by Tim Curran
“Got the coroner’s report on our Jane Doe,” Mason announced, walking into the detective’s squad. “Female. Estimates the age to be about 20 years old. The burning was post-mortem. Cause of death was a slit throat. Looks like she was bled out.”
Jeff leaned back in his chair, a toothpick dangling in his mouth. “There were no signs of fire in the woods or blood, so she was probably killed somewhere else and then mounted on the tree later.”
Mason handed the photos to Jeff, one by one. “This type of thing takes time, Jeff. And planning. There’s more than one perp here.”
“Just like the old fucking days,” Jeff said, aimlessly looking out the window a few desks over. From there, one could see the beginning of the hill that the university sat on like a large, squatting toad.
Mason didn’t catch the reference. “What do you mean?”
Jeff shrugged. “You wouldn’t know. You’re not from Arkham. My grandfather used to be a campus cop and he told me some wild stories—even one about a break-in at the library. A fucking library! Someone stealing a book, for crissakes. Got themselves killed by a security dog, of all things.”
“What’s that got to do with any of this?” Mason asked, not seeing the point.
Jeff sighed. “Listen, what I’m saying is that Arkham is different. Lots of weird shit has happened here over the years. Salem’s got nothing on us.”
“So you think this could have been witches or Satanists?”
Flipping through the pictures, Jeff stopped and looked intently at one. It was a close-up of the charred face. Something about it looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Nah,” he said, “we wouldn’t get that lucky. Hey, tell that fuckwad coroner to check for tattoos, just in case.”
“You see something?” Mason asked, looking at the pictures again himself.
“Just a hunch,” Jeff said and looked out the window again. There was a large storm cloud coming in from over the hill, and it sat there over the university building, glaring with menace.
“So we’re only hours away from the highly anticipated planetary alignment. As we can see from this computer model, five planets are aligning along with Earth’s moon. By early this evening, we will see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn form more or less a straight line along with our moon.”
“I guess that leaves us as the ‘odd planet out’, right, Dr. Mike?”
Laughing, the weatherman replied, “I guess you could say that, Phil. Earth will be sticking out like a sore thumb to anyone watching! Might as well just draw a line straight to us!”
The other members of the ‘Dream Team’ began to drift in after 6 p.m. The program was not one that required the residents to stay at the facility all day, and in fact Munroe preferred that they didn’t. Not as if anyone could make a living on this money, anyway. There were five of them, and Elaine introduced William to each as they came in. There was John, the 54-year-old morbidly obese accountant who mumbled when he talked and looked as if the sight of a mouse might scare him to death. He sat down on his bunk, opened his laptop and quickly began working on his spreadsheets. Alicia was a 32-year-old divorcée who was working as a call-center rep for a phone company. Every word out of her was painful to speak or hear. Simone was 19 and was some sort of New Wave punk with the right piercings and tattoos in the prescribed places. She spent most of her time listening to her iPod, which she had set at an ungodly level, and her spiked hair had several distinct colors. Don was a misplaced redneck who wore a baseball cap with the logo of a tractor company and a kind of flannel shirt jacket. Last was Priscilla, who was a psychology student at the university and was taking part in the study as part of her course work and for the extra money.
Elaine had placed William in the sixth bunk, the one that had been empty earlier, and explained the procedure. “We’ll be attaching these electrodes to your head,” she said, “and these will measure your brainwaves. Lights go out at 9 p.m. and you’ll be monitored at all times. Before then, you’re free to walk around, talk, watch TV, whatever you like, but you can’t leave this room for any reason other than to use the facilities.”
“Why not?”
She smiled at him, used to how her smile could make others simply go along with her wishes. “It’s just part of our controls for the experiment.”
As she walked out, Simone carefully came walking over to William, never taking her eyes off Elaine as she did so. She motioned for William to be quiet and positioned herself with her back to the reflective glass wall. “They don’t like us to talk to each other,” she said, “cross-contamination. They don’t want us to influence each other. What are you here for?”
William shrugged. “The money.”
“And the nightmares,” Simone added. “We all have them. You’re sitting on his bunk, you know. Alex’s bunk.”
“Who?”
Don spoke up loudly, not caring who heard him. “Alex Kintner. That was his bed until three nights ago. He used to dream about sharks attacking him.”
Starting to become wary, William asked, “What happened to him?”
Don went silent. Simone’s eyes darted back and forth. “Guess the sharks got him,” she said. “There was a lot of blood. See?”
She pointed on the floor near the corner. There, nestled in the cracks of the antiseptic tiles, were a few tell-tale lines of dried blood that could not be reached by brush or mop.
“Got any weed?” Simone asked.
“What we’re seeing here is dramatic footage of the violent rampage now taking place in the Auburn Mall in Auburn, Massachusetts. Details are still coming in but early eye-witnesses have described a mob of, and I’m quoting here, ‘insane people screaming crazy words’ who have armed themselves with any weapons they can get and started murdering indiscriminately. At present we have no information on the origin of this mob or where … I’m sorry, as you can see by our helicopter camera, riot police have begun to storm the mall and you can hear the screams and gunshots. What is that sound? Is that … chanting?”
Over the sound of screams and gunfire came the cry of dozens of voices calling all at once, “Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn!”
“Coroner for you on line five, Byers,” said one of the other detectives.
“Go for Byers,” Jeff grunted into the phone.
“Yeah, Lt. Byers, this is Dr. Dexter Wilson, the assistant coroner. Dr. Pagliaro asked me to give you a call about that Jane Doe. We haven’t found a match for the dental records yet but we were able to recover several tattoos on the body. I’m surprised you thought of checking for these. Luckily, tattoos penetrate below the epidermis, so even though the outer skin was cooked, we can recover the tattoos if we dig deep enough. She had some pretty intricate designs on her arms. Color is pretty faded, though, but I’ll fax you the photos.”
A few minutes later, someone brought Jeff a few pages of faxed photographs. He grunted without even looking at the other person and grabbed the pages. He sat there and looked at the pictures, not believing what he was seeing. There was the same tattoo that he’d seen every day for months and which pissed him off without his understanding why. On her left arm was what looked like some sort of humanoid octopus with tentacles that wrapped around a circle with a symbol inside that looked like a cross between a hieroglyphic and a Japanese kanji. It was exactly the same as the tattoo on his stepson, William.
“Son of a bitch,” Jeff said and grabbed his coat as he ran out the door with Mason in quick pursuit.
“Reports are coming in from Antarctica about a new and startling discovery. Seemingly overnight, an entirely new mountain range has been discovered along with the ruins of an ancient city. Although several pundits have claimed that these appearances are due to climate change and the melting of the ice caps, archeologists disagree.”
“This is not a case of ice retreating,” said Dr. Felton, head of the National Geological Society. “Those areas have been well charted years previously. The mountains and the city just suddenly appeared there. Just as if they ha
d opened a door and stepped through.”
“You’re gonna tell me where that worthless prick of a son of yours is, and you’re gonna tell me right the fuck now!” Jeff yelled at Teri who stood with her back against the wall, still wearing the same robe from that morning. Jeff’s fist was raised and ready to strike.
Mason stepped forward and tried to grab Jeff’s arm. “Jeff, for crissake’s!” he yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Jeff pushed him off. “This little bitch’s kid has a tattoo on his arm. The same fucking tattoo our BBQ case has, which means that he’s mixed up in this, and I’m going to make him tell me what’s going on.”
Remembering his ‘hostage situation’ training, Mason put himself between Jeff and the frightened woman and tried to speak in a slow, evenly measured tone. “Ok, Jeff, let’s just take this easy. Your wife will tell us where he is and we’ll go talk to him. Ok? Everything clean and above-board. Right?”
Jeff nodded. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, Mason. Clean.”
Then he punched Mason hard in the face and Mason crumpled to his feet, unconscious.
“Now,” Jeff said as he grabbed Teri by the throat and pushed his face into hers. “I’m going to be all calm and nice. Where the fuck is he?”
Crying, Teri remembered and sobbed, “He’s at the university. He’s doing one of those sleep tests, remember?”
Jeff did remember, but he punched her anyway.
“We’re getting some unbelievable images from our plane over the new island that formed after the earthquake in the South Pacific. Frank Simpson is our man in the plane. Frank, can you confirm for me what we’re seeing here? Is that actually a huge door?”
“Yes, Jane, that’s exactly what that is. It’s difficult to get bearings on the island’s landscape. It’s like looking at an Escher painting come to life but I don’t think that there’s any doubt that we’re looking at a massive door that, our experts are now saying, opens from the inside!”
Far above, in the vacuum of space, vast planets moved without knowledge or luster or name, coming into an almost perfect alignment. Left aside, conspicuous in its non-conformity, was a tiny blue planet. Vast and dark figures flew through space, guided by the aligned planets like a car driver measuring his journey by the lines painted in the middle of the road.
“We interrupt this program for a special report: Worldwide episodes of mass hysteria, rioting, murders and suicides are occurring at a cataclysmic rate. London is aflame in the worst case of destruction seen there since the days of World War II, while communication with France is intermittent and almost gone. Scientists and doctors have been unable to identify the source of these outbreaks. And we’ve just received word that the President of the United States has been evacuated to a secure and secret location.”
In the sleep lab, there was no contact with the outside world. No one knew the chaos that was unfolding. Dr. Munroe had banished all cell phones from the lab, feeling that they would be too disruptive to not only the patients but the staff as well. Normally, it would just be Elaine and maybe one other attendant monitoring the sleepers but, this night, Dr. Munroe had decided to stay himself. It was just Elaine and him in the booth, which made Elaine uncomfortable, but for once, Munroe had little thought for his attractive assistant.
Together they watched the sleepers and charted the brainwave patterns. The synchronization began sooner than before, but this time was different. William, who had never been present before, was now the base pattern. First Simone matched him, then John. After a short pause, Alicia joined the group, and then Don. Priscilla seemed to resist joining.
“Look at her pattern,” Munroe said, “she’s actively fighting it. She’s locked in an ‘anguish pattern.’ I think she’s actually trying to instigate a nightmare to break her out of her sleep.”
“Should we wake her up?” asked Elaine.
The doctor shook his head vigorously. “No, no, not yet. We have to see what happens next.”
Suddenly captured by a new thought, Munroe barked, “Quick! Get me the printouts from last night!”
Elaine ran to the side of the room, grabbed the binder and hurried back. Munroe flipped the pages back and forth, not understanding what he was seeing.
“I thought so … but I don’t understand how this can be happening.”
“What is it?” Elaine asked, not seeing whatever Munroe was seeing.
“Here: the pattern that they all synchronized to last night? It’s William’s pattern. They were matching his sleep pattern even though he wasn’t here.”
With a start, Priscilla’s pattern finally locked into the group.
“Where am I?” William asked. Everything shimmered around him and the landscape was a barren firestorm.
“You never remember, do you? After all the times we’ve done this and you still don’t remember,” said Simone.
They stood around him, in honor. They were all naked, and on the left arm of each one was a tattoo of what looked like some sort of humanoid octopus with tentacles that wrapped around a circle with a symbol inside that looked like a cross between a hieroglyphic and a Japanese kanji.
“He’ll remember now,” John said. “His day draws close.”
“I’d have thought he’d have remembered the sacrifice, though,” said Alicia. “We did it for him.”
Above, in the skies that rained fire from red clouds, horrifying things flew through the air. Things with pointed tails and no faces.
Don smirked. “Can’t blame him. Dope don’t even remember who his dad really was. Neither does his ma for that matter.”
“I don’t like this,” Priscilla said, “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You can’t back out now, Priscilla.” John said. “It’s preordained. Remember what we did to Alex when he tried to leave?”
“I don’t understand any of this. What’s going on?” William said.
Priscilla began to cry, but the others looked at William the way you look at a child who still can’t comprehend something he’s been told a hundred times.
“This is the world yet to come,” John said. “You are its herald. Through you, the Old Ones will come again.”
“The Old Ones were,” Alicia said.
“The Old Ones are,” Don said.
“The Old Ones shall be,” Simone finished.
There was something pulling in the back of William’s brain. Some memory that he couldn’t quite access but should be able to. Slowly, it was becoming clearer but was still unfocused.
“That which was set in motion decades ago is coming to fruition,” John said. “Yours is the most important role. Feel yourself becoming.”
William’s skin began to blacken and pain began to emanate up and down his back as fibrous wings broke free. Slowly, painfully a pointed, spiked tail began to emerge.
“His form is many for he is vast,” John said.
“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate,” Alicia said.
“Yog-Sothoth is the gate,” Don said.
“Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate,” Simone finished.
Priscilla could not stop crying. “I didn’t know it would be like this. I don’t want my baby to be born into this world.”
With great pain, William managed to speak. “What is going to happen to me?”
“You will rise and open the gate. The Old Ones will pour through you and remake the world in their image.”
“Man rules now where they ruled once,” Don said.
“They will rule again where Man rules now,” Alicia said.
“Past, present and future are one in Yog-Sothoth,” Simone said.
“As they are in you, William,” said John.
The boy screamed in pain as he was remade into the key and the gate.
The door to the monitoring room flew open and Jeff burst into the room. “Lt. Jeff Byers! I’m looking for William Byers. Where the hell is he?”
Both Dr. Munroe and Elaine jumped away from the controls in fear and sh
ock.
“What’s this all about?” Munroe demanded. “William’s my patient.”
“I don’t give a shit, Doc. He’s a suspect in a murder case, and it’s taken me all fucking night to find him and you, so where the fuck is he?”
In reflex, Munro and Elaine looked through the window into the lab room. All six subjects were asleep but the needles on the brainwave printouts were moving wildly up and down.
“I won’t go on with this!” Priscilla screamed. “I won’t! I don’t want that world anymore!”
“It doesn’t matter,” John said, “you can’t stop it now. No one can. He comes. They are coming. Like the girl last night that we sacrificed through our dreams to give William strength, you will light the way.”
In her dream, Priscilla’s body spontaneously erupted into flames. She screamed, and instead of trying to help, William watched dispassionately through his new eyes.
In the sleep lab, Priscilla screamed and suddenly erupted into flames. She leaped from her bed and ran straight into the observation window and began clawing at it. The fire alarm began to blare and the sprinklers exploded, drenching the room in water. None of the other sleepers woke up or even moved.
Smoke began to fill the lab room.
Without a word, Jeff opened the door and Priscilla leapt onto him, knocking him back into the monitoring room. Munroe and Elaine backed away, terrified. Still on fire, Priscilla screamed horribly as Mason ran into the room. Thinking quickly, he grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and covered Priscilla and Jeff in foam.