Philip read on. "ln'path gix mth'nabor. In'path nox vel'dekk."
Suddenly, with a shriek of wind and a noxious odor that was palpable and vile, the monster surfaced. It came from the other side of space, perhaps, shedding electric sparks. The eye could not hold it all; no human eye would wish to.
Amelia, her white lab coat flapping, screamed as the mad god Azathoth waved her as though she were a handkerchief in a knot of giant worms.
Philip stopped reading. "Let her go!" he screamed into the rising wind.
Abruptly, Amelia rose high in the air, then down—a softball pitcher's windup—and flew through the open doorway and past Philip. She rolled as she hit the floor, coming to rest against the white sink counter. Philip ran to where she lay.
"Amelia?"
Her eyes were closed. She was alive though. She breathed.
Philip turned and quailed before huge, staring eyes that crowded the doorframe.
Philip felt words thunder in his mind.
"Drone. You deign to harness an Overlord?"
Philip felt his soul shrivel. Something was being pulled from him, extracted, some life essence.
He looked down at the throbbing book. His hands were bleeding. The page in front of him was unreadable, the alien words blurred beyond recognition by the pain in his head.
He read them anyway.
"Yig sudeth M'cylorim. M'xxlit kraddath Soggoth im'betnk." The evil thunder in him abated some. But still it shook him.
There were no words, but the sense of it was this: "Drone, I will paper the universes with tiny pieces of your pathetic sentience."
Philip read on. And as he read, he began to understand what he spoke. The sense of it was this: "You will leave this spot, which spot denies the logic of your coming and going, and you will take, in the Name of the Nameless One, all your minions and their devices with you. And even the uttering of your name will be lost to this world until Time has eaten its Own Head."
The waves of Azathoth's hate still beat within him. There was a ritual, a gesture yet to make, some switch to turn.
Philip glanced up from the book, seeking a weapon.
The monster sensed this momentary release, and it shot a single cold tentacle across the distance and wrapped Philip's ankle in scaled, burning muscle. Philip screamed, and the pain darted like cockroaches up his spine.
He turned, dropping the Necronomicon. He clutched at a desk as he fell, trapped by the burning, viselike grip on his ankle.
A drawer fell out, clattering next to him (pencils, pens, a pocket calculator, a book of crossword puzzles, rubber bands, a condom, a broken cigarette, paper clips).
Paper clips. The glue of bureaucracy. The heart-sinking, tedious, menial egg cases of the lumbering, soul-breaking business world. Paper clips. The drawer-crouching, bright, cheery, phony, truant darlings of time-servers and despairing clerks.
Philip scrabbled to snare a paper clip between thumb and forefinger. As usual the small, silvery bug eluded him. The pain ran briskly up his neck and squatted at the bottom of his brain.
He grabbed the clip, slapped his palm down on a rubber band, and screamed again as the monster continued to drag him toward the abyss where—this vision was too precise not to be an image from the creature itself—his skin would be sucked from him by a thousand rasping mouths.
He bent the clip against his palm, slipped the rubber band between thumb and forefinger, and lurched upright on the edge of the precipice.
"You stinking space slug!" he screamed, and he fired a paper clip into the great, blank eye of implacable evil.
He could not say what happened next.
Something appeared to scream inside his head. "Nogs'dath blexmed!" he shouted, releasing the entities of sealing, those words that closed the way back.
He flew through the air. Perhaps he lost consciousness. Certainly time was fragmented, although that might have been the result of other forces. In any event, he found himself lying on top of Amelia. The doorway was empty, with curious lights shivering and flashing in the darkness. The building itself was rumbling and shaking. Above him, plasterboard crumpled like cellophane. He gathered the inert Amelia in his arms and fled.
Somehow, through falling plaster and dust and the unholy shifting of hallways, he found his way to the surface. He walked through an empty lobby whose floor leapt and buckled as though huge steel pistons pummeled it from below. The glass doors were locked, but he smashed them with a chair and carried Amelia through.
It was raining, and he walked through the rain carrying Amelia. He walked out into the parking lot. He stumbled and fell. He did not think he could get up again, and so he sat in the rain, cradling Amelia, gazing upon the quivering, black tower. Lightning harried the sky, affording brief glimpses of shape-shifting Pelidyne. As he watched, it suddenly shivered, a vile, orgasmic tremor that ran its length beginning at its base and echoing upward. This shiver was accompanied by a rending, splitting sound that dwarfed the thunder.
And then the black walls themselves peeled back, like burning cardboard, and something dark and convoluted, something beyond description, broke free of the walls and rose in the air, some noxious insect shedding its larval case.
Philip looked away, sickened by wonder and loathing. And when he looked back, Pelidyne had shrunk somehow. It still towered above the other buildings, and the general population, inured to sleek architecture and unobservant at the best of times, might notice nothing different. But it was small now, insignificant, mundane. The whole block was black, not a light to be seen.
"No power," Philip muttered.
Amelia stirred in his arms. She would come awake with complaints and accusations. She was consistent in that regard.
A car was racing toward him. It braked, screeching on the wet pavement, and Sissy jumped out.
Running through the rain, her red hair darkening, she looked as beautiful and full of salvation as any angel, although less serene, looked concerned, a little scared perhaps. Philip smiled and waved.
EPILOGUE
Megan was two, and she ran everywhere. She was running across the lawn, herded slightly by her older brother Michael. Michael was five and full of sad wisdom and resignation acquired, Philip assumed, in a previous incarnation.
"Megan doesn't trust walking," Philip explained. "Running has the law of inertia going for it: A body upright and moving fast tends to remain upright and on the move."
"Daaaaaaaaaa," Megan said, colliding with Philip's leg and presenting her father with a crushed daisy that had lost most of its petals.
Philip thanked her and fluffed her fiery hair.
AL Bingham reached down and lifted Megan in the air. She giggled.
Sissy and Lily came down across the lawn. Sissy was carrying a tray of iced drinks.
It was a year since Lily and Bingham had last visited, and Philip had been initially troubled by Lily's new fragility. She had lost weight, turned gossamer and insubstantial.
Perhaps some metaphysical law of energy conservation was at work here, for when she spoke it was clear that she was grumpier than ever, more opinionated and peremptory, as though her soul had put on weight.
"Philip is just naturally secretive," Lily was telling Sissy. "It's pathological. Has to do with control, power. It's a male thing, the little-boy, clubhouse mentality. Secret rituals, codes, passwords. He ever tell you where he got all that money?"
"Sure," Sissy said. "He said he earned it working as a temp."
Lily snorted her disgust. "It's women like you that keep men from growing up."
They all sat in lawn chairs and looked out at the North Carolina ocean, which, excited by news of an approaching storm, raced and tumbled over the sand.
Megan walked over to a blanket and dropped into sleep instantly, her thumb in her mouth.
Michael, relieved of his sister watch, climbed solemnly into his father's lap.
"I open up that envelope," Bingham said, perhaps for the five hundredth time, "and there is a check for one hundred
thousand dollars and I'm shaking my head and thinking it's a sorry shame that Philip has gone so far round the bend, and Lily, she snatches that check and says, 'We'll just deposit it and see."' Bingham laughed. "Guess she knew something I didn't."
"Philip's a wild card," Lily said. "I knew that."
They sat in the lawn chairs enjoying the last warm rays of the sun and the way the salt wind licked their faces. After an hour, they got up and went inside, Bingham carrying the conked-out Megan.
After dinner, they sat in the living room and talked about old times. Lily remembered the first time she met Philip. "I wasn't sure I could help him," she said.
At around ten that evening, the phone rang. Philip went into the bedroom to answer it. It was Azathoth. The connection was bad; the Old One was somewhere out beyond Andromeda. He asked about the kids.
Strange how old adversaries can gain respect for each other, learn that what locks them in combat is a common interest, a shared obsession.
"The Amelia one," Azathoth asked, "what of her?"
He had never asked before.
"I hear she is still married," Philip said. "And glad to be shed of me. She has a new job, working for a company called Findel Limited."
Azathoth made a noise that was difficult to interpret.
"You've heard of them?"
"A rival," Azathoth said.
"You sound tired," Philip said.
"I am thinking your Wordsworth poet was right," Azathoth said.
"How's that?"
"It is of rats and their race," Azathoth said. "You know. I utter the quote: 'Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."'
"Well, that's true," Philip said.
"It has its kind of truth, yes." Silence. The electric crackling of light years. "I must go now. Meteors eat the Mind Gates. Goodbye."
"Who was that?" Sissy asked when Philip came back into the living room.
"Arnie."
"Your friend from Virginia?"
"Yes."
"How is he doing?"
Philip shrugged, flopped down in the ancient armchair. "Oh, I don't know. He's confused. Mid¬life crisis, I suppose."
"How about you?" Sissy said. She came over and sat on his lap, leaned forward, kissed him on the cheek. Lily and Bingham had retired. The children were asleep.
"I love you," Philip said. “I am the world's most fortunate man. I have a beautiful, loving wife, model children, good friends—and two weeks ago I resold The Despicable Quest and it will be published as a single, massive hardback."
"Lily's not entirely happy about that development, you know." Sissy ran her fingers through Philip's thinning hair. "She still thinks the book might, well, aggravate your condition."
"That was long ago. Things have changed."
"How?"
For answer, Philip lifted Sissy in his arms and carried her into the bedroom.
"I've made peace with my demons," Philip whispered in her ear. "My Enemy has become my Muse."
Sissy put her arms around her husband. "I love it when you talk literature."
"Kafka, Vonnegut, Poe, Peake, Barth." Wet kisses, a deluge. Small, bright lightning of tongues. "Brautigan, Matheson, Dickens, Defoe."
"Lovecraft."
"Lovecraft."
"Love."
William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C. He has held a variety of dismal, dead-end jobs (excellent research for Resume with Monsters). Like Philip Kenan, the novel's protagonist, Spencer has often worked as a typesetter or graphic artist (he illustrated and designed the covers for his first two books). Resume with Monsters is his most surrealistic novel but also, he maintains, his most autobiographical. Joe Lansdale, writing in the Austin American Statesman, has compared this novel to the work of Philip K. Dick, asserting that Spencer possesses that same ability to "warp reality to such an extent you find yourself looking over your shoulder to see if the world is being dismantled behind you."
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