And then as her eyes adjusted she saw what the green glow had hidden, till now—its extensions, green but filled with diluted blood, stolen blood, the tentacles stretching from the sphere-of-spheres like stems and leaves from a tuber, but prehensile, mobile, stretching out from thick tubules to gradually narrow, to thin, very thin tips that stretched out red cords, like fishing line up into the grooves on the ceiling, and from there into minute cracks, and, she knew—with an intuitive certainty—up high into the building, where they reached into people, taking control of them one by one, starting with those who’d been here longest, Skytown’s employees. And some of the tentacular extensions had swallowed up whole people, drawn them down and into itself, so that they squirmed in the tubes, dozens of them, shifting in and out of visibility . . . She saw Koenig, drawn down in one of the transparent tentacles, sucked through it, his face contorted with a terrible realization . . . blood squeezing in little spurts from his eyes, his mouth, his nose . . . And then he was jetted back up the tentacle, becoming smaller as he went, transformed into transmissible form that could be reconstituted up above . . . And all this she glimpsed in less than two seconds.
Visibility was a paradox, a conundrum—the tentacles were visible as a whole but not individually, when you tried to look at one it shifted out of view, and you just glimpsed the people trapped inside it before it was gone . . . And the moaning filled the room, only they heard it more in their minds than in their ears . . .
“It’s like this thing is here but it’s not completely here,” Jorny said, wonderingly. “Like it’s . . . getting to be more and more here as it . . . ”
“The people look pale, some of them like they’re dying or dead,” Deede said, feeling dreamlike and sick at once. “I can’t see them clear enough to be sure but it’s like they’re being drained real slow.”
Jorny said, “It’s not coming at us . . . Why?”
“It’s waiting,” she said. It was more than guessing—it felt right. The answers were in the air itself, somehow; they throbbed within the murky green light. Her fast-seeing drew them quickly into her. “It wants us to come to it. It’s lured the others in some way—we saw how it lured Jean. Everyone’s been lured. It wants you to submit to it . . . ”
“Look—there’s something on the other side.”
“Jorny? How are we going to get out of here? There’s no way back up.”
“There has to be another entrance.”
“Okay—fine.” She felt increasingly reckless—she felt so hopeless now that it felt like little was left to lose. She led the way herself—she was tired of following males from one place to the next—and edged around the boiling, suspended sphere-of-spheres, getting closer to it and learning more about it with proximity . . .
It was only partly in their space; it was in many spaces at once. There was only one being: each sphere they were seeing was another manifestation of that same being, one for each world it stretched into. It slowly twisted things in those worlds to fit its liking. And they were only seeing the outside of it, like the dorsal fin of a shark on the surface of the water. It had many names, in many places; many varieties of appearance, many approaches to getting what it wanted. Its true form—
“Look!” Jorny said, pointing past her at a jagged hole in the floor—a hole that was the exact duplicate of the one in the ceiling they’d dropped through on the other side of the room. Its edges were shaped precisely the same . . .
The tentacular probes of the sphere-of-spheres teased at them as they passed, almost caressing them, offering visions of glory, preludes of unimaginable pleasure . . .
But the creature frightened her, more than it attracted her—it was somehow scarier for its enticements. It was as malevolent to her as a wolf spider would be to a crawling fly. Or as a Venus fly trap would be.
“Jesus!” Jorny blurted, hastening away from the thing. “I almost . . . never mind, just get over here!”
She wanted to follow him. But it was hard to move—she was caught up in its whispering, its radiance of promise, and the undertone of warning. Run from me and I’ll be forced to grab you! Jorny ran to her and grabbed her wrist, pulled her away from it. She felt weak, for a moment, drained, staggering . . .
He knelt by the hole in the floor and dropped through. “Come on, Deede!”
After a moment she followed—almost falling through the hole in her weariness. He half caught her, as before—and she felt her strength returning, away from the sphere-within-spheres.
“Look—we’re on the ceiling!” Jorny burst out. “Aren’t we?”
They were on a floor—with pipes snaking around their knees—but above them was the machinery of the elevators, affixed upside down on . . . the ceiling. Or—on the floor that was now their ceiling. There was a door, identical to the one they’d come through to find the hole into the temple room above—but it went from a couple feet above the floor to the ceiling. The knob seemed in the wrong place. The door was related to the ceiling the way any other door would be related to the floor—it was upside down. Jorny went to it and jumped to the knob, twisted it, pulled the door open, and scrambled through, turned to help her climb up . . . and then he yelped as he floated upward . . . They both floated up, tumbling in the air . . .
They were floating in space for a moment, turning end over end, in the bottom level of the stairway they’d come down. It was the very same stairway, with the occasional cabinet with fire extinguishers and floor-numbers painted on the walls—only, it stretched down below them, instead of up above them. They instinctively reached for a railing, Jorny caught it . . .
A nauseating twist, a feeling of turning inside-out and back right-side out again, and then they were standing on the stairway, which once more was zig-zagging upward, above them. Only—it couldn’t be. It had been below the temple room. Or had they been somehow transported back above?
“What the fuck?” Jorny said, pale, fumbling for a cigarette with shaking hands. “Damn, out of smokes.”
Deede stared. Someone was up above—crawling down the walls toward them. Two someones. A man and woman. Coming down the walls that contained the stairs, crawling like bugs, upside down relative to Deede.
“Jorny—look!”
“I see ’em.”
“Jorny I don’t know how much more I can . . . ”
“I’m not feeling so good either. But you know what? We’re surviving. Maybe for a reason, right? Hey—they look . . . familiar.”
They were about thirty-five, a man and woman dressed in what Deede could only describe, to herself, as dark, clinging rags. The man had a backpack of some kind tightly fixed to his shoulders. They approached, crawling down the wall, and Deede and Jorny backed away, trying to decide where to run to—up the stairs past them? And then the strangers stopped, looking at them upside down, the woman’s hair drooping down toward them . . .
And the woman spoke. “Jorny—it’s us, me and you as kids!”
“What—from earlier, somehow? But we never discovered the temple as kids!” said the man. “We just found out about it last year!”
“They’re us in one of the other worlds—younger versions . . . and they found their way here! Just like in my dream, Jorny! I told you, there was something here—something that would help us!”
Jorny—the younger Jorny standing at the younger Deede’s side—shook his head, stunned. “It’s us—in, like, the future or . . . ”
Deede nodded. “Would you guys come down and . . . stand on the level we’re on? Or can you?”
“We can,” the older Deede said. “The rules shifted when Yog-Sothoth altered the world, and gravity moves eccentrically.”
She crept toward the floor, put one foot on it, then sidled around on the wall like a gecko, finally getting both feet on the floor and standing to face them; the older Jorny did the same. His blond hair was cut short and beginning to recede, his face a trifle lined, but he was still recognizably Jorny.
Deede found she was staring at the older version
of herself in fascination. She seemed more proportional, more confident, if a bit grim—there were lines around her eyes, but it looked good on her. But the whole thing was disorienting—was something she didn’t really want to see. It made her want to hide, seeing herself, just as much as seeing the thing in the temple.
“Don’t look so scared, kid,” the older Jorny said, smiling sadly at her.
Deede scowled defiantly at him. “Just—explain what the hell you are. I don’t think you’re us.”
“We’re another you,” the older Deede said. “And we’re connected with you. We all extend from the ideal you, in the world of ideas. But this sure isn’t that world. Time is a bit in advance in our world, I guess, from yours, for one thing . . . ”
“Come on with us,” the older Jorny said. “We’ll show you. Then we can figure out if there’s a way we can work together . . . against him.”
They turned and climbed the stairs—after a moment’s hesitation, Jorny and Deede followed. They went up eleven flights, past battered, rusting doors. “Your building,” the older Deede said, “extends downward from ours—but to you it will seem upward. Ours is downward from yours. They’re mirrored, but not opposites—just variants at opposite poles from one another. Me and Jorny found out that the primary impulses were coming from the basement of our building so we cut the hole in the sub basement floor—that’s the ceiling of the other room.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” said the older Jorny.
“I don’t know, it depends. Anyway the Great Appetite—that’s what we call it, though some call it Yog-Sothoth—he reaches out through the many worlds through that same temple . . . and he changes what he comes to, so the beings on that world become all appetite, all desire, and nothing else—so he can feed on low desires, through beings on those worlds.”
“You say he?” the younger Jorny asked. “Not it?”
“Right—he has gender. But little else we can comprehend. Once he’s changed a world enough, he can eat what you eat, feel what you feel. Some he will already have changed, in your world—the rest he will change later. He changed our world about eighteen years ago. We’ve resisted—but most people don’t. They get changed—the Great Appetite removes whatever there is in them that checks appetites and desires and impulses. Any kind of strong controlling intelligence, he takes it out. Makes psychopaths of some people, and zombies of just feeding, of different kinds, of others—”
“Like Gunnar Johansen!” Deede burst out.
The older Deede stopped on a landing and turned to look at her. “Yes,” she said gravely. “He killed my mother too—before the Great Appetite took over. Like him. He was already under Yog-Sothoth’s control . . . without knowing it.”
She looked like she wanted to embrace the younger Deede—but Deede was afraid of her, and took a step back.
The older Deede shrugged and turned to follow the older Jorny through a doorway—the door at this landing had been wrenched aside, was leaning, crumpled against the wall, hinges snapped. They passed through and found themselves in the lower Mezzanine lounge, exactly like the one they’d left—sterile in its furnishings and design.
They walked over to the window and stared out at the world—the transformed world.
There was no sky. Instead there was a ceiling, high up, just above the tallest building, that stretched to the horizon. And the ceiling was covered with images, enticing objects and enticing bodies flashing by and intermingling and overlapping. She saw an advertisement for BLENDER—and the indeterminate segments of fleshy material that she’d seen in the Skymall shop window; she saw an ad for something called BRAIN BLANKER: For really changing your child—remake it exactly as you please! She saw an ad for INTER-REACTIVES, INC, the sea urchin helmets she’d seen in Skymall; she saw an ad that said simply, WE ELIMINATE PROBLEM NEIGHBORS—GOVERNMENT CERTIFIED AGAINST RETALIATION; another ad asked, WANT A PET THAT REALLY SCREAMS? ORDER LITTLE PEOPLE! and there was an image of a frightened, dwarf sized semi-human figure lifted by its neck from a “home-grow vat”—by a grinning man holding a two-by-four with nails sticking out of it, in his other hand; there was an ad for LATEST FACE: THE TOP TEN FACES, WITH NEAR-INSTANTANEOUS TRANSFER GUARANTEED, AT REDUCED PRICES. The images were sometimes blurred by great gray clouds of smog—clouds pierced by people who flew through them, people mechanically enhanced to fly, their bodies pierced by pistons and wires, shrieking as they went; other people crawled up and down the sides of buildings like bugs; clusters of junk material floated by, clouds of metal with people clinging to them, wailing and tittering and fornicating; unspeakably fat people drifted by on flying cushions tricked out with pincers and mechanical hands; emaciated people drifted by too: their heads penetrated by wires, their faces twitching with pleasures they no longer really felt, their vehicles suddenly spurting with speed to deliberately crash headlong into other vehicles, going down in spinning, flaming wreckage to join the accumulation of twisted metal and weather-beaten trash that filled the streets hundreds of feet deep, black with insects . . .
“That’s pretty much the way the whole world looks,” the older Jorny said, his voice cracking. “There are attempts at changing it, in places—but the influence of the Great Appetite is too strong . . . unless you have with you . . . ” He turned to his younger self. “What you are supposed to have.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You have something I need . . . ” The older Jorny took off his backpack, and took out a boxy device that had speakers at both ends, like a boombox, but no place to put in CDs or an iPod—only a small recess at one end. “You see? It goes here . . . ”
“You’re expecting something from us?” Deede asked, confused.
The older Deede looked out the window. “When we found the locus of the Great Appetite, in the temple, we found I had a kind of . . . a sensitivity to it. I could pick up information from it. By something I think of as ‘looking fast.’ ”
Deede nodded. “I’m like that too.”
“I saw you, then—saw that you were coming and that you carried something the Great Appetite is afraid of. A many-voiced note of refusal.”
“A what?”
“Do you have a recording device with you?”
Jorny stared at them . . . then slowly reached into his pocket and drew out his iPod.
The older Deede frowned. “That’s not what I saw . . . ”
“It’s inside it!” The older Jorny said. He snatched the iPod from Jorny’s hand and—ignoring Jorny’s protests—smashed it again and again on the metal window frame till it burst open.
“There it is!” The older Deede shouted, pointing at the wrecked device. “That thing!”
“It’s a microdrive!” the older Jorny said excitedly. “We use them to make sounds too—but we put them directly in our sound machines. We have only sounds that have been appropriated, co-opted by the Great Appetite. Now . . . ”
“This better work,” Jorny grumbled.
The older Jorny plucked the microdrive from the wreckage and pressed it in the recess of the alternate boombox. It fit neatly in place. He hit a switch and the box boomed out—with a roaring cacophony.
“Shit!” the younger Jorny yelled, reaching over to snap the boombox off again. “It’s not picking out any one song—it sounds like it’s playing all of them at once! There’s more than a thousand songs in there!”
“So that’s it . . . ” the older Deede murmured. She looked at the older Jorny. “Remember? ‘A thousand voices will silence his roar!’ That’s what I heard from the green light—it tried to cover it up but I saw it! It’s supposed to play them all at once!”
A vast moaning shook the floor then, and the ceiling shed bits of plaster. It was coming from the elevator banks . . .
“We’ve frightened him with the sound—for just that one second!” the older Jorny said. “He’s coming for us!” He handed the younger Jorny the boombox. “Play it as loud as possible in the temple! Go on! It’ll make everything possible! W
e’ll draw it off!”
They he looked at the older Deede—and, to Deede’s exquisite discomfort, the two adults kissed, kissed hugely and wetly. She looked away—so did Jorny. Then the older Jorny and Deede turned and ran past the elevator. The elevator doors opened and something red and green and endlessly hungry reached from it, stretching after them . . .
“Oh no . . . ” Deede said.
“We’d better try this . . . ” Jorny whispered. And they turned and pounded down the stairs.
In minutes they’d reached the upside down basement room, and dropped through the ceiling, coming up, spinning in space with momentary weightlessness, in the temple room . . .
Deede found herself on the floor, with the sphere-within-spheres, the Great Appetite, Yog-Sothoth looming over her, reaching for her, making its unspeakable offering. . . .
And then Jorny reached to switch on the boombox, at full volume. . . .
“Jorny!” His hand hesitated over the boombox and he looked up to see his mother, trapped in one of the transparent tentacles, compressed and terrified. “Jorny—wait! I don’t know what you’re doing but it’ll punish me if you do it! Stop!”
He drew his hand back. Deede knew she had to trigger the box—but she was afraid of what she’d see if she reached for it. This thing had the power to hurt, to punish, beyond time. It could reach into your soul. It was evil times evil. It was the dark side of pleasure and it was the green light of pain. It wasn’t something to defy . . .
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Page 33