New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (7 page)

h nrn cocked low He was carrying a shopping bag In

With a fierce tug, he dragged him out of the car, wa~~

One of them handcuffed him immediately. The other bolted his door and led him by the nose to the bathroom. They were big, wild, mongrel blacks with natty lenims, their hair twisted into spikes.

One had a beard and was missing half of his left ear. The other wore wraparound glasses and a pink hat.

In the bathroom, they knelt him down before the toilet the butterfly under his nose. 'All right, rughead, any more surprises. Who put you on me? Hey cool out, Ralf pleaded. I m clean with Gusto.

The bearded one laughed, said, 'My name's Duk Parmelee. And that's Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. We the boys goin' to take your face apart.'

Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz took four cans of drain cleaner and a bottle of Clorox out of the shopping bag and emptied them into the bowl. The Duke continued 'Gusto wants you to know, he's hurt you ignored him.'

Hi-Hat grabbed Ralf behind the neck and shoved his face towards the fuming water in the bowl.

The acid vapours seared up into his sinuses and scalded hi eyes.

'Yaww? Ralf bawled. 'Don't! Please! Don't! I got the stuff!'

Hi-Hat eased up, and Ralf pulled back with a gaq

His face was slick with tears, and he was quaking. 'Where is it?' the Duke asked.

'My touch has it stashed. Tomorrow, I'll lift tomorrow.'

Hi-Hat steered Ralf's face towards the blue burnit water. Ralf screamed, but the fumes gagged him, and he went into a glide.

The Duke pulled him back and slashed him across the face with a sharp-ringed hand. 'Cry for me, man - cry and I won't make you drink that soup.'

Ralf was crying, his whole body was shuddering.

Henley Easton took a cab from St Vincent's to Pennsylvania Station. From there he rode the train to Garden City where he rented a car. After eating at a McDonald's, he had fifty dollars left. The nightmare hadn't recurred, and he was beginning to feel confident. It was his plan to get to his cache and head west.

He didn't want to burn Ralf, but he felt that he had no choice. The coma he had been in changed everything. No doubt Gusto and his black mafia felt ripped after a nine-day delay. They would be too suspicious to make him a good deal. It would be best now, Henley figured, to find another market and leave Ralf behind to answer questions.

Henley spent the night in a motor inn where he nspected his foot for the first time since leaving the Hospital. There was no swelling, but the lips of the wound were a scaly black. Just looking at it made him feel drowsy. He put his sock on, lay back, and slid off into a dark sleep.

The next morning he went down to the stream early. After he uncovered his cache and secured it inside the cat's spare tyre, he got behind the wheel to go, but something stopped him. He stared through the windshield at the larkspur, the myrtle, and the great bellowing fireweed that dotted the slopes like embroidery. He felt woozy suddenly, as if he were swaying with deep sea rapture out over whispering distances -

with

sobs. , ~

'Just you remember,' Duke Parmelee said, you ~

juke and everybody knows you a juke. If you don't hav~ becvming no one, everything, e.ndless space.

that H tomorrow, you goin' to suffer. Mister, you goi~ ('orne alive! he snapped at himself and jerked to suffer.' upright behind the wheel. But it was no good. He felt They uncuffed him and were gone before he couli that he had to get out of the car, and when he did it

get to his feet. All things considered, they had bee~ was like moving in a dream. He felt light as a cloud

practically cordial. beginning to vanish. A shadow was spreading its ú ú ú an~nyrnous dark over everything, and the air was

66 New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

becoming soft as rock seen underwater. His limbs were remote and rubbery and seemed to be moving by

their own will. He let them guide him down the slope and through a swatch of burned reeds. When he stopped moving, he looked down, and there, huddled among the crusts of dirt like a stunned animal, was the stone that had cut him.

It came away from the ground easily, and the dry dirt crumbled revealing a palm-sized green rock.

When he had first seen it, wet, he thought that colour was moss. But the green and the oily shine were its own strange attributes, and when he saw them again, the dizziness and the nausea returned.

Henley moved to heave it away, but something about the patterning on the rock stopped him.

Looking closely, he saw that it was engraved with sharp cuneiformlike designs. He ran his fingers over them, studied again the fine cutting edge, and turned to take it back with him.

The return walk to the car was uneventful. His body no longer felt light. It was hungry, and he decided to find a restaurant and eat. On the highway, he turned towards the city impulsively. He wanted to wheel around and go west, but it was impossible to do more than speculate about that. He felt stoned and uneasy, and he stopped several times to question his motives, but each time he stopped an overriding urgency, razorapt, urged him back into his car. When he arrived in New York, his clothes were soaked through with a cold sweat.

He returned the rented car and took a room at the Elton on East Twenty-sixth. There he unbagged the heroin and repeatedly touched it with his fingertips. It had become the primary purpose in his life, yet he was doing everything with it wrong.

He took a pinch of it, divided it into two thin slivers, and used his thumbnail to snort them. A few moments later, he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the cool red light of day's end. He mastered a small spasm of nausea and floated to the corner of his cot where he sat down, all of the day's problems already on the point of an energetic solution.

An hour later the room was darkening. Stern shadows, deep as oil, gloomed on all sides. Everything seemed immense, and the apprehensions of the nightmare began to feel real. The cutting stone, propped up on the windowsill, pulsed a dull incandescent green. It's drug-action, he reassured himself, but he wasn't confident. Fear hazed around him like a thunder charge. He realized that at any moment the horror could begin again. Something dark and cold as an ocean current was tugging at him, pulling him away.

He touched the bedspread to reassure himself. It was death-cold flesh! He hopped off the bed in terror before he saw that he had touched the metal backpost.

He breathed deeply to calm himself. It came to him that the nightmare was still there, somewhere deeper, much deeper than awareness. It was continuing. It had never stopped. Like the thunder beginning too late to remember the light, his mind was shivering in the afterfall of an intractable doom. Clearly, he saw that it was only a matter of time before the darkness welling within. surged up. He sat shivering in the twilight and resolved to contact Ralf. He had to unload the heroin. If he went into a coma and was found with it, it would be better if he never woke up.

There was a pay phone in the lobby. Henley called Ralf's apartment, and the phone rang a long time before it was answered by a basso-rumble voice he didn't recognize. Henley hung up immediately.

His hands were trembling so violently that it took him five minutes to dial correctly an alternate number Ralf had given him. A woman answered and said she hadn't seen Ralf in days and had no idea where he was. Henley told her his name and where he was staying and then hung up.

He went back to his room and closed, bolted, and chained the door before he noticed the green luminance glowing in the darkness. It pulsed brighter as he turned, and he saw that the cutting stone was emitting a haze of light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and to recognize that it wasn't light at all but a gas or a vapourous plasma that was deliquescing as it sublimed from the rock.

Henley stood for a long time, mesmerized. It was a tricky gas. Against the dark windowpanes, it was feathered and iridescent. Along the ceiling, it was billowing in small dark streams. But Henley was watching the stone. There the vapour was folding over on itself slowly, like a flower blossoming. It entranced him, and he kept his gaze fixed on it until something of another texture altogether appeared in its depths. There against the surface of the jade-coloured rock, a shiny wet substance was oozing. Slowly a knob of clear jelly striated with smoky colours bulbed out. It extended a pseudopod and slimed along the edge of the sill.

The light switch was to his left, and Henley snapped it on. Nothing happened. The tungsten coils glowed red in the light bulbs, but the room stayed semidark, crepuscular in the thin vapour light of the stone.

A cold finger touched Henley between his shoulder blades, and he shuddered and spun about to leave. As his hands fumbled with the dead bolt, a horrible thing happened. The idiot's voice, scrawny and demonic as in his nightmare, called out from behind: Fear arrives like a runner.

Shut your ears big, Henley, and look shadows go by long after the bodies have passed. Your eyes blow backward.

Henley whimpered and turned from the door. The ichor squeezing from the stone had stretched into a membrane and was quivering in the air like a sea plant. It was still pulling from the rock, and in the halflight Henley thought he could see a net of fine blue capillaries webbed over it. He was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to flee, but the voice, booming in his head, held him fast: Dark carries you, broods like wells in the deep ground. You can't run, nowhere to run, for you and I are the same.

A soft moan forced itself out of Henley's lungs, and he pivoted to run. The dead bolt clanked open, and the chain lock jangled free before there was a loud popping noise behind him followed by a frying sizzle.

Henley glanced over his shoulder as he fidgeted with the door latch. The viscous protoplast had snapped free, and it was swimming through the air towards him, a small shimmering mass the size of his fist.

Curly-edged feathers of flesh trailed below it, as from a jellyfish, and the whole bulk, dimpled with blood spots, arrowed for his head.

Henley swung the door open and bolted into the corridor just as the tendrilous thing caught up with him from behind. Icy snug fingers wrapped around the back of his head and over his ears.

Something hard and needle-sharp was pressing against the nape of his neck, forcing the base of his skull. He scrambled for the stairway, stumbled, and fell. The corridor went suddenly white, as if blasted by lightning. There was a hot piercing pain between his eyes, and Henley understood, with a spasm of terror, that the thing had punctured his skull!

He lurched to his feet, jerked forward a pace, and plunged over the stairwell with a stammering cry.

He bounced off the top steps and went careening over the banister into space. There was an awful moment when it felt as if his head were rupturing at the seams, and then the blur of steps braked.

Henley could see the yellowed flower wallpaper spin off gracefully to one side as the stairs swung up from below. He was floating. The hug of gravity was strong around his waist, and he sensed something within him pushing out, buckling space around him so that his descent was very slow.

Only the piercing ivory pain that pitched him through the back of his neck to a point between his eyes, kept him from marvelling.

Abruptly, the pain cracked, shot down his spine, and cramped his bowels. There was a terrifying explosion, and the stoop of the stairs that he was settling towards banged apart and splintered across the vacant lobby like a broken vase. Henley slapped to the ground amid a patter of dislodged plaster and lay there stunned, trying not to faint.

His stomach muscles knotted again, and he was hoisted to his feet by a powerful surge of strength.

There was some movement down at the opposite end of the lobby, but he couldn't make sense out of it in the whistling deafness. Mechanically, his body turned, swung over the blasted stoop, and lumbered up the stairs. In his room, Henley collapsed.

On the floor, some sense of self-control returned. His head was throbbing, and there were trickles of dark, almost black blood dripping over his cheeks from the back of his head. With one finger, he felt the nape of his neck. There was a deep hole in it, too painful to probe. He swayed to his feet and leaned against the wall. People were scurrying up and down the hall.

Gradually, one thought cleared itself from the terror trilling through him. It was his cache. Despite the horror, he had to think about his stash. Quietly and quickly as possible, he shuffled over to the night table and sealed the cotton ditty bag with the heroin in it. He debated for a moment about flushing it down the toilet and getting himself to a hospital, but that idea was too closed. He felt trapped and terrified. There was the smell of something broken in the air, and he knew that he had to get away and think all of this through.

There was a fire escape outside his window, and he clambered down it to the street. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the Elton, so he skipped down the alley and jumped a fence to Twenty-seventh Street. He was glistening with sweat and shaking ferociously. Whatever it was that had leaked out of the rock and attacked him, it had burrowed into his skull. He could feel part of it quavering at the mouth of the puncture wound it had made. It sickened him with despair, and he wanted to get help immediately, heroin or no, but he couldn't stop walking. His body marched on mechanically, sleepwalking. His eyes were glazed like small brown fruits, and those that saw him approaching gave way, widely.

The moon sang down around him, grim and cool, and he walked on and on, sticking to the darker cross streets. Finally, hours later, he stopped. He was on a tiny side street, virtually an alley, whose name he hadn't seen. A shopfront door with iron bratticing opened and an old, old man, skin grey and hackled as bark, urged him in. The old man leaned forward like a dead tree and studied him with eyes as bright as pins. Visions had made his face unearthly, scorched-looking, between the silver wires of hair. He wore a mantle sewn with seashells and porcupinequill scrollwork, and he stood still, hooded like a cobra, silent, beckoning Henley with a sway of his head to enter.