Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Merk wouldn’t have the countering rings. But killing him might put Oswald in danger. You can’t just kill people. You could get bagged.

I looked up at the stars — and they started roiling around. I was getting the tingling and I started seeing things flying by up there. One of them I hadn’t seen before was like entrails with wings. It made me sick to see it. Another one was like a big ugly baby that was floating along eating some little furry animal and it was eating it alive.

There were the floppers up there, too, and the crepuscules and there was the slow-motion exploder that kept rewinding back and exploding all over again and there was The Yellow Fog That Hates. (That’s what Oswald calls that fog creature.)

I didn’t want to see that stuff, not then, and suddenly, between looking at the Christmas lights and seeing those flying entrails — I didn’t want to see that kind of stuff anymore.

I would miss the feeling I got from working with Oswald. But I had to choose my mom and my world. I had to choose Christmas and summer vacation and learning how to fix cars and having a girlfriend.

I got nightmares, sometimes, from Oswald’s attic. It seemed worth it, then, but now, looking at the Christmas lights, I thought, it’s not worth it. I need to forget that stuff or I won’t ever come back. Maybe I’ll get crazy like Crawford Tillinghast and get stuck in some place in my mind so they take me away and give me that antipsychotic shit.

Thinking about that, I really wanted to see my mom. I climbed over the fence by our trailer and then I saw my mom was driving away. I could see she was crying. I ran up and tried to wave her down but she wouldn’t stop and the side mirror on her old Chevy coupe clipped my arm as she went by. I don’t think she knew it. My arm wasn’t broken but it really hurt and I felt like I was falling in a hole.

I found the trailer door open and I seen Merk in there under my mom’s artificial Christmas tree, opening all the presents. He got most of them open already.

“You looking for shit to steal?” I asked.

He turned around, fast. He looked wicked hammered and mad. “She owes me money.”

“Not much to steal there. We haven’t got much. Steal from somebody rich, down the road.”

He stood up, and staggered, and fell back against the Christmas tree. Bash, it went over. Christmas tree bulbs broke. “Come here, kid, you little fucker.” He was getting up, pulling tree lights off him. “Fuck!”

He was standing in the middle of Christmas, kicking it.

I guess it was always kind of stupid anyway. Christmas.

I said, “Man I wish I could feed you to the Baphomet.”

He didn’t know what I meant.

I turned around and ran around the trailer to the fence, climbed over, jumped into the field, ran down the trail. Only then did it come to me, whoa, I made this trail, me alone, to Oswald’s house.

Then I was close to the house and yelling for him. For Oswald.

He came to the door and shushed me. “Do you wish to alert the authorities? Come in, come in, then. What of your mother?”

“She left. I don’t want to talk about that shit.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t use that vulgar, ah, lingo. Well, well, well. Come in, then. Perhaps we shall discuss transition.”

I’m going to write this out and leave it in resonant-blocking shield we have, and during transition it’ll fall right through the floor and land in the field. If you’re reading this then somebody found it.

I am not going to say too much more. I guess I got in the habit of being secret, like Oswald.

I’ll tell you a few things. We set up the fuel cells Oswald collected for the generator, to use after full transition, and we increased the output of the resonator, so that it does more than letting us see that world, and a little physical contact with it.

It can take us there all permanent so we don’t have to come back.

It can take the whole house, too. It’s a portable house, I guess. Like a trailer. But it rides vibrations into another world.

First we had to do what Oswald calls a preliminary attempt , while we still had a way to get back if we wanted. So, Oswald started up the machine and put it on the new setting that would really open up major big time to that world. We had to go transition careful so careful, shifting in space Oswald said, in a way that wouldn’t get the animals in the Alternating World stuck in our bodies and we’d show up in a place where there was room for the whole house. That was part of the preliminary.

But one thing went wrong. The Baphomet showed up, during that test, when we were almost completely into that world, and because of the wider resonation field, we opened a door for him, and he went totally right the fuck into our world.

And the walls were transparent, I could see them but they were like dirty glass. And I seen the Baphomet running over to the Cumberland Glory Trailer Park. He was running right to our house. My mom’s car was gone. But Merk was still there. I knew he was there because I knew I had called that Baphomet in some way, to go find Merk. I don’t understand how. But I did. Like that time I made him hide behind something. He went where I wanted. And he went to my mom’s doublewide because of me. And he went in it.

I couldn’t hear Merk scream, but I could feel it.

“Is something wrong?” Oswald asked me. His voice sounded normal now because we were becoming part of that other wave system. “Are the police coming? You seem to be looking through the walls.”

“No,” I told him. “Nothing’s wrong. But Oswald, if something gets through to our world from that other world, like something that could hurt people, because of us, does it just stay over there?”

“Have you seen such a thing?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Not sure.”

“If it came through it might do some damage but once we’re gone, the gap will close and it will be drawn through, back to the Alternating World, as the gap closes — a kind of energy suction. Are you concerned about someone?”

I looked away from the wall, and went back to looking at the monitor, to check wavelength ratios. “No. I’m not concerned.”

So right now, we’re taking a break, and I’m writing this last part up in this notebook, and then I’ll put it in the insulation covers, and let it fall to the field. And we’ll see what happens now, as soon as we finish the transition, and we go over there for good.

But Oswald and me, we are partners. Nothing will stop us.

And when we’re tired of that world, there are more.

But we can never come back here, Oswald told me. He said I have to choose.

It’s okay. Because, I choose that world, the Alternating World. I choose it, and whatever else we see. I choose the world of crepuscules and The Yellow Fog That Hates and the slow exploder and the slitherers and the floppers. I have a pet, waiting for me there. My own blue-spotted slitherer. Spot.

We have tools, and weapons. The Baphomet, I know, will be there, and it will kill me if it can, just like it killed the servants of Oswald’s grandfather.

I don’t care. It’s still better than my own world.

Almost anything would be better.

“The Sea Inside” is Amanda Downum’sresponse to Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” “It’s one of my favorite Lovecraft stories,” she states, “but I’m very skeptical of the events as presented by Daniel Upton. This is my first rebuttal, and probably not the last.”

A resident of Austin, Texas, Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles series, published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters , from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons , Realms of Fantasy , Weird Tales , and elsewhere. One day she will return to the sea.