Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
The wide wound now began closing, the petals folding inward, once again concealing the infinity beyond. But one small glowing sphere was still hurtling at the portal, as if it thought it could make it through before the door of flesh closed completely...
Kaddish collided against Bell in his retreat. Bell staggered back a step, and when he recognized his own pistol rising in both of Kaddish’s hands, realized what his friend had done.
Kaddish fired at the boy’s head even as the globe impacted against the nearly closed flaps of skin. The dark purple energy bolt plummeted into the boy’s forehead just above one eyebrow, snapping his head back. His small skull was shattered, the wall behind him becoming splashed with a black mulch that couldn’t possibly be human brain matter.
The closing flaps of skin opened again briefly at the impact of the globe, letting in a blast of weirdly colored light. A single wide ray or beam, which struck Joshua Kaddish squarely in the chest and hurled him backwards out of the room, against the opposite wall of the corridor. And then the petals in the boy’s chest sealed completely, as if they had never existed, and his corpse slid into a sitting position against the wall, his open eyes fixed with that expression of malice that no child -- no human -- should be able to manifest.
Bell and the others went to Kaddish, but stopped themselves. Bellioc withdrew in horror. The uniformed officer whispered some half-prayer under his breath.
Kaddish was also slumped in a seated position, propped against the corridor wall. His entire front, his face, had been charred black, his eyes empty sockets steaming -- as if the horror of what he had seen in that last moment had burned his eyes away utterly. And yet his lips had burned away also, and his blackened skeletal grin seemed hideously full of a sardonic humor. It seemed an apt expression for the man, in death.
Bell retrieved his gun from where it had been dropped by his friend, and carrying it in his fist, walked off down the corridor.
He asked to be let into the station’s vault, and was told by the officer on duty that he needed clearance. He pointed his gun at the young man’s eyes and softly repeated his request. It was granted.
John Bell took two steps into the vault of Precinct House 15, leveled his sidearm at the Shining Trapezohedron, and squeezed the trigger.
Black shards of crystal were scattered across the room.
A transmission, weak and uncertain, was at last received from a colony on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Contact had been lost with the colony over a half hour before.
Bell watched the transmission live on VT, a drink in his hand. A man filled the vidtank. His image was shot with static, but Bell could see that the man’s face was horribly swollen, covered in great blisters with a weirdly metallic sheen. He barely looked human, his eyes were fused
shut, but the man was smiling nonetheless. And he was greeting his viewers with the words, “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
The newscaster returned to report that more transmissions were now being received, one by one, from the colonies on Jupiter’s icy moons, from Mars and from Earth. Bell was torn between hope and utter despair. He was tempted to turn the VT off before he saw what those transmissions contained.
He wondered if he and Kaddish by themselves had been responsible for blocking the Old Ones from coming, or if there had been other men and women, like themselves and Kate Redgrove, here on Oasis and on the Earth, who had been fighting their own desperate battles to prevent the dead, defeated gods from rising anew from their cosmic sepulchers. Were the doors now locked again -- or merely shut? He watched, and waited for the news.
Even now Bell didn’t know if his mutant companion was elderly or a youth, male or female. It pointed a scrawny arm through the rubble of the ruined structure in which the two of them hid, its great lidless eyes filled with fear at the sight of what it pointed at.
Across a lot heaped in junk and the exoskeletons of hovercars, a low flat-roofed building stood, its windows long since gone. The building was painted white, and thus, with its many gaping windows, resembled the fossil skull of some vast creature, with rows of black sockets. And an evil ghost of a brain, whispering inside.
Bell paid the mutant, barely noticed it as it crept away. The poor blighted creature would have elicited more interest and concern from him, if such beings weren’t so abundant here in the slum of Tin Town.
In his hands, Bell gripped a sawed-off pump shotgun with a banana clip full of crystal shot. In a shoulder holster was a ray blaster, in a hip holster a pistol loaded with solid projectiles, and in an ankle holster a little palm piece loaded with plasma capsules.
And in one of the pockets of his leather jacket he carried a small spray gun, loaded with a tube of blood red paint.
The Avatars of the Old Ones
-1-
H'anna
was used to having others stand before her artwork in attitudes of confusion and even discomfort as they attempted to interpret it, to understand it...but now, she found herself in a similar pose as she regarded her new creation, "Headless Angel."
Other pieces crowded her apartment in a kind of personal museum. It was all she had by way of a permanent exhibit; only several pieces had ever been accepted into a few small gallery shows, and she had yet to sell anything. But then, it mattered more to express herself than to sell herself. Not that she wouldn't have minded a bit more appreciation. Or to quit her day job.
Outside her high apartment window, a string of helicars hovered at a stoplight, and then hummed onwards again. On the roof of the building opposite, a gigantic holographic Indian woman in traditional garb sang in a cheery high-pitched voice like that of a dwarf child on helium about the virtues of a new netlink service. The summer sun shone through the woman's chest like a molten heart within her. Inside H'anna's livingroom/studio it was stifling; only the climate control in the bedroom was functional. At least she could sleep at night. Right now she wore only her panties and the t-shirt she had slept in, her long dark hair in sweaty snarls.
Not only had her inspiration for "Headless Angel" come to her in dreams, but even now with it finished she had still dreamt about it last night...as if the thing were still not out of her system. It was work, she felt, that was doing this to her. Giving her these nightmares. Work was a recurring daily nightmare...
Her sculptures up to now had been nothing like this piece, even when they were born of anger and meant to shock, like "Precious Knickers", which hung in her bedroom. That piece had found its origins in an annoyingly tiny pair of bikini underwear she had stolen from her ex-boyfriend's apartment when she let herself in to gather up the last of her belongings; needless to say, they were not her own panties. Filling the underpants were two pigs' hearts. The hearts were stitched together like conjoined twins, and she had taken the wings from a dead pigeon and stitched one to each of the hearts. The whole piece had been spray-painted a lurid red and spray-sealed with a hard preserving plastic.
So, it might not be so difficult for someone else to imagine that "Headless Angel" was nothing out of the ordinary. But H'anna felt the difference...even if she couldn't understand it.
She had completed it last night; perhaps the morning would give her fresh perspective. And so she took it in as if someone else had created it (and it felt that way, didn't it?). The sculpture was entirely composed of sheets of thin scrap metal, jaggedly cut and torched together into an entirely black-painted figure as large as herself, which resembled a suit of armor one moment and a chitinous exoskeleton the next. This latter effect was heightened by the wings of the being, which looked like they'd been charred when this angel had fallen. Its crouching body was both anthropomorphic yet dog-like. One hand was raised as if in a perverse blessing. And it had no head. But rising up from the stump of the neck was a thin rod, which branched off to support three black metal discs with edges so sharp she'd sliced her flesh while snipping them. These were the headless angel's triple halos. H'anna wondered if subconsciously she had meant for the triple halos to represent the Holy Trinity. Thus, the lack of a head might represent - what? The death of God? The emptiness of blind faith? Or might this creature not even be anything affiliated with Christianity? It had the aspect of a sphinx. Some mythological creature...some other, older God.
And in standing nearly stripped before it, H'anna felt either like a worshipper to it...or a sacrifice.
-2-
The man's face was horribly swollen, covered in great blisters with a weirdly metallic sheen. He barely looked human, his eyes were fused shut, but the man was smiling nonetheless. He greeted H'anna with the words, "Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
"Same to you," H'anna replied pleasantly, walking on quickly by the man. She cast a look over her shoulder to be certain he hadn't turned to follow after her, but he kept on s
trolling - shambling, rather - along the sidewalk in the opposite direction. She had heard that precise gibberish repeated so many times over the past four years that she could almost recite it herself, maybe with the help of a mouth full of marbles.
The summer air was compacted in the narrow chasms of the looming city, so that the squalid smells of garbage and piss and sweat were more potent than ever, densely concentrated into a nearly solid miasma. Up
-town, with its better quality shopping district and higher-class office blocks, was climate-controlled, but a combination of a troubled economy and the terrible calamity of four years ago had left much of the city in a blighted state. The sun was directly overhead, in what little of the sky could be seen, but even when the streets were entombed in the shadows of the towers that soared impossibly on all sides, there would be little respite. Helicars whirred far overhead like agitated hornets, and closer to the streets, hovercars whisked impatiently, all as if maddened by the hellish atmosphere. Was it just her imagination, or had the summers become hotter since the incident of four years ago? Had everyone just taken it for granted now, as they had all the people like that blister-faced man? Taken it for granted because they didn't want to confront the implications?
H'anna wore a sleeveless vest-
like garment unbuttoned at the bottom to reveal the sly depression of her navel, and similarly dark brown cloned-leather pants. These were a tad tight and heavy in this sweltering heat, but she was a bit self-conscious about baring the muscular thickness of her thighs and calves, not being as cadaverously thin as was once again the fashion. Her scuffed boots looked too large for her feet. H'anna Chabert was twenty-one, shortish and pale, her brown hair parted down the center and falling to below her breasts in greased tangles and tendrils. Her brows were heavy, her eyes dropping down at the corners, hazel in color and intelligent in aspect. Her lips were full, and her smiles showed a broad expanse of bright teeth. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but someone of more refined taste would appreciate its various effects taken singly and in their very human whole.
H'anna had taken a hoverbus from her neighborhood to this sector, and now was coming up on the Ambuehl Building, where she worked; a sleek tow
er with a rounded top, pale sea-green in color and trimmed in lines of bright chrome. It housed a number of Social Services offices, including the local welfare branch. It was the welfare office that had established the soup kitchen in the basement, and this was H'anna's destination.
In the lobby with its high vaulted ceiling and glitter and glass, there was a tiny mall of sorts: a hair dresser's, a haberdashery and a little cafe with scattered tables that offered a limited luncheon menu. H'anna stood behind a woman in line, glanced around with boredom, grateful for the cool of the building's interior. Her eyes returned to the woman ahead of her. It was her turn at the counter, but the girl behind the counter looked irritated and nervous.
"Downstairs," the counter girl said. "You want to go downstairs..."
The woman in front of H'anna shuffled slowly around and H'anna took several steps back. She was one of the Afflicted. Her mouth squashed to the side by one of her metallic tumors, another growth filling an eye socket, her remaining eye crusted shut. The disfigured creature seemed to be studying H'anna's face, though how her kind saw at all through their slitted eyes she didn't know.
"The entrance is in back of the building," H'anna told her.
The woman smiled, and dutifully trudged across the lobby and blundered out the revolving door after several trips around and around in it like a gerbil in a treadmill. H'anna had expected her to end up back in the lobby again, for a moment or two.
At the counter, H'anna purchased a large coffee and a small salad for her lunch. She would eat it here before going to her work in the basement, however, as it seemed to be in poor taste to eat such things in front of the many who were sustained by lumpy gruel and poor bread.
An old security guard robot purred into the lobby from a branching hallway. The hallway was lined with scratches from the robot's flanks, which was hardly reassuring as to its
accuracy in matters of protection. While making its rounds, it must have sensed too late that one of the Afflicted had been misdirected into the lobby. The building's owners did not seem to perceive the Afflicted as a serious threat, though in the soup kitchen there was always one organic guard on hand, due to the sheer numbers of the clientele.