The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (25 page)

It was reassuring. Called upon, the peyote was still there to help you — ready, warm, purring in your shoulder muscles, your neck and spine. How different from the silence that had answered her prayers in the sterile, mostly empty modern churches of her childhood with their useless, symbolic, placebo sacraments.

Like an athlete in the zone, who sees the pitched curveball slow down to await her swing, she stood, turned to face the west, away from the sunrise, and suited up, not hurrying, calmly, the sun already warm on her back. To move quickly without hurrying. All her belts and straps snug and tight, no binding. Boots, shooting jacket with a shoulder pad so thin it was generally referred to as “wishful thinking,”
belt knife, backpack which held a second belt knife, canteen. Now the heavy lifting, the aluminum case in her left hand, the other piece in its canvas tube leaning against a tent rope where she could reach it. She flicked on the resonator headset the way Cory had shown her — the other five new sets were securely stowed in her pack. She smiled and nodded to the friends who’d come here so cheerfully, some from so far away, to help her.

For she hadn’t been left here to do it all alone, after all. One by one they rose to hug her, young Gilbert offering her a swallow of water from his bottle, which she gladly accepted. And now she started to boost the volume on the resonator. It set her teeth on edge with its vibrations, transferred directly to her skull. And then, sure enough, like the commuter train pulling into the station, here came the vortex to D-6, opening well ahead of her, maybe 10 to 15 yards away.

Three feet wide, the white mist swirling at its edges, five feet wide, eight. On the other side, clearly now, a bright morning with very different vegetation, a clearing with a bare granite outcropping in the middle, edged by what appeared to be giant palm trees. What did they say? In for a penny, in for a pound. Most of her friends would go home now, to await word. Her Apache guides would stay here, though, in this tent, tending the fire, for as much as three days, awaiting her return. Hopefully, she would not have to return alone.

The soldier will not go far wrong, she had once been told, if he marches toward the sound of battle. Balancing the canvas case across her right shoulder, the vortex now offering a clear eight-foot passage inside its spinning, mist-cloaked borders, she walked forward. The hardest thing to do was sometimes the simplest thing to do. The warrior walks forward. That’s all. That’s what makes her the warrior.

* * *

With the usual rush of wind caused by the pressure differential, the air at the far side of the clearing shimmered, the vortex irised open, and Chantal came through, stumbling for a moment to find her footing. She was carrying a large hammered aluminum suitcase,
damned heavy, and over the opposite shoulder a longer tube of canvas, apparently not quite as heavy but cumbersome enough to make up the difference. And she was wearing a backpack. What, she hadn’t been able to figure out how to tote along a guitar and amplifier? Maybe a steamer trunk and a piano?

“Chantal!” Matthew shouted from the edge of the woods, “don’t get caught in the open!”

She trotted his way, the five-foot canvas tube over her shoulder, lugging the metal case. One of the big meat-eaters had also spotted the disturbance as she came through and now emerged from the trees at the far side of the clearing. The big bastard — 12 feet tall when it was upright on its hind legs, like now, scales glistening on his head and neck like a giant iridescent green hummingbird, grinning a hideous grin as it chattered its 10-inch teeth — started moving their way, slowly at first, but gradually picking up enough speed that he was likely to overtake Chantal before she could make the woods, unless she dropped the damned baggage. Matthew headed toward her at a run, out into the open.

“Great to see you babe, but you’ve got company. Leave the damned luggage!”

“Like hell!”

He reached her and took over hauling the silver case, which must have weighed 20 pounds all by itself. The longer, lighter cloth case she kept over her own shoulder.

“Sure we can’t leave these?”

“Absolutely.”

“Into the rocks, then, we’ll never make the trees.”

The boulders, more than head high, had been split by ice many ages before and provided some narrow spaces they could squeeze into, though it wasn’t likely to confuse the big meat-eater for long. In fact, they could hear him still coming, his feet pounding the earth like a train coming up the tracks. Chantal wedged her canvas tube upright in a crevice, took back the silver suitcase, dragged it up onto a horizontal ledge, and popped it open.

“Your nightie?”

“And my curlers. A girl always has to look her best.”

The chest held several pieces of equipment nestled in form-fitting gray plastic foam. The first section she pulled out was a big triangular grid of aluminum with cross bars to give it strength without adding too much weight.

“Good, a crutch, we can use that to whack him over the head. I assume you know you’re now trapped on this side with me.”

“Cory sent along some of their newest headset resonators; we should be able to open a vortex from this side.”

“Is that what you’re building, here?”

She’d attached the aluminum crutch to some kind of box with a steel handle. Now she pulled out a big length of steel piping, more than two feet long and probably weighing 10 pounds all by itself. This heavy piece of plumbing she proceeded to attach with a locking ring to the other end of whatever she was assembling.

“No. The resonators are in my pack.”

“Honey, as I’m sure you saw, Henry Annesley’s resonator is as big as a truck.”

“Henry Annesley did not have printed circuits.”

“And part of their problem is his Dimensionauts, his Psychenauts, have no training at all for accessing and using the pineal body. We may need psychoactive help.”

“Darcie and Gilbert’s grandmother sent along a thermos of really nasty tea.”

“Peyote?”

“All they had.”

“Good girl. I knew you’d figure it out.”

She now pulled the fourth and last heavy component out of the suitcase, shoving the big rectangular chunk of gray steel up into the bottom of the machine, just ahead of the aluminum crutch.

“You were here waiting for me,” Chantal noted.

“I know you. I figured you’d be coming through as soon as you could figure out a way.”

“So you’ve been staked out here in the dinosaur feeding grounds, what, 12 hours a day?”

“More or less.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You knew that when you took up with me.”

By this time the big raptor had found them. It roared, towering over their heads a mere dozen feet away, its breath hot and smelling of last night’s raw lizard dinner, now turning quite ripe. It reached one of its leathery green forepaws into their little crevasse, three sharp four-inch nails on the end, knocked the barrel of Chantal’s big contraption aside. It came within inches of laying open her shoulder.

The big critter was beautiful, actually, much of its body a geometric pattern of black and orange, like some giant upright Gila monster, though shading to green in the forelimbs and the giant steamshovel head with its foot-long tearing teeth. The scales on the neck and head, though, were iridescent, shimmering various colors, mostly orange and pink or back to green, depending on how the sun hit them. It made for a kind of cognitive dissonance, as though you were about to be torn to pieces by a lovely, four-ton hummingbird.

What had she been saying to herself, only days ago? That finding herself face-to-face with a six-foot poisonous snake, within striking range of a monster as thick as your arm, was about as scary a reptile encounter as she ever hoped to have? This thing was just as quick, and what, fifty times, a hundred times the body mass of a desert rattler? It could eat off your top half with one snap of its jaws, chomp a little, and then decide if it liked you enough to eat the rest.

“Jesus Christ. Is that a gun?”

“Of course it’s a gun. Did you really think it was my curling iron?”

“Modern technology often befuddles me.”

“I know, dear.” Chantal worked the bolt, brought the stock back into her shoulder. “He seems to be hungry.”

“They’re always hungry. As the Cthulhians say, ‘Jesus loves us just the way we are …’”

“Yes, ‘… but Cthulhu prefers us with a little ketchup.’” Having reacquired her sight picture, she shouted “Cover your ears!” and pulled the trigger.

The gun-shaped device had obviously malfunctioned. Inside the confines of their little rock crevasse it blew up with a noise like a stick of dynamite going off at arm’s length. Matthew was temporarily deafened, the pain making him wonder if at least one ear drum was cracked. A yellow flame the size of a football erupted from the front of the monster rifle, with smaller jets of flame venting to either side from the last few inches of the barrel, where it had presumably just split open. Cheap foreign manufacture, probably. Chantal flew back into him; they both would have tumbled on their asses except for the fact they were now tightly wedged into a narrow slit in the rock.

The big meat-eater had backed off a few steps and was looking at a bloody patch on its chest. It raised its head and roared again. At least Matthew was pretty sure it roared. The way his ears were ringing and throbbing, it was hard to be sure. The monster actually picked at the wound with one of its paws, trying to figure out where it had come from.

Chantal acted as though all this was perfectly normal, though she did mutter “Dammit” under her breath — Matthew didn’t hear it so much as feel it, since they were still wedged close together. It appeared she was unhappy with the results of her shot. Working the bolt on the giant shoulder-cannon, which Matthew was amazed to see remained intact, she took a deep breath, lined up for another shot. Another explosion like sitting on top of a half-stick of dynamite. This round went through the monster’s skull, a fair amount of bloody pink pulp exploding out the rear, at which point it tumbled to the ground and started thrashing around quite dramatically.

“Is it dead?” he shouted.

“I certainly hope so. Primitive nervous systems can take a while to figure it out. Where’s the other one?”

“Other one?”

“From what I could see through the vortex the other night, it looked to me like they hunt in pairs.”

“Ah. Like Ozzie and Harriet.”

“Who?”

“Lucy and Ricky.”

Another blank look from Chantal.

“Penn and Teller?”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

“What’s in the other package, sporting equipment?”

“Yes, a nice pair of metal Rossignols with poles. I was hoping once I wipe out all the tyrannosaurs in this dimension we could get in some skiing.”

“Babe, it never drops below 50 degrees, here.”

“And I
specifically
asked the Triple-A people about skiing. You cannot rely on
anyone
anymore.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

The big carnivore’s mate having failed to make an early appearance, Matthew and Chantal figured discretion was the better part of valor, and high-tailed it into the trees to the southwest.

“They’re beautiful creatures,” Matthew sighed, as they skirted the downed tyrannosaur in the clearing.

“They are. I hope you’re not suggesting I should have given it an ear tag and brought it home on a leash.”

“No,” Matthew agreed, a bit wistfully.

“I’m surprised you found me so fast,” Chantal added, as their hearing started to recover. “I must have come in almost a half mile northwest of where you and Skeezix came through.”

“When Worthy didn’t send a team in the first 12 hours I figured his equipment damage must have been serious and you’d have to make your own arrangements. This is about as far north as I was patrolling; we got lucky.”

At first Chantal thought she was hearing a strange noise, but then she realized what her ears were telling her was that a certain noise was missing — the dull, low-pitched rumble of trucks on a distant highway, jet aircraft high above, the mechanical background noise that never really went away in the modern, urban world.

Not that the trees they walked through were silent. There was a different background noise, of insects humming and trilling, broken by the more raucous noise of birds flitting in the trees overhead, brilliant flashes of red and yellow and blue.

“We heading anywhere in particular?” she asked, trying to remember to sweep her head from side to side in the dappled sunlight under the canopy of trees. The broken shade and increased
humidity felt nice, but it could make it hard to spot the outline of a lurking predator until it decided to spring. Nasty things could also drop out of the trees overhead. It didn’t pay to get complacent.

“The locals live in a tree village a couple of miles out this way, inland from the Bay. Something to do with the seasonal storms. Let’s remember where you downed that lizard, they’ll probably want to send somebody back to butcher the meat.”

“The locals? Do not tell me there are human beings living in this dimension that look like skimpily clad cave men out of some old Roger Corman movie.”

“Not ‘cave people,’ really. They build their villages primarily in the trees, to escape the larger predators. Though there may be other clans, further west, that use cliff sides. As for skimpily clad, well … yes, I guess you could say that.”

“I do not believe this. Cave men
and
dinosaurs?”

“I thought you said technically they might not be dinosaurs.”

“Giant flying pterodactyls?”

“Oh yes.”

“Armored gorillas on horseback?”

“No, that was
Planet of the Apes,
Pierre Boule, a six-hundred-dollar first edition if the orange print on the jacket spine isn’t faded too badly. Haven’t seen any mounted apes yet, anyway. There’s some talk about a more technologically developed race, though. Not very pretty, apparently. More insectoid. The English of our hosts is very limited. I’m still trying to learn Pthang, so I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it.”

“Pthang?”

“Their language. Pthang.”