Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond

by Christine Morgan

  I looked at the table.“If you say so.”

  John looked like he wanted to say something else, but held his tongue. We’d all been through a lot.

  Jason didn’t build the machine. He didn’t build it at all. He just inherited it, right around a long midlife crisis that didn’t come as young as the dye in Tillinghast’s elaborate Mod quiff seemed to suggest. I tried to dig through his reputation and find the human in the closet. I give people too many chances. In industry circles alone, he used every last one and a few more.

  Still, there’d been a good minute or two of that. I knew him. I read between the lines of his endless editorials and various blogs. At first, on top of the writing, way back, he’d wanted to start a touring band. Then a church. He wanted something to equal anywhere near the stature his great-uncle Crawford held, something longer than that long shadow, without actually becoming a scientist the way his parents dogged him to. The great-uncle had been a great psychedelic researcher, to hear him tell it, and a suppressed visionary on a par with Niko Tesla.

  But Jason said a lot of things, and so did the few people he managed to keep around him.

  I remember the first review I ever read of his first collection, SYCOPHANTASIA: “Jason Tillinghast’s work is new and startling, stimulating senses we forgot we had, opening terrifying new vistas of illumination to our heretofore-unexamining eyes, and eliciting terror and ecstasy from a realm far beyond our plebian perceptions.” So I tried to read it. I tried. Again.

  Then I tried to read his solo novel. His first. Seven hundred and eighty pages. He wrote it when he was touring with something called an “atheist metal keyboard rock experience, featuring Jason Tillinghast performing as Kläüs Ümläüt.” None of the videos are anywhere online. Very few negative reviews of his work are, either. Not that they don’t exist. But there are so few reviews of it in general that the bad ones were probably easy to Googlebomb away.

  Not that it matters now. The whole tempest will fade, and fall to the bottom of archive and search-string alike, in ways no one could program or predict. But as an editor and a writer, his behavior was the stuff of legend at the time.

  He came to my writing workshop once and didn’t critique one story until he’d been made to wait until second-to-last. At that point, he exploded on my ex Bobbi, who was new to the game and needed feedback. Jason called Bobbi’s work “high and twee” (it isn’t) and spent the next fifteen minutes insulting every metaphor in it, and her. I walked over and held the front door open before Bobbi could even open her mouth.

  Likewise came Tillinghast to my collaborator Daniel Maximoff’s house for the last Solstice party Kelly Maximoff got to throw before the two of them moved back to San Franpsycho. Jason came just to publicly reject a story Daniel had submitted to PHANTOUCHE magazine. Daniel never forgot that, and toward the end of his time in our city he was starting to find Jason less and less blackly hilarious.

  Frankly, you don’t do that to Daniel if you don’t want to hear about it. For someone most people would label a shoestring horror writer on the fringes of Punk Rock and activism and anarchy, Daniel’s a professional, and he remembers when others aren’t. And calls them on it.

  So do I. Like I said, I do a lot of Cons, and I see a lot. I don’t say all I know, because I don’t need to. It’s not worth it. But sometimes, The Fun just follows me.

  Jason is...(excuse me, was...though we really don’t know, do we? More of a metaphysical question now...) was tired of no one noticing him, or wanting to. Bad was better than Nothing. Better than ho-hum. Better than being just about as good as the next author, or filmmaker, or musician. Better than really telling the story. Really making the film. Really feeling the thing. Really accepting anything that didn’t come from him. Really behaving in consensus reality.

  “I’m just an intense person,” he told greater and greater numbers of people as the years wore on and we both did what we did in the same city, and watched. “If you don’t like that, I’m sorry.” That was the closest thing to an apology that ever came out of his mouth, followed soon enough each time by more acting-out and clamoring for any attention in the field at all a few months after everyone had shaken hands.

  About four months before PanCon, which would have been right around February, that slope started getting noticeably deeper and more slippery. There was always one more thing up his sleeve. One more issue. One more way to stir up nastiness.

  But I wasn’t even thinking about any of that when the shivering gargoyle cornered me as I walked into the elevator, leering over the sheeted machine on the cart, staring hideously into my eyes. “It’s okay,” he said, and what I felt was greater than any intoxicant or circumstance or issue. “I forgive you, Edward. We can work through this. No one is perfect. There’s a little time.”

  “What the fuck are you smoking?” No response. But he had something else to say. I waited. Horrible beyond conception was the change I saw in him. He looked disfigured. Altered. The shell of bloated bloviation was gone. His socketed eyes glowed, and his hands shook.

  I backed up as close to the door as I could, trying to figure out what was under the white linen drop-cloth. It was making a whining sound. It smelled funny. Something about its angles was all wrong.

  As wrong as the Wrong that was all I could feel like infrared heat radiating from the forty-six-year-old man in pajamas and Iron Man slippers in that elevator.

  “I will pop you in the mouth if you come near my face. Jason. Do you understand what I just said to you? Please give me some sign that I am speaking a language you understand. Acknowledge. Hablados Ingles? Parlez-vous—”

  Nothing. I kept looking at the door. Jason looked like he hadn’t slept for a good long time. The sweat shone on his forehead and his cheeks. His voice sounded higher than usual, unnatural, though as pedantic as ever.

  “I know I melted down. But look. There are things happening here. We all have to see this. My aunt just died,” he gushed, as if that explained something to me then. “In Providence, and...You don’t know? That my great-uncle came close to changing what we call Science?”

  Something spoke for me, something that had occasionally sat on panels half-asleep or sick or worse. Something with a different interest. “S.T. Joshi discredited that,” I heard myself answer. “He said Crawford Tillinghast was a bad check artist and a junkie, and the neighbors rode him out of town on a rail.”

  Now he was close enough that I pushed him gently back. Every flabby muscle in Jason’s shoulder felt like piano-wire in an earthquake. “I locked myself in the attic for ten weeks—” he cleared his throat when his voice broke, “Ten weeks...testing this fucking thing. At the old place,” he told me, like I had any idea what he was even on about. “In Providence. When we finally went back. You...you know we’re not real well-liked there. It. Huh. Ha.” He saw my deer-in-headlights visage and drifted away again.

  “My great-uncle built several of these resonators. Like Preston Tucker with his cars. If I have this right, the one with the bullet hole is the only non-functional unit, and small wonder...”

  I could smell his breath, and what was behind it was worse than any disease.

  “But this one works.”

  As if slaved up to his brain like a hard-drive, the machine under the cloth began to glow with a sickly, sinister rose-madder pulse, a not-quite-blacklite effulgence. With no surprise, I observed a giant 240-volt plug hanging from beneath it. Huh. Then why was it glowing? It must have built up a charge...

  “You...just told me off online,” I said slowly and carefully. “Me and about half the writers at this Con. Who...what...how...”

  He grinned at me like an animal that doesn’t know it’s dead yet. “I’m a co-sponsor of this Convention. So I can do any goddamn thing I want. In just a minute, you’re all going to shut up and listen. I saw you looking. I have a portable charger for...the big test, but it doesn’t...exactly...need one...”

  The laugh was nothing anyone should ever have to hear. He kept looking behin
d me. At the glass walls of the elevator, and the outer glass wall of the shaft. And the sky behind that. Licking his lips. Searching. Trying not to look like he was either cringing or begging, by turns. Begging something of the sky.

  I’m not going to say he should never have become a writer, or an editor, or anything he did. There are plenty like him. He simply never should have gone to Providence. He should have left well enough alone, or at the very least delegated some help. Admitted that he was no authority on the matter.

  Accepted what he might have seen as a failure, and become stronger by it. But he was the prey of failure.

  “You’re kind of an idiot,” he said blithely, still smiling, “But most of the real writers here will get the evidence from beyond.” The glow was increasing, shadowing the far corners with hazy unreality. “Things will see you in this light. First. Ha. Hope they find you. They...They’re not very forgiving.”

  The drop-cloth fell to the floor. I marveled at the cluster of multicolored lights atop a fairly-aeronautical bank of oldschool redline dials and more complicated gauges. The main body of the machine was burnished metal, faced in something like crystal or clear Bakelite. The glow it produced was giving me a headache. Jason moved closer to it like it was a warm stove.

  “The knobs talk.” He began to play with the first row of them, but not haphazardly. Like he was cracking a safe. Listening to the clicks. “I have to zero them out. It’s almost...” he giggled. “Showtime.”

  All of a sudden, I realized he was alone. No wife. No mentor. No phone ringing. I wondered a lot about that. He never went to Cons alone. Too many people wanted to kick his ass. “How’s Shandeen? How’s Bill?” I whispered, and his head came up like a marionette’s.

  “Beyond. They’re...busy. They’ll be back. They...I can fix it. They...They’ll come back. They always come back.” Incredibly, he sobbed. In that sob was a quality so pathetic it surpasses my capability to describe. Then the elevator went ding. But I waited.

  His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. “Do you think you understand anything? I’ve seen things your little brain can’t picture, and bound gods from the stars. I’ve strode across the worlds. Space belongs to me. Not to you. You’re no god. Look outside the glass! See them! See the creatures from the air and the sky!”

  I merely exited the car ahead of him wordlessly, trying not to scream. When I got out in the hall, I started texting writers: TILLINGHAST’S MELTING DOWN. COME WATCH...

  It was a shitshow. But it was over with quickly. I made it into the main ballroom just behind the storm.

  In the darkness of the ballroom, beyond the small circle of light, people were beginning to make We’re Leaving noises. Not Part of the Act noises. Columbine noises. From the first.

  At the main podium on the stage, Brian Keene had just been telling a story. Most of the audience had moved their chairs in closer, or come up to stand and listen. A few other writers had circled up their chairs onstage behind him as well.

  Something about that setup was familiar. I should have guessed it. They were all Horror people, some with faces I knew. Like they were waiting their turn for something, or had been. Now they were all either watching in clinical awe and bemused disgust, heckling, or herding together until they had a reason to run out the door. At conventions, everything becomes part of the act eventually. But this was the wrong part of the wrong act. And everybody knew it.

  “I have seen the truth, and I intend to show it to you, and all you dupes and parvenus up on that stage in particular! Do you wonder how it will seem? I’ll tell you!"Jason shrieked at them. The hollow, altered quality of his voice was sickening. Every pudgy gamer in a Security shirt I saw in the room was standing at various posts with their mouths hanging open and their radios squawking bloody damn hell in the Coptic of disaster.

  “What do we think we know about the universe? Whattaweknowabout the inner workings of...anything, really? Einstein used to carp about ‘zeee feeeeble huuuman percepshual eqvipmment...’ but what the fuck did Einstein know? We’ve shoved him out of the way. My great-uncle shoved him out of the way, and the FDA burned his notes just like they did with Reich and Tesla. You and all the rest, you only see what you’re constructed to see. Real visionaries change the game. Listen to me! The waves from this machine will wake our evolution!”

  “IS THIS PART OF THE CONTEST? LOOK? HE—”

  “Oh, Tillinghast’s doing another one. Someone throw something.”

  “SECURITY! WHY ARE YOU ALL JUST—”

  We could all see Jason’s boiled eyes in the hellacious rose-madder glow the machine threw off.

  This was the nightmare end of a long history. Still, no one expected him to actually start turning knobs.

  He watched the machine’s light sink into their eyes, the knowledge crossing every face. This was an Unknowable. Jason’s own face looked green, the lenses of his glasses opalescing a similar hue. Behind them, Jason’s eyes drifted, turning lazily like silver pinwheels on a summer day in a slow breeze, the eyes of a vacant-eyed child doodling tracks in the dust with a scalpel, watching the pulsing rigor of the animal model on cheap display.

  “My great-uncle lives through me, and I have reimagined his work. We don’t have to take drugs anymore,” he babbled softly. “Or drink, or anything of the kind. Nothing between us and the Word. Nothing. Behold...”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP, TILLINGHAST! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIGHTS?”

  “WHAT ARE YOU—”

  “WHAT IS—”

  “GET THE FUCK OFF THE STAGE!”

  But slowly, another world was spilling from the machine’s glow. The audience in that hall began to see. Silence rolled through the room like a pinball, randomly coming to rest. And rest. And rest.

  Even the petulance was gone from Jason Tillinghast’s face, which was the most frightening thing of all. What was left looked like a waxen mask, or any brain case in the main room of a nut ward when the movie was on and the med-cart had just come by.

  “There are beings out there who use different senses. There are whole other realities right at our fingertips. We can open up vistas unknown to organic life! No breathing creature has yet seen what happens when I turn this machine all the way up!”

  Slack. Unhinged. Fever-bright with old, curdled sweat. Shiny, flat carny eyes that had beheld utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space. Childish fear, and behind that, absolute void.

  Those eyes now pointed toward only one thing.

  The machine in front of him on the cart that burped up and up and up with the blatting sound of ancient fanbelts running without lube in the dust and the dark, singing an old song that everyone just knew we didn’t want to hear again, before the noodling solo even started from the furthest regions of remoteness, assailing every ear all the way like ground glass scratching together.

  That sound begat a cold wind that sprang up in the ballroom, a wind with a howl behind it like an oncoming train, a great big new toy train Jason controlled with the machine on the cart at his right hand. His right hand.

  Trembling on the knobs. 11. 12. Working each one in a complicated series from the zero-out pattern I’d seen him achieve. I wondered what a unity-gain reading would look like on that monitor, how one would start to get a level when listening, and what level of What.

  Then I had it. What level. Oh, what level indeed. Zero on this machine was the world we all knew. Eleven, twelve, anything up that high...

  We were all in Jason’s world now. Like a magic-lantern throwing the nerves of one’s own eyes into light and life upon a screen, a whole other place was superimposed across the room, and it had always been there. When I looked up again, a river ran through the ballroom slantwise, one that had never touched human affect enough to see before, but matched every angle, between the angles, like the forest that rose behind the back wall of the room.

  Everything smelled like rain all of a sudden, rain and a strange plastic undercoating of
smell I couldn’t identify, fumes that hurt my mind. The smell of the machine.

  The room held the same outlines, but everything was blurry and silvery-incandescent. Shadow meant as much as shape, and behind the shadows was a whole other picture. I could see the sky, but it wasn’t ours. Not Oregon sky.

  The clouds blew through the roof. The stars made no sense. The machine was barely making any noise. And the river flowed on, all around us, cutting a path through the forest whose massive cycad-things and leaning palms gave way to only more of themselves, no firs or pines or cedars anywhere. Just trees that had barely evolved up to the definition.

  Terror stalked the shadows, but the surpassing wildness I felt from the way the wind moved every immortal, unclassifiable leaf was nigh-on Tantric, making my throat close, stirring my blood. There were other worlds beyond this room, worlds with greyhounds and centaurs and giants and demons along the dark road that I could make out stretching just past the main hall that led to the lobby. Worlds where a reporter had never before Gone Live...

  Then I looked back toward my own kind, and keen salutary pain pierced my heart. Fans and writers were screaming, dropping to their knees, slapping at the motion of air that looked like water that looked like sky, and strange blind-robin fish they couldn’t exactly touch that bumbled and nosed at their ears, or explored their pockets, or ducked back from their screaming wives or boyfriends or, in some cases, children.

  I saw a thirteen-year-old boy sitting back in wonder in the middle of the ballroom, looking up as that which could have never been called a jellyfish danced a glowing, lugubrious waltz one pseudopod at a time through the upper registers of what I would have once called a suspended ceiling. As I looked harder, I saw more. More of what was in the river. More fish. And not-at-all-fish. The creatures that flowed forth from the silvery water, breathing air and flying in it interchangeably. And the things that fed upon those things, loathsome plasmic profusions that overlapped, and walked up out of dirt to devour, or passed through each other and took a bite on the way.