by Lee Thomas
The condition of the man and his surroundings appalled Samuel. Bodily waste had settled into the carpet and clotted on Dodd’s skin in long stinking scabs. Further whatever intoxicant the man had consumed seemed to be acting as aphrodisiac as the sickly gentleman’s penis remained in a state of erection.
Still not convinced that the servant girl was free of liability, Samuel considered the very real possibility that Dodd had been poisoned, perhaps with some exotic toxin he’d procured on one of his great adventures. Or Dodd may have been feverish from an illness given him by one of the strange specimens he kept in the adjacent building. Thoughts of disease caused Samuel to pause and wonder on his own well-being. Still, if he were going to be infected it would have already happened, and he couldn’t leave Dodd to thrash and die in his own filth.
Only upon closer inspection of the man did Samuel believe he found the cause of Dodd’s hysteria. Inside the man’s thigh, very near his scrotal sack, a pale wormlike creature, long and thin like the lace of a boot, clutched the wrinkled skin. Samuel instantly thought of leeches. He had seen a jar of the black, slime-coated creatures at his physician’s office, and though this parasite bore little resemblance to those horrible slugs, he imagined it was of the same genus. Without hesitation he reached down and tugged at the worm, which was dry and scaly, and not slick with vile excretion as he’d imagined, and while the central thread of it easily peeled away from the skin, it held firm on either end.
“Leave it be,” Dodd bellowed.
But Samuel ignored the delusional command and grabbed firmly to the worm and yanked with all of his force, separating the worm from Dodd’s thigh and discarding the dreadful thing to the carpet where he ground it into the filth and fibre with the heel of his boot.
Dodd appeared infuriated for a moment, then he closed his eyes and sank unconscious.
With no chance of carrying Dodd up to his rooms—even withered, the man bore a tremendous heft well beyond Samuel’s physical abilities—he located a large library on the first floor with a broad leather sofa and dragged the unconscious man along the hall atop a carpet. He hoisted Dodd onto the sofa and then set about matters of practicality. Certainly he would need to call a physician, but no servants remained to send about this task, and Samuel feared leaving the stricken man alone. He stoked the hearth in the library and did the same with the stove in the kitchen, on which he placed an ample stockpot that he set about filling with water from a ceramic pitcher. Ruby followed at his heels from library to kitchen and then up the stairs where Samuel came upon a guest suite. He removed pillows and blankets from the mattress and carried them back to the library. They remained piled on the floor while Samuel used warm water to clean Dodd’s reeking skin. Then he wrapped the man in blankets and pushed a pillow beneath his broad head.
He thought to leave then. In part, his concern was for Dodd, thinking to hurry back into the storm to fetch a physician who might competently treat the man; but he also felt a profound disquiet as he considered the creatures occupying the building next door. Surely, he’d seen some of them scrabbling about the walls. Even if the door were locked as the servant girl had suggested, some might climb from the room and spill over the banister. He thought about the catlike species he’d encountered in the alley, and his resolve to leave this place heightened. Upon making the decision to depart, the sickly man stirred and came awake. Confusion and exhaustion worked on Dodd’s face. He looked like a drunk who’d woken to find himself in strange rooms. “Samuel,” he muttered, using the familiar name as if they were dear old friends. The name caught in his throat though, and he coughed violently.
“What have you done to yourself?” Samuel asked.
“The parasite?” Dodd asked, suddenly concerned. A great scramble beneath the blankets indicated he sought the thing out on his thigh.
“I’ve done away with it.”
“Good man,” Dodd said. “I was unable to do it myself. Its gifts were beyond my refusal.”
“Gifts?” Samuel asked, confounded.
“Some manner of opiate,” Dodd said before another racking flurry of coughs convulsed him. When the fit passed he continued, “Even when I first discovered it latched to me, I knew it was trading the blood it drew with an euphoric substance. I thought to document the effects of the creature before removing it, a clear indication that the opiate worked with an initial subtlety on my reason, and as the hours passed, I drew deeper into its thrall, until I was its prisoner.”
“Where did you find such an odious specimen?” Samuel wanted to know.
“Dear, Samuel,” Dodd whispered as if to a dense child, “I did not find it. It found me.”
“Because of that contraption?”
“You’ve seen it?” Dodd asked, seeming pleased with the information. “I dare say, it’s a wonder.”
“But what is it?”
“The contrivance is an accumulation of knowledge,” Dodd said. “Some of that knowledge emerged from my own tinkering and experimentation, and some of it I quite simply stole, at the time not being aware of the comprehensive design. That came when I discovered the particular property of lightning.”
“And what property is that?” Samuel asked.
“Do you remember regaling the men at the club with your theories about raindrop worlds? How you believed that each drop contained the possibility of realms and what might happen when those varied worlds puddled together?”
“Yes, but…”
“You were not incorrect, at least not in the broadest sense. That was one of the reasons I thought to bring you to me. Many worlds run adjacent to our own. They bump and caress and gather. Like the raindrops, these other realms are innumerable, shifting and fluid all part of the collecting puddle you imagined, but they are segregated by sheer membranes, which is to say the drops heap without dilution. But the lightning… the lightning creates a momentary tear between realms. It is a double-edged sword that slices the veils, and my device holds those lips of fabric open, making it possible to cross realms as easily as stepping over a threshold into a new and astounding room.”
“You’ve made these journeys?” Samuel asked, dumbfounded.
Dodd snuffled a laugh and leaned his head back, letting it sink into the pillow. “I am not that brave,” he said. “Were it not for the specimen you so kindly removed from my leg and that odd bird-thing I keep in the laboratory cage, I wouldn’t have even known of the experiment’s success, but it is apparent that if these creatures can slink into our world, then we could just as easily cross into theirs.”
“And what of the others?”
“What others?” Dodd asked.
“The other specimens in the laboratory. It brims with them.”
Dodd smirked as if having been made the butt of a joke, but then his eyes cleared and he pushed himself upward. “What day is this?”
“Day?”
“What is the date?”
“It is the Sixteenth of November.”
Dodd’s face slackened as if the muscles there could no longer sustain the weight of his skin. “November?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“For the love of God, I’ve been in thrall for a fortnight? Maureen must have cared for me until she lost all hope for my recovery.”
Samuel thought about the coarse Irish woman and couldn’t imagine her caring for anyone, let alone the man she’d described in such callous terms, but perhaps she’d endured so much in the last two weeks that her harsher instincts had surfaced. Still, if her master had been so ill, why had she not summoned a physician for his care?
“What of the weather?” Dodd asked, attempting to drag himself from the bed.
“Is that really relevant?” Samuel replied.
“Has it stormed frequently?” Dodd demanded.
And then Samuel took his meaning. If Dodd’s contrivance operated on lightning, nothing could be more important than the weather. The news on that front was quite bad. “Storm most days.”
“And lightning?” Dodd asked
.
“And lightning,” Samuel confirmed.
“God help us. My contrivance lacks only the convenience of predictability. The rifts in fabric shift away from its hold and mend themselves, which is to say that the device may hold back the curtain for a moment or an hour or a day at a time, but cannot do so indefinitely. Had the weather been calm, my worries would be few, but with each fresh bolt that strikes my conductor a new tear occurs.”
Dodd struggled to his feet, but his legs were not sufficiently recuperated for the task of sustaining his weight and the bearish man collapsed on the floor amid a great Whush! of air. Samuel and Ruby rushed to the fallen man. The dog hoped to soothe the tumble with licks to the man’s face, while Samuel took the more practical approach of grabbing him under the arms and assisting Dodd back onto the sofa.
“What can we do?” Samuel asked.
“The device’s controls are in the laboratory. If you could get there it is simply a matter of withdrawing the coupling rod from the lightning rod on the roof, or disengaging the coils from the base. Either would take no more than moments, but if the laboratory is as infested as you claim…”
Samuel considered wading into the writhing mass of exotic monstrosities and knew his courage fell well short of the task. The very notion of approaching that building raised gooseflesh on his neck.
“It must be burned,” Dodd said. “There’s no alternative.”
The pronouncement startled Samuel. Much of Dodd’s life and a considerable portion of his estate must have gone into the creation of the contrivance, and the sheer miracle of its existence contended a casual approach to its destruction. What might be discovered should the wonder of the device be controlled and utilized in the pursuit of knowledge? What existed beyond these folds? Surely they all didn’t contain unsavory beasts. It seemed wrong to do away with such opportunity, and yet, Samuel knew such a dangerous machine could not continue to function unchecked.
A roar of thunder shook the house and Samuel looked to Ruby, who cowered at the edge of the sofa. Then he looked at the weak and sickly man.
“It must be burned,” Dodd told him earnestly. “You’ll find tins of kerosene in the cellar.”
But simply setting fire to Dodd’s laboratory proved no easy task. There was the possibility of the fire spreading to the house or to other homes on the block. Considering Dodd’s incapacitation, the man would never be able to flee in time, so his evacuation of the property would have to precede Samuel’s arson. A carriage had to be summoned, and the debilitated man packed into it. And so he was. Though Dodd continued to refuse the attentions of a physician, Samuel told the carriage driver to help Mr. Dodd into his house on Walnut Street and once having done so, fetch Doctor Meriwether with due haste.
He placed Ruby in the carriage next to a blanket-wrapped Dodd. She whimpered and tried on more than one occasion to leap from the coach, but Samuel was forceful, and though the dog never settled, she ceased her attempts at flight.
“As for you, young miss,” Samuel said to his pet, “you keep an eye on our guest until I return. You’re the lady of the house, and it’s your duty to make visitors feel welcome.”
She whined and leaned out to lick his face, tongue swiping and darting with affection. He chuckled, tickled by the wet tongue, and gave her a good scratch behind the ear before closing the carriage door and rapping the back, sending it on its way.
Then Samuel returned to the house. The first order of business was to locate Dodd’s stock of kerosene.
He followed the man’s directions, found the door to the basement, and after a deep breath, again reminding himself that the wonderful device could not survive, he pulled open the door and was immediately accosted with a stench not unlike sulfur. The foulness of odor clotted in his throat and Samuel removed a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his nose and mouth. With a lantern firmly clutched in the other hand he began down the stairs.
The atmosphere here was cold and damp and worked quickly through the wool and cotton of his garb to latch onto his bones. The meager light of the lantern only revealed four steps at a time, while the rest of the chamber swirled, shadows upon shadows.
A clicking sound deep within the basement startled him. Too fast to be a clock mechanism and too sharp to be dripping water, Samuel felt tremendous unease as he attempted to identify the sound. A number of possibilities occurred to him: a draft sending a bit of wood against a beam or window jamb; a rat gnawing its way into a wooden storage crate; but again he felt the noise was too rapid, too precise to fit into any scenario of which he could conceive. Another sound, like the throaty belch of a toad rose from beneath the stairs.
Samuel froze in place, waiting for the noise to come again, but only the tick-ticking in the corner sounded. Could some of the creatures from Dodd’s laboratory have slipped into the house? Made their way to his basement? It struck Samuel as wholly unlikely, as the door above had been secured upon his entry, so he continued his descent until he stood on the hard packed dirt of Dodd’s basement. The smell here was dreadful, working through the cloth of his kerchief like maggots digging in flesh.
Dodd had told him the canisters were lined against the wall directly ahead of the staircase. Samuel walked forward and lifted the lantern high. A wall of crates, tattooed with stencils rose to the left, but the light could not reach deeply enough into the room to reveal the casks he sought.
Another great belching filled the chamber. Samuel turned to it, and something skittered across the floor just ahead of his light. His heart leapt into his throat and panic cascaded down his spine like water from a melting glacier. The clicking multiplied until it sounded as if the entire basement were chock-a-block with racing metronomes. Motion displaced the air at his back, and Samuel spun around, swinging the lantern like a club, but it passed through the air harmlessly.
Upon completing this pirouette, Samuel found himself facing a hole in the wall of Dodd’s basement. Its diameter spanned a good meter, more than enough room for a small man to have squirmed through, certainly large enough to accommodate any of a number of creatures. The dawning realization brought a fresh stream of icy tingles to his back.
Some faction of the hellish bestiary had managed to escape. A burrowing species had taken the initiative, and now shared the same dismal void in which Samuel found himself. The panic became too much for him to bear. The lantern clacked in his trembling hand. He begged his feet to move, wanting nothing more than to vanish from the hideous gloom and to reappear on the street or even in front of the mantle at his home, and though his mind screamed for his legs to take action, they resoundingly denied his pleas.
Only when the air again felt displaced very near his left ear did Samuel manage to turn away from the gap in the wall of Dodd’s cellar. Samuel whipped around in a reflexive jerk. The lantern flew from his fingers, sailing into the darkness like a comet. It glanced off the side of a rapidly fleeing specimen, which was clearly of the same clan as the savage stick-men he’d viewed in the laboratory. Amid a crash of brass and the cracking of glass, a window of flame opened on the far wall, and in this sudden illumination Samuel noticed two things simultaneously: his lantern had made impact above a row of cans he recognized as kerosene containers; the other revelation came in the form of dozens of tiny specs hanging like fireflies about the back wall and ceiling. Moist eyes from innumerable heads reflected the spreading flames, and faces bathed in the orange light cast by the conflagration pushed tightly together like blossoms in an unholy garden.
A scream escaped his lips, and Samuel fled for the stairs. An unknowable appendage reached through the gap between the steps in an attempt to trip him up, but Samuel sprang past the terrible limb with a yelp of terror and continued to scrabble toward the dull light above. He attained the landing and the room beyond and slammed the door. He searched for a lock but finding none, he backed away and quickly surveyed his immediate surrounding for something with which to secure the panel. Finding nothing, he chose flight, but instead of racing through
the house, he made his way to the kitchen and the door to the alley, which remained open.
Another of the cat-like creatures had joined the first in the dim corridor. They groomed one another, only pausing long enough to eye Samuel curiously before setting their foul tongues back to task.
He thought to flee this block entirely, to run and keep running until he was again secure in his own rooms where the unspeakable creations of some alien god did not prowl with malicious intent. But his rational mind—sorely tested to be sure—screamed at him to finish the task, to destroy Dodd’s device and bring an end to this grotesque invasion. All he need do was cripple the contrivance so that it could no longer brace open the panels of veil separating his world from the others. A single lantern, well-thrown, could fulfill his duty. Perhaps the bulk of the mechanism would go unharmed but it could be disassembled at some future time, just so long as Samuel sabotaged it sufficiently to make it ineffective.
Lightning flashed directly above his head, thunder immediately accompanying the bath of light. He heard its crackle and pop. A brilliant glow of light rose from behind the banister beyond the door, and he knew that Dodd’s contraption was again in use.
A small body with skittering claws struck his leg, and Samuel recoiled to the jamb of the laboratory door. He searched for the source of the attack and was shocked to find it came from a familiar face.
Ruby, his fine pet, raced in for another pounce, her tail whipping the air and her eyes glittering with happiness, unaware of the horrible spectacle surrounding her. She must have escaped the carriage and sprinted back to him—her unconditional affection drawing her like moth to killing flame.