Christ's sake. We'd been suckered here specifically to get this book.
And maybe it made sense, in a weird, puppet-master kind of way. The protective circle was inviolable. Zayid couldn't drop it or break it without risking some rather nasty metaphysical consequences. Someone outside the circle had to come in and actually lift the Necronomicon out of the triangle, out of the metaplane where it had manifested.
I suppose they could have hired some poor schmuck to do the grabbing, some rent-a-cop or clueless middle-management corpie… or maybe the spell required an outsider, or even an enemy, someone with his own will, doing his own bidding, doing it voluntarily.
For whatever reason, the bastards had sought out our Mr. Johnson and, through him, hired us to do the actual grab from the metaplane. And now they had what they wanted. I could feel all those guns aimed at me from around the room, feel the eyes and the sharp magical focus of the chanters, feel Zayid's mad delight.
I felt that single, nightmare eye peering out from the cover of the book in my hands, looking up at me with its glare of malevolent madness. It whispered to me, in my mind, whispering blasphemous things about God and power and life. Hideous things, things so terrible I can no longer remember the words.
But I remember their feel. And the fire-charred and worm-eaten and ichor-slimed malevolence behind them.
'Don't be foolish, Mr. Michaels,' one of the chanters said. He brushed back the hood of his robe. I recognized the face-Roger Nakamura. 'Put the book down. You will come to no harm, I promise you. Your friend there needs medical help. And you have no place to go.'
'Maybe not.' My voice cracked. Cammie! I'm so sorry I got you into this! 'But you can go straight to hell!'
I dropped, falling into a knee-bend crouch, and as I did so, as a dozen fingers tightened on the triggers of those aimed weapons behind me, I snapped out with my right leg, the sole of my combat boot on the floor inside the now empty triangle, and swept in a sharp turn to the left, dragging my foot across the chalk marks, scuffing a gap between triangle and circle where they'd touched.
Then I lost my balance and fell flat on my face, and that might have saved my life as full-auto gunfire cracked and reverberated through the conference room.
A few of the bullets meant for me chewed through black robes and thrashing chanters. 'Don't shoot!' Nakamura was screaming. 'Idiots! Don't shoot!' One of the magicians sprawled back against the altar, knocking the table and both candle stands over. The flames flared, then winked out.
But there was still light…
Flat on my belly, the Necronomicon clutched beneath me, I couldn't see what was happening very well, but I could see that that cold and sickly illumination was back, all shifting blues and greens, and as I looked up I could see the look of sheer, brain-curdling terror on Zayid's face as something like a sinuous shadow stretched past and over me, uncoiling to reach from the unplumbed depths of that hellish triangle to encircle and grasp the shrieking Arab mage.
Gunfire continued to bark, but it wasn't aimed at me. I rolled over onto my back, still clutching the evil book to my chest, and looked up into sheerest Nightmare…
People nowadays think they understand magic. They think they understand the Awakening. Orks. Trolls. Elves. Astral spirits. Elementals. Magic circles. Mystic incantations. It's all frou-frou, man. Fluffy-bunny Halloween dress- up make-believe, robed in black and pretending to be all about power. I looked into the face of that… that thing emerging from the triangle of evocation and I knew that our magic-obsessed and technically adept modern reality was nothing, nothing compared to the eldritch Horror writhing and gibbering at Reality's gates.
Five of the chanters inside the circle were hanging in the air, now, shrieking and struggling as near-invisible tentacles slowly but inexorably squeezed. Nakamura was among them, his eyes bugging from his face in agonizing, mind-rending terror. The rent-a-cops were running, but the Thing had reached out from the triangle and grabbed two of them as well.
And tentacles were reaching for me.
'Here!' I screamed. 'Take it!' And I hurled the heavy book at the monstrous chaos emerging from the triangle's rift. The tentacles hovering above me snatched the book from the air, and by then I was scrambling to Cammie's side, scooping her up in my arms, and running, running like Doomsday itself was descending upon us.
And for all I knew, it was. The entire building was shaking and swaying, as though its century-old structure was barely containing the unimaginable force emerging from that alien plane. Ceiling panels and overhead lighting tubes burst and fell in a shower of glass and plastic. The floor danced and shivered, earthquake-wracked, and I heard shatterproof windows outside the room shattering, the crashes like gunshots.
It sounded like the whole damned building was screaming…
I reached the nearest door, pausing just long enough for a quick glance back over my shoulder. Maybe the Thing had what it wanted. One by one, the shrieking, squirming men suspended in the air vanished, though I swear I could hear their fading screams long after they'd gone.
I could still hear them as I descended the stairwell. • • •
The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, 'Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I've got wounded here! Get the hell out of my way!'
Somewhere in all the confusion, I'd lost my nanny… and I'd peeled Cammie's off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn't track us. The humans wouldn't, anyway.
Gods of all the Metaverse… what did I see?
It still haunts me.
It wasn't a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don't think it was a mouth.
Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?
Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthulhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.
Perhaps whatever can be imagined is real, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.
I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.
The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.
And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it's all right.
But it's not.
I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.
And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.
The Book of Dead Names.
Oh, gods! Gods in whom I've never believed, help me! The Art of Diving in the Dark By Ilsa J. Bick
Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she's left the room.) She has published extensively in the Star Trek, BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. 'The Key,' a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named 'distinguished' in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, 'Second Sight,' has just been released in Crime Spells (eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus's Rich Horton calls the novelette ' the best (in the anthology)… heady and involving.'
Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books: Draw the Dark, a paranormal mystery Publisher's Weekly called 'inventive' and 'riveting,' which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter); and The Sin Eater's Confession, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.
Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.
