The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (33 page)

“Chantal?” asked Matthew, concerned for her bruised and painful shoulder, but also hoping she hadn’t waited too late, as the big bug now decided they were bluffing, lurched inside the cave mouth, loomed to within fifteen feet of Chantal … eight feet … till they could smell Alvin’s hot blood where it still bathed the creature’s mouth parts, metallic like the copper bottom of a burning pan.

Chantal fired. The noise of the big rifle was actually painful within the enclosed space of the cave. A large chunk of spider matter was expelled out the top of the monster’s cephalothorax, under the multiple eyes, which held the brain and the sucking stomach. The giant bug flopped and started thrashing around, obviously done for.

The noise of the shot, however, brought the final arachnid through the cave mouth, running on six legs so it sounded like a couple of horses, tossing aside one of Alvin’s thigh bones as it came, like a little kid tossing away the bone of a stripped-clean chicken wing on a summer sidewalk.

Chantal worked her bolt, checking to see if she’d counted wrong, hoping against hope she might have one more round. No joy. She checked her pockets for a forgotten round. The last spider was accelerating toward them, now, obviously none too pleased that its companion had been sent to visit their ancestors.

“Uh-oh,” said Matthew.

Skeezix tried to make the keening noise that had been so effective for the massed felinidae down on the flatlands west of Quonset Point. But even assuming the efforts of a single individual would have done
any good, his vocal chords were unable to duplicate more than a faint echo of the sound.

Matthew and Bucky picked up the two shotguns. Even empty, they could be swung as clubs, though there was little doubt how the fight would end.

Chantal leaned her rifle against the cave wall and rose back to her feet, a small rectangular object in her right hand. Pointing it at the second giant spider, which had raised its sharp-edged forelegs, balancing on its remaining six, preparing to take her first, she pushed a button with her thumb.

The spider froze in place, looking puzzled. There was a delay of a second. Then two seconds. Then three. The spider now actually backed off a step. Instead of grabbing Chantal with its two outstretched forelegs, it pressed them to the sides of its own head, shaking its head from side to side as though it were in some kind of intense pain. Then, in a nasty shower of yellow and bluish goo, the monster’s head exploded. Its body rattled slightly as it dropped to the ground, like the frame of a dead automobile dropped from a crane in a junkyard

Chantal tilted her head to the side, evidently a bit surprised at her success. Then she slowly pocketed her miniature weapon, picking up her empty rifle and brushing off some dirt before slinging it to her shoulder. Only in stupid movies did a trooper abandon his weapon because it was empty. Would you give away your car because it was out of gas?

“Babe?”

“Yeah?”

“What did you just do?”

“I didn’t have any choice, honey. It was him or us. Or maybe her or us.”

“Right. Absolutely. I mean, how did you make the spider’s head explode?”

“Oh. I pushed ‘Emergency beacon.’ They warn you it can drain the battery if you leave it on for long. Sends out a nice strong signal.”

“On your cell phone.”

“Yeah.”

“Microwaves?”

“Microwaves.”

“You’re brilliant.”

“I had a good teacher.”

“We’re all much obliged. Though I think that pretty much kills your chances of ever landing any cell phone endorsement deals.”

“Alvin was kind of a jerk, but I hated to see him go that way.” Chantal shook her head. “Shouldn’t we, like … bury him?”

“Seems only right,” Bucky nodded.

“I’d rather not hang around here long,” Matthew warned. “We don’t know if that’s all the spiders in the area; Chantal’s phone battery won’t last long, and we’re out of everything else.”

“They didn’t leave much,” Bucky sighed. “Gather the bones and, uh … parts together and we’ll pile some rocks over them.”

They did. Bucky said a few words, stressing Alvin’s courage, managing to not even mention the fact that he’d turned out to be a completely unreconstructed Derlethian heretic, after all. By now, of course, the mescaline in the little green cacti had come on fairly strong.

“So assuming the portal Alvin chose was
not
the right portal, do you know which one we use?” Chantal asked, carefully disassembling her heavy rifle and stowing it away in its traveling case.

“Yes.” Matthew sounded reassuringly certain. “That one down there on the left, through the second chamber.”

“Honey? I know you did a bigger dose than the rest of us. You’re the roadman, I don’t mean to question you. But I have a feeling that one doesn’t lead back to Earth One, at all.”

“You’re right, babe. Not directly, anyway. But we’ve got to assume there are more spiders out there, and they seem to be getting smart. If we try to jump directly back to Earth One, even assuming we don’t fall for any more of their fake doorways, they’re likely to try and come through behind us. Presumably they’d find the EM environment
toxic, but they might do considerable damage in the meantime, and they’d be pretty hard to explain. Do you sense danger down this way?”

“No. Actually, it feels like the right way to me, too. I just figured that couldn’t be right.”

“What have I told you?”

“Trust my instincts. Trust the spirit guides.”

“I believe this way leads to D-8.”

“Further from home?” Skeezix asked, unable to disguise his dismay.

“Distance is an irrelevant concept, here, Skeezix. Sometimes, the way back to D-4 lies through D-8. Now, if I’m right, what we’re going to encounter on the other side could be pretty confusing, so at the risk of bringing back memories of kindergarten field trips, I’m going to ask that we all stay close together and not go wandering off, sightseeing. In fact, since we don’t have a rope to tie off with, if everyone could take a good hold of someone else’s arm, so we’re all connected and we all step through together, that would be best. And we need to have courage. We need to be open. This is the experience of a lifetime, right? Don’t let it get clouded up with dark thoughts. I suggest it’s time for the four of us to try on the new headsets Chantal brought along.”

They did so, Chantal checking to make sure they were all adjusted comfortably, then showing them how to activate the resonators and gradually bring up the volume till the vortex opened clean and wide in the doorway to which Matthew had led them.

“All ready for adventure?” asked Matthew, who had insisted on hefting Chantal’s heavy aluminum case. “OK, kids, here we go.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

It was not like watching a movie. That was part of what would always make it so hard to describe to anyone who hadn’t had the experience. The moviemakers tried to get close, with 3-D, stereo sound, whatever. It was bright, it was loud, it was all around you in three dimensions, like being trapped inside some kind of extremely hyperactive kaleidoscope. At first you simply thought your visual and auditory senses had broken down, that you might never regain the ability to focus all this input into meaningful patterns or images. You heard a sound which was at the same time a distant droning, a single note, and yet — somehow — the swelling harmony of an angelic chorus. It was beautiful, so beautiful it made you want to cry, and you wanted to focus on what you were hearing till you got it classified, categorized, but of course you couldn’t, there was simply no time, since the visual input was so urgent, coming at you in an explosion of colors, more colors than you knew existed, not simple primaries but metallic, opalescent, shimmering, shifting, a light show of precious stones exploding in slow motion.

But there were creatures there, too, and you knew somehow the creatures were friendly, they were glad to see you, they’d been waiting for you. They exuded warmth in their greetings, they had an urgent message they were trying to convey, though of course when they chirped, when they made their noises, the noises changed into colors, and then colored objects, wonderful gleaming geometric objects which managed to be both liquid and solid, their solidity maintained only by some kind of surface tension, while at the same time these objects retained their identity as sounds, until you realized they weren’t merely sounds, they were words, you were seeing their words
as the creatures tried to talk to you, though at first the only message you could decipher was “Stop being so amazed, you need to listen.”

The chirpings were not, strictly speaking, English, but they became gradually understandable, which seemed to indicate some kind of telepathic rapport.

“Where are we?” Skeezix asked.

“The McKennas called it the Hall of the Mountain King,” Matthew answered, “with the revelry of the self-transforming elves in progress. It’s a kind of Grand Central Station of the dimensions.”

“How many dimensions?”

“That many.”

A set of ancient helpers were there, not the tryptamine munchkins in this case, but their phenethylamine equivalents, larger, more potentially frightening, but cheerful Anasazi clowns at heart, hyperdimensional entities that the McKennas had long ago compared to fractal reflections of suddenly autonomous parts of your own psyche. Had they been here, all this time? They offered love, and the download.

“I don’t think I could stop this if I wanted to,” Matthew said. “As a matter of fact, resistance at this stage could be harmful. You can all feel that they mean us well, right?”

No one else seemed able to speak, just then, but since the four of them all still grasped one another’s arms, he took the squeezes he felt for confirmation.

“OK, then, we need to trust our hosts. Don’t fight them. We’ve come to visit them of our own volition, they’re very happy to see us, and they want to give us some good information. How much we’ll later be able to access and use I can’t say. But right now what we mostly need is trust. You need to open the pathway. They’re going to download into us far more structured input than we’re going to be able to understand as it flows through. Remember how we’re told we normally use only 10 percent of our brain capacity? Well I think we’re about to begin to get a hint on what the rest of that storage space is for.”

If you closed your eyes the warmth radiated from the center in pulsing, expanding circles in various comforting shades of red and orange. But then as the colors shifted toward yellow and white and finally swirling neon blue fractals the speed of the flow accelerated literally beyond comprehension. It was like being connected to a high-speed fiber-optic information conduit, blasted with rapidly shifting and evolving extra-spatial perceptions. They felt if they could somehow absorb and interpret, comprehend and use even a fraction of this data, they could graduate at will to hyperdimensional galactic citizenship. But it was like hoping you could reach out and embrace a speeding train.

What was wonderful and dazzling yet finally bittersweet was how much the Anasazi, the Old Ones, hoped the travelers could grasp and use it all, yet how unlikely it was that any of them could comprehend even a fraction of that data stream in a single lifetime. The introductory physics lectures Dick Feynman had given at Cal Tech from 1961 to 1963 were widely acclaimed as the best ever devised, the room was packed from first session to last. Yet after the series was done the administration declined to retain the course at anything like that level of intensity, tacitly admitting the lectures had failed in their purpose.

Why? As the series went on and its fame spread, graduate students and then other faculty members and finally even visiting world-class physicists anxious to watch that Nobel-class mind working at stream-of-consciousness speed gladly filled the seats increasingly abandoned by the underclassmen at whom the course was initially targeted. Even at a school whose students were selected for their supposed grounding in math and science, few of the younger minds could absorb the concepts at anywhere near that pace. At varying rates their eyes glazed over; they took two aspirin and gave up.

Multiply the problem a hundredfold. You felt like you were an ant or some other bug who’d wandered into the screening of an advanced training video on nuclear fission or faster-than-light drive that had accidentally been switched to fast-forward. How on earth
could you interpret those shimmering multidimensional spaces filled with highly polished curved surfaces, thoughts materializing into visible objects, so incomprehensibly varied yet somehow all apparently rooted in the helical wave-form of your own DNA, confirming all this stuff had been waiting inside you all along, your eager tutors saying “Finally we’ve got your attention, but time is short; now do you see?”

The four travelers were filled with wonder, astonishment, awe to the brink of terror. Their brains felt like your stomach after you’ve overdone a holiday feast and you just want a place to lie down.

Which is precisely why, as the information stream subsided, Matthew took the initiative, knowing otherwise he’d lose them. They needed to take deep breaths but nonetheless keep moving, he warned them, no time now to stop and sort it all out or they’d be flopped here for hours, like Dorothy and Toto in the field of poppies. Instead he led them a short ways down the path till they encountered an old Indian man with a gray ponytail, hunched over a small fire on a rocky ledge in the rays of a late afternoon sun. They stood quite close to him yet they still had the impression they were separated from him by some kind of translucent screen.

“Emilio?” Matthew asked.

The old man looked up at them and squinted. Then his heavily lined face broke into a smile.

“Little Brother,” Emilio said. “I figured if I sat here long enough today, I might see you.”

“Have you come to show us the way?”

“In whose footsteps do you travel, Little Brother?”

“The path is mine alone, grandfather.”

“Then how could anyone else show you the way?” Emilio replied. And then they both laughed, quietly, sharing an old joke.

Padre Emilio’s laugh turned into a hoarse, dry cough. It took him a moment to catch his breath.