Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Cab drew his 9mm Beretta. He moved to the back door, prepared to kick it off its hinges. But the door was unlocked.

  Peter Goetz lay sprawled on the broad plank floor. The left side of his torso looked mangled and burned. But he wasn’t burned; he was changed. Like Joe Rodriguez. Only Goetz’s transformation had taken a different form. His left arm was thinned out, almost a black bone, with a couple of extra joints thrown in. Three fingers instead of five, and they weren’t really fingers. His left leg was violently twisted, erupting out of the hip socket, halted halfway in its transformation between human and something else.

  Cab stepped over the inert body. He had to find Nancy. The floor was streaked with a substance like black tar. It was too thick for blood, which is what Cab took it for at first. He followed it to an open door and the smoke-filled room beyond. His flashlight beam swept through gray layers to discover what looked like a miniature broadcast tower. The air smelled of fried ozone. The tower was partially melted, the intricate cross-braces sagging. This was it, ground zero.

  Cab started out of the room to look elsewhere, but a barely audible whimpering made him turn back.

  “Nancy?”

  “Go away, Cab, I don’t want you to see me.”

  “Are you hurt? Where are you?”

  The room wasn’t that big, nothing in it but the weird tower and a table loaded with electronic equipment. No place for a girl to hide.

  “Come on, Nancy.”

  He swept the room with the flashlight. A stifled sob, low to the floor. Under the table. But there wasn’t space for her under there. He holstered his gun, squatted, pointing the flashlight. The beam touched her and she scuttled back. Cab’s heart thudded, blood roaring in his ears. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t. He reached for her. It was Nancy’s face, mostly, but God the rest of her . . .

  She darted away from his hand, scrabbling out the door on multiple legs, insectile.

  “Nancy!”

  He stumbled after her into the hall, saw her disappear through an open door. Before he could follow a hand closed on his ankle. He jerked around, gasping. It was Peter Goetz. He had dragged himself down the hall, leaving another smeary black trail. Raising his head, he rolled his eyes up to look at Cab. The left one was big as a golf ball, popping from its socket, egg yoke yellow with a red pinpoint in the center.

  Cab jerked loose and said, “What have you done, God damn you?”

  Goetz started talking, his words coming out in a rocky mumble—a troll’s voice.

  “. . . the Ancient Ones . . . brought it through, then overload, power surge . . . gar’ne sothoth neg’a geeth! . . . god . . . two dimensions, objects can occupy the same space . . . never thought . . . blended with counterparts across the dimensional interface . . .”

  Goetz’s words became unintelligible. Syrupy drool leaked from the corner of his mouth. His alien limb twitched and rapped on the floor. Repulsed, Cab started to back away. Peter Goetz’s human hand locked on his ankle again, this time with a much firmer grip. As Cab tried to pull free the black bone limb twitched up behind him, the talonlike digits spiking into Cab’s leg.

  “Ga’na-soth!”

  Cab cried out in pain, threw himself back with all his weight and strength, breaking loose. He hit the floor hard. The hideous thing Goetz had become dragged itself toward him, the yellow eye with its evil red spot almost glowing in the dark hall. With a quick, practiced movement Cab produced a small canister of mace and discharged it into the eye. Goetz shrieked, and Cab was able to shove himself away. His hand dropped to the butt of his automatic but he left the weapon holstered. If there was a way of reversing this nightmare Peter Goetz was the only one who knew how to do it.

  Cab stood up, reached for his handcuffs. He looked for his chance and lunged in, grabbing Goetz by his human arm. He slapped one cuff snug around the wrist and quickly locked down the other cuff on the wide knob of the tower room’s door. Goetz thrashed blindly for him with the spiked digits of his alien hand. Cab danced back out of reach. He felt surprisingly steady and in control, even optimistic. After all, if he’d mistakenly thought Goetz was dead he may also have been wrong about Joe. Cab might still put things right again, even in this insane situation. All he had to do was find Nancy. Once he had her under control they could get out of here in the truck, bring back help, somebody who could figure out what Goetz had done.

  Cab backed slowly down the hall, his leg throbbing where talon had spiked him. Goetz whimpered and thrashed helplessly on the floor, the cuff rattling loosely on the neck of the doorknob. Cab proceeded to the open door through which he’d seen Nancy disappear. He paused outside the room, his nerve beginning to fray. He could hear her in there, a chitinous scrabble on the wood floor. For a moment he couldn’t move. He had to force a rational calm over himself. He counted five deep breaths, and then he strode into the room and kicked the door shut behind him.

  There was a window but by now the twilight had failed. He swept the room with his flashlight. She could be anywhere, anywhere. “Nancy, goddamn it.” His light touched the closet door, the windowsill, the counterpane, a pillow without a slipcover, the nightstand, the bare floor, the steam radiator with its elaborate scrollwork, sweeping around, back and forth, a nervous searchlight. He couldn’t see her, but she had to be in the room. Then his light fell on a Coleman kerosene lantern sitting on top of the dresser. He set the flashlight down, dug a book of matches out of his shirt pocket, primed the wick and lit it. The room filled with hissing lantern light.

  He heard the scrape of one of her legs on the floor and turned in time to catch a glimpse of her retreating beneath the bed, like some gigantic, loathsome insect. He cursed under his breath, steeling himself. Plenty of times since he’d taken over guardianship of Nancy she had driven him to the brink of rage with her smart mouth and stubborn refusal to obey his reasonable restrictions. But he had never allowed her to see his anger. At the most trying times he mentally cut her off, completely blocked the annoying teenager she was and cast back into memory for a picture of her as she’d been when their father died. The innocent toddler, the little girl who held his hand to cross the street, who begged him to read stories to her and push her in the swing. He had been the man of the house. Now, getting down on his knees with the flashlight, he used the mental trick again, imagining Nancy as a child, remembering how it had felt to look out for her, to be the man.

  “Come out of there, Nancy.”

  Her words, blurred with sobs, nevertheless sounded human. “I can’t stand myself like this.”

  “We’ll get you back to normal somehow. I promise.”

  “You can’t.”

  A hard knot bulged in Cab’s throat. He had been the man in the house but he’d been a child, too, a boy unfairly pushed toward maturity. He had tried, God he had tried. But always, dogging him like a shadow demon, had been the cruel fear of failing his mother and sister—of letting his father down.

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he said.

  He moved the flashlight and she cringed back, holding up two of her knobby, triple-jointed arms to shield her eyes.

  “Come out,” he said. “All I want to do is help you.”

  She only sobbed louder. Cab had to get her away from here, back to the Jeep, and he didn’t want to waste any more time doing it. He stripped the bedspread from the mattress. Nancy shifted nervously under the box springs.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m taking you out of here.” He spoke in a flat, no nonsense tone, deliberately purging his voice of emotion. He couldn’t afford to waver, not now. He had to concentrate, keep his head. He had made mistakes with Nancy, he could see that with shocking clarity. The horrors he’d encountered this day seemed to have released all his deepest fears, throwing them up in hideous relief. All his life, since the death of his father, he had been so frightened of failing to live up to his responsibility that he had gone overboard, pushing, pushing until he had pushed Nancy out of his life altogether. But i
t might not be too late to put things right; he had to try.

  Cab set his booted foot on the edge of the bed frame and shoved hard. The bed scraped away from the wall. Nancy tried to dart between his legs but he threw down the bedspread and gathered her up. She fought but he had her, wrapping the spread tight around her, confining her movement. “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t fight me, Nancy.”

  Her struggles grew less frenzied.

  He tucked her under his right arm, hating the sharp little twitches of her alien limbs. Gripping the big flashlight in his left hand he started down the hall.

  Goetz, too, had ceased struggling. Shackled by his wrist to the doorknob, his face lowered, Goetz muttered in a strange, contorted language as Cab stepped past him. The atmosphere was suddenly hushed, expectant. He could feel Nancy breathing inside the bedspread.

  He opened the front door with the hand holding the flashlight. Something whipped out of the darkness, striking him across the chest like a stiff yard of rubber hose. Cab staggered back, grunting. Whatever it was crowded itself into the doorway, hissing and muttering alien syllables. At once Nancy went wild trying to kick free of the bedspread, responding to the thing in the doorway. Cab brought the flashlight up.

  Joe was still alive, all right—or the thing that had been Joe. It lurched toward him, mostly human from the waist down, but from the belt upward it was a writhing Medusa of tentacles. Rodriguez’s face clenched and gasped in the dead gray bulk of its torso.

  Cab backed away. It was speaking to him, though the words were alien. He could barely hold onto Nancy in her frenzy to get away. Her muffled voice called out to the advancing creature in its own language. The Peter Goetz monstrosity swiped at Cab and he dodged out of the way, retreating down the hall.

  He switched Nancy to his left arm. It was more difficult to hold onto her and he couldn’t direct the flashlight where he wanted it, but it freed up his right hand. He drew his 9mm but didn’t shoot. He couldn’t shoot, not Joe. The Rodriguez-thing waved its tentacles, whacking against the walls in the narrow hallway. Cab backed into the bedroom he’d only moments ago quit, and slammed the door.

  Immediately, Nancy wrenched free and hit the floor, frantically disentangling herself from the bedspread. Before he could stop her she skittered up on the bed and launched herself at the window.

  “Nancy!”

  The glass shattered and she was gone. Snow breezed into the room.

  The Rodriguez-thing crashed through the door, shrieking like a banshee, Joe’s human mouth stretched impossibly wide. Cab threw the flashlight. A tentacle sent it pinwheeling into the wall. Cab leveled his automatic but hesitated to fire. If there was one chance in a million of restoring his friend . . .

  A tentacle lashed out and wrapped around Cab’s ankle, another seized him tightly around his left thigh, while a third waved by his neck, seeking purchase. Cab was out of options. The tentacles tightened down. Cab’s femoral artery pounded as if to burst under the pressure. He thrust the Beretta forward. At the same moment a flailing tentacle brushed against the lantern, coiled around its fuel tank and lifted it off the dresser.

  Pain hazing his vision, Cab cried out, “Joe, I’m sorry,” and squeezed off two quick rounds. They splatted into the gray flesh. All the grasping tentacles squeezed in spasmodic reaction. Cab screamed, fired twice more, but it didn’t matter. The lantern burst under the pressure, dousing the Rodriguez-thing with flaming kerosene. Instantly it released Cab, and he was able to push himself away and stumble to the window. The monster’s many tentacles waved helplessly. Joe Rodriguez’s face became more prominent, stretching out of the hot core of yellow fire. And then it began to melt.

  Tears streaming from his eyes, the heat baking over him, Cab shoved the wooden sash up, dislodging a rain of broken glass. He clambered over the sill and pitched face down in the snow that had drifted against the side of the cabin.

  He lay there for some moments, his face half buried in the snow, his cheek turning numb, breathing hard, trying to gather his will. What a mess he had made of things. It was all coming apart now. Joe was finished, the cabin was burning—and with it the machinery that had created this nightmare.

  Now only Nancy was left.

  It was just the two of them, like when they were kids. The way she was now she needed him even more than she had back then. In her present form she was helpless in the world. She would have to understand that. She was going to be depending on him a lot. Who else could bear to love her? He wouldn’t screw up again. He was all she had now, but first he had to find her.

  He got up and began to walk, favoring his left leg. The jumpy glare from the burning cabin revealed Nancy’s tracks in the snow, each peculiar impression a tiny cup of shadow in the red light. She was fast and had a good lead; finding her wouldn’t be easy. He set his jaw and slogged forward, determined. He wasn’t letting anybody down, not ever again.

  As he reached the very limit of the firelight he saw her, squatting on a stump as if she had been waiting for him. Cab halted ten feet from the stump, his instinct warning him to approach no closer. She was barely visible in the weak, red glare, but what he could see was terrible. Oh yes, she was going to need him again. And he would handle things differently this time. He wasn’t his father and he didn’t have to be. All he wanted was to be good, to do the right thing.

  “Nancy.”

  “I don’t belong to you, Cab.”

  Funny. It was what she had said so many times before, since he had taken responsibility for her. To hear the same words in that tortured rasp her voice was becoming, to see her as she now was, a freakish thing. But it wasn’t going to be the old battle of wills. He wouldn’t let it be that way. He moved closer.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  “I won’t.” She turned and sprang from the stump.

  Cab lunged after her, but she was right there on the other side of the stump, not really trying to escape. In a moment he knew why. He found himself hung up in a net of invisible threads. Sticky. A trap. The gun, which he’d still been holding, slipped out of his hand. The more he struggled the more entangled he became. Where the threads touched his exposed skin—on his hands and face—they burned like acid.

  Not a net . . . a web.

  “I pick my own friends now, Cab. Gah ’Sogoth!”

  There was a vibration in the web. Cab remembered what Peter Goetz had said about bringing one of the Ancient Ones through before his machine overloaded. And Nancy’s hysterical call about a thing biting Goetz.

  Cab pulled wildly at the complex web that ensnared him, but it was useless. Finally he sagged, exhausted, and looked up. A pair of yellow eyes centered with pinpoints of blood glowed in the dark above him. “Sig na’getha.” The eyes twitched closer, and Cab strained to reach his automatic. It lay in the snow, just beyond his grasp.

  “Nancy help me!”

  The gun was right in front of her; she might have pushed it closer to him, but she didn’t. And Cab knew it really was too late. Nancy, the creature that had been Nancy, cocked her strange little head and regarded him with cold, inhuman detachment. Cab never looked away from her again. In his final seconds he had to accept it. After all, he was responsible.

  The Chimera Transit

  After sex the stranger, whose name was Rebecca, cuddled under my arm. I transmitted seretonin—enough to raise my mood above depression without inviting further arousal. The stranger moved against me, her leg slung over my hip, her hand on my chest, breath in my face. She had a mouth like Lynn’s, the shape of it. I waited until she was asleep then carefully extricated myself from her body and her bed.

  I walked home in the rain. It was past two a.m. The gloom came upon me again. Looking up, rain anointing my face, I transmitted a dopamine and norepinephin brain cocktail. My mood soared, and for a moment I was infatuated with the sky, as I used to be. A distant roll of thunder reminded me of the Outbound shuttle launches I used to watch with my dad when I was a kid, daydreaming stars. My mind felt nimble. Jaz
zed. City lights underlit the cloud cover. I thought of starships, which led to my father and the Big Bang (weapon discharge in the basement), which led to Lynn, and I wondered what she was to me.

  A woman laughed. I looked across the street. She wore a long coat and floppy hat and she was with a man, hanging on his arm, ducking. A green Tinkerbelle Flirt hovered around her, flew away, returned. The man reached out and captured it in his hand. They bent over it together, their faces illuminated by a green flicker. I heard her say, “It’s beautiful, I love you!” She moved her face under his and kissed his mouth. I looked away.

  What Lynn was to me: gone.

  *

  The next evening as I was dressing to go out a fairy light hovered in close to my window. I stared at it, my shirt hanging open. I thought of half a dozen women who knew my name and could access my People Finder code. But none of them possessed a romantically flirtatious disposition. They might call, or pop me an EyeText on my retinal repeater. Fairy Flirts were kid stuff. I whacked the window with a rolled up New Yorker. The Flirt drifted back, flimmering wings making a ruby nimbus in the rain.

  *

  I sat by the window in a coffee bar on lower Queen Anne, sipping espresso and reading a flashprint copy of a faux Updike novel. The style and plot were perfect Updike (Rabbit in the 22nd century) but thin under the surface, like all program-written books. I read the sentences and listened to the words in my head. It improved when I transmitted some phenylethylamine into my limbic system. A boost of joy surged through me. The words glowed. Analog or not, it didn’t matter.

  A pretty girl sitting alone at the next table suddenly ooo-ed in my direction. Her hair was styled into glossy blue spear points. I tried a tentative smile, but the ooo wasn’t for me. Ruby light shimmered on the other side of the window.

  “You have an admirer,” the pretty girl said.

  “So it seems.”

  I stowed the fake Updike in my overcoat and went out of the bar. The Fairy did a couple of loops around my head. I was conscious of people watching me through the window.