The Architecture of Fear (36 page)

Then Phail's belly split open, and something white and shiny and crablike leapt out, skittering on the floor; it had a dozen cylindrical legs and a long ropy tail uncoiling slowly from Phail.

Boudreau pulled out Ormsby's gun (I guess it was brave of him to get the thing, at least) and fired at the white crab, once, twice, three times. He hit it each time, hell it was only two yards away, blasting glossy bits from it. Curiously, no guts spill, no blood sprays. The white thing was apparently solid whatever-it-was. It quit moving.

As we hustled out of the kitchen I finally recognized the thing. "Congratulations," I said to Boudreau. "You just shot the world-record specimen of the Dalkon Shield."

"You gotta be fucking kidding."

"John Carpenter's
The Thing,"
I labeled his quote, and said, "Not in the least. We keep calling this a manifestation, why haven't we thought about what it's manifesting?"

Boudreau capped his camera lens with his hand—he did that to think better—and it started to develop for him (twenty seconds in the tray, then stop bath and fixer). "It's the cover of a Gothic novel, my
wife
reads—oh my God—"

And then lightning lit the room and took our breath away.

The panorama was definitely breathtaking. Bolts of blue energy arced between pitted copper spheres, casting high shadows against the vaulted stone ceiling. Relays clattered, sparking. There was the steady maddening heartbeat of vacuum pumps. A computer, a huge console resembling a theatre organ with triode tubes instead of pipes, occupied most of one wall.

In cells of curved glass bound with steel, things pulsed and quivered and flopped. One had tiny hands, pink and babylike.

She came wandering in, in a modernistic straight-lined gown of slick white satin. The creatures in the flasks have not yet frightened her, because she barely understands what it is she is seeing. The chamber is beautiful, in the manner of functional art, gray sheeny steel, liquid black Bakelite, indicator lamps brilliant points of primary color. The twitching things might almost be spaniels, crouched before the actinic fire, the master's slippers in their fangs, little pets with scales, with chitin, with cilia.

And all of them have blue eyes, just like her husband's.

In this version of the story, you see, her scientist (biologist? physicist? TV repairman?) husband has been making these things out of, well, the essences of matter and spirit, right? You get the idea? (Okay. Jizz and voltage.) Only, instead of potential Notre Dame quarterbacks, he gets these Pekingese from Hell. Finally, having mixed up Scientific Specialties Man Was Not Meant to Interface, the interdisciplinary idiot wakes up one morning, smacks his forehead (quite painful that, because his researches have given him an immensely strong and furry right hand) and says, "Of course! Ova!" (Like all scientists, he breakfasts solely on glazed donuts and coffee.) Following a few comic-relief episodes of trying to buy the finished product, he decides he ought to go to the source, and wines and dines and weds and beds (once, experimentally) a goose of his very own. Warning her. Never. To go. In. The. Lab.

We gaped, but didn't move. Wrong audience, don't you see, this is a James Whale picture for Universal, Dr. Pretorius's homunculi in jars (as I thought that, the scene faded to panchromatic black and white, and she turned to show white lightning streaks in her madly ratted hair, and hissed). It's a pretty laboratory, it must be given that, it's a place any of us would have been willing to work, but we do work in real workshops day in day out and (where are the moldy coffee cups? the radio blaring FM rock? the
Playboys?)
Charlie,
this ain't it.

The film broke, pocketa pocketa sound, glare of white light, purple phosphenes, and there we were in the hall again, Totten, Boudreau, me. Nobody else. Sometimes when you win you get your marbles back. Maybe best of seven?

Totten sighed. Boudreau leaned against a wall, then his eyes snapped open and he pushed away: but it was just a wall, William Morris paper and vertical wainscot.

There still weren't any doors: more corridors, all dark and absorbent, and the staircase. We could go in, we could go up. We could not go down, how very odd.

Boudreau's camera looked at me. Below it, the muzzle of Ormsby's gun looked just as blank. "I'm going upstairs," Boudreau said. "There might be a window. If we can't jump, maybe we can signal."

Jump to where, signal to whom? But Boudreau was frightened (so what are we, chopped liver? Well, maybe we are at that). Usually he gets drunk when he is frightened, but no such luck. Up we go, then.

Boudreau took a step, and then another, pointing camera and gun into the darkness overhead. Mind makes tools, tools dispel madness, paper smothers brain—

There was a screech, like that of a bluejay or a furious crow, and the huge taloned feet of a bird thrust down from the dark. The claws entered Boudreau's shoulders like can openers, with a wet hiss of compressing flesh, escaping blood, and a crunch as his camera crumpled. He fired a shot, generally upward, and then the gun fell. Above him was the sound of flapping wings, and he was lifted off his feet for a moment, but he seemed too heavy for the creature and it settled him down again. The shock drove the claws deeper into his body, and he howled.

Toward the top of the stairs, I could make out a rippling pattern of dark feathers, and then the pale flash of a pendulous breast. The harpy's face was invisible above. It could stay there, I would not protest. It was rending Boudreau, the only one of these men I had known for more than this morning, it was crushing him to jelly, and still I would not protest or ask to see any more of the monster's nature. Because, you see, I also knew Boudreau's wife (no, not in that sense, I am very dreadfully frightened, but why will you call me mad?) and I was too certain of the hidden face, I knew those talons much too well.

The priest chanted something about neither fearing the terror by night, and I wanted to punch his face in, but he put a foot on the stairs and walked up them, careful while treading through Boudreau's blood, and I followed. It beat drinking alone.

It was no longer dark at the top of the stairs. Candles were lighted on the walls, in iron candelabra. I felt inexpressibly sad that the holders were not grasped in human hands, but this wasn't my fantasy after all, at least not quite, not yet.

A stone archway beckoned to us, figuratively I mean. Father Totten looked through to the room beyond, said, "What on earth...," making two errors in three words.

I could hardly believe he needed a gazeteer. Here we had the iron maiden, here the suspended cages, here the rack, that bed with options. Around the walls, the usual assortment of ironmongery. The budget evidently would not support Poe's pendulum, but then of course it is not so readily metaphorical.

There is a curiously popular version of the story in which the house is built on crypts containing the private torture chamber rec room and wet bar of a prominent Inquisitor. Sometimes the tale is historical, with much hot Spanish blood staining black Spanish lace, swordplay, and fairly naked Anglican commentary on the habits of those wretched Papists, and how do you feel about Ulster, Father Totten? In other editions, the evil former owner has a descendant who drools on his copy of
Philosophy in the Bedroom
and longs to keep the old family tradition alive and screaming. A ghost or ghosts may be added to taste. There are inevitably many thrilling and detailed scenes in which they use phrases such as "no mercy" and "spare her nothing" as if they were in the habit of sparing a woman anything; they call for the iron boot, the fire and the ice, when twenty minutes in the birthing room would have any of them, Cardinals on down, in a dead faint.

Father Totten said, "I don't understand," and I was rather glad for him, but not so very glad because I only half believed him, and if you had seen his face you might not have managed half.

And there she was, but oh dear, something was very wrong here, she should have been wide-eyed with terror, abject, helpless (run that word over a few times, why don't you, it's so popular, helpless, helpless, never overmatched, never even outwitted, which you'd think would be okay, no: helpless it has to be, without strength or, gulp, cunning, the stupid twit never stood a chance,
help
less, oh it has such a slick sound off the tongue,
helpless,
I want to stop but I can't I'm... oh God).

As if to speak of whom, Father Totten held up a cross. Didn't help Clement, but then we were all new at this death thing, and besides maybe she was Hindu or something. However, I
was
watching carefully, after all any old piety in a storm. And it's usual in these things, of course, that after blockheaded old soulless science has gotten its nose bloodied, the men of faith step in and show us the way to the light, or safety, or San Jose.

She was looking at us, smiling in her long white dress, which was actually not much more than a long strip of fabric hanging down fore and aft, a white cord belting it; and the candlestick, of course. She set the candle at the head of the rack. She lay down on the wood. She stretched her long arms up, teased the shackles with her fine wrists.

Helpless, helpless.

But then again, you know, perhaps not so feeble as that; I took a step. I heard the chains rattle and the locks click. Another step, and there was a creak as the windlass tightened. Another step, and the creak this time was from her joints. She sighed.

I touched the crank (the windlass, that is) and wound it tighter still.

"What are you
doing?"
the priest said.

"Enjoying myself," I said, not really at him. Then suddenly the handle spun under my hands as the chains wound up; there was nothing stretched between them any longer.

Lysisfuckingstrata cuts both ways, you know. You can't make me play if I don't wanna.

We went back out into the hall. Plain little hall, no doors, no stairs, windows all of cloudy glass.

There was a closet, however.

And Father Totten, and I.

There is in every man's soul a desire to confront the Devil, and a firm unfounded knowledge that the Devil can be beaten face to face: sometimes it's chance, sometimes clever argument (logic's chiefest end, as Faust said), sometimes the right lawyer (Daniel Webster comes highly recommended), but whatever the out we all want the showdown. Haven't we all looked long and hard at photographs of Belsen, of the Ripper's Whitechapel, of the nuclear mushroom? It would be terribly reassuring to have no doubt of Hell. Perhaps if we knew we could stop doubting Heaven.

Surely Father Totten didn't doubt Heaven, surely goodness and mercy he didn't doubt Hell, but why would that stop him? After all, St. Thomas's doubt was indulged to the depth of the wounds. Christ was a man. He understood these things.

Totten pulled open the closet.

There was a high rackety rumble, and there fell upon the priest a great wave of garter belts, of fishnet stockings, of spike-heeled shoes, of boned corsets, of leather and black lace and spandex and red satin and buckskin fringe and torn sweaty denim.

The pile was still, and I thought he might be dead beneath it, perhaps the shoe heels had gotten him, but then a corset stirred and a padded bra was thrust aside, and he stood up. Lace and nylon clung to him. He turned his head.

And turned, and turned, and
turned
his head, until his collar was right way round.

Totten's mouth opened, and a hand reached out, a slender knobby hand with black hair sprouting from its back, and blood-red nails. The hand flopped around, and then it pushed at Totten's upper jaw, stretching his lips until they tore, making room for another red-nailed hand to wriggle out. The two hands clawed his jaw apart, burst his throat. They tossed aside most of his head like a monkey throwing a coconut. The hands unseamed Totten's body, tossing sheaths of boneless meat aside with grand abandon and remarkable facility (do you not recall how, when you first undressed for an audience, even your socks were uncooperative?)

The escapee was perhaps a yard high, hairy goat legs ending in little hooves, the hands too big, the head too big, the hair insufficient to cover, yes, too big too. The little satyr looked around at the kinky riches spilled from the closet, and began selecting a wardrobe.

Somehow or another there was still a camera round my neck, fitted with an SCR strobe that could have lit Mount Rushmore. I punched the charge button, and it whined, an unpleasant noise to me, worse to the satyr: he clapped his red-clawed hands to his ears.

And that was how I shot him.

He screamed and started for me, stumbling on his half-donned garter belt. I shot him again. I had SCR recharge and a German motor drive. Flash flash flash. It worked for Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window,
but then the cops were on their way to save him. Flash
whirr
flash
whirr
flash.

As I shot the thing, capturing its ugly self on Kodak VR 1000 for posterity (if any, as Paul Frees said while the Martian war machines advanced), it began to shrink. Flash
whirr
flash. A foot high now, too stupid to realize what was happening to it, or maybe too egotistical to turn away from the camera. Flash
whirr
flash went the killer
paparazzi,
peeling guilt off the thing in 35-millimeter strips, and what substance did it have but guilt? There was a pop of air and a whiff of dead goat, and it was gone.

Just me now. I wondered if I'd won. Whatever that meant.

There was a narrow stairway that hadn't been there before. A faint golden light shone on its polished wooden treads. The Light From the Attic Window, filtering down to me.

The steps creaked as I climbed them. At the top was a little room, an attic room with sloping ceilings, butter-colored light washing its wooden walls. There were brass candlesticks all around the walls.

In the center was a four-poster bed, clothed in down and satin and clean wool.

I looked back down the stairs. They were still there, but they looked rickety, and there was a hint of red to the darkness at their foot that I can't say I liked very much.