by Paul Kane
“But how would Dippel profit from that? Allowing such things into our world?”
“Perhaps he has been made promises of power, whispers in his head that make him outrageous offers. Perhaps he is little more than a tool by now. All that matters, good friend, is that we can not allow him to continue his work.”
“If the red cloud over the moon is a sign, how much time do we have?”
“Let me put it this way: We will not wait until morning, and we will not need to question either the boy or the man who saw the lightning. By that time, I believe it will be too late.”
There was a part of me that wondered if Dupin’s studies had affected his mind. It wasn’t an idea that held, however. I had seen what I had seen, and what Dupin had told me seemed to validate it. We immediately set out on our escapade, Dupin carrying a small bag slung over one shoulder by a strap.
The rain had blown itself out and the streets were washed clean. The air smelled as fresh as the first breath of life. We went along the streets briskly, swinging our canes, pausing only to look up at the moon. The red cloud was no longer visible, but there was still a scarlet tint to the moon that seemed unnatural. Sight of that gave even more spring to my step. When we arrived at our destination, there was no one about, and the ashes had been settled by the rain.
“Keep yourself alert,” Dupin said, “in case our simian friend has returned and is in the basement collecting body parts.”
We crossed the wet soot, stood at the mouth of the basement, and after a glance around to verify no one was in sight, we descended.
Red-tinged moonlight slipped down the stairs and brightened the basement. Everything was as it had been. Dupin looked about, used his cane to tap gently at a few of the empty beakers and tubes. He then made his way to the container where I had seen the amputated limbs and decapitated heads. They were still inside, more than a bit of rainwater having flooded in, and there was a ripe stench of decaying flesh.
“These would no longer be of use to Dippel,” Dupin said. “So we need not worry about him coming back for them.”
I showed him where I had last seen the ape, then we walked to the other side. Dupin looked up and down the wall of the warehouse. We walked along its length. Nothing was found.
“Perhaps we should find a way to climb to the top,” I said.
Dupin was staring at a puff of steam rising from the street. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.
He hastened to where the steam was thickest. It was rising up from a grate. He used his cane to pry at it, and I used mine to assist him. We lifted it and looked down at the dark, mist-coated water of the sewer rushing below. The stench was, to put it mildly, outstanding.
“This would make sense,” Dupin said. “You were correct, he did indeed climb down on this side, but he disappeared quickly because he had an underground path.”
“We’re going down there?” I asked.
“You do wish to save the world and our cosmos, do you not?”
“When you put it that way, I suppose we must,” I said. I was trying to add a joking atmosphere to the events, but it came out as serious as a diagnosis of leprosy.
We descended into the dark, resting our feet upon the brick ledge of the sewer. There was light from above to assist us, but if we were to move forward, we would be walking along the slick brick runway into utter darkness. Or so I thought.
It was then that Dupin produced twists of paper, heavily oiled and waxed, from the pack he was carrying. As he removed them, I saw the Necronomicon was in the bag as well. It lay next to two dueling pistols. I had been frightened before, but somehow, seeing that dreadful book and those weapons, I was almost overwhelmed with terror, a sensation I would experience more than once that night. It was all I could do to take one of the twists and wait for Dupin to light it, for my mind was telling me to climb out of that dank hole and run. But if Dippel succeeded in letting the beings from the borderland through, run to where?
“Here,” Dupin said, holding the flaming twist close to the damp brick wall. “It went this way.”
I looked. A few coarse hairs were caught in the bricks.
With that as our guide, we proceeded. Even with the lit twists of wax and oil, the light was dim and there was a steam, or mist, rising from the sewer. We had to proceed slowly and carefully. The sewer rumbled along near us, heightened to near flood level by the tremendous rain. It was ever to our right, threatening to wash up over the walk. There were drips from the brick walls and the overhead streets. Each time a cold drop fell down my collar I started as if icy fingertips had touched my neck.
We had gone a good distance when Dupin said, “Look. Ahead.”
There was a pumpkin-colored glow from around a bend in the sewer, and we immediately tossed our twists into the water. Dupin produced the pistols from his bag and passed me one.
“I presume they are powder charged and loaded,” I said.
“Of course,” Dupin replied. “Did you think I might want to beat an ape to death with the grips?”
Thus armed, we continued onward toward the light.
There was a widening of the sewer, and there was in fact a great space made of brick that I presumed might be for workmen, or might even have been a forgotten portion of the sewer that had once been part of the upper streets of Paris. There were several lamps placed here and there, some hung on nails driven into the brick, others placed on the flooring, some on rickety tables and chairs. It was a makeshift laboratory, and had most likely been thrown together from the ruins of the warehouse explosion.
On a tilted board a nude woman... or man, or a little of both, was strapped. Its head was male, but the rest of its body was female, except for the feet, which were absurdly masculine. This body breathed in a labored manner, its head was thrown back, and a funnel was stuck down its throat. A hose rose out of the funnel and stretched to another makeshift platform nearby. There was a thin insect-like antenna attached to the middle of the hose, and it wiggled erratically at the air.
The other platform held a cadaverously thin and nude human with a head that looked shriveled, the hair appearing as if it were a handful of strings fastened there with paste. The arms and legs showed heavy scarring, and it was obvious that much sewing had been done to secure the limbs, much like the hurried repair of an old rag doll. The lifeless head was tilted back, and the opposite end of the hose was shoved into another wooden funnel that was jammed into the corpse’s mouth. One arm of the cadaver was short, the other long, while the legs varied in thickness. The lower half of the face was totally incongruous with the upper half. The features were sharp-boned and stood up beneath the flesh like rough furniture under a sheet. They were masculine, while the forehead and hairline, ragged as it was, had obviously been that of a woman, one recently dead and elderly was my conjecture.
The center of the corpse was blocked by the body of the ape, which was sewing hastily with a large needle and dark thread, fastening on an ankle and foot in the way you might lace up a shoe. It was so absurd, so grotesque, it was almost comic, like a grisly play at Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. One thing was clear, the corpse being sewn together was soon to house the life force of the other living but obviously ill body. It had been cobbled together in the past in much the same way that the other was now being prepared.
Dupin pushed me gently into a darkened corner protected by a partial brick wall. We spoke in whispers.
“What are we waiting for?” I said.
“The borderland to be opened.”
Of course I knew to what he referred, but it seemed to me that waiting for it to be opened, if indeed that was to happen, was the height of folly. But it was Dupin, and now, arriving here, seeing what I was seeing, it all fit securely with the theory he had expounded; I decided to continue believing he knew of what he spoke. Dupin withdrew the Necronomicon from the bag and propped it against the wall.
“When I tell you,” he said, “light up a twist and hold it so that I might read.”
“From
that loathsome book?” I gasped.
“It has the power to do evil, but also to restrain it.”
I nodded, took one of the twists from the bag and a few matches, and tucked them into my coat pocket. It was then I heard the chanting, and peeked carefully around the barrier.
The ape, or Dippel I suppose, held a copy of a book that looked to be a twin of the one Dupin held. It was open and propped on a makeshift pedestal of two stacked chairs. Dippel was reading from it by dim lamplight. It was disconcerting to hear those chants coming from the mouth of an ape, sounding human-like, yet touched with the vocalizations of an animal. Though it spoke the words quickly and carefully, it was clear to me that Dippel was more than casually familiar with them.
That was when the air above the quivering antenna opened in a swirl of light and dark floundering shapes. I can think of no other way to describe it. The opening widened. Tentacles whipped in and out of the gap. Blue-white lightning flashed from it and nearly struck the ape, but still he read. The corpse on the platform began to writhe and wiggle and the blue-white lightning leaped from the swirling mass and struck the corpse repeatedly and vibrated the antenna. The dead body glowed and heaved and tugged at its bonds, and then I saw its eyes flash wide. Across the way, the formerly living body had grown limp and gray as ash.
I looked at Dupin, who had come to my shoulder to observe what was happening.
“He is not bringing him back, as in the past,” Dupin said. “He is offering Grimm’s soul for sacrifice. After all this time, their partnership has ended. It is the beginning; the door has been opened a crack.”
My body felt chilled. The hair on my head, as on Dupin’s, stood up due to the electrical charge in the air. There was an obnoxious smell, reminiscent of the stink of decaying fish, rotting garbage, and foul disease.
“Yes, we have chosen the right moment,” Dupin said, looking at the growing gap that had appeared in mid-air. “Take both pistols, and light the twist.”
He handed me his weapon. I stuck both pistols in the waistband of my trousers, and lit the twist. Dupin took it from me, and stuck it in a gap in the bricks. He opened the Necronomicon to where he had marked it with a torn piece of paper, and began to read from it. The words poured from his mouth like living beings, taking on the form of dark shadows and lightning-bright color. His voice was loud and sonorous, as we were no longer attempting to conceal ourselves. I stepped out of the shadows and into the open. Dippel, alerted by Dupin’s reading, turned and glared at me with its dark, simian eyes.
It was hard for me to concentrate on anything. Hearing the words from the Necronomicon made my skin feel as if it were crawling up from my heels, across my legs and back, and slithering underneath my scalp. The swirling gap of blue-white lightning revealed lashing tentacles, a massive squid-like eye, then a beak. It was all I could do not to fall to my knees in dread, or bolt and run like an asylum escapee.
That said, I was given courage when I realized that whatever Dupin was doing was having some effect, for the gash in the air began to shimmer and wrinkle and blink like an eye. The ape howled at this development, for it had glanced back at the rip in the air, then turned again to look at me, twisting its face into what could almost pass as a dark knot. It dropped the book on the chair, and rushed for me. First it was upright, like a human, then it was on all fours, its knuckles pounding against the bricks. I drew my sword from the cane, held the cane itself in my left hand, the blade in my right, and awaited Dippel’s dynamic charge.
* * *
It bounded toward me. I thrust at it with my sword. The strike was good, hitting no bone, and went directly through the ape’s chest, but the beast’s momentum drove me backward. I lost the cane itself, and used both hands to hold the sword in place. I glanced at Dupin for help. None was forthcoming. He was reading from the book and utterly ignoring my plight.
Blue, white, red, and green fire danced around Dippel’s head and poured from its mouth. I was able to hold the monster back with the sword, for it was a good thrust, and had brought about a horrible wound, yet its long arms thrashed out and hit my jaw, nearly knocking me senseless. I struggled to maintain consciousness, pushed back the sword with both hands, coiled my legs, and kicked out at the ape. I managed to knock it off me, but only for a moment.
I sat up and drew both pistols. It was loping toward me, pounding its fists against the bricks as it barreled along on all fours, letting forth an indescribable and ear-shattering sound that was neither human nor animal. I let loose an involuntary yell, and fired both pistols. The shots rang out as one. The ape threw up its hands, wheeled about and staggered back toward the stacked chairs, the book. It grabbed at the book for support, pulled that and the chairs down on top of it. Its chest heaved as though pumped with a bellows.
And then the freshly animated thing on the platform spat out the funnel as if it were light as air. Spat it out and yelled. It was a sound that came all the way from the primeval; a savage cry of creation. The body on the platform squirmed and writhed and snapped its bonds. It slid from the board, staggered forward, looked in my direction. Both pistols had been fired; the sword was still in Dippel. I grabbed up the hollow cane that had housed the sword, to use as a weapon.
This thing, this patchwork creation I assumed was Grimm, its private parts wrapped in a kind of swaddling, took one step in my direction, the blue-white fire crackling in its eyes. Then the patchwork creature turned to see the blinking eye staring out of the open door to the borderlands.
Grimm yanked the chairs off Dippel, lifted the ape-body up as easily as if it had been a feather pillow. It spread its legs wide for position, cocked its arms, and flung the ape upward. The whirlpool from beyond sucked at Dippel, turning the old man in the old ape’s body into a streak of dark fur, dragging it upward. In that moment, Dippel was taken by those from beyond the borderland, pulled into their world like a hungry mouth taking in a tasty treat. Grimm, stumbling about on unfamiliar legs, grabbed the Necronomicon and tossed it at the wound in the air.
All this activity had not distracted Dupin from his reading. Still he chanted. There was a weak glow from behind the brick wall. I stumbled over there, putting a hand against the wall to hold myself up. When Dupin read the last passage with an oratory flourish, the air was sucked out of the room and out of my lungs. I gasped for breath, fell to the floor, momentarily unconscious. Within a heartbeat the air came back, and with it, that horrid rotting smell, then as instantly as it arrived, it was gone. The air smelled only of foul sewer, which, considering the stench of what had gone before, was in that moment as pleasant and welcome as a young Parisian lady’s perfume.
* * *
There was a flare of a match as Dupin rose from the floor where he, like me, had fallen. He lit a twist from the bag and held it up. There was little that we could see. Pulling the sword from his cane, he trudged forward with the light, and I followed. In its illumination we saw Grimm. Or what was left of him. The creatures of the borderlands had not only taken Dippel and his Necronomicon, they had ripped Grimm into a dozen pieces and plastered him across the ceiling and along the wall like an exploded dumpling.
“Dippel failed,” Dupin said. “And Grimm finished him off. And The Old Ones took him before they were forced to retreat.”
“At least one of those terrible books has been destroyed,” I said.
“I think we should make it two.”
We broke up the chairs and used the greasy twists of paper we still had, along with the bag itself, and started a fire. The chair wood was old and rotten and caught fast, crackling and snapping as it burned. On top of this Dupin placed the remaining copy of the Necronomicon. The book was slow to catch, but when it did the cover blew open and the pages flared. The eye hole in the cover filled with a gold pupil, a long black slit for an iris. It blinked once, then the fire claimed it. The pages flapped like a bird, lifted upward with a howling noise, before collapsing into a burst of black ash.
Standing there, we watched as the ash dissolv
ed into the bricks like black snow on a warm window pane.
I took a deep breath. “No regrets about the book?”
“Not after glimpsing what lay beyond,” Dupin said. “I understand Dippel’s curiosity, but though mine is considerable, it is not that strong.”
“I don’t even know what I saw,” I said, “but whatever it was, whatever world The Old Ones live in, I could sense in that void every kind of evil I have ever known or suspected, and then some. I know you don’t believe in fate, Dupin, but it’s as if we were placed here to stop Dippel, to be present when Grimm had had enough of Dippel’s plans.”
“Nonsense,” Dupin said. “Coincidence. As I said before. More common than you think. And had I not been acquainted with that horrid book, and Dippel’s writings, we would have gone to bed to awake to a world we could not understand, and one in which we would not long survive. I should add that this is one adventure of ours that you might want to call fiction, and confine it to a magazine of melodrama; if you should write of it at all.”
We went along the brick pathway then, with one last lit paper twist we had saved for light. It burned out before we made it back, but we were able to find our way by keeping in touch with the wall, finally arriving where moonlight spilled through the grating we had replaced upon entering the sewer. When we were on the street, the world looked strange, as if bathed in a bloody light, and that gave me pause. Looking up, we saw that a scarlet cloud was flowing in front of the sinking moon. The cloud was thick, and for a moment it covered the face of the moon completely. Then the cloud passed and faded and the sky was clear and tinted silver with the common light of stars and moon.
I looked at Dupin.
“It’s quite all right,” he said. “A last remnant of the borderland. Its calling card has been taken away.”