THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (19 page)

             
I heard soft laughter and mistakenly looked around the dismal front room of my apartment, thinking someone had entered while I was gone. That someone now sat laughing at me where I stood leaning, sweating, grimacing against the door.

             
But no one was there in the violet shadows.

             
It was merely Carla laughing, softly, letting me know that I was right, so right. I would never be done with her.

             
#

             
Nights were the most difficult to handle. During the day when I attended classes other than the mythology class we shared, I didn't fret about Carla reading my mind. But at night, in my apartment, my curtains drawn, the lights turned low, I would find myself pacing the small rooms like a trapped animal--a cat, maybe, that wants to go out, to be let free. Every uncharitable thought of her I had was probably being monitored. Any thought of privacy fled and I felt invaded, sullied, my self stolen from me. I alternately disbelieved her claim and then believed it. Over the next few days my worries were confirmed when we met after class together and she remarked on personal thoughts I'd been having.

             
"When you hear me whisper in your head, that's really me," she said. "I've always been able to do that, but I want to do it more. I want to meet the old ones and be tutored in the art of forcing the world into surrender."

             
She was able to read the murder in my expression without entering my thoughts.

             
#

             
The first three times Carla and I left the campus and rode our bikes out to the swampy wooded area at the outskirts of town where we determined we would be left alone to summon the gods, we accomplished nothing but a slight shuddering of the ground.

             
"I don't understand it," Carla said, her mouth curling into a moue. "Maybe I'm not pronouncing the words correctly. Or I'm not in the proper frame of mind."

             
"Worshipful, you mean." I liked to bite into her with sarcasm when possible. She was constantly inside my brain now, day and night, walking around poking into areas that were dusty and cobwebbed, unearthing unseemly thoughts and past misbegotten deeds. I hated her with a passion everlasting. And she knew that, too.

             
She glared at me before beginning to quote from the little book one more time. It was our fourth try over as many weeks. It was the end of October, nearly All Hallow's Eve, and there was magic and foreboding in the crisp apple-scented air. Around us stood a black sentinel of soldier tree skeletons, arms yearning to take the sky in an embrace. Above us stars twinkled with intermittent gleeful winks and the old yellow moon, half eclipsed, released a mellow uniform light. Fog eddied along the frosty ground, weaving in and out of our legs like tendrils of plasma rising from the soggy soil. I could smell winter coming, cold and blustery, fierce as a runaway train.

             
"Pay attention!" Carla said, jerking me back to the moment. I had drifted again, as I was drifting more often whenever she stayed out of my head, granting me the illusion of peace and independence.

             
"If you'd get on with it, maybe I would."

             
"This is sacred!"

             
"Of course it is."

             
"You're mocking me."

             
"I wouldn't do that, Carla. You're such a sweet, kind, understanding..."

             
She made the hissing sound, not aloud with her vocal cords, but in my head where it felt as if a snake crawled, belly down and sniffing the convolutions of gray matter for prey.

             
"All right. Go ahead." I composed myself, folding my hands together in front of me, locking fingers. I even put my tongue between my teeth, intent on biting down and drawing blood to remind myself if I began to drift away.

             
She brought the flashlight to bear on the old browning page of the little book and began to speak the words in reverent tones. I paid little attention to the words themselves. They flowed from Carla like a lazy river, clouding my mind. I heard an owl hoot and a bat swooped from the darkened sky between us, but Carla read on.

             
Calling, calling. Urging the Elders to hear her and to reply.

             
Once more I drifted, my thoughts leaving us there standing face-to-face across a foggy clearing between the brooding trees. For some reason I thought about home, about my parents, about summertime when I went alone to swim in the creek's pure green crystalline waters. I heard the waterfall that cascaded over worn rock outcroppings, and I felt the sprinkle of splashing waters. Sun on my back, burning. Wind in my ears, keening.

             
A scream.

             
It erupted and bounced around inside my skull like a nickel swirled in a tin pan. I blinked and came back from summer in Alabama to see Carla backing away from me, her mouth open, her eyes huge.

             
"What happened?"

             
Beneath my feet the earth moved. I swayed, trying to keep balance, put out my arms and was able to stand upright. Now my heart was pattering in my chest, a trapped thing about to get loose, and panic rose to a crescendo that made my vision waver. "It's coming," I shouted. "They're coming!"

             
The earth in the center of the clearing between us opened a crack, emitting white light so astoundingly bright that my eyes narrowed against it. There was a high screeching sound like a thousand rusty doors opening all at once.

             
Clouds covered the moon. The stars overhead dimmed. The air became perfectly still and dead, not a breath moving, not a bird tittering, not a muscle of any living thing twitching.

             
"They come," Carla said, staring directly into the light slicing up from the ground and into the night sky. "My lords have come to me."

             
That's when I heard the roar in my head and realized it was not Carla's doing. She was totally braced by the light, immersed in The Coming, her hands dangling at her sides, the little book still held in one of them.

             
No, it was not Carla roaring in my brain, but Chaos. It was demons set free, blood lust flying on the backs of crooked, misshapen reptiles, death spawning from the belly of a monster the world had never seen. This is not what I wanted--a release into reality of the beasts of destruction. I wanted knowledge and power, things I knew the horde waiting in the rent earth would not give me. I had been an instrument, merely, Carla and I were insignificant blobs of muscle and bone. We would be swept aside in the onrush of foul decay soon to emerge from the Pit.

             
"No!" I shouted over the roar.

             
"Yes," whispered Carla in my head. "Yesyesyesyes, forever yes, till time is out of hand, yes, I will be part of this, yes, the Ancient has seen me, yes."

             
I endured the roaring in my head only by moving from where I stood, staggering over uneven ground that trembled and shook. I skirted the abyss yawning between us, and ran to Carla to tear the book from her hand. "Give it to me!"

             
She was dazed, incoherent, her mind devoured by the promise of wonder lurking in the blazing hellfires beyond at our feet.

             
"They'll kill us," I said, trying to unlock her fingers from the book. She had not turned to me or acknowledged my presence. "They'll kill everything, Carla! Everything! I don't know what they want or why they want it, but we're nothing to them, we're less than the mote in God's eye."

             
"Yesyesyes," came the sibilant hiss in my head.

             
She was lost, gone from the land of humanity and the world of the known, swallowed into the gulf that widened even as I struggled to take the book away. I began to cry, to wail, understanding what we had done, realizing we faced the Unspeakable and were responsible for calling it forth. If the break between dimensions remained open, we would sustain total Pandemonium. Reason could not reason with it. Pleading could not find mercy. Rebuttal, prayer, and desperate measures would be as nothing against it.

             
I wrenched the book from her vise-like grasp and turned, running from the crack in the earth, fleeing from the mesmerizing light that would consume the only world I knew.

             
As I ran, stumbling over fallen logs and lurching through rabbit holes, I tore at the little bound book, flinging the bits of crumbling pages into the air. Every tear I made brought a crackling similar to electricity loose on the wind. Sparks flew from my fingertips and the pain of burning flesh made me howl. But on I ran, dining on pain the way a connoisseur of sadism dines on suffering. And the book bit by bit shredded beneath my vicious rending until it was little more than a twisted leather cover that I threw from me in disgust.

             
The roaring sound in my head grew silent, but now it was outside my head, coming through my ears. This made me hesitate, breath singing in and out of my lungs in great noisy whooshes. I turned to look back and saw the trees on fire, flames licking the sky from the tips of the tallest branches.

             
"Carla!" I screamed.

             
I knew she was gone, taken down into the pit or taken up as ash that floated in clouds toward the stars. She had made her decision, given her allegiance, sacrificed herself wholly to her gods.

             
I backed from the inferno, the smoke boiling across the field toward me like a sentient being. It moved the way the fog had done earlier, sinuously lapping at the ground with hungry tongues. I ran for the highway and my bike so that I could race away into the dead of night, praying all the while the crack had closed up solid, the earth was all of a piece, and the Ancient Ones were once again entombed in the core of the planet.

             
The bible of incantations that had opened a door to the pit was destroyed. Perhaps the Ancient Ones' passage was again blocked.

             
#

             
Some nights in my apartment next to the ruined church I think I hear bells ringing and I get up to look out my window to see. There is never anything there but shadows intermingling and mating on the wind. That those shadows remind me of grotesque figures doesn't indicate to me that some amount of the horror escaped through a slit in the fabric of reality. I'm sure they are only shadows of...nothing.

             
Some days in my classes I feel the hair at the nape of my neck tingle and I turn around, expecting to find Carla watching me with her huge staring eyes, and smiling at me, the smile of the mime.

             
Some year in the future I may go home again and search out the old fortune-teller--if she's still alive. I'll ask her if there are any more odd little books somewhere in the world that hold the secrets of life and death and the seeds of chaos. If she says yes, I'll have found my profession, my goal. I'll find every book and demolish it just as I did with the one Carla stole from the library stacks. No more do I yearn for the puny power to manipulate those who would thwart me. No longer do I think myself so grand and invulnerable to destruction. I've given up on my little selfish desires as being not worth a grain of sand in the scheme of the universe.

             
I have been instructed here at Miskatonic more than I thought possible. As the first step in the furthering of my real education, I've applied for a position with the Dean of Anthropology so that I might visit the stacks to search through the shelves. It's probable I'll be hired to take Carla's place.

             
My mission to save the world from the colossal roar of the abyss has only just begun. If I do not succeed--and if someone else finds the sacred books that are out there waiting--then I, along with you, along with every living being, is doomed. We won't even see it coming, there will be no way to prepare and no escape.

             
That is the most important lesson of all learned at Miskatonic University. We keep the Ancient Ones buried.

             
Or we die.

             
THE END

For more of Edgar- and Stoker-Nominated Billie Sue Mosiman's stories and novels visit her Kindle store here: 
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