New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 21

She went to it and put her hand on the k.n.o.b.

Jorny whispered, "Be careful . . . you could end up locking it. "

She nodded and turned the k.n.o.b while pulling hard on the door-and it swung open.

Inside, it was an ordinary closet, containing a new vacuum cleaner with the price tag still on it, and bottles of cleaning fluid, all of them full, and a push broom . . . and another smaller door, in the wall of the closet to the right. She bent over and turned the little chrome handle it had in place of a k.n.o.b-and it opened onto the stairway. "Cool! Come on!"

Hunching down to fit, they went through-and found themselves in the main stairway. It was dimly lit, echoing with their every movement, a smell of rot overlaying the smell of new concrete and paint.

"Smells like road kill," Jorny said. He turned to look at the door they'd come through-which shut behind them into the wall, hardly showing a seam. "Weird that they put that door there."

"It's for them, to use-in case of emergency," Deede said. "And don't ask who they are-I don't know."

"Deede-there's something moving down there . . . and it doesn't seem like people."

She leaned over the balcony and looked. Something slipped across the s.p.a.ce between flights about four stories down-a transparent dull-red flipper . . . feeler . . . tentacle? She couldn't get a clear visual picture of it from where she stood. But it was big-maybe three feet across and very long. Slipping by, like a giant boa constrictor. She could just make out that it was connected to something bigger, something that stretched down the open s.p.a.ce between the descending flights of stairs.

And as it moved she heard the familiar moaning. That sobbing despair.

She stepped back and said, "Jorny-punch me in the shoulder."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm not dreaming. But only pretty sure. So go ahead and-ow!"

"You said to! Okay-do me now. Right there. Stick out your knuckle so it-s.h.i.+t!"

"So what do you think?" he asked, rubbing his shoulder, wincing. "d.a.m.n you hit hard for a girl."

"That's s.e.xist. And I think we're awake. We have to decide."

He surprised her by suddenly sitting down on the steps, and taking a cigarette out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "I've been trying not to smoke. Promised my mom I'd give it up." He took a wooden match out with the cigarette and flicked it alight on his skateboard-Deede thought it was an admirably cool thing to do. He lit the cigarette, and puffed. "But right now I don't care what my mom thinks about cigarettes."

"So what're we gonna do?" She was thinking of going back to the apartment again and seeing if Lenny had come home. She'd made excuses for him but under the circ.u.mstances she thought he'd have left her a note or something if he'd left . . . voluntarily.

Don't think about Lenny, too, she thought, sitting on a step a little below Jorny. One person at a time. Get Jean. She's younger. He's older and he can take care of himself.

Jorny was blowing smoke rings, and poking at them with his finger-he was absentmindedly running his skateboard back and forth on its wheels with one foot. "One time two or three years ago," he said, his voice a dreamy monotone, "when my dad was still living with us, I was worried about where he was all day. See, he was a photographer, and he worked at home. So he was usually there. But one summer he just started being gone all day and there was a lot of . . . I dunno, him and my mom were arguing all the time about little things. About bulls.h.i.+t. Like there was something else . . . but they weren't saying. I was feeling like he was doing something-and it was gonna make them break up. So anyway I followed him. I didn't even think about why. I borrowed my sister's car-she's moved out now-and I followed him. He didn't notice I was following. He was really into where he was going, man. He went to a motel. I should've left it there but I saw which room he went to and after awhile I went up and they had the windows curtained but there was a place where if you bent over and looked, at the corner, you could see in."

"Oh Christ, Jorny."

"Yeah. He was doin' it with some woman I never saw before. They had champagne and stuff. Later on he left my mom for her."

"That must've been . . . " She couldn't keep from making a face.

"It was. I wished I hadn't gone, wished I hadn't looked. It's different, really seeing it. Worse. He was still married to my mom, and . . . Anyway, since then, I figure there's things I don't want to find out about. And if we go looking down there, we'll see things we don't want to know about." He flicked his cigarette away half smoked. "I'm not scared. Not that much. I just . . . don't want to see anything else that I don't want to know about . . . especially since my mom might be in any one of a million places."

"But . . . " Deede heard the moaning again from below. She just wanted to go back to the apartment, and wait there with the doors locked. But that hadn't helped Lenny.

"You okay?" Jorny asked, looking at her closely.

"I'm just worried about my brother. And Jean. I'd like to go back to the apartment but . . . " She sighed. "No one did anything about my mom being killed. No one . . . no one pursued it." Deede felt her hands fisting-and she couldn't prevent it. "They said it was suicide or an accident. But there was a man who scares people-he was following some girls in the neighborhood, and there's rumors about him-and he was there that day, he was seen on the same trails, and then there was the dream. The dream seemed almost as real as . . . as today is."

"What dream?"

"It was one of those dreams you get over and over-but the first time I got it was the morning my mom was killed. She was out jogging early and I was still asleep. Our house was out on the edge of town, by this sorta woodsy area with an old quarry. And in my dream I saw her jogging along the edge of the old quarry, where there's this little pond, jogging like she always does on the trails there, and I saw Gunnar Johansen watching her and he looks like he's been up all night, he's sort of swaying there, and then he starts following her and then starts running and she turns and sees him and stumbles and falls on the trail and then he throws himself on her and she struggles and hits him, and he laughs and he knocks her out and then he . . . plays with her body kind of, with one hand on her throat, squeezing and the other hand in his pants, and then she kicks him in the groin and he gives a yell and picks her up and throws her down in the quarry, and she falls face down and she hits hard in that shallow water down there. And . . . bubbles come up . . . And that's exactly how they found her."

"They found her like that, in that exact place? And you hadn't heard about it yet?"

Deede nodded. "I tried to tell them but they said dreams don't count in court. I had that dream again, I had it a lot. I was afraid to go to sleep for a long time."

She put her face in her hands and he came and sat close beside her, not touching her, just being there with her. She appreciated that-the sensitivity of it. Him not trying to put his arm around her. But coming to be right there with her.

A few seconds more, and then a moan and a long, drawn-out sc.r.a.ping sound came from below. Deede decided she had to make up her mind. "I have to go down there. No one found out about my mom. I'm going to find out about Jean. You can go back."

He cleared his throat. Then muttered, "f.u.c.k it." Nodded to himself. He stood up and offered his hand to help her up. "Okay. Come on."

They descended. Jorny carried his skateboard for two turns, and then decided to do a jump, as if some kind of oblique statement of defiance of whatever waited below, and he jumped a whole flight-and the skateboard splintered under him when he came down, snapped in half, and he ended up sliding on his a.s.s. "s.h.i.+t G.o.dd.a.m.nit!"

She helped him up this time. "Sorry about your skateboard. You going to save the trucks?"

"I don't know. I guess." Disgustedly carrying half a skateboard in each hand, he led the way downward-and they stopped another floor lower, to peer over the concrete rail.

Something slipped sc.r.a.ppily by thirty-five feet below, something rubbery and transparently pinkish-red. It made her think of the really big pieces of kelp you saw at the sh.o.r.e, thickly transparent like that, but redder, bigger-and this one had someone swallowed up in it: one of the kids, a young boy she'd seen in the lounge. The boy was trapped inside the supple tree-trunk-thick flexible tube, trapped alive, squeezed but living, slightly moving, eyes darting this way and that, hands pressed by the constriction against his chest . . . and moaning, making the despairing moan they'd been hearing, somehow louder than it should be, as if the thing that held him was triumphantly amplifying his moan.

"You see that?" Jorny whispered.

She nodded. "One of those kids who was with Jean . . . in a . . . I don't know what it is." And then it moaned again, so loudly the cry echoed up the shaft of the stairway.

It's calling to us, she thought. It's luring us. Saying "Come and save him, come and save them all. Come down and see . . . "

The slithering thing, connected to something below, itself descended-or, more rightly, was pulled down-ahead of her and Jorny, themselves going down and down, the light diminis.h.i.+ng ever so subtly toward the lower floors. The transparent red tubule drew itself down, like an eel drawing itself into a hole, pulling the boy-and others, too, squirming trapped human figures glimpsed for a moment enveloped in other thick tendrils, moaning, down and down. Did she see Jean, caught down there? Deede wasn't sure. But she felt that sick flu-chills feeling again and she wanted to turn and run up the stairs and- "I saw my mom down there," Jorny said, his voice cracking. Inside that thing. "Now I've really got to go."

Deede wanted to run. Don't let them scare you into not going. She almost thought she heard her mom's voice saying it. Almost. He needs someone to go with him. And Jean . . . don't forget Jean.

"Okay," Deede made herself say. She started down, following the slithering descender, following the moans and the moaners, following the trapped squirmers.

Down and down till they got to the dimly lit bottom floor. And to the bas.e.m.e.nt door.

Deede had expected to find the squirming thing at the bottom but it wasn't there, though there was a thin coating of slushy red material on the floor-like something you'd squeeze from kelp but the color of diluted blood-surrounding the closed bas.e.m.e.nt door. The thing had gone through the door-and closed it behind.

She half hoped the door was locked. Jorny tried it-and it opened. He stood in the doorway, outlined in green light. She looked over his shoulder.

About forty feet by thirty, the bas.e.m.e.nt room contained elevator machinery-humming hump-shaped units to the right-and cryptic pipes along the ceiling. But what drew their eyes was a jagged hole in the floor, right in front of the door, about seven feet across, edged with red slush-the green light came from down there. From within the hole.

She followed Jorny into the room, and-Deede taking a deep breath-they both bent over to look.

Below was a chamber that could never have been made by the builders of Skytown. It was a good-sized chamber, very old. Its stones were rough-carved, great blocks set by some ancient hand in primeval times, way pre-Columbian. Grooves had been carved in the stone floor by someone with malign and fixed intentions. They were flecked with a red-brown crust that had taken many years to acc.u.mulate.

"It looks to me like they dug this building in real deep," Jorny said, in a raw whisper. "I heard they dug the foundation down deeper than any other building in Los Angeles. And . . . I guess there was something down there, buried way down, they didn't know about . . . "

She nodded. He looked at the fragments of skateboard in his hand and tossed them aside, with a clatter, then got down on his knees, and lowered himself . . .

"Jorny!"

. . . through the hole in the floor; into the green light; into the ancient chamber.

"Oh f.u.c.k," she groaned. But she lowered herself and dropped too, about eight feet to a stinging impact on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet.

Jorny caught and steadied her as she was about to tip over and they looked around. "Some kind of temple!" he whispered. "And that thing . . . "

The grooves cut into the naked bedrock of the floor, each about an inch deep, were part of a spiral pattern that filled the floor of the entire room-and the gouged pattern was reproduced on the ceiling, as was the dais, the spirals, above and below, converging on the circular dais and the translucent thing that dwelt at the room's center. Spiral patterns on ceiling, spiral patterns on floor, between them, a thing hung suspended in s.p.a.ce-suspended between the s.p.a.ce of the room and the s.p.a.ce between worlds: an enormous, gelatinous, transparent sphere containing a restless collection of smaller iridescent spheres, like a clutch of giant fish eggs -were they smaller than the encompa.s.sing sphere, or were they of indefinite size, perhaps both as small as bushels and as big as planets? The iridescent spheres s.h.i.+fted restlessly inside the enveloping globe, changing position, as if each sphere was jostling to get closer to the outside of the container, the whole emanating a murky-green light that tinted the stone walls to jade; the light was a radiance of intelligence, a malign intelligence-malevolent relative to the needs and hopes of human beings-and somehow Deede knew that it was aware of her and wanted to consume her mind with its own . . . She could feel its mind pressing on the edges of her consciousness, pus.h.i.+ng, leaning, feeling like a glacier that might become an avalanche.

And then as her eyes adjusted she saw what the green glow had hidden, till now-its extensions, green but filled with diluted blood, stolen blood, the tentacles stretching from the sphere-of-spheres like stems and leaves from a tuber, but prehensile, mobile, stretching out from thick tubules to gradually narrow, to thin, very thin tips that stretched out red cords, like fis.h.i.+ng line up into the grooves on the ceiling, and from there into minute cracks, and, she knew-with an intuitive certainty-up high into the building, where they reached into people, taking control of them one by one, starting with those who'd been here longest, Skytown's employees. And some of the tentacular extensions had swallowed up whole people, drawn them down and into itself, so that they squirmed in the tubes, dozens of them, s.h.i.+fting in and out of visibility . . . She saw Koenig, drawn down in one of the transparent tentacles, sucked through it, his face contorted with a terrible realization . . . blood squeezing in little spurts from his eyes, his mouth, his nose . . . And then he was jetted back up the tentacle, becoming smaller as he went, transformed into transmissible form that could be reconst.i.tuted up above . . . And all this she glimpsed in less than two seconds.

Visibility was a paradox, a conundrum-the tentacles were visible as a whole but not individually, when you tried to look at one it s.h.i.+fted out of view, and you just glimpsed the people trapped inside it before it was gone . . . And the moaning filled the room, only they heard it more in their minds than in their ears . . .

"It's like this thing is here but it's not completely here," Jorny said, wonderingly. "Like it's . . . getting to be more and more here as it . . . "

"The people look pale, some of them like they're dying or dead," Deede said, feeling dreamlike and sick at once. "I can't see them clear enough to be sure but it's like they're being drained real slow."

Jorny said, "It's not coming at us . . . Why?"

"It's waiting," she said. It was more than guessing-it felt right. The answers were in the air itself, somehow; they throbbed within the murky green light. Her fast-seeing drew them quickly into her. "It wants us to come to it. It's lured the others in some way-we saw how it lured Jean. Everyone's been lured. It wants you to submit to it . . . "

"Look-there's something on the other side."

"Jorny? How are we going to get out of here? There's no way back up."

"There has to be another entrance."

"Okay-fine." She felt increasingly reckless-she felt so hopeless now that it felt like little was left to lose. She led the way herself-she was tired of following males from one place to the next-and edged around the boiling, suspended sphere-of-spheres, getting closer to it and learning more about it with proximity . . .

It was only partly in their s.p.a.ce; it was in many s.p.a.ces at once. There was only one being: each sphere they were seeing was another manifestation of that same being, one for each world it stretched into. It slowly twisted things in those worlds to fit its liking. And they were only seeing the outside of it, like the dorsal fin of a shark on the surface of the water. It had many names, in many places; many varieties of appearance, many approaches to getting what it wanted. Its true form- "Look!" Jorny said, pointing past her at a jagged hole in the floor-a hole that was the exact duplicate of the one in the ceiling they'd dropped through on the other side of the room. Its edges were shaped precisely the same . . .

The tentacular probes of the sphere-of-spheres teased at them as they pa.s.sed, almost caressing them, offering visions of glory, preludes of unimaginable pleasure . . .

But the creature frightened her, more than it attracted her-it was somehow scarier for its enticements. It was as malevolent to her as a wolf spider would be to a crawling fly. Or as a Venus fly trap would be.

"Jesus!" Jorny blurted, hastening away from the thing. "I almost . . . never mind, just get over here!"

She wanted to follow him. But it was hard to move-she was caught up in its whispering, its radiance of promise, and the undertone of warning. Run from me and I'll be forced to grab you! Jorny ran to her and grabbed her wrist, pulled her away from it. She felt weak, for a moment, drained, staggering . . .

He knelt by the hole in the floor and dropped through. "Come on, Deede!"

After a moment she followed-almost falling through the hole in her weariness. He half caught her, as before-and she felt her strength returning, away from the sphere-within-spheres.

"Look-we're on the ceiling!" Jorny burst out. "Aren't we?"

They were on a floor-with pipes snaking around their knees-but above them was the machinery of the elevators, affixed upside down on . . . the ceiling. Or-on the floor that was now their ceiling. There was a door, identical to the one they'd come through to find the hole into the temple room above-but it went from a couple feet above the floor to the ceiling. The k.n.o.b seemed in the wrong place. The door was related to the ceiling the way any other door would be related to the floor-it was upside down. Jorny went to it and jumped to the k.n.o.b, twisted it, pulled the door open, and scrambled through, turned to help her climb up . . . and then he yelped as he floated upward . . . They both floated up, tumbling in the air . . .

They were floating in s.p.a.ce for a moment, turning end over end, in the bottom level of the stairway they'd come down. It was the very same stairway, with the occasional cabinet with fire extinguishers and floor-numbers painted on the walls-only, it stretched down below them, instead of up above them. They instinctively reached for a railing, Jorny caught it . . .

A nauseating twist, a feeling of turning inside-out and back right-side out again, and then they were standing on the stairway, which once more was zig-zagging upward, above them. Only-it couldn't be. It had been below the temple room. Or had they been somehow transported back above?

"What the f.u.c.k?" Jorny said, pale, fumbling for a cigarette with shaking hands. "d.a.m.n, out of smokes."

Deede stared. Someone was up above-crawling down the walls toward them. Two someones. A man and woman. Coming down the walls that contained the stairs, crawling like bugs, upside down relative to Deede.

"Jorny-look!"

"I see 'em."

"Jorny I don't know how much more I can . . . "

"I'm not feeling so good either. But you know what? We're surviving. Maybe for a reason, right? Hey-they look . . . familiar."

They were about thirty-five, a man and woman dressed in what Deede could only describe, to herself, as dark, clinging rags. The man had a backpack of some kind tightly fixed to his shoulders. They approached, crawling down the wall, and Deede and Jorny backed away, trying to decide where to run to-up the stairs past them? And then the strangers stopped, looking at them upside down, the woman's hair drooping down toward them . . .

And the woman spoke. "Jorny-it's us, me and you as kids!"

"What-from earlier, somehow? But we never discovered the temple as kids!" said the man. "We just found out about it last year!"

"They're us in one of the other worlds-younger versions . . . and they found their way here! Just like in my dream, Jorny! I told you, there was something here-something that would help us!"

Jorny-the younger Jorny standing at the younger Deede's side-shook his head, stunned. "It's us-in, like, the future or . . . "

Deede nodded. "Would you guys come down and . . . stand on the level we're on? Or can you?"

"We can," the older Deede said. "The rules s.h.i.+fted when Yog-Sothoth altered the world, and gravity moves eccentrically."

She crept toward the floor, put one foot on it, then sidled around on the wall like a gecko, finally getting both feet on the floor and standing to face them; the older Jorny did the same. His blond hair was cut short and beginning to recede, his face a trifle lined, but he was still recognizably Jorny.

Deede found she was staring at the older version of herself in fascination. She seemed more proportional, more confident, if a bit grim-there were lines around her eyes, but it looked good on her. But the whole thing was disorienting-was something she didn't really want to see. It made her want to hide, seeing herself, just as much as seeing the thing in the temple.

"Don't look so scared, kid," the older Jorny said, smiling sadly at her.

Deede scowled defiantly at him. "Just-explain what the h.e.l.l you are. I don't think you're us."

"We're another you," the older Deede said. "And we're connected with you. We all extend from the ideal you, in the world of ideas. But this sure isn't that world. Time is a bit in advance in our world, I guess, from yours, for one thing . . . "

"Come on with us," the older Jorny said. "We'll show you. Then we can figure out if there's a way we can work together . . . against him."

They turned and climbed the stairs-after a moment's hesitation, Jorny and Deede followed. They went up eleven flights, past battered, rusting doors. "Your building," the older Deede said, "extends downward from ours-but to you it will seem upward. Ours is downward from yours. They're mirrored, but not opposites-just variants at opposite poles from one another. Me and Jorny found out that the primary impulses were coming from the bas.e.m.e.nt of our building so we cut the hole in the sub bas.e.m.e.nt floor-that's the ceiling of the other room."

"I think it's the other way around," said the older Jorny.

"I don't know, it depends. Anyway the Great Appet.i.te-that's what we call it, though some call it Yog-Sothoth-he reaches out through the many worlds through that same temple . . . and he changes what he comes to, so the beings on that world become all appet.i.te, all desire, and nothing else-so he can feed on low desires, through beings on those worlds."