Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  “But this creature came through.”

  “No, no one saw this creature emerge. Because it did not emerge. Whatever Dreamscape god is involved, it did not come through the breach. I suspect the breach was very small, just as I originally believed, too small for one of those grand beings to pass. No, what came through were its intentions, its desires. And it is using the available organic material on our side of the breach to assemble a body for itself, a puppet which it can control from a vast distance.”

  The terrible collection of human bodies then began to pivot and shake. The soldiers still standing fired perfunctorily into the body of the thing, and when there was no visible effect they dropped their weapons and ran.

  “But Randolph, how is it that it is still being controlled? The breach opens, something comes through, and then the breach closes again. That’s the way it has always worked, or at least that is what you have told everyone.”

  Randolph looked perplexed. “I have no idea. It has always been a bodily voyage across those vast spaces between our worlds. The only uncertainty has been the exact nature of the physical form that arrives. I must have done something that has changed this. Somehow I am responsible for the deaths of all these people!”

  “Randolph, you don’t know that! You’ve done what you could. Without the early warning system you put in place . . .”

  He stared at her. “We have to get back to the Monument!” He grabbed the radio operator’s arm. “Can you drive one of those trucks?”

  Once they were back at the Monument, Agent Miles was stunned by their appearance. He had dozens of urgent questions, but Carter waved him off and continued on to the office, insisting that Dorothy come along. They left their radio operator behind to explain everything, and by the time they exited the far door Miles was barking orders and calling the military.

  “Randolph? Shouldn’t we explain to him that their weapons aren’t likely to do them any good, and the soldiers—”

  “Our soldier will tell them what he can. They can draw their own conclusions, but of course they’ll hardly listen. They’re like children—they have to discover the truth in their own way. We have important things to do. May I have your bag?”

  “Why, are you injured? Stop, let me look at it.” But he’d already snagged the strap with his claw and taken the bag away from her. Things were so frantic, she hadn’t even realized he’d lost, or removed the pillowcase. “Randolph? I need that. My medical supplies—”

  “You’ll get it back in a little while. I think I may have a need for it.”

  He struggled with the doorknob to Dream Division, and then forced the door open. It swung hard into the wall, cracking the pane. She could hear the weeping coming from several rooms inside, the small sounds of protests, and then toward the back of the offices, the screams.

  “Exactly as I expected I’m afraid.” They went into the closest office. The tramp she had last seen yesterday lay dead, apparently having choked on his own vomit. His eyes were still open, however, and glistening. She was convinced she could see something in the pupils, but Randolph was still moving and she had to struggle to keep up.

  They found two more dead, but the others appeared to be alive, although in intense physical and mental pain. They finally reached his office. The old woman lay there on the low couch, arching her back and screaming. Randolph plopped Dorothy’s bag down on his desk, and then opened it before she could stop him. He pulled out some of the medical supplies, finally a syringe and a bottle.

  “This should calm her down a bit, give her a little peace. Please administer it, Lieutenant, if you would?”

  “We have to be careful with any pain medication. I don’t really know what’s wrong with her.”

  “It’s my responsibility, Lieutenant. And I sincerely believe she will survive that shot you’re going to give her. Now.”

  She injected the poor woman and her screams gradually subsided into whimpers, and then nothing. But she was thankfully still breathing, although her pulse was wildly erratic.

  Dorothy looked up at Randolph. He held the gun she kept in her bag. “I’m sorry, Randolph. I was told . . . I was ordered to carry it.”

  “Oh, no apologies necessary, Lieutenant. I told General Craig he needed to give you something, just in case. In fact I insisted on it. It’s a Colt, isn’t it? I don’t really know that much about handguns.”

  “Colt M1911 semi-automatic service pistol,” she replied.

  “Why did he give you something so old? I told him you needed something reliable.”

  “Randolph, I’m told it’s highly reliable. They were standard during the Great War, and the general swears by it.”

  “Well, if it’s good enough for the general.”

  “Why did you want me to have a gun, Randolph?”

  “Because you might need it, Lieutenant. Look at me. I had no idea what I might come back as or even, without any additional trips into the Dreamscape, if I would maintain this physical shape, or if my brain might undergo some unexpected mutation. I told you, those creatures, there’s no fathoming their thinking. I was afraid there might come a time when I wouldn’t recognize the difference between you and, well, food.”

  “Randolph, there are always other options.”

  “We’ve wasted too much time here, Lieutenant. I need you to call Doctor Andrews at Butler Hospital. My hand is full.”

  Randolph wasn’t pointing the gun at her, but she understood that he intended to be obeyed. She dialed Daniel’s direct number. He answered almost immediately. She could hear the screams of his three special patients in the background. He sounded breathless, panicked. “Daniel, this is Dorothy. Randolph Carter wants to speak to you.”

  “Hold the receiver up to my ear, Lieutenant.” She did as she was told. “Doctor Andrews, I’m afraid my early warning system has proven to be a terrible idea. I can hear them—I can’t imagine how you stand it. I need you to apply the remedy we agreed upon, the swift remedy. Yes . . . yes I know. Yes . . . I’m sorry too. But please, every moment we wait makes matters worse.”

  He handed it back to her. She heard three gunshots in succession, and after a pause, a fourth. Her hand shook and she dropped the handset.

  Randolph turned and fired one shot into the old woman’s head. “Randolph, no!” He marched out of his office and down the hall. She wanted to follow him, to stop him, but she was afraid. And although she didn’t quite understand what was going on, she knew he was doing this for a reason, and no doubt for a very good reason.

  The telephone handset made a steady click-click-click sound. She dropped it back into its cradle. There were five more shots, a minute or so between each one. She wanted to scream. She gripped the edge of the desk with both hands, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Randolph walked back into the room, tears streaming down his cheeks. He looked very much like a sad little boy. The gun dangled from his hand. The clawed hand slowly opened and closed again and again with a steady, machinelike regularity. He gazed at her.

  “I had not anticipated this. Perhaps I should have. My early warning system, those unfortunates I chose, they kept the passage open between us and the Dreamscape. Not very wide, but wide enough for directions, for orders to come through. They had no way of stopping it. They couldn’t help themselves. The passage closed after my own trips, perhaps, at least I had a key—the full truth of that remains to be seen. But they had no such method available to them. Theirs was a one-way street.”

  “But was shooting them the only way? They were human beings; they had human families.”

  “Of course I know this, Lieutenant. The three at the asylum were my very own cousins—one was only in his teens. We Carters have always had certain inclinations; we have always been magicians of a sort. Butler has been the family asylum, just as it was for the Lovecraft family. Recruiting members of my own family seemed only natural. I understand their inherited abilities.”

  She walked around the desk and reached to take the gun from him, but he stepped aw
ay from her and held the gun up to his head. “Randolph, you should give that to me.”

  “I know very little about these pistols, Lieutenant, but I just shot six people in the head. Are there any more rounds in the magazine? You might as well tell me—I can always conduct a test.”

  “There is one round left,” she said.

  “Very good,” he replied.

  The phone rang. Her hand was shaking. She made a tight fist, opened it, and then picked up the receiver. She closed her eyes and listened, then cradled the phone again.

  “That was Agent Miles. The creature has fallen apart into its component bits. There are no signs of movement, anywhere in the slums. It’s over Randolph, and that weapon belongs to me, am I correct?”

  He handed it over. Improperly, but he hadn’t been trained. A line of insects made a series of loops on the wall behind him, then another pattern she did not recognize. Silently she begged him not to turn around.

  SIX

  The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

  FIRST, I WAS TOTALLY minding my own business.

  Second, if the pretty boy behind the bar had shown his hand sooner, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wash what was left of two of his customers off the walls.

  I’d been nursing a cocktail, the taste of which I like, but the name of which I prefer to keep private because it sounds like something Deanna Durbin might order if she was doing the town with the Pope, and I was waiting for Mike Bowman, my business partner. He was already spectacularly late, but that was hardly cause for alarm. With Mike, keeping people waiting is practically an art form.

  I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not like I hadn’t noticed the blonde when she walked in—there was a lot to notice and hardly any of it was shy— but after that initial glance, I’d kept my eyes on the counter and my mind on whether the lead Mike had claimed to be following would turn into an actual case paying actual money. We could use it. It had been a slow month in a long winter.

  The blonde wasn’t alone anyway—a guy twice her age and certainly more than half her height joined her at the counter after wasting two minutes glad-handing a table of second-stringers from the Chronicle.

  “Just making sure they’re going to cover the opening of the new store,” he said to her and to anyone within a hundred yards. “Prime location, Ruby,” he added, though I suspect Ruby might have already had that fact mentioned to her once or twice. “Right there on Market.”

  “Are you going to make a lot of money?” she asked him. I know, I know. I wish I could tell you Ruby didn’t actually say that out loud, but she did.

  “Well, it’s not like I’m hurting now,” he said, and pulled something shiny from his coat pocket. It was a small green stone of some kind that hung from a thin gold chain, and he dangled it from his fingers to catch Ruby’s eye.

  “What is it?” she said.

  He waved it in front of her eyes again, twitching his fingers so that it did a little shimmy for her. But he waited to speak until he slipped it back into his pocket, waited in fact until he patted the pocket to be sure his trinket was safely there, as if he feared some last-minute trick from an unseen magician. Seemed odd. Maybe he was crazy. But what the hell did I know? Maybe he wasn’t crazy. Maybe Ruby’s day job was Beautiful Assistant to some quick-with-his-hands vaudeville shyster, and they were setting this idiot up for a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t routine. Christ knows, wouldn’t be the first time.

  Done patting, he gave her a wink. “My ship came in,” he said. Kind of smug, kind of teasing.

  “That’s nice, Albie,” she said. “But what is it?” Flirting with petulant, heading for insistent.

  Albie lent his voice as much drama and mystery as he could, which wasn’t much, but you work with what you’ve got. “The stuff that dreams are made of . . . ,” he said, and his eyes did their rheumy best to twinkle.

  “On,” said the barman quietly. He was wiping glasses down and not even looking at Ruby and her swain, but the latter believed he knew a challenge when he heard one.

  “I beg your pardon?” Albie said. Little spin on it, like he was giving the guy the opportunity to plead insanity.

  “On,” said the barman again, looking up this time. “It’s ‘on,’ not ‘of.’ It’s Shakespeare, isn’t it? The Tempest, if I remember correctly. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’”

  His voice was rich with that just-like-us-but-smarter thing that had once had women throwing themselves at John Barrymore. Ruby heard it too. Still worked, apparently. She smiled. “I love your accent,” she said. “Are you British?”

  “When the occasion calls for it, madam,” the barman said. He gave her a small nod that managed to be both self-satisfied and self-deprecating, and the smile with which he backed it up was a clear signal that should she be looking for male company, he was more than willing to step into the breach once she came to her senses about the asshole she rode in on.

  Before all interested parties could learn just what the hell Albie was going to do about that, the street door to the bar slammed open, loud enough to make everybody in the joint look over.

  Revealed in the opening, framed against the rain that was just starting to fall outside, was an odd little fellow who was busy lowering the silver-topped cane with which he’d shoved the door open. Really quite splendid in his own bizarre fashion, he was a compact dandy in a formal dress suit, his hair slick with pomade, and only his eyes—slightly protruding, almost batrachian—spoiling his pocket-Adonis ambitions.

  Those eyes fixed themselves on Albie, and a small and far from pleasant smile twitched across his tight little lips.

  “Jerome Cadiz,” I heard Albie mutter just before the barman stole my attention by tapping an unobtrusive finger on the counter in front of my stool. He’d laid down a small key—like something for a left-luggage locker at a train station or a bus depot—and slid it toward me.

  “Got a little something for you, Steve,” he said quietly.

  I pocketed the key instinctively—what else are you going to do, someone hands you a key?—but it bothered me that he had my name, because as far as I knew, I hadn’t been handing it out.

  “Huh?” I said. And I’ll have you know I said it pretty damn incisively. I didn’t read those Perry Mason stories every month for nothing.

  “I know how much you like your hats,” the barman said, as if that explained anything.

  “What?” I said. “Have we met before?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘before,’” he said. And then the world went mad.

  Albie suddenly pushed himself back from the counter, stool slamming to the floor behind him, and glared down the length of the bar at the little peacock he’d called Jerome Cadiz.

  Whatever trouble Cadiz might have thought he was bringing to the party, it seemed that Albie was determined to head him off at the pass. “P’hath bar nyleq’h hunq’a!” he yelled at him. Or, you know, words to that effect.

  “Albie!” Ruby said sharply, not like she feared for his sanity, but like he was embarrassing her, like he’d just told an off-color joke to a minister’s wife or something.

  But Albie wasn’t done. And he certainly wasn’t chastened by Ruby’s disapproval. If anything, he looked like this might be the very opportunity he’d been waiting for to impress her.

  “Behold the shard of the god!” he shouted, which was at least in English, even if it was still gibberish. He drew out that shimmering green stone from his pocket with his right hand, held it out threateningly at arm’s length toward Cadiz, and waved his left hand over it in three consecutive, counterclockwise circles . . .

  And then nothing happened.

  You got to assume that was a bad moment for Albie, and I’m sure the contemptuous giggle that escaped Cadiz’s mouth didn’t help at all. Like the kind of jerk who sits down at the piano and plays a perfect “Moonlight Sonata” after you’ve just failed to play “Chopsticks,” Cadiz also put his hand into his pocket and brought something out.

  Not
much of something, though. All he had in his hand was an unprepossessing mound of ashy gray dust. It looked like he might have scooped up a tablespoon’s worth of somebody’s dead relative from an unguarded urn, no more than that. It sat there cupped in his palm, doing precisely the same amount of nothing that Albie’s shard of the green god had done. Until Cadiz blew on it. At which point it began to behave a little differently from your average pile of crematorium ash.

  At first rising up in an arching line, swollen at the head like a king cobra woken by the charmer’s pipe, it then swept upward and outward through the air in a curving arc, trailing more of itself behind it than should have been possible, and roiling at the head like a tidal wave about to break.

  “Albie?” Ruby said, her voice small and unsure.

  That voice, and Albie’s devastated expression, were the last any of the rest of us knew, other than the deafening concussive roar of Cadiz’s party favor as it reached critical mass and exploded.

  I wasn’t the last to wake up, but I wasn’t the first either, and by the time I did, the uniform cops were already taking notes and sharing disbelieving glances.

  There were a handful of us left in the bar, but there was no Jerome Cadiz. He’d gone, as had my curious friend, the key-dispensing barman. As for Albie and Ruby . . . well, they weren’t gone, exactly, but they were unlikely to be giving statements to the lead detective. They were nowhere to be seen, unless you counted the two vaguely people-shaped bloodstains that were dripping their way down the back wall, already seeping and staining unpleasantly into the sawdust piles atop the bar’s old-school tiled floor.

  The detective though—in this case, a one-time beat cop bruiser named Dominic Coughlan whom nobody expected to ever make detective, let alone turn out to be good at it—certainly wanted to hear for himself what the rest of us had to say, no matter how ridiculous. He saved me til last, figuring with the license and all I might actually be of some use to him. On this occasion—and not, I’m sorry to say, for the first time—I was a great disappointment to Dominic, being as unconscious as every other idiot in the room when whatever finally happened finally happened.