Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  D’Urberville's eyes were becoming strained, but he was unable to blink. Was it the guttering candlelight or could the tendrils of that beard be seething with movement like plants stirring at the bottom of the sea? Could those black emotionless pupils be glittering, reflecting ember-like glints from the glowing candles? Could those two tentacles atop the head be flexing, as if to uncoil and reach out of the slab to him?

  “Sir d’Urberville,” Rosier whispered. D’Urberville heard the rustle of clothing, the clink of a belt. “Turn and face me.”

  Without questioning, still without blinking, d’Urberville pivoted his body fully to face his host. Now the candlelight glittered in his own eyes. Now he knew why he had not been destined for the priesthood. At least not in that order. His destiny had been awaiting him here, all along.

  Rosier had disrobed. His paunch was as heavy and pale as a satyr’s. He held his arms out from his sides, as if offering himself as a sacrifice or sacrament. He turned his back to d’Urberville.

  And, like a trained acolyte, d’Urberville knelt and kissed the base of the man’s spine. He remained on his knees while Rosier presented him his front. D’Urberville laid a kiss upon the man’s navel, and then allowed Rosier to help him to his feet. Rosier embraced the younger man, who did not resist, and they pressed their lips together. As he kissed Rosier, d’Urberville felt tears trickle down his cheeks. They were not tears of self-horror or self-pity, but rather of joy, for after all these generations – after his family had known such disgrace and dishonor in its past – the name of d’Urberville had once again been initiated into the Order of the Knights Templar.

  Cells

  “Dr. East, your wife has been calling for you.”

  “I know, Mrs. LeBlanc. I can hear her from here.” Noticing how the private nurse was trying to peer curiously past him into his workshop, Carl East closed the door so that only his face was wedged in the crack. Mrs. LeBlanc softened slightly. His face was not the face of an apathetic, unconcerned man. Rather, he looked so drained of color and energy she might have believed that his wife’s cancer was contagious. He seemed to be dying with her. It was no wonder he was apparently avoiding seeing her, now that the end was drawing close, now that Violet East was delirious with the cancer in her brain and morphine was being administered to alleviate the agony.

  “It’s difficult for you, I realize, but...”

  “So many divorces, Mrs. LeBlanc. So many unhappy couples even when they do stay together. But my wife and I...we truly love each other. We’ve been married seventeen years, and we’re still in love. She is my best friend, Mrs. LeBlanc. I’ve never been embarrassed to say that, even to my male friends. They’ve teased me. Laughed at me. But I think they’re jealous, because they don’t have that. Such a simple thing, to let someone close to you like that. But so few people will do it, for all our love songs and romance novels. And even when they do open themselves they sabotage it in so many ways. But we were happy. So happy. And we could have had so many more years. We’re only in our forties. We could have had decades. Why does this have to happen to us, when we had what was so rare? Does that seem fair to you?”

  “No sir...it doesn’t. I guess you can call it irony.”

  “I call it evil. And I won’t accept it.”

  The face wedged in the door looked odd – maybe frightening. Mrs. LeBlanc hesitated. She saw a computer monitor’s glow behind Dr. East, heard a steady liquid burbling. “I know it’s hard to accept these things, Dr. East, and it really isn’t any of my business, but I think she needs you right now...”

  “That’s the drugs talking. And the pain. It isn’t her She knows I have work to do in here. We discussed all this.”

  “It could be any time now.” She was getting a bit irritated again. Work? What kind of work? He needed to wake up and go hold his wife’s hand right now, help her on her way. If he didn’t, he’d never forgive himself when he realized what he’d done. “Denial is normal, I know, but...”

  “I don’t deny that my wife is dying. I just deny that Death has a right to take her.”

  Mrs. LeBlanc thought it odd that a Beckham University biology professor should make death sound like an entity. “Look,” she sighed, “I’d better get back to her.”

  “Please do, Mrs. LeBlanc. Please stay with her.” The anger that had made East’s face increasingly unsettling dispersed, and once more he simply looked exhausted by his tragedy. “Mrs. LeBlanc...do you believe in the afterlife?”

  “Yes, sir. I...just don’t know what it must be like.”

  East knew better than to believe her. She had no faith. Still, he told her, “My wife believes. She believes very strongly. And so do I. She got me to believing, despite the stance of those who do what I do. My wife is very widely read...and she introduced me to concepts of metaphysics my colleagues haven’t even heard of, let alone subscribe to.” East thought better of what he was revealing, and got to his point. “I believe there is a spirit, but that it’s simply a scientific reality beyond the scope of contemporary science.”

  “I sure hope so, Dr. East. It sure would be nice.”

  He would tell her no more. “Thank you, Mrs. LeBlanc. Now, please go to her.”

  Nodding, the nurse turned back toward the house. East’s workshop was contained within a converted stable adjacent to a vast barn she thought would make somebody a nice apartment, though she had never seen inside. On her way back across the cool night grass, she thought about what East had said. He was right; what he had with his wife was rare. She and her husband had just filed for divorce themselves.

  He couldn’t go up there. Couldn’t see what she had become at the last. And he couldn’t place the tank in the room with her, not with the nurse keeping constant vigil. He had explained this to Violet before – before she lost coherence – and she had understood. She had smiled to reassure him. “I’ll come find the tank. I'll know where to look. And you don’t have to be with me when I go, Carl, because I won’t be gone long.” She had had even more faith than he in this all along. Now she was crying out, but it was like Christ crucified and feeling forsaken. The suffering getting in the way. He only hoped that through the suffering, through the drugs, her subconscious, her will, her spirit held on to her conviction.

  Christ had cried out. But Christ had come back.

  “I don’t want you to see me like that anyway,” she had reassured him, then. She was down to ninety-six pounds, but the mass in the tank weighed one hundred and forty -- the weight she had carried before. Well, minus twenty pounds.

  It would seem a huge mass of protoplasm to anyone not familiar with the experiment. (He tried not to think of it as an experiment. That implied possible failure. This must not fail. It was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.) But East thought of the mass as tiny, compared with what he had grown and could have grown.

  He had been inspired by a series of experiments by Dr. Phillip White of the Rockefeller Institute, had duplicated much of them in his workshop and later in the barn.

  Like White, he had begun with a tiny wart of a growth taken from a tobacco plant. This, rather than the specialized cells of, say, a stem or a leaf. In a special solution of nutrients, he had allowed the cells to multiply, unhindered, unchecked. He dubbed the growth a “couch potato”, since it only had to sit and grow obese, without work, with no specialized identity. Undifferentiated cells with no purpose or responsibility other than to eat, to grow...

  The theoretical rate of multiplication for White’s cells – and East’s – was 10,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold over a forty week period. At this rate of growth, had White not cut away and disposed of the culture of cells, at the end of that forty weeks he would have ended up with a solid mass which would fill the solar system to its very rim.

  Theoretically speaking, of course. And given the vast nourishment necessary.

  But White had continued to dispose of most of the growth throughout the course of his experiments. East had followed suit; he was constantly pruning, slic
ing away, like a surgeon. Sometimes he imagined that he was cutting out Violet’s cancer, and burning it. But every day it grew back, and he had to do it again...

  Carl East had disposed of much of his growth. Though not as much as Dr. White had disposed of.

  East lifted his head with a small gasp. After one vertiginous moment he remembered where he was. The workshop. Shortly after the nurse had left him he had put his head down on his arms at his desk, fatigued.

  He was badly shaken from his dream. It had been awful. In it, it wasn’t Violet's spirit which found a new home in the blank mass of cells, in its tank of nourishment awaiting some purpose as a canvas awaits paint. It was the cancer which took over the mass...becoming a 140-pound tumor. After all, wasn’t that what the cancer wanted to do? Engulf and obliterate Violet entirely? And didn’t its mindless will now seem to be stronger than her own?

  He smoothed back his hair with his hands, his eyes falling on the spines of the books on their shelves above his desk. Some Violet had owned when he met her. Others they had sought out together, in preparation. Modern works by Colin Wilson, rare moldering texts by all but forgotten hands. Violet might once have been burned as a witch for possessing any one of these older tomes. What would East’s fellow professors think if they knew he had spent as much money acquiring two volumes of the eleven-volume Revelations of Glaaki as they would spend on a vacation to Bermuda with their healthy wives? And what would they think if they saw what those pages contained, the madness purported to be history and science? Why, they might well wonder, was there a bookmark in the pages which told of the origins and conjuring – the growing – of something called a shoggoth...an amorphous aggregation of cells that could be telepathically molded by those who dared to use these creatures as slaves?

  What would they think of the odd, Mayan-like tattoo Violet had copied from one of her books onto her belly, only last month? Vaguely East wondered what Mrs. LeBlanc must think of that strange spiraling design. Would she believe them both insane if he told her it was a doorway from which his wife would escape her poisoned flesh?

  He rose from the desk. His dream had so unsettled him that he felt compelled to go look in on the tank...

  The fluorescent lights of the barn came on with a hesitant flicker.

  East was reassured to see things in order. He checked the tank for the tenth time that day. Inside its glass coffin, the culture was an oblong blob of pale dough. It didn’t breathe. It didn’t pulsate. But it was life, in its most primitive state. It awaited specialization. Transformation. It awaited the strong vision of the artist and her paints. If only there would be enough of Violet left to be that artist...

  At least the mass wouldn’t fight her for dominion of its body. It had no consciousness, no sense of self; indeed, no self. It awaited self.

  East wandered the barn, smoking a cigarette. He peered into the other tanks and containers.

  There were other masses. Some tiny. A few in tanks as large as the one containing Violet’s clay. Some masses were larger. One of these was a huge mound, a white mountain of protoplasm, sitting in a puddle of solution in a child’s plastic swimming pool. As he passed, he stroked its slick, smooth flesh. In a few other pools were somewhat smaller masses. Other experiments. But these were also spare parts. If Violet couldn’t shape, sculpt, transform the designated lump of cells, maybe she could switch to another and try again. Or what if she did transform the mass, but it couldn’t sustain its integrity? She might need to constantly switch to a fresh vehicle.

  He hoped his wife would not have to live in one of these tanks, sit forever in one of these pools. No...she wouldn’t have to. He mustn’t let his faith falter.

  The spirit existed. Persisted. So many already believed that when the body died, the spirit went on its own. But why shouldn’t it have a new body to possess? One with no real life of its own to oust? A sort of reincarnation. Tibetan monks conjured up thought forms called tulpas, gave them life of their own. Why shouldn’t Violet conjure herself in this pliable stuff of life from which all life had originated in the first place?

  East heard her calling for him in the house, sobbed as he stood smoking his cigarette amongst his hulking, idiot crop.

  The pounding at the workshop door was, in East’s dream interpretation, the beat of a heart lurching violently to life. His ear was to his work bench as if to a cold chest listening for that throb. In his jolting awake he leapt to his feet, almost knocking back his chair. He rushed to the door, opened it to see the orange-pink of dawn glowing dimly around the head of Mrs. LeBlanc.

  She was breathless. “Dr. East...I’m sorry. She’s gone...”

  “Gone?” He gawked at her, disoriented.

  “I’m not sure when it happened. I fell asleep in my chair. She’s very cold; it must have been a few hours ago, at least. I’m sorry, Dr. East, I’m so sorry. But it must have been peaceful, for me not to have heard anything...”

  “Yes,” East said, snapping his head to look at his wall, racks and shelves cluttered with the paraphernalia of science and his books on the occult and mysticism. Beyond that wall was the barn interior. “Thank you, Mrs. LeBlanc. Please make the appropriate calls now, will you?”

  “Yes, sir, um...I will. But...don’t you want to see her?”

  “Not yet. Maybe later.”

  The nurse’s eyes dropped to his fingers, gripping the door edge as if to burrow into the wood. In addition, the claw hand was humming with vibration. She said, “Yes, sir,” and walked back across the sparkling morning dew, crushing and killing countless minute and primitive organisms whose passing went unnoticed and unmourned.

  He burst into the barn. Slants of pink-gold light were beaming through a few gaps in the high wood walls. A bar of this light lay across the giant mound of cells in its child’s pool, the rest of its flesh a cool shadowy blue. The tank was out of reach of the light, dark and obscure. Before going to it, East hit the lights...as if for the first time, the thought of seeing Violet lying in there naked, eyes open and waiting for him, terrified him. But even as he did so, he knew what he would see.

  The dough was not bread The stone unchiseled. The canvas blank.

  In its tank, the 140 pounds of tobacco plant wart slept serenely, dreamless.

  How could he have ever believed? How had he ever deluded himself, found faith in his delusions?

  The same way all those who dreamed of the spirit persisting, of heavens, deluded themselves. Out of denial, as Mrs. LeBlanc had said. Out of fear...

  It all ended in the flesh. In the jail of the cells, without escape or chance of parole.

  With a liberation of his full fury, with a long suppressed wail of loss and frustration, Carl East swept up a heavy spade from its nail in the barn wall and ran at the obese bathing mound first. The Lord of the Idiots. The Emperor of the Unknowing. Its flesh was slashed without bleeding under the thumping and whacking blows of the shovel. It didn’t seem to mind dying.

  East was soaked in sweat and hoarse by the time he turned on the tank. It was the last target he’d saved, and he hesitated. He hesitated. But then he struck. The glass shattered, the nutrient solution gushed free like liquor amnii...but this fetus had never formed.

  Mrs. LeBlanc heard his cries, and the smashing, but was too afraid to go see what he was doing. She’d rather remain with the corpse.

  Her cold flesh had been taken away. East laughed at himself, wagging his head. He nearly tipped the glass of vodka reaching for it. Finally, with Violet gone, he sat in the house. Finally he had held her hand, just as they were ready to take her. Once again Mrs. LeBlanc had been right; he should have come to her while she was calling for him. Now it was too late. She was gone forever. Even Mrs. LeBlanc was gone. Night was a mantle on his house and on what he once would have called his soul.

  She must have been calling out for him to tell him the truth she had realized toward the end. That there were not going to be any miracles. Only the mindless mind of Nature could shape primal matter – not the ingenuity o
r will of humans. Nature was pragmatic; maybe that was the key. With humans, passion hindered everything.

  There was a loud crash from outside the house. From the barn.

  East stiffened. It was surely something he had attacked with the shovel, toppling further. Or maybe raccoons or skunks had gotten in there, now that it was night; he remembered having left the barn doors wide, no longer concerned with secrecy.

  But another sound came, and East knew that no raccoon or skunk would be smashing things so loudly...

  He rose from the sofa. Vandals, maybe? Kids, having seen the barn open? He moved into the kitchen, shut off the lights and peeked around the lace in the back door window. The barn door gaped darkly. No ghostly flashlights in that cavern. He took up his own flashlight – and a short sword of a bread knife. Violet’s knife. She had been a wonderful cook. A gourmet. The foolish attention humans paid to such primitive functions as eating...and for what, in the end, all that effort, all that love? Only to lose it, only to die, only...

  East hushed his babbling mind as he eased the back door open. The night was cool and still – poised. He stalked away from the house, feeling vulnerable away from it, under the yawning black sky. His ears strained ahead of him like dogs on leash, but he heard no further sounds coming from the...

  “Carl...”

  Oh, God.

  East was spiked to his spot, transfixed from head to soles. It was Violet’s voice. The same mournful sob of a cry he had heard last night. But now it came from the barn.

  Part of him leaped up inside, elated. Part of him wanted to spin and bolt for the house. Caught between these extremes, he swayed, a sob of fear or hope or confusion snagged in his throat.