The Haunter of the Threshold (46 page)

He turned to look at Joe again just as he received another queer inkling that someone was watching them. He had no time to scream, nor did any synaptic activity in his brain have time to even
consider
what he might be looking at. It had actually been standing there all along, though invisibly from another phase-shift: a slug-skinned, tentacular abomination in a scarlet robe and hood. Simultaneously, the thing had slipped a tentacle-arm about each man’s neck, and with a quick constriction—

pop!

pop!

—both Joe Sargent and Wally Gilman’s neck-bones were separated, severing the spinal columns. The final image to register in Wally’s brain was the marauder’s face: swollen lips on a bulbous forehead, eyes implanted on corroded cheeks, all set in the countenance of something rotten.

“Sneb ngal’n shubb,” the thing uttered, and then a para-dimensional egress opened rather like a malformed zipper. Wally and Joe were shoved into the egress, then the egress disappeared.

This repulsive servitor—whose name it still thought of as Frank—–peeked into the window.

The last agent of the night, a Bosset’s Way resident named Jervas Dudley, was just now withdrawing a crystal from Sonia Heald’s multipurpose womb.

At the window, Frank nodded in approval.

Minutes later, the agents inside had all left. Tomorrow night more would come, and more the night after that and the night after that, until all of the Shining Trapezohedrons had been dispensed. Then off each agent would go, plane tickets in hand, to their specified target cities. It would not be much longer before Nyarlathotep’s message had been delivered, all in the glory of Yog-Sothoth.

Frank eyed Sonia and her robust breasts, her great white belly, the abundant pubic plot, and when he did so, the puffy turd-like lips on his forehead turned up into a smile.

Ah, yes.

Frank decided that once all the crystals were out of the cow, he’d be knocking her up again just for the hell of it.