by Michael Shea
Every girl ran the risk of rough trade. It was an ugly and lonely way to die. With the dark, instinctive knowledge of their sisterhood, Patti knew that it was only laying out and covering up that her friend needed of her now. She shoved inward on the bedroom door, throwing a broken rhomb of light upon the bed.
It and the room were empty—empty save the near-physical mass of the stench. It was upon the bed that the reek fumed and writhed most nastily. The blankets and sheets were drenched with some vile fluid, and pressed into sodden seams and folds. The coupling she had glimpsed and snickered at—what unspeakable species of intercourse had it been? And Sheri’s face staring up from under the shadowed form’s lascivious rocking—had there been more to read in her expression than the slack-faced shock of sex? Then Patti moaned:
“Oh, Jesus God!”
Sheri was in the room. She lay on the floor, mostly under the bed, only her head and shoulders protruding, her face to the ceiling. There was no misreading its now-frozen look. It was a face wherein the recognition of Absolute Pain and Fear had dawned, even as death arrived. Dead she surely was. Living muscles did not achieve that utter fixity. Tears jumped up in Patti’s eyes. She staggered into the living room, fell on the couch, and wept. “Oh, Jesus God,” she said again; softly, now.
She went to the kitchenette and got a dish towel, tied it around her nose and mouth, and returned to the bedroom. Sheri would not, at least, lie half thrust from sight like a broken toy. Her much-used body would have a shred of dignity that her life had never granted it. She bent, and hooked her hands under those dear, bare shoulders. She pulled and, with her pull’s excess force, fell backward to the floor; for that which she fell hugging to her breasts needed no such force to move its lightness. It was not Sheri, but a dreadful upper fragment of her, that Patti hugged: Sheri’s head and shoulders, one of her arms…gone were her fat, funny feet they used to laugh at, for she ended now in a charred stump of rib cage. As a little girl might clutch some unspeakable doll, Patti lay embracing tightly that which made her scream, and scream again.
Valium. Compazine. Melaril. Stelazine. Gorgeous technicolored tabs and capsules. Bright-hued pillars holding up the Temple of Rest. Long afternoons of Tuinal and TV; night sweats and quiet, groggy mornings. Patti was in County for more than a week.
She had found all there was to be found of her friend. Dismemberment by acid was a new wrinkle, and Sheri got some press, but in a world of trashbag murders and mass graves uncovered in quiet backyards, even a death like Sheri’s could hope for only so much coverage. Patti’s bafflement made her call the detectives assigned to the case at least once a day. With gruff tact they heard through her futile rummagings among the things she knew of Sheri’s life and background, but soon knew she was helpless to come up with anything material.
Much as Patti craved the medicated rest the hospital thrust on her, a lingering dread marred her days of drug-buoyed ease. For she could be waked, even from the glassiest daze, by a sudden sense that the number of people surrounding her was dwindling—that everywhere they were stealing off, or vanishing, and that the hospital, and even the city, was growing empty around her.
She put it down to the hospital itself—its constant shifts of bodies, its wheelings in and out on silent gurneys. She obtained a generous scrip for Valium and had herself discharged, hungry for the closer comfort of her friends. A helpful doctor was leaving the building as she did, and gave her a ride. With freakish embarrassment about her trade and her world, Patti had him drop her at a coffee shop some blocks from the Parnassus. When he had driven off, she started walking. The dusk was just fading. It was Saturday night, but it was also the middle of a three-day weekend (as she had learned with surprise from the doctor) and the traffic on both pavement and asphalt was remarkably light.
Somehow it had a small-town-on-Sunday feel, and alarm woke in her and struggled in its heavy Valium shackles, for this was as if the confirmation of her frightened hallucinations. Her fear mounted as she walked. She pictured the Parnassus with an empty lobby and imagined that she saw the traffic beginning everywhere to turn off the street she walked on, so that in a few moments it might stretch deserted for a mile either way.
But then she saw the many lively figures through the beloved plate-glass windows. She half ran ahead, and as she waited with happy excitement for the light, she saw Fat Face up in his window. He spotted her just when she did him, and beamed and winked. Patti waved and smiled and heaved a deep sigh of relief that nearly brought tears. This was true medicine, not pills, but friendly faces in your home community! Warm feelings and simple neighborliness! She ran forward at the WALK signal.
There was a snag before she reached the lobby, for Arnold from his wooden cave threw at her a leer of wet intensity that scared her even as she recognized that some kind of frightened greeting was intended by the grimace. There was such…speculation in his look. But then she had pushed through the glass doors, and was in the warm ebullience of shouts and hugs and jokes and droll nudges.
It was sweet to bathe in that bright, raucous communion. She had called the deskman that she was coming out, and for a couple of hours various friends whom the word had reached strolled in to greet her. She luxuriated in her pitied celebrity, received little gifts, and gave back emotional kisses of thanks.
It ought to have lasted longer, but the night was an odd one. Not much was happening in town, and everybody seemed to have action lined up in Oxnard or Encino or some other bizarre place. A few stayed to work the home grounds, but they caught a subdued air from the place’s emptiness at a still-young hour. Patti took a couple more Valium and tried to seem like she was peacefully resting in a lobby chair. To fight her stirrings of unease, she took up the paperback that was among the gifts given her—she hadn’t even noticed by whom. It had a horrible face on the cover and was entitled At the Mountains of Madness.
If she had not felt the need for some potent distraction, some weighty ballast for her listing spirit, she would never have pieced out the ciceronian rhythms of the narrative’s style. But when, with frightened tenacity, she had waded several pages into the tale, the riverine prose, suddenly limpid, snatched her and bore her upon its flowing clarity. The Valium seemed to perfect her uncanny concentration, and where her vocabulary failed her, she made smooth leaps of inference and always landed square on the necessary meaning.
And so for hours in the slowly emptying lobby that looked out upon the slowly emptying intersection, she wound through the icy territories of the impossible and down into the gelid nethermost cellars of all World and Time, where stupendous aeons lay in pictured shards, and massive sentient forms still stirred, and fed, and mocked the light.
Strangely, she began to find underlinings about two-thirds of the way through. All the marked passages involved references to shoggoths. It was a word whose mere sound made Patti’s flesh stir. She searched the flyleaf and inner covers for explanatory inscriptions, but found nothing.
When she laid the book down in the small hours, she sat amid a near-total desertion that she scarcely noticed. Something tugged powerfully at memory, something that memory dreaded to admit. She realized that in reading the tale, she had taken on an obscure, terrible weight. She felt as if impregnated by an injection of tainted knowledge whose grim fruit, an almost physical mass of cryptic threat, lay a-ripening in her now.
She took a third-floor room in the Parnassus for the night, for the simplest effort, like calling a cab, lay under a pall of futility and sourceless menace. She lay back, and her exhausted mind plunged instantly through the rotten flooring of consciousness, straight down into the abyss of dreams.
She dreamed of a city like Hollywood, but the city’s walls and pavements were half alive, and they could feel premonitions of something that was drawing near them. All the walls and streets of the city waited in a cold-sweat fear under a blackly overcast sky. She herself, Patti grasped, was the heart and mind of the city. She lay in its midst, and its vast, cold fear was hers. She lay, and someh
ow she knew the things that were drawing near her giant body. She knew their provenance in huge, blind voids where stood walls older than the present face of Earth; she knew their long cunning toil to reach her own cringing frontiers. Giant worms they were, or jellyfish, or merely huge clots of boiling substance. They entered her deserted streets, gliding convergingly. She lay like carrion that lives and knows the maggots’ assault on it. She lay in her central citadel, herself the morsel they sped toward, piping their lust from foul, corrosive jaws.
She woke late Sunday afternoon, drained and dead of heart. She sat in bed watching a big green fly patiently hammer itself against the windowpane where the gold light flooded in. Endlessly it fought the impossible, battering with its frail bejeweled head. With swift fury and pain, Patti jumped out of bed and snatched up her blouse. She ran to the window and, with her linen bludgeon, killed the fly.
Across the street, in a window just one story higher than her own, sat Fat Face. She stood looking back for a moment, embarrassed by her little savagery, but warmed by the way the doctor’s smile was filled with gentle understanding, as if he read the anguish the act was born of. She suddenly realized she was wearing only her bra.
His smile grew a shade merrier at her little jolt of awareness, and she knew he understood this too, that this was inadvertence, and not a hooker’s come-on.
And so, with a swift excitement, she turned it into coquetry and applied her blouse daintily to her breasts. This was the natural moment—she had been right to wait because now her tender fantasy would bloom with perfect spontaneity. She pointed to herself with a smile, and then to Fat Face with inquiry. How he beamed then! Did she even see his eyes and lips water? He nodded energetically. With thumb and forefinger she signaled a short interval. As she left the window she noted the arrival, down the sidewalk, of a gaggle of hydrotherapy patients, several with leashed strays in tow.
It chilled her somewhat. And would the patients’ arrival interfere with the intimate interview she imagined? Her preparations slowed. She stepped down to the lobby some ten minutes later and walked slowly to stand by the front doors. The lobby was empty and so were the sidewalks. All lay in a sunny Sunday desolation. It was dreamlike, beautiful in a way, but it caused her a delicate shudder, too. She stepped outside and looked around her—and felt suddenly the craziness of kinky sexual charities such as she intended. Maybe she should forget it, just go party somewhere. And right then, as she stood there, a car full of her friends pulled up to the curb in front of her. In a chorus they invited her to join them. They were off to cruise, maybe crash out of town, had some parties they knew about.
Almost, Patti went. But then she noted that Sheri’s kid sister Penny was in the car. She shuddered at so near a reminder and waved them off with a laugh. She began to move down the sidewalk, weighing how strong her urge to visit Fat Face still was, not looking up toward him because maybe she would just walk on down to the bar…And then Arnold lurched from his booth and made a grab for her arm.
She was edgy and quick, and jumped away. He seemed to fear leaving the booth’s proximity and came no nearer, but pleaded with her from where he stood:
“Please, Patti! Come here and listen.”
Like a thunderbolt, the elusive memory of last night now struck Patti. “Shoggoth” was eerie, and that whole story familiar, because they were precisely what that letter had been all about! She was stunned that she could so utterly banish from her mind that lurid document. It had spooked Patti badly the night before her friend died. It had come from Arnold—and so had that book! That was the meaning of his look. The red moronic face glared at her urgently.
“Please, Patti. I’ve had knowledge. Come here—” He darted forward to catch her arm and she sprang back, again the quicker, with a yelp. Arnold, thus drawn from the screening of his booth, froze fearfully. Patti looked up, and thrilled to find Fat Face looking down—not in amity, but in wrath upon Arnold. The newsman gaped and mumbled apologetically, as if to the sidewalk: “No. I said nothing. I only hinted…” Joyfully, Patti sprang across the street and in moments was flying up those green-carpeted stairs she had climbed once before with such reluctance.
The oppression she had first found in these muted corridors was not gone from them—the quality of dread in some manner belonged there—but she outran it. She moved too quickly in her sunny fantasy to be overtaken by that heaviness. She ran down the fourth-floor hall and, at the door where Sheri had knelt giggling and she had balked, seized the knob and knocked simultaneously while pushing her way in, so impetuous was her rush toward benign sanity. There Fat Face sat at a big desk by the window she’d always known him through. He was even grosser-legged and more bloat-bellied than his patients. It gave her a funny shock that did not change her amorous designs.
He wore a commodious doctor’s smock and slacks. His shoes were bulky, black, and orthopedically braced. Such a body less enkindled by spirit might have repelled. His, surmounted by the kindly beacon of his smile, seemed only grandfatherly, afflicted—dear. From somewhere there came, echoing as in a large enclosed space, a noise of agitated water and of animals—strangely conjoined. But Fat Face was speaking:
“My dear,” he said, not yet rising, “you make an old, old fellow very, very happy!” His voice was a marvel that sent half-lustful gooseflesh down her spine. It was an uncanny voice, reedy and wavering and shot with flutelike notes of silver purity, sinfully melodious. That voice knew seductions, quite possibly, that Patti had never dreamed of. She was speechless, and spread her arms in tender self-preservation.
He sprang to his feet, and the surging pep with which his great bulk moved sent a new thrill down the lightning rod of her nerves. On pachydermous legs he leapt spry as a cat to a door behind his desk, and bowed her through. The noise of animals and churning water gusted fresher from the doorway. Perplexed, she entered.
The room contained only a huge bowl-shaped hydrotherapy tub. Its walls were blank cement, save one, which was a bank of shuttered windows through which the drenched clamor was pouring. She finally conquered disbelief and realized a fact she had been struggling with all along: those dozens of canine garglings and cat shrieks were sounds of agony and distress. Not hospital sounds. Torture chamber sounds. The door boomed shut with a strikingly ponderous rumble, followed by a sharp click. Fat Face, energetically unbuttoning his smock, said, “Go ahead and peek out, sweet heedless trollop! Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes—soon we’ll all dine on lovely flesh—men and women, not paltry vermin!”
Patti gaped at the lurid musicality of his speech, struggling to receive its meaning. The doctor was shucking his trousers. It appeared that he wore a complex rubber suit, heavily strapped and buckled, under his clothes. Dazed, Patti opened a shutter and looked out. She saw a huge indoor pool, as the sounds had suggested, but not of the same shape and brightly chlorinated blue she expected. It was an awesome slime-black grotto that opened below her, bordered by rude sea-bearded rocks of cyclopean size. The sooty, viscous broth of its waters boiled with bulging elephantine shapes…
From those shapes, when she had grasped them, she tore her eyes with desperate speed; long instants too late for her sanity. Nightmare ought not to be so simply there before her, so dizzyingly adjacent to Reality. That the shapes should be such seething plasms, such cunning titan maggots as she had dreamed of, this was just half the horror. The other half was the human head that decorated each of those boiling multimorphs, a comic excrescence from the nightmare mass—this and the rain of panicked beasts that fell from cagework above the pool and became in their frenzies both the toys and the food of the pulpy abominations.
She turned slack-mouthed to Fat Face. He stood by the great empty tub working at the system of buckles on his chest. “Do you understand, my dear? Please try! Your horror will improve your tang. Your veil shall be the wash of blood that dims and drowns your dying eyes…You see, we find it easier to hold most of the shape with suits like these. We could mimic the entire body, but far more effort and concentration would
be required.”
He gave a last pull, and the row of buckles split crisply open. Ropy purple gelatin gushed from his suit front into the tub. Patti ran to the door, which had no knob. As she tore her nails against it and screamed, she remembered the fly at the window, and heard Fat Face continue behind her:
“So, we just imitate the head, and we never dissolve it, not to risk resuming it faultily and waking suspicions. Please struggle!”
She looked back and saw huge palps, like dreadful comic phalluses, spring from the tub of slime that now boiled with movement. She screamed.
“Oh yes!” fluted the Fat Face that now bobbed on the purple simmer. Patti’s arms smoked where the palps took them. She was plucked from the floor as lightly as a struggling roach might be. “Oh yes, dear girl—you’ll have for bridesmaids Pain and Dread, for vows you’ll jabber blasphemies…” As he brought her to hang above the cauldron of his acid body, she saw his eyes roll jet-black. He lowered her feet into himself. A last time before shock took her, Patti threw the feeble tool of her voice against the massive walls. She kicked as her feet sank into the scorching gelatin, kicked till her shoes dissolved, till her feet and ankles spread nebulae of liquefying flesh within the Shoggoth Lord’s greedy substance. Then her kicking slowed, and she sank more deeply in….