Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
He did. And now I saw him and Sue less and less as I remained in my apartment to read and study and decipher. To practice the pronunciation of impossible tongue- twister chants. I was convinced that these words, rather than being magic, per se -- if pronounced properly, with the proper tone and rhythm -- created a kind of resonant vibration, as is the intention of Buddhist chants. Capable, maybe, of piercing time and space? I was very careful not to combine any of these words in my practice, would only try one word, over and over, each day...though my impatience was growing. I began to feel the butterflies of a guy looking forward to his upcoming first blind date. Dread. And hope.
Only three weeks after the materials fell into my hands -- or were placed there by the unknowing administrant of my fate, Cavel -- I was ready to begin.
I didn't have a basement in which to carry out my experiments, or to lock something in if things went wrong. My apartment was the third floor of an old house near school, a married couple below -- both second-shifters, luckily -- and the two old widowed sisters who owned the building on the ground floor. The apartment was one huge room, with weird and interesting slanted walls and alcoves for my book shelves. Framed movie posters for
Eraserhead
and
Taxi Driver.
On
the red linoleum floor between the kitchen area and the living room-bedroom was the insignia for a Miskatonic fraternity which had once occupied the house, looking like a necromancer's cabalistic circle. Or so it appeared now.
There were two incantations I had memorized; one for the "ascending" mode, or summoning, and the "descending" mode, for banishing. This was pretty much the first one spelled backwards, but for the word
Yog-Sothoth,
present the same way in both. I had taped my voice chanting the descending incantation over and over. I didn't have a gun, or any other weapon. If I couldn't control this visitor, I planned to switch on the tape and flee the house immediately...then probably to go beg cool, confident Cavel to bail me out.
Who was I to think that I could control this thing, I wondered on that night, as I prepared to begin. I didn't have the telepathic abilities of the Old Ones, and even they had had to war the shoggoths to beat them back into submission. But of course I had come too far. In this state of mind, I was prepared to risk my life...maybe my soul. Willing to risk releasing a dangerous entity into our world. That's how primitively hungry our bodies can be. And that was the most frightening part of the whole thing...
It was raining out, the air was charged -- lightning flashed in the distance. I hoped it wouldn't come this way. If the power were to go out in the midst of things...
I lit candles throughout the apartment. I had every electric light on, too. Now I was ready.
Trembling, feeling nauseous, I stood on that frat symbol, facing toward my sleeper sofa, and began speaking aloud for the first time the ascending chant from a paper in my hands. I wanted to sit down, so boneless and bloodless my legs felt, but couldn't permit that. I was a step from the tape recorder and three from the door.
At the end of the incantation...there was nothing. Some mispronunciation? A different pitch needed? On the tape I had tried numerous variations, not trusting to get it right the first time. I was both disappointed and relieved that nothing had happened...but I started again. It was hard to think clearly enough to try variation. At the end of the second round: nothing. I was a fool. Maybe this was what Cavel had wanted, as a perverse joke...for me to be standing here alone trying to summon up magical powers while he was off somewhere making love to Susan. Revenge. Surely he had caught me looking at her, dreams in my eyes. He flaunted her before me, to tease me. He encouraged us to go places without him. To tease me. How could I have let his mean-spirited humor lead me into...
It came.
I had just finished the third attempt, and perhaps the doubts had taken the fear out of my voice. Maybe the anger behind the words had done it...
But it was here. No strobes or lasers, no dry ice or thunder clap. There was a sudden chill, but I realized that was coming from its body. It had come from a very cold place. Also, water ran down its body onto the old living room carpeting. It was huge; fifteen feet around. Loosely spherical, it looked to be made up of huge bubbly cells clinging together like soap suds...but black. It had an oil-slick's multi-hued iridescence. There were none of the temporary organs, limbs or eyes they could manifest, thank God. I had feared that it might try mimicking the terrible form of the Old Ones, as they could. It was not even amorphous, really, as it was said they were; ameba- like. It kept to that rubbery spherical form, and in fact it didn't move but for a subtle pulsation. I realized why, when my fear leveled off to a manageable degree (my first desire, besides letting my bladder go, of course, had been to hit the tape player and run). It was waiting to be told what to do.
I had succeeded.
For an hour or so I just observed it, finally making myself a cup of coffee (decaf; I was shaken enough), but keeping my eyes on it. The frigid cold no longer came misting off it, and in its place was a horrible odor, rotten fruitish, dead animalish, and fishy. That could prove quite the problem, but I'd worry about it later. It just remained there throbbing. As I drew a little closer to it with my coffee, I began talking to it. Throughout, this helped me focus better than trying to think commands at it, except on certain occasions later when I grew more daring. I decided to be honest, up front and respectful, but kept my voice firm.
Your function here, I told it, is to as flawlessly as possible imitate the form of a human female. You may be required to imitate
numerous
human females, but you will not change shape in any other way, and never change except when I tell you. You will live here with me. If I leave here for a time you must not leave this room. You must never attempt to imitate the human voice, or any other, never have contact with anyone unless I prompt you. You must never attempt to reproduce. (The shoggoths reproduced by parthenogenesis, being neither male nor female.) You will never attempt escape, rebellion or to harm others. You will never harm me. You need me to send you back home one day. I will do that some day...I don't know when. Hopefully one day soon. And I promised it that.
This is the female form, I instructed it. Observe. I activated my VCR. I had been making this tape for two weeks. Bits of this and that. Movies. Talk shows. Sit-coms. Game shows. Aerobics. MTV. I sat and watched the tape also, so that it could simultaneously read
my
perceptions of the subject matter. Also, for weeks I had rented porn flicks, and copied excerpts from them onto the tapes. I sat there remembering the few girls I had kissed, what it had felt like. I smelled the skin of my arm, touched my hair and smelled that. I had poured over my anatomy books, and been especially intent over my dissection notes. The thing would need to approximate an inner structure to some extent to give the outer accurate form and movement. I was going to put my tongue and my fingers and penis inside it. I didn't want to be met by anything bubbly and black in there.
At first I was horrified to see that it had
manifested dozens of luminous, pupilless green eyes all over it, blinking in and out of existence, the better to observe, but I didn't try to discourage it. Its intentions appeared obedient. I began to have doubts about its size -- could it compact that bulk into the size of a much smaller human female, and if so, would she be of normal human weight? I envisioned a fifteen foot tall woman, or a five foot tall one who weighed hundreds of pounds. Maybe I'd have to have it split into two women at once. I banished these thoughts; I had to be careful of my imagination.
The tape ended. I spoke to it some more softly while I paged through those magazines and books I had collected, even before this project, which contained the most evocative imagery of women I had been able to capture. I had no true memories of sex to feed it, but for movies and fantasies and
Penthouse
letter columns. It would have to do...
It began, suddenly, to flex its muscles.
A human arm tore out of the blob, thrusting and grasping at the ceiling. Another burst from one side; this one was the arm of a black woman. Another. A naked leg slipped out, the foot thumping the floor in a nervous spasm.
A bulge, the bulge ripped open, a woman's head emerged, her eyes rolling. I recognized her as a porn actress. She had on makeup, her hair dry and fluffy. One arm's fingers had nail polish. At least it seemed to know that clothes and jewelry were separate objects, and didn't reproduce them.
The mass was alive with writhing limbs, heads peering out then being sucked back in, insane pulsations and ripplings as though an orgy were taking place within it. It was all pretty alarming a display, and I raised my voice to the creature...told it to stop. One woman at a time, not all this. It died down and stopped at last, and I realized then that it had only been testing its abilities, or something to that effect. I let out a shaky breath, trembling and hugging myself. Good, I told it. Now just one woman at a time...I put on a new video tape. Opened new magazines and books. Focused my mind on one woman.
Within a half hour, the black bubbly mass split open again...but this time, it tore deeply down the middle and began to turn its halves inside out. The inner surfaces of the halves tore further and the wounds were pink. The pink areas spread as the mass turned in on itself again and again, like a storm cloud brewing, until all the mound was a fleshy pink. Its previous iridescence suggested the ability to isolate and expand on any number of colors. Now the shapeless, tormented-looking flesh seemed to be shrinking rapidly...but was in fact contracting, drawing itself into a more compact bundle. The bundle became smooth as hideous wrinkles were ironed away, and I was now staring at a human woman -- naked -- rolled into a ball on elbows and knees, head tucked in, shiny bottom in the air.
The blonde head lifted, and Marilyn Monroe looked at me with her bedroom eyes. She smiled dreamily.
Marilyn was never one of my real favorite celebrity beauties, but I felt almost obligated to manifest her, particularly as the very first sculpture, powerful American icon that she is. Cavel loved Marilyn, too. I felt kind of smug about that.
I didn't take her to bed right away, of course. I watched her a good couple of hours while I made myself more decaf and tried to screw up my strength. Rather than being impatient to begin, I wasn't sure I could ever touch her. She sat in my armchair watching TV as I had instructed, occasionally smiling over at me. Chills went through me...of both fear and delirious excitement. She wore my bathrobe. She had crossed one leg over the other without my conscious command. Beauty mark and all. My God...
At last I decided to wait until tomorrow. It was very late and I was tired. I told her to sleep on a blanket on the bathroom floor, then I put a chair with stacked cans of food atop it in front of the closed door as an alarm. I slept with the tape recorder in bed with me.
The next day my phone awoke me but I didn't answer it. Tape recorder under my arm, I stalked the bathroom door. The chair was undisturbed. She waited on the floor for me in a fetal position but with eyes open, turning up toward me...
I had breakfast, then walked to the armchair where it was sitting again and gingerly reached out to it. I lay my hand on her shoulder, round and firm under the robe. I could feel bone in there. She looked up to smile at me again, and I told her to go to the bed...
I was a virgin, as I have said. Even as I write this I'm not sure I really know what it's like to make love with a woman. But it was -- as it could only be -- as I had imagined it. And it was wonderful. As frightening as clinging nude to the face of a cliff, without ropes, without comrades, and yet it was wonderful. She read my mind. She knew what I wanted and needed. The
ultimate blow-up doll. Play-Doh of the Gods.
That week I went to bed with the Jane Fonda of
Barbarella.
Young actresses
like
Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon and the terminally busty and cute Jennifer Love Hewitt. Voluptuous silent screen vamp Theda Bara and the rail-thin singer Fiona Apple. The exquisite British actress Helena Bonham Carter, my favorite, lasted three whole days before I traded her for a vintage Marilyn Chambers (I told myself I'd go back to Helena, maybe settle on her, later). I called up a beautiful Asian woman from a magazine ad. It was always better, though, if I had seen movies, many views of a body or face, for maximum detail. When I summoned the stunning actress Nastassja Kinski, she had the naked body I had seen in films from the eighties, that mole on her shoulder and the little scar on her cheek from a girlhood accident while playing with a knife. The Asian girl, however, had a modified Marilyn Chambers body, lean and with her muscular neck, but in Asian skin tones. This body for the face was selected not by me, but by the creature from its files.
I made a frightening mistake by asking it to take the form of a Renoir nude. What began to manifest itself looked more like a three-dimensional painting than a living thing, and I quickly told it to go back to the previous model, Brooke Shields. She was the first to sleep throughout the entire night beside me. When I woke up the next day, I saw that she had left the bed.
She was at the stove, turning up the heat under the coffee pot. She looked over at me and smiled. As on that first night, I was both thrilled and washed with fearful awe. Where did my subconscious programming end and the creature's personality, as such, begin? Was its own personality all but gone, leaving only a mindless robot, or were those smiles in any way authentic in their sentiments? I found that hard to believe. But what of this? Had my dreaming mind told it to rouse and make coffee? Was it imitating me? Or was it trying...to please me?