by John Shirley
“This creature was glowing.”
“So it was, I’m sure. And it vaporized. It was raw psychic energy. Grit from the soil was combined with it, formulated through the use of a powerful mental control, and that sent it about its business. It is enough to give it some mobility. But without ectoplasm, and a considerable time to control the formulation, it’s not possible to create much that lives, long . . . this has no trace of ectoplasm. Perhaps there was just enough . . . it may be a clue as to the motive of the man who killed Morgan Harris . . .”
“What motive?”
“I’m not sure—I shall not muddy the waters, as it were, with further speculation.”
“This thing didn’t seem to be trying real hard to get away from me . . .”
“No indeed. And it seemed to taunt you! It wanted you to follow it. But, it stumbled and lost its charge in the water.”
“Its charge?”
“Life electricity. The psychic energy I mentioned. Very like what Mrs. Shelley employed to bring her novel alive.”
“So this thing was luring me into the forest . . .”
“Yes. So I infer. To what end? Why, clearly, to destroy you. But not without a purpose. First of all, you are becoming troublesome to the creator of this thing. Secondly, you have something it needs. Just as it needed something from Morgan Harris . . .”
“Ectoplasm? I’ve got that stuff in me now?”
“Of course. It’s basic to the function of your spirit body—your afterbody. Our murderer created a sort of golem, which he controls psychically, to draw you somewhere in the forest. But we shall not be able to catch him there now. He’s gone on . . . probably gone to ground. Let us move on to the mansion.”
“Can I wring out my pants first?”
“Do be quick about it.”
I removed my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, wrung the cloth items out, and put them back on. It was only slightly more comfortable than before wringing. “I keep ending up having to slog around with water in my pants and shoes. Doyle . . . you really think Higgs took down all his traps? I don’t want to be skewered. Whether it kills me or not.”
“Oh, no, I’m not sure at all. I think it likely. But surety? No. But, I am not overconcerned. You will naturally scout out the ground ahead of me.”
“I will?”
“Of course you will! Step lightly, Fogg! Step lightly!”
TWELFTH
The mansion had grown horribly large. Horribly large, horribly sprawling, horribly devised.
We stared at it—it was all too easy to see since there were lights shining from nearly every window. It was as if someone had intercepted the architect’s blueprint on the way to the construction site, and they’d defaced it and altered it with pathological levels of hostility.
Jagging projections, the kind you see on crystals: these were sticking out with a perverse randomness, and they shivered in the rising wind. I remembered Long’s remark about gravitation working here—these growths would surely collapse, and fairly soon.
“Somebody’s gone right out of their mind,” I said. “Probably Merchant.”
The center front section of the mansion seemed the same. Higgs’s big curved spikes were still up, as we’d left them—a warning to passersby.
I started forward—Doyle held me back.
“I’ll go this time. Higgs might’ve put a new trap in here.”
He strode forward, before I could stop him—and passed safely up to the porch.
The front door was unlocked and we stepped into the hallway . . .
At first it looked like wreckage. Then I could see that it was a sort of internal, cancerous growth of the original building. That upside-down staircase that ran along the ceiling had replicated itself, zigzagging from its end down the open space to the left. It was impassable and absurd—but well lit. Cracks in the walls emanated light, as if the creative force that had jammed all this extra material here was overflowing, glowing with frustration from the places where its growth had been constrained.
The entry-hall stairway on the right that Garrett Merchant had descended when we were here before was intact but partly blocked by a jutting, angular outcropping of the ceiling over it. The carvings of angels and imps along the balustrade seem to have fleshed out and bloated, their arms reaching out in random directions as if the mythical beings were about to tear themselves from the posts and clamber madly around the room. The floor of the entry hall was flat—then angled joltingly up as if a crystalline form out of a giant cavern had forced itself up, distorting the diamond pattern of black and white, and fused with the lowered, bloated, fantastically complicated chandeliers. The building was creaking in a way I found alarming, too; it was as if it were groaning in pain from architectural cancer.
I gaped around me. “What the f—”
Doyle gave me a sudden frown of reproach.
“—hell is all this?”
“An unhealthy formulation—it’s an extension of someone’s diseased mind, I’d say. Or—I suspect—more than one man’s diseased mind.”
“You think anyone’s here anymore? I mean—how could they live in this?”
“Both good questions.” He cupped his mouth with his hands. “I say, Higgs! Long! Merchant! Who’s about?”
The only reply was the groaning of the house.
Doyle put his lantern down; I set mine beside his. There seemed to be plenty of light, some of it almost hurting my eyes, as if it were hostile.
“It occur to you this place might be unstable?” I asked.
“In which sense?” he asked.
“In which—? Oh. I mean, structurally, at this point. Might be a house of cards right about now.”
“The thought has crossed my mind,” Doyle admitted, moving to the stairway on the right. “Let’s see if we can make our way up this . . . it might be a tight squeeze . . .”
It was. We had to crawl over the stairway, at one point, to get past the down-jutting projection from the ceiling. I thought about funhouses I’d gone to, as a kid, at the state fair. This house wasn’t fun. It seemed to be dying, and threatening to collapse when it did.
I was starting to feel the afterworld peculiar variant of fatigue, a sort of psychic wearing, slowing me down.
“Come along, Fogg, come along!” Doyle called, as he straightened up and climbed quickly to the balcony. He had the tone of an Englishman riding behind his dogs, hallooing after the fox.
We entered a corridor off the balcony that passed back into the house, with bedrooms and suites to either side—Doyle muttered that he’d been here when the house was more “itself” and this corridor had been straight. Now it had changed direction, judging from the tension marks and cracks at the sudden switches of angle, and it was almost a maze now. Once we realized it had doubled back and we’d gone in a circle, were now heading back the way we’d come.
Doyle paused and looked around, then turned to a door off the hall. “Let’s try the master suite—if it’s still there.”
He tried the door—it opened a fraction, then seemed to stick, refusing to open the rest of the way. The shifting of the walls had warped the door frame.
It took the two of us, applying our shoulders to it, with Doyle counting down, “One two three!” several times, before it finally gave.
We pushed past the crooked, broken door and into a short hallway leading into the master suite. There were closets of clothing to either side and farther on we came to the sitting room of the suite, with a fireplace, sofas, and carpets. French doors opened onto a back balcony . . .
Only the fireplace was projecting out from the wall like a grotesque, sucking mouth; it had projected into a coffee table, leaving it smashed up against a sofa. The other furniture was pushed out of place by anomalous constructions shunting up from the floor; the mirror was shattered, its shar
ds mingling with glass from the cracked, warped French doors.
To the left was an open doorway, once rectangular, now shifted into a slanting convex quadrilateral. The doorway quivered, releasing dust and a squealing sound, then stabilized.
I was increasingly convinced the whole building might collapse at any moment.
While death might not have a guillotine-like finality in the afterworld, I had no desire to be trapped in a collapsed building, unable to move, crushed and agonized, yet alive, for, perhaps, years. Would the afterworld leave me like that? I wasn’t sure. It seemed possible. And it would be worse than death.
“This is really looking unstable, Doyle,” I said. “If it comes down on us, how do we get out of it?”
“Yet another good question,” he murmured, looking at the cracked ceiling.
“I’m suddenly missing cell phones and nine-one-one.”
“I’ve heard of cell phones,” Doyle said, peering around. “We are quite pleased to do without the blasted things.”
Doyle went into the next room, not stepping delicately enough for my liking. But I followed him.
This had been the master bedroom. The bed was now pressed against the ceiling by a group of octagonal columns that had thrust through the floor from below. I hoped Merchant wasn’t stuck up there, squashed against the ceiling.
“Merchant!” Doyle called. “You here, anywhere?”
The building creaked, and squeaked . . . and squeaked again, as if asking for mercy . . .
That last squeak. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t the building.
There was a bathroom, at the back of the suite. Had that last pitiful squeaking sound come from there?
I took the lead this time and went through the rhomboid doorway.
There was no toilet, of course—just a sink, with gold fixtures, a shattered white-and-blue-tile floor, and toward the back, a really large bathtub, larger than a hot tub, and in it was Garrett Merchant. But he was trapped there, half crushed, nude, looking purple and black . . . yet he was alive. Around him, at the level of water in a bath, was a dirty-looking translucent gel, rather like aspic.
“G’me,” he squeaked, barely about to move his mouth. “G’me ooh.”
Porcelain projections had grown up, and they must have come up suddenly, judging from the splayed position his purpled naked body had been forced into. His hairy right leg was up, curled around a porcelain pole; his left was crushed brutally between two projections that rose at angles, crossing to hold the limb in place; a wall growth that took the shape of an old-time public stocks, where men were held with their necks thrust out, had collared Merchant, gripping his throat tightly so he could hardly speak . . .
Other projections emanated from Merchant’s back, angling into the walls, symmetrically arraying outward from him. They seemed an expression of him.
“Doyle—does it look like to you that all of this sick architectural stuff grew right out of his body?”
“Yes,” Doyle said. “But likely it was not of his conscious volition. Help me try to release him.”
We tugged at the materials holding Merchant’s neck. At first it was intractable. But when we worked together, pulling on a single part of the “stocks” holding his neck, it began to crack away. In a few moments we’d freed his throat.
Blood dripped from the place the stocks had gripped him, but there was no swelling. Our bodies here just don’t work on the same principles.
Merchant spat blood, and gasped. “Oh thank God,” he sobbed. His voice was a rasp. I could barely hear him.
“Did you do this yourself—perhaps unintentionally?” Doyle asked, as we struggled to free him from the rest of the architectural restraints.
“I—no. Maybe . . . yes. But . . . he just walked in when I was in the bath and he dumped something in it and the stuff thickened . . . in an instant . . . so I couldn’t get loose. And it . . . all started to happen . . . the changes to the house . . . like it came from me . . .”
“Who just walked in?” I asked.
“Don’t know. I was half asleep, you know, having a memory dream, and when I came out of it and there he was . . . his face was . . . shadowed and . . . like, hooded. It did seem like a man. Faceless man. Clothing was black, something I haven’t seen . . . there were symbols sewn on it. Red thread . . .”
Doyle seemed to hold his breath for a moment before asking, “What sort of symbols?”
Merchant groaned. “I don’t know—one was maybe an astrological thing.”
“He wore a mask?” Doyle asked, as we cracked the porcelain away from Merchant’s right leg.
Merchant cried out in pain. “Oh shit. That hurts, it hurts . . .” He seemed close to weeping.
“You’ll heal up fairly soon,” Doyle soothed him. “Now then—his face was completely masked?”
“Yeah but . . . not a cloth. More like . . . mask made of . . . just blackness. Some . . . like magic. Black shadow over his face. Oh get me out of here . . .”
“No explanation from this guy about why he did this, Merchant?” I asked, as we helped him up. “Why he cemented you in here and started all this?”
“No. No . . . he was only here for maybe twenty seconds and then it started, and I was stuck, trapped, afraid that . . .”
“Have you seen Louisa Doyle?”
“Who? Oh. No. Only once about a year ago, in town.”
Conan Doyle showed no expression, hearing that. “Where are Higgs and Long?” Doyle asked.
“Don’t know, don’t know. Maybe he got them. Not sure. Don’t know . . . Please, in God’s name get me out of this tub . . .”
We lifted him between us, holding him up by the arms; he came loose from the thick gel reluctantly, like a tooth from a jaw, the extraction making a wet crackling sound. Merchant dripped the stuff as we carried him back out to the bedroom. He hopped between us on his intact leg; his damaged limb was sticking out at odd angles like an extension of the house’s warped redesign.
The house shook; it quivered and grumbled to itself; dust silted down from above. The shining cracks in the walls pulsed more brightly.
The ceiling cracked wide—and the room above began to tumble through the crack, chairs and a table dropping down, tumbling and clattering and splintering just in front of us, burying the doorway out. A rafter suddenly jammed itself through the wall to our right, crashing through like a ramrod through a rotten castle door. It stopped coming a few inches from the right side of my head.
“Another four inches and that would have hurt,” I pointed out
“Quick,” Merchant rasped. “The hall! Between those columns . . . there’s a door . . .”
I was reluctant to go that way, but Doyle tugged us to our left, between the columns shoved under the crushed bed, and when we’d pressed through, dragging Merchant along, I saw the wreck of another set of French doors a couple of steps beyond the columns. It was warped open, and beyond it we could see a balcony.
The house seemed to be trying to wrench itself from its foundations—we staggered, struggling to keep to our feet. Merchant cried out in pain.
“Oh bloody hell,” Doyle muttered.
Then Doyle got us going through the door to the balcony—which was even less stable. It quivered like the lower out-thrust lip of an angry child. We fell over backward, the three of us, Merchant gritting his teeth, me swearing a blue streak. Then I got up, and Doyle was up—we tugged Merchant up on his good foot and struggled to the balustrade looking over the back garden . . .
A loud, angry cracking sound came from behind me . . .
I looked over my shoulder and saw a projection from the roof collapse backward, crushing its way into the house.
That seemed to be the one card that made the house of cards collapse.
“Hold on!” Doyle shouted.
The roof began t
o slide off the building toward us . . .
Long ago, in the Before, I saw floodwaters cresting on the Missouri River. The wide front porch and very large front section of a good-sized house was sweeping down the river, coming past me. It was being pushed along by a big dirty brown wave filled with debris; it was as if the porch were surfing on the wave.
That’s what it was like now: we rode the porch that way. The house collapsed into a mix of muddy fluid and fragments of debris—it was as if the lower parts of the house were melting—and we suddenly dropped down, and surged forward, thrust over Merchant’s back garden, the porch riding along ahead of the wave, slopping along, its outward side tilting upward . . .
I grabbed the railing with my right hand; Doyle did likewise with his left; we held Merchant between us while the porch skimmed along on slippery gray goo; chunks of house went flying past.
One of them struck me in the back of the head.
Yes. You can be knocked cold in the afterlife.
I was sitting in a wooden chair close beside a cluttered steel desk in the police station, in South Las Vegas. Cops bustling back and forth. Glaring lights overhead.
It was a noisy room. People talking, drawers opening and slamming, doors thunking in their frames, phones ringing. Handcuffed to the next desk, a Latino transsexual in a red blouse and skintight jeans insisted in two languages that it wasn’t her dope they’d found in her pocket, she’d borrowed those pants from her roommate, or was it her sister, no it was . . .
The bored white cop writing the arrest report didn’t seem to be listening.
I wasn’t handcuffed. That was a good sign. The lady cop who’d chosen not to cuff me to her desk was a short, thickish Asian woman, talking to my lawyer, Crispin Barr, across the room. He was only my lawyer because we were drinking buddies and we liked the same music. I couldn’t have afforded to pay him. He was a gray-haired man with sunken, lined cheeks; he wore small round wire-rim glasses and a blue blazer. He kept yawning as she talked to him, and I could tell he was apologizing for it. He’d been asleep when I called him.
The Asian lady cop waved dismissively toward me, shook her head, and stamped off, cuffs jingling on her heavy belt, and Crispin came over to me. “You got to pick and choose your clients, Nick,” he said.