“Did you just convince me that assassinating judges is the more moderate course of action?”
“Quite possibly. Anyway, the good news is that D-6 turns out to be anchored to the earth in our own three dimensions.”
“D-6?” Chantal asked.
“Our reality up till now has had four dimension, the fourth dimension being time, temporality, the curved axis of change. The place where Marquita’s orbs come from to visit us is very close, I do think of it as kind of like an airlock attached to our back door, we can see right into it in the ultraviolet spectrum, for heaven’s sake. For convenience sake we call it D-5.”
“The Fifth Dimension.”
“That was a pop group in the sixties, actually. Marilyn McCoo: ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’?” But the orbs actually appeared to come and go from somewhere farther away, Worthy explained, somewhere that could only be accessed through the vortexes … vortices, whatever.
“So the orbs are returning to … D-6?”
“That’s what we’re calling it, for convenience sake.”
“And you said,” Chantal joined in, again, “that D-6 turns out to be … anchored to our own earth?”
“On the other side there’s an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with some CO2, gravity about one earth normal, normal amounts of sunshine, all that good stuff.”
“This was in doubt?” Chantal looked understandably concerned.
“All the physicists will tell us is there could be 31 dimensions — God knows where they got ‘31’ — all compressed on top of one another like helical ribbons, but invisible to us because we’re only equipped to see in three dimensions. They won’t even hazard a guess as to what relation they’d bear to one another. But Lovecraft reported seeing these strange creatures apparently swimming through the air, so right from the start we were pretty sure we were going to find different worlds.”
“Like earth, but not like earth.” Chantal was trying to visualize it.
“Exactly. Though we still don’t know about all of them. For all I know, there may still be dimensions where the earth’s not there at all — you step through your vortex and suddenly you’re floating in the frozen vacuum of deep space. You’d be a zero-degree Popsicle long before you could turn around and run for home.
“But even with dimensions that seem earth normal, I still worry. If you’re really popping into a different Rhode Island that’s had some different geologic history, who’s to say you won’t arrive while there’s an Ice Age going on, find yourself crushed under a couple thousand feet of glacier? Or maybe what looks like the surface of the earth here has been eroded into a giant canyon or gully by different weather patterns in your Earth Six or Earth Eight, and once again you pop out the other side and you’re up in the air looking at the ground a thousand feet down, like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff.”
“You worry a lot, Worthy,” Matthew nodded.
“Every now and then worrying about contingencies has real survival value, if not for me then for the next poor sap who pulls on a helmet and buzzer and walks into that vortex. And that’s the other thing, the vortexes themselves, vortices, whatever you want to call them.”
“Dangerous?” Matthew asked.
“Are they naturally occurring? Could someone or something on the other side be creating them? Clearly they don’t always lead to the same place. What controls that? Can we dial a different destination, like dialing the frequency on a radio?”
“Like our old Stargate TV show.”
“I see you wasted your youth the same way I did.” Worthy smiled.
“You’re working on frequency control?”
“Yes, but without some theoretical grasp of how they work, it’s all shots in the dark.”
“Is that what happened to Bucky and Alvin? They crossed over and back once, figured they could do the same thing again, but something went wrong? Where do you figure they are?”
“We don’t know. We just keep sending teams in, whenever the coast is clear, gradually widening our search area.”
“Whenever the … coast is clear?” Chantal asked.
“It’s not exactly uninhabited. There’s, uh … wildlife.”
“I see.”
“Yeah.”
“Has it struck you your problem is that you’re looking for solutions that are entirely electro-mechanical?” Matthew asked.
“You mentioned that before. But how are you going to generate sound vibrations without using something electro-mechanical?”
“The sound waves themselves aren’t opening the vortexes,” Matthew explained. “The sound waves are necessary, but they’re vibrating the human skull, which in turn has some impact on the pineal gland, possibly the hippocampus, which then has some impact on the optic nerve. The openings have to be perceived by a human brain. So maybe your solution lies inside the brain.
“Sure, the first component is the resonator, but to fine tune your destination your solution may have to be biochemical, training human minds in a DMT-activated state to discern and choose their options. The mechanical aid is like the first big booster rocket, lots of power but no precision. Eventually you need to allow your travelers to fine tune things based on their own volition. That’s going to require either tryptamines or, more likely in this case, the phenethylamines, acid or mescaline.”
“Holy cow,” said Worthy. Matthew just nodded, knowing enough to give him time to think it through.
Then Worthington Annesley did something Chantal wasn’t sure she’d actually seen anyone do in real life — she’d always thought it was something you just read about in books, or they told actors to do in the movies. Worthy actually slapped himself upside the forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Of course! How could I be so blind? And they’re the sacraments of our own church!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The four-member away team stood ready in the middle of the huge, barn-like corrugated steel building, three men and a stout woman with hair even shorter than Chantal’s, identically outfitted in full combat survival gear, including military-style helmets, backpacks, canteens, and rifles that were not little skinny-barreled M-16s. They were M-14s, in .308. Chantal thought at first that one might be the slightly larger .338, though that would have been dumb. If they ran into trouble, you’d want everybody to be able to use the same ammo. So probably it was just a bull-barreled .308 sniper. Heavy, but a tack-driver. The four of them stood facing the blank wall where Worthy’s upgraded resonators would attempt to open a vortex through the fifth to the sixth dimension. Or allow them to perceive a vortex that was already there. Or something.
There’d been no time to talk about dosing them up on anything psychoactive on such short notice. Tonight, at least, they’d still be relying on the electro-mechanical resonator, alone.
As Worthy got a thumbs up from each control desk, he nodded for them to begin their power-up. Circuits were thrown closed, green lights came on, flickered, then grew steady, as the low hum of power flowing through the system slowly grew louder.
He waited almost half a minute for the desks to signal their power levels had stabilized before signaling for the juice to be fed to the giant resonator itself.
The device began to hum, presumably generating most of its effect from the things that looked like huge tuning forks jutting up toward the ceiling. The main tone was in the mid-range of human hearing, somewhere in the alto register, though there were also harmonics, making it sound a bit like a two-hand chord being played on an old church organ. Even the floor vibrated a little.
Then, as the volume increased, Chantal noticed the sound setting her teeth on edge. Suddenly she was developing a mild headache behind her eyes. Well, that’s where the pineal gland was supposed to be, after all. Then the center of the discomfort gradually rose to the very top of her skull, where it sat along a line from front to back, presumably the line between the two hemispheres of her brain. She looked at Matthew, who remained stoic but was squinting a bit, evidently feeling the same effects. Skeez
ix put his hands to his ears, as did some of the engineers sitting at their consoles, though most of them smiled — they’d obviously been through this before. Presumably their machinery was employing levels of power geometrically greater than those that had been available to Worthy’s great-uncle, a hundred years before.
And then, against the blank wall, or maybe just this side of the blank wall, something began to happen. At first, it was like a swirl of mist, maybe four or five feet across. But it grew, both in size and definition.
Watching the vortex open was riveting, almost hypnotic. You had to turn your eyes away and look back to convince yourself it wasn’t a trick with mirrors, or some kind of 3-D movie projector. Like the iris of a giant camera opening to admit more light, an opening simply appeared in the fabric of space, surrounded by swirling but somehow tautly stretched white and blue mist.
And beyond — as though you could see right through what you knew was a solid metal wall — was a different landscape, an open, moonlit clearing or savannah with, in the distance, a primeval forest of giant trees, like something out of the Jurassic era. No fog tonight on that side. Not far away, waist-high creatures stopped what they were doing and looked back through the vortex, directly at the occupants of the building. Their eyes caught the moonlight like cats’ eyes, glowing gold or copper. But these animals were not mammals. They were something else.
And, off in the middle distance, something else stopped and turned to look, something … much larger. Chantal felt a shiver run down her spine. What the hell was that? No, make that a “them” — two sets of copper-colored eyes the size of softballs now stared directly at her. Perspective could be tricky in the moonlight, but she felt sure they had scales. Reptilian. Upright on their hind legs, they appeared to stand eight, maybe 10 feet tall, and they were looking for something to eat. Tentatively, they turned and started approaching the vortex.
“We’ve got a problem, Worthy,” said one of the engineers, not shouting, but also not joking.
“What is it?”
“Don’t know. Looking at a whole bank of yellow lights over here, and now a red, three reds, my bank is going red, Worthy.”
“Power down. Power down the resonators. Away team back off, you’re not going through if we’re not stable.”
With a cracking noise, a huge blue spark arced across what appeared to be several large transformers on the far side of the room. More banks of condition lights started to flicker from green to yellow, and then to red.
“Shut down. From the resonators on back, shut down in reverse sequence.”
“I’ve been trying, Worthy, the controls aren’t answering. It’s like the circuits are welded closed.”
More blue lightning flashes arced across the top of the giant resonators themselves and now the control panels, as well. The cracking noises were actually scarier than the flashes. Several of the operators shouted and pulled their hands away as they were hit with electric shocks.
Meantime, the vortex had not been shrinking away, or even holding steady. It was now almost as wide as the building, and the edges were gradually, perceptibly, creeping further into the building, threatening to envelop the control panels and the engineering staff themselves.
“Shut down! Emergency shut down! Throw the main!”
The away team was backing away from the advancing vortex more quickly now. One of them half-tripped over Skeezix, who’d been frozen in place, watching the advancing spectacle. Little Skeezix spun to the floor.
“Where’s your main breaker?!” Matthew shouted over the growing commotion, now verging on panic.
“Over there!” Worthy shouted back, pointing to a large gray metal box on the furthest control panel, now well within the verge of the expanding vortex.
“Oh, that’s brilliant,” said Matthew, as he broke like a halfback through the defensive secondary, darting past a half-dozen white-shirted engineers who were either backing away or frozen in postures of confusion.
Matthew dashed past Skeezix, who’d been struggling to get back to his feet, reached the foot-long lever of the master breaker, and threw all his weight onto it. Skeezix picked himself up off the floor and raced to help him. Between them, they slammed it down to the “Off” position.
The reaction was immediate. The high-pitched mechanical hum quickly began to drop both in pitch and volume. There were a few more sparks now, but they were red and yellow, not neon blue. There was a smell of burnt insulation. The vibrations of the resonators themselves began to drop away, and as they did the giant vortex began to shrink, closing down till it was a mere 20 yards across, a mere 10 yards, the edges beginning to grow obscured in a swirl of mist, and then — with a hiss and a pop — it closed.
They were safe. A few of the technicians grabbed fire extinguishers and sprayed foam on some hot connections that were still smoking, but otherwise everything appeared to be back to normal.
Except that Matthew and Skeezix were gone.
“Where are they?” Chantal asked.
“What?” Worthy didn’t yet seem to have fully absorbed what had happened.
“Where are Matthew and Skeezix?”
“They were on the other side of the vortex when it closed down,” explained Cory the engineer, currently the calmest voice in the room.
“Which means they’re …?”
“Still on the other side,” Cory nodded.
“And we’re going to be able to open that thing and get them back when?”
Worthy didn’t answer.
“We’ve got some circuitry here that’s just melted, Worthy,” reported one of the engineers over by the far wall, “like somebody’s been at it with a welding torch. I have no idea why the breakers didn’t open sooner. It’s like they were held closed by some kind of magnetic field.”
“Cory?” Chantal asked.
“Too soon to know. But I’d guess we’ve got a couple days work here to re-wire, and that’s before we even talk about figuring out what went wrong, installing some new backup safety systems.”
“It’s all right, Chantal.” Worthy, rarely at a loss for long, had regained his composure. “We’ve had other people go through and come back safe and sound. The air and water on the other side are fine. We’ll get them back.”
“Worthy, am I the only one who saw the kind of wildlife they’re up against, out there? Do I need to point out to you that Matthew and Skeezix are unarmed, they don’t have so much as a canteen and a candy bar between them?”
“Chantal, the native fauna will probably be just as surprised to get a look at them. Animals tend to run away from the unknown.”
“Are you standing there and making this shit up?!” she shouted.
“Well … OK, yeah. But what’s true is that other people have gone through and come back. Our top priority now is to re-open a stable vortex and send through a rescue team. We’ll get them all back, Chantal. Soon as we can.”
* * *
Chantal hung around for three hours, long after it was obvious their systems had suffered enough damage that it was going to be several days, at least, before they could attempt to open another vortex — and that was before they started talking about the new safeguards they needed to put in place so they wouldn’t have another “runaway.”
“I’ve got people on the other side, too, Chantal,” Worthy kept insisting, “people who have been out there a lot longer. I assure you we’ll get back to you as soon as we can send someone through to get word about how they’re doing, and then we’ll get them back. In the meantime, I’m hoping I don’t have to worry about you causing us any …”
“The last thing I need at this point, Worthy, is you in jail and Sergeant Smoky from the state police barracks trying to figure out how to get this thing to work — assuming they wouldn’t just take it apart and store it in an evidence yard wrapped in yellow tape for a year or two. For now, we’ve got a common cause. In fact, I’ve got to get back to the city and collect a few letters from the lawyer’s office.”
�
�Glad to hear it, Chantal. Sorry it worked out this way. Matthew saved our bacon by throwing that breaker, he saved all our asses; we owe him a big one.”
“He’ll be so glad to hear that.”
At the end she was actually killing time, stumbling around like a sleepwalker as the crew pulled apart fried wires and circuits, some of them melted and still smoking, till she could get a private word with Cory. He finally came over to bring her a refill on her lukewarm cup of tea. In styrofoam, of course, lovely.
“A number where I can reach you in private,” she said, casually.
“Slip of paper under the bottom of your cup,” he smiled. “Whoever answers, you’re my sister Kate. Do I have a problem?”
“Once in the teams, always in the teams.”
“Glad to hear it.”
The sky was already growing a lighter gray as Chantal recovered their $50 bolt cutters from outside the fire door and took her leave. She’d been planning to walk but an older black man with a closely trimmed white mustache and beard who looked like Uncle Remus offered to give her a ride. It did occur to her there might be a few outliers in Worthy’s outfit who figured she’d seen too much and might cause less trouble chained to a piece of angle iron and dropped in the Bay, but since she still had her .40-caliber equalizer in the easy-access pocket in her purse she said she’d accept the ride as long as it was just going to be the two of them.
He started to turn left, for the airport, but she directed him right, to the small-boat marina.
“Ah. A little misdirection back there, about your mode of arrival.”
“It rarely pays to lay down all your cards; Matthew taught me that.”
“A wise man.”
“Thanks for playing chauffeur,” she said, after a few moments’ silence.
“That’s my job, actually, chauffeur, mostly out at the airport.”
“Worthy and his church seem to draw folks from all walks of life.”
“Yes, ma’am, that they sho ’nuff do.”
The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Page 15