It wasn’t milky white under there. It was dark. A tattoo, I thought at first. But it was so dark. Dark as crow’s feathers at the bottom of a hole in a cave. Dark as the depths of a studio chief’s heart. Dark as . . .
As my deepest fears.
She continued toward me, shirttails flapping behind her as that darkness grew in my sight. I tried to look away from it, but I couldn’t see V, couldn’t turn away to the light. There was no light.
Except in the middle of the darkness.
A pinpoint. Then a pattern. Swirls and matrices and spirals that surrounded and ate each other as they spun through the blackness. The shapes took on dimension and grew impossibly large.
Or I shrank improbably small.
The patterns enveloped me, wrapped me up like a bean burrito and took my breath away. I closed my eyes, but still the patterns burned my brain. Once seen, they could not be unseen. They filled my head, my throat, my stomach.
And then a voice. It was V’s voice, but amplified across a stage, a field, a world.
“This is what lies behind and beyond,” she sang to me, though the voice came without words. “This is the truth that you cannot allow yourself to see.”
I wanted to talk—no wising-off this time—but I had no lips, no tongue or throat; I was nothing in this vastness. Just a hole in an emptiness.
I would have wet myself, but Little Arty was on holiday too.
“There are worlds and more beyond this one. Dimensions so ancient and vast that your universe is but an inkblot on a page of crumpled paper in a small room of a forgotten shack.”
“My universe?” I managed. I don’t know where my voice came from.
“Battles rage across these dimensions among beings ancient when your world was rock-dust spinning about a newly-birthed star.”
“My world.”
“These intelligences are enormous and cruel. And petty.”
“Like movie producers. Well, not the intelligence part.”
The darkness in which I was immersed exploded into light. I had no eyes in this place, but could still see in my mind. I couldn’t shut those mental eyes, however desperately I wanted to. And what was illuminated was too awful to behold. Shapes of . . . things, alive and dead, twisted and deformed and inside out—though how the outside could ever be in was not comprehensible. Through eyes that were not eyes, I saw . . . other eyes. Millions of them, billions. Watching me, wanting me, desperate to feed. Blinking randomly to mercifully hide—however briefly—the monstrous souls to which they were the windows.
“Unnnhhh,” my voiceless voice said.
“Yes,” V hissed. “Unnnhhh, indeed.”
For a moment—and thank God it was but the slightest of moments—I thought I saw something else. An impossible thing too inhuman to even recognize. Once, when I was in the service, we came across a Panzer that had taken a direct hit not far from El Alamein. You always had to check these things out and I was on point. Three Nazi bastards had been cooked inside. And they’d been in there for a while. The smell was indescribable. Sometimes, at night, I still wake up with a trace of it in my nose.
The thing I saw used that scent for aftershave.
Then a flash and it was all gone. And V and I were back in the cabin. She tossed the bourbon back to me.
“Are we dead?” I asked her.
“You should be so lucky, Arty.”
I gave Old Grand-Dad a very long kiss.
“Why me?”
V scowled. “Why not you?”
“Can’t you ever just answer a simple question?”
“Maybe I would if you asked one.”
“Cripes!” I said. “If all else fails you can write for Sid Caesar.”
Before, I would have described the moonless night we drove through as dark, but after the things I’d seen, well . . . the unlit road into the Hills felt like Pismo Beach at noon.
“Look, V, I’m just a regular guy . . .”
She guffawed. “You’re factotum prime for one of the most powerful men in the world!”
“Deep down, I mean.”
“Few of us know what we are deep down,” she said. All serious now.
“I suppose you’re one of the lucky ones.”
“No luck involved,” she said. “No such thing as luck exists. There’s only knowledge, design, and hard work.”
“So what are you? Deep down, I mean.”
She dropped down a gear, never taking her eyes from the winding canyon road. She didn’t flinch as something furry squished beneath our wheels.
“I’d like to say I’m a warrior,” she said softly. “I like to think of myself that way. But I’m just another pawn, dreaming of being a castle or a bishop. All a dream within a dream.”
“Is that what this is? A game of chess? Why not dream of being a queen or king?”
“You’ve caught a glimpse of the sovereigns of this game,” she said. And now she did turn her head and looked me square in the eye. “Would you aspire to so terrible a condition?
“No,” I whispered.
I was still trying to make sense of all that V had told me. The Arty of two days ago wouldn’t have believed a word of it—wouldn’t even have bought it as the script for Cthulhu—but now . . .
A war. A vast and ancient war. Beings—gods?—beyond anything we little humans could even conceive, battling for . . . what? That bit I still didn’t really understand.
Just for the hell of it, it seemed to me.
But some of them—I hesitate to say the bad guys, ’cause I couldn’t really see any white hats in this picture—want what we have. “Our dimension,” V had explained back in the cabin. Our space, our world, our stuff.
Us.
They poke and probe and seek ways in. Those vast and unspeakable eye-things that V allowed me to see. They want to take us.
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
“What’s so great about this place, anyway?” I asked.
“What?” V asked, but kept her eyes on the now tortuously winding road.
“These . . . beings. What did you call them?”
“The Great Old Ones.”
“Yeah, those guys. What the hell do they see in this place? Earth. Why the razzamatazz? Why here?”
For some reason, she shook her head. Then said: “Our world is a kind of conjunction. A point in space and time where the dimensions meet. Kind of a revolving door in the cosmos. That’s why there’s life here, how it arrived in the first place.”
“You mean like cavemen?”
“No. Not like cavemen. Is your entire knowledge-base gleaned from low-budget movies?”
“Not entirely. I used to read dime novels too. Doc Savage was great.”
“I think the Man of Bronze would have known better.”
“We could sure do with him now. We need someone on our side.”
“We are a force to be reckoned with, Arty. We are part of a tradition that has stood against the Old Ones for many years. We are still here.”
“And they’re still trying to get in.”
“Yes.”
“And we have to stop them.”
“Yes.”
“Us.”
“We’re not alone.”
“You, me, and Enchantra then. Watch those giant space monsters run.”
“We have Mr. Hughes.”
I still couldn’t believe it. But V had told me that Hughes’s persona as an obsessive, fast-living, vulgar, womanizing, breast-obsessed, billionaire arms mogul was a front.
“You’re kidding?” I’d said.
“Well, mostly a front,” she’d replied.
In fact, Hughes was one of the de facto leaders in the war against the Old Ones. His whole life was an illusion to make him look like anything other than what he was: an invisible hand guiding—and helping finance—those who were trying to hold the line against the return of these elder . . . gods?
“Everything he has done has been in the service of our cause. His aviation business, mun
itions interests. All his investment and riches have allowed us to build up a war chest. The real weapons he forges are to be raised against a far more profound enemy than the Russians.”
“And the film studio?”
“This, too, is part of the fight. Hearts and minds are important in war as well. And there are messages in the films. Of course, people go for the thrills, the romance . . .”
“The popcorn?”
“Yes. They go for the emotional pleasure, the visceral kick, the kinetic charge. But they get a message too. Sometimes when they are least aware, the message penetrates the deepest. When their guard is down while they are watching silly little comedies or—”
“Monster movies,” I’d said, as a cog fell into place. “Cthulhu! Creature of Destruction!”
“Exactly. It is a warning, a way of putting out to the many what could never be said, what would never be believed if stated directly. Surely the preponderance of monster movies these last few years has not escaped your notice?”
“But who goes to see them? A bunch of B movies at the drive-in. Horny teenagers looking to get to second base in the dark?”
“‘Give me the child until he is seven and he is mine for life.’”
“Isn’t that the church?” I’d asked.
“Are we not speaking of gods?” V had replied.
Touché.
“And Mr. Hughes’s crusade against the commies?”
“A front against another front.” She’d practically spat.
V explained that the Red Scare served as a cover too. A classic diversion.
“Leave the masses in terror of a false threat, to keep them from seeing the real one,” she’d said. “Turn all your guns to one flank, leave your rear unguarded.”
“But the government, the Feds . . .”
“Some know of the threat and are doing their best to oppose it. Some are blind. And some—very high up—are quislings, serving the Ancient Ones. All’s fair, as they say.”
I thought of some of the Reds I’d put the boot to. I didn’t cotton to playing the pawn for anyone.
“What about Enchantra?” I’d asked.
“Television will be the most powerful force at our disposal. A signal into every home, every room.”
“You mean who can afford it.”
“That will change. Television will be everywhere before you know it. Imagine a world littered with screens, all sending out the same hidden message: Watch the skies! Beware!”
“Crazy,” I’d said.
And crazy it still felt. Even as we hurtled through the dark to meet the enemy face to face. Eyeball to . . . eyeballs?
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Have you no sense of irony, Arty?”
“Irony I can do. But this is pushing the boat out.”
We’d arrived at our destination. Or was it our destiny? V pulled off the dirt track we’d been rumbling up and announced we’d have to hike the rest of the way. I didn’t have the shoes for it, but I didn’t have much choice either.
She’d managed to get the car about two-thirds of the way up Cahuenga Peak before that dirt road petered out entirely. Mr. Hughes owned most of the mountain—he’d bought it after he proposed to Ginger Rogers. (Apparently he thought its shape was a dead ringer for her right breast. Romantic or what?) When Ginger decided he was too nutty for her, he abandoned it. I only knew because I once saw the tear-stained plans on his desk for the mountaintop castle he’d planned to build for her. He’d rambled to me about her betrayal as he scrawled dirty words and obscene caricatures of Fred Astaire all over the blueprints.
Just to the east, atop the slightly smaller Mount Lee, stood the mighty Hollywood sign. The altitude at which we stood left us about level with it.
“You can take the Elder Gods out of show business . . . ,” I started.
That actually elicited a laugh. Short-lived, though.
“Come on,” V said. “It’s a rough walk.”
Los Angeles always looks better at night, and from atop Cahuenga the basin sparkled like an upturned bowl of stars—a mirror below of the vastness above. Did the same monsters lurk in both? A warm breeze rattled the thin rows of pines and rasped the back of my throat. I reckoned we’d be in the teeth of a proper Santa Ana by morning.
We’d been walking a good hour before V stopped. My feet had swollen in my Stacy Adams and my shirt was soaked through. Don’t ask where my boxers had ridden. I’d long since taken off my jacket and thought about just tossing it into the brush now.
Even in the dim glow thrown up by the city lights I could see that V looked as fresh as a sailor in a shore-leave cathouse.
V pulled something out of the small leather bag she carried over her shoulder: it looked like a glass pyramid. She murmured a word I couldn’t make out and tapped the top of it. It let out a bright white light.
“Ancient artifact?” I asked.
“Hammacher Schlemmer catalog,” she told me.
She placed the pyramid on the ground, pulled another item out of the bag and held it up. “This is the artifact.”
Between her thumb and index finger she held a green, star-shaped object. I thought it was a sheriff’s badge, but as I looked at it, the thing changed shape, grew in her hand. The sharp edges I had taken for points on the star seemed to extend and retract. It looked like it was made of sandstone or perhaps jade, but it also seemed . . . alive. Like some weird sea urchin or ocean-bed creature pulsing in her fingers. Kind of disgusting, but also hypnotic.
“What is that?” I asked, leaning over to get a better look.
“It is you, Arty,” she said.
And she thrust it between my lips.
An anise bomb exploded in my mouth. It tasted like Good & Plenty, only without the Plenty (or is it the Good?—I’ve never known which bit the licorice is supposed to be . . .). I started to gag as I felt the pulsating blob dance around my mouth. Then it scurried—I swear I could feel the toes of its nasty little feet galumphing down my gullet. I felt sure I would puke it up, along with my stomach lining, when . . .
Everything changed.
Once, long ago, I found myself at the bottom of an old well (don’t ask). I screamed for help and the sound echoed back and forth, around and through me, such that I felt like I could hear with every fiber of my bones and organs.
This was that times a million.
The light had changed around me too. Every tree, every rock, every skittering bug and blade of grass had grown sharper in focus and buzzed with a deep purple luminescence. There was no darkness now, no night— the world was a shimmering violet wonderland. I looked up at V: she had become an angel, her blistering white aura extending ten feet high, her smile an argent slash that set off chimes in my skin—then I raised my gaze to the skies.
Where I saw them all.
“My gods,” I issued.
“Yes,” V sang.
Others emerged from the brush. Where they came from I couldn’t say, but they were inhumanly beautiful. Soldiers, I knew, though their faces and forms were strange to me. And at the last—her true essence a roiling silhouette of orange and blue, veined with madder rose—I recognized Enchantra.
“Are we ready?” V asked her.
I knew the answer before I felt Enchantra’s reply.
We were one. We were ready.
We advanced.
The doorway into the hillside of Mount Lee could not have been seen with human eyes, but in my new state it was as obvious as King Kong at a cookout. With a gesture, Enchantra blew it open and our little platoon of the otherworldly poured inside.
In my heightened state, all senses merged into one. I could hear the tightly packed dirt of the path that had been torn out of the side of the mountain and down which our cadre moved. I could smell the determination and pride that passed between the warriors both in front of and behind me. I could taste the bitter sweetness of the ancient un-human extremities that had forged this trail.
I could see, hear, taste, smell
, feel—in colors, along wavelengths previously unimagined—everything.
I saw everything.
They came at us all at once through the rock. Shapeless, yet deformed. Empty, but bearing the weight of worlds. Throatless, yet screaming with a fury beyond time, beyond dimension. These things were not of this world. No human could have dreamed them. I didn’t know how they could even be alive.
Maybe they were not—it was way out of my league.
The warriors—I still don’t know who or what they were—met them. The mountain rocked. The great sign on the hilltop above us teetered on its supports, Hollywood on the brink of falling.
To the millions below it must have felt like an earthquake; to our ethereal company, it was a rocking of the stars themselves.
Light of hitherto unseen chromaticism exploded as the forces met. Flanked by V and Enchantra, I pressed on as the battle burned around us. Glimpses of . . . things—tentacles, eyes, organs blacker than the pit— penetrated my expanded consciousness, staggered me. Always, though, the women on either side held me up, edged me forward.
Then, in a fraction of a blink, Enchantra was gone. A mouth—inside of it a thousand mouths, and within their maws an infinity of onyx teeth flailing with foul life—opened and took her. I tasted the rending of her soul in my heart.
It tasted a little like chicken.
V and I pressed on as the trail inside the mountain widened, finally opening out into a vast chamber of stone. Every inch of the walls was poisoned with a graffito—the symbols and figures carved into the rock a mad god’s vandalism. To even glimpse these obscenities was to feel elemental pain.
At a very center was not a darkness, but an absence. A hole in everything, the enemy of light and reason. The nothing—this impossibility in reality—nonetheless glowed somehow. It glowed with a blackness that burned like a sun.
“What in the Sam Hill?” some piece of me said.
As we neared the heart of the cavern, stupidly approaching this radiant blackness, V reached inside—I want to say her pocket, but if so, that pocket was sewn somewhere inside herself. Her hand went wrist-deep inside her torso. Just a day ago that alone would have made me kack my skivvies. Now I just thought: copasetic!
Waiting Page 30