New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (35 page)

“I’m going too. I don’t care if it’s the men’s room. They took my sister in there.”

“She went on her own. But fuck it, let’s go.”

He led the way into the men’s room—which was empty.

Not a soul in it. Jorny even opened the toilet booths. No one. There was only one entrance. There was no way out of the bathroom except the one door. There were no ventilation shafts. There was just the big, over-lit, blue-tiled and stainless steel bathroom and their own reflections in the mirrors over the metal sinks.

Jorny gaped around. “Okay, what uh . . . ” His voice seemed emptied of life in the hard space of the room. “We were right in front of that door. They didn’t get out past us . . . ”

“Look!” She pointed at the mirrors. They were reflected in a continuum of mirrors, as when mirrors are turned to mirrors. Only, there was only one set of mirrors on one wall. There were no mirrors opposite—yet the reflection was the mirror-images-within-mirror-images telescoping that happened only if you turned mirrors to mirrors . . . And Deede saw hundreds of Deedes and Jornys stretched into infinity, each face looking lost and shocked and scared.

Lost and shocked and scared endlessly repeated, amplified.

And then she saw Jean in the mirrors, about thirty reflections down the glassy corridor, passing from one side to the other, glancing at her as she went past.

“Jean!” She turned from the mirror, looked the other way as if she might see Jean throwing the reflection there—but saw nothing but a row of toilet booths and urinals. She looked back at the mirrors. “Jorny—did you see someone in the mirrors beside us?”

Jorny’s endlessly repeated reflections nodded to her. “Thought I saw your sister.”

Feeling dizzily sick, Deede turned away. “It’s like there’s another room in this room.”

She noticed an outline, about the size of a door, on the farther wall between the urinals and the corner, etched with what looked like red putty along the joins in the tiles. She walked over to it. “There’s a door-shaped mark here . . . but . . . ” She touched the puttied areas. “This gunk is hard, here, like it’s been this way a long time. It couldn’t be where they got out.” Jorny came over and battered at the marked section of wall with his skateboard; they pushed at tiles but could find no way of opening the door, if it was a door. And when they touched it there was a sensation like a very weak electric shock—not enough to make them jump but just enough to give a feeling of discomfort. Electrical discomfort—and the hairs rising on the back of their necks. And chills too, sick chills like you get with the flu. “It’s like a warning,” she whispered. “Come on—I want out of here.”

Jorny nodded, seeming relieved, and they hurried out of the men’s room, back into the lounge area—where they were entirely alone. “I’ve been thinking about some of the shops we saw,” Deede said, as they walked over to the elevators and the door to the stairwell. The stairway door was locked. “And—it was like something was influencing stuff around here, something changing the way things . . . just the way they are.” Should she tell him about the cord connecting Koenig’s foot to the floor tiles?

“I know what you mean,” Jorny said absently, as he fiddled with the door to the stairway. “ Locked. But yo—
that
door’s open.”

The door he was pointing at, between the stairs and elevator, was marked M
AINTENANCE 47-17.
It looked like it hadn’t quite closed—like the doorframe was slightly crooked and it had stuck with the door just slightly ajar. You had to look close to see it was open.

She went to it and put her hand on the knob.

Jorny whispered, “Be careful . . . you could end up locking it. “

She nodded and turned the knob while pulling hard on the door—and it swung open.

Inside, it was an ordinary closet, containing a new vacuum cleaner with the price tag still on it, and bottles of cleaning fluid, all of them full, and a push broom . . . and another smaller door, in the wall of the closet to the right. She bent over and turned the little chrome handle it had in place of a knob—and it opened onto the stairway. “Cool! Come on!”

Hunching down to fit, they went through—and found themselves in the main stairway. It was dimly lit, echoing with their every movement, a smell of rot overlaying the smell of new concrete and paint.

“Smells like road kill,” Jorny said. He turned to look at the door they’d come through—which shut behind them into the wall, hardly showing a seam. “Weird that they put that door there.”

“It’s for
them
, to use—in case of emergency,” Deede said. “And don’t ask who
they
are—I don’t know.”

“Deede—there’s something moving down there . . . and it doesn’t seem like people.”

She leaned over the balcony and looked. Something slipped across the space between flights about four stories down—a transparent dull-red flipper . . . feeler . . . tentacle? She couldn’t get a clear visual picture of it from where she stood. But it was big—maybe three feet across and very long. Slipping by, like a giant boa constrictor. She could just make out that it was connected to something bigger, something that stretched down the open space between the descending flights of stairs.

And as it moved she heard the familiar moaning. That sobbing despair.

She stepped back and said, “Jorny—punch me in the shoulder.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m not dreaming. But only pretty sure. So go ahead and—ow!”

“You said to! Okay—do me now. Right there. Stick out your knuckle so it—shit!”

“So what do you think?” he asked, rubbing his shoulder, wincing. “Damn you hit hard for a girl.”

“That’s sexist. And I think we’re awake. We have to decide.”

He surprised her by suddenly sitting down on the steps, and taking a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “I’ve been trying not to smoke. Promised my mom I’d give it up.” He took a wooden match out with the cigarette and flicked it alight on his skateboard—Deede thought it was an admirably cool thing to do. He lit the cigarette, and puffed. “But right now I don’t care what my mom thinks about cigarettes.”

“So what’re we gonna
do
?” She was thinking of going back to the apartment again and seeing if Lenny had come home. She’d made excuses for him but under the circumstances she thought he’d have left her a note or something if he’d left . . . voluntarily.

Don’t think about Lenny, too
, she thought, sitting on a step a little below Jorny.
One person at a time. Get Jean. She’s younger. He’s older and he can take care of himself.

Jorny was blowing smoke rings, and poking at them with his finger—he was absentmindedly running his skateboard back and forth on its wheels with one foot. “One time two or three years ago,” he said, his voice a dreamy monotone, “when my dad was still living with us, I was worried about where he was all day. See, he was a photographer, and he worked at home. So he was usually there. But one summer he just started being gone all day and there was a lot of . . . I dunno, him and my mom were arguing all the time about little things. About bullshit. Like there was something else . . . but they weren’t saying. I was feeling like he was doing something—and it was gonna make them break up. So anyway I followed him. I didn’t even think about why. I borrowed my sister’s car—she’s moved out now—and I followed him. He didn’t notice I was following. He was really into where he was going, man. He went to a motel. I should’ve left it there but I saw which room he went to and after awhile I went up and they had the windows curtained but there was a place where if you bent over and looked, at the corner, you could see in.”

“Oh Christ, Jorny.”

“Yeah. He was doin’ it with some woman I never saw before. They had champagne and stuff. Later on he left my mom for her.”

“That must’ve been . . . ” She couldn’t keep from making a face.

“It was. I wished I hadn’t gone, wished I hadn’t looked. It’s different, really seeing it. Worse. He was still married to my mom, and . . . Anyway, since then, I figure there’s things I don’t want to find out about. And if we go looking down there, we’ll see things we don’t want to know about.” He flicked his cigarette away half smoked. “I’m not scared. Not that much. I just . . . don’t want to see anything else that I don’t want to know about . . . especially since my mom might be in any one of a million places.”

“But . . . ” Deede heard the moaning again from below. She just wanted to go back to the apartment, and wait there with the doors locked. But that hadn’t helped Lenny.

“You okay?” Jorny asked, looking at her closely.

“I’m just worried about my brother. And Jean. I’d like to go back to the apartment but . . . ” She sighed. “No one did anything about my mom being killed. No one . . . no one
pursued
it.” Deede felt her hands fisting—and she couldn’t prevent it. “They said it was suicide or an accident. But there was a man who scares people—he was following some girls in the neighborhood, and there’s rumors about him—and he was there that day, he was seen on the same trails, and then there was the dream. The dream seemed almost as real as . . . as today is.”

“What dream?”

”It was one of those dreams you get over and over—but the first time I got it was the morning my mom was killed. She was out jogging early and I was still asleep. Our house was out on the edge of town, by this sorta woodsy area with an old quarry. And in my dream I saw her jogging along the edge of the old quarry, where there’s this little pond, jogging like she always does on the trails there, and I saw Gunnar Johansen watching her and he looks like he’s been up all night, he’s sort of swaying there, and then he starts following her and then starts running and she turns and sees him and stumbles and falls on the trail and then he throws himself on her and she struggles and hits him, and he laughs and he knocks her out and then he . . . plays with her body kind of, with one hand on her throat, squeezing and the other hand in his pants, and then she kicks him in the groin and he gives a yell and picks her up and throws her down in the quarry, and she falls face down and she hits hard in that shallow water down there. And . . . bubbles come up . . . 
And that’s exactly how they found her
.”

“They found her like that, in that exact place? And you hadn’t heard about it yet?”

Deede nodded. “I tried to tell them but they said dreams don’t count in court. I had that dream again, I had it a lot. I was afraid to go to sleep for a long time.”

She put her face in her hands and he came and sat close beside her, not touching her, just being there with her. She appreciated that—the sensitivity of it. Him not trying to put his arm around her. But coming to be right there with her.

A few seconds more, and then a moan and a long, drawn-out scraping sound came from below. Deede decided she had to make up her mind. “I have to go down there. No one found out about my mom. I’m going to find out about Jean. You can go back.”

He cleared his throat. Then muttered, “Fuck it.” Nodded to himself. He stood up and offered his hand to help her up. “Okay. Come on.”

They descended. Jorny carried his skateboard for two turns, and then decided to do a jump, as if some kind of oblique statement of defiance of whatever waited below, and he jumped a whole flight—and the skateboard splintered under him when he came down, snapped in half, and he ended up sliding on his ass. “Shit god
damn
it!”

She helped him up this time. “Sorry about your skateboard. You going to save the trucks?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” Disgustedly carrying half a skateboard in each hand, he led the way downward—and they stopped another floor lower, to peer over the concrete rail.

Something slipped scrappily by thirty-five feet below, something rubbery and transparently pinkish-red. It made her think of the really big pieces of kelp you saw at the shore, thickly transparent like that, but redder, bigger—and this one had someone swallowed up in it: one of the kids, a young boy she’d seen in the lounge. The boy was trapped inside the supple tree-trunk-thick flexible tube, trapped alive, squeezed but living, slightly moving, eyes darting this way and that, hands pressed by the constriction against his chest . . . and moaning, making the despairing moan they’d been hearing, somehow louder than it should be, as if the thing that held him was triumphantly amplifying his moan.

“You
see
that?” Jorny whispered.

She nodded. “One of those kids who was with Jean . . . in a . . . I don’t know what it is.” And then it moaned again, so loudly the cry echoed up the shaft of the stairway.

It’s calling to us
, she thought.
It’s luring us. Saying “Come and save him, come and save them all. Come down and see . . . ”

The slithering thing, connected to something below, itself descended—or, more rightly, was pulled down—ahead of her and Jorny, themselves going down and down, the light diminishing ever so subtly toward the lower floors. The transparent red tubule drew itself down, like an eel drawing itself into a hole, pulling the boy—and others, too, squirming trapped human figures glimpsed for a moment enveloped in other thick tendrils, moaning, down and down. Did she see Jean, caught down there? Deede wasn’t sure. But she felt that sick flu-chills feeling again and she wanted to turn and run up the stairs and—

“I saw my mom down there,” Jorny said, his voice cracking. Inside that thing. “Now I’ve really got to go.”

Deede wanted to run.
Don’t let them scare you into not going.
She almost thought she heard her mom’s voice saying it. Almost.
He needs someone to go with him. And Jean . . . don’t forget Jean
.

“Okay,” Deede made herself say. She started down, following the slithering descender, following the moans and the moaners, following the trapped squirmers.

Down and down till they got to the dimly lit bottom floor. And to the basement door.

Deede had expected to find the squirming thing at the bottom but it wasn’t there, though there was a thin coating of slushy red material on the floor—like something you’d squeeze from kelp but the color of diluted blood—surrounding the closed basement door. The thing had gone through the door—and closed it behind.