Résumé With Monsters (34 page)

The robot swayed slowly on thin, articulated legs, as though engaged in the alien equivalent of some martial arts discipline.

"Go away," Philip said. “I don't want any trouble here. I'm leaving. I quit."

The robot scuttled forward.

Philip swung the fire extinguisher over his head. He spun it in a warning circle. "Scram!" he shouted. "Get!"

The robot skittered three feet closer.

Philip released the extinguisher, and it flew through the air. Effortlessly, with the laconic skill of an outfielder snatching a lazy fly ball, the robot snagged the red cylinder with three
whiplike
appendages.

Philip turned, tossed the wrapped
Necronomicon
on Amelia's stomach, and lifted her in the air, cradling her in his arms.

"Hang onto that book, Amelia," he whispered. "We are going to need it before this is over."

Philip turned and hurried toward the door. He looked back to see if the robot was following.

It was not. It was turning the bright cylinder over, tumbling it from tentacle to tentacle as its ocular units extended and retreated. It made a whirring noise, perhaps the machine equivalent of a man's vocal accompaniment to thought:
Hmmmmmmmm
.

Philip had almost reached the door when the fire extinguisher erupted, a spray of foam hissing into the air. This violent, accidental detonation seemed to cause some reflexive locking mechanism to occur within the robot. Rather than release the trigger, it stiffened. Philip was reminded of a wasp, stilled instantly by a poisonous burst of insecticide.

Philip moved on toward the door, looking back one last time to see the immobile robot, transformed into a vision of some skeletal sculpture in the aftermath of a snowstorm. Foam continued to spew into the air, cotton-candy clots scudding across the smooth floor.

Philip kicked the door open with his foot and entered the hall.

This hallway was unfamiliar. It was cold and poorly lit with walls of dirty cinderblock. When he came to the first doorway on the right, he opened it.

He was in some sort of laboratory, with long sinks and white counters and banks of equipment and glinting glass. One long table was occupied by a pale white corpse, male, nude. Philip lay Amelia on the floor. He spied a lab coat hanging from a rack and grabbed it. He bent over her.

"Amelia," he whispered. "Can you hear me?"

She opened her eyes. "Philip," she said. "What are you—"

She became aware of her nakedness, sitting up abruptly.

"Where are my clothes?" she screamed, scrambling away from him.

"I don't know," Philip said. "Here." He extended his hand with the lab coat. She grabbed it from him and donned it instantly.

"You'll go to jail for this!" she screamed.

"I didn't take your clothes off," Philip shouted back. "What kind of person do you take me for?"

"A crazy person," Amelia said. "The kind of person who would break into my apartment when I'm at work and lie on my bed. And drink beer! I always wondered why the place smelled like beer. The kind of person who would drug a woman and take advantage of her while she was unconscious, like some sick pervert, like, like a psychiatrist, like that psychiatrist they wrote a book about. The kind of person who should be locked up for life."

Philip spoke slowly, trying to calm her. He was hurt by these accusations, only some of which were true.

“I saved your life, actually," Philip said. "Well, I hope to save your life. We aren't in the clear yet, and I don't think we can afford to stand here discussing this at length right now."

"Where are we?" Amelia asked, looking around her with a wary eye.

"
Pelidyne
," Philip said. "Or a parallel
Pelidyne
. Think. Maybe you can remember. They switched you with a robot and brought you down here. They were going to send you to
Yuggoth
. That's what they do to all the Employees of the

Month. My guess is they like to weed out any humans who are a little too innovative, too intelligent. They don't want them in the workplace. So..."

Amelia turned and began to walk away.

"Where are you going?" Philip shouted after her.

"Anywhere away from you."

"Wait. You don't even know where you are. This is not—"

Amelia began to run, her bare feet slapping on the tiled floor.

Philip snatched up the Necronomicon and raced after her.

She banged through a white door.

And fell, pitched into the abyss.

Philip paused, swaying on the edge of the dark, fetid pit. He clung to the doorway, hearing Amelia's scream, already dreadfully distant.

Dear God!

He opened the
Necronomicon
. A dark wind from the depths whipped the apron violently and Philip almost lost his grip. He clutched the book fiercely as the apron swam out over the black void, like some flat, bottom-dwelling fish.

He held the book tighter, despite the grim images it engendered, despite the rotted-flesh feel of its binding.

He found the page, the page Al Bingham had marked. He spoke loudly, his words ringing out over the pit.

"
Na'ghimgor
thdid
lym
,"
Philip screamed. "
Mjn
th'x
barsoom
lu'gndar
."

He did not know the meaning of the words, but he felt the power of their shapes, and sensed that these vocals were more than words, were conjured entities.

From the dark pit sounds began to rise. And light.

Philip read on. "
ln'path
gix
mth'nabor
.
In'path
nox
vel'dekk
."

Suddenly, with a shriek of wind and a noxious odor that was palpable and vile, the monster surfaced. It came from the other side of space, perhaps, shedding electric sparks. The eye could not hold it all; no human eye would wish to.

Amelia, her white lab coat flapping, screamed as the mad god
Azathoth
waved her as though she were a handkerchief in a knot of giant worms.

Philip stopped reading. "Let her go!" he screamed into the rising wind.

Abruptly, Amelia rose high in the air, then down—a softball pitcher's windup—and flew through the open doorway and past Philip. She rolled as she hit the floor, coming to rest against the white sink counter. Philip ran to where she lay.

"Amelia?"

Her eyes were closed. She was alive though. She breathed.

Philip turned and quailed before huge, staring eyes that crowded the doorframe.

Philip felt words thunder in his mind.

"Drone. You deign to harness an Overlord?"

Philip felt his soul shrivel. Something was being pulled from him, extracted, some life essence.

He looked down at the throbbing book. His hands were bleeding. The page in front of him was unreadable, the alien words blurred beyond recognition by the pain in his head.

He read them anyway.

"
Yig
sudeth
M'cylorim
.
M'xxlit
kraddath
Soggoth
im'betnk
." The evil thunder in him abated some. But still it shook him.

There were no words, but the sense of it was this: "Drone, I will paper the universes with tiny pieces of your pathetic sentience."

Philip read on. And as he read, he began to understand what he spoke. The sense of it was this: "You will leave this spot, which spot denies the logic of your coming and going, and you will take, in the Name of the Nameless One, all your minions and their devices with you. And even the uttering of your name will be lost to this world until Time has eaten its Own Head."

The waves of
Azathoth's
hate still beat within him. There was a ritual, a gesture yet to make, some switch to turn.

Philip glanced up from the book, seeking a weapon.

The monster sensed this momentary release, and it shot a single cold tentacle across the distance and wrapped Philip's ankle in scaled, burning muscle. Philip screamed, and the pain darted like cockroaches up his spine.

He turned, dropping the
Necronomicon
. He clutched at a desk as he fell, trapped by the burning, viselike grip on his ankle.

A drawer fell out, clattering next to him (pencils, pens, a pocket calculator, a book of crossword puzzles, rubber bands, a condom, a broken cigarette, paper clips).

Paper clips. The glue of bureaucracy. The heart-sinking, tedious, menial egg cases of the lumbering, soul-breaking business world. Paper clips. The drawer-crouching, bright, cheery, phony, truant darlings of time-servers and despairing clerks.

Philip scrabbled to snare a paper clip between thumb and forefinger. As usual the small, silvery bug eluded him. The pain ran briskly up his neck and squatted at the bottom of his brain.

He grabbed the clip, slapped his palm down on a rubber band, and screamed again as the monster continued to drag him toward the abyss where—this vision was too precise not to be an image from the creature itself—his skin would be sucked from him by a thousand rasping mouths.

He bent the clip against his palm, slipped the rubber band between thumb and forefinger, and lurched upright on the edge of the precipice.

"You stinking space slug!" he screamed, and he fired a paper clip into the great, blank eye of implacable evil.

He could not say what happened next.

Something appeared to scream inside his head. "
Nogs'dath
blexmed
!"
he shouted, releasing the entities of sealing, those words that closed the way back.

He flew through the air. Perhaps he lost consciousness. Certainly time was fragmented, although that might have been the result of other forces. In any event, he found himself lying on top of Amelia. The doorway was empty, with curious lights shivering and flashing in the darkness. The building itself was rumbling and shaking. Above him, plasterboard crumpled like cellophane. He gathered the inert Amelia in his arms and fled.

Somehow, through falling plaster and dust and the unholy shifting of hallways, he found his way to the surface. He walked through an empty lobby whose floor leapt and buckled as though huge steel pistons pummeled it from below. The glass doors were locked, but he smashed them with a chair and carried Amelia through.

It was raining, and he walked through the rain carrying Amelia. He walked out into the parking lot. He stumbled and fell. He did not think he could get up again, and so he sat in the rain, cradling Amelia, gazing upon the quivering, black tower. Lightning harried the sky, affording brief glimpses of shape-shifting
Pelidyne
. As he watched, it suddenly shivered, a vile, orgasmic tremor that ran its length beginning at its base and echoing upward. This shiver was accompanied by a rending, splitting sound that dwarfed the thunder.

And then the black walls themselves peeled back, like burning cardboard, and something dark and convoluted, something beyond description, broke free of the walls and rose in the air, some noxious insect shedding its larval case.

Philip looked away, sickened by wonder and loathing. And when he looked back,
Pelidyne
had shrunk somehow. It still towered above the other buildings, and the general population, inured to sleek architecture and unobservant at the best of times, might notice nothing different. But it was small now, insignificant, mundane. The whole block was black, not a light to be seen.

"No power," Philip muttered.

Amelia stirred in his arms. She would come awake with complaints and accusations. She was consistent in that regard.

A car was racing toward him. It braked, screeching on the wet pavement, and Sissy jumped out.