Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  Finding the way in was easy enough, as here too a path had been shoveled through the snow. She followed it clockwise around the dome to where a door was set into the concrete.

  Hippolyta used the first of her keys. She shone her flashlight inside and saw a short flight of concrete steps leading up to a metal walkway with handrails. A power switch was mounted just inside the doorway.

  The walkway was raised above a pool of shiny black liquid that filled the base of the dome. Lights ringed the pool, illuminating the dome’s interior surface, which was as smooth and blank as its exterior. The walkway led to a central platform with some sort of control console. Beyond the platform the walkway continued, extending about three-quarters of the way across; fixed to the end of it was a vertical rectangular frame that seemed to have been coated with the same dark shiny fluid that was in the pool.

  Hippolyta stepped carefully along the walkway. She didn’t know what the substance in the pool was—her frozen nose could detect no odor, chemical or otherwise—but she guessed it would not be good for swimming in.

  She examined the console. Arrayed on its face in eight rows of eight were sixty-four windows, each displaying the number 001, the individual digits stamped onto separate metal reels. To the right of the number array were a small round hole and a single large button.

  Hippolyta tried pressing the button first. The console emitted a loud sterile click but nothing else happened. She got out the rod-shaped key and inserted it into the hole. It fit perfectly. She slotted it all the way home.

  The lights flickered. From beneath the platform came a whir of machinery starting up, the sound broadening and deepening to a bass hum that produced a standing wave on the surface of the pool. Gradually the hum faded, settling into a barely audible register. The lights flickered again, and dimmed, and then the whole dome just disappeared, leaving Hippolyta exposed on the open hilltop.

  No. The dome was still there. What she was seeing was a projection, a live panorama from outside: There was Jupiter, and there was the path she’d trod through the snow.

  She turned her attention back to the console. A red glow emanated from around and between the metal reels, illuminating the numbers. Hippolyta focused on the lower-rightmost window in the array. She touched a finger to the 1, giving it a light downward nudge; the reel ticked over to 2. She looked up. The view was unchanged. She thought: Now try the button.

  This time when she pressed it there was a deep thrum of vibration from beneath the pool. The dome went black and for a moment she could see nothing but the red glow from the console. Then the projection came back up and she found herself in a starry void. The hilltop had vanished.

  Hippolyta craned her head around, looking for familiar constellations and not finding any. Two stars did stand out, not because she recognized them but because they were close enough to appear to her as tiny disks, one blue, one orange, set like mismatched eyes just a few degrees apart. Twin stars!

  Near the base of the dome was a third object: a small, irregularly shaped asteroid, tumbling slowly but visibly, each moment’s rotation exposing a new portion of its surface to the light of the twin stars. Hippolyta laughed and clapped her hands. If only her father could see this!

  She turned again to the console, calculating: If each of the sixty-four number settings went from 000 to 999, that would put the sum total of possible combinations at ten to the 192nd power. Hippolyta tried to think what word, ending in -illion, you’d use to describe that figure, came up with “sixty-thrillion,” and burst out laughing again.

  Sixty-thrillion celestial panoramas. But they couldn’t really all be different, could they?

  Hippolyta reached out and ticked the 2 in the lower right window over to 3. Then, seized by a giddy abandon, she began changing numbers at random.

  She pressed the button again, and—

  Thrum.

  —she was skimming an ocean of blue clouds, mountainous azure thunderheads rising all around her, while above through a thinner haze she glimpsed another unfamiliar sun and the broad bands of a ring encircling the planet.

  It was beautiful. It was also frightening—especially the view straight ahead and down, the frame at the walkway’s end now looking very much like a doorway through which she might dive, or fall, into a turbulent sea whose depths were lit by titanic lightning flashes. In a sudden terror of vertigo, Hippolyta reached for the console array, changed a single number, and hit the button again.

  Thrum.

  Bright light! A scorched landscape of black rock was tinged red by an enormous sun cresting the horizon in front of her. Hippolyta put up a hand to shield her eyes—then spread her fingers to peer at an optical illusion. The edge of the sun intersected the doorframe at the end of the walkway, highlighting a discontinuity in the image. The portion of the projection that fell within the frame appeared to be closer, somehow.

  Hippolyta shivered, the winter air inside the dome conflicting with the hellish vision that surrounded her. She thought about the snow lying on the ground outside and asked herself what would happen if she were to toss a snowball through that open frame. Would it splatter against the wall of the dome, spoiling the illusion? Or would it flash into steam as it encountered the heat of an alien star?

  Interesting experiment. Hippolyta might even have tried it, if the next thought hadn’t occurred to her: You don’t open a doorway just to chuck out snowballs. Doors are for walking through. Which implied a place to walk to, a destination where a human being could stand without asphyxiating or being turned into a charcoal briquette.

  Of course, with sixty-thrillion destinations to choose from, it could take an eternity of trial and error to find one that wouldn’t kill you. Hippolyta would have liked nothing better than to stay here and sample those myriad worlds, but she didn’t have much time, so she decided to cheat and look up the answer in the back of the book.

  Working quickly, she set the dials. She took a last look at the scorched planet of the red sun (about to be lost to her forever, she realized, since she had not copied its address down). Then she pressed the button.

  Thrum.

  Out of the momentary blackness, a great spiral galaxy appeared. It hung in a night sky before her and was reflected, like a brilliant, many-armed moon, in the surface of a dark ocean whose waters lapped the shore of a white sand beach.

  Hippolyta went to the end of the walkway and stood staring through the open frame. Then she leaned sideways, steadying herself against the handrail.

  No simple illusion, this: When she looked around the doorframe, she could see the unbroken panorama projected against the curve of the dome a few feet away; but when she looked through the frame, the beach was right there, and no mere projection but a seemingly three-dimensional space into which a single step would carry her.

  Right there, and yet also, obviously, elsewhere. She could see the night surf breaking on the beach, but she couldn’t hear it. And the air she drew in and expelled visibly from her mouth was still Wisconsin air, winter air. The air on the beach—she couldn’t say how she knew this, but felt certain it was so—the air on the beach would be warmer.

  She stretched out a hand. As it passed within the frame she felt a tingling against her palm that quickly became unpleasant. She reached further, encountering increasing resistance and pain, and finally drew back, having meanwhile intuited a new piece of information: This doorway didn’t allow half measures. You couldn’t just stick a finger or a toe through; you had to commit, step boldly.

  Sure, Hippolyta thought, glancing at the dark pool beneath the walkway. And the next thing that happens is you fall in the muck, and probably break a leg in the bargain. Because it’s a trick; it has to be.

  “But I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said, and stepped through the doorway.

  The air on the beach was warmer.

  The salt breeze blowing in over the gently plashing surf felt like late spring or early fall. The shoulder season, Hippolyta thought: Tourist cabins would be a bargain,
provided you could find someone to rent to you. She breathed deeply, the sea air differently scented than that of her native Atlantic but containing sufficient oxygen—she didn’t grow dizzy or faint.

  The sand felt strangely springy. Hippolyta looked down and bounced experimentally on the balls of her feet. It wasn’t the sand, she realized: It was her. She was lighter. Not much—unlike Orithyia Blue on Mars or Ganymede, she did not go bounding into the air—just enough to feel it in the tendons of her ankles as they flexed: gravity turned down a notch.

  Smiling, Hippolyta stretched out her arms, went up on tiptoe, and executed a graceful half-pirouette. To face, behind her, a seven-by-three-foot rectangle cut out of the fabric of reality, through which could be seen the chilly interior of the dome on Warlock Hill. The doorway on this end was framed by thin bars of light that cast a faint glow on the sand.

  She walked around it, curious to see what it looked like from the backside. Not like much: Though the glowing frame was visible from every angle, when viewed from behind it was an empty frame, the same beach inside and outside the lines. She circled around to the front again, watched Wisconsin rotate back into view out of nowhere. “OK,” she said nodding.

  Next she surveyed her wider surroundings. The beach fronted on a high rocky cliff, atop which Hippolyta could make out a line of trees, their leaves shining silver in the light from the galaxy. To her left the cliff ran straight as far as she could see, the strip of beach in front of it unbroken save for a single boulder, a dark lump on the sand in the middle distance. But to her right, just a couple of hundred yards away, a ridge of rock extended fingerlike from the cliff, forming a high promontory that cut down across the sand to the water. The side of the ridge was marked by a gray zigzag that registered instantly as a staircase, and up top she could see two buildings. One, set back near where the ridge joined the cliff, appeared to be a single-story flat-roofed structure; the other, located at the very end of the promontory overlooking the water, was dome-shaped, and while it was difficult to make out details, Hippolyta would have sworn she detected the bulge of a telescope hatch.

  Just a quick look around, she thought. In and out. But what happens—looking back through the doorway to Earth, she made herself ask the question—what happens if, while you’re up there, somebody comes and turns the machine off?

  You wake up, she answered. Because this is a dream. Obviously.

  The warm sea breeze, caressing her cheek, begged to differ on that point.

  She ignored it.

  The staircase bolted to the side of the ridge was enclosed in metal bars, and there was a gate at the bottom. The gate wasn’t locked, but the latch was a complicated affair requiring two more-or-less human hands to operate. Wondering what sort of intruders this was meant to keep out, she recalled the ocean-dwelling squid men of Europa from Orithyia Blue #5. If it was squid men, Hippolyta thought, she should be OK; they respected pistol fire.

  A buzzer sounded on the ridge above her as she pulled the gate open. She stepped through quickly, shut the gate, and listened. Nothing now but the surf.

  Despite the reduced gravity, the steps rattled disconcertingly beneath her feet as she ascended. She sprinted up the last flight and stopped to catch her breath on the top landing. Now she could see the dome clearly: It was an observatory. She guessed the other building was a residence, a guesthouse for planet-hopping astrophysicists. There was no sign of life in either structure.

  To exit the top of the staircase she had to pass through two more gates, set in opposite sides of a ten-foot-wide cage. This reminded Hippolyta of the booby-trapped airlock the corsairs of Neptune had used to knock out Orithyia Blue in issue #4, but she was well past the point of no return now, so she said a quick prayer and entered the cage.

  The inner gate wouldn’t open. She’d bent to get a closer look at the latch when she heard crackling and felt invisible fingers teasing her hair. She looked up. Blue sparks were dancing around a series of coils suspended from the top of the cage.

  That can’t be good, Hippolyta thought, and then her head filled up, appropriately enough, with stars.

  When Hippolyta came to she was lying on a cot in a small lamplit room. Her first thought was that she was back in Wisconsin, in the guard shack. But the ceiling and walls that surrounded her were metal, not wood, and the figure sitting watch on her was a Negro woman with iron-gray hair and a face deeply seamed with wrinkles. The old woman had the Survey in her lap, open to the page with the numbers, and she was holding Hippolyta’s .38.

  Eyes on the gun, Hippolyta sat up. She felt light-headed, but there was no pain and no obvious bumps or bruises from the fall she must have taken. She swung her legs over the side of the cot.

  The old woman spoke: “Stand up before I give you leave, and your brains will be all over that wall behind you.” She said it calmly, not threatening but as though making a simple observation about how the universe—this corner of it, anyway—worked.

  “All right,” said Hippolyta, and folded her hands in front of her.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Hippolyta Berry.”

  “You work for him?”

  “Who?” Hippolyta said.

  “Winthrop! Hiram Winthrop.”

  “No. I—”

  “Don’t you lie to me!” The old woman snatched up the open book, presenting it face-out like a warrant. “This writing is in his hand!”

  “I don’t know whose hand that is. I found the book in the Winthrop House, but—”

  “So you were in his house. So you work for him!”

  “No,” Hippolyta said. “It’s called the Winthrop House, but Hiram Winthrop is dead. My friend Letitia Dandridge lives there now. It’s her house.”

  “You’re friends with a white woman named Letitia Dandridge?”

  “She’s not a white woman.”

  “A colored woman owns the Winthrop House? And she sent you here?”

  “No one sent me. I came out to see the observatory on my own.”

  “Why? What would possess you to do that?” She dropped the Survey back into her lap and thrust the gun forward. “I told you not to lie to me!”

  “Wait,” said Hippolyta. “Just wait. I can explain. Years ago, when I was a little girl, my father brought home a telescope . . .”

  “Well,” the old woman said when Hippolyta had finished. “I don’t suppose anyone would make up a tale like that. You got one thing wrong, though: Mr. Winthrop did send you.”

  “No. I told you, he’s—”

  “Dead, yeah, I got that. But I’m talking about his spirit.” Hippolyta must have looked skeptical, for the old woman suddenly narrowed her eyes. “Oh, what? You’re too smart to believe in ghosts? Flying across the universe, though, that’s logical . . . I’ll tell you something else, too: You’re too late again. This planet? Mr. Winthrop already named it.”

  Hippolyta glanced at the book, feeling a sudden, absurd pang of disappointment. “T. Hiram,” she guessed. “Terra Hiram: Hiram’s world.”

  The old woman nodded. Then she said: “You can get up now. My name’s Ida.”

  “You hungry?” Ida asked her.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’m hungry,” Ida said.

  They’d come out to a larger room with a dining table and chairs, a counter and sink along one wall, and windows that looked out towards the dome at the end of the promontory and down at the beach. The room and pretty much everything in it was fashioned out of the same grayish metal; studying the wall behind the chair she sat in, Hippolyta could see seams where big metal plates had been fitted together like jigsaw pieces.

  “This house was built from a kit,” Ida explained. “Portable explorer’s cottage, or somesuch. It’s got an instruction manual. What I’d really like to see, though, is the box the parts came in.”

  She turned to an appliance resembling a miniature oven that rested on the counter beside the sink. It had a swing-down door on the front and a control panel featuring an eight-digi
t number window, a green light, and a button, which Ida pushed. There was a chunk of a lock engaging and the green light turned red. A bass note sounded. After about half a minute the noise ceased, the red light turned yellow, and the door unlocked. Ida opened it and lifted out a gray metal pan, its top sealed with foil. She carried the pan to the table and peeled the foil off, releasing a puff of steam. Hippolyta leaned forward: The pan was filled with some sort of sweet-smelling white sponge cake. “Angel food?” she guessed.

  “Manna,” said Ida, sitting down. “That’s what the manual calls it. Supposed to have all your daily requirements. It’s kept me alive, anyway.” She reached in and tore off a hunk of the cake and popped it in her mouth.

  Hippolyta picked up the foil sheet that had sealed the pan. Impressed on it was a series of eight digits: 00000001.

  “Every number’s something different,” Ida told her. “It’s all food, but the manual doesn’t have any menu description beyond number one, so you don’t know what you’re going to get until you get it. And the box has a regulator that only lets you run it once every four hours”—she indicated the yellow light—“so if you conjure up something nasty, you either have to choke it down or wait. Mary, she liked to stay up nights and play the food lottery. I kept hoping she’d hit the number for hot chocolate.”

  Hippolyta looked over at the food maker. “Do you know how it works?”

  “There’s a big round tank in the utility room with pipes running in and out of it,” Ida said. “The manual calls it ‘the prime matter vessel,’ and stresses how you must never, ever, ever try to break it open. The prime matter, I gather that’s something like the dirt God made Adam out of, right before He breathed life into it.” She tore off another hunk of manna. “Tasty dirt.”

  “Who’s Mary?” Hippolyta asked.

  “We worked together at the Winthrop House,” Ida said. “There were six of us: James Storm, who was Mr. Winthrop’s chauffeur; Gordon Lee, the cook; Mr. Slade, the handyman; and me, Mary, and Pearl, the maids.