“Yes, fool, I suppose it is.”
“Then I give you a gift, fellow slave.” Skrey shoveled a blob of feed up into Kreve’s face.
Kreve sputtered, stumbled back, blindly tried to raise his pike, but too late. The shovel blade swung sideways against his skull like an ax.
Kreve plummeted over the lip. No hand-holds now. Slick mucus walls. Skrey did not hear him hit the sea of bile...just a screeching cry fading to nothingness.
“Be free,” Skrey said.
The bottle of maximum strength aspirin sat on the top shelf of her locker. Also on the shelf, inside a paper lunch bag, was her boyfriend's cherished SIG- Sauer P-225 semiautomatic. Boy, would he kill her if he knew she’d smuggled it out of the house...not just tonight, but every night of the week thus far. But she had never taken it out of the bag, had returned it to its drawer each night when she got home. Lightly, she reached into the bag and touched the pebbled handle, the black metal. It had been a rebellious act, bringing this black blot into this white place. Like the panties she wanted to wear...
Roy, a plumber, owned his own house at twenty-six. Now he wanted to get married. He wanted children. Two and a half children, Jean thought. She did not want children.
“Why?” Roy had said. “Jesus! What kind of woman doesn’t want children?”
She couldn’t answer that. There might be many answers. A woman who simply did not care for those particular responsibilities? Who did not want to give away her life to others when she could be living it herself? A woman who did not see why she had to propagate a species whose worthiness of continuation was questionable?
Well, Roy had gone on, in essence, what do you want to do? What else is life for? To produce and reproduce. Like a good sheep. But Jean had once dreamed of traveling, of exploring, of being everything she could be, like they told you in school. Only, she had found in her twenties that you couldn’t be all you could be. You couldn’t really, ultimately, be what you wanted. There were limits. Walls. Society was bigger and stronger and had its own agenda. Oh, it sounded like a cop-out, even to herself...but it was true, wasn’t it?
The pain was so great in her head, in the agonized orbs she stared through, she doubted the aspirin could help her now. Maybe if she took the whole bottle, it could help her. Cure her. Maybe then...
Instead, she removed the heavy paper bag from the locker. She slipped the chunky gun into the waistband of her pants, pulled her shirt down over it. No, its blackness didn’t show through. Good. She felt better. She would smuggle some personality back into the sterile department. A shard of identity, a piece of self, compacted like a collapsed star into a heavy black core of anger.
Skrey rode a feed conveyer belt most of the way to the First Orifice, jumped off before the crew there could spot him. The absence of the feeders at the Twelfth Orifice would have been noticed by now, but the Supervisor would not guess Skrey’s destination...
He worked his way into the forest of the Dreamer’s tentacles, immense trunks that stirred far above or flopped over, their tips almost brushing the floor of tough wrinkled flesh. Several times Skrey ducked behind a trunk as a cleaner crew moved by. At last, he reached one of the narrow cauterized tunnels leading to the headquarters of the explorers...
More ducking, here, more stealthiness; the explorers looked different enough for Skrey’s presence to be conspicuous. Finally, one explorer did ask his purpose. Skrey chattered, “I’m a feeder, off-duty, come to visit my friend Gret.”
Gret was not truly a friend. but the explorer was satisfied with this explanation and waved Skrey on.
Skrey wound his way deeper into the lair of the explorers., brushing past several more of that caste, muttering his same successful story a few times, until he entered at last into the Chamber of Portals. There were no guards at the entrance; no one had thought to enter this place before with questionable intent. Only once prior had Skrey come here, with a few other feeders and an explorer they’d bribed, just to look through the portals and marvel. Skrey had never forgotten. How could Kreve have suggested that freedom was an illusion? Every one of the round windows ringing this chamber hewn from flesh was a window on freedom.
This room was close to the outside of the brain of the Slumbering Master, and it was His mind that dreamed open the doors into these other worlds, these alternate realities. Some portals showed only seething fog, or writhing light. One showed the dark depths of an ocean. An ocean of water, not bile! Did Skrey have a self in that realm, and if so was it an intelligent being or a simple animal? Even living in that sea as a mindless animal, free to swim where it chose, would be liberation...
But he had only ever felt the connection to the female who wore white, the soft-fleshed being in the world of humans. It was her world he wanted to escape to. It was with her he wanted to be.
She would never have met a being like him. She would be horrified, but he would persuade her to accept him, and help him establish a life in some safe region. And she would help him. She would realize their connection. That she and he were the same many-faced soul.
An explorer entered the chamber and Skrey pivoted his head. He recognized Gret.
“I am told you are looking for me, feeder?”
Jean removed the tray from the carousel. She had not, however, paused the carousel. As though mesmerized, she watched it turn, a slow whirlpool, a vortex, drawing her in...
The gleaming glass parade of cartridges marched straight off the cliff edge to dash themselves on the floor between Jean's feet.
The amused/scornful woman outside the sterile department had come over to receive the tray but now began rapping on the glass, pointing at the carousel. Jean ignored her.
Peripherally, Jean saw her boss join the woman. He rapped more loudly on the glass. Still she didn’t look. The cartridges became a small jagged pile, even across her booty-covered sneakers. A blur as her boss moved from the window.
This carousel was her life. Circles. It took her nowhere. And she was just one of many cartridges. No. Not just any. One of the ones with a dented cap. One of the ones with an air bubble. One of the dangerous ones...
Skrey felt vaguely guilty smashing Gret with the wrench he had brought with him from the crane, but he knew the explorer would regenerate. Of course, before he set upon him he had had the sense to ask, in a casual tone, which of the portals led to the world of humans.
More explorers came, responding to Gret’s shrieks. From the floor he pointed a limb at one of the portals lining the circular room. “He passed through there!” he croaked. “He must be mad!”
“He’ll be directed to his alternate!” cried a young explorer who had never journeyed into that place. “He will be revealed!”
“Don't worry,” Gret groaned, pulling himself up. “He won't be noticed.”
“Shall we go after him?”
“We don’t know who his alternate is, do we?” Gret shook his cracked, bleeding head. “He’s not worth tracking down, the crazy fool. He’s just a feeder.”
When the boss came in the room, fully suited, Jean heard his roaring over the roaring of the machine and the tinkle of glass. She turned to welcome him with a roar which blotted out his roar. A glittering brass shell leaped to join the cartridges. Another.
The white wall behind the boss was suddenly vivid with color. His pristine uniform became splattered with a deep beautiful red. He went crashing back, pinwheeling his arms. His eyes were wide and horrified in his goggles. Windows of the soul with the shades spinning. The lights went out in them as he dragged his color down the wall. White canvas splashed with paint; Jean felt like an artist.
Now she turned to fire the SIG through the window-wall. Confusion had already wiped the scorn from the woman’s face. Jean obliterated the potential for its return. The shower cap-like hair-covering the woman wore protected her hair from the blood.
Now the air outside communicated with that inside the sterile department. Oh-oh. The company wouldn’t approve of that. Jean peeled off her hood, t
ossed aside her goggles. She inhaled deeply and smiled, as if divesting herself of her mask was the most radical action she had taken.
She fired the next two bullets into the carousel’s control panel. It came to a halt, the last cartridges rolling off to shatter.
She heard screams beyond the window, saw darting forms. Termites exposed to the terrors of the world and scampering for fresh shelter, new rocks to hide under.
Jean placed the muzzle of the SIG between her eyebrows and hooked both thumbs over the trigger. She was sure the bullet would be the equal of her headache. It would end all her pain, in fact. It would sever her bonds, cut her tethers, and set her free.
Skrey floated through a vortex of blackness, of nothingness and allness, as if sucked down a whirlpool. A tunnel traversing space and time. He was drawn by some current, or propelled by the Master’s unending dreams.
Though this tunnel led to only one of the infinite realities, Skrey still had an odd consciousness of his own infinity. He felt, simultaneously, something of the existence of all his many parallel forms...an incomprehensible bombardment of sensations. Distantly, he sensed himself battling in a war. Crying, hopeless, somewhere else. Dying in some worlds...being born in a thousand others. It was exhilarating and terrifying. He was a bullet shot through the very clockworks of the wheel of life. He could never know all the manifestations of himself. Could never know himself in his vast entirety. Just the little piece that he was. That, and the woman he was rushing onward to meet.
Like yet another soul being born, he perceived a circular light ahead – opening like an eye onto his destination – and then he was through that portal. The portal closed behind him, was gone. The tunnel itself was gone. It had bored itself ahead to link him with his alternate self, and no one who sought to pursue him could know who in this world that might be. He had succeeded! He had escaped...
The light, as in his vision of this plane, was dazzling – blinded him. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust...and then what he saw dazzled him more than the light.
The monster Skrey gazed up at in awe was not so huge as the Dreaming One, would still be infinitely small in comparison, but towered nonetheless. Unlike the Master, this creature could be taken in by the eyes all at once...and Skrey recognized it as a human.
Had he actually been friends with Gret, the explorer’s knowledge could have spared him this shock of realization.
Skrey realized then precisely where the portal had deposited him. He stood upon the great supine form of his soul-mate. Was she sleeping, dreaming? The white-clad behemoth moved toward her, now bending. The horror of its visage! Could the Phantast Himself be so hideous? In terror, Skrey bolted for the nearest shelter. A forest of slim trunks he could hide in, reminding him of the Master’s far huger tentacles. On the way, Skrey crossed a shallow pond of red fluid, with a current as it spread. He traced it to its source: a raw orifice, freshly bored. The monster leaned close over his alternate self. Had it spotted him, minuscule as he was? Skrey took no chances. He scurried into that orifice against the tide of blood.
Time passed in alien quantities. Skrey burrowed himself a safe nook. No parasites large enough to threaten him appeared. He could tell his parallel self was lifted, moved, transported. By this time, he had guessed the truth. She was dead...
Poor mortal thing. But even in dying, she helped him find shelter. He only wished he could have communicated with her, known her...
He went on living in her. Feeding on her. He was alert to the possibility that her kind would burn or dissolve her, but they buried her far below the ground in a container, much as the Dreamer had been buried in His deep cavern. Skrey ventured out at last, saw the container would be hard to escape from, even small as he was...
... but it would decay, weaken, in time. Until then he had all of his other self to explore, and feed on. And when her nourishment ran out he would survive his hunger, as he was virtually immortal. One day, a hundred years from now or a thousand, he would make his way to the surface. See the open sky for the first time, and the stars at night. He was not concerned. He was patient. He was elated.
He was free.
Mren was a cleaner in the waste holes, hosing out the foul matter of the Phantast’s processed nourishment. It was the least enviable of the servitors’ positions, but she had put in for work on a feed team. It would be a wait, as she was a young servitor, only freshly born.
She was a servitor born from an egg, rather than cloned from a lost limb, but still she had a sense of a prior life. This was not unusual, she was told, when one had been born of regeneration, but rare for the egg-born. Still, not unknown. Her fellow workers told her that she might be catching a sense of a previous existence, a soul banished from one realm to find fresh expression in another.
This explanation soothed her somewhat, but it could be a very disquieting sensation. Memory fragments surfaced at times unexpectedly, shocking her. Whiteness, blinding, loomed in her consciousness. Strange noises, strange machinery. Jarring violence.
The most horrible sensation of all was that at times she felt a horror of herself, a self-loathing almost as sharp as panic. As if that other self had awakened in her to find itself transformed into a nightmare. A demon. Trapped in a new body it couldn’t run out of, escape from.
Mren’s work made her restless. And these waking dreams made her restless. But she told herself someday things would get better.
The Doom In The Room
Gentlemen, though you undoubtedly consider me mad as I sit here before you, and indeed mad I nearly went after my encounter with that hell-spawned Doom in the Room, I can only assure you of my sanity and describe to you, though the memory horrifies me to the bowels of my soul, the events which befell me in that hideous house of gambrel-roofed antiquity in ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts.
I was, on that May Eve, 1927, a professor of archeology at Miskatonic University, and had for the past year been searching for a mysterious crystal from the tomb of an obscure Egyptian Pharaoh, said to have come into New England through various strange sets of circumstances. My latest information had focused on a vacant tenement in my own Arkham. The crystal, black with red striations, cut into an odd, unearthly geometric pattern, was said to be a key to dark and hideous wonders, and, though naturally I did not believe such legend literally, I knew I must examine the mystic object at close quarters.
And so it was that I located, with no small difficulty, that ancient, moldering edifice in the more decayed and decadent quarters of Arkham, once glorious but now given over mostly to seedy, furtive foreigners. Some of these types eyed me with horror or bitter humor as I unlocked the door to that building with a key secured from the foreign owner with the guaranteed persuasion of a bottle of spirits.
The musty interior choked me and a strange mood of unholy, wretched, bone-cracking nightmare evil swept me, which filled me with a terror which I didn’t comprehend but which scared me. Luckily, some light came through the boards over the windows – enough to keep me from being totally engulfed in Stygian blackness, and I had my trusty pocket flashlight in my coat, along with my frayed clothbound copy of the infamous Necronomicon, which I had been reading on the ride here in the motor-coach to occupy my time.
No sooner had I closed the door behind me and taken several steps forward when I heard a strange sound above me which gripped my intestines in the wrenching jaws of stark maddening terror. It was a hard thump, as if something heavy had fallen, some accursed tripper in the dark, which rattled the rickety walls of the structure, followed by a kind of shattering sound, and the unmistakable exclamation, though hideously inhuman and muffled through the intervening floors, of, “Oops!”
I gathered my wits, and steeled myself, my professional curiosity as yet the equal of my weird and nameless fear, and drawing forth my trusty pocket flashlight, mounted the moldering staircase which took me higher into the bowels of that hell- haunted ruin.
At the first landing I took another moldering, stench-ridd
en flight, and at the second landing a strange sight lay before me. On the moldering floor of the landing lay an odd chunk of crystal, black in the beam of my light...with red striations. It lay just outside a closed door of rotting greenish wood. My excitement temporarily banished my fears as I knelt and retrieved this obvious fragment of my searched-for object, holding it close to my face to make out the weird, unearthly hieroglyphs plainly carved into its surface. And then another surprise took me – as I recognized the horrifying symbols as resembling some I had seen only that day in the fabled pages of the hideous text of the Necronomicon of that Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred!
Excitedly, gripping my trusty pocket flashlight in my teeth, the crystal fragment in one hand and the book in the other, I compared the symbols of the crystal to those on those hell-penned arcane pages. Yes! I was correct. Here were the very symbols, part of some weird incantation meant to be chanted at a ritual of untold nightmarish motivation. As I read the Latin translation of that ancient, mysterious language I muttered the words under my breath and moved what little I had of the infamous crystal in strange geometric patterns as dictated by the text. This mumbled chanting was difficult to accomplish with my trusty pocket flashlight gripped in my teeth.
Just then, there was a strange noise behind the moldering greenish door, inside the unknown room beyond, which made me start and look up and nearly drop the flashlight from my jaws...a sound as of something large and alive shifting its weight on creaking, moldering floorboards.
I slipped the crystal fragment into one pocket and the Necronomicon into another, took the flashlight in my left hand and willed myself to reach to the knob of that horrid closed door with my trembling right. I was not alone in that gambrel-roofed haunt of ancient horror, and I knew I must confront my unknown companion face to face.
My uncertain hand closed on the cold knob – too late to turn back now – and twisted it until it clicked, and the door opened inward. I pushed it away from me, it swung on its creaking hinges, and I moved the beam of my flashlight into the room.
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