Unholy Dimensions (43 page)

Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

Afraid to near the wall, and thus Ng's corpse, I had to steel myself...but I approached the lens, pushing through the ghastly, clinging webs. For even from across her room, and at an indirect angle, I thought I saw blurry movement in the glass.

If only I hadn't looked through it! But then, I wouldn't have been inspired to shatter that lens (with difficulty, using a hammer) afterwards. I can only hope that the telescope, as such it was, was not merely an instrument for viewing, but for summoning, as I suspected it to be. I can only hope that in smashing it, I prevented more of those Outsiders from coming here. It has been many years since that terrible day, and perhaps I was successful. But who knows what mysteries, what horrors, lurk behind the innocent facades of old houses, here in this haunted town, and in every town?

My first impression was that it was a magnifying glass, trained on several beetles or slugs...a sort of microscope. These creatures I observed in the grain of the wood boarding the window were hideous, and all the more so for their familiarity. For they were black rubbery things, loosely bovine in their general outline...their blocky forms moving with great slowness. Only the nests of tentacles moved quickly, these seeming to feed from the ground, perhaps on creatures as tiny to them as these things were to me.

The creatures – one in the
foreground, two further back - moved across a jagged bed of irregular dark crystal. In the background there was a forbidding sky of molten orange and dark brown cloud.

I looked up from the lens sharply. The mysterious instrument was not trained on the wood, but on the sky outside, seen through the crack. And yet...and yet...the sky outside was blue and
clear. What sky was this I was seeing?

I realized, of course, that it was the sky of some other world. Some world separated by space, perhaps dimension, perhaps dream.

And I also realized that those were not tiny, microscopic monstrosities (those things that resembled the creature my father had killed, except for that creature having been bipedal, as if mixed blasphemously with human genes)...they were, instead, immense beyond anything that had walked on Earth, or God willing, ever would. For it was not a bed of dark crystal they strode upon, and crushed beneath their bulk, and fed from...but a city, an alien city, as great in size as New York...greater...but no more protected, no less vulnerable, for all that.

The creature in the foreground lifted the nest of worms that was all it owned for a head, and seemed to gaze back at me through the glass. I backed away from it with a cry of terror, and swatted the instrument out of the wall with the sticky crowbar that I seized out of my father's hands.

Panting, tears streaming down my face, I again regarded the shell of what had been my lover. Then, finally, I noticed the sheet she had written on. It was, I saw, a final message to me.

That note was the only thing I removed from her room before I sealed it up. Yes, even now, decades past her death, Ng sits in her chair in her room below me, much as she had in life. Her presence gives me comfort, and sometimes I sit on the cellar stairs, and talk to her through the wall.

When I decided to entomb her there, I wondered what the next owner of the house would think if they ever tore out that wall and found her...and the colossal stone head. But shortly before I sealed the room, I discovered that the head was gone, presumably sunken back into the earth or other world that it had risen from, leaving only a broken place in the cement, like a wound clotted with dirt.

I still don't know for certain, entirely, what Ng meant by her note. But I think she was apologizing for having followed the call of her kind, for having attempted to perform her chosen duty, despite her feelings for me and my family. I don't think she really wanted to do what she did. I must believe that.

But I also think she was apologizing for causing me worry and pain, over the years. And it caused me more pain to think she might not have realized that I had no regrets about our relationship. That I had loved her deeply, and would have wanted no other wife.

To the end, she was cryptic. To the end, a mystery. My mystery.

For the note she had left me said only, "I am sorry, Grayeyes" – and no more.

*****

About the A
uthor:

Jeffrey Thomas
is the author of such novels as
Deadstock
(finalist for the John W. Campbell Award)
, Blue War, Monstrocity
(finalist for the Bram Stoker Award)
, Letters from Hades, The Fall of Hades
and
A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers,
and such short story collections as
Punktown, Nocturnal Emissions, Voices from Hades, Voices from Punktown, Aaaiiieee!!!
and (with his brother Scott Thomas)
Punktown: Shades of Grey
. Several of his books have been translated into German, Russian, Greek, Polish and Taiwanese editions. His stories have appeared in the anthologies
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Leviathan 3, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
and
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.
Thomas lives in Massachusetts.