by Curtis Hox
Dreya’s cell rang. “I don’t recognize the number.”
She stood for a moment in her little black dress that seemed frivolous now. She let her brunette hair fall in her face to block the fear in her eyes.
She put the phone to her ear. “Oh, God. It’s her. It’s Hattie Sterling.”
“Let me see it,” Corbin said.
Dreya listened to the entire message, then hung up.
“So?” he asked.
“She said it didn’t work. She said if we try again, she’ll respond.”
Dreya dropped the phone. Its glass front shattered on the floor.
Corbin nearly stepped on it as he reached for her. She pushed him away.
“Should I call the others?” he asked.
“No,” she snapped. “You know we don’t need an investigation. I need you to focus on what this means.”
Corbin stood there looking like a forlorn child about to be slapped.
“Sit down,” she said. “This is your fault, you fucking bastard.”
Dreya Lyell had spent most of her marriage battling Corbin’s obsession with his preposterous Lovecraftian mythos that he preached to the masses. The problem was, they bought it. She had to admit she used them when she could, tossing them aside if they didn’t dance to her music. But they followed him more than her. His gospel was vague and abstract enough to seduce. He claimed a great store of power from the Deep masks reality, and Lovecraft and Howard are its prophets.
“Hattie knows it was us. What can she do, Corbin? I told you it was foolish to attack her.”
“I’m not afraid of her like you are. I want her to come out and challenge me. I’ve waited years for this. You have no faith, Dreya. The Deep is real. The Great Horror waiting to break through the cracks of the world is ready. This is not about perpetual war between light and dark, good and evil. The clichés of cosmic war are boring. So don’t start on that with me. I want to rend nature for its secrets. The ones who dig deepest, drink the sweetest. So, keep your fucking insults to yourself. I know what I’m doing.”
“Corbin—”
“I want a drink.”
“No, you can’t. You know that. You know what happens when you drink before you fall asleep.”
“Jesus, you love to remind me of that.”
“Have you taken your medication? You can’t be lucid dreaming.”
“Yes.”
She moved closer. “Listen, I know that giving up your marathon sessions of horror novels and movies and comics was the hardest thing you’ve ever done. I never worked so hard to convince anyone of anything, either. In many ways you’re childish, simple, transparent. You’ve been a book-nerd since I can remember. But you’ve gone too far, Corbin. You’ve finally angered Hattie Sterling, the one person I begged you not to bother. I can’t believe I let you persuade me to move on her.”
“We can’t let her win, Dreya.”
“Win what, exactly? We have everything we want: enough power to sell the N.P.B. for decades.” And then, “You’re scaring me with all this talk. You sound like you did before. We have to promise her we won’t bother her again. We have to, before you go too far.”
Corbin plopped himself in a chair. His long fingers grabbed the ends of the armrests like some skeletal king retiring in his death chamber.
“Yeah, you’re definitely scaring me,” she said.
* * *
Dreya remembered a night years ago when he’d first manifested his odd behavior after a weekend with his nose stuck in a large omnibus edition of seven serial novels. When she’d found him, he was sitting in a similar reading chair in their den, stacks of books piled up around him like a curtain wall.
“How long have you been reading?” she remembered asking.
“A day or so, straight. It’s a record,” he said.
“You look like hell.”
“Get me some coffee. I’m so tired.”
“No. No more. You’re done.”
He grabbed a paperback and launched it at her like a missile.
She ducked, feeling it disturb the air at her cheek, and it bounced off the wall with a slap.
“Get me a goddamn cup of fucking coffee now!”
She remembered slamming the door hard enough to make her palm sting, then praying he wouldn’t go sneak his own cup.
He didn’t.
When she checked on him an hour later, he was in his loveseat, eyes half-open, rolling in their sockets.
At first, Dreya didn’t feel the temperature drop or see the squirming mass of limbs wrap themselves around his body in unholy mimicry of self-adoration or hear the sucking sounds as they caressed his body. His cries turned from whimpers to moans at the same time the projection coalesced. Thunder echoed from ‘the Deep’ (as he called it) and even shook the walls.
She thought he was in pain.
Then she noticed the ecstatic, half-open eyes, the rictus of pleasure.
Translucent ribbons surrounded him like dancing fairies and knocked over a lamp. At first, the thing was no larger than a mouse, a miniature Shiva-like demonoid writhing in fury, only to erupt in a tiny ball of acrid smoke that stung her nostrils.
A larger abomination followed, an abhorrent concoction of arachnid carapace and cephalopod tentacles that actually slung a freezing string of fluid across her body. One foot-long tentacle knocked over her Tiffany lamp, then reached out for an armoire. It coalesced into a dog-sized creature from hell that calmed as it rested on Corbin’s lap. By then, he was covered in slime, as if he’d been dipped in a pool.
Corbin’s grin spread from ear to ear as the thing nuzzled up against him, each open orifice making a sucking sound that made her retch.
Then Dreya saw a moment of doubt.
“No,” he groaned.
The thing grew agitated, clung to him, as a distant thunder rumbled. She stepped back when his lips quivered. The thing-that-was-his shivered, tried to hold on, then erupted in a flash of light, leaving nothing but the awful electric smell of ozone.
He cried and cried but couldn’t be consoled.
She would regret later what she said next: “If you did it once, you can do it again. Just a little reading, right?”
Corbin brightened, the clarity of the unthinking mystic filling him. “Yes, I can.”
She’d never meant to encourage his fantasy that his books had shown him the truth of the N.P.B. She regretted taking this tack. His simplistic mind was now convinced that a minion of H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods had incarnated on his chest and that he was their harbinger, their new prophet, their servant.
“I am the Voice of the Deep,” he started saying, completely creeping her out.
Then he began his experiments with one intention: a confrontation with Hattie Sterling
* * *
Not long after at Hexcom United’s headquarters in North Jersey, Dreya watched him prepare to summon his Elder God.
At the time Hexcom was a private research complex dedicated to all things speculative fiction. Since that first “communion in their apartment,” as he called it, Corbin had created a system of summoning, Lucid Media Projection, that was highly controversial but would eventually make Hexcom millions selling access to bleedover in popular culture.
The heart of the operation was a floor dedicated to L.M.P.
Dreya remembered standing next to him with all the odd monitoring equipment blinking and beeping and his stacks of reading material that filled the room with the smell of moldy paper. He crawled inside a projection cocoon.
“I’m ready,” Corbin said, “to summon the beast.”
When the projections first started to dance along the slick interior of the cocoon, technicians wheeled him into an adjoining chamber, four stories tall and as wide as a racquetball court. These secure areas were observable through fifteen-inch reinforced customized plazglass.
Once in the adjoining chamber, Corbin did his best to summon his projection.
Dreya stood alone, trying not to chew her nails.
> She saw the thing appear. In the chamber next to his cocoon, a rhino-sized monstrosity emerged with a squat, arthropod torso atop twelve articulated legs. From its head extended a dozen or so spiked appendages that could skewer a large man. Eyes as black as obsidian rested deep in its body.
“Corbin, no,” Dreya whispered when she saw him crawl from his cocoon. “Don’t …”
He could barely stand because of the river of fluid that poured from the beast. He looked up at the cameras in the ceiling and walls that would finally capture proof the Deep was real. He allowed it to nestle up to him.
Then, the inevitable.
It began to shimmer.
He reached out and grabbed a tentacle.
“No!” he yelled.
Corbin tried to hold on. It vaporized as well, recalled to whatever faraway place from which it had come.
Later, they learned the cameras had captured nothing. The technicians argued the beast had never been fully corporeal.
All of Corbin’s employees who could project would also encounter the same problem: their creations were stolen from them only moments after their partial births. Each time this cruelty occurred, he grew angrier.
The time after his rhino was taken required a month of bed-rest due to his depression, loss of weight, and nervous collapse. Dreya made him promise he’d not try again, that he would let other talented individuals try. He agreed, then broke his promise.
Eight times in the last decade he’d given himself to the Deep. Eight times Corbin was rewarded, then punished.
Dreya had had enough.
* * *
On the night of Hattie Sterling’s call (and threat), Corbin eventually wandered off to bed.
While he slept dreamlessly, Dreya wrapped herself in a warm quilt and paced in their living room, often stopping to gaze out the floor-length window. So much potential, she knew, for control.
If Hattie Sterling had truly provided a lasting F.G.O., a real Full Generated Object, like an apple that could be eaten, that didn’t disappear … she wielded a type of knowledge that could undermine Dreya’s project to sell herself as a guru dispensing the truth of the N.P.B. to the world.
Dreya walked across her living room to her study.
Black-and-white photos of Hattie Sterling and her students lay in large sheets on a table. Maybe the key was with them, Dreya mused. She focused on one photo. To her the young man looked like nothing more than an eager-to-please boy.
“Just a graduate student,” she mumbled.
She tapped the photo. A plan formed how she might undermine Hattie Sterling’s quest to explain the N.P.B. Dreya needed that young man.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Towns received the message from a friend of his mother’s that afternoon: She’s in the Oncology Unit, Christ’s Hospital.
In a cold, dark room with the windows drawn, he sat by her side on a metal chair. She was sedated, with tubes sprouting from her nose and mouth. The machine at her side hummed and occasionally beeped. He smelled antiseptic in the room, strong enough he’d never forget it.
Her eyes were half open, even though she saw nothing.
Towns hadn’t understood what the doctor had said; he had stood in a daze while they’d prepared her room, vaguely hearing something about the possibility of a large residual tumor and tumor-node-metastasis. He barely caught the meaning.
He’d learned his mother had complained of a headache to her boss where she answered phones at the Hoboken Tow Yard. She’d said she was going to the bathroom but could barely stand. She almost crashed to the floor, phone in hand. Her boss called an ambulance. She fell into a coma soon after arrival. They even showed Towns a CAT scan of something that looked like a dark spot.
Brain tumor.
They said she was stabilized, but that the growth seemed perfectly placed inside her head to inhibit higher functions. It was so deep and near the stem that they were considering a slow form of treatment to attack its genetic structure. She could be there for months.
They’d left him alone then.
Towns now sat by her side behind a curtain hanging from rings. He heard them slide along the curved, aluminum support.
A distraught woman stood at the foot of her bed. She was tall and wide and carried herself like a man. In her red-and-black plaid shirt, she looked like she made a living wrangling cattle. Her eyes welled and a tear streaked down the side of her face.
“You must be Ernest,” she said. His mother used that name—no one else. She must be a friend. “I’m Sandi, Sandi Jones. I know her from work.” He nodded in mute acceptance. She said, “Thanks. I won’t bother you. I just want to sit with her.”
* * *
The stranger named Sandi sat in an empty chair on the opposite side of the bed and pretended to suffer the pains of seeing a dear friend in a coma. However, Sandi kept Towns in her periphery as she stared at his mother. She had one job: to convince him that she could be trusted. He had already let her stay. That was a start.
“How do you know my mom?”
“I freelance; tow-truck driver. Got my own rig. I see her down in the yard most weeks. Me and your mom even had lunch a few times. Your mom is a kind person.”
“Yeah, you look like the people she works with.”
“You mind if I come back sometime?” she asked.
“No, come when you like.”
She stood, content she had done her job. She planned to return the next day, and the next, until he was ready for her to make a simple suggestion.
* * *
That evening, Dr. Hattie Sterling answered her phone while walking through the stacks.
“I need your help. My mother’s sick. Brain tumor or something like that buried deep inside.” He waited on the other end, as if he expected something from her. “Do you have any interpolations that heal?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, a little too quickly.
“You’re sure?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“She needs help.”
“I’m sorry.”
He paused, as if he didn’t believe her, but didn’t know how to challenge her.
“Bye.”
* * *
She rounded a corner and nearly ran into Eliot on the top floor.
They began to walk together in a circuit around the atrium, patrolling the open space.
“I think something’s happening to Towns,” she said.
“Because his mother’s sick? I heard.”
“The thing is, Eliot, I know who my real enemies are. I just have no idea to what lengths they may go. There are so many variables to assess, so many unknowns. Towns’s mother getting sick feels too inconvenient.” And then, “It’s the Lyells coming for me.”
“Is that the plaintive whisper of Sterlinesque intuition I hear? Like the one that urged you to establish your Society as quickly as possible? And to do the press conference.”
“Yes, but the construction of our Society from the ground up takes dedication and imagination. It also requires a delicate balance that understands the need for ritual and sacrament—”
“While maintaining a secular ethos.”
“Of course. And it has to happen soon. But what model should I choose? The modern research university won’t work. It’s too open, too democratic. A secret society fails for opposing reasons.”
She paused in one of her favorite places on the top floor, a far corner in the stacks that almost seemed forgotten. She wiped a layer of dust from a shelf of books.
“Something in between?” he asked.
She began walking again, hands behind her back. “I have to admit what sort of society I want to create. I have to admit it to myself and to you and the others.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I was seriously considering the monastic tradition, then struck that as impractical.”
“Won’t work in today’s techno-globalized world?”
“You think Masumi will lock herself away from computers? Never.”
>
“What about a military order?” he asked.
“That’s closer to what I imagine it’ll be—”
“Intellectual knights upholding the virtuous raison d’être of rational knowledge and its newest understanding of nature rethought.”
She faced him. “But the resistance, from even my allies! How do I persuade them to listen?”
“To your strange theology?”
“I hate that phrase—”
“To your intuition, then?”
“Better,” Hattie said. “Will they allow me such a privilege as to lead them? Will you? I even doubt myself.”
“But you believe you’re right.”
She knew what he meant. It had come up more than once in the past: Margery’s gift to Hattie in understanding the N.P.B.
“Yes, I do.”
* * *
They eventually settled in the atrium of what was to become the home of her new Society of Spinners. With Eliot at her side, Hattie struggled to recall the memories of those early days when Margery Krauss claimed to know the why of the N.P.B.
The young Hattie Sterling, of course, had resisted when Margery mumbled phrases from ancient texts, myths, stories, novels, poems, films. It was a jumbled narrative that Margery eventually guessed had structure. Hattie had thought it was all noise.
“Eliot, you knew her. I wish you had really listened.”
“She seemed so off back then.”
“I know.”
“Even you discounted her ravings as nonsense.”
“But only in the beginning. She was into such strange stuff.”
“All of those emotional outbursts?” Eliot asked.
“A comparative literature student with too much medieval French under her belt and too little Sanskrit to truly understand Hindu mythology—that was Margery. Always a dreamer. Did you know she turned down a Fulbright to study twelfth-century Provençal literature and instead traipsed around Europe visiting old cathedrals and abbeys, universities, museums? She catalogued the epiphenomena of narrative in human culture, as she called it bleedover. At first I thought all this was just an excuse to dig up old myths and stories about old buildings and dead people.”
