by Michael Shea
“Who knows who might call me?” smiled Daryl. And in truth the new machine squatting there excited him. Hadn’t he begun to writhe in the narrow box of his life? And if perhaps that box had begun spontaneously cracking along the edges…and suddenly his grip on the vision’s familiarity tightened a notch. The face was a writer’s face. It was a writer he’d consumed amidst all the miscellaneous fiction he devoured in his first years at college…
They went down to the Silver Dragon and drank coffee at a window-table, watching Sixteenth Street and its Friday evening traffic of colorful characters. “I love this neighborhood,” said Brad, “I really do. But I still don’t get why you insist on living in it.”
“It’s magical!”
“It’s funky.”
“Lighten up. I’ve all but decided to take that job.”
“‘All but’?”
Daryl himself wondered why he had uttered that qualification. “Well, it’s a big transition.”
“For chrissake Dare, just come outta your cave.”
“You’re right. Of course.”
When Brad left, Daryl gazed a while longer out the window. All the colors of neons and signals and tailights and headlights, all the races, all the streetfolk in their piratical costumes. It was a beautiful carnival. But was Daryl turning into one of the sideshows? Seeing visions, and now, hovering over an answering machine for word from Beyond…?
He had to grant that it was possible he had just taken his first step toward becoming a Whack. But in truth, he didn’t believe it. Something was developing, a revelation from his own unconscious. What persuaded him wasn’t the vividness of what he had seen, it was what his own fingers had done: get one get one get one. Whatever revelation awaited, it had spoken to Daryl from within him, not from Beyond.
He tried to bring himself another step closer to the Face’s identity. An author’s photo on a battered old paperback—he could come no closer than that. Lantern jaw, mournful apprehensive mouth, frightened eyes…of the author’s name, no trace.
He left the Dragon and went walking through the Mission for a while as the going-home traffic began to die down and the glare of headlights yielded to the constellations of the neon signs. An indefinable tang was in the air…a sweetness, a sharpness. Was it danger?
He walked for hours, enjoying the people, the lights, until at length he stopped in for a rest at the Skyscraper Bar.
Three beers to the good, he judged it was late enough to go home. Late enough to have…caught something in his new answering machine.
Back up in his room, with the hotel growing quiet all around him, he viewed his machine, its message indicator still displaying a bright red “0.” Sitting hesitantly at his desk, feeling out of place in his home for so long, he asked what kind of fantasy he was slipping into here.
The phone rang, and he snatched it up expertly, as if his hand had been waiting for it, convinced all along that the Call would come.
“Yes?”
“Hey, Dare.”
“…Hey, Brad.”
“Got any messages yet?”
Though still half-tranced, Daryl had to laugh. “Yeah. A tip from the Cosmos. Buy low. Sell high.”
“A tip from the cosmos, hmm…you OK up there, dude?”
“Let me weigh that…yeah. I’d say I was OK. Life is interesting.”
∴
Sweet Saturday. Walking down the halls, he traded greetings and jokes with other late risers. From the cage Harry, the Hindu manager, beckoned him. “You going out, Daryl? Take these down to the office.” Two boxes of old paperwork stood on the carpet in front of the cage. Daryl took them up and started down the stairs to the street level.
“I’ll get these filed right away, Harry.” This was a standing joke, just as the term “office” was.
Down in the hotel’s little foyer, he held the boxes one-armed and keyed open a door set at right angles to the street door. Reached in and clicked a switch inside. A cluster of bare lightbulbs came on above an isolated table amid an acre of dark junk filling the unpartitioned street floor, a forest of floor supports crowded with the dusty generations of the hotel’s furniture, and the innumerable boxes of personal effects collected from vanished tenants through the decades.
Leaving the door on the foyer open for added light, Daryl stepped in and began following a crooked, narrow lane-way through the junk to the office.
He wasn’t halfway there when the heavy door boomed shut behind him.
There was no one in the foyer to shut that door, and there was no draft to blow it shut.
He advanced quietly, his heart still hammering, his ears straining for whispers to come from the dark-sunk shapes all around him. He scanned what seemed an archaeological wilderness around him: black stonehenges of stacked bedframes and mattresses, the monoliths of piled bureaus, the sarcophagi of old refrigerators, the scattered building-blocks of cardboard boxes…through all this he moved, his feet slow, pulse thudding.
On the wobbly table he set down his boxes. Sat in the rickety chair and listened some more. His everyday self tried to mock him for sitting here like this, in an inner-city hotel basement, with his ears cocked like the Last of the Mohicans…
But the voice of his everyday self was small and far away.
Back in the raftered darkness, there was a soft crash—a flat, cushy impact that hit him like a slap in the face. He nearly jumped out of his skin, his heart galloping, galloping…he’d done this to himself! Had let himself believe, if only for a moment, there was Something reaching out for him. And now, this impact. Something falling with no imaginable cause.
He advanced, step by halting step, into the shadow encircling his cone of light.
Past big-shouldered bureaus and teetering stacks of boxes, he threaded his way to the south wall…and back along it…and there. Half-hid in dark, a box lay on the path, toppled from its perch.
His eyes had shown him phantoms, his fingers had spoken unknown to him, but here he was, picking up a battered old cardboard box, feeling its soft, wrinkled hide, its weight in his hands. The sensation of holding it took his breath away.
But when he had carried it back to the light and dumped its contents on the table, he beheld no more that the cheap clothes and oddments that some vanished tenant had left behind.
Daryl picked through it and found faded T-shirts and jeans, a comb, a hairbrush, a toothbrush all dry and dusty with age, a yellow frisbee that looked as if it had been chewed by a long-ago dog, a bleached-out pair of tennis shoes, a cheap Tijuana butterfly knife, a battered Bible, a much-thumbed pocket dictionary, and a little desk calendar printed by Bob’s Plumbing for 1973, with not a single notation on it…
Grinning at himself now, nodding his head as if someone beside him were saying I told you so, he idly tugged at one of the T-shirts that had felt slightly heavy…plucked at it, and saw a battered old paperback fall out of it.
On the cover, a big skull with the eyes still in it. At the Mountains of Madness.
Bells were ringing for Daryl. He turned the book over, and there was the little postage-stamp-sized black-and-white photo of the haunted-looking lantern-jawed man! H. P. Lovecraft.
The longer he stared at the little photo, the bigger the basement’s shadows grew around him. It seemed to stretch for blocks in all directions, this pillared darkness and its multitude of relics. His wild flight through the earth on the BART came back to him. He suddenly felt that he was in an endless subterranean maze, and that some mighty evil thundered through it, zigging and zagging, sleeplessly seeking him.
Or was it the evil tale in this book that his memory echoed with? He opened it.
Within a few pages, long stretches of the narrative were already coming back to him. An ancient alien race found still living under antarctic ice. After thirty years’ absence, Daryl reentered the dark places of this strange account…
∴
Two hours later—somewhat dazed—Daryl stepped out onto Valencia Street into a honey-gold afternoon. He set
himself to walking around the Mission, awkwardly for a while, and even when his gait grew smoother, the ice and dire black mountains that now filled his brain were starkly dissonant with this golden day.
What had these glacial horrors to do with him? It was as if, with ghostly fanfare, the Beyond had delivered its message to the wrong man on the wrong world.
But a message was delivered. The hallucinated face had broken through again to Daryl’s life. He had it in his pocket. The message was utterly cryptic, but it had been thrust before him.
At length, he gave up wrestling with his amazement. More was going to be shown him. Could his life have changed so quickly? From a grim trap to an ascending path of wonder and discovery? All he knew at this point was that he had been marked out for a revelation.
He found that he’d strolled all the way to the Skyscraper Bar, and so he went in. There was a goodly crowd in here of mellow Saturday drinkers warming up for the night.
“Hey, Daryl! Joo hear about Roger?” And here was his fellow dirt-man, Don.
“Hey, Don. Lemme buy you one. How is he?”
“Shot a well-bourbon and a draft beer back,” said young, hearty Don to the bartender. “He’s fucked up! It was bizarre! You remember how his boot was all slimed? Thanks.” Don downed his shot. “I drive him down to Emergency off Potrero, they get his boot off, and by then he’s almost screamin! Thanks.” He took the draft beer, downed that too. “They hadda cut his socks off! And underneath? He had like second-degree burns all over his foot and ankle! I shit you not! I just went back to the hospital this morning with Jack to see him. Jack was like petrified about a workers’ comp claim, OSHA coming in, exsettera, but guess what? While we’re there in Rodge’s hospital room, Jack gets a call on his cell from Mike Love! Love’s saying he heard one of our guys got hurt? Long and short, Love tells Jack that he can offer Rodge fifteen K cash, same day, if he signs it off as an off-job accident!”
“No shit?”
“I was there! Jack was so surprised, he told me everything!”
“So did Rodge take it?”
“You shitting me? Fifteen K in hand? A guy like Rodge?”
“Man! Love must really want this pool signed off.”
“Sure. Wants his pay, just like the rest of us.”
But Daryl couldn’t help thinking that Mike Love had never before paid any attention at all to his subcontractors’ problems, unless absolutely forced to do so…
Hours later, walking home through a night grown misty and sharp, he thought of Love again. There was something about those harsh syllables he’d made Amy Robideau intone above the pit. The last three syllables. Shaw gaw thoy. Shoggothoi? Could it have been? A foretremor of this book he had just…been shown?
Some ghost-web seemed to have snared his life and was pulling his world in closer around him. There was terror in it, yes there was…but there was also that secret pang of exultation.
He took the flights faster and faster up to his room, the crackly old rubber carpet-runner making a quickening cricket-noise as he climbed…
The message indicator of his new machine still glowed its scarlet zero.
∴
A long week went by. The Hoe Down crew spent all five days of it laying pipe. Days of sun, but days that were cooling and shortening. The autumnal equinox was almost upon them. During the breaks, neither the Robideau job nor Rodge were ever mentioned. Jack had set the example on that score, and the crew followed suit.
Evenings, Daryl came back up to his room to find an unvarying “0” on the machine and sat down to fix more of Brad’s copy—a heftier manual this time, for a new laptop.
Each night before turning in, or going on one of his graveyard shifts, Daryl checked the pages he’d just typed, looking for unconscious messages from his own fingers. He found not a one.
On his nights in the cage, he fell asleep promptly when the 2:30 A.M. lull hit. He was now convinced that the deep-night silence was wormholed with a silence deeper still, and that Something stirred beneath that silence. But he also knew that whatever this sleepless presence was, it would accost him when it chose, and until it chose, nothing he could do would bring it nearer.
And the result was that he slept deeply, trustingly, sure—or almost sure—that the Impossible would come to call. That the Impossible had chosen him for something. And what an odd, dark happiness that gave him! He scarcely knew himself through these strange, half-expectant nights. He was a man already embarked on a rare voyage…
On Friday, his crew ran an eleven-hour day and finished trenching the vineyard. Daryl trudged up to his room and fell into bed, not waking up until noon.
He jumped right off the bed and checked the machine, yet still it showed him its scarlet Zero.
Daryl felt all at once almost unbearably impatient. It occurred to him that today Amy Robideau would be returning home from Nice, and for some reason he found that thought disturbing. His heart was pounding, as if he had been running through a wide, dark place, with something darker still speeding after him…
He had to stop waiting, obsessing. Just stop it. Go out and have a Saturday. If it was going to come, it would come.
Once made, the resolution proved a great relief. He went down to the Silver Dragon: bacon, pancakes, eggs. Took the bus to Market and shot several hours of pool, happily into it, getting four- and five-ball runs going…
Took the bus on back up Market, down Mission, and strolled into the Skyscraper Bar. And there he found Don again, this time with Toby.
Don felt pent up at work on the subject of Roger, and they were really chewing it over now. “He stepped in something,” said Don. “I didn’t see any hole, but—”
“I didn’t see any either, but I tell you I felt a soft place under my foot. And I’ll tellya what Rick said. He told me that when he laid his bucket on the hole’s floor, it didn’t feel solid. Said it felt like he was knockin’ on some kinda space down there.”
“Yeah, yeah, his bucket’s his third hand, all that. But hey, how much solid do you need to hold up a swimmin’ pool? And we’re talkin’ about something small here, some kinda leak.”
“Well,” Toby said, a little miffed, “the point is those fuckin’ hills are supposed to be solid. I mean, don’t you think a hollow down there is interesting?”
“What I think is interesting,” Daryl said, “is those burns on Roger’s foot.”
“Exactly! There was some kinda hole we missed. Where else would that caustic shit come from?”
“But how did it fill itself in?”
“It didn’t. We just missed it.”
“No way.”
They batted it around and got moderately buzzed, as the shadows lengthened outside.
Daryl rose and stretched. All strange business felt comfortably remote. Night was falling, the streets lively with a happy Saturday energy. “I’ll see you guys. I’m gonna take in a movie.”
But as he passed the Hyperion, he darted inside to get some cash, climbed up to his room…and saw the scarlet “1” on the Messenger 2020.
He sat on the edge of his bed, and took a deep breath.
Pushed play.
A staticky hiss—the vast whisper of electromagnetic void. And then—it was a hiss, a gasp, not a voice—
…The pool! The pool! Sssseeee, and knooow…
They coruscated along his spine, these crackly ghosts of words.
Five words, and an additional, unspoken word, which was the word Now.
Daryl had been right. Revelation was at hand. He just had to get to it. Now.
Back at the Skyscraper Bar, Don and Toby were slouched in exactly the postures Daryl had left them in.
“Don!” he blurted. “Listen. Something seriously urgent has come up. Will you lend me your truck? Will you rent me your truck? Just for tonight?”
“Whoa. Whoa. It’s Saturday night here, Dare.”
“Just stay here and drink beer for another three hours—all your beer on me!”
This piqued Toby. “We haven�
��t been sittin here drinkin beer for three hours!”
“Closer to four, Tobe. Come on, guys. This is something I just can’t explain.”
“You should explain it,” smiled Don. “Maybe it’s someplace we wanna go too, and we’ll take you there.”
Daryl’s urgency was great. He didn’t care who else saw, if it came to that, but he must see, whatever it took.
“OK,” he said. “I have a source, and I won’t say who. Something’s going to happen tonight at that pool we put in, and I have to be there to see it. It’s happening soon. If you wanna come with me, come, but answer me quick yes or no, because I’m going one way or another.”
∴
Don’s battered pickup climbed grassy rises. The oaks were black giants silvered with the gibbous moon rising above Mount Diablo across the Bay. They’d driven high up in the Marin hills, and all the way up here Toby and Don had pried at Daryl’s silence. He would’t budge.
At last, he answered them. “Here’s what it is. You’d think I was crazy if I told you how I know this, so I’m just not fuckin telling you. But something’s going to happen at that pool.”
“Something?” asked Toby.
“Something…terrible, I don’t quite know. And my, like, mission is to see it, and know it. That’s all.”
“Are you”—Don was trying to strike a sympathetic note—“having some sort of mid-life crisis, Dare?”
“I never claimed this was sane. All I said was that I’m going to do it.”
“Well hey—” young Don said sincerely, “I’m down with that. Totally.”
“Totally,” echoed the older Toby, who looked a little more apprehensive. It seemed he’d recognized Daryl’s fear beneath his determination. Perhaps had caught some of that fear himself.
When they were a couple hundred yards downslope of the Robideau property, they pulled off the road and parked in the shadow of some madrones.
They got out. “Guys,” Daryl said, “I feel I’ve got to emphasize. I’m supposed to see something here. Be some kind of witness. I don’t think I’m supposed to interfere, so I don’t think you are either.”
