Whispers From The Abyss (3 page)

The hardest part was not killing the kids, but cutting them up to fit in the furnace. All we had in the cabin was a carving knife and a small hand saw. Mary wept for an hour afterwards, lying on our son’s bed clutching his stuffed bear and futilely begging for forgiveness.

I burned each piece as memories cut me. The time at the park when our son fell off the swing; when Zoe, learning to read, sounded out graffiti on the L train before we could stop her;
the door opening in the middle of the night so our toddlers could crawl into bed to escape the nightmares.

Gone gone gone. The smoke wrote their names in cursive as I adjusted the flu.

We never should have moved back. I thought it had ended with the murder-suicide of my great-uncle so long ago. But it was here waiting, the madness waiting all this time.

It was almost dark. Nearly time to pull down the storm shutters and turn on the floodlights.

Mary was back from upstairs. She picked up the battered Innsmouth Times crossword page and asked mechanically, “To steal words.”

“Plagiarism,” I answered; the ash of our children in my nostrils.

She said nothing as the dark came and the night whispers began outside like metal fingers on an untuned zither.

I loaded the shotgun and checked the heavy door.

We waited.

Mary shifted and caught my eye. “When I change, promise you’ll kill me like you did the kids. Promise.”

I looked away. “I will.”

At twenty-four, Baskin continued to fight a losing war against acne with some pimples volcanic, ready to erupt, while collapsed craters were dotted with medication patches. As he squinted at a business card his face pinched with such concentration his entire head seemed to be a zit about to pop.

He sat at his dining table across from his visitor. Decorating a window seat, a bleached bovine skull stared at the two through empty eye sockets, its mandible curved in a leer, its twin horns jutting up, twisted and tall. Out the window, a grove of walnut trees continued on forever, a well-spaced army marching over the horizon.

Baskin read the card aloud. "Doc-tor Hi-ram Ler-ner. Plant pa-ra-sit-ologist. They make doctors for that?"

"PhD."

"The card says you are a D-R-period doctor."

"Scientist. I work out of UC Davis. I got a call to investigate an infestation at the Edrisi farm."

"Then head back to 99, take a left and in about five minutes you'll see Lulu's Roadside Stand - closed these days. A dirt drive pokes out its rear end. Follow that a mile til you hit their house."

"Been there," Lerner said. "They didn't answer their door or phone."

"Then they're out in the orchard, shaking the trees. It's harvest time."

"I drove around their place some. All the nuts are still on their trees. Looks like they just up and left."

"Not during shaking season. If they're not off rattling the walnuts from their trees, their crop is gonna rot."

"You've been shaking?"

"My dad and the Mexicans are out on through to sundown working the tree-wobbler."

"Mr. Baskin, have you inspected your grove, lately?"

"Up and down."

"I've been investigating a parasite. You've seen any odd nuts?"

"Just you."

Lerner smiled. He'd walked into that one. "I collected some infected nuts from the Edrisi place. They're housing a most unusual parasite. With the Edrisis out, I headed here to check whether the infestation had spread to your place."

"What kind of bug?"

"Mollusk."

"Like a clam?"

"Snails are also mollusks."

"Hmm."

Lerner tented his fingers and spoke gravely, "this is a serious matter. I saw something peculiar at their orchard today. As you know, the common English walnut grows to maturity inside a green husk that surrounds their shells. Those at the Edrisi farm had all completely shed their husks - while still on the trees."

"That would be a sight."

"So you got thousands of these light brown nuts dangling from the tree stems and they're trembling."

"How come they were trembling?" Baskin asked.

"It's like what happens with another plant parasite,
Cydia deshaisiana
. These invade the Mexican jumping bean. The beans hop around because they have larvae twitching inside them. I collected some of the infected nuts from the Edrisi place. If you'd like, I'll show you."

"They're not going to jump at me?"

"No. I gassed the specimens as I collected them."

Lerner flipped back the flap of his satchel. He took out a tall thin jar with several light brown walnuts stacked one on top of the other.

"Those are just walnuts," Baskin said.

"The creatures are inside the shells. Note the twin symmetrical pinpoint holes. I believe this is where they enter while in the larva stage."

"Skinny buggers."

"Just when they are young. They eventually grow to fill the shell. Let me show you."

Baskin sat back, his hands clenched, pressing knuckle against knuckle.

"Nothing to worry about," Lerner said, "they're quite dead."

The doctor shook out the top nut, setting it on the table. Then, popping open his pocket knife, he pressed the edge of the blade against the seam, prying it open. Once it had been separated into two halves, sitting there on the table before them was: the golden nutmeat of a walnut.

"Now, that's just a walnut kernel," Baskin said.

"That's how it appears, I agree. It's not unusual for mollusks to fill in and become the shape of their shells. Some snails do it, barnacles, there even exist some squids who internalize their shells and grow around them. Now this creature seems to have taken on the coloration and form of the walnut kernel as it ate away the nut. Feel it." When Baskin showed reluctance, Lerner demonstrated, poking the kernel. "It's safe, go ahead."

Baskin jabbed his finger against the nutmeat then quickly jerked it back as though stung.

"It feels..."

"...spongy," Lerner finished the sentence for him. "Like a tiny brain. The entire interior of the walnut is the creature and the shell is its casing, its protection."

"Its skull."

"Appropriate analogy," Lerner said. "These appear to be part of a rare family of parasitic mollusks called Caddaricus. Their aquatic cousins were first discovered near undersea volcanic vents. The larvae of the mollusk invade the shell of a tube worm, consuming the worm and filling the tube with mollusk nerve cells and—fascinatingly enough—
only
nerve cells, nothing for hunting or digesting food. These neurons explode with filaments which plug into the nervous systems of bottom feeders which soon become their slaves bringing the tube mollusks pre-digested meals. Really, a marvelous scheme."

Lerner was speaking with a giddy joy. Baskin looked nauseated.

"But, what's truly incredible," Lerner went on, "is the parasitic mollusk that invades the
Diplora labyrinthiformis
, what is called, the brain coral. The long cylindrical shape of the tube worm limited the mental capacity of the tube mollusk, but the brain coral has convolutions and fissures, much like gyri and sulci of the human brain. Do you know why the human brain is so much more intelligent than that of lower animals? Because the folding allows for a high complexity of architecture. We have a much larger surface area, more organization and greater compartmentalization of thought."

The farmer's expression appeared blank, a wisp of a polite smile. Lerner imagined this man's brain free of convolutions, this story whisking straight through, no neural net to catch it. Still, he felt compelled to finish the story.

"The mollusks that invade the brain coral are logarithmically more intelligent than the tube worm parasite. These creatures reign over their personal domains of coral reef, directing the actions of fish, crustaceans and other mollusks. They are like the queen bee ruling a hive through layered divisions of labor."

Baskin continued to project the same empty moonchild smile. Lerner thought, isn't that the same vacant stare his students gave him? Nevertheless, if this farmer was going to deal with this infestation, it was best that he be informed. "Now we have the same type of phenomenon going on here, this time a land-based Caddaricus has invaded a shell, filling it and mimicking the walnut meat's complex structure and forming a brain-like neural network. Let me show you this other specimen."

Lerner took a second walnut from the jar. He had already once split open this specimen, so the halves now divided with a simple twist. He raised one half-shell up so they could both peek at the bottom. "You see the tiny holes? Eight of them, symmetrical and evenly spaced. The walnut's parasite enslaved worms, had them burrow holes in a coordinated and uniform pattern on the bottom of the shell. When I discovered this shell, the worms were projecting from these holes like tentacles and moving in a synchronized rowing motion - a dry land version of a Roman galley. And look here." He poked his finger at two tiny stems projecting from the cortex of nutmeat. "These shoots are eyestalks, the tips are compound eyes, donated by slave insects."

"These creatures seem pretty damned shrewd," the farmer said.

"Sophisticated for a parasite, I suppose," Lerner said. "And a terror as an agricultural pest - absolutely. But, as for being some sort of intelligent predator... well, you've heard tell of the dinosaur with a brain the size of a walnut?"

"Perhaps the individual pods are not the brains," Baskin said. "Perhaps they are clusters of nerves and the whole of the population form the brain."

"That's a very ingenious theory," Lerner said, then paused a moment.
Too ingenious
. Nothing in the way Baskin had acted, nothing that he'd spoken to this point suggested he could come up with that. Lerner said, "I... um... if they were individual nerve centers, how could they communicate with one another?"

Through the window Lerner could see the walnut tree branches shudder in the wind. No, not the branches and there was no wind, only the nuts and their stems were quivering.

Lerner eyed the longhorn's skull. Had it moved? Pinpoint holes appeared drilled in its temple.
They grow to fill their shells
.

Lerner looked to Baskin's face. Something squirmed beneath a pimple patch.

Outside, a half dozen field hands strode toward the house carrying shovels and a shotgun. They seemed to jitter as they walked.

Visited Arkham. Found Necronomicon. Blasphemous ceremony, Great Old One summoned. Sanity blasted. Being eaten by tentacled monstrosity as I

On a drizzly, unshaven morning, I swirled non-dairy creamer in my paper coffee cup and calculated how much money I could afford to spend on the unknown. Alice the Attendant, wearing her U-Stash-It windbreaker, leaned on a long-handled set of bolt cutters to chop off a padlock, metal tinkling to the asphalt. The other hopefuls and I watched with eagerness and reverence, as though she were an archeologist opening a pharaoh's tomb. She lifted the roll-up door to an accompaniment of metallic squeaks and groans, and we all leaned forward to peer into an unlit space: fifty-square feet of bare concrete floor and plywood walls. It nearly sizzled with potential.

It costs almost a hundred dollars a month to rent a storage unit this size, but the space was only half full. There were three heaped shapes, covered in drop cloths, which could have concealed anything from antique furniture to stacked boxes of ancient tax forms. The other guys groaned, but I've always had a thing for the thrill of the unknown, even though I oughta know better by now.

There was nothing to indicate the kind of person who'd rented this place, apart from a willingness to recycle stained drop cloths. Eccentric millionaire who ran out of room in his mansion, or absent-minded hoarder who needed more space for old newspapers? The only thing we knew for sure was that they'd defaulted on the rent, and on the third Tuesday of the month, U-Stash-It auctions off the contents of defaulted storage units. We're not allowed to enter the chambers. We're only allowed to stand outside and bid on what we can see. About a year ago, I paid $150 for a lot of cardboard boxes. Most of it was paperwork, but one contained a stash of collectable Barbie dolls, and that's how I paid for my dental work. Last month, I spent $300 for an intriguing footlocker that ended up being full of socks, which is why I've been eating nothing but beans and rice for three weeks.

Alice
the Attendant clicked her pen and stood ready with a clipboard. "Okay, boys, let 'er rip."

Some days we get slumming twenty-somethings who watched a reality show and have dreams of uncovering a stash of Nazi gold or a lost Picasso painting in an abandoned unit, but today it's just us regulars. "Twenty," said Old Irving, scowling behind his aviator shades, a USS Midway baseball cap pulled down to his ears. As far as I know, Old Irving has never served in the armed forces. Maybe he got the cap in an auction. Old
Irving doesn't brag.

"Thirty," called out Peter Pabst. Peter looks almost exactly like
Irving, only with a Pabst Blue Ribbon cap instead of the USS Midway.

We pretty much all look alike, we regular bidders. It's not really that we dress the same, or share close physical resemblances. It's that we're all a bit on the margins of things, and we all stare into dark rooms with battered but resilient hope.

The bidding went on like that for a while, rising in ten dollar increments. Almost everyone got into it. Not me, though. I kept my chapped lips sealed, hands stuffed in my pockets. I had to keep quiet, because otherwise I'd have shouted out a preemptive two-hundred bucks. Those vague shapes, lumpy and pointy and squared-off in places, captivated me. I wished I could see through the cloth, but it was actually the opacity that got me vibrating. There could be anything under there. Or nothing. There's a lot of possibility between anything and nothing.

Finally, when it seemed like Peter had it all sewn up with his bid of $300 -- more than my current net worth -- I thought about the five-hundred-dollar-bill I keep folded and tucked away behind the empty photo sleeves in my wallet. It's been there for years, a high school graduation gift from my uncle. I do my best not to think about that bill when I'm rolling pennies for gas, because it's reserved for some unspecified emergency, a moment of rock-bottom desperation, or else a bargain too outlandishly fabulous to pass up -- but in my life, how likely is it I'm going to need to bribe a border guard to let me slip through the big fence to freedom? How likely is it I'll find a bum selling a set of fifty Fabergé eggs at ten bucks a pop on a blanket on the corner? Not very. Maybe this storage unit, with its shrouded wonders, was the opportunity the bill was destined for. So I took out my wallet, slipped out the bill, unwrapped it like a flag, and held it up in the air.

"Five hundred," I said. "Cash money right now."

Old
Irving whistled. "Wow. A genuine McKinley?"

"I'll give you six hundred for the bill," Peter said. I wasn't surprised. Five-hundreds are legal tender, but rare enough to be collectable.

"Nope." Alice snatched the bill from my hands. "Sold, the contents of this unit are yours." She turned grinning to Peter. "Now, you can talk to me about that six hundred. Let me get on the internet and see how bad you're trying to cheat me..."

They walked off, Old Irving following after them from professional interest and the other regulars shuffling off to pick over estate sales or flea markets. I stepped reverently into the mouth of my latest Ali Baba's treasure cave, hoping I hadn't just wasted my one family heirloom on a bunch of worthless old junk. I took the nearest drop cloth in my hands.

For every King Tut's tomb there's an Al Capone's vault, and if I'm strictly honest, the world's more Capone than Tut. But people are funny and they put funny stuff in storage. And one man's trash...

I yanked off the drop cloth, revealing a heap of lumber. Old, seasoned lengths of sawn wood, with boards stacked neatly and beams leaning against the wall. I closed my eyes. Good wood is worth more than you might think, but it's not quite what I had in mind. I tore down the next drop cloth, and found a pallet of crumbly red bricks and some cans of ancient, dried-up paint hand-labeled as "Eldritch Red" and "Plutonian Black."

So I'd uncovered the building materials for someone's Satanist playhouse. Just the thought of moving the bricks to my truck made my back hurt.

The fire of discovery was pretty well burned-out when I lifted the final drop cloth, from the smallest, squarest heap.

There were more boards there, and more bricks, but resting on top of the stack was a big old sea chest, dark wood with slanted sides, fitted out with brass hardware and handles. Cleaned up, it might be worth something. The lid was secured with an ornate padlock, the body made of black iron shaped like the face of a frog or a fish (it was kind of crude). I could have borrowed Alice's bolt cutters and opened it right there, but the lock itself looked like an antique and might have been more valuable than anything inside. That suspicion was reinforced when I grabbed the handles of the chest and tested the weight and found it far less than I'd hoped. There was
something
in the chest, probably, but it wasn't gold Krugerrands.

I decided the bricks and wood could wait. I had 24 hours after the auction to get everything out, and if I bought
Alice a coffee she'd stretch it to 48. I wanted to get the sea chest home and crack it open and satisfy my fluttering, thrill-seeking impulse. A sealed box, under a cloth, in box of metal and concrete – it was literally a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in, well, you get the drift.

*     *     *

I lived in half a duplex not far from the bay. The other half had been unoccupied for about eight months, which suited me fine. I dragged the sea chest to the center of my sparsely-furnished living room and fetched my toolbox.

I could have picked the lock, if I'd been more patient. I'm not very good at tickling locks, but as a rule old padlocks aren't too tough. I'd have to pick it eventually if I wanted to sell the lock intact – I couldn't afford to hire a locksmith to make a key. But I was more curious about the inner mystery, so I decided to take another approach.

Here's the thing about locks. It doesn't matter how good they are if you put them on a door or a box with exposed hinges. A few minutes with a hammer and a screwdriver – using a dishcloth to cushion the hammer blows so I wouldn't damage the brass – and I had the pins of the hinges removed.

I took a hopeful breath and lifted open the lid. The underside was densely carved with peculiar shapes, like hieroglyphics drawn by a drunk with a corkscrew.

At first I thought the chest was empty, which was a crushing disappointment, but then the darkness at the bottom struck me as a little
too
dark, and I frowned and reached inside, thinking there was... I don't know what. A sheet of midnight black velvet at the bottom, maybe.

Instead my hand reached down, down, down, well past where the bottom of the chest should have been. I snatched my hand back, started at the chest, then lifted it off the ground and looked at the bottom.

Solid wood. I grunted. Had I uncovered some stage magician's prop? But how the hell did it
work
? I could imagine using mirrors to make the bottom of a chest look like a black pit, sure, but to
feel
like it?

In retrospect, I should have been frightened. Screamed, or gone crazy, or fainted. But I was just curious. I was always curious. Dangerously so. And if it was a magician's prop , those were highly collectable.  So I went to the kitchen and got my good flashlight, the one with four D batteries that could double as a pretty good caveman's club, and returned to the chest.

When I shined the light inside, I saw more than just darkness. I saw darkness and a set of
stairs
. The stairs were wooden, the steps painted alternately black and red, and they descended as far as my flashlight's beam could penetrate.

There was a moment when madness, fainting, etc. seemed legitimate possibilities, but the strongest thing I felt was the hunger to
know
.  After a moment's thought, I went to the kitchen, got a butcher knife, wrapped it in a dishcloth, and tucked it away in the inner pocket of my old green Army jacket. (I never served; found it in a unit and it fit, so I kept it.) Then I wrote a note and left it on the coffee table. It read: "To Whom It May Concern: If I have disappeared without a trace, check the wooden chest on the floor. Bring guns maybe."

I knew I should probably do a lot more planning, but if I was good at planning, I wouldn't live the kind of life I always have. I wouldn't have lost, in order ,a good job, a shitty job, a wife, another shitty job, another wife, and my last shitty job. So I just climbed into the box and started going down the steps. The flashlight clutched awkwardly in my hand, I shined it around below me as I descended. The stairs were creaky but solid, and I saw they were fixed to some kind of natural stone wall. The walls narrowed in on me until I felt like I was squeezing down a chimney, and after a while the stairs became nearly vertical, more like a treehouse ladder, boards nailed to the trunk.

The walls ran with what I thought at first was water, but the trickles didn't reflect the way they should have -- some streams took in the light of the flashlight and returned queasy-looking rainbows, like hallucinogenic oil slicks, and other streams just took the light and gave back
nothing
, eating the illumination without even a glimmer of reflection.

After what felt like an hour but was maybe really fifteen minutes I saw solid ground beneath me. I was half afraid there'd be nothing at the bottom except the termination of a coffin-sized shaft, but instead there was an opening-out, a tunnel I could enter if I ducked my head a little.

I tried to tell myself I was just beneath my house, but I knew that, wherever I was, my house was nowhere nearby. The cavern smelled sharply of minerals, and faintly of something musty, like old drapes in an abandoned house.

Proceeding along the tunnel, which opened up enough for me to go upright, just barely, I found brackets fixed to the walls holding actual torches, which I considered lighting with my old Zippo, but didn't. After a short walk I emerged into a space that sounded bigger, based on the echoes of my footfalls, and shone my light around.

I stood in a roughly circular room, maybe a hundred feet across. There were heaps of black cloth all over the floor, jumbled together, surrounding a pool dead-center in the room, filled not with water but with a swirling mixture of that rainbow-shimmering liquid and the light-eating black-hole goop. But neither the pit nor the dirty laundry interested me, because my beam also showed me what I can only describe as
altars
.

They were built of old red bricks, constructed into free-standing structures, some with brick arches or shelves or weird radiating platforms, and they were all filled with small statues. The statues weren't all that pretty – they tended toward the squat and froglike – but my sense of antiquities is as well-honed as it gets for any amateur, and I knew these things were old. More importantly, their eye sockets -- some had one, some had three, a couple even had eight to go with their tentacles, but none had the standard two – all gleamed with jewels. Red and black and blue and several with the perfect clarity that reflected the word
diamonds
into my mind.

I had the idea to scoop up one of the bits of black cloth on the floor to use as a sack, and when I picked it up, there was a clatter... and bones fell out. Yellowed and brittle human
bones.

The vision before me shifted, and I realized those weren't old clothes all around me. They were old
bodies
, wearing the shreds of black robes.