Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron Page 12

  “Ah.” Tsyganov’s peaked eyebrows twitched. “I heard you had married at last.” He had, of course, read Doughty’s dossier. “And your child, Elwood, he is strong and well?”

  Doughty said nothing. It would be hard to keep the tone of pride from his voice. Instead, he opened his wallet of tanned basilisk skin and showed the Russian a portrait of his wife and infant son. Tsyganov brushed hair from his eyes and examined the portrait closely. “Ah,” he said. “The boy much resembles you.”

  “Could be,” Doughty said.

  “Your wife,” Tsyganov said politely, “has a very striking face.”

  “The former Jeane Seigel. Staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

  “I see. The defense intelligentsia?”

  “She edited Korea and the Theory of Limited War. Considered one of the premier works on the topic.”

  “She must make a fine little mother.” Tsyganov gulped his vodka, ripped into a crust of black rye bread. “My son is quite grown now. He writes for Literaturnaya Gazeta. Did you see his article on the Iraqi arms question? Some very serious developments lately concerning the Islamic jinni.”

  “I should have read it,” Doughty said. “But I’m getting out of the game, Ivan. Out while the getting’s good.” The cold vodka was biting into him. He laughed briefly. “They’re going to shut us down in the States. Pull our funding. Pare us back to the bone, and past the bone. ‘Peace dividend.’ We’ll all fade away. Like MacArthur. Like Robert Oppenheimer.”

  “‘I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,’” Tsyganov quoted.

  “Yeah,” Doughty mused. “That was too bad about poor old Oppy having to become Death.”

  Tsyganov examined his nails. “Will there be purges, you think?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I understand the citizens in Utah are suing your federal government. Over conduct of the arms tests, forty years ago…”

  “Oh,” Doughty said. “The two-headed sheep, and all that. There are still night gaunts and banshees downwind of the old test sites. Up in the Rockies… Not a place to go during the full moon.” He shuddered. “But ‘purges’? No. That’s not how it works for us.”

  “You should have seen the sheep around Chernobyl.”

  “‘Bitter wormwood,’” Doughty quoted.

  “No act of duty avoids its punishment.” Tsyganov opened a can of dark fish that smelled like spiced kippered herring. “And what of the Unthinkable, eh? What price have you paid for that business?”

  Doughty’s voice was level, quite serious. “We bear any burden in defense of freedom.”

  “Not the best of your American notions, perhaps.” Tsyganov speared a chunk of fish from the can with a three-tined fork. “To deliberately contact an utterly alien entity from the abyss between universes… an ultrademonic demigod whose very geometry is, as it were, an affront to sanity… that Creature of nameless eons and inconceivable dimensions….” Tsyganov patted his bearded lips with a napkin. “That hideous Radiance that bubbles and blasphemes at the center of all infinity—”

  “You’re being sentimental,” Doughty said. “We must recall the historical circumstances in which the decision was made to develop the Azathoth Bomb. Giant Japanese Majins and Gojiras crashing through Asia. Vast squadrons of Nazi juggernauts blitzkrieging Europe… and their undersea leviathans, preying on shipping….”

  “Have you ever seen a modern leviathan, Elwood?”

  “Yes, I witnessed one… feeding. At the base in San Diego.” Doughty could recall it with an awful clarity-the great finned navy monster, the barnacled pockets in its vast ribbed belly holding a slumbering cargo of hideous batwinged gaunts. On order from Washington, the minor demons would waken, slash their way free of the monster’s belly, launch, and fly to their appointed targets with pitiless accuracy and the speed of a tempest. In their talons, they clutched triple-sealed spells that could open, for a few hideous microseconds, the portal between universes. And for an instant, the Radiance of Azathoth would gush through. And whatever that Color touched-wherever its unthinkable beam contacted earthly substance-the Earth would blister and bubble in cosmic torment. The very dust of the explosion would carry an unearthly taint.

  “And have you seen them test the bomb, Elwood?”

  “Only underground. The atmospheric testing was rather before my time….”

  “And what of the poisoned waste, Elwood? From beneath the cyclopean walls of our scores of power plants…”

  “We’ll deal with that. Launch it into the abyss of space, if we must.” Doughty hid his irritation with an effort. “What are you driving at?”

  “I worry, my friend. I fear that we’ve gone too far. We have been responsible men, you and I. We have labored in the service of responsible leaders. Fifty long years have passed, and not once has the Unthinkable been unleashed in anger. But we have trifled with the Eternal in pursuit of mortal ends. What is our pitiful fifty years in the eons of the Great Old Ones? Now, it seems, we will rid ourselves of our foolish applications of this dreadful knowledge. But will we ever be clean?”

  “That’s a challenge for the next generation. I’ve done what I can. I’m only mortal. I accept that.”

  “I do not think we can put it away. It is too close to us. We have lived in its shadow too long, and it has touched our souls.”

  “I’m through with it,” Doughty insisted. “My duty is done. And I’m tired of the burden. I’m tired of trying to grasp issues, and imagine horrors, and feel fears and temptations, that are beyond the normal bounds of sane human contemplation. I’ve earned my retirement, Ivan. I have a right to a human life.”

  “The Unthinkable has touched you. Can you truly put that aside?”

  “I’m a professional,” Doughty said. “I’ve always taken the proper precautions. The best military exorcists have looked me over…. I’m clean.”

  “Can you know that?”

  “They’re the best we have; I trust their professional judgment…. If I find the shadow in my life again, I’ll put it aside. I’ll cut it away. Believe me, I know the feel and smell of the Unthinkable—it’ll never find a foothold in my life again….” A merry chiming came from Doughty’s right trouser pocket.

  Tsyganov blinked, then went on. “But what if you find it is simply too close to you?”

  Doughty’s pocket rang again. He stood up absently. “You’ve known me for years, Ivan,” he said, digging into his pocket. “We may be mortal men, but we were always prepared to take the necessary steps. We were prepared. No matter what the costs.”

  Doughty whipped a large square of pentagram-printed silk from his pocket, spread it with a flourish.

  Tsyganov was startled. “What is that?”

  “Portable telephone,” Doughty said. “Newfangled gadget. I always carry one now.”

  Tsyganov was scandalized. “You brought a telephone into my private quarters?”

  “Damn,” Doughty said with genuine contrition. “Forgive me, Ivan. I truly forgot that I had this thing with me. Look, I won’t take the call here. I’ll leave.” He opened the door, descended the wooden stair into grass and Swiss sunlight.

  Behind him, Tsyganov’s hut rose on its monster chicken legs, and stalked away—wobbling, it seemed to Doughty, with a kind of offended dignity. In the hut’s retreating window, he glimpsed Tsyganov, peering out half-hidden, unable to restrain his curiosity. Portable telephones. Another technical breakthrough of the inventive West.

  Doughty smoothed the ringing silk on the top of an iron lawn table and muttered a Word of power. An image rose sparkling above the woven pentagram-the head and shoulders of his wife.

  He knew at once from her look that the news was bad. “Jeane?” he said.

  “It’s Tommy,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Oh,” she said with brittle clarity, “nothing. Nothing you’d see. But the lab tests are in. The exorcists—they say he’s tainted.”

  The foundation blocks of Doughty’s life cracked swiftl
y and soundlessly apart. “Tainted,” he said blankly. “Yes… I hear you, dear….”

  “They came to the house and examined him. They say he’s monstrous.”

  Now anger seized him. “Monstrous. How can they say that? He’s only a four-month-old kid! How the hell could they know he’s monstrous? What the hell do they really know, anyway? Some crowd of ivory-tower witch doctors…’’

  His wife was weeping openly now. “You know what they recommended, Elwood? You know what they want us to do?”

  “We can’t just… put him away,” Doughty said. “He’s our son.” He paused, took a breath, looked about him. Smooth lawns, sunlight, trees. The world. The future. A bird flickered past him.

  “Let’s think about this,” he said. “Let’s think this through. Just how monstrous is he, exactly?”

  ∇

  Flash Frame

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  The sound is yellow.

  ∇

  It was when you could still make a living freelancing in Mexico City. Nowadays, it’s wire-services and regurgitated shit, but in 1982 rags still needed original content. I did a couple of funky articles, the latest about the cheapest whore in the city for Enigma!, a mixed-bag of crime stories, tits and freakish news items. It paid well and on time.

  I also did articles for an arts and culture magazine which, I was hoping, would turn into a permanent position. But when it came time to gather rent money, Enigma! was first on my mind.

  The trouble was that there was a new assistant editor at Enigma! and he didn’t like the old crop of stringers. To get past him, I had to pitch harder. I needed better stories. Stories he couldn’t refuse.

  The crime stuff was a bust, nothing good recently, so I moved onto sex and decided to swing by El Tabu, a porno cinema housed in a great, Art Decco building. It’s gone now, bulldozed to make way for condos.

  Back then, it still stood, both ruined and glorious. The great days of porno of the ’70s had come and gone, and videocassettes were invading the market. El Tabu stood defiant, yet crumbling. Inside you could find rats as big as rabbits, statues holding torchlights in their hands and a Venus in the lobby. Elegant, ancient and large. Some people came to sleep during a double feature and used the washrooms to take a bath. Others came for the shows. Some were peddling. I’m not going to explain what they were peddling; you figure it out.

  It was a good place to listen to chatter. A stringer needs that chatter. One afternoon, I gathered my notebook and my tape recorder, paid for a ticket and went looking for Sebastian, the projectionist, who had a knack for gossiping and profiting from it.

  Sebastian hadn’t heard any interesting things—there was some vague stuff about a whole squadron of Russian prostitutes in a high-rise apartment building near downtown and university students selling themselves for sex, but I’d heard it before. Then Sebastian got a funny look on his face and asked me for a cigarette. This meant he was zeroing on the good stuff.

  “I don’t think I should tell you, but there’s a religious group coming in every Thursday,” he said, as he took a puff. “Order of something. Have you heard of Enrique Zozoya?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He’s the one that’s renting the place. For the group.”

  “A porno theatre doesn’t seem like the nicest place for a congregation.”

  “I think it’s some sort of sex cult. I can’t tell because I don’t look. They bring their own projectionist and I have to wait in the lobby,” Sebastian explained.

  “So how do you know it’s a sex cult and they’re not worshipping Jesus?”

  “I can’t watch, but I can very well hear some stuff. It doesn’t sound like Jesus.”

  ∇

  There was no Wikipedia. You couldn’t Google a name. What you could do, was go through archives and dig out microfiches. Fortunately, Enrique Zozoya wasn’t that hard to find. An ex-hippie activist in the ’60s, he had turned New Age guru in the early ’70s, doing horoscopes. He’d peaked mid-decade, selling natal charts to a few celebrities, then sinking into anonymity. There was nothing about him in the past few years, but he’d obviously found a new source of employment in this religious order.

  Armed with the background I had clubbed together, I ventured to El Tabu the following Thursday with my worn bag pack containing my notebook, my tape recorder and my cigarettes. The tape recorder was a bit banged up and sometimes it wouldn’t play right, or it would switch on record for no reason, but I didn’t have money to get a new one. The cigarettes, on the other hand, could be counted upon on any occasion.

  Sebastian didn’t look too happy to see me, but I mentioned some money and he softened. He agreed to sneak me into the theatre before the show started, onto the second balcony where I would not be spotted. The place was huge and the crowd that gathered every Thursday was small. They wouldn’t notice me.

  Sitting behind a red velvet curtain, eating pistachios, I waited for the show to start. At around eight o’clock about fifty people walked in. I peeked from behind my hiding place and recognized Enrique Zozoya as he moved to the front of the theatre. He was dressed in a bright yellow outfit. He said a few words which I couldn’t make out and then he sat down.

  That was that. The projection started.

  It was a faux-Roman movie. Rome as seen by some Hollywood producer. It could have been filmed in 1954 and directed by DeMille. Except DeMille wouldn’t have featured bare tits. Lots of women, half-dressed, in what was some sort of throne room. In the background I noticed several men and women, less comely and muscled. Slightly unsettling in their looks. There was something twisted and perverted about them. But the camera focused on the people in the foreground, the young and beautiful women giggling and feeding grapes to a guy. There were men, chests-bared, leaning against a column. The tableaux was completed by an actor who was playing an emperor and his companion, a dark-haired beauty.

  It lasted about ten minutes. Just before the lights when on, I caught sight of a flash frame. A single, brief image of a woman in a yellow dress.

  That was it. Enrique Zozoya stood to speak to the audience. I didn’t hear what he was saying—I was sitting too far back—but it wasn’t anything of consequence because just a short while later everyone was out the door.

  I left feeling dejected. There was nothing to write about. Ten minutes of some porno, probably imported from Italy. And even that it had been disappointing. You could hardly see much of anything in that scene they’d chosen; bare breasts, yes, but nothing more.

  What a waste.

  ∇

  I returned the following Thursday because I kept thinking there had to be something more. Maybe the previous show had been a bust, but this one might be better.

  Sebastian let me in after I shared my cigarettes and I sat down in the balcony. People arrived, took their seats, Enrique Zozoya in his yellow outfit said a few words and the projection began. It was the same deal, only this time the group was larger. Maybe a hundred people.

  I was disappointed to see the film was the one we had watched last time. Not the same section, but it was obviously the same movie. This time, the sequence took place in a Roman circus where aristocrats had gathered to watch a chariot race. There was more nudity and the erotic content had been amped a bit, with a stony-looking emperor sitting with two naked girls in his lap—one of them the dark-haired woman from the previous sequence—fondling their breasts. Unfortunately, he seemed more interested in the race than the women.

  The music was loud and of poor quality. There was no dialogue. There hadn’t been any dialogue in the previous scene either, which struck me as a bit odd, since you’d expect a few jokes or poor attempts at breathless sexiness at this point.

  The emperor mouthed a few words and I realized the audio track must have been removed. The music playing was probably layered onto the film to replace the original soundtrack and had nothing to do with the film. Someone had taken the added effort of inserting moans and sighs into the audio track, but the dialogue tra
ck had been clearly lost. Not that it would be much of a loss for this type of flick.

  The emperor mouthed something else and again I noticed a flash frame—a few seconds long—of a woman in a yellow dress. She was sitting in a throne room, held a fan against her face, and her blond hair was laced with jewels.

  The film was cut off shortly afterwards and the audience left.

  I drummed my fingers against my steno pad. What I had was nothing but some European exploitation movie, probably filmed in the late ’70s by the looks of it, which for some odd reason attracted a group of about a hundred people to its weekly screening. And it wasn’t even screened completely, just a few minutes of it.

  Why?

  ∇

  I visited the Cineteca Nacional on Monday, which was the place to find information about movies. I had very little to go by, and looking through newspaper clips and data sheets proved fruitless. I asked one of the employees at the cineteca’s Documentation and Information centre for assistance, and she said she’d phone me if she found something.

  I decided to move in a different direction, expanding my knowledge of Zozoya. He’d been a film student before turning to astrology, even shooting a couple of shorts. Aside from that, which might explain how he got hold of this bit of film, there was nothing new.

  Tuesday I pounded some copy for the arts and culture magazine, ready to give up on El Tabu.

  Wednesday I had a nightmare.

  I was laying in bed when a woman crawled up, onto me. She was naked, but wore a golden headpiece with a veil. Her skin was a sickly yellow, as though she were jaundiced.

  She pressed her breasts against my chest and began rubbing herself against me. I touched her hips, but withdrew my hand, quickly. There was something unpleasant about the texture of her skin.