Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Beneath it, the wall had an odd character. It was dark, smooth where the blade had scraped away what little dry paste still remained. It was not plaster, beneath, but some slab of metal or glass that had been papered over many years before.
I used my tool again to dig under more of the paper, and clear more of the crumbling residue of paste. I peeled off more long strips by hand. I expected to find that the smooth slab comprised only
a limited section of the wall. Instead, as more and more of the wall was cleared, I came to realize that this entire wall, running the entire length of the room, was made of that smooth dark material.
And now, I had decided that it was in fact glass. A great single sheet of it, of a deep red color so dark that at first I mistook it for black. But there was a distant light glowing behind the glass wall. Not the glow of an electric light, but of sky. And as I cleared more and more of the paper and paste away, incredibly, I saw the glow grow softly brighter until I realized that what I was seeing behind the glass wall was the coming of dawn. Even as outside the windows of the room, night was falling.
I nearly stumbled downstairs. Ran around to the side of the house, staring up at where that wall would be situated. But there were no windows in that length of wall, to let in light from streetlamps or elsewhere that I might be mistaking for a dawning glow. Solid wooden slats, freshly painted by Lynn and myself.
I returned to the house, putting on every light along my way. The steps of the gloomy staircase creaked. Entering the bedroom, I put on the lights, but they reflected in a glare on the glass surface. When I put them out I could see that the glow was ever strengthening, streaking a sky free of the tree and roof tops of Eastborough.
Gingerly, reluctantly, I went to the wall. Cupped my hands around my face, and pressed it against the cool surface.
It was a barren terrain, beyond. Not desert, but blasted, strewn with rubble, twisted wire and jagged metal, as if an atomic blast had leveled a city to just the rubble of rubble. Here and there a thorny bit of scrub wavered almost imperceptibly in the faint breeze. A dead leaf from some unseen tree would tumble lazily along in the air, black against the gashes of red cloud. Everything red, as if I gazed through an aquarium window into an ocean of blood.
And then, I realized that it was an ocean.
The leaves tumbling before the desolate vista were not blown on a breeze, but floating along in deep, nearly still waters, the scrub swaying in a gentle undertow. But then, what was that light spreading from the horizon, rather than coming from above?
I backed away from the spectacle, so that again all I could really make out was the crimson strata of clouds, the landscape again lost in gloom. I backed into the opposite wall, and then I jumped away from it, whirled around as if it might engulf me, my bladed implement held like a knife before me. Electricity buzzing through my body, surging in my guts, I advanced on this other wall and dug my blade under the paper there, too. But beneath the paper on this wall was only white plaster. I discovered the same was true of the other walls. The miracle was confined to just one wall of the bedroom of the Screaming Man.
The windows of his room were now black. But the wall of red glass...it was now so luminous with dawn's light that I could make out the silhouettes of ruin and debris and eerily waving vegetation even from across the room.
And further...I now began to detect other distant shapes silhouetted against the red horizon.
I floated to the wall. As I neared it, I saw its red glow on my shirt front, on my hands. The glow now softly illuminated the entire room.
I was terrified to press my face to the glass again. I was in a state like shock, like a waking faint. The fear in my belly was so great that I had to gag back a retch of nausea. My parents were in the next house, and I wanted to run to them, but I was so in awe of the red glass wall that I was too frightened to turn my back on it. And I felt almost a masochistic compulsion to find out what those new shapes were emerging from the distance.
I returned my face to the glass, again cupped my hands around it.
They were floating a bit off the blasted floor of rubble, carried on some slow current or tide. Dark forms, upright, without limbs. They were leaf-shaped, and so terribly still as the current drew them nearer and nearer...nearer to the red glass wall.
Again I backed away.
This time I lunged out into the hall, descended several steps, gripping the creaking banister for support, as if it were the railing of a platform miles above some seething volcanic pit. I must call Lynn, who would be home from work by now. Beg her to come over here. I couldn't bear this alone. And if I was insane, then I had to know that. I desperately hoped I was not sane. And yet, I was too stricken to move. I was too afraid to step outside into the dark of night to descend the driveway of my parents' house. Even that short distance was now a gulf of impossible mystery, with all the unknown cosmos yawning infinitely above. For a while I remained totally paralyzed, my sense of reality so decimated that a single step might hurl me into some whirling vortex.
At last, I turned and gazed back at the open doorway to the bedroom. The red light glowed on the mildewed wallpaper of the hall landing. It beckoned me. Slowly, I ascended one step. Another...
I stepped into the bedroom of the Screaming Man.
But I froze in the threshold as if I had been caught in a powerful electric charge. My hands seized the doorframe and the air hissed out of my throat, and I was suddenly so terrified that it was as though I had
simply been mildly anxious, before...so terrified that tears literally rolled from my eyes and I heard my own voice whimpering like that of a child awakened from a nightmare and too afraid to call out for his parents. But I had not awakened from a nightmare, but into one.
The infernal, alien
landscape was hidden now behind a wall of figures crowded up against the glass, living figures mashing their flesh against its surface so that it was bent and flattened horribly. There were so many of these figures that they stretched off to the formerly barren horizon, a sea of them at the bottom of this red sea. Pressed together, unmoving, thousands if not millions. And all gazing through the glass wall at me.
They had no limbs, their bodies elliptical, and red, glistening, with rows of ribs showing starkly under the thinnest sheath
of skin. They looked like half-dissected things, prehistoric invertebrates - I am put in mind of the planarian - and I wish I could believe that they were that primitive. But...those silent glaring faces. Blank, hardly human, barely even animal. Empty as they were, they conveyed a malign - unmistakable - intelligence. And worst of all, of course, the eyes. Because their eyes glowed. Glowed white, somehow, even through the deep red tint of the heavy glass wall. The white hot gaze of those unmoving multitudes upon me...pinning me...and yet enticing me to come closer to the wall. To pick up the hammer from my tool box. To swing the hammer...against the glass...
I don't know if the Screaming Man had been driven mad because he had somehow, consciously or not, summoned th
ese things, opened this window - unseen by him behind the paper, but those gazes felt upon him - or if the window had opened and those things had gathered as a result of his existing madness.
But I hope to find him now. I hope to ask him what he knows.
I feel he's here in this complex with me somewhere. I have all the time in the world to find him. They think me crazy, you see, because they don't understand why I would have burned my new house to the ground. And there is no proof, because my tactics were successful: I destroyed that strange portal with cleansing fire. No one found a trace of it in the charred ruins of my new house. Just timbers, and empty window frames.
I'll find the Screaming Man. And I'll dig at the wall of his room, to see if he has attracted those hungry beings again.
And if he has, I will have to kill him...so that he does not let them into our world. And then, of course, I shall kill myself as well. For they have tasted my fear now, and been drawn to it.
They have both created
- and hungered for - my own madness.
I Married a Shoggoth
The
ending of my story should be spoiled for you in one respect; since I’m narrating in the first person, it will be fairly obvious that I don't die at the end. However, consider me a survivor of a race car crash, who lost a few psychic limbs in the inferno. Now your morbid interest will be engaged. But I'm being bitter and cynical. Think of me, then, as a mountain climber, an explorer of new places, whose return to the mundane world is forever haunted by memories of dangerous terrain, and beauty. The dangerous terrain was as much in my mind as it was in the pages of that book. And the beauty?...
My story begins with fear. Now I am a factory worker. Then I was a pre-med student. The human body in death didn't stir fear in me. Revulsion, yes -- skull dust kicked up by a bone saw is a taste that lingers in the mouth very unpleasantly for hours -- but the dead can't hurt you. The dead can't laugh at you. The dead can't reject you. The dead don't toss their hair out of their eyes or swing their blue- jeaned asses when they walk, which they also don't. Naked dead women lying complacently before me don't move me. But when I was a pre- med student, that was the only kind that did lie before me. I was a virgin then. Maybe I still am. That's the question here, I guess.
A self-portrait at this point would be helpful in explaining much of my fear of my biological counterparts. I'm very tall, in a stooped sort of way, and gangly. I'm horse-faced and lantern-jawed, a possible reincarnation of Huntz Hall. Frankenstein was a common childhood nickname, and maybe a kind of premonition. Anyway, we are a very corporeally oriented culture. Material, obsessed with the random juxtaposition of molecules we call beauty. My own obsession is largely to blame for what happened. Tell me some less than beautiful woman somewhere wouldn't have had me. Maybe one still will, someday -- if I ever feel ready for that. But our culture is constantly shoving fleshly beauty down our throats, and being the arrogant, immodest, greedy creatures that we Americans are, even a geek like me thinks he should have beauty in his bed.
Cavel had one. Cavel was my best "friend" in school. Why we were friends, I'm not entirely sure. He was good-looking, bold, outspoken, confident. Opposites attract. I guess he liked having a sorry case like me around to instruct and goad so that I could be like him, which he must have known was useless. I set off his greatness by contrast. For my part, I suppose his undeniable charisma held me. Though I did often like him, more often than not I found myself contemptuous of him. I really just wanted to be free of his hold.
Another reason I stayed, however, was Susan. Cavel’s beauty. Not a movie star goddess beauty by any means, but perhaps the more enticing for her seemingly more accessible "human" beauty. I've always preferred flawed, idiosyncratic beauty even in celebrities. Sue was short and "Rubenesque" (as Cavel would both reassure and tease her, depending on his context and mood), very pale, blue-eyed, with a thick nest of naturally curly, naturally blond hair that killed me. Basically cheery and kind-hearted, she became more of a true friend to me than was Cavel. Sometimes we had lunch, went shopping or for a walk together without him. That was a good feeling.
He could be so cruel to her. Mean-spirited, was Cavel. He was what all young American men seem to want to be these days, aside from a cretinous rock star. When he would torment her in front of me, a favorite pastime of his, I would want to stab my dinner knife into his smug handsome face. At such times I would either pity her or despise her for her weakness and masochism. I suppose that she was held by his charisma too, poor thing...he obviously wanted to lower her self-esteem to the point where she felt she deserved his cruelty. Like I said, Cavel was so typical of our country. Of our species, actually...and gender.
Cavel had a sweet job in the university library, and it was he who first got me interested in the book. It wasn't like I'd never heard of it...I'm a townie, after all. But gone were the days when the book was displayed or permitted for study to just anybody who asked for permission. One night as the three of us sat over beers in the campus pub, Cavel told us how he had finally seen the legendary ancient book, and paged through it. He had also gotten his hands on related notes, documents, translations stored with it in its vault. He related the famous story, with great relish, of the time when three boys from the school stole the original manuscript and drove off with it. Their car was found flipped over and smashed, though what exactly they had hit was never determined. The three boys were decapitated in the crash...and the book, the
Necronomicon,
was recovered without so much as a drop of blood on it.
Can you imagine, Cavel said, grinning, the odds of three people being decapitated in one car? He’d never heard of such a thing. Neither had I, I admitted. And what had they struck? They were drunk, I reminded him. Cavel shook his head. If you ask me, he said, a shoggoth got them. That was the famous signature of a shoggoth killing. The head was unscrewed...like a bottle cap. What, of course I asked, was a shoggoth?
Oh, he was only too happy to share his weird enthusiasm, grinning all the while, voice lowered in a conspiratorial tone. Sue and I, ever his rapt audience, leaned close to listen.
According to the book, and to the documents of an Antarctic explorer who claimed to have visited strange ruins in 1930, the Earth was colonized by a race called the Old Ones before the inception of life on our planet. In fact, it was said that the Old Ones created the first life on Earth. This was done to insure a constant food source, though later life went on to evolve by itself more in the way we're familiar with. Also, the Old Ones introduced to the colonies a malleable blob-like creature called a shoggoth. These basically formless masses could be shaped and controlled in their movements by telepathic command, sort of like living silly putty. These were more or less the slaves and beasts of burden for the weird, semi-vegetable Old Ones.
After a time, the shoggoths seemed to gain in intelligence -- a more dangerous attribute than the ability to alter one's shape -- and finally the Old Ones had to go into battle against them in order to suppress and control them once again. This accomplished, the colonists went on to breed bigger and better shoggoths, capable of responding to vocal commands, and even to imitating their masters' voices.
Eventually the Old Ones regressed, went decadent. Died out -- though the crazed explorer claimed not only to have seen the recently killed bodies of Old Ones...but the shoggoth that supposedly killed them. By sucking their heads off.
Of course Sue and I said we didn't believe a word of it. Cavel insisted that the explorer had been a rational man, and reading his story was chillingly convincing. He urged me to do so...he would photocopy the whole thing for me. His eyes twinkled at this invitation. Cavel seemed to be capable even of enslaving the light to him. Well, I am an open-minded person. I am fascinated by the unknown...though these attitudes might seem incongruous for a man of former medical aspirations. I told him I would read the manuscript after finals, when I'd have more time. Cavel then told me he would also include related passages photocopied directly from the
Necronomicon.
Frankly, I aced the finals. So did Cavel. He gave me the materials, and about a week later I sat down with them. It didn't take long. I'm sure I was seized that first night...and that I was already -- subconsciously -- researching a specific subject within a few days. My inner self plotting on what it foolishly felt was my behalf. These secret intentions didn't suddenly crash into my forward mind, or even come to it in gradual wisps of awareness. They just smoothly, seamlessly flowed into it, undetected, and integrated themselves there, like cancer.
In my childhood I lived in books of mythology. How could I forget the feeling of opening a book and seeing in its depths untold possibilities?
Transportation. Escape. Magic. I thought of the story of the sculptor who fell in love with his beautiful statue, which came to life...though as an adult I could no longer remember if that were an actual myth (a strange expression, actual myth) or just a movie.
Raw, unformed flesh. Raw potential. Waiting only for that command which would give it shape and purpose. No games. No silly, humiliating, primitive courtship dance. No pretense. No need to be handsome or rich or popular or a drug dealer or music star in order to touch the flesh of beauty . . .
Clay, waiting for the artist's caressing hands...the breath of life.
And then maybe the clay would be able to breathe some life into me.
I asked Cavel to show me more. He was only too happy to oblige me, perversely enjoying my mounting interests in the controversial readings that had captured his interests, though it was a little harder for him to get near the materials now with classes finished. I told him how fascinated I was by the insane notion that life on Earth was created initially by aliens, and particularly how they enslaved the things called shoggoths to do their bidding. Get me whatever you can on shoggoths, I told him...