The Haunter of the Threshold (44 page)

“When, Frank?” came Hazel’s parched question.

His grin seemed multi-dimensional. “When the stars are right. When the sun is in the Fifth House and Saturn is in Trine. Then YogSothoth will come again, once His messenger has made way for Him.”

“And what about you?”

“Me? I will live to serve them and their retinue forever, here and everywhere, in other dimensions, in other phase-shifts.” Frank’s breath rattled when he sighed. “Forever and ever...” Was he limping when he went and opened the door? He looked out into the twilight as if marveling at preeminent sights. But when he turned—

Hazel winced.

Frank’s pants were open, his genitals exposed. “For old time’s sake, okay? You do it so well.”

“Frank, do you have any idea of the
shit
I’ve been through?”

“But that’s life, isn’t it?” He stepped forward until his limp penis dangled before her face. “Please? Then you can go.”

Hazel wished she could dematerialize.

“I said please.” A chuckle. “And it’s not like I have to.”

Groaning, Hazel straightened up on her knees. His crotch couldn’t have smelled more foul; obviously he hadn’t washed in days. She kept her mind blank when she took the shriveled flesh into her mouth and began to work it with her lips. The malodorous balls started constricting at once, then the puny flesh lengthened to full hardness in only moments. She got up as much spit as she could, then moved her head back and forth till she found her rhythm.

“Yes,” he seemed to gurgle.

Her head bobbed, lips tightly sliding, tongue curled beneath the veiny, hot shaft. When his hips began to quiver, he grabbed her head and started humping her face. But when he came—

Frank’s throat boomed laughter.

—he violently filled Hazel’s mouth with anything
but
normal semen. It was more like chunky slime, with a rotten and somehow tarry taste. The putrid slop filled her mouth one gust after another, until she pulled her lips off and shrieked, only to take another blast right in the face. Frank was jerking the rest out by hand, laughing in a deep sub-octave staccato, and when it was done, Hazel leaned back against the stone wall, sopped.

“There!” Frank exclaimed. “Yes—look! It’s happening!”

The final stroke of his hand peeled the skin off his penis, and then the penis swelled as if from within. Frank tore the scrotum and testes off too, tossing them aside, then looked down with his scarlet eyes and watched as the skinless shaft expanded and then—

Pop!

Frank’s old human penis split open, and from within sprang a new and incontestably
inhuman
one. What emerged, however, was something she’d seen before, in her visions: a grayish coil of meat, like the first two feet of an elephant’s trunk.

Only then did Hazel look at the rest of him.

Black mist seemed to exude from his pores; he was
teeming
with it. Whatever this otherworldly ichor was, it melted off his clothing, his shoes, even his belt and then began to melt off his
flesh.

Hazel simply stared, even as the last of the noxious ejaculation dripped from her mouth.

When the metamorphosis was complete, Frank’s humanity had been sloughed away, and what stood now in its place was the
new
Frank...

Hazel began to crawl toward the wide-open door.

The thing was a twist of what could only be called tentacles: two for arms, two for legs, and a suckered column of many such appendages comprising his mid-section. Inverted cones of flesh sufficed for feet that
schucked
when he stepped forward.

By now Hazel was quite ready to die, but before she could roll herself over the threshold to plummet to the bottom of Whipple’s Peak, the thing that used to be Frank snatched her up with its ropy arms and held her aloft.

In a slopping voice, he gushed, “Glood bye, Hlazel!” and then he flung her viciously out the door.

Silence. Stillness.

Hazel expected to plummet immediately to her death but instead she merely hung there in the air...

In the doorway, the monstrosity was donning a crimson robe with gold fringe. When it pulled the hood up over the nodule-like bump for a head, Hazel glimpsed its face.

If the pestiferous visage could even be
called
a face, its features were upside-down. A puff-lipped mouth formed an arc on the forehead, while irregular outbreaks for eyes extruded from the cheeks. Its complexion gave the face the overall semblance of an overcooked pie.

“Shub neb flurp n ey ftagn,” it said to her and waved a mocking tentacle. “Naabl e uh bleb nuuurrlathotep—”

Hazel fell.

6

“God in Heaven,” whispered Father Greene, pastor of the United Trinity Church of Christ, near Providence, Rhode Island. He stared through the car window with eyes held wide on what could only be called a
landscape
of destruction.

Sitting beside him behind the steering wheel was an equally shocked grad student by the name of Ashton Clark. When the state police had noticed Father Greene’s roman collar, they’d allowed the vehicle to pass through the road blockade.

“This is horrendous,” Ashton fretted. “Everything looks
flattened.
”

Greene gripped the silver cross about his neck. “It’s even worse than the news reports this morning.”

The great pines and oaks that densely lined the road had, indeed, been crushed flat by a storm of incredible magnitude. The news had yet to properly identify what had happened here. Hurricanes brought rain, yet there’d been none, and they certainly couldn’t form instantly. A multiple-vortex tornado system was the only speculation thus far.

“Just like the Mother’s Day Storm in St. Petersburg,” Ashton muttered. “And I don’t like the common denominator.”

“That man, yes,” Greene replied. “The suicide.”

“Professor Henry Wilmarth. Sir, it’s just
too much
of a coincidence. The guy killed himself
here,
in
this
town, just last week.” He paused as they cruised by a small trailer park: crushed flat. Ashton saw limbs sticking out of some of the folds of metal. “And now...
this.
Same thing all over again. You tell me.”

“It’s not for us to know, Ashton,” the reverend said. “It’s for us only to have faith. We
must.
” He crossed himself when they passed several mangled bodies. “I have faith in God on High that Hazel is still alive...”

Ashton was about to say something but then his lips stilled when he saw a woman whose body had been accordioned between two felled trees. Some of her internal organs hung out her mouth, shadowed by flies.

“I guess...this is the town,” Greene remarked. An upside-down sign lay across still more snapped trees: WELCOME TO BOSSET’S WAY. POPULATION: TOO FEW TO COUNT. The demolished forest-scape gave way, then, to what had once been a small town square, crushed buildings and cars its most salient feature now. Several people in the road looked crushed flat as well, as if steam-rollered. What on earth could’ve
done
this?

Ambulances sat with lights athrob, while National Guardsmen stretchered out corpses they’d found in the rubble. A strange tarped pile lay near what looked like a demolished tavern:
More dead
bodies,
Ashton thought, but then—

He jerked the car to a halt, jumped out, and ran.

“Ashton! Where are you—” Father Greene got out and chased him, hurtling over tree stumps, debris, and more bodies.

“That car!” Ashton yelled. “Look!”

Huffing, the older man peered and spotted a silver sedan sitting half squashed under rubble from the tavern.
Rhode Island plates,
he detected.

Ashton plowed into the mess, throwing planks, heaving rubble aside. “I’m pretty sure this car belongs to Professor Sonia Heald! It’s the car she and Hazel drove up here in!”

Please, God, please,
Greene prayed, prying planks away.
Don’t
let my daughter be in that car.
No one inside could’ve possibly lived.

“Thank God, it’s empty,” Ashton said, and slouched on his knees. “But it’s got to be the right vehicle.” He pointed to the Brown University sticker on the cracked windshield.

“This cabin they went to,” Father Greene inquired. “We’ve got to find it.”

“Wilmarth’s cabin.” Ashton dusted himself off. “We’ll have to ask a local...if any are still alive.”

They meandered back out to the parking lot. “Keep looking around,” the pastor said. He hefted his prayer book. “I suppose I’d better do my job,” and he approached the tarp-covered corpse pile and began to read the Intercessions for the Dead.

When Ashton saw a man coming down a side road, he ran up. It was an
old
man, bent-spined. He hobbled along bearing a suitcase.

“Sir, sir! I’m trying to find the Wilmarth cabin,” Ashton begged. “Do you know where it is?”

“Waal, ee-yuh, I dew, young feller,” the codger said, and wiped his brow. Advanced age and a life of hard work had wizened his face.

“Jest up that road theer, but...I en’t gonna lie to yew, son. I walk by theer this mornin’ and it’s...waal, it’s destroyt.”

Ashton slumped in place. “Have you seen a young woman, early-twenties? Red hair, slim, nice figure? Or a woman with black hair, a
pregnant
woman?”

“New, son. Curn’t say’s I have.” When he wiped his brow again, Ashton noticed a clunky crimson ring on one finger. “Good luck, young feller. I’se got to go. En’t many heer survived last night, but they’re drivin’ me aout.”

A car horn honked; Ashton saw an old pickup with several rustic types inside. He helped the oldster stow his suitcase in the back. Then the old man squeezed into the car. “Could’a ben wuss, I s’pose but, son, be keerful ‘roaund heer. Be bettuh for yew to leave.” The truck rattled away but not before Ashton noticed a similar scarlet ring on the finger of the weathered driver.

A stench was rising, an odd one...like fresh meat and rotting meat together. When squawking was heard overhead, Ashton looked up to see great swarms of crows circling,
hundreds
of them.
They
want to eat,
the student thought. He jogged back to the pastor just as a military truck roared by, its rear load-bed
stacked
with occupied body bags.

Father Greene was making the sign of the cross over several more bodies. The corpses’ limbs appeared burned somehow, charry, yet the bones showing were bent and oddly
yellowed.
One corpse, wearing a Boston College shirt, had a head that looked melted. “What could cause
that?
” Ashton asked.

“God knows,” came Greene’s solemn reply. “I’ve seen several bodies like that already.” He reached down—

“Keep your hands away!” barked one of the soldiers. It was a sergeant who strode over.

“Sergeant, any idea what—”

“It could be some sort of corrosive,” the poker-faced troop told them. “We don’t know. Almost everyone from the residential section is dead, and most of them looked burned like that.” He grabbed a stick and prodded a dead, fat woman’s bowed shinbone. It jiggled as if something had turned it rubbery.

“Corrosive?” Ashton asked. “This was some kind of a freak storm. What could
corrosives
have to do with it?”

“Look, Father,” the sergeant said, “I know you’re concerned here, but it might be better for you to clear out till we can get things in better order.”

“All right, Sergeant,” the pastor agreed. He nudged Ashton by the arm and veered back toward the car. “This might be our last chance,” he whispered. “What did the old man say?”

“That Wilmarth’s cabin was destroyed,” Ashton repeated.

“But we’ve got to look nonetheless.”

“The road’s up here...”

More trucks roared by, corpse-laden, while more ambulances moved in. Blanched-faced EMT’s stood drained or knelt grimly before still more corpses. The stench was rising with the sun. It didn’t take long in heat and humidity like this; Father Greene had seen as much in Bosnia.

“The road’ll probably be blocked by fallen trees,” Ashton observed as they approached their car.

“We’ll drive as far as we can, then walk the rest.” Greene gripped his cross till his knuckles whitened.
All this death—everywhere, but I
KNOW Hazel’s still alive. She’s GOT to be.