Résumé With Monsters (19 page)

THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

"That don't apply to Satan's Spawn," F.F. said. "Good try, though."

The room exploded.

Even knowing what was coming, the sound made the time-transported Philip jump, as though his soul might bang the roof of his mind.

The fat man's head flew back, spraying blood, hair, skull fragments.

Someone shoved past Philip to stand over the sprawled form of Flatulent Freddie. The uniformed man looked down at the corpse and spoke.

"Son of a bitch," the man said. "Thought you'd make me look bad, did you? Look who is looking bad now."

Hal Ketch turned and grinned at Philip. He blew on the end of his revolver, winked. "Guess he thought I was beating off in the furnace room."

Ketch put his gun back in his holster and walked over to Philip. He put an arm around Philip's shoulder. "Let's get out of here," he said.

In the hall, he leaned into Philip. "Look in my eyes," he said. Although Philip could not feel or smell, he knew that their noses were touching, and that the security guard's breath smelled of Listerine. He remembered.

"What do you see?" Hal Ketch asked.

I DON'T KNOW.

"What you see is a man who wants things to run smoothly. A man who was hired to do that, and who is doing it. Smoothly. This incident is closed. This incident didn't happen. You don't even talk about this to your girlfriend. You don't say, just making conversation, 'Guess who got his head shot off today?' You don't do it because you don't want anything to happen to her. Do you understand all that?"

Philip understood.

#

Whup
. Lily Metcalf and Philip were outside, walking on the grounds. The sky was bright. A cool breeze rippled the leaves of the live oaks. The light under the trees skittered like a school of fish being chummed.

"You saw this mail clerk get killed, and you couldn't tell Amelia. That created a strain in the relationship."

"That was certainly part of it."

Lily came to a concrete bench and sat down.

"Well, that would be enough, I would think. What else?"

"Amelia really hated my novel."

#

Whup
. Amelia's voice called down the hall. "Philip. Philip. What are you doing? Come to bed."

JUST A MINUTE, HONEY. I'M FINISHING THIS CHAPTER.

Philip watched the green letters appear, glowing, on the computer screen.

Thank you, God, for inventing the word processor during my lifetime. I know you might have used the same time to alleviate poverty, or end war and disease, but I personally applaud your priorities here. I am, after all, a writer. Thank you.

They were living together now, the both of them working long hours at MicroMeg, and time away from the office was at a premium.

The letters formed words, the words, a paragraph:

A kind of green-grayish mold dripped from the walls and covered all the furniture, like kudzu on a hillside.

Professor
Rodgen
swung his flashlight in a slow arc. A damp, dismal miasma choked him.

"There!" Weaver exclaimed.

Something shaped vaguely like a man sat at the gray, feathered desk. What were once hands floated upward, shielding the hollows where eyes might lie from the glare of the flashlight.

"Approach no further," the creature said, each word laboriously expelled as though breaking flesh and tooth and bone in its effort to come free from the rotting body.

"If you value your sanity, professor, come no closer. We were colleagues once. I was your intellectual superior, and I outran you, and this is the prize I won."

Something in the ruined voice was familiar. Professor
Rodgen
, with misgivings, edged forward.

“Dr.
Armitridge
? Is that you?"

Amelia came up behind Philip and put her arms around his neck. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

"Come to bed, Philip," she said.

FIVE MINUTES, he said. He reached back and touched her shoulder.

"Right now. I know your five minutes," she said.

OKAY. I'M COMING.

He saved what he had written, exited the program, turned the monitor off.

Philip watched their lovemaking which took place in the country of fatigue amid the small, tiny betrayals of living together and the slow, crafted affection of their daily intertwining.

And the sadness assailed him again.

5.

Amelia woke him in the morning, and he had a moment of disorientation when he saw her there, dressed in her tan suit, poised for workday battle. "Why didn't you wake me?" he muttered. Amelia always arose without an alarm clock, took the first shower, and then woke him. They drove to work together, although their jobs had

diverged and they no longer worked on the same floor of MicroMeg.

He came fully out of sleep and saw the room, its fraudulent brightness, its air of brief, transitory inhabitation by this Philip
Kenan
and his small store of identity-confirming possessions: the books, the Cezanne poster, the picture of Amelia feeding seagulls at the beach.

"I apologize for waking you up," she said. "Last night when I went by your place to get your mail, there was this. It's from your agent. I figured you'd want to see it." Amelia extended her hand with the bulky envelope. "I thought I would swing by here before going to work. I didn't know what time I'd be getting off work."

"Thank you," Philip said. He felt sleepy and at a disadvantage, a middle-aged man awakened in a psych ward by his ex-girlfriend. He had become what
Lovecraft
would call a "decayed" member of the
Kenan
tribe, his hair sticking out in unfortunate clumps, his face in the mirror pale and slack-jawed and stupefied, like a drugged killer rousted out of sleep by the cops.

"Agent?" he said, blinking at the letter. He said it much the way a muddled felon might have said, "Murder?"

He read the return address, "James Pierce Literary Agency." He remembered then, surprised himself with the memory. He had written to one of the agents Wingate House had suggested when the editor there sent along the contract. "Oh yes."

He put the envelope on the end table. He smiled at Amelia.

"How's
Pelidyne
?"

Amelia smiled. "Busy. Really crazy. I've been

working a lot of overtime."

#

Whup
. An entirely different set of colored pencils were used to chart overtime on the mandatory TAT form.

Overtime was charted with the complement of the color used to chart normal time. Should one forget the color scheme for overtime, a simple look at a color wheel could set one straight (provided, of course, that one could remember the regular scheme). It was a bit complicated at first, but it was ingenious.

Philip sat on the low bed and colored in three TAT forms. He'd gotten behind. He had been working a lot of overtime recently. So much so that he had adopted the Quality Domicile incentive program, spending his nights in one of the minimal converted living quarters which constituted the entire fourteenth floor and part of the fifteenth and sixteenth.

Amelia had also been closeted in the building for the last couple of weeks. Philip had not seen her, although he had talked to her on the phone. The fourteenth floor was a male dorm, closed to women.

A memo stated that this sexual segregation was an "efficiency" measure, although what that meant was unclear. In practice, it meant that Ray Barnstable could walk nude down the halls to the showers. And if that was efficiency—a view of Barnstable's hairy, pocked butt—then inefficiency, chaos itself, had much to recommend it.

Each room was supplied with a computer, and Philip had brought a disk with the last chapter of his novel. He worked on it for awhile.

When he tried to save the disk, the screen uttered a green error message:
DISK FULL.

SHIT.

Just save it to the hard disk
, Philip urged his younger self.

At the time it had seemed critical that he find a blank disk. Why? A foolish question. As Philip was learning, bad decisions never made sense in retrospect.

He went into the hall.

Some kind of
tarlike
residue covered the carpet. He entered the elevator where the usual reek of strong cleaning agents was dominated, that night, by something dark and fetid, a stink of slaughtered animals and stagnant tidal pools.

Philip did not
reexperience
the odors, but they had been so strong that his memory conjured them instantly.

Don't you smell that? Aren't you just a little bit concerned with the
goddam
originator of that stink?

The fifth floor, where Philip worked, was locked. The elevator doors refused to open, and he had forgotten to bring his access card with him. SHIT.

That's when he had rolled his eyes upward. Philip watched again as this action of petition or dismay brought the lurid graffiti into focus. On the elevator's ceiling, someone had spray painted a purple scrawl, the jagged script reading,
e'yaya
ngh'aaaaa
YOG-SOTHOTH!

Yog-Sothoth
, the accursed gate-keeper, the one who would usher in the Old Ones, the blight from black Space and Time.

Philip experienced the same sharp fear that had occurred when he first saw the writing. But then he had been able to allay the fear with reason. Some practical joker, no doubt. Someone who was aware of Philip's fascination with
Lovecraft
.

Now reason could not quell the fear, for Philip had been here before, and he knew what lay ahead.

Back to the fourteenth floor
, he urged.

But he did not heed himself. He stepped out into the basement.

The lights in the hallway were flickering wickedly, accompanied by a dull hum and something else, the rolling liturgical sound of voices speaking in unison.

Had he recognized the sound as voices then, or only now, knowing what was to come?

He followed the voices, past a room of coiled wires and large, steel barrels and blind computer screens and the peeled nervous systems of unidentifiable electronic components, and past glass-enclosed banks of white computers. The hall was long, and—a trick of perspective— seemed to narrow as it stretched in front of him. He had been in the basement before, of course— and didn't he know that bad things happened in the basement?—but none of what he saw seemed familiar. The walls were speckled, a gray and black reticulation that suggested those optical illusions that appeared three dimensional if stared at long enough. From the corner of his eye, he sensed motion and sudden pockets of swirling translucency.

He passed another bank of glassed-in computers. These computers were black and showed signs of corrosion and disuse, as though they had been repaired endlessly and in a slipshod, expedient way. The massive machines rested in a tangled sea of cable and rubber tubing. A junkyard for old technology, Philip thought, but myriad small lights, green and blue and red, flickered, and tire-sized wheels whirred, transporting tape. The machines were running.

On-line to the Other World
, he thought.

Then he was moving away from the sound. He stopped, turned back.

He tried a black, unmarked door, and it opened to reveal a descending flight of concrete steps—a basement beneath the basement. The sound rose up, a mournful chant, conjuring the horror of forbidden rituals in the dark— implacable, cruel deeds that shunned the light.