Résumé With Monsters (10 page)

She was altered physically, of course. There were a number of nasty scars on her face. One angled laceration had required the shaving of her left eyebrow, and the hair had not grown back. Her outthrust jaw and a tendency on the part of her left eyelid to droop created an expression of simple-minded cunning. Her right ankle had been broken, necessitating a brace and an orthopedic shoe and producing what in a normal person would have been a limp but which, in the hyperactive Monica, was a bird like hop.

All these physical changes were nothing compared to a mental shift that Philip found unsettling.

On the third day of Monica's return, a chance remark by Bingham unlocked some internal door, and that night Philip dreamed of MicroMeg. The old printer's remark had been uttered casually into the cool night air. "Old Ralph has got himself a model employee in that Monica. She's twice as efficient since she got run over. Let's hope Ralph don't put two and two together or we will all be having accidents."

Philip dreamed he was in the men's restroom on the fifth floor of MicroMeg. He knew it was the fifth floor restroom, because Ray Barnstable was brushing his teeth at the sink. Ray spent most of his office hours in this restroom.

"Is Jennings still in the building?" Ray asked.

"No," Philip said. Jennings was Ray Barnstable's hated rival and they shared an office.

"Good," Ray said, and he left the restroom. He would now go—as Philip knew from office gossip—and search Jennings' desk drawers for incriminating information.

The restroom expanded suddenly, growing to the size of a train station. Indeed, there appeared to be a train at the far end, a great, black blur of an engine surrounded by a milling crowd. A line of stalls, dozens of them, stretched down the long white expanse in the direction of the train.

Philip's bowels cramped and he flung open the first of the stalls and availed himself of the toilet. As he sat there, dizzy and oddly hollowed by a sudden liquid evacuation, his eyes fell upon the door and the scrawled writing there: "
Phnglui
mglw'nafh
Cthulhu
R'lyeh
wgah'nagl
fhtagn
." He knew the translation, of course, which was "In his house at
R'lyeh
dead
Cthulhu
waits dreaming."

He felt a numbing horror, a sense of his insignificance amid black, cosmic forces. He yanked his pants up and stumbled out of the stall as he heard the unholy wail of the train.

The crowd that surrounded the train rose like burnt leaves swirling on an autumn bonfire. Not men at all, but winged creatures, and—for with this knowledge came the realization that they were much more distant than he had at first assumed—creatures of a far greater size than men, the least of them perhaps twelve feet tall and some twice that.

And then the black engine in the midst of the swarming horde turned, a sinuous, immense unwinding, a flowing of its intention, and Philip felt its baleful scrutiny, knew that he was regarded by something malevolent and ancient, a shifting viscous mass. And his reason, like a slippery city shoe coming down on a newly- mopped linoleum floor, skittered and he sought to give the creature a name, and his mind said, "
Shoggoth
" for those were the ghastly,
golemlike
creations of the Old Ones and surely that was what now turned a cold and palpable scrutiny upon him. These creatures had, for a time, broken free of their masters and waged a terrible war. Perhaps this was one of the renegades.

Philip turned and ran toward the door. In an instant, the distant monster was racing toward him, accompanied by a horrid rending sound, as though its own protoplasmic flesh were tearing as it moved. Philip looked back and saw the sputtering green eyes burn on the crest of its motion. Like a black cloud of flies, its loathsome winged compatriots hovered over it.

A strange, musical scream filled the air, "
Tekeli-li
!
Tekeli-li
!" and Philip felt volition abandon him. The door in front of him shrunk to the size of a cigar box, and as he watched, it swung open toward him, and poor Amelia, attired primly in a brown suit, entered the room. A doll-sized version of Amelia, with long eyelashes and
clownlike
circles of rouge on her cheeks.

"Philip," she began, and then her eyes widened, comically, the overblown acting of a silent film, and she said "Aw shit."

And the raging
Shoggoth
overtook them both, tumbling them into the fetid dark of the waiting abyss.

Philip awoke sweating and blinked at the clock on the end table. Glowing red numbers announced that it was three o'clock. It seemed that it was three in the morning more often than it was any other time. The explanation was no doubt sinister and had something to do with the control the System possessed over time itself.

Having thought this, Philip groaned. Why fight cosmic forces?

He got up, turned on his computer and sat before the green screen. The cursor pulsed like a drugged, rectangular heart.

He wrote for awhile on his novel. He had been writing on this novel for so long, through so many incarnations, that he thought of it as a beast he fed.
Why couldn't Amelia understand?

Today he wrote,
"They slept in the woods that night having fled the giant, ravening dogs. In the morning, they set their faces into the sun and marched, at a good clip, toward the cliffs of
Leng
. "

Philip wrote for two hours and then saved what he had written. The blank screen remained, and on that he typed, in all caps,
MONICA IS A ZOMBIE. THEY ARE HERE NOW! THEY HAVE SNIFFED ME OUT. THEY COME AT ME, AS ALWAYS, IN DREAMS. BUT I SENSE THAT THEY WON'T SETTLE FOR JUST RUINING MY SLEEP. THEY HAVE LOST PATIENCE, I THINK.

Philip saved this too, under the file name "zombie" and turned his computer off. He went to bed then and did not wake until noon when Amelia called.

She was excited. "I just got back from orientation," she said. “I think this job is going to be great."

"I hope so," Philip said.

Amelia heard the caution there. "Hey, come on. Be positive."

Before brushing his teeth, before shaving, before taking a shower, Philip turned his computer on and added this to the zombie file:
WHEN THEY COME, THEY COME IN A RUSH. THEY ATTACK ON ALL FRONTS
.

Once Philip understood Monica's altered state, he marveled that none of the other employees saw the obvious. Bingham, of course, had remarked on the change, but even he missed the darker truth.

You could even see the stitched incision where they had gone in and tinkered with her brain. It was at the nape of her neck, a two-inch straight line, and while it was generally hidden by her hair, it was easily visible when she leaned forward to study her computer screen.

And didn't anyone notice that Monica Gibson was no longer interested in Lucille Ball? Well, no, of course not, because these were new people. They did not know that Monica was an insufferable fan of the original
I Love Lucy
show and all its interminable incarnations. Monica could—and would—quote entire episodes. Like all fanatics, she found it inconceivable that others did not share her enthusiasm, and she even had audio cassette tapes of Lucy material which she played incessantly.

Not anymore. No Lucy tapes. No Lucy stories. No Lucy dialogue. And anyone who had known Monica prior to hospitalization would not have missed this transformation, as noteworthy as, say, a born-again Christian suddenly forswearing mention of Jesus or salvation.

As soon as Philip understood that Monica was now externally operated, much became clear. Her zombie-hood explained her boss' new, cavalier manner with her. In the past, Ralph had always been a little frightened of Monica, fearing she would quit. Now he spoke to her without cringing or wringing his hands, and he abandoned all the wheedling body language and facial expressions of supplication that he had previously used to urge her on.

"I need this, this and this," he would say, dumping the papers on her desk.

Monica would nod rhythmically, like an addled geriatric on a porch swing.

One weekend several weeks later, Philip talked Amelia into going to a movie. Her resolve not to see him until he destroyed the novel that came between them had been weakened by her delight in her new job. The movie they saw was about a lot of postwar baby boomers who were living in California and experiencing mid-life crises that caused them to drive expensive cars very fast, have sex with shallow people, and question the value of their jobs as movie directors, fashion designers, and architects.

After the movie, Philip and Amelia went to The Magnolia Cafe.

Amelia looked different, her features sharper somehow. He realized that her hair was newly cut. Pale-orange lipstick made her mouth seem oddly childlike, and when she briefly put on large, round glasses to study the menu, Philip felt a pang of protectiveness and something approaching panic.

Amelia talked about her new job at
Pelidyne
.

"I'm learning all about computer graphics," she said.

Philip listened with a growing sense of dismay.

Amelia told a humorous anecdote about her coworker, Thelma, who had worked at
Pelidyne
for thirteen years.

"Don't," Philip wanted to shout, "become too attached to your coworkers."

Philip studied the restaurant's walls, which were covered with the watercolors of a local artist who appeared to be obsessed with frogs and their relationship to extremely large, nude women.

"Mr. Grayson says I'm a very quick learner," Amelia said. "He says most people who already know about computers can't figure the database out because..."

"The Dada base?" Philip said. "Ah." Worry muddled him. When the waiter came to the table and tried to engage them in a discussion of Umberto Eco's latest novel, Philip waved the man away.

"Philip, are you okay?" Amelia asked.

"I've had a bad week," Philip said. "Bad dreams."

Amelia frowned. "I'm sorry. I still think you might look into some group therapy."

"I have a therapist," Philip said, noting some coolness in his voice.

"Yes, I met her, remember. She's kind of old, isn't she? And just what are her credentials?"

"Well, she's still alive," Philip said, wondering just why he was growing suddenly irritable. "She's old and still alive, those are certainly credentials."

Later, he drove Amelia to her house and kissed her on the cheek under the porch light that was exploding with fat white moths and brown beetles that pinged against the screen door. In the past they had been lovers. He had stuck his tongue in her belly button. Now he planted a chaste kiss on her cheek. It was depressing.

When Philip climbed back in his car and shut the door, he said, "I love you Amelia Price." There was no comfort in the statement, which was, in truth, only an acknowledgment of the increasing scope of his dread.

11.

Philip found
Pelidyne's
address in the phone book and drove by the building on his way to work. It was a shiny black building, windowed with cold black glass suggesting hostile takeovers, a towering, five- sided, arrogantly modern structure on San Jacinto. The sides of the building were not of equal length, and this added to its sinister aspect. Was this the loathsome, non-Euclidean geometry of ancient
R'lyeh
, that reason-defying, accursed city where dread
Cthulhu
waited to be reborn?

Philip didn't have time to stop and examine the building's interior. He was already late for work.

The job was uneventful that night. Monica worked throughout Philip's shift and was still there when Philip left. She did not look very good; there were dark circles under her eyes and her brown hair had lost what
lustre
it once had. She had, if Philip wasn't mistaken, worn the same black jeans and tie-dyed T-shirt for a week now. Philip was not surprised. Zombies, of course, take no pride in their appearance.

"Moving right along," she said to Philip when he first sat down. It was the only thing she said directly to Philip during the course of his shift.

Ralph came into the room several times, snatched illegible orders from an ancient fax machine, and handed them to Monica without a word.

After work, Philip picked up his mail from the P.O. box at the apartment complex's main office.