“Yes, Mr. Silver, anyone who watches the nightly news would recognize you, so why the deception in the first place?”
“I wanted to be careful. I don’t want it to get out that I came to see a psychic…uh, no offense, Ms. Theroux.”
“That’s ok, I’m used to it. You would be surprised how many regular customers I have who still don’t want anyone to know that they have been seeing me. And please, you can call me Miranda, May I call you Raymond now?”
“Oh yes, please do.”
“So again, why are you here?” Miranda asked. Her brown eyes narrowed as she studied the TV anchorman. The fact that he was still hiding something all but poured out of him on an emotional level she was attuned to.
Raymond Silver took a moment to think and then he took a deep breath as he looked at Miranda with eyes gone moist. “I’m desperate and I don’t know where else to go.”
He’s either telling the truth or he’s a very talented liar, the young woman thought as something deep within the recesses of her mind added, he is hiding something, but what?
An uncomfortable silence passed between them before Miranda offered a faint smile and said, “Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”
Raymond nodded and bent down to rummage through the briefcase he had brought in with him. Straightening back up, he placed an odd bracelet of a light green, almost jade-like, stone on the table in front of her.
“I’ve heard it said that psychics can touch an object and know things about the person who owns it. Is that true?”
Miranda stared at the strange bit of jewelry in front of her, but she made no move to touch it. It was an unusual piece: wide, thick and heavy. It would be uncomfortable to wear. It was also carved in such a way that it resembled a multitude of long, thin things all coiled together to form the body of the bracelet. Without a closer examination, Miranda was unable to tell what those undulating twists of green stone were meant to represent, and yet she still hadn’t reached out a hand to pick up the bizarre trinket.
Am I afraid of it? She wondered. What in God’s name for?
“Miranda? Ms. Theroux, are you alright?”
“Hmm, oh yes, sorry about that.”
“Did you get something already from the bracelet?” Raymond asked.
“No, nothing like that, sorry. I was just taken by its…oddness. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Is it yours?”
A heavy sigh escaped the anchorman as he slumped back into his chair. “No, it belongs to someone very special to me.”
“Your wife?”
Raymond cleared his throat as color rose to his cheeks and said, “Now this is where I’ve got to be sure that what we say in this room stays in this room. Do I have your word on that?”
“Yes, Mr. Silver, what you and I discuss here stays between us.”
“Well, okay. No, the bracelet doesn’t belong to my wife, it belongs to my…my mistress. I guess that’s what she’s called, although let me get one thing straight right now, I love Linda as much as I love my wife. Maybe more, I don’t know. I know that may sound weird to you, but that’s the truth, and right now she’s missing. She’s been gone for over two weeks. She just up and left without telling me, or anyone else, anything. Now I can’t go to the police because that could uhm…”
“Complicate things?” Miranda offered.
“Yes. But I am very worried. Linda and I have a great relationship, and before you ask, no, we didn’t fight before she left. I just came by her apartment one night after she hadn’t been returning any of my calls and she was gone. All of her things were still there, but she was gone and she’s been gone now for far too long.”
“I see.” Miranda said. This time some of her disdain did creep into her carefully measured voice, but she didn’t think the adulterer across from her noticed it. “So you brought me this thing here to help you find your missing girlfriend?”
Why did I call that bracelet a ‘thing’ like that? She wondered after she spoke. My God, I am afraid of it. But why?
“Yes, that’s been in her family for generations and she loved it, so I thought if you could, you know, get some kind of vision from it, that you could tell me where she is or if she’s okay or not. Can you do that?”
“Perhaps. I am sometimes able to see things from personal effects, but the more personal the better, so if you have anything else of hers that she might have worn every day or – ”
“No, that bracelet would be the best thing. She did wear it every day, or at least whenever she could.”
You knew he was going to say that, so why did you ask? Miranda thought as she forced a smile. “Well then, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try my best to help you find your lost lady friend.” With that, she reached out and snapped up the green stone bracelet before her unreasonable dread of it could stop her.
Now that she was holding it, Miranda was surprised at how light the jewelry was for being such a bulky thing. She turned it about in her hands, looking at it, and came to the conclusion that the ropy coils carved into the odd green stone were meant to be countless, twisting tentacles. Upon discovering that, her opinion of this heirloom dropped from strange to downright ghastly and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to wear such a thing.
Then the center of her brain started to itch.
At least, that’s what it always felt like.
While someone else might have mistaken the sensation for an aneurysm or another brain defect making itself known for the first time, Miranda was well used to the feeling. It was her psychic gift starting to awaken within her, like an old style television slowing warming up. As she held onto the weird bauble, Miranda’s other five senses started to be replaced one by one by a sixth, all-encompassing one.
The first sense to pick up the psychic emanations coming from the loop of stone in her hands was her sense of smell, which was always the case. Miranda sniffed a few times then wrinkled her nose in disgust as the strong sent of the sea assailed her. It wasn’t the charming salt-spray of sailboats and white sandy beaches. It was the thick muck-stench of low tide, rotting fish, and decaying seaweed.
“Are you getting something?” Raymond asked as he pulled his hands back from the table and brought them up to his chest in an almost comical expression of fear.
“Shhhh. Yes, I am but please be quiet.” Miranda said as her fingers now felt the bracelet with a psychic’s touch. Although the stone remained cold, it seemed to move and writhe in her hands. Miranda was sure she felt some of its tiny carved tentacles wrap themselves about her fingers and squeeze. It was also now very damp, and she could feel phantom drops of water run down her fingers before dripping off at her wrists to hit the table below.
Oh my God, these are the strongest sensations I’ve ever had while reading an item, she thought.
“What is her connection to the sea?” She asked.
“The sea?”
“Yes, the ocean. Did she live on the shore or did she like to swim or anything like that?”
Raymond raised one hand to his chin and dropped the other to his lap and seemed to think hard about the question before answering, “No. Not that I know of, anyway. Oh I know, her family was in the fish business, that’s why that bracelet is carved so strangely. Could that be what you’re seeing? Or perhaps she’s near the ocean now?”
“No, that’s not it, and these aren’t fond memories of the fishing life, either.” Miranda said as her brain continued to process sixth sensory input. “There’s a definite feeling of anger at the sea, here, at the heavy, thundering waves. They are an obstacle of some kind. I…I see something now. I see the image of a locked door.”
At that, Raymond let go of his chin and sat up in the chair. “A locked door? Has someone kidnapped Linda?”
“No, it’s not that. It is a feeling of imprisonment, a door is locked, but not for her. It is locked for someone else. In fact, I don’t get any feelings of your Linda at all from this.”
“Oh God, is she dead?”
; “No…I don’t think so. I just get no sense of her with this item. Are you sure she actually—”
There was a long stretch of silence before Raymond said, “Miranda?”
The woman did not reply, she just sat motionless, giving herself over to her gift, sense by surrendering sense.
“Miranda, are you okay?”
But the woman did not hear Raymond’s question, because the sound of crashing waves were now all encompassing, as, too, was the taste of brine in her mouth.
As always, the last sense to give way to ‘the Sight’ was, ironically, her vision. The simple image of the locked door that had superimposed its self upon whatever Miranda looked at in the real world suddenly became the only real thing before her. It blocked everything else out. Then the door disappeared, leaving Miranda in a total darkness that her inner, third eye adjusted to.
The terrified woman could see that she was in an enormous chamber of some kind. But it was wrong. Everything all around her was wrong. The shape of the huge columns that held up the vaulted ceiling confused her. They wavered and moved and yet remained as still as the green stone they were carved from. All the angles of the room hurt her brain when she looked at them for too long. The shadows slithered in the corner of her third eye, but remained motionless when she turned her full attention to them. Everything here was blurry and without focus, and yet so sharp that it cut into her vision like knives, causing her pain.
So enthralled with the logic-defying sights that played within her mind, Miranda didn’t notice that the sounds of the crashing waves were gone and everything was now silent. That is, until she heard something heavy shift behind her in this psychic, and all too real, nightmare.
Overwhelmed by her gift, Miranda turned her mind’s eye toward the source of the sound, even as a familiar, but now faint, voice inside her head screamed at her: Don’t look! Don’t look! Don’t look!
She looked anyway.
It was sprawled out upon an enormous altar-like stone as high as a two story building and so long that it trailed away into darkness without ending. Miranda’s third eye recoiled at the sight of it, even though she couldn’t see a complete picture of the thing that stirred before her because her brain could not process the impossible images fast enough. What she got were sensory glimpses at best, like a camera flashing in a dark room, but even those brief flashes were almost more than her screaming mind could handle.
She felt its ponderous, flabby flesh press in against her and smelled the rot of countless ages wafting out of it and saw huge, membranous wings twitch in a restless, dreaming slumber. She heard an errant claw longer than any three men gouge the ancient stone it rested upon as the creature’s hand curled into a gigantic fist. And, dear god, there were so many tentacles. But the worst part was when a huge baleful eye opened, rolled in its diseased socket, and focused on her. The horrible thing not only saw her, but it saw through her, into her mind, into her very soul. Miranda’s gift was less than a wan shadow of the power this thing commanded while still partially locked in an ages-long death-dream. Then a whisper of rumbling thunder rose in her head as the massive monstrosity called out…
Pfft. Crack!
Those two little sounds were what freed Miranda from the awful vision that had gripped her mind. The first was a soft sound, like a thick book being shut too hard, but it was the sound of a silenced pistol firing. The crack was the table splintering as a piece of lead, nine millimeters in diameter, broke through it from below before plowing into Miranda’s abdomen just inches below her pounding heart.
Miranda looked down and saw the blood welling out of her that turned her blue dress a darker shade, but she was none the less relieved. Then she looked up at Raymond Silver who sat across from her. One of his hands was below the table, the other rested on its top. Gone were his expressions of fear, bewilderment, and embarrassment. His tanned face was no longer handsome; it was now a mask of cold detachment.
“The locked door,” that was all Miranda could think to say.
“What about it, Ms. Theroux?” the cold man asked.
“It…it is opening…soon.”
A smile touched Raymond’s lips as he pulled his hand out from under the table and pointed the automatic pistol at her face. “Yes, I know.”
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
#
Outside Miranda’s apartment building, and three blocks distant, Raymond Silver sat on a bus stop bench and waited. In one coat pocket was his pistol, in the other his bracelet. The briefcase at his feet was stuffed with Miranda Theroux’s Blu-ray player, iPad, her cheap jewelry, and a pair of silver picture frames. Raymond was checking his Rolex when a police car pulled up to the curb in front of him.
It was actually a limousine, but inside was the Chief of Police.
Raymond stood, opened a rear door, and looked inside at the two men within before stepping inside. “Brothers.” He said.
“Brother.” They both answered as the TV anchorman sat down across from them.
Inside, the Deputy Mayor handed Raymond a snifter of brandy as the Police Chief asked; “So how did it go?”
“Good. And yours?”
“Mine kept seeing ‘danger from the west’ and that I should avoid the water but nothing more than that.” The policeman said as he took a sip of his own brandy.
“Did you take care of him?” Raymond asked.
“Sure did. We can’t be too careful this time.”
“And yours, Andy?”
“Well, I didn’t kill him if that’s what you mean,” the politician said, “I think he can wait. All I saw out of him was a change in his color scheme. Instead of painting mostly in blacks and reds as he did before, he has recently been using a lot of blues and greens. But he’s still doing abstract stuff. He hasn’t painted any seascapes or anything more obvious, so I think we should just watch him for now.”
“That’s fine”
“And you, Silver,” began Police Chief Westmore, “how about that sexy little dark-haired gal you saw tonight?”
“Oh yes, she was genuine, and she was very good, too. She bought my ‘lost girlfriend’ story completely, but she still had a real reaction to my family’s bracelet.”
“So how’d you do her?” the elderly cop asked with his typical heavy-handed innuendo.
“The usual: a robbery murder.”
“Hmmm, myself, I would have done a rape murder with that one.”
“That’s the forth robbery murder this month,” the Deputy Mayor said, “and that’s not counting what Snyder and his group does tonight.”
The Chief sighed, “So?”
“No, Andy’s right,” Raymond said, “I think the next couple should be suicides, accidents, or health related. Like you said, we can’t be too careful this time. Not when we are so close.”
“Cthulhu fhtagn!” the deputy Mayor added.
“Cthulhu fhtagn!” the other two replied in unison, and that ended the conversation because there was no arguing with it. This time the Grand Event was real, everyone in the Order could feel it. This wasn’t going to be another near miss like back in 1925, and this time there weren’t going to be any ‘sensitive’ people around to warn the world. In the twenties, the world was simple and isolated; today it was anything but. The Order couldn’t risk the off chance that a government would believe the raving artists and clairvoyants and send a fleet to await the rising of R’lyeh. So right now, all across the globe, the faithful were spreading out, finding those who had no right receiving the sacred Call, and doing away with them before the alarm could be sounded.
This time everything was going to be right. The place, the time, the people.
Even the stars.
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Interview with Brian M. Sammons
Tell us your latest news?
An anthology I co-edited with author David Conyers just came out called Undead & Unbound. As the title suggests, it is all about creatures that mock death and doing new things with them. So while you will find vampires, zombie
s, and ghosts in the book, they won’t be the same old clichéd things that have been doing over the years. There are also many other rarer and less identifiable undead horrors lurking in these pages. So if you like fiends from beyond the grave, you’ll get a kick out of this book.
Later this month a second anthology I co-edited, this one with author Glynn Barrass, called Eldritch Chrome, will be released. That book combines the worlds of cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror and it’s a ton of fun.
When and why did you begin writing?
I have always been a story teller. As a kid, long before I started writing, I made up stories to entertain my friends. That led to running role playing games for them like Dungeons & Dragons. There I could continue to make up tales and have my friends interact with them. That led to my first bit of writing, a book of adventures called Secrets for the horror role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu. That spawned more game writing, me starting to do reviews of books, movies, video games, and anything else related to the genre, and then after a few years, doing short fiction. I have since wrote one novella and am now working on a novel.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
The first time I got paid for it. Seriously, anyone who writes can call themselves a writer, and that’s fine. However, having someone like and believe in your work enough to give you their cold, hard cash for the right to publish it and bring it out for the whole world to see, well to me that’s when you are officially a writer.
What inspired you to write your first book?
My first book was a collection of scenarios (i.e. adventures or short stories) for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. I decided to do that first because (A) I was a fan of the game and of the work that inspired it. Namely the horror and weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and others that wrote what is commonly known as “Cthulhu Mythos” fiction. Such authors as Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and many more. (B) I knew the game and I was comfortable with the rules, so I knew I could pull it off well. (C) I’m a big believer in going with what you know when you start out, and since I knew both the game and the fiction behind it, it seemed like a good place to start. (D) I contacted the publisher, Chaosium, asked if they wanted me to do something for them, and they said yes. I think that last one was the biggest bit of inspiration for me.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 6
