Authors: Harlan Ellison
He’s had an amazing career. Came out of nowhere. One of the biggest developers in Manhattan. Zeckendorf looks like a kid making sand castles next to Stierman. Trust him all the way. Helluva guy. Charming.
Sand in the cement. Quite a lot of sand.
Specifications cut close to the line. Quite close.
A little juice to the surveyors.
A little juice to the building commission.
A little juice to the councilmen.
Oversubsidized. Oversold. Overworked.
Trust and charm. Frank Stierman.
It was working. The wide blue eyes. The strong chin. The cavalryscout ruggedness. It was working.
Which two are patched into the Organization?
Work, mouth, work this man out of the East River where fish eat garbage.
“Okay, so we’ve got a situation here. We’ve got a contingency we never expected. The ground is settling. Okay, we’re losing the building. Maybe.
“And...”—he paused, significantly—”maybe not!”
They listened. He dredged lies from the silt of his mind. “I had half a dozen structural engineers in here today, land assayers, men who know what to do with this kind of situation. Now, I’m not going to tell you that we’re out of the woods...Jesus, we’ve got some rough sledding ahead of us. But we know there was faulty workmanship in the construction, we know the damned contractors who sank the pylons shorted us on the quality of the fill...we know we’re going to have some losses...but
we’re friends!
That counts for a lot. We’re going to have to—”
Dis stirred.
Frank Stierman, naked save for loincloth, found his back against a rock wall, found a bronze blade in his right hand, found himself staring across what had been the conference room of his office at a creature of scales and fish-gills that writhed on eight legs with a head of vapor and eyes in the vapor that burned into his own.
He screamed and threw the sword at the thing....
Seven men were staring at Frank Stierman. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew he had lost all ground. In the middle of an impassioned plea for reason and patience, he had suddenly fallen back against a wall, screamed like a madman, and lost all tonus in his face. Whatever Frank Stierman had been a moment before, now he was unreliable...perhaps insane. Seven men stared back at him, their resolve now solidified not by anger and suspicion but by the realization that they were dealing with a lunatic.
The connecting door to Stierman’s private office opened, and a woman entered.
“Frank, can I see you for a moment?”
Stierman was trembling. The creature. That head, made of...of some kind of
vapor..
.what was happening to him? “Not now, Monica. This is very important.”
“I agree, Frank.
Important.
I have to speak to you
now.
“
“Monica, I—”
“Frank, don’t make me talk here, in front of these men!”
“You’d better go on, Frank. We want to talk about all this in private for a moment, anyhow. “
“Yes. Go ahead, Stierman.”
“It’s all right. Go ahead and talk to her.”
Oh my God, dear God, it’s falling apart!
When the door was closed behind him, Stierman turned to his wife and said, “Why are you doing this to me? You know what’s at stake in there.”
“I’m getting out, Frank.”
“Don’t be a bitch!”
“I’m getting
out.
That’s the bottom line, Frank. I was served today, by the District Attorney’s office....”
“Don’t worry about a thing. I had structural engin—”
“Don’t lie to me, Frank. I know you too well.”
“I’m
not
lying.”
“I’m going to help them, Frank. They said I wouldn’t be held responsible. They know you got me to sign my name on the contracts as a dodge. I can’t go through any more of this with you, Frank. After that southern thing, I thought—”
“My God, Monica, don’t do this to me! Look, I’m begging you.”
“Stop it, Frank.”
“You’re pregnant, you’re going to have my child, how can you do this to me?”
“That’s the reason, Frank. Because I
am
pregnant, because I can’t let a child come into the world with you for its father. I’m getting out. Now, Frank. I came down to tell you, so you wouldn’t count on me when you talk to those men. Save yourself, Frank.”
She turned to go. He reached across the desk and lifted the obsidian bookend and took three steps behind her. She turned just as he raised the weight. Her eyes were cool, waiting.
He slammed the bookend across her forehead.
She stumbled back, head jerking as though struck from three different directions. Her head opened and the white ash of bone was suddenly coated with blood. She flailed back, eyes glazing, and crashed into the dark window. Then the glass bowed, gave, and she was gone, silently, into the night.
Stierman dropped the bookend. His arms came up and his hands groped out before him, shaking violently. He twitched with cold, a sudden cold that came from a place he could not name. Gone, she was gone, he was alone.
The words burned on the teakwood wall.
AH-WEGH THOGHA
He wanted to scream, but the trembling was on him, the insane twitching that he could not stop. His body was helpless in the spastic grip of the seizure. Gone, she was gone, they were in the next room, the building going down down into the earth, those words, what were those words...
“Ah-wegh thogha!” His throat had never been shaped to form those words, but it did.
Dis woke.
He hungered for his body.
Time is a plaything for the gods. It only has substance for those who use it. Men fear time and bow to it. Gods cup it and mold it and use it.
Time ceased its movement.
Dis called for his body.
From seven far lands they came with the stones. From deep within the earth two of them were brought, by creatures that did not walk. From Mecca the worshippers defiled their own temple with theft, and brought it. From across the lost snow lands of Tibet they came with yet another. Seven great religions were gutted. Seven sources of power were lost. All in the moment without time.
Came, and brought with them the seven stones of power, the body of Dis.
To the skyscraper in Manhattan.
And Dis took back what had always been his.
Within the cornerstone the black soul mote glowed and pulsed with the undying fire that lived within. The mote grew, and absorbed the cornerstone. It flowed black and strong, mighty and changing, absorbing the skyscraper as it had absorbed the bulk of Stonehenge.
The building shifted, shaped itself, and inside its growing body Frank Stierman knew a moment of madness before he was absorbed into the rock-flesh of Dis. His face, frozen in that moment of undying death, an eternity of broiling insanity through which he would gibber forever. The face of Mag, burned into the stone.
Dis came alive, and replaced his soul.
And rose, and darkness washed up again from the concrete-covered Earth that was his essence.
Above the city the bulk of Dis rose, spraddle-legged, enormous.
All this was rock. All this was flesh of his flesh. All this belonged to Dis, to be absorbed, to permit him to grow as he had never grown before.
To feed Dis.
Now
men would know why the rock god had gone to sleep.
Reality has become fantasy; fantasy has
become reality. 35 mm constructs have
more substance than your senior
congressman, but Martha Nelson is real,
no matter what you think. And the
search for your soul in a soulless world
requires special maps.
When Moby Dick awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed of kelp into a monstrous Ahab.
Crawling in stages from the soggy womb of sheets, he stumbled into the kitchen and ran water into the teapot. There was lye in the corner of each eye. He put his head under the spigot and let the cold water rush around his cheeks.
Dead bottles littered the living room. One hundred and eleven empty bottles that had contained Robitussin and Romilar-CF. He padded through the debris to the front door and opened it a crack. Daylight assaulted him. “Oh, God,” he murmured, and closed his eyes to pick up the folded newspaper from the stoop.
Once more in dusk, he opened the paper. The headline read: BOLIVIAN AMBASSADOR FOUND MURDERED, and the feature story heading column one detailed the discovery of the ambassador’s body, badly decomposed, in an abandoned refrigerator in an empty lot in Secaucus, New Jersey.
The teapot whistled.
Naked, he padded toward the kitchen; as he passed the aquarium he saw that terrible fish was still alive, and this morning whistling like a bluejay, making tiny streams of bubbles that rose to burst on the scummy surface of the water. He paused beside the tank, turned on the light and looked in through the drifting eddies of stringered algae. The fish simply would not die. It had killed off every other fish in the tank—prettier fish, friendlier fish, livelier fish, even larger and more dangerous fish—had killed them all, one by one, and eaten out the eyes. Now it swam the tank alone, ruler of its worthless domain.
He had tried to let the fish kill itself, trying every form of neglect short of outright murder by not feeding it; but the pale, worm-pink devil even thrived in the dark and filth-laden waters.
Now it sang like a bluejay. He hated the fish with a passion he could barely contain.
He sprinkled flakes from a plastic container, grinding them between thumb and forefinger as experts had advised him to do it, and watched the multi-colored granules of fish meal, roe, milt, brine shrimp, day-fly eggs, oatflour and egg yolk ride on the surface for a moment before the detestable fish-face came snapping to the top to suck them down. He turned away, cursing and hating the fish. It would not die. Like him, it would not die.
In the kitchen, bent over the boiling water, he understood for the first time the true status of his situation. Though he was probably nowhere near the rotting outer edge of sanity, he could smell its foulness on the wind, coming in from the horizon; and like some wild animal rolling its eyes at the scent of carrion and the feeders thereon, he was being driven closer to lunacy every day, just from the smell.
He carried the teapot, a cup and two tea bags to the kitchen table and sat down. Propped open in a plastic stand used for keeping cookbooks handy while mixing ingredients, the Mayan Codex translations remained unread from the evening before. He poured the water, dangled the tea bags in the cup and tried to focus his attention. The references to Itzamna, the chief divinity of the Maya pantheon, and medicine, his chief sphere of influence, blurred. Ixtab, the goddess of suicide, seemed more apropos for this morning, this deadly terrible morning. He tried reading, but the words only went in, nothing happened to them, they didn’t sing. He sipped tea and found himself thinking of the chill, full circle of the Moon. He glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen clock. Seven forty-four.