Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron Page 7

  IV

  He watched television. Movement of light and colours, forming shapes. Outside the window the sky drew his gaze, stretched taut, heavily imminent as thunder. He wrote words.

  Later, he was sailing through enormous darkness; glinting globes turned slowly around him, one wearing an attenuated band of light; ahead, the darkness was scattered with dust and chunks of rock. A piece of metal was circling him like a timid needle, poking towards him, now spitting flame and swinging away. He felt contempt so profound it was simply vast indifference. He closed his eyes as he might have blinked away a speck of dust.

  In the morning he wrote his review at the flat. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear the teeming aisles for long. Blindly shouldering his way across the floor, he found Bert. He had to gaze at him for a minute or so; he couldn’t immediately remember what he should look like. “That rewrite you did on the TV review wasn’t your best,” Bert said. “Ah well,” Ingels said, snatching his copy of last night’s Herald automatically from his desk, and hurried for the door.

  He’d nearly reached it when he heard the news editor shouting into the telephone. “But it can’t affect Saturn and Jupiter! I mean, it can’t change its mass, can it? … I’m sorry, sir. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply I knew more about your field than you. But is it possible for its mass to change? … What, trajectory as well?” Ingels grinned at the crowd around the editor’s desk, at their rapt expressions. They’d be more rapt when he returned. He strode out.

  Through the writhing crowds, up the steps, into a vista of beds and dressing-tables like a street of cramped bedrooms whose walls had been tricked away. “Can I speak to the manager, please,” he said to the man who stepped forward. “Brichester Herald.”

  The manager was a young man in a pale streamlined suit, longish clipped hair, a smile which he held forward as if for inspection. “I’m following a story,” Ingels said, displaying his press card. “It seems that when your warehouse was a theatre a room was leased to an astronomical group. We think their records are still here, and if they can be found they’re of enormous historical interest.”

  “That’s interesting,” the manager said. “Where are they supposed to be?”

  “In a room at the top of the building somewhere.”

  “I’d like to help, of course.” Four men passed, carrying pieces of a dismembered bed to a van. “There were some offices at the top of the building once, I believe. But we don’t use them now, they’re boarded up. It would be a good deal of trouble to open them now. If you’d phoned I might have been able to free some men.”

  “I’ve been out of town,” Ingels said, improvising hastily now his plans were going awry. “Found this story on my desk when I got back. I tried to phone earlier but couldn’t get through. Must be a tribute to the business you’re doing.” An old man, one of the loaders, was sitting on a chair nearby, listening; Ingels wished he would move, he couldn’t bear an audience as well. “These records really would be important,” he said wildly. “Great historical value.”

  “In any case I can’t think they’d still be here. If they were in one of the top rooms they would have been cleared out long ago.”

  “I think you’re a bit wrong there,” the old man said from his chair.

  “Have you nothing to do?” the manager demanded.

  “We’ve done loading,” the man said. “Driver’s not here yet. Mother’s sick. It’s not for me to say you’re wrong, but I remember when they were mending the roof after the war. Men who were doing it said they could see a room full of books, they looked like, all covered up. But we couldn’t find it from down here and nobody wanted to break their necks trying to get in from the roof. Must be there still, though.”

  “That has to be the one,” Ingels said. “Whereabouts was it?”

  “Round about there,” the old man said, pointing above a Scandinavian four-poster. “Behind one of the offices, we used to reckon.”

  “Could you help find it?” Ingels said. “Maybe your workmates could give you a hand while they’re waiting. That’s of course if this gentleman doesn’t mind. We’d make a point of your cooperation,” he told the manager. “Might even be able to give you a special advertising rate, if you wanted to run an ad on that day.”

  The five of them climbed a rusty spiral staircase, tastefully screened by a partition, to the first floor. The manager, still frowning, had left one loader watching for the driver. “Call us as soon as he comes,” he said. “Whatever the reason, time lost loses money.” Across the first floor, which was a maze of crated and cartoned furniture, Ingels glimpsed reminiscences of his dream: the outline of theatre boxes in the walls, almost erased by bricks; a hook that had supported a chandelier. They seemed to protrude from the mundane, beckoning him on.

  The staircase continued upward, more rustily. “I’ll go first,” the manager said, taking the flashlight one of the loaders had brought. “We don’t want accidents,” and his legs drew up like a tail through a trapdoor. They heard him stamping about, challenging the floor. “All right,” he called, and Ingels thrust his face through drifting dust into a bare plank corridor.

  “Here, you said?” the manager asked the old man, pointing to some of the boards that formed a wall. “That’s it,” the old man said, already ripping out nails with his hammer, aided by his workmates. A door peeked dully through. Ingels felt a smile wrenching at his face. He controlled himself. Wait until they’ve gone.

  As soon as they prised open the office door he ran forward. A glum green room, a ruined desk in whose splintered innards squatted a dust-furred typewriter. “I’m afraid it’s as I thought,” the manager said. “There’s no way through. You can’t expect us to knock down a wall, obviously. Not without a good deal of consultation.”

  “But there must have been an entrance,” Ingels said. “Beyond this other wall. It must have been sealed up before you got the building. Surely we can look for it.”

  “You won’t have to,” the old man said. He was kicking at the wall nearest the supposed location of the room. Plaster crumbled along a crack, then they heard the shifting of brick. “Thought as much,” he said. “The war did this, shook the building. The boards are all right but the mortar’s done for.” He kicked again and whipped back his foot. He’d dislodged two bricks, and at once part of the wall collapsed, leaving an opening four feet high.

  “That’ll be enough!” the manager said. Ingels was stooping, peering through the dust-curtained gap. Bare boards, rafters and slates above, what must be bookcases draped with cloth around the walls, something in the centre of the room wholly covered by a frame hung with heavy material, perhaps velvet. Dust crawled on his hot face, prickling like fever. “If the wall would have collapsed anyway it’s a good job you were here when it did,” he told the manager. “Now it’s done I’m sure you won’t object if I have a look around. If I’m injured I promise not to claim. I’ll sign a waiver if you like.”

  “I think you’d better,” the manager said, and waited while Ingels struggled with his briefcase, last night’s Herald, a pen and sheet from his notebook, brushing at his eyebrows where dust and sweat had become a trickle of mud, rubbing his trembling fingers together to clean them. The men had clambered over the heap of bricks and were lifting the velvety frame. Beneath it was a reflector telescope almost a foot long, mounted on a high sturdy stand. One of the men bent to the eyepiece, touching the focus. “Don’t!” Ingels screamed. “The setting may be extremely important,” he explained, trying to laugh.

  The manager was peering at him. “What did you say you do at the Herald?” he said.

  “Astronomy correspondent,” Ingels said, immediately dreading that the man might read the paper regularly. “I don’t get too much work,” he blundered on. “This is a scoop. If I could I’d like to spend a few hours looking at the books.”

  He heard them descending the spiral staircase. Squirm away, he thought. He lifted the covers from the bookcases gingerly, anxious to keep dust away from the telesco
pe, as the velvety cover had for decades. Suddenly he hurried back to the corridor. Its walls bobbed about him as the flashlight swung. He selected a plank and, hefting it over the bricks, poked it at the rafters above the telescope, shielding the latter with his arm. After a minute the slate above slid away, and a moment later he heard a distant crash.

  He squatted down to look through the eyepiece. No doubt a chair had been provided once. All he could see was a blurred twilit sky. Soon be night, he thought, and turned the flashlight on the books. He remembered the light from the oil lamp lapping at his feet in the dream.

  Much of the material was devoted to astronomy. As many of the books and charts were astrological, he found, some in Oriental script. But there were others, on shelves in the corner furthest from the sealed-off door: The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, Image du Monde, Liber Investigationis, Revelations of Glaaki. There were nine volumes of the last. He pulled them out, curious, and dust rose about his face like clouds of sleep.

  Voices trickled tinily up the staircase, selling beds. In the close room dimmed by the dust that crowded at the hole in the roof, towards which the telescope patiently gazed, Ingels felt as if he were sinking back into his dream. Cracked fragments of the pages clung beneath his nails. He read; the words flowed on like an incantation, like voices muttering in sleep, melting into another style, jerking clumsily into another. Sketches and paintings were tipped into the books, some childishly crude, some startlingly detailed: M’Nagalah, a tentacled mass of what looked like bloated raw entrails and eyes; Glaaki, a half-submerged spongy face peering stalk-eyed from a lake; R’lyeh, an island city towering triumphant above the sea, a vast door ajar. This he recognised, calmly accepting the information. He felt now as if he could never have had reason to doubt his dream.

  The early winter night had blocked up the hole in the roof. Ingels stooped to the eyepiece again. Now there was only darkness through the telescope. It felt blurred by distance; he felt the distance drawing him vertiginously down the tube of darkness, out into a boundless emptiness no amount of matter could fill. Not yet, he thought, withdrawing swiftly. Soon.

  Someone was staring at him. A girl. She was frowning up at the hole in the roof. A saleswoman. “We’re closing soon,” she said.

  “All right,” Ingels said, returning to the book, lying face upwards in the splayed light. It had settled into a more comfortable position, revealing a new page to him, and an underlined phrase: “when the stars are right.” He stared at it, trying to connect. It should mean something. The dim books hemmed him in. He shook his head and turned the pages swiftly, searching for underlining. Here it was repeated in the next volume, no, augmented: “when the stars are right again.” He glanced sharply at the insistent gap of night above him. In a minute, he snarled. Here was a whole passage underlined:

  “Though the universe may feign the semblance of fickleness, its soul has always known its masters. The sleep of its masters is but the largest cycle of all life, for as the defiance and forgetfulness of winter is rendered vain by summer, so the defiance and forgetfulness of man, and of those others who have assumed stewardship, shall be cast aside by the reawakened masters. When these hibernal times are over, and the time for reawakening is near, the universe itself shall send forth the Harbinger and Maker, Ghroth. Who shall urge the stars and worlds to rightness. Who shall raise the sleeping masters from their burrows and drowned tombs; who shall raise the tombs themselves. Who shall be attentive to those worlds where worshippers presume themselves stewards. Who shall bring those worlds under sway, until all acknowledge their presumption, and bow down.”

  Ghroth, Ingels thought, gazing up at the gap in the roof. They even had a name for it then, despite the superstitious language. Not that that was so surprising, he thought. Man used to look upon comets that way; this is the same sort of thing. An omen that becomes almost a god.

  But an omen of what? he thought suddenly. What exactly was supposed to happen when the stars were right again? He knelt in the dust and flurried through the books. No more underlining. He rushed back to the telescope. His thighs twinged as he squatted. Something had entered the field of view.

  It was the outer edge of the wandering planet, creeping into the telescope’s field. As it came it blurred, occasionally sharpening almost into focus for a moment. Ingels felt as if the void were making sudden feeble snatches at him. Now the planet was only a spreading reddish smudge. He reached for the focus, altering it minutely. “We’re closing now,” said the manager behind him.

  “I won’t be long,” Ingels said, feeling the focus sharpen, sharpen—

  “We’re waiting to close the doors,” the manager said. “And I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.”

  “Not long!” Ingels screamed, tearing his gaze from the eyepiece to glare.

  When the man had gone Ingels switched off the flashlight. Now he could see nothing but the tiny dim gap in the roof. He let the room settle on his eyes. At last he made out the immobile uplifted telescope. He groped towards it and squatted down.

  As soon as he touched the eyepiece the night rushed through the telescope and clutched him. He was sailing through the void, yet he was motionless; everything moved with him. Through the vast silence he heard the ring of a lifted telephone, a voice saying “Give me the chief editor of the Herald, please,” back there across the void. He could hear the pale grubs squeaking tinnily, back all that way. He remembered the way they moved, soft, uncarapaced. Before him, suspended in the dark and facing him, was Ghroth.

  It was red as rust, featureless except for bulbous protrusions like hills. Except that of course they weren’t hills if he could see them at that distance; they must be immense. A rusty globe covered with lumps, then. That was all, but that couldn’t explain why he felt as if the whole of him were magnetised to it through his eyes. It seemed to hang ponderously, communicating a thunderous sense of imminence, of power. But that was just its unfamiliarity, Ingels thought, struggling against the suction of boundless space; just the sense of its intrusion. It’s only a planet, after all. Pain was blazing along his thighs. Just a red warty globe.

  Then it moved.

  Ingels was trying to remember how to move his body to get his face away from the eyepiece; he was throwing his weight against the telescope mounting to sweep away what he could see. It was blurring, that was it, although it was a cold windless day air movements must be causing the image to blur, the surface of a planet doesn’t move, it’s only a planet, the surface of a planet doesn’t crack, it doesn’t roll back like that, it doesn’t peel back for thousands of miles so you can see what’s underneath, pale and glistening. When he tried to scream air whooped into his lungs as if space had exploded a vacuum within him.

  He’d tripped over the bricks, fallen agonisingly down the stairs, smashed the manager out of the way with his shoulder and was at the Herald building before he knew that was where he intended to go. He couldn’t speak, only make the whooping sound as he sucked in air; he threw his briefcase and last night’s paper on his desk and sat there clutching himself, shaking. The floor seemed to have been in turmoil before he arrived, but they were crowding around him, asking him impatiently what was wrong.

  But he was staring at the headline in his last night’s newspaper: SURFACE ACTIVITY ON WANDERER “MORE APPARENT THAN REAL” SAY SCIENTISTS. Photographs of the planet from the space-probe: one showing an area like a great round pale glistening sea, the next circuit recording only mountains and rock plains. “Don’t you see?” Ingels shouted at Bert among the packed faces. “It closed its eye when it saw us coming!”

  Hilary came at once when they telephoned her, and took Ingels back to her flat. But he wouldn’t sleep, laughed at the doctor and the tranquillisers, though he swallowed the tablets indifferently enough. Hilary unplugged the television, went out as little as possible, bought no newspapers, threw away her contributor’s copies unopened, talked to him while she worked, stroked him soothingly, slept with him. Neither of them felt the earth begin to
shift.

  ∇

  A Colder War

  Charles Stross

  Analyst

  Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

  He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

  The file he is reading frightens him.

  Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

  Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

  He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

  There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.