by S. T. Joshi
“What did you see?” Biggs asked.
She shook her head. “There’s no opening. Just a brick wall.”
I approached her and took her arm. “Wait, you’re saying there’s no tunnel?”
She shook her head.
“Goddamn you, Dalhoy, I should have known better than to believe your crazy story!” Biggs erupted.
Before he could insult me any further, I lifted my dust-covered camera and recalled the picture I had snapped of Aught’s walking corpse with the black thing sticking out of his mouth. I showed it to Biggs in the viewfinder. That shut him up. I showed him the other picture of the black ball. It didn’t convey much. There was no way to judge its size in the photo, and not much detail was visible on its black surface, but at least it was something to prove that I hadn’t fabricated my story.
Days went by. Biggs investigated the disappearance of Lewiston but found nothing. He even tried to dig out the bricks at the back of the corpse drawer, but after his men dug in six or eight feet, he had to stop. There was no tunnel. Somehow those creatures had filled it in during the time it took me to get to the surface and back to the morgue.
Nobody questioned me again. Nobody tried to seize my photographs for evidence. The whole thing was so insane, the police just quietly let it drop. Can you blame them? Who would want to be responsible for investigating such a story?
You’d think I’d make a fortune selling those pictures, right? Wrong. These days, everyone automatically assumes a pic is phony if it contains anything weird. There are so many ways to fake photographs, most of the time they are right. Trouble is, the genuine pictures fall through the cracks because nobody takes them seriously.
Lewiston’s body was never recovered. I went to his memorial service. I didn’t want to go, but I had to do it. At the end of the ceremony I approached his mother to offer my condolences.
“I knew your son briefly, Mrs. Lewiston,” I told her, holding her hand. “He was a fine man and a real credit to the police force.”
She nodded. Her eyes were red but not wet. She had already cried all the tears she had in her.
“I just pray to Mother Mary that he’s at peace. He was a good son.”
I nodded and tried to smile, but in my mind I had an image of Lewiston’s corpse, lurching through the darkness with a little black head full of teeth sticking out of his gaping mouth.
The Shard
DON WEBB
Don Webb teaches horror writing at UCLA extension. When his twin brothers were excused from the draft for their gout in 1967, they gave him The Colour out of Space and Other Stories. One look at the flaming skull on the cover, and he belonged to Lovecraft ever since.
MY COUSIN BART AND I WERE THE SAME AGE. WE were both smart. He was Ivy League smart and I was University of Texas smart, and we were big SF geeks. James and Bart: big dorks. He was seventeen when IT happened. We never knew what IT was. His parents took him to the UK that summer. Mainly straight-on tourist stuff—Stonehenge, Big Ben, Bath, that sort of thing. My aunt was (and is) a musicologist. She was researching the “Brichester Sound”—an obscure late ’60s phenomenon—overshadowed by the lads from Liverpool. It was a mix of psychedelica and something called “Severn Valley” folk music. Stuff like that bored Bart silly. He was like me a collector of coins, rocks, and weird stuff. So while Mom and Dad were interviewing old hippies, Bart took a handful of pounds and visited Lower Brichester shops. The last one, Mercy Hill Curios (“If you can afford it, it’s a Mercy”), had tons of neat (and, despite the slogan, affordable) junk. He bought a plastic frame that showed Britain’s last traditional currency next to the decimal stuff, a large very worn copper penny with Queen Victoria, a signed copy of Carl Dreadstone’s The Mummy (Carl being a Lower Brichesterer made good), and a tourmaline spar about four inches long. On the flight back to Dallas he slept in the plane, holding the green and pink rock crystal in his left hand.
His senior year started and his grades fell like a stone. His parents suspected dope or girls. But Bart just stayed in his room. Frequent searches did not reveal the devil’s cabbage— and other than his growing fascination with Star Trek in the form of Spock posters, he seemed to have no vice. I remember visiting him for Thanksgiving. His room was creepy. Every wall had posters of Spock, Saavik, Sarek, T’Pring, and every other Vulcan or Romulan you can name covering all the walls. His books were gone (except Star Trek comics). His CDs gone. His rocks gone save for the aforementioned tourmaline spar. He wore a blue Star Trek uniform. He tried to Vulcan nerve-pinch me. His parents had him tested. His 186 IQ had dropped by a hundred points. There were drugs and therapy—and by the end of the year he was out of high school and in a special institution. His parents stopped talking about him.
By 1992 I had my BS in geology from the University of Texas and was doing a master’s at Rice University in petroleum geology. My future was so bright, I had to wear shades . . .
I was the only family member who would visit Bart. He still liked sci-fi, and I would take him to current movies. He told me corny jokes:
Q: What did Spock find in Kirk’s toilet?
A: The Captain’s Log.
or:
Q: How many Vulcans does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Approximately 1.0000000000000000000000000000.
He would joke about being crazy. I noticed he never let the spar leave his hands, even when eating. I reached for it once. He did a Gollum impression: “My precioussssss.” But he held on. And life went on. I got my MS, and then got a Mrs., and then divorced and got another Mrs. Then Sally died. I would see Bart once or twice a year. He was a little less talkative. Somehow we both became thirty and then forty. I got a golden retriever. I joined a couple of book clubs—one read classic science fiction, the other touch-to-read stuff like House of Blue Leaves or The Raw Shark Texts. And Bart held on to his crystal. On his forty-second birthday I showed up to take him to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
“Don’t want to go,” he said.
“Why not? You loved the book,” I said.
“I see better movies in my head.” He showed me the spar as if that explained anything. I hung around for fifteen awkward minutes, while Bart said nothing. I didn’t come again. In 2013 he began not speaking at all and was often force-fed. In 2014 he began sleeping almost all the time, became neglectful of basic hygiene, and other than fighting violently if his crystal was taken away showed no interest in the outside world. In 2015 he passed. His parents sent me a small box containing the crystal shard, a couple of worn-out comic books, and a small diary that bore the word “Glarky” written about a thousand times.
I put it in my garage, where it lay undisturbed until Amanda, my on-again off-again girlfriend, had a garage sale. I gathered old clothes, tons of paperbacks, and odds and ends to sell. I found the box and took a long look at the crystal.
At first it appeared to be zoned tourmaline—the kind sold at gem shows as “watermelon tourmaline”—but it was not a crystal. Its shape suggested a small stalactite. It had been exuded. I looked in my old mineralogical books. There was nothing like this. I scraped off a little and had our lab guys look at it. For the most part, it was boron silicate colored with iron and magnesium. It was also mixed with a plastic that resembled DNA. It had a trace of radium. In short, it was unlike anything we knew about. Apparently it was an artificial extrusion, perhaps the product of some gem-making process, but the weird organic contamination and the radium would have been ridiculously expensive to manufacture. It was smooth and showed dichroism: it looked red if you held one way, green in a different angle.
Now these aren’t details that would interest anyone without a background in mineralogy. But the sheer strangeness of this blend cannot be exaggerated. I spent many hours trying to figure out how it had been made, why it had been made, by whom and so forth. I started carrying it around with me. Then one night I fell asleep holding it. I had a dream—both vivid and boring—of Bart flying from London to Dallas all those years ago. I
could taste the diet soda and the stale chicken sandwich he ate; listen to my aunt talk about the bands Titus Groans and Faveolate Colossi. I watched the flight attendant with the dyed red hair and cute butt drink rum and cokes with Uncle Bill. I could feel Bart’s boredom, just as I could feel the ache he got in his legs mid-Atlantic. Despite the uninteresting content of the dream, it was without a doubt the most vivid/realistic dream I had ever had. I assumed that my emotional need for closure had conjured up the dream. OK, Amanda assumed that when I told her about it.
So I repeated the experiment. I slept with the shard in hand every night. I had tons of dreams about Bart. Bart brushing his teeth (with crystal in hand), Bart masturbating, Bart in high school, Bart doing art therapy at the asylum, Bart eating popcorn with me at a movie, Bart refusing to go see The Hobbit. It was amazing and strangely soothing. The dreams, regardless of their content, made me feel good—deeply rested, happy, even blissful. I began to suspect that the shard was a device for recording experience. Maybe it had belonged to a spy, or maybe it was an occult thingamajig.
It led to my first (and last) fight with Amanda. I wanted to hold on to the crystal while we made love. Yeah, that went well . . .
After I had become a dream junkie for a couple of months, my boss told me to take some time off. She also told me to “throw that damn rock away.” Being single, economically cautious, and a good investor, I knew I could do without a job altogether for two or maybe three years. If I could figure out how to make these crystals I would make major bank. At least I told myself that. Mainly I lay around in the yellow pajamas with the gold crown embroidered on them that Amanda had bought me. I stopped watching TV, going on Facebook, even listening to the radio.
The next set of dreams was of a skinny unshaved British man in a Titus Groans T-shirt writing something in a notebook. This guy lived in a little flat in abject poverty. One time I saw him going to buy milk. His flat was on the second floor at the top of Mercy Hill—shopping was a bit of an ordeal—and he seemed to give it up. I had a few dreams of him starving to death, but grinning as though in the throes of inexpressible ecstasy.
Then I started dreaming about Mr. Spock. In my dreams I was Spock. Then I made myself look into a mirror. I wasn’t Spock.
I was a green-skinned humanoid with tufted and retractable ears. I had seven fingers on each hand and something that looked like a vagina between my catlike eyes. I wore no clothes, but sometimes I wore black armor. I had red and green crystal spars growing under my armpits. One of the longer spars I recognized as the one I now owned.
Or perhaps owned me.
In the presence of others of my kind, a thin pink tentacle would come out of the slit on my head. Others depending on social rank had different-colored tentacles. When these waved in the air I knew what the others thought. Those with blue tentacles outranked me, I outranked the other five colors.
We were on a space ship. Actually a small part of a planet that we had built a city on and detached from the main planet. We were hurtling through space, I guess protected by a force field.
I was of an upper class. I had not yet decided what gender (of the four) I should become. We had a mission. It was very important. Our city was beautiful—great black spiraling steeples and angled archways. In the center of the city was a huge transparent crystal trapdoor. Something very bad was underneath it.
Slowly I became the Other.
* * *
I am exuding this memory crystal under universal protocol. It should be directly viewable to Class II (or higher) sentient of organic or artificial nature. I am a Class III engineer responsible for propulsion maintenance. We are transporting the asteroid out of the galaxy. If you are experiencing this record, it will be clear if we were successful. I am taking dream suppressants to keep the Unnamable’s Dream Pull from effecting me. I estimate that in thirty years we will have left the galaxy.
Our colony on Saty IV had been in place for fifty years, until the Unnamable was awakened by mining operations. We had encountered such beings before: their hibernation cycles were well known. Because of the value of the minerals on Saty IV, it was decided that we would enclose the Unnamable in a force field and continue mining. A large crystal door was placed over Its burrow and a constant guard placed to observe the Being. It was estimated that our mining operations would be finished in thirty-five years. Afterward we would destroy all organic life on the world so that It could not use dream engineering to create organic servitors. We had underestimated the age, and therefore the strength, of the Being. It may be one of the first of its kind. The symptoms were manifested ten years ago.
Where Class IX sentients are entombed, a disease called “religion” is manifested. As opposed to the self-controlled quest for pleasure and power balanced by the needs of maintaining orderly society that marks all Class III sentients, religion is a compulsion produced in memory creation—which for most Class I or higher sentients is called “dreaming.” The compulsion is a fixing of certain states of quantum flux on a Class IX. This focusing is expressed through Art, Ritual, Sex, and Death. The attention provides a certain energy for the Class IXer that enables it to mutate into forms capable of extremes of ecstasy and greater personal power. It is obviously an illogical process, although most sentient races pass through the process on the way toward true consciousness. As the IXers do not need a constant source of these energies, they tend to Awaken, Feed, and move on. Some species have been destroyed by this process. We were aware of the risk but in our hubris thought we could avoid the danger—at least long enough to gather what we came here for.
What we later discovered was that this was a Class X. We Class III sentients live in the four dimensions of a ten-dimensional universe; the other six dimensions are closed to us, save for the leakage of gravitons, which causes our four-space to curve. We perceive time as flowing in one direction only and have a major distinction between past, present, and future. We are aware of a fifth dimension, which we perceive as “consciousness” that affects the collapse of probability in the four-space. Class VIII–X sentients live in nine dimensions, with only one closed dimension. They can perceive time flowing (or stationary) in any direction they choose. Likewise, they have three dimensions that act in ways analogous to our “consciousness.” They are aware of the dimension gravity leaks out from and can share dreams with any memory-encoding organism that is within their gravity. Hence time in a galaxy—or possibly even a galactic cluster—is a simultaneous event. Their manifestations in four-space—their bodies—are constantly evolving in reaction to stimuli that we can largely not perceive. Although their bodies can be very large (star size) or very small (molecule), these are not the main part of their being, and are analogous to the sharp nail on our seventh finger: painful if removed, but in no way life-threatening. Since they exist in the nine-space, they appear to us as existing both before and after the current four-space came into being. The Unnamable had other properties we could not test for—and strictly speaking we (as five-dimensional beings) could not think of.
It seems that the dreams started about nine years ago. They are exceptionally pleasant, involving sex, cruelty, strange ideation, and sensations that we have not evolved organs to experience. At first the dreams were seen as a harmless pastime. The dreamers soon began to use hidden means to communicate with one another—hand gestures or the production of certain slightly offensive smells with their scent glands. Painters and weavers began making images of the Unnamable in Its previous bodily forms. It was openly suggested that such artworks might even be an addition to our “way of life.” And besides, in twenty millennia what harm had ever come from art?
Productivity began to lag. On three occasions miners bored far too close to Its burrow. This was dismissed as coincidence by some, but the engineering caste realized that the Dream Pull of this Class X was several hundred kilohertz stronger than any others we had encountered. We decided to close mining operations in two years’ time, and we began placing atomic bombs around the surface o
f the world. One of our bio-engineers developed the dream suppressant, and everyone was ordered to take this on a regular basis. At first the artist caste refused, but after several executions compliance was offered.
Or so we thought.
In fact, a large cult of the Unnamable began to meet in the desert when both were full. They developed several disgusting behaviors involving sounds, smells, and self-mutilation. They drew converts from all castes and all genders. This would not have been a problem until they began spreading the “good news” to others of our kind on the home world. The “good news” was that the Unnamable could offer some sort of bodily immortality. This religious idea even spread to other species. Their rituals became more violent—and in some strange way it increased the Dream Pull. I even had dreams of a particularly disgusting nature, wherein I flew (as though with wings) to one of their orgies and did strange things there. Despite the revolting nature of the deeds my dream-self performed, I was filled with strange joys—and frankly neglected my work for some days.
When it was discovered that the dream-sect was gaining a strong foothold on the home world, it became obvious that we needed to take the semi-sleeping corpse out of the galaxy. If It Awakened here it would devastate us as much as Azathoth had done with the insect race of Shaggai. The engineering class decided to remove a section of the planet and simply drive it out of our galaxy. We knew that this was suicide, but if we simply tried to shoot the corpse outward, It might awaken and could easily steer the vessel with gravity waves. Many of the cultists were rounded up and dumped on our world. Thousands more were simply executed.
And so we sailed into the void.
The cult flourished as more and more of us lost consciousness and became religious. Those who remained in charge of the asteroid began using a stronger dream suppressor. We began to wear thin armor made of the metal from Tond, which also seems to deflect dreams. Then a dangerous new phenomenon caught our attention. The Unnamable had begun to mutate. It was growing multi-colored metal spines. We were unsure of their function, but the religious horde began demanding that we turn off the force field so that they could impale themselves on the spines. This would enable them to participate in the eternal nature of their “god.” This is a word they used to describe a Class X sentient. We suspected that the spines enable a direct level of control or communion with the Unnamable.