Unholy Dimensions (28 page)

Slowly, his body aching, he began paddling toward it. But he was smiling. He was happy to be alive.

“Thank you, Gods,” he mumbled to himself, again and again, like a man who has had his faith restored. “Thank you, Gods...”

And he would be looking forward to that dry land, however desolate it was, however scorching the desert. He looked forward to the long, arduous trek ahead of him.

For he was going to Nineveh.

Ascending To Hell

In
the weed-encroached house his dead uncle willed him

Dan Virgil noted an odd thing in a closet

Behind musty coats, a small door plastered up

He uncovered the door, a chill gust did erupt

And beyond was a stairwell, narrow and dim.

There were no switches so he brought up a flashlight

The warped wooden steps creaked at his tread

Another way into the attic, thought he

But the stairs did not end at that level three

Continued on up past a point that seemed right.

On and on he mounted, as if climbing a skyscraper

His heart beat madly from the strain and the fear

His mind reeling madly at what was amiss

Ascending into an inverted abyss

His pale beam a ghost across rotting wallpaper.

At last he reached a landing, densely shrouded in web

He pushed timidly through into a place strangely lit

A cliff edge plummeted in front of his shoe

Far below there was nothing but a fog blocking view

And high above him a sea of living flow and live ebb.

It was a forest of kelp, black and impossibly long

Swaying and flowing as if stirred by deep currents

Like tentacles hanging down from a jellyfish bell

And the wind wailing through this vision of hell

Was as eerie and maddening as a banshee troupe's song.

And snared in the tendrils of this black sky of limbs

Were clipper ships and whalers, cradled like toys

Old airplanes entwined as if caught in a pass

Were those figures moving behind the cracked glass?

The wind through torn hulls sang dead sailors' hymns.

Dan had lost track of the time, and also of space

But now spun and darted back through the door

Back down the many stairs he did flee

His sanity scorched by what he did see

When the kelp parted to reveal its vast staring face.

The Third Eye

My
father was a policeman in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts for twelve years, but he never spoke openly of his work. Not, in any case, in my presence. But on rare occasion I overheard him confiding to my mother in a low voice, late at night when I was out of my bed to creep to the bathroom. Sometimes I would steal nearer to their door, to listen more closely. Even then, I heard only snatches, but these fragments of stories were all the more frightening to me for floating free of any kind of context that might help me comprehend and accept them. Father would allude to, "those books stolen from the college," or refer to, "the fires in the woods." There was something about a "baboon, or dog maybe, but walking on two legs" that someone had seen somewhere, and could that have been connected to the hunter or fisherman, apparently, who had been found with, "his face all scooped out"?

Mother died when I was eleven, and within a year my father was no longer a policeman. He suffered a breakdown upon her death, and took to drinking, and when I lay in bed at night I listened to new mysteries, but these recited loudly, and to no one, in a drunken rant. It seemed my father blamed someone or some group for mother's death, though she had died of cancer. He would rumble about, "their rays", and claim that this mysterious enemy had, "set their eyes on her." But was he really blaming
himself? For other times he would sob, "It's my fault...it was me they wanted...they want to punish me..." Neither source of guilt seemed likely to me. I was afraid of my father by then, though he was not cruel to me, and never ventured from my bed to comfort him. But then, he was too lost in his own pain to tend to mine. We both suffered; he loudly, me in silence.

Which isn't to say that he was not entirely without concern for me. One evening he drew me into his little study or office, into which he had never allowed me before. In fact, he had kept it locked at all times when he wasn't inside it himself. Mother had told me it was because of his gun collection, but I saw only one gun in there that night: a heavy revolver, resting by father's elbow on his desk blotter. I tried to take in the forbidden room as best I could without openly gawking, but father pulled me close to his chair. Around my neck he looped a rawhide cord, on which was strung a small stone disk. This crude amulet was etched with a design like a star with an eye in its center, though the pupil of the eye looked like a flame.

"Don't take that off, son. Never, ever," he told me grimly, his own eyes with a flame of madness, either dulled or compounded by tears and drink. "If your mother had only been wearing it...if I had only given it to her." He rose from his chair then, walked me from his private place to lead me to bed, but I remember stealing one good look over my shoulder on the way out. Though the room was murky, I saw a pile of very old books on the desk blotter, near the pistol, their spines peeling and page ends gilded. There were shelves on the walls, and the shadowy objects I spied upon them were like those tantalizing, terrifying fragments of stories: images floating like scraps of nightmare, beads unstrung or dinosaur bones in need of assembling to give them meaning. What to make of the glass jars in which pickled organs pushed gray against the glass, and the ratty-looking stuffed creature, moth-eaten and with glass eyes, which might have been a young ape but might also have been a hyena or wild dog, positioned by some taxidermist so that it reared on it hind legs?

As father's drinking worsened, he began to forget to close the door when he went into his study. One evening I peeked in to find him slumped across his desk passed out, by his elbow the solemn still life of whiskey bottle and Smith and Wesson. Though I dared not actually enter the room, I lingered to take in more of the details I hadn't been able to discern before in the gloom. Was it the taxidermist who had so marked the snarli
ng, hideous face of that monkey-thing? I couldn't imagine that in life, the animal's face had been covered in swirling tattoos like those of a Maori tribesman. Also, I noticed that some of the pickled specimens were not organs, but fetuses, though I couldn't imagine them to be human...unless monstrously deformed. One had a huge bulbous head and great black eyes as empty as those of a shark, but its lower face deteriorated into a nest of translucent strands or tendrils that floated motionlessly in its womb of formaldehyde.

A book was open before father, and I craned my neck to look at the odd geometric diagrams worked in with the type. In so doing, I saw an odd object on the other side of him, previously blocked by his head. It was a human skull, or a sculpture of one. I thought it must be the latter because of certain strange characteristics. There was a hole in the side of the skull, of such size and smooth outline that I might have believed it was a third eye socket. It might have been bored in an actual skull, however, I considered. But the color? Was it paint, or stone, that accounted f
or the black color and obsidian-like glassy polish?

As I leaned forward a bit further, the extra pressure caused the floorboards to creak, as if to sound an alert. And drunk as he was, my father bolted upright in his chair, his left hand clawing for his gun and in so doing, knocking over the bottle of whiskey. The gun whirled in my direction.

When father saw that it was his son he pointed the revolver at, the madness in his eyes lessened. I had clung to the door frame, too frightened to flee. He lowered the pistol to his leg, and gestured to me.

"Come in, son. I'm reading the books we took from them. The one's in English, at least. We have to fight fire with fire, right? Come read with me. We can use it against them. We can make ourselves safe. Come read with me, son..."

But I didn't enter the room. Slowly, I backed away. I turned down the hall, retreated to my own room. And I locked the door. And shortly afterwards, my father gave up on trying to call me back.

My father didn't emerge from his office, its door again shut, for several days, unless he did so while I was at school. But at last, one night as I sat at the kitchen table, eating cereal for my dinner, he appeared. He went straight to the refrigerator, gulped milk from the carton, then turned to face me. Milk dripped from his unshaven chin. His hair was in disarray. And from the right side of his head bulged a lump the size of a hen's egg.

He saw me staring, and rubbed at the growth self-consciously. "It's from the reading, I think. Some of them in the woods and the cellars had tumors like this. It's like...I think it's like a new part of my brain is growing, filling up with the stuff I'm reading, because it doesn't belong anywhere else in there." He fluttered a spasm of a smile. " But with the book, and the skull, and the other things I took from them, I'm just as strong as they are. They can call their gods, and I can call the others..."

"Don't read any more, daddy," I remember pleading to him in a small dry voice. I hadn't uttered a word to him in weeks.

"It's for your mother," he told me.

My father took the milk back to the study with him. And I didn't see him for another few days after that...not until the night I heard the gunshot.

When I reached the door to his study, I found it unlocked. I had sped to the door in slapping bare feet, but now found myself hesitating, my hand on the knob. At last, I pushed the door open a few inches to peek in. And there sat my father at his desk, slumped across the blotter like that earlier night. The book was there, and the bottle, and the glossy black skull. But this time the pistol was in his fist. This time, a puddle of blood -vivid under the close glow of his desk lamp - spread around his fallen head like some living thing reaching liquid pseudopods toward that book and that skull.

"Daddy," I moaned, and went to his side. I touched his back. Once I had ridden on it, piggy
-back. Once his back had been the strongest, broadest wall in the world. Now it was bent, and still.

But it was suddenly not still, abruptly not bent, as father sat up sharply in his seat. He seized me by my wrist, held me, regarded me as I screamed. I could see, now, the gore that had run down his face, making it a wet red mask in which his blue eyes were horribly contrasted. I could see, now, that he had fired the gun point
-blank into the growth on the side of his head. Now, in place of it, there was a yawning wound from which blood ran copiously, down his neck and chest. The wound was too large for a bullet's outline; it was as though the growth had burst, and left its outline.

"I should have listened to you, son," he croaked, his voice a gurgle of aspirated blood. "I had to get that stuff out of my head. I was becoming one of them. I had to get it out..."

He let go of me and rose to his feet. Weeping, I backed into the wall. I knew I should run and call the hospital. I also knew that my father should not even be alive. I could see deeply inside his draining skull.

He staggered a few steps, gripped the edge of a bureau. The jars atop it rattled, tendrils stirred in yellowish fluid. "My God," father whispered, and looked at me. "I can see...things. Someplace...some other place..."

I sank to the floor, hugging my knees, still sobbing. My father tried to take another step, couldn't, slid down to sit on the floor, also, still staring agape into space. Blood was a soft continual pattering like rain on the floor and his legs.

"The air is all rippled, like it's hot. Or maybe it's under water. Those plants...it isn't the wind makes them move...so huge...and no
-- they aren't really plants..."

The bullet hadn't destroyed all those new tissues. No: somehow, even, its presence had given them more power. Perhaps it was the metal itself of the bullet, stimulating that tissue, interacting with the electrical charge in its cells. Or perhaps, in ruining so much of father's normal tissues, the bullet had given the new matter that remained the upper hand.

"The towers hurt my eyes...the lines," he went on. "There are things moving past the windows. White...pulpy. Starfish. And now they're looking out at me. More of them...noticing me. They can see me...see me watching them...dear God...looking at me...even now..."

We sat together thus for an indefinite time; it was hours, I know that. The blood began to congeal, turn to a black mask on father's face, cracking and flaking away around his mouth, the only part of him that moved (even his transfixed eyes did not blink), and crusted thick around his wound, which
was now only weeping. He spoke incessantly of what he saw, I have no doubt, though after a while his words had become a gibberish that might be another language, or a muddle born of his ruined brain. There were only fragments of English, fragments of images. He made reference to, "the purple ooze, across the land...like a sea", and in a similar tone of terrible awe made mention of, "the great crater...big as a city..."