“You did the right thing,” she said, and kissed him. On the forehead. “Thank you, Marc.”
Shaky, she got up off the floor and deftly shrugged out of the bathrobe, toweling herself clean with it, then stepped into her dress.
“What should we do...?”
“About what?”
“The fucking resonator...”
“You can destroy it now, if you want.” She laced up her boots and clumped towards the door as if she’d just finished an appointment with her masseuse.
“But Shirley...you...if you’re...cured? Then...what about us?” Marc wrung his hands, only then becoming aware of the oddly bloodless wound in his forearm. “I...I love you...”
She turned and looked at him, and she started to laugh. But then she looked up into the space above his head, and the laughter turned to a jaded gasp. “You’ve got a bad one, Marc.”
She turned and went out, closing the door behind her.
Something stretched to its limit and snapped in his chest. Stupid! He hadn’t even known how he felt until he’d spit it out.
Spinning around, looking for something to break, he found himself staring into a mirror.
He didn’t need the resonator any more, to see the thing that rode him, any more than he needed the device to feel it suckling his pain. Only a vague distortion of the air around his head and heart was visible, yet he could see it with his new organs of sight, his newly awakened mind.
All his life he’d been chasing a dream of a girl, when she was right behind him.
It was nothing like a human, nothing like a female, and yet it looked just like her.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said, and reached for the knife switch.
SATORI
Rodney Turner
The true nature of Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment has always been a source of fascination for me. What exactly transpired under that tree while the Buddha sat nearly dead from starvation? What did he see when he looked up at the sky and witnessed Venus, the so-called morning star? I suppose you could say that understanding that revelation has always been the cornerstone of my practice...much to the chagrin of my instructors. What do they know with their paper Zen?
I am not entirely certain how I came to be in possession of the wondrous machine. Perhaps I found it on some auction website thinking it to be some curiosity from the golden age of quackery or a home-made light and sound machine for a Halloween display. I suppose it makes no difference now.
I had given the device a home on top of a bookshelf in my bedroom. A technological oddity striking a paradox with all the texts of ancient wisdom collected below. It sat there gathering dust. I, too, seemed to be gathering dust. Pointless stretches of meditation before the serene, knowing smile of the Buddha statue on my makeshift altar. I had quit going to the meditation center. There was not any point to it. I didn’t need to listen to someone else, someone unenlightened, tell me what enlightenment was all about. I wanted to see for myself.
A hot August day marked the beginning of my new path. I love patterns and that this first revelation, .this initial awakening came in a month called “august” amused me greatly.
I had been straightening my bedroom and dusting off the shelves when the machine caught my eye. A sense of wonder and excitement came over me as though I was seeing the device for the first time. Perhaps I had forgotten it completely in the repetition of the daily grind that had followed since I had acquired it.
It was not a large object. Slightly smaller than a shoebox with a number of wires and coils protruding from the top. All the faces were painted a flat grey and devoid of markings. One side, I suppose it was the front, had a simple chrome toggle and a heavy black knob. I flipped the switch and felt the satisfying resistance of old solid state electronics. I tested the knob next, cold and heavy between my fingers. It turned freely between what I assumed were the minimum and maximum settings for whatever function the device performed.
I decided to take the machine off the shelf. I sat on the bed, carefully wiping the months of collected dust from the exposed components. It was then I finally became aware of the power cord. Curiosity welled up in the back of my mind. Should I plug it in? Did I really want to know what function this odd little box performed? I decided that the mystery was better for the time and placed the machine back in its place on the bookcase.
That night’s meditation was fruitless and full of distractions. My eyes kept drifting from the blank spot on the wall toward the machine. My breathing would not settle into the usual rhythm. I gave up and rose, finding myself gravitating toward the box. I stared at it for what seemed like hours before taking it down. I turned the device over in my hands looking for some detail I may have missed earlier in the day. Finding nothing, I placed the machine on the altar and plugged it in to the wall. I held my breath, unsure as to what would happen when I flipped the switch.
No fire. No sizzle followed by a shower of sparks. I breathed a sigh of relief that the device did not perform as expected. Instead there was a gentle hum, almost inaudible. I adjusted the knob slightly and the hum grew in intensity. I felt a little dizzy and disoriented. For a moment, everything seemed different. Distorted and alien. Then it settled back into familiar patterns. I switched off the machine and went to bed. That night, I slept fitfully and dreamed of the void between stars.
Days went by in a haze of color and motion. I felt a bit disconnected from my life, from the world. It was as though I was living that fairy tale with the shoemaker and the elves. What I needed to accomplish was completed but I had no real recollection of it. I recalled very little conscious thought of my actions. I felt as though I were just a passenger in someone else’s body. The machine sat on the altar. Another lifeless thing collected.
A month passed before I even thought about activating the device again. A whim came over me while I was reading the Heart Sutra. Avalokitesvara’s words echoed in my brain: “Form is not different than emptiness and emptiness is not different than form.”
I looked at the machine and, although it was off, I could feel the hum from the first time I activated the device bouncing around inside my skull. I placed the book on the night stand and crossed the room to my altar. I noticed the enigmatic smile on the Buddha statue. For the first time since I had set out on the path of Dharma, it meant something. He was encouraging me to continue. He knew what the end of this road would bring.
I sat down in front of the altar, pressed my palms together in the gassho and flipped the switch. I adjusted the dial to a higher setting and closed my eyes. I took a few deep breaths to center and felt myself settling into a natural rhythm. In and out. I followed my breathing. The hum tugged at my mind. It pulled at the edges of my consciousness. The blackness in front of my eyes wavered.
Light! At first it was a pin prick like the glow of a distant star but it steadily grew larger and brighter. I was falling toward it and it toward me. The hum grew louder as the light grew more intense. The light burned. It soothed my senses and sharpened them at the same time. Fear overtook me. My eyes snapped open and I slapped the switch back into the off position. I sat there, the dim light of my bedside lamp creating puddles of shadow in the corners. The Buddha’s smile seemed much more sinister.
I called in sick the next day. I felt fine but the previous night’s experience clung to my brain. I could not tune out the hum. All of my senses felt heightened. I could hear the individual melodies of every species of bird nearby. Colors were sharper and textures stood out in sharp relief. I felt as though I could count the threads in the t-shirt I was wearing. It was incredible. I spent the whole day listening, looking, touching things. I basked in sensation even though I knew deep inside that this was not enlightenment. I had to go deeper.
My next session with the marvelous device was that evening. I was still reeling from the experience of heightened senses so the now familiar hum that saturated my mind and the bright light behind my eyelids grew in intensity much more quickly. I fought back the fear and
endured the burning sensation.
The effort was rewarded with the most stunning vista I had ever seen. Countless worlds overlapping with this one. Countless Buddhas radiating the same clear white light. Flower petals falling from the sky in multifarious colors. They drifted on a light breeze like snowflakes. Throngs of beings assembled, waiting for the Lord to speak a single syllable of truth.
It was exactly as the sutras described it. I was overcome by the beauty of the vision. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
The disconnected feeling, however, stayed with me to the point that it was becoming increasingly difficult to function in normal society. I lost my job because I preferred the world of visions to that of my mundane life. I quit participating in any situations that distracted me too much from my time on the meditation cushion.
My power was turned off when I ran out of savings. I was left without the means to feed my addiction to the machine and the fantastic visions that it induced. I wandered about town, angry and frustrated. The myriad things lost their lustre. I had become a hungry ghost, craving the experience of the visions. I wanted how it made me feel.
Some people say that the truth will set you free. I felt more like I was shackled to it, imprisoned by it. So long I had exposed myself to the frequency the device emitted, that I was never free from the hum. The tone constantly reverberated in my head. If I let my eyes go out of focus, the infinite worlds would superimpose over the mundane. No one could see it but me. Why could no one else see it? Did they not have eyes? People passed by the Lord Buddha’s radiance, passed through it, never once seeing what was really there.
One afternoon in the city square I decided I had had enough. I began screaming at the people. I told them what was actually there. They stared at me with wide eyes. Some even screamed in fear. The initial taser hit was the first time the hum had been silenced in months.
Thankfully, no charges were pressed concerning my public outbursts and the police released me once they were convinced I had sobered sufficiently. Sober was certainly how I felt. An afternoon in jail had drained away the feeling of bliss that had overcome me after my experiences with the machine. I craved another session, but I knew that without any way to power the machine I was stuck. The sky grew purple as I walked back toward my apartment.
Three blocks away from the police station I saw something move in my peripheral vision. It was a nearly shapeless mass, darker than the surrounding shadows and moving in the jerky fashion of a marionette. I turned to face it directly but saw nothing but darkness. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my heart began to race. Adrenaline surged through my veins.
A light rain began to fall over the city making the glass and concrete appear greasy. Oil slick rainbows formed in puddles of water and lamplight. A light mist congealed between the buildings. I saw few cars and no pedestrians. Everyone had decided to stay out of the rain as if it were an ill omen.
I felt that the city that I had called home for most of my life had become some sort of alien jungle. A primeval fear gripped my spine. I felt cold. The hum returned stronger than ever.
By the time I was near my apartment I was running. Shadow creatures manifested more frequently. They pounced from behind corners and reached out toward me with spindly fingers. I paused to catch my breath in the reassuring glow of a street-light. The hum bored into my mind, making my head throb. The pain was almost unbearable but secondary to the fear that I felt.
Things moved outside my fortress of light. Shapes vaguely human meandered about seemingly ignorant to my presence. In the deepest shadows I saw eyes, yellow-green eyes, peering at me with a predatory gaze.
Specks of light drew my attention away from them. Strange jellyfish-like creatures faded in and out of reality. Their bioluminescent bodies flickering like a florescent light with a faulty ballast.
Sharp pain shot through my skull as though a spike had been driven through my forehead. I dropped to my knees, clutching my head. I screamed at the night as images flooded my senses. The emaciated figure of the Buddha right before or right after his enlightenment. The familiar knowing smile twisted into a grin of madness. His third eye glowed the same yellow-green of the shadow creatures. Innumerable worlds stretched out in the eight directions, each one presided over by a skeletal figure radiating yellow-green light.
I was bombarded by infinity. Every word, every song, every beastly howl and whimper rose in my ears. Every odor that ever was or will be assaulted my nose. I was but a single grain of sand among infinite grains of sand in an infinite number of rivers.
I saw sentient beings of every possible permutation moving about their day to day lives unaware of me, unaware of everything else occupying the same space. Gods and Buddhas, monsters and men all real, all existing, right here and right now.
The sensory overload transformed into a profound stillness and silence amid all the activity. I raised my eyes toward the rain. Rain, flowers, snow, ice, fire, blood and shit washed over me. Venus glowed in the brightening sky. I smiled.
PROFESSOR HILLIARD’S
ELECTRIC LANTERN
Robert J. Santa
To the best of my knowledge, Jonathan Hilliard never slept. Ever. It was a handy trait for an astronomer, to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed all through the wee hours and into the dawn. It was quite something else to be his friend and suffer through phone calls or knocks on doors at all hours. Jonathan was too much of a genius to allow something as trivial as human development stand in his way. I believe he simply willed himself to stay awake, and his body listened.
Which is, of course, why I killed him. But the story is really much better from the beginning.
The winter of 1930 was a marvelous time. Jonathan and I were discovering asteroids on what seemed like a daily basis. Eckert wrote the most amazing paper on sunspot activity. And, once Tombaugh discovered Pluto, you can only imagine the buzz around the university. Flagstaff has always been a quiet place, and the addition of another planet to our solar system didn’t exactly cause fireworks.
Still, in the areas that counted—the scientific community, and especially government funding—our group was famous. Tombaugh was at the peak, naturally. Convinced that there was more to the solar system than we knew, our budget trebled. I’m certain it had something to do with the hysteria of planetary doom that swept through the civilized world when Halley noted the comet would “come close.” If the public heard “a few hundred thousand miles” instead of “close,” I doubt even a single eyebrow would have been raised.
But I digress. The astronomy department at NAU was flush with money. Tombaugh and his crew had tacit permission to monopolize the telescope, which afforded the rest of us time to work on other projects. Eckert continued his sunspot work, since the telescope was virtually untouched during the day. I examined photographic plates in an effort to justify the government’s expense on us; I am happy to report that I discovered sixteen asteroids of significant size in the space of only nine weeks, none of which had an orbit that would cross Earth’s.
Jonathan tinkered.
It is hard to define his area of expertise. Mine is both astronomical and geological, for I’ve been working of late on mineral composition of the objects around our sun. I’ve dedicated six years to it. In that same time, Jonathan aided Hubble with his idea of an expanding universe (taking no credit, which was typical), built a battery that recharges itself through magnetic agitation, discovered two comets, wrote nineteen papers and three books (two of which are still in use at NAU and most other universities), and considerably advanced his own work in uniform theory. These would only be the scientific contributions. He also rebuilt the art department’s kiln, planted a mushroom field, constructed a tiny helicopter that can be remotely controlled through a cable, and a hundred other successes too numerous to recount. He was undoubtedly a genius, one not limited to a few skills.
The observatory was not just brimming over with money; it had a surplus of personnel as well. Interns and graduate students aboun
ded. I had two assistants, as did Eckert. Tombaugh must have had eight or ten. I’m not sure if Jonathan had any. If he did, he certainly didn’t utilize them. It’s likely that a few of Tombaugh’s originally belonged to Jonathan, and they drifted away from him if only to find something to do. It’s why I loved examining photographic plates so much: it was solitary, time-consuming work of which there was always more to do than could be done. A practiced eye will see the discrepancies between two different photographs of the nighttime sky. Those shifted differences are nearer objects, probably asteroids. It was a rewarding use of time.
Jonathan hated it. He found he had less and less time booked on the big telescope, and for a cosmologist, this is a frustrating experience akin to being a chef with no stove. He taught his classes, but it was as one who is forced to do a chore instead of enjoying the work.
So he built things. I think one of them was meant to just pass a few days: a brass and steel insect, about as big as a toy poodle. The contraption actually walked, powered by a steam engine he fueled with coal as if it were a passenger train. The thing chugged and crawled and was rather clever, if only a distraction. I’ve spoken of his other inventions. Dozens more emerged from his workshop, existed for a while as if to justify Jonathan’s efforts, then vanished.
Then came the knock on the door. I have already mentioned Jonathan made this something of a habit, waking colleagues he knew to have worked all night. Perhaps he saw sleep as a sign of weakness. I never asked him, afraid his answer would strain our friendship. As I was intent on visiting my uncle that morning, I was mercifully already awake, though still dressed in night clothes.
“Do hurry up, Henry!” he called from the street. “It is cold out here.”
I ran downstairs as I tied my robe. When I opened the door, Jonathan pushed past me. A light snow had fallen, rare for Arizona.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 4