by Michael Shea
“A workaholic, what can I say?”—but Estella’s face, watching him within, flashed with something. “Empty glasses!” she scolded. Did her hand tremor slightly, filling them? The Cejas’ eyes betrayed they felt their hosts’ unease, and conversation faltered. A gust blew icy spray beneath the canopy.
“Should we go inside?” Estella’s glance indoors seemed to aim the question at her husband, the keyboard having fallen silent. “Come inside guys!” Ray’s tone did not quite succeed in sounding hearty.
When they’d closed the door the rain roared, as in anger at their retreat. Ray had an ornately carven little box in his lap, and when they saw the long look he traded with his wife, the Cejas sat silent. He took something out of the box, a flat carven stone the size of his palm, and his hand closed slowly upon it.
“Is it…certain?” Estella almost whispered the words.
“It’s coming.”
Three slow-spaced knocks sounded on the door. Strange, those concussions—booming, and yet somehow far away. Slipping the stone in his pocket, Ray stood. “Please, my friends. Say nothing.” How slowly he rose, approached the door…and opened it.
Upon a thin man enveloped in a long black overcoat. His hat too was black, and broadly brimmed…and not a drop of rain dripped from either coat or hat. Between his black-gloved hands he held a little leathern pouch.
But oddest of all was his face, so thin and narrow, the nose a blade, the smooth cheeks tapered to a pointed chin, the satiny skin a lustrous dusky hue. It was almost the abstraction of a face, save for the eyes, so spherical and stark their whites, not quite human, Nolo thought, until he realized that wrap-around clear spectacles enlarged and distorted them. They seemed almost ceramic replicas of eyes, bulging from that exquisite meager visage.
“May I come in?”
His voice. Had Nolo heard the words…or thought them?
Ray smiled a tiny, wintry smile. “You are already…in.”
The visitor came one step inside. Nolo and Adrienne traded a look. The room had grown distinctly colder. “I am Mr. Ginunga. I dwell here now. I prize my solitude. I wish to purchase your respect. For my solitude.”
So elusive that voice! A voice to only half of Nolo’s brain, while to the other half its syllables were distant oboe notes, hisses of the falling rain, guttural fragments of faraway thunder. Mr. Ginunga held out his pouch.
Ray stepped forward. “We accept your offer.” As he received the pouch with one hand, his other slipped into the pocket where he had put the stone. Mr. Ginunga bowed, and turned, and walked out into the storm.
Ray closed the door and emptied from the pouch a heap of coins onto the coffee table. Gravely beckoned his guests. Old coins, only approximately round, each struck with a spindly little thicket of incised lines and triangles. Each with the heft of solid gold.
“These runes,” Ray said absently, “are Old Norse.” The Cejas looked from the marvel of the coins to the equal marvel of Ray’s lack of surprise. He was gazing in Estella’s eyes, and both were grave. She turned to them, “Nolo. Adrienne. You’re our friends. Are you our allies?”
“What do you mean?”
“We would tell you to pack up and leave here for good. To do it tomorrow,” she answered. “But we both feel we’ve met you for a reason. We face here a danger, great and dire. You will always be our friends, but if you are not our allies you must leave this place at once.”
Nolo looked into Adrienne’s eyes, seeing a confusion as complete as his own. Both of them returned their eyes to the gold, reached out and touched it again. “This has to be a quarter million dollars,” Adrienne murmured.
“Closer to half a million,” Estella said gently. “He actually thinks it possible we do not know what he has come to do.”
“And what—” Adrienne had to clear her throat. “And what is that?”
“We cannot tell you. Never if you leave. Not yet, even if you stay and stand with us.”
The young pair looked at the old. Stay and stand with us. Looked again in each other’s eyes. Nolo saw that Adrienne had made a decision and was hiding it until she saw his own. He looked again at the elderly couple. His father’s old joke about no lo hize—I didn’t do it—reflected the fact that Armando Ceja had not infrequently stood before judges. He had been a warm and truly affectionate father, but a rough youth had cursed him with problems, and Nolo’s dad was now upstate and would be there a very long time. Nolo had always felt that—young though he was—he should have helped his father somehow.
“We’ll be your allies. What do we do?”
“The first step,” said Ray. “The reason that he gave us that”—pointing to the coins—”is because we have this.” And he showed them the flat, carven stone. “We’ve arranged for…some help, and now we have to set them to their work. Get your coats.”
Adrienne’s eyes met Nolo’s again—both remembering the unearthly music they had heard in Mr. Ginunga’s words—and exchanged a final, disbelieving yes.
Through the rain’s drench they trooped…to the spot where Ray and Nolo had often stood above the leechfield. Ray held out the stone. “You must both touch it. When you do, our allegiance will become irrevocable.”
Adrienne touched it first. What met her palm was a raw mental voltage. Cyclopean vaults loomed over her, echoing with hoarse inhuman shouts, while upon a far jagged horizon titan towers hid their crowns in storm-rack black and scarlet torn by mighty lightning bolts.
The amazement on her face had only partly readied Ray when, in his turn, he touched the stone. And when he too stood reeling with the vision’s aftermath, the two of them watched Ray kneel and lay the stone upon the leechfield’s earth. His lips moved, but the rain’s roar obliterated his quiet words. Then he took up the stone, and pocketed it again. Estella looked at them and gently said, “Now you begin to understand.”
∴
“You wanna talk about it?” she asked, scrambling eggs.
“…Yeah…but what can I say?”
A long pause. “They were…dead serious.”
“Yeah. And that stone. What did you see? Like, landscapes?”
She nodded. “Is the stone some kind of hallucinogenic mineral? Or was it something we drank? Or maybe just the mood. That Mr. Ginunga. His voice…What’s that?” She meant a sound of heavy concussions outside. Nolo went to the window.
“Look, babe.”
When Adrienne looked out, she said, “Those fuckers!” She strode to the door, but when she tore it open, there was Ray, just raising his hand to knock. “Excuse me, Ray. I’ve got to talk to those assholes. They nearly ran me down on the road yesterday.”
“Please. Adrienne. We, uh, hired them to work in the leechfield. We already knew what was coming. We just didn’t know how soon. May I come in?”
He placed a packet of bills on their counter. “Here’s fifty thousand dollars. Part of Mr. Ginunga’s bribe. In the contest to come, we will need physical resources, and it may fall to you to get them. Can I ask you to come meet our…employees?”
Pocketing the cash gave Ray a sense of having entered virtual space, and wielding the mythic windfalls featured in some video game—an impression not diminished by the workers they encountered outside, two extremely big men, uniformed in grimy coveralls, both rotund, massively limbed, with bland, bulging countenances oddly similar.
The van and trailer Adrienne had dodged yesterday were parked down the slope, half engulfed in the vegetation. The men’s sledges were driving a line of steel fence-stakes across the upper quadrant of the field. Big though the workmen were, the casual, machinelike power of their hammer-blows was disorienting to Adrienne, like the breathtaking wad of wealth now in her pocket. Something big was happening, and had engulfed her and Nolo. The remonstrations she’d intended died in her throat. “Why are they doing that?” she asked Ray.
“Because their work will be…somewhat unsightly.”
They stood watching until the men had strung wire along the tops of the posts and draped a serie
s of big, filthy canvas dropcloths over the wire, crudely fencing the site. Their tread could be heard crunching down the slope beyond. A pair of snarling gas motors roared to life. Rattling power-tools were heard at work.
Adrienne shuddered. “Christ, it’s cold,” Nolo said, putting an arm around her shoulders. It seemed, all at once, that they stood in a current of icy air.
“Oh yes,” said Ray, turning around. “He’s at work too, you see.” They turned as Ray had done. They were facing the boarded-up windows of Mr. Ginunga’s apartment, not fifty feet directly behind them.
“What do you—”
“Please, my friends. Estella and I must go back to work. Things will…develop, and I’ll come to you when your help is needed.”
∴
Two days passed. When Nolo and Adrienne tried to talk over the mystery enveloping them, they had to give up. In a void of information, conjecture faltered. They sat at their screens and plugged away at their work. Fell asleep holding each other, smothering fears neither could give a shape to.
“You hear that?”
Out their window, fast cloud-shadows were alternately blotting out and unveiling the reddish-saffron light of late afternoon. Nolo’s head was cocked and, after a moment, Adrienne got it.
“They’ve stopped working.”
The workers’ power tools were silent. “How long, you think?”
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
In another half hour, Nolo shut down his computer. “I’m just gonna go and take a look.”
Astir in the wind, the vegetation of the leechfield had a strange distinctness in the violet gloom. Leaf and branch heaved and fretted, seeming to grow denser and lusher in the onrushing air. Awkward in the act of trespass, Nolo stepped round one end of the canvas screen.
The light was bleeding off fast. In the blur of the wind’s rummaging, he made out down there a trampled zone, a pool of shadow, power tools lying by…and more: a low, pale shape…no, two of them splayed out amidst the weeds. He trudged, tanglefoot, towards them.
Close, the shapes were startling, like trophies of some alien hunter in a different biosphere—big, filthy skins. They were, he realized, the scabrous overalls of the two workers, sprawling empty of their massive tenants. What was it that was so…disturbing about this shed gear?
Then another surprise. Just a little farther downslope, there was a ragged-rimmed hole, black and deep, perhaps six feet in diameter. He carefully neared it. Straight down into the earth it went.
He wanted to turn away, but found it hard to leave this scene. Hard to leave such a perfect strangeness, little though he liked it.
He stumbled more walking out than he had going in, but finally stood on the walkway circling his building. The cloudrack tore as it ran before the wind, and the first pale stars were glinting through the gaps. Did he hear something under the wind…? He must go talk to Ray and Estella, get some kind of grip on the situation. Had gone half a dozen steps in their direction when he heard a reedy voice behind him. “Help you? Help you?”
One of the workers, huge in his coverall. His broad fat face seemed twitchy, vaguely restive. His voice had a flutelike quality, though sketchy and broken.
“Well, I guess”—Nolo looked up at that vague massive countenance—“I was just wondering, um, how’s it going?”
“It going,” the man intoned, “…going.”
“Well…great! If you need any help, just let me know.”
“Need any help?” said the man. His face was so big. There was a strange ripply tension in it.
“Just let me know, yeah.” He went on toward Ray’s, though now felt he should be back with Adrienne, with these dazed giants wandering around the place. But in a few more steps she called his name, catching up with him.
“Did you talk to that guy? What are they doing?”
Still a little unnerved by the exchange, Nolo told her, “I’m not sure. That guy doesn’t talk too well.”
“Those two give me the creeps.”
“Yeah…” And in a hushed voice added, “More than Mr. Ginunga does?” They were passing his blinded windows.
“That’s a hard call.”
“Let’s go see Ray and Estella.”
Opening her door to them, Estella stood smiling, but grave. “We were just coming to you. We’ve arrived at a turning, my dears. I’m afraid…our danger is most urgent now. Now you must learn exactly what we face.”
“Let’s have some sherry,” called Ray from behind her.
The younger couple sighed, and went inside.
∴
Their elders spoke to them, gravely and at length. When they had done, all four sat silent, and the roar of the wind filled the room. Outside, the atmosphere was flirting with a gale.
When Adrienne finally found her voice, it came out so ragged and hollow it startled Nolo. “How far down is it?”
“Far,” said Ray. “Below the bedrock of this promontory. But farther down the way is…paved. The strength we will need to go down there will be in our spines, not our legs.”
“It helps—” Nolo had to clear his throat. “It helps, a little, that we have no choice.”
A measured knocking on the door. Its resonance was strange for so polite a tap. Ray stood up. “Say nothing. Do not cease to meet his eyes.” He opened the door. Mr. Ginunga did not quite come in—stood precisely within the doorframe. Indeed, centered as he was in that shallow plane, he seemed an almost two-dimensional being, and planar as he was, his image had a dire distinctness, as if he was some kind of taut seal rather than a man…as if the membrane of him might tear at any moment, and a feral darkness pour out from the fissure.
Mr. Ginunga delivered his pale smile to each of them in turn. His lens-swollen eyes were metamorphic as they moved, seemed different eyes for each face that they scanned.
“Forgive my knocking, good friends. Do you…have something for me?” The wind roared in his question’s after-echo. Nolo thought with awe that Ray must frame an answer to this terrible query. The way the word have gusted from Mr. Ginunga’s pallid lips. It seemed to say that everything they had belonged to him.
When Ray raised his voice in answer that act struck Nolo as pure courage. “I do have something,” Ray said. And indeed, within his hands’ prayerful clasp Nolo saw the edge of that carven stone. Ray lifted this clasped talisman up to the level of Mr. Ginunga’s eyes. “He Whom you know is with us.”
Their visitor’s bloated gaze grew more mutable—the gulfs of his pupils seemed to simmer. And now something slender moved down along the center line of his pale face. A thin blade of seething blackness was growing longer as they watched, dividing his countenance.
It widened till it filled the outline of his face, was his face, this sizzling black that spumed and misted round its rim. This nothingness beamed forth a lethal gravity, and Nolo felt that should he loosen one fiber of his will, his whole being must be plucked like chaff into its gulf.
And then the open doorway stood empty. The room’s light spilled out and faintly touched the heaving vegetation surrounding the Battery, all waving and shuddering in the freshening gale.
In bed, Nolo and Adrienne didn’t try to talk. Words now seemed pointless things. Just lay embraced, trying to wrap each other in sleep. And at length, Adrienne’s breathing grew slower, deeper in his arms, and Nolo lay holding her, and thinking of war.
All his life he’d been convinced that war, always and everywhere, even when inescapable, was a terrible mistake. Was convinced of it now.
But this…This was the war, the One War Eternal, the war in which all life, all light is always locked. This was Life’s war against the freezing dark of the universe, against the Void.
Ginunga-gap. They’d sought this dire name on their computers when they came back home. Ginunga-gap. One of the old Norse giants that dismantle the earth at the End of Days…huge, assaultive Chaos and Old Night.
∴
Ray had told them it would begin at high noon, and they must
make their descent before the sun touched the sea. The day was all glorious windy blue, broken cumulus cruising like galleons. The younger couple returned from town mid-morning, laden with the spelunkers’ equipment they were going to need. They met Ray and Estella before the workers’ dropcloth screen.
“You haven’t yet truly met our helpers,” Ray said. “Now you must see what they are. You must begin to accustom yourselves to the…denizens of the place we’ll be going.”
They passed around the screen. The mouth of the new-dug shaft yawned even larger, and the heap of spoil beside it was a broad hill now. The coveralls again lay crumpled and empty, but were now flung far out in the clearing, as if decisively discarded. They all sensed movement in the earth they stood on. Concussions and…a dragging friction, rising it seemed.
An indescribable mass erupted from the shaft. Its bulky skin was soil and broken stone and splintered timber, reminiscent of a caddis fly larva’s cocoon of pond debris. This elongate, rubble-crusted mass lurched up onto the spoil-heap, flexed itself, and shed all at once the stone, soil, and timber that enveloped it.
What was revealed was a slick supple mass equal to an elephant’s, but sinuous, and tapered at both ends like an immense slug. This creature whipped round and poured itself back down the shaft, the sun striking its viscid black flesh and revealing a bubbly texture within. Vanishing into the earth, it left behind a gust of ethereal stench, a vile fetor that the bright winds scoured away.
“Behold our shoggoths. The pair of them have merged to make a single tunneler of themselves. They are pure strength, pure will, and utterly tireless. But their work is great. We must be through, must be down there before the sun touches the sea. Because he, now, is going to start cutting his furrow in our world.”
Nolo had climbed the great heap of spoil and was poking through it. Here, among the soil and broken rock, were fragments of stonework surely two centuries old, perhaps of the Old Battery far beneath. Here too were fragments of the more recent understructure, the Haven of Health…a shard of lintel…a piece of panelling carven in oak-leaves and acorns. He looked to Ray.