by Various
Petey gave a nod and a wink to Warren, who visibly relaxed. Color flooded his cheeks. Geoff suddenly remembered the unnamed designer he’d replaced. “…this time…”
“We’re going to leave you with the miter, Geoff. I think you’ll find you can remedy all deficiencies. You’ll get R’lyeh right this time. You’ll get on the Dreamer’s dark side, and all will be well.”
“We haven’t much time,” said Calamaro.
“With a dedicated designer like Geoff here, I’m not worried in the least. Are you worried, Warren?”
“Wha…no! Not at all. Geoff’ll burn both ends till we’re done with this guy. That’s why he makes the big bucks.”
The miter had begun to feel heavier. He must get back to his desk and plunge into his work. He hardly heard what the others were saying. Ideas were coming, strong and vivid. They must be captured. He must surrender to them, bring them to life.
The others must have sensed that he was no longer following the conversation. Warren stood up, signaling that it was Geoff’s turn to do the same. Petey squeezed his hand. Emil Calamaro merely bent slightly at the waist, gripping his cane.
Geoff found himself in the lobby.
Lulu, the receptionist, regarded the glittering headpiece in awe. “Wow…”
She must have seen something in his eyes that silenced her.
Geoff strode toward his cubby, the prickling sensation still strong, but turning to something cold and liquescent, an icy tendril that held his will and gave him marching orders.
What am I doing?
He dragged to a stop in the elevator lobby, determined not to surrender. This was a job, only a job. He shouldn’t have to compromise his inmost thoughts, his imagination, his dreams. He would finish the damn map because it was the only way to get back to his own project, but that was all. Beyond that, he would resist.
Elevator doors rumbled open and a small group of programmers, returning with coffee, stumbled off and stared at Geoff with a mixture of amazement and respect. He pushed past them, into the small car, just as the doors closed, and stabbed the button for the ground floor. At that moment, the watery tendrils turned to knives of ice. He put his hands on either side of the wretched miter and tried to twist it off, but it clung tight. The car plummeted past his chosen floor. The car slowed but did not stop. It had entered realms for which there were no markers. The miter had some power over the elevator, even as it fought for power over him. He half expected to step off into a cavern of watery light where Byakhee waited to wing him away to dismal festivities.
Instead, the doors opened on a concrete cell, familiar from that morning. There was the stairwell where Warren had dismissed him, and a door into the vast dark garage.
The miter tightened like a fist, as if sending a final warning, and then it relaxed its grip. He was free.
It took five minutes, at a limping run, to reach the huddled cars, his own seeming vulnerable at the edge of the row. He dug into his pocket for keys. Once he was clear of the building, he would find a way to shed the miter, using a crowbar if necessary. After that, his greatest fear was that Petey and Calamaro would find a way to blackball his career. All he wanted was to get free of this cursed project and back to something he cared about.
As he turned his key in the lock, he heard a sound that stopped him. He waited for it to repeat. It must have been an engine coughing to life on some floor far above. Nothing on this level stirred. The other cars were empty, as he proved to himself by peering through the window of the adjacent Volkswagen. The same clutter of papers on the seat; the same collection of tiny dashboard idols; the same pile of sod and sticks thrown about like yard waste interrupted on its way to the dump.
The sound, as if aware of his attention, played again.
He bent closer. Crumpled sketches littered the seat. Waves of tingling swept across his scalp. His pupils felt impossibly huge. Among the sketches he could make out a fragment of coastline, an ocean expanse, an X in the midst of the sea.
R’lyeh.
The other drawings suddenly made more sense. The tilting oblongs…a poor draftsman’s attempt at non-Euclidean geometry…a massive door…a model ship…
The miter caressed him warningly, as if an octopus could purr.
They were maps. Levels. Attempts to sketch out the very same areas he was building for the Simulator. Very poor designs, he had to admit, by a less than skilled designer.
Whose car was this?
Reluctantly, he recognized the kinship between the collection of dashboard dolls and the vinyl creatures that lined his desk.
And an even less welcome connection: The broken brown twigs were tangled with black rags that bore the Aeon Entertainment logo.
The sound came again. This time, unmistakably, it came from inside some car in this row. It sounded less like an engine noise and more like something clearing its throat.
He eased his door shut, slipped the keys into his pocket, and began to back slowly toward the distant elevator.
The miter, satisfied that he understood, regained its grip.
You haven’t won, he told it. I’ll get through this and move on.
It’s only a job.
***
He fought from the first, in his own way.
He fought from his desk, in front of his monitor, keyboarding until his eyelids trembled and the urge to sleep became all but impossible to resist. But all his other sleepless nights on the Austen project had given him the resources he needed to stay upright and conscious through the deathmarches of crunchmode. The Dreamer worked through him, but he fought back. Subverting the Dark Advent would not have been possible had he not already finely honed the ability to resist sleep; for a game designer it was second nature, a matter of instinct, ingrained.
The first line of defense was a visible act of defiance. Out came every last one of his vinyl Jane Austen figures. He set them to run lines of interference between the figures of eldritch power. The population of Casterbridge mingled incongruously among Whateleys and Peaslees and the entire Arkham establishment.
These small personal touches, injecting something of himself, were minor sorties in the main battle. But they brought a very real satisfaction and sense of resistance.
To resist outright was a doomed proposition. His sanity was at stake, after all. There were limits to how much he was willing to sacrifice just to make a point. Direct opposition would only lead to failure, madness, and the unemployment office. If he could just get through this, there would be other opportunities in store for him. With all the glory attendant on the Second Rising, he would be free again to pick his assignments. He could push his Trollope project. Or finally develop The Bronte Sisters Massacre.
Such thoughts did not sit well with the miter, which struck back by clenching down so hard that his brain felt like a raisin. Even through stifling pain, he clung hopelessly to his passion.
Warren dragged a cot into an empty office, dedicating it to Geoff for the duration. Yet to lie there, to sleep, would have been to surrender himself completely.
Beneath the waves, in the lightless depths of his map, the city took shape. Geoff modeled shapes in ABDUL, shapes unlike any he had created before. They were direct projections from the Dreamer; they prefigured the Dark Advent. Even as he built them, he knew they were true. Before this, he had merely imagined R’lyeh; he had improvised, glibly making shit up. This was utterly different. These creations were not of him; he was simply a conduit for the Dreamer’s own excretions. What that made of him, he felt all too keenly.
Yet, while his hands hewed R’lyeh from deformed terrain, his heart took shelter in a green imagined England. It was not mountains of madness that filled his mind, but hillocks of happiness. While fluorescent light throbbed down upon his mitered head, he imagined it was the sunlight of a hot August afternoon; he sought respite from the fields of baled hay, finding Tess the dairymaid (loosely of the D’Urbervilles) waiting for him in the sultry shade, her breasts white as the cream she churned to butte
r. This was a vision of loveliness no Elder God could threaten. It was not unknown Kadath that shimmered in the distance like a phantasmagoric tapestry, but a stolid grey manor house holding dominion above a manicured lawn. It was not distant witless piping in a cosmic void that filled his ears, but the silver peal of church bells ever ringing through a lilac-scented evening. The pastor walked out among his flock. Roses grew on old white lattices and nodded their heavy heads at the coming night, willing him to sleep…sleep…all would be well if only he would…sleep. Not surrender, merely…merely…
“Geoff? Geoff! Wake up, man, it’s coming! It’s time!”
Groggily aware that something was wrong, Geoff lurched into consciousness. When had he lapsed? What had he lost?
In sleep he had laid himself wide open to the Dreamer. He’d given up everything he valued. He had been party to atrocities. He must delete his work! It was the only way to keep the monster from leaking into the world.
Warren stopped his hand. “You’re done. Come on, we’re in the conference room.”
“Done? But---”
“Don’t worry. The map’s compiled, it’s built, it’s beautiful. Petey and Calamaro couldn’t be happier. Timing’s perfect. We’re not the bottleneck, Geoffrey. Retail can sweat the rest of it. We did our part and we’re done. Now come watch the Rising.”
Stepping into the conference room, he experienced double vision and disorientation. Twin monitors showed the same scene. It took him a moment to realize that one was the simulator and the other was a live broadcast from ships and news helicopters far out at sea. The similarity between the two scenes was uncanny.
Heads swiveled toward him; he tried to smile. Emil Calamaro and Petey Sandersen were plainly delighted to see him. Petey took his hands off the keyboard, where he had been tinkering with the R’lyeh simulation, and, supporting himself on the edge of the table, leaned toward Geoff with his hand out, shouting “He is Risen!” with evangelical fury.
Geoff mumbled his reply.
“We want to thank you and honor you. What you’ve done is beyond amazing!”
Calamaro was rising, his dark sneer full of satisfaction. He too pressed in close to Geoff. “Indeed, it is completely astonishing. You have greatly eased the Rising. We have watched the ascent again and again, and it is most pleasing. Those who did not witness this day firsthand will be able to witness it over and over again for ages to come. It will be as it was.”
On the live screen, the tossing sea had only just begun to tremble; but in the simulator that commemorated the occasion, the ocean had become a frothing stew of green slime belched from the depths. Dark angular towers began to thrust from the waters, black windows gaping, doors opening like the mouths of the abyss. To gaze upon the exhumed city was madness—even he, its author, could hardly bear to look. Then again, he felt he was no more its author than author of what the networks were transmitting.
Petey pulled over a keyboard and paused the simulation. It began to tick backward, then ran forward again at greater speed. R’lyeh was swallowed by the waves, vomited out, swallowed up again. Warren shook his shoulder. “Good work, Geoff. I mean it. Outstanding. You’ve really outdone yourself.”
Meanwhile, the actual rising would not be rushed; it could not be paused or reversed. If only!
The news cameras drifted over the open sea. Its gentleness filled him with dread.
“All right,” Petey said. “Plenty of time for this later.”
As he spoke, the simulated R’lyeh had just crested the false waters. The great stage door to the false dreamer’s lair, the tilted slab, had begun to gape. The shape within, waking, was caught by the stroke of a key. Paralyzed. Not dead. Not even sleeping. On hold.
Petey pushed the keyboard aside and picked up a remote. He pointed it at the live monitor and turned up the volume.
***
First you heard the thrum of helicopter blades. After a moment, seeping through, a deeper sound like the tolling of drowned bells vibrated out of the television and filled the listeners in the conference room with the solemnity of the moment. Geoff sank into a chair. He had seen all this before. He had dreamed it, lived it, fought it. Failed. His sense of defeat was complete.
Water slithered and eddied from the dark complexities beneath. Huge mounded shapes. Cruise ships and luxury liners had come close for the occasion, while keeping a respectful distance from the turbulence. The cameras showed their decks and rails thronged with wealthy golden worshipers. Several aircraft carriers waited on the horizon in case of international incidents. But only one incident mattered now, and it transcended all merely “international” concerns.
The bells tolled louder, and at a slowly rising pitch. Something in Geoff thrilled at the sound in spite of himself. He had dreamed this. He had been down there in the depths. He had met the Dreamer mind to mind and been utterly defeated, and yet…and yet…
The waters surged. The chopper pulled closer. From far down in the foul foam came something shining and angular, all points and slopes and corners, upthrusting towers and turrets, and still those bells, so wrong, so infinitely wrong.
Petey and Emil turned to one another, worried looks flitting.
Something gleaming, something of brilliant shining ivory whiteness, suddenly breached the surface. A gasp went through the room.
The helicopter lurched as if the pilot had lost control, caught by a vicious gust from below.
As the chopper recovered, the view stabilized. The distant television crew was shouting about the near disaster, distracted from the inevitable one. They were closer to the water now, closer to the immensity that continued rising into light and air. Gargantuan bluffs of black dripping stone, chiseled shapes covered with slime and ancient marine encrustations. And atop all this, the greatest monstrosity, the holiest of holies…
A church.
Exactly that. A small old-fashioned English country church with a single perfect spire. Sparkling white and dripping wet, it perched atop the squalid rocks as if it had been lifted whole from Geoff’s reveries and transplanted in this unlikeliest of spots.
Geoff himself could only stare as seawater flowed from the bell tower, as the pealing bells grew louder, clearer, cheerier.
They filled the room until Petey and Calamaro had to clamp their hands over their ears. The two men whirled on Geoff with their eyes bulging, mouths flapping but unable to speak.
Geoff backed away with both hands on the miter, trying desperately to pry it off, to throw it down and run, even though he knew they could not harm him now. He had given birth to this thing. He and it were one and the same. Minds had mingled in the depths, and now…
Onscreen, the TV screen, the doors of the church swung wide. The timbre of the bells deepened abruptly, sounding a sour and dismal note. Petey and Calamaro, pierced by sudden rapture, whirled to take in the sight.
The church was not empty—hardly that. The white outer shell, the churchlike carapace, had transfigured the softer thing inside, and decidedly not for the better.
It lashed out, and the helicopter went down in an instant. Green water closed over the lens. For a moment that monitor showed the bubbling surface of the sea from underneath. Sunlight flared across the screen, but shadows were spreading. Somewhere, the cruise ships were being pulled under one by one. You could hardly hear the screams above the bells, which tolled and tolled. They would stop for nothing and nothing could block out the sound.
Not even Warren: “You’ve done it, Geoff!”
Not even Emil Calamaro: “Big, big congrats!”
Not even Petey Sandersen, conveying the last words he heard or wanted to hear: “Don’t take the miter off! The job is yours! Forever!”
Dark Blue
by Alan Dean Foster (2007)
The Sea below the keel of the ocean-going ketch Repera was the bluest blue Chase Rontgern had ever seen. It was bluer than blue. Bluer than the clearest sky, bluer than all the lapis-lazuli in Afghanistan, bluer than sapphire or azurite or a studio track by Coltr
ane. Rontgern had spent considerable time on a number of boats on two oceans but he had never seen blue like this. He asked Captain Santos about it.
“There are no fish here, in this deep, deep water. No fish because no zooplankton. No zooplankton because no phytoplankton.” Standing on the flying bridge with his long hair tucked under his cap and dark wrap-around shades shielding his eyes from the sun and wind, Santos nodded to port. “With no microscopic life in the water, no life of any kind, there nothing to scatter the sunshine. Everything get absorbed except the blue. The sun pours down unobstructed and just keep going, going, until it fade away to indigo-black.”
Rontgern nodded his understanding as he raised the expensive binoculars that were hanging from the padded strap around his neck. They hadn’t seen a thing since leaving Pitcairn behind. Only a few patrolling seabirds searching diligently for the fish Santos insisted were not there.
They had tried but had been unable to land at Pitcairn. The island’s famous swells were too high for their single rigid inflatable to chance a dash for the concrete and rock breakwater that protected the tiny artificial harbor at Bounty Bay, and given the rough conditions the islanders were not inclined to risk one of their vital Moss aluminum longboats just to venture out and say hello to those on board a tramp ketch like the Repera.
As it had sailed on eastward out of sight of Pitcairn’s towering green-clad peaks, Rontgern had reflected in passing that the original Bounty mutineers had indeed succeeded in isolating themselves on one of the least accessible islands in the entire South Pacific. Now the Repera was headed for a speck of land that was even more inaccessible than Pitcairn, and devoid even of the resilient descendents of rowdy mutineers and their dedicated vahines.
A more or less oval chunk of solid coralline limestone rising straight up out of the ocean from a depth of three and a half kilometers, Henderson Island lay another two hundred kilometers northeast of Pitcairn, which in turn was more than ^wice that distance from where he had met up with the Repera in the Gambier islands of southern French Polynesia. The nearest airstrip to Henderson was on Mangareva, more than six hundred kilometers away in the Gambiers. No aircraft could land on Pitcairn and it was too far to reach by chopper. The closest outpost of civilization to Henderson in the other direction was Easter Island, which lay so far over the dead-flat horizon that the inhabitants of Mangareva were next-door neighbors by comparison.