The Haunter of the Threshold (18 page)

“Some kind of a stone, right? Isn’t that what Henry’s instructions implied?”

Hazel nodded, then decided to tell her...”Remember the guy we saw earlier who you called the ‘woodsman?’”

“Yeah, the hunk of beefcake you have the hots for,” Sonia said with a smirk.

“Whatever. He’s the guy who gave me a ride home today, but he took me to his place first, a trailer out in the woods.”

Sonia glared. “Oh my God, Hazel! You didn’t!”

“No...”

Sonia wagged a finger. “I know you, Hazel. You’re kinky and spontaneous. In this day and age you can’t just pick up men and
do
them. The sexual revolution is dead, and STD’s are what killed it.”

Hazel sighed. “I didn’t
fuck
him, Sonia. Jesus.”
All I tried to do
was suck him off, THEN I would’ve fucked him...”
I’m trying to tell you something, okay? The guy’s name is Horace—”

“
Horace?
”

“Horace Knowles. He’s a potter, sells his stuff at a shop in town. But he had a box identical in size to this metal one, only it’s made of clay.”

Sonia’s previous perturbation faded. “You’re kidding.”

“No, and it was Henry Wilmarth who paid him to make it, last spring, before the storm.”

“Why on earth would he—”

“I don’t know, but he also indicated he might want Horace to make a whole bunch more of these boxes, but later—when he got back from Florida—he cancelled the order.”

Sonia turned the metal box in her hand. “Boxes just like this...”

“Yes, the same dimensions, the same asymmetry.” Hazel took the box from her friend and studied it, puzzled. “It’s the same size, all right, but I’m positive that the engravings are different. They’re the same types of configurations but on Horace’s clay box there are more of them, and in different sequence.”

“Now you’re losing me.”

“The only thing Horace could tell me about the box is that Henry said it was supposed to hold a
crystal.
”

“How...strange.” Sonia seemed flustered now, interested to an extent but addled by something. “Hazel, I’ve been sitting too long and now my back’s killing me. Help me to the bed, will you?”

Suddenly Hazel’s attentions were diverted. She helped Sonia up from the desk and carefully piloted her into the main room. Only a few lights burned out here, and the rain could be heard teeming from the open windows. “At least the rain cooled things down...” The queen-sized bed sat in one corner, while the couch, TV, coffee table, and entertainment center sat in the other.
I wonder if I’ll get to sleep
in the bed with her,
Hazel quietly hoped. She sat Sonia on the edge of the bed.

“God, I’m so tired all of a sudden,” Sonia murmured.

Hazel’s eyes fell on her friend’s bosom, and the beautiful bolus of flesh that contained a new life. She gazed at Sonia’s drowsy face.
My God I love you.
“Go to sleep then. It’s been a long day.”

“I can’t, Frank’s calling at nine.” She yawned. “Wake me up at eight-thirty, will you?”

“Sure,” Hazel said, cringing on the inside. In her mind she saw herself rolling Sonia’s maternity dress up, parting her legs, and pressing her face into all that warm fur. “I’ll be in the den, prying some more into a dead man’s privacy.”

Sonia chuckled, eyes closed.

Back at the computer, Hazel took to clicking on random files—anything to get her mind off of Sonia. Many of the files were brief, typed notes, like:

File 67: invariant intervals seem to be rectilinear, which suggests
a designation for dimensionality reliant on a non-existent power
source. S to the 2nd power cannot possibly equal Y2
+ Z2

Or:
File 745: The carrier for the ST can only be a manner of
uplinkage, which harnesses energy from available space, even a
perfect vacuum! Yes! (See File 691)

File 691: It seems to me that Alhazred possessed only a partial
understanding of quotient potential. Euclid MUST have been in
possession of original box and perhaps even the ST itself, circa 270 B.C., and made notes that Alhazred copied and input along with
the schematic in Al Azif...In Euclid we know that there are only
10 axioms and postulates but the schematic (File 13) PROVES the
existence of an 11th. Of course Alhazred wouldn’t have understood
this! He was an occultist, not a mathematician!

“All right,” Hazel groaned, and clicked on File 13...

File 13:

v = S

^ = T

< + E

> = (D)imensionality

Fluctuations of power rely on the sum total of each degree of
every v, ^, <, and >

Hazel blinked. “S equals space, T equals time, E equals energy?” she asked the air.

The file’s last line read:

~ = the square root of the former times .33.

Now her head was beginning to hurt.
All right, I’m bored now. I
should stick to what I know: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.
She was about to turn the computer off when she thought,
Oh, what
the hell?

She clicked on the very last file...

File 944:

v><<^ ~ v^ ~ v<^>>v^>^v ~ v ~ v^<^ ~ <>

= D + S + E + T to the 33rd power!

Thurnston! Frank! My God, this is it!

Hazel scrolled down in the body of the same file and found another exploded diagram, like a box opened up and unfolded. Unlike the first, which was a digital scan of the metal box, this was hand-drawn with the meticulousness of an architect, a veritable blueprint of another box. Each section was filled with more of the glyphs, abundantly more than the sections of the metallic box. Hazel felt certain:
This is the schematic for the clay box that Horace made...

It occurred to her then that since she’d opened the very last file, why not look at the very
first?

click

File #1 was another jpeg, radiant in its brightness and clarity. The picture showed an egg-shaped gemstone which at first looked black as obsidian but then, after a blink, appeared to possess the hue of dark red wine. Within the crystal’s body she thought she detected darker and lighter scarlet striations. The entire stone glimmered from hundreds of minute facets.

She held her gaze, then realized that the crystal had been photographed on this self same desk.

Below the picture was a legend that read: THE SHINING TRAPEZOHEDRON.

Hazel stared as if the screen were a chasm.
Shining...Trapezohedron...

The S-T...

It had to be.

I’ve GOT to find out what this thing is...
Resurged now, Hazel zipped the cursor back to the index and determined to peruse every file in the directory if need be, until she discovered the purpose of this puzzling red-black crystal.

That’s when a great clap of thunder shook the house, then all the lights went out.

Hazel flew out of the seat when the shrill shriek sounded in the other room. She plunged into nearly full darkness until lightning flashed and showed her that the bed was empty. “Sonia! Where are—”

“I’m in here—oh, damn it!”

Hazel used her cellphone to light her way toward the voice.
I
thought she was in bed!
but then she found Sonia standing awkward and naked in the metal washtub beneath the primitive shower.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, but I almost fell when the lights went out,” Sonia fretted.

“You scared the crap out of me; it sounded like a horror movie in here. You told me you wanted to take a nap.”

Dripping wet and clotted in soap bubbles, Sonia grumbled. “I know, but even as tired as I was I couldn’t sleep. Every time I’d start to drift off, I’d start thinking about Frank up on top of some dumbass mountain in the middle of a dumbass thunderstorm and probably getting hit by lightning.”

“You really are a worrywart,” Hazel laughed.

Sonia paused, looking off as if something unpleasant entered her mind. “And then, when I finally
did
fall asleep”—she shivered—“I had the most
awful
dream...”

“What happened in the dream?”

“I was covered in some kind of slime, and then-and then, this thing that I guess was an octopus tentacle started to go into–” Sonia squeezed her eyes shut hard and vigorously shook her head.

“What?” Hazel egged on. “A tentacle started to go
where?
”

“Oh, Hazel, it’s too gross to talk about. Don’t make me think about it...”

Tentacle,
Hazel reflected, of course recalling her own daymare in the outhouse: the atrocious, tentacled baby with a sucker for a mouth.

“So I decided to take a shower in this dumbass metal tub,” Sonia continued, “and that dumbass water pump!”

“Just stand there and don’t move; you’re liable to slip. I’ll be right back.”
Honestly,
Hazel thought.
She’s like a little kid all of a sudden.
She quickly found some candles in the kitchen, lit one, and returned. Sonia shrieked again when more thunder boomed. “Relax,” Hazel said.

“Help me finish, will you?” Sonia pointed to the crude pump-handle.

“Sure...” Hazel worked the pump as Sonia finished lathering herself.

“This is a first: a shower in spring water. But that water-heater thing works; otherwise it’d be ice-cold.”

“I feel sorry for the settlers in Colonial days.”

“They probably didn’t even
bother
washing. You know, the first bath tub wasn’t even invented until the 1800s.”

“Gross.” Hazel kept pumping, only allowing herself to look indirectly at Sonia’s body.
Good Lord...
The simple sight of her made Hazel’s groin jitter. The swollen breasts and even more swollen belly, all gleaming. Pregnancy had stretched Sonia’s nipples out to lovely dark-pink circles, inches wide; Hazel imagined herself slowly licking each circumference in an inward spiral, then stopping on the distended papillae, to suck. Her eyes followed the trails of suds as they coursed down Sonia’s shapely legs.

I can’t stand this...

“I’ll just be another minute.”

“Take...your time.”

Did Sonia grin over her bare shoulder? And did her hands linger as they soaped the milk-gorged breasts? Next, she sudsed the nest of dark hair between her legs...

Now Hazel’s sex began to moisten, in spite of all that had been done to it today. She knew she could never tell Sonia about the rape; likewise, she was surprised by how unaffected she felt now, only hours after the brutal fact. Instead, her attention remained fixed entirely on Sonia, on her shining body, all those voluptuous curves, all that perfect warm white skin. One of Hazel’s therapists had once declared her
erotoscopic.
“You’re much more like a man in the spontaneous way you react to sexual imagery,” the woman had said. “Not only are you erotomanic, you’re
erotoscopic
. A merely arousing
image
triggers your libidinal system...
instantaneously.
Very rare among women. In fact
all
of your paraphilic disorders are exceptionally rare among females. Consider yourself unique, Hazel.”
Fuck you,
Hazel had thought in response. In little more than a year she’d gone through half a dozen therapists and had wound up abandoning them all.

Still, the image of Sonia in the shower seemed to percolate in Hazel’s psyche...

“You can stop pumping now.”

“Careful stepping out.” Hazel opened a towel and wrapped it around Sonia’s shoulders.

“Thanks.” Sonia tucked the towel above her bosom, then winced when more lightning flashed in the tiny window. The candle light flickered, throwing their shadows on the wall. The shadows jerked.

“Let’s get out of here. This room’s creepy.”

This whole cabin is creepy,
Hazel decided. She grabbed the candle and followed Sonia back into the main room.