by Michael Shea
IX
They arrived at the basement expecting to find Close-out in progress, but there wasn’t a ladder or scaffold or chalk-stick in sight, and all the artists were standing on the unpainted half of the floor. A soft surf of conversation rose from them as they viewed their work.
The power of that painted image overcame the folded plane it occupied. It seemed one living mouth of stone, hinged jaws that opened on a seamless, lightless gulf.
Perfecting its power was all the cryptic embroidery of street-art that rimmed it, like the Testament of later ages cunningly scrawled across the stony palimpsest of old basalt. Rich in form and color as tidepool life, these incantations crusted those lips of stone and made the lips seem to speak an intricate litany of spells…
Rick wondered how long the four of them had stood there, because someone was saying, “It’s almost time,” and holding out to him a piece of scarlet chalk. It was the bony man who had risen that night at the meeting, to put them all directly on their path.
Rick took the chalk, stepped to the rim of the Portal, and knelt. Heard the man behind address them all. “When it’s signed, just follow me up to the balcony section. We should take our seats the minute he signs.”
Rick signed one of the painted stones, trying for some flourish. Rubicons should be crossed with flair and style. When he lifted the chalk from the upsweep of the tail of the ‘l’ of ‘Tindal,’ it became very much colder in the basement. He looked into the field of darkness within the painted stones and almost fell in, dizzied by the absolute gulf whose breath bathed his face.
Hands grabbed his shoulders, pulled him back. He was brought to his feet and turned. The whole crowd of artists was cohering into a promptly moving column behind the bony man.
They flowed behind him out of the basement…up the stairs…
X
It was a high balcony—almost opera-house high. The artists drank in the scene below.
The theater, while richly appointed, was somewhat surprising, was somewhat antique for the technology expected here. The seats—practically armchairs—were upholstered in burgundy velvet, but they formed a conventional, gently banked array, as in a movie theater. And they faced a stage, of gorgeous blond oak, but a stage, backed by high, closed red curtains.
The well-dressed potentates, or potentates’ viceroys, who were already filtering to their seats below registered the quaintness of this venue. They exchanged smiles and words of urbane perplexity, displaying their expectation of something far more futuristic, but sharing too the thought that perhaps some touch of retro humor was intended.
But seats were quickly filled, the people settled, laptops appearing here and there. This audience, though its air was easy, was eager. This audience was drawn.
The brushed-chrome sconces on the lusciously fauxed walls (a delirious mix of tan and silver that seemed to dissolve the real world outside as if in a gentle sandstorm) dimmed. But, though darkness settled, the seats had little lap-lights in their arms, and, winking on, these made a dim starfield of the darkened seats. And now the lit stage dominated the theater…
Like a dwarf emerging from the titanic red curtains, Chet Shugrue walked out to stage-center.
The man was made, and dressed, for center stage. He instantly commanded all attention. He didn’t speak, but with a meaning smile he spread his arms out wide at them. The audience instantly understood. The gesture said: Look at you! The richest and best, together here! What more could be said? He displayed them to themselves, inviting their self-celebration, reminding them of their power, and thus of his own, in gathering them all here. A murmur of appreciation rose from the crowd.
“You have decided to come,” he said. His voice was easy-intimate, and yet it filled the hall. “You’ve decided to come on the chance that this just might be an epochal moment. You were right. It is. You will be buying stock, right where you sit, and pretty soon—that’s all I’ll say. Why should I waste time on promo, with a product like you’re going to experience?
“But. There’s always a ‘but’ attached to a fortune, isn’t there? But. Before we embark, I must speak for my Principal. I must tell you what he…asks me to tell you. He bids me tell you that before this presentation’s done, you will know him. Will know him so completely, there will be no room for even the slightest doubt of his greatness in your minds. And I am to ask you, before we embark, if there are any of you who object to this stipulation.”
Now this was surprising. You could see the lap-lit audience looking at one another in the gloom. Several moments went by, and Chet’s silence became as fascinating as his voice had been. The crowd studied him, intrigued by the cryptic proposition he had just produced. But no one of them could find anything to say.
“Well,” smiled Chet. “Qui tacuit consentit. Why delay then?” He turned his back on them and walked to the curtains behind him. Stepped through and faced them again, only his head now visible. “My friends, behold!”
Then he vanished, and so did the theater. Except for the lighted empty stage, the theater had disappeared. The audience, with their dim-lit laps and their black ties, sat amidst the galaxies. Sat in deep space, their banked seating like a fragmentary raft that sailed the spherical infinitude of space and stars. Sitting there with nothing but time and space between their bodies and the galactic clockwork, the audience knew—without dying of it—the absolute grip of Absolute Zero. On their shadowy raft, with the lit stage for a kind of prow, they sailed immensity together. They gazed upon—above and to all sides of them—the tilting discs of stars, and saw the wisps of finer stars their slow spin trailed, like outflung gauzy scarves…
Some of them emerged from their awe before others. From somewhere on that interstellar raft, the faint, feverish clack of a keyboard arose. Several more instantly awoke…and then it became a soft roar, a gentle plastic downpour amid the perfect silence of the fleeing galaxies On that little raft of floating theater seats, thousands of millions of dollars changed…hands.
From every laptop these dollars, these valuable objects, flowed into one Account in one of the banks of one of the cities of one of the continents of one of the planets of one of the trillion trillion stars exploding in perfect silence all around them.
To the audience of this audience, the artists up in their high balcony, while their breath was collectively taken by this grandeur, the revelation of it wasn’t as surprising, and the awe it bred was already part of their minds and hearts. Among this hyper-audience, a ripple of knowledge moved. They all knew that this Account was a Dark Name, a syllabic cipher, an echoic whisper within the catacombs of San Francisco finance. It was a capacious Account. They knew it had room and to spare for that torrent of wealth.
For the financiers, this was the longed-for efflux. You could see the stir of them feeling it on their shadowy raft. These gathered potentates had come to be squeezed, had come wanting to be squeezed because money shrinks when it’s not poured into the whirlpool of new-born money. They’d come to be squeezed to be augmented. And having just poured out their candidacy for membership in this mighty river of wealth at whose banks they’d been gathered, they sent up a soft sigh of unanimous relief.
Now they would flow with this stream and, allied with its might, carve out whole new landscapes from the earth, whole new domains and ownerships. And this was the universe they’d acquired, not just the world. They’d all just hit the Mother Lode.
Many of them knew in that moment Gawain’s vision when he beheld the Grail. This was the Cosmic G-Spot: the conjunction of a timely investment with a global revolution. Rockefeller with Oil. Gates with Software. This, but precisely, was one of those.
And thus every investor in those seats knew as well that egoless humility all humans feel when they stand contemplating the colossal architecture of Time and Space. The last of the clacking had ended. They all sat resonating with the act of allegiance they had just performed.
And that was when, as one, they felt the sudden presence of the Entrepreneur, the Holder of this Acco
unt into whose bottomless wealth they’d just disgorged their holdings. The Holder of the Account hung just below them in the black gulf.
They felt him as an immense subjacent gravitational mass. They felt the tug of a leviathan hanging just under the keel of their collective consciousness.
And his sudden presence gave them all a wonderful moment of childhood.. It was that Daddy feeling—that the grand, glorious, but frighteningly vast muchness and suchness of the world was mediated for your little self. That Daddy’s greater, loving mass hovered between you and the immensity, a loving canopy of concern, a big ally in the bigness of it all.
And feeling this vast Daddy beneath them, they really felt their true dimensions for the first time, really saw the galaxies then. Look at them! Each galaxy a titanic white pool of Time. It would take whole planetary lifetimes to cross the white velvet, the frost-spuming whirlpool, of even the smallest disk, tilted like a little white cog fleeing some factory explosion, way out there amidst a cluster of similar little outflung cogs, that whole little cluster whole stellar lifetimes distant from themselves…
It made them rejoice for this big, knowing nearness, this planetary bulk invisibly beneath them.
But this was strange…their raft of seats had just…shuddered. Hadn’t it?
And then the raft rocked. The curtains, three stories high, convulsed and vanished. The Portal’s annulus of stone replaced them, its throat a second gulf within the universal abyss. A huge mass erupted from the Portal and settled, the stage exploding to splinters beneath it.
It was the beak of an immense cephalopod. The valve of flesh that ringed this beak was a horror in itself—green-gray, elephantine folds of skin. Beneath its millennial encrustations of barnacle and moss and oceanic weed, the flesh itself was that stern integument of supple stone that clothed the first gigantic things that lived, after the blown stars cohered, and let life be.
But the beak! This crescent megalith gaped wide. The arcs of its cutting edges were eroded, flaked, and splintered, the damage mossy, eons old, testifying titanic prey dismembered when Life was young. Glaciers had crossed these bony mouthparts and melted away. Populations had perished within them.
Gaped wide, and a gust welled out of it—as pure and razor-cold as space, but laced with ancient carnage of a thousand races. And after this whelm of giant’s breath, tentacles erupted—brute cables of sinew as they disgorged, but swiftly branching, slimming, as they leapt like damburst down into the audience, so that they hit the financiers in a spray of greenish filaments.
Rapt, the artists watched the worming weave flood the seats below and pierce the body of each potentate. Their flesh glowed with these penetrations, their hands and necks, their startled faces all nimbused by a faint, unearthly green.
The beak stirred, and a convulsion rippled down its multibrachiate tongue. An utterance it seemed, a soundless syllable of command.
The audience received it, and, without rising from their seats, they erupted. Their arms shot up as if in acclamation, their faces strained, necks cracking, toward the stars. Their very bones grew within them, their flesh swelled and twisted, brutal muscles hinged their gaping jaws. Then all their eyes blew out.
The exploded tissue, like little pale novas, swelled thinning from their orbits, drifting up into space as new eyes flashed beneath their deep-shelved brows: slash-pupiled eyes like merciless emeralds. Slender tentacle-tips sprouted sinuously from their mouths.
For a long moment, that snake-field conjured from their throats gently wavered and danced, a reptilian unison, a wordless assent.
And then, within its bony gates, the tentacular efflux shuddered and began to recoil. The tendrils were snatched back down into the audience’s jaws, snatched from the shirtfronts and bodices they had pierced, and re-knit as they withdrew into the massive cables that had first erupted.
The beak engulfed these and thundered shut. The mighty concussion shattered the Portal and the abyss it framed as if both were painted glass, and the monstrous mouthparts vanished within the glittering curtain of fragments.
The lights came up. The audience, the theater, the stage were all themselves again, and on the stage stood Chet Shugrue once more. The only trace of strangeness was the audience’s utter silence, their perfectly identical postures of full attention.
“Friends,” Chet smiled, “that’s it. You’ll all be far, far richer soon. We’ll be in touch.”
The investors rose. A companionable, enthusiastic murmur rose from them as they trickled to the aisles, and streamed from the theater.
XI
It was late afternoon a week later. In the loft of Death Groan Comix Rat and Rick—separately, of course—were drawing what had happened. Naturally the narratives were tweaked, the characters transformed—both of them mutating reality into art, all that. But in essence they were both drawing what had happened. They avoided seeing one another’s work. They would share when each had decided he was done, but not till then.
Rick refused to have a phone at his drawing table, so it was Rat’s cell phone that chirred. Rick inked away, hearing Rat murmur into the phone, but listen far more…
Rat too went back to work. “That was Zed,” he announced. “They did it. Chet’s Principal bought MOMA.”
“Whoa.”
“A couple of skyscrapers too—she wasn’t sure which ones.”
Their pens scratched through a thoughtful silence. There were so many things that might be said between them…and which they had learned there was no point in saying.
“One thing’s sure,” Rick offered. “There’s some big commissions headed our way.”
“You got that right.”
• FAT FACE •
They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings…
— Howard Phillips Lovecraft,
"At the Mountains of Madness"
When Patti came back to working the lobby of the Parnassus Hotel, it was clear she was liked from the way the other girls teased her and unobtrusively took it easy on her for the first few weeks while she got to feel steadier. She was deeply relieved to be back.
Before she had to go up to State Hospital, she had been doing four nights a week at a massage parlor called The Encounter, of which her pimp was part owner. He insisted the parlor beat was like a vacation to her, because it was strictly a hand-job operation and the physical demands on her were lighter than regular hotel whoring. Patti would certainly have agreed that the work was lighter—if it hadn’t been for the robberies and killings. The last of these had been the cause of her breakdown, and though she never admitted this to Pete, her pimp, he had no doubt sensed the truth, for he had let her go back to the Parnassus and told her she could pay him half rate for the next few weeks, till she was feeling steady again.
In her first weeks at the massage parlor, she had known with all but certainty of two clients—not hers—who had taken one-way drives from The Encounter up into the Hollywood Hills. These incidents still wore a thin, merciful veil of doubt. It was the third one that passed too nearly for her to face away from it.
From the moment of his coming in, unwillingly she felt spring up in her the conviction that the customer was a perfect victim; physically soft, small, fatly walleted, more than half drunk, out-of-state. She learned his name when her man studied his wallet thoroughly on the pretext of checking his credit cards, and the man’s permitting of this liberty revealed how fuddled he was. She walked ahead swinging her bottom, and as he stumbled after, down the hall to a massage room, she could almost feel in her own head the ugly calculations clicking in Pete’s.
The massage room was tiny. It had a not-infrequently-puked-on carpet, and a table. As she stood there, pounding firmly on him through the towel, trying to concentrate on her rhythm, she beheld an obese black cockroach running boldly across the carpet. Afterward she was willing to believe she had hallucinated, so strange was th
e thing she remembered. The bug, half as big as her hand, had stopped at midfloor and stared at her, and she in that instant had seen clearly and looked deep into the inhuman little black-bead eyes, and had known that the man she was just then firing off into the towel was going to die later that night. There would be a grim, half-slurred conversation in some gully under the stars, there would be perhaps a long signing of traveler’s checks payable to the fictitious name on a certain set of false I.D. cards, and then the top of the plump man’s head would be blown off.
Patti was a lazy girl who lazily wanted things to be nice, but was very good at adjusting to things that were not nice at all, if somebody strong really insisted on them. Part of it was that Patti was indecisive by nature. Left alone, she was made miserable by the lonely struggle of deciding what to do. Pete was expensive, but at least he kept Patti’s time fully planned out for her. With him to supervise, Patti’s life fit her snugly, with no room for confusing doubts.
But this plump man’s head, all pale in moonlight, blown wide open—the image wouldn’t leave her; it festered in her imagination. The body was found in three days and got two paragraphs, but the few lines included corroboration of her fantasy, in the words “gunshot wounds to the head.”
By the time she read these paragraphs, Patti was already half sick with alcohol and insomnia, and that night she took some pills that she was lucky enough to have pumped out of her an hour or so later.
But now, with the hospital’s Xanax just fading from her system and a little of her appetite and her energy coming back, Patti decided that if there was any best therapy for her kind of nightmare, it was this, hooking again out of the lobby of the Parnassus. Some of the bittersweet years of her apprenticeship had been served here. The fat, shabby red furniture still had a voluptuous feel to her. The big, dowdy Parnassus, uptown in the forties, now stood in the porno heartland of Hollywood. It was a district of neon and snarled traffic on narrow overparked streets engineered before the Great Depression. And Patti loved to watch it all, the glitter and glossy vehicles, through the plate-glass window of the lobby, taking it easy, only getting up and ambling out to the sidewalk now and then when there was eye-contact from a shopping john driving past. This was the way hooking should be.