The Haunter of the Threshold (20 page)

She felt droopy now, yet somehow motivated, and next thing she knew she’d opened the bottom desk drawer. Her hand glided past the revolver and without forethought from her, landed on the magnifying glass.

What am I—

She put the glass to the computer screen, began to stare...

Her mind bent, it
stretched
as if her skull had dissolved, leaving only her raw brain which was siphoned through her eye-holes and somehow sucked into the image on the screen. She thought of out-of-body-experiences, something she’d never believed in, had dismissed as hopeful hallucinosis, but now—

Her eyeless vision was forced to gaze; it plummeted like a stone dropped from a plane, soaring. The closer she got to whatever it was she was falling toward, Hazel saw cities, or things like cites: a geometric demesne of impossible architecture which extended in a long vanishing line of horrid black—a raging
terra dementata.
Concaved horizons crammed with stars, or things like stars, sparkled close against cubist chasms. She saw buildings and streets, tunnels and tower blocks, strange flattened factories whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, bereft of error in its moving angles and lines. It was pandemonium. Gutters ran black with noxious ichor. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Insanity was the monarch here, ataxia the only order, darkness the only light. Ingenious, unspeakable, the monarch stared back...and smiled.

Hazel saw it all. She saw time tick backward, death rot to life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history. And she saw people too. Or things
like
people.

One of the things was waving at her, with a tentacle.

“E uh shub nleb nbb lrrg glud blemmeb,” came the words.

Hazel’s disembodied consciousness stared and drooled.

“Nub krebb nebb e uh yurgg flurp ey ftagn—”

Several of the things were now waving at her with their suckered tentacles. Their faces stared intently back,
upside-down
faces covered with carbuncles.

“Gub nbb grlm naabl e uh nuuurrlathotep.”

When Hazel finally shook off the terror’s glimpse, she found herself face-down on the floor. The magnifying glass lay cracked.
What the hell?

A nightmare, of course. She’d fallen asleep at the screen. A tiny clock in the other room was gently chiming midnight.

Oh, shit, I feel hungover.

She dragged herself up, looked at the computer screen, and groaned. YOUR COMPUTER IS BEING SHUT DOWN DUE TO A GENERAL PRODUCTION ERROR. Then the screen turned black.

Great.

She sat back down and rubbed her eyes. The vision she’d had seemed lodged in the back of her mind like a blood clot.
What WAS that?
She’d been fatigued to begin with, and was likely also suffering some delayed stress from her rape. And then?
I fell asleep at the
screen and had a nightmare. Big deal.

But what a nightmare it was.
Tentacles. People with tentacles,
and upside-down faces like overcooked pies.
They’d been talking to her.

“Bedtime,” she determined. She pulled off her top and stepped out of her shorts, then tiptoed into the main room where Sonia could be seen sound asleep on the bed. The fans were on, blowing air all around. She was about to get into bed herself but faltered.
Oh, no...
She had to go to the bathroom, and since there
was
no bathroom in the cabin...
No way. I’m NOT going to the outhouse,
she knew immediately.
Not at midnight.
Her only other option?

Bears pee I the woods, so I guess I can too.
She found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, then a door at the rear of the house let her out. At once she was taken aback by the dense, half-deafening chorus of crickets and peepers underscored by the dripping forest now that the storm had passed. Clouds thinned overhead, letting moonlight fall down behind the house. Oddly, she sensed she could feel the light on her nude body. Her skin prickled at a scant, tepid breeze which rustled through the woods.

She came off the short steps, wandered a moment, then squatted abruptly next to an old charcoal grill and began to urinate.
Oh, that’s
better...
The most morbid thought struck her just then:
How much
of Peter Pan’s piss is coming out in mine?
He couldn’t have made her throw up every drop, could he? Wouldn’t a little of it, if only a trace, have metabolized in her own body? She pursed her lips as if tasting something disgusting.

It was still coming out.
Come on...
In a scenario such as this, how could she
not
imagine herself being spied on by some night-prowling pervert? Then she closed her eyes, and all at once, the image was drilled unwillingly into her head: the Tentacle People from inside the crystal had converged on her. Two held her aloft on their ropy arms while a third positioned its corrupted face between her thighs, then opened the puffily lipped mouth that was located on its runneled forehead. It drank up her piss as fast as the stream could arc out of her, and when it began to ebb, the lips closed around her sex and sucked, until every last drop had been coaxed from her bladder and pilfered through her urethra. Hazel squirmed in the unyielding, tentacular embrace. But now that the thing had quenched its thirst on her liquid waste, waste of the solid variety was its next desire. The hideous mouth slurped lower and began to suck hard on her anus. Finally her intestines gave into the pressure and began to release their wares, and when they’d been sucked flat, the lumpen-faced monstrosity began to sloppily eat. Was the thing squealing in exuberance? Its own tentacles writhed in delight. Hazel was dropped to the wet ground then, and saw aghast that it was not only the arms of her visitors that were tentacles, but their legs too, for they wore blushing scarlet robes embroidered in gold, within whose borders were gold-stitched glyphs similar to those on the box. When the robes parted, she could see that their legs were stouter, more venous tentacles with widened, circular suction cups for feet, and, worse, their genitals seemed rolled up like gray, meaty hoses at their groins. Two of the things moved between her legs now, while the third remained at her shoulders with one of its rubbery arms girded about her throat. When it began to constrict, boa-like, Hazel’s body tensed, stretching out, then the fleshy noose tightened till her tongue stuck out and she couldn’t breathe. That’s when the other two unreeled their cocks and began to gibber in some insane excitement. Balloon-cheeked now, yet erect-nippled, Hazel peered up in the moonlight and saw the exact nature of their penises: two feet long each, and reminiscent of the ends of elephant trunks. The trunks wasted no time in burrowing into her vagina simultaneously. The eyes like pustules planted on their cheeks gazed down on her terror-rigid body; the swollen-lipped mouths panted and drooled. Hazel began to orgasm in salvoes; it was like a
seizure
of pleasure colliding with the terror of asphyxia. Her ass wriggled in the dirt as she came time and again, even as the netherworldly genitals pumped gouts of hot, chunky slop deep into her sex...

Hazel’s eyes snapped open at a mental lurch. She remained squatting, though she’d finished relieving herself.
Just like me. A
head full of perverted SHIT...
What could compel her mind to manufacture such a detestable vision? She took several deep breaths, began to stand up—

“Shub nbb grlp naabl nith.”

Hazel gasped and fell backward on the verge of shrieking.
It can’t
be!
She shot her flashlight beam in the heinous droning’s direction but there was nothing there.

I am really out of it tonight,
she thought once she’d calmed down.
There are NO TENTACLE PEOPLE in the woods!
She went back in the cabin, locked the door, then went to bed and fell immediately into convulsive sleep laden with putrid-smelling dreams and black, mindless gibbering.

4

Next morning, a little local driving around led them to the none-too-surprisingly named Main Street which comprised a small downtown area. Knickknack shops, some antique, used-book, and hand-dipped candle stores, and several eateries took up most of it, plus a tiny post office and a bait shop. After rising, they’d decided to come here upon Hazel’s affirmation, “I’m so hungry I could out-eat a couple of truck drivers”; additionally, she wanted to stop by the Pickman Curiosity Shoppe and fulfill her promise to Horace. The little shop sat right on the corner.

“Interesting little downtown area,” Sonia said after breakfast at a diner called simply The Diner. They walked idly down the barely occupied street, passing shop windows. “I would’ve thought it’d be more redneckish, like the tavern.”

“I think a lot of rich people come here during skiing season,” Hazel said innocuously, but then she noticed Sonia smiling at her. In fact, she’d caught her doing that several times already this morning, even immediately upon rising from bed.
Why’s she keep
smiling at me?
She felt skewed to begin with: a lousy night’s sleep, the dreams, the things her tired mind had imagined seeing in the jpeg of the crystal, not to mention being raped. Sonia’s periodic smile seemed scolding, the way an adult might smile at a child who’d done some minor thing wrong. Furthermore, Sonia seemed much more perky today, bright-eyed, skin glowing. She wore a colorful maternity-cut sundress bursting with floral patterns. Even her body seemed to glow obscurely through the dress.

Hazel had dressed in khaki shorts and a T-shirt tied at the midriff. The shirt displayed the face of Mark Twain and read along the bottom ENGLISH MAJORS MAKE GREAT LOVERS, and then showed the Brown University crest. “You want to look in any of these shops?”

“No. Maybe later. I’m happy just walking around with you.”

The remark made Hazel feel off-guard; it had sounded almost intimate. But then Hazel was doubly surprised when Sonia was suddenly holding her hand.

“I’m so lucky to have a wonderful friend like you,” Sonia said.

Hazel looked at her and didn’t know what to say. But she knew what to think.
I love you. I love you so much it hurts...

“Oh, there’s the place you want to go,” Sonia said, and pointed to Pickman’s on the corner. “I’d be very interested in meeting this
Horace
fellow,” and then Sonia slipped Hazel another of her arcane smiles.

What is WITH her today?
“Yeah, he’s a potter but he also works on the side at the tavern.” She passed a barber shop, a nail salon, then Hazel’s gait slowed at the next store: HAMMOND’S OUTDOOR

GEAR.
Same store where Henry Wilmarth bought the rope he used
to hang himself with,
but then she recalled what else he’d bought: pole-climbing boots, of all things.

“Let’s cross here,” Hazel said after a car passed.

Sonia was smiling at her.

Goofy,
Hazel thought.
Hormones or something. Mental note:
don’t EVER get pregnant. It makes you weird.

A cowbell clanged when they entered the curiosity shop. The store smelled stuffy, and the gaunt, dim-eyed man behind the counter
looked
stuffy. He sat poised behind the register, his thumb through a palette as he eyed a large half-painted canvas on an easel. Oddly, he wore pressed slacks, a nice button shirt, and a tie.
Ever
hear of smocks?
Hazel felt like telling him. “Hello, ladies,” his voice creaked like an old door hinge. He dabbed at the canvas with a thin brush.

“Hi,” Hazel said. “We’re here to see Horace Knowles. He said he’d be in today.”

The man—who surely wore a toupee—didn’t look at her. Instead, he spoke as he dabbed more paint. “Ah, Horace. He was indeed supposed to restock today but called at the last minute. Another job came up, he claims.”

Shit.
“Oh, well, we’d like to look at his pottery.”

He frowned, then fidgeted with his ear. That’s when Hazel noticed he had a hearing aid. “Blasted thing. Ah, but—yes—Horace’s work can be found on the west wall. And should you be interested in original oils, my personal gallery can be found in the east room.”

Sonia stifled a laugh at the odd man; Hazel merely smirked.
East, west? Gee, I forgot my compass.
She took a quick peek at the proprietor’s current canvas: a skeleton with long, flowing blond hair held an infant skeleton at her bosom.

“Madonna and child,” the man informed her. “Do you like it?”

“Uh, oh, yes. It’s very interesting,” Hazel blundered.
Do you
think you could come up with something
less
original?
She grabbed Sonia’s arm and directed her toward the display shelves full of pottery.