by Edward Lee
What she saw, though—and with an unbidden yet insistent focus—was the very window that had been previously vandalized by the talents of Monsieur Czanek. All the boards had been pried away, and the frame itself too. This left a gaping black oblong hole...
“Git reddy!” Silva exclaimed as Czanek poised his kicking leg.
“Git set!”
Czanek pulled his leg back farther.
“Aaaaaaaaaaand...”
Sary remained too dizzy even to pray, but her bedimmed mind managed a final gesture: Yew take keer, Wilbur Whateley. Hope ya know I love yew...
The extra second which Silva would require to yell “Go!” would not be provided, nor would Czanek have opportunity to propel his foot forward against the desired abutment of Sary’s sexual aperture. Instead, both men seemed to seize in place, their heads cocking toward a faint, even barely audible sound.
Was it a hissing? Or more semblant to a slithering, as of a snake advancing rapidly?
Sary’s eyes remained peeled on the vicinity of the agape window. Just below this stretched a portion of scrub grass, which—
Sary squinted in the moonlight.
The grass was moving. As if, indeed, a snake were traversing there.
But in this case, it would have to be an invisible snake.
Joe Czanek and Manny Silva, with a suddenness as if catapulted, left their place on the ground and flew up into the air. They roved there, not as if flung but as if via some manner of controlled suspension—that is...an invisible controlled suspension. Screams took little time to issue from both of the airborne gentlemen, screams which might mirror an abstraction as those of human souls held helpless and ad perpetuum in the clutches of perdition.
In truth, these two valueless sociopaths were in the clutches of something else altogether.
Into Sary was injected an amount of adrenalin more than commensurate to efface her pain and bleared consciousness, and to locomote her with an excess of speed to the edge of the tool-house. Circumstance left her no option but to stare into the moonlit area before the house and behold the unbelievable sight. Her two accosters continued to belt out blood-spraying screams as they continued, too, to rove about in the mid-air. By moonlight, Sary could see well that they were fully naked, and could see too well every depressing detail of their fish-belly-white bodies, their horror-diminished genitals, and the splats of excrement blurting from their bowels. Each scream stepped up as their uncanny hovering went on. Were bones heard cracking? And was some inexplicable distortion suddenly effecting the abdominal regions of both men? Sary felt certain that Joe Czanek’s waist collapsed for no discernible reason; again, the “snake” parallel came to mind, for many times on her walks she’d witnessed snakes subduing squirrels, rats, and such by constricting about the mammals’ bodies. When the snakes unreeled to reposition themselves, their prey displayed mid-sections that were collapsed in a corkscrew fashion...
Manny Silva’s more corpulent physique distorted to a degree that might even be called spectacular; suddenly he was a sack of suet bisected by a tightening string. Whatever was happening here alarmed Sary so much as to becloud her cognizance entirely. Therefore she wasn’t really even aware of what she did next...
She made the Voorish Sign.
If her jaw could’ve actually come detached and dropped off, it likely would have. Sary could now see the invisible “snakes” which had wrapped about the thieves and held them aloft.
But these snakes were an incarnadine color, a foot-wide, dozens of yards long, and overlain with what seemed to be countless cup-shaped outdents, which, had Sary any ken with aquatic zoology, she might have likened to the tentacular suckers of octopi and other similar cephalopoda.
The tentacles seemed to revel in what their capture yielded; they reeled back and forth displaying the duet of prizes—indeed, almost as if to display them to Sary herself. More than feces rained down now, but blood too, exiting mouth and anus alike due to the constricitve pressure. Were Czanek’s lungs actually dangling from his lips? And what wagged wetly beneath Silva’s fat legs was a tail of intestines. But more curious than any of this was the point of origin of these monstrous appendages:
The vandalized window.
At this point, the tentacles began to withdraw back into the ragged portal, taking their human rewards with them. But before they’d retracted fully into the house, they disintegrated to nothingness, just as had the old man and the insatiable albino woman.
Sary knew very little just then, but she knew this: however perilous the prospect might be, she would have to see all of what was in Wilbur’s house. She would have to behold with her own eyes what manner of thing existed at the other end of those “snakes.”
She very slowly rose to her feet, and in an automatonic state returned to the tool-house, took up the lantern, and walked back through the moonlight to the house—
To the window.
She maximized the lantern’s wick and was at once cocooned by licks of wavering yellow light. She thrust the lantern into the aperture, then set it back down after seeing nothing whatever inside. The phrasal idiom No time like the present was not one with which Sary had any conversance, but her own unenlightened grey matter managed something correspondent. She stared into the window’s Acherontic blackness as she prepared again to make the sign. Something, though, gave her pause.
A feeling. A notion whose origin could not be terrestrially identified. Sary sensed—as people were wont to do—the distinct and singular impression of being watched—no, more—of being gazed upon with intentness, even deliberateness; but this was stemmed in far more than the commonplace and rather prosaic fear of the unknown. An altogether different persuasion of fear infected Sary as the house interior (and its nearly corporeal darkness) commandeered her gaze. Was it really fear? It seemed so, for her heart raced, she trembled acutely, her molars were chattering, yet these denominators of the emotion in question ended resolutely, and were then accompanied by traits clearly unrepresentative of the same.
The lubriciousness within her sex—in a single mental throb—grew so teeming that such sequent fluids ran openly down the inside of her thighs; and with each contraction of her heart there came an equal contraction of her genitals—ghosts of orgasms that seemed part of her natural state at the present time. It was the darkness past the ravaged window, she knew (something not as much a darkness as a reckoning, audient physicalization) and some constituent therein proving to be far more than a simple retardation of light. She could sense it thick in the air, while the air—inscrutable as it might sound—seemed surcharged with not only awareness but also some catalytic attribute that seeped into her blood. It histrionicized her nudity; it fired conduction in nerves hitherto unsparked; it ignited mycoplasmic triggers to permit of sensation thus far unrealized and unfelt; it tickled the very gene-markers hidden deep amongst the neurosecretory pieces of minims that comprised every fiber of every living cell. Sary’s breasts hummed in reactivity; her ovaries vibrated like hummingbirds caught in one’s hand; while hormones transmogrified into new hormones, and gusted forth from her pituitary gland to drench her libidinal receptors; and the orgasmic spasms of her genitals migrated directly—like an electric bolt—to her brain.
All this, merely by looking into the darkness within the house.
Out of mind now, Sary made the Voorish Sign, thrust the lantern back into the window, and looked—
***
Was it some imp of the perverse that decoded the retinal images in Sary’s eyes and directed them into her memory? Her first glimpse into the bizarre house brought with it a paradoxical unconsciousness: paradoxical in that she seemed to behold herself and her surroundings as if drifting above her physical body; hence, a consciousness within unconsciousness. Had her very spirit evacuated her body, to move about and to see? If so, in what manner of vessel did her spirit now abode?
This question, and a superfluity of others, would occur to her in rapid succession only to be just as rapidly discarded as incon
sequential. Matters of far greater signification were at hand...
Her nude body lay dormant beneath her, and Sary noted the clarity in which she saw it, as if through some slightly distorted yet harrowingly accurate lens which revealed every pore of her skin, every razor-sharp black hair upon her head and betwixt her legs, each individual lacteal duct of her areolae, etc. She then raised her head (in a manner of speaking, of course, since whatever now served as quarterage for her sensibilities no longer enjoyed a physical connexion to her body) in order to pilot her sense of sight into the confines of the house. The two tentacles she’d previously glimpsed absconding with the ruffians were now joined by dozens more, each tipped by mouths which snapped open and shut in some celebrative synchrony. Those first two tentacles, however, still reeled about, grasping the now quite dead Manny Silva and Joe Czanek; and had Sary a greater capacity for linear thinking, she would’ve wondered what the appendages had in store for the two miscreant corpses. Instead, all of her attention fixed on the morphological madness and physical contradiction that existed within. Did the scores of stovepipe-thick tentacles change from blue to grey to purple as they also swelled and shrank as if to a premeditated rhythm? Ultimately, the living bulk looked like it had outgrown its shelter to such a degree that very little further growth would be permitted before the house erupted; indeed, so close were the massive thing’s boundaries that Sary could scarcely see deep enough through the tentacles to espy what manner of body existed to sport the appendages. Might it be akin to the torso of a mammal? The carapace of a crustacean? Or the plasmic sheath of a bacillus cell? Inexplicable, too, was the manner in which the thing seemed to phase in and out of various states of being. First came a state of palpable organum; then a less composited state, as of jelly or mucus; then a state of distinct semi-solidness, akin to compressed vapor.
Was this incalculable creature’s physical mass edging into and out of a dimensional realm contrary to that of the known three dimensions?
If Sary were to learn this question’s answer, it would not be today.
When she looked again, the corpse of Czanek was being dragged slowly in and out of the mouth-end of a broader tentacle, and each withdrawal dissolved or in some way abraded the cadaver’s flesh. (One might’ve thought of a child sucking a popsicle.) Eventually little remained save for bones, whereupon these, too, were admitted into the tentacular mandibles and swallowed whole. But Sary had been mistaken about the other corpse—Silva, the fat one—which still twitched with piteous life. From the writhing, impossible congeries, a more petite appendage emerged; it wrapped itself about Silva’s genitals—just where the scrotum adjoins the crotch—and slowly tore the organ out at the root. This was swallowed, while more such tentacles converged and consumed Silva’s physical form one bite at a time. Lastly, the remnants, like Czanek’s, were swallowed and digested.
At this point, something changed.
Sary’s unembodied senses felt a decline of temperature and an elevation in proximal air pressure. The incognizable behemoth stilled itself, and Sary interpreted the stasis as an indication of attention on the thing’s part. Why she would make this interpretation, there was no telling. Nevertheless, she was correct.
The thing, indeed, was assessing her.
Then a great many of the appendages which composed its physical form retracted...
Now Sary could see what existed as a foundation for the tentacles, the heart of the artichoke, so to speak. It was a mass of eyes, all which looked upon her in fascination and even respect. A mass of eyes, yes, the height and breadth of the largest pine tree on the property. Each eye seemed to be set in nothing at all akin to a socket but instead some gelatinous substance, and...did this substance also have mouths, or things like mouths, situated throughout? It would be pallid to say that this being—entity, creature, what have you—existed with virtually no alliance to the laws of nature as we know them; and it would be just as insufficient to say it was not of this earth. It was far more—and far less—than any of that.
The thing’s body seemed to percolate, it seemed to bubble within. Its eyes did not blink, for they had no lids with which to do so, but they did variegate in shape, while their irises went from one astral hue to the next—colors, tints, and shades never before beheld by the natives of this planet.
Horrific? Yes. But fascinating as well.
And next?
The great bubbling mass began to turn.
Of course, it did not turn as, say, a human being would, nor did it change its position by means of swivelling, or traversing. Instead, the excrescence of its base squirmed and rippled, licensing movement, and said movement could only be voluntary.
It meant to show her something.
When the squirming ceased, the creature had presented to Sary the side of itself that had been previously eclipsed by the lantern-shadows. It was this moment of unalloyed shock and tenebrific revelation that blacked out Sary’s gossamer senses and sent her spirit soaring back into her prostrate body. A pair of appendages protracted from the hulk—the same pair, in fact, which had so effectively ended the careers of Messrs. Czanek and Silva—and gently lifted an unconscious Sary from her place just outside the window, then—extending farther—placed her back on the cot in the tool-house. They hovered momentarily, as if contemplating her in some commendable way, then retraced themselves back to the material gibbosity of which they were a part.
The actual sight which so forcefully shot Sary back into stygian realms of unconsciousness was nothing more than this:
The creature’s face.
It was a half-face, really, the right side consisting of runnels, bumps, and indescribable contours whose purpose could not be estimated. The left side, however, demonstrated great patchworks of what might actually be hair, kinky, black accumulations like sporadic moss; one eye not in keeping at all with the myriad eyes that enshrouded the thing’s thorax, complete with lashes and an irregular brow; a sagging, lipped orifice that the anti-nature of the thing meant for a mouth; a distinctly recessive chin; and patches of some pale, yellowish covering which hideously resembled human epidermis. More clumps of crinkly hair sprouted about the mouth and the side of its face—a cheek?—and there was even a macabre convolution of flesh which bore a suspicious likeness to an ear.
Overall, however, this “face”—or the atrocious assemblage of impossibility that sufficed for one—bore a suspicious likeness to Wilbur’s face.
Seventeen
At a time nearly identical to that during which the criminal denizen Joe Czanek had been breaking into Wilbur’s house, Wilbur himself was breaking into a mercantile emporium known as Leffert’s Feedstock & General Goods, located in the township of Aylesbury. The mechanical nature of the intrusion had been so easy as to unwarrant exposition; and so were the descriptive details of the interior shop. Wilbur lowered his trousers enough to just expose the two ancillary eyes situated in his hips, and with these he suffered no effort in navigating himself through the shop’s utter darkness. A cash-box sat opened beneath the counter, revealing obvious loose bills and change, but the giant occult scholar had not come here with any intention of stealing; his moral posture, in fact, made distasteful—and moreover unthinkable—the idea of stealing from someone who hadn’t stolen from him. On the contrary, his intention was to leave more than sufficient payment on the counter when he found what it was he needed.
And what he needed was ammunition.
Taking chances—or, worse, taking blessings for granted—was a sin he could not well afford, for tomorrow night, indeed, was the time. He remembered too well the guard dog near the Miskatonic library, and in spite of several physiological advantages, Wilbur knew that the dog was fortified with reflexes which surpassed his own, and harbored fangs and jaws that might very well make simpleton’s work of his tentaclettes and even his probosciduct. Wilbur, in fact, had been plagued by vicious dogs all his life; he could scarcely embark on a leisurely stroll without some such hostile cur, enraged by his scent, tearing afte
r him. Grandsire’s big pistol had forestalled many a canine confrontation, much to the displeasure of the dogs’ masters.
But not only was Wilbur running out of bullets for the formidable Webley .455, the cartridges his did possess were so old as to be of questionable reliability. Twice now, he’d had to repel attacks only to have the weapon’s hammer fall on a defective primer; and though engaging the next round was but a matter of seconds, seconds were insufficient in certain instances. Wilbur was not afraid to die, but he knew that he must not die—or be grievously injured—before he discharged his all-important task on the night of the morrow.
Osborn’s had stopped carrying the peculiar caliber Wilbur needed; and even when they’d most recently had it in stock, they’d refused to sell to him. “Ya big ass-ugly freak! Yer face looks like the devil’s bunghole, and ye smell even wuss!” Tobias railed at him once. “Ye think I’m a-gonna sell ammunition to the likes of ye? Ya done already kilt half the dogs in the village, ya cockeyed monster! I’ll have me no truck with the blood’a Wizard Whateley! Naow git aout!” Wilbur was surprised not at all by his cousin’s hostile rant. “Yer bleach-faced ma sucked my dick onct, fer a haff-pint’a hooch,” the old misanthrope saw fit to add. “I pushed up that trash-cloth dress’a hers and gandered her pussy and—sweet Jesus!—the sight give me nightmares, boy! Look like a blammed woodchuck with a ax-cut in it!” Wilbur was none too pleased to hear such talk about his mother, yet he doubted the rant was invention; hence, it wouldn’t have been ethical to hex the old man for mere words.
All that aside, the young colossan could ponder no other resort but to travel hither to Aylesbury to procure the necessary bullets. The piddling lock on the ammunition cabinet came apart with a single tug, then—
Disappointment.
The .455 cartridges Wilbur so desperately needed were not in the store’s inventory. And since the establishment sold only ammunition, and not firearms as well, Wilbur’s trek had been a profitless one.