Philip tried the door. It was locked.
He had anticipated that. He was prepared to break a window if the lock had been changed. It hadn't. The key on his key ring fit, and the bolt slid back.
The reception area was dark. The hallway exhaled feeble light that outlined the long counter. Philip stood in the darkness, listening. Barely audible music reached his ears: violins and horns. He leaned forward on the balls of his feet, straining for a trace of human industry beneath the radio's hum. Nothing. He recognized the tune: Yesterday.
He moved slowly across the lobby and down the hall. To his right the corridor led to Ralph's office, Philip's ultimate destination. For now, he needed to reconnoiter. He needed to see who was in this part of the building. The printers, lodged in their ear-splitting, backroom ghetto, were not likely to come up front.
He moved quickly now, vulnerable in the corridor. Anyone coming out of typesetting or graphics would see him. No hiding here.
Bright light fell from the door to typesetting, and Philip flattened against the wall and eased his head around the door frame.
Monica.
She was hunched over her computer, typing rapidly, her shoulders rocking as though to lively music—not the case, though; Yesterday still played. She was wearing a shaggy shawl of some green material, and her hair stuck out in curious tufts, as though she had been pulling on it.
Next to her, a large, thickset woman leaned over a drafting table.
Who?
The woman turned to thrust a piece of paper through the waxer, and Philip recognized the flat, stolid countenance. Helga. Sworn enemies laboring side by side.
Philip felt cold, muddy dread. Helga and Monica, working in tandem, seemed to herald Armageddon. How had Ralph accomplished this? The answer came to Philip immediately: Zombies harbor no grudges.
Philip backed away from the door. He turned and ran back down the hall and around the corner toward Ralph Pederson's office. Fear had overthrown caution, and he was no longer interested in discovering just who was in the building. Philip paused at the closed door to Ralph's office. Was Ralph inside? Philip leaned his ear against the door and listened. He heard nothing. He pushed the door open. The room was dark. He breathed a sigh of relief and fumbled for the light switch.
The stark fluorescent light bathed Philip in a moment of bright terror. Irrationally, he expected to see shattered window glass on the carpet, and, looking toward the ceiling, encounter the sanity-searing visage of Yog-Sothoth.
But there were no signs of that day's violence. The carpet, indeed, appeared to be new, a thick gray pelt.
Philip moved across the room and behind the desk. He tugged open drawers. One was locked.
He found scissors on the desk and pried at the wood. The lip of the drawer splintered, but the drawer remained locked.
Philip was frantic. This wasn't any high security safe. This was just a goddam wooden desk, a flimsy, cheaply constructed, mahogany- veneered desk with a locked drawer that any secretary worth her steno pad could open with a hairpin.
The room was having an effect on Philip. The horror that had hurled him back to MicroMeg had come through this very ceiling, and he couldn't shake the notion that it lay, flattened like a truck-sized scorpion, in the overhead crawlspace.
Panic seized him. He squatted on his heels, clutched the base of the desk with both hands and heaved.
The desk rose up and crashed forward and Philip stood and kicked violently at the exposed underbelly of the locked drawer. The slats splintered and he reached down and jerked them away, a sharp fragment of wood sliding brightly into his thumb. The large, dark, ancient book fell halfway out and he grasped a corner and hauled it the rest of the way, dropping it on the carpet when its icy chill surprised his touch and the dead-flesh feel of its leather binding conjured loathsome images.
Philip stared at the Necronomicon as it lay on the carpet. This unholy map of black space and time, mad Alhazred's accursed book of spells and portents, appeared to pulse, as though breathing. Philip looked wildly around the room. Had anyone heard the desk overturn? He had to get out of here. He couldn't bring himself to touch the book. He would have to, soon enough, but not now, not in this room with its violent assault on his memory.
A printer's apron hung on the coat rack, and Philip grabbed it, tossing it over the book. He reached down then, and clutched the hefty volume through the apron. It seemed to expand and contract, a hideous sensation, but at least no vile vision of other worlds leapt to his mind.
Philip hugged the swaddled book to his chest and turned to the door.
Ralph Pederson stood in the doorway. He held a revolver in his hand.
"Philip," Ralph said. "This will all come out of your pay, you know."
"I don't work for you anymore," Philip said.
Ralph shook his head sadly. "You've never had an ounce of loyalty," Ralph said. "Things get a little rough, you don't get a raise every six months, and you are out the door. And always complaining. You don't know what hard work is. Your whole generation doesn't know spit about hard work. It is all you can do to wipe your own ass. When I was fourteen years old, I was holding down three jobs. And ask me how many hours a day I work now."
“I don't—"
The revolver exploded. The desk shook.
Jesus.
"Ask!" Ralph roared.
Philip heard his voice, small and shaky. "How many hours a day do you work?"
"Twenty," Ralph said. "I work twenty hours a day." Ralph's head dropped forward and he was silent, staring at the carpet, his eyes sullen and stupid, his lips pooched out in a drunken pout. His arm dropped to his side, the revolver's barrel pointing at the floor.
Philip stepped forward.
Ralph came alive with a start. His arm jerked up, the gun pointed directly at Philip.
Jesus. Ralph was going to pull the trigger. Philip could see it in the crazy, red-rimmed eyes.
"Don't shoot," Philip said. "I'm no good to you dead."
Ralph grinned.
Well, that was a stupid thing to say, Philip thought. Dead, he would become a paragon of industry—like Monica.
The corners of Ralph's mouth inched toward his ears as he slowly squeezed the trigger. Philip saw someone move behind Ralph. It was Bingham.
The gun exploded as Ralph lurched forward, Al Bingham's hands around his throat. Philip fell to his knees, dropping the shrouded Necronomicon.
In front of Philip, the two men wrestled. Bingham, his bald head gleaming under the lights, clutched Ralph's gun hand and banged it against the wall. Ralph rolled from under the older man and kicked out. Bingham half rose, banging against the wall and bouncing back into Ralph. They rolled on the floor. The gun went off again.
"Al!" Philip shouted.
Philip watched as Ralph Pederson, muttering darkly, rose and stood shakily over Bingham who moaned as he tried to push himself up from the floor. Bingham's left hand was bright with blood.
"You goddam can't get decent help," Ralph muttered and he stood up very straight, straightening his shoulders, and then tottered and fell stiffly backward, hitting the carpet with a whumf). He had fallen back out the door, so that his legs and polished shoes were all that entered the room.
Bingham was staggering to his feet. He held his left hand with his right. "Fucker shot off the top of my little finger," he said. "Goddam cheap low-rent sonofabitch."
Philip and Bingham walked to the door. Ralph lay on his back with his eyes open. He looked angry and preoccupied at the same time. The front of his shirt was saturated with dark blood.
"Shot his own lights out, too," Bingham said, with an air of faint disgust. He squeezed his injured hand. "This hurts like a sonofabitch. Hand me old Ralph's tie."
Philip undid the dead man's tie, sliding it through the collar, and offered it to Bingham, who frowned and continued to clutch his wounded hand. "I'm gonna need your help here."
Once the tourniquet was applied, Bingham looked around the room.
"What
a mess," he said. "I suppose you have an explanation for all of this."
Philip said he did, but that it was long and he wasn't sure if time permitted its telling. Bingham suggested Philip just hit the high points.
"...so I came here to get the Necronomicon. There are incantations in it, rituals that are effective against the Old Ones..."
"And I suppose you know just where to find them," Bingham said.
Philip felt extremely tired. "No. I guess I'll need all the luck and inspiration I can find."
Bingham shook his head. "Wonderful. What a plan." Bingham gave the room one more disgusted look. "Well, first things first. Let's tote old Ralph out to the trunk of my car. I'll dump him in the old quarry later."
Dead, Ralph remained a difficult man. His corpse was unwieldy and heavier than it looked. They lugged him down the corridor toward the side exit in the back. They had to pass the lighted door of typesetting, and Philip, who was in the lead, paused and peered in the door.
Monica and Helga were dancing to the radio. The tinny tune fell unrecognized on Philip's ears, and it was only as he came out into the night air that he identified it: an easy listening version of All You Need Is Love.
They tumbled Ralph into the trunk of Bingham's car and went back inside. Philip could not resist another peek at Monica and Helga as he crept by the door.
Helga appeared to be leading, moving with slow, sliding steps, her feet never leaving the floor. She was wearing a small black beret and a black dress with small white dots. Monica, her hands on Helga's shoulders, was singing loudly, shouting each word as though urging on a rowing crew.
Back in Ralph's office, Philip gingerly gathered the Necronomicon from the floor, bundling it again in the apron.
"Wait," Bingham said, moving to Philip's side.
He reached for the book.
"You don't want to touch it," Philip said.
"I guess I know that," Bingham said. "Although I doubt it affects me the way it does you."
Bingham took the book, opened it, and gingerly turned the pages with an index finger.
Philip looked on in wonder.
Bingham nodded his head as he flicked pages. "Tax evasive rituals," Bingham muttered, "lawyer conjuring, inner child exorcisms, women (attracting, warding), travel (dimensional, linear, time), demon entreating... here: demon repelling, binding, contracts."
Bingham flipped another page, nodded his head, and closed the book. He folded the apron over the book and handed it back to Philip.
"Na'ghimgor thdid lym," Bingham said. "That's where you want to start."
Philip's eyes were wide. "How do you know all this?"
"I been around," Bingham said. "I was hauling bricks before you were an argument in the backseat of a car. I'm a union man. I guess I've seen a few monsters."
"You've known all along that they were real!" Philip said, no accusation in his tone, simply bafflement.
"Let's get out of here," Bingham said, taking Philip's shoulder.
They walked through the lobby and out the front door. As they crossed the parking lot, Sissy came out of the car, running, and hugged Philip.
Philip introduced her to Bingham.
"Pleased to meet you," he said.
Sissy got back in the car, started the engine.
"I gotta go clean up Ralph's office," Bingham said. "Then I gotta dispose of Ralph. I guess I'm out of a job."
"I'm sorry," Philip said.
The old man shrugged. "I was getting too old for the work, anyway."
Philip had to ask. "Why didn't you tell me you knew about the monsters?"
"Hell," Bingham said, "everyone knows about the monsters. Some people just catch a slither out of the corner of their eye and some people just get an afterimage when they turn on the lights at two in the morning. Most folks make their accommodations quicker than you have. Most people make a deal so quick, they don't even know they've made it. I saw them Old Ones for awhile, but I don't see them anymore. I got no time and patience for them now. What truck do I have with big, steamrolling forces? I got my bowels to worry about, and the weather, and my wife, and the rent. I got no time for your Yog-Sothoth."
"Don't worry about losing your job," Philip said. "I'm going to send you and Lily some money; I've got more than enough."
Bingham smiled sadly.
"It's true," Philip said. "I've got a lot of money."
Bingham patted Philip's shoulder. "That's all right, Philip. Better get going, now. That Sissy is a fine woman; hang on to her. I told you: a redheaded woman is good luck. I'll say hi to Lily for you."
As they drove away, Philip looked back. Bingham was already turned around and headed toward the building, stoop-shouldered, his bald head gleaming faintly in the darkness. He didn't look like a man with enough stamina left to straighten a room and dispose of a corpse, and Philip felt a pang of guilt.
Then he remembered Amelia, the lateness of the hour, and the perils ahead. He turned and stared grimly toward the future. Sissy pulled out onto the empty roadway.
"Turn left here," Philip said. "We'll want to get on Mopac and head south, downtown."
As they took the on ramp, the first large raindrops smacked the windshield.
10.
Philip had Sissy park three blocks down from Pelidyne.
"I'll walk from here," Philip said.
"Let me come with you," Sissy said.
"No. If I thought you could help, I'd ask you to come. But I'm the only one who can do this— and only if I do it alone."
Sissy didn't argue. Perhaps she understood, from reading The Despicable Quest, that her first look on the abyss, on the shifting visage of Azathoth, would render her useless.
Philip had been through the fire of unreason, and his patched-together sanity was cauterized, sealed against the dark miasma of the Old Ones and their lurid blandishments of madness.
Or so he hoped.
He walked slowly down the sidewalk, cradling the apron-swaddled Necronomicon in his arms. Austin's late night was cool and damp, the street deserted. He had formed no plan, trusting to the inspiration of need. There was still something of the romantic in Philip, and he felt that a just cause and a good will might serve as a talisman against evil. He had, of course, no reason for such faith.
Pelidyne towered over him, its dark, gleaming lines thrusting skyward with malevolent illogic. Philip's resolve faltered. Amelia was already dismembered, no doubt, the patterns of her personality transferred to throbbing nets of alien tissue or gleaming, dispassionate machines.
Run.
Philip stopped and stood very still. His heart beat rapidly.
Run as fast and as hard as you can and be grateful that your blind, puny existence has been spared.
A chill wind blew up the street, throwing a handful of stinging grit in his face. The stench of long dead fish filled his nostrils. His eyes watered.
"Amelia," Philip said, and then he shouted her name, "Amelia!" His heart slowed a little, and the bleak voice lay silent.
He stepped forward. One foot in front of the other. Hate helped him on. You dirty stinking space spiders. You rot-bred intergalactic ticks. It's over. Kiss your hairy abdomens goodbye.
The doors to Pelidyne would be locked. The lobby's security guard would be on duty. Perhaps Hal Ketch himself would be patrolling the halls.
The thought of Ketch, shark-mouthed and vigilant, made Philip's heart roar again, as though a reckless child had twisted the volume control.
A man came out of a door, bursting onto the sidewalk like a blackbird that's been trapped in a chimney. Philip jumped back, and the man, bundled in a heavy overcoat, swayed quickly past. Philip turned and watched the man move swiftly down the sidewalk. Something in the way he walked caught Philip's attention, a kind of sliding, leaping gait that suggested ignorance of earth's gravity. The back of the man's coat seemed to squirm oddly.
That's nothing human, Philip thought, as the figure turned a corner.
The building the man had abruptly
exited was a low, dirty brick structure that leaned against Pelidyne, as an alley cat might lean against the tailored trouser leg of an elegantly attired businessman. Philip walked to the door and read the blue neon sign: JOE'S FANTASYLAND ADULT VIDEO EMPORIUM. Beneath these glowing words, black and white print strongly urged that anyone entering the door have two IDs indicating an age of eighteen years or older.
It was also suggested that a potential patron not be offended by explicit photographs of sexual acts.
Résumé With Monsters Page 22