Unholy Dimensions (12 page)

But there was no mistaking the rustling, hissing sound of some great mass squeezing its bulk through the narrow corridor, just around that bend. Coming this way...

“In here!” Juliana said, falling against a door. She, too, knew that they were in the path of something terrible, that they might not be able to outrun it. She opened the door to a botany lab, and Pal crowded in after her. They shut the door as quietly as their nerves would allow, and sealed it closed with a keypad. But a long, large window in the lab faced directly out into the corridor, and the two of them ducked down below it so as to be out of sight to whatever might come.

In the half-dark, they squatted low to the ground, their panting and throbbing blood nearly deafening them to the whispery sliding sound of approach. Whatever it was, it came slowly, but it came. Pal looked at Jule, saw her watching his face with dark eyes bulging wide. They didn’t dare speak. Then, a faint shuffling sound became audible to them. But to Pal, it had more the sound of a bipedal creature – a man – dragging its feet than of the great bulk he vaguely envisioned. Gingerly, he turned to the window and poked his head up slightly. Juliana did the same.

Indeed, it was a human figure they saw shuffling down the hallway. A man, staggering along as if he’d been wounded, or walked in his sleep. At first Pal thought it might be the soldier, having lost his helmet, but this man wore a white smock...and as he came further into the pallid light, Pal recognized him a split second after Juliana did.

“Peter!” she gasped, springing to her feet. She darted to the door.

“Wait,” Pal hissed, taking hold of her shoulders from behind, grabbing fistfuls of her own smock to restrain her. She tore out of it altogether, reached her hand to the keypad. “Look, look!” he insisted, still clutching at her.

She shot a look out the window, and stopped fighting him. Peter saw them through the window, bluish light glowing on his face. And bluish light glistened on a long boneless limb like a cable, which trailed from the back of his head, across the floor, and out of their sight. This slender limb was striped in alternating bands of black and silver. Though they couldn’t see where it ended, it was apparent that its tip was buried in the scientist’s nape.

“Peter!” Juliana screamed.

And Peter responded to her call, his eyes on them through the glass but as empty as those of a
manikin. He moved out of view, but they heard the chirp of the code he was entering on the keypad. He was trying to unlock the door.

“This way,” Pal said, and taking her hand, drew Juliana toward the back of the botany lab. With a reluctant sob, she followed. They passed between great burbling tanks in which aquatic
plants swayed dreamily. The outpost addressed many areas of research, from the botanical to the biological to the geological, in addition to its experiments with crossing dimensions. Its focus had been more on R’lyeh itself, since Pal’s disappearance and the reluctance to send another subject beyond the veil. Through an open doorway, they burst into a large nursery area. In long elevated trays, dune grasses like glassy rods sparkled with the bluish glow of the emergency lights. A white, spherical species of fungus grew in other trays, the largest specimen being too fat for a person to get their arms around. These looked like the tops of huge skulls, rising from the fetid soil of their graves.

Behind them they heard the crash and clatter of a tray of tools, knocked to the floor. Peter had got in. And they heard his voice moan sepulchrally, “Juliana...”

Pal and Jule had reached another door at the back of the nursery, one they knew would take them out into the labyrinth of corridors again. But Juliana threw a look back toward the botany lab and pleaded, “Pal...please...we can’t leave him that way.” She looked at Pal directly, her eyes so tragic in their anguish that their touch agonized him. “We can’t leave him like that, Pal.”

He understood. But he dreaded her words. Would she subconsciously hate him hereafter, for doing her this mercy? He felt guilt that he should be worrying about his own considerations when she was in such pain, when this other poor man was as good as dead. If not dead already. He broke his eyes from her, glanced around desperately for something to use.

“Juliana,” they heard his nearing voice. “Julianeh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah...”

They saw him walking toward them through the rows of glowing grass. And beyond him, they heard a large aquarium tank burst, its water gush out across the floor, as the thing that used Peter oozed its great body into the botany lab.

Pal spotted a hoe, thought of snapping it in half and driving its end into the marionette’s throat...but his eyes fell on a knife on a sink counter. He snatched it up, surged forward. He didn’t know if Jule watched him or not, but he prayed that she closed her eyes as he rushed to murder the husband of the woman he loved.

Peter saw him coming. He lifted his arms as if to embrace him.

Pal cocked his arm back for a strike. He would bury the blade in the scientist’s forehead.

But as Pal was within reach of Peter, his stomach lurched, and he found himself unable to deal the killing blow. Peter’s outstretched fingers touched his sleeve. He batted the man’s hands aside, stepped behind him, and plunged the knife into the tentacle that was buried at the base of his skull.

The limb withdrew like an angry snake, whipping in the air, the knife still in it. And with the tentacle no longer inserted into his brain, Peter dropped bonelessly. He didn’t give so much as a twitch, and his eyes had rolled up white in his head. Pal crouched by him, felt at his neck. He only remained a moment, fearful of the limb thrashing in the air, but he didn’t detect a pulse. As the tentacle arched itself like a cobra to strike, he bolted.

Jule already had the door open, and they piled through it. He was sure she expected, as he did, to find another creature in the hall waiting for them – or at the very least, to be confronted by another marionette. But the hall was deserted in either direction. One direction would take them toward the many small apartments of the crew. The other would head them toward the transdimensional project. With no conscious reason why, Pal led Juliana in that direction.

-5-

At this moment, Pal Sexton assumed that Special Investigator John Bell – who had accompanied Peter Locklin to destroy the last of the creatures that had stowed away inside his body like soldiers in the Trojan horse – had also been possessed, or killed.

Bell was surprised he hadn’t been.

He hadn’t seen what happened. He had been in an adjoining portion of the lab reading some data off a monitor as Locklin went about the preparations to destroy the specimens. Bell wondered, now, if Locklin had tried to do something to move or hide some of the organisms, which had released them to the air. But he believed, instead, that somehow they had known that they were the last, that they could no longer bide their time, and must act now before it was too late for them...

There had been a crash, Locklin had cried out and come running in from the other room. Behind him, Bell had seen something fall from a counter to the floor like a large jellyfish, with an appropriate splat of wet flesh. Then another. Another. A few other creatures had seemed more like eels or perhaps centipedes with rippling bands of silvery cilia, and one slithered into the room after the scientist. Even as it came it seemed to grow larger, its half-liquid flesh rapidly shedding and being reabsorbed and then sloughing away to be assimilated again, over and over...as if it fed on its own substance.

Bell ripped his gun from its holster, fired at the eel-like creature as he let Locklin get past him and open the door. He splattered much of the gelatinous centipede’s assumed head, but now beyond it the other animals grew even larger, and he saw nests of writhing tendrils striped silver and black. He turned to flee after Locklin, whom he saw waiting for him at the threshold, staring back at the nightmarish display in horrified enthrallment.

As Bell pushed Locklin out the door, a tendril flashed past Bell’s face, nearly grazing his cheek like a bullet, and speared into the back of Locklin’s neck. He was yanked backwards.

Bell whipped about, fired his handgun past Locklin’s grotesquely dancing body, which spasmed like a man at the end of a gallows rope. He hit the animal that held him again and again, but this one was too large and his projectiles appeared to have little effect. With the greatest reluctance, but driven by blind terror, Bell left the poor scientist in the creature’s grip, and fled out into the hall.

And now, he stole his way through more hallways, peering around corners like a mouse dreading the stride of men. But finally he had found his way blocked by a door made of rubbery flesh. This flesh crawled slowly from left to right. He realized it was the flank of some great creature, grown so huge in the transverse corridor that its bulk was squeezed flush with the open threshold as it slowly oozed along.

Worse than the look of that grayish, half-substantial flesh was the sound he heard coming through the walls around him, and even over the open intercom. He wondered if the two distinct – voices – represented the two different creatures he had glimpsed. One sound was like the bellowing of a mammoth, blended with a synthesizer, run backwards and underwater. It was awesome in its depth and in conveying what Bell interpreted as loneliness on a cosmic scope. It was terrifyingly forlorn. Bell had never considered that before today. That the Old Ones, the Outsiders, might suffer in that way.

He took that to be the voice of the bulky, apparently tentacle-headed spawn. The other voice was angry rather than morose, like the hysterical whinnying of a horse...but with almost subliminal whisperings laced under it, along with a fluctuating ringing tone that reminded Bell of someone playing glasses of water with their fingertips. This he imagined was the sound of the elongated beasts.

He backtracked, entered a lab, started violently when he found a dead man slouched by the door with his arm wrenched off. The blood made a wide swatch down the wall where he had slumped. Bell took in his surroundings, unfastened an air vent and determined he could fit within the narrow shaft beyond. Before he entered, however, he dabbed a towel in the stump of the dead man’s shoulder and began drawing a figure on the door to seal off his retreat.

The figure he painted portrayed a star with an eye in the center, the pupil of which resembled a wavering column of flame.

It was the sign of the Elder Gods, the mysterious race who had sealed up the Outsiders in their various tombs, cells and places of exile. They were not angels to the devils of the Outsiders, might be seen merely as rivals. Bell had never communicated with them, did not pretend to comprehend their whims, could barely comprehend their existence -- if in fact they did exist. But this had not stopped him, any more than it had many a human before him, from appealing to the gods for their intervention.

All he knew was that the sign could be potent, and he felt better with it behind him as he entered into the circulation system and began crawling in what he hoped was the direction of the dimensional research area.

Bell didn’t know what he could accomplish there. He didn’t know if he could even hope to remain alive much longer. But his instincts told him that the place to be was the hangar where the transdimensional pod was suspended like a bathysphere waiting to be lowered into black depths. It was a threat, somehow. A weak spot. A bulging door with creaking hinges...

The Spawn were here. But their master was not. The Spawn had not come to strangle and wrench apart each trifling human being one by one. They were here to open the way for their father.

So Bell crawled. Like an insect, rushing to intercept the tramp of a legion of armored soldiers.

-6-

Pal and Juliana emerged into a closed observation deck that looked down into the hangar where the pod hung suspended from its two intersecting arches. With only the emergency lights on in the great open space below, the view that lay before them was murky. It looked like a black ocean, with glistening waves that rose and fell. But the waves, they realized, were of flesh – and then they were glad that their view was limited. They tried to keep down out of the way after that. But Pal did peek long enough to make out a few white lab coats. There seemed to be some figures calmly at work down there, amid the shifting flesh, and the terrible cacophony of sound.

“Look, Pal!” Juliana whispered, pointing to a bank of monitors. Figures scrolled down the screens.

“They’ve taken some of the crew, like they did Peter,” Pal whispered grimly, hunkering down beside her again. “They’re using them to program the pod.” He shifted closer to a control board. “I’ll see if I can override them.” He tapped a few keys gingerly, then moved across to another control board. He chewed his upper lip. This end of things was not his area of expertise; he was the one sent, not the sender.

Juliana poked her head up enough to gaze down into the yawning blackness again. She flinched as a dark train of flesh poured across the outside of their enclosed balcony and then was gone in a blur of cilia-like legs.

“Here,” Pal whispered, and tapped a few last decisive keys.

Below, Juliana swore she saw the lab-coated figures all look up at the window simultaneously. She dropped below its edge and hissed, “Pal! Oh God – whatever you did, they know it was done in here!”

“We have to go,” he said, and rushed to her side.

Before the two of them could reach the door, it opened.