Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  The banana had turned to slush. She dropped it back onto the counter. In the silent, dark refrigerator that smelled warm but was still somewhat cooler than the current room temperature. The cucumber was soft to the core and adhered to the shelf with a long accumulation of other mystery substances. She shut the door. She just wouldn’t look in there anymore.

  There might be a can or two still left in the “just in case” basement room. Kelly could almost hear her mother tsking over her not having kept it stocked the way everybody did around here, in case of tornado or nuclear attack or ice storm or some other disaster they didn’t have a name for yet but knew was coming because that’s how life is.

  Disoriented in the dark, icicled, wind-noisy house, she must have taken a wrong turn, or the configuration of the house she’d lived in all her life had changed—which, of course, it had, with all the things that had accumulated around her on its floors, walls, steps, sills, ceilings. Such as black ice. She fell. Her right ankle twisted inside its boot and icy-hot pain flared as she skidded down the crooked basement steps whose railing had come loose a long time ago because she had nobody to fix it for her.

  Leaning against a wall that crumbled like pie crust, she fumbled for her cell phone, then remembered it was on the floor somewhere near where she’d been sleeping, then realized reception would be even less reliable than normal out here because of the ice. Anyway, the phone company had probably cut off her service again because she’d missed just a couple of the payments she’d agreed to in order to get them to turn it back on. It had been a while since she’d needed to call anyone, but now she did, and this was exactly the kind of situation she’d been doing her best to prepare for. And the phone company just wouldn’t let her.

  From down here the wind was a muted throaty roar. Something big crashed, likely a branch or an entire tree like the giant cottonwood in the front yard, just on the other side of this wall. Where her car had been parked since the transmission had finally gone out months ago and she didn’t have money to get it fixed or friends who would do her a favor, but she’d been holding onto vague hope of driving it again someday.

  She was worried about her face. Her nose and cheeks burned from the cold. Her tear-wet lashes might freeze the eyes shut. Somewhere around here were scarves and at least one ski mask; she should have thought of that.

  Maybe she should get back upstairs, on the chance that the main part of the house would be a few degrees warmer. Or maybe that was wrong, maybe it was actually warmer underground. Maybe the best plan was just to wait for somebody to find her down here in the basement when the ice storm was over.

  But who would miss her? Who would bother to come looking for her?

  When she tried to stand up, her ankle buckled. Her padded and cold-stiffened hands couldn’t find a grip on the unstable walls. The steps splintered, dropping her into the dark cold dirty space against the foundation that was probably deteriorating around her in the frozen ground though she couldn’t see or hear or feel it.

  Shivering violently, she had a memory flash of Mom putting quilts in the emergency stash, geometric and curvaceous designs and soft-edged plastic-covered bundles anchoring bright boxes and wavy water bottles and the cylinders of canned goods and toilet paper. Where was the “just in case” room from here? She’d always been directionally challenged, especially inside, and now any cues had been obscured, in one way or another, by ice.

  A sudden rumble above her head set off a spurt of panic until she could identify it. First she imagined it as the refrigerator motor trying to keep going, but without power that was implausible. She settled on ice inside the freezer compartment finally giving up.

  A fuzzy blueprint came into her head, along with the conviction, probably fleeting, that if she could just get to the quilts and food—warmth, sustenance, the comfort of somebody else’s forethought—she might outlast this storm. If she was under the kitchen, the emergency supplies were in the far left corner of the basement.

  No. Far right.

  Pick one.

  What if it’s wrong?

  Do something.

  Why wasn’t anybody here to help her?

  In the tight space under and among the broken steps, Kelly feinted left and then made her move to the right, as if tricking something. More than her ankle had been hurt in the fall—the small of her back, something internal. Hands and knees wouldn’t support her weight. So she squirmed on her belly, much more work than walking or crawling, but what choice did she have? The bulk of her clothing impeded her progress and made her colder as the damp dirt from the basement floor soaked in. When her mittened and gloved hands trailed a wall to keep herself oriented, they stuck and came away stiff, and she realized the walls were coated with ice, here inside. Those were icicles, then, pressing into her belly and face, spreading under and, now, over her. The ice was coming in.

  She struggled to pull herself along in what might turn out to be the wrong direction and all this pitiable effort wasted. Would snakes be around in an ice storm? Serial killers? Or would she just freeze, starve, bleed, worry to death alone?

  The basement was more or less rectangular, and its walls abutted each other. If she could keep going long enough, wouldn’t she reach her destination no matter what direction she’d started in? But there was so much stuff piled along the walls, and she was discovering so many pocks and protrusions, and ice was getting in, had probably been getting in and freezing and melting and re-freezing for a long time. It would be easy to get disoriented and keep missing the “just in case” room, maybe by fractions of an inch, maybe by the shifting width of the house.

  Something above her broke with a bang and a whoosh. The refrigerator, maybe; Kelly’s understanding of the working parts of anything was hazy. Water torrented over her, glazing every surface it found, warm at first in comparison to the invading ice but turned frigid within split-seconds as it wormed its way through her clothes. She kept moving her limbs, but she didn’t think she was making any progress, and she’d lost focus, couldn’t quite grasp anymore where the emergency provisions were or why she had wanted to get there. Something large and sleek moved a little farther down the outside of the wall she was trying to follow.

  Suddenly the wall vanished and she lurched sideways into a stack of slabs that collapsed on top of her without, it seemed, actually doing harm. Some were slick under her mittens as she struggled to push them away, others tufted and ridged. Quilts, she realized. Wet and then iced over. Unusable.

  Everything else in the “just in case” room was ruined, too. Cardboard containers had frozen in mid-disintegration, tears and flaps jagged. Cans were like cylinders of concrete. Light bulbs had shattered; slivers stuck in her mittens. Rolls of toilet paper had settled into semi-solidity. Bottles of water had burst to add their contents to the ice mass.

  It was only to escape the “just in case” room that Kelly pushed herself backward and over to the right, not out of any actual plan. But the motion brought her up against what she recognized as a door to the outside. She could see a sliver of different darkness, touch a bowed gap. The door was very slightly ajar, whether from the weak impact of her body or the freezing and thawing ice or just the failing of old wood she hadn’t noticed till now.

  She didn’t know what to do. Outside was black ice. Inside was ice, also black, also spreading. What difference would it make?

  Not making a decision was making a decision, and easier.

  The gap at the doorway glistened. There was motion. Kelly lay down in the path of the transparent encroaching ice. There was no snow.

  At Home with Azathoth

  John Shirley

  When Frederic DuSang saw the eye text from Filrod, he knew the bait had been taken. He knew it before he even read the eye-t. He had that tingle, as when code was about to become a program; that particular shiver of closure.

  But it wasn’t over yet. He still had to reel him in . . .

/>   Walking down the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk to the VR ride, on a wet September morning, Frederic tapped the tiny stud, under the skin beneath his right eye, the contact cursor in his fingernail telling the device to transcribe a subvocalization— he had learned to subvocalize his voice-recogs for security. And he subvocalized, “Text, ‘Come over at seven tonight if you want it, FilRod. FdS.’”

  The head chip heard and obeyed, sending the text to Filrod’s palmer.

  The guy’s name was Rodney Filbern, but everyone called him by his screen name, and Filrod replied almost immediately, Not a good time 4 me. Just tranz it?

  Frederic responded, “Tough, sorry, leaving town. Not offering it any other way. Wouldn’t work. Need you there in person.”

  Filrod bit down harder on the hook. “OK, Fred U dick, will be there.”

  Frederic snorted. He hated being called Fred.

  He reached the perpetual carnival on the boardwalk, waved to his manager, a bruise-eyed, rasta-haired old surfer, and went to work at the VR ride, putting pallid teenagers through fullbody virtual experiences and cleaning up the stalls afterward. . . . As always, as he mopped, thinking, I need a new goddamnjob. Vraiment, yo.

  Frederic’s thoughts were sometimes in French because his parents were French and they’d tried to make him bilingual. Never quite got there, but they left their mark.

  His mom had left them four years earlier, after Jackie killed himself. Jackie was . . . had been . . . Frederic’s younger brother. . .

  Frederic’s père was a thin man with shoulder-length white hair and an eaglebeak nose. When Frederic came home that evening, he looked at Frederic over his glass of Bordeaux— with that familiar dull wince, that “depression nerveuse” expression he got when he thought about his son.

  Okay, Frederic thought, so I’m almost twenty-six and still living with you, so what. I know what you don’t know, you old fils de pute.

  He nodded to his dad, in honor of the free rent, and started for the basement door.

  “Frederic,” Dad said muzzily, “a moment, eef you please. We should talk about . . . Oh, I don’t know, somezing . . .”

  Frederic paused and looked back at his dad. There was a little extra slurriness, a particular mush in his father’s voice, and more French accent than usual, too much for a bottle of wine. Probably he was back on the Oxycontin. Supposedly he took it for a work-related injury. Right, Dad. Frederic’s father had been a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. Made good money, too, till Jackie died and Mom left, and then Dad started sinking, slowly sinking, and now they were living mostly on his disability, since Frederic spent most of his money on AI and chip augs.

  “Dad, I thought you weaned off that shit.”

  Dad opened his mouth to deny he was on it, but Frederic looked at him evenly—and his père gave him the ol’ Gallic

  shrug. He licked his lips and articulated more carefully, “Oh, well, you know, zuh scan . . . the scan, it said the crack in the vertebrae was open again, so . . .”

  “Whatever. Come on. You’re just . . . it’s about Mom and Jackie. So if you gotta self-medicate, whatever. You do that, go ahead. I’ve got my own thing. Okay?”

  Frederic turned and went down into the basement, thinking he should probably get his old man to go to a therapist, but Dad hated shrinks and Frederic just couldn’t carry the weight of dealing with Dad’s stuff. He did, in fact, have his own thing. He veered between storage boxes and went to his basement room.

  Once his father’s den, the room was now Frederic’s own little soundproofed warren of linked-up used hard drives, monitors, transervers, low-grade floating AI, a desk he used for extra shelf space and, in a corner, almost an afterthought, an old futon with yellowed sheets reeking of mildew. The skuzzden, Frederic’s mom had called it. Laughing, though, as she said it. That was something he loved about her, that she laughed at you in a way that meant she didn’t care if you had failings, it was all good, no one’s perfect. Now he hardly ever saw her.

  Frederic sat on the futon, bunched up pillows behind his back, and reached over to the hardware to activate the tranz box. The virtual screen appeared in front of him—something only he could see, at the moment, thanks to his implants—and Frederic muttered the keywords that would activate the floating AI ovoid bobbing near his bed. The AI chirped and Frederic muttered the first password, got his menu, flicked a finger at the air to open SpaceHole, got the prompt screen, and . . .

  And hesitated. It always made him nervous, kind of sick and giddy, to open this program. Buster Shecht was still missing. But Buster was a crazy fuck, could be missing for lots of reasons. The reason didn’t have to be the Azathoth place.

  Anyway, Buster Schecht wasn’t half the programmer Frederic was; couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag. Could be he’d screwed something up and got some kind of brainfry— maybe the yellowflash feedback effect in an implant? It wasn’t unheard of. Frederic was not going to screw up.

  He licked his lips and spoke the three entry words—words that Buster had found online, in the Necronomicon file. The “screen” flickered in his mind’s eye, shashed, pixel bits spinning like water going down a drain in the center . . . and then in the very center of the virtual screen they interacted, as cellular automata do, and they formed a spreading organization— something ugly, jagged, but hinting darkly at life.

  The whirling finished, and the image sucked away into the SpaceHole—and the Realm of Azathoth unfurled to fill the screen . . .

  That’s what Buster had called it . . . Azathoth. Claimed the thing living in Azathoth itself taught him the name. If it had, that must mean it was, in fact, the result of a program some brilliant game design engineer had worked up, the gamer having put that in somewhere, and not—as Frederic theorized— the result of a series of meta-program worms linking up in cyberspace, almost like the way the early forms of life had linked up to make more complex organisms, in that giant bowl of hot primordial soup the sea had been.

  Of course, there was Buster’s explanation—or what he claimed to believe, the last time he’d been here in the skuzz den. Probably just playing Frederic for lulz:

  “Dude, I’m going to tell you this and you’re gonna think I’m snagging, but man, this is for real: the fractal set I worked up outta the Rucker formula, it opened a door into a real place, man. Check with Jacques Vallee: information is a form of energy. In fact, everything’s a form of information. And, deep down, information is the form of everything. So we can create real objective stuff with pure information long as it’s the right information . . . And I’m telling you, Azathoth is a for-real place. But see, it’s a place and an entity, both at once. That’s what people don’t get— every person is a place. They’re a world to themselves. And some big nasty messed-up entities are big, nasty messed up worlds . . .”

  “You do know I stopped smoking dope, right?” Frederic had said. “You think you’re gonna get me all freaked and shit, but it’s flat not happening, man . . .”

  Frederic shook his head, remembering. What he was seeing couldn’t be a real place. This place couldn’t really exist . . . except in the mind of some lunatic. It was just a cellular automata model, tessellation automata, iterative arrays.

  Automata cellulare, his dad would say.

  They were fractal patterns generating templates of life forms in a three-dimensionally modeled artificial environment, purely digital, and he knew from looking at great special effects all his life how animation could seem crazy-real.

  And of course he was seeing it in a virtual screen, the floating AI’s work projected to his chip, his chip projecting to his mind, his mind projecting to his mind’s eye, so that he saw a three-dimensional place, and the things in it, hanging in space just up above . .

  There was no clear-cut edge, unlike other virtual projections. It was squamous, wrigglingly ragged along the edges of the “tank” of image that floated over him. It just plain seemed alive. Amaz
ing animation work, really, given the source of it—a couple of deep-web eccentrics, Buster figured, had worked it up, made it out of some bits and pieces of online gaming environments, movie clips copied and altered, someone’s personal animation program, all mixed together.

  That was the only acceptable explanation for what he was seeing: a place that was an entity; an entity that was a place. It was as if he were looking with X-ray eyes into something’s body, but he was also looking into a world, an entire landscape. Those numerous writhing protracted pyramids of ichorous green were organs of perception, maybe; but at the same time they were a kind of forest and somehow he knew that if he were to go there (horrible thought), the growths would tower menacingly over him; yet for sure that thicket was some kind of living cilia; that jade and purulent sky was a high enclosure of living tissue—at the same time he was certain that if he were to reach it, himself, to ascend to it, he would penetrate into it, and it would go on and on and on, unending. And surely that iridescent, spiky compound tetrahedron in the foreground, slowly whirling, fulminating with bloody fury, was an angry thought crystallizing in a trapped mind.

  He could almost . . . almost . . . hear it thinking. It thought in minatory buzzing sounds; its words became its form . . . its mind defined its world . . .

  Frederic shivered. C’est fou. He was having some kind of weird psychological reaction to the program. And this was only the first mode; overdrive mode was faster, captivatingly visual, something you had to use big willpower to look away from . . .

  He stared into the mêlée of brutal abstract shapes, the slowmotion maelstrom of Azathoth, wondering about Buster . . .

  And Buster appeared there, at that exactly moment, within Azathoth. Buster’s chunky, acne-spackled bearded face materialized in the center of the translucent compound tetrahedron. Buster’s mouth moved; after a moment Frederic heard the words, materializing in his mind.