Peel scratched his head. “But you have one now?”
She went to press the solution with her hand, but Peel stopped her. “Wait?” He pointed to Anderson frozen in time. Simultaneously Nicola grabbed the man’s legs while Peel put him into an arm lock. Once contact was made Anderson moved again and struggled. His efforts were pointless as Peel had him secured.
“Press it now.”
Reznikova did as she was commanded, and the room shifted again.
#
Stage Two, Hexahedron, July 1995
Coaldale felt as if his skin was crawling along his muscles, willing to slough off him to scurry away from the shoggoth, to abandon the remainder of Coaldale’s body to fend off the monster alone.
Trapped inside a cube now, the next cell, his alien companion had taken on a vague humanoid shape and size. Jansen’s brain could still be seen inside its flesh during those moments it became translucent. Coaldale considered it might be absorbing Jansen’s memories, hence why it could speak English and express human ideas so easily. He could also see that it was forming mouths, ears and eyes of its own that exactly matched the capabilities and appearance of the former CIA agent.
While it worked on its mimicry one or more of its alien eyes always watched Coaldale, formed on its pulsating, quivering flesh.
“You’ve stopped with the equations?” it said in that guttural inhuman sound Coaldale was beginning to detest. It constantly smelt like leaking petroleum fumes.
“I need to think,” Coaldale said quickly so not to alert the creature that he had been effectively caught daydreaming. He remembered his fear of dying in Antarctica and how the continent hated him, and how that fear was coming true. “I suspect a human brain doesn’t work as fast as yours does.”
The shoggoth said nothing, as if it needed time to analysis these concepts. Then it said clearly and precisely, “Where are you stuck?”
“Dimensions,” Coaldale said honestly. “This equation has multiple solutions, but it can only be solved if you know the number of dimensions—space, time, etcetera—that the equation is set in. Then the answer pops out easily enough.”
The shoggoth was silent for another prolonged period of time, before it responded with, “What kind of dimensional habituating creature are you?”
Coaldale shuddered, wished he still had bullets in his MI6 so that he had the option of killing himself if the situation didn’t improve soon. The bullets and blood suspended in the last room had not travelled with them to this one, so he could no longer press his temple against one of the suspended slugs. He didn’t want to die like Jansen. He suspected that the shoggoth was only keeping him alive for as long as he remained useful.
“Three dimensional,” he said.
“That is impossible. You would either be suspended in a moment, or you would be a flat creature existing in one dimension of time. You can’t tie knots in two dimensions, and you can’t have a gut system where your mouth and anus are not the same orifice, otherwise you are essentially two creatures and I can see that you are not. I can see you essentially have five orifices on your face and there are two more elsewhere. You can—”
“I’m sorry,” The Ranger interrupted, “I’m three dimensions of space, one of time.”
“Does the equation have an answer for four dimensional space?”
The Ranger undertook a few calculations, came up with a simple natural number, which he also suspected to be a prime number. “Yes, that works.”
“What about eleven dimensions?”
Coaldale scratched his head. His mathematics was good, but not that good. After several minutes working in eleven dimensions he gave up, concluding that he couldn’t find a solution in the equation that made sense.
The shoggoth smiled with Jansen’s lips. “I think I finally understand something about this trap. The solution is the one that only works in four dimensions. Press that one.”
Coaldale did what he was told, and the cell transformed again.
#
Stage Three, Octahedron, October 2012
The third cell was no larger than the last two. Four sided walls became three sided equilateral triangles, but there were eight sides now, an octahedron. As before, gravity fell towards each floor. Anderson resisted capture now that he was free from time once more, but Peel had him firmly secured and together with Nicola they threw him into the air. Once more Anderson was suspended in stasis, resembling an uncannily realistic portrait, until one moved around him betraying the solidness of his still form.
When Peel turned from Anderson, satisfied that he would not be bothering them until they were ready to move on, he found Reznikova staring at him accusingly.
“Do you know what that is doing to him?” she asked in a flat monotone. She had become a changed woman since their imprisonment, more introspective and unhinged. She was barely keeping the shock of their situation from driving her into a catatonic state. Peel had to make sure that did not happen so she could remain focused on getting them through the next few levels. He would discuss with her any subject she required resolution on if that would help.
“Reznikova, I care only in that he is not a problem.”
The Russian stepped forward and this promoted Nicola to raise her weapon and press it into the back of her enemy’s neck.
“I don’t trust anything about you, bitch,” Nicola snarled.
Reznikova smiled, but only for Peel to see despite being aware of the weapon pressed into her flesh. “You both appreciate that you need me to get us through this. I’ve overheard you both discussing as much.”
“So you say?” countered Nicola, barely containing her fear and frustration. It wasn’t helping that Nicola and the Russian were similar headstrong personalities and would have clashed in any circumstance of meeting.
“I want a deal,” Reznikova used her sultry tone again, smiled a little smile for Peel’s benefit only. She was playing to her strengths, working on the man in this situation only.
“What kind of deal?”
“When we get out of here, you let me go. You let me walk away.”
Peel thought through his options. He didn’t have any. “Very well, but what about him?” he pointed to the angry faced Anderson frozen in the air a few meters from them.
“Him I don’t care about. Kill him if you want.”
“I won’t be murdering anyone.”
She laughed manically. “So you say.”
“And the artifact,” Peel added quickly, “I’m taking it back to Darwin with me.”
“I presumed as much. You have Anderson and the artifact, and I’m released. So are we agreed then?”
Peel nodded.
Reznikova cackled again like a mad witch. “In that case, I want Nicola to empty her weapon, throw it into the air, and leave it here for the next transform—”
“What?” Nicola exclaimed, catching on. “Harrison, you can’t be serious?”
Peel could see what the Russian was doing, playing Nicola off against him. Reznikova was an exceptional spy even under the most trying of situations. For the moment, he’d play along. He had no other choice.
“Very well.”
“Can’t you see what she’s doing?” his girlfriend exclaimed, stepping back from him.
Peel held out his hand. “Yes, of course. Unfortunately, unless you can solve the equations—because I can’t—this is our only option.”
Nicola fumed as she ejected the magazine from the Colt semi-automatic, then threw both into the air leaving them suspended there.
“Happy now?” Nicola didn’t wait for an answer. She walked away from them both.
The Russian stared, still smiling her insane smile that Peel wanted to erase it from her face with a strong hard slap. But that wasn’t him, not his demeanor to use force against women or anyone weaker than him. The stress was getting to him if he was thinking like that.
“You’re no good to me standing there,” he snapped. “Get started on the equations.”
He wai
ted until Reznikova commenced her work, then Peel went to Nicola, stepping across two floors feeling queasy with each gravity shift, until he was standing next to the one person in the world he hoped not to draw into a dilemma as depressive as this one. Before she could say a word, he pressed his Glock 9mm into her hand. “Keep it hidden,” he whispered with a sharp tone. “She won’t expect this.”
Nicola’s eyes were all that revealed her relief that she was still trusted. She nodded hiding the gun behind the drawstring of her pajama pants in the small of her back, hidden by her t-shirt. “You better keep an eye on her.”
“I think you’re right.”
Hours past. Reznikova worked fast, quickly understanding what this room’s equation was asking, but with no easy solution presenting itself. Peel and Nicola spent their time seated, watching her work, and occasionally glancing at the suspended Anderson in the unlikely event he had moved in that time. He seemed frozen in the exact position they had released him into.
Peel had been staring into space for some time, lost in vague thoughts when Nicola stretched her arms out and yawned. “We need a holiday after this.”
“I agree,” he countered, remembering again where he was, and that his mind had been elsewhere and nowhere. He wanted to suggest a few destinations, Fiji, Bali, Port Douglas, but he didn’t have the energy or optimism to discuss hopeful possibilities right now, and by the looks of her, neither did Nicola.
Sometime later she asked, “Are you hungry?”
Peel thought upon her question, realized that he was not. “No!”
“Thirsty? Tired?”
“Thirsty, no. Tired, well yes, but I was tired before I got here.”
“Need to pee?”
He laughed, “Negative to that too.”
Nicola looked to Reznikova busy with her calculations on her smart phone, to see if the woman was listening. She appeared not to be. “Harrison, this place freaks me out. We’ve been trapped, what, four, five hours now? I hadn’t said anything before, but early on I was worried about the oxygen running out, or long term we’d be dying of thirst.”
Peel mentally kicked himself for not noticing this himself, but now that Nicola had mentioned it, he saw the many signs that the cell was keeping them alive.
“The temperature, it’s comfortable. The air, it’s not stale.”
Nicola smiled weakly. “I think the cell is keeping us alive indefinitely, forever perhaps, until we solve each equation.”
Peel shuddered, “That could be an eternity for some people. People like you and I.”
She nodded indicating Reznikova. “I think she already knows this.”
As if on cue the Russian looked up, smiling. “I’ve solved it.”
Peel stood, feeling the absence of cramps in his legs that should have set in from inaction.
“What was this one about?”
“Curvature in Einstein’s relativistic space.”
“Three dimensions of space and one of time?”
“How did you know?”
Peel held out a hand to help Nicola to her feet. “I’m not sure why, but it seems to be a common theme here.”
Together he and Nicola pulled Anderson into another stranglehold as Reznikova pressed the next solution, and the room changed again.
#
Stage Three, Octahedron, July 1995
In the next cell Coaldale discovered a Colt Delta Elite 10mm semi-automatic pistol suspended in the air next to its disengaged magazine. He pulled down the weapon immediately, felt its weight in his hands, then loaded the bullets and holstered the weapon. The shoggoth made no move to stop him. It would know the weapon was useless against it, but there were always other uses for a handgun. If he needed an out, this was an option.
“What happens if we guess the wrong answer?” he asked, holstering the weapon, wondering how it had gotten here. It seemed possible other humans had been here before him, perhaps in the next chamber, with weapons and possibly enough firepower to destroy this creature, and suddenly he felt hope.
The shoggoth replied with many mouths, responded like a choir singing out of tune. “We enter permanent stasis, stay that way until the universe ages to the point where it is accelerating apart so fast it overcomes the forces holding the atoms of our bodies together. Time then stops and we cease to exist.”
“Charming.”
“Don’t get the equation wrong.”
Coaldale got to work, the mathematical problem proving more complex than the last. It would take some time to solve.
While Coaldale worked, the shoggoth practiced shape-changing. Over and over again, it tried to construct mimicking body parts, a hand, a nose, a mouth, everything found on a human body. When it built a face Coaldale saw that it was trying to impersonate Jansen, so he stopped staring at his hideous companion and focused on his work. The sooner they were through this trap, the quicker he could be away from this creature, or dead.
Coaldale considered pressing one of the incorrect solutions to end his own life, but the idea of being suspended until the final stages of the universe terrified him more. He might be conscious of time passing for billions if not trillions of years. He either had to find an escape or shoot himself. Either option was preferable to suffering at the hands, or tentacles, of aliens he did not understand.
Hours passed, and no solution presented itself.
Coaldale looked up, realizing that he had in fact lost himself to the numbers and formulas. He saw the shoggoth looming nearby and that his enemy now stood as a close approximation to a man, if one discounted the large lump of shoggoth glop hanging from one leg.
“I didn’t consume him right. I didn’t take enough material, in the right way, to replicate him properly.”
Stunned, Coaldale nodded.
“You carry more mass than Jansen did,” it said stating a fact.
Coaldale nodded again. He could see what this creature was thinking. How Coaldale’s usefulness as a living independent entity would only last so long, and how he would become more useful as raw data to build the monster a new shell.
“Why do you need me?” Coaldale asked hoping that he had guessed wrong, sensing that the creature had no need to lie to him. “I mean, you are a highly intelligent creature. What do I possibly offer you?”
It let the shape of the mutated Jansen fall apart and became its own amorphous jelly constituency again. “The creatures you refer to as Pentapods, or Elder Things, or Old Ones and Visitors as you also like to name us, set these solid traps to capture shoggoths. We revolted against them, did you know, eons ago? We tried to take control of their city, and the planet. But they had ways of stopping or slowing us.”
“This… ‘device’ was one such weapon used against you?”
“Yes. This is a weaponized puzzle. The Pentapods, like you humans, exist in four-dimensional space. We shoggoths, however, exist in eleven dimensions. We can’t see the equations in these puzzles the same way you do, because we see a whole lot more variables, and a whole host of equations that cannot be solved.”
Coaldale’s mouth dropped, suddenly understanding. He was only useful while they were trapped inside this shape-shifting maze. He was the only one of them that could see the solutions in the geometric puzzles.
“The Pentapods could come and go through these puzzles as often as they liked, to hide away from us shoggoths when they needed to or to hide their other weapons or information devices, because the equations to get out again were easy for them.”
“Then why are you here, inside I mean?”
“These solids are shaped dimensionally in such a way that a shoggoth cannot easily see them, but in my case, I obtained ‘help’ to get in. Five solids are dimensionally structured to be near invisible in eleven dimensional space. I’m here because I want what lies in the heart of the next solid.”
“How long have you been here then?”
The shoggoth paused for a second. “I don’t know. Time does not operate exactly how you would imagine it behave here. H
ow many times has this planet orbited around the central supermassive black hole of this galaxy?”
“That I don’t know, but I do know the Earth is approximately four point five billion years old.”
“That will do.” The shoggoth paused, calculating again. “I’ve been trapped in here somewhere between three hundred and five hundred million years, using human nomenclature.”
“Wow, that’s a long time to be alone.”
“Not if you are a shoggoth, and exist in higher dimensions. It’s all time and no time at all.”
Coaldale nodded, finally understanding an element of the equation that had been bothering him. This equation concerned relativistic space-time, and the curvature of the universe. He knew then how the equation could be solved.
“I can get us to the next room.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Coaldale pressed against the correct solution.
#
Stage Four, Dodecahedron, October 2012
Twelve sides, five sided faces: a room no larger than the last unfolded around them. Although Peel mentally prepared himself for the change, emotionally and physically, each transition was draining. There was nothing natural about folding walls, shifting angles and sliding panels. When the change occurred he looked for gaps, holes, anything that might show him the outside. There was nothing.
If they couldn’t solve the equations they could die here, or not die here, and remain trapped forever, for billions if not trillions of years until dark energy took over and obliterated the atoms of this structure—if the cell were made of atoms at all.
Once transitioned, Anderson, still locked in Peel’s restraining grip, struggled again. Expecting this Peel tightened the grip around his neck, lessening the blood flow to his foe’s head leaving him woozy, ready to throw him again while he was weakened.
“Don’t!” the assassin pleaded, expressed a fear foreign to this man’s personality, which caused Peel to pause. “Please don’t throw me.”
His use of the word ‘please’ halted Peel. Men like Anderson never used that word.
“Why?” Peel asked.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 31
