Light filled the mouth of the tunnel, sodium-cold and remote as a star, breaking through darkness that gave way with the reluctance of cobwebs. Light like poison, like the light at the beginning of everything, tasting of inert gases and the hot death of suns, air fleeing before the terrible radiance as if it were a storm.
Not one light. Many lights surrounded by something that looked like shadow, but moved like a tarred residue, an oil-slick on the feathers of a dying bird, water clouded with ethylene and arsenic.
Sumire threw a kick at the guard who still bothered to do his job.
I stumbled toward Crowley with the shaft of a broken scalpel in my hand.
April looked at the paper that Holly had given me, the one that Professor Dawes had extracted from his moldering books at the university. It was written in a language that hadn’t been spoken since the dawn of mankind, since the world had belonged to the monstrous beings that slept in city beneath the sea. Then, in a slow, halting tone, quavering with drugs and exhaustion, April began to read.
The voice was hers and it wasn’t. The words were not words. They were weapons, toxic and abhorrent. I was reminded of water flowing across mossy stone in a remote place beneath the earth, dizzying passages of time, and the city sleeping beneath the ocean. I smelled saltwater and decay, saw the red of the sunset, remembered the darkness behind the broken windows on Leng Street. One syllable dripping from April’s cracked and bleeding lips would recall the strange statue that loomed above the city, a stone girl waiting to be pulled down farther than I could imagine – the next encompassed every nightmare I ever had with a vividness that had an almost physical impact.
The words were not words; they were ideas, they were the things themselves.
The Nameless City, and the other city dead beneath the waves.
The Institute and its leaden sky.
April’s private language, concise and evocative.
Crowley’s long face and hooked nose, illuminated by the amber light of an electronic readout, the low beeping of a monitoring device cycling endlessly like a Buddhist Sutra.
A child crying, turning in circles in a crowd of people hurrying by, already unable to precisely remember his mother’s face.
The sense of pressure within the vein when an injection is given. The quiet suffering of neurons as they are snuffed out, blood in saliva leaking from her mouth.
The steel rails cried out in unison, inorganic misery dulled by the weight of a Black Train.
The words were not words. They were the things that haunted me.
April bound to a chair, face lit by the glare of a television she had faced for more years than I had known her. Behind the filthy tangle of hair, her face was tired and sickly pale, her palms scarred with indents from her fingernails. Her body convulsed in drug-induced seizures, but somehow she always managed to smile at me.
The sound of her wrist restraints the first time I released them – finality, a distinct sense of the air pressure changing. In the distance, the sound of an impossibly distant alarm echoing through empty hallways. I was the first thing she reached for.
Losing myself in her, her matted hair, long fingernails, and the intoxicatingly sweet scent which I knew to be volatized narcotic pheromones. Her skinny legs clutching me, the humidity of the contact between us, the yielding of her flesh and the small sound she made beneath me. And the horror, the slow self-realization that followed, followed me everywhere like the memory of the way she smiled, blood oozing from her lips. I knew I would run away before I lifted myself off of her.
Five years lost to fear of the consequences of my actions. Five years that I refused to remember.
And then, when it happened, I was looking the wrong way.
***
As for exactly what happened, well – I’m not completely certain.
I had been hit in the head any number of times that day. Not to mention the fever-like symptoms I had been experiencing, the exhaustion, the frayed nerves and lack of sleep. And, of course, who knows about the half-lives of whatever drugs I’d been filled with – by Holly and by Crowley’s goons – I could have been hallucinating. The mystery psychoactives I’d been fed could have done my poor brain permanent damage.
There are any number of possibilities. My own memory is frustratingly indistinct.
One of these possibilities – just one, mind you – There was no train.
Instead, the shadows erupted from the tunnel like oil under hydraulic pressure with a ferocity that tore tile from the walls and shook my brain in my skull. Then there was the physical force of the thing, a biological wave that briefly overtook all of us like sinking to the knees in a thick and frigid ocean.
Up close it didn’t look at all like a shadow. It wasn’t even black. It was dark, thick as maple syrup, and had a swirling multifaceted quality that did strange things to the light. The color was a little like indigo and a little like the sky just after sunset, but not precisely either. While I cannot forget it, it is impossible to describe except to say that I have never seen anything like it, before or since. It brought to mind the terrible vastness of the space between worlds and the long and silent suffering of the passage between stars.
There was a certain tacit assumption in viewing it – that, in as much as I was watching, I was being watched. I thought of certain curious carvings on Mayan ruins, and of the wet stone remains of even older cities that are mercifully hidden by the ocean, relics of a time best forgotten. Like the city around me, I realized. Oh, a place had been hollowed out inside it, and we scurried about like insects within it. But we were nothing more than algae spread across the surface of a deep and awful pond, a thin layer of precarious life suspended over inestimable depths.
Thin ice, my friend. Thin ice.
Where it touched my clothes, I felt a burning cold, but no sensation of wetness. The surface moved with eddies that seemed to describe horrific dimensions I could not fully realize. And it was strong; where it lapped against the cement walls of the tunnel they crumbled and caved, and the floor tiles buckled and broke like dropped plates.
There was a profound sense of violation – though there were no eyes, no hands, no organs or definition. A horrible sound like metal crying out in pain with no apparent source. It could not, I realized, be sound at all – because I could hear April reading the awful text in her small, cruel voice, the words as foul as the thing around us. I could not shake the feeling that the better part of the monstrosity was still below. Like an iceberg coming out of the fog, lethal mass invisible beneath the water line.
April’s intonation was dry and indifferent, but the words were sharp and vile, nonsensical and blasphemous. I knew they were wrong without knowing what they meant, with the instinctive horror of a spider crawling across skin. Hearing it was like a change in ambient pressure, a ringing in my ears. Something about to happen rather than something already in motion.
As April’s reading came to a close, there was a brief and tremendous silence. I grabbed for the signpost behind me. Sumire, bright girl that she was, clung to a safety railing with one arm and grabbed April about her waist by the other.
In a horrible way, it reminded me of the ocean.
The moment April stopped speaking, the bottom dropped out. I don’t know how exactly. Maybe it lost interest. Maybe it lost the way. Perhaps it needed to be called, and maybe April knew better than to finish that particular passage. Or it could have been Holly – she was smart enough to anticipate that very thing and make sure Professor Dawes gave us nothing but a fragment, no more than we needed. I don’t know what it was, or where it was coming from, so I can’t speculate on why it never fully arrived.
What I do know was what happened next.
It fled back to the darkness as fast as it had come, shattering stone in its wake. My fingers ached . One of my shoes went tumbling along with the current. As did Crowley and his goons, all too busy watching us to look behind them. The last I saw of him was the shock and hatred on a face I had always thought
too unflappable for such base emotions.
We were left alone in a broken metro station under a handful of flickering lights, rubbing our eyes as if we had woken from a dream. I had to crawl to make it over to the girls. I pulled both of them into a spontaneous embrace, but April made sure she was the one with her arms around my neck.
That is one possibility.
It’s also possible that there was a train.
The Black Train. Wheels that sounded like a cross between screaming and weeping, as if the rails themselves suffered under the burden of its existence. The lamp on the front of the monstrous black engine burned like magnesium, while the rest of the train was so black as to negate the light itself. It hurt to look at and it was impossible to exactly define its dimensions as it emerged from the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the station.
I could not shake free of the prying fingers of the guard that I was almost sitting on, struggling to fend off his attempts at gouging my eyes.
Crowley smiled in the illumination of the train’s lamp and glanced at his watch with obvious satisfaction at its punctuality, one arm hovering paternally around April’s back, supporting her from the opposite side as the nurse. They stepped calmly toward the yellow safety line as the train screamed into the station, ignoring the commotion that Sumire created nearby.
One of the guards was a moaning heap of broken bones on the ground while the other backed fearfully from Sumire, his telescoping baton wavering in the air between them along with the invisible currents of his tension. I tried to stand and the guard bit my leg, his teeth digging into my ankle and dragging me back down.
April swayed so gently from the nurse’s grasp that I thought she had fainted. Surely, Crowley thought so as well.
After all, he seemed very surprised when April stumbled into him, knocking him off balance and across the yellow line, briefly out into space, not allowed the dignity of hitting the ground before the arrival of the train obliterated him.
Then again, April doesn’t seem like that sort of girl, does she?
Epilogue
I wouldn’t care if she killed me.
It was like being held. She lay behind me on the bed, warm against my back. We were entangled with each other and the mess of the sheets. One small arm synched tight around my neck, hooked into the elbow of her other arm. You don’t have to be strong to kill someone that way. It doesn’t take much strength at all. She tightened her grip and for a bare moment I couldn’t breathe. I felt nothing but gratitude.
There were black dots on my vision when she released me, rolling on top of me and into my numb arms. We were surrounded by her motley collection of plush animals, garish and obnoxious. I filled my lungs with regret and relief intermingled.
I lay flat on my back with April’s head nestled on my shoulder. She was careful to avoid my wounded side, her hair tickling my chin when she moved. So tired that staying awake a little longer felt nice, contemplating the pleasures of imminent and inevitable sleep.
The kind without dreams.
“Hey April,” I said softly. “You’ll be finished soon, right?”
Her giant brown eyes reflected my face back at me, as honest as I’ve ever seen myself, the edges of her mouth turning up in the hint of a smile. Cats smile that way when they know a mouse has nowhere else to run. How long has it been? How much longer till it’s over?
“Of course,” April said, rubbing the side of her head against my shoulder like she wanted me to pet her. “Why else would I go to all this trouble?”
I considered it for a moment, the way a working man fantasizes about winning the lottery and quitting his job. Comforting, a good way to get through a hard day, but not the kind of thing you want to believe in too much, not the kind of thing to get your hopes up about.
“And, once you have what you need, then…”
“Hush,” April said, pulling me close as her eyes shut, her voice heavy with the promise of sleep. “You know that I always look after you. I will take care of both us, you’ll see. You can trust me, Preston.”
And that made both of us liars.
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 23
