The Zenobar rewarded the operator of the lens with views of many different worlds. Scenes of unimaginable beauty and terror would be shown. This was why Edward Crane developed the reputation as a rake. This explained the beautiful women that Uncle Ephraim always had with him. The image of the women was the price for cosmic wonder.
This explained Ephraim’s interest in her mother. He had wanted her to pose for his aliens. She had refused when she saw the Zenobar. She had gone into shock and fled his house. Emily watched her running into the night. Emily began to track her mother. The more of herself she showed the Zenobar the more the lens would show her. Emily watched her own birth. In her diary she speculates that the shock of having seen the Zenobar had affected her mother’s pregnancy. With the aid of the glass from Leng, she relived her father’s disgust at her ugly mewling form. She saw Ephraim trying to get William involved with the lovely Suzie Reiman. Suzie was not only startlingly attractive, but very gifted with the amulet. She could make the lens show truly amazing things. She watched her father pimping out this girl to alien powers and falling deeper into a pit of alcoholism and drug abuse. She saw Suzie watching the lens one night and seeing something so horrible that she cut her own throat.
She saw Ephraim and her father digging up Suzie’s coffin to steal back the amulet.
More and more skulls were carried to the hill every time she saw it. The skulls were buried in the greenish earth so that lidless eyes could watch her. There are pages and pages of diagrams where Emily slowly works out that the glass from Leng magnified her. When she lay naked before the Zenobar, she must have taken up half the sky of Golgotha.
The mobile Zenobar wanted her to become more beautiful. They placed images in her mind of what they wanted her to become. At first she balked, and then the glass stopped working. She found that she had grown addicted to the scenes of other worlds. She had no love of the human world; she lived only for the cosmic. When she agreed to be receptive to their images, she communicated to them that she could not become attractive, but they gave her instructions—instructions that she later passed on to the plastic surgeons of Boston. She explained that she lacked the funds for the change, and the glass showed Albert Rieman molesting his twelve-year-old daughter. Emily made pictures and then visited Albert’s bank; and afterward money was never a problem. Emily’s newfound beauty did distract for a while. She loved the attention of rich, good-looking men. Mom, dad, grandmother had never loved her. She was not popular nor rich in Savannah.
She dreamed of simply smashing the window. Once she even bought a sledgehammer for this purpose. But that night her diary only records, “Saw the dance of the flame vampires.”
Emily tried to reintegrate herself into human society, but she could never resist the temptation of using the rose window to show her the dark secrets of the men who adored her. At twenty-five Emily found that she could not stand the human race. She began to find that the horrible form of the Zenobar no longer horrified her. She began to see other scenes from their world—the Temple of Daoloth, a canyon deeper than the Marinara Trench, the sculpting of giant bonsai that took thousands of years. As long as she showed herself to the living skulls there seemed no limit to the wonders of the cosmos that could be hers. She felt that she must be a living goddess. She grew better at sensing the thoughts of the mobile Zenobar: she could not gain an impression from the living brains in the skulls, however. She guessed that their life force had lessened, that they could no longer animate their large bodies. She began to love them. She thought of them constantly as they slowly died on the hill; she was their last image. Toward the end of her life Emily would spend as long as possible showing herself to them. She writes that she had found peace. Unlike her mother, who had been consumed with guilt at Emily’s ugly little body (Momma always blamed herself for Emily’s disfigurement, but the Zenobar must love her). Unlike Daddy who drank himself to death rather than look at his helpless crying daughter, but the Zenobar adored her.
She wanted to cross the gulf that separated her from the Zenobar world. She used the lens to follow the life of Edward Crane and her uncle and the inhabitant of the cold Asian plateau where the glass had first landed as a meteorite, but she could find no rite that would allow her to go to her worshippers. She knew there must be an enchantment that would turn the glass into a doorway; why else would have the Zenobar have sent the glass across the dark light years to Earth?
Eventually she observed Edward Crane near the end of his days. He traced an angular sigil with blood-red chalk on the floor of the very room she lay in. The sigil somehow gave him a higher sense of connection with the lens and the beings on the other side. After many tries she was able to trace the figure and get some results. At this point she had been exposing herself—a naked altar of her own divinity to the living brains of Zenobar—for four earthly years. Her romantic notions of the Zenobar began to evaporate. Yes, they did spend thousands of years sculpting slow-growing trees. Yes, they spent countless hours worshipping their god Daoloth. But their main occupation was ritualized warfare. The teams (?), gangs (?), sects (?) had fought one another longer than humans had lived on this globe.
Exactly how Emily discovered these things is not clearly spelled out, but it seems that she was growing in her ability to connect with their minds.
After the wars the heads of wounded warriors were gathered and treated with a preservative that allowed their brains to exist for decades without nourishment or sleep. Their eyelids were removed so they could watch the sky without pause. The winning warriors brought their living trophies to Golgotha to watch the sky.
They were not watching a living goddess who loved them.
They were staring at the most horrible demon they could imagine. Her. The living ones had her sculpt herself into curved symmetries that had been designed by their most vicious shamans to cause the most pain, fear, and loathing. The living skulls were in Hell, and she was It.
Ephraim had known, and he found it funny.
Emily recorded this. The only place in the cosmos that she had ever felt true love from had no love for her at all. The telepathically gifted Suzie Reiman had known it in weeks. Emily chose the same death as Suzie. Her last diary entry begged whoever found her hateful body to burn it and scatter the ashes.
I don’t know if her death caused the earthquake. I suspect the relief of the thousands of living skulls on the Zenobar world may have had some effect, some cosmic lessening of total pain. We gathered up pieces of the glass. We agreed to destroy the books, we burned down the house and the sheriff said he burned the diary after we had read it. I imagine I am not the only one who copied down the four lines from the diary. I imagine that I am not the only one who has said them over the shards.
Once they glowed for me, and I found myself promising a god, whom I had come not to believe in, that I would only look for the wonders of the universe and not at teenage girls showering next door. I am a weak old man and I knew it was a lie. Some nights I think of Emily’s lovely face. She was a Helen, a Mona Lisa, a Nefertiti. I should count myself lucky to have seen such a face—what are the chances of that in a little town like Kingsport? But sometimes I feel something, maybe some eldritch vibration coming from a plastic garbage can full of pink glass in my garage, and I hate her and fear her.
What is the human race and
why
are we that some other intelligence would hurl a fireball at us just to look at our ugliness? What is the cosmos if we are its horrors?
(
For Matt Cardin
)
A Ship Afar
The
Yankee Rose
is seen, approaching port;
it merits a notice in the
Kingsport Chronicle
.
The terrible old man smiles his snaggle-toothed smile.
His ship is coming in.
He meets it at the rotted dock,
and sees to the unloading of its shuddersome cargo
blackened skulls of Tcho-Tcho priests,
a glass or two from Leng,
Curiosities from the city of the pyramids.
He sells these rare wares
to the most innocent of shops.
They wait
in dusty drawers and neglected niches.
Till fresh eyes see their evil beauty
and the
Yankee Rose
sails again
into an unearthly fog.
Looking Glass
The call came at 13:30. The Los Angeles air was 90+ degrees. The neighbors had reported a smell from unit 3-C. Detective Sergeant Blick knew the smell of a human body ripened by summer heat. He’d worked a case in the drought of ’04, an old man cooked at 113 degrees. Kept his doors closed, windows bolted, no city evil could sneak in. The coroner said the man had lain there for twenty days; when Blick found him, his limbs stirred faintly with the burgeoning life within. Crows like to look at corpses because of the million lights moving in the dark. Fireworms on coals.
Blick was not a crow. If possible, he would have walked away from the Phoenician Arms. Or have waited till twilight and the end of his shift, when the stench would be less. But being a policeman was largely a liquid affair; you poured from mold to mold that the public held up for you. Here, the neighbors were indignant, the young couple in 3-C must be keeping a dog locked up while they vacationed. Vacation? No one had seen the Tenniels for a week, so they must be on vacation. No one in the city knows how common death is here. They believe in the American way of death, hospital-clean and safely isolated.
Blick took their statements. The complaints looked startling, black felt tip in the L.A. sun. The neighbors wanted to follow Blick up the stairs. Blick said no. Regulations. Since he could smell them on the first floor, the bodies must be near liquefaction. God, no wonder people were complaining.
The door was hard to open, with heat and swelling. Blick noted first the graffiti, second the bodies, then the machinery. Blick would see this scene forever; he turned back on the balcony. Two thin ribbons of his black vomit splattered three stories down. The apartment was two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, full bath. Two operating tables lay in the living room. On each was a body connected to a servo mechanism. From each head, like a magician’s crown, was a variety of metal arms. Each arm was capped with a scalpel, a saw, or a waldo. All were blood-stained. The control wires snaked into the shaven heads of the dead couple. The autopsy would later show that each unit performed a laser tonsure and guided the wires directly on the raw nerves. The neurosurgery involved would be characterized as “centuries beyond our time.”
Not only would the brains handle twenty new complex limbs, the organic cores would process sensory data from a variety of remotes placed over their bodies, bringing biologic news from the war zone.
The bodies were cut in several places. Certain organs were removed, whether wholly or partially was impossible to say due to the advanced state of putrefaction. Externally missing were the eyes and genitals. Internally, the woman’s womb, and the liver, hypothalamus, and pineal gland belonging to both sexes. How they survived such surgery without anesthesia puzzled the medical savants. Blick was puzzled by their faces: although deformed by decay and heat, they were young and healthy. The Tenniels had died with expressions of ecstasy.
Painted on the ceiling above them was Ouroborus, the worm that swallows its own tail.
The investigation was carried out quietly. The Tenniels had no next of kin or, if so, none could be found. In fact, they had very little personal history at all. Charles paid each month’s rent in cash. He left each morning at 8:00 by taxi. The cab company was able to place him: he always rode to the UCLA library.
He had no library card—never checked out anything. Blick went to the librarians with a sketch by the police artist (no pictures of Charles). Charles had spent most of his time perusing math texts, René Thom and Rudy Rucker in particular.
His occasional visits to the rare book room had left an impression. The stout, white-haired matron with the keys described him as a “creep.” Blick assumed his choice of reading earned him the epithet. Charles made no impression on most people. The man moved in a fog of his own making; his neighbors couldn’t totally agree on basics like height or hair color, his three years’ residence notwithstanding. Blick re-created a picture of Charles from memories of Aunt Sadie’s house. Sadie’s bay window glass had warped. Men in the distorted glass shifted, deformed into bizarre topological fantasies. When Blick was a small boy, he’d thought it was the nature of the outside of Sadie’s house that warped the old men walking their dogs. It was many, many years before he would play in Sadie’s yard.
Charles had taken advantage of the Powell Library’s collection of European and Arabic works on the occult. His request lists initially covered almost all available titles. The last four months narrowed his requests to three:
De Vermis Mysteriis
by Ludvig Prinn,
Zegrembi Manuscript
(transcribed by Nicholas Zegrembi), and finally
Mysteriorum Liber Sextus et Sanctus
by Dr. John Dee. The last title quickened Blick’s interest. An avid fan of Ian Fleming, he knew the first secret agent to use the code 007 was Dr. Dee in reports to his queen. The book turned out to be a disappointment to Blick, his high school Latin being no match for Dee’s Renaissance elegance. Some of the book seemed to be written in an entirely unknown tongue.
On a Tuesday five days after he had found the bodies, the autopsy report was dumped on his desk. He arrived at work bleary-eyed and headachy and was almost detached enough as a consequence not to feel nauseated on discovering that the missing organs were found semi-digested in their stomachs. Cause of death: massive traumatic shock. Doh, there’s a surprise!