It had been inside her! In sick horror, she clutched at the spiky pain in her temples. In addition to the gossamer-bleeding rifts, other openings began to trouble the air, irregular patches of an ethereal fabric that separated the room from some very other place.
“Helen, what’s going on?”
The ethereal fabric stretched. Behind it were entities much larger than the gossamers that passed freely from plane to plane. Through a patch that thinned alarmingly, she caught the gelatinous heave of an enormous haunch and then the glint of clustered eyes.
She covered her face. “Jeremy. I’m seeing creatures. All over the room. I don’t know what they are.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“You can’t. I can.”
“Can they hurt you?”
“I don’t know!” Helen pressed her palms against her closed eyelids. It didn’t help—she saw through both lids and hands. A gossamer drifted through Jeremy’s shoulder. It brushed intangibly across her face. “I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s all right. I’ll help you. I’m here.”
His arm was around her shoulders, his palm on her forehead, warm through the glove. Warm. Cybele’s palm had been cool when it had pressed a calmer fear into Helen, fear that didn’t fear itself. She remembered the scent of flowering grasses. She remembered Geldman saying that what didn’t hurt her when it was invisible couldn’t hurt her when she saw it.
“Helen, can you finish reading the spell?”
Fear that didn’t fear itself. “I’ve got to,” she said. “Get me back to the table.”
Interminably, quickly, he led her through the swarming gossamers. Had they sensed her awareness and flocked to it? Their long, limber bodies slid over the pages of the Necronomicon. Their appendages clung to her hands. But she could see right through them, to Bishop’s pale script lolling in the ink.
The ethereal patches, strained from within, she didn’t look at. “Where did I stop?”
Jeremy fumbled paper. “‘To be constrained by the Elder Sign as before.’”
Helen clamped her hands to her temples. She read more instructions, an incantation. They weren’t long, thank God, and she finished before her swelling bladder of a head burst. It didn’t matter then that she slipped sideways from her chair. It didn’t matter that she dropped; the gossamers cushioned her fall like a mattress of strange life, like the thick thatch of flowering grass that she smelled again for one unending instant.
22
Celeste called around four. Sean told her he had no fever, no headache, no problem. That was two-thirds true. As the Servitor’s hunger grew, Sean’s stomach threatened to implode with empathic emptiness. He crashed on the chaise, where he didn’t sleep; aside from the rumbling in his gut, he’d never felt more awake.
Now, whether he opened or closed his eyes, he lay both in Gus’s study and in the cool brilliance of the Seekonk River. The soul-thread had started two-way transmission. When his eyes were open, Sean was the main “sensor” and the study had the greater solidity—the river bottom was a transparent overlay, a watery ghost come to haunt the house. When they were closed, Sean surrendered “sensorship”—the river bottom became the reality, the study a queer distortion like an infrared image the Servitor picked up right through Sean’s eyelids. One big difference: The river overlay Sean received was constant, while the study image the Servitor received and then cycled back to Sean was sporadic, an occasional flash in the mesh of shared sensation. The best Sean could figure was that the Servitor only looked through his eyes when it felt like it. It seemed to have much more control of the soul-thread than he did. What if it got to the point where it could read his mind and found out he was going to dismiss the hell out of it?
The frigid stream of its consciousness had morphed since their dream-contact. It was now more like bubbles of alien intention percolating inside Sean’s skull and putting out slow probing pseudopods. To battle the bubbles, he had to keep his eyes open and concentrate on the study. Trouble was, he also had to pay attention to the river, to make sure the Servitor stayed put. Maybe the Servitor could deal with simultaneous inputs, but Sean’s mere human brain was boggled. To really watch it, he had to close his eyes and exchange river ghost for river reality.
And the Servitor needed watching. It was not happy.
Sean closed his eyes.
Water muffles the sounds of the air-world, but the Servitor’s hearing is keen. It listens to the purr of boats, the calls of birds, the high hum of airplanes. Nearer and louder is the growl of a motorcycle.
Boats, birds, planes, the motorcycle. This morning the Servitor hadn’t known that web-footed paddlers were swans and small human vessels were kayaks. This afternoon it knew the names of everything. How could it have learned them except through Sean? More proof it was getting deeper into his mind.
The motorcycle roar stutters and stops. Staccato laughter replaces it. Humans. Very close. The Servitor rolls off its back and starts to swim up the shoreward slope.
Sean arrowed thought at it: No.
In return, he felt the minute taps of bubble pseudopods. It is starving, and the summoner hasn’t come.
No. Stay put.
It will only look.
The water darkens as the Servitor strokes toward sunlight. In the gloom, fleeing minnows are streaks of life-radiance. Faint, failing radiance outlines the trunk of a tree fallen into the river. The still-leafy aerial boughs will conceal the Servitor when it looks at the humans. Just looks. It insinuates itself into the sunken branches, bunches small, stretches lean, until its head breaks the surface.
The reek of gasoline fumes and pot smoke burn the sensitive forks of its tongue, but they can’t mask the odor of human blood in human flesh. On the steps of the tomb recessed into the bluff, twin auras pulse, a man and a woman, passing a joint. Their motorcycle is plastered with mud.
They must have plowed through every bog on the riverside path instead of just taking the paved road down. Jesus, people were stupid to go off by themselves like this, first the guy with the schnauzer, now these bikers. They thought they were immune to muggers and pervs and psycho killers. Inhuman monsters didn’t even cross their minds, because inhuman monsters weren’t real.
Too bad this particular inhuman monster didn’t know it couldn’t exist. The Servitor began splashing and snapping twigs, getting clear of the fallen tree. If the bikers would stop blowing smoke at each other and cracking up over it, they’d hear. If they’d pay attention to the shadowy spots around them, like you had to in a world monsters could invade, they’d see.
It drifts toward shore behind the tree trunk. It won’t just look, after all. It needs to eat.
Sure, monsters ate, and why not eat people? People weren’t the monster’s own kind, so it wasn’t cannibalism, wasn’t wrong for the monster. Sean, though, was human. Last night, in their dream-connection, he’d called the Servitor off so he wouldn’t have to endure the nightmare of its attack. Today, in their waking connection, he knew what was about to happen was real, no nightmare, and so his obligation to stop the attack was that much greater. If he stopped fighting for control, he’d see the man and woman impaled on talons; he’d hear their screams, he’d smell their blood, taste it, feel the give of bone under needle-teeth. He’d become an accidental murderer.
The Servitor’s claws touch bottom. It sinks to its belly in the mud of the shallows. Overhanging trees cast bright shade around it. Soon it will be in the reeds at the water’s edge, through which it can start its final stalk.
An accidental murderer or worse. What if he wanted to let it happen, so he could fill the emptiness inside him, inside them?
He will like the killing, because the Servitor likes killing and Sean is becoming it.
He forced his eyes open. On the high ceiling of the study, the transparency of the riverside and the clueless bikers played like a washed-out movie. Okay. He could stand a movie massacre, and maybe distance would get him off the hook for
complicity—
Eddy bent into view over him. The movie played on her face.
He closed his eyes. What would Eddy say if she knew he was letting people get slaughtered? What about Dad or Helen Arkwright, Celeste or Gus, Joe-Jack, Phil, and their other friends, Geldman even?
“Hey, Sean.”
The Servitor heaves itself into the reeds.
Go back.
It will not.
“Sean, come on.”
I’ll come now, if you do what I say.
It doesn’t believe. It peers through the reeds at the bikers. The woman frowns. “Something stink?” she asks the man.
“Tide must be going out.”
“Sean, stop faking it. I know you’re awake.”
This time he hurled thought like a javelin: I mean it. Wait in the river. I’m coming.
The Servitor rocks back on its haunches. It let its prey go last night because the summoner promised to come to the river and give it more blood. The summoner never came.
I swear, I’ll come this minute. Let them go. Wait for me.
If he doesn’t come, it will find other meat.
Coming.
Eddy was shaking him. Sean kept his eyes clamped shut until the Servitor eases back into the water. Life-radiant clouds of minnows scatter before it.
She’d shake his damn teeth loose. He shouldered Eddy’s hand away. “Lay off! What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong with you? Your face was all screwed up. Were you dreaming?”
“I was resting.”
“You’re sweating buckets, too, by the way.”
He was. The study was hot, in spite of the river-ghost swaying over it. Sean stood up, on carpet, in riverweed. Gus wasn’t in the room. “Where’s my uncle?”
“Downstairs, on the treadmill. I’ve got to go. Mom’s taking me to Pa Ndau class; then I’m supposed to go over to Keiko’s.”
Eddy gone, Gus in the basement gym. No one to stop Sean. “Right,” he said. “No problem.”
“You sure? I mean, were you in the Servitor’s head just now?”
“Yeah, but nothing’s going on. It’s still in the river, down near the old receiving tomb.”
“Because if you need me to stay, I’m here. The stupid class is no big deal, and I can go to Keiko’s another day. We were just going to hang out.”
For Eddy to blow off a school project was, like, revolutionary. For a second, Sean felt like he was going to bawl. Then he said what he had to say to get her gone: “I’m okay. Except I smell like a pig. I’m going to take a shower.”
“Make sure you call me later, about the dismissing ritual.”
“Soon as I know.”
Eddy gave him a last look so long Sean was afraid she wouldn’t leave after all. Then she trotted into the kitchen, and he heard the back door slam.
What about Gus? Sean didn’t have time to set up much, but he did turn on the shower in the hall bathroom. Gus would hear it running when he came upstairs and for a while, at least, he’d think Sean was still in the house.
Outside the front door Sean stopped. He was crazy to go, especially if Dad and Helen would be back soon. Could he break his new promise to the Servitor? When he was up in the bathroom arranging the shower trick, he’d closed his eyes and heard, river muffled, the retreating roar of the motorcycle. So the bikers were safe.
Yeah, but all the Servitor had to do to find people-snacks was take a jog up to the boulevard.
Through superimposed riverscape, he peered down Keene Street. No Civic, no Dad and Helen. Should he call them? If they did have the dismissing ritual, he could go to the Servitor with a big surprise, not just with the blood in his veins.
For one second, that was all, he closed his eyes. It was long enough for the bubbles of Servitor-thought to deal him pseudopoidal prods of impatience.
He opened his eyes. No Civic. No more time. On the steps to the sidewalk, he wobbled, light-headed from hunger or disoriented from navigating two surrounds at once. He stiffened his knees. Then he walked toward Hope Street, and beyond Hope, toward the cemetery and the river.
23
The first things Helen saw after her fall were black rectangles slashed with fiery pinstripes. The rectangles billowed and collapsed, billowed, collapsed, like membranous air-gates through which monsters struggled to birth themselves. She shrank away, then made out what the rectangles were: blinds drawn against afternoon sun, stirred to false life by the AC unit underneath them.
The blinds covered the windows of her own office at the MU Library. She lay on the couch. Someone had taken off her cap of spikes and wrapped her forehead in damp cloth. When she touched the cloth, a hand towel, her fingers came away wet with water, not blood, so her swollen bladder of a head hadn’t burst after all. That was a plus.
On the minus side, her intact head throbbed like an infected tooth. “Damn,” she muttered.
The mutter incited movement beyond the arm of the couch on which her feet were propped. Helen peered between her sneakers, expecting to see gossamers. Not one. Only Jeremy, with a cell phone at his ear.
To the phone, he said, “Wait, Professor. She’s waking up.”
Professor? If it was Gus, why the formality? And why was Jeremy talking on her phone?
He knelt by her head. Too loudly, he said, “Helen? You hear me?”
She winced. “Like a megaphone.”
“Sorry. You can see me?”
“I can see fine, I guess. How’d I get here?”
“After you passed out, that guy at the desk wanted to call nine-one-one, but I talked him into helping me get you over to your office. You’ve been unconscious for hours—it’s after six. I was about to drag Geldman out of the pharmacy. But as long as your eyes are all right. I mean, I could tell they weren’t bleeding, and your pulse and breathing seemed okay, but I couldn’t tell if you were blind.”
Bleeding, blind? Oh, Geldman’s warning. “Is that him on the phone? Mr. Geldman?”
“No. It’s Marvell.”
The name made her sit up, which was a mistake—pain jolted from the top of her skull into her cervical vertebrae. She dropped back onto the unforgiving vinyl cushions.
“Whoa!” Jeremy said, gruff with alarm. “Lie still. He called about a quarter hour ago. I’ve already told him everything.”
Jeremy put the phone in her hand, warm from his grip. Helen pressed it against her ear. “Professor?”
“Helen! Thank God. You’re all right, aren’t you?”
Her eyes watered at the vigor of his voice, buzzy as it was. “I guess so. I don’t have the symptoms Geldman said would mean trouble. You know Geldman? He knows you.”
“Oh yes, I know Solomon, and I’ll be giving him hell for selling you a potion that could’ve blinded you.”
“He had to. Didn’t Jeremy explain?”
“The boy’s father? Yes. Rotten mess, and you in the middle of it.”
“Are you still in the mountains?”
“No, I’m in London. Leezy McGrigor said you were in trouble. Her son drove me into Inverness, and I was lucky enough to catch the last plane south. I’m flying to New York in an hour, then on to Rhode Island.”
Helen’s throat tightened. “I’m sorry to break up your vacation, but I can’t tell you not to come. Talk about planes, I feel like I’ve been piloting one upside down while trying to read the flight manual.”
Marvell laughed, then spoke with an equally comforting gravity: “I’m the one who should be sorry. The Order trusted me to watch you, and here I put myself out of reach for days. And I don’t know how to apologize to Mr. Wyndham.”
“You know Geldman. Do you know Redemption Orne, too?”
“Only his history. The Order heard rumors of his survival years ago, in Henry Arkwright’s time. No one could confirm them.”
The Order, twice now. “You’re talking about the Order of Alhazred.”
A couple beats of silence, followed by a sheepish, “Yes, Helen.”
“Geldman was surprised I
didn’t know about it.”
“I should have told you sooner. What you’ve already done, on your own, proves that.”
Given the trouble Marvell was taking now, Helen couldn’t let him berate himself. “No, you were right. I needed to do that background reading first.”
“The Order of Alhazred, then. Well, briefly, it’s an international group, magicians, paramagicians, ordinary people. They’ve got two things in common. They all know the truth behind the Cthulhu Mythos, and they all work to mitigate the dangers posed by its creatures and adherents. Henry Arkwright was one of its founders, after the Dunwich incident.”
“Which Lovecraft wrote the truth about, whatever Uncle John used to say.”
“Lovecraft was an Order member, though not a popular one, the way he told tales out of school. Obviously there’s a huge amount more I have to tell you, but the important thing now is keeping you and the others safe. I’ve already contacted another member in Providence, Thomas O’Conaghan. I told Mr. Wyndham about him, and it turns out they’ve already met.”
O’Conaghan, right. The detective who’d stopped by the Litinski house. “Can he help us with the dismissing ritual?”
“I’m afraid Tom hasn’t witnessed a dismissal before. I have, so I want to be there when Sean tries it. Especially now that he’s been inoculated—he could need someone to keep him on track.”
“Even if he takes the Patience Orne potion?”
“That should help, but it’s not a sure thing. For tonight Tom is going to take all of you to a hotel downtown. The Servitor won’t want to expose itself to traffic and crowds. Tomorrow night, we’ll get rid of it.”
It seemed time to say good-bye, but Helen didn’t want to give up the connection to Marvell, distant as it was. “This call must be costing a fortune.”
“To hell with that. Look, Helen. I’m going to help you make sense of what’s happened. I remember what it’s like, to find out the impossible is real.”
She cradled the cell phone closer. “Professor, I saw things after I took the Bishop potion. Creatures floating everywhere. And gates—I don’t know, with some kind of veil over them and things inside trying to get out.”
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