After rapping on its sliding door and waiting a minute or two, I decided to check inside the library instead.
It was no cooler inside the library. As with all the buildings belowground, I felt I was entering a building inside the belly of a much vaster building. I supposed that sensation would go away as I became more acclimated. I removed my dark glasses.
The Kalian Reading Room wasn’t very large; four longish tables in the center, and a small desk at the end of each aisle of books. The shadowy-musty smell of old books in here reminded me of Mr. Dove’s place, a smell I had once loved but which now had an unpleasant connotation. There were computers at each of the tables and desks. I felt better that there were two other nonKalians in here as well, though these two looked like college students and I looked like a guy who wanted to buy guns.
Picking out a book at random (it was a child’s picture book of the home world, I found), I stood at the mouth of an aisle, cracked the volume and over the top of it scanned the Kalians around me. One man read a Kalian newspaper. Two others played a kind of game like dominoes, but using thin yellow sticks. With grim calculation they were forming some sort of weird geometric pattern between them, as if they were mapping out the destiny of the universe rather than playing a game.
But the Kalian who quickly attracted my gaze was a woman seated alone at the end of one of the central tables. What seized me was the fact that she wore no turban.
Kalian hair is black as their eyes. Hers was long, falling below her shoulder blades, very thick and wavy, parted in the center. It was like a dark hood and cape in itself. It framed a high, smooth forehead. Her gray skin was as pale and colorless as ash.
Traditionally, I knew, Kalian women were not permitted to bare their hair in public. I thought I remembered hearing that women had been stoned to death for this, had even had acid thrown in their faces. A woman’s hair was for the eyes of her husband only, because it was the alluring, tempting weave of lust and evil personified.
So, we had a modern girl amongst us. I wondered if the men at the other tables peeked at her with murderous scorn, or secret hunger. Both, I was sure.
She was very, very pretty. She had a layer of youthful baby fat I found appealing; I guessed her to be in her late teens to early twenties. Her lips were compressed into a subtle unconscious smile as she perused a massive book open before her. The lips were very full, the bow-shaped upper lip perhaps slightly fuller than the lower, and these were a darker gray than the flesh of her soft face. Those almond-shaped, glistening black eyes. Though her black eyebrows were not excessively heavy, they met into one unbroken line over the bridge of her nose, putting me in mind for a moment of the ancient Earth artist Frida Kahlo. Traditionally, Kalian men and women shaved their brows at this mid-point to separate them. So, we had another perhaps defiant gesture.
But there was one very obvious brand of conformity upon her. She had the ritual scarring that every Kalian woman simply must have, and she had received hers upon the day she began her first period, as they all did. These scars varied, I believed, very little, at least to my untrained eye. They were on the face only. Three lines began just above the central point of her eyebrow and fanned out across her forehead into a three-pronged fork. They almost looked like an exaggeration of wrinkles of intensity or concentration.
In addition, she had a scar on either cheek. These were V’s resting on their sides, a and a , pointing inward toward the nostrils, so that the top branch of each design curved along the cheek bone, the bottom branch running down to the edge of the jaw.
These scars were squiggly, and raised like keloids. They were as dark as her lips but had a kind of silvery sheen to them, too. I understood that when a Kalian girl first menstruated, her soiled clothing was burnt, and then the ashes were rubbed into the wounds that were carved into her face, so as to form the particular look of the healed scars.
The lovely young woman’s markings were both horribly disfiguring, a kind of stamp of contempt upon her, but at the same time added oddly to her beauty.
She wore a black t-shirt. Her arms were bare, unthinkably: pale gray and soft-looking. The tight shirt made evident the heavy thrust of her breasts. I saw a tease of midriff, then her lower body was wrapped in a long, metallic gold skirt. Her feet were bare.
When I looked up from her toes to her eyes, I saw they were upon me. There were no whites, irises or pupils for me to know for sure that they pointed my way, but I could feel them on me. Maybe she had felt mine on her.
Awkwardly, I smiled at her.
I thought I saw her lips, already subtly smiling, stretch a bit more at the corners.
Before I understood what I was doing, I started toward her. Then I realized that I meant to ask her where I might find a man named Rabal. She might know of his reputation, and be aghast at the mention of his name, but it was the only excuse I could think of in an instant.
Before I reached her table, a hand lightly caught me by the elbow. I turned to see that a shortish, plump Kalian male in red satin pajamas had taken my arm. He grinned at me, his teeth bright in his slate-colored face, and whispered, “Hi, friend...hey, you mustn’t talk to any girls around here, buddy. Not allowed. I mean to say, they are not allowed. I don’t mean to tell you what you should do, my chum...I only don’t want you to anger some jealous husband.”
I recalled, then, that Kalian women were not permitted to speak outside the home. Even, sometimes, within it. The female voice was “lewd”.
“Anyway,” the man went on, “she’s trouble, that one. Look at her; a disgrace. It’s being on another world; in her homeland, it would never be tolerated. No offense to your people, sir.” Grin.
“You’re Rabal.”
“Yes.”
“Did someone say I was coming?”
“Someone told me you were knocking on my van. Should we go there, now? I’m done here for today. I’m reading the great Kalian novel, Qubutstu. It’s in fifty-two volumes. I’m up to book thirty-seven now!”
“How is it so far?”
“A little slow. But the love interest was just introduced. Shall we go, friend?”
I glanced at the girl, hoping she’d still be watching me. She wasn’t. She pored over her book again.
“All right,” I muttered, and though I had come to find this man, I was disappointed at following him from the library.
***
WHEN I STEPPED up into Rabal’s van and he slid its door back into place, I saw a Kalian woman seated at a small table reading prayers from a computer monitor with a split screen. The other half of the screen showed her a loop of various security camera angles of the parking lot in which the van rested. She must have called Rabal in the library to let him know I’d been to the van earlier. She looked up at me, gave me a shy smile, and returned to her prayer reading. If she were ever to speak one word of those prayers aloud in her lewd voice her husband was allowed to execute her on the spot. She wore her hair cocooned inside a blue turban.
There was a kitchenette smaller even than mine, and a bed in the far back, I assumed, hidden by a curtain richly embroidered with metallic thread. Its design showed a kind of weirdly-spired palace. A row of people walked into its front door, hunched and using canes. Out the palace’s back door filed a procession of small children. Rabal saw me admiring it.
“That is the demon-god, Ugghiutu,” he explained proudly. “Ugghiutu takes many forms, pal, and often appears as a house or even masquerades as a temple to himself, to lure inside unwary souls so as to test them. Sacrifices to him were sent into such structures.”
“But what’s happening here?”
“This is the endless cycle of life, death, and renewal, my good friend. Ugghiutu feeds on life to create new life.”
“God slap me dead,” I said to myself.
“Hm?”
“Nothing.” I turned to him. “Can I see what you have?” I was willing to bet I’d passed through a scan on the way in, so he knew I wasn’t carrying a weapon – as a forcer or a robb
er – already.
Rabal stooped to slide aside a panel in the floor, then rose puffing from the mild effort. At my feet were row on row of guns large and small, dark and bright and colored. Before I could settle my eyes on any one of them, he slid aside another panel in the wall opposite the door, revealing another impressive, museum-like display. A library of weapons.
There were replica old Earth guns; everything from flintlocks to Thompsons, but which very well might fire ray bolts instead of musket balls and bullets. There were Kalian and Tikkihotto weapons. Assault rifles...I enjoyed using them in games, but knew they were too big to be practical for my needs. Shotguns, also a satisfying weapon in virtual battle, posed the same problem – but ah! I pointed to a sawed-off version. “Can I handle that?”
Rabal passed me the gun. It was heavier than I would have expected, metal rather than plastic or ceramic like the pistol I’d disposed of. A pump-action, with a pistol grip in place of a full stock and a strap at the end of the grip. Out of politeness, I made sure not to point its barrel toward Mr. or Mrs. Rabal.
“For this baby, amigo, I can give you lead shot or crystal shot.” He tapped the shotgun’s truncated barrel with a finger.
“What does crystal shot do?”
“A lead ball makes a big hole, but a hole can be sealed. Crystal shot makes a hole but then shatters against bone; it turns to shrapnel, and sends sharp dust all through the tissues, into the blood, where it will be carried to the heart.” He spread his hands demonstratively, grinning all the while.
I shrugged. “I’ll take a box of both.”
“You want a smaller piece, too, sir? A nice handy handgun?”
“You must have read my mind, mon ami,” I replied dryly.
“Ray blaster or projectile shooter?”
“Um, projectile, I guess.”
He waved an arm at the floor display. I pointed at a smallish automatic with mean lines and a nonreflective matte black finish. He retrieved it and handed it to me.
“A Thor .86...it’s a small version of the Thor .93. A beautiful baby, huh? Thirty bullets in a staggered clip, or sixty plasma capsules.”
I hefted it. Ceramic, like Gaby’s gun, but still it was heavier. The black color alone made it seem heavier. I liked it well enough, I supposed. It looked efficient, all business. “Can I have a box of bullets, and a box of plasma?”
“What kind of plasma?” He pulled open a drawer from the wall, touched cartons with a finger. “Usually plasma is color coded. Red eats a fairly small, limited hole before it stops dissolving. Blue is stronger but only eats organic surfaces, like flesh, though the projectile will penetrate cloth to get to the flesh. Green will eat anything...green can eat through a wall, or a car, before it burns out. With a couple of green caps, maybe even one good hit on a small body, it will eat the whole corpse. No body left. Very handy, good buddy.”
“Very expensive, too, huh? What if I miss and hit a bystander? A bullet and they might have a chance. Green plasma and they’re eaten alive.”
Rabal shrugged. “Hey, you hit a bystander either way, it’s bad news. Don’t shoot near bystanders, if you’re worried, my friend.”
I straightened. “I’ll take a box of the green plasma.”
***
RABAL GAVE ME a big plastic shopping bag which advertized a woman’s clothing store, in which to carry the shotgun and ammo home. I doubted he let his silent wife shop there. The handgun went into my waistband, unloaded. (I had asked him to show me how to load it, and he had explained it, but apologized that he couldn’t allow me to actually load any weapons inside his miniature gun store). I was terrified of being detained by a forcer on the walk home, but despite my fears, I stopped again inside the Subtown Library. The Kalian Reading Room.
As I had fatalistically expected, the exotic gray-skinned girl was gone. Idly I wondered what she’d been reading.
Before I left, I saw that those two men still played their game with yellow sticks. The web-like pattern between them had now covered almost three quarters of the long table. I wondered how far it would spread before they were finished.
***
THE WEATHER CHANNEL said it was raining, upground. It seemed like another lifetime since I’d been upground.
I stayed in all day, as if it were raining down here, too. I snacked on junk food. I watched VT. I paced. I made coffee. I played with my new guns. The green plasma scared me even to look at the gel capsules ranked inside their box, so I loaded the handgun with solid bullets.
I sat and read from the Necronomicon.
Could I really believe that Gaby had opened some interdimensional portal, just by lighting some candles and playing a recorded chant? The Coleopteroids, that unpleasant beetle-like race, had to ride in great black train-like machines around and around upon train-like tracks laid out in odd geometric patterns in order for them to travel to our dimension from theirs. I couldn’t think of an extradimensional race that could enter into ours without use of some sort of technology. But did that mean it was impossible?
After she had performed the ritual, Gaby had realized that the “ascending mode” had been said twice – once by her, and once by the recording of Maria – but the “descending mode” had only been said once. When I’d suggested she play the descending mode again, she’d said it was, “Too late.” Assuming some door truly could be opened in this way, as she – and Mr. Dove – believed, would it hurt for me to play the recording of Maria reciting the descending mode for a second time, anyway? Or, instead of closing the portal, might that just make matters worse? Ultimately, I didn’t dare play any more of Maria’s recordings until I knew more.
Aside from the spells themselves, some of which required the prerequisite bizarre ingredients and occasional sacrifice, and which generally consisted of a lot of unpronounceable gibberish, the book read like a mythology written under the influence of hallucinogens. Cosmic battles between monster-gods. And the defeated race of monsters scratching in their sleep at the barrier that separated them from us. Influencing our dreams with their dreams.
As skeptical as I was, I dared not say the names of the beings out loud; I tried not even to say them in my head. I made my eye skim over them. I thought of them simply as the Others. Even their names, Dove had said, were incantations.
Yes. I admitted to myself once and for all that I did believe. Even if one opposes a faith, sometimes, one must first have faith in it. A Satanist is a Christian inverted. I had been converted. A fresh acolyte. How else could I explain Gaby’s tricks with time and space, the horrible change in her?
Gaby. Did she still lie, even now, on the floor of my upground apartment?
If this book really could open doorways to other worlds, to let in the Others or at least to let in a greater degree of their influence, then no wonder the book was so difficult to obtain. I imagined that it had been repressed, sought out and destroyed, for generations. It should be. And so should those other books at Mr. Dove’s shop...
What did he, a “priest” as Gaby had called him, intend to do with the Necronomicon himself?
Someone should suppress him. Get a hold of the copy Gaby had made for him and destroy it.
I remembered the two books he had mentioned to me which took some of the more mathematical ideas of the Necronomicon further, focused and improved upon those approaches. One by a Choom author, one by a Tikkihotto. Those sounded like especially dangerous books that should be sought out and destroyed, as well.
Gaby still lay on the floor of my apartment. A victim of my past life. I couldn’t exorcize the image from my mind.
I switched off the Necromomicon, and used my computer to call the candle store at the Canberra Mall. I spoke to Ebonee. Any word yet on Gaby?
I expected, by now, that I’d been found out. I had murdered Gaby. Ebonee would be horrified. She’d curse me, try to have my call traced (though I used a blocking feature).
She only smiled sympathetically. No...no...still no word from Gabrielle, she apologized. But what had
I done to my hair? She almost hadn’t recognized me.
Oops.
To hell with my new look. I called my boss, Julie.
“Christopher,” she fumed, “you said you were going to call Diane! You never did! She won’t give you a leave of absence now, you know...whatever your personal emergency was, you should have talked to her before it was too late!”
“I know,” I stammered. “Um...I realize I’m terminated. But I just wanted to call to apologize to you. To say I’m sorry about all this. You can just, uh, transfer my last check to my bank account...”
Julie did not say, “My God, Christopher, why are you calling me? You’re a murderer! They’re looking for you!”
No one was looking for me. No one was looking for Gabrielle, I realized. Poor, forgotten Gabrielle. Missed and mourned only by her murderer.
Dare I return to my old apartment, then? My old life? Put all this furtive, fugitive dung behind me?
I couldn’t. Like Gaby, I had been changed somehow. Not just in appearance. It was both terrifying, and oddly exhilarating. I hated to admit it to myself, but there was a kind of freedom in walking away from my ant-like past self...a kind of liberation in self-destruction.
But more than that, I felt I should try to do something to avenge Gabrielle. To protect other foolish people like her and Maria. To protect everybody. It would be easy enough, wouldn’t it? No great heroic sacrifice. I wouldn’t have to battle cosmic monster-gods. Just burn a couple of books. Maybe, at most, one book store.
No, I wouldn’t return to my old life. Not just yet. But if Gaby’s death hadn’t been discovered yet, perhaps it never would be. If I handled it correctly. As much as I dreaded it, I had to return to my old apartment and take care of this before my next rent came due, and the landlord let himself inside.
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