Terrors (46 page)

They didn’t see the greenish stuff that initially resembled nothing more than a cloudlet of thin, blowing dust moving across a drought-parched swamp-bed.

Ch-ch-ch Junior felt itself picking up the mental emanations of the numerous carpenters and technicians, lighting operators and camerapersons, costumers, directors, assistant directors, makeup men and women, set movers, sound-effects
operators, musicians, holo mixers, scent-and-taste sprayers, animal handlers, animals, actors, extras, and hangers-on who populated the Colossal Galactic lot.

Bits of what had looked like dust, blowing in what seemed an otherwise unpredictable, even undetectable, breeze, moved here and there around the lot.

One wisp of dust swirled through the Miskatonic University Library set, then swirled
away and rejoined a larger cloudlet of the oddly greenish stuff.

On the set, Josephine Anne Jones consulted her chrono-tempometer and yelled peremptorily, “Time! Places, please!”

Gaza de Lure II costumed as Sally Sawyer set herself behind the old-fashioned New England librarian’s desk.

Karlos Karch, long overcoat hanging to his high-shoed ankles, took position at the cast-iron door. He faced
back toward Gaza, a look of desperation on his distorted, almost acromegalous features.

Gaza threw her hands in the air and screamed.

Karlos lurched toward her.

Gaza screamed again and pointed toward Karch and the cast-iron gate.

Josephine Anne Jones signalled directions.

Cameras rolled.

Gaza leaped across her desk and headed away from Karlos, toward the dark alcove that represented the
opening to the library’s vault. She disappeared through the alcove and out of camera range.

Karlos Karch halted in puzzlement.

Josephine Anne Jones yelled, “Cut! Cut! What the hell’s the matter with Gaza? What’s her blocking? Doesn’t anybody here know anything?”

Karch turned back to face Josephine. His eyes widened in horror. The sight that he beheld, moving toward the set, was one that had
been seen before by the human imagination, first by the strange scrivener of College Hill in the City of Providence on old earth. It was a sight that had been reproduced in the imaginations of generations of readers who perused the prose of that scrivener.

It was a vision that had challenged—and defied!—the pens, brushes, and hands of generations of illustrators and sculptors who had attempted
to render in ink, oil, or clay the vision as the gaunt dreamer had described it.

It was Wilbur Whateley’s unnamed fraternal twin, the twin who had resembled old Lavinia Whateley’s alien mate more nearly than he did the pitiful albino Lavinia.

Karlos Karch’s voice rang out. That voice which had chilled myriads of thrill-seekers, armies of audiences, who had come, over the years, to associate
the very name Karlos Karch with shuddering, chilling paralyzing fear and revulsion.

But never, never in a career that had spanned both decades and light-years, had Karch delivered a line the way he uttered these words:

“Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it … that face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys … an octopus, centipede, spider
kind o’ ting with
a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, an’ it looks like Wizard Whateley only it’s yards and yards acrost …!”

And the thing, the nameless monstrosity that lurched and
oozed
through the bars of the cast-iron door, responded:
“Ygnaiih … ygnaiih … thflthkh’ngha … Yog-Sothoth! Y’bthnk … h’ehye-n’grkdl’lh!”

The monster billowed and bulged, swelling to engulf almost the entire library.
Karlos Karch, screaming hideously, was engulfed, disappearing utterly beneath the tentacles, claws, gullets, eyes, fangs, speckles, tympanum-like disks, and indescribable horrifying miscellaneous organs of Ch-ch-ch Junior.

Josephine Anne Jones bolted from her director’s chair, leaped to one camera operator after another, commanding each of them frantically to keep rolling, keep rolling, whatever
might happen and at whatever cost life, limb, or expensive studio-owned equipment—
keep rolling
!

Only when the shooting was finished and a degree of calm—a very small degree of calm, it should be noted—had returned to the set, were the cameras finally shut off.

There now assembled the cast and crew of
The Dunwich Horror
.

Karlos Karch, still in full Wilbur Whateley makeup and costume, sat as
best he could in a prop library chair. Opposite him, quite indistinguishable except in size from its former horrifying appearance, sat Wilbur’s twin brother, Ch-ch-ch Junior. Somehow, among Junior’s apparently limitless powers of self-shaping and coloration, was the ability to expand or to contract itself to any desired density or size. Junior was now precisely the same size (although not the same
shape) as Karlos Karch.

Marvin van Buren MacTavish, the master copy of
The Dunwich Horror
script literally shredded in his hands, paced back and forth, unable to remain in a seat. “It’s great!” Martin kept repeating. “It’s great! It’s stupendous! It wasn’t what I wrote, but we can work around it! It’s the most gloriously gross and terrifying scene ever filmed, taped, crystalled or acted live!
Oh, even the old boy himself would have loved it. He would have loved it!”

He halted opposite Ch-ch-ch Junior.

“You splendid old monster, however the hell you managed that, I love you!”

And Martin van Buren MacTavish ran to the most hideous being in the history of Colossal Galactic or any of the studios in any of the Hollywoods in history and gave it a mighty hug and a resounding kiss,
smack
in center of one of its most disgusting (but indescribable) organs.

Two weeks later (
Starrett
standard calendar)
The Dunwich Horror
was finished.

Two months later the El-Khnemu/Ulianov Instantaneous Communicator was put on sale by Colossal Galacti Enterprises Unlimited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Colossal Galactic Studios.

The first big promotion carried out through the new communications
system was the initial release of the Colossal Galactic production of
The Dunwich Horror
, starring Karlos Karch, Gaza de Lure II, Nefertiti Logan, and, making its holoflix debut, the newest and greatest horror star in history, billed (for obvious reasons) as the protégé of the veteran Karch—Ch-ch-ch Junior.

The Dunwich Horror
opened simultaneously on 4,888 planets. It had the largest single-performance
audience of any production in the history of the galaxy, and was the biggest money-maker as well.

There was a huge celebration on the Colossal Galactic lot. Junior, of course, was wildly lionized. Amy 2-3-4 Al-Khnemu and Alexander Ulianov floated about, bemused. Gaza de Lure II made a pass at Karlos Karch who brushed her off and carried a plate of
hors d’oevres
to share with his wife of some
twenty-six years.

There was hardly a lull in the course of the party, but at one point the noise level and frenetic activity did lessen a bit. It was at this point that Golda Abramowitz used her towering green-skinned presence to beat a path to the side of the cheerfully gloating Tarquin Armbruster IV.

“Tarquin,” Golda asked sweetly, “now that
The Dunwich Horror
has made us one of the biggest
fortunes in the history of the universe –”

“
Us
?” Tarquin interrupted her. “Us? What this
us
business? I own Colossal Galactic, darling, don’t forget.”

“All right,” Golda went on undaunted. “Now that
you
own one of the biggest fortunes in the history of the universe, scattered over some 4,888 planets … tell me, Tarkie, how are you going to collect it?”

Tarquin Armbruster IV blanched.

In fact,
there was a way. But that was another matter, and the telling of it is another story.

I was not really surprised when my employer, Alexander Myshkin, called me into his office and offered me the assignment to troubleshoot our Zeta/Zed System at the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute in Old Severnford. The Zeta/Zed System was Myshkin Associates’ prize product, the most advanced hardware-software lashup in the world, Myshkin liked to boast, and the Fuchs Institute was to have
been our showpiece installation.

Unfortunately, while the Zeta/Zed performed perfectly in the Myshkin lab in Silicon Valley, California, once it was transported to the Severn Valley in England, glitches appeared in its functioning and bugs in its programs. The customer was first distressed, then frustrated, and finally angry. Myshkin had the Fuchs Institute modem its data to California, where
it ran perfectly on the in-house Zeta/Zed and was then modemed back to England. This was the only way Myshkin could placate the customer, even temporarily, but we knew that if the system in Old Severnford could not be brought on-line and into production, the Institute could order our equipment removed. They could replace it with a system from one of our competitors, and further could even sue Myshkin
Associates for the lost time and expense they had put into our failed product.

“Park,” Alexander Myshkin said to me as soon as I entered his office in response to his summons, “Park, the future of this company is in your hands. If we lose the Fuchs Institute, we could be out of business in six months. We’re hanging onto that account by our fingernails. You’ve got to get that system running for
the customer.”

I asked Myshkin why our marketing and technical support teams in the UK had not solved the problem. “We have good people over there,” I told my employer. “I know some of them, and I’ve seen their work.”

Myshkin said, “You’re right, Park.” (My name is Parker Lorentzen; Lorentzen for obvious reasons, Parker in honor of a maternal ancestor who actually hailed from the Severn Valley.
I had never seen the region, and was inclined to accept the assignment for that reason alone.)

“You’re right,” my employer repeated, “but they haven’t been able to solve it. Somehow I don’t think they
like
visiting this account. They don’t like staying anywhere in the Severn Valley and they absolutely refuse to put up in Old Severnford itself. I’ve never been there myself, but I’ve seen the pictures,
as I’m sure you have.”

I admitted that I had.

“The countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills, ancient ruins, the Severn River itself and those smaller streams, the Ton and the Cam. I’ll admit, a certain, well, call it
sense of gloom
seems to hang over the area, but we’re modern people, enlightened technologists, not a pack of credulous rustics.”

“True enough, chief. All right, no need to twist
my arm.” I gazed past him. Beyond the window the northern California hills rolled away lush with greenery. I found myself unconsciously touching the little blue birthmark near my jaw-line. It was smaller than a dime, and oddly shaped. Some claimed that it resembled an infinity sign; others, an hour-glass; still others, an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of immortality. My physician had assured me that
it was not pre-cancerous or in any other way dangerous. Nor was it particularly unsightly; women sometimes found it fascinating.

My mother had had a similar formation on her jaw. She called it a beauty-mark and said that it was common among the Parkers.

“Thanks, Park,” Alexander Myshkin resumed. “You’re my top troubleshooter, you know. If you can’t fix a problem, it can’t be fixed.”

Within
twenty-four hours I had jetted across the country, transferred from my first-class seat in a Boeing jumbo to the cramped quarters of the Anglo-French Concorde, and left the Western Hemisphere behind for my first visit to England, the homeland of half my ancestors.

I stayed only one night in London, not sampling that city’s fabled theatres or museums, but simply resting up, trying to rid myself
of the
jet-lag inherent in a body still running on California time even though it had been relocated some eight or nine time zones. I boarded a wheezing, groaning train that carried me from fabled Victoria Station through Exham and the very peculiar-looking town of Goatswood and thence to its terminus at Brichester.

My luggage consisted of a single valise. In this I had placed my warmest clothing,
a tweed suit and Irish hat that I had purchased years before in an English shop in San Francisco and reserved for trips from California to areas of less salubrious climate. I carried an umbrella and, slung from my shoulder, a canvas case containing a notebook computer.

In Brichester I spent my second night in England. The inn where I lodged was old and run-down. It contained a pub on its ground
floor, and I looked forward to an evening of good-fellowship, a tankard of beer (perhaps more than one!) and a platter of good English beef before bed.

Alas, I was disappointed on every count. The beef was tough, stringy and overdone. The beer was watery and flat. But most disheartening of all, the local residents, for all that they appeared just the colorful and eccentric folk that I had hoped
to encounter, proved a taciturn and unforthcoming lot. They responded to my opening conversational ploys with monosyllabic grunts, and rejected my further attempts at camaraderie by pointedly turning their backs and engaging in low, muttered dialogs, casting unfriendly glances from time to time at the obviously unwelcome interloper in their midst—myself.

After chewing futilely at the beef until
my jaws ached, and giving up on the poor beer that the innkeeper served, I finally retired early, not so much from fatigue, for my body was beginning to recover from its jet-lag, but simply because I could find no comfort in the surroundings of this disappointing pub and its hostile clientele.

In the morning I was awakened by a pale wash of sunlight that seemed barely able to penetrate the gray
and louring sky that I soon learned was typical of most days in the Severn Valley. I found myself wondering why the residents of these towns remained there—why, in fact, their ancestors had ever settled in this gloomy and unpleasant region.

At first I thought it fortunate that I had brought my cellular telephone with me—my room at the inn, of course, had no such modern convenience—but of course
I got nowhere with the local telephone
system when I tried to place a call. Eventually I located a pay station, however, and spent most of the day conducting business. I spoke several times with Alexander Myshkin, and let me not rehearse the agonies of placing a call from a decrepit pay station in the Severn Valley town of Brichester to Myshkin Associates in Silicon Valley, California. I finally
reached my employer, after being cut off several times by malign operators somewhere in the British telephone system, and at least once by Myshkin’s own secretary, who apologized effusively once the connection was re-established, only to cut me off again.