creatures that had stowed away inside his body like soldiers in the Trojan horse – had also been possessed, or killed.
Bell was surprised he hadn’t been.
He hadn’t seen what happened. He had been in an adjoining portion of the lab reading some data off a monitor as Locklin went about the preparations to destroy the specimens. Bell wondered, now, if Locklin had tried to do something to move or hide some of the organisms, which had released them to the air. But he believed, instead, that somehow they had known that they were the last, that they could no longer bide their time, and must act now before it was too late for them...
There had been a crash, Locklin had cried out and come running in from the other room. Behind him, Bell had seen something fall from a counter to the floor like a large jellyfish, with an appropriate splat of wet flesh. Then another. Another. A few other creatures had seemed more like eels or perhaps centipedes with rippling bands of silvery cilia, and one slithered into the room after the scientist. Even as it came it seemed to grow larger, its half-liquid flesh rapidly shedding and being reabsorbed and then sloughing away to be assimilated again, over and over...as if it fed on its own substance.
Bell ripped his gun from its holster, fired at the eel-like creature as he let Locklin get past him and open the door. He splattered much of the gelatinous centipede’s assumed head, but now beyond it the other animals grew even larger, and he saw nests of writhing tendrils striped silver and black. He turned to flee after Locklin, whom he saw waiting for him at the threshold, staring back at the nightmarish display in horrified enthrallment.
As Bell pushed Locklin out the door, a tendril flashed past Bell’s face, nearly grazing his cheek like a bullet, and speared into the back of Locklin’s neck. He was yanked backwards.
Bell whipped about, fired his handgun past Locklin’s grotesquely dancing body, which spasmed like a man at the end of a gallows rope. He hit the animal that held him again and again, but this one was too large and his projectiles appeared to have little effect. With the greatest reluctance, but driven by blind terror, Bell left the poor scientist in the creature’s grip, and fled out into the hall.
And now, he stole his way through more hallways, peering around corners like a mouse dreading the stride of men. But finally he had found his way blocked by a door made of rubbery flesh. This flesh crawled slowly from left to right. He realized it was the flank of some great creature, grown so huge in the transverse corridor that its bulk was squeezed flush with the open threshold as it slowly oozed along.
Worse than the look of that grayish, half-substantial flesh was the sound he heard coming through the walls around him, and even over the open intercom. He wondered if the two distinct – voices – represented the two different creatures he had glimpsed. One sound was like the bellowing of a mammoth, blended with a synthesizer, run backwards and underwater. It was awesome in its depth and in conveying what Bell interpreted as loneliness on a cosmic scope. It was terrifyingly forlorn. Bell had never considered that before today. That the Old Ones, the Outsiders, might suffer in that way.
He took that to be the voice of the bulky, apparently tentacle-headed spawn. The other voice was angry rather than morose, like the hysterical whinnying of a horse...but with almost subliminal whisperings laced under it, along with a fluctuating ringing tone that reminded Bell of someone playing glasses of water with their fingertips. This he imagined was the sound of the elongated beasts.
He backtracked, entered a lab, started violently when he found a dead man slouched by the door with his arm wrenched off. The blood made a wide swatch down the wall where he had slumped. Bell took in his surroundings, unfastened an air vent and determined he could fit within the narrow shaft beyond. Before he entered, however, he dabbed a towel in the stump of the dead man’s shoulder and began drawing a figure on the door to seal off his retreat.
The figure he painted portrayed a star with an eye in the center, the pupil of which resembled a wavering column of flame.
It was the sign of the Elder Gods, the mysterious race who had sealed up the Outsiders in their various tombs, cells and places of exile. They were not angels to the devils of the Outsiders, might be seen merely as rivals. Bell had never communicated with them, did not pretend to comprehend their whims, could barely comprehend their existence -- if in fact they did exist. But this had not stopped him, any more than it had many a human before him, from appealing to the gods for their intervention.
All he knew was that the sign could be potent, and he felt better with it behind him as he entered into the circulation system and began crawling in what he hoped was the direction of the dimensional research area.
Bell didn’t know what he could accomplish there. He didn’t know if he could even hope to remain alive much longer. But his instincts told him that the place to be was the hangar where the transdimensional pod was suspended like a bathysphere waiting to be lowered into black depths. It was a threat, somehow. A weak spot. A bulging door with creaking hinges...
The Spawn were here. But their master was not. The Spawn had not come to strangle and wrench apart each trifling human being one by one. They were here to open the way for their father.
So Bell crawled. Like an insect, rushing to intercept the tramp of a legion of armored soldiers.
-6-
Pal and Juliana emerged into a closed observation deck that looked down into the hangar where the pod hung suspended from its two intersecting arches. With only the emergency lights on in the great open space below, the view that lay before them was murky. It looked like a black ocean, with glistening waves that rose and fell. But the waves, they realized, were of flesh – and then they were glad that their view was limited. They tried to keep down out of the way after that. But Pal did peek long enough to make out a few white lab coats. There seemed to be some figures calmly at work down there, amid the shifting flesh, and the terrible cacophony of sound.
“Look, Pal!” Juliana whispered, pointing to a bank of monitors. Figures scrolled down the screens.
“They’ve taken some of the crew, like they did Peter,” Pal whispered grimly, hunkering down beside her again. “They’re using them to program the pod.” He shifted closer to a control board. “I’ll see if I c
an override them.” He tapped a few keys gingerly, then moved across to another control board. He chewed his upper lip. This end of things was not his area of expertise; he was the one sent, not the sender.
Juliana poked her head up enough to gaze down into the yawning blackness again. She flinched as a dark train of flesh poured across the outside of their enclosed balcony and then was gone in a blur of cilia-like legs.
“Here,” Pal whispered, and tapped a few last decisive keys.
Below, Juliana swore she saw the lab-coated figures all look up at the window simultaneously. She dropped below its edge and hissed, “Pal! Oh God – whatever you did, they know it was done in here!”
“We have to go,” he said, and rushed to her side.
Before the two of them could reach the door, it opened.
The two techs barely seemed to glance at them; instead, they made their way stiffly to the two control boards Pal had tampered with. Pal and Juliana saw the tendrils snaking from the backs of their heads, tethering them to something horrible and mercifully out of sight. But out of view or not, it would be blocking their escape from this room.
All that remained, then, was to stop these two puppets – or inconvenience things as long as they could...however empty that gesture must obviously, finally prove. Pal picked up a chair and swung it over his head with all his strength, down on one of those trailing cables. The tech was jerked backward and fell on her rump comically, but the tendril was not dislodged and she righted herself with just a dirty look at her attacker. Pal dropped the chair. He looked around for something that could cleanly split the skull of the female tech herself.
“Pal!” Juliana shrieked, and he looked up to see a third tendril slithering into the room. Raising up into the air. Banded silvery and black...and it was inclining itself in Juliana’s direction.
It launched itself.
“No!” Pal roared, and shot his hand out, and to his own amazement, he caught the snake-like appendage in mid air, grasping it firmly. It thrashed, tried coiling around his forearm, but he did not lose his grip. He glanced at Juliana, and even in her terror she too seemed to gaze at him in wonder.
He stared back at her face. How he loved her. He had a sudden, piercing memory of her from years before. She was wearing a sweater he had bought for her as a Christmas gift. They were at an ocean – not this ocean. A blue ocean. They were in a cottage they had rented. And she sat and he stared at her face and marveled at its purity. The white of her skin was so perfect that he could not imagine it to be made up of rough links like the contrasting dark weave of the sweater. Could not imagine it to be made up of cells. It was a white wholeness, like a single cell, made from light -- glowing soft light from which her eyes beamed like black stars. And she smiled at him subtly, but he read love in it clearly, and it was the most beautiful image that had ever registered upon the sad and ephemeral jelly of any man.
But another image came to him a second later, and it carried equal force in its vividness. He saw an ocean that spread to the limits of sight in all directions, as if he hovered just above the very center of it. It was an ocean of churning red fog. The sky above it was streaked gray and yellow. And from this limitless ocean of red smoke, great black idols loomed high out of the mist. Roughly human faces, with long lobes and slanted dreaming eyes.
This image abruptly switched to another, again as shockingly vivid. He was looking up at a ceiling of stone...he was on his back...and figures leaned above him in an intent circle. They were faceless; more like plants than men. Their hands, upon him, more like fluid branches. But he felt no horror at their touch – for he himself appeared to be one of them.
Dreams. But why were dreams crowding in on him now? Why...
He saw his hand that gripped the squirming tentacle. He saw the flesh on his forearm slough away, the shed flesh reabsorbed, then shed again, in an almost liquid rippling effect. Its color became grayish. Its flesh looked less substantial...
His eyes flashed to Juliana. She saw it too.
The two techs stared at his arm as well, their eyes glassy and growing large in drugged confusion.
Juliana screamed, “Pal, Pal, what’s it doing to you?” She started toward him.
He raised his other hand to ward her off. In a soft, trembling voice he said, “It isn’t doing this to me.” And even as he said it, the tendril in his hand blackened and withered as if burnt. It dropped from his hand, and was violently extracted from the room. The two tentacles fled the heads of the wavering techs, leaving their dead husks to crumple slackly to the floor.
Pal felt the churning move up his shoulder. His neck. It flowed throughout him. Juliana saw his face begin to subtly ripple.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, and his voice caught on the start of a sob. He felt tears rise to his eyes, even as he realized they had never been eyes. He took a half step toward her. “I’m sorry, Jule. All this time I’ve been back...I thought...I was me.”
And then she screamed again, as Pal Sexton disappeared altogether.
The Changeling loomed before her, in the pool of Sexton’s clothing. Gray, plant-like, its various limbs floating in the air like coils of liquid smoke. It remembered itself now, now that it had shed its camouflage. The cloned memories had been shed with the cloned flesh. It recalled itself...and how it had come to be here.
“Pal, no, no, no!” Juliana wailed, her hands fluttering. She wanted to kill this thing that had masqueraded as her lover all along. Tricking their most delicate scans, on the most minute microscopic level.
The Changeling understood her terror, but knew that she misunderstood its origins. She took it to be a tool of the Old Ones. But that tool, the human named Pal Sexton, had been stolen by the Changeling’s kind even as the servitors of the Old Ones were returning Sexton to this plane. Pal Sexton had been intercepted. The switch had been so perfect, that even the spore of the Old Ones that had been secreted in his body were switched to this body instead. It had all occurred in the blink between that world and this world, but the exchange had taken place. The Spawn dreaming inside the Changeling had never been the wiser.
The weirdly both awkward and graceful creature turned to the windows that overlooked the hangar, and pressed its upper ring of limbs to the surface. It perceived itself reflected it that glass and was glad to know itself restored. It ignored the poor noisy human as it began to grow up and out -- its flowing, increasing bulk at last pressing the window panel out of its frame to crash below. Then, the Changeling lowered its gray sinuous form into the arena.
-7-
Bell lay in the metal shaft with his hands clamped over his ears, imagining that at any moment his palms would become wet with blood...or with his streaming brains.
He had nearly reached the dimensional research area, by his figuring, when the uproar began. The sounds he had heard before – and had been following – paled in comparison. Those previous sounds were present in this mix, but new noises equally alien and monstrous were blended in as well, until it all became one deafening hurricane of sound.
And just when he thought the cacophony might kill him – or at least wished it would – silence.
His feet had braced against the wall of the shaft. Now they slid down. He lay there, unable to hear his own panting breath, his ears ringing. At last, he rolled back onto his hands and knees, and resumed his crawl to a vent at the end, through which he saw slats of soft blue light.
After peeking out into the hangar for several wary minutes, he finally kicked out the vent grate and emerged timidly to inspect the great, sprawled body of the dying thing.
It was gray, and immense, like the body of a whale that had been flattened or deflated, and yet still subtly pulsed and shifted. Tendrils lay torn from it, others half-ripped away. Gray shrouds of mist or smoke escaped tears in its translucent flesh. Most of the gray creature’s central body lay directly under the transdimensional pod – which still hung there suspended. Intact.
Of the offspring of Cthulhu, Bell saw only heaps like
tar. Black pools. Bubbling smears. Smudges and stains, like sticky shadow. All spread about the mass of the failing gray creature.
A few other people had straggled into the room since Bell had entered. And on the far side of the hangar, he found Juliana. Her hair was badly disheveled, and her eyes were burned painfully red from tears. She looked up at him like a shell-shocked soldier, without recognition at first. But then she motioned with her arm stiffly at the dying animal.
“It was Pal,” she said softly, and with his hearing still blasted he wasn’t sure he understood her words. “Pal.”
He put his arm around her, and when he looked back to the gray mass, it no longer pulsed or shifted. Bell felt an instinctual understanding in his very cells, and a kind of awe so acute it was like a yearning ache. Its vast body, he took in at last, was five-lobed -- like the star he had painted on the door in blood. It had sacrificed itself here, he understood, where the veil had been so thin. Its very body had become a seal...
He wanted to express his gratitude to the dead thing. But how does one say a prayer over the corpse of a god?
As he stood there with his arm around Juliana, more people found their way into the room, to form a kind of reverential ring around the perimeter of the creature. And even at this moment – outside the hangar building – another person came staggering blindly, drawn to pay his respects. He trudged barefoot across the black sands, and water ran down his naked flesh.
Pal Sexton remembered nothing of the last eight years. He only remembered that he was home.
Red Glass
We called him the Screaming Man. I don't know if he is alive or dead, though he was probably moved into Eastborough State Hospital once the old woman passed away. He may still be a patient, and I plan to find out. Find out if they've medicated him into passivity, or if he still rants and laughs. If he is an inmate, I'll visit his room. And sneak in a knife, to scrape off some of the paint on his wall...
Unholy Dimensions Page 10
