The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  My dad was only a few months in jail, then. I was noticing him not being there, that night, on the Fourth of July. He used to take us to the free fireworks at the beach park every Fourth. But there was Dulesta’s barbecue and we had sparklers, me and my friend Bebe, who’s kind of my girlfriend but kind of not, and we had some firecrackers. Mrs. Finch got mad when we used a firecracker behind her trailer, it made her fuzzy little white dog hide under the doublewide and cry, so she yelled at us and we run off.

  Bebe and I slowed down when we got to the fence between the park and the Tillinghast property. I was feeling wicked sick to my stomach, then, for running after eating too much barbecue and maybe something else that was just in the air.

  Then I looked past the fence and I seen Mr. Tillinghast up on his roof. I could see him pretty good between the trees, because that time of year, it’s not so dark yet after dinner. He was putting some kind of metal mesh thing on the roof.

  And then it came over me, like, Boom! I know what I’ll do.

  I told Bebe I was going to go over there and tell Mr. Tillinghast the police were going to bother him. Warn him. Get his back.

  “You are crazy to go there.” She shook her head. That always made her black braids fly around. “Don’t be a dumbfuck.”

  “I’m going. The police are going to bother him just for nothing. He’s gonna get bagged! He helped us, he hired my dad!”

  I was thinking about my dad. We never liked cops much and now I felt, about cops, just, Fuck you.

  I started climbing over the fence.

  “No, Vester!”

  But I climbed over the fence and left her there and walked off. Maybe I was showing off some even though she said it was a bad idea.

  I crossed the lot and walked under the trees and yelled up at him. “Hey, Mr. Tillinghast!”

  He went all twitchy up there and I saw him grab at a chimney. He almost slipped off the roof.

  “Sorry, Mr. Tillinghast!” I called. “I just wanted to tell you—”

  “Get out of here, boy! You! Go!”

  I felt slapped, when he did that.

  I turned around and started to walk off, then decided that because Bebe was watching, from over the fence, I had to say something else. I turned and yelled, “They’re coming out to bust you is what!”

  I was almost over the fence when he called again, from the house. “Boy! Come back here and tell me what the devil you’re talking about!”

  He’s the only one I ever heard say, What the devil.

  It smelled like mold and dust and burning wires and something else I never smelled before. That’s what the attic smelled like. Tasted like it, too, on my tongue when I breathed in.

  Mr. Tillinghast was looking at me like he was thinking of taking a bite out of me. “They’re coming tonight? You are certain it was to happen tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what she said.”

  He looked at the ceiling, like he could see right through it. “I just put those insulation baffles on the roof. They will address the problem. The signals will not penetrate aircraft now.” I didn’t know what meant by address it. I’ve learned a humongous lot from the way he talks since then, though. (But I have to use spellcheck on this.) He gave me a big frown and pointed his finger at me. “But if the authorities come rooting through here, they will find devices that break a variety of their paltry regulations! Indeed, frequencies that might interest Homeland Security. Not that they should fear me but . . . one can explain nothing to those people. They see nothing but what is in front of their noses. And even that they do not see.”

  (I told you, I remember everything people say.)

  “Can you hide that stuff?” I asked.

  “There is no time . . . That is – no time, working alone.”

  “I could help.”

  “That is a possibility – that is why I brought you up here. Your father was discreet. Are you?”

  Discreet was another word I didn’t know then. But I could tell he wanted me to say “yes.” And I remembered he paid cash money.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I shall reward you! You’re small, but— forty dollars?”

  Forty! “Where you want to start?”

  It was hard. The machines parts were larger than my mom’s old HP computer, and made of heavier stuff. Some were missing panels and inside them I saw vacuum tubes. I knew they were real old.

  It was hot in there, and I was coughing from dust and my fingers was getting slick from sweat but I carried what I had to. We took certain machines down from the attic, all the way to the basement, and he set them up there. We had to make five trips.

  By the time I was back down with the rest of the equipment he had four pieces of gear set up, wired together. I seen the wires looked really old, they were doubled and winding around one another and they had cloth on the outside. He stripped the ends of the wires with a knife and twisted them to each other’s with needle-nose pliers, so the units was all connected up. I was, like, what?

  “Good, good, put that one on top of this unit, here. We’ll set up our camouflage antenna, ha ha, and it will be transmitting before they arrive.”

  I know what camouflage was and I started to get what he was doing then.

  Pretty quick the vacuum tubes were lit up and there was a smell of hot copper wire in the air. There was a big cluster of lightbulbs, all wired close together. Some of them were broken. There was a “transmitter” made of an old TV antenna and a hum came out of one of the machines. Mr. Tillinghast chuckled as he turned the humming part up as loud as it would go. That humming came and went but it wasn’t the hum from the attic.

  We had set it all up between a bunch of dirty wooden boxes under a light fixture so low he knocked his head on it and the fixture broke and we were in the darkness. He switched on a flashlight so he could replace the bulb. While he did that he cursed with some words I never heard before.

  Then he arranged the “units” a little more. “The key unit isn’t here,” he said. “But they won’t know that.”

  Just when he got the arranging done, there was a banging on the front door above.

  “Coming, coming!” Mr. Tillinghast shouted. He whispered to me, “Wait in the attic if you want to be paid right away. Otherwise – slip out the back and come back when they’re gone.”

  I went toward the back door because, after all, cops was coming into the house. But I couldn’t help going around to the basement window, laying down in the dirt there and listening. I could only see a man’s shiny shoes and suit pants down there next to the equipment.

  I heard Mr. Tillinghast say, “Very well, here’s my equipment! But why should the FAA come here?”

  The woman said something about interference with the radios of jet planes passing overhead. And the other person, who had a deep voice, said he was a Federal Marshal and he had a warrant.

  “You see the only transmission devices I have,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “When I patent this device I shall be wealthy! It will send radio signals through the center of the Earth! No satellite will be needed!”

  Damn he was good at sounding like a cranky old nut.

  The Marshal said, “I see!” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “I am sorry but we’re going to have to confiscate this equipment, Mr. Tillinghast. I have all the permissions right here.”

  “What! My life’s work!”

  “After it’s inspected, and pending approval, you can work on it in a safer location, sir.”

  “The Devil, sir! And it is he who has arranged this! My equipment may indeed show the actual physical location of hell below the crust of the Earth! Do not look so incredulous! The Devil exists, sir!”

  “I am sure he does, Mr. Tillinghast!” The man said that all chuckling.

  “And when you pass into his realm, even should it be a hundred years from now, he will be waiting to chew on the bones of your soul, you pompous ass! Do you suppose the soul does not have bones? In that realm it is does, I assure you!”


  I always loved the way Mr. Tillinghast talks.

  “I’m going to ask you to unplug this equipment, please. Mary, could you ask the removal team to come in? They’d better wear gloves, this stuff is pretty old, could have lead or mercury in it . . .”

  But in half an hour they was gone. I seen them just driving away in their van, with pieces of his granddad’s equipment and some stuff he took out of an old stereo.

  I went to the back door. It was still a little open, and I yelled out, “Mr. Tillinghast!”

  In a couple minutes he came puffing up, his face red and all sweaty, and he had a smile on his face that I think would’ve scared Bebe. “We baffled the fools, boy! They took my grandfather’s equipment – only the parts that don’t matter. Of course the key piece was destroyed.” He was digging out his wallet. “Long ago, destroyed. By an oaf.”

  I asked, “They didn’t take the stuff that shakes makes that hum, the dream hum?”

  “What’s that you say? Dream hum?”

  He had the money halfway out of his wallet. He was staring at me like I just said I was working for the cops.

  “I . . . that’s what I call it. When your equipment makes that noise like bees and that other hum and I feel a little sick but then I get a tingle in my head and then I start to have those dreams.” It all came out at once like that. I felt stupid.

  “A tingle. Where in your head.”

  I tapped my forehead, between my eyes.

  “You feel it there – that is an indication of extrasensory activation of the pineal.”

  I shrugged. I was wondering, back then, what a pine-eel was.

  “Yes,” he went on, looking at my head like he might want to do one of those frog dissections of it. “The tingle. I know it well. One feels it between the eyes, inside the skull – but it originates deep in the vertebrate brain, between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain you see. At the pineal! Yes.”

  I was looking at his hand. It was still frozen to that money.

  “Oh, your remuneration!” He took the money out and handed it to me. “You did a fine job. We cut it fine but we fooled them, boy.”

  “My name’s Vester.”

  “Indeed? What is the derivation of the name?

  “Derivation? Oh. It’s from . . . Sylvester.”

  “Then why not go with Sylvester! I like it much better! Or Syl, perhaps?”

  “Syl – I like that better.”

  “Syl it shall be. This business of . . . dreams. What sort?”

  “Like . . . at the aquarium.”

  “You dreamed you were at an aquarium?”

  “No. The dreams – sometimes I dreamed of giant things like the jellyfish from the Providence aquarium. But I seen big ones right in the room with me. But not exactly jellyfish. And a slow-motion exploding thing. Like in a video game if they show a explosion playback. You know?”

  He was gaping at me. “Good lord. You saw all this over there, at the trailer park?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remarkable! Do come in, boy, we’ll have a glass of wine and discuss it.”

  Wine?

  I was suddenly wondering if I should trust him. Maybe he was going to get all handsy on me.

  But we went in the living room, that had only two old chairs in it, that smelled like someone’s grandmother, and he poured us two glasses of something he called red port. I’d had beer before, and some of my mom’s Carlo Rossi, but not this. I liked it.

  “Only one glass for the youngster, ha ha,” he said. He said ha ha that way when he was in a good mood. “This is old port, old like me. I like old things, apart from the productions of science. I am, like my father, an antiquarian yet I like technology that is quite modern – if only my grandfather had computers!”

  Then he started telling me about Crawford Tillinghast, his grandfather, and how he was a genius but “a vile person, in himself” so that Grandmama – he pronounced it grandmahMAH – ran off from him when she was pregnant. She had a baby, who was Mr. Tillinghast’s father. A letter came to her from someone with a story about Crawford Tillinghast and someone who shot his machine because of what he saw. And Grandmama told Mr. Tillinghast’s father that the letter was true. It was a story of how he had a machine that used “resonance waves” to transport some secret frequency – that’s Mr. Tillinghast’s words. Secret frequency. He sent it right to the pineal gland in the brain and it allowed the person to see a world that’s all around us, real close, but you can’t see it.

  “Yes yes yes, the servants were affected, they attracted a predator from that world, yes yes yes they died, but what of it? That was not Grandfather’s intention! All truly vital research entails risk! His research was unprecedented! It was of vital importance to science and then it was rudely interrupted. Such a tragedy. So much to explore!” He gave out a big sigh at that. “Of course, I have continued from precisely where he was forced to stop.” Mr. Tillinghast drank some more of his port and smacked his lips like he was tasting what he was thinking. “Consider, Syl! There is the microbiological world we all know of. Bacteria, viruses . . . Yet imagine how startled the first researchers were to realize these tiny creatures were everywhere! And then there was the hidden worlds of radio waves and X-rays and cosmic rays. Naturally there are other kinds of hidden worlds with organisms quite unknown to us and I do not mean the worlds to be found in other planetary systems! I mean a hidden world right here, Syl! Oh my grandfather knew – yet there’s so much Grandad Crawford did not know! Why, consider quantum effects and neutrinos. I have gone much further than he! I have superior equipment, I have annuities from Great-granddad’s oil wells, I have endless time for research . . . but I am beginning to grow old, child.” He looked at his hands. “Arthritis troubles me. And I do not trust physicians.” He gave me that weird smile again. I guess it should have scared me but it didn’t. “I shall need an assistant! Someone like you, who evidently can see the truth and not go mad! But perhaps youth is the key to keeping sanity when exposed to the secret world as youth is not mentally ossified.” (I still haven’t looked up ossified yet.) “Still – why not test this hypothesis?”

  “Yeah. I guess.” I wasn’t saying much. I was, like, whoa, how did this guy get so talkative? He always seemed like he never wanted to talk to anybody. But I guess he didn’t have anybody he could talk to about this stuff before.

  Then I seen he was looking at me like he was waiting for something.

  When I didn’t say anything he said, “Well? Are you willing?”

  “Willing to do what?”

  “To test the hypothesis about your gland.”

  I was looking at the front door thinking yeah, I should run for it . . .

  He made a kind of “oh, sorry” noise in his throat. “To be clear – your pineal gland. Within your brain! Your ability to see the . . . you called them dreams. They are not dreams, however. You see, the pineal gland, though deep within your brain, is a kind of sensory organ, Syl. It has other functions, too, but when properly stimulated it allows you to see more than anyone else – a whole new world alongside ours! The Alternating World!”

  “Oh. Yeah that’s okay,” I said. “Can I have a glass of water first?”

  After moving all that stuff I was really thirsty.

  “You can call me Oswald, if you like, Syl,” he said, as he powered up the equipment.

  I sat on an old kitchen chair set up at one end of the attic facing the equipment. There were little wired up circles he called monitoring devices taped to me. He promised they wouldn’t hurt.

  The attic was long and narrow and it surprised me how big it was. There was equipment in I had never seen, but I haven’t seen much. One piece had a screen that showed waves on it. There was something in the middle of the attic pointed upward that reminded me of a satellite antenna. There were windows in the walls at either end of the attic but they were covered up with sheet metal.

  I was starting to feel scared. But I was thinking about him saying, You can call me Oswald, if
you like, Syl.

  That felt good. I liked being called Syl. Even my dad had always called me Vester. (Sly would’ve pleased my dad more, but so what). And I liked that Oswald was talking like a friend, like we were just as good as each other. So I stayed where I was.

  Mr. Tillinghast – I can’t get myself to call him Oswald yet – was using a computer mouse to turn up a digital control on a screen, and as he did that I heard the bees start buzzing. Like the biggest hive you ever could imagine.

  When Mr. Tillinghast spoke, he sounded like he was far away in a tunnel somewhere. “My system is based on my grandfather’s . . . I have his blueprints . . . but I have taken it to another level of power and control . . .”

  The bees sounded angry. That sound made me shiver. The walls were vibrating a little so that some dust fell off. But then he switched on the dream hum.

  I felt a little sick, for a minute. And then the tingle came. I felt it right between my eyes, and inside my head.

  Then I seen a colored light that wasn’t coming from anywhere, really. It isn’t a color I knew. I don’t know how to say what color it was. Darker than purple but not dark purple. It went dim for a few seconds and then it got bright again, and then dim and then bright. Every time it got brighter I seen more things. More new things.

  They were living things and they were flapping and floating. They were floating around these big pillars, like you’d see in a huge old museum building holding up the roof, but they seemed like they grew out of the ground way down below and they went on up above us forever. And the flopping floating things were floating between them. The floppers had these long strings made out of rubber or glass floating from the bottom, and one of them stretched out the strings to grab another flopper and pulled it close and sort of gobbled it up. Which made the gobbling one grow some bigger.

  There were other things, too – they were slithering around the bases of the columns. These were like centipedes with hundreds of little feet but they seemed to be made of smooth soft-looking skin except it was gray-colored spotted with blue that wasn’t blue and they had human eyes on the front but no nose and mouth. This hose came out from under their chin and they ate with that. I seen they were feeding on stuff that was on the floor under our floor – see, I could see right through the attic floor. There was another floor, or a ground, under the attic floor, about three feet down, and these big centipedes slipped around on it like snakes. They were bigger than boa snakes. I seen something else, too – kind of like those seeds with little wings that go all twisting when they fall down from trees, but these went up and down, up and down, and they were as big as my hand and they would connect with one another into shapes that were like writing, and then they would erase that, flitter apart, and write something else.