Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Before Judith could back away – before she could scream – the face pressed up against the interior of the glass. Huge nails raked against the inside of the lens. The thing's jaws gnashed vertically, so that its fangs ground across the glass as well. And the eyes of the Gug glared hungrily out at her.

  "No!" Judith heard Robert shout behind her. "Don't let it see you! Don't let it see you!" He was suddenly pushing her out of the way, throwing himself across the lens as if to blot it out, pulling down the dreaming eyelid of the dark tarp and pinning it again with bricks.

  Judith fell back against the wall, gasping for air as when she had been jolted from her nightmare. When Robert whirled to face her, they stared at each other in horror and despair.

  "Robert," Judith began to sob, "what is it? What are they? What's down there?"

  "It's the Dreamlands, Jude. It's why you shouldn't have come. It's what you shouldn't have seen, and what my family has been chosen to guard against since my grandfather's father built this house around the Dream Lens."

  "I don't understand!"

  He continued on as if in a trance, as if a terrible numbing calm had fallen over him. "The Dreamlands are on another plane, Jude. But Sesqua is a special place. The veils are very thin here. Extremely thin in a spot like this. It should not have been seen. Especially not by an outsider. Now you know why I can never leave again, and why I can't have you here...even if I wanted."

  The scratching continued, frantic, desperate, hungry. Judith shook, hugging herself, eyes fixed on the shroud of the tarpaulin. The mound was like a belly pregnant with a monster anxious to be born. Who knew how many monstrosities, waiting to be born into this world?

  "I'm afraid now that it saw you, and you saw into its world," Robert went on, "that...that things will be bad. The two worlds mustn't see into each other. It starts a door to open. My father looked too long in the lens, once..." He let the story trail off. "But it's too late, now. You didn't know; it isn't your fault. It's...too late to change anything now."

  Robert had to support Judith as he walked her back up the stairs, and down the hall back to her bed. He sat on its edge as he covered her. As he rose, she looked up at him imploringly, her large eyes like those of a frightened child, and lay a hand lightly on his arm.

  "Please," she whispered. "Don't leave me."

  He sat beside her again, and held her hand. Held it until mercifully dreamless sleep clouded her stunned mind. Continued holding it. Long minutes after she was asleep, at last he whispered back, "I won't."

  Was it a nightmare?

  Robert was at the bedroom window, his body tense as a deer's...or a cougar's, ready to spring on the deer. He was staring out into the night, and Judith heard him whisper, "No...God, no..."

  He whirled from the window, lurched toward the door. Judith caught a glimpse of his eyes, wide and flashing silver, and then he was at the gun rack. And then out through the door. She swung her legs out of bed. "Robert!" she called after him.

  As she rose, Judith turned to glance out the window, and the curtains were still spread, as if some ethereal veil had been parted so that she might see what lay behind her former reality.

  A translucent mist lay over the pasture like a milky membrane, a caul, a burial shroud, and the moon had come out from behind the dispersing rain clouds. It made the mist glow.

  In the center of the wild meadow, the standing stone was gone. In its place towered a ghost, seemingly made of that same glowing fog.

  "Robert!" Judith cried again, and then she too was darting from the room...barefoot, in her nightgown, like a sleepwalker running from her nightmare – or running deeper into her dream.

  He had already left the house ahead of her...was already racing through the tangled field. As she burst through the door into the night air, Judith saw again that figure of mist where the standing stone had been. It was not a ghost, but a ghostly outline of the megalith's former essence. The mist sparkled in that smoky pillar, and then she felt she knew why. The stone had not turned to mist...but its substance had come unwoven, unmeshed, so that the tiny granite crystals swirled and glittered like powder.

  As Judith waded into the meadow, the weeds and tall grass grabbed at her bare ankles like myriad living limbs of one vast, malignant creature. She thrashed wildly along, and at one point she fell. As she struggled back to her feet and lifted her head, she saw two things -- that Robert had very nearly reached the center of the pasture...and that a pair of glowing pink eyes had appeared within the ghostly megalith.

  Robert planted himself in a stance, worked the shotgun's slide, and a crashing report like thunder rumbled across the meadow as he fired into the mist...and then again...and then again. Judith flinched at each blast...and saw the pink eyes quickly withdraw.

  She resumed her wading into the field, and Robert saw her coming. He called to her, "A sacrifice will appease them. Blood will close the door again. I think I got it." But he returned his attention to the unwoven obelisk, and added, "It's not closing...Jude, go back to the house!"

  Pink eyes rushing...and then the Gug was through...

  It stooped to pass through the portal of fog, but quickly raised itself to its full height. A tower of shaggy blackness with those orbs blazing near its summit. In one motion, as it came through, it swung one heavy forelimb – and Judith saw Robert go flying back as if struck by a car, the shotgun spinning end over end through the air.

  She heard the weapon thud somewhere ahead of her. She beat her way toward it, trying not to look upon the great beast or being that shambled toward Robert. It took its time in reaching him. It did not expect him to escape it. No sound came from its jaws, which worked vertically like a giant clam fused into what passed for its face.

  The Gug stood over Robert, and then turned its head abruptly to see Judith there, bringing the shotgun up and squeezing the trigger.

  A small dry click like a twig snapping. The Gug took a step, now, toward her...reaching out...great clawed fingers spreading...fingers dripping dark drops of human blood...

  Judith pumped the slide and squeezed the trigger again and the recoil kicked her back a few steps. She saw one of the twin pink suns above her suddenly go black.

  It made no cry, but the Gug whirled away – in agony, now a cyclops – and stooped again into the portal. Was gone...

  Judith turned to see that Robert had risen to his feet. He hugged himself tightly as if against the cold, but from the dark ribbons flowing over both arms, Judith knew he was holding himself together. Their eyes met.

  "Robert!" Judith sobbed, her whole body quaking. "Robert...I'm so sorry. Oh Robert...my love...I'm so sorry..."

  He smiled, and turned his back on her as if afraid she would see how badly he was wounded. He trudged painfully toward the misty pillar, and just short of reaching it he faced her again. "Sacrifice will appease them," he repeated. "Blood...will close the door..."

  "Robert!" Judith cried, but she didn't try to stop him as he began to back into that glittering, swirling mist.

  He smiled again. "I forgive you," he told her, and then was gone, as if it were his own essence that resolidified into that dark, leaning standing stone.

  It was a crisp, early autumn morning, the sky so blue and the bleached double peaks of Mt. Selta – looming over the valley – so bright that they nearly hurt the eyes. And morning found a small, lovely woman with dark hair and eyes walking up the road to the combination general store/gas station, where the infrequent buses stopped.

  His eyes hidden by dark glasses, an elderly man hovered in the doorway, watching the woman approach. When she was near enough, he asked her, "Are you returning now, my dear?"

  But Judith didn't stop at the spot where buses came. She continued approaching the old man, until she stood before him. "Is your store open?" she asked him in a calm, quiet voice.

  "Yes," the old man replied, a bit confused.

  "There will be things I need to buy. For the house."

  "For the house?"

  "Yes �
� there's a task that needs to be seen to," Judith told him. "I'll be staying."

  The Servitors

  Skrey had chosen this as his day of emancipation.

  He gave not the slightest indication of his plans, nor even of the discontent that had spawned them. He functioned as he had every day for the past four thousand years.

  Skrey was an assistant feeder at the Twelfth Orifice. Kreve was crane operator and head feeder of this opening. At present, Kreve had had to shut down the feed crane in order to reset the great ring of black metal which held the circular wound open. As the wound attempted to heal, the ring was sometimes forced to contract. Kreve would adjust a huge crank to expand the ring and reclaim lost ground. First, however, he used a bladed pike, of the same black metal as the ring and the idle crane, to slice at the flesh which had begun to actually grow over the ring’s rim. The severed fragments either stuck to Kreve’s four multi-jointed grey arms, splatted at his bony cloven feet, or tumbled away into the great yawning crater of the orifice.

  Standing almost on the opposite side of the vast wound, Skrey shoveled feed manually over the edge, digging a black metal spade into a black metal tub filled with a translucent sebaceous matter, yellow with coarse black hairs sprouting out of it. He heard the feed thump against the raw red throat of the wound occasionally but had never heard it strike bottom.

  Pausing from his labors, all four arms aching, he watched Kreve pick at the unwanted collar of flesh in his usual crude, sloppy manner. He left ragged strands dangling, wouldn’t sweep the debris over the lip into the volcano-like maw. Skrey would have to clip those untidy shreds, clean up the rubble. When he excised the flesh he always did it neatly. When he, rarely, got to operate the crane he never splashed feed accidentally all over the lip. Skrey kept the crane oiled, scraped off rust and blood – where Kreve would let the machine become clogged almost to a halt, on his own. But who was still head feeder, after four thousand years? Who was the favorite of the Supervisor, and could do no wrong? Yes, Skrey thought, I could be a favorite also...if I treated the Supervisor like he was God. But the Supervisor wasn’t God; just another servitor, like the rest of them. A tiny, crawling nothing, scraping out his tiny existence on the planet-huge body of the Dreaming One. The One Who Slumbers. The Phantast. Now, He was God.

  Kreve, the bastard. He had also been at fault for the death of Skrey’s mate, four thousand years ago, when the drillers had first bored the Twelfth Orifice. Poor Mrek had been on the drill team. It had been the responsibility of both drill leader and Kreve, in setting up his crane, to ensure they had chosen a sound site to bore. But their check for parasites had been cursory. Just below the epidermis, the drill hit a great nest of plump writhing larvae, which in feasting had tunneled the immediate sub-layers profoundly. The drill lost its support and toppled into the fresh wound. Skrey remembered it now; the drill platform screeching metallically, vanishing in the thick mist of blood which geysered up out of the wound. And the operators, trapped on the drill, screeching in horror. One of those voices had been Mrek’s...

  Kreve had only received light punishment; his four arms and two legs cut off and prevented from regenerating for forty years. Unbelievable. Skrey’s only consolation had been that brief respite, working without Kreve, while the bastard lay in a dark corner somewhere, counting dust motes.

  Mrek had never pulled herself up out of that maw, as two other drillers had. They’d caught hold of the sides, which still offered ragged hand-holds, not yet fully bored smooth. Shaken, covered in blood and mucus, but alive. Mrek must have hit that far-away bottom. An ocean of bile, lost in the darkness beyond sight.

  As he shoveled feed anew, Skrey imagined what it was like to die. The servitors had been created all but immortal. He had survived countless atrocious on-job accidents (most of them Kreve’s fault). He was sure he had spawned a few fresh servitors that way. Vaguely he was aware that he himself had started life as an arm jerked off a worker in a cleaning team when a wild hose got wrapped around it. Was that worker like himself? Dissatisfied? Unhappy? Angry? And ever angrier, for being so unhappy?

  Had the Supervisor allowed Kreve’s six severed limbs to clone themselves into full servitors? Dormant One – he hoped not! Six more of the bastard...

  Six more for Skrey to kill.

  The servitors could die...if their bodies were fully and quickly dissolved. Or digested – as in the unseen corrosive sea at the bottom of the giant well Skrey labored at every day.

  Jean’s eyes felt full and hard with the pain of heir headache, like billiard balls in her skull. They were the only part of her that showed, ninja-like, in her white costume, and she even wore goggles to complete her disguise.

  Through these aching lenses she watched the carousel turn, the jiggling glass cartridges filling with a clear local anesthetic to be administered via hypodermic by dentists. Thousands of tiny tubes of pain-numbing elixir, none of it any good for the pain she felt now. They were a taunt. She imagined the deep stabbing of those thousands of needles.

  Jean watched for crimps or dents in the little metal caps which her huge machine then sealed the cartridges with. A dent could make an air bubble. Dangerous. She plucked these and broken cartridges out with rubber-sheathed fingers. The carousel fed into a tray, the cartridges squeezing their multitudes into it like people swarming out of a carnival ride. When it was full she paused the filler, removed the tray and inserted it through a hole in the wall to a person on the other side, whom she could see but not speak with. This was a woman who always seemed to have a look of amused scorn on her face, and who seemed to make comments about Jean to the others out there. They could watch her all night through the glass, like a creature in an aquarium.

  Jean couldn’t go get some aspirin. Not for two more hours, her next break. And she shouldn’t have had two coffees at supper; she would have to wait two more hours to relieve herself. Eight times a day she changed her clothes at work. Every time there was a break, all the outer garments of the sterile department – hood, mask, jumpsuit, booties, gloves -- would be discarded ... then, after break, a fresh outfit would be donned over her standard white uniform. All of it a blinding, eye-stabbing white. A termite white. Jean felt a rebellious urge to wear black or red underwear under all that sterile white, but was afraid that it would show through.

  No conversation in sterile was audible over the roar of machinery, no lips could be seen to be read. There was no piped-in music, no portable tape or CD players allowed. There were no posters, no tacked up photos of children. Color, it seemed, had been forbidden. Just eyes...and though these were said to be the windows of the soul, the eyes Jean had contact with during the nights were dusty, showed no lights on inside, or seemed to have their shades drawn. She was sure that hers looked the same.

  George, her immediate boss, came in and greeted her by motioning impatiently at the tank into which the great bags of metal caps were poured to keep them replenished. It was nearly empty. Jean knew this; she’d been keeping a peripheral eye on it. Hadn’t she worked this job for five years now? But with huffy movements, George ripped open and dumped a fresh bag himself.

  The tray was full; too full, as Jean had taken her eyes from it to look at George. It happened sometimes, but shouldn’t while George was around. She paused the filler, slid the tray out, and, despite her attempts not to jar them, two dozen cartridges lingering on the walkway between carousel and tray toppled off the precipice like a horde of lemmings, crashing to a floor already crunchy with glass, wet with pain-killer.

  At the end of the shift she would suck up the glass with a vacuum, hose down the floor, while the last dregs of the tank were drained. She could not go home, or even leave the room, until this was accomplished. She had complained once. “Overtime!” George had exclaimed. “How can you complain about making time and a half?” But the nights were so long, and life so short...

  George disgustedly caught up a mop and pushed the bulk of the mess away from her feet, against the wall until later. The mop bumped
her feet roughly as he did so. Jean thought, then, that anyone who could not at least understand why a worker would slaughter supervisors and co-workers had never worked blue collar.

  Sometimes, as now, when Skrey concentrated hard or allowed a meditative calm to come over him, he could feel her. He turned his face of bony chitin up toward the roof of the cavern the Dreaming One reposed in, so distant and dark that it seemed the infinity of space itself. Beyond the infinity, he sensed her. She was her own being, and yet a version of himself, interpreted differently by the dimension she lived in, the plane she dwelt on. They were apart, yet connected. Did she ever sense his life?

  She was a female of her kind, he knew that much. It didn’t trouble him. What intrigued him was the softness of her flesh, and especially the brightness of her world. Every day she garbed herself in white, ritualistically, and entered a white place. Perhaps she was a priestess...

  Skrey knew of her plane not only from this connection he had to it, but from what he’d heard from the caste of servitors called the explorers, who ventured into other dimensions to inspire cults of worship for the Phantast, and to destroy enemies. What a place of wonders they told of! Open skies of color, and – at night -- stars.

  Kreve came toward Skrey, carrying his pike. His mandibles chattered to admonish Skrey. “Dreaming again, friend? Leave dreaming for the Master and shovel that feed! If the Master grumbles hungry in His sleep you’ll wish you had been sent to work in the waste holes, when the Supervisor is done with you.”

  Skrey dug his shovel into the tub, swiveled his head to glance over his shoulder. He saw no other workers from here. “Do you ever dream of freedom, Kreve?” he asked.

  “There is no such thing as freedom. It is an abstraction. Even the Master is not free. He is trapped in His dreams.”

  “Death is freedom, though, is it not? Freedom from slavery? Freedom from pain?”