“Let me see your phone for a second,” said Basil, holding out his hand. They had reached the top of the stairs and Basil had paused in the act of knocking on the door. Nolan gave him a quizzical look and handed over his cell. Without bothering to turn it on, Basil ran the tip of his finger over the screen several times in a looping pattern. Then he spat a large quantity of clear spittle onto the screen.
“What the hell!?” Nolan exclaimed, trying to snatch back his phone.
“Calm down. Would you rather I bleed on it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look,” said Basil, holding up the phone for Nolan to see. On the black screen a symbol traced in blue light pulsed for a few seconds and disappeared. As it vanished Basil's spit bubbled and evaporated away.
“Protection spell,” said Basil, “electronics, particularly devices that store digital information, are notoriously vulnerable to certain types of magic. They call it “Technomancy” and the man you're about to meet happens to be especially adept at it. And don't worry, any germs I'm carrying wouldn't have survived the process.”
“At least warn me the next time you want to spit on my belongings, okay?”
“Deal,” said Basil and he knocked on the door.
From the sound the hinges made as the black door eased open Nolan suspected the occupant of this building was not one for frequent outings. There was no one at the door but at the far end of an exceptionally long room, sitting in a pool of light emitting from an overhead lamp, Nolan could just make out a hunched figure sitting behind a wooden desk. Deep shadows fell over his features making them hard to make out but Nolan didn't need to see them to know he was watching both of them closely. He could feel it like a weight pressing against him.
The door closed behind them as they entered and Nolan heard something scurry away in the dark. It sounded like a metal rake dragging across the wood floor. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness Nolan first noticed that the room was not completely dark. There were lights everywhere, tiny little lights in a myriad different colors, glowing up and down every wall. Green and red and orange and blue, square and round and thin, some blinked and some flickered, and a few even followed them as they made their way up the length of the room.
Power lights, thought Nolan in amazement, there must be hundreds of them.
As his eyes adjusted more Nolan began to see the shapes belonging to those lights and he smiled a little in spite of his nervousness. All along every shelf were strangely constructed mechanical devices. It was difficult to make out precisely what they were but they all had the general appearance of something a child might cobble together from various found objects. Except these devices appeared to actually work. They twitched and bobbed as Basil and Nolan passed by, their tiny lights dancing like multicolored fireflies in the dark.
“Remember what I said: touch... nothing,” Basil whispered to Nolan, almost inaudibly, over his shoulder.
The man behind the desk continued to watch them, a faint yellow glow shining from his hooded eyes, as they stepped into the circle of light around him. He was small and thin, like a very old man, but he had no marks of extreme age. His completely bald head was smooth and unblemished. His small hands, interlaced and resting on the top of the desk, had few wrinkles. He was wearing a plain, white t-shirt and Nolan could see cords of hard muscle running up his narrow arms. His appearance was deceptive and easily misinterpreted. It was also, Nolan suspected, deliberately so.
The man opened his mouth and when he spoke Nolan felt every hair on his body stand on end. His voice was extremely deep. Every word seemed to hum with a faint buzzing sound that rose from deep in his throat and lingered in the air after it was spoken. It reminded Nolan vaguely of the sound created by those electronic devices smokers used when they lost their voice boxes to cancer.
“Basil,” the man intoned with a smile, “if I'd know you were coming I would have made tea.”
“Sorry to drop by unannounced, Garrity,” replied Basil, not sounding sorry in the least, “but I'm afraid this couldn't wait.”
“Yes, very rude. You know how I feel about uninvited guests,” Garrity shot Nolan a hard look and he again felt that feeling of something heavy pressing against him, “especially unknown persons.”
“Nolan, Garrity. Garrity, Nolan. Now we're all acquainted...”
“Pleased to meet you, Nolan,” said Garrity, not sounding at all pleased, “you seem a bit out of your depth. New to the game are you?”
Nolan remained silent. He tried to lock eyes with Garrity, wanting to give the impression of not being intimidated, but it wasn't easy. Staring into Garrity's eyes felt like drowning in a pool of gravity. Nolan forced himself to hold his gaze. Finally, Garrity turned back to Basil with sly grin.
“Quiet type isn't he?”
“Whatever,” said Basil knowingly, “we're here on business and that's all you need to worry about. Something's up in the city, any idea what that might be?”
“Hmmm. Rumblings. Something big is stirring. Something new.”
“Again I ask: what?”
“And again I say: something new.”
“Do we really have to do this dance? Huh? I'm so very not in the mood.”
“Then maybe you should have called on someone else.”
Basil leaned on the desk. “Please don't waste my time, Garrity, if you know something just spit it out.”
The two men continued to go back and forth, verbally sparring, and getting nowhere. Nolan watched them without really listening. Something was happening. He felt something move inside his mind, a palpable, visceral shifting. This man, this moment, something about it felt achingly familiar. It was impossible but there it was. And with that familiarity came a overwhelming sense and frustration and anger. What happened next felt like a dream, like he was watching himself from the outside.
Nolan snatched something off the shelf without looking; a little, round thing with spindly legs. Holding it by one twitching limb, he brought it crashing on the center of the desk. The clockwork contraption exploded. Gears and diodes and machine screws scattered everywhere. Wires splayed out like burst veins, bleeding sparks in all directions. Basil jumped back, dancing out of the pool of light and back into the shadows. Garrity withdrew, tipping back in his chair, and nearly falling over. Nolan slammed both his fists down on the desk, driving several small gears and screws into his hands in the process. He didn't notice. Words spilled from his lips with a snarl.
“Stop fucking around!”
Garrity rose from his chair and shoved his face into Nolan's, their noses almost touching. His yellow eyes glowed brighter and their color deepened until they burned like filaments. In the darkness behind him Nolan heard a rising cacophony of clicking gears and whirring motors. Already Nolan could feel the anger leaving and his control returning. He held his ground and didn't flinch. He had made his play, such as it was, and all he could do was see it through to whatever conclusion awaited him.
Slowly Garrity's eyes began to return to normal and a tiny smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. He drew back from Nolan and regarded him curiosly. Behind them the rising mechanical din subsided. He looked to Basil, who was still standing well back, muscles tensed, waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
“And here I was thinking Basil was the one to look out for,” said Garrity, casually sweeping the shattered remains of his creation onto the floor, “very well, since you're so insistent, I may know something, but not much I'm afraid.”
Nolan relaxed and stood back from the desk. He could feel the tiny fragments of metal embedded in the skin of his hands but made no effort to remove them. Basil stepped back into the light and resumed their conversation, trying his best to pretend as if nothing of consequence had transpired.
“Well?” said Basil.
Garrity leaned forward on the table again, steepling his fingers in front of his face, adopting a clichéd posture of ominous foreboding. “Rumors abound of something moving through the streets in the night. It isn't like anything any of us has seen before. It hides for now, waiting for something. There is a great deal of tension out there. Much of the weaker element has fled the city already. Others are on the move, seeking the hand behind these events. Someone brought it here, obviously, someone with a great deal of skill and a complete lack of fear.”
“We've already identified the summoner,” said Basil.
“Gang,” Garrity said with a frown.
“Gang,” replied Basil, “we need to know what he summoned and where to find him.”
“I don't have those answers but, if you're willing to deal, I'm sure I can use my skills to find them.”
“No deals. You help, we'll pay, that's the end of it. If you don't like it we'll go elsewhere.”
“Do you really think you have that kind of time? Because I don't.”
Now it was Basil's turn to get angry. He leaned in close to Garrity and practically spat his words at him. “And what do you think Sound is going to say when he hears how uncooperative you're being? Do you really want to go there? No... fucking... 'deals'.”
Garrity waved him away like he was a fly buzzing in his face. “You're no fun at all. Fine, simply business. But I at least want a promise of protection. If I'm going to stick my neck out I expect you and yours to be there keeping it from being chopped.”
“We'll keep an eye on you.”
“I suppose that will have to suffice. I'll dig up whatever I can and get back to you in the usual way,” Garrity stood up and motioned towards the door, “ now if you will excuse me, it appears I have some cleaning up to do.”
Basil turned and pushed Nolan gently towards the exit. Nolan could feel Garrity's eyes on his back as they headed for the door. As Basil opened it Garrity called after them. “Nolan!”
Nolan turned and looked back at him. He was smiling the same crafty grin as before. “Wonderful to have met you.”
As they made their way back down the rickety staircase Nolan picked distractedly at the metal shards in his hand. Thin trickles of blood ran down his palm from a dozen tiny puncture wounds.
“I did say 'be quiet and touch nothing' right? I could have sworn I did,” said Basil, his voice sounding tense beneath his usual veneer of nonchalance.
“I know, sorry.”
“You have no idea how lucky you are to be standing there picking metal out of your hand right now. I don't even know why he let you walk away after that. He certainly wouldn't have done the same for me. You mind telling me what happened?”
Nolan picked the last of the machine screws from his palm as they walked through the maze of metal and tossed it aside. It landed on the edge of a rusted out washing machine, leaving a faint smear of blood where it landed, and rolled inside, making tiny metal on metal clinks as it fell.
“I don't know. One minute I was fine and then suddenly I couldn't stop myself. It all felt so familiar and for some reason that just made me incredibly angry without knowing why. It was like I was trapped in my own head, watching everything happen.”
“Well, you'd better figure it out. I can't have you freaking out on me in situations like that. It seemed to help us out this time but we might not be so fortunate in the future,” Basil gave Nolan, who was still intently examining his bleeding hand, a sympathetic look that he didn't notice, “maybe you should talk to Mr. Sound when we get back, he might be able to help you figure things out.”
“Well isn't that sweet. On the job only one day and you two are already bonding,” said Constance as she stepped into the open end of the alley, her body casting a long, shapely shadow across the dusty concrete.
Basil stopped so suddenly that Nolan nearly ran into him, his body instantly becoming a rigid statue of tense muscle.
“This day just keeps getting better,” hissed Basil.
Chapter 18 - The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty
Nolan leaned against the door and stared out his window. Basil had turned on the radio and they were listening to something slow and melancholy that he didn't recognize. It wrong, listening to such a song, on a day like that. It would have been more at home on gray, rainy September afternoon. But Basil seemed like he might being enjoying it so Nolan said nothing.
Nolan was not, as he would have expected, all that unnerved by the events of the day. Strange things had happened, sure, but once the initial shock of it all had worn off he found he was more curious than anything else. This concerned him. It didn't feel right to be taking it all so easily. He half worried that he might be in some kind of fugue that would eventually break, leaving him shaken and frightened, though it didn't seem likely. He supposed that he ought to be glad that he was taking everything on board so readily but it just felt too fast to be normal.
Basil put his thumb to the volume knob and turned the music low. He hadn't said anything since they'd left the apartment building. “So how are you feeling?”
“Like someone who's walked in on the middle of a movie.”
Basil let out a short laugh. “Yeah. That's the hard part, you can eventually get used to the weirdness of it all, but that feeling never really goes away.”
“Never?”
“Nope. And I think that's the part that really gets to some people. All that uncertainty. Going out into a world where you know, not just suspect but genuinely know, that there's no real way of telling what might happen next.”
Basil rubbed at the space behind his ear as he talked. There were several deep blue lines that ran down his neck from his ear and disappeared under the collar of his coat. Nolan had noticed them before and mistook them for veins but upon closer inspection, as Basil rubbed them, he saw them shift around beneath his skin.
“When it gets to be too much that's when most people snap. I've been fortunate not to have too many of those but I have had a few. It isn't pretty. There's not much that can be done for someone in that state except put them some place where they can't hurt themselves.”
Again Nolan pondered the ease with which he had accepted everything. It couldn't really be helped. He couldn't force himself to find things more difficult to deal with then he did. So he let it go. If he was going to snap then he would and there probably wasn't much he could do to stop it.
Nolan nodded. “So... magic is a thing then?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Real, capital 'M', 'Magic'? Wizards, magic wands, the whole thing?”
Basil chuckled a little. “No, at least not like you mean. The term 'magic', it's kind of a catch-all for things that defy the conventional view of what is 'possible'.”
“You lost me.”
“Look at it like this: if you took a cellphone back in time a few hundred years and showed it the people there, what would they call it?”
“You mean before or after they burned you at the stake?”
“Exactly. They'd call it 'magic' or 'witchcraft' or whatever. But you and I know it's not. To us, here and now, it's science. You may not be able to explain exactly how a cellphone works but you do know there's a perfectly acceptable explanation behind it. So when I say 'magic' I'm referring to something that doesn't have such an acceptable explanation. Hell, most of the time I couldn't tell you why what I'm doing works, I just know that it does. The point is that there's really no such thing as 'magic', meaning there's no such thing as being able to defy the laws of reality, it's all just doing stuff that doesn't fit in with what we understand.”
“So when you say 'magic' you really just mean 'science that no one understands'.”
Basil shot Nolan with a finger gun. “Spot on. There are energies at work in the world that can be manipulated in ways that seem 'magical' but it's really no more so than flipping a switch and having the lights come on.”
“So what's the trick? What makes someone able to do that sort thing?”
“The trick to magic,” Basil said nonchalantly, as if instead of “magic” he’d said “poker” or “omelets”, “is that there isn’t any trick at all. Which is to say, some people have it and some people don't, but just about anyone can do it to some degree.”
Nolan looked at him skeptically. The idea seemed simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
“Let’s say you like to draw, right? You can study and practice and you might even get pretty good. But there’s always going to be those annoying bastards who will make your work look like shit without even trying, and usually without near as much practice. Some people just have it.”
Basil wheeled the car around a sharp corner without, Nolan suspected, bothering with the brakes at all. Nolan was becoming to accustomed to this and braced himself accordingly. Basil hardly seemed to notice and often seemed to hardly be watching the road at all.
“Now in my case,” he continued, “I come by my talents by virtue of not being entirely human and I even a few unique abilities that are fairly rare.”
Again Nolan felt that feeling of accepting something that should have thrown him. It wasn't even that much of a surprise. He'd noticed several physical abnormalities in Basil, like the blue lines behind his ear, and him not being completely human seemed as likely an explanation as anything. In fact, it somehow made the whole situation seem even more plausible.
“That’s what makes this game so difficult and dangerous. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything, in spite of how much effort people have put in trying to find some, so you never know what your going to come up against. There’s the usual stuff, the sorts of things you might read books about or find people teaching, but then all of a sudden you’ll run into some shit no one’s ever seen before. That’s when it gets interesting.”
Basil gave Nolan a sarcastically toothy grin and Nolan noticed, not for the first time, the faint glimmer of madness lurking quietly behind that expression. He didn't think Basil was crazy but he definitely had a reckless approach to things that was disquieting.
“If it's not too personal a question,” Nolan asked carefully, “um, what are you?”
Basil laughed hard. “Half human, half... something else.”
“You don't know?”
“Nope. My mother was human, I know that. As for my father, who can say? 'Unknown Extra-dimensional DNA', that's what my file says.”
“Your mother never told you who, or what, your father was?”
“I never knew my mother. She died before I was born.”
Nolan almost glossed over that last bit, strange as the conversation was, and it took him a second to process the idea.
“Wait, did you say 'before' you were born?”
Basil's hesitated for moment as if deciding whether or not to continue. They were coming into the downtown area of the city and he briefly turned his attention to the traffic around them. A shadow fell over his face as he contemplated what were clearly unpleasant thoughts.
“According to her medical records, my mother tried on no less than six separate occasions to abort her pregnancy with me. Every one failed. Equipment failures, strange power outages, once the attending physician had a heart attack in the middle of the procedure. Eventually, about six months along, she killed herself, almost certainly hoping to take me along with her. I was still alive when they found her, four hours later. So I think it's safe to say she had at least some idea of what she was carrying around inside her. But if she knew for certain who or what put it there, she never told anyone.”
Nolan tried to think of some response and came up empty. What does a person say to something like that?
Basil gave him a careless smile “I know it sounds pretty awful. I'll admit that when I first read the files I was in a bit of a state. What can you do? You either learn to live with your past or you let it drag you down.”
“And for the record,” Basil continued, “I am not the Anti-Christ.”
“Thanks for not making me ask,” replied Nolan, “though that does bring to mind another question...”
“All religions are bullshit,” Basil said flatly.
“All of them?”
“Every last one.”
“So you know for a fact that there's no God?”
“I didn't say that. I don't know if there's a God, though personally I don't see how there could be, but I do know that all organized religions are nonsense.”
“How can you be so sure though?”
“Because we've been at this for a very long time. The history of our organization goes back further than any currently practiced religion. In other words, we were there when they made this stuff up, so we know the actual origins of all their mythologies. Every major religion has its beginnings in various inter-dimensional phenomena that some bunch of nutballs in the past decided to turn into a way of life.”
“I suppose that makes sense, when you think about it.”
“Damn right it does.”
Basil pulled the car over to the curb and cut off the engine. They were in a part of downtown Nolan didn't recognize at all. The street was a single lane of cracked concrete with barely enough room for parking. All the buildings looked old. There were no businesses that he could see, no storefronts, just two rows of dull, brick structures separated by narrow alleys. A few pedestrians hustled along the sidewalks, clearly feeling no desire to linger in the area any longer than they had to.
“Q & A will have to put on hold for now. We're here.”
“Where is this? I thought I knew pretty much every street in the city but I'm sure I've never been down here before.”
“You wouldn't have. This is the sort of place you can't find unless you have specific business here.”
“You mean like that hidden door?”
“Sort of but not exactly. It's not hidden, you just don't notice it. You could drive past this street a dozen times and never realize that it was here.”
Basil led Nolan down an alley and around to the back of one of the buildings. The area behind the building was a small courtyard surround on all sides by a high, wooden fence. Discarded machines and rusting metal hulks created a precarious, waist high maze of jagged edges. Nolan felt like he needed a tetanus shot just looking at it. The narrow paths led up to the back of the building where a poorly constructed wooden staircase zigzagged up the wall and terminated in front of a black door.
“Follow me and touch nothing. The man we're going to see does not like people touching his things. To be honest he hates visitors in general, so try to keep quiet and follow my lead. And if he asks you a question, no matter what it is, under absolutely no circumstances should you answer it.”
“Why not?”
“Because this man is not the sort of person you want knowing anything about you. He is not a pleasant man and he is not nearly as harmless, or stupid, as he may appear. He is a reprehensible little scum bag and you should keep that in mind at all times.”
As Basil led Nolan through the crumbling labyrinth the stained curtains behind a clouded window overlooking the courtyard parted. From behind the curtains two beady, yellow eyes carefully tracked their progress.
Nolan was not, as he would have expected, all that unnerved by the events of the day. Strange things had happened, sure, but once the initial shock of it all had worn off he found he was more curious than anything else. This concerned him. It didn't feel right to be taking it all so easily. He half worried that he might be in some kind of fugue that would eventually break, leaving him shaken and frightened, though it didn't seem likely. He supposed that he ought to be glad that he was taking everything on board so readily but it just felt too fast to be normal.
Basil put his thumb to the volume knob and turned the music low. He hadn't said anything since they'd left the apartment building. “So how are you feeling?”
“Like someone who's walked in on the middle of a movie.”
Basil let out a short laugh. “Yeah. That's the hard part, you can eventually get used to the weirdness of it all, but that feeling never really goes away.”
“Never?”
“Nope. And I think that's the part that really gets to some people. All that uncertainty. Going out into a world where you know, not just suspect but genuinely know, that there's no real way of telling what might happen next.”
Basil rubbed at the space behind his ear as he talked. There were several deep blue lines that ran down his neck from his ear and disappeared under the collar of his coat. Nolan had noticed them before and mistook them for veins but upon closer inspection, as Basil rubbed them, he saw them shift around beneath his skin.
“When it gets to be too much that's when most people snap. I've been fortunate not to have too many of those but I have had a few. It isn't pretty. There's not much that can be done for someone in that state except put them some place where they can't hurt themselves.”
Again Nolan pondered the ease with which he had accepted everything. It couldn't really be helped. He couldn't force himself to find things more difficult to deal with then he did. So he let it go. If he was going to snap then he would and there probably wasn't much he could do to stop it.
Nolan nodded. “So... magic is a thing then?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Real, capital 'M', 'Magic'? Wizards, magic wands, the whole thing?”
Basil chuckled a little. “No, at least not like you mean. The term 'magic', it's kind of a catch-all for things that defy the conventional view of what is 'possible'.”
“You lost me.”
“Look at it like this: if you took a cellphone back in time a few hundred years and showed it the people there, what would they call it?”
“You mean before or after they burned you at the stake?”
“Exactly. They'd call it 'magic' or 'witchcraft' or whatever. But you and I know it's not. To us, here and now, it's science. You may not be able to explain exactly how a cellphone works but you do know there's a perfectly acceptable explanation behind it. So when I say 'magic' I'm referring to something that doesn't have such an acceptable explanation. Hell, most of the time I couldn't tell you why what I'm doing works, I just know that it does. The point is that there's really no such thing as 'magic', meaning there's no such thing as being able to defy the laws of reality, it's all just doing stuff that doesn't fit in with what we understand.”
“So when you say 'magic' you really just mean 'science that no one understands'.”
Basil shot Nolan with a finger gun. “Spot on. There are energies at work in the world that can be manipulated in ways that seem 'magical' but it's really no more so than flipping a switch and having the lights come on.”
“So what's the trick? What makes someone able to do that sort thing?”
“The trick to magic,” Basil said nonchalantly, as if instead of “magic” he’d said “poker” or “omelets”, “is that there isn’t any trick at all. Which is to say, some people have it and some people don't, but just about anyone can do it to some degree.”
Nolan looked at him skeptically. The idea seemed simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
“Let’s say you like to draw, right? You can study and practice and you might even get pretty good. But there’s always going to be those annoying bastards who will make your work look like shit without even trying, and usually without near as much practice. Some people just have it.”
Basil wheeled the car around a sharp corner without, Nolan suspected, bothering with the brakes at all. Nolan was becoming to accustomed to this and braced himself accordingly. Basil hardly seemed to notice and often seemed to hardly be watching the road at all.
“Now in my case,” he continued, “I come by my talents by virtue of not being entirely human and I even a few unique abilities that are fairly rare.”
Again Nolan felt that feeling of accepting something that should have thrown him. It wasn't even that much of a surprise. He'd noticed several physical abnormalities in Basil, like the blue lines behind his ear, and him not being completely human seemed as likely an explanation as anything. In fact, it somehow made the whole situation seem even more plausible.
“That’s what makes this game so difficult and dangerous. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything, in spite of how much effort people have put in trying to find some, so you never know what your going to come up against. There’s the usual stuff, the sorts of things you might read books about or find people teaching, but then all of a sudden you’ll run into some shit no one’s ever seen before. That’s when it gets interesting.”
Basil gave Nolan a sarcastically toothy grin and Nolan noticed, not for the first time, the faint glimmer of madness lurking quietly behind that expression. He didn't think Basil was crazy but he definitely had a reckless approach to things that was disquieting.
“If it's not too personal a question,” Nolan asked carefully, “um, what are you?”
Basil laughed hard. “Half human, half... something else.”
“You don't know?”
“Nope. My mother was human, I know that. As for my father, who can say? 'Unknown Extra-dimensional DNA', that's what my file says.”
“Your mother never told you who, or what, your father was?”
“I never knew my mother. She died before I was born.”
Nolan almost glossed over that last bit, strange as the conversation was, and it took him a second to process the idea.
“Wait, did you say 'before' you were born?”
Basil's hesitated for moment as if deciding whether or not to continue. They were coming into the downtown area of the city and he briefly turned his attention to the traffic around them. A shadow fell over his face as he contemplated what were clearly unpleasant thoughts.
“According to her medical records, my mother tried on no less than six separate occasions to abort her pregnancy with me. Every one failed. Equipment failures, strange power outages, once the attending physician had a heart attack in the middle of the procedure. Eventually, about six months along, she killed herself, almost certainly hoping to take me along with her. I was still alive when they found her, four hours later. So I think it's safe to say she had at least some idea of what she was carrying around inside her. But if she knew for certain who or what put it there, she never told anyone.”
Nolan tried to think of some response and came up empty. What does a person say to something like that?
Basil gave him a careless smile “I know it sounds pretty awful. I'll admit that when I first read the files I was in a bit of a state. What can you do? You either learn to live with your past or you let it drag you down.”
“And for the record,” Basil continued, “I am not the Anti-Christ.”
“Thanks for not making me ask,” replied Nolan, “though that does bring to mind another question...”
“All religions are bullshit,” Basil said flatly.
“All of them?”
“Every last one.”
“So you know for a fact that there's no God?”
“I didn't say that. I don't know if there's a God, though personally I don't see how there could be, but I do know that all organized religions are nonsense.”
“How can you be so sure though?”
“Because we've been at this for a very long time. The history of our organization goes back further than any currently practiced religion. In other words, we were there when they made this stuff up, so we know the actual origins of all their mythologies. Every major religion has its beginnings in various inter-dimensional phenomena that some bunch of nutballs in the past decided to turn into a way of life.”
“I suppose that makes sense, when you think about it.”
“Damn right it does.”
Basil pulled the car over to the curb and cut off the engine. They were in a part of downtown Nolan didn't recognize at all. The street was a single lane of cracked concrete with barely enough room for parking. All the buildings looked old. There were no businesses that he could see, no storefronts, just two rows of dull, brick structures separated by narrow alleys. A few pedestrians hustled along the sidewalks, clearly feeling no desire to linger in the area any longer than they had to.
“Q & A will have to put on hold for now. We're here.”
“Where is this? I thought I knew pretty much every street in the city but I'm sure I've never been down here before.”
“You wouldn't have. This is the sort of place you can't find unless you have specific business here.”
“You mean like that hidden door?”
“Sort of but not exactly. It's not hidden, you just don't notice it. You could drive past this street a dozen times and never realize that it was here.”
Basil led Nolan down an alley and around to the back of one of the buildings. The area behind the building was a small courtyard surround on all sides by a high, wooden fence. Discarded machines and rusting metal hulks created a precarious, waist high maze of jagged edges. Nolan felt like he needed a tetanus shot just looking at it. The narrow paths led up to the back of the building where a poorly constructed wooden staircase zigzagged up the wall and terminated in front of a black door.
“Follow me and touch nothing. The man we're going to see does not like people touching his things. To be honest he hates visitors in general, so try to keep quiet and follow my lead. And if he asks you a question, no matter what it is, under absolutely no circumstances should you answer it.”
“Why not?”
“Because this man is not the sort of person you want knowing anything about you. He is not a pleasant man and he is not nearly as harmless, or stupid, as he may appear. He is a reprehensible little scum bag and you should keep that in mind at all times.”
As Basil led Nolan through the crumbling labyrinth the stained curtains behind a clouded window overlooking the courtyard parted. From behind the curtains two beady, yellow eyes carefully tracked their progress.
We have lost our way
No new chapter this week. I haven't the heart for it. Instead I offer the following...
18 children are dead.
18 families have been destroyed.
We should all be ashamed.
Tragedies like this have happened before and will happen again unless we do something about it.
Regardless of your opinion or point of view on the subject there is one thing that cannot be denied: something is very wrong here. This is an event that simply should not have been possible. I don't claim to know every facet of the issue or to know for certain what should be done. But it is very clear that something needs to change.
It's time to stop talking about personal safety and time to start talking about everyone's safety. It's time to stop talking about personal freedom. It's time to stop talking about your rights.
Because those 18 children had rights too. They had the right to live. They had the right to grow up and be happy and find love and make a life for themselves. That right was taken from them.
The parents of those children had the right not to face a lifetime without their children, a lifetime of empty rooms and wounded hearts that will never fully heal.
We have to change. The cost of not doing so it too high.
My heart goes out to all the families marked by this tragedy. May they find the strength to see them through this dark time.
18 children are dead.
18 families have been destroyed.
We should all be ashamed.
Tragedies like this have happened before and will happen again unless we do something about it.
Regardless of your opinion or point of view on the subject there is one thing that cannot be denied: something is very wrong here. This is an event that simply should not have been possible. I don't claim to know every facet of the issue or to know for certain what should be done. But it is very clear that something needs to change.
It's time to stop talking about personal safety and time to start talking about everyone's safety. It's time to stop talking about personal freedom. It's time to stop talking about your rights.
Because those 18 children had rights too. They had the right to live. They had the right to grow up and be happy and find love and make a life for themselves. That right was taken from them.
The parents of those children had the right not to face a lifetime without their children, a lifetime of empty rooms and wounded hearts that will never fully heal.
We have to change. The cost of not doing so it too high.
My heart goes out to all the families marked by this tragedy. May they find the strength to see them through this dark time.
Chapter 17 - Interlude I: A Ballad For Lost Tomorrows
There had been a dream. The kind that fades too quickly but leaves something of itself behind. I've never remembered it, though I've tried. Sometimes I wish I could remember, other times I'm glad I can't.
It was cold that morning. I remember that so clearly. It shouldn't have been so cold, it was too early for the cold, but there it was. It's funny what you remember.
I remember laying in bed, looking out the window at the park next door. The wind was high and the clouds dashed by quickly, casting long shadows on the field of grass. I remember thinking it was like laying on the floor of the ocean watching the shadows of whales as they swam past overhead.
I remember a black bird sitting on a wire in the park, the wind ruffling it's shiny feathers. It was singing, I could see its beak opening again and again, but I couldn't hear it through the window. I remember wanting to hear and somehow that longing made my heart ache.
I remember we were of out toothpaste and I had to brush without it. I remember the way the brush tasted with the faint hint of the toothpaste from past brushings, the way the bristles felt too coarse and rough against my gums. I remember having toast and a fried egg for breakfast. I remember spilling coffee on my hand and the red spot it left there all morning.
The signs were all there. I've never be able to figure out why I missed them. Never.
I don't remember much of what anyone said or did that morning. I know I must have seen people, talked to them, but few things stick out. I remember stopping for gas on the way in. There was a woman on the other side of the pumps that I thought I knew from somewhere. I thought about saying hello but didn't. I remember the Indian cashier bowing his head and saying a short prayer in his native tongue instead of his usual “thank you”. I don't remember thinking anything of it. All the signs were there.
I was in my office when the phone rang. I remember a spike of ice going through my heart and not knowing why. The voice on the other end was harried. Something bad had happened. I was needed. I drove fast through the city, running lights, scaring pedestrians. I remember an elderly couple standing on a street corner, staring up at something in the sky, their mouths agape with wonder. Signs.
I arrived at the scene. Several cars were already there and lots of people were milling around looking concerned and confused. I pushed through the crowd, not caring as the dazed and wounded stumbled and fell as I passed, desperate to get through. There was smoke everywhere. A blizzard of grey ash fell all around. I choked and gagged. The smell was like nothing else. Bodies, there were so many bodies. I still did not know what had happened.
I heard a voice calling my name from somewhere in the smoke and followed it. He was covered in so much dirt and soot and ash that I barely recognized him. He was hurt, blood had darkened the front of his shirt, but he was tough, he'd be all right. He was trying to speak, to tell me something important, but he kept coughing and spitting black phlegm into the dirt. I lead him back to the cars, away from the worst of the smoke, and propped him up. He wheezed and gasped. I knew he needed a doctor but he still kept trying to speak. Finally he managed a single word. I can remember the way it sounded, whispery and hoarse, as he said it, coarse sandpaper words scraping inside my ears, full of regret. I remember the cold pressure in my chest, like an icy, steel clamp around my heart. I remember the tears in his eyes and in my own. “'Minda”.
I don't remember making my way through the crowd, though I must have. I don't remember rushing through the smoke and ash, though that must have happened too. I don't remember tripping over bodies or stumbling against charred walls, though those things surely happened as well. I do remember that room. I remember every single detail. I remember the smell being strongest there. I remember the way the black smoke drifted slowly through the broken windows. I remember the way the paint on the walls had bubbled and split and the way the few remaining beams glowed red with retained heat. I remember that single bare spot on the floor, untouched, unmarred, perfect, save for a few spatterings of blood. I remember feeling my mind bend and twist and knowing that any moment it was going to snap.
He didn't move at first. He just sat there, covered in black, sweat trickling down his face, leaving trails of reddened skin. He was cradling her head in his lap, her blond hair spilling over his legs. He slowly raised his head and our eyes met. I knew him. I'd known him for a long time. And I knew then that this day had been coming all along, that it had been inevitable, that all of it, everything, had been leading to this single, terrible moment. He smiled that same vile grin I had seen a hundred times. But this time was different. This time that smile was for me alone and I could almost hear the words behind it: “this I do for you”.
I couldn't move fast enough. He was always faster. I almost had him though. I was so close, the tips of my fingers caressing his neck as he danced away, twirling her body as he rose. I remember the way her hair spread out as she spun, her head lolling back on her limp neck, deep blond waves gliding through the smoke. It was almost beautiful. She collided with me and I fell with her. He laughed as though it were the greatest joke in the world. In a way I suppose it was, a special joke, just for he and I. Then he was gone, running through the broken and smoking ruins, still laughing.
I slowly laid her down and knelt there beside her. He'd been careful with her. She looked perfect, as if she were only sleeping, but I could feel the sharp edge of bone through the skin of her neck. I wanted to believe she hadn't suffered but I knew she must have. He would have made certain of that. I ran my thumb across her lips, wiping away a few traces of blood. I remember the way she felt in my arms, so limp and heavy. I wanted to cry. I wanted to fall across her body and weep and sob and never get up again. I wanted them to drag me away screaming. But I couldn't. There were no tears, not then. They were locked away behind a wall of something cold and dark. I stood and turned away. Others were coming. They would take care of her for me. I had work to do.
Nothing was going to be right again. That world was gone and I didn't care. The only thing left for me was pain and blood and death. He was fast but that wasn't going to be enough this time. Nowhere would be far enough. There would be no hole deep enough for him to hide. I would find him and I was going to make him hurt. Pain was the lesson and I was going to be his teacher. And then he was going to die.
- From the journal of [author's name removed]
It was cold that morning. I remember that so clearly. It shouldn't have been so cold, it was too early for the cold, but there it was. It's funny what you remember.
I remember laying in bed, looking out the window at the park next door. The wind was high and the clouds dashed by quickly, casting long shadows on the field of grass. I remember thinking it was like laying on the floor of the ocean watching the shadows of whales as they swam past overhead.
I remember a black bird sitting on a wire in the park, the wind ruffling it's shiny feathers. It was singing, I could see its beak opening again and again, but I couldn't hear it through the window. I remember wanting to hear and somehow that longing made my heart ache.
I remember we were of out toothpaste and I had to brush without it. I remember the way the brush tasted with the faint hint of the toothpaste from past brushings, the way the bristles felt too coarse and rough against my gums. I remember having toast and a fried egg for breakfast. I remember spilling coffee on my hand and the red spot it left there all morning.
The signs were all there. I've never be able to figure out why I missed them. Never.
I don't remember much of what anyone said or did that morning. I know I must have seen people, talked to them, but few things stick out. I remember stopping for gas on the way in. There was a woman on the other side of the pumps that I thought I knew from somewhere. I thought about saying hello but didn't. I remember the Indian cashier bowing his head and saying a short prayer in his native tongue instead of his usual “thank you”. I don't remember thinking anything of it. All the signs were there.
I was in my office when the phone rang. I remember a spike of ice going through my heart and not knowing why. The voice on the other end was harried. Something bad had happened. I was needed. I drove fast through the city, running lights, scaring pedestrians. I remember an elderly couple standing on a street corner, staring up at something in the sky, their mouths agape with wonder. Signs.
I arrived at the scene. Several cars were already there and lots of people were milling around looking concerned and confused. I pushed through the crowd, not caring as the dazed and wounded stumbled and fell as I passed, desperate to get through. There was smoke everywhere. A blizzard of grey ash fell all around. I choked and gagged. The smell was like nothing else. Bodies, there were so many bodies. I still did not know what had happened.
I heard a voice calling my name from somewhere in the smoke and followed it. He was covered in so much dirt and soot and ash that I barely recognized him. He was hurt, blood had darkened the front of his shirt, but he was tough, he'd be all right. He was trying to speak, to tell me something important, but he kept coughing and spitting black phlegm into the dirt. I lead him back to the cars, away from the worst of the smoke, and propped him up. He wheezed and gasped. I knew he needed a doctor but he still kept trying to speak. Finally he managed a single word. I can remember the way it sounded, whispery and hoarse, as he said it, coarse sandpaper words scraping inside my ears, full of regret. I remember the cold pressure in my chest, like an icy, steel clamp around my heart. I remember the tears in his eyes and in my own. “'Minda”.
I don't remember making my way through the crowd, though I must have. I don't remember rushing through the smoke and ash, though that must have happened too. I don't remember tripping over bodies or stumbling against charred walls, though those things surely happened as well. I do remember that room. I remember every single detail. I remember the smell being strongest there. I remember the way the black smoke drifted slowly through the broken windows. I remember the way the paint on the walls had bubbled and split and the way the few remaining beams glowed red with retained heat. I remember that single bare spot on the floor, untouched, unmarred, perfect, save for a few spatterings of blood. I remember feeling my mind bend and twist and knowing that any moment it was going to snap.
He didn't move at first. He just sat there, covered in black, sweat trickling down his face, leaving trails of reddened skin. He was cradling her head in his lap, her blond hair spilling over his legs. He slowly raised his head and our eyes met. I knew him. I'd known him for a long time. And I knew then that this day had been coming all along, that it had been inevitable, that all of it, everything, had been leading to this single, terrible moment. He smiled that same vile grin I had seen a hundred times. But this time was different. This time that smile was for me alone and I could almost hear the words behind it: “this I do for you”.
I couldn't move fast enough. He was always faster. I almost had him though. I was so close, the tips of my fingers caressing his neck as he danced away, twirling her body as he rose. I remember the way her hair spread out as she spun, her head lolling back on her limp neck, deep blond waves gliding through the smoke. It was almost beautiful. She collided with me and I fell with her. He laughed as though it were the greatest joke in the world. In a way I suppose it was, a special joke, just for he and I. Then he was gone, running through the broken and smoking ruins, still laughing.
I slowly laid her down and knelt there beside her. He'd been careful with her. She looked perfect, as if she were only sleeping, but I could feel the sharp edge of bone through the skin of her neck. I wanted to believe she hadn't suffered but I knew she must have. He would have made certain of that. I ran my thumb across her lips, wiping away a few traces of blood. I remember the way she felt in my arms, so limp and heavy. I wanted to cry. I wanted to fall across her body and weep and sob and never get up again. I wanted them to drag me away screaming. But I couldn't. There were no tears, not then. They were locked away behind a wall of something cold and dark. I stood and turned away. Others were coming. They would take care of her for me. I had work to do.
Nothing was going to be right again. That world was gone and I didn't care. The only thing left for me was pain and blood and death. He was fast but that wasn't going to be enough this time. Nowhere would be far enough. There would be no hole deep enough for him to hide. I would find him and I was going to make him hurt. Pain was the lesson and I was going to be his teacher. And then he was going to die.
- From the journal of [author's name removed]
Chapter 16 - Constance and the Devil Blues
It was warm and Constance was thankful she had dressed for it. There had been a chill in the air that morning when she was getting ready to leave and her first instinct had been to dress accordingly. But one look at the clear, blue sky outside her window and she'd known immediately that the chill wouldn't last. Now, as she walked down the street in her light, airy blouse and open toed flats, she would at least be comfortable while she worked. The only concession she'd made to the potential rigors of her day was her jeans, black and somewhat loose fitting. They didn't quite go with the blouse but she'd never really had much care for fashion and, besides, who was she looking to impress anyway?
She turned the corner at Bayview onto Waterside, mentally noting the aquatic connection of the two streets, and headed towards the source of whatever it was that she was following. Whatever it was, it was not easy to track, which Constance felt was cause for concern. She could feel something in the area but pinpointing it was like staring into the sun. If she tried too hard her head began to hurt and she had to shift her focus to something else for awhile. That was bad. Normal energy sources didn't, at least in her experience, cause such pain. It was big and it was strong and it was something she had never encountered before; all of which was a potential recipe for disaster. Damn Them for dragging her into this. Why couldn't They take care of Their own problems? The answer was, of course, quite simple: because They didn't have to. She was Their tool for taking care of Their problems and so long as They retained Their hold over her there was nothing she could about it. Her personal opinion, as well as her personal safety, was of little, if any, consequence to Them.
Twenty feet up Waterside Constance came to an abrupt stop as she noticed all the sounds she wasn't hearing. It had been a gradual shift, there had not been any point that delineated precisely where the silence started, it was more akin to someone slowly turning down the volume of the world. At least now she could be sure she was closing in on the whatever, though she found that she genuinely envied all the other living creatures that had been free to vacate the area. She continued walking, her footsteps on the concrete now seeming too loud in the quiet.
Constance wasn't accustomed to fear. It wasn't that she was immune to its effects, just that she didn't find many opportunities to experience it. She was surprisingly strong given her height and build, reasonably skilled in defense against both normal and paranormal encounters, and more than a little brilliant, if she did say so herself. As such she usually found that she was more or less capable of handling the majority of dangerous situations. Being relatively fearless was a useful trait, most of the time, in that it allowed her to remain calm in situations where others might not. The only real drawback was that she didn't have much practice at dealing with fear and this left her somewhat unprepared when it came. Which was probably why she found herself so uncertain of what to do when she saw the lone figure standing in the middle of the street ahead of her. He was clearly the source she had been tracking. His head was turned in her general direction but not quite directly at her making it hard to tell if he had noticed her or not.
She wanted to hide, which was a rare and interesting sensation, but she was too afraid that moving might draw his attention if he hadn't already seen her. Fear crept into her veins like a virus. Her heart thudded away in her chest. Beads of sweat bloomed and ran down her face and the insides of her arms. It was unnatural, that fear, born of whatever strange energy he was giving off. It wormed it's way into her mind and tapped into the reptilian core of her basest instincts. The urge to run grew stronger but Constance held herself in check. Somewhere beneath the fear she could feel a quiet rage boiling up. She hated this man, hated him for making her afraid, and hated him even more because the fear she felt was almost certainly justified. He was a warning siren blaring at full volume, a walking biohazard symbol, and everything about him screamed “DANGER: STAND CLEAR”.
The man tilted his head slightly and she saw him smile, which she shouldn't have been able to see at that distance, except that his mouth seemed to grow abnormally large. He raised his hand slowly and gave Constance a short, quick wave, before turning to stride off down the adjoining street. Constance did nothing but watch, cursing her own paralysis, until he was gone.
The first car that passed Constance was a black sedan, its revving engine shattering the silence and pulling from her daze. It was going slightly faster than what might be considered acceptable in a residential neighbor and probably too fast for its occupant to notice her standing there. She'd left her own car several blocks back, following an intuitive impression that driving to her destination was a bad idea. Constance listened to her instincts whenever possible and it was clear she'd once again been proven wise for doing so.
That was fast, she thought, how the hell did they get here so quick?
The black sedan squealed to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building further up the block. Two men in brown suits got out and hurried into the building. Constance stepped back into the shade of a large tree, easing her way amongst the leaves of the bushes the lined that side of the street, and kept very still. Another vehicle, this one a black SUV, cruised more casually up the street and parked behind the sedan. A man and woman, both wearing matching black uniforms and armed with pistols holstered to their hips, climbed out of the front seats and scanned the street robotically. Constance slowly pressed back against the screen of bushes, trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible. Three more people, these wearing more casual attire than the rest, climbed out of the SUV and went around to the back of the vehicle. They opened the rear door, removed several large, plastic cases, and carried them into the building, followed quickly by the black clad guards.
Constance stepped out of the shadows, brushed a few stubborn leaves from her blouse and pants, and made her way up the street to the apartment building. There might have been more vehicles on the way but she was pretty sure they'd take longer to arrive. These were the first responders, there to secure the scene and deal with anything potentially dangerous. They were also not going to take kindly to her nosing around but at least she didn't have to waste time figuring out where Mr. Creepy had come from.
The front entrance of the building was unguarded, which was good. It meant that the whole building wasn't being picked over and hopefully she would have more room to move around. Constance climbed the stairs, listening to the sounds of heavy footsteps moving around several floors above her, and regretting her decision to wear open toed shoes.
I'll have to soak my feet in bleach after this, she thought.
On the third floor she stopped and exited the stairwell. Two doors down the hall the armed man and woman stood, hands clasped in front of them, on either side of an open apartment door. Constance walked slowly up the hall, they hadn't noticed her yet, so she took the brief time before they did to try and figure out what to do next. Overpowering them wasn't an option, they would be well trained, and she'd be lucky to take out one before the other managed put a bullet in her head. Bluffing her way inside probably wouldn't work much better; she didn't really look the part of an agent or anyone else they were likely to let in. She could always wait and come back later when they were gone but by then there would likely be little left that would prove of any use to her. It seemed the best she could hope for would be getting a quick look at the place through the open door, she might even be able to buy herself a little extra look time by pretending to be the residents friend or something.
Constance moved in closer. The female guards eyes flicked briefly in her direction, clearly indicating that her presence had been noted, but otherwise both guards remained still. What were they playing at? In her experience these types were rarely so blasé about potential threats. They ought to at least be warning her off or something. A second later a large, unquestionably male hand fell on her shoulder and held it with a light but firm grip, a grip that said “you really don't want to find out how hard this hand can squeeze”. She did not start of flinch and she did not whirl around to face the owner of that hand, because she already knew who the owner was, and she also knew that remaining calm was the only rationale course of action. Slowly Constance looked back over her shoulder and up into the stern face of Isaac Scoggins.
“Isaac,” she said with a nervous smile, “I swear, it's like you get bigger every time I see you.”
Isaac did not return her smile. “What are you doing here?” He said, releasing her shoulder and watching her closely as she turned to face him.
Constance smoothed out the slight wrinkle in her blouse left by Isaac's hand with exaggerated irritation. “Same thing you are,” she said. “Working.”
“I really don't think that's a very good idea.”
Constance knew she had to choose her words carefully. Isaac was nice enough but he was not someone to be trifled with, he had little patience for games and even less for threats. He wouldn't hurt her, at least not without a good reason, but only because he didn't have to. If he wanted her to leave he had only to pick her up and carry her out of the building and there would little if anything she could do to stop him. Better to try and appeal to what little sympathy he might have for her.
“Can't you cut me a little slack?” She said, “You think I want to be here? I've got an assignment and you know what happens if I don't follow through.”
Isaac relaxed slightly. “That's no concern of mine, dear. This is our investigation now. If you want in you'll have to talk to the agent in charge.”
“And that would be?”
Isaac smiled sardonically. “Basil.”
She wanted to scream. Of course if would be Basil. Why would it be anyone else? Why would it be anyone but the one person who was the least likely to help her?
“Sorry,” said Isaac.
“No you're not and I wouldn't give any of the fucks if you were.”
Constance took several, deliberate steps to the right and walked past Isaac towards the stairs. As she reached the door she stopped.
“I saw him,” she said.
Isaac turned around. “What's that now?”
“The guy you're looking for, whoever was living in that apartment before today. I saw him out on the street just before you all arrived.”
“I don't suppose you happened to recognize him, did you?”
She hadn't, but there was no reason for her to be any more cooperative than he was being. She flashed Isaac a quick, sly smile over her shoulder and walked through the stairwell door.
Alright then, she mused as she descended the disgusting steps, so Basil's the one I have to deal with. This isn't going to be pretty but at least I'm dealing with a devil I know... and I think I have a pretty good idea of where he's likely to head next.
Out on the street Constance turned up Waterside and headed back to where she had parked. The tiniest glimmer of a smile was beginning to form on her lips. Hearing Basil's name had thrown her at first but as she walked she began to feel better about the whole thing, she might even be able to turn the situation to her advantage, if she played her cards right.
First things first though, she thought, and I believe the first thing ought to be a change of clothes.
Constance strode confidently up the street, her smile growing wider with each step.
She turned the corner at Bayview onto Waterside, mentally noting the aquatic connection of the two streets, and headed towards the source of whatever it was that she was following. Whatever it was, it was not easy to track, which Constance felt was cause for concern. She could feel something in the area but pinpointing it was like staring into the sun. If she tried too hard her head began to hurt and she had to shift her focus to something else for awhile. That was bad. Normal energy sources didn't, at least in her experience, cause such pain. It was big and it was strong and it was something she had never encountered before; all of which was a potential recipe for disaster. Damn Them for dragging her into this. Why couldn't They take care of Their own problems? The answer was, of course, quite simple: because They didn't have to. She was Their tool for taking care of Their problems and so long as They retained Their hold over her there was nothing she could about it. Her personal opinion, as well as her personal safety, was of little, if any, consequence to Them.
Twenty feet up Waterside Constance came to an abrupt stop as she noticed all the sounds she wasn't hearing. It had been a gradual shift, there had not been any point that delineated precisely where the silence started, it was more akin to someone slowly turning down the volume of the world. At least now she could be sure she was closing in on the whatever, though she found that she genuinely envied all the other living creatures that had been free to vacate the area. She continued walking, her footsteps on the concrete now seeming too loud in the quiet.
Constance wasn't accustomed to fear. It wasn't that she was immune to its effects, just that she didn't find many opportunities to experience it. She was surprisingly strong given her height and build, reasonably skilled in defense against both normal and paranormal encounters, and more than a little brilliant, if she did say so herself. As such she usually found that she was more or less capable of handling the majority of dangerous situations. Being relatively fearless was a useful trait, most of the time, in that it allowed her to remain calm in situations where others might not. The only real drawback was that she didn't have much practice at dealing with fear and this left her somewhat unprepared when it came. Which was probably why she found herself so uncertain of what to do when she saw the lone figure standing in the middle of the street ahead of her. He was clearly the source she had been tracking. His head was turned in her general direction but not quite directly at her making it hard to tell if he had noticed her or not.
She wanted to hide, which was a rare and interesting sensation, but she was too afraid that moving might draw his attention if he hadn't already seen her. Fear crept into her veins like a virus. Her heart thudded away in her chest. Beads of sweat bloomed and ran down her face and the insides of her arms. It was unnatural, that fear, born of whatever strange energy he was giving off. It wormed it's way into her mind and tapped into the reptilian core of her basest instincts. The urge to run grew stronger but Constance held herself in check. Somewhere beneath the fear she could feel a quiet rage boiling up. She hated this man, hated him for making her afraid, and hated him even more because the fear she felt was almost certainly justified. He was a warning siren blaring at full volume, a walking biohazard symbol, and everything about him screamed “DANGER: STAND CLEAR”.
The man tilted his head slightly and she saw him smile, which she shouldn't have been able to see at that distance, except that his mouth seemed to grow abnormally large. He raised his hand slowly and gave Constance a short, quick wave, before turning to stride off down the adjoining street. Constance did nothing but watch, cursing her own paralysis, until he was gone.
The first car that passed Constance was a black sedan, its revving engine shattering the silence and pulling from her daze. It was going slightly faster than what might be considered acceptable in a residential neighbor and probably too fast for its occupant to notice her standing there. She'd left her own car several blocks back, following an intuitive impression that driving to her destination was a bad idea. Constance listened to her instincts whenever possible and it was clear she'd once again been proven wise for doing so.
That was fast, she thought, how the hell did they get here so quick?
The black sedan squealed to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building further up the block. Two men in brown suits got out and hurried into the building. Constance stepped back into the shade of a large tree, easing her way amongst the leaves of the bushes the lined that side of the street, and kept very still. Another vehicle, this one a black SUV, cruised more casually up the street and parked behind the sedan. A man and woman, both wearing matching black uniforms and armed with pistols holstered to their hips, climbed out of the front seats and scanned the street robotically. Constance slowly pressed back against the screen of bushes, trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible. Three more people, these wearing more casual attire than the rest, climbed out of the SUV and went around to the back of the vehicle. They opened the rear door, removed several large, plastic cases, and carried them into the building, followed quickly by the black clad guards.
Constance stepped out of the shadows, brushed a few stubborn leaves from her blouse and pants, and made her way up the street to the apartment building. There might have been more vehicles on the way but she was pretty sure they'd take longer to arrive. These were the first responders, there to secure the scene and deal with anything potentially dangerous. They were also not going to take kindly to her nosing around but at least she didn't have to waste time figuring out where Mr. Creepy had come from.
The front entrance of the building was unguarded, which was good. It meant that the whole building wasn't being picked over and hopefully she would have more room to move around. Constance climbed the stairs, listening to the sounds of heavy footsteps moving around several floors above her, and regretting her decision to wear open toed shoes.
I'll have to soak my feet in bleach after this, she thought.
On the third floor she stopped and exited the stairwell. Two doors down the hall the armed man and woman stood, hands clasped in front of them, on either side of an open apartment door. Constance walked slowly up the hall, they hadn't noticed her yet, so she took the brief time before they did to try and figure out what to do next. Overpowering them wasn't an option, they would be well trained, and she'd be lucky to take out one before the other managed put a bullet in her head. Bluffing her way inside probably wouldn't work much better; she didn't really look the part of an agent or anyone else they were likely to let in. She could always wait and come back later when they were gone but by then there would likely be little left that would prove of any use to her. It seemed the best she could hope for would be getting a quick look at the place through the open door, she might even be able to buy herself a little extra look time by pretending to be the residents friend or something.
Constance moved in closer. The female guards eyes flicked briefly in her direction, clearly indicating that her presence had been noted, but otherwise both guards remained still. What were they playing at? In her experience these types were rarely so blasé about potential threats. They ought to at least be warning her off or something. A second later a large, unquestionably male hand fell on her shoulder and held it with a light but firm grip, a grip that said “you really don't want to find out how hard this hand can squeeze”. She did not start of flinch and she did not whirl around to face the owner of that hand, because she already knew who the owner was, and she also knew that remaining calm was the only rationale course of action. Slowly Constance looked back over her shoulder and up into the stern face of Isaac Scoggins.
“Isaac,” she said with a nervous smile, “I swear, it's like you get bigger every time I see you.”
Isaac did not return her smile. “What are you doing here?” He said, releasing her shoulder and watching her closely as she turned to face him.
Constance smoothed out the slight wrinkle in her blouse left by Isaac's hand with exaggerated irritation. “Same thing you are,” she said. “Working.”
“I really don't think that's a very good idea.”
Constance knew she had to choose her words carefully. Isaac was nice enough but he was not someone to be trifled with, he had little patience for games and even less for threats. He wouldn't hurt her, at least not without a good reason, but only because he didn't have to. If he wanted her to leave he had only to pick her up and carry her out of the building and there would little if anything she could do to stop him. Better to try and appeal to what little sympathy he might have for her.
“Can't you cut me a little slack?” She said, “You think I want to be here? I've got an assignment and you know what happens if I don't follow through.”
Isaac relaxed slightly. “That's no concern of mine, dear. This is our investigation now. If you want in you'll have to talk to the agent in charge.”
“And that would be?”
Isaac smiled sardonically. “Basil.”
She wanted to scream. Of course if would be Basil. Why would it be anyone else? Why would it be anyone but the one person who was the least likely to help her?
“Sorry,” said Isaac.
“No you're not and I wouldn't give any of the fucks if you were.”
Constance took several, deliberate steps to the right and walked past Isaac towards the stairs. As she reached the door she stopped.
“I saw him,” she said.
Isaac turned around. “What's that now?”
“The guy you're looking for, whoever was living in that apartment before today. I saw him out on the street just before you all arrived.”
“I don't suppose you happened to recognize him, did you?”
She hadn't, but there was no reason for her to be any more cooperative than he was being. She flashed Isaac a quick, sly smile over her shoulder and walked through the stairwell door.
Alright then, she mused as she descended the disgusting steps, so Basil's the one I have to deal with. This isn't going to be pretty but at least I'm dealing with a devil I know... and I think I have a pretty good idea of where he's likely to head next.
Out on the street Constance turned up Waterside and headed back to where she had parked. The tiniest glimmer of a smile was beginning to form on her lips. Hearing Basil's name had thrown her at first but as she walked she began to feel better about the whole thing, she might even be able to turn the situation to her advantage, if she played her cards right.
First things first though, she thought, and I believe the first thing ought to be a change of clothes.
Constance strode confidently up the street, her smile growing wider with each step.
Chapter 15- As Inevitable As Inevitable
In the aftermath of his transformation Gang found it difficult to make his way home. The distance wasn't great, a few hours by foot normally, but it ended up taking him the rest of the day, the following night, and a good portion of the next day. He kept getting lost. The exultation of his new self had given way to a sort of pleasant frustration. He was in the learning curve. His new senses, fascinating as they were, made navigating the once familiar streets nearly impossible. It was like suddenly being dropped in the middle of a foreign country; all the signs were gibberish, the streets were laid out according to some alien mentality, nothing was familiar or helpful. Not that it mattered, he wasn't in any hurry. He wandered the streets, still naked, still covered in own blood, content in the knowledge the he would eventually get where he was going. No one bothered him. He wasn't invisible, people saw him, if only long enough to give him furtive, awkward glances before turning away. They just didn't want to notice him. He radiated something the crawled into their little minds and awoke a primal terror they were helpless against. Gang could feel the wake of fear and revulsion spreading out behind him in the minds of everyone he passed and he couldn't help but smile. Eventually, as he became more accustomed to the world as he now experienced it, he started to make connections between things he'd known and their new appearance. It was a slow process but it finally led him to his destination.
The sun had climbed to its zenith and the light felt warm and pleasant on Gang's back as he came in sight of the old, crumbling apartment building. It was quiet, as it always was, and nothing moved in the streets. But something was moving in the building, he felt it, up on the third floor. Then he noticed the black sedan parked on the street. It could have been nothing but the timing seemed far too coincidental. Gang retreated into a stand of bushes along the sidewalk opposite the building and watched. There was a tremendous bang from inside the building and few seconds later a shaggy haired man in a brown trench coat burst out of the building followed closely by another man in a black leather jacket. Gang recognized the trench coat wearer immediately let out an involuntary snarl of disgust. The other man felt somewhat familiar as well but it was hard to tell; his appearance was mired in a dark aura that swirled around him like living shadows, making it impossible to see him clearly.
They had been much more efficient than he would have believed possible. For them to be there already, so soon after his transformation, was unexpected and unfortunate. He knew they would have come for him sooner or later, events were going to become much too big to keep hidden for long, but it had been Gang's intention to clean up the room in an effort to at least delay his enemies. He couldn't remember much of anything following the ritual but he was fairly certain that everything was still as it had been that night. And there was no reason to think that Basil would have had any trouble finding the hidden room either. It wouldn't be long before the rest of Mr. Sound's lackeys descended on his home and put the pieces together.
The two men stopped on the sidewalk and conversed for a moment. Gang could hear them perfectly, in spite of the distance, but found he was still having some trouble with sounds, so their words came to him as so much garbled noise. There was, however, one word he did recognize: his name. Gang tensed, fighting the instinct to charge forward and attack. Basil was strong, too strong for him to deal with, in his current state he wouldn't stand a chance. Of course Gang's involvement would be obvious to Basil, given their history. Everything was happening faster than he'd anticipated, it too soon, he needed more time.
“iT DoeS nOT MaTteR.”
Gang had first noticed the presence in his head somewhere along his journey home but he'd been too distracted by trying to find his way to really give it much consideration. It had been there though, sitting back in the shadows. Now it spoke to him, a voice that was both his own and not. It was comforting, like having a dear, old friend take up residence in his mind. He felt instantly calm, his muscles relaxed and he sat back slowly on the bare earth beneath him.
“theRE Is nOthINg tHEy CAN do. THeY cAn nO MoRe stOp WHat iS to cOmE ThAN a Flea MIGht stOP THe TurnInG Of tHe StaRS.”
I've underestimated them before... and paid the price for it. Gang replied. It was strange having a conversation with himself in his own head, especially when the “him” also felt like someone else, but it was also oddly reassuring.
“Let ThEm trY. tHEy wIlL FAll wITH thE ResT oF THe UnWorTHY.”
In the street Gang watched the two men climb into their vehicle and drive away. The street was quiet again. He was right. There was nothing to fear and he was foolish to think otherwise, even for a moment. Gang stood up from his hiding place and slowly crossed the street.
As Gang climbed the dark steps he could feel them somewhere off in the distance, approaching quickly, but there was time. He would be gone before they arrived. He went into the bathroom, turned on the shower as hot as it would go, and stood in it for several minutes, relishing the feel of the scalding water cascading over him. When the last, stubborn flecks of dried blood were boiled away Gang turned off the water and got out. As he reached for a towel he caught his reflection in the mirror and froze. His hair had washed away in the shower, leaving his scalp bare and perfectly smooth. He also realized that his face had changed, his new face bearing little resemblance to the one he'd previously worn. The proportions had changed dramatically. His nose, his mouth, his cheek bones, the entire underlying structure had shifted. Small, pointed knobs protruded from the bottom of his chin. They were small now but he could feel them pushing against his skin, slowly growing. His eyes were gone as well, replaced by two huge, lidless, pupil-less, blood red globes. Gang ran his hands over his wonderful new face and laughed. This was truly the face of the new world.
Gang toweled himself off carelessly and tossed the towel on the floor. Would they realize what that meant? Would they understand how close they'd come to finding him? Almost definitely.
In his bedroom he found clothes to wear; a pair of jeans, a dark green t-shirt, and black sneakers. He picked them at random from what was there, hardly paying attention to what they might have looked like. In the top drawer of the dresser he rummaged around until he found a pair of sunglasses that he'd purchased on whim at some trendy shop in the city but never worn. He did not particularly need them but, given what he planned to do next, he thought that covering his eyes might make things go a bit smoother. They were larger than normal sunglasses, closer to goggles really, with wide, curved lenses that were very dark. On Gang's smallish face they looked enormous and insect-like.
Gang walked back out into the living room. There was a small table by the windows with a narrow drawer inside it. Gang opened the drawer and looked inside. The only item in the drawer was a pendant, a single red stone set into a circle of gold, on a leather strap. It had no value. The stone was merely colored glass and the gold was fake. It had been his mother's. He'd taken it the day she had died without really knowing why. He held it up and it shone in his new eyes like a tiny sun. Gang put the pendant around his neck and tucked it beneath his shirt, not really knowing why he felt the need to take it now anymore than he had the first time.
Gang walked over to the couch and picked up the book Basil had tossed there. It hummed in his hands like a live transformer. This is all far from over half-man, he thought, the next time I will see you twist and burn. There is no room for you in my beautiful new world. Gang placed the book back in the space on the shelf it had come from and walked out of his apartment for the last time without bothering to shut the door.
Gang emerged from the building and back into the sunlight. He felt good, purposeful. Let them come. They couldn't stop him. Nothing could stop him. The way was set. Still, he thought it would not do to be so grossly out numbered. He didn't need help but he liked the idea of gathering others to him. After all, what was a savior without disciples? He could already feel them out in the city, minds that were ready for him, begging to be given direction and purpose. He would gather a few, the truly special, and leave the rest to come to him on their own. And they would, of this he had no doubt.
Up the street Gang saw a glint of metal as the first of the approaching cars turned the corner. He smiled a serpent's smile, cold and mirthless, thinking of them examining and cataloging, employing their precious knowledge, deducing his actions and intent. He almost felt sorry for them.
Almost.
The sun had climbed to its zenith and the light felt warm and pleasant on Gang's back as he came in sight of the old, crumbling apartment building. It was quiet, as it always was, and nothing moved in the streets. But something was moving in the building, he felt it, up on the third floor. Then he noticed the black sedan parked on the street. It could have been nothing but the timing seemed far too coincidental. Gang retreated into a stand of bushes along the sidewalk opposite the building and watched. There was a tremendous bang from inside the building and few seconds later a shaggy haired man in a brown trench coat burst out of the building followed closely by another man in a black leather jacket. Gang recognized the trench coat wearer immediately let out an involuntary snarl of disgust. The other man felt somewhat familiar as well but it was hard to tell; his appearance was mired in a dark aura that swirled around him like living shadows, making it impossible to see him clearly.
They had been much more efficient than he would have believed possible. For them to be there already, so soon after his transformation, was unexpected and unfortunate. He knew they would have come for him sooner or later, events were going to become much too big to keep hidden for long, but it had been Gang's intention to clean up the room in an effort to at least delay his enemies. He couldn't remember much of anything following the ritual but he was fairly certain that everything was still as it had been that night. And there was no reason to think that Basil would have had any trouble finding the hidden room either. It wouldn't be long before the rest of Mr. Sound's lackeys descended on his home and put the pieces together.
The two men stopped on the sidewalk and conversed for a moment. Gang could hear them perfectly, in spite of the distance, but found he was still having some trouble with sounds, so their words came to him as so much garbled noise. There was, however, one word he did recognize: his name. Gang tensed, fighting the instinct to charge forward and attack. Basil was strong, too strong for him to deal with, in his current state he wouldn't stand a chance. Of course Gang's involvement would be obvious to Basil, given their history. Everything was happening faster than he'd anticipated, it too soon, he needed more time.
“iT DoeS nOT MaTteR.”
Gang had first noticed the presence in his head somewhere along his journey home but he'd been too distracted by trying to find his way to really give it much consideration. It had been there though, sitting back in the shadows. Now it spoke to him, a voice that was both his own and not. It was comforting, like having a dear, old friend take up residence in his mind. He felt instantly calm, his muscles relaxed and he sat back slowly on the bare earth beneath him.
“theRE Is nOthINg tHEy CAN do. THeY cAn nO MoRe stOp WHat iS to cOmE ThAN a Flea MIGht stOP THe TurnInG Of tHe StaRS.”
I've underestimated them before... and paid the price for it. Gang replied. It was strange having a conversation with himself in his own head, especially when the “him” also felt like someone else, but it was also oddly reassuring.
“Let ThEm trY. tHEy wIlL FAll wITH thE ResT oF THe UnWorTHY.”
In the street Gang watched the two men climb into their vehicle and drive away. The street was quiet again. He was right. There was nothing to fear and he was foolish to think otherwise, even for a moment. Gang stood up from his hiding place and slowly crossed the street.
As Gang climbed the dark steps he could feel them somewhere off in the distance, approaching quickly, but there was time. He would be gone before they arrived. He went into the bathroom, turned on the shower as hot as it would go, and stood in it for several minutes, relishing the feel of the scalding water cascading over him. When the last, stubborn flecks of dried blood were boiled away Gang turned off the water and got out. As he reached for a towel he caught his reflection in the mirror and froze. His hair had washed away in the shower, leaving his scalp bare and perfectly smooth. He also realized that his face had changed, his new face bearing little resemblance to the one he'd previously worn. The proportions had changed dramatically. His nose, his mouth, his cheek bones, the entire underlying structure had shifted. Small, pointed knobs protruded from the bottom of his chin. They were small now but he could feel them pushing against his skin, slowly growing. His eyes were gone as well, replaced by two huge, lidless, pupil-less, blood red globes. Gang ran his hands over his wonderful new face and laughed. This was truly the face of the new world.
Gang toweled himself off carelessly and tossed the towel on the floor. Would they realize what that meant? Would they understand how close they'd come to finding him? Almost definitely.
In his bedroom he found clothes to wear; a pair of jeans, a dark green t-shirt, and black sneakers. He picked them at random from what was there, hardly paying attention to what they might have looked like. In the top drawer of the dresser he rummaged around until he found a pair of sunglasses that he'd purchased on whim at some trendy shop in the city but never worn. He did not particularly need them but, given what he planned to do next, he thought that covering his eyes might make things go a bit smoother. They were larger than normal sunglasses, closer to goggles really, with wide, curved lenses that were very dark. On Gang's smallish face they looked enormous and insect-like.
Gang walked back out into the living room. There was a small table by the windows with a narrow drawer inside it. Gang opened the drawer and looked inside. The only item in the drawer was a pendant, a single red stone set into a circle of gold, on a leather strap. It had no value. The stone was merely colored glass and the gold was fake. It had been his mother's. He'd taken it the day she had died without really knowing why. He held it up and it shone in his new eyes like a tiny sun. Gang put the pendant around his neck and tucked it beneath his shirt, not really knowing why he felt the need to take it now anymore than he had the first time.
Gang walked over to the couch and picked up the book Basil had tossed there. It hummed in his hands like a live transformer. This is all far from over half-man, he thought, the next time I will see you twist and burn. There is no room for you in my beautiful new world. Gang placed the book back in the space on the shelf it had come from and walked out of his apartment for the last time without bothering to shut the door.
Gang emerged from the building and back into the sunlight. He felt good, purposeful. Let them come. They couldn't stop him. Nothing could stop him. The way was set. Still, he thought it would not do to be so grossly out numbered. He didn't need help but he liked the idea of gathering others to him. After all, what was a savior without disciples? He could already feel them out in the city, minds that were ready for him, begging to be given direction and purpose. He would gather a few, the truly special, and leave the rest to come to him on their own. And they would, of this he had no doubt.
Up the street Gang saw a glint of metal as the first of the approaching cars turned the corner. He smiled a serpent's smile, cold and mirthless, thinking of them examining and cataloging, employing their precious knowledge, deducing his actions and intent. He almost felt sorry for them.
Almost.
Chapter 14 - Incongruous Detail Analysis
Nolan managed to hold on to his breakfast through the remainder of the “autopsy”, which turned out to be less of an autopsy and more of a point-at-mangled-lumps-of-flesh-psy. The victim's body held little if any useful information and virtually nothing that wasn't already known having captured the creature responsible. Even identification of the victim was impossible given the extent of the damage. Following the examination, Basil had taken Nolan down another series of narrow hallways that eventually led to an underground garage. They left the garage in a predictably nondescript, black sedan, heading for what Nolan assumed was the next stage of their investigation. The whole thing still held a sense of surrealism for him. It was almost impossible to believe that less than forty-eight hours had passed since he'd stepped out of his cab and into his bizarre new existence.
Basil silently navigated the car through the streets with a certain grim determination. He did not seem to enjoy driving even a little bit and continually cursed his fellow motorists under his breath. After driving in silence for nearly twenty minutes he began to speak as if he were continuing a conversation that had previously been interrupted.
“While you were making up your mind about us,” he said, “we've had teams trying to backtrack the path of the EDH that attacked you.”
“'EDH'?” said Nolan.
“Sorry. Stands for 'Extra Dimensional Hybrid'. Fancy name for the offspring of things from outside this dimension. It seems that body in the morgue wasn't its only victim. Unfortunate for them but it did allow us to link it to a previous incident out in the suburbs. Bill's team thinks they've managed to nail down where the whole thing started, though we've still got no leads on whatever crossed over. That's what you and I are going to follow up now. Hopefully we'll be able to dig up something on the source of all this.”
Basil brought the car to an abrupt, somewhat jarring, stop and opened his door.
“And here we are,” said Basil, “lucky us.”
There were worse neighborhoods in Inlet City, Nolan mused as he examined the dilapidated, crumbling structure that was their destination, but he was hard pressed to think of any at that particular moment. The apartment building looked deserted and Nolan had a hard time believing that anyone actually lived in it. The scant lawn in front of the building was an overgrown jungle of browning city weeds that had invaded the pavement leading to the entrance as well, he couldn't see any signs of movement or habitation in any of the windows, and the exterior of the building had clearly long since been abandoned to the elements. This sense of desertion was further reenforced by the unusual silence that pervaded the entire area. It was another unseasonably warm day, the sort of day people usually take full advantage of in temperate climates, yet the streets were eerily deserted. He couldn't even hear any birds or insectile buzzings. Basil walked up the sidewalk, brushing aside a few unruly grasses that slapped at his face, and pushed open the front door of the building. They were immediately beset by a startling miasma of urine, mold, and assorted garbage. The only source of light was what little could pierce the translucent yellow film that coated the two thin windows in the front door. Overhead an empty light socket peered at them through a thick scrim of cobwebs. Basil briefly scanned the bank of mailboxes on the wall. Most of the little windows meant for the occupants names were empty and the ones that weren’t contained tags that had long since faded to illegibility.
The address they sought was on the third floor and Nolan found, much to his dismay, that the building’s condition did not improve the further they journeyed into it. As they climbed the stairs Nolan could feel things, mercifully unseen in the gloom of the stairwell, crunching, breaking, and occasionally squishing beneath his feet. There were occasional sounds of movement through the refuse and more than once he was certain he felt something scurry across the top of his shoe.
The third floor hallway was even darker than the entryway, having no windows and only one fluorescent tube that sputtered dimly from a canted ceiling fixture. If not for the occasional muted sounds of movement from within the other apartments it would have been easy to believe that the whole place was abandoned.
As they exited the stairwell into the hall Basil suddenly froze and stuck his arm to halt Nolan as well. A second later an enormous man wearing tattered jeans and a badly stained, white tank-top came striding towards them out of the shadows. He was so tall and horribly thin that Nolan's mind initially rejected it as a hallucination, and even after he accepted its existence as an actual, living create, he could still hardly believe that such a man was capable of standing let alone walking. His sunken eyes stared at them with blank, unfocused rage as he bore down on them. Basil took a step forward and the man stopped just short of colliding with him. He stood virtually motionless, breathing in a thin, wheezy rasp, hunched over slightly so he could stare directly into Basil's eyes. Basil stared calmly back for a moment and then, in a single fluid motion, raised his right hand and smacked the tall man square in the forehead while uttering a low, gutteral noise in his throat as if he had an unpleasantly large hunk of mucus stuck there. The tall man blinked, shook his head, nearly fell over, and placed a skeletal hand on the wall to steady himself. He looked from Basil to Nolan and back again several times, as if encountering other humans for the first time in his life. Then, without a word, he walked shakily through the stairwell door and was gone.
“Enthralled,” said Basil, looking over his shoulder at Nolan, as if that explained everything, “that's promising.”
Basil strode off down the hall, staring at the floor as he walked. Nolan got the impression he was following some sort of trail, though what it might be and how he could possibly see it were a mystery. Finally Basil stopped in front the door for apartment 305 and tried the knob. It didn't turn.
“Of course not, that would be too easy,” said Basil.
Basil put his hand in front of the door knob key slot and snapped his fingers three times in rapid succession. Tiny blue sparks jumped from where his fingers met and bounced off the the face of the lock. There was a faint click from inside the the lock and when Basil tried it again it turned easily.
Basil smiled at Nolan’s perplexed expression. “I know it doesn’t seem like it but you really do get used to this stuff after awhile. Just roll with it.”
Basil pushed open the unlocked door and stepped inside. Nolan followed.
Nolan had expected something a bit different than the utterly normal looking home they entered. There were no arcane books on the tables or snarling statues of tentacled beasts or pentagrams drawn on the walls in blood. Nothing about anything he saw seemed out of the ordinary, it was a simple apartment, perhaps a little threadbare. The worst he could have said was that it was a tad boring.
“The trick,” offered Basil, as if reading his thoughts, “is to purge from your mind any notions of what you’re ‘supposed’ to be looking for. This isn’t ‘CSI: Miami’ or whatever. If you were to bring any conventional forensics team in here it’s doubtful they would find anything significant and anything they did find wouldn’t mean much to them.”
Basil walked to the center of the room and gestured at the area around him.
“Use your instincts. Let your eyes slide over everything and try to pick out the things that don’t fit. That’s what we’re looking for. If there’s anything here that can help us that’s how we’ll find it.”
“I'll try but I don't know if I'll be of much help.”
“Don't sell yourself short. Your a smart guy, I can tell. Besides, sometimes the best eyes are new eyes.”
Basil walked over to a set of bookshelves and looked over the volumes and knickknacks resting there. Nolan decided to start with the small kitchen area off the living room. It was clean but had clearly been in use recently. Toaster, microwave, spice rack, stove, nothing any normal person wouldn't have. Nolan opened the refrigerator and found nothing unusual there either, apart from it being nearly empty; a half gallon jug of milk two weeks past its expiration date, a small container of yogurt, half a sliced tomato in a plastic bag. He closed the refrigerator door and walked out of the kitchen.
Nolan walked down a short hallway, stopped briefly to look in the very tiny looking bathroom (toilet, sink, toothbrush holder complete with translucent red handled toothbrush) and continued through a doorway at the end. It was a bedroom and, like everything else, it appeared unbearably average. A bed, a beside table, pale green table lamp, a short dresser that was clearly well past its prime. He pulled open a closet door and shut it again quickly. Jeans, t-shirts, a couple pairs of shoes on the floor. Nothing of consequence. All perfectly normal.
In the living room he could hear Basil rummaging around, opening drawers, flipping through books, apparently finding nothing either.
Because there's nothing to find, thought Nolan hopelessly, everything is perfectly normal.
The idea rolled around in Nolan's head, in particular the single phrase “perfectly normal”. He'd thought it several times since they'd entered the apartment and he couldn't shake the feeling that it meant something. Nolan looked back at the bedroom and was suddenly certain that he was wrong. There was something there, something literally sitting right in front of him, that he just wasn't seeing. What was it? He went back into the kitchen and opened one of the cupboards over the sink. Some glasses, a stack of plates. Perfectly normal. He opened one of the drawers. Forks, spoons, knives. What the hell was he missing? And then it was there, so clear and obvious that he couldn't believe he'd missed it. Nolan left the kitchen and stood in the middle of the living room. He turned slowly, taking in everything; t.v., sofa, curtains, coffee table. He stopped and faced Basil, who had been flipping absently through on book on medieval farming practices, and was now watching him intently.
“Well?” Said Basil.
“Do you see it?” Replied Nolan. Basil responded with a faint smile.
“You do, don't you? You were just waiting to see if I would see it.”
“Maybe. What do you see?”
“It's normal, all of it. Perfectly normal. Absolutely, completely, and utterly normal. It's like a film set. Everything single thing is exactly as someone would expect it to be.”
“Which means?”
“It's a lie. It's hiding something.”
Basil's smile widened. He slammed shut the book and tossed onto the couch. “Nicely done, and I don't think it's just a cleverly arranged setting either. I have the feeling that if you and I were to compare notes on what we're seeing right now we might find some interesting inconsistencies.”
“So this is all some kind of illusion to, what, keep people from looking too closely?”
“Precisely. It's not the most imaginative camouflage in the world but it would probably work on most people.”
“Now we just have to figure out what it's trying to cover up.”
“Actually, I think I already have.”
Basil walked across the living room and stood in front of a blank wall on the other side.
“I noticed it when we were out in the hall but it didn't really register until I realized the same thing you did; there's a door missing.” Basil continued.
“What?”
“There were four doors on the opposite side of the hall, four apartments, but on this side... only three. And I believe that missing apartment would be on the other side of this wall.” He ran his fingers over the blank face of the wall. “Ah, here we are.”
Basil produced a small knife with a curved blade from within the folds of his coat. Nolan noticed there were tiny runes etched into the surface of the blade. Basil raised the knife and plunged it hard into the wall. The blade disappeared through the surface and sunk into something that sounded like wood beneath it. The wall began to ripple where the knife pierced it, as if it were an image mirrored on the surface of a pool that had just been disturbed. Slowly the image of the wall faded away, revealing a heavy wooden door with Basil's knife stuck in its surface. There was a line of raised metal discs set into the wood along the door's jamb, to Nolan they looked like brass, each with a red symbol painted on it's surface. Basil ran his finger along each one and they sizzled as the painted symbols were smudged away.
“Alright, knife's done its job then, else touching those probably would have killed me.”
Basil plucked the knife free and returned it to its place within his coat. A thin line of spoke drifted up from the spot where it had been.
“There are more elegant ways to do that sort of thing,” he said as he turned the door's knob, “but I always say: 'why fuck around'?”
Nolan had about a million question about what had just happened but thought better of asking them. Hopefully there would be time for that later. Basil shouldered open the door and stepped into the room. Nolan followed after him and stood in the doorway, uncertain of what he was seeing. The room was filled with electric fans of every size and description. Nolan coughed as the smell of burnt plastic and wiring washed over him.
“Good lord,” he said, covering his mouth and nose. Basil didn't seem to notice.
“I'd stay there if I were you. It looks like the party's over but you can't always tell for sure.”
Basil walked across the room, weaving his way through the obstacle course of defunct fans, and knelt next to a white circle drawn on the floor in chalk. In the middle of the circle was a metal bowl that had been partially over turned. It's contents, a pile of black ash, had spilled out onto the floor. Basil took a pinch of the ash, sniffed it, and put it in his mouth.
“Shit,” said Basil with a deep frown.
“I hope you don't mean that literally.”
Basil stood and wiped his finger on his coat. “Thankfully, no. Though honestly it might be better if it was.”
“What's all this for?”
“Smoke drawing. Old, old magic; some of the first that humans ever learned to perform as a matter of fact. Hard to control, very dangerous if you get it wrong, but quite effective in the right hands. I can think of only a handful of people with the talent and skill to use it and even fewer who would be crazy enough to try.”
Basil squatted there for several minutes, scanning the room, and clearly thinking so hard Nolan could almost hear his synapses firing. Finally he stood and walked around the circle, being careful not to smudge it, and stood over what looked to Nolan like a large pile of burnt plastic melted onto the floor.
“Looks like we've definitely found the source of our problems. And from the looks of it those problems may be considerably worse than we thought.”
Basil took his cell phone from inside his jacket, pushed a single button, and spoke into it.
“Bill? Basil here, we're at 305 Waterside as you suggested, and looks like you were right on the money. Nolan and I have found the point of entry and it does not look good. Something serious crossed over here and I have a nasty suspicion about who's responsible. I think that a certain extremely dangerous lunatic is not nearly as dead as we were lead to believe.”
Basil turned and made his way back through the fans, waving his hand absently at Nolan for him to get moving, listening closely to whatever Bill was saying on the other end.
“Not a hundred percent but sure enough. I'd suggest you get a team over here quick as you can and start processing the evidence. If it is him then we need to get on his trail immediately.”
Nolan stepped back into the apartment and let Basil pass. He was glad to get away from the smell of the room, it was starting to make him feel light headed. Basil shoved his phone back into his coat and headed for the door. It was clear to Nolan that he was extraordinarily agitated. Whatever information he'd gleaned from the room had changed his mood completely. He hardly even seemed to notice that Nolan was still there. Nolan followed him out the door.
“Basil, would you mind telling what's going on?” Said Nolan.
“We need to get moving. Forensics will be here soon and I'd rather not be in their way. So, while they're doing their thing, we're going to see if we can't dig up some answers of our own.”
“Before, you told Bill you thought you knew who was behind all this.”
Basil shoved the door to the stairs so hard it slammed into the wall, producing a loud bang that reverberated through the dark shaft of the stairwell.
“His name is 'Gang'. He is unquestionably my least favorite person on the face of the earth and easily in the top five of anywhere else. He's also supposed to be deceased.”
Basil descended the stairs quickly, unhindered by the darkness, and Nolan was barely able to keep up. Several times he nearly tripped on something in the gloom and went sprawling. Once they finally reached the bottom and Nolan was able to focus less of his attention on not falling down, he continued their conversation.
“If he's supposed to be dead then how can you be sure it's him?”
“Because he's the only person who's smart enough, talented enough, strong enough, and insane enough to pull off something like this. Whatever came through into that room was not your average unspeakable horror from beyond. That looney found something really 'special' out in the wherever and decided to let it loose on the world. Whatever it was we need to find it and him or else a whole lot more people are going get dead.”
Basil silently navigated the car through the streets with a certain grim determination. He did not seem to enjoy driving even a little bit and continually cursed his fellow motorists under his breath. After driving in silence for nearly twenty minutes he began to speak as if he were continuing a conversation that had previously been interrupted.
“While you were making up your mind about us,” he said, “we've had teams trying to backtrack the path of the EDH that attacked you.”
“'EDH'?” said Nolan.
“Sorry. Stands for 'Extra Dimensional Hybrid'. Fancy name for the offspring of things from outside this dimension. It seems that body in the morgue wasn't its only victim. Unfortunate for them but it did allow us to link it to a previous incident out in the suburbs. Bill's team thinks they've managed to nail down where the whole thing started, though we've still got no leads on whatever crossed over. That's what you and I are going to follow up now. Hopefully we'll be able to dig up something on the source of all this.”
Basil brought the car to an abrupt, somewhat jarring, stop and opened his door.
“And here we are,” said Basil, “lucky us.”
There were worse neighborhoods in Inlet City, Nolan mused as he examined the dilapidated, crumbling structure that was their destination, but he was hard pressed to think of any at that particular moment. The apartment building looked deserted and Nolan had a hard time believing that anyone actually lived in it. The scant lawn in front of the building was an overgrown jungle of browning city weeds that had invaded the pavement leading to the entrance as well, he couldn't see any signs of movement or habitation in any of the windows, and the exterior of the building had clearly long since been abandoned to the elements. This sense of desertion was further reenforced by the unusual silence that pervaded the entire area. It was another unseasonably warm day, the sort of day people usually take full advantage of in temperate climates, yet the streets were eerily deserted. He couldn't even hear any birds or insectile buzzings. Basil walked up the sidewalk, brushing aside a few unruly grasses that slapped at his face, and pushed open the front door of the building. They were immediately beset by a startling miasma of urine, mold, and assorted garbage. The only source of light was what little could pierce the translucent yellow film that coated the two thin windows in the front door. Overhead an empty light socket peered at them through a thick scrim of cobwebs. Basil briefly scanned the bank of mailboxes on the wall. Most of the little windows meant for the occupants names were empty and the ones that weren’t contained tags that had long since faded to illegibility.
The address they sought was on the third floor and Nolan found, much to his dismay, that the building’s condition did not improve the further they journeyed into it. As they climbed the stairs Nolan could feel things, mercifully unseen in the gloom of the stairwell, crunching, breaking, and occasionally squishing beneath his feet. There were occasional sounds of movement through the refuse and more than once he was certain he felt something scurry across the top of his shoe.
The third floor hallway was even darker than the entryway, having no windows and only one fluorescent tube that sputtered dimly from a canted ceiling fixture. If not for the occasional muted sounds of movement from within the other apartments it would have been easy to believe that the whole place was abandoned.
As they exited the stairwell into the hall Basil suddenly froze and stuck his arm to halt Nolan as well. A second later an enormous man wearing tattered jeans and a badly stained, white tank-top came striding towards them out of the shadows. He was so tall and horribly thin that Nolan's mind initially rejected it as a hallucination, and even after he accepted its existence as an actual, living create, he could still hardly believe that such a man was capable of standing let alone walking. His sunken eyes stared at them with blank, unfocused rage as he bore down on them. Basil took a step forward and the man stopped just short of colliding with him. He stood virtually motionless, breathing in a thin, wheezy rasp, hunched over slightly so he could stare directly into Basil's eyes. Basil stared calmly back for a moment and then, in a single fluid motion, raised his right hand and smacked the tall man square in the forehead while uttering a low, gutteral noise in his throat as if he had an unpleasantly large hunk of mucus stuck there. The tall man blinked, shook his head, nearly fell over, and placed a skeletal hand on the wall to steady himself. He looked from Basil to Nolan and back again several times, as if encountering other humans for the first time in his life. Then, without a word, he walked shakily through the stairwell door and was gone.
“Enthralled,” said Basil, looking over his shoulder at Nolan, as if that explained everything, “that's promising.”
Basil strode off down the hall, staring at the floor as he walked. Nolan got the impression he was following some sort of trail, though what it might be and how he could possibly see it were a mystery. Finally Basil stopped in front the door for apartment 305 and tried the knob. It didn't turn.
“Of course not, that would be too easy,” said Basil.
Basil put his hand in front of the door knob key slot and snapped his fingers three times in rapid succession. Tiny blue sparks jumped from where his fingers met and bounced off the the face of the lock. There was a faint click from inside the the lock and when Basil tried it again it turned easily.
Basil smiled at Nolan’s perplexed expression. “I know it doesn’t seem like it but you really do get used to this stuff after awhile. Just roll with it.”
Basil pushed open the unlocked door and stepped inside. Nolan followed.
Nolan had expected something a bit different than the utterly normal looking home they entered. There were no arcane books on the tables or snarling statues of tentacled beasts or pentagrams drawn on the walls in blood. Nothing about anything he saw seemed out of the ordinary, it was a simple apartment, perhaps a little threadbare. The worst he could have said was that it was a tad boring.
“The trick,” offered Basil, as if reading his thoughts, “is to purge from your mind any notions of what you’re ‘supposed’ to be looking for. This isn’t ‘CSI: Miami’ or whatever. If you were to bring any conventional forensics team in here it’s doubtful they would find anything significant and anything they did find wouldn’t mean much to them.”
Basil walked to the center of the room and gestured at the area around him.
“Use your instincts. Let your eyes slide over everything and try to pick out the things that don’t fit. That’s what we’re looking for. If there’s anything here that can help us that’s how we’ll find it.”
“I'll try but I don't know if I'll be of much help.”
“Don't sell yourself short. Your a smart guy, I can tell. Besides, sometimes the best eyes are new eyes.”
Basil walked over to a set of bookshelves and looked over the volumes and knickknacks resting there. Nolan decided to start with the small kitchen area off the living room. It was clean but had clearly been in use recently. Toaster, microwave, spice rack, stove, nothing any normal person wouldn't have. Nolan opened the refrigerator and found nothing unusual there either, apart from it being nearly empty; a half gallon jug of milk two weeks past its expiration date, a small container of yogurt, half a sliced tomato in a plastic bag. He closed the refrigerator door and walked out of the kitchen.
Nolan walked down a short hallway, stopped briefly to look in the very tiny looking bathroom (toilet, sink, toothbrush holder complete with translucent red handled toothbrush) and continued through a doorway at the end. It was a bedroom and, like everything else, it appeared unbearably average. A bed, a beside table, pale green table lamp, a short dresser that was clearly well past its prime. He pulled open a closet door and shut it again quickly. Jeans, t-shirts, a couple pairs of shoes on the floor. Nothing of consequence. All perfectly normal.
In the living room he could hear Basil rummaging around, opening drawers, flipping through books, apparently finding nothing either.
Because there's nothing to find, thought Nolan hopelessly, everything is perfectly normal.
The idea rolled around in Nolan's head, in particular the single phrase “perfectly normal”. He'd thought it several times since they'd entered the apartment and he couldn't shake the feeling that it meant something. Nolan looked back at the bedroom and was suddenly certain that he was wrong. There was something there, something literally sitting right in front of him, that he just wasn't seeing. What was it? He went back into the kitchen and opened one of the cupboards over the sink. Some glasses, a stack of plates. Perfectly normal. He opened one of the drawers. Forks, spoons, knives. What the hell was he missing? And then it was there, so clear and obvious that he couldn't believe he'd missed it. Nolan left the kitchen and stood in the middle of the living room. He turned slowly, taking in everything; t.v., sofa, curtains, coffee table. He stopped and faced Basil, who had been flipping absently through on book on medieval farming practices, and was now watching him intently.
“Well?” Said Basil.
“Do you see it?” Replied Nolan. Basil responded with a faint smile.
“You do, don't you? You were just waiting to see if I would see it.”
“Maybe. What do you see?”
“It's normal, all of it. Perfectly normal. Absolutely, completely, and utterly normal. It's like a film set. Everything single thing is exactly as someone would expect it to be.”
“Which means?”
“It's a lie. It's hiding something.”
Basil's smile widened. He slammed shut the book and tossed onto the couch. “Nicely done, and I don't think it's just a cleverly arranged setting either. I have the feeling that if you and I were to compare notes on what we're seeing right now we might find some interesting inconsistencies.”
“So this is all some kind of illusion to, what, keep people from looking too closely?”
“Precisely. It's not the most imaginative camouflage in the world but it would probably work on most people.”
“Now we just have to figure out what it's trying to cover up.”
“Actually, I think I already have.”
Basil walked across the living room and stood in front of a blank wall on the other side.
“I noticed it when we were out in the hall but it didn't really register until I realized the same thing you did; there's a door missing.” Basil continued.
“What?”
“There were four doors on the opposite side of the hall, four apartments, but on this side... only three. And I believe that missing apartment would be on the other side of this wall.” He ran his fingers over the blank face of the wall. “Ah, here we are.”
Basil produced a small knife with a curved blade from within the folds of his coat. Nolan noticed there were tiny runes etched into the surface of the blade. Basil raised the knife and plunged it hard into the wall. The blade disappeared through the surface and sunk into something that sounded like wood beneath it. The wall began to ripple where the knife pierced it, as if it were an image mirrored on the surface of a pool that had just been disturbed. Slowly the image of the wall faded away, revealing a heavy wooden door with Basil's knife stuck in its surface. There was a line of raised metal discs set into the wood along the door's jamb, to Nolan they looked like brass, each with a red symbol painted on it's surface. Basil ran his finger along each one and they sizzled as the painted symbols were smudged away.
“Alright, knife's done its job then, else touching those probably would have killed me.”
Basil plucked the knife free and returned it to its place within his coat. A thin line of spoke drifted up from the spot where it had been.
“There are more elegant ways to do that sort of thing,” he said as he turned the door's knob, “but I always say: 'why fuck around'?”
Nolan had about a million question about what had just happened but thought better of asking them. Hopefully there would be time for that later. Basil shouldered open the door and stepped into the room. Nolan followed after him and stood in the doorway, uncertain of what he was seeing. The room was filled with electric fans of every size and description. Nolan coughed as the smell of burnt plastic and wiring washed over him.
“Good lord,” he said, covering his mouth and nose. Basil didn't seem to notice.
“I'd stay there if I were you. It looks like the party's over but you can't always tell for sure.”
Basil walked across the room, weaving his way through the obstacle course of defunct fans, and knelt next to a white circle drawn on the floor in chalk. In the middle of the circle was a metal bowl that had been partially over turned. It's contents, a pile of black ash, had spilled out onto the floor. Basil took a pinch of the ash, sniffed it, and put it in his mouth.
“Shit,” said Basil with a deep frown.
“I hope you don't mean that literally.”
Basil stood and wiped his finger on his coat. “Thankfully, no. Though honestly it might be better if it was.”
“What's all this for?”
“Smoke drawing. Old, old magic; some of the first that humans ever learned to perform as a matter of fact. Hard to control, very dangerous if you get it wrong, but quite effective in the right hands. I can think of only a handful of people with the talent and skill to use it and even fewer who would be crazy enough to try.”
Basil squatted there for several minutes, scanning the room, and clearly thinking so hard Nolan could almost hear his synapses firing. Finally he stood and walked around the circle, being careful not to smudge it, and stood over what looked to Nolan like a large pile of burnt plastic melted onto the floor.
“Looks like we've definitely found the source of our problems. And from the looks of it those problems may be considerably worse than we thought.”
Basil took his cell phone from inside his jacket, pushed a single button, and spoke into it.
“Bill? Basil here, we're at 305 Waterside as you suggested, and looks like you were right on the money. Nolan and I have found the point of entry and it does not look good. Something serious crossed over here and I have a nasty suspicion about who's responsible. I think that a certain extremely dangerous lunatic is not nearly as dead as we were lead to believe.”
Basil turned and made his way back through the fans, waving his hand absently at Nolan for him to get moving, listening closely to whatever Bill was saying on the other end.
“Not a hundred percent but sure enough. I'd suggest you get a team over here quick as you can and start processing the evidence. If it is him then we need to get on his trail immediately.”
Nolan stepped back into the apartment and let Basil pass. He was glad to get away from the smell of the room, it was starting to make him feel light headed. Basil shoved his phone back into his coat and headed for the door. It was clear to Nolan that he was extraordinarily agitated. Whatever information he'd gleaned from the room had changed his mood completely. He hardly even seemed to notice that Nolan was still there. Nolan followed him out the door.
“Basil, would you mind telling what's going on?” Said Nolan.
“We need to get moving. Forensics will be here soon and I'd rather not be in their way. So, while they're doing their thing, we're going to see if we can't dig up some answers of our own.”
“Before, you told Bill you thought you knew who was behind all this.”
Basil shoved the door to the stairs so hard it slammed into the wall, producing a loud bang that reverberated through the dark shaft of the stairwell.
“His name is 'Gang'. He is unquestionably my least favorite person on the face of the earth and easily in the top five of anywhere else. He's also supposed to be deceased.”
Basil descended the stairs quickly, unhindered by the darkness, and Nolan was barely able to keep up. Several times he nearly tripped on something in the gloom and went sprawling. Once they finally reached the bottom and Nolan was able to focus less of his attention on not falling down, he continued their conversation.
“If he's supposed to be dead then how can you be sure it's him?”
“Because he's the only person who's smart enough, talented enough, strong enough, and insane enough to pull off something like this. Whatever came through into that room was not your average unspeakable horror from beyond. That looney found something really 'special' out in the wherever and decided to let it loose on the world. Whatever it was we need to find it and him or else a whole lot more people are going get dead.”
Chapter 13 - Parapsychic Ophelia
She was lost.
There was nothing save the half-sensation that she had been there before.
Shot through with the pervasive sense of self-doubt chattering away like a thousand petulant stepmothers.
She had gone too deep again. Maybe too deep this time to ever come back.
She was searching, chasing a phantom, triangulating a garbled transmission from somewhere in the uncharted recesses of her mind.
She didn't stop. She pushed harder. She could feel it there, pulsing erratically, a fibulating psychic heartbeat, emanating waves of pure thought stuff.
It was too deep. No right minded person who valued their sanity would keep going. But she was so close... just a little more...
Cognitive whiplash hit like a repressed memory and she tried to roll with it. Cogent breakdown was normal but this was the worst she had experienced. Thoughts began to collapse in on themselves, their new psychic density creating mental gravity wells that drew other ideas in on them.
Her sense of self was the first thing to go. Nothing save the most basic concepts of what she was, Human, Woman, remained clear. Everything else mixed with a lifetime's worth of random thoughts and gave birth to a jarring juxtaposition of contradictory identities.
She was the bearded lady, the anthropomorphic cat girl, the good time nanny from Sheffield, the tall blond helicopter, the soft palindrome engine.
Signal.
Bug.
Star.
Bullet.
Ink.
Echo.
All of it was something and nothing and everything. Up was loud and down was blue.
She reached further still, even as the last remnants of self-awareness fell away and she was left mentally naked. The whole of her being became that single, desperate pursuit. And then... pain.
The man who had taught Dimes how to travel inside herself had been quite adamant about teaching her the fail-safe. She'd tried to tell him it was unnecessary, that she was prepared to take the risk, but he would not hear of it. So she'd learned it, an automatic mental trigger that would disrupt the trance state and haul her back to reality. It was a wholly independent mental construct without need for conscious intervention. It had to be, since its whole purpose was to draw a person out at the point of total cognitive collapse. Dimes had spent the first few months after leaving her mentor's tutelage deliberately trying to disable, or at least override, that mental programming. She thought she had succeeded but the bloody hunks of torn skin under her fingernails told a different story. The nails of her right hand had managed to tear through her jeans and rake four deep furrows into the flesh of her thigh. It hurt like hell and for a moment it was the only things she knew. Then her senses began to slowly reawaken, followed shortly by her first conscious thought: “bandage”.
The wound on her leg turned out to be worse looking than it really was. Fortunately she kept her nails relatively short and they had only managed to tear through a few layers of skin after penetrating the fabric of her jeans.
Still, she thought, better to be safe, as she applied an ample layer of antibiotic ointment and placed a large adhesive bandage over her injury.
In truth her failure, her tenth successive, hurt more than her wound. She had really believed that this time would be the one. The feeling of something lurking in the shadows of her mind had been an ever present distraction since childhood. It sat like a splinter of glass in her brain, nagging her with its inexplicable presence, daring her to determine its nature and origin. Her father would have called her a fool and remonstrated her for her inability to accept what she could not change. She could almost hear him: “You waste your time and endanger yourself, for what? What does it matter? What will knowing this thing change?” Her father's voice was the voice of her conscience, the voice of reason and rationale, always there to set her straight. Of course she would have argued with him about that, as she always had, and she would have lost, as she always had. But what was she supposed to do? Sit and wait for the inevitable?
After dressing her wound Dimes went into the kitchen and threw her torn, bloodied jeans in the garbage. She debated putting on clean pants but decided the risk of her bandage bleeding through was still too possible. Besides, it wasn't like she was expecting company or anything. Her short, black hair was a mess, her pale blue tank top was in desperate need of washing, she honestly couldn't be sure how long she'd been wearing that particular pair of underwear, and she could still feel a few tiny fragment of blood and skin that she hadn't been able to scrub from beneath her nails. No, today was definitely not the day for entertaining guests.
In Dimes' living room, hanging on the eastern wall, was a single, small photograph in a plain wooden frame. The photo was of her father. So far as she knew it was the only photo of him in existence. It was also the only thing that adorned any wall in her home. Dimes had taken the photo herself on the day she'd left for college. Her father's hair was short, as he'd kept it later in life when it had started thinning, and he wore a thoughtful, almost blank, expression. Anyone else looking at the photo might think he was looking at something beyond the photographer, his eyes distant and contemplative, seemingly unaware that he was being photographed. Normally her father would have refused any attempt to take his picture but on that day he'd allowed it, staring off into the distance and pretending that he hadn't noticed Dimes with her camera.
Dimes walked into the living room and stood in front of her father's picture. She thought that she ought to feel awkward or uncomfortable standing there in her underwear, even though it was only a picture, but she didn't. She knew, had he been standing there in the flesh, that he hardly would have noticed the state of her dress, let alone cared one way or the other about it. Dimes looked into the distant eyes of the only person she had ever truly respected and wished he really were standing there at that moment.
Arthur Kibuya had been a brilliant man, though Dimes had not realized it while he was alive, and like many brilliant men he had not wasted time trying to be understood. As a child she had loved him. As a teen she had hated him. But it wasn't until adulthood that she had understood him, and with that understanding came respect. It was her father who had given her the name “Dimes”, a name that had, most of her life, been something of a conundrum. When she was ten years old she had asked her father what her name meant. His actual answer, being almost entirely devoid of pertinent information, she promptly forgot, but the gist of it had been: "what difference does it make what your name means?" At the time, and for years after, she had determined the reason for this non-answer to be that there wasn't an answer. Her name didn't actually mean anything. It would take another decade for her to realize how wrong that assumption was. Her father was an eccentric man, often give to behaviors that seemed random and purposeless, but he rarely, if ever, did anything without a reason. The name he had given to his only child was no exception nor was he simply being obtuse by not telling her why he had named her so.
Now here she was, what seemed like a thousand years later, ironically longing for his guidance. Her father had never been one for telling his daughter what she ought to do, yet somehow all his cryptic phrases and answerless answers had done more to help Dimes find her way than any advice she could have received. She tried to imagine what he might actually say to her now but it was impossible. The voice in her head was as close as she could come and it was a pale shadow by comparison.
Madness was closing in on her, she felt it as surely as she felt her own beating heart, and that cruel wire twisting through her mind was the source. Every day it crept closer, tiny claws gently picking away at her sanity bit by bit, and she was still no nearer to any sort of answer. She'd spent five years trying to fix herself, five years of everything from psychotherapy to psychic surgery, and she had nothing to show for it but an extensive knowledge of what didn't work. She had not exhausted all her options but those that remained were less than appealing.
Dimes' specialty was names, an obsession born of her own unusual moniker. Etymology, onomastics, toponymy, if it had to do with names she had studied it. She was not identified as an expert in any particular field, but only because her area of expertise was not recognized as a “field of study”. Of particular fascination for her was the power of names. Dimes' theories regarding the psychological impact of names, on either side of the social interaction equation, were often met with skepticism, if not outright disdain. On the less “realistic” end of her spectrum of study, what some might term “paranormal” or even “occult”, she tended to remain quiet. It was hard enough for her to be taken seriously given the unorthodox views she did express. On those subjects she could hardly even be considered a novice, having pulled back quickly when she had realized what she was getting into. Over time she'd continued, very carefully, to probe the depths of that world, if only out of curiosity. Except now she found herself looking to that world as perhaps her last chance for salvation. Were there answers there and was she willing to go looking for them? Insanity was a terrifying fate but her limited studies had lead her to believe it might be far from the worst.
No, she thought, I don't care how dangerous it is. I won't spend the rest of my life as a screaming lunatic, shitting herself and beating her head against the wall of some padded cell. Anything but that.
Dimes went into her bedroom and pulled the sheet off her bed. It was plain and white, which was exactly what she needed. She took the sheet into the living room and laid it out on the floor in front of her father's picture. To say that her father would have disapproved of what she was about to do was a dramatic understatement. Dimes had made many questionable choices in her life, some her father had lived to state his opinion on and some he had not, but this was something he might have actually tried to intervene against. She could have gone into a different room, it would have been easier, but she refused to do so. Following this new path would require courage and if she couldn't summon the courage to do it in her father's sight then she wouldn't have the courage to see things through to the end.
Dimes knelt on the clean, white sheet and carefully tore the bandage from her leg. The blood had stopped flowing and she could see the reddish pink of her exposed, raw flesh. Gritting her teeth she dug her thumb into the deepest of the gashes. Fresh blood welled up and ran down the side of her thigh. Dimes placed her bloodied thumb to the sheet and slowly wrote her name in tall, capital letters. Beneath her name she drew a series of symbols and then drew a large circle around all of it. Finally she closed her eyes and plunged all her fingers into her leg, fully reopening the wound, and tearing the flesh even deeper than before, as focused all her mental energy on a single question. The pain in her leg grew to a burning crescendo and she fought back the urge to withdraw. Pain was part of it, pain would draw attention to her, pain was her gift and her offering.
Dimes' hand twitched, bringing a fresh gout of pain and blood, and stilled. It spasmed again, though her muscles remained lax, and she winced as the fingers clawed deeper still. Suddenly her hand leapt up from her leg, dragging her limp arm behind it, and rose up over her head like an overeager student begging to be called on. It was as if her hand were a glove that someone else had slipped on, she could feel it move, but the will was not her's. Her index finger flicked forward, pointing towards the wall in front of her, flinging a line of bloody droplets across the glass of her father's picture. Dimes leaned forward as her arm swept down and slammed her finger painfully against the sheet. She kept her eyes closed, focusing all her concentration on her question, as her finger twitched and jumped across the blank sheet, sometimes returning to jam itself back into her leg, her wound serving as bloody inkwell to her finger's quill, before continuing on with its frantic scribbles.
When it was over Dimes slumped and nearly fell over. It was only her desire to see the results of her ordeal that kept her from succumbing to the urge to pass out. Across the formerly pristine face of her bed sheet, which she was now obviously going to have to replace, were scrawled a nearly indecipherable mass of symbols. They competed with one another for space, occasionally overlapping and intermingling. Most them she did not recognize, or at least could not immediately identify, though a few seemed somewhat familiar. But in the center of the mass, untouched by any other symbols, was something she did recognize, though what it might mean was beyond her. It was a single word, neatly written in wide, block letters: “GANG”.
There was nothing save the half-sensation that she had been there before.
Shot through with the pervasive sense of self-doubt chattering away like a thousand petulant stepmothers.
She had gone too deep again. Maybe too deep this time to ever come back.
She was searching, chasing a phantom, triangulating a garbled transmission from somewhere in the uncharted recesses of her mind.
She didn't stop. She pushed harder. She could feel it there, pulsing erratically, a fibulating psychic heartbeat, emanating waves of pure thought stuff.
It was too deep. No right minded person who valued their sanity would keep going. But she was so close... just a little more...
Cognitive whiplash hit like a repressed memory and she tried to roll with it. Cogent breakdown was normal but this was the worst she had experienced. Thoughts began to collapse in on themselves, their new psychic density creating mental gravity wells that drew other ideas in on them.
Her sense of self was the first thing to go. Nothing save the most basic concepts of what she was, Human, Woman, remained clear. Everything else mixed with a lifetime's worth of random thoughts and gave birth to a jarring juxtaposition of contradictory identities.
She was the bearded lady, the anthropomorphic cat girl, the good time nanny from Sheffield, the tall blond helicopter, the soft palindrome engine.
Signal.
Bug.
Star.
Bullet.
Ink.
Echo.
All of it was something and nothing and everything. Up was loud and down was blue.
She reached further still, even as the last remnants of self-awareness fell away and she was left mentally naked. The whole of her being became that single, desperate pursuit. And then... pain.
The man who had taught Dimes how to travel inside herself had been quite adamant about teaching her the fail-safe. She'd tried to tell him it was unnecessary, that she was prepared to take the risk, but he would not hear of it. So she'd learned it, an automatic mental trigger that would disrupt the trance state and haul her back to reality. It was a wholly independent mental construct without need for conscious intervention. It had to be, since its whole purpose was to draw a person out at the point of total cognitive collapse. Dimes had spent the first few months after leaving her mentor's tutelage deliberately trying to disable, or at least override, that mental programming. She thought she had succeeded but the bloody hunks of torn skin under her fingernails told a different story. The nails of her right hand had managed to tear through her jeans and rake four deep furrows into the flesh of her thigh. It hurt like hell and for a moment it was the only things she knew. Then her senses began to slowly reawaken, followed shortly by her first conscious thought: “bandage”.
The wound on her leg turned out to be worse looking than it really was. Fortunately she kept her nails relatively short and they had only managed to tear through a few layers of skin after penetrating the fabric of her jeans.
Still, she thought, better to be safe, as she applied an ample layer of antibiotic ointment and placed a large adhesive bandage over her injury.
In truth her failure, her tenth successive, hurt more than her wound. She had really believed that this time would be the one. The feeling of something lurking in the shadows of her mind had been an ever present distraction since childhood. It sat like a splinter of glass in her brain, nagging her with its inexplicable presence, daring her to determine its nature and origin. Her father would have called her a fool and remonstrated her for her inability to accept what she could not change. She could almost hear him: “You waste your time and endanger yourself, for what? What does it matter? What will knowing this thing change?” Her father's voice was the voice of her conscience, the voice of reason and rationale, always there to set her straight. Of course she would have argued with him about that, as she always had, and she would have lost, as she always had. But what was she supposed to do? Sit and wait for the inevitable?
After dressing her wound Dimes went into the kitchen and threw her torn, bloodied jeans in the garbage. She debated putting on clean pants but decided the risk of her bandage bleeding through was still too possible. Besides, it wasn't like she was expecting company or anything. Her short, black hair was a mess, her pale blue tank top was in desperate need of washing, she honestly couldn't be sure how long she'd been wearing that particular pair of underwear, and she could still feel a few tiny fragment of blood and skin that she hadn't been able to scrub from beneath her nails. No, today was definitely not the day for entertaining guests.
In Dimes' living room, hanging on the eastern wall, was a single, small photograph in a plain wooden frame. The photo was of her father. So far as she knew it was the only photo of him in existence. It was also the only thing that adorned any wall in her home. Dimes had taken the photo herself on the day she'd left for college. Her father's hair was short, as he'd kept it later in life when it had started thinning, and he wore a thoughtful, almost blank, expression. Anyone else looking at the photo might think he was looking at something beyond the photographer, his eyes distant and contemplative, seemingly unaware that he was being photographed. Normally her father would have refused any attempt to take his picture but on that day he'd allowed it, staring off into the distance and pretending that he hadn't noticed Dimes with her camera.
Dimes walked into the living room and stood in front of her father's picture. She thought that she ought to feel awkward or uncomfortable standing there in her underwear, even though it was only a picture, but she didn't. She knew, had he been standing there in the flesh, that he hardly would have noticed the state of her dress, let alone cared one way or the other about it. Dimes looked into the distant eyes of the only person she had ever truly respected and wished he really were standing there at that moment.
Arthur Kibuya had been a brilliant man, though Dimes had not realized it while he was alive, and like many brilliant men he had not wasted time trying to be understood. As a child she had loved him. As a teen she had hated him. But it wasn't until adulthood that she had understood him, and with that understanding came respect. It was her father who had given her the name “Dimes”, a name that had, most of her life, been something of a conundrum. When she was ten years old she had asked her father what her name meant. His actual answer, being almost entirely devoid of pertinent information, she promptly forgot, but the gist of it had been: "what difference does it make what your name means?" At the time, and for years after, she had determined the reason for this non-answer to be that there wasn't an answer. Her name didn't actually mean anything. It would take another decade for her to realize how wrong that assumption was. Her father was an eccentric man, often give to behaviors that seemed random and purposeless, but he rarely, if ever, did anything without a reason. The name he had given to his only child was no exception nor was he simply being obtuse by not telling her why he had named her so.
Now here she was, what seemed like a thousand years later, ironically longing for his guidance. Her father had never been one for telling his daughter what she ought to do, yet somehow all his cryptic phrases and answerless answers had done more to help Dimes find her way than any advice she could have received. She tried to imagine what he might actually say to her now but it was impossible. The voice in her head was as close as she could come and it was a pale shadow by comparison.
Madness was closing in on her, she felt it as surely as she felt her own beating heart, and that cruel wire twisting through her mind was the source. Every day it crept closer, tiny claws gently picking away at her sanity bit by bit, and she was still no nearer to any sort of answer. She'd spent five years trying to fix herself, five years of everything from psychotherapy to psychic surgery, and she had nothing to show for it but an extensive knowledge of what didn't work. She had not exhausted all her options but those that remained were less than appealing.
Dimes' specialty was names, an obsession born of her own unusual moniker. Etymology, onomastics, toponymy, if it had to do with names she had studied it. She was not identified as an expert in any particular field, but only because her area of expertise was not recognized as a “field of study”. Of particular fascination for her was the power of names. Dimes' theories regarding the psychological impact of names, on either side of the social interaction equation, were often met with skepticism, if not outright disdain. On the less “realistic” end of her spectrum of study, what some might term “paranormal” or even “occult”, she tended to remain quiet. It was hard enough for her to be taken seriously given the unorthodox views she did express. On those subjects she could hardly even be considered a novice, having pulled back quickly when she had realized what she was getting into. Over time she'd continued, very carefully, to probe the depths of that world, if only out of curiosity. Except now she found herself looking to that world as perhaps her last chance for salvation. Were there answers there and was she willing to go looking for them? Insanity was a terrifying fate but her limited studies had lead her to believe it might be far from the worst.
No, she thought, I don't care how dangerous it is. I won't spend the rest of my life as a screaming lunatic, shitting herself and beating her head against the wall of some padded cell. Anything but that.
Dimes went into her bedroom and pulled the sheet off her bed. It was plain and white, which was exactly what she needed. She took the sheet into the living room and laid it out on the floor in front of her father's picture. To say that her father would have disapproved of what she was about to do was a dramatic understatement. Dimes had made many questionable choices in her life, some her father had lived to state his opinion on and some he had not, but this was something he might have actually tried to intervene against. She could have gone into a different room, it would have been easier, but she refused to do so. Following this new path would require courage and if she couldn't summon the courage to do it in her father's sight then she wouldn't have the courage to see things through to the end.
Dimes knelt on the clean, white sheet and carefully tore the bandage from her leg. The blood had stopped flowing and she could see the reddish pink of her exposed, raw flesh. Gritting her teeth she dug her thumb into the deepest of the gashes. Fresh blood welled up and ran down the side of her thigh. Dimes placed her bloodied thumb to the sheet and slowly wrote her name in tall, capital letters. Beneath her name she drew a series of symbols and then drew a large circle around all of it. Finally she closed her eyes and plunged all her fingers into her leg, fully reopening the wound, and tearing the flesh even deeper than before, as focused all her mental energy on a single question. The pain in her leg grew to a burning crescendo and she fought back the urge to withdraw. Pain was part of it, pain would draw attention to her, pain was her gift and her offering.
Dimes' hand twitched, bringing a fresh gout of pain and blood, and stilled. It spasmed again, though her muscles remained lax, and she winced as the fingers clawed deeper still. Suddenly her hand leapt up from her leg, dragging her limp arm behind it, and rose up over her head like an overeager student begging to be called on. It was as if her hand were a glove that someone else had slipped on, she could feel it move, but the will was not her's. Her index finger flicked forward, pointing towards the wall in front of her, flinging a line of bloody droplets across the glass of her father's picture. Dimes leaned forward as her arm swept down and slammed her finger painfully against the sheet. She kept her eyes closed, focusing all her concentration on her question, as her finger twitched and jumped across the blank sheet, sometimes returning to jam itself back into her leg, her wound serving as bloody inkwell to her finger's quill, before continuing on with its frantic scribbles.
When it was over Dimes slumped and nearly fell over. It was only her desire to see the results of her ordeal that kept her from succumbing to the urge to pass out. Across the formerly pristine face of her bed sheet, which she was now obviously going to have to replace, were scrawled a nearly indecipherable mass of symbols. They competed with one another for space, occasionally overlapping and intermingling. Most them she did not recognize, or at least could not immediately identify, though a few seemed somewhat familiar. But in the center of the mass, untouched by any other symbols, was something she did recognize, though what it might mean was beyond her. It was a single word, neatly written in wide, block letters: “GANG”.
Chapter 12 - Behold The Prisoner
“Nyarlathotep,” said Nolan. He'd intended for it to be a question but somehow it hadn't come out that way.
“Yes. Are you familiar with the name?”
Nolan’s brow furrowed as he picked at the edge of a faded memory. “Vaguely. I think I’ve heard it somewhere before.”
Mr. Sound gave Nolan a curiously knowing look. Nolan, too busy being awed by the colossal thing before him, failed to notice.
The creature hung against the wall, reaching to the top of the twenty foot high ceiling, held by a complex arrangement of heavy clamps and chains. It looked to be a confused conglomeration of various unrelated appendages attached to the body of a bulbous fish and its coloration reminded Nolan of an unfortunate gastrointestinal experience he’d had with a plate of spoiled broccoli covered in cheese. From the center of the mass of limbs a huge, unblinking, pale yellow eye stared at him with a black pupil that shifted like an endlessly cycling Rorschach ink blot. Around the large eye was a ring of smaller black blobs that pulsed and quivered. Nolan crossed the space before the creature and the great eye followed him. Other details about the room hovered at the edge of his perception as well. There were guards in black uniforms standing at regular intervals along the walls, each holding a smaller version of the weapon that had saved him in the forest. The wall opposite the creature was composed entirely of panes of thick glass set in steel frames. Behind the glass people hovered around large pieces of equipment, the functions of which he could hardly guess. But none of those things made any real impression on him. It was the thing on the wall that demanded his full attention. He hardly even noticed when Mr. Sound started speaking again.
“We’ve had him here for twenty years. Most of what we now about his kind, their biology in particular, we've learned from him. For example; we know they're capable of reproducing with virtually any complex life form. In fact, that creature you encountered in the forest is almost certainly one of their offspring .”
“Something like this made the thing that attacked me?”
“Not exactly, most likely it was one of the lesser ones. You wouldn’t want to encounter one their offspring,” said Mr. Sound gesturing at Nyarlathotep, “and you wouldn’t be standing here if you had.”
Painted on the floor some forty feet from where the monster hung was a thick, red line. Nolan stepped up to it without looking down.
“Mind the line,” said Mr. Sound casually.
Without warning a thin, suckered tentacle tipped with a cruel looking hook shot forward at Nolan and hung, quivering, in the air less than an inch from his face. It all happened so fast that Nolan had no time to react and he stood staring straight ahead as if he hadn't even noticed what had occurred. One of the guards leveled his weapon and fired a single blast at the tentacle. The offending limb whipped backward to its owner who let out a high pitched squeal that Nolan, in his shock, was only vaguely aware was not audible.
“Seems he likes you,” said Mr. Sound with a grin.
“What?” replied Nolan when he finally remembered to breath.
“I’m joking of course. To be honest we’ve no idea what goes in their minds, or if they even have minds, or if they even ‘think’ in the way we perceive thoughts. We have managed to establish a limited means of communication over the past few years but I’m afraid he isn’t very forthcoming on such matters.”
"You can talk to it?"
"He understands human speech and we’ve been able to translate some of the things he ‘says’. Personally I’m convinced that he could address us in our own tongue if he wanted to but chooses instead to play the enigmatic ‘Creature From Beyond’. Or maybe I’m just projecting.”
“And it’s name is Nyarlathotep.”
“Not really, that’s just what we call him. We don’t think they really have any use for names where they come form. He was 'assisted' in crossing over to our world by a cult calling themselves 'The Followers of Nyarlathotep', so it seemed as good a name as any. Names help us to keep track of the more unique specimens we encounter.”
This last statement managed to penetrate Nolan's enthralled mental paralysis and he looked away from the creature for the first time since entering the room. It wasn't easy.
“You have other things like this here?” Asked Nolan, looking concerned.
“Unfortunately no. He’s the only one we’ve managed to capture alive, or dead for that matter, but we do keep records of our encounters with other members of his species, though such encounters are rare.”
“Is it safe? The restraints look a little…”
“Medieval?” Mr. Sound finished.
“Yeah.”
“Our equipment here has to be somewhat ‘low tech’. These creatures, particularly the larger ones, project a localized electromagnetic field, which plays havoc with all manner of electronic equipment, especially delicate things like microprocessors and integrated circuits. Things tend to go haywire or just stop functioning all together.”
“But aren’t those electric?” Said Nolan pointing at one of the guard's weapons.
“Ah yes, the ‘Tesla Cannons', a very astute observation,” Mr Sound paused, “the truth is we don’t have the slightest idea why they work when everything else doesn't. I wish we did but our boys in the lab can’t seem to puzzle it out.”
Nolan nodded and turned back to Nyarlathotep. His gaze kept wandering back to the eye, the pupil in particular. Something about the ever changing shape seemed familiar to him and he found it harder and harder to look away. Mr. Sound placed a hand on Nolan’s shoulder and he started .
“Be careful of the eye,” Mr. Sound said seriously, “if you’re not it will draw you in and you really don’t want that. We nearly lost a very good agent of ours that way.”
Nolan shook his head and turned away from the creature. The effort he had to exert in resisting the urge to look back was alarming.
“Come on,” said Mr. Sound, clapping him on the back, “there’s someone else you need to meet.”
“Who’s that?”
“Your partner.”
Mr. Sound led Nolan through a door on the far side of the room. As they left every technician and guard in the room, all of whom had been deliberately not looking at them the whole time, turned to watch them go.
The hallway past the door was much more narrow and less brightly lit than the one they'd entered through, which gave Nolan a momentary twinge of claustrophobia as the door swung slowly shut behind them. The corridor was empty and quiet. Mr. Sound led him in silence and Nolan took the time to try and regain his mental balance. Mr. Sound had been right, he had thought he'd understood what he was in for, but seeing Nyarlathotep had thrown all that straight out the window. He realized what a mistake it had been, assuming he knew what to expect, and made a mental note to avoid that sort of misstep in the future. He had a feeling that following such a guideline might just be the key to surviving.
Mr. Sound stopped abruptly in front of a door along the hallway and pushed it open. The room inside was mostly dark except for a white light that shown brightly down from the center of the ceiling. Two men were standing in front of a metal table and looking down at something that Nolan couldn't see. One of the men wore a long, brown trench coat that looked about a hundred years old. Both men turned and looked up as Nolan and Mr. Sound entered the room. Nolan caught a small glimpse of something red and wet lying on the table behind them.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Sound, “good to see you've arrived. This is the new agent I informed you about, Nolan Savitch. Nolan, you may recognize the gentleman on the right from your previous encounter, one Bill Tin. The gentleman on the left is your new partner, Basil Dollory.”
Basil Dollory stood with a slight hunch, which made him seem shorter than he really was. His dark brown hair, looking in desperate need of both a strong comb and a sharp pair of scissors, hung lankly across his forehead and cast thin shadows on his face that distorted his feature. Basil looked at Mr. Sound for a moment and Nolan got the sense of some unspoken communication passing between them, then he turned to Nolan and aggressively locked eyes with him for an uncomfortable span. Nolan froze and could think of nothing to say. Basil's eyes were like thunderclouds, dark grey and full of barely restrained force, yet his expression was blank and Nolan could glean nothing from it, so he simply looked back, uncertain how to proceed. Finally Basil's eyes softened and a slight grin formed on his lips.
“So then,” said Basil, “new agent eh? Well there's worse things to be I suppose. I take it you've just been to see 'Ol' Squiddy'? Quite the piece of work isn't he? Now from that... to this, hell of a first day.” Nolan caught the hint of an accent in Basil's speech, something nasal and vaguely European, but it wasn't like any he'd ever heard before.
Basil turned back to the table while Bill stepped forward and held out a leather gloved hand to Nolan. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and Nolan noticed that the visible skin of his outstretched arm was hairless and mottled with scars. From beneath the cuff of his glove light winked off something that looked like a metal bracelet.
“We meet again Mr. Savitch,” said Bill and he gestured with a nod over his shoulder, “don't mind him one bit, he's not nearly the bastard he seems to be.”
Bill took Nolan's hand and shook it twice. Nolan noticed that his grip was inhumanly strong and solid.
“Now that the introductions are out of the way,” said Mr. Sound, “perhaps you two would like to give us a rundown on what we have so far in this particular investigation.”
Bill and Basil each took a step apart to give the newcomers a better view of the table. Nolan's stomach turned and he silently prayed that he would not throw up. Piled on the table like a mound of ground meat sat what Nolan could only assume, based on the few intact parts he could identify, were human remains.
“You might recognize this,” said Basil, “as the body you saw in the alleyway the other night, though I suppose 'body' is now a bit of stretch.”
“Yes. Are you familiar with the name?”
Nolan’s brow furrowed as he picked at the edge of a faded memory. “Vaguely. I think I’ve heard it somewhere before.”
Mr. Sound gave Nolan a curiously knowing look. Nolan, too busy being awed by the colossal thing before him, failed to notice.
The creature hung against the wall, reaching to the top of the twenty foot high ceiling, held by a complex arrangement of heavy clamps and chains. It looked to be a confused conglomeration of various unrelated appendages attached to the body of a bulbous fish and its coloration reminded Nolan of an unfortunate gastrointestinal experience he’d had with a plate of spoiled broccoli covered in cheese. From the center of the mass of limbs a huge, unblinking, pale yellow eye stared at him with a black pupil that shifted like an endlessly cycling Rorschach ink blot. Around the large eye was a ring of smaller black blobs that pulsed and quivered. Nolan crossed the space before the creature and the great eye followed him. Other details about the room hovered at the edge of his perception as well. There were guards in black uniforms standing at regular intervals along the walls, each holding a smaller version of the weapon that had saved him in the forest. The wall opposite the creature was composed entirely of panes of thick glass set in steel frames. Behind the glass people hovered around large pieces of equipment, the functions of which he could hardly guess. But none of those things made any real impression on him. It was the thing on the wall that demanded his full attention. He hardly even noticed when Mr. Sound started speaking again.
“We’ve had him here for twenty years. Most of what we now about his kind, their biology in particular, we've learned from him. For example; we know they're capable of reproducing with virtually any complex life form. In fact, that creature you encountered in the forest is almost certainly one of their offspring .”
“Something like this made the thing that attacked me?”
“Not exactly, most likely it was one of the lesser ones. You wouldn’t want to encounter one their offspring,” said Mr. Sound gesturing at Nyarlathotep, “and you wouldn’t be standing here if you had.”
Painted on the floor some forty feet from where the monster hung was a thick, red line. Nolan stepped up to it without looking down.
“Mind the line,” said Mr. Sound casually.
Without warning a thin, suckered tentacle tipped with a cruel looking hook shot forward at Nolan and hung, quivering, in the air less than an inch from his face. It all happened so fast that Nolan had no time to react and he stood staring straight ahead as if he hadn't even noticed what had occurred. One of the guards leveled his weapon and fired a single blast at the tentacle. The offending limb whipped backward to its owner who let out a high pitched squeal that Nolan, in his shock, was only vaguely aware was not audible.
“Seems he likes you,” said Mr. Sound with a grin.
“What?” replied Nolan when he finally remembered to breath.
“I’m joking of course. To be honest we’ve no idea what goes in their minds, or if they even have minds, or if they even ‘think’ in the way we perceive thoughts. We have managed to establish a limited means of communication over the past few years but I’m afraid he isn’t very forthcoming on such matters.”
"You can talk to it?"
"He understands human speech and we’ve been able to translate some of the things he ‘says’. Personally I’m convinced that he could address us in our own tongue if he wanted to but chooses instead to play the enigmatic ‘Creature From Beyond’. Or maybe I’m just projecting.”
“And it’s name is Nyarlathotep.”
“Not really, that’s just what we call him. We don’t think they really have any use for names where they come form. He was 'assisted' in crossing over to our world by a cult calling themselves 'The Followers of Nyarlathotep', so it seemed as good a name as any. Names help us to keep track of the more unique specimens we encounter.”
This last statement managed to penetrate Nolan's enthralled mental paralysis and he looked away from the creature for the first time since entering the room. It wasn't easy.
“You have other things like this here?” Asked Nolan, looking concerned.
“Unfortunately no. He’s the only one we’ve managed to capture alive, or dead for that matter, but we do keep records of our encounters with other members of his species, though such encounters are rare.”
“Is it safe? The restraints look a little…”
“Medieval?” Mr. Sound finished.
“Yeah.”
“Our equipment here has to be somewhat ‘low tech’. These creatures, particularly the larger ones, project a localized electromagnetic field, which plays havoc with all manner of electronic equipment, especially delicate things like microprocessors and integrated circuits. Things tend to go haywire or just stop functioning all together.”
“But aren’t those electric?” Said Nolan pointing at one of the guard's weapons.
“Ah yes, the ‘Tesla Cannons', a very astute observation,” Mr Sound paused, “the truth is we don’t have the slightest idea why they work when everything else doesn't. I wish we did but our boys in the lab can’t seem to puzzle it out.”
Nolan nodded and turned back to Nyarlathotep. His gaze kept wandering back to the eye, the pupil in particular. Something about the ever changing shape seemed familiar to him and he found it harder and harder to look away. Mr. Sound placed a hand on Nolan’s shoulder and he started .
“Be careful of the eye,” Mr. Sound said seriously, “if you’re not it will draw you in and you really don’t want that. We nearly lost a very good agent of ours that way.”
Nolan shook his head and turned away from the creature. The effort he had to exert in resisting the urge to look back was alarming.
“Come on,” said Mr. Sound, clapping him on the back, “there’s someone else you need to meet.”
“Who’s that?”
“Your partner.”
Mr. Sound led Nolan through a door on the far side of the room. As they left every technician and guard in the room, all of whom had been deliberately not looking at them the whole time, turned to watch them go.
The hallway past the door was much more narrow and less brightly lit than the one they'd entered through, which gave Nolan a momentary twinge of claustrophobia as the door swung slowly shut behind them. The corridor was empty and quiet. Mr. Sound led him in silence and Nolan took the time to try and regain his mental balance. Mr. Sound had been right, he had thought he'd understood what he was in for, but seeing Nyarlathotep had thrown all that straight out the window. He realized what a mistake it had been, assuming he knew what to expect, and made a mental note to avoid that sort of misstep in the future. He had a feeling that following such a guideline might just be the key to surviving.
Mr. Sound stopped abruptly in front of a door along the hallway and pushed it open. The room inside was mostly dark except for a white light that shown brightly down from the center of the ceiling. Two men were standing in front of a metal table and looking down at something that Nolan couldn't see. One of the men wore a long, brown trench coat that looked about a hundred years old. Both men turned and looked up as Nolan and Mr. Sound entered the room. Nolan caught a small glimpse of something red and wet lying on the table behind them.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Sound, “good to see you've arrived. This is the new agent I informed you about, Nolan Savitch. Nolan, you may recognize the gentleman on the right from your previous encounter, one Bill Tin. The gentleman on the left is your new partner, Basil Dollory.”
Basil Dollory stood with a slight hunch, which made him seem shorter than he really was. His dark brown hair, looking in desperate need of both a strong comb and a sharp pair of scissors, hung lankly across his forehead and cast thin shadows on his face that distorted his feature. Basil looked at Mr. Sound for a moment and Nolan got the sense of some unspoken communication passing between them, then he turned to Nolan and aggressively locked eyes with him for an uncomfortable span. Nolan froze and could think of nothing to say. Basil's eyes were like thunderclouds, dark grey and full of barely restrained force, yet his expression was blank and Nolan could glean nothing from it, so he simply looked back, uncertain how to proceed. Finally Basil's eyes softened and a slight grin formed on his lips.
“So then,” said Basil, “new agent eh? Well there's worse things to be I suppose. I take it you've just been to see 'Ol' Squiddy'? Quite the piece of work isn't he? Now from that... to this, hell of a first day.” Nolan caught the hint of an accent in Basil's speech, something nasal and vaguely European, but it wasn't like any he'd ever heard before.
Basil turned back to the table while Bill stepped forward and held out a leather gloved hand to Nolan. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and Nolan noticed that the visible skin of his outstretched arm was hairless and mottled with scars. From beneath the cuff of his glove light winked off something that looked like a metal bracelet.
“We meet again Mr. Savitch,” said Bill and he gestured with a nod over his shoulder, “don't mind him one bit, he's not nearly the bastard he seems to be.”
Bill took Nolan's hand and shook it twice. Nolan noticed that his grip was inhumanly strong and solid.
“Now that the introductions are out of the way,” said Mr. Sound, “perhaps you two would like to give us a rundown on what we have so far in this particular investigation.”
Bill and Basil each took a step apart to give the newcomers a better view of the table. Nolan's stomach turned and he silently prayed that he would not throw up. Piled on the table like a mound of ground meat sat what Nolan could only assume, based on the few intact parts he could identify, were human remains.
“You might recognize this,” said Basil, “as the body you saw in the alleyway the other night, though I suppose 'body' is now a bit of stretch.”
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