The cataleptic, disembodied eye of a blood-red cyclops moon looking down at a jagged sewer-dank landscape below where shadows rustled in cellar-spaces and immense crystalline worms rose from rivers of hissing filth. Faceless winged hags picking at rawboned children that wore the faces of graveyard rats and feasted upon one another. Crypt poachers with eyes of bleeding sunset and too many undulant limbs beckoning, grinning with rusting teeth from high, blasted hills where abominations like writhing entrails crawled from ruptured blackened soil. He heard the high, sweet voice of a child singing from hollow spaces like a single white-hot needle piercing the night.
Rondo stared in shock at Sloat, drool hanging from his mouth, gibberish falling from his lips: “Cthulu Fhtagn! Iä Iä Cthulhu Fhtagn!” Then his hand came out with a razor and he slashed Mondo across the eyes.
Mondo sank to his knees, but did not try to protect himself. He held his hands up in supplication, mumbling something, his eyes crying scarlet tears. Rondo laid open his throat again and again until hot pumping blood sprayed over him like an inkblot, bright red and glistening.
Mondo made a gurgling sound and fell face-first to the ground, dead or near to it.
And by then the hacks were everywhere, knocking Sloat aside and beating Rondo to the ground with their sticks while hundreds of cons stood around and watched silently, their eyes wide, their mouths moving but no sounds coming out.
Chi Chi and Luis had gotten Coogan back to the table by then.
“What kind of shit was that?” Chi Chi said. “You see it? Did you fucking see that?”
Coogan saw all right. He sat there, trying to find his center, trying to tell himself that he had not seen those tattoos move on McGrath’s arms. Had not seen them slither and crawl, rising up from the flesh in a multitude of writhing maggoty forms then pull aside like curtains to give him a view of that dead city from his dreams: a necropolis going to slime and rot in the pathless wastes of some interdimensional slum where a loathsome horror rose above the clustered tombstone buildings like a harvest moon.
10
Lockdown again.
Warden Sheens really didn’t know what else to do, so he locked his shitheads in their cages and he had Sloat brought below and put in solitary. They told Sloat it was for his own protection, but the truth was Sheens wasn’t sure who needed protecting more: Sloat or the rest of the population.
For two days there was nothing for Luis and Coogan to do but to sit in their cells, read, smoke, play cards and do push-ups and sit-ups on the floor. By the second day, Coogan had pretty much avoided the subject of Eddie Sloat as much as he possibly could. Then he gave in.
“What’s your take on Sloat?” he finally said. “That shit in the yard?”
Luis did not speak for some time. He stared into space. Then he licked his lips and said, “There was this acid making the rounds in the streets. They called it Third Eye. I pop a tab and expect to zone for four hours, but I don’t zone. Something else. My perception is heightened, doors opened, I creep in dark corners of space-time and thread the needle in nameless gulfs where geometric shapes scream and bleed. I stare into the ultimate primal chaos at the center of cosmic creation and touch black crystal towers on dead moons where alien hands have scratched the Yellow Sign into living rock. I scale the Purple Mountains and get funneled into the Great White Space. I am formless and bodiless. But I am not alone. You hear me on this, man? I am not alone.”
Coogan pulled off a cigarette, sighing. Here we go again with the crazy talk. But he listened, for somehow he knew it was important. “Who was there with you?”
“Other minds from other places and I brushed against them, tunneling through them as they invaded me and we got tangled together, a big ball of yarn in an endless shadow plane,” Luis admitted. “How do you separate one from the other? I was a canvas, home, white and drab and not a single brushstroke to call my own and they—these minds, ancient, ancient minds—they start painting on me and teaching me and instructing me and then I knew what it was to be them. Can you understand? These minds…they jump everywhere, through time, through space, from one dimension to the next. They inhabit minds in the past, the present, the future, this world, a million other worlds you never heard of. They have a name, but you don’t need to know it. They had many enemies but there was only one thing they were afraid of.”
“And what’s that?”
“Something out in space, something horrible waiting at the edge of our solar system.”
Coogan said, “Something in the Oort Cloud?”
“Yes. An entity…a colony of ancient decayed minds that existed long before this solar system was formed, something that lived in the cold formless blackness, an entity which hates all living things. Something primal and bodiless and destructive. Something that has been called the Million Malignant Minds, but to us is simply Nemesis.”
“And what’s this shit got to do with Eddie Sloat?”
“It’s got everything to do with him, home. He’s some kind of conduit to them and I have no doubt of it. He’s linked with them and he’s responsible for the missing men same as he’s responsible for what happened in the yard today and the dreams we’ve all been having. He’s part of what waits out there, what’s getting closer every night and if you think I’m fucking crazy, home, well that’s just fine. But it’ll be dark in an hour and then you look out the window over there and that darkness you saw will be larger and closer. Then, then you tell me how crazy I am.”
Coogan sighed. It was all so contrary to everything he was, all he knew, everything he had seen and experienced. “He’s…what? Like supernatural or something?”
“I don’t know, man. I really don’t know. But he’s part of it.” Luis paused, thinking. “You said he wore the face of a guy you saw die at Auburn.”
“Yeah. Franky McGrath.”
“I heard of him. Some kind of headhunter for the Lucchese family in New York?”
“Sure. He had a lot of bodies out there.”
“He died…when?”
Coogan told him that it was four years ago this month.
“Which means shortly after he died, Eddie Sloat turns up with his cult in Vermont. That’s interesting.”
Coogan liked Luis…but this was madness, it was a private delusion. Crazy sort of fucked-up shit you’d hear from cons sometimes, their minds soft from incarceration, rotting inside out over the guilt of what they’d done and who they were. That’s what he kept telling himself, but he couldn’t get himself to believe it. He had seen things now, felt nameless forces and malefic energies circling him…how could he deny it? Sloat was not human. He couldn’t be. He wore McGrath’s face, he had the power to send you tripping into weird anti-worlds, and he had compelled those two black fuckheads in the yard into destroying themselves. That was power. That was not human.
And there was also what he had shown Coogan that first day in the yard: that crawling monstrosity. And, Jesus, was that Sloat’s true face?
“How can you know these things?” he asked Luis and Luis just shrugged said, “I feel them. I believe them to be true. That Third Eye fucked me up in ways you can’t know, home. I’ve got senses beyond the normal five. But when I saw him that day, that first day they processed Sloat out into the general population, my skin crawled and I was covered in cold sweat. I had seen things like him when I tripped on Third Eye…maybe not seen them, but knew they were there. When I traveled through those outer spheres I became aware that something was out there, something was watching me, something was following me, taking great interest in who and what I was. A cold, primal hatred. Can you dig that?”
Luis said he stopped using Third Eye because it had opened up something inside him that was hard to close back down. The walls of perception had thinned. Reality began to fly apart all around him. He was running with the Latin Lords in those days, he said, moving a lot of heroin and guns in East Harlem, 103rd Street. He was a real terror…but after Third Eye, things were never the same again. He began seeing things, feel
ing things…things unseen moving around him, interacting with him, toying with him. That’s when he knew that something from the outer spheres had followed him back and was dogging him like a ghost.
“It was little things at first, home,” he admitted, his voice dry and squeaking. “Things in my room would be moved. Doors would swing open in the dead of night. There would be this foul sewer smell in my closets, coming from under my bed. I lay there, trying to sleep, and I’d hear voices whispering in the walls, hear something scratching like fingernails inside my pillow.” He shook his head, shivering. “It just kept getting worse. One night every window in the house shattered at three a.m. What the fuck, I thought. What could do something like that…the windows exploded out not in. Explain that, if you can.
“I was scared, I mean really fucking scared. But who could I turn to? A priest? My mother? Shit, nobody would understand and particularly not the street-eaters I was banging with.” Luis buried his face in his hands. Head bowed, he said, “I was doing pretty good for myself. Drug dealing, selling guns, working some girls on the side. Just a drug pushing pimp, but I had lots of scratch in my pockets. I could buy anything or anyone I wanted. I had respect, home, and that was because people feared me and feared the Lords. But…well, after Third Eye, I started losing it. I was nervous. I couldn’t sleep. Got so I was afraid of the dark. You dig that? Me. A fucking Latin Lord, the terror of the Barrio. But, yes, I was afraid. I was spiking all the time. Only time I felt calm was when I spiked some skag, it smoothed me out. Truth was, I wasn’t nothing but a junkie. A violent, crazy-eyed junkie who was afraid of his own shadow. And I had good reason. Oh yes, my brother, I had good reason.”
Luis said he became aware that something was in the house at night, walking around. He’d hear it…click, click, click. Like the sound of nails on the floor. He would be paralyzed with fear like a little kid waiting for some hollow-eyed boogeyman to come ghosting out of the closet. In the morning he would find prints, the tracks of what had come calling.
“Things were walking around in my house, home, things that had followed me back from the outer spheres. I didn’t know what they were. The prints they left were not the prints of men…just three-pronged tracks like something had been walking around on the tips of muddy claws.” Luis kept swallowing, trying to keep his throat wet. His eyes were wide, red-rimmed, glassy with fear. “I had no doubt they were watching me. I couldn’t see them because they did not wish to be seen. But one night…on around three in the morning…I saw something come into my room and it was no man…a weird shadowy form moving towards my bed. It did not walk, it hopped. And when I screamed…it walked right through the wall.”
Coogan was listening with rapt attention. He felt like he was tripping himself. It was all absolute madness, but there was no doubt of the sincerity in Luis’s voice: he believed absolutely what he was saying and the memories of those days were haunting his bones.
Luis said the fear got stronger because people began to disappear. People in the neighborhood. Members of the Lords. They were being taken in the night.
“By what?” Coogan asked, knowing he had to. “Nemesis?”
“No, not Nemesis,” Luis said. “But another race that is in league with Nemesis, being used by it. Maybe it’s out of choice and maybe it’s out of fear. I don’t know.”
“They were abducting them?” Coogan said. “These things?”
“Yes, in a way. In a way. Taking them into the sky.”
People would disappear, then come back a week later with no memory of where they had been. “They were taken away…then brought back as if something wanted me to know exactly how powerful they were and how weak I was. Like a man plucking ants from a sidewalk crack, home, and sticking them in a jar, returning them later when it amused him to do so.”
“For what purpose?”
“Again, I don’t know. But these things took people and when they brought them back, they were never the same again. I think they did something with their brains. Changed them, restructured them, what have you. I think…I really think it has something to do with those canisters from the dreams. Something about those canisters.”
Luis admitted his thinking was all very muddled. That time had been very traumatic. Those people who came back seemed perfectly ordinary to other people, but to Luis they were crawling abominations, monsters. They could pretend around the others, but he could see through them, see exactly the sort of horrors they were. He called this ‘the taint’. The ability to see them. He thought they were returned, used as spies or something, like undercover agents or fifth columnists whose job was to watch and wait, report everything they saw.
“Yeah, I know how that sounds, Coog. A-1 fucking loco loony bullshit. Kind of fucked-up thinking that gets you a straightjacket…but I swear it’s the truth or what I guessed was the truth. Things just kept getting worse and worse. I was strung out, paranoid, afraid, jumping at sounds, too scared to sleep. I was a wreck. And it was all on account of Third Eye…what it had done to me.” He smoked a cigarette and his hands would not stop shaking. His face had the constricted, yellow look of someone nearing a stroke. “I was desecrated, violated, my brain was not the same anymore…you don’t know what it was like. All the time…the sounds, the smells, the sense that you are watched like a microbe on a slide…seeing those kaleidoscope dimensions opening all around you like a man looking through a million windows. Imagine that, Coog. Just sitting there watching all those doors around you swing open, the pulsating green matter filling your sight, eyeless horrors and pallid worming things slithering through a primeval ooze of antimatter…and knowing, knowing that as awful as that is, there’s something far worse and deranged and diabolic that you Don’t see because they do not wish to be seen. At night…oh yes, Coog…at night my third eye would open all the way and I would see a haunted city of towers and spheres and rising cones and pipes. That’s when they would come: the old, old, ancient ones, the gray ones with the starfish heads and the bright, bright red eyes. They’d feed off me, draining me like a psychic battery. Parasites, Coog, mind parasites. They wanted my memories and my experiences because they were stagnant and dead and dry, nothing inside them anymore but time and dust.”
“These were the things you saw walk through the wall?” Coogan asked. “The ones that left the tracks?”
“No, no. I don’t know what they were. But you’d see them in the outer spheres haunting dead cities, drifting around. All they wanted was to tap into your mind and drink your thoughts and energy and memory. Some kind of parasite…old, old, something that died out long ago and were just ghosts, shades. The ones that were following me, taking people away into the night…they were different.”
Luis said it was about that time as he saw things from those other dimensions and felt them moving around him that he just up and lost it. He found his girlfriend in a room with three of the Lords. All of them had been taken away and returned. They were not right. Their faces often moved like there was something beneath that wanted to get out and he saw something behind their eyes, something watching him. Something that was not human. When they got together like that, they would start whispering crazy things, math and physics and the curvature of space, treading the fourth dimension. When he found them swarming like that after like the third time, he pulled out a chromed-up Glock nine and emptied the clip into them. He went into hiding and when an FBI agent tracked him down, he shot him dead, too, thinking he was an agent of the things following him.
“I was wrong. He was just some bull, some Fed out playing G-man. I killed him anyway.”
Luis was promptly arrested and housed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City awaiting trial. There was no bail to be had for capital murder. Stuck away in the depths of the MCC, things were no better.
They kept him in solitary and time was fluid and utterly seamless. The only way to mark the days was by the periods of sleep or the hours when they let him have a light on. His meals came and went. The hacks would bring him mag
azines. Gradually, he lost count of how long he had been down there. That distorted sense of perception began to fade. He was probably the only guy in the MCC who was actually glad to be there, glad to be away from what his life had become. After a week, listening to nothing but the beat of his heart, the death-watch ticking of some internal clock, he felt isolated and abandoned. Paranoia seeped in and he began to imagine there were things in the darkness with him at night—faceless, formless, and malefic.
“I began to hear sounds and I knew they had tracked me down. The things that had followed me back. I could feel them around me. In the cell next door…I was hearing these funny noises…like something wet being dragged across the floor, scratching sounds as if claws were drawn over the wall. At night I would hear this dry, cold cackling like somebody was laughing over there.
One night, unable to stop shaking, Luis looked beneath the sink at the grille down there—a ventilation grille that connected the cells. Steeling himself, he crawled near the grille and flicked his lighter, knowing he had to know, he had to see, he had to confirm that he was not stark raving mad.
Because something was over there.
Something that had come to torment him.
Something from the outer spheres.
He could smell a wet, damp stink. The flickering flame lit up the underbelly of the sink, the pipes, the paint-flaking concrete wall, and the grille itself. Through the steel mesh, he clearly saw eyes staring back at him: six glistening green toad eyes that did not blink.
It went on and on.
“I don’t know what it was, home. Not those things…but something else, something like Eddie Sloat maybe.”
Night after night, Luis would hear slithering sounds over there, like snakes were moving across the floor and up the walls. Sometimes it would sound like someone wading through a pool of their own vomit. It would go on and on. If he called one of the guards—and they didn’t like coming because he was a cop killer—the sounds would fade away.
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