WikiWorld

by Paul Di Filippo

  Picking their way further along the uneven but well-swept stone floor, the trio soon reached a subterranean shore where the black water lapped. Here rested patient Elver, his exposed torso gleaming, his lower appendages submerged. He was holding the Yotsa 7 to one of his eyes with a curly tendril that branched from his side.

  “Elver, my sweet,” sang Ola. “Show our new friends your thoughts.”

  The glabrous surface of the eel man’s body abruptly became a high-res display—his subdermal chromatophores, densely packed, were synched to his mind. And now Mark and Laura took in a little movie scenario.

  In Elver’s movie, passive viewers around the globe are watching video displays and hand-held gizmos. A steady parade of bad news and horrors marches across their idiot screens. In speeded-up time, the media slaves become increasingly bestial and depraved. But now, from above, a celestial rain of glowing counter-imagery descends upon the benighted citizenry. The images are elegant glyphs encapsulated in comic-strip-style thought balloons: quaint cities amid verdant hills, cathedral-like forests, rich fields of fruits and grain, treasuries of fish and cheeses, temples of learning, artists at work and orchestras at play, joyous carnal orgies, swift ships sailing beneath smiling skies, and scientists peering into the heart of the cosmos. In Elver’s movie, the recipients of his ideational manna brighten and perk up. They turn off their screens and address one another face to face, laughing and stretching their limbs. They’re fully alive at last.

  Mark’s spirits rose to see the energizing thought balloons and their effects. He savoured the fusillade of upbeat glyphs, and revelled in the bountiful, idyllic futurescape that the images evoked.

  But it was Laura who discerned the ultimate import of Elver’s show.

  “That flood of counter-programming—the thought balloons—those stand for semiotic ontological transmissions from the Yotsa 7!” she exclaimed. “Elver wants to reverse what we thought was a one-way flow. We’ve been using the Yotsa 7 to perceive the hidden meanings of images, Mark. But now we can start with the most desirable meanings and wrap our images around them!”

  “We’ll—we’ll make ads that people can’t resist,” said Mark, slowly. “Ads that change the world.”

  “Indeed,” said the willowy Ola, leaning against Laura’s side. “This is Elver’s lesson. He is proud to have such clever devotees.”

  Mark beamed as if he were still ten years old and receiving his father’s praise for a perfect report card. But he hadn’t quite lost his head.

  “If we’re going to advertise, we need a product,” he said. “You need a cash flow to pay for ads. It’s symbiotic—and in a positive way if you have an honest product.”

  “Elver’s Smoked Eel,” said Ola, not missing a beat. “With special labels and trademarked Elver figurines. Today we four are designing the packaging and the ads. And thanks to your wonderful Yotsa 7, we are folding in our most utopian dreams.”

  “You two have thought about this a lot,” said Laura. She glanced over at Elver and giggled. The silent Elver responded with a nod.

  “Our products will go everywhere, and their glyphic subtexts will remake the world!” declaimed Ola. By now, Elver had wriggled fully out of the water, settling himself near Laura’s feet.

  “So let’s get it done,” said Mark, a little distracted by the thoughts evoked by the eel man’s proximity.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” said Laura brightly. “We’ll work images of Mark and me into a lot of the ads. We’ll be wrapped around glyphs of love and trust and acceptance, you see. That way those government pigs will be primed to pardon our so-called crimes. In case we, uh, ever want to go home.”

  “We will be mailing our press-kits to whomever you suggest,” said Ola smoothly.

  The quartet worked congenially all that day in the mould-lit cavern. Elver wasn’t a bad guy, for being an immortal subaqueous demigod who communicated via pictures on his flesh.

  Around tea time they took a break, and Ola fetched them a picnic basket of wine, berries, bread, and smoked eel-meat, along with a blanket to make it more comfortable on the stony edge of the underground lake.

  As he lay resting from the repast, idly dreaming up still grander plans, Mark noticed one of Elver’s tendrils snaking across the cloth to alight on Laura’s leg. Laura sighed and smiled, shifting onto her back. Ola was watching too, and batting her eyes. Mark felt himself slipping into the same erotic intoxication that had possessed him the night before. He turned to look at the ålefisk man.

  Although Elver possessed no precise human countenance, Mark could detect what passed for a smile in an eel.

  THE HPL COMMONPLACE BOOK

  11 Odd nocturnal ritual. Beasts dance and march to musick. [x]

  Dancing with Your Familiar: A Manual for Witches and Warlocks is requisite reading for any lonely practitioner of the black arts. No longer need the hideously deformed sorcerer, mage, crone or necromancer lack for a date on a Saturday evening, when all the other villagers, even the hybrid merpeople, are cavorting at the local dance or ritual invocation. A simple transformation spell turns your hellish cat, bat, owl, or hound into an alluring human companion of either gender, fit to whisk about the dance floor as the envy of all. No need to make banal chit-chat with your terpsichorean partner either, so long as you remember to keep a pocketful of your familiar’s favourite treats. Although those coastal wizards who favour seal familiars are advised to try dried kelp rather than raw fish, if they wish to remain socially acceptable.

  24 Dunsany—Go-By Street

  Man stumbles on dream world—returns to earth—seeks to go back—succeeds, but finds dream world ancient and decayed as though by thousands of years.

  The Michelin Guide to the Ruined Cities of Futurity is a must-buy companion for travellers in the astral realms. Whether the spectral tourist wishes to discover the best spot for ghoulish cemetery snacks, the most well-preserved library of mind-shattering tomes, or the café tres chic where ghosts of the beau monde endlessly replay their assignations, this volume has all the answers for a variety of cities across many dimensions. Be sure to check out their sidebars on how much to tip skeleton staffers and where to purchase the dustiest cerements.

  51 Enchanted garden where moon casts shadow of object or ghost invisible to the human eye.

  Martha Stewart’s Handbook of Phantom Gardening is calculated to let even the rankest amateur produce a soul-curdling display of teratogenic horrors that will keep the whole neighbourhood awake and shivering beneath their beds by night. With the aid of special seeds and tools (available quite reasonably from Martha’s own catalogue), plus a set of prisms designed to impart special quickening qualities to moonlight, the beginning occult horticulturist will soon be able to harvest a fine crop of gruesome vegetal nightmares. Share the bounty with your neighbours, and they’ll never steal your more conventional produce such as apples or tomatoes again!

  98 Hideous old house on steep city hillside—Bowen St.—beckons in the night—black windows—horror unnam’d—cold touch and voice—the welcome of the dead.

  Selling Your Shunned House: A Realtor’s Guide will help even the most inexperienced real estate salesman unload—at a good profit—that cursed property in a jiffy! The writer is an expert of long standing, having once sold Charles Dexter Ward’s home with the original malign inhabitant still in it! Tips on dealing with interdimensional cracks in the spacetime continuum or countervailing claims by Elder Gods, evicting undead tenants, and placating the residents of trespassed burial grounds will give confidence to any agent. This tome does not neglect arcane rituals such as burying a statue of Cthulhu upside-down on the property to invoke his aid. A complex discussion on what to do if your client is eaten before the deal can be sealed concludes the book.

  PROFESSOR FLUVIUS’S PALACE OF MANY WATERS

  I awoke in a soft, damp bed, atop the covers, not knowing my name.

  A standing man hovered solicitously over me. His genial face, with wine-dark eyes, reminded me of someone I
thought I should know. Thick white wavy locks cascaded to his shoulders. A Van Dyke beard of equal snowiness did little to conceal his jovial, ebullient expression. Yet despite this arctic peltage, his unlined face and clean limbs radiated a youthful vitality.

  “Ah, Charlene, you’re with us now! Splendid! We have much to do.”

  My name was Charlene then. That seemed right.

  The man announced, “I am Professor Fluvius. Can you stand?”

  “I think so….” Professor Fluvius placed a hand on my shoulder, and a sudden access of galvanic spirits coursed through me. “Why, certainly, I can stand!”

  In one fluid movement I came to my bare feet on the warm wooden floorboards. I was wearing an unadorned white samite smock, the hem of which hung to just below my knees. A balmy wind blowing in through an open window, past lazily twitching gauzy curtains, stirred my robe and conveyed to me certain bodily sensations indicating that undergarments of any sort appeared to be lacking in my wardrobe. But the clement summer atmosphere certainly did not require such.

  Professor Fluvius, I noted now, was dressed entirely in aquamarine blue, from long-tailed coat to spats. He took my hand as a favourite uncle might, and again I felt a surge of vigour through my cells.

  “Let me introduce you to the other ladies first.”

  We stepped forward toward the door leading from the single room, which appeared to be a guest bedchamber of a quality sort.

  Looking back at the bed where I had awakened to myself for the first time, I saw a long slim twisting tendril of bright green water weed adorning the damp duvet.

  The carpeted corridor beyond that room hosted a dozen other doors, each bearing a brass number. Professor Fluvius and I crossed diagonally to Number 205.

  “You rejoined us in my own modest quarters, Charlene. All quite proper, I assure you. But just across the corridor here, I have chartered an entire suite for you and your peers.”

  Professor Fluvius knocked, then cracked the door of 205 wide without awaiting a response.

  Inside, draped languorously across an assortment of well-upholstered chairs and divans, six smiling women calmly awaited our arrival; plainly, they had been expecting us. Exhibiting a variety of beautiful physiognamies of mixed ethnicities, they all wore simple shifts identical to mine, and remained similarly unshod.

  I caught my own reflection then in a canted cheval glass, and was perhaps immoderately pleased to find myself wholly a match to my sisters in terms of mortal beauty.

  “Charlene, allow me to introduce your comrades to you. Callie, Lara, Minnie, Lila, Praxie and Sally. Ladies, this is Charlene.”

  The six women trilled a tuneful assortment of greetings, several of them playfully abbreviating my name to “Charl” or “Charlie,” and I responded in kind. Once they sensed somehow my ability to blend into their pre-established harmony, they were up off their perches and clustering around me, indicating by various endearments and mild sororal caresses how happy they were to have me among their number.

  Professor Fluvius watched us beneficently for a short while, but then cut short our mutual admiration society.

  “Ladies, have you forgotten? We have an important appointment to keep. Let us be on our way now!”

  So saying, and recovering his ocean-blue topper from a hat-tree, the professor led the way out of the suite, and we all obediently followed.

  A staircase at the end of the corridor debouched after a long single arcing flight into a splendid lobby, and I received confirmation, if needed, that this establishment was a commercial hotel. The large pillared space was thronged with people—all of them, male and female alike, dressed with considerably more formality than I and my sisters. Nor did I see any man sporting anything like the beryl suit worn by the professor. It was unsurprising, then, that our passage across the lobby toward the street entrance should attract stares and semi-decorous exclamations. And this attention was not minimized by the professor’s unprompted yet effervescent lecture to us, his charges.

  “Witness the glories of the Tremont House, ladies. The first hotel ever to incorporate running water, and thus a fit establishment to temporarily host Professor Fluvius and his Naiads during the early portion of our Boston stay!”

  The professor seemed intent on advertising himself and us, and it was at this juncture that I began to apprehend that I had become, willy-nilly, part of a commercial venture of some sort.

  We exited the hotel through its grand colonnaded entrance on Tremont Street and crossed a miry sidewalk and concourse, nimbly dodging carriages and carts.

  Amazingly, I found myself stepping unerringly on an irregular trail of clean patches amidst the offal and manure, thus succeeding in keeping my bare feet unsullied. I noticed that my sisters trod a similar random series of sterile stepping stones.

  Or was it that the uniformly dirty pavement spontaneously developed virginal patches beneath our feet?

  As we seven attractive women and pavonine man hiked determinedly through the streets of Boston, we began to attract a crowd of followers, picaroons and mudlarks mostly, whose unsolicited comments veered more toward gibes and lewd offerings of unwanted intimate services than had those of the Tremont House crowd. But I and my dignified sisters ignored the verbal affronts from the swelling ranks of our entourage, and Professor Fluvius seemed actually to relish their attentions.

  “That’s it, lads, that’s it! Roll up, roll up! Follow us for the most exciting news of the decade!”

  Almost immediately after leaving the hotel, we found ourselves in a park full of greenery, and were able to indulge our bare feet on grass. But this respite was short-lived, as we soon exited the Public Gardens and proceeded uptown on a street labelled Boylston.

  My eye was drawn to a posted bill advertising a new play—The Children of Oceanus, by Eleuthera Stayrook—at the Everett Hall Theatre, and bearing the commencement date of July 12th, 1877.

  And so it was that I had my first inkling of what year it was in which I had awakened—assuming the poster to be of recent vintage, an assumption which its unweathered appearance supported.

  Reaching a cross-street named Clarendon, we turned and encountered a construction site. Here, a vast project sprawling across several blocks was in its obvious end stages.

  The building at the centre of the site was a church of soaring magnificence. Not as large as a cathedral, the brown-hued sanctuary nonetheless radiated a deep gravitas counterbalanced by an exuberant sense of joy.

  Workmen swarmed around the nearly complete structure, taking down scaffolding, entering the interior with loads of fine materials, sweeping up debris. One man seemed in charge of the general organized hubbub, and it was toward him that Professor Fluvius made a beeline.

  At my side, the woman introduced to me as Plaxie now spoke in a stage-whisper, leaning her pert-nosed, black-ringleted head close to my own auburn locks. Her breath smelled mildly of fish.

  “If you think you’ve seen the Prof put on a show so far, just wait till he gets to work on this mark!”

  We now—my comrades, and the raggle-taggle flock that had attached itself to us—came to a stop around the overseer. He was a plump gent with a thick chestnut beard, hair parted down the middle, and an intelligently playful twinkle to his eyes that offset his otherwise stern demeanour. He wore an expensive brown suit.

  Professor Fluvius hailed him in a loud voice more suited to the baseball outfield than face-to-face conversation, and I could tell he was playing to the crowd.

  “You, good sir, are Henry Hobson Richardson, the veritable visionary architect of this grand dream in rough stone we see before us!”

  Richardson seemed more amused than perturbed. “Yes, sir, I am. And may I enquire your name and purpose?”

  “I am Professor Nodens Fluvius, and I am here to give you your next commission!”

  “Indeed? And what might that be?”

  “A public bath house!”

  Loud guffaws and taunts arose from the spectators, but Fluvius remained unperturbed
, and Richardson continued to express some unfeigned interest at this odd commission.

  “A public bath house, Professor Fluvius? I assume you are thinking along the lines of the municipal facilities found on the Continent. But are you unaware of the spectacular failure of the Mott Street Bath House in New York City, some twenty years ago? Since then, no private investor nor any municipality in our great nation has deemed such an enterprise feasible. Nor has the public clamoured for such facilities.”

  “Ah, but that is because all businessmen and politicos have lacked my farsighted conception of what such an establishment could offer. And as for the public—they know not what they want till it is presented to them.”

  At this point, the professor encompassed us seven maidens with a sweep of his arm, as if to indicate that we would appear uppermost on his bill of fare. Some of my sisters lowered their glances demurely, but I maintained a bold gaze directed at the hoi polloi, even when raucous huzzahs went up from the crowd. For a moment, I wondered with alarm if we were meant to be courtesans in this hypothetical establishment. But then I recalled the clean organic thrill of the liquid energies that had flowed from the professor’s touch, and felt reassured of his honest intentions toward us.

  “Moreover,” continued the professor, “no prior entrepreneur has held a doctorate in hydrostatics from La Sapienza University in Rome, as do I. Surely you know of the marvellous accomplishments of the ancient Romans in this sphere… ? Well, the ultra-modern technics of boilers, valves, conduits, gravity-fed reservoirs and suchlike that I intend to install will make the Baths of Caracalla look like a roadside ditch!”

  At the mention of a technological challenge, the architect Richardson developed an even keener expression. “Speak on, Professor.”