Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
“It’s something from another plane of existence. Another dimension.”
“I’ve seen a lot of exotic fauna come through this town, but never anything like that baby.”
“Graf...did you take that crystal thing from the scene with you?”
“Yeah, we have it here. It looked like it might be of value, so we thought it best to put it in the vault. Why? You were wondering why Kaddish tried to blast it?”
“Yeah. I’m also wondering why he didn’t put his gun down a second to take it. He wasn’t thinking.” Bell glanced up and out the windshield as two teen-age Choom girls pranced up the front steps of the library, sharing innocent laughter. Ignorant laughter. The mundane
image did not soothe Bell’s disorienting sensation of vertigo. It only served to worsen it, by contrast. Seeing him watching them, one of the girls gave him an obscene gesture before ducking after her friend into the building. So much for innocent laughter, but Bell was too absorbed to let it irritate him. “What else did Josh tell me that I should believe?”
“What did he tell you in there, John?”
“Show the chief the recording. And tell him not to let that boy leave the station, no matter how many C. S. people or family members come for him. He isn’t to leave our custody until I can talk to the chief himself about it. Understood?”
“I’ll tell him, but you tell me what Kaddish told you.”
“I will. But right now I have to go talk to Kate Redgrove. If anything else Josh told me has truth to it, we might be under a kind of...deadline here.”
-4-
On the outside of Kate Redgrove’s apartment door there was a red five-pointed star with an eye, perhaps, at its center, the pupil if such it were being a pillar of flame.
This one was not crudely spray-painted, but very neatly done, as if it had been masked off first. Still, Bell found it no less dramatic. He stabbed his finger into the buzzer several times more, though his buzzing from the lobby had gone unanswered. Beside him stood Mr. L’Vesk, the apartment manager, who had agreed to escort the inspector up here when his attempts to contact the archaeologist failed. Before L’Vesk had agreed to accompany him, however, he had first tried calling Ms. Redgrove on her vidphone. The calls had also gone unanswered.
“I can’t believe I let her talk me into painting that thing,” the spindly humanoid sighed,
nervously drumming together pale fingers twice as long as the detective’s. “Her neighbors are not happy with it. But she was so set on it, and she’s been a fine tenant except for that. She teaches over at P. U., you know...”
Bell rang her again. “Damn,” he whispered.
“Maybe she’s out. Over at the school. Or she might not want to be disturbed, you know; she’s always been extremely insistent that I never let anyone up here unless she knows about it in advance.”
“Open it.”
“I...well, do you have a warrant, Inspector?”
“No, but you’re the manager, right? You can voluntarily open it for me.” If the being refused, there was always the lock-cutter device in an inner pocket of his leather jacket.
L’Vesk sighed, and moved past Bell to tap out a code on the keypad by the door frame. The apartment manager held open the door, stuck his tiny head in, and promptly withdrew it with a rattling gasp of horror.
Bell pushed past him, drawing his pistol from its holster under his jacket. “Go call Precinct House 15. Tell them to send some people over here, quick!”
Once inside, Bell shut the door behind him.
Kate Redgrove sat on a sofa at the far end of the parlor, slumped to one side with her chin resting on her chest. She was as white as a cave dwelling animal. She wore a suit of comfortable, loose-fitting men’s pajamas, the front unbuttoned. Or torn open. In the center of her chest, above her heart, there was a large circular wound, so deep that the blackness within her seemed an awful void.
As Bell moved closer to her, wondering if the wound had been caused by a bolt from a ray pistol, he noticed the tear marks on the lovely white carpet.
He swung around with his chunky black pistol held out before him, eyes large and flicking in their sockets. Before he examined the corpse more closely, he stealthily moved through the rest of the apartment. He found no lurking intruders, human or otherwise. Only slightly at ease, he returned to the body propped on the living room couch.
He knelt down to gaze up into her face. As Kaddish had told his ex-friend, his ex-lover was beautiful, her short dark hair hanging softly around a delicate face with large, dark brown eyes that were now half-veiled by their lids in death. Bell took his eyes quickly from her face, switched his study to the wound in her chest, between her slight breasts. Her skin looked like wax. There was no blood around the wound, on her clothing or the sofa or the immaculate carpet. Bell knew from the look of her that no blood would be found inside her body, either. But there was another fluid along the rim of the great puncture wound. It was thick, syrupy, and a ghastly blue color that was almost luminous. Bell remembered the memory of a thrashing tentacle. Or tongue.
The Elder Sign might have repelled intruders from her front door, but they had found another way to send an assassin. And Bell didn’t doubt that the assassin was the same being or creature that Pugmire had summoned up, perhaps for this very purpose. Kaddish had not wounded it enough to kill it, if it could be killed.
Bell rose, still holding his gun by his side, and glanced around at the woman’s things. A series of shelves along one wall drew him for a closer inspection. There were framed photographs of Kate Redgrove with friends and colleagues at various digs, apparently on various worlds. On one planet they had worked inside a giant bubble, it seemed, Bell guessing that the atmosphere had been unsuitable for humans. In fact, what he could see of the landscape through the transparent wall behind them had a lunar appearance, though Bell didn’t know what ancient civilization might be excavated on an airless moon.
More notable than the photos, however, were the artifacts on display behind the glass cabinets of the shelves. They were lit and labeled with cards as if exhibited in a museum. There were vases in whole or part, a row of crude iron chisels that might be weapons or tools, a human bust with white eyes and its nose and lips broken away, as if all of its senses had been robbed. A bowl with the painting of a naked Choom warrior inside it. A small stone tablet with carven lines in some unfathomable language, and above that portraying in bas-relief a sphinx or griffin-like creature with wings somewhat like a bat’s and the head of an octopus, with a nest of tentacles in place of a mouth. Bell looked at the card for this piece.
“Oasis. Choom. Irezk Island Tribe. 19th Cent. Cthulhu.”
Bell frowned, disturbed by the strange, abstracted image and feeling that he should understand or recognize that last word on the card. Unable to, he shifted his attention to another
artifact.
This looked to be more of organic origin than shaped by the hands of an artisan or craft-maker. It was a large fossil that he had at first thought was a great shallow bowl carved from stone, standing on its end inside the cabinet. Ringing the bowl were thick spines or spikes, some little more than blunt bumps and others long and sharp like the horns of a dinosaur. Bell couldn’t imagine what sort of animal it might have come from, or even what part of the body of an animal it might be from. Was it a shell or carapace? A portion of skull? A half of a pelvis? A lower jaw, a scoop-like hand? Some fragment of anatomy for which there was no terrestrial counterpart? Aga
in, he read its card, standing on his toes to see it.
“Oasis. Irezk Island. 225,000,000 B.C. Fragment Old One? Spawn?”
“Jesus,” Bell breathed.
The sharp barking cry behind him made him spin around. The thing was rushing at him, flopping madly from side to side like a man with his legs bound, and his arms too, for it had none. Just that tongue or tentacle, whipping out of the opening atop its body. Its claws tore up the carpet as it flung itself toward him.
Bell thrust his gun at the thing as if the action of his arm alone would make the bolts of energy fly from it. Bell’s beam weapon fired short lances of a dark violet light. They pierced the creature, bored round holes from which drooled that blue blood or mucus. Bell backed into the shelves. He cried out in terror and rage. The creature barked in rage and maybe pain. But it kept coming.
Behind the creature, Josh Kaddish leapt out of the walls where they joined together in the corner. He fell to his knees, looked up at Bell, his eyes crazed in a squirming black mask. There were black leeches half covering his face, his white shirt, some as big as lampreys or remoras with primitive flippered tails thrashing, their mouths fixed to his skin.
Bell nearly quit firing into the creature, so shocked was he by this manifestation. He was confounded even more when Kaddish got to his feet and bolted from the room as if running for his life.
“Help me!” Bell roared, and aimed higher up, at the tongue and its five-lobed mouth. Several beams tore through the base of the tentacle and out the other side, spattering bits of rubbery flesh. Bell heard glass shatter somewhere as his beams passed through. The limb’s frenzied whipping only became more violent.
He darted sideways as the creature reached the shelves, smashing into them blindly. Perhaps it was blind in this dimension, and followed the smell of his blood or the hum of his life force inside him.
Dancing sideways, putting more space between him and the being, he whirled and fired into it again. And now Josh Kaddish had returned, came to his side. Most of the slugs were gone from him, Bell saw peripherally, the rest dropping off him and writhing in the fibers of the pristine carpet.
Kaddish had a pistol in each fist, and began adding his onslaught to Bell’s. One bucking handgun fired solid projectiles with a deafening report, the other launched gel caps filled with a corrosive green plasma. Where these hit, larger wounds began to open in the shiny, dolphin-like hide of the being, the uneven edges of the wounds bubbling and sizzling. One wound joined with the next, making yet larger wounds. Inside, the creature was all slick pulsing blackness. Bell now aimed his beams into that blackness. Under this fusillade, the creature finally toppled, and began a terrible flopping on its side like a fish drowning in the air. Bell and Kaddish had to fast-shuffle backwards to give it more room in which to convulse, but they didn’t relent in their conjoined attack.
The creature, much torn and melted through the middle, split into two large pieces. To Bell’s horror, both began to make their way back toward the corner of the room from which it had appeared -- the upper half pulling itself along with its serpentine limb, the lower pulling itself along with the talons which had served as toes, before.
“Keep shooting!” Kaddish bellowed. “Here!” He passed Bell the gun loaded with plasma capsules, then rushed to the shelves of artifacts. Out of the corner of his eye, firing both pistols at the ends of his extended arms, Bell saw Kaddish sliding open one of the cabinets and withdrawing some small item.
“All right!” Kaddish yelled. “Hold fire!” Bell did, and saw the private detective lunge after the hideous crawling shapes. He was holding out the item he had taken from the shelf, and actually pushed it into one of the holes Bell’s rays had punched into its flesh. He then leapt away, and covered his face as if expecting an explosion.
It was apparent why a second later, as a smoke or vapor as black as squid’s ink and just as slow -- as if it were spreading under water rather than in the air -- billowed from both portions of the bisected animal or entity. The foulness of the vapor’s stench was so intense that Bell immediately dropped to his knees and vomited. Nothing he had ever smelled at any crime scene, however long the victim had waited to be discovered, could hint at this.
But moments later, the air was clean of both smoke and stench. Lifting his head with a groan, Bell saw that the broken thing had vanished, leaving behind not so much as a drop of its blue fluids on the soft white carpet. Kaddish was crouching close by, cupping one hand over his mouth. When he removed the hand, he was smiling that cat-curl smile.
“We killed it. We killed one of their bloody hounds!”
Bell gestured with his gun toward the couch. Kaddish started to look around, but stopped himself. His smile dissipated. “I know. I saw her there. Fucking demons. They’ll pay for that.” He stood, held up his remaining pistol. “I bought these for Kate, to protect herself. They caught her off guard.”
Bell slowly got to his feet, fighting to hold onto what little else his stomach contained. Adrenalin crackled through the wires of his nerves. He realized that all the slugs had dropped off Kaddish now, and dissolved from the carpet, also leaving no trace. “How the Christ did you get here?” he asked.
“Same way that thing did. Through the wall. But I went through the lines, and it went through the curves. I picked up some stowaways on the way, but they didn’t last.” He rubbed at
his neck, looked at his palm as if for blood, but he was unmarked.
“Have you done that before?”
“No. Never. But your friends left me no choice. I knew I could chance it if I had to. I kept a diagram in my pocket, and I copied the formula into the corner of my cell back at your precinct house. You can thank your friends for giving me that marker. You should have remembered, Johnny, that I’ve never done a crossword puzzle in my life.”