Strange Eons (25 page)

It was his feet that found her, pressing against the sprawl of her robe on the floor before him.

She lay unmoving and he did not breathe her name again. Instead he stooped quickly and gathered her limp form in his arms. She was so slight that he had no difficulty in carrying her back to the entrance, then out into the foggy night. It was there, as he stared down at her, that he realized why she seemed so light a burden.

Whatever had seized her in the darkness had not harmed her body; limbs and torso were mercifully intact.

But she no longer had a head.

How long had he been running?

His last clear recollection was the sight of the torn and twisted stump of the gushing neck. He dropped his grisly burden then, and what followed was a panting progress through realms of charnel horror.

Everything was fragmented into flashes, punctuated by pain stabbing at his skull.
A splitting headache,
wasn’t that the old phrase? A headache that split the distinction between reality and hallucination.

There had been a girl named Laurel and she was dead, but how could he be certain of the rest? If there was no dog-thing, then why did he retain the memory of it with such hideous clarity—the glimpse of dripping snout, of scrabbling arms fringed with silvery fur? Could this be any less real than his vision of an army of such creatures tunneling through the graveyard to find and feed upon that which lay beneath?

Or was that merely an evocation of one of Lovecraft’s stories, something he had read?

But Laurel’s head was gone.

And he
had
run,
had
reached the boulevard gate on the other side of the burial ground. Here the sepulchral silence gave way to strident sound—the wailing of sirens in the distance, wailing of voices in the nearby streets. Roar of flames in the night, shriek of tortured metal as cars collided in zigzag course, crash of falling brickwork, blare of bullhorns at a barricade as uniformed figures fought the looters invading a shattered shopping center.

Laurel’s head was gone.

He had to get downtown, get to Heller, tell him what happened back there in the cemetery. The quake was the big story, it must be as bad or worse than the one twenty-five years ago—but he had a story too, and it must be told.

No car.
Then walk, it can’t be much more than a mile. Dodge the huddled bodies, the burning brands.

Chinatown was on fire. An old man ran down the street, hair and beard haloed in flame. A gas main exploded in the distance and the old man disappeared; concussion—shock waves—a rain of debris—a fiery wall rising to bar the way.

Go around it.
Cross under the freeway span, but hurry. The stretch ahead had already collapsed, scattering debris, tumbling cars like crushed tin toys and spewing forth their passenger-dolls. But dolls do writhe and scream. The sound made his head throb.

Just be grateful you have a head. Laurel’s head is gone. Must tell Heller—

Mark gasped and wheezed his way up Bunker Hill. Here smoke mingled with the fog, searing his lungs and making his eyes burn. But now he reached the summit, and downtown lay ahead.

Staring into the spiraling smoke, he saw the phrase monstrously embodied.

Indeed downtown lay ahead. Lay in the deed’s aftermath, the deed of the quake that had laid the high-rises low, smashed spires down from the skies, pounded the Pavilion and Music Center to the pavement, and torn off the top of City Hall.

Laurel’s head was gone.

And the Times News Center was gone. In its once-proud place on the horizon there rose a pillar of fire.

So he couldn’t tell Heller. He couldn’t tell anyone. Except Judson Moybridge. That was it, he must get to Moybridge.

He must have lost all sense of time because now he was climbing again, not downtown but here, near the hills. Was it reality or imagination that evoked a dim memory of a man with a car, a young black man who stopped and beckoned to him?

“You wiped out, man—better ride with me—where you going? I figger on trying 101 if it ain’t blocked. Okay, I take you far’s the bottom of the canyon. Then I gotta split.”

Splitting headache.

But it must have happened that way, he must have ridden. Now he was here, climbing the hillside road in the dark. Power lines undamaged for the most part, but no light shone from the silent houses nestling against the slopes and few cars remained in their driveways. Everyone had panicked, run off. Gone—like Laurel’s head.

“You see now? You were wrong, and Lovecraft told the truth. There are such things, because I saw one. God knows how many more were lurking there in those burrows—God knows what was released to swarm across the city. They’ll have plenty to feast upon tonight, they’ll gorge themselves—”

That’s what he was telling Moybridge. Or was he talking to himself, mumbling in the darkness as he climbed?
Hallucination and reality.

As he reached the summit the sky beyond was red. Red soaring, red roaring. Sound of flames and sirens, helicopters hovering overhead.

The ache in his head, pain in his neck and shoulders, matched now by sensation in lungs and loins and legs. Climbing, still climbing.
Got to get to Moybridge, tell him.

The hilltop house was dark, but a car stood in the carport and there was another car parked on the street just beyond.

Mark found the gate unlatched; he entered and crossed to the front door. There was no response to his ring, nor to his knock; he rattled the knob but the door was locked.

Moving along the walk at the side of the house he found a shuttered window; it, too, was locked and he glanced around for a rock or stone to smash the glass.

As he did so he noted that the gate at the end of the walk was ajar. Pushing it open, he entered the rear patio. The fog was thicker here, swirling in from the sea to blanket the poolside area beyond.

But it wasn’t the pool that concerned him; turning he saw the French door to the living room. It stood open, and from within came a faint humming sound and a flash of flickering light.

Mark peered inside. The humming and flickering came from the television wallscreen within. Its cracked face bore no image, merely a blur of clouded luminence.

He entered the room, found and pressed a wall switch. The lights stayed out, so there had been some damage here after all. And if so, what happened to Judson Moybridge?

Mark called his name, then shouted, but there was no reply.

Again he felt the throbbing in skull and shoulders, and he wheezed as he crossed the room and started down the hall leading to the kitchen and bedrooms beyond.

There was no sign of disturbance, no sound except that of his own footsteps stumbling through the darkness. Then he remembered the lighter in his pocket and fumbled for it. The flame flared and held steady as he inspected the dining area and kitchen; both were empty and undamaged.

Slowly he made his way to the first bedroom, steeling himself to glance within. But here again the lighter flame revealed no sign of occupancy, and the bath beyond yielded no clues.

Then he remembered Moybridge once mentioning that the second bedroom was used as a combination study and office.

Mark moved to the far end of the hall. The door here was closed, but not locked. He pushed it open, raised his lighter, moved inside.

The area beyond the doorway was a shambles. Books had been swept from built-in shelving to clutter the floor in random heaps. A desk chair rested on its side amidst fallen file cabinets, and their contents cascaded across the carpeting. The desk itself stood at an odd angle from the wall, its surface strewn with a jumble of papers and folders.

Mark stared, frowning. Only a freak of the quake could have produced such results. Or could it?

Earthquakes can open drawers, but not empty them. Earthquakes might hurl filing cabinets to the floor, but cannot force their locks or ransack their contents. Earthquakes can’t open a wall safe—

He crossed to the space behind the angled desk where the circular steel safe door hung ajar.

The safe was empty.

Stooping, he surveyed the pile of papers at his feet. Some of them had come from the safe, no doubt of that; the leather portfolio of insurance policies, the long manilla envelope inscribed with the name of a mortgage company, and the neatly bundled sheafs of currency.

Mark picked one up and examined it. The scotch-taped stack was three inches thick, and the bills were all hundreds. A half-dozen more lay at his feet—a fortune in legal tender.

Obviously, whoever opened that safe wasn’t after money.

He squatted, conscious of the pain that had spread to his chest now; his breathing was labored and he gulped for air. Something was wrong with him, very wrong, but it would have to wait. Something was wrong here, and he had to know—

There were other discards from the safe here on the floor; receipts, stock certificates, legal documents. Near the bottom was an envelope he almost ignored until his fingers accidentally pressed against the hard object within. It wasn’t another paper or letter, though whoever tossed it aside must have thought so. Mark ripped the flap open with his free hand and the contents of the envelope rolled into his palm.

It was only a tiny spool of microfilm, enclosed in a plastic pouch sealed with tape. Across the tape was a handwritten scrawl of identification.

“Excerpts—Necronomicon.”

Again Mark’s vision blurred and he felt a stab of pain shooting across his shoulders.
Hallucination and reality.

The
Necronomicon
was hallucination; Judson Moybridge himself said such a book existed only in Lovecraft’s imagination. But the spool of microfilm was real, and it came from Moybridge’s safe.

What else had that safe held—and who had come here to find it?

Mark rose, dropping the spool into his pocket. The lighter trembled in his grasp and the stabbing pains were stronger.

Hallucination and reality.
Moybridge had sworn there was no such thing as the Black Brotherhood, but the Black Brotherhood preached the coming of the quake and it was real. Moybridge had devoted years of his life to prove Lovecraft’s imaginings had no basis in fact, but tonight one of those stories came alive, and because of that, Laurel was dead.

If Moybridge knew the truth, why had he lied?
Laurel’s head was gone. And where was Moybridge?

Mark backed out of the room and edged his way along the hall, alert for signs or sounds that might betray a hidden presence. He saw nothing but shadows, heard only the humming from the cracked wallscreen in the living room. Beyond it on the patio the fog was dense to the very doorway.

He snapped his lighter off, then moved out into the shrouded night where water lapped and gurgled. The sound drew him to the side of the pool beyond and he looked down at its rippling surface where black bubbles boiled and burst.

Something was moving below.

Something was moving, writhing and rising upward from the depths. And now, slowly, it surfaced.

Through coiling wisps of fog Mark stared at what floated in the center of the pool, stared and saw the bobbing body and bloated face of Judson Moybridge.

The glassy eyes bulged sightlessly and no sound issued from the twisted, gaping mouth, for the dead neither see nor speak. Moybridge was dead.

Stooping and leaning forward, Mark reached out toward the corpse.

And it was then, from the water’s edge, that the hands rose swiftly to grip his ankles and plunged him down into the bubbling blackness below.

When you drown, your whole life passes in review.

So went the old wives’ tale, but it was false.

Mark knew because he was drowning now, drowning in the pool beside the floating corpse of Judson Moybridge. Pain peaked in his head, throbbed through his neck and chest. He fought to free himself but the unseen hands held fast, dragging him down into the depths until his bursting lungs were filled with water.

That’s when he must have died, but it was not the end. There was a dream . . .

In the dream he was still alive when they pulled him from the pool; wet and dripping, dazed and helpless, but alive.

He could see them now as they surrounded him, propelled him to his feet, half-carried him out to the car he’d noticed parked beside the curb just above the house.

There was something wrong with their clothing; it didn’t fit. The garments had been tailored to follow normal human contours and his captors were not normal. A shambling gait attested to the malformation of their legs, humped backs and swollen necks expanded and contracted with the hoarse rhythm of their breathing; elongated wrists protruded from confining cuffs to terminate in webbed fingers that curled and clasped like claws. And what he glimpsed of their faces served to turn his dream into nightmare.

Great globular eyes that did not blink; splayed, flattened noses with flaring nostrils; wide, lipless mouths opening to display rows of tiny, serrated teeth; scaly skin stretched tautly over hairless heads; wattled necks with slitted sides that opened and closed in a perpetual pulsing—all this was part of the dream.

But it was their overpowering fishy odor that really repelled; their odor and their voices. The deep guttural sounds seemed only a semblance of speech, but he could recognize the laboriously formed words only too well.

Two of the creatures sat or crouched beside him in the backseat of the car; two more occupied the front. The one who drove seemed to know the way, and it was he whose voice now droned through the dream.

“Not coast—highway gone—all wash away—must go back roads—through mountains—”

Then, mercifully, everything faded.

When awareness returned Mark realized that the night was cold, but he felt no chill. They had climbed above the fog, lurching and skidding. Mark opened his eyes to peer into the distant redness of the horizon behind and the sable darkness of the sky ahead where high peaks loomed.

As they swayed along the rising rutted roads cut into the steep slopes of the higher hills it seemed to him that the breathing of his companions became more labored; they gasped complaint but the driver kept shaking his bald and bulging head. Over and over he droned, “Only way safe here—only way.”