Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Pal switched his attention to her exit, watched her nicely ample rump in her tight white slacks. He hadn’t seen a woman in eight years. But then again -- except where his former fiancée was concerned -- that fact did not register to him as a profound loss. Perhaps if he had his full memories intact, right now he would be sick with yearning for the blandly pretty med as if she were some glamorous model. Perhaps this long-unknown coffee would taste better to him. Perhaps he would feel more grateful for the security of this base, and feel more bitter at the years of his life robbed from him. But he couldn’t remember. He felt more dazed and perplexed than anything. It had only been yesterday, as far as he was concerned, that he had sat down inside the spiky urchin of the transdimensional pod.
Sexton twisted in his chair to gaze out the window that ran the length of his room, the heavy drapes drawn back to reveal it. One might have thought the glass was tinted a purplish color, but that was the color of the sky and the sea on R’lyeh. There was little more than sky and sea on R’lyeh.
He saw low humps that were a cross between small hills and large dunes, sparsely crested with long, translucent colorless grasses that bowed and rippled like rods of flexible glass in the breezes that came in off the sea. White lines of foam coursed slowly to the shore, which was a seemingly endless narrow strip of
beach under the lowering clouds of twilight, growing a darker and darker purple. The whole world seemed bruised, and the ocean like a polluted wine. The sand of the beach and of the dunes was a fine black powder which glittered when you held it in your hand, like pulverized obsidian.
Sexton could see his yellow-warm room and his own face reflected back at him, as if he were a ghost without that stared longingly, forlornly in at him. Only by looking at his face could be believe that eight years – eight long, mysteriously draining years – had transpired. He was still fit, tight –
tanned from much time, apparently, spent outside. It had been required, after all, that he be tough enough to cross over alone. His eyes were an acetylene blue in his face, which was thin-lipped and intense. He was not scarred, not wasted like some furtive, desperate mongrel (that poor dead thing humiliated, not glorified, in its starring role as Hamlet). His face had not sunken, and its lines were not deep. But his short, curly hair had been a sandy brown, eight years ago. Now, it was going silver. The nests of his eyes seemed darker. Not more sunken. Just that the shadows seemed more dense.
He had kept himself clean-shaven, apparently, he was told. He had a thin beard of whiskers
now. It was darker than his hair, and he hadn’t shaved it off since regaining consciousness, as if to compensate for the premature graying.
There was a knock on the door to the infirmary room, and Pal broke his connection to the window with a flinch. Just a split second before the knock, he had thought he saw the water far out to sea swell with a massive rising, as if a terrible bomb had gone off on the ocean floor. A new visitor let himself into the room. Pal had not met this one yet. As the stranger crossed to join him, Pal threw a quick look out the window again. Nothing had arisen; just the terrible sameness of the dreaming waves, the lapping surf.
“Mr. Sexton,” said the stranger, extending his arm. They shook hands and he dragged a chair nearer to sit more directly opposite Sexton, blocking the VT. “I’m Special Investigator John Bell.”
“Who are you with?” Pal asked.
“Colonial Security. Just recently.”
“Just recently? What were you before that?”
“Just security,” Bell said with a smile, but wouldn’t elaborate. “I’ve gone over your circumstances – such as we know of them. I realize there isn’t anything more you can tell us about your experiences that we haven’t already extracted from your memory artificially, but it’s only fair to you that we let you know our conclusions in regard to those memory scans.”
Bell, Sexton decided, did look wasted, as if something had physically drained him. He was clean-shaven, his short brown hair brushed back from his forehead, taller and thinner than Sexton. There was a melancholy to his eyes, his friendly smile, but that didn’t mean Pal trusted him. He didn’t trust any man who carried a gun, openly like Bell did or otherwise. Sometimes openly was worse. Where Pal wore white pants, white t-shirt, white sneakers as if he were a med himself, Bell wore a charcoal sports jacket over a black shirt and black pants; perhaps it was even a uniform. The gun glimmered under the flap of his jacket in a shoulder holster. Pal had taken a gun with him into the other dimension, though he hadn’t brought it out with him, they’d said.
“What do you consciously remember of the eight years you were lost?” John Bell asked. “And I’ll tell you how your interpretation compares to the dry facts your brain recorded through your eyes.”
“There isn’t much...like I told the doctors. The researchers. Just scraps, shreds. It’s like...someone dug out all the tiles in the mosaic, and only left a little grout.”
Bell nodded knowingly, which already told Pal that they hadn’t salvaged much more than that, either.
“It isn’t a matter of me forgetting. It’s gone. Irretrievable. Erased or lifted away.”
“Do you feel...is it your opinion, or your – I don’t know, intuition – that this erasure was due to the process of dimensional travel? Or...”
“No,” Pal Sexton cut in. “No. They did something to me. I can’t remember it. But I know it. I know it in my eyelashes, in my fingernails. In every cell of my body.”
“Again...just what exactly do you remember?”
Pal looked again out the window, and night had already fallen. So quickly? Time was alien to him now...
The great darkness of the window unnerved him. For all he could see out there, the base might be resting on the floor of the ocean. Before he continued, he rose from his chair, crossed the room, and activated the button that drew the heavy curtains closed.
-2-
Inside the great hangar with its high, semi-circular ceiling, the pod hung suspended from two black intersecting arches, like some thorny black fruit from a branch. Outside, a strong wind had picked up, spraying a fine mist of black grit against the skin of the hangar in howls and rasping hisses.
Pal Sexton wore a bulky black life support suit that nearly doubled his width, its helmet now being fixed in place by two young techs. The insect-like helmet bulged and bristled with cameras, scanners, sensors. They knew the atmosphere of that other dimension to which he would cross could support human life, but still felt it was wise not to take chances, to insulate Sexton as much as possible from direct exposure, unbuffered contact.
Sexton had been to other dimensions before – to the world of the beetle-like race of Coleopteroids, to that of the roughly humanoid Antse and the boneless, putty-like L’lewed. These races had congress with Earth and its colonized worlds. But it was possible that the number of dimensions yet to be explored rivaled even the number of planets that might support life. Perhaps, some said, even far exceeded that number. Due to one anomaly or other, there were places where the membranes between dimensions became thin. It was easier to tear through them at these points. One such point had been discovered on the otherwise largely unremarkable planet R’lyeh – mostly sea, and the life in those seas of primeval development.
But he was jittery about today’s excursion. This was the first time a live subject would have passed into this other plane. Probes and robots had returned successfully, with little to tell. The atmosphere was breathable, the temperature bearably cool. Vids showed that for all intents and purposes, it was a twin of the planet R’lyeh...but without the extensive research complex that had been completed only six months ago.
Pal mounted a few steps to the pod, and was settled inside with the aid of those same two techs. They then withdrew, as did the steps, and the spiny pod hung suspended with the researcher/explorer Pal Sexton sealed inside it. As if within a chrysalis, waiting to be born into a new world.
Inside, he checked his umbilical coupling, to be certain it was tight. He knew it would be; it was only a nervous mannerism. A long umbilical cord would keep him connected to the pod’s interior at all times during this first expedition. He would venture no farther than its utmost reach.
Inside his helmet – almost a cockpit it was so large – he lifted his eyes to several small monitor screens. One showed him the external view of the transdimensional pod from the perspective of his colleagues in the control center. He heard a synthesized woman’s voice too placidly begin a countdown. He swallowed a wedge of saliva, and saw the pod on that monitor screen begin to cloud and blur black...
“And that’s the last thing I remember,” said Pal Sexton to Special Investigator John Bell, in the infirmary of that same research installation, eight years later.
“The last thing you clearly remember, until they found you back here on R’lyeh,” Bell said. “Walking out of the sea.”
“Yes,” Pal murmured. “Walking naked out of the sea. No pod found. No life suit. No memory.”
“But you do recall some scraps between.”
“They may only be dreams...”
“Tell me,” Bell persisted softly.
Pal averted his gaze, resettled himself in his chair, as if he were to disclose some particularly embarrassing erotic fantasy. “It has to be only a dream. I don’t see why they would let me remember this. Unless...it was so – horrible – that it was the hardest thing to erase...”
“Yes?” said Bell. He wasn’t going to let him out of it.
“Well, you’ve seen the dream, no doubt, in the scans they’ve taken. That huge, unbelievable animal, coming out of the sea...”
“Describe it.”
Pal rushed along with it then, just to get it out. “Gigantic. It’s against the laws of physics that an organism could be so large without crushing itself...it isn’t biologically practical, considering the amount of fuel it would require. It goes against the square cube law, all right?”
“So it’s broken the law,” Bell said, more sternly now. “Tell...”
“I am!” Pal snapped, his eyes jumping fiercely back to the other’s. “It was mostly submerged. Maybe...maybe a liquid medium helps support its mass. What I saw was a grayish color. Smooth, slick...but it looked like there were rough patches, crusted, like huge colonies of barnacles or maybe diseased flesh. I saw what looked like the shoulders or upper portions of front limbs, but no extremities broke the surface. On its back were a couple pairs of small fins, I guess...small for
it
. And there was one pair of fins that were just titanic...they were ribbed like a swordfish’s sail. Black.” He paused. “They might have been wings...”
“And the head?”
“Rounded. No eyes. No ears. Nothing but a thick cluster of tentacles up front around where a face should have been, about half-way down the head. They were a metallic silver color, with black patches that became stripes toward the ends. They were...they were squirming in the air. Like worms. Alive. Like they were all seeing. Seeing
me
...”
Sexton turned away, his hands gripping the armrests of his chair, as if he feared an unseen vortex in the room would suddenly tear him from his seat.
“And where were you, when you saw it?”
“In the water. In the sea. Out in the middle of the sea, with no land in sight. Treading water. Cold...very, very cold...”
“How did you get out there?”
“I don’t know how or why. They must have left me there...”
“Who are ‘they’, you keep referring to?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they look like?”
“I can’t see them. But I know they were there. I told you. I can remember it in my skin. I think...”
Pal heard Bell’s own chair squeak as he leaned closer to him. “Yes?”
“I think they serve him, and worship him. They’re like his children, I think...”
“And who is this ‘him’?”
“The creature. I can hear its name in my head, I think, but I’m not sure if I can
pronounce...”
“Cthulhu,” said John Bell.
Pal Sexton whirled to stare at him. “Did you get that from my scan? From the dream?”
“It isn’t a dream, Mr. Sexton. That’s what I came to tell you. The scans can differentiate between what you actually physically saw, and what you might hallucinate, dream or imagine. The animal or being you just described is real. What you saw...it really happened that way.”
Several empty seconds. “And you know something about it.”
“A little. That’s why I’m here.”
If it were possible, the scientist grew more intense, his emotions as compacted as the stuff of a collapsed star. “I see a lot of military people on the base since I’ve come back, Mr. Bell. Tell me you aren’t here to try to use that thing as a weapon. To find ways of releasing it at a given target point...”
“Hell no,” Bell said, glancing at a wall clock as he rose to his feet. “I wouldn’t be a part of that.”
“What’s the military presence for, then?”
“What do you think, Pal? To make sure that thing never does come through to this dimension, or any other. Because that’s what it wants. Some day we might know enough about it to send a weapon through, to kill it. But we can’t risk that now. We can’t risk tearing the hole wider. We can’t risk making that thing angry. Some day we might learn how to mend the veil. But for right now, we’re just here to learn. And to be on guard.” Bell moved to the door. “I have another meeting now, with Dr. Locklin. But we’ll talk again.”