The Dunwich Romance (22 page)

Manny Silva’s more corpulent physique distorted to a degree that might even be called spectacular; suddenly he was a sack of suet bisected by a tightening string. Whatever was happening here alarmed Sary so much as to becloud her cognizance entirely. Therefore she wasn’t really even aware of what she did next...

She made the Voorish Sign.

If her jaw could’ve actually come detached and dropped off, it likely would have. Sary could now see the invisible “snakes” which had wrapped about the thieves and held them aloft.

But these snakes were an incarnadine color, a foot-wide, dozens of yards long, and overlain with what seemed to be countless cup-shaped outdents, which, had Sary any ken with aquatic zoology, she might have likened to the tentacular suckers of octopi and other similar cephalopoda.

The tentacles seemed to revel in what their capture yielded; they reeled back and forth displaying the duet of prizes—indeed, almost as if to display them
to Sary herself.
More than feces rained down now, but blood too, exiting mouth and anus alike due to the constricitve pressure. Were Czanek’s
lungs
 actually dangling from his lips? And what wagged wetly beneath Silva’s fat legs was a
tail
of intestines. But more curious than any of this was the
point of origin
of these monstrous appendages:

The vandalized window.

At this point, the tentacles began to withdraw back into the ragged portal, taking their human rewards with them. But before they’d retracted fully into the house, they disintegrated to nothingness, just as had the old man and the insatiable albino woman.

Sary knew very little just then, but she knew
this:
 however perilous the prospect might be, she would have to see
all
of what was in Wilbur’s house. She would have to behold with her own eyes what manner of
thing
existed at the other end of those “snakes.”

She very slowly rose to her feet, and in an automatonic state returned to the tool-house, took up the lantern, and walked back through the moonlight to the house—

To the
window.

She maximized the lantern’s wick and was at once cocooned by licks of wavering yellow light. She thrust the lantern into the aperture, then set it back down after seeing nothing whatever inside. The phrasal idiom
No time like the present
was not one with which Sary had any conversance, but her own unenlightened grey matter managed something correspondent. She stared into the window’s Acherontic blackness as she prepared again to make the sign. Something, though, gave her pause.

A feeling. A
notion
whose origin could not be terrestrially identified. Sary sensed—as people were wont to do—the distinct and singular impression of being watched—no, more—of being
gazed upon
with intentness, even deliberateness; but this was stemmed in far more than the commonplace and rather prosaic fear of the unknown. An altogether different persuasion of fear infected Sary as the house interior (and its nearly corporeal darkness) commandeered her gaze. Was it really fear? It seemed so, for her heart raced, she trembled acutely, her molars were chattering, yet these denominators of the emotion in question ended resolutely, and were then accompanied by traits clearly
unrepresentative
of the same.

The lubriciousness within her sex—in a single mental
throb
—grew so teeming that such sequent fluids ran openly down the inside of her thighs; and with each contraction of her heart there came an equal contraction of her
genitals
—ghosts of orgasms that seemed part of her natural state at the present time. It was the darkness past the ravaged window, she knew (something not as much a darkness as a
reckoning, audient
physicalization
) and some constituent therein proving to be far more than a simple retardation of light. She could sense it thick in the air, while the air—inscrutable as it might sound—seemed surcharged with not only awareness but also some catalytic
attribute
that seeped into her blood. It
histrionicized
her nudity; it fired conduction in nerves hitherto unsparked; it ignited
mycoplasmic triggers
to permit of sensation thus far unrealized and unfelt; it tickled the very
gene-markers
hidden deep amongst the neurosecretory
pieces
of minims
that comprised every fiber of every living cell. Sary’s breasts hummed in reactivity; her ovaries vibrated like hummingbirds caught in one’s hand; while hormones transmogrified into
new
hormones, and gusted forth from her pituitary gland to drench her libidinal receptors; and the orgasmic spasms of her genitals migrated directly—like an electric bolt—to her brain.

All this, merely by looking into the darkness within the house.

Out of mind now, Sary made the Voorish Sign, thrust the lantern back into the window, and looked—

***

Was it some imp of the perverse that decoded the retinal images in Sary’s eyes and directed them into her memory? Her first glimpse into the bizarre house brought with it a paradoxical unconsciousness: paradoxical in that she seemed to behold herself and her surroundings as if drifting above her physical body; hence, a consciousness within
un
consciousness. Had her very spirit evacuated her body, to move about and to
see?
If so, in what manner of vessel did her spirit now abode?

This question, and a superfluity of others, would occur to her in rapid succession only to be just as rapidly discarded as inconsequential. Matters of far greater signification were at hand...

Her nude body lay dormant beneath her, and Sary noted the clarity in which she saw it, as if through some slightly distorted yet harrowingly accurate lens which revealed every pore of her skin, every razor-sharp black hair upon her head and betwixt her legs, each individual lacteal duct of her areolae, etc. She then raised her head (in a manner of speaking, of course, since whatever now served as quarterage for her sensibilities no longer enjoyed a physical connexion to her body) in order to pilot her sense of sight into the confines of the house. The two tentacles she’d previously glimpsed absconding with the ruffians were now joined by
dozens
more, each tipped by mouths which snapped open and shut in some celebrative synchrony. Those first two tentacles, however, still reeled about, grasping the now quite dead Manny Silva and Joe Czanek; and had Sary a greater capacity for linear thinking, she would’ve wondered what the appendages had in store for the two miscreant corpses. Instead, all of her attention fixed on the morphological madness and physical contradiction that existed within. Did the scores of stovepipe-thick tentacles change from blue to grey to purple as they also swelled and shrank as if to a premeditated rhythm? Ultimately, the living bulk looked like it had outgrown its shelter to such a degree that very little further growth would be permitted before the house erupted; indeed, so close were the massive thing’s boundaries that Sary could scarcely see deep enough through the tentacles to espy what manner of
body
existed to sport the appendages. Might it be akin to the torso of a mammal? The carapace of a crustacean? Or the plasmic sheath of a bacillus cell? Inexplicable, too, was the manner in which the thing seemed to
phase in and out
of various states of being. First came a state of palpable
organum;
then a less composited state, as of jelly or mucus; then a state of distinct semi-solidness, akin to compressed vapor.

Was this incalculable creature’s physical mass edging into and out of a dimensional realm contrary to that of the known
three
dimensions?

If Sary were to learn this question’s answer, it would not be today.

When she looked again, the corpse of Czanek was being dragged slowly in and out of the mouth-end of a broader tentacle, and each withdrawal dissolved or in some way abraded the cadaver’s flesh. (One might’ve thought of a child sucking a popsicle.) Eventually little remained save for bones, whereupon these, too, were admitted into the tentacular mandibles and swallowed whole. But Sary had been mistaken about the other corpse—Silva, the fat one—which still twitched with piteous life. From the writhing, impossible congeries, a more petite appendage emerged; it wrapped itself about Silva’s genitals—just where the scrotum adjoins the crotch—and slowly tore the organ out at the root. This was swallowed, while more such tentacles converged and consumed Silva’s physical form one bite at a time. Lastly, the remnants, like Czanek’s, were swallowed and digested.

At this point, something changed.

Sary’s unembodied senses felt a decline of temperature and an elevation in proximal air pressure. The incognizable behemoth stilled itself, and Sary interpreted the stasis as an indication of
attention
on the thing’s part. Why she would make this interpretation, there was no telling. Nevertheless, she was correct.

The thing, indeed, was
assessing
her.

Then a great many of the appendages which composed its physical form retracted...

Now Sary could see what existed as a foundation for the tentacles, the heart of the artichoke, so to speak. It was a mass of eyes, all which looked upon her in fascination and even respect. A mass of eyes, yes, the height and breadth of the largest pine tree on the property. Each eye seemed to be set in nothing at all akin to a socket but instead some gelatinous substance, and...did this substance also have mouths, or things
like
mouths, situated throughout? It would be pallid to say that this being—entity, creature, what have you—existed with virtually no alliance to the laws of nature as we know them; and it would be just as insufficient to say it was not of this earth. It was far more—and far less—than any of that.

The thing’s body seemed to percolate, it seemed to
bubble
within. Its eyes did not blink, for they had no lids with which to do so, but they did variegate in shape, while their irises went from one astral hue to the next—colors, tints, and shades never before beheld by the natives of this planet.

Horrific? Yes. But fascinating as well.

And next?

The great bubbling mass began to
turn.

Of course, it did not turn as, say, a human being would, nor did it change its position by means of swivelling, or traversing. Instead, the excrescence of its base squirmed and rippled, licensing movement, and said movement could only be voluntary.

It meant to show her something.

When the squirming ceased, the creature had presented to Sary the side of itself that had been previously eclipsed by the lantern-shadows. It was this moment of unalloyed shock and tenebrific revelation that blacked out Sary’s gossamer senses and sent her spirit soaring back into her prostrate body. A pair of appendages protracted from the hulk—the same pair, in fact, which had so effectively ended the careers of Messrs. Czanek and Silva—and gently lifted an unconscious Sary from her place just outside the window, then—extending farther—placed her back on the cot in the tool-house. They hovered momentarily, as if contemplating her in some commendable way, then retraced themselves back to the material gibbosity of which they were a part.

The actual sight which so forcefully shot Sary back into stygian realms of unconsciousness was nothing more than this:

The creature’s face.

It was a half-face, really, the right side consisting of runnels, bumps, and indescribable contours whose purpose could not be estimated. The left side, however, demonstrated great patchworks of what might actually be
hair,
kinky, black accumulations like sporadic moss; one eye not in keeping at all with the myriad eyes that enshrouded the thing’s thorax, complete with lashes and an irregular
brow;
a sagging, lipped orifice that the anti-nature of the thing meant for a mouth; a distinctly recessive chin; and patches of some pale, yellowish covering which hideously resembled
human
epidermis.
More clumps of crinkly hair sprouted about the mouth and the side of its face—a cheek?—and there was even a macabre convolution of flesh which bore a suspicious likeness to an
ear.

Overall, however, this “face”—or the atrocious assemblage of impossibility that sufficed for one—bore a suspicious likeness to
Wilbur’s
face.

Seventeen

At a time nearly identical to that during which the criminal denizen Joe Czanek had been breaking into Wilbur’s house, Wilbur himself was breaking into a mercantile emporium known as Leffert’s Feedstock & General Goods, located in the township of Aylesbury. The mechanical nature of the intrusion had been so easy as to unwarrant exposition; and so were the descriptive details of the interior shop. Wilbur lowered his trousers enough to just expose the two ancillary eyes situated in his hips, and with these he suffered no effort in navigating himself through the shop’s utter darkness. A cash-box sat opened beneath the counter, revealing obvious loose bills and change, but the giant occult scholar had not come here with any intention of stealing; his moral posture, in fact, made distasteful—and moreover
unthinkable
—the idea of stealing from someone who hadn’t stolen from him. On the contrary, his intention was to leave more than sufficient payment on the counter when he found what it was he needed.