Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

That felt good. I liked being called Syl. Even my dad had always called me Vester. ( Sly would’ve pleased my dad more, but so what). And I liked that Oswald was talking like a friend, like we were just as good as each other. So I stayed where I was.

Mr. Tillinghast — I can’t get myself to call him Oswald yet — was using a computer mouse to turn up a digital control on a screen, and as he did that I heard the bees start buzzing. Like the biggest hive you ever could imagine.

When Mr. Tillinghast spoke, he sounded like he was far away in a tunnel somewhere. “My system is based on my grandfather’s . . . I have his blueprints . . . but I have taken it to another level of power and control . . .”

The bees sounded angry. That sound made me shiver. The walls were vibrating a little so that some dust fell off. But then he switched on the dream hum.

I felt a little sick, for a minute. And then the tingle came. I felt it right between my eyes, and inside my head.

Then I seen a colored light that wasn’t coming from anywhere, really. It isn’t a color I knew. I don’t know how to say what color it was. Darker than purple but not dark purple. It went dim for a few seconds and then it got bright again, and then dim and then bright. Every time it got brighter I seen more things. More new things.

They were living things and they were flapping and floating. They were floating around these big pillars, like you’d see in a huge old museum building holding up the roof, but they seemed like they grew out of the ground way down below and they went on up above us forever. And the flopping floating things were floating between them. The floppers had these long strings made out of rubber or glass floating from the bottom, and one of them stretched out the strings to grab another flopper and pulled it close and sort of gobbled it up. Which made the gobbling one grow some bigger.

There were other things, too — they were slithering around the bases of the columns. These were like centipedes with hundreds of little feet but they seemed to be made of smooth soft-looking skin except it was gray-colored spotted with blue that wasn’t blue and they had human eyes on the front but no nose and mouth. This hose came out from under their chin and they ate with that. I seen they were feeding on stuff that was on the floor under our floor — see, I could see right through the attic floor. There was another floor, or a ground, under the attic floor, about three feet down, and these big centipedes slipped around on it like snakes. They were bigger than boa snakes. I seen something else, too — kind of like those seeds with little wings that go all twisting when they fall down from trees, but these went up and down, up and down, and they were as big as my hand and they would connect with one another into shapes that were like writing, and then they would erase that, flitter apart, and write something else.

All these things came through the attic walls and floor and ceiling, like it wasn’t there.

The buzzing sound was there but it was like I couldn’t exactly hear it — I felt it instead, in my bones and in my stomach and head. I couldn’t hear the humming anymore at all.

I heard Mr. Tillinghast’s voice all echoey say, “Your vital signs are elevated but you do not seem to have succumbed to panic.” (I had to look up succumbed at a dictionary site, later. I thought he was saying I didn’t suck or something but I didn’t see how that fit with the rest of it.) “ You will have observed several organisms. Perhaps the blue-spotted slitherers are alarming in appearance, but they are harmless, and even friendly. They are aware of us — the more intelligent creatures in the Alternating World are aware of us, as soon as we are aware of them.”

“How can they be here and be so big and we can’t see them without your machine?” My voice sounded strange in my ears.

“Think of it this way: our universe happens in beats. Let us say that for every other one millionth of a second our universe’s reality does not exist; then it does exist, then it doesn’t, all in millionths of a second. Or cut the fractions even finer than that! Less than momentary — and yet our reality appears and reappears in the stream of time so fast we do not detect its going and coming — it seems continuous. Let us then say that this other world, which you are seeing now, vibrates in and out of existence, too, but it is here when ours is gone, and ours is gone when the Alternating World is here! The particularly potent resonance waves my grandfather distilled . . . and the even more powerful and malleable waves I have distilled . . . have rendered this world visible, so that we can see their appearance and ours at once — and made a great deal more possible, as you may learn, some day. It creates a tunnel between those two realities.”

I still don’t understand what he said. Not real well. But that’s what he said.

I was thinking about it — and then one of the blue-spotted slitherers reared up and looked me right in the eyes. Up close.

“Do not be afraid, Syl!” Mr. Tillinghast yelled. “He is friendly!”

I looked into the slitherer’s eyes. They were a color that was sort of like green but not.

Then the blue-spotted slitherer laid its head in my lap, and wriggled against my stomach, and looked up at me.

I don’t know why, but I scratched it on the head. It pushed back against my fingers to get some more. It liked the scratching.

“Good lord! They do not take to me so! You have made a friend!”

I was starting to feel dizzy; my head was hurting. It ached deep inside. My stomach felt like it was turning inside out.

It wasn’t the slitherer doing that. I just felt like I’d had that buzz feeling and tingling too long.

Then I was gagging. The slitherer slipped away and I felt sicker and sicker . . .

I heard a loud click and the buzz feeling stopped — I heard the humming and then it stopped, too. The room was rocking like a boat when the wind comes in. Then it stopped rocking and I threw up.

I tried to tell Mr. Tillinghast I was sorry for puking but he had helped me up and took the monitors off me and he said, “It is I who should apologize.” There was a ringing in my ears so loud I could barely hear him. “I was swept away, all too intrigued, by your apparently gifted pineal capacity, Syl! I should not have proceeded with the experiment so precipitously, but these opportunities come so rarely. Come along . . .”

He helped me down the stairs, which was good, because my knees were wobbly. He gave me some water and I said I wanted to go home and he said, “Certainly, of course, but Syl — please — may I trust you to tell no one? Remember that if you do speak of it they will take you to a doctor and give you some horrible antipsychotic medicine and you will not like it, I assure you.”

“I won’t tell.” He was right, no one would believe me. They’d think I was psycho. I couldn’t even tell Bebe. Not all of it.

So I went back to the trailer park. I didn’t see Bebe waiting around. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk to her yet. I went in our doublewide and it felt all strange there, the television and the smell of some real skunky weed and my mom sitting with some guy I didn’t know, like it was the strange world and not the one I seen in the attic. My mom’s lipstick was messed up and her hair was, too. But that’s not what was strange. It’s just that everything I seen a million times looked like I never seen it before. The cigarette butts in the ashtray looked like some horrible little dead animals.

She said the guy’s name was Merk. He just got here from California. He was a friend of her friend Belinda who moved to California.