The Haunter of the Threshold (19 page)

Hazel let her heart slow down. Even in the frumpy towel, Sonia’s beauty raged in her eyes. She felt like masturbating, but where?
Impossible.
“At least it sounds like the rain’s falling off,” she remarked to distract her.

“Is it?” Sonia went to the front window. Now there was just a trickle. “Yeah, but with our luck the power’ll be out for a week.”

THUNK

All the lights snapped back on. “See what you get for being cynical?” Hazel said and snuffed the candle.

“Oh, damn it, I keep forgetting—” Sonia fished through her travel bag and withdrew a plastic bottle.

“Forgetting what?”

“This stuff.” She held up the bottle. “It’s this special lotion I saw on TV. All the stars use it. It helps prevent stretch-marks.” She took off the towel, and tossed it to the bed, again standing utterly nude before Hazel.

“Oh, let me!” Hazel couldn’t resist. She reached for the bottle but Sonia wouldn’t let her take it.

“No, Hazel, it’s not a good idea. You’d get carried away, and you know it.”

“Bullshit. The only reason you won’t let me is ‘cos you’re afraid it’ll turn you on.”

“Oh, so
that’s
what you think?” Sonia cast a sharp gaze, paused, then handed the bottle to Hazel.

My lucky day.
She squeezed the creamy beige liquid into her palm, then gently smoothed the cream over the center of Sonia’s stomach. Hazel was marveled; she couldn’t believe how
tight
the fetus-filled abdomen felt, how
firm
it was. She rubbed in repetitious circles very slowly, then paused to trace a fingertip about the nub of her popped-out navel. When she flicked back and forth—

“Stop!” Sonia giggled. “It’s tickles!”

“Oh. Sorry.” Hazel squirted more into her hand and repeated the process, all the while growing more and more dizzy from the warmth, image, and presence of her friend.
I love you so much I can’t stand it,
she could’ve wept. Now she glided her hand to Sonia’s breasts and began to gently rub. When Sonia tensed to object, Hazel cut her off, “Women get stretch-marks on their boobs, too, you know.”

“Yeah, I guess they do...”

Hazel’s hand slid into the shape of each breast, very daintily caressing. She giggled, unable to help it, “These really are big, Sonia—”

“Tell me about it. They’re heavy, too. Between my boobs and junior here, I’m surprised I don’t need a backbrace.”

Hazel liberally applied more lotion—

“Come on, you’re using half the damn bottle,” Sonia objected.

“Noooo,” and then Hazel’s fingers began to tease one of Sonia’s spread, pink nipples.

Sonia snatched the bottle away. “That’s enough, thank you. I can’t get stretch-marks on my nipples—”

“How do you know?”

A coy smirk came to Sonia’s lips but before she slipped her robe on, Hazel was certain her friend’s nipple-tips were twice the size they’d been in the shower.
She’s all turned on now but she’ll never
admit it
. At least there was
some
satisfaction.

“Oh, I found a picture of the S-T,” Hazel revealed. “It was the very first file in Henry’s index.”

“The S...Oh, you mean the stone?”

“Um-hmm. It’s a big crystal; Henry took a digital picture of it right on his desk.”

Sonia grabbed her arm. “Show me!”

In the study, however, the laptop sat dead. Hazel pushed the power button but only an error screen came up. “I don’t believe it! The storm crashed the computer.”

“But it’s a laptop. The battery should’ve kicked on the instant the power went out.”

Hazel lifted up one end of the laptop. “There’s the reason it didn’t—no battery.” The battery slot was empty.

“Oh, no. Frank’ll be furious.”

“Not if we don’t tell him,” Hazel reminded. “Oh, gee, I don’t know why the computer doesn’t work. Must’ve been a power spike.”

“I don’t really like lying, Hazel.”

“It’s not lying. It’s merely circumventing the truth.”

Sonia laughed. “I guess it’ll do. What else was in those files?”

“An exploded diagram for
another
box. The symbols on it were different, and I swear they’re the same symbols on the clay box that Horace made.”

“You and your Horace...Anyway, what did the stone look like?”

Hazel had to think about it. “It was beautiful but also kind of...

I don’t know. Disturbing? Don’t know why. Sometimes it looked black, other times maroon, and there were threads of red inside. Henry called it the Shining Trapezohedron.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“I think a trapezohedron is a crystal whose surface is composed entirely of polygons, if I remember my geometry right.”

Sonia picked up the metal box on the shelf. “And it’s supposed to go inside this?”

“Yeah, or—I guess Henry had the clay box built for the same purpose. I got the idea that the clay box—with the new symbols—is supposed to be an upgraded version of the metal box, at least that’s what some of the text files seemed to imply.”

“Damn.” Sonia frowned at the dead laptop. “I’d love to see that picture, if only for curiosity’s sake.”

“Later I’ll go on my own laptop and read some help files about rebooting and recovery techniques—”

From the main room, Sonia’s cellphone went off. “That’s Frank!”

Sonia rushed to the room, snapped up the phone. “Hi, honey! How are you?”

Hazel followed, then stood right next to her, her ear inclined toward the phone. Distantly she heard Frank say: “‘—s’re fine up here.” Some crackling. “—damn lucky I found the cottage before the storm started.”

“Is there electricity in the cottage?” Sonia asked.

Frank seemed to laugh over more static. “No way, just candles. But you wouldn’t believe how much of Henry’s stuff is stowed away. It’ll take a long time to go through it all, I’m afraid.”

“Bullshit, Frank!” Sonia snapped. “You’re coming back tomorrow, like you promised, right?”

Hesitation, then more static. “—ght not be able to make it by tomorrow afternoon, honey. Tomorrow night, maybe.”

“Frank, that’s unacceptable!”

The crackling and static seemed to double. “—you hear me? I’m sorry, honey, but Henry left a lot of papers, and—”

“Yes, and all you have to do is destroy them like he ordered! So
do it
and get back here!”

“Just try to bear with me—”

“The only thing I’m
bearing
is your child in three or four weeks! You could at least be considerate enough to spend some time with me!”

Wow, she’s really pissed,
Hazel thought.

After another wave of static, Frank said, “I want to at least read some of this work before I destroy it, honey. Can’t you understand that?”

“No!”

“It’s my field of study. Just give me till tomorrow evening, okay?”

Sonia’s teeth ground. “
Early
evening!”

“Okay—”

“Promise!”

“Baby, I promise. In the meantime there’s plenty to do around there. I’m sure you and Hazel’ll have a great time. Walk the nature trails, check out Lake Sladder, go for a country drive. You could even—” but then the crackling increased tenfold.

“Frank, I can barely hear you!”

“—breaking up from the storm...bad cell reception...call you in the morning—”

“You better!”

“—love you, honey...”

Sonia was vibrating in place she was so irritated. “I love you too, but if you’re not back tomorrow night, I’m gonna kick you in the balls so hard—”

“—breaking up worse now...better go. Goodnight...”

The connection fizzed off.

Sonia snapped her phone closed and put it on the nightstand. Her face was
pink
in anger. “That son of a bitch just burns me up. ‘Oh, come up to the cabin, honey. We’ll have a lot of fun.’ Fun, my ass. I’m about to have a
kid
and he’s up in some cottage on a mountain dicking around with a bunch of geometry papers.”

Hazel rolled her eyes. “Sonia, give the man a break. All he’s really doing is carrying out a colleagues last wishes.”

“Yeah?” Sonia huffed, then sat down on the bed. “Or maybe he has a girl with him up there.”

Hazel couldn’t resist some coyness: “Oh, but I thought yours was an
open
relationship.”

“Only with my
preapproval,
” Sonia replied, stone-voiced.

“A
conditional
open-relationship, I see.” Hazel had to laugh. “I wouldn’t worry anyway. Frank’s too self-absorbed to have a lover on the side. Why would he orchestrate this whole cabin-thing just for that? You really think he’s fooling around when his mentor only died a few days ago and happened to leave him the entire estate?”

Sonia settled down. “You’re right. And he
is
too self-absorbed.”

“So just don’t worry about it. Take some advice from a friend. You’re kind of cranky right now, so why don’t you just go to bed? You’ll feel a lot better tomorrow.”

Sonia smiled meekly, nodding. “You’re right, as always. I’m sorry my skewed hormones keep finding their way to you.” She kissed Hazel on the cheek. “Goodnight.”

“I’m going to try to fix Henry’s computer, but I won’t make a peep.”
Kiss me again, kiss me again,
beat the thought.

“That’s okay.”

“Oh, and...where am I sleeping?”

“In the bed, silly!” Sonia laughed. “You’re so paranoid. What, did you think I’d make you sleep on the couch?” She chuckled into the main room and started turning off the lights.

Hazel watched her raptly, then snapped out of it several moments later.
My head is such a mess I can’t believe it.
She typed in some recovery commands into Henry’s laptop, had no success, then retrieved her own laptop and set it up on the desk.
At least it’s not the Blue Screen
of Death,
she thought. She left the study door cracked only an inch, and as she read through some trouble-shooting files, one eye kept glancing every so often to the bed, where Sonia lay on her side atop the sheets.
How can I love someone so much and yet it’s so wrong?
Nothing seemed fair. Her own sexual anomalies were unfair as well.
Sick, sick,
sick,
she thought, remembering the orgasm she was sure she’d had even as Peter Pan had been strangling her whilst a foot had been sunk into her sex.
Why can’t I just be normal?
But in the back of her mind came a reply, in her father’s voice:
Come back to God.

She covered her mouth to stifle a delighted squeal when she saw that Henry’s laptop was at last reloading; in a moment she was able to access the directory full of Henry’s files. When she reclicked File #1, the screen filled with the startling image of the Shining Trapezohedron.

Its undefinable color captivated her. Each facet of the complex polygonal surface glimmered. She found herself staring as her mind lost focus, but then a vertigo jolted her like two fingers snapping before her face. It had been ten p.m. when the computer got back to rights but now it was eleven.
I must’ve dozed off and not realized it...

She clicked on the zoom feature and moved the cursor to a random facet. Each click thereafter brought the sparkling jpeg closer and closer, until the entire screen was a vitreous black-maroon.

The image that now filled the frame looked like nothing at first, just that odd color, but as she looked more intently...

Did she hear the piping of
flutes?
The music—if it could even be called that—resounded very faintly yet seemed structured and discordant at the same time. Hazel jerked her head around, then even put her fingers in her ears, but the minuscule cacophony prevailed.
Aural mirage,
she thought.
Probably fatigue-born, probably some
traumatic-stress reaction.
When a breath caught in her chest, the maniacal sounds had vanished.

“What was
that
all about?” The more she looked at the zoomed image, the more taken by it she felt. She thought of cavemen staring in awe and wonder at a fire, or gazing at stars while having no idea what they were.