Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
“Are you crazy? Huh? How did you think you could survive that? How did you find your way?”
“I was lost a few minutes, I admit. I suppose it was a few minutes. You can’t tell time in there. It’s...not something I can describe. I was disoriented. I started to panic, especially when those things started swarming onto me. The diagram was supposed to get me back to my apartment in an emergency...if I ever got cornered or trapped. Kate drew it up for me. But then I saw or sensed the beastie, and I followed it here. Good for you, huh? I really do think some force, at least, is an our side. Fate, or maybe even -- Them.” He walked to the spot where the being had dissolved, bent, picked up something from the carpet. He came to Bell and showed him a stone disc resting in the palm of his hand. It bore an etched star, and at the center of the star was an eye-like design, with a band of fire for its pupil if indeed it were an eye.
“The sign of the Elder Gods,” Bell said.
“Like a crucifix against a vampire. Remember? Do you believe me, now, pal?”
Bell’s communication device beeped on his belt. He unclipped it, brought up before his face.
“Bell here.”
It was the commander of P.H. 15, Chief Bellioc. His face was like a living postage stamp on the device’s tiny screen. “John, your friend Kaddish is gone.”
Bell almost said, “I know.” Instead, he said, “Gone?”
“Check this out. We had a camera on him the whole time he was in his cell -- standard procedure. I’m going to run you the end of the vid.” Bellioc’s face was replaced by a scene of Kaddish in his cell, shot from a corner of the ceiling. Kaddish was finishing up a drawing in the corner, a black web of lines and angles. He was using the edge of the folded newspaper he’d requested to make them as straight as he could.
He finished a last line, stepped back to admire his handiwork for several moments while capping the marker and slipping it into his breast pocket. Then, he extended an arm -- which vanished into the white wall as if it were a pool of milk.
“Unbelievable,” Bell said, even as he watched Kaddish walk into the wall and disappear, leaving only that web of black lines to mark his passage.
Bellioc returned. “I saw the memory recording of that creature, too. Do you know what the hell is going on, here?”
“Ah. I think...I’m not entirely sure. But...”
“I’m putting a call into Colonial Headquarters. I think they should send some of their security force in here. We’re dealing with some uncatalogued life forms here. And God knows about these portals...these dimensional...”
“I think that’s a good idea, chief. Get them in on this. And keep everybody out of that cell.
Keep the barrier up. There’s no telling what might come out of that opening, now.”
“The boy!” Kaddish hissed. “The kid!”
“That boy,” Bell said into the device. “Chief, don’t let anyone take him. Trust me. Don’t let C. S.
have him. We have to keep him in custody. Under guard...”
“What do you know about all this, John? You obviously know a lot more than you’re telling me.”
“I’ll fill you in, chief, but I have to get my head together first. I’m not sure what I’ve seen or how to describe it. Just trust me for a little while. I’m on this. I’m trying to find out what it’s about. In the mean time, all I can ask you is to keep that boy under lock and key.”
Bellioc’s diminutive features did not look pleased, but Bell was his best homicide investigator, not some impulsive rookie. “All right, do whatever it is you’re doing...but when I get the Headquarters to send somebody over, I’m going to call you back, and I’m going to want you to be here and tell them -- and me -- everything you know.”
“I will, chief. But until then? Play back the part of the surveillance vid when I went in to interview Kaddish. Listen to what he says. All that crazy dung about an ancient, god-like race? I’m afraid it might be true.”
Over the top of the communication device, Bell saw Kaddish smiling at him, and nodding in a weary kind of satisfaction.
-5-
“We’d better get out of here before the uniforms arrive,” Bell told the other man, handing him back the borrowed gun.
“Are we going together?”
“Yes,” Bell answered, sounding disgusted at himself for saying it. “You’re the expert, apparently, so you tell me where it is we should go.”
“I know of another especially dangerous cult in Tin Town.” Tin Town was one of the least friendly sectors of a generally unfriendly city. Bell had never ventured there, nor did any peace officers, unless pushed into it. “We have to stop them, pal. I don’t know how much time we have left before the doors really come off the hinges, but...”
“You mean kill them, don’t you?”
Kaddish paused, drew in a breath. “Yes. Kill them. We can’t lock them up. They can still perform rituals to a lesser extent, even in custody. You saw what I did...and they know more than I.”
“I won’t be murdering any cults tonight, Josh. And neither will you.”
“You’ve seen the truth, man! Jesus, what does it take? I just walked out of that fucking wall, there!”
“Shit!” Bell hissed, whipping his head around as if someone had whispered in his ear, reminding him of something. Something about walking into walls. Webs that could bend the walls between dimensions. “The kid...”
“What about him?”
Bell unfolded the boy’s drawing he had taken from him. Lines and angles in silver ink like the symbol of silver ink tattooed on his chest. He passed it to Kaddish. “The boy was drawing things like that in the holding room. Formulas. Like the one you used...”
Kaddish’s eyes leapt up from the paper. “If
I escaped that way, he can, too!”
Bell brought his communication device back up to his face, beeped his precinct house. He didn’t want to have to talk to Bellioc again, however. Bellioc might change his mind, order him back right now. “Put Graf on!” he snapped at the dispatcher. Several moments later, the Choom was there. “Graf -- you have to do me a favor, man. Don’t ask why. Go in and take that marker away from the kid from the cult. Make sure he has nothing at all to draw with, understand?”
“Sure. But...”
“Is he being guarded, now?”
“Yes. The chief said you called, and...”
“Tell them to watch him! He might even try to draw in his shit or his blood. Watch him! Keep him at the table. Don’t let him near the corners of the room!”
“The corners? John, look...”
“Do it!” And Bell cut him off, lowered the device.
“He has to be drugged, John. Or put suspended animation. I’m telling you. He was born and raised to be an extension of Yog-Sothoth. And of all the gates of the Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth is the biggest. The rest are just cracks. Yog-Sothoth is the fucking dam, Johnny, and this kid’s finger is all that’s holding back the flood. Understand? Yog-Sothoth is the gate and the guardian of the gate and the key to the gate, all in one.”
“I’ve got to get back there. I have to fill the chief in now. And you’re coming with me, Josh, I’m sorry. I can’t let you go off killing more people. There has to be another way to handle this. You can tell my chief your story, and the Headquarters agents when they get there.”
Bell fully expected Kaddish to put up an argument, given the strength of his obsession. He was surprised, then, when Kaddish dropped his eyes and slowly nodded in agreement. “All right,” he said quietly, “I’ll go back there with you.”
Outside Precinct House 15, lions cast in a pale blue resin flanked the front steps. These terrestrial creatures, no matter how fearsome in aspect, were a weak and ridiculous symbol of protection in the face of the threats Bell had learned of.
Bell was handing over to another officer the two pistols Kaddish had acquired for Kate Redgrove when Chief Bellioc, having heard that Bell had brought his quarry in, came hurriedly into the room. The private detective looked calmly up at the police chief and gave him a pleasant nod.
“So, it’s the magician who performed that disappearing act in his cell,” Bellioc grumbled.
“You must be Chief Bellyache.”
“Don’t fuck with me, you sleazy little piece of dung. I should put you in a nice safe stasis field right now. Tell me what’s happening here. What kind of threat is this to the city?”
“The city?” Kaddish snorted a bitter laugh. On the ride here, Bell had filled him in on the loss of contact with Earth, its moon, the Mars colonies and now, according to the news they had listened to on the Edsel’s radio, outposts on the moons of Jupiter. When asked what he thought the spreading cloud might be, Kaddish had only said under his breath, in a tone of awful reverence, “Azathoth.”
“Sir, the whole Coalition...the whole universe...is under threat,” Bell told him. “There are cults still here in Punktown, cults on Earth, that are working to make this happen.”
“John, do you expect me to believe in Satan worshipers calling up demons?”
“Demons, gods, aliens, call them what you want.”
“And what are we supposed to do about it? Go and murder all these cults like your friend here did?”
“We have to see the boy,” Kaddish said. “There’s no more time to argue.”
“He’s under observation,” Bellioc assured him harshly.
“Let me talk to him. I can get him to open up about this. What he has to show us...you might find enlightening.”
Bellioc looked to Bell, who nodded. “We’ve got to trust him. He knows more about this than
we do, and it doesn’t look like we have much time to learn.”
The precinct commander gestured roughly. “Okay, okay, let’s go.”
As they moved down the corridor toward the holding room where the orphan was being kept, a guard visible outside its force barrier, Kaddish asked Bell, “What became of the Shining Trapezohedron?”
“The what?”
“The black crystal Pugmire had in his apartment.”
“We have that here, in the vault. Why? What’s it do?”
“Not sure, but some say it can be used to view other worlds. Other realms. It may also be a battery of power, a focal point of power...or a door in itself. Whatever it is, it should be destroyed. I never should have left there without it.”
“Like I say, we have it. No one’s gonna touch it.”
They had reached the barrier, and the uniformed forcer stepped aside. The barrier was deactivated, and the boy with the shaven head lifted his head from his arms, crossed before him on the table. He was smiling, and his eyes had locked on Kaddish.
“I’m going to show him something,” Kaddish said, slipping a hand into his pocket.
Bellioc seized his wrist. “What is it? Has he been scanned for weapons, John?”
“Yes.”
“Just this, I want to show him.” Kaddish withdrew the stone disc with the carven eye, and held it out for the chief to see.
Bell saw the boy crane his neck, trying to get a look at what the object was. His smug smile had became less sure, more concerned.
Kaddish turned, and held the seal of the Elder Gods aloft in his left hand for the boy to plainly see.
The boy let out a cry of rage, bolted up from his chair and backed into the wall. He turned his eyes away and tore at the front of his shirt, scattering buttons, revealing pale skin and bony ribs and a silver symbol tattooed on his chest: concentric circles, one inside the next, with lines or rays radiating out from the center.
“What is that?” Bellioc demanded. “What are you doing to him?”
The boy’s cry had turned to a rattle, and the rattle to another kind of cry that made Bell shudder. The child began to scream gibberish in a weirdly altered voice, at once sounding both full of phlegm and full of gravel...
“Ygnaiih...ygnaiih...thflthkh’ngha...”
“Jesus!” Bellioc gasped.
The tattoo on the boy’s chest was splitting along its radiating lines. The skin of his chest began to peel open of its own accord, like a flower blooming in stop motion photography. The petals of this flower folded back, curled in upon themselves, opening up a black maw within the boy. A great cavity that showed no organs inside. Too deep for the shallow confines of his slight child’s body. It was as though all space itself resided inside his frame.
“Yog-Sothoth,” the boy shrieked, still hiding his gaze from that dreaded seal. “Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah -- e’yayayayaaaa...”
“Look!” Bell yelled, pointing at the void in the boy’s flesh. In that empty blackness of space they could see distant stars shining. But the stars were drawing nearer. They were like a shower of comets coming toward them, a fleet of glowing spheres or globes, iridescent, but the colors of that iridescence alien to their human eyes. As they neared, the spheres began to join with each other, become a great mass made of these glowing bubbles, like cells linking to form one immense body. And yet some few smaller, faster spheres shot on ahead, still seeking to reach the hole in the boy’s chest. To shoot through it...
And still the boy went on screaming, “Ngh’aaaaa...ngh’aaa...h’yuh...h’yuh...”
“Yog-Sothoth,” Kaddish breathed, and lunged into the room. No one tried to hold him back. Not even Bellioc.
Into that void, Kaddish tossed the stone disc in his hand.
The boy lifted his head at last, his eyes wide in horror and a rage that could show in no human child’s face, however deranged the mind behind it. The boy threw out his hands to grab a hold of Kaddish, but he danced back out of his reach.