Unholy Dimensions (20 page)

The map of the city claimed James’s attention now. For one thing, across the top margin of it was written, in highlighter marker, YOG-SOTHOTH. Drawing close to the map, he took note of the push pins. The location of them was obvious. One pin was situated in the place where Monumental Life loomed above the streets. Another, where the headquarters of Pantheon Banks was situated. Another represented CM Investments, then OO Software. James couldn’t interpret some of the placements of the pins, however. Another map was butted up to this one, some of the pins spread there along the coast, even out in the ocean. One pin was inside the borders of this city’s oldest graveyard, dating back to the eighteenth century. Again, all these sites were connected with highlighter marker, forming a rough series of concentric circles, James saw now, as if they represented the waves of destruction emanating from a nuclear bomb. At the center of the circles was the pin for Monumental Life.

James lifted his eyes to the marred bay windows.

He saw that towering edifice, its lights glittering against the darkening sky. And beyond Monumental Life, distant but still towering ominously, a silent titan, was the headquarters of Pantheon Banks. Across the river, he knew, was CM Investments. One of the pins was in the river, he had noted.

One of the...spheres, he realized. One of the fallen meteorites. Once glowing with unnamed colors, but turned black in the battle that had raged above this spot eons before humans had dwelt upon it.

YOG-SOTHOTH, the word at the top of the map proclaimed, accused, defined it. The map was a diagram of Yog-Sothoth. As much of Yog-Sothoth as Richard Penn had discovered the traces of. Yog-Sothoth...Gate, Key, Guardian all in one.

And this man, Ralph Nye, or whatever his true name was...he was buying the sites of these fallen globes. Making them places of power, or more power. Uniting them into a web of power.

Another newspaper clipping nearby. A photo of a sphere being raised from the earth beneath the foundation of a building demolished by dynamite. The story explained that the rock, thought to be a meteor, had been discovered after the building had been brought down to make room for a new company called OO Software. Yes, James thought, yes. Spheres exhumed beneath or in the vicinity of CM Investments, Pantheon Banks, Monumental Life Insurance. Enshrined in each lobby. Linked, united into a web...

James looked out the window once more. Pictured that great sphere resting in the lobby of his company, and beyond that, inside the Pantheon Banks lobby, guarded by bat-winged seraphim, another sphere. And beyond that, a sphere buried beneath the mud of the night-black river snaking through the city.

The conglomerate was growing. And growing more powerful. More and more sites being linked together. What would happen when Nye possessed all those spheres, buried in the sea, in the earth? Would his power be complete? And then what? Would he then own all of this city? Would he then own all this planet, and more?

James did not question his sanity at these conclusions. He no longer questioned the sanity of the man who had killed himself with his gun. The truth of it all resonated in his soul on a primal level. It resonated in his cells, as if touching upon the memories of the ancient cells from which they had evolved. Upon memories of a horror so great that it had imprinted itself on the minds of creatures not yet born.

It was a gateway. A gate. And Ralph Nye was clearing it as surely as if he were a patient, diligent archaeologist. He was uncovering the gate, and its key. He would open the portal, James knew. And there were prisoners beyond it. Outsiders,
The Metal Book
had called them. Yog-Sothoth was the guard at that gate, which was Himself.

Colin James backed slowly away from the bay windows, as if he thought faces lurked behind each of the glittering windows of Monumental Life, windows glittering like stars against the now black sky. The brutish faces, the yellow eyes of servitors...perhaps human, perhaps not. Eyes watching him, reading his thoughts.

Was Ralph Nye even now behind one of those windows? And staring across the city at these bay windows, with their mysterious protective talismans?

James left the living room lamp on. He did not want to retreat through the apartment in utter darkness.

It was a new dream. A dream of the future, perhaps, where the other dreams had been of the past. One of the quotes on Penn’s walls had read, after all, “Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.”

It was dawn, and there was a rumbling beneath the city. An earthquake, perhaps.

But it was a selective earthquake. Only one building fell, crumbling in upon itself with a monstrous roar. Monumental Life collapsed, an amorphous cloud of dark dust billowing into the air as if to take its place.

But now another structure was crumbling. Pantheon Banks. And the water of the river was churning, bubbling. From the rubble of the fallen giants, through the clouds of dust, rays of light shot into the air. Light of unknown iridescent colors, dust swirling in its beams.

The sources of these beams lifted into the air. One brightly glowing sphere rose and hovered above the city. Then another. Another. One rose from the hissing steam of the river. Others rose from a great distance, like bright stars, perhaps from the sea.

They were now moving toward each other. Began to link with one-another. They were
forming an undulating, blinding ribbon of light in the sky. And one man, a dark silhouette, stood on the roof of an intact building with his arms spread to this terrible spectacle, this unholy miracle. He was crying, “Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!”

And in the dream, James was crying out, also. But his cries were of
terror, and pain, and damnation. And moments later, as the glow of the ribbon blinded him to the city completely...as if it had been burned out of existence...the air became filled with the screams of every occupant of the city. Every damned soul. Not sent down to hell, but hell raised up around them.

Colin James awoke with his scream still ragged in his throat.

And so he waited. Each day, he manned his desk. He asked for, and was granted, extra hours. He took over a Saturday for a grateful younger guard.

But he hadn’t seen Ralph Nye yet. Not yet. But Nye owned this company. When he returned from his latest exploits, as eventually he must, James would be waiting.

He watched that silent ball for hours sometimes, its pebbled surface gazing dully back at him like the gigantic compound eye of some monstrous insect. The protective talisman was gone...but in his car, James had a can of paint.

The flayed octopus thing rippled above him, like the ghost of some creature hovering threateningly over his head. He smirked up at it. Go back to sleep, he mocked it.

He watched the rotating door for Ralph Nye. In his holster was the gun with which Richard Penn had ended his life. If Ralph Nye was mortal, his life would end too. And if not, perhaps just this incarnation, this mask, would end. Perhaps they couldn’t be killed. But at least they could be prevented from coming back alive.

Yog-Sothoth, he thought. Gate, and Key, and Guardian of the Gate, all in one.

No, thought Colin James.
I
am the Guardian.

Book Worm

Pym's
grandfather had disappeared nearly sixty years ago, during the fabled twenties of Al Capone and Prohibition and Tommy guns, of which Pym had read quite a bit, lover of books that he was.

Books were vastly more transporting than any movie could hope to be. Pym almost resented movies. While better than most, when you watched
Tess
, you were aware of camera set-ups and directorial techniques and familiar actors; when you read
Tess
, she breathed and you ached to save her from her Fate. A monster wasn't rubber on an articulated steel skeleton with pulsing air bladders to mimic life -- it was alive, and it was something to be afraid of. The reading experience was transcendent to all other human experience; it was an out of body freedom of flight. But like some ancient supernatural ability lost to distant races, it was a fading talent, a forsaken skill, as television and Nintendo, rock and drugs loomed up almost as a unified force to eclipse the past.

Largely out of disgusted rebellion, Pym sought to plunge fully into that to which so many others were becoming increasingly blind. The past held a particularly powerful attraction for him, and books were the hatches to be crow-barred open, the coffin lids to be pried off for revelation. Books were the tombs of Pharaohs, the strata rich with dinosaur bones, the portals to
the universe beyond. And so it was natural for Pym to become intrigued with his grandfather's colorful life and strange disappearance, and to become wholly obsessed when his aunt first told him of his grandfather's mysterious book...

From what his aunt and others had revealed to him through the years, Pym had pieced together a shady history of his grandfather Arnold Stowe. Even prior to his knowledge of the book, which his aunt had never dared refer to before, Pym had sought out all the information he could on the man who had died thirty years before his birth, even securing some cracked and blurry photographs of the young and handsome Arnie Stowe, dapper and smiling for the camera, arm slung around the shoulders of his pretty young wife, Pym’s grandmother, whose death at eighty-one was what led to his aunt's disclosure of the existence of the weird metal book.

That Pym's grandfather had been a gangster in the true sense was doubtful, but it was doubtless that he had had his underworld connections, dealings and inclinations. Thinking of his withered and dying grandmother, Pym had difficulty imagining her, even with the photographs, as the sexy young woman her husband had repeatedly attempted to involve in a blackmail scheme, suggesting to her that if he secretly photographed married men with her they could quickly draw in thousands -- assuring her, considerate man that he was, that she needn't strip down beyond her underclothes. She resisted. On several occasions Arnie Stowe's wife found inordinate amounts of wrist watches in a dresser drawer. After a time he took to carrying a revolver, and he slept with it under his pillow. He had recently done someone a favor by taking in and hiding away a package, and perhaps this was the source of his growing anxiety. He angrily resisted all inquiries made by his wife. When he suddenly vanished without a clue and remained that way, it was naturally assumed by all that his underworld dealings had caught up with him. His pretty young widow remarried, and Pym's pleasant but rather less colorful second maternal grandfather had died under rather less mysterious circumstances four years ago.

It was during the family gathering at his aunt's house, following the funeral of his grandmother, that Pym learned of the metal book.

They had been discussing Arnie Stowe, Pym and his aunt and his cousins Judy and Tom, appropriately philosophical on this day, wondering where Arnie Stowe's remains had finally come to rest. Tom suggested that Arnie Stowe hadn't in fact been murdered and weighed to a lake bottom somewhere, but had run off to start a new life under a new name, abandoning his wife. Tom's mother, Pym's aunt, told them why she felt this wasn't so.

Months after her husband's disappearance, Pym's grandmother started finding money hidden in books throughout their large but much-worn Victorian house in the suburbs. The last amount she chanced upon was two-hundred dolla
rs in a volume on the Civil War...this being in 1961. Arnie would surely not have left what amounted to thousands of dollars behind.

Naturally Pym's grandmother embarked on an Easter egg hunt throughout her husband's abundant library, but his books were everywhere, in boxes and closets, in attic and basement, for he was a lover of books despite his cruder inclinations, and for this Pym felt a kinship with him though there was no actual physical linkage. The Civil War book, as stated, escaped her search. But during her initial search a singularly strange volume was found.

It was on the floor in the basement when she found it, beside a cardboard box full of junk which had up to now obscured it. On a table above, along with stacks of books, was an open cardboard box which was empty, once bound with string. The box was unlabeled. The book which Pym's grandmother lifted from the floor where it seemed to have dropped was heavy. The front and back covers of it were made from slabs of a tarnished metal, the edges of the paper were gilded and a thick metal catch system locked the book closed, requiring a key, which wasn't present and was never found. The spine of the book was very curious, being sort of a spring-loaded mechanism hinged to the front and back covers. There were some characters, maybe Arabic, inscribed into the book's front cover but no English translation. Pym’s grandmother had never seen this book before or been aware that her husband possessed it.

At that time she put the book away in the event that her husband might return, and in later years her second husband made a few half-hearted attempts to force the lock mechanism without success, but resisted breaking the lock in case the book was ever found to be of historic value. He meant to bring the book around to dealers or museums but never got around to it, and the book was largely forgotten in its box on the top shelf of a closet in the old house where they went on to live the remainder of their lives.

What caused Pym's aunt to bring up the book was her rediscovery of it upon organizing her mother's belongings for a yard sale or distribution to the surviving relatives. Her mother had shown her the book once as a young teen-ager, but she hadn't seen it again until now by accident, and the rediscovery made her nervous to such an extent that she had been reluctant to discuss the book before this. Pym, increasingly fascinated, pressed her for details.