I wish to strip from my eyes the veils of illusion that time has thrown over them, and see the beginning and the end.
Right.
There is an abyss of being which man has never fathomed.
Sure thing.
A hole in time, leading all the way back past Precambrian seas and good ol’ Archean squiggly microbial what-have-yous, back four billion plus years and spare change to an aptly named Hadean hellscape, the brand-new molten moon filling up half the writhing charcoal sky. That’s what they claimed they saw.
What’s more, says the Horse, says he, during various debriefings over the next several months, agents of the National Defense Research Committee et al. were regaled with stories of strange angles that have no counterpart on Earth (quote/unquote) and formless grotesqueries that moved slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles (ibid., I think). When told to please be more precise, none of them does much better. But someone used the word hounds and someone else spake the three-mystery syllables we keep coming back around to—Tindalos. A little of this bushwa even, allegedly, came from Fermi himself. Upshot being, maybe it wasn’t just a bunch of stray neutrons got loose that Wednesday afternoon. As for the patriotic folks administering the Manhattan Project, they’re just trying to stop Hitler and the Japs, and there’s bombs to be built and dutifully dropped, and so no one strains themselves overly trying to make hide nor hair of the dubious ravings of a bunch of clearly excitable eggheads and their fellow travelers. Maybe it was something in the air. Who knows. An unforeseen psychoactive side effect of being so very proximal to all those graphite blocks and uranium pellets. Who cares, ducky. There were bigger fish to fry, fatter geese to cook, and so forth. Move along. Nothing to see here.
“The seeds of the deed move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and athirst!”
Oh, really? Hungry and athirst? I’m just saying, I’d have rolled my eyes. I mean, who talks like that? Anywho . . .
Where was I?
Where were we?
Rewind. Press play. Whatever. It all comes down to who you’re gonna believe.
Harry the Horse, he likes to talk about dead people. It’s a thing with him. As regards to the matter at hand, and I mean Tindalos, he has talked (in prudent, hushed tones, mind you) about the death of a doomed young man who worked for a certain DuPont chemical engineer, a chemical engineer who happened to be in attendance at Stagg Stadium on that celebrated, fateful December day in 1942. The victim was, allegedly, said chemist’s secretary. Maybe also the object of numerous homosexual indiscretions. But who am I to judge? What you do in the privacy of your own Erlenmeyer flask and all that. So, six months after the experiment, the secretary goes and turns up dead, and I’m saying not just only merely dead, but, according to the ol’ reliable Horse, really most sincerely dead. Dead dammit. Dead with Reddi-Wip and a maraschino cherry perched on top. And also, what is more, the scene of this gruesome discovery had been (aka would be) described thirteen years prior in that aforementioned issue of Weird Tales. Wanna hide something right out in plain fucking sight? Just hide it behind you:
Chalmers lay stretched upon his back in the center of the room. He was starkly nude, and his chest and arms were covered with a peculiar bluish pus or ichor. His head lay grotesquely upon his chest. It had been completely severed from his body, and the features were twisted and torn and horribly mangled. Nowhere was there a trace of blood.
The Horse says he actually saw some corroborating crime scene photos what made the rounds a few years back, and maybe he did (but we’re talking real deep web, darknet stuff here, so don’t even bother googling this shit). He says over the years there have been a few dozen identical deaths, seemingly random. No discernable patterns or what have you. Attacks, he calls them. He’s got unhealthy interests, does Harry. He’ll talk your ear off about Elizabeth Short and Jack the Ripper and the Beast of Gévaudan, if you let him.
He’s a sick twist, that one.
It was also him, by the by, what told me about the big black sphere Dreamland maybe had built special back about 2005, somewhere like Bolivia or Nevada or the goddamn Southern Mauristemo Islands, someplace thin like that. (But you know all about the thin places of the world, don’t you? We’ve already had that conversation.) Supposedly, the whole raison d’être for this gadget—the sphere—was to create a sort of cubbyhole in spacetime so perfectly smooth on the inside that if you—well, not you, per se, but someone—were hiding within it you’d be safe as houses from these so-called hounds of Tindalos, these hungry and athirst creatures from another dimension that Fermi and his Project Y goons had inadvertently called up, these critters that can only reach us through angles. The inside of the sphere, we’re talking hypersmooth, here. We’re talking smoother than goose poop on a rotten banana peel, quantum stabilized atom mirrors of nanometric thickness cobbled together from an alchemical soup of lead molecules and silicon crystals and so on and such like. Real Marvin the Martian, Mr. Wizard territory, yeah? You better believe it.
So, I asked the Horse from whose mouth came all these sundry marvels, I asked him, “If these attacks are random, then what good’s
