Someone was shouting; not Monica, a man's voice.
Boxes slid under him as he crawled forward. His palm touched the dirty concrete floor; he pulled himself forward and stood up again.
Just then the lights went on. Machines, alert again, fidgeted mechanically, hummed.
"Philip! Monica!"
A figure strode toward Philip.
"Ralph," Philip said.
"Philip—My God!"
Ralph darted past Philip. Philip turned. Monica was flat on her back between two metal shelves. Ralph clutched her ankles and dragged her forward.
Philip ran to help.
"What the hell happened?" Ralph asked.
Monica was unconscious and she did not appear to be breathing. There was blood on her forehead. Several quarter-sized, red bruises decorated her cheek.
Ralph was shaking his head and muttering. Philip leaned forward and sought a pulse.
She's dead, he thought, reaching to touch her throat. The carotid artery was silent. Something flickered under the corner of one of the metal cabinets, a last segmented tentacle withdrawing. Of course. The symmetry of those welts on
Monica's cheek could be one thing only, the mark of biting suckers, the track of a monster's caress.
"Let's get her down to my office," Ralph said.
They staggered and dragged her down the hall to the office, cleared a space on Ralph's desk, and laid her out on her back.
Ralph wiped sweat from his forehead. "I don't need this," he said. "I goddam don't need this. We are already behind schedule."
Philip picked up the phone, punched 911.
Ralph grabbed the phone away from Philip. "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" he asked. He slammed the receiver down.
"I was calling an ambulance," Philip said. "She's—" She's dead. "She's really hurt."
"She's fine," Ralph said, absently patting her head. "She just fainted or something. She'll come around."
"No."
Ralph leaned forward across Monica's still form and shouted in Philip's face, propelling flecks of spittle. "Look, I can't spare her! I goddam can't spare her. This is a goddam business, and it can't have everybody lying around in bed recuperating from one thing or another—pleasant as that might be."
Philip shouted back, "She's dead!" There. He had said it.
Ralph shook his head. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water. "No no no no no no no no." He came around the desk in a flurry of arms. "Go home," he shouted, shoving Philip toward the door. "I'll handle this."
Ralph proved to have surprising strength, and Philip found himself colliding with the hallway wall. The door slammed behind him.
Philip turned, tried the doorknob. The door was locked. Philip hammered with his fist. "Let me in!" he shouted. "Come on."
Philip threw his shoulder against the door. Nothing.
He heard it then, heard the voice. It rose and fell. He pressed his ear against the door panel, but he could not decipher a word. It was his employer's voice, rolling in a kind of liturgical cadence, but the language was—
My God. Was this the corrupt Latin of Olaus Wormius, the forbidden translation, the—
Go home. That was the ticket. Go home. Unlock the lobby door and walk out into the safe haven of thunder and lightning and rain.
Philip moved away from the door. He walked back to his computer. Always the good, always the dutiful employee, he turned the computers off. He turned off the hot wax machine and the photocopier. He punched out and donned his raincoat.
He pushed his collection of pens, his X-acto knife, his ruler, his calculator into his briefcase. He wouldn't he returning.
Walking through the lobby he could hear a deep, humming noise, and the sound of some whispery, flutelike whistle. He jiggled his key in the lock and opened the doors. He stepped out into the rain, which had slowed to a steady, businesslike drizzle.
He turned and saw the green light that poured from the window.
Don't. In Lovecraft it was always the same. They always paused too long. Curiosity always drove them forward. Once the ancient, hideous knowledge pierced them, they were lost.
Don't.
They never had the power to resist.
Philip walked to the window and peered in.
Monica floated in the air above her employer, who held a luminous box in his hands. No, it was a glowing book, that book...
Powerless.
It seemed to Philip that he was not looking at a window at all. He was peering down at a small, rectangular swimming pool. Its green water rippled hypnotically. He stared, leaned forward. He fell.
The window shattered, and the roar of vast engines filled his ear. He hit the floor and rolled, glass crackling in the wet folds of his raincoat. He thrust out a hand to regain his balance; a bitter shard of pain found his palm.
He clutched his bleeding hand and looked up. Monica hovered over him, airborne again. Déjà vu. A green sheath of light surrounded her ample form. She turned slowly, like some inflatable mobile jarred into motion.
Ralph Pederson's hair stood on end. Each word he spoke seemed to erupt from his mouth, a silver, mercurylike bubble that blipped instantly ceilingward as soon as it slid from between his lips.
Philip's eyes turned upward. A loathsome nest of such bubbles spread across the ceiling. At their center was a bright, vertiginous hole. A rift.
Ralph Pederson, desperate for good help, was attempting to reanimate Monica Gibson.
As Philip watched, Monica raised one of her arms, and Pederson, heartened by this success, spoke yet more rapidly, the abhorred words ripping from between his teeth like viscous bubbles in molten lead. Rift.
The hole in the ceiling widened; its radiance filled Philip's head with strange voices, voices grotesque and terrible but also—dear God— familiar.
They were trying to come through. Pederson, that fool, was summoning them.
Philip tried to rise to his knees.
Don't bother, a voice said. You'll be light as air soon. Trust us.
Invisible forces held him down. He tried to push upward, and his hand screamed. He felt lighter. Then, instantly, the thick, dead weight returned.
Pain. Pain was the antidote for this unnatural gravity. He reached his good hand across and gripped his bleeding, savaged hand.
I don't want to do this, he thought.
He squeezed. Jesus! He stood up. All right. Okay now.
The pain abated. His shoulders sagged under sudden pressure. His knees buckled. Back on the planet Jupiter's bone-cracking gravity.
He squeezed again. Screamed. Hurled himself toward Ralph Pederson, who was roaring like Hell's own evangelist as the ceiling cracked open
and plaster began to fall like snow from a cement
sky.
Philip struck Ralph Pederson with his damaged hand, howled, they both howled, cosmic dogs. The accursed Necronomicon slipped from Pederson's grip. Looking like one of the creatures it conjured, it flapped its leathery pages to impede—but not halt—its fall.
Monica also fell, slamming down behind the desk, lost to Philip's line of vision. Philip looked up as he rolled on the floor under his employer's frenzied assault. The ceiling was closing again; the Call had been incomplete.
There was no time for triumph, however. Something in the narrowing crack peered out and saw Philip. An animate darkness, trembling with malevolent rage, it recognized Philip. And he recognized it. Sundered in Time and Space, they had come together again.
Tendrils poured from the ceiling, like the entrails from some unimaginable beast.
Philip might have screamed as the first cold, impossibly cold, pseudopod licked his face, but he was already removed from the place of screaming, floating above the floor where he saw, beneath him, the top of Ralph Pederson's head, thinning hair, narrow shoulders, and beyond Pederson, on the other side of the desk, the dark form of Monica Gibson, moving slowly (but quicker, far quicker than dead), a hand reaching up toward the edge of the desk, pale moon-face
staring up at him with an unreadable expression, terror, perhaps, or joy.
She opened her mouth to form a scream or shout, but the world was soundless now in this receding space, this diminishing, this—No! God Jesus not there!—this Returning.
part two
the doom that came to micromeg
1.
He was staring at the horrible gray flesh, long dead and pocked with Swiss-cheese-like holes. This was a Wednesday, then. They always served meatloaf on Wednesdays.
He knew the place, of course. It was the hated cafeteria at MicroMeg.
But where, exactly, precisely, was he! That is, himself? He had no sense of a body. Was he incorporeal, a ghost? Was this cafeteria of milling office drones his purgatory, his hell? A tremor of pure white panic threatened to dissolve his reason.
Just then, he saw a hand—his own; he would have recognized it anywhere—enter the sphere of his vision where the meatloaf and the paste¬like mashed potatoes resided dismally on a pea- green plate. The hand held a fork, which speared a square of meatloaf, skated it through tan gravy, and lifted it in the air.
It was clear to Philip that he lodged somewhere in that Cartesian theater that science had abandoned.
Hello? Hello? No answer.
Think.
He knew what had happened. Perhaps that was just enough consolation to keep him from going insane. What had happened was of almost inconceivable horror—but it did have its precedent.
What had happened to Philip was similar to the fate suffered by the narrator of Lovecraft's The Shadow Out Of Time. The Great Race had, in the case of that unfortunate man (a professor at Miskatonic University), hurled him back across millions of years to reside in a monstrous, alien body.
In Philip's case, the time leap was only a matter of a few years, and he had landed in his own body.
Thinking of the professor's plight, Philip could summon some measure of gratitude. Things could be worse.
It was disorienting, however. Hello. Nothing. He appeared incapable of communicating with himself.
The camera of Philip's consciousness lifted away from the meatloaf as a man approached the table carrying a tray. The man sat down opposite Philip.
It was Ray Barnstable, looking as unsavory as ever, his pale forehead bulging, his eyebrows bristling, his thick glasses enlarging his eyes into orbs of brown incredulity. Philip encountered the old, uneasy sensation that those extraordinary long black hairs that rose above the eyebrow thickets were the antennae of sequestered insects, mole crickets or bugs indigenous to body hair, flat, sinister eyebrow roaches.
I'm really back. Oh Jesus, I'm back.
Maybe he would go insane. Locked inside his own mind, he would lose his mind. How would that feel to this Philip Kenan from the past? Would he hear some thin, brief note of gnat- hysteria? Would he experience a brief shiver of disorientation, of vague disquiet? Would he think, "What was that?"
WHANK WHONK WAY.
The noise boomed in an echoing vault.
What? What?
Philip heard himself speak, but the words were an unintelligible roar. He was too close, somehow. Where was the goddam volume control?
"Hey Phil," Ray said, "how's it going?"
WOBAY. Okay. You could translate. It was possible. You just had to listen a little differently, a little distantly, like seeing in the dark with your peripheral vision.
"You seen that new girl?" Ray said. "The one works down in Personnel? Whoooeeeee." Ray stuffed a forkful of meatloaf in his mouth and washed it down with iced tea. "I might just ask her to take a look at my résumé." Ray laughed. "You reckon she'll say,"—here Ray put a hand under his chin and wriggled fat fingers as he launched his voice an octave higher than usual and imitated a coy maiden— '"Oh, Mr. Barnstable, this resume is too long for little old me."' Ray laughed, a fat man's body-rocking series of snorts. He stopped abruptly and quickly shoveled meatloaf into his mouth, cleaning the plate with sudden savage fury. Finished, he patted his mouth primly with a napkin.
He leaned forward. "Well, I heard Cowell is out. He pissed in Woodson's pool once too often. He's got nothing, and that talk about going to IBM is a lot of crap. He's finished and he knows it."
WHAB NOT BONE. I've got to be going.
Oh it was all familiar. It poured into him with gruesome clarity, with every detail, every footfall on the blue-gray carpet. He was in the basement of MicroMeg, where the cafeteria was lodged, where banks of cold-room computers pontificated, where the storage rooms presided over outmoded equipment and file cabinets of entombed documents, where janitors smoked the nubs of old cigarettes, tossing them out—with a killed-serpent hiss—in the overcast water of dirty mop buckets, where security guards read old copies of Penthouse amid guttural bursts of officious two-way radio static, where—where the rituals were performed in preparation for the great Leap.
Dear God, wasn't once enough?
He was staring now at the bulletin board next to the elevator. Someone had cut the article about Merv Wiggins' retirement from the MicroMeg Monitor newsletter. There was old Merv, smiling, a death's head grin in the clairvoyant flash of the camera. Old Ronald Bickwithers had his arm around Merv and was waving a glass of champagne in the air.
Okay, Philip thought. Just where the hell in time have I landed?
He could figure it out. He could narrow it down. Obviously, he had been transported to a time after Merv's retirement. How long after? Things could stay pinned to the bulletin board for an indefinite amount of time, but in this case, Merv had died less than a month after retiring, so someone would have taken the article down by then, replacing it with the obituary.
Philip studied the contrasty newsprint photo. Merv Wiggins had worked with Philip in the Graphics Support division of MicroMeg. Old Merv. Merv with his crisp white shirts, sleeves rolled up, his harried smile, his crew cut, and his dauntless team spirit. "We can do it," he would say. "It would be nice if they had given us some warning before springing this project on us, but we've got the weekend, and if we all make that extra effort, we'll be golden on this one."
"Golden," Merv would say. "Golden."
Philip remembered the retirement party, held at a Ramada Inn. Ronald Bickwithers, Merv's supervisor, had delivered a rousing testimonial to the man's spirit.
"Old Merv," Bickwithers said, squeezing the man's shoulder. “I hate to see him go. If I was to look in the dictionary under 'dedication' I would find the name Merv Wiggins written there."
Bickwithers told the story with real drama. "It was right after the Ellison Naval project that Merv went into Fairfax hospital. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were just getting the completed boards out the door, and I look around and there is Merv curled up under the drafting table, and I lean under and ask if he is okay, and, you know Merv, he says sure he is just fine but if I would call up an ambulance he would greatly appreciate it."
That was the time they took out half of Merv's stomach. “I figured we wouldn't see him for six months, but three weeks later he's back. It's two in the morning, and I ring up the office expecting to get one of the younger folks, and it is Merv that is there working on a last minute proposal for BeeSams. I tell him to go slow, and he says, 'Going slow didn't make us number one.' I guess if you looked up the word 'trooper' you would find Merv's name there too."
Later Merv had had to have a substantial part of his upper intestines removed. He had been back on the job in less than a month. A number of health problems plagued Merv.
Ronald Bickwithers spoke at length and with some eloquence on Merv's hospitalizations, cataloging, with a pathologist's zeal, the various organs that had been pared down or completely removed from Merv's system. Each time some new physical catastrophe would strike the man, office gossip would have it that he was out for the count. But, invariably, Merv would return and work the youngest and hardiest of them under the table.
"But he came back!" Bickwithers would shout, rising up on the balls of his feet like a preacher full of Good News. "Ye
s sir, he heard MicroMeg cry out, 'We need your expertise and enthusiasm,' and he didn't turn his back on that cry for help.
You look under 'loyalty' and you'll find the name Merv Wiggins written large there too."
Philip remembered the speech, remembered old Merv bent over and smiling and saying he just did the best he could. It seemed now that when Merv waved his hand in a self-deprecating gesture intended to quell the audience applause, a blue wristband from his last hospitalization was visible next to his watchband, but this may have been one of those details created by a memory more in love with aptness than with accuracy.
Résumé With Monsters Page 10