Unholy Dimensions (13 page)

The two techs barely seemed to glance at them; instead, they made their way stiffly to the two control boards Pal had tampered with. Pal and Juliana saw the tendrils snaking from the backs of their heads, tethering them to something horrible and mercifully out of sight. But out of view or not, it would be blocking their escape from this room.

All that remained, then, was to stop these two puppets – or inconvenience things as long as they could...however empty that gesture must obviously, finally prove. Pal picked up a chair and swung it over his head with all his strength, down on one of those trailing cables. The tech was jerked backward and fell on her rump comically, but the tendril was not dislodged and she righted herself with just a dirty look at her attacker. Pal dropped the chair. He looked around for something that could cleanly split the skull of the female tech herself.

“Pal!” Juliana shrieked, and he looked up to see a third tendril slithering into the room. Raising up into the air. Banded silvery and black...and it was inclining itself in Juliana’s direction.

It launched itself.

“No!” Pal roared, and shot his hand out, and to his own amazement, he caught the snake-like appendage in mid air, grasping it firmly. It thrashed, tried coiling around his forearm, but he did not lose his grip. He glanced at Juliana, and even in her terror she too seemed to gaze at him in wonder.

He stared back at her face. How he loved her. He had a sudden, piercing memory of her from years before. She was wearing a sweater he had bought for her as a Christmas gift. They were at an ocean – not this ocean. A blue ocean. They were in a cottage they had rented. And she sat and he stared at her face and marveled at its purity. The white of her skin was so perfect that he could not imagine it to be made up of rough links like the contrasting dark weave of the sweater. Could not imagine it to be made up of cells. It was a white wholeness, like a single cell, made from light -- glowing soft light from which her eyes beamed like black stars. And she smiled at him subtly, but he read love in it clearly, and it was the most beautiful image that had ever registered upon the sad and ephemeral jelly of any man.

But another image came to him a second later, and it carried equal force in its vividness. He saw an ocean that spread to the limits of sight in all directions, as if he hovered just above the very center of it. It was an ocean of churning red fog. The sky above it was streaked gray and yellow. And from this limitless ocean of red smoke, great black idols loomed high out of the mist. Roughly human faces, with long lobes and slanted dreaming eyes.

This image abruptly switched to another, again as shockingly vivid. He was looking up at a ceiling of stone...he was on his back...and figures leaned above him in an intent circle. They were faceless; more like plants than men. Their hands, upon him, more like fluid branches. But he felt no horror at their touch – for he himself appeared to be one of them.

Dreams. But why were dreams crowding in on him now? Why...

He saw his hand that gripped the squirming tentacle. He saw the flesh on his forearm slough away, the shed flesh reabsorbed, then shed again, in an almost liquid rippling effect. Its color became grayish. Its flesh looked less substantial...

His eyes flashed to Juliana. She saw it too.

The two techs stared at his arm as well, their eyes glassy and growing large in drugged confusion.

Juliana screamed, “Pal, Pal, what’s it doing to you?” She started toward him.

He raised his other hand to ward her off. In a soft, trembling voice he said, “It isn’t doing this to me.” And even as he said it, the tendril in his hand blackened and withered as if burnt. It dropped from his hand, and was violently extracted from the room. The two tentacles fled the heads of the wavering techs, leaving their dead husks to crumple slackly to the floor.

Pal felt the churning move up his shoulder. His neck. It flowed throughout him. Juliana saw his face begin to subtly ripple.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, and his voice caught on the start of a sob. He felt tears rise to his eyes, even as he realized they had never been eyes. He took a half step toward her. “I’m sorry, Jule. All this time I’ve been back...I thought...I was me.”

And then she screamed again, as Pal Sexton disappeared altogether.

The Changeling loomed before her, in the pool of Sexton’s clothing. Gray, plant-like, its various limbs floating in the air like coils of liquid smoke. It remembered itself now, now that it had shed its camouflage. The cloned memories had been shed with the cloned flesh. It recalled itself...and how it had come to be here.

“Pal, no, no, no!” Juliana wailed, her hands fluttering. She wanted to kill this thing that had masqueraded as her lover all along. Tricking their most delicate scans, on the most minute microscopic level.

The Changeling understood her terror, but knew that she misunderstood its origins. She took it to be a tool of the Old Ones. But that tool, the human named Pal Sexton, had been stolen by the Changeling’s kind even as the servitors of the Old Ones were returning Sexton to this plane. Pal Sexton had been intercepted. The switch had been so perfect, that even the spore of the Old Ones that had been secreted in his body were switched to this body instead. It had all occurred in the blink between that world and this world, but the exchange had taken place. The Spawn dreaming inside the Changeling had never been the wiser.

The weirdly both awkward and graceful creature turned to the windows that overlooked the hangar, and pressed its upper ring of limbs to the surface. It perceived itself reflected it that glass and was glad to know itself restored. It ignored the poor noisy human as it began to grow up and out -- its flowing, increasing
bulk at last pressing the window panel out of its frame to crash below. Then, the Changeling lowered its gray sinuous form into the arena.

-7-

Bell lay in the metal shaft with his hands clamped over his ears, imagining that at any moment his palms would become wet with blood...or with his streaming brains.

He had nearly reached the dimensional research area, by his figuring, when the uproar began. The sounds he had heard before – and had been following – paled in comparison. Those previous sounds were present in this mix, but new noises equally alien and monstrous were blended in as well, until it all became one deafening hurricane of sound.

And just when he thought the cacophony might kill him – or at least wished it would – silence.

His feet had braced against the wall of the shaft. Now they slid down. He lay there, unable to hear his own panting breath, his ears ringing. At last, he rolled back onto his hands and knees, and resumed his crawl to a vent at the end, through which he saw slats of soft blue light.

After peeking out into the hangar for several wary minutes, he finally kicked out the vent grate and emerged timidly to inspect the great, sprawled body of the dying thing.

It was gray, and immense, like the body of a whale that had been flattened or deflated, and yet still subtly pulsed and shifted. Tendrils lay torn from it, others half-ripped away. Gray shrouds of mist or smoke escaped tears in its translucent flesh. Most of the gray creature’s central body lay directly under the transdimensional pod – which still hung there suspended. Intact.

Of the offspring of Cthulhu, Bell saw only heaps like tar. Black pools. Bubbling smears. Smudges and stains, like sticky shadow. All spread about the mass of the failing gray creature.

A few other people had straggled into the room since Bell had entered. And on the far side of the hangar, he found Juliana. Her hair was badly disheveled, and her eyes were burned painfully red from tears. She looked up at him like a shell-shocked soldier, without recognition at first. But then she motioned with her arm stiffly at the dying animal.

“It was Pal,” she said softly, and with his hearing still blasted he wasn’t sure he understood her words. “Pal.”

He put his arm around her, and when he looked back to the gray mass, it no longer pulsed or shifted. Bell felt an instinctual understanding in his very cells, and a kind of awe so acute it was like a yearning ache. Its vast body, he took in at last, was five-lobed -- like the star he had painted on the door in blood. It had sacrificed itself here, he understood, where the veil had been so thin. Its very body had become a seal...

He wanted to express his gratitude to the dead thing. But how does one say a prayer over the corpse of a god?

As he stood there with his arm around Juliana, more people found their way into the room, to form a kind of reverential ring around the perimeter of the creature. And even at this moment – outside the hangar building – another person came staggering blindly, drawn to pay his respects. He trudged barefoot across the black sands, and water ran down his naked flesh.

Pal Sexton remembered nothing of the last eight years. He only remembered that he was home.

Red Glass

We
called him the Screaming Man. I don't know if he is alive or dead, though he was probably moved into Eastborough State Hospital once the old woman passed away. He may still be a patient, and I plan to find out. Find out if they've medicated him into passivity, or if he still rants and laughs. If he is an inmate, I'll visit his room. And sneak in a knife, to scrape off some of the paint on his wall...

An elderly woman lived in the small house by the head of our driveway, and she cared for several disturbed people in her home over the years, an assortment who came and went; there was a hulking huge bearded man, ever silent, who took walks in the neighborhood. I didn't care to have him trailing even distantly behind me when I walked uptown to buy a jug of milk for my parents. There was the shriveled little mummy of a woman, her face lined beyond what seemed natural, who would stand at the head of our driveway and watch me while I walked my dog in the yard. There was a youngish man with banged blond hair, who also wandered about town occasionally. One time when I entered my back hall to take my dog out, I was startled to see this man's face at the window of the outer door, staring into our back hall. He turned, upon seeing me, and trudged up the driveway back to his own home.

But the Screaming Man unnerved me most of all. Sometimes I thought that he was never let out of the house - not even out of his room. I imagined him chained by the leg to his bed. And yet, would that afflicted a soul be permitted to live with an elderly woman? Other times - and this was even more frightening, in a way - I believed he was actually that huge hulking man, so very quiet when drifting about town by day, and so bedeviled by night.

The Screaming Man's silhouette in the second floor windows was, after all, bulky. I would peek out my parent's kitchen window and watch his silhouette against the shades of his room. He would be pacing and flailing his thick arms wildly in the air. Roaring, as if in outrage, frustration...and then, other times, laughing in a way that I could only feel was calculated to disturb, unsettle his neighbors. My family, in particular, I came to believe...perhaps only out of fearful paranoia. But did he see me peeking nightly around my shade at his windows? Was he peeking around his shades at me, when his lights were out? I can still remember his abru
pt, booming, deliberate laugh - "Ha...Ha...Ha...Ha!" Each part of it unnaturally spaced out...those spaces between more chilling than the sudden, barking sound itself.

When the old woman died, the miniature sanitarium was emptied of both her belongings and her inmates. I remember my father somehow acquired a few of her things, and offered to me a pair of tacky Japanese fans. I declined them...horrified at what diseased energies might have soaked into them.

And yet, when my father told me how little the small house was going for, now it was on the market, my negative feelings toward it began to change. By this time, I lived in my own apartment across town, a sterile few rooms, depressing as a cell in themselves. My credit was good, and I was engaged, and my fiancée and I decided to take advantage of this opportunity quickly, before someone else acted on it. She was close to my family emotionally, and didn't seem to mind the prospect of being so close to them physically.

I bought the house. It would be tough, but if I could handle it alone until that June, my new wife would be living with me and adding her income to my own. Our wedding would be modest, but it was worth the sacrifice, not having to live in a slightly larger version of that sterile cell I occupied.

To save more money, we took to doing most of the renovations in the house ourselves. The simpler things, at least; some plumbing and electrical matters were beyond my abilities. But Lynn and I painted the outside of the small house, and stripped the age-darkened, water-stained wallpaper inside to paint the walls instead.

I was alone when I began to strip the wallpaper from the upstairs bedroom.

Lynn was at work that afternoon; I had called in sick with one of my frequent, agonizing headaches. But I had become restless watching TV downstairs, and thought I might at least make the day productive in some small way. And I had been relishing the thought of tearing away that room's particularly ugly paper: jagged, swirling paisley designs like an orgy of psychedelic tadpoles.

Instantly, something seemed amiss, as my blade tore through the discolored paper and seemed to skid upwards almost out of my control. The action caused my entire hand to slip under the paper as if into the belly of some beast I was flaying. I took hold of the flap of old paper, and tore a large strip of it free from the wall.