A breathless man burst into the room then, and began babbling to the inquisitor incoherently. Hilliard had flinched sharply at the man's dramatic entrance, but grew even more alarmed at the look that came over the inquisitor's face at this news...especially when the inquisitor shot a narrow-eyed glance Hilliard’s way.
The new man left, and the inquisitor bent to whisper in the blind man's ear. The old man nodded, his sightless gaze not wavering from Hilliard until he stood up and shuffled out of the cell, leaving the iron door open behind him.
“Come with me,” the inquisitor said gruffly.
“Where are we going?”
“More of your friends are on their way. They’ll be here soon. You should be happy, Lieutenant...they may have just saved your life. You're going to contact them. Tell them you're alive. Tell them to turn back.” The man grinned and flicked his cigarette to the stone floor. “I know you'll do it. I said you were brave, but only superficially. You're a coward with no solid commitment, no real faith, no true loyalty to your God, your country, your kind. You don't understand the glory of true servitude. You will live, Lieutenant. For now. Until those who slumber awaken.” He gestured. “Enough chat. Come on; we'd better be quick...”
Dazed by the revelation that he would live after having just absorbed the fact that he would die, Hilliard floated unsteadily to his feet. Should he trust this madman, this Devil worshiper who believed that demons -- more so than chemical, biological or nuclear weapons -- were the greatest threats his country had to offer? But what choice did he have? If this place took another bombing he knew the labyrinth would cave in completely. And he would be buried forever amongst these people, his skeleton one day indistinguishable from the rest.
He shuffled out of the cell as wearily as the old man, the inquisitor taking his arm. Together they walked the narrow tunnels of these catacombs, a few times stepping over fallen stones, skirting partially tumbled walls. Dust was still trickling down from the arched ceilings. Men ran past them carrying weapons, supplies, and more of the ancient books.
And then they turned a corner and stopped. A group of nearly a dozen men were ahead of them, blocking an intersection of several tunnels, at least one of these fully caved in. The men were dragging something large and heavy out of one tunnel that looked mostly collapsed, and carrying it toward the mouth of another tunnel. The object they carried was long as a tree trunk and just as thick, but flaccid, drooping from their arms heavily. At first, Hilliard took the black, slippery-looking object to be the carcass of an immense python. Some pet, living idol, mascot. The tapered forward end he took to be the snake’s tail.
But then he saw that along the underside of the glistening black object were rows of suckers, much like those of an octopus...except that they were more diamond-shaped than circular, a translucent gray. And, impossibly, they seemed to be moving independently, their edges slowly opening and closing. Could this be the limb of some gigantic cephalopod? Did the men expect to drag the entire creature through these tunnels by just one arm? The entire animal must be impossibly gargantuan. Could this hive connect with some vast subterranean pool, out here in the middle of the desert?
Just then the last man clambered out of the partially collapsed tunnel, bringing up what proved to be -- despite the fluctuating suckers -- the severed end of the arm. The end was a ruined mess where a falling ceiling had torn it from its body. There was no blood, just a jagged wound in fibrous, stringy flesh, the meat white under the black skin. Dangling from the wound were a number of globe-like bladders or tumors, like obscene clusters of fruit, the largest the size of a beach ball. These globular organs were translucent and covered in webs of black veins. A sloshing sound came from the orbs, and was he imagining that shadowy dark shapes, vaguely human, fetus- like, were contained within them? Was the largest globe actually pulsing with movement, as if its occupant were restless to be born?
Hilliard heard a cry and jerked his head. The man at the front of the great limb had called out in fear as the pointed end wound itself around his neck. Another man moved forward, helped extricate the limb before it could cut off the man's air, held it in both hands as they continued toward the new corridor.
An anus-like pucker the pilot hadn't noticed before at the tip of the tentacle suddenly yawned wide into a straining toothless maw, but the man gripping this end maintained his hold. It was a good thing; the mouth had stretched wide enough to engulf...
...a man. And suddenly Hilliard understood the globes that hung from the shattered limb. Those figures inside the orbs were not fetuses growing...but men being dissolved into grotesque little dolls...
“It is a desecration that you see this,” said the inquisitor. “A blasphemy that you will live to remember it. But we have no choice. See what you have done to this child of Pazuzu, Lieutenant? But he lives. He will regain his body, in time. But those planes have to be stopped, first.” The inquisitor dragged him forward again, and they moved around behind the great limb and the struggling men.
“My God,” Hilliard whispered, glancing back over his shoulder.
“Sorry, it's too late for conversion; I don't think this god would have you. But how quickly one becomes a believer, eh, Lieutenant?”
They would not feed their own men to the creature, would they? Perhaps it was an honor to sacrifice oneself. “The glory of true servitude.” Please let it be that, Hilliard thought. Please that ...and not the other possibility.
That perhaps Hilliard hadn't been the only survivor of the two Vikings, after all.
They lost sight of the nightmare spectacle, turned a few more corners and stepped into a fairly large room. Atop a table rested a radio set. Men stood around the room with anxious faces, some gripping assault rifles. One of them was already holding a microphone out to Hilliard.
“Tell them you live,” the inquisitor repeated. “You have my oath that you will be freed. No one will believe what you saw. Until the day comes when they see Pazuzu's children for themselves, of course. Whole. And Pazuzu himself, when the stars sit right. But go back to your wife and dog for now, Lieutenant. Tell your friends to turn back.”
Hilliard staggered forward a few steps. Hesitated. Lifted his arm slowly, as if under water.
He pictured the Vikings in his mind, soaring on the desert winds. Small, yes, but steel. Angels of death... “spirits of the air who come raging violently”...
Coward, the inquisitor had called him. No loyalty to his kind...
A man wearing headphones gestured wildly, sputtered urgently. The inquisitor snapped, “They're getting nearer. Hurry, now!”
Hilliard accepted the microphone, moved it to his lips. He thumbed on the switch.
“Hello?” he croaked.
“Who is this?” crackled a voice that sounded as though it were filtered through a sand storm.
“Hit them!” Lieutenant Gavin Hilliard cried abruptly, finding his voice. “Hit them with everything you have! Hurry up!"
The inquisitor snarled something in Arabic and surged toward the American, to tear him away from the radio and speak into it himself. Other men rushed at him. Rifle barrels lifted...
And even as their hands found him, he coiled his own hand in the radio cord and with his right wrenched the microphone from the end of it.
And even as the microphone ripped free, Hilliard continued to shout hoarsely into it.
“Hit them!” he screamed. “For the love of G—
The Boarded Window
Alan used his trowel to poke at the thing in the rain gutter.
It resembled a dead baby bird; translucent, purple-pink flesh devoid of feathers, crooked limbs like rudimentary wings and legs. But it was as large as a full grown pigeon, or larger. A group of pigeons favored the roof of his mother’s tall old house, sleeping in the cornices and in gaping holes in the eaves. He guessed it was one of those birds, dead and decomposing. Still, it didn’t look long dead. And the mouth...he prodded the small limp carcass once more. The mouth looked more like it possessed l
ips than a beak.
Disgusted, Alan used the trowel to flip the animal over the side of the gutter to drop into the large trash barrel below.
He had decided to clean out his mother’s rain gutters himself, since neither she nor he could afford hiring someone at the present. The gutters had become more like flower pots in the past few years since his father had passed away; lush green plants filled this one stretch of gutter, no doubt seeded there by the tall tree which grew along the side of the sorrowful-looking Victorian. Alan had borrowed a ladder from a friend, and brought up with him a number of small trash bags to be filled with the plants and the layer of debris they grew in. When each bag was full he meant to drop them down into the bucket.
But the discovery of the bird or flayed squirrel or whatever it might be had distracted him from his project. That, and the broken attic window.
The window was visible from the ground; it ran diagonally, filling a space between a higher and shorter level of the roof where the attic rose above the second story. It consisted of three square panes, none of which seemed able to slide or swing open. However, one of the panes was broken at the corner. From the ground Alan hadn’t been able to see this, the plants in their trough helping to obscure the damage.
Another project. Alan sighed. Well, who else could help his mother tend to these things? For now he would simply go up into the attic and tape a piece of cardboard over the hole so that no pigeons or squirrels would get in there to make it their home.
He’d do that first. He hated heights, and now found he welcomed the chance to come down from the high ladder.
Before descending, however, he dared to lean closer to the window, near enough to touch it with his fingers if he had cared to stretch, which he didn’t. He tried to see into the attic from here. He had played in it as a boy, despite his father forbidding him from going up there. It had been years since he’d really looked around in there. He was trying to imagine this diagonal window from the other side, in relation to his memories of the attic rooms. He found he couldn’t picture it from the inside.
He couldn’t see into the attic through it, either. The panes might have been painted black inside, for all he could tell. The most he could make out was his own curious face reflected in the dirty glass, staring back at him.
When Alan stepped up into the attic a small creature hopped behind a box of books, thrashing its upper limbs. He gasped, became a frozen pose framed in the threshold. Then he heard the cooing, and saw the white droppings on the floor boards. Damn pigeons; how had they got up in here? Why did his mother have to throw bread out for them and encourage them to congregate? When he came further into the attic he saw that a window in this end had been propped open with a board. Mother. She must have done that to let some air in while she was up here one time, and had forgotten to close it again. Alan sighed. He’d have to close it and catch each pigeon individually and carry them outside. Yet another project. Maybe he should just go home, he thought.
For now he left the window as it was, and moved into the darker end of the attic, where the walls angled closer together...
It was no wonder he couldn’t see through the window from the outside. It was thoroughly boarded up on the inside. This also explained why he hadn’t been able to recall the window from the inside from his boyhood; it had apparently been covered like this for many years.
Returning from the attic to borrow his father’s old tool box from his mother, Alan first gave her hell about the pigeons up there, and then asked, “Why did Dad board up that slanted attic window? On this end of the house, up over the back door?”
“Oh, my father was the one who did that. Your father started to take the boards off once so the attic would get more light, but then he changed his mind and boarded it back up again.”
“Well, why did Grand-dad board it up in the first place?”
“When your grandparents owned the house there was a big thunderstorm one time, and I guess a lightning bolt struck that window. I remember that night...I was about eight, I think. It was terrible. The whole house shook. I don’t know what the lightning did to the window, though. Maybe it scorched the glass black or just cracked it.” She shrugged.
“It isn’t cracked. One piece is broken off, is all. Recently, too; I saw the broken pieces in the gutter.”
“I don't know.” She shrugged again.
“Well, I’m gonna pull the boards off. The attic is real dark down in that end and there’s no electric lights. It could use a little sunlight.”
His deceased father’s tool box in hand, Alan returned to the back hall, climbed up past the second floor, up into the attic.
Alan pulled the uppermost board off first, using the back of a claw hammer. The first thought that struck him as he looked out through the glass was how quickly it had become dark. It was only five thirty in the afternoon, and here it was summer. Maybe a thunderstorm was brewing.
He glanced over his shoulder, into the opposite, roomier end of the attic. That end of the attic was awash in golden sunlight. Dust motes swam lazily in the slanting mellow beams.
Alan jerked around to gape at the diagonal window. After a moment of confused hesitation, he began to pry off the next board down. It was nailed thoroughly and he really had to lever and strain, splintering the wood, but at last it clattered at his feet.
The sky out there was almost entirely black, but closer to the horizon was streaked in startling reds and purple. Alan saw a distant cluster of birds or perhaps bats cross the bands of laser red.
Could that be an approaching storm, or was the earth more in shadow in that direction as the sun sank? It seemed far, far too great a contrast to be that. Strangely alarmed, Alan pried off the next board with several great jerks.
“Dear God,” he breathed, stepping back from the window. He clutched the hammer tightly before him as a weapon or merely for reassurance that reality had not abandoned him without leaving some sort of hand hold.
The roofs of neighboring houses should be out there. Trees bushy between them, and familiar church steeples rising against a backdrop of gentle hills.
Should be...
Instead, the distant hills were jagged rocky peaks, ominous in the red glow of twilight. Red and purple light glistened on a lake or large pond in the distance, where he knew none should be. In the foreground there were weirdly gnarled and tangled trees, the closest ones showing him that their branches were thorny and leafless.
Alan wanted to scream, up there in that claustrophobic space, the ceiling close to touching his head, the walls slanting in toward him, dust coating his lungs. He wanted to turn and bolt from there. And yet, he was riveted. Mesmerized. Too afraid to move. Reality indeed was not as it seemed. If he moved, what terrible revelation might next yawn wide before him to engulf his sanity?
Without stepping nearer to the window or reaching to tear free the last board, he looked more closely out upon what could be seen at present. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the scene, and he decided he could make out a few rooftops here and there after all...amongst the thorny trees and across the dark lake. None of these houses or buildings had any windows lit, however, despite the deep gloom.
A breeze stirred the twisted trees; Alan felt it through the broken corner of window, and though the breeze was merely cool he shivered as though it were an arctic gust. He realized then that he could also hear this hallucination as well as feel it; he heard the scrape of those barbed-wire branches against one-another as the breeze stirred them. And there were the distant cries of birds, perhaps. Very faint...but he wished, from their odd child-like quality, that he could not hear them at all.
What had that lightning bolt done to this window?
It had to be a corresponding dimension he was looking out into. A parallel universe, an alternate interpretation of the same space. Somewhere far away but in this same space there was another old house with an attic, and it was as though he himself were now standing in the attic of that alien building gazing out. This idea so s
hook him that he had to look wildly around him to convince himself that he was still here in his mother’s attic. But the sun still shone warmly at the opposite end. Nothing else had changed around him.
A bird flapped by out there, closer than the others had been. Its movements were unexplainably frightening, unnatural. Awkward or just too weirdly different. How could a creature without real wings fly? It was dark, but he had seen the creature well enough to know that it was identical to the one he had found in his mother’s rain gutter.
Alan sought to comprehend how the creature he had discovered had blundered into his reality. The murmur of a pigeon behind him made him realize that in the doppelganger house, a window must have been left open also. The bird-thing had come into the alien house that way, and exited through the diagonal window. The attic window of that house must not be boarded, and thus permitted exit. But when the creature broke out through the glass to take to the sky again, it had entered into his dimension, and died, either from its injuries or because of the different conditions of Alan’s world.
That meant that the window in the parallel house had been altered, also. Their views had become switched, traded. The alien window must look out, now, upon the more plentiful rooftops of his New England town. Distant church steeples, gentle hazy hills...
He had to board the window back up again. As his father had done, when he had discovered its secret.
Alan took new nails from the tool box, filled his pockets. He didn’t want to near that window but he couldn’t leave it like this for his mother to find. What if something else came through that broken hole? What if she stuck her hand through the hole to see what it looked like translated into the reality of that other realm?
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