Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales (23 page)

And for that fear, I can only blame my parents.

My mother had told me there were rumors about Doctor Thistle, and I knew Dad and she were angry about him moving in, but it didn’t make sense. He may have been strange, but he’d been nothing but nice to me. I can probably guess, in hindsight, what stories my mother had heard, but nothing unsavory ever happened. I’m pretty sure I would remember something like that. Well, reasonably sure.

The basement lights were off, but sunlight edged around the material papering the windows. I heard the hum of the machinery running, as well a whining noise and something shuffling. The rotten tobacco odor from upstairs had given way to the tremendous stench of old musky sweat, and no matter how deep I breathed it wasn’t deep enough to get acclimated. The world wavered in the periphery of my vision, and what I could see amounted only to the red and blue indicator lights of a room full of electronic gear. I heard something there in the dark, like breathless panting and slobbering, and a low growl that sounded as if it was almost on top of me and not very happy.

“When did you buy a dog, Doc?”

“A dog?” His voice seemed warped there in the dark. “I don’t have a dog. What you’re hearing, that’s—well, that’s something else entirely. I’ll show you, but you need to see something else first. Just stand right where you are. I don’t want you knocking anything over.”

I heard Thistle’s footsteps move away from me, and I thought I could make him out faintly in the corner of my eye, rippling the dark as he passed. The smell off him faded a bit, but I still felt nauseated. And curious. I definitely felt curious.

The lights blinded me when they came on. I don’t know if they were too bright, or I just wasn’t ready, but the pain in my head was as sharp and swift as a razor and I was already screaming before my eyelids shut. It drove whatever animal Thistle had down there crazy. It started howling and thrashing while Thistle’s shushes seemed aimed at us both. When I finally managed to pry my eyes open again I immediately wanted to shut them. Impossibly, the basement was more cluttered than the floor above. I don’t think there were as many boxes and piles, but what was there was larger and odder shaped. It just seemed full of equipment. Blue network cables were wrapped around and hanging from joists crisscrossing the room, sometimes dangling so low they looked like they’d clothesline any average-sized man walking past. Machinery and computers were running everywhere, displays spitting out screen after screen of meaningless code. In the middle of it all was what looked like a mirror. About two feet square, its surface was less reflective and more as if it had the appearance of reflection. That’s the best way I can put it. Whatever I could see in its surface was blurry and didn’t look quite right. The thin metal square was held up by a two-post rack, and I wondered if every goddamn cable in the place was attached to it in some way.

“What’re you building down here, Doc?”

“Oh, it’s built, it’s built.” Thistle laughed, but the sound of it had a strange throaty warble, and the look on his face was hard to peg. “It’s a door, Owen. I’ve built a door.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hang on. Don’t touch anything.”

He started hitting buttons and turning knobs, and the machines in the room made the same noises they had before, but the pitch was higher. It was like they were working together to produce the most ear-splitting whine possible. Immediately, my nausea tripled, and I experienced something similar to my worst flashbacks. I covered my ears but Thistle didn’t, probably because he was already used to the experience. Or maybe he’d just found a node to stand in. He worked the controls as if he were a lot crazier than I’d ever given him credit for. He danced between the switches and keyboards with glassy-eyed glee, his tongue peeking from his mouth, periodically licking his bottom lip. I also heard the mournful cries of that animal, though it wasn’t easy over the device’s whine.

Thistle turned around—it was the first time he’d looked directly at me since switching on his equipment, and without missing an excited step started pointing at the middle of the room where the reflective metal square was standing. Beneath it, lights flickered with the same hyperactivity, but the mirror itself had changed. Earlier its reflection had been a poor reproduction of what was in front of it—colors muted, angles bent, images blurred and unknowable—but now the surface had started to glow and ripple, and whatever had been reflected there wasn’t any more. Just what images were reflected was baffling, but the sight was enough to make what little I’d eaten for breakfast come rushing up my throat. I bent over and vomited, and it spread across the floor like thick soup.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right, Owen?” I stood and nodded, looking at Thistle though my watering eyes. I wiped off my mouth.

“The noise is really messing with my head.”

He nodded. “It takes some getting used to. Don’t worry. It’ll wear off in a minute. And don’t worry about the floor. It’ll be fine once it dries. Come look at this.”

He led me to the mirror, and though I felt the pressure in my head worsen, my stomach settled down. Thistle’s odor didn’t help matters. I wondered what I was doing in that basement, and what the hell Thistle was up to. Mostly, though, I wanted to leave and get myself to a bar. If there was one thing I’d learned about throwing up, it was that it always tasted a lot better followed by a shot of gin. And maybe one before, as well.

“Look, but don’t touch,” Thistle said, and I peeked into the mirror with suspicion. I didn’t see my refection. What I saw I don’t think I can properly describe. It was like a window hanging over the middle of the floor, and what was on the other side of it was a vast landscape of rock and scrub brush. I peered closer as Thistle watched me, a playful smile on his face while mine was no doubt clouded with confusion.

“What is this?”

“It’s a world, Owen. A world almost nothing like ours. I discovered it many years ago, but over time the barrier between there and here has grown thin. So thin, in fact, I was able to fashion a quantum hole using harmonic glass and—”

“But . . . how?”

Thistle looked at me over the top of his glasses.

“I am a doctor, you know.”

Suddenly I saw the truth in his eyes.

“You think this is going to make you rich, don’t you?”

Thistle cleared his throat. “Well, the thought did cross my mind, but no, not yet. I haven’t been able to tune it. Right now, this is the only world I can see, and it’s not the kind of place anyone wants to visit.”

“What do you mean, visit?”

“Yes, Owen. This isn’t a window. It’s a door.”

When a man as old and as obviously crazy as Dr. Thistle smiles, when you get a good look at those crooked yellow teeth and the white film on his bleeding gums, it’s nothing short of disturbing. Especially when that man is talking to you in his underwear. Compared to that, a portal into another world barely registered. I’d seen weird things before, as the late Mrs. Mulroney can attest, and eventually they stopped being anything more than curious. But old-people smiles . . . those things ate at my soul.

“Have you gone through it yet?” I took a step closer to get a better look. Thistle stopped me with an arm across my chest.

“You don’t want to get too close, Owen. But this brings me to what I wanted to show you.”

“It wasn’t this?” I was confused, and more than a bit irritated he wouldn’t let me get closer to his dimensional window.

“I only showed you this so you’d better understand what I have locked up in the other room. It’s no dog.”

“What is it?”

“One of them.”

“One of who?”

Again, he smiled that creepy smile, this time punctuated with a slide of his tongue across his lower lip. I don’t think he knew he was drooling.

“One of them.”

Now things were getting interesting.

After he led me through the maze of wires and equipment that filled the basement, Thistle stopped me at the door to the rear storage room. It had a large padlock around the handle to keep it shut. From the other side of the door I could hear that growling, slobbering noise again. I didn’t know what it was, but it was clearly inhuman.

“If you were anyone else I wouldn’t show you this, but I have a feeling that you won’t judge me too harshly. I wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t shock you at all.”

He was wrong, though. What I saw inside that storage room was indeed shocking. Beneath the deadening fluorescent lights was an old wooden table. Short thick ropes were tied around each of the legs, and they led up to secure Thistle’s trophy to the tabletop. I recognized it at once, and I felt a rush of revulsion and excitement that were so close together I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. The creature he stole from that other world looked to me like no creature at all, but instead like a teenage girl, no more than fifteen. She was tied down spread-eagled. And she was naked.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? She looks almost human.”

“Where did you find her?” I asked. The primal side of me was reacting to her nakedness in a way I was trying desperately to stop. Her violent gyrations on the table didn’t exactly help. I was very worried about the situation I was in, especially if cockeyed Detective McCray found me. If Thistle had picked up this girl off the street—even during some hallucinogenic episode—then I was in the kind of trouble I wouldn’t be able to slide out from under. “Where did you get her, Doc? I need to know.”

“I told you, Owen. I got her from over there. And I know what you’re thinking, but don’t be fooled. She’s not some little girl I snatched up off the street. She’s a ghoul.”

“A what?”

“See for yourself.”

I walked slowly to the girl, forcing my eyes away from her tiny breasts and the allure of her bare mons. I kept my eyes on hers, looking for any sign of humanity in them, but there was nothing there. Only animal ferocity. She was a feral beast, and when she looked at me and roared I could see her teeth were ragged and sharp. And there were far too many of them. I hadn’t seen a ghoul before that point, and she was nothing like those I saw later, so I don’t know if I can call her that now in hindsight, but I know from experience that every plane has its own reality, and I suppose she was just as likely to be a ghoul as not.

“She doesn’t seem to have any idea of where she is.”

“No, I doubt she does. She’s no more than an animal. As far as I can tell her reality doesn’t have any sort of civilization, merely hunting packs.”

I stepped back, afraid of the stress I saw her putting on the ropes. She looked far stronger than I expected. “Why did you bring her over? You know you’d never be able to sell her.”

“Well, maybe not for any scientific reason, but . . .” He trailed off into that smile again, waiting for me to understand what he was saying. I thought I did, but I didn’t believe I was right, not until I noticed the erection in his pants.

“You mean—?”

He nodded slowly but with pride. As though she understood what we were talking about, she violently pulled at the ropes, bucking and thrusting her groin into the air in an effort to break free. She did not seem pleased with her situation. I was at a loss for what to say. I wondered how many men might pay for the experience of fucking an animal shaped like a teenage girl. Then when I realized the answer I wondered just how
much
they would pay. I looked back at the creature, and she was staring straight at Thistle and growling at a quiet, subhuman decibel.

“You haven’t— Have you—?”

“I had to test it out, Owen. I had to make sure that . . . that all the parts worked. Then I had to make doubly sure.”

I nodded, wondering how I managed to get myself into another mess.

“So why show me?”

“I know you, Owen. You’ve got connections all over the place, and from what I gather they aren’t the kind who’d be shocked by something not quite of this world. There’s money to be made here, and I want you to be my partner. No more sleeping on the street or rundown flops or begging for money for you. It’s really the kind of experience you don’t forget, believe me. It’s addictive. I feel years younger, and I think maybe I look it, too. I haven’t taken my medication in weeks. I don’t need to, not with this thing around. It reinvigorates me!” He spit at it and it hissed and strained at its ropes, rubbing its arms raw. “Go ahead,” he said, at last getting to his point. “Try it out.”

Sometimes I get put in strange situations. I’m not going to tell you I’m a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but neither am I as bad as people say I am. People like crooked-eye McCray, for one. That sort of thing, it’s good for the reputation, and having a reputation tends to open more doors than it closes, but sometimes you’re expected to do things you wouldn’t normally do, and the question is always whether you do them and deal with the consequences or don’t do them and allow a chink in that precious image you’ve worked so long on building to protect you. It’s amazing how quickly one can be destroyed.

Whether it was the obviously aroused Thistle or the naked girl writhing in front of me, I wasn’t sure, but I became acutely aware that the storage room smelled of stale sex. Thistle was chuckling and rubbing himself over his stained boxers at the mere thought of watching me fuck the bound creature. The last thing I needed was his perverted eyes on me while he masturbated.

“I’d rather do this on my own.”

In an instant, his face broke. It was obvious he didn’t want to leave. “But it’s not safe. What if she gets loose?”

“Something tells me that if you’ve gone at her alone you’ve made sure she’s tied up good and tight. I’ll take my chances. Better the devil I can see.”

His disappointment turned to irritation that bordered on anger, but I reminded him of the help he was going to need to get his project off the ground.

“All right, I’ll give you a few minutes. I need to check on the window anyway.”