Whispers From The Abyss (17 page)

The jeep, he could see, had swerved to the side of the road, and a gape mouthed red headed MP goggled back at him, unbelieving.

The man with the valise began to run towards him, and then stopped, uncertain, fifty feet away.

Then the skull man was there, much closer than anyone else. Leaning in. He was smiling his smile. He smelled like oranges.

"Those from my time are known as a cruel people. But what I told you was true. All except the year of your death."

"Why—" Emmanuel said.

"There is no why, there is only when."

"Only one when which their machinations shape."

"Only
our
when, or nothing."

"We all play our parts. This is yours. Mine continues, forever. Be grateful."

"Yes."

"Yes, yes."

Emmanuel died, again.

The man with the white mustache stood in the doorway of the house across the street while a woman threw things in the yard and yelled at him in a language I didn't recognize. I got out of my car and walked inside, pretending not to pay attention. The man said nothing, and the whirlwind had passed by the time I peeked out the window to spy.

I'm not sure when the man with the mustache moved in. Maybe he'd always been there. I met one of my other neighbors while dragging our trash cans to the curb the next morning, and she claimed he'd recently inherited the house from a relative. It was a common story in our historical neighborhood; I had my own two-story because my parents had moved to a retirement community. My sister had a family and a house in the suburbs, but I lived alone and had been happy to move out of my cramped apartment.

Debris from the fight was strewn across the yard and street. A pair of sea-foam green panties hung off a bush; half a broken plate stuck in the front lawn by its jagged corner; trash littered the gutter. A shiny object in the center of the road caught the light of the street lamp and I bent down to pick it up. A silver key.

Surely this had been the foreign woman's copy to the house. A good person would have placed the key on the man's porch, or just left it in the street. But I? No. I saw that key and saw opportunity.

Some people have dreams about flying or being naked in public. But I've only ever had one recurring dream, and I've had it since childhood. The house and circumstances differ, but always in this dream I'm breaking into other people's houses. Not to steal, just to look. The landscape of the house becomes like a labyrinth or a carnival as I look into drawers and cabinets, touch and observe the uncensored arrangements of someone's life. Sometimes I slip out without a worry, other times the dream inhabitants return and I have to sneak out through the windows or air ducts. I never feel guilty or scared after these dreams. I feel exhilarated, like I've absorbed some secret that can't be taken away.

That's why I took the key. With a rush I realized I could find out about this silent neighbor. I could go in and touch his secrets.

He drove off in a bulky sedan nearly every afternoon the same time I got home from work, always a cigarette dangling from his lips, the smoke curling around his comically large mustache. I would wave from my car, just trying to be neighborly, but he never returned the gesture.

I wish I could say I argued with myself about whether or not to use the key, but the truth is I made up my mind the second I picked it up. All day at work I anticipated the evening's adventure. He hadn't left yet by the time I got home. From my living room window I watched for his movement, fingering the key anxiously, never once thinking that my plan was dangerous, or that there might be secrets I did not want to know.

Then there he was, cigarette in mouth, driving away. I waited for him to turn the corner, then I crossed the street with my secret key.

The key slid right into the keyhole, alleviating any doubt I'd had about its identity. I paused one moment with the door barely cracked, feeling as though I were crossing some metaphysical boundary, moving through an action I'd walked with my spirit but never with my body. I'd come close once in a coffee shop when someone at the next table asked me to watch her purse while she went to the bathroom. I guess I looked trustworthy, and when she came back she smiled and never knew that I'd pawed through it. No one's ever asked me to watch their stuff since then, though. Maybe I don't look trustworthy anymore.

I shut the door behind me, the boundary broached.

Just as in my dreams, the landscape of the house seemed charged with meaning, each crumb on the counter top, each piece of unopened mail a story unveiling my mysterious neighbor.

The house was two stories, like mine, built in the early days of the city and in need of renovation to fix the broken staircase banister and the stained ceiling. The old furniture did not look much used. There was no television, no computer. No technology any more advanced than a can opener.

As a young child, my sister and I had decided a witch lived here, though I can't remember why. My mother, who never let us watch cartoons without quizzing us about what moral we'd learned, shut down our speculations by taking us to an herbal apothecary where we learned that so-called witches were merely nature worshipers and alternative healers, and our fear was only propagating the dangerous oppressive stereotypes of
Hollywood sensationalism.

I felt sensational in the house across the street. I prowled through it, touching everything I could, feeling the vibrations of the man's strange life absorb into my skin.

The room upstairs wasn't locked.

Grotesque puppets hung from the ceiling by their strings, staring at me with childlike faces.
Crystals dangled and flashed in the afternoon sun, bumping against the flesh-colored arms of the puppets. White powder on the floor created a strange symbol and a tattered black book waited in the center.

I'd never seen the symbol before. It certainly wasn't a pentagram. The room had a dark atmosphere that bore no resemblance to the Wiccan healers I'd met at the apothecary so many years ago, and I felt a little thrill, followed by an instinctive urge to get out of the house as fast as I could. I obeyed my instinct and crept through the house and out the back door, clutching the key in my hand as if it would try to escape my grasp.

No website or library book had anything that resembled the symbol. Even the ancient curator at the museum was no help. I tried to let it go, but the book haunted my thoughts. Several nights in a row I dreamed about creeping back through the neighbor's house. Each time, I opened the book and it told me the mysteries of the universe, and each morning those answers faded before I could grasp them with my waking mind.

I happened to look out the window one evening, shortly after the sun had set, and saw the man with the mustache leaving. Almost by reflex, I seized the key.

Without a flashlight I could barely see the outlines of the furniture. I laboriously navigated the living room and climbed the dilapidated staircase, both hands on the rail, feeling out each step with the sole of my shoe.

I found the door of the strange room. Moonlight flooded in, making the white powder almost glow. The puppets swayed from the ceiling as if waving an absurd “Hello.” Their strings were nearly invisible, like fishing line that disappeared in the dim light. I stepped carefully around the powder toward the book, but just as I reached for the black cover, the front door slammed. Voices followed.

I glanced at the window and considered jumping, but the room was on the second story. The voices got closer. I shut myself into the closet just as the door to the strange room opened and the man with the mustache came in. A woman entered with him, new, but a variation of the other, wearing exotic clothing and beaded jewelry, her hair wild.

The man plucked a puppet from the ceiling and burned it in a bucket, filling the room with the most vile fish-smelling smoke. I listened to a chant containing syllables a human throat should not be able to produce, and all my childhood fears resurfaced. I watched through the slats of the closet. The woman stood in the center of the symbol and the light in the room changed from gray to blue to a deep, sinister green. Then the ceiling opened and let in the clouds.

A face, a hideous fish-like face, emerged from the clouds and its eyes locked to mine. The inhuman chanting disappeared under a primeval roar. The face rushed closer and for a moment I blacked out. When I came back to consciousness, I was still standing, still staring out through the closet door.

The man stood next to the white powder symbol with the closed book in his arms. The woman fidgeted and gave an unsure smile. The clouds and strange lights were gone. The man set the book on the floor.

“It didn't work,” he said.

The woman's face melted to a look of terror.

“It didn't work,” he repeated, angry this time.

Maybe he attacked her. I don't know. Nausea overwhelmed me and I slowly sank to the floor of the closet, trying to calm the dizziness.

I stayed there for hours, feeling waves of dizziness roll through my body, falling in and out of consciousness, not sure if the movement of the puppets I saw through the closet door was real or dream.

In the dead of night I stood and snuck out, down the dark staircase and out the front door. There was none of that exhilaration I always felt in my dreams of other people's houses. I crossed the street to my own house, feeling only nausea and exhaustion.

I called in to work and spent the whole next day sick in bed, occasionally stumbling to the bathroom, where I vomited a slimy substance I couldn't match to any food I'd eaten.

On the second day of my illness I called my sister and she came over to take care of me. It was she who mentioned the fishy smell that exuded from my skin, and the change to my eyes. I didn't believe her, but the look on her face was pure horror. I stumbled to the bathroom and propped myself up in front of the mirror. Bulbous protruding globes looked back at me from the mirror, the pupil stretched too wide, the iris stained sickly yellow.

She's called an ambulance, but I don't expect to be here when it comes. The world is fading the way a dream does, like I'm looking out at it from the bottom of a pool. My limbs are loose and boneless, like tentacles or puppet arms. There's pain, yes, there's pain, but beneath that, I can feel this body sliding into another world—evolving, and I feel...

Exhilarated.

1.

It is a dreadful thing, the up-and-out
, the Stop-captain thought, as he paced the planoforming room. He never had gotten used to it, not in twenty years of space travel and almost as many crews.

The Stop-captain knew that to the dashing crew of the
Wong-Danforth
, he was a milquetoast, but his job was important in its own way. The ship couldn’t run without his maintenance checks. And of course, he was also there for the sake of the passengers, to reassure them. Neither the heroic Go-captains nor the pinlighters in their crowns of telepathic amplifiers could keep the passengers from truly understanding that they were literally between dimensions: only a few millimeters away from death or insanity.

Only the Stop-captain could do that.

Except I’m not any better at dealing with this than they are
, he mused, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. Space still scared him. The formless, mindless up-and-out.

He straightened the epaulets on his captain’s jacket and stepped through the door into the main part of the ship, done up in a simulacrum of a lovely beach at low-tide. Passengers strolled about, laughing. Further up the shore, four adolescents played volleyball. The Stop-captain much preferred this view to the sights of the planoforming room, even if he knew it wasn’t real.

Then a strange thing happened.

Thunder cracked the sky.

2.

The Stop-captain opened the door to the planoforming room. Inside, pinlighters with the crust of colored lights on their heads jerked about spasmodically. The Go-captain sat in his usual trance, his eyes crossed at the locksheets, mouth slightly open.

“Sir and Master, what is the meaning of this?”

The Go-captain’s head swiveled, giving the Stop-captain as much mind as one would give a bug.
“Pardon me?”

“The ship, Sir. The programming seems to be off.”

“All is well.”

“All is
not
... I’ve just never seen this before. Not in twenty years.”

“Just a little interference. Go back to your part of the ship. Calm the people down.”

The Stop-captain sighed. He could do this. He had no choice but to do this. On his way out of the planoforming room, he felt a jolt as one of the pinlighters spun into him. Both toppled to the floor.

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh...” The pinlighter’s words were drowned in a chorus of babbles.

Crazy telepath
. The Stop-captain pushed through the door. He had to get back to his own duties.

3.

The discovery of planoforming had finally unlocked the galaxy for mankind. No longer would humans have to slumber for decades in adiabatic pods in order to colonize the worlds. You simply got into a large structure not unlike a warehouse, lived for a few subjective hours in a simulated world, and walked out onto another planet.

The passengers knew – objectively – that traversing the galaxy meant skipping between dimensions. They knew that it was the job of the Go-captain and his crew of pinlighters to keep them from the madness that surely awaited any human when exposed to whatever it was that dwelled between the stars.

But they didn’t
really
know anything.

The Stop-captain knew. A little. He had seen pinlighters rip out their eyes after a poor calculation sent extra-dimensional forces slamming into their telepathic senses. He had signed off on the medical forms after his last Go-captain had requested that his brain be shut off.

              That Go-captain’s last words before the leucotome’s healing slash had been cryptic. “Mad men with horse heads, and golden their eyes were – oh! Oh! Oh!” He shivered, now, thinking of it.

The Stop-captain patrolled the beach, feeling ridiculous in his maroon-and-gold captain’s uniform. Overhead, the sky whirled like a pinwheel. All the colors in the simulacrum looked flat and washed out. The Stop-captain listened to the fervently whispered conversations with concern.

“—something’s gone wrong—“

“—getting colder—“

“—thought I saw something on the breakers, right out there--“

A woman wearing nothing but a bathing suit jogged up to the Stop-captain. “Captain, is something wrong?”

He thought of the crew, toiling away in a room fifty yards and one layer of reality away. “Just a bit of interference, my dear. Don’t be alarmed.”

“But the sky! Haven’t you listened?”

The Stop-captain cocked his head. He listened.

The sky was groaning.

4.

The Stop-captain begged off and went back into the planoforming room. Instead of an orderly, clinical environment, he’d come into a disaster.

He’d seen men go insane in the up-and-out before.

But not like this.

The pinlighters danced in a devilish quartet, the array of augments flashing like an insane carnival ride. One of the women had taken off her clothes, and the Stop-captain clapped a hand over his eyes. This was most indecent.

He turned to the Go-captain in his trance.  But the Go-captain wasn’t even looking at the locksheets anymore, the printed guides that helped him navigate the
Wong-Danforth
from one safe region of the galaxy to another, that got them through the endless abyss of uncharted space.

He was looking at the Stop-captain.

“This is the space which is not space.”

“Sir and Master?”

“Man rules now where They ruled once. They will rule again.”

“Who, sir?”

The Go-captain swiveled his head toward the fallen locksheets, which had gathered in a clutter on the floor.

“The Great Old Ones. They have lived in the up-and-out eons before man’s ancestors were even born. And we... we have gone to them.”
The Go-captain threw back his head and laughed.

The Stop-captain slowly backed away.

5.

Without the locksheets, and a sane man to follow them, there would be no way to return to the charted regions of space. He reached for the fallen sheets, only to be kicked aside by one of the Go-captain’s legs.

“This is not for you.”

“With all due respect, Sir and Master, I disagree.” The Stop-captain had watched all his life as greater men and women than him had taken the spotlight. He had seen these remarkable talents guide passengers from one end of the galaxy to the other, through the heartless void of the up-and-out. He had trusted people like this with his life hundreds of times.

But he would not let them lead him into madness.

The Stop-captain had no telepathy, no talents of any kind. Maybe that was the key. Maybe a mundane person could guide the
Wong-Danforth
through this patch of “interference.”

I have to try
, he thought.

The Stop-captain wound back his fist, and sent it slamming into the side of the Go-captain’s head. His knuckles split at the impact, but the once-heroic navigator was out cold.

The gibbering pinlighters sat on the floor, talking to one another in a strange, ugly language. He could only hope that they were continuing to monitor the ship with some portion of their lunatic brains.

The Stop-captain gathered up the locksheets and put them back into what he thought was the right order. He could be wrong. But right now there was no order at all.

He bit his lip. “Have to
try
,” he said.

The Stop-captain dragged the Go-captain’s prone body into a corner of the planoforming room, tying his hands together with a scrap of cord. Then he settled back into the Go-captain’s chair and crossed his eyes at the locksheets pinned to the wall.

“Go,” he said, then screamed as the room melted –

6.

Later, the Stop-captain could only recall fragments of what he had seen.

He remembered the lamentations of horned madmen as they danced about a fire whose smoke seemed to spell out something of the greatest importance, if only he could make it out...

He remembered the grinding of an inhuman voice below a sheet of ice, beckoning him to come closer, whispering in his ear, with a voice that seemed to encircle his brain like a thick webbing...

He remembered pleading for mercy at a tribunal with thousands of other men and women, facing the backs of iron gods who never turned, never reacted, until one of them shifted slightly to the side and oh God, the face, the face...

All of these scenes he remembered as he sat in the planoforming room of the
Wong-Danforth
, the pins sticking from his head like cactus needles, hot tears streaming into his mouth, but alive. Alive.

He had made it through the up-and-out.

When he came to the second time, it was in a hospital. The Go-captain was in the bed across from him, a bandage over his left eye. The Stop-captain reflexively looked down at his fist.

The smiling nurse entered, a cup of bright pink pills in his hand. “That was a close one,” he said. “We found the Go-captain knocked out on the floor, and you in the chair. Isn’t that funny? The pinlighters are in the next room.” He jerked his thumb.

“And the passengers?”
My people
.

“Oh, they’re fine, of course. A little more rattled than usual. They said something about a storm.”

The Stop-captain stared into the pill cup. “Just a bit of dimensional interference.”

“They were asking about you. I told them you made it off the ship just fine.” The nurse looked back at the Go-captain. “You’re doing a lot better than him, I can tell you that much. We had to shock him. He may never captain again.”

“A pity.” The Stop-captain couldn’t imagine
wanting
to climb back in the chair after this. He didn’t even know how he would be able to perform his mundane Stop-captain’s duties, after seeing what truly dwelt between the dimensions through which ships like the
Wong-Danforth
sailed.

“Get your rest,” the nurse said. “You should be out of here in a few days.”

The Stop-captain asked the nurse to close the curtain around him. In the privacy of his hospital bed, the Stop-captain turned over all the things in his mind. Is this what the Go-captain and the pinlighters saw every time the ship dropped into extra-dimensional space? Did he have enough saved to retire? Could he even stand to be a
passenger
on a planoforming ship?

The Stop-captain’s eyes roamed over the curtain. Such an unusual pattern. He couldn’t stop looking at it. As he watched, the curtain seemed to twist and bend, the shapes within to press out from the surrounding fabric like a holovid. He felt his mouth move without conscious control, his lips bending around unfamiliar sounds.

“Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,” the Stop-captain muttered. “He has risen, he has risen.”

             
The dimensions were coming undone. No more would man travel into the up-and-out. The up-and-out had come to Mankind.