New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (36 page)

She half hoped the door was locked. Jorny tried it—and it opened. He stood in the doorway, outlined in green light. She looked over his shoulder.

About forty feet by thirty, the basement room contained elevator machinery—humming hump-shaped units to the right—and cryptic pipes along the ceiling. But what drew their eyes was a jagged hole in the floor, right in front of the door, about seven feet across, edged with red slush—the green light came from down there. From within the hole.

She followed Jorny into the room, and—Deede taking a deep breath—they both bent over to look.

Below was a chamber that could never have been made by the builders of Skytown. It was a good-sized chamber, very old. Its stones were rough-carved, great blocks set by some ancient hand in primeval times, way pre-Columbian. Grooves had been carved in the stone floor by someone with malign and fixed intentions. They were flecked with a red-brown crust that had taken many years to accumulate.

“It looks to me like they dug this building in real deep,” Jorny said, in a raw whisper. “I heard they dug the foundation down deeper than any other building in Los Angeles. And . . . I guess there was something down there, buried way down, they didn’t know about . . . ”

She nodded. He looked at the fragments of skateboard in his hand and tossed them aside, with a clatter, then got down on his knees, and lowered himself . . .

“Jorny!”

. . . through the hole in the floor; into the green light; into the ancient chamber.

“Oh fuck,” she groaned. But she lowered herself and dropped too, about eight feet to a stinging impact on the balls of her feet.

Jorny caught and steadied her as she was about to tip over and they looked around. “Some kind of temple!” he whispered. “And that
thing
 . . . ”

The grooves cut into the naked bedrock of the floor, each about an inch deep, were part of a spiral pattern that filled the floor of the entire room—and the gouged pattern was reproduced on the ceiling, as was the dais, the spirals, above and below, converging on the circular dais and the translucent thing that dwelt at the room’s center. Spiral patterns on ceiling, spiral patterns on floor, between them, a thing hung suspended in space—suspended between the space of the room and the space between worlds: an enormous, gelatinous, transparent sphere containing a restless collection of smaller iridescent spheres, like a clutch of giant fish eggs —were they smaller than the encompassing sphere, or were they of indefinite size, perhaps both as small as bushels and as big as planets? The iridescent spheres shifted restlessly inside the enveloping globe, changing position, as if each sphere was jostling to get closer to the outside of the container, the whole emanating a murky-green light that tinted the stone walls to jade; the light was a radiance of intelligence, a malign intelligence—malevolent relative to the needs and hopes of human beings—and somehow Deede knew that it was aware of her and wanted to consume her mind with its own . . . She could feel its mind pressing on the edges of her consciousness, pushing, leaning, feeling like a glacier that might become an avalanche.

And then as her eyes adjusted she saw what the green glow had hidden, till now—its extensions, green but filled with diluted blood, stolen blood, the tentacles stretching from the sphere-of-spheres like stems and leaves from a tuber, but prehensile, mobile, stretching out from thick tubules to gradually narrow, to thin, very thin tips that stretched out red cords, like fishing line up into the grooves on the ceiling, and from there into minute cracks, and, she knew—with an intuitive certainty—up high into the building, where they reached into people, taking control of them one by one, starting with those who’d been here longest, Skytown’s employees. And some of the tentacular extensions had swallowed up whole people, drawn them down and into itself, so that they squirmed in the tubes, dozens of them, shifting in and out of visibility . . . She saw Koenig, drawn down in one of the transparent tentacles, sucked through it, his face contorted with a terrible realization . . . blood squeezing in little spurts from his eyes, his mouth, his nose . . . And then he was jetted back up the tentacle, becoming smaller as he went, transformed into transmissible form that could be reconstituted up above . . . And all this she glimpsed in less than two seconds.

Visibility was a paradox, a conundrum—the tentacles were visible as a whole but not individually, when you tried to look at one it shifted out of view, and you just glimpsed the people trapped inside it before it was gone . . . And the moaning filled the room, only they heard it more in their minds than in their ears . . .

“It’s like this thing is here but it’s not completely here,” Jorny said, wonderingly. “Like it’s . . . getting to be more and
more
here as it . . . ”

“The people look pale, some of them like they’re dying or dead,” Deede said, feeling dreamlike and sick at once. “I can’t see them clear enough to be sure but it’s like they’re being drained real slow.”

Jorny said, “It’s not coming at us . . . Why?”

“It’s waiting,” she said. It was more than guessing—it felt right. The answers were in the air itself, somehow; they throbbed within the murky green light. Her fast-seeing drew them quickly into her. “It wants us to come to it. It’s lured the others in some way—we saw how it lured Jean. Everyone’s been lured. It wants you to submit to it . . . ”

“Look—there’s something on the other side.”

“Jorny? How are we going to get out of here? There’s no way back up.”

“There has to be another entrance.”

“Okay—fine.” She felt increasingly reckless—she felt so hopeless now that it felt like little was left to lose. She led the way herself—she was tired of following males from one place to the next—and edged around the boiling, suspended sphere-of-spheres, getting closer to it and learning more about it with proximity . . .

It was only partly in their space; it was in many spaces at once. There was only one being: each sphere they were seeing was another manifestation of that same being, one for each world it stretched into. It slowly twisted things in those worlds to fit its liking. And they were only seeing the outside of it, like the dorsal fin of a shark on the surface of the water. It had many names, in many places; many varieties of appearance, many approaches to getting what it wanted. Its true form—

“Look!” Jorny said, pointing past her at a jagged hole in the floor—a hole that was the
exact duplicate
of the one in the ceiling they’d dropped through on the other side of the room. Its edges were shaped precisely the same . . .

The tentacular probes of the sphere-of-spheres teased at them as they passed, almost caressing them, offering visions of glory, preludes of unimaginable pleasure . . . 

But the creature frightened her, more than it attracted her—it was somehow scarier for its enticements. It was as malevolent to her as a wolf spider would be to a crawling fly. Or as a Venus fly trap would be.

“Jesus!” Jorny blurted, hastening away from the thing. “I almost . . . never mind, just get over here!”

She wanted to follow him. But it was hard to move—she was caught up in its whispering, its radiance of promise, and the undertone of warning.
Run from me and I’ll be forced to grab you!
Jorny ran to her and grabbed her wrist, pulled her away from it. She felt weak, for a moment, drained, staggering . . .

He knelt by the hole in the floor and dropped through. “Come on, Deede!”

After a moment she followed—almost falling through the hole in her weariness. He half caught her, as before—and she felt her strength returning, away from the sphere-within-spheres.

“Look—we’re on the ceiling!” Jorny burst out. “Aren’t we?”

They were on a floor—with pipes snaking around their knees—but above them was the machinery of the elevators, affixed upside down on . . . the ceiling. Or—on the floor that was now their ceiling. There was a door, identical to the one they’d come through to find the hole into the temple room above—but it went from a couple feet above the floor to the ceiling. The knob seemed in the wrong place. The door was related to the ceiling the way any other door would be related to the floor—it was upside down. Jorny went to it and jumped to the knob, twisted it, pulled the door open, and scrambled through, turned to help her climb up . . . and then he yelped as he floated upward . . . They both floated up, tumbling in the air . . .

They were floating in space for a moment, turning end over end, in the bottom level of the stairway they’d come down. It was the very same stairway, with the occasional cabinet with fire extinguishers and floor-numbers painted on the walls—only, it stretched down below them, instead of up above them. They instinctively reached for a railing, Jorny caught it . . .

A nauseating twist, a feeling of turning inside-out and back right-side out again, and then they were standing on the stairway, which once more was zig-zagging upward, above them. Only—it couldn’t be. It had been below the temple room. Or had they been somehow transported back above?

“What the fuck?” Jorny said, pale, fumbling for a cigarette with shaking hands. “Damn, out of smokes.”

Deede stared. Someone was up above—crawling down the walls toward them. Two someones. A man and woman. Coming down the walls that contained the stairs, crawling like bugs, upside down relative to Deede.

“Jorny—look!”

“I see ’em.”

“Jorny I don’t know how much more I can . . . ”

“I’m not feeling so good either. But you know what? We’re surviving. Maybe for a reason, right? Hey—they look . . . familiar.”

They were about thirty-five, a man and woman dressed in what Deede could only describe, to herself, as dark, clinging rags. The man had a backpack of some kind tightly fixed to his shoulders. They approached, crawling down the wall, and Deede and Jorny backed away, trying to decide where to run to—up the stairs past them? And then the strangers stopped, looking at them upside down, the woman’s hair drooping down toward them . . .

And the woman spoke. “Jorny—it’s us, me and you as kids!”

“What—from earlier, somehow? But we never discovered the temple as kids!” said the man. “We just found out about it last year!”

“They’re us in one of the other worlds—younger versions . . . and they found their way here! Just like in my dream, Jorny! I told you, there was something here—something that would help us!”

Jorny—the younger Jorny standing at the younger Deede’s side—shook his head, stunned. “It’s us—in, like, the future or . . . ”

Deede nodded. “Would you guys come down and . . . stand on the level we’re on? Or can you?”

“We can,” the older Deede said. “The rules shifted when Yog-Sothoth altered the world, and gravity moves eccentrically.”

She crept toward the floor, put one foot on it, then sidled around on the wall like a gecko, finally getting both feet on the floor and standing to face them; the older Jorny did the same. His blond hair was cut short and beginning to recede, his face a trifle lined, but he was still recognizably Jorny.

Deede found she was staring at the older version of herself in fascination. She seemed more proportional, more confident, if a bit grim—there were lines around her eyes, but it looked good on her. But the whole thing was disorienting—was something she didn’t really want to see. It made her want to hide, seeing herself, just as much as seeing the thing in the temple.

“Don’t look so scared, kid,” the older Jorny said, smiling sadly at her.

Deede scowled defiantly at him. “Just—explain what the hell you are. I don’t think you’re us.”

“We’re
another
you,” the older Deede said. “And we’re connected with you. We all extend from the ideal you, in the world of ideas. But this sure isn’t that world. Time is a bit in advance in our world, I guess, from yours, for one thing . . . ”

“Come on with us,” the older Jorny said. “We’ll show you. Then we can figure out if there’s a way we can work together . . . against
him
.”

They turned and climbed the stairs—after a moment’s hesitation, Jorny and Deede followed. They went up eleven flights, past battered, rusting doors. “Your building,” the older Deede said, “extends downward from ours—but to you it will seem upward. Ours is downward from yours. They’re mirrored, but not opposites—just variants at opposite poles from one another. Me and Jorny found out that the primary impulses were coming from the basement of our building so we cut the hole in the sub basement floor—that’s the ceiling of the other room.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” said the older Jorny.

“I don’t know, it depends. Anyway the Great Appetite—that’s what we call it, though some call it Yog-Sothoth—he reaches out through the many worlds through that same temple . . . and he changes what he comes to, so the beings on that world become all appetite, all desire, and nothing else—so he can feed on low desires, through beings on those worlds.”

“You say
he
?” the younger Jorny asked. “Not
it
?”

“Right—he has gender. But little else we can comprehend. Once he’s changed a world enough, he can eat what you eat, feel what you feel. Some he will already have changed, in your world—the rest he will change later. He changed our world about eighteen years ago. We’ve resisted—but most people don’t. They get changed—the Great Appetite removes whatever there is in them that checks appetites and desires and impulses. Any kind of strong controlling intelligence, he takes it out. Makes psychopaths of some people, and zombies of just
feeding
, of different kinds, of others—”

“Like Gunnar Johansen!” Deede burst out.

The older Deede stopped on a landing and turned to look at her. “Yes,” she said gravely. “He killed my mother too—before the Great Appetite took over. Like him. He was already under Yog-Sothoth’s control . . . without knowing it.”

She looked like she wanted to embrace the younger Deede—but Deede was afraid of her, and took a step back.

The older Deede shrugged and turned to follow the older Jorny through a doorway—the door at this landing had been wrenched aside, was leaning, crumpled against the wall, hinges snapped. They passed through and found themselves in the lower Mezzanine lounge, exactly like the one they’d left—sterile in its furnishings and design.