by Edward Lee
“Bullshit. The only reason you won’t let me is ‘cos you’re afraid it’ll turn you on.”
“Oh, so that’s what you think?” Sonia cast a sharp gaze, paused, then handed the bottle to Hazel.
My lucky day. She squeezed the creamy beige liquid into her palm, then gently smoothed the cream over the center of Sonia’s stomach. Hazel was marveled; she couldn’t believe how tight the fetus-filled abdomen felt, how firm it was. She rubbed in repetitious circles very slowly, then paused to trace a fingertip about the nub of her popped-out navel. When she flicked back and forth—
“Stop!” Sonia giggled. “It’s tickles!”
“Oh. Sorry.” Hazel squirted more into her hand and repeated the process, all the while growing more and more dizzy from the warmth, image, and presence of her friend. I love you so much I can’t stand it, she could’ve wept. Now she glided her hand to Sonia’s breasts and began to gently rub. When Sonia tensed to object, Hazel cut her off, “Women get stretch-marks on their boobs, too, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess they do...”
Hazel’s hand slid into the shape of each breast, very daintily caressing. She giggled, unable to help it, “These really are big, Sonia—”
“Tell me about it. They’re heavy, too. Between my boobs and junior here, I’m surprised I don’t need a backbrace.”
Hazel liberally applied more lotion—
“Come on, you’re using half the damn bottle,” Sonia objected.
“Noooo,” and then Hazel’s fingers began to tease one of Sonia’s spread, pink nipples.
Sonia snatched the bottle away. “That’s enough, thank you. I can’t get stretch-marks on my nipples—”
“How do you know?”
A coy smirk came to Sonia’s lips but before she slipped her robe on, Hazel was certain her friend’s nipple-tips were twice the size they’d been in the shower. She’s all turned on now but she’ll never admit it. At least there was some satisfaction.
“Oh, I found a picture of the S-T,” Hazel revealed. “It was the very first file in Henry’s index.”
“The S...Oh, you mean the stone?”
“Um-hmm. It’s a big crystal; Henry took a digital picture of it right on his desk.”
Sonia grabbed her arm. “Show me!”
In the study, however, the laptop sat dead. Hazel pushed the power button but only an error screen came up. “I don’t believe it! The storm crashed the computer.”
“But it’s a laptop. The battery should’ve kicked on the instant the power went out.”
Hazel lifted up one end of the laptop. “There’s the reason it didn’t—no battery.” The battery slot was empty.
“Oh, no. Frank’ll be furious.”
“Not if we don’t tell him,” Hazel reminded. “Oh, gee, I don’t know why the computer doesn’t work. Must’ve been a power spike.”
“I don’t really like lying, Hazel.”
“It’s not lying. It’s merely circumventing the truth.”
Sonia laughed. “I guess it’ll do. What else was in those files?”
“An exploded diagram for another box. The symbols on it were different, and I swear they’re the same symbols on the clay box that Horace made.”
“You and your Horace...Anyway, what did the stone look like?”
Hazel had to think about it. “It was beautiful but also kind of...
I don’t know. Disturbing? Don’t know why. Sometimes it looked black, other times maroon, and there were threads of red inside. Henry called it the Shining Trapezohedron.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“I think a trapezohedron is a crystal whose surface is composed entirely of polygons, if I remember my geometry right.”
Sonia picked up the metal box on the shelf. “And it’s supposed to go inside this?”
“Yeah, or—I guess Henry had the clay box built for the same purpose. I got the idea that the clay box—with the new symbols—is supposed to be an upgraded version of the metal box, at least that’s what some of the text files seemed to imply.”
“Damn.” Sonia frowned at the dead laptop. “I’d love to see that picture, if only for curiosity’s sake.”
“Later I’ll go on my own laptop and read some help files about rebooting and recovery techniques—”
From the main room, Sonia’s cellphone went off. “That’s Frank!”
Sonia rushed to the room, snapped up the phone. “Hi, honey! How are you?”
Hazel followed, then stood right next to her, her ear inclined toward the phone. Distantly she heard Frank say: “‘—s’re fine up here.” Some crackling. “—damn lucky I found the cottage before the storm started.”
“Is there electricity in the cottage?” Sonia asked.
Frank seemed to laugh over more static. “No way, just candles. But you wouldn’t believe how much of Henry’s stuff is stowed away. It’ll take a long time to go through it all, I’m afraid.”
“Bullshit, Frank!” Sonia snapped. “You’re coming back tomorrow, like you promised, right?”
Hesitation, then more static. “—ght not be able to make it by tomorrow afternoon, honey. Tomorrow night, maybe.”
“Frank, that’s unacceptable!”
The crackling and static seemed to double. “—you hear me? I’m sorry, honey, but Henry left a lot of papers, and—”
“Yes, and all you have to do is destroy them like he ordered! So do it and get back here!”
“Just try to bear with me—”
“The only thing I’m bearing is your child in three or four weeks! You could at least be considerate enough to spend some time with me!”
Wow, she’s really pissed, Hazel thought.
After another wave of static, Frank said, “I want to at least read some of this work before I destroy it, honey. Can’t you understand that?”
“No!”
“It’s my field of study. Just give me till tomorrow evening, okay?”
Sonia’s teeth ground. “Early evening!”
“Okay—”
“Promise!”
“Baby, I promise. In the meantime there’s plenty to do around there. I’m sure you and Hazel’ll have a great time. Walk the nature trails, check out Lake Sladder, go for a country drive. You could even—” but then the crackling increased tenfold.
“Frank, I can barely hear you!”
“—breaking up from the storm...bad cell reception...call you in the morning—”
“You better!”
“—love you, honey...”
Sonia was vibrating in place she was so irritated. “I love you too, but if you’re not back tomorrow night, I’m gonna kick you in the balls so hard—”
“—breaking up worse now...better go. Goodnight...”
The connection fizzed off.
Sonia snapped her phone closed and put it on the nightstand. Her face was pink in anger. “That son of a bitch just burns me up. ‘Oh, come up to the cabin, honey. We’ll have a lot of fun.’ Fun, my ass. I’m about to have a kid and he’s up in some cottage on a mountain dicking around with a bunch of geometry papers.”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “Sonia, give the man a break. All he’s really doing is carrying out a colleagues last wishes.”
“Yeah?” Sonia huffed, then sat down on the bed. “Or maybe he has a girl with him up there.”
Hazel couldn’t resist some coyness: “Oh, but I thought yours was an open relationship.”
“Only with my preapproval, ” Sonia replied, stone-voiced.
“A conditional open-relationship, I see.” Hazel had to laugh. “I wouldn’t worry anyway. Frank’s too self-absorbed to have a lover on the side. Why would he orchestrate this whole cabin-thing just for that? You really think he’s fooling around when his mentor only died a few days ago and happened to leave him the entire estate?”
Sonia settled down. “You’re right. And he is too self-absorbed.”
“So just don’t worry about it. Take some advice from a friend. You’re kind of cranky
right now, so why don’t you just go to bed? You’ll feel a lot better tomorrow.”
Sonia smiled meekly, nodding. “You’re right, as always. I’m sorry my skewed hormones keep finding their way to you.” She kissed Hazel on the cheek. “Goodnight.”
“I’m going to try to fix Henry’s computer, but I won’t make a peep.” Kiss me again, kiss me again, beat the thought.
“That’s okay.”
“Oh, and...where am I sleeping?”
“In the bed, silly!” Sonia laughed. “You’re so paranoid. What, did you think I’d make you sleep on the couch?” She chuckled into the main room and started turning off the lights.
Hazel watched her raptly, then snapped out of it several moments later. My head is such a mess I can’t believe it. She typed in some recovery commands into Henry’s laptop, had no success, then retrieved her own laptop and set it up on the desk. At least it’s not the Blue Screen of Death, she thought. She left the study door cracked only an inch, and as she read through some trouble-shooting files, one eye kept glancing every so often to the bed, where Sonia lay on her side atop the sheets. How can I love someone so much and yet it’s so wrong? Nothing seemed fair. Her own sexual anomalies were unfair as well. Sick, sick, sick, she thought, remembering the orgasm she was sure she’d had even as Peter Pan had been strangling her whilst a foot had been sunk into her sex. Why can’t I just be normal? But in the back of her mind came a reply, in her father’s voice: Come back to God.
She covered her mouth to stifle a delighted squeal when she saw that Henry’s laptop was at last reloading; in a moment she was able to access the directory full of Henry’s files. When she reclicked File #1, the screen filled with the startling image of the Shining Trapezohedron.
Its undefinable color captivated her. Each facet of the complex polygonal surface glimmered. She found herself staring as her mind lost focus, but then a vertigo jolted her like two fingers snapping before her face. It had been ten p.m. when the computer got back to rights but now it was eleven. I must’ve dozed off and not realized it...
She clicked on the zoom feature and moved the cursor to a random facet. Each click thereafter brought the sparkling jpeg closer and closer, until the entire screen was a vitreous black-maroon.
The image that now filled the frame looked like nothing at first, just that odd color, but as she looked more intently...
Did she hear the piping of flutes? The music—if it could even be called that—resounded very faintly yet seemed structured and discordant at the same time. Hazel jerked her head around, then even put her fingers in her ears, but the minuscule cacophony prevailed. Aural mirage, she thought. Probably fatigue-born, probably some traumatic-stress reaction. When a breath caught in her chest, the maniacal sounds had vanished.
“What was that all about?” The more she looked at the zoomed image, the more taken by it she felt. She thought of cavemen staring in awe and wonder at a fire, or gazing at stars while having no idea what they were.
She felt droopy now, yet somehow motivated, and next thing she knew she’d opened the bottom desk drawer. Her hand glided past the revolver and without forethought from her, landed on the magnifying glass.
What am I—
She put the glass to the computer screen, began to stare...
Her mind bent, it stretched as if her skull had dissolved, leaving only her raw brain which was siphoned through her eye-holes and somehow sucked into the image on the screen. She thought of out-of-body-experiences, something she’d never believed in, had dismissed as hopeful hallucinosis, but now—
Her eyeless vision was forced to gaze; it plummeted like a stone dropped from a plane, soaring. The closer she got to whatever it was she was falling toward, Hazel saw cities, or things like cites: a geometric demesne of impossible architecture which extended in a long vanishing line of horrid black—a raging terra dementata. Concaved horizons crammed with stars, or things like stars, sparkled close against cubist chasms. She saw buildings and streets, tunnels and tower blocks, strange flattened factories whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, bereft of error in its moving angles and lines. It was pandemonium. Gutters ran black with noxious ichor. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Insanity was the monarch here, ataxia the only order, darkness the only light. Ingenious, unspeakable, the monarch stared back...and smiled.
Hazel saw it all. She saw time tick backward, death rot to life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history. And she saw people too. Or things like people.
One of the things was waving at her, with a tentacle.
“E uh shub nleb nbb lrrg glud blemmeb,” came the words.
Hazel’s disembodied consciousness stared and drooled.
“Nub krebb nebb e uh yurgg flurp ey ftagn—”
Several of the things were now waving at her with their suckered tentacles. Their faces stared intently back, upside-down faces covered with carbuncles.
“Gub nbb grlm naabl e uh nuuurrlathotep.”
When Hazel finally shook off the terror’s glimpse, she found herself face-down on the floor. The magnifying glass lay cracked. What the hell?
A nightmare, of course. She’d fallen asleep at the screen. A tiny clock in the other room was gently chiming midnight.
Oh, shit, I feel hungover.
She dragged herself up, looked at the computer screen, and groaned. YOUR COMPUTER IS BEING SHUT DOWN DUE TO A GENERAL PRODUCTION ERROR. Then the screen turned black.
Great.
She sat back down and rubbed her eyes. The vision she’d had seemed lodged in the back of her mind like a blood clot. What WAS that? She’d been fatigued to begin with, and was likely also suffering some delayed stress from her rape. And then? I fell asleep at the screen and had a nightmare. Big deal.
But what a nightmare it was. Tentacles. People with tentacles, and upside-down faces like overcooked pies. They’d been talking to her.
“Bedtime,” she determined. She pulled off her top and stepped out of her shorts, then tiptoed into the main room where Sonia could be seen sound asleep on the bed. The fans were on, blowing air all around. She was about to get into bed herself but faltered. Oh, no... She had to go to the bathroom, and since there was no bathroom in the cabin...No way. I’m NOT going to the outhouse, she knew immediately. Not at midnight. Her only other option?
Bears pee I the woods, so I guess I can too. She found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, then a door at the rear of the house let her out. At once she was taken aback by the dense, half-deafening chorus of crickets and peepers underscored by the dripping forest now that the storm had passed. Clouds thinned overhead, letting moonlight fall down behind the house. Oddly, she sensed she could feel the light on her nude body. Her skin prickled at a scant, tepid breeze which rustled through the woods.
She came off the short steps, wandered a moment, then squatted abruptly next to an old charcoal grill and began to urinate. Oh, that’s better... The most morbid thought struck her just then: How much of Peter Pan’s piss is coming out in mine? He couldn’t have made her throw up every drop, could he? Wouldn’t a little of it, if only a trace, have metabolized in her own body? She pursed her lips as if tasting something disgusting.
It was still coming out. Come on... In a scenario such as this, how could she not imagine herself being spied on by some night-prowling pervert? Then she closed her eyes, and all at once, the image was drilled unwillingly into her head: the Tentacle People from inside the crystal had converged on her. Two held her aloft on their ropy arms while a third positioned its corrupted face between her thighs, then opened the puffily lipped mouth that was located on its runneled forehead. It drank up her piss as fast as the stream could arc out of her, and when it began to ebb, the lips closed around her sex and sucked, until every last drop had been coaxed from her bladder and pilfered through her urethra. Hazel squirmed in the unyielding, tentacular embrace. But now that the thing had quenched its thirst on her liquid waste, waste of the sol
id variety was its next desire. The hideous mouth slurped lower and began to suck hard on her anus. Finally her intestines gave into the pressure and began to release their wares, and when they’d been sucked flat, the lumpen-faced monstrosity began to sloppily eat. Was the thing squealing in exuberance? Its own tentacles writhed in delight. Hazel was dropped to the wet ground then, and saw aghast that it was not only the arms of her visitors that were tentacles, but their legs too, for they wore blushing scarlet robes embroidered in gold, within whose borders were gold-stitched glyphs similar to those on the box. When the robes parted, she could see that their legs were stouter, more venous tentacles with widened, circular suction cups for feet, and, worse, their genitals seemed rolled up like gray, meaty hoses at their groins. Two of the things moved between her legs now, while the third remained at her shoulders with one of its rubbery arms girded about her throat. When it began to constrict, boa-like, Hazel’s body tensed, stretching out, then the fleshy noose tightened till her tongue stuck out and she couldn’t breathe. That’s when the other two unreeled their cocks and began to gibber in some insane excitement. Balloon-cheeked now, yet erect-nippled, Hazel peered up in the moonlight and saw the exact nature of their penises: two feet long each, and reminiscent of the ends of elephant trunks. The trunks wasted no time in burrowing into her vagina simultaneously. The eyes like pustules planted on their cheeks gazed down on her terror-rigid body; the swollen-lipped mouths panted and drooled. Hazel began to orgasm in salvoes; it was like a seizure of pleasure colliding with the terror of asphyxia. Her ass wriggled in the dirt as she came time and again, even as the netherworldly genitals pumped gouts of hot, chunky slop deep into her sex...
Hazel’s eyes snapped open at a mental lurch. She remained squatting, though she’d finished relieving herself. Just like me. A head full of perverted SHIT... What could compel her mind to manufacture such a detestable vision? She took several deep breaths, began to stand up—
“Shub nbb grlp naabl nith.”
Hazel gasped and fell backward on the verge of shrieking. It can’t be! She shot her flashlight beam in the heinous droning’s direction but there was nothing there.