He led the way up the last remaining set of steps, and one by one the others followed him up, all of them watching him thoughtfully, in their own ways.
All too soon they ran out of stairs and stood together looking at the last set of closed swing doors. None of them made any move, for quite a while. JC finally reached out a hand to the doors, then snatched it away again as a great Voice was heard, filling the stairwell, filling their heads. Not a human Voice, not even human words, but still it seemed to JC and the others that Something called to them, summoned them, to come to the final floor and account for themselves.
“What the hell was that?” Melody said hoarsely. “It was inside my head…”
“It went right through all my shields and barriers as though they weren’t even there,” said Happy. “And no, JC, I’m still not picking up anything else. That wasn’t telepathy. It didn’t feel anything like telepathy.”
“The power,” said Kim. “The sheer power…”
“If they’re that powerful, we’d better not keep them waiting,” said JC. “In we go, children. Best foot forward and try not to show me up.”
He pushed the doors open and strode straight in, and the others followed right after him.
JC kept walking, even though he wasn’t sure where he was any more. He could feel the pressure, the sheer presence of the New People, even before he could see them. An overwhelming impact, as though their simple existence had stamped itself onto reality so completely, it was hard to feel anything else. He finally stumbled to a halt, stopped in his tracks by the sheer alien strangeness of the situation. A fierce, unnatural light with no obvious source suffused everything, a light painful even to his altered eyes, and a great Sound filled the air, without beginning or end. JC felt it in his bones and in his soul as much as heard it. He knew that he was in the presence of something unknown, and perhaps even unknowable.
The others had stopped with him. Happy and Melody and Kim huddled close together for the simple comfort of human contact. They all had their eyes screwed up against the light, and the sound and the heavy presence of a place not meant for human kind. Kim seemed as much affected as any of the living.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Happy whispered, like a child in a cathedral. “We don’t belong in a place like this.”
“Chin up, my children,” said JC, as clearly and calmly as he could manage. “Yes, I would have to say that we are in the presence of things unknown… But that’s the job, when you work for the Carnacki Institute.”
“I resign,” said Happy.
“Shut up, Happy,” said JC.
He took off his sunglasses and looked around. In this new place his eyes hardly glowed at all. It was as though the golden light was nothing compared to the harsher light of what had been the top floor of Chimera House. JC nodded slowly, and put his shades back on.
“We have a job to do,” he said flatly, “And we’re going to do it together. Because it’s our duty, and our responsibility, to the Institute and perhaps all Humanity. And because we’re the best damn team in the Institute, and we don’t back down from anything. Right?”
“Right,” said Happy.
“Damned right,” said Melody.
“If I weren’t already dead, I think I’d be very worried,” said Kim. “But yes, of course you’re right. Let’s do it.”
They all moved slowly forward, pushing against the presence of the New People, like swimmers breasting a heavy tide.
The light seemed to fall away some as they moved on, revealing the substance and details of the place in which they found themselves. Huge abstract shapes loomed up everywhere, weird mutated structures that watched and observed. Great pyramids with massive unblinking eyes; jagged energies crackling up and down the air like slow lightning; blurred uncertain shapes that had the feel of living things. Wherever JC looked there were colours he couldn’t name, objects with too many details for the human eye to encompass, and nightmare forms on the edge of his vision that shrieked of bad intent
… And always, everywhere, the feeling of potential doors, or even trap-doors, that led Somewhere Else. Doors to let things In as well as Out…
The New People were waiting for them. Four of them. Standing inhumanly still in the middle of everything, untouched and untroubled by the world around them. The world they’d made, or perhaps a world that appeared to accommodate who and what they were now. Often it seemed that there were more than four of them, dozens or even hundreds, in infinite ranks, superpeople in a superposition, everywhere at once. Their number and location was constantly changing, and yet at the same time there were only four, standing before JC and his group, waiting. JC squeezed his eyes hard shut, and then opened them again, but it didn’t help. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing was actually happening, or whether it was his mind trying to make sense of an impossible situation.
He couldn’t look at the New People directly; none of his group could. They shone too brightly, they were too real, too overpoweringly there. Stamped on this world like an identifying imprint. Each of the New People existed in more than three dimensions at once. They had length and width and breadth, and other things, too. Other dimensions, physical and spiritual dimensions.
Happy couldn’t cope with what he was seeing, or experiencing, even with his shields in place. He dropped to his knees and vomited noisily. Melody crouched beside him, partly to comfort and protect him, partly so she didn’t have to look at the New People any more. She didn’t vomit, but she looked like she wanted to. JC understood. It hurt him to look at them, even with his blessed eyes. The New People existed in spiritual dimensions as well as spatial. The human brain wasn’t equipped to deal with so much information at once.
And all the time, JC was thinking… Is this what we were meant to be? What we all should have become? Or is this what we were spared?
Kim moved in close beside JC, gazing uncertainly at the New People. “I can’t see them,” she whispered. “It’s all just light to me. Why can’t I see them?”
JC shook his head vaguely, then turned his whole body away from the New People. It didn’t help. He didn’t need to see them to know they were there. Their presence overlaid everything.
The longer JC and his people remained in the new place, the more they saw. Contact with the New People opened their inner eyes, opened up their minds, to the noumenon-all the adjacent levels of reality, the worlds within worlds, or surrounding worlds, the interpenetrating and overlapping worlds that most of us are mercifully unaware of. All the places and all the things that exist right next to us, blessedly hidden from normal view. Because if most of Humanity knew who and what we shared this world with, they’d go stark, staring mad. JC had seen some of it before, through his golden eyes, but never as much as this.
He shut his golden eyes and still caught glimpses of other places, other worlds, other dimensions, where life had taken on shapes and aspects far beyond the possibilities of this limited Earth. He saw two suns shining fiercely in a sick green sky, over a landscape that was always moving, never still. He saw dinosaurs with huge, distended heads stalk purposefully through stone galleries and massive tunnels, carved into the side of a mountain. He saw a dull red sun drop sullen bruised light from a mustard yellow sky, over man-sized insects that crawled all over a stone mound the size of a skyscraper, darting in and out of deep dark holes in its sides, intent on unknown missions.
JC cried out, and put his hands to his head. He thought he said, Too much, too much, but he couldn’t be sure. His thoughts came painfully fast, idea upon idea, rushing through his mind, darting this way and that beyond his control, as he fought to understand and assimilate a dozen improbable things at once. Sudden sharp insights slammed into his head, insights into the nature of reality itself. Blindingly obvious… but he was never able to remember them afterwards. Or at least, not in any way that made sense. Except sometimes in dreams… from which he woke cold and sweating, crying out, gripped with a nameless horror.
He sat down suddenly, and Kim hovered over him uneasily. JC gritted his teeth together, and concentrated on being the master of his own mind, the captain of his soul. And slowly, piece by piece, he put his thoughts back together again. And when he opened his golden eyes, he was at last able to cope with what he saw.
And one of the first things he saw was Happy, pushing away Melody as she tried to stop him dry-swallowing a handful of pills from various containers. JC forced himself back up onto his feet and went over to Happy, who abruptly stopped what he was doing and let more pills fall from an open hand. He looked at JC and his eyes were wild, almost feral.
“Guess what, JC? You were right all along! The drugs don’t work!”
