Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  The things behind him are forgotten, and, as if they are driven back by some invisible barrier, or as if it really has been his attention, however indirect, that held them here, the sounds of their pursuit cease. Or, was it ever really pursuit? Were they herding him here?

  What would he call the structure that he sees before him, this extruded building of green stone with its soaring towers and many gaping windows, if he saw it in the waking world? A castle, a tower, a house?

  There have been countless attempts to map the Labyrinth, and even more to explain it. Is it the first step of an afterlife, a tiny taste of death that we get each night when we close our eyes? Is it a representation of something from the collective unconscious, an enormous symbol housed in all our psyches? Is it a literally just the maze of our own neurons? These were things Kendrick never thought about, not outside the Labyrinth and certainly not within it, but he thinks about them now.

  What does it mean, this structure? No map of the Labyrinth has ever found its center. No rider, no dream hound has ever come this far and returned, at least, not that he’s ever heard of. In the mind of every sleeping man and woman, a maze, and in the center of the maze, this place. And inside this building, he knows with that same faultless logic, McCabe.

  Without hesitating any further, he goes through the front door.

  ***

  Inside, the house is like a castle, though strangely sparse and unfurnished. There are no guttering torches in sconces on the wall, but it isn’t dark, either. The green stone seems to provide its own illumination.

  When he passes windows and looks outside, what he sees isn’t the Labyrinth, and that doesn’t surprise him. Out one window massive stormclouds gather into an anvil-shaped thunderhead, crackling with multihued lightning. Out another, he looks down upon a misty valley, where golden statues nestled in peaks watch some kind of gladiatorial game on the distant floor below.

  He walks here as he walked in the Labyrinth, one foot in front of the other, keeping his mind focused always on McCabe. This house isn’t separate from the Labyrinth, he knows. It’s part of it, maybe the greatest part, and here, more than ever, he must be very careful.

  He tries to clear his mind of expectations, and so he is surprised when he suddenly stops walking. He’s standing in the doorway to a room. At first glance it’s not different than any of the other rooms he’s passed, but then it is. It’s furnished, with a fireplace and a single high-backed chair, and the window in the far wall is covered with a thick, velvet curtain. Kendrick stands in the doorway for a long moment, holding his breath, and then he steps inside.

  “McCabe,” he says, because he knows that McCabe is sitting in the chair, turned away from him, facing the window. He knows in the same way he’s known all along which way to turn his feet to find this place.

  There’s no answer, not right away. Instead, the figure in the chair stands slowly and turns to face him.

  In the waking world, Kendrick isn’t a handsome man. He was once, when he was young, but a poorly-healed job of plastic surgery done to repair a face mangled by a broken bottle left him much the worse for wear. In the dreamland, though, he has greater control over his features, and he always looks as he did when he was a young man, the way he still sometimes sees himself in his own dreams.

  Kendrick has never seen McCabe in the Labyrinth before, and he had never thought to ask what the other man looked like here. He’s surprised to see his friend looking old, worn, tired beyond his years. His hair, which is still black in the waking world, is gray here, and wrinkles of worry mar his eyes. He looks, Kendrick thinks without being able to stop himself, like a man who might welcome death.

  “I had hoped they wouldn’t send you,” McCabe finally says, when they’re facing each other across the suddenly small room. “Though I knew they would. And, to be honest, once I failed the job myself, I needed them to, because I knew there was no one else I could trust.”

  Kendrick hasn’t rehearsed the lines he’ll say now. He’s kept them out of his mind, just as he keeps everything out when he’s inside the Labyrinth, everything except the thought of his quarry. “Why?” he asks, and he’s surprised himself by the notes he hears in his voice, the betrayal, the hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” McCabe says. He doesn’t step forward, he stays standing by the chair, and Kendrick can see the effort it takes him not to turn his eyes back toward the curtains. “I suppose I should have come to you first, but I wanted to spare you. I see now that I couldn’t, that no matter what I did you’d have found your way here sooner or later. I wish I could have, though, that there’d been a way. Now, more than ever. Now that I know what you would do for me, how far you’d go.”

  Kendrick feels like he should be confused by what McCabe is saying, but it makes a strange kind of sense. McCabe learned something. Of course he did. Something that he wanted to keep secret. But men like him and Kendrick were in the business of finding secrets, of running them to the ground, even in places like this, places made of secrets. So he tried to hide in the one place he knew that no one, not even dream hounds, could track him: death.

  “You should have told me,” Kendrick says, taking a step forward. “I could have helped. I could’ve protected you.”

  McCabe shakes his head, takes a step back to match the one that Kendrick has taken forward, which makes him freeze. He’s made a mistake, he realizes. He’s misunderstood something.

  “I’m not protecting the secret, Kendrick,” McCabe says sadly, and Kendrick can see that there are tears in his eyes, this man who he’s seen shot, who he’s seen kill, and never seen shed a tear. “I was protecting you. But I can’t, not anymore. You’re here now, and even if I could make you leave without explaining, without showing you, you’d come back. Again and again, until you found out. Wouldn’t you? Even if I asked you to leave it alone? Even if I asked you to walk away?”

  “I’d try,” Kendrick says, softly.

  “But you’d fail, yes?”

  A nod.

  “I know. I would, too, if our places were reversed. I’d come here, eventually, to see what it was that had taken you from me. So I’ll show you, I will, but you have to promise me something first.”

  Kendrick nods again, knowing already that he’s lost somehow. Lost a friend and more than that. “Anything,” Kendrick says, and McCabe tells him the secret, and then he pulls down the curtains and shows him.

  ***

  The men guarding the two bodies are bored. It’s been three hours since Kendrick plugged into the machine and dropped away from the waking world, and since then they’ve had nothing to do but stand and wait. There’s nothing here to guard, not really, but their jobs depend on them staying, so they stay. The technician who monitors the readouts on the dozens of screens connected to McCabe and Kendrick is asleep in a chair. One of the guards stares out the big picture window, the other plays solitaire on his phone. Neither is prepared when Kendrick suddenly wakes up.

  Normally, riders coming back from the Labyrinth are sluggish, half-drunk from the things they’ve seen, their senses still attuned to the dreamland. But Kendrick is a professional, one of the best, and he’s gotten accustomed to acclimating quickly. He’s on his feet before the machines can give their warning beep, and he’s crossed the room before the guard has even looked up from his phone. Before the technician has come awake, Kendrick has the first guard’s gun out of his shoulder holster and is using it to kill the second guard, whose phone drops to the floor and shatters. The first guard tries to elbow him, but Kendrick steps back, faster than he looks, and shoots the guard twice, once in the back and once in the side.

  If the technician hadn’t been asleep, he might have had time to run. Might have made it as far as the door of the hotel room. But as it is, by the time he’s gathered his wits enough to be afraid, Kendrick is already standing over him, his finger already squeezing the trigger. Then he walks over to McCabe and begins unplugging machines. McCabe will die on his own, given time, without the machines to keep him
alive, but there will already be more men coming, and neither of them has that much time. Kendrick touches his friend’s cheek, puts the gun under his chin, and pulls the trigger.

  The door of the hotel room is already locked, but he pushes a chair under the handle to slow the men who’ll be coming to break it down. Then he walks over to the window and looks out and down, down all those many stories to the street below. He could do for himself the same way he did for McCabe, and he will, if he has to, but he wants a few more minutes first. He can hear the men out in the hallway already, hear their muffled shouts and the banging on the door. It won’t be long until they’re inside. He looks down at the gun in his hand.

  Three shots are enough to shatter the window, and then he steps out. For a moment, he’s flying, flying as he sometimes does in his own dreams, and then he stops dreaming for good.

  ***

  “We’re so goddamned arrogant,” McCabe had said in that room in the heart of the Labyrinth. “We think we’re the masters of this place, the makers of it, that it sits out here for our entertainment, our enlightenment, our edification. But we’re fools, and we’re wrong. That’s the secret, Kendrick, just that.

  “Look at this place. Look around. It doesn’t seem familiar, does it? This isn’t something we made with our thoughts, our wishes, our prayers. This place is a dream, of course it is, what else could it be? But it’s not our dream.” And here he had pulled down the curtain, torn it from the wall, and Kendrick had felt himself carried to the window to look out across a vast expanse, like an alien planet, with hillocks that darted at the movement of the eyes beneath, and vistas that rose and fell with gigantic breath. He had seen the great, dreaming, cyclopean thing, and he had finally understood.

  Author’s Notes:

  I don’t write a lot of science fiction, so when the call came to do something for Future Lovecraft, it took me a while to hit upon an idea. After several false starts, “The Labyrinth of Sleep” finally came together when I thought of combining Lovecraft’s Dreamland stories—which I love, though they seldom get much attention, even in the Mythos-drenched world of today’s weird fiction markets—with the dream-entering technology posited by movies like Inception and The Cell.

  While what I set out to write was a Dreamlands story, though, the aesthetics of the titular Labyrinth and the castle at its center probably owe more to William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland—and maybe especially to Richard Corben’s graphic novel adaptation of same—than to anything Lovecraft ever did.

  Lovecrafting

  “The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.”

  —Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft

  It’s a scene straight from the pages of one of Gordon’s earlier, more lurid stories. The graveyard scene. Dana and Conner as the latter-day resurrection men, tramping across the swampy ground in the pissing rain with a battery-powered lantern and shovels that they picked up at Home Depot.

  Dana’s hoodie is pulled up against the weather, her glasses spattered with drops that she can’t wipe away completely because her sleeve is too damp. She wears black leggings under her jeans for warmth, but you can only tell in the places where her jeans are worn through. The shock of purple in her otherwise brown hair is hidden by the darkness and the wet.

  Conner is a good foot taller than Dana, wide at the shoulders. If he were a character in a movie, he’d play basketball or football, be wearing a letter jacket. Instead, he plays chess and video games, can’t stand most sports, though he’s been known to do Frisbee golf on occasion. He wears a leather jacket that repels the rain, and one of the shovels is over his shoulder, while Dana carries the lantern and the other shovel. His jacket hangs unevenly due to the weight of his father’s Colt .45 in his right pocket.

  The lantern’s light is golden and seems very small in the graveyard, picking out just the edges of tombstones that seem to lurch out of the darkness in its uneven light, leaving everything else to shadow and rain.

  DANA: Fuck Gordon for this, y’know?

  From the tone of her voice, and from Conner’s non-reaction, you can tell it’s not the first time tonight that she’s said these words.

  DANA: Fuck him for leaving this to us, and fuck him for convincing us to do it in the first place. And you know what? Fuck him twice for knowing that we would do it.

  Conner doesn’t say anything, just trudges on ahead while Dana stops to wipe off her glasses again, this time taking them off and fishing under her hoodie for the edge of her relatively dry T-shirt.

  DANA: He really is the Danny Ocean of this little trio, and no mistake.

  CONNER: Frank Sinatra or George Clooney? Not that it matters much, I just call dibs on not being Sammy Davis Jr.

  DANA: Not really any good parts for me, though I’d take Julia Roberts over Dana Phillips right about now.

  CONNER: Maybe that’s what the next one of those movies oughta be about. Grave robbing.

  DANA: It’d be a change.

  Both of them stop, the banter dead on their lips. They’ve come to wherever they’re going, now. The lantern swings in Dana’s grip, the radius of light moving up and down, revealing the inscription on the stone before them, then hiding it again. In the light the stone is fresh, smooth and unblemished, and the name on it is clear: Gordon Phillips.

  CONNER: I guess this is where we start digging.

  DANA: Roshambo to see who goes first?

  from “The Transition of Jacob Cutter”

  by Gordon Phillips

  His own hands began to disturb him. When he looked at them now, he no longer saw them as hands. To him, they appeared to be something else, pincers or tendrils or things with sucking pads. The hairy claws of an ape, the digging appendages of a mole. He knew that he was wrong, that they were still just hands, and, when he concentrated, he could still see them as he knew they must look to others, but the other image was always there, superimposed, like a double exposure in an old film.

  They still worked like hands, he could still grab and manipulate things with them. Before Catherine left, he could still hold her hands in his, still touch her skin, but he always knew that the other hands were lurking there, beneath the surface, itching to break free as soon as he let his guard down.

  And worse, they no longer felt like his hands. Not just that he could feel their wrong texture, shaggy or squamous or chitinous or gelid, but that they never seemed like he was really in control of them. Oh, they made no overt move against him, but he still felt that it wasn’t he who governed them. It was like watching the hands of your reflection in the mirror, or, closer still, watching some stranger mimic your every movement. The stranger may do everything that you do, just as you do it, but there is always the knowledge that at any moment they may stop. That thought carried with it a subtle menace, somehow more frightening than if his hands had suddenly leapt up of their own accord to strangle him.

  He grew to hate his hands, and everything that he relied on them to do. He could no longer bring himself to type, and so deadlines came and went. He stopped using his phone, stopped checking his email. His computer sat dark and silent. He imagined cobwebs gathering on it. He lay in bed, curled into a ball with his hands clasped between his knees to still them, though he knew they weren’t moving. He thought about movies that he’d seen with possessed hands in them, and about the carving knife in the kitchen drawer, but he never went to get it, because he knew, even then, that cutting off his hands wouldn’t help.

  It was in him everywhere…

  A cheap-looking hotel room, two weeks earlier. Less a setting from Gordon’s fiction, but maybe a crime scene in a low-budget television police drama. There’s only one bed, with a confetti-colored comforter, and Conner sits on it, almost lounging, his foot hanging off, his sneaker brushing the carpet as he kicks his foot back and forth, back and forth. The light inside the room is buttery and dull,
the light that creeps in from outside is cold fluorescent blue, the kind of light that makes you think of morgues in movies. That’s the association that’ll stick.

  Dana paces in front of the big double window. The thick hotel drapes are pulled closed, but they hang slightly askew, letting the blue light in around the edges. Her circuit takes her from one taupe wall (the one with the TV and a generic painting of nightingales perched on branches) to the other taupe wall (with a matching painting, whip-poor-wills this time, and lamps screwed into the wall above the bed, casting that yellowy light). Back and forth, back and forth, like a mannequin on rails, like Conner’s foot.

  DANA: Why would he break into a cemetery?

  It’s the first time in a while either of them have spoken, they’ve been inhabiting their own frustrated silences, each doing their own mental pacing, but the question doesn’t seem to startle the quiet. Instead it’s so expected, it feels almost rhetorical.

  CONNER: You know why.

  DANA: Because of some stories? That doesn’t make sense.

  CONNER: Gordon never made a lot of sense.

  DANA: More than this. Did they tell you how he got hurt?

  Conner shakes his head, not long, just a brief motion, one side to the other, not interrupting the rhythm of Dana’s pacing, or of his own swinging foot.

  CONNER: Just that he fell, somehow, getting over the fence. A night watchman caught him, I guess, scared him off. Gordon ran, and the guy went after him. Gordon was trying to get over the fence, and then at the top, he must’ve just fallen. They think maybe he hit his head.

  DANA: It doesn’t make sense.

  CONNER: It made sense to Gordon. Sense enough for him, anyway. You read his email. He was going to prove something to himself, one way or the other. If the body was there, if everything was as it was supposed to be, then great, he was wrong, he was crazy, high-strung, over-imaginative, like everybody always said. If not, if he found what I guess he was expecting to find, then he was right, at least, and he had proof. Maybe not that anybody else would buy, but maybe enough for him.