Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
"Floor eleven, I think - right?" John said. "For alien antiquities? Choom? Tikkihotto?"
"Yes," H'anna replied. She knew the museum well, had often wandered its halls while fantasizing about exhibiting her own work there one day. It seemed such a trivial dream, now, with a gateway to another dimension opening up somewhere below them. The elevator sped them downward toward that place. H'anna felt like it was lowering them into Hell.
"Floor eleven," a pleasant female voice announced, and the door opened. Before them stretched a wide, dim hallway with glossy floors. It was utterly, eerily silent. Warily, they disembarked.
"What display do you want?" H'anna whispered.
"Tikkihotto," John replied.
"Um, that way." She pointed with her gun, and so they headed down a narrower branching corridor. It was also gloomy, almost dark, but with recessed, lighted displays in the walls. These were holographic dioramas portraying the colonization of the Tikkihottos' planet by Earth people, nearly a hundred years ago now. The holograms, on a regular cycle, switched to ad
s for various museum sponsors - a sneaker company, a vidphone service, a mood adaptor implant. "Stress dominating your life?" asked a pleasant female voice.
The corridor opened into a series of interconnecting galleries of ancient Tikkihotto artifacts, beginning with a collection of intricately embroidered ceremonial robes spread across the walls like tapestries. The rooms were as still as a labyrinth of tombs.
Next, an exhibit of weapons; axe-like swords, lances, handsome early muskets. In this room, they began to hear a sound at last, somewhere ahead. Murmuring voices. A chorus of them. It sounded like a low monotonous chanting. They glanced at each other, crept forward more stealthily to listen.
"Iä...ngai...ygg..."
Waving his companion back, John ventured a bit further ahead, poked his head through the next doorway. H'anna held her breath - and nearly screamed when a gun started firing explosively. At first, she thought it was John, but he jolted back just as startled as she. He then lunged forward, however, and not wanting to be left behind, she plunged after him.
It was a wide, circular gallery, ringed with statues and busts on pedestals, with the colossal figure of a legendary Tikkihotto hero in the center, bronze tendrils curling from his sockets where a human's eyes would be. At the base of this figure, some of its tentacles wound around the bronze legs, was a great undulating bulk that could not have been less than thirty human beings at one time. One of its limbs had whipped out and circled the throat of a security guard, who had now dropped his gun, his eyes bulging in a blackening face.
John and H'anna skidded to a stop and opened fire wildly, in a desperate panic, as the beast turned several of its limbs in their direction.
H'anna's melting plasma did more good than John's solid projectiles. A tentacle was burned free and flopped at H'anna's feet like a dying snake. Black smoke began to billow, a vile fluid as shiny as quicksilver to spread in a pool. A third of the monster was able to surge away through the opposite doorway, but they could still hear it wailing away in agony, the plasma still
diligently at work on it. The miasma it left behind caused H'anna to retch, but she clapped her free hand over her mouth. John had already rushed forward to one of the statues, and H'anna saw that there were numerous silvery lines affixed to it. Lifting her head, she followed them to a ring of windows near the concave ceiling of this domed projection of the museum. The windows - though bullet and ray-proof - had all been melted through somehow to permit the entry of the strands.
Still covering her nose and mouth though the putrid mists were dissipating, H'anna crossed the room to join John at the base of the statue.
"Yes," she said, lowering her hand. "Oh my God...yes. And I've seen this before...I have. Maybe, maybe subconsciously I remembered it, copied it..."
"No," John said. "You were right the first time. You saw it in your dreams. They were using you to make an idol for them. Another nodal point of power."
H'anna read aloud the translated title on the plaque. "The Black Messenger." She read more. "They don't know what kind of material it was carved from. A kind of resin, they think, 'perhaps secreted by insect colonies cultivated for such a purpose; the Tikkihotto were known to breed certain insect species for food and silk'." She again lifted her gaze to the sculpture.
Whatever it was made of, it was entirely ebon in color, the silvery black of hemat
ite. It was a crouching, sphinx-like hybrid, with the longer forelimbs of a hyena, and stylized folded bird-like wings. Atop its head was a crown with three cones. And there was no face on the creature's head. No snarling demon's visage with mere eyes and fangs could have disturbed her more than this.
"Nyarlathotep," she breathed aloud.
John looked at her sharply. "How do you know?"
"I just know. From the dreams..."
Both front limbs rested on the ground, whereas her version had had one hand raised in a blessing.
But now, one of its front limbs did rise up, with a crackling sound like the crumbling of sanity.
-5-
Jerking up her pistol in both fists, H'anna let loose a shriek of madness and a volley of gel capsules, that broke against the statue's blank visage. Sizzling, black smoke, and corrosive blue glow. The sculpture toppled forward off its base, and the taloned fingers of its raised hand raked H'anna across the leg. She screamed and crumpled.
John caught her under the armpits, dragged her across the marble floor and knelt protectively over her, gun aimed toward the fallen statue.
H'anna expected it to convulse in seizures of pain, to see the vulture-like wings open up and beat at the floor madly...that the now headless monster would scrabble across the floor to tear them with it claws. But it lay still, the plasma slowly spreading down its shoulders now, a black pool beginning to grow under it. Had she only imagined the arm raising, then? Might it have been raised all along?
John clamped his palm over the young woman's furrowed thigh. Blood flowed between his fingers, but there was no arterial jetting.
"I thought blue plasma only worked on organic things...living things," she cried.
"It does," John muttered softly, watching the statue melt. Most of the strands had torn free of it, bleeding drops like mercury, a few tongues of violet electricity flashing from their ends, but then dying out.
H'anna clung to John and now, as if finally jarred out of some prolonged trance of numbing unreality, began to sob against his chest. He stroked her back reassuringly, but looking up at his face, she saw that his eyes appeared just as afraid, just as exhausted. He seemed to be glancing around the circular room at the other statues on their pedestals, as if he might be wondering what other horrors lay hidden behind quiet masks, on this world and others.
"We did good," he said at last, turning his attention back to her and helping her to her feet. "You did really good. But let's get you to a hospital, now, huh?"
She leaned against him, her arm around his shoulders, as they started across the chamber. She winced at the pain. But something distracted her from it momentarily, a glitter on the floor. She glanced toward the metallic pool where most of that tentacled monstrosity had melted away. Lying in that silver ichor was a gold wedding ring. She now saw, also, rags and bundles of clothing. A belt. Some shoes. She was reminded of the human loss, the tragedy behind the monster's face - or facelessness.
They took an elevator back to the roof. Because a tourniquet might do more harm than good, especially where arteries weren't severed, H'anna had simp
ly stripped off her torn cloned-leather pants and put pressure on the lacerations in her thigh with the undershirt of the strangled security guard. While riding the elevator she saw John cast a guilty look at her bare bloody legs, and smile at her bashfully. She resisted the joke that he was welcome to wash her off later if he liked. Despite their intimacy of having been forced to take part in murder together, she wasn't sure if she were ready for sex yet.
On the roof, they heard the city alive with sirens (as if it were one vast organism wailing from countless echoing mouths) and the crackle of gunfire, as citizens and policemen alike launched a counterattack against the mutated Afflicted. Whether these creatures were still channeling the consciousness of the Old One called Nyarlathotep, or were merely mindless protoplasm at this point, not even John speculated...though in the next few days, all of the Afflicted on Earth and her immediate colonies w
ould have been slaughtered or - in most cases - perished on their own.
John disappeared for a few days. She thought for good, but then he appeared at her
apartment, and told her that people from the government had questioned him about what had transpired...and what might transpire in the future. Though he wouldn't admit as much to her, H'anna believed that he had agreed to work with the government in some capacity.
He ended up moving into her apartment with her for several weeks. He helped her clear out the ruined "Headless Angel", patch bullet holes, look for a new job; he cooked breakfast for her, painted her toe nails dark brown one evening, and they made sweaty love with an almost frightened desperation in the sweltering summer heat.
And then one afternoon she came back from her new job in the FAM gift shop and he was gone. But a few days later, she received a crackly, static-shot call from him on her vidphone.
"I'm sorry, H'anna," he told her. "It was a spur of the moment thing. My new friends needed me here. I don't know when I'll be back, either."
"Where is here?" she asked him. She heard an ocean surf somewhere close by, wherever he was. But the sky outside the window behind him had an unearthly purple glow. Was that strange cry she heard the call of some sea bird?
"I can't say right now," he replied, his eyes beseeching for understanding. "Another world. It seems even farther than that. I miss you, H'anna. I'll try to come back...I will..."
"Okay," she said blandly. She gave a little shrug like it didn't matter. It did, but she understood. After what they'd seen together, she understood quite well.
It was difficult being alone again, but there was something even more difficult that soon developed. H'anna found she was
incapable of returning to her art. She couldn't sculpt...couldn't even sketch. It was not so much that she couldn't, however, as that she was afraid to.
Because one night she woke up and felt a compulsion to sketch in colored pencil an image from her dream. She had the mental picture mostly captured before she fully realized what she was doing. And then she tore the thing to bits. But before she did so, she sat back from the sketch and took it in, as if studying a drawing someone else, some stranger, had rendered.
The drawing showed a great gray beast rising up from the sea in a spray of foam against a dark purple sky. The leviathan had vast jagged fins or wings spreading out from its back, and a face without eyes or any features other than a nest of thrashing silvery tentacles.
The Young of the Old Ones
-1-
VT
programs had changed a lot in the eight years that Pal Sexton had been lost in another dimension.
He was watching a version of
Hamlet
that had been released last year, and was now running on the premium channels. Hamlet’s voice was by Kenneth Branagh, taken from a twentieth century film version, and Ophelia’s voice was by Helena Bonham Carter, taken from a slightly older version than that. Pal did not realize that the joke here was that the two actors had been romantically involved in their time. But the voice of Polonius was provided by a contemporary actor, the rubber-faced Choom comedian Kip Vreelee, whose body customarily jerked about a movie screen like that of an electrocuted marionette.
But these voices were dubbed in, so that they appeared to be spoken by actual dead animals, the mouths and beaks of which were computer-animated to mouth the dialogue. Hamlet, for instance, was a scruffy dead mongrel that had been filmed where it lay in some lot or alley, and
his animated lips moved around a drooping motionless tongue. Ophelia was physically portrayed by a dead cat which steadily decomposed as the film wore on, so that by the time of her suicide it was a roiling mass of maggots. In keeping with the fact that Vreelee was not an earthly being, the animal which starred as Polonius was a rotting land-mollusk called a t’uub, indigenous to the planet Oasis, its shell apparently crushed by some wheeled vehicle.
The medical attendant who brought Pal his breakfast lingered beside his chair after she had set his tray in front of him, and chuckled at the scene now unfolding. Yorick the jester was presented as the skull of a small bird.
Pal looked up at her. “I can’t believe they made a whole three hour movie like this. How well did it do?”
The young med pried her eyes away to grin down at him. “Are you joking? You should see the new
Romeo and Juliet
. Everyone’s doing ‘dead critter’ movies now. They’re hilarious.” A more serious expression crossed her face as if she chastised herself. “And educational, too – they keep these important classics alive.” She poured Pal a coffee from the cylinder on his tray, and then whisked whitely from the room, tossing back one last look at the screen.