Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
The young man continued in his hushed, melancholy voice.
“You were right to get out. I should have listened. I took it too far. I really don’t think I’m going to have the guts to go in there. I think...I really think I need to close it up again. That’s what I’m going to have to do. I’m just afraid that if any of them see it from their side, they’ll be a lot braver than I am. They’ll want to come here. And not to learn. Not to explore. I don’t even want to imagine what...”
“END OF – MESSAGES.”
“Bastard,” Cornelia hissed under her breath at the robot.
Well, her man was in some kind of danger, then. But who were these people he feared? What had he done that might draw their attention to him?
Who am I kidding? Cornelia thought. He’s crazy. He’s obviously crazy. Or on drugs. Or both.
She played the message back again. And this time, having already listened to the words, she discerned another sound behind them. It lasted only a fraction of a second, and it came right before the tape allocated for his message ran out. Right before he said, “...imagine what...”
Cornelia played the tape a third time. Leaned so close to the machine that its sound became distorted, but at least she heard that funny little background sound again.
It was a distant squeal of high-pitched laughter. She guessed. From a child. But...maybe it had been a cat’s drawn-out meow? A pet tropical bird, making an odd sound...trying to form words?
Monkeys calling...electronic sounding...
I’m letting his delusions become my delusions, Cornelia thought, disgusted at herself and the gooseflesh she’d raised on her arms. She deleted the message, removed her winter coat, and stepped into the bathroom to pee.
She put the light on quickly, however – not wanting to see the mirror in the dark.
The next night there were two messages left on her machine – like letters written by an old friend, a lover called away overseas, brimming with contents that ached to be opened.
The first message had come in at 11:43. The second at 11:45. Damn, Cornelia thought...damn. Why couldn’t he have called just a little bit later? She would have been home to pick up at last...
Pick up and what? Tell him he had the wrong number? But then he’d stop calling, wouldn’t he? Not if she asked him what was troubling him so. Not if she asked him if she – unlike his apathetic lover – could help him.
Cornelia squeezed her wool gloves into a ball, unsqueezed them, squeezed them, like a heart she was manually pumping. You’re losing your mind, she told herself gravely.
But then her eyes returned to the twin heralds on her table. And she played the first message on the tape.
The whisper was softer, more intense than ever. It seemed to come through a blizzard of static, to make matters worse. Had he switched to a portable phone with a weak battery? Or was something interfering with the connection?
“Two of them came through tonight...I pray to God it was only two. I was in the bedroom. I stayed home all day – I don’t dare go to work, to go out at all, with the doorway open like that. I was in the bedroom – ” there was a pause here, and it made Cornelia’s breath solidify in her throat, as if the caller had stopped to listen for something “ – and I heard something like feet pattering in the kitchen. A sound like children giggling. I rushed out...without a weapon, like an idiot...and I saw them duck into the bathroom. It was just a second, just a flash...I’m not sure I could really describe them. But...but they were horrible. Dark purple, like they were – rotting. Their heads were huge, pulpy. Like sacks. Like they didn’t have skulls. And their arms didn’t have bones. They couldn’t have had bones, the way they were moving. They might have been...tentacles...”
“My God,” Cornelia barely mouthed.
“I’m sure they’ve been stealing my books...my papers. They’re all gone. All of it. It has to be the Larvae. Carrying it all away – ”
His sentence was severed. But the tape went on to the next message; this time he had immediately phoned back to continue. Being cut off the first time only seemed to heighten the tone of urgency in his voice.
“I can’t remember the words to close the doorway! I have most of it, but I can’t remember what sign to put on the second stone. And I can’t remember the fourth utterance of descent! Please...please...I know you’re angry at me...”
He was almost in tears now. So was Cornelia. She didn’t know why. Did she ache at having to listen to an agonized man go out of his mind? Or did she...believe him, somehow? Poor Cornelia. Always so gullible when it came to men. But listen to him! Listen to his sincere emotion!
“...I need your help. I don’t want you to come here – I don’t want you to be in danger, too. But if you remember the things I’m forgetting, please help me! Just this one last time! I beg you, honey, I beg you!”
There was a distant crash behind his last words. Something knocked over in another room.
“I have to go!” he hissed.
“END OF – MESSAGES.”
No!” Cornelia said loudly, accusingly, to the traitorous, taunting machine. A tear coursed down her cheek. “No!” she sobbed, louder still.
He might call back yet. Right? It hadn’t been that long ago. If he had called twice in one night, why not again?
She didn’t check her email. Going online would give a caller the busy signal.
She drew a bath. Put on a CD. Made a cup of orange flavored tea. A headache was coming on, so she lay back in the tub with a wet face cloth folded over her eyes. But it was like being blindfolded – it was too dark. She didn’t even want to shut her eyes. Not in the bathroom, of all places.
Her eyes traced suspicious cracks in the plaster of the ceiling she had never taken note of before, then slowly lowered to the corner of the room, just beyond the tub. They scanned sideways, across the toiletries and hair brushes piled atop her toilet tank. Something had crashed to the floor....something in his bathroom. Her eyes returned to the corner. At any moment, she expected to see it yawn open. To feel a frigid breath exhaled from that new opening, like the breath of a dead man. To hear horrible cries deep within the churning mists. To see eyes, perhaps, glinting out at her from between the tendrils of fog. If they even
had
eyes...
Even as she finally slipped into bed, at 3:10, she thought he might call her yet. That she would be awakened by the yearning cry of the phone.
Her sleep went undisturbed, however – except by dreams.
Just before she’d drifted off last night, Cornelia had decided to stay home from work the next day – to call in sick. This time she’d be here to receive his message when it came...
But in the light of day, she found herself unable to go through with it. When Brian had left her, only a week and a half ago, she had stayed out sick for two consecutive days. The company wouldn’t put up with much more of that.
But at the end of the shift, when Brett – Cornelia’s boss – asked her if she could stay an hour late tonight, she stammered her way out of it, claiming she had a headache.
And as soon as she unlocked the back door to her apartment she headed straight to the kitchen table...
The counter on her answering machine read 0.
Slowly she withdrew the finger that brushed the PLAY button.
Had he found the correct phone number, finally? Or had he given up on appealing to his former lover?
Unwilling to believe it was over, this little affair of hers with a man who didn’t even know she was receiving his communications, Cornelia checked the caller ID’s dim little window. It, too, showed no calls had been received.
Well, then. Well...
She took off her coat. Reluctantly trudged into her bedroom – where her computer waited for her like a paid lover – to check her email. She illogically hoped to find a message from her mysterious caller there. But...another chain letter. An animated email card from her mother. Not even anything from Brian. She looked at the contents of her email account’s trash can. It was empty.
They got him, she thought in a small, droning interior voice. They got him...
“He’s crazy!” she argued out loud. “You heard him! He’s...”
Cornelia disconnected from the internet. What if he had tried to call while she was online?
“He won’t call again!” she snapped. “Jesus! She doesn’t care – he knows that now! So he gave up on her!”
From the kitchen, the shrill alert of her telephone.
Cornelia pushed her chair back so hard that it nearly toppled. She plunged into the livingroom, on into the kitchen. She had programmed the machine to start recording after four rings. She knew she would get to it in time to pick up the call herself...
But when she stood over the kitchen table, even though there were still two rings left to go, she found herself unable to take the receiver off the wall. She had to listen first. Screen her call. See if it was him. And even if it was – would she really be able to speak back to him at last?
Third ring...
A glance at the caller ID display. UNAVAILABLE. It might as well be his name.
Fourth ring.
“Hi,” she heard her own recorded voice say. She hated her voice. Dark and gluey, it sounded -- morose, sulky, self-pitying. Weak. Lonely. It sounded just like her, she thought. “I’m not able to come to the phone right now,” she lied, so as to avoid bill collectors, so as to eavesdrop on desperate strangers, “but please leave a message after the beep and I’ll try to get back to you.”
The tape began to turn, to record...
Dead silence.
A bill collector? At one o’clock in the morning?
But then she heard a faint rustling noise. The subtle shifting of a body on the other end. A wet little sound like someone licking dry lips before speaking. But the static, worse than last night, might be fooling her. She might be hearing nothing at all...
And then the terrible noises began. They were animal cries of some kind, wild, deranged – deafening. Cornelia fell back from the table several steps, and clapped her hands over her ears. It was a cacophony. Voices filled with rage and glee. But they sounded like monkeys or tropical birds, whooping and shrieking, as if they were on fire. Banshee wails. The laughter of insane children with tumors like new brains crowding out their skulls.
“END OF – MESSAGES.”
Slowly, timidly, Cornelia lowered her hands from her ears. She heard the humming of her refrigerator directly behind her. And that was all.
Where had the calls been originating from? Several towns away? Another state?
She hoped, now, that he had lived very, very far away from her.
Tomorrow she would have her number changed. But for tonight...she took the phone off the hook.
She could only hope that it was the other woman – the nameless lover
– and not her, not Cornelia, that tonight’s call had been intended for.
Despite her own fear, however, she felt fresh tears well in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said very quietly to the two small machines. Wishing she could be speaking the words into a mouthpiece instead. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. And she reached out to the answering machine once more.
“MESSAGES – DELETED.”
The Writing on the Wall
(Author’s
note: the following vignette appeared in the newsletter of the printing company I once worked for. It was supposed to be the second chapter in a comical series I was coerced into doing, called The History of Printing – but darker impulses seized my mind. I’m not sure if a story featuring Mythos elements ever before appeared in a company newsletter...but said publication did have the decidedly Lovecraftian-sounding title of The Nameless Newsletter.)
Last time we spoke of the use of Egyptian hieroglyphics as a major step in the history of the written word, the recording of language, and hence a prelude to printing. We also alluded to the theory that the pyramids and the plain of Giza were the first industrial park (the brain-child of that forgotten and very unpopular pharaoh, Immafartun). But with Halloween around the corner, we’ll concentrate on the pyramids in more recent times, and on those who study the writing of the ancients, like the archeologist and hierogylphist, Dr. Henry Paxton.
Paxton turned around...
He wanted to excitedly exclaim about the discovery he had just made, but then he remembered he was alone in the cellars of the pyramid. No one was there in the gloom of the tunnel behind him. The others waited above, outside, bored porters and tired assistants without his sense of dedication. How could they not be more enthusiastic? After all, no one had even suspected that these hidden chambers lay beneath the pyramid until Paxton had discovered them only a few days earlier.
He returned his attention to his latest discovery, moved the lantern closer and used a brush to sweep aside the dust of dreaming millenniums. He began to unveil a long series of hieroglyhs, carven in the stone blocks that formed this narrow corridor, which tapered into silent darkness at either end.
The figures in the hieroglyphics seemed more realistic, naturalistic than he was accustomed to. Normally they were more stylized. He recognized familiar symbols mixed in with others he had never encountered before. He had seen the scarab, but never the starfish with a human eye in
its center. He had encountered the jackal-headed, baboon-headed and falcon-headed gods...but what of this alien god, with a head like an octopus and wings rather like those of a bat?