Unholy Dimensions (19 page)

When he entered the lobby, the great stone ball glared at him accusingly with the black eye that had opened upon its rough hide. But there was a man already here, scrubbing at the vandalism with a brush. The man glanced over his shoulder at James as he came in. The man was short, almost a dwarf, stocky, his white coveralls too large fo
r him and his face troll-like, toad-like, shockingly ugly. His irises were too yellow. He turned back to his scrubbing and James smelled a strong chemical cleaner as he walked to the reception desk.

“How come maintenance isn’t doing that?” James whispered to Warnes, the third shift guard.

“Dunno.” Warnes stretched and finished off his coffee. “He had clearance, though. Somebody obviously called him in.”

James shrugged as he came around behind the desk, and seated himself in front of the computer there. “I’m gonna call the police in a minute and see if they have anything on Penn that would save me from having to research him myself.”

“He knew his paint, anyway,” Warnes joked grimly, softly, nodding over at the ball. “Quasimodo’s having a helluva time getting it off the globe.”

The detectives in charge of the investigation didn’t get back to James for several hours, but at last one did. By then, impatient, James had already begun his research. The two men exchanged their findings over the phone.

James reported, “We don’t have any Richard Penn as a past employee, or as a past customer of Monumental Life at any time.”

“We checked that end, too,” said the detective, Robart. “He had Trustwell Insurance, through Berg College. He was a professor there up until he left two years ago, and he continued his coverage on his own.”

“A professor? Of what?”

“Ancient history. They asked him to leave two years ago because he’d been acting erratic, coming to school drunk. They said he was teaching some really out-there things in class...Chariots of the Gods kind of crap. Didn’t go over well with the dean, although I’m sure it was a lot less boring than the real stuff as far as the kids were concerned.”

“Had he been seeing a psychiatrist, anything?”

“Nothing in the way of mental health. Unfortunately. And you may be interested to know he did know how to use a gun; he once had a gun taken away from him and his license to own revoked for threatening somebody with it. Just after he lost his job, in fact. He didn’t do time for it, though.”

“Who was he threatening? What was it about?”

“The man he threatened took off before police could reach the scene, but there were witnesses to testify that Penn had brandished his gun in a threatening manner. At the time he babbled some stuff about this man being a, um, cultist of some kind...some kind of Satan worshiper or something. A ‘servitor,’ he called him. We only have a description of the man as being very short, powerfully built, maybe foreign.”

“Mm,” James grunted. “So...there’s no motive for why he came here. Why he painted that thing on our sculpture.”

“Not yet, unfortunately. We’re trying to pin down family. They seem to be all out in Arizona.”

“Strange,” James muttered, more to himself than to the tiny holes at his lips. He listened to the whisking
scrub, scrub, scrub
of the man in the too-large coveralls as he worked to free the globe of its desecration.

“You might wanna check into the files of all the other Nye Conglomerate companies, to see if he might have had some dealings with another branch of the company,” Robart suggested.

“What? The
what
Conglomerate?”

“Nye. Don’t you know who you work for?”

“Monumental Life, I thought,” James replied with some slight irritation.

“Monumental Life is one of the companies Nye owns. Man, Nye owns half this city, and a good chunk of the country. How long have you been working over there?”

“I’ve been in town and worked for Monumental just four months. I’m security chief, though. I’m surprised I never heard that before.”

“Well, I’ve lived here all my life, so. But yeah, this foreign guy, Nye, he owns Monumental Life, OO Software, CM Investments...um, oh yeah, and of course all the Pantheon Banks...”

“That’s my bank,” James said, his brow furrowed into frowns.
Scrub, scrub, scrub.
He couldn’t see the squat worker behind the glistening hematite planet.

“You may have seen Nye over there and never known it. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. Thin guy, always wears expensive black suits. Polite. Quiet. Looks Indian...Arab, maybe. Leave it to the foreigners; own everything in this country.”

“Wow,” James said, ignoring the last comment. “Funny. Yeah...yeah, I’ll have to look into all of that. Penn might have had a grudge against one of these other companies.”

“Keep me informed. I’ll be happy to trade with ya. And pal...”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t be hard on yourself about this. It wasn’t your fault. The guy was a head case. You hear me?”

James said nothing. His gun pulled at one side of his chest like an organ fossilized into metallic rock.

“Buddy? You hear what I said?”

“Mm,” James grunted.

It was the second night he had had this dream.

An aurora borealis spread across the heavens, a glowing curtain of light that would dwarf the mere ribbons over the Antarctic skies. As it billowed like some impossible serpent writhing, the air crackled and boomed deafeningly, charged with electrical anomalies. Lightning flashed, illuminated in harsh strobe glare a lan
dscape of dense jungle. Not Costa Rican jungle, James thought weirdly, but far older. Far more primeval. He saw, in those flashes, scurrying life that no man had ever seen with flesh on its bones.

But now the aurora writhed more violently, like a snake pinned with the blade of a shovel. It was opalescent, iridescent, but this iridescence was made up of colors for which James’s dream-self had no names. The electric storms grew more fierce, the thunder like the explosions of a battlefield. Somehow, he knew, it
was
a kind of battle. The curtain of light seemed under attack, somehow, and was lowering closer to the primeval earth from a great height. And as it descended, James could see that the curtain was actually made of many individual parts, like iridescent soap bubbles – like cells, he thought. Boiling, foaming, merging and reforming in a vast, lowering conglomeration. Until the conglomeration of glowing spheres seemed to fill the whole sky, Lucifer, angel of light, falling...

But as the vast curtain –
entity
, James thought – began to break up and fall, the pieces of it went dark first, like coals with the fire burned out of them. Like flesh turned to fossil. More of these dark spheres rained, more, until the air was black with a meteor shower such as the earth had not known since its surface had been one lake of fire. The earth was pounded, hammered. The forest began to burn, the great-but-dwarfed lizards began to howl, aflame, and black clouds of smoke began to billow into the air.

The dark, petrified spheres plummeted down toward James’s up-turned face, toward his tiny dream-self, and he covered his face with his arms and screamed.

That was how he found himself when his eyes shot open. With his arms crossed over his face, and his own scream filling his ears.

Richard Penn had not worked for any of the companies that Detective Robart had named. But then, how many other companies might this Mr. Nye own that James hadn’t been aware of? James used the phone to contact all of them but for Pantheon Bank, which he dropped in on while on his way home that afternoon. But it was the bank’s head office that he sought out, not the small branch of the bank he cashed his check at every Friday. Having been able to leave a half hour early today, he hoped there was time to catch someone, maybe the head of personnel or security, who could answer his questions.

The building loomed above him as he approached its front doors, smaller
than the obsidian black colossus of Monumental Life and older, art deco in style. As he entered, he saw two giant, tarnished metal angels to either side of the lobby, supporting the ceiling on their wings. They were curious angels; in the deco style, yes, slim beautiful women, but the wings had an almost bat-like quality. He only noticed this after, however. After he noticed what rested in the center of the lobby...

James didn’t bother contacting personnel. He’d do that tomorrow. Although he had already called them, he returned
to his car and drove over to OO Software. Then CM Investments.

There was no ugly
octopoid hanging suspended in any of those other foyers. That was a touch singular to Monumental Life’s building. But there was, however, in the center of each lobby, a huge sphere made up of many dark pebbles that gleamed metallic like hematite. Like meteors that had crashed through the roofs of these buildings. Or, as if the buildings had been erected around them.

“He has a sister in Arizona supposed to come out and deal with his stuff,” croaked the stooped landlord, unlocking the door to Richard Penn’s apartment. He was wheezing dangerously from the climb to the third floor of this old tenement house on its steep hill overlooking much of the city. James had gotten lost trying to find this winding back street. It must be murder to drive on in winter. He was reminded of his teen-age visit to San Francisco.

The landlord put on a light, stepped aside to let James in; a prosaic enough kitchen, for an obsessed madman.

“I thought you guys had been over everything,” the landlord went on. James had told him he was a detective. Detective Robart.”

“We have some new information,” was all James would say. He turned to the old man. “You can go on back downstairs, sir...I’ll be in to see you with the keys when I'm done.”

“Oh, well...okay,” the old man wheezed.

James bolted the door quietly behind him.

In the living room, things were less prosaic.

A bay window overlooked the city, its buildings a misty violet-gray in the autumnal twilight so that they resembled crowded tombstones and obelisks in a graveyard. On each of the three windows that composed the bay, Penn had painted the same black star design with which he had defaced the sphere.

The walls of the room were one big bulletin
board. Taped there were photographs of buildings James recognized from town, or didn’t recognize, charts with apparent mathematical equations, photocopies from books, magazine articles. A large map of the city, full of push pins that Penn had connected with a highlighter marker. The resultant pattern had a geometric look.

James drew nearer to one wall to more closely examine this montage-like display. One photocopy was from a book written in another language;
Latin? Taped beside it was a handwritten translation, James judged. It was headed: “From
The Metal Book.
”

“So in the heavens there raged a war, as the Elder Gods did battle the Outsiders, and did hurl Them into the seas, and thrust Them under the earth, and lock Them in tombs and cells of Their own making. A sleep like death came upon the fallen Gods, but it was a sleep from which They might yet awaken, a death from which there might yet come resurrection and rebirth. The gates of the tombs and cells must be guarded from those servitors of the Outsiders, who seek to open them. The greatest of these gates is Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth is the Gate, Key to the Gate, and Guardian of the Gate all in one.”

James let his attention drift to another page. It was from an article on the extinction of the dinosaurs; specifically, on the theory that a comet fallen to earth had brought on their doom. A shudder went through him. His dream of prehistoric monsters, screeching, aflame, puny compared to the cataclysm in the heavens.

Penn had said nothing in the lobby about this subject, had he? No, definitely not. So why should James have dreamed it? Why should he have felt that the writhing ribbon of light, the electrical storm and the subsequent meteor shower in his dreams had all been part of a battle of some kind...a cosmic struggle between gods as described in that passage from something called
The Metal Book
?

On the opposite wall of the room, James studied various other hangings, putting on a lamp as much to dilute his unease as to illuminate his reading. A newspaper clipping commanded his attention. It was from a business section, and there was a photograph of a man accompanying
it. He was dark-haired, handsome in a severe, intense way. He was familiar, and the caption confirmed James’s suspicions. He had indeed seen this man before, at Monumental Life. It was a picture of Ralph Nye, president of the Nye Conglomerate. The article concerned Nye’s latest acquisition, a bought-out company to be renamed Gateway Realty.

Gateway.
James thought of that transcription from the so-called
Metal Book .

Under the caption, Penn had written his own caption in red marker. It consisted of one alien word: NYARLATHOTEP.

Was it Nye’s full last name, shortened and made more Anglo-sounding for the sake of business? Nye didn’t sound exotic enough to suit the man’s swarthy looks, nor did Ralph, for that matter.

Ralph. James considered the alien word again. Nye could indeed be extracted from Nyarlathotep. And so could Ralph, for that matter.