The Haunter Of The Threshold

by Edward Lee

  Frank took off his sunglasses, showing that his excavated eye sockets had been re-filled with golf-ball-sized nuggets of crimson crystal.

  “I should’ve known,” she muttered. “But where’s the metal box?”

  “I left it down there. We don’t need it anymore,” and then he pointed to the opened suitcase in the corner, which sat filled with thirty-three of the new clay-versions of the box.

  “I don’t get it,” Hazel blurted.

  “And you probably won’t get it all entirely, Hazel. It’s incontemplatable. You’re not smart enough to get it.”

  She smirked at him. “I know, I’m just a lit-head. ”

  “But, see, we were smart enough. Me, my father, and Henry—especially Henry. In a sense, when it came to non-Euclidian thesis, Henry was even smarter than them. ”

  “Who’s them, exactly?”

  Frank only pointed to the door. “The metal box you can think of as a power harness. Like the stone, it’s over ten million years old. It was delivered here all those eons ago: an experiment to see what the creatures of this planet might one day learn to do with it. But when Henry broke the code, he realized that the glyphs engraved on it were actually geometric equations that could tap the power of the Shining Trapezohedron. But he realized something else as well.”

  “What?” Hazel asked, incredulous.

  “He realized that those equations were obsolete. They didn’t even come close to accentuating all of the crystal’s energy.” His scarlet eyes glittered at her. “So you know what he did?”

  The answer clicked in Hazel’s head like a pencil snapping. “He rewrote them—”

  “And thereby improved them—yes! Very good! See, that’s how smart Henry was, and that’s why he had that bumpkin build him a prototype of a new carrier with the improved equations on it.”

  Hazel leaned up on her elbows, sickened. “I think I am beginning to get it now, Frank. He took the crystal and the metal box to St. Petersburg as kind of a test run, didn’t he?”

  Frank stilled. “Yes,” he eventually answered. “Just to see if it really would work. That’s why he chose Mother’s Day. The city was a ghost town. Most businesses were closed, a good number of residents had left town for the holiday.”

  “So that if it really did work, then there’d be a minimal loss of life,” Hazel deduced.

  “Exactly. And that was Henry’s downfall—he wussed out at the last minute.” Frank sighed black mist. “When it got right down to it, Henry wasn’t evil enough to rise to his full potential, and neither was my father.”

  “But you are,” Hazel said with venom in her voice. “Pure, grade-A fuckin’ evil. ”

  A chuckle, then Frank shrugged. “It’s all just rhetoric, Hazel. If you like, you can easily replace the word evil with the word responsible. ”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake, Frank!”

  “What?” He seemed surprised. “Was it evil for the United States to nuke Japan, or for Rome to destroy Carthage? Was it evil for the Mongols to decimate Eastern Europe? Or was it responsible? Weren’t these more worthy races merely taking steps to keep themselves intact? Weren’t they being responsible for their own preservation?” He looked more deeply at her with the scarlet eyes. “That’s all I’m doing. I’m being responsible for my masters.”

  “You must really hate the world,” she sputtered.

  “The world? What’s the world, really? It’s a pile of shit that mankind has fucked up in every way possible. The human race is a disgrace; it no longer deserves to even exist. Survival of the fittest, as they say. And mankind ain’t it.”

  “The Shining Trapezohedron somehow triggers devastating storms,” Hazel apprized. “And you want to use it to create storms in the thirty-three biggest cities on earth.”

  Frank’s lips pursed in annoyance. “Not storms, Hazel. You saw what happened down there. Was that a storm? ”

  Hazel’s lip quivered.

  “It was a summoning—”

  “For some god or something”—she remembered what Pickman and Clonner had said, and she remembered the word from her visions. “Narloth-something.”

  “Nyarlathotep, Hazel. The Messenger. And his message is annihilation. That was him you saw down there, he and his attendants; his mere presence brings destruction all in the glory of Yog-Sothoth.” Frank closed his eyes and for once appeared solemn. “Yog-Sothoth is the key. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. Yog-Sothoth is the gate whereby the spheres do meet, and Nyarlathotep is his messenger...”

  Hazel wanted to get up but pain flared whenever she tried. “So that’s what this is? You’re shitting me, Frank. Occult spells? Witchcraft?”

  “Really now, Hazel. In older times—back when this cottage was built—the truth of Yog-Sothoth was indeed camouflaged by occultism. First, Indians? Then superstitious Colonists? Witchcraft was the only concept they could relate to. They were ignorant peasants; they thought they were worshiping the devil because the devil was all they could understand. But they were really paying homage to Yog-Sothoth. Their lopsided pentagrams were, unbeknownst to them, non-Euclidian formulae.” Frank continued to step about the meat-scented room. “But in truth? It’s not witchcraft, Hazel. It’s not spells. It’s simply math that gives one plane of existence access to another.”

  How could Hazel believe such a thing? And—now—how could she not?

  Frank’s voice darkened as he quoted, “‘The earth gibbers with their Voices; the earth mutters with their Consciousness—’”

  “Where’s Sonia, Frank!” Hazel spat.

  “‘—where reverence of their Word lingers, and upon where their Totems are blessed, they come. They come and they roil the seas—’”

  “Frank!”

  “‘They smash the forests.’”

  “Frank, what’s happened to you!”

  “‘They crush the cities...’”

  Suddenly the wind could be heard howling outside. Frank turned to her again. “They made me an offer, and I accepted. That’s what’s happened to me. They made the same offer to my father who began to accept it but then reneged. For this he was blinded. They made the offer to Henry too, but he rejected them outright when he realized the totality of the theorem’s potential. I’ve agreed to serve them, Hazel, but as a full-blooded human they’d find me detestable. So...they changed me a little, that’s all.” He grinned. “I’ve been transfected with mutagenic material of their own creation, from an entity of servility known as a Shoggoth. Sort of like DNA only much more complicated.” He seemed to flinch, as if in momentary discomfort. “It takes a while, but once I’ve turned over, I’ll be acceptable to them. I’ll be able to serve them, here, once the earth is cleared off.”

  Hazel didn’t want to hear it anymore. “Fine, Frank. Whatever. But where’s Sonia?”

  “I told you. She’s safe.”

  “She said that something on the other side of that door took her someplace...and took her baby out—”

  “That’s quite true.” He coughed. “The baby had to go...”

  “Frank! That was your child! ”

  Black mist shot from his mouth as he chuckled. “Do I look like I care?”

  “What did they do with it?”

  “Oh, once aborted I’m sure they used it for amusement and food, after the fetal brain tissue was sucked out, of course. They use that for research.”

  Hazel cringed against her body’s aches and pains. “And then what?”

  “Think, Hazel. They took the baby out to make room.”

  “To make room for another baby! ” Hazel shrieked. “I thought she was crazy when she told me that, but it’s true, isn’t it? They took her kid out and put one of their kids in!”

  Frank’s moldering face creased up in the sharpest frown. “Oh, Hazel, you’re hopeless. We have thirty-three cities on the list, right? And thirty-three passports coming for thirty-three agents. You know this. Once the passports are processed, thirty-three plane tickets
will be issued. The theorem works in sequences of thirty-three; this has to be obvious to you now. Think, Hazel. Think. ”

  “I am thinking, you prick!” she yelled. “But what’s all that got to do with them putting a monster in her belly?”

  Frank walked over to the suitcase and pointed. “Thirty-three power-carriers, right?”

  “Yes!”

  “But only one of these,” and he held up the Shining Trapezohedron. “Now do you understand?”

  Hazel was about to yell an emphatic No! but instead she shrieked when a loud knock came to the door.

  When Frank opened it, it was not the night sky nor the twilit town that she saw, it was dark, pulsing blood-red light. Tendrils of black mist slithered up from the floor, and then she heard a squishing sound—

  No, no, no...

  —as four robed and hooded aberrations walked into the room. Their hideous inverted cones for feet moved them inside, and in their tentacular arms they cradled Sonia.

  She was nude, dull-eyed, and very, very pregnant. Her entire body shined as if shellacked, and for the most irreducible moment, her head lolled to one side and she made eye-contact with Hazel. Her lips tried to move but no sound came out.

  Two of the things constricted their tentacles to part Sonia’s thighs, then Frank stepped up. He leaned over, peering between his fiance’s legs like a demented gynecologist. He raised the Shining Trapezohedron—

  “No!” Hazel screamed.

  —and inserted it into Sonia’s vagina. He pushed, then his hand disappeared, then half of his forearm had been inserted as well. Then: shhhhluck...

  He pulled his hand out, leaving the crystal in Sonia’s womb.

  “That’s why they sucked out the baby, Hazel. Not to replace it with one of their own but simply to make room.”

  “For more Trapezohedrons,” Hazel croaked.

  “Now, for the first time in history, all thirty-three of them are together.” He patted the bloated stomach. “Perfect hiding place, huh? And when the time is right, each agent will come to her, take their crystal and their power carrier, and then fly to their pre-assigned destination.” He addressed the robed things. “Take this cow out of here. I’ll arrange for her transport later.”

  They walked back the way they came, Sonia satcheled in their ropy arms. When they’d cleared the threshold, the door slammed.

  Was Frank fidgeting now? He seemed to do so as if chilled. “The power is exponential, Hazel. With all thirty-three crystals on earth at the same time? Let me give you an example. Once activated, darkness is what summons Nyarlathotep. Together they’re all thirty-three times more powerful than if used individually. Now, imagine the force that Henry unleashed in St. Petersburg being increased by thirty-three but instead of fifteen minutes of activation, it goes on all night long. Can you conceive of that? Hmm? When the agents use these, they will begin at the minute after sunset, and it won’t stop until dawn. It starts in the middle and works outward. See, Nyarlathotep is like your God in a way. He is omnipresent. He can be thirty-three places at once, or thirty-three million places. I’ll bet we kill a billion people the first night. And when the first thirty-three cities are annihilated, the agents will then proceed to the next largest city, and on and on until there’s nothing left.” A hush filled the room. “It will be glorious...Glory be to Yog-Sothoth and to his messenger Nyarlathotep, whose message is annihilation.”

  “When, Frank?” came Hazel’s parched question.

  His grin seemed multi-dimensional. “When the stars are right. When the sun is in the Fifth House and Saturn is in Trine. Then YogSothoth will come again, once His messenger has made way for Him.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Me? I will live to serve them and their retinue forever, here and everywhere, in other dimensions, in other phase-shifts.” Frank’s breath rattled when he sighed. “Forever and ever...” Was he limping when he went and opened the door? He looked out into the twilight as if marveling at preeminent sights. But when he turned—

  Hazel winced.

  Frank’s pants were open, his genitals exposed. “For old time’s sake, okay? You do it so well.”

  “Frank, do you have any idea of the shit I’ve been through?”

  “But that’s life, isn’t it?” He stepped forward until his limp penis dangled before her face. “Please? Then you can go.”

  Hazel wished she could dematerialize.

  “I said please.” A chuckle. “And it’s not like I have to.”

  Groaning, Hazel straightened up on her knees. His crotch couldn’t have smelled more foul; obviously he hadn’t washed in days. She kept her mind blank when she took the shriveled flesh into her mouth and began to work it with her lips. The malodorous balls started constricting at once, then the puny flesh lengthened to full hardness in only moments. She got up as much spit as she could, then moved her head back and forth till she found her rhythm.

  “Yes,” he seemed to gurgle.

  Her head bobbed, lips tightly sliding, tongue curled beneath the veiny, hot shaft. When his hips began to quiver, he grabbed her head and started humping her face. But when he came—

  Frank’s throat boomed laughter.

  —he violently filled Hazel’s mouth with anything but normal semen. It was more like chunky slime, with a rotten and somehow tarry taste. The putrid slop filled her mouth one gust after another, until she pulled her lips off and shrieked, only to take another blast right in the face. Frank was jerking the rest out by hand, laughing in a deep sub-octave staccato, and when it was done, Hazel leaned back against the stone wall, sopped.

  “There!” Frank exclaimed. “Yes—look! It’s happening!”

  The final stroke of his hand peeled the skin off his penis, and then the penis swelled as if from within. Frank tore the scrotum and testes off too, tossing them aside, then looked down with his scarlet eyes and watched as the skinless shaft expanded and then—

  Pop!

  Frank’s old human penis split open, and from within sprang a new and incontestably inhuman one. What emerged, however, was something she’d seen before, in her visions: a grayish coil of meat, like the first two feet of an elephant’s trunk.

  Only then did Hazel look at the rest of him.

  Black mist seemed to exude from his pores; he was teeming with it. Whatever this otherworldly ichor was, it melted off his clothing, his shoes, even his belt and then began to melt off his flesh.

  Hazel simply stared, even as the last of the noxious ejaculation dripped from her mouth.

  When the metamorphosis was complete, Frank’s humanity had been sloughed away, and what stood now in its place was the new Frank...

  Hazel began to crawl toward the wide-open door.

  The thing was a twist of what could only be called tentacles: two for arms, two for legs, and a suckered column of many such appendages comprising his mid-section. Inverted cones of flesh sufficed for feet that schucked when he stepped forward.

  By now Hazel was quite ready to die, but before she could roll herself over the threshold to plummet to the bottom of Whipple’s Peak, the thing that used to be Frank snatched her up with its ropy arms and held her aloft.

  In a slopping voice, he gushed, “Glood bye, Hlazel!” and then he flung her viciously out the door.

  Silence. Stillness.

  Hazel expected to plummet immediately to her death but instead she merely hung there in the air...

  In the doorway, the monstrosity was donning a crimson robe with gold fringe. When it pulled the hood up over the nodule-like bump for a head, Hazel glimpsed its face.

  If the pestiferous visage could even be called a face, its features were upside-down. A puff-lipped mouth formed an arc on the forehead, while irregular outbreaks for eyes extruded from the cheeks. Its complexion gave the face the overall semblance of an overcooked pie.

  “Shub neb flurp n ey ftagn,” it said to her and waved a mocking tentacle. “Naabl e uh bleb nuuurrlathotep—”

  Hazel fell.

  6r />
  “God in Heaven,” whispered Father Greene, pastor of the United Trinity Church of Christ, near Providence, Rhode Island. He stared through the car window with eyes held wide on what could only be called a landscape of destruction.

  Sitting beside him behind the steering wheel was an equally shocked grad student by the name of Ashton Clark. When the state police had noticed Father Greene’s roman collar, they’d allowed the vehicle to pass through the road blockade.

  “This is horrendous,” Ashton fretted. “Everything looks flattened. ”

  Greene gripped the silver cross about his neck. “It’s even worse than the news reports this morning.”

  The great pines and oaks that densely lined the road had, indeed, been crushed flat by a storm of incredible magnitude. The news had yet to properly identify what had happened here. Hurricanes brought rain, yet there’d been none, and they certainly couldn’t form instantly. A multiple-vortex tornado system was the only speculation thus far.

  “Just like the Mother’s Day Storm in St. Petersburg,” Ashton muttered. “And I don’t like the common denominator.”

  “That man, yes,” Greene replied. “The suicide.”

  “Professor Henry Wilmarth. Sir, it’s just too much of a coincidence. The guy killed himself here, in this town, just last week.” He paused as they cruised by a small trailer park: crushed flat. Ashton saw limbs sticking out of some of the folds of metal. “And now... this. Same thing all over again. You tell me.”

  “It’s not for us to know, Ashton,” the reverend said. “It’s for us only to have faith. We must. ” He crossed himself when they passed several mangled bodies. “I have faith in God on High that Hazel is still alive...”

  Ashton was about to say something but then his lips stilled when he saw a woman whose body had been accordioned between two felled trees. Some of her internal organs hung out her mouth, shadowed by flies.

  “I guess...this is the town,” Greene remarked. An upside-down sign lay across still more snapped trees: WELCOME TO BOSSET’S WAY. POPULATION: TOO FEW TO COUNT. The demolished forest-scape gave way, then, to what had once been a small town square, crushed buildings and cars its most salient feature now. Several people in the road looked crushed flat as well, as if steam-rollered. What on earth could’ve done this?