Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
“Oh...poor Dianna.”
“So you understand my dilemma? Don’t be so quick to label me a fiend, Gaby. What would you consider doing, in my position?”
“I’d like to talk to her about all this...”
“To see if I’m telling the truth about her delusions?” Wallace swept his arms theatrically. “Be my guest. Maybe you can talk some sense into her, huh? Maybe you can get through to her. Myself, I’m at a total loss.” He touched his fingers to her arm. “I’d appreciate whatever you could do for her.”
Gabrielle slipped away from the contact. “I’ll do what I can. For her...not for your sake. You don’t deserve her.”
Wallace grinned. It was as repulsive to her as that icon in Dianna’s study. “I always had the feeling that Di liked you herself, Gaby. In much the same way I do, I mean. Is it possible that you feel the same way toward her?”
“You disgust me, Mr. Wallace.” Gabrielle again left him in the kitchen, and he smirked at her smartly moving buttocks as she headed for the office at a determined clip.
Through Dianna’s closed office door came a weird atonal piping, frenzied in pace as if part of some primitive ritual full of rapture and dance. A recording of something from her travels, Gabrielle decided, rapping on the panel. Somehow she was heard over the disturbing racket, which abruptly ceased. She heard the door unlock, and there stood the impassive Mr. Smith behind his impenetrable sunglasses. He let Gabrielle in, then departed.
“Come in, hon,” Dianna said from behind her desk.
Gabrielle did so, but froze after a step.
The idol of the Dreaming One, Tsathoggua, was missing from atop his stone base. In fact, the base itself was missing, replaced by another stone basin to match the empty basin on the other table. Except this tub was not empty. It was, instead, filled to the brim with an opaque fluid, dark as squid’s ink.
“Where’s the statue of our chubby friend?” Gabrielle joked, gesturing at the receptacle.
Dianna seemed to hesitate, and then answered, “There was no statue.”
“Of course there was. You told me not to touch it.”
“That’s what you saw, there,” Dianna said, also gesturing at the basin.
Gabrielle approached to peer into it. It was indeed a vile-looking black liquid. As black and as shiny as the icon had been. It was as though the statue had been made of black wax, and then melted into this pool. As if this hollow tub, and not a solid base, had been below the statue all along.
“You must have heard it playing for me,” Dianna went on. “I’m its master, now.”
Gabrielle looked up at her friend, a weighty ache of compassion in her chest. Yes, that bastard Kevin was right; Dianna
was
insane...
“Whose master are you, Dianna?”
“The spawn serve me, now. The formless spawn of Tsathoggua. I brought that creature there back from N’Kai with me. I carried it inside my astral self...”
The vomit, Gabrielle realized with a woozy shiver. The basin was now filled with the black vomit she had refused to let Kevin dispose of. But how could there be so much? Had she been accumulating it over weeks?
“Kevin...Mr. Wallace told me you’ve been...you feel you’ve been exploring a sort of...alternative plane,” Gabrielle managed.
“Yes,” Dianna said, nodding eagerly to see that her friend was sympathetic to her, willing to listen. “I’ve seen...
wonders
...”
“You saw Tsathoggua.”
Dianna visibly shuddered, averted her gaze. “Yes. And I lived...” She intoned this last as if that in itself were the marvel. “He had his sleep imposed upon him by the other gods...the Elders. So, we who would otherwise be mere insects to him can instead serve him a purpose. We can be his eyes. We can be his consciousness in the waking world.” Dianna returned her stare to her young friend. “I serve him, Gaby, as you serve me. His followers in our world tried to kill me...but now I’ve become one of them.”
“This Smith,” Gabrielle said, trying
to remain calm, “does he bring you drugs, Dianna? Does he...?”
“What I tell you is true, hon. Believe me. I know it isn’t easy. I stood before the Dreaming One. His mind spoke to mine. He sat dreaming on his throne of carven rock, miles below the surface. The bones of his sacrifices heaped all around him. The sacrifices sustain him in his long hibernation...
“To either side of him were great basins filled with his spawn. They’re amorphous...like protoplasm...primordial soup...primal clay. They are what you will them to be, taking any shape. He gave me my own, to take back with me...”
Gabrielle drew away from that inky pool in the basin. Had she heard it gurgle, softly?
“Gaby, I wouldn’t trust many people with this knowledge. I told Kevin, and it was a mistake. He thinks I’ve lost my mind. But I trust you...”
“Dianna...”
“I know you slept with Kevin. But I don’t blame you for it, my dear girl. You were young, he took advan–“
”Who told you that?” Gabrielle burst out in an angry, helpless sob. “He told you, didn’t he? To hurt you, and hurt me...to ruin our friendship!”
“Shh,” Dianna said soothingly, her smile maternal, “shh, baby. I told you. I forgive you. It isn’t important. And it wasn’t Kevin who told me, but Smith...”
“I thought...I thought you said he was mute,” Gabrielle sobbed, lowering her teary eyes in shame and self-loathing.
“It isn’t important. What is important is that Smith told me that he heard Kevin speaking to his brother on the phone. His brother is a clinical psychologist, Gaby. Kevin is talking about declaring me incompetent. About committing me to a hospital. You can’t let him do that to me, all right? I have so much else to learn! So much else to see! The Tower of Koth! Celephais! The castle of the Great Ones on the mountain of Karnath! You have to tell him I’m not mad, Gaby...you have to tell him you believe me!”
“But I don’t believe you!” Gabrielle blurted. “I’m sorry, Dianna, I’m so sorry for
everything...but how can you expect me to believe any of this?”
“You have to believe me!” Dianna cried, her eyes bulging alarmingly. “You have to listen! Let me show you! I’ll show you what my spawn can do...” And with that she reached across the desk, pointing to the basin of fluid.
But Gabrielle could take no more, turned and darted from the room, sobbing even harder. Above her own sobs, however, as she dashed through the door, she could swear she heard a burbling sound rising from that faintly luminous basin.
Gabrielle remained in her room for several hours. She paced, biting her nails until the skin around them bled, expecting that at any instant Dianna would rap at her door. Or
worse -- perhaps -- Kevin. But no one came to fetch her, no one called for her, and at last she stealthily cracked her door.
At the end of the hall was the door to Smith’s room. She paused, struggling with herself, and then crept down the hall to listen outside it. No sound from within, but then the man made no sound even when in plain sight. She drew a deep breath to steel her nerves, and then cracked the door as she had her own. Smith was not inside the small room, so she slipped through the door, eased it shut behind her. She prayed he would not return in the middle of her snooping.
He must have been part of the cult that had tried to kill Dianna, and had been brainwashing her either with drugs or otherwise, preying upon her vulnerability since her traumatic experiences in Tibet. Even though Kevin had said Smith arrived after Dianna’s strange behavior had already begun, Gabrielle could not rule out Smith’s silent influence over her friend.
His bed looked unslept in, as neatly made as if he had served in the military. The closet held a few more suits and ironed shirts, the bureau neatly folded underwear and socks, all identical. No personal belongings in the sense of photographs, papers. The only object that gave Gabrielle pause was a glass of water by the bed. It contained a full set of dentures. And then she noticed, folded beside the glass, Smith’s pair of dark glasses.
She stole from the room, having found no drugs, no weird literature. Despite how much her last meeting with Dianna had unsettled her, Gabrielle knew she must go look in on her. Dianna needed to eat. Dianna needed tending to. However frightening her ranting, Gabrielle must go to her, help her the best she could. It seemed impossible that she could salvage anything of the once brilliant woman before her husband could have her committed to some Dante’s purgatory of a psych ward, but she must try .
As she moved through the large house in the direction of Dianna Wallace’s office, Gabrielle once again heard that bizarre, distorted piping music. It seemed to be growing in volume until it was a maniacal shrieking, and Gabrielle wished the Wallaces had neighbors near enough to complain about the cacophony at this hour of the night. But they didn’t.
As Gabrielle put her hand to the knob, she thought she heard another shriek beneath the frenzied music. The shriek of a voice made unnatural with terror beyond mere panic. But as she turned the knob, the music died suddenly away, and she opened the door to a silent room.
That made the horror the room contained all the more surreal.
Dianna sat back in her wheelchair behind the desk, as if merely a spectator like Gabrielle. But where Gabrielle watched in stunned horror, Dianna was smiling faintly, calmly, her eyes alight.
Kevin Wallace struggled with Smith in the center of the room. Smith was larger, stronger, and Kevin’s efforts seemed futile. It was easy to understand that the scream Gabrielle had heard had been his...and easy to understand how it had been cut off. Kevin’s head was buried inside Smith’s mouth, buried to the neck as if in a lion’s maw, and that was how wide the black man’s mouth had opened, like a snake’s with its jaws unhinged. Perhaps without his false teeth it was an easier feat, part of Gabrielle’s mind considered with the blasé attitude of encroaching madness.
His false teeth must also give his mouth a bit of color, she realized, should he ever part his lips a bit. His only color besides black. Because she saw that without his glasses, even his eyes were entirely ebon-colored.
From the cuffs of his expensive suit, his fingers had lengthened into smooth serpentine tendrils, which had wound themselves around Kevin’s arms and throat. Even as Gabrielle watched, more tendrils sprouted off and grew and twined around Smith’s prey, reminding that blasé portion of the young woman’s mind of a television program in which jungle creepers had been shown growing in stop-motion photography.
Then Smith’s head began to slip down over Kevin’s weakening, suffocating form, stretching impossibly, stretching out of human guise. As Kevin was consumed, absorbed, lost his form, so did the creature -- the mass -- that had been Smith seem to lose its hold on humanity. Soon all that was left of both of them was a black viscous ooze that poured out of Smith’s clothing, leaving it puddled but unstained on the rug. And then the ooze ran up the legs of the table nearby, coiling along them like a spill in reverse, up the sides of the violet stone basin. Poured inside. Until there were two basins filled to the brim with black ooze, that gurgled a
nd bubbled softly like hot tar.
“My servants,” Dianna explained dreamily, “as you serve me. And as I serve Tsathoggua.”
Gabrielle backed into the door frame, did not have strength remaining to take a step to the left and back out of the room. Instead, she sank down the frame until she sat on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest like a child in its mother’s womb. Staring at Dianna, who had been like a surrogate mother to her.
“I told you he was trying to hurt me,” Dianna went on. “I was hoping you could dissuade him. But you didn’t believe me, Gaby. I had no choice. I’m sorry. I’m not sure whether you lo
ved him or not, but I’m sorry.”
“Let me go,” Gabrielle whispered in a ghostly little voice. “Please don’t hurt me, Dianna.'”
Dianna sat up a bit, looking distressed. “I wouldn’t hurt you, my darling girl. I love you! Please don’t think that...”
“I have to go now. I have to go...”
“Please don’t, baby. Please stay with me. I love you. More than Smith and the other one. You’ll be my favorite servant. And you will win the favor of my master, for in serving me you shall be serving him...”
“I can’t.” Tears coursed down Gabrielle’s cheeks. “I can’t.”
Dianna slumped in her wheelchair again, sadness pulling at her hollow features. “You could come dream with me. There are such places I could show you.”
“I just can’t, Dianna. Please understand.”
“I understand,” the older woman mumbled, barely audible, and her head lowered. Her chin touched her chest. Her eyelids began to flutter. “You had better go, then.”
“Dianna!” Gabrielle now found the strength to scramble to her feet,
jolted by alarm. “Don’t go back there! Please stay here! It’s not your world!”
“That’s...why...I want...to go,” murmured Dianna Wallace, like a somnambulist. And then her eyes closed.
“Dianna!” Gabrielle cried out, approaching the desk.
From both the stone containers, the formless spawn reared up. Gabrielle could make no sense of what she saw, only that they reached the ceiling, even spread across it, and that their many limbs and pseudopods had blossomed in the air like some explosion of raw living matter. Some of these limbs were snaking, ropy tendrils, others like thrashing flippers, some frilly like the bodies of sea worms, others barbed with cruel spurs.
The display sent Gabrielle twirling on her heel and bolting for the door. She nearly fell as her foot snagged Smith’s pooled clothing, but caught herself. She heard the many limbs rushing at her through the air...and as she dove through the threshold, the reaching arms slammed the door closed behind her.
She heard it lock.
Gabrielle forced herself to pack all her belongings before fleeing the house of Dianna and Kevin Wallace, made sure to leave no trace of her presence there. At any moment she expected to turn and see Smith standing behind her. Or just as bad, Dianna with her mad, acolyte’s gaze. But she was able to collect her things and leave the house without harm.
In the city, the next morning, she paid a homeless man twenty dollars to call the police and tell them he thought they should go look in on a crippled woman named Dianna Wallace.
In the paper the morning after that, Gabrielle read about what the police found there.
The noted archaeologist/anthropologist/author Dianna Wallace had been found dead in her study, slumped across her desk. She had suffered a killing stroke, the article reported. There had been an autopsy, since the husband Kevin Wallace had not yet been located and there was men’s clothing discarded in the room, but foul play had been ruled out.
A former housekeeper, Rita Molina, had been interviewed and said that Mrs. Wallace often napped in her wheelchair between her long hours of study, and so it was possible the woman had died peacefully in her sleep.
The article went on to describe the impressive collection of artifacts in the house...but made no mention of any black fluid residing in twin containers in the study. Though Gabrielle could never be sure, she guessed that the formless servitors of the Dreaming One had left this waking plane in the same manner they had entered it, by stowing away inside the body of Dianna Wallace...and thus, within her astral self.
For weeks after she had fled the Wallace house, Gabrielle slept fitfully, in short restless naps, and only in the day with sunlight streaming into her apartment, with the TV on and babbling for mindless comfort. And even still, she dreamed.
Sometimes she thought she saw Kevin in her dreams. But he was tangled in a writhing, living nest, half submerged in a slime of black protoplasm, reaching for her, screaming.
And she thought she saw Smith standing in a strange sort of graveyard which she found herself walking through, barefoot, her nightgown billowing behind her. He kept his distance,
merely watched her, his eyes black as obsidian.
She saw alien places, and somehow knew their names. The impossible tower of Koth. Celephais. And the looming, mist-cloaked peaks of Kadath in the Cold Waste.
And she saw Dianna, with her long hair restored, whipping and snaking in the wind. Dianna walking toward her without her wheelchair, reaching out to Gabrielle to join her. Join her forever in the realm of dream.
But Gabrielle resisted sleep the best she could, until she was haggard, could barely function, would pass out from sheer exhaustion. But it seemed to work, to break up her link to the portal
Dianna had left in her wake. The portal closed up. The strange, beckoning dreams stopped.
Finally Gabrielle was able to mourn her friend instead of fear her. And even, after a time, envy her the freedom she had found.
If she was indeed free to explore those remarkable dreamlands...
...and not serving the whims of some dark and evil god, who slumbered in the prison of sleep -- Dianna herself a damned soul, herself sentenced to a nightmare from which there was no waking.
Conglomerate
SOLID
AS A ROCK was the company’s motto, and the company icon rested in the Cathedral-huge foyer of its corporate headquarters. It was displayed atop a circular base, directly in the center of the glossy sea of floor, the first thing one saw when entering the towering edifice of Monumental Life. The elevators were pushed off to the left, the reception desk to the right, like afterthoughts.
Atop this central pedestal rested a huge globe, tall as a man. It reminded Colin James of those massive stone spheres found scattered
throughout the jungles of Costa Rica. Rather than being smoothly shaped from one great rock, however, the sphere seemed to be made from thousands of individual pebbles, cemented closely together. Its outer skin was a dense mosaic of shiny stones like the scales of a vast snake coiled sleeping in a tight ball. The pebbles had the color and metallic polish of hematite.
Seated behind the reception desk, staring across at the immense ball, James thought that a better symbol of the Monumental Life Insurance Corporation would be one solid
rock, like those Costa Rican spheres, but then he supposed the pebbles might represent the people who bought into the Monumental Life policies, all held firmly together in one family. Didn’t go as well with the motto, but then, he was no artist, and he was sure whoever had created that sphere had been paid a pretty penny to design it.
James let his eyes trail up to the high ceiling of the foyer, three full levels above. No, he was no artist. The ball at least he could understand, but that hanging thing was just ugly and weird. It was like a circus pavilion of translucent material, stretched across the foyer half-way up and held taut by strong hooks. It was colored in irregular patterns of blues and greens, so that with the lights glowing through it,
the hanging had the organic look of a titanic butterfly wing. Maybe, with its many arms stretched and hooked to the walls, it looked like the flayed skin of some immense octopus. Sometimes, subtly, the hanging rustled like a sail above James's head.
The light glowing through the hanging cast a soft blue and green radiance across the sphere, so that sometimes it resembled a mysterious planet hanging in the murk of space – the vastness of space beginning just over the edge of James’s desk. This impression would give James a jolt and then a shudder, as if he had snapped awake after drifting into a hypnotic doze. A dream of vertigo.
The revolving door that gave access to the lobby began to turn, a treadmill rotating on its side. Its churning seemed to stir the air, and the hanging billowed slightly. The door took several seconds before it revealed its occupant: a middle-aged man with longish blond- gray hair and a thick gray beard. His suit was as shabby as James’s was tailored and free of wrinkles. The visitor took two steps into the foyer and froze there, staring at the globe in the center.
James watched the man for a few moments, waiting for him to orient himself, to look around and see the reception/security desk over here to the right. And at last, the man did look James’s way. But he didn’t turn to approach the desk. Instead, he remained where he was. For several more seconds, at least.
Then, the visitor reached under his open jacket for something in its lining pocket. He withdrew a can of spray paint. James could tell this when the man began to shake it, and the can made its characteristic clattering sound.
“May I help you?” James asked curtly, coming out from behind the desk at a determined clip. “Sir? Excuse me – sir!”
But the man didn’t glance at him again. Instead, he stepped up so close to the ball that he nearly disappeared behind it, out of James’s range of sight. But, James heard the hiss. Smelled the stink of paint.
When he darted forward, he saw the bearded stranger was vandalizing the Monumental Life icon, spray- painting it with some graffiti. The paint was black, and the man moved his arm with such sure strokes that he might as well be an artist himself, the artist who had made the ball, belatedly signing his name to it.
James seized the man’s arm, gave it enough of a twist to cause the man’s hand to open and the can to drop. He watched the man’s other hand, lest he draw something else from inside his jacket, like a knife.
The bearded man whipped his face around and his mouth worked moistly inside that scruff of beard, eyes red-rimmed and insane under the tufts of his brows.
“Let me do what I have to do, friend...you haven’t got a clue. Not a god-damned clue.”
“I think you’d better sit down, sir,” James told the man. “I really don’t want to hurt you.”
“We have to stop them. It’s futile, I’m sure of it, but we have to try, don’t we? We have to at least
try.
”
“Come with me, sir.”
The bearded man didn’t struggle. He looked back at the sphere, and James allowed himself one quick look at it himself. Well, the damage had been done. The stranger had painted some symbol in wide strokes, right across the face of the ball. It appeared to be a star with five points and an eye in the center of that, running with black tears. The pupil of the eye was jagged like an abstracted flame.
James felt a hand dip inside his own jacket.
The bearded man slipped James’s hidden 9mm SIG-SAUER out of its holster and from there it was just a few inches higher for it to poke James under the jaw. He felt the front sight tear his skin.
“Please," he whispered, “don’t.” He let go of the man’s arm.
The stranger pushed James back with his free hand, and then thumbed off the chunky pistol’s safety, snapped back the slide with a
clack.
“Don't!” James blurted.
“You’ll be doing the same, if they come,” the stranger told him, aiming the handgun. “You
should
do the same, if they come.” And with this said, the stranger jammed the gun’s muzzle under his gray scruff of beard and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of his skull. A rain of blood pattered across the glossy floor, James’s glossy shoes and the scaly skin of the vandalized ball. And then the stranger crumpled almost gently to the floor.
James felt under his jaw, looked at his fingers. A slight smear of blood.
“Are you all right?” the police- man asked him.
“Yes,” he muttered. Another policeman drew near.
“Was your gun’s safety on?”
“Yes. I saw him move it off with his thumb. He looked like he knew how to use a gun.”
“Was your holster buckled?”
“It’s always snapped,” James replied evenly, but without meeting the man’s hard eyes. “He got the strap off fast. Like I say, he seemed to know how to handle a gun.”
“He didn’t look especially big or strong, Mr. James. You got fifty pounds on this guy, easy. And he had ten years on you, easy. How did he get that gun away from you?”
“He was high on adrenaline Or drugs.”
“Drugs, huh? Is that your professional opinion? Were you ever a cop before, Mr. James, or did you just wanna be?”
James still wouldn’t look at the man’s eyes, or let his voice falter. “No. I was never a cop.” He did look at the first policeman, however. “What was his name? Did he have any ID?”
“Yes. His name was Richard Penn. That’s pretty much all we know so far.”
“Richard Penn,” James repeated in a bland tone. '”I’m gonna want to look into his files here at Monumental, see if he had a job here at some time, or a dispute over an insurance claim. He was saying something about, ‘stopping them, somebody’s gotta stop them,’ something like that. He had a grudge of some kind.”
“Good thing he took it out on himself,” said the second cop, “and
that
thing,” he nodded at the sphere, “instead of you.”
James was offered a week off, but declined it. He wanted to find out who the bearded man had been, why he had done what he’d done. It was James’s gun the man had died by. He had no more been able to prevent him from using that than he had stopped him from using the spray can. If I was my boss, he thought as he drove to work the next morning, I’d fire me.