The Haunter of the Threshold (42 page)

“One, two...”

She tightened her grip.

“Two and a half...”

The old man mewled beneath the duct tape.

Hazel forewent the “three” and lowered his head into the bucket.

God, that’s gratifying...

She was happy to see the level come up well above his nostrils. Clonner didn’t weigh much, but she was surprised he didn’t put up much of a fight once submerged. After several long moments, the bucket’s horrendous contents began to bubble. Clonner’s stumps flailed, however lamely, and then the frail body bucked a few times. The bubbles grew violent, then—

They stopped.

Hazel hauled him out, threw him down, and tore off the tape. Detestable as the task may have been, she straddled him and pumped his chest several times till he hacked out a lungful of fluid. Then—
Wow, this is really gross!
—she cleared debris from his mouth with her fingers, and—
Here goes!
—brought her lips to his, blew, and re-inflated his lungs. Next, she compressed his chest until his heart re-started. A hacking fit ensued, then his eyes fluttered back open.

“Did you meet your maker?” Hazel asked.

Tainted spittle flew when he cracked, “Ya evil bitch! You was supposed to kill me!”

“I did.” She smiled. “Then I resuscitated you.”

His stumps rowed in the air. “Kill me, ya dirty ‘ho! Ya cocksucking, piss-swiggin’, ass-lickin’, dog-dick-blowing jizz pot!”

Hazel stood up and smiled, then, by complete surprise, she brought her heel down into Clonner’s solar plexus, and when his toothless mouth shot open in a gasp—

Ahhhhh,
she thought.

She upended the bucket over his face, filling his mouth.

She watched him squirm aghast-faced, and said “I feel so much better,” to the destroyed tavern.

But what of the Shining Trapezohedron and its mysterious box?
We’ll see about this.
She picked the odd objects up and stomped outside. Clonner cussed after her, feebly flopping on the floor.

In the parking lot, the sound of crickets and peepers throbbed in a delightful din. The full moon
beamed.
Not a cloud in the sky,
she saw, but certainly the tumultuous sound she’d heard minutes ago
had
to have been a particularly vicious thunderclap.

She sat on a bench for a few minutes, to let her psyche calm down. The cricket-sounds tranquilized her. She looked uneasily at the crystal and the box.
I wish I’d never seen these things...whatever
they really are...
She knew she should be trying to find Sonia instead of sitting here but...

She had to prove something to herself first.

Hazel set the crazily-angled crystal atop the band. Her fingers hovered.
Nothing’s going to happen,
she thought. Then she closed the lid—

What she witnessed took only several minutes to transpire but it might as well have been hours. Sounds immediately deafened her, first the series of the same cacophonic
Bang!
she’d heard before, so loud she couldn’t hear her own screams. Then came a great all-pervading
cracking
sound. Behind it all rose wheeling squeals so high-pitched it felt like lances in her eardrums. The squeals came from the sky, and that’s where her terrified gaze shot next: to the sky...

The sky was
swelling;
it was
churning
itself inside-out, and with each churn it seemed to occlude more of the
real
sky she’d just been looking at. At first Hazel thought the sky was changing, but after the cacophony and chaos began to set to its own tempo, she realized it wasn’t changing at all . . .

It was being blotted out.

But by what? What could account for this? Did she hear echoic laughter behind the squeals? Like something of titan proportions laughing into a mountain rift? When she looked again, the moon was now fully covered over, and so were all the stars. The only illumination came from the sodium light on the pole which swayed madly back and forth as if in hurricane winds, but, but—

The
was
no wind.

Hazel sat petrified, staring up with the closed box cradled in her lap. Now the sky began to twist in an impossible swirl, in motions like water going down a drain only in reverse. A thunderous groaning reverberated and pressured her eardrums, and whatever the sky had become, it had turned into sickly colors, a brownish-blackish-gray that seemed to throb. The colors merged into shapes, not accidental but deliberate shapes which left Hazel with no choice but to think of appendages of some kind. Then the appendages began to reach down and touch the land...

Each contact flattened what it touched: centuries’ old trees, vehicles in the parking lot, and the entire strip mall across the street. The great crunching and crackling trebled, then she noticed rent-marks in the road that were
wider
than the road itself. Uprooted trees flew by in one direction, then a mangled panel truck flew by in the other, with the delirious driver still in it. Hazel watched the light pole bend to the ground as if stepped on by some invisible cyclops.

Desperately, then, she opened the metal box and removed the Shining Trapezohedron.

Nothing happened.

The revelation was met with more of the wheeling squeals, more of the same otherworldly laughter. Amid the chaos, all the electricity shut off, darkening the town beyond. Yet the dark, pulsing luminescence provided enough light to continue to see the destruction. Savaged rooftops blew by but it was nothing like wind that propelled them, more like something concussive or pressurized or perhaps even a perversion of gravity. People flew by, too, screaming people.

A plume of the brown-black murk funneled downward and crushed the town hall building to a pile of rubble.

The sky had become an
excrescence
that was alive, calculating, and premeditating. Hazel kept screaming when several more uprooted trees soared right toward her, then served away at the last second. Now all she could see was the roiled murk—murk within murk—and she thought she also saw shadows within shadows. She had the idea that the excrescence was
evolving
now, even vomiting things up from its midst. Shapes that seemed bipedal disgorged from more shadows and darted about almost too fast to see. Did the shapes have
tentacles
for arms and legs? Could the inky flaps about them be
robes?
Did a quick glimpse into one of the hoods show her a corroded face that was upside-down? Towering above her, though, was the most massive shape of all, a multi-appendaged, glob-headed
thing
that stood hundreds of feet high.

Pressed into the glob was a face that was somehow
no
face. It grinned insanely. Hazel drooled, detecting the suggestion of a monstrous eye up above, a burning, three-lobed eye.

Then the figure began to walk...

Down the way, she saw great perimeters of woodland crushed flat with each thunderous step. The smaller figures continued to dash about in the meat-smelling murk, some molesting people with their invading tentacles, others plowing down buildings by merely passing through them. When three of the shadow-boned shapes zipped toward Hazel, she screamed over the impossible din, but just as the things meant to seize her, they paused, and skirted away, right into the tavern. Seconds later, they hauled out the squirming forms of Clonner, Shot Glass, and Clayton just as a rive formed in the lowest part of the murk–not a rive, no, but an orifice. One at a time, they dragged their victims through the orifice and disappeared.

All of this chaotic sound, motion, and destruction took place all around Hazel.
The crystal,
she numbly thought.
It’s protecting me
while everything else is being destroyed...
Now the earth in the distance actually
beat
as if by the footfalls of a colossus.

When Hazel ran across the parking lot—

Wham!

—the entirety of Bosset Way’s Woodland Tavern was first crushed flat, then upheaved into a million pieces.

What am I gonna do!

The earth continued to beat, the mad flutes piping, and the evil shadows soaring this way and that, and all the while that obscene colossus continued to pound the earth.

Hazel fell to her knees and curled up shrieking into a ball.

“Give me that!” snapped a meaty voice above her, and suddenly two hands were scrabbling at the Shining Trapezohedron and its carrier. Hazel’s eyes flicked up—

“Frank!”

Indeed, it was Frank who’d prized the objects away from her: unkempt, dirty, hair sticking up. He still wore the preposterous sunglasses. “Hazel, you
idiot!
” he roared, black breath smoking.

“Frank, for God’s sake, what is
happening?
”

“What’s happening? You’re destroying the town, that’s what’s happening,” he fumed. Very quickly, he placed the Shining Trapezohedron back into the metal box, closed the lid, and muttered, “Meb gled’nl, e uh, ngai ygg...”

The words gusted out with his black-mist breath, and when he’d finished speaking them—

The sky
cracked—

Hazel stared.

—and the excrescence and all in its midst convoluted in on itself and—

Bang!

—was gone.

Hazel stood reeling. Above, the stars twinkled, and the full moon’s bright white light bathed both her and Frank as they stood in the destroyed parking lot.

“You’re quite the little dickens,” Frank said. He chuckled and shook his head.

“I just accidentally did what Henry Wilmarth did in St. Petersburg last Mother’s Day,” Hazel murmured.

“Yes, and it was damn foolish. But—” He held up the crystal. “Your foolishness provided me with
this—
the very first stone. It’s ten million years old, Hazel. And now that we have it...”

“Now that you have it
what!
” Hazel shouted.

“Just forget it. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” Frank turned around and began counting off steps. “One, two, three—”

Hazel jerked after him. “Where’s Sonia!”

“Safe. With us—five, six, seven—”

“Bullshit, Frank! I want answers!”

Frank began to jog. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen—Go home, Hazel, and consider yourself lucky—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—”

“Why?”

“Twenty, twenty-one—Because I’m letting you live—Twenty-five, twenty-six—”

Hazel broke into a sprint. “Thirty-three passports! Thirty-three people! And the thirty-three clay boxes you paid Horace Knowles to make!”

“Thirty, thirty-one—”

Hazel grabbed him and halted his progress. “Henry’s notes said that the non-Euclidian theorem relied on an energy quotient of ten to the thirty-third power!”

Frank turned to face her. He smiled. “Your yearning to know is
remarkable,
Hazel. But won’t you take my word for it that it’s really something you
don’t
want to know?”

“No.” She shuddered in place. “Tell me.”

Ever grinning, he took one step backward. “Thirty-two...”

“Don’t leave me here not knowing, Frank!”

“Thirty-three—”

Frank disappeared in a puff of meaty black mist.

Figures...
Hazel slumped in the moonlight. In the distance she heard shouts, shrieks, and moans. Dogs barked. Sirens of emergency vehicles began to bay...

Hazel turned to leave, then—

“Got’cha!”

—two hands reached out of the thin air, grabbed her by her top, and hauled her into oblivion...

***

“So,” Frank whispered and rubbed his hands together. “Here we are.”

Hazel lay crumpled on the stone floor. When Frank had pulled her into nothingness, they’d both been regurgitated into the middle of the Gray Cottage. The sheet of vellum fluttered on the door, then the door slammed shut.

Candle flames flickered all around. Frank meandered about the stone-lined interior, glancing idly out several windows. He carried the Shining Trapezohedron in both hands as though it were as fragile and valuable as a Faberge egg. “You’ve helped us more than you can ever know,” he intoned in a slight echo. His breath gusted black.