The Shining Trapezohedron
When I was bored or sad, I liked to shop. I would descend from my apartment, stroll the few blocks downtown, and frequent bookstores, clothing outlets, repositories of trinkets and collectibles. One of my favorite destinations was a small establishment called Stony Steve’s, a seller of gemstones, small fossils, potted plants, weathered books, and antiques of wood, fabric, and metal. Over the years I made some valuable finds—an original edition of Rage, a musty, undated tome of indecipherable hieroglyphs, several well-preserved Cambrian trilobites, a geode infected by two clearly differentiated colours of crystal (I insisted this one had to be a fake, but Steve, a few threads of white hair combed over his mottled head, only gave a noncommittal one-shouldered shrug), and other odds and ends which, depending on my mood, invited either warm contemplation or subtle disquiet.
On the occasion of which I would like to speak, I had recently fallen out with a longtime friend following an exchange of views which, quite contrary to my expectation, culminated in his feverish denunciation of my words, morals, and person. I walked into Steve’s in low humour, shrouded in a long brown coat despite the glaring sun and spring thaw, a dissonant bell tinkling after me. I looked briefly over the crystals, fossils, and amber-drowned arthropods near the front before proceeding to the large, rough-hewn shelves of wooden antiques which stood near the back of the store. There were carven animals, little chests and music boxes, bowls and game sets and wind instruments. My fingers trailed over a checkers set, a rough-whittled ladle, a tiny clock with frozen hands, a tiny cherrywood box.
This last item was very plain and smooth, and very small, only about eight inches wide and five tall, with a hinged lid. I made to open it, wondering what, if anything, lay inside (Steve usually displayed such items with open lids), but no matter how hard I tried, the lid would not budge. I saw a small keyhole on the front and, assuming the existence of a corresponding key, took it to the counter, where Steve sat perusing a philatelic magazine.
“Is there a key to this?”
Steve looked up, gathered his wits for a moment, then rasped, “Oh, so you found it!”
I gave him a quizzical look.
“No key,” he said. “None of my skeleton keys work either. Couldn’t even do it with a hairpin, and”—he tapped his forehead—“I’m usually good at that. Thought it’d be your sort of thing.”
“It was closed when you got it?”
He nodded. “Seen the bottom?”
I turned it over and saw, engraved on the smooth underside of the box, a lacy script which superficially resembled Arabic. “What language is this?”
“That’s what I asked my friend Pete. Philologist at Northwestern. Forget the exact language, he didn’t know what part of the world it was from. Said he… couldn’t find grammar, wasn’t sure where the word breaks were. Assumed it was gibberish, just a decoration.”
My interest kindled, I told him I would buy it, then asked the price, as I hadn’t seen one on the shelf.
“Hundred dollars.”
“A hundred?”
He grinned, showing the gaps between his remaining teeth. “Hold it up to your ear, shake it a little.”
I did so, and I heard a quiet rattling, as though some object were held in place by an apparatus slightly larger than itself.
“Could be an egg-sized diamond in there, for all I know,” he said.
“Fair enough. I’ll pay for the uncertainty.”
“Hey,” he said, as I handed him my credit card, “gotta tell me what’s in there, if you manage to get it open.”
“I’ll keep you apprised of the situation.”
He returned my card and placed the box in a brown paper bag while I scrawled something on a receipt. “See you around,” I said, picking up the bag, my mind already moving elsewhere.
“Take care!” He turned his attention to his magazine, a knobby finger tracing the page to find the place at which he had left off. I left the store, the bell tapping the grimy glass behind me, and headed to the bookshop across the street.
Once home, I inspected the box. The gap between the lid and main body was infinitesimal, and, though I tried my thinnest knives, none would pierce it. I attempted to wrench the lid off again, using the full extent of my admittedly unimpressive strength, and again I failed. I was loath to break the item, so I turned my attention to the mysterious scrawl chiselled into the bottom surface. Reasoning that the deciphered phrase might indicate a means of access, I photographed it and shared my find on several Internet forums—Reddit, 4chan, and other, more obscure websites dedicated to the paranormal and the occult. Three days passed without incident, and I had quite forgotten about the mystery when I received a private communication from a fellow inhabitant of the forum Real Fluoride Dangers.
xX_TallPa_Xx: cant help u but i know a guy
WesternBloch: who?
xX_TallPa_Xx: calls himself professor hazard
xX_TallPa_Xx: or ph
xX_TallPa_Xx: not online
WesternBloch: how can I contact him?
xX_TallPa_Xx: thru me
xX_TallPa_Xx: dont get ur hopes up, idk if he can help i just remember seeing smthing like that in his office
WesternBloch: like the box?
xX_TallPa_Xx: no just the writing
WesternBloch: put me in touch then
xX_TallPa_Xx: ill get back 2u
Two days later, my friend TallPa informed me that my case had an easy fix. The professor knew the language in question, and could represent the phonemes of the phrase with the Latin alphabet. However, he thought it inadvisable to share such information online, and so would delegate TallPa to meet me in person, on which occasion he would share the pronunciation. Professor Hazard had seen such vessels before, and theorised that the vocalisation of the words written thereon would cause mine to open, a subsequent vocalisation causing it to close and so on. He warned me, through TallPa, that there was no way to tell what crouched within the box, and that it was possible I would expose myself to great physical or mental danger by opening it. He did not begrudge me my curiosity—was it not a heedless plunge into the unknown that had set him on the path to his current expertise?—but felt it incumbent upon himself to inform me of the risk I took.
Amused, though not expecting much, I agreed to meet TallPa. By strange good fortune he lived near Chicago, and we fixed the rendezvous at a small faux-vintage café called The Idiot. It was another four days before the pseudonymous acolyte’s schedule permitted him to take the train to my general location; he preferred to come to my part of town, he said, because his abode lay in a suburban backwater whose quality of public meeting-place was much lower than that to which he assumed I was accustomed.
In the dim babble of The Idiot I waited, thumbs twiddling, aroma of my peppermint mocha rising to my nostrils, eyes tracing with displeasure the grime-filled gouges on the wood of my table. I was deep in daydreams when a young red-bearded man in garish plaid attire imposed upon my field of vision.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you, uh, go by the name Western—”
“Bloch.” I nodded. “Do you have my spell?”
He sat down, his eyes darting around, and shook my hand. “Real names are fine with me if they’re fine with you, but, uh, I know this is a bit seedy, I totally get it if—”
“John,” I said.
“Right.” He grinned. “Francis.” He extracted a ragged scrap of paper from his cargo pants. “It’s written here, I’ll say it and you can repeat it after me till you’ve got it.”
He placed the paper on the table in front of me, and I puzzled over the bizarre syllables.
arák-hatá nyár-latá kurán
He said it, slowly, and I attempted to match him. Dissatisfied with my first try, he repeated it, and I again said it after him. This second try pleased him better, and he had me say it twice more, after which he congratulated me on my swift grasp of the material. He asked whether I could hold it in my memory until such time as I returned to the box; after I assured him I could, he balled up the paper, popped it into his mouth, chewed a bit, and swallowed.
“The professor said not to leave something like that lying around,” he explained, flashing another grin.
“Might I meet this professor?”
Francis looked uncertain. “Maybe. Let me know what you find in the box. But, uh, don’t say too much, just give me a general idea, no exact descriptions.”
“Why the secrecy?”
He shrugged. “I just do what the professor says. Dangerous to talk openly about ancient magic, apparently. Gets you the wrong sort of attention.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me more about the sort of ancient magic you study.”
“Well, how much shit have you seen?”
“Nothing beyond the material,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’d just laugh at me. Update me on the box, then we’ll talk.”
We talked a little more, our conversation turning to the materially grounded conspiracies discussed on the site on which we had met, but soon I became impatient to return home and try the phrase Francis had given me. My half-buried lifelong craving for some proof, or at least hint, of spheres beyond the mundane cosmos had flared up in force, and I nursed what I considered an insane hope of satisfying this desire. Francis had me repeat the words twice more, and I departed sure of their preservation in my memory.
I sat in my cluttered bedroom, bed piled with clothes, desk choked with books and papers, half-blinded window admitting thin streams of sunset light. The box sat before me on a cleared-off section of desk. My heart thudded, yet I also felt rather silly. I took a breath—it caught. I took another, and spoke the words: “Arák-hatá nyár-latá kurán.”
A barely audible click reached my ears.
I reached for the box with trembling fingers and pulled at the lid. It opened easily, revealing a minute and complex metal locking mechanism along the front. I did not linger on this, though, as my attention was utterly arrested by what lay within.
Nestled in a queer wooden apparatus shaped to snugly enclose its contents—I saw that the other half of the apparatus was attached to the lid—was a ruby-red gemstone about the size of a hen’s egg. It was some sort of diamond-like polyhedron, its many sides polished and reflective, and the entire thing emitted a soft glow. I could not tear my eyes from it. Its beauty was greater than that of the rising sun, greater than that of a beautiful woman in heat, greater than that of the most exquisite music, than that of any single thing I had ever seen or heard. I picked it up and cradled it in my palm; it was warm to the touch, and suffused me with an almost lustful desire to continue gazing into its depths. I turned off the lights so as to see it better, and as the light through my window faded, so its light swelled to encompass the very horizons of my vision. Its inner structure was shot through with odd planar shadows derived from the varied polygons which constituted its surface, and as my eyes slid out of focus the shadows moved, intersected, reached…
I looked up. I sat in a room of red mirrors. Every surface—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the stone, my own skin—was reflective, and I saw copies of myself crouched in the same position, the same expression on my face, iterated endlessly in images within images within images. My awareness, my centre of being, leapt from image to image with exponentially increasing speed, and I felt in some deep region of myself, in some fold of the stem of my brain, that there would be no end, that there was no end, that there had been no end, that I could jump forever from image to image and never find one that was the slightest bit different, and that these images were real, that they were instantiations of myself which actually existed, and that my own self was only one of them, less than one of them, because it jumped from shadow to shadow to shadow. I was a wisp on the surface of an infinitely compound eye, and I knew dimly that these copies of myself were also looking into the gem, were also leaping from one image to the next, but that they would never touch, and that I would never touch them, so that the whole, the compound eye, was blind…
Then my perspective shifted, and I experienced a sensation not unlike being plunged into warm water, my eyes stinging as if assaulted by chlorine, and the images around me wavered, bulged, and split, each into innumerable copies, and this time each copy was the tiniest bit different from the one that stood next to it. Some of these images of me were holding the gem at a different angle, or with a different hand, some gazed into it as it sat on the desk, some did not hold it at all, some bewildered me with minuscule yet dread-inspiring differences in facial expression, in the way they held their bodies, in the shadows which dwelt behind their eyes. The farther I travelled from the original image, the less I could identify these doppelgängers with myself. A strange, dull, watery pounding seeped through my head as I sped down a far-flung branch of decreasing familiarity, the copies growing ever less like me in countenance, their surroundings changing, first to other rooms, then to wide spaces, streets, plains, rivers, skies. Alarm flooded my veins when I saw the first gross distortion in one of these beings (I could no longer call them copies)—its cheek was swollen, and a great yellow eye glared out. All at once I was lost in an abyssal red-litten gallery of horror. The beings around me had gargantuan mouths, maddening asymmetrical forms, tentacular growths between their legs and in the spaces which should have housed eyes, amœbal feelers extending from liquid skin, and their surroundings were stranger still, stretches of starry blackness, massive fungoid growths in garish colours, shards of reflective material which ran right through their increasingly distended and disunified bodies.
A burst of blood, and one of the images was gone, replaced by an area on which I could not focus, an area which inspired in my brain a strange, thought-muting fuzz. I fled by instinct, wandering aimlessly through the endless mirrored realms of self-parodies, but seconds later another pane disappeared, imparting in the instant before its vanishment an image of a gray-skinned, three-limbed version of myself impaled on a rocky spar. Again the fuzz on which I could not concentrate, again I shifted focus, and almost immediately I saw a tentacle-haired being trapped in a silver-toothed gullet, and that too went dark… My mind juddered from death to death, annihilation to annihilation, and fear rose in my throat as the unfamiliarity began to abate, as the voyage reversed, bringing me back to familiar scenes, variations of myself which were closer and closer to humanity, then were fully human, so I saw myself eaten, shot, run over, expiring in lingering, medicated agony, dead at my own hands, and by some obscure sense I divined that the time until my death was also decreasing, that these copies, who were now indistinguishable from myself, were dying first a hundred years hence, then fifty, then ten, then one…
I screamed with a thousand voices, or I screamed along with those copies of myself which were looking at the gem, some of which fell where they sat, or stood. The screams took on subtly differentiated aspects, some sounding higher, some lower, some like strings, some like horns, some like hideous ill-carved flutes. The pounding of my own heart, and the hearts of my infinity of fellow sufferers, combined to form an accursed drumbeat, the rhythm recalling every stutter of the chest that had ever accompanied a harsh word, or a bad bit of news, or a blood-draining image. Those screams which remained were uncannily musical now, an orchestra of high woodwinds, madly declaiming jagged, atonal melodies in metric alliance with the awful pounding. The mirrored panes flickered, then went dark, and my countless copies vanished into the void from whence they had come, and I was alone, alone with the flutes and the drums, an absolute subspatial darkness before me. My limbs jerked, my tongue twisted, and I realised with horror that I was singing, sounds like those of the flutes crawling from my throat to accompany my involuntary dance. The gem was nowhere. I was nowhere, and I could not close my eyes even as they burned, and as I stared into the great blackness, a shimmer passed across it, and in one abominable instant I could see.
White light seeped between my eyelids. I opened my eyes, casting my bleary gaze around the small room in which I found myself. The walls were padded, and I lay in a badly furnished bed, a thin blanket pulled up to my chin. I tried to raise my arm, but something tugged at my wrists—I realised with a start that my wrists and ankles were fastened to the bed.
Psych ward. I had placed myself. I could recall the nightmare journey that had followed my encounter with the gem, and a final fell image from which my mind shrank as I attempted halfheartedly to remember it, and then… well, obviously I must have done something to warrant my confinement here, but my memories had vanished, or had never been formed.
At length a doctor entered and inquired as to my subjective condition.
“I…”—I paused, noting the rawness in my throat—“I’m tired, and my throat hurts, but besides that I’m fine. What did I do to get here?”
A few extra creases appeared on the doctor’s mottled forehead. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Sitting in my room.” No sense mentioning the gem.
“You don’t recall anything unusual occurring in your apartment?”
I shook my head.
The doctor sighed. “We can discuss this more later. Someone will be in to check—”
“Tell me what happened,” I said, trying to make my voice at once calm and insistent. “I can handle it.”
He hesitated.
“It might jog my memory. Anyway, I’m not in a position to do anything to you, or myself.”
The doctor clasped his hands together, then spoke slowly. “You were found on the floor of your bedroom, screaming. Neighbours had called the police. You wouldn’t stop, and you resisted restraint, so the police called an ambulance, and the paramedics sedated you. You were taken here and confined in case you resumed your… activities when you woke up.” He paused. “Do you remember any of this?”
“None of it,” I said. “Maybe I fell asleep and had a nightmare.”
He gave me a glance which suggested he found this a dubious proposition.
“What’s the time?”
“Just past six in the morning.”
I looked around for a window, then realised there were none. “How long do you plan to keep me here?”
The doctor frowned. “I would advise you to stay for at least another day, so we can—”
“Let me rephrase the question,” I interrupted. “How long do I have to stay?”
He looked unhappy. “First, we’d like to give you a questionnaire—”
“Look, man.” I held his gaze, peering into the little shrewish eyes that hid behind rimless oval glasses. “I’ll fill out whatever paperwork is necessary. I’d just like a straight answer.”
“We can release you in a few hours,” he said, a note of curtness creeping into his voice. “However, in doing so, we would forgo all liability for your future decisions, and it is my opinion that you should remain another day for observation, and to see if we can jog your memory.”
I flashed him a thin smile. “Thank you. I respect your opinion, but I really think I’ll be fine.”
I finally got out just before noon, and the April sun glared down at me as I hurried through the bustling streets. A chill wind was about, and I shivered in the absence of my coat.
Back in my apartment, I ran to my bedroom, and suffered a momentary panic when I could not locate the gem. I crouched on the floor, searching desperately, and spied a dim red glow coming from the musty blankets and dog-eared tomes beneath my bed. A damn good thing it had ended up there, as I could not have prevented its theft in the state in which the doctor insisted they’d found me, and still less could I have kept someone else from looking into its depths and suffering a similar madness.
I retrieved the glowing crystalline polyhedron—it was oddly heavy in my hand, and warm—and, looking the other way, half-closing my eyes, I tried to re-fit it in the wooden apparatus which had housed it. After several anguished moments I was forced to admit that this was an eyes-open job. Already waves of inexplicable fear beset me, travelling somehow from the hand that clutched the gem, through my arm, and up to my brain. At the same time I longed to peer into it again, to bathe in that unearthly beauty, to see what transuniversal secrets a second scrying could uncover.
I looked full-on at the ruby-coloured stone. Panic rose in my throat, but this time the images were wholly different. To describe the experience I need to remind you of the unbounded nature of normal perception. We feel there are things beyond the horizon we do not see; we look at the sky and imagine uncharted depths which do not meet our eyes; we know that with greater magnification we could see details of the world which normally escape us, and that if we grew to giant size or soared high in the sky our vision could compass the entirety of structures which normally dwarf us. We know there are sounds too quiet or far away for us to hear, that there are scents and qualities of touch other than those we currently experience. We are aware, in short, of the vast realm of sensible phenomena beyond those which fill our consciousness at any given moment.
This sense disappeared from my mind. In a flash, by some subsensory mechanism, I had “zoomed out,” and my field of awareness now encompassed all of reality. My eyes, my ears, my nostrils were filled by a vast black void which brushed my skin, submerging me like clammy slime. I could still see the room around me, but at the same time it was minuscule, a vanishing point of matter in the great expanse. The two images, room and void, were superimposed, neither behind the other but each running through the other like fog, and as I stared, more images half-materialised, great mountains and seas, the fiery innards of stars, dizzying green fractals and writhing, twisting ciliated forms. The mosaic of overlapping vistas rippled, it wavered, it looked so damnably fragile that I felt suddenly unassured of my continued existence from one moment to the next. Yet there was still something red and many-sided in front of me, and by a great effort I refocussed on this window to the cosmic depths, I could see it, the clearest part of the fog, and I placed it correctly in its wooden home. I slammed the lid closed and cried out: “Arák-hatá nyár-latá kurán!”
A quiet click.
I collapsed on the floor with a heavy thump, then crawled onto the bed and lay with limbs akimbo. The horrible rippling fragility from the gem-vision persisted, and bits of the wall and ceiling seemed to bulge and buckle. I closed my eyes, but the fragmentary shapes behind my eyelids distorted themselves like excited seismographs. After a few minutes of this, I decided that sleep was not approaching, and in any case would likely bring no peace, so I stood up with a groan and walked to the bathroom. There I discovered an extreme aversion to the mirror on my medicine cabinet—I did not look at it long enough to see what might warrant my fear—and could not relax until I had found a screwdriver, undone the hinges, and stowed the reflective surface face-down under my bed. The shower was comparatively calming, though I fought the persistent illusion that the water was eating through my skin, turning my flesh to cold liquid and washing the resulting slurry down the drain. This feeling abated as time passed, giving way to an unaccountable dizziness. Perhaps this was a side effect of the sedative given me. I shut off the tap, dried my goosebumped skin, wrapped a towel around my waist, and returned to my room, where, after hiding the cherrywood box under a thick blanket, I opened my laptop and looked for something, anything, with which to distract my thoughts.
All I found, though, was a concrete horror to replace my vague disquiet. The news was abuzz with a ghastly incident that had occurred on the Metra North Line the previous evening. A man sitting in a car full of passengers had been cleaved from mouth to groin, his ribcage opened, his guts spilling out onto the floor. None of his fellow passengers had been charged with his murder; none, in fact, were even being held. Witnesses swore that the injury had just happened, that one moment the man had been sitting reading a paperback book, and the next he had been writhing on the floor, his flesh peeled back, his blood flowing down the train car. Obviously there must have been a bomb on his person, or he must have sliced himself open under his jacket, although police were curiously reluctant to divulge any particulars concerning which of these theories they thought more plausible. The deceased’s name was Francis Wade.
Cold dread trickled down my back. I imagined a coroner leaning over the body, head whirling, struggling to figure out why, at about noon, the massive tear had knitted itself back together, smooth flesh stretching over an empty abdomen. Or perhaps this had not happened; perhaps the means of such a miracle had fallen out of the body along with the intestines. My head grew light as I remembered the photographs of the fell words dwelling on my phone and laptop, and I closed the screen, leaning back in my chair, hands over my eyes. I could feel a headache coming on.
But, after all, my laptop had not disgorged its electronics, and maybe it was another Francis… the name, after all, was common… I went back online, this time with a purpose. Official channels had no picture, as the case was too nightmarish and irregular for police to dare provide one, but certain unofficial sources of scandalous information confirmed that this was indeed the Francis I had met. My next stop was Real Fluoride Dangers, where I intended to begin as thorough an elimination as possible of every photograph of the spell I had shared online, but once on the forum I found my attention sidetracked by a new private message.
User7748: This is the professor
User7748: We need to meet
User7748: Do not use the spell again
User7748: Do not use whatever was inside
Professor Hazard was a small man with a wrinkled face and a shock of gray hair. He sat across from me at a window table in The Idiot, drinking uncarbonated water in small sips. I drank nothing.
“It should not have happened,” he said, his voice a quaver. “The spell does not transfer like that, not on its own. Nevertheless the words, when written down, leave a kind of residue, which by certain dark, unhallowed methods can be… activated. That box, or what was inside it, must have been the activator. It was booby-trapped.”
I stared at him, trying to pay full attention but distracted by faint strains of dissonant music which hovered on the edge of my perception.
“What was in the box?” he asked.
“A gemstone. Red, glowing. It gave me these visions which I’m not sure how to describe.”
The professor stiffened. “Was it many-sided, roughly diamond-shaped?”
I nodded.
“Four edges to each face?”
I thought for a moment, then nodded again.
His face turned white, and he took a shaky gulp of water. “May the Great Ones forgive me. I did not exercise proper caution. I did not think such items could be found, could surface, nearly as easily as this.”
The distant music scratched at my eardrums like the claws of rats. High flutes, piccolos, the thundering of blood in my heart and veins. “What is it?”
The professor shook his head. “Better for you to end all inquiries now. Take me to the box, and I will take charge of it. If you are lucky, you will be left alone.”
“Look,” I said. “This thing has already tainted me. I looked into it twice. The first time I ended up in the loony bin for a night. I can hear things, music, drumbeats, and the whole world seems unstable, like everything is made of water. You can at least tell me what I’m in for.”
He fixed me with sorrowful eyes. “I fear greater knowledge will not help you, and it may well harm you, even if I can draw off of you that whose coming I fear.”
“Damn it!” I hissed, slamming my hands on the table. “Tell me what this is!”
A few hostile glances strayed my way. The professor stood and grasped his cane. His voice was gruff. “Take me to the box. I will explain some things to you on the way, but once the items are in my possession our discourse must end permanently.”
“Right.” I stood up as well.
We said nothing as we threaded our way out of the café. Once we were on the sidewalk, the professor began to speak.
“There are certain instruments, surviving from prehistory, which can be used to see much more widely than our limited senses, our limited technology, and our limited position in the cosmos normally allow. These objects date from incredible antiquity, millions, billions, trillions of years or more in the past.”
“The universe is only thirteen—”
“You had better forget what scientists have taught you of the limits on things,” he said. “I would have thought your recent experiences had demonstrated as much.”
“For all I know,” I rejoindered, “the thing just causes powerful hallucinations, or—”
“No.” He shook his head. “What the Shining Trapezohedron shows you is real.”
I said nothing for a long while. Wind blew, people shouted, car horns blared, and the sounds mixed with the strange abyssal music still infesting my ears.
“Then…” I finally spoke, halting over my words. “There really are other versions of me out there, precisely the same in every way.”
The professor’s face was troubled. “This is not something I had confirmed. But if you saw this in the Trapezohedron, it is true.” He paused, then continued. “Yes… the number of particulate arrangements possible within a given amount of space is finite, so in a vast enough area, one would eventually find exact copies of… everything. And, you must believe me, the cosmos is infinitely more vast than you can imagine.”
“I’ve looked into the Trapezohedron,” I said. “I can imagine. I’ll bet I can imagine better than you.”
He grunted.
“I saw this awful thing that I can’t remember.”
“Quite so,” said the professor. “There are many entities which can cause such an effect, many which you could have seen. It is better that you do not remember.”
I was silent for a minute, then spoke again. “I do remember horrible versions of myself, things with tentacles, extra heads, distorted bodies. I suppose those really live out there somewhere.”
The professor stopped and clutched my arm. He pointed at the air in front of my nose. “One could be right there, right now,” he said.
“Is the world really as… I don’t know, as fragile as it looks? I mean, as it looks to me now?”
He gestured for me to continue leading the way, and I did, with some reluctance. “It is my hope that the impressions you have gleaned from the Trapezohedron will fade with time,” he told me. “But you will have to learn to bear what you do remember. It does no good to dwell on the fragility you have mentioned.”
“What exactly is it that you want to ‘draw off of’ me?”
The professor said nothing.
“I won’t take you to my apartment if you don’t tell me something.”
“The old cults,” he spat, “made certain propitiations before using instruments such as the Trapezohedron. These propitiations were expected. Absent such rituals, that which expects propitiation is likely to be displeased.”
A chill ran through me at his words. I pressed him for further information, but the unhappy man clammed up until we came to my building. I led him to the seventh floor, helping him climb the stairs—for apparently undivulgable reasons, he would not use the elevator—and let him into my apartment.
“I used the spell yesterday, to lock the thing back in the box, before I got your messages,” I told him. “I haven’t said it since.”
He gave me a distracted nod, leaving me unsure whether my actions had made the situation better or worse. When we had reached my room, I fumbled beneath the blanket for the box, then held it out to him, my hands shaking, the spell perched on the tip of my tongue. He took it in his gnarled hands, and the temptation to uncover the gem subsided slightly.
“Thank you,” he said, fixing me with intense eyes. “I am sorry for the trouble which I unknowingly visited upon you. I hope—”
Then he stopped, and turned, because he saw my colour-drained expression, and he knew that I had seen something behind him.
Standing in the doorway was a tall, thin man with ink-black skin and a smooth, elongated head. He had no hair anywhere—no eyelashes, no eyebrows—and his eyes were dead white voids crisscrossed by gray veins. He wore a floor-length black robe, and his hands, emerging from oversized sleeves, sported too-long nail-less fingers. At his approach the shadows in the room lengthened, the darkness in the corners grew deep, and the daylight seeping through the window grew weak and wan. His eyes were on me, and he smiled, showing mottled grayish-black teeth, and I found myself unable to move.
The professor dropped the box and lifted his cane with both hands, pointing it at the intruder. He screamed a consonant-laden phrase, spittle flying from his mouth, and the air between them rippled, but the black man’s only reaction was to wrench the cane from the professor’s grasp and snap it in half. Then one huge, thin, spidery hand closed around the old man’s throat, and there was an awful sizzling sound, and the smell of charred meat, and the professor, his feet no longer touching the ground, writhed and choked. Little drops of reddish grease fell to the floor. For long, agonising moments, the black man held the professor in the air, turning his throat to a shrunken, hissing red welter. The professor’s struggles continued for what felt like an age before finally dying away, at which point the intruder let him fall. Through all of this, the man’s gaze never left me, and I remained frozen to the spot.
After discarding the professor, he paused for a second, as if savouring his work. Then he walked toward me and crouched down, his face inches from mine.
“John Randall,” he whispered, his voice like quiet cicadas. “You have killed two people. Was it worth it, for what you saw?”
“You killed them.” Drums pounded in my ears.
The man smiled. “I did not place the curse on the box. I did not summon your would-be protector.” He reached down, picked up the box, cradled it in his hands. It burst into flame, belching forth thick black smoke, and in half a minute had dissolved into ashes. Only the gem remained, clean and glowing. I looked at it, and for a moment I saw countless copies of myself in predicaments identical or similar to my own, standing, kneeling, lying before the ink-black sorcerer.
He stowed the Trapezohedron somewhere in his robe, hiding it from view, and locked eyes with me.
“In exchange for the agony I intend to visit upon you,” he hissed, “I think it is only fair that I grant you a glimpse of what your own mind has hidden from you.”
His hands reached for my face, and his mouth leered open, showing a black, slimy, conically tentacular tongue. I opened my mouth to speak, but before a sound could escape me, his fingers touched my skin, and I saw again the great blackness which had preceded my trip to the hospital, and I saw again the shimmer that heralded a clear view of what churned within that void, and I heard again the maniacal flutes whose serrated melodies cleaved the very tissue of my brain, and this time, I could not scream, and I could not faint, and I could not forget.
In order to describe what I saw I must speak for a moment on the concept of wrongness. When you see a table, and one leg is shorter than the rest, this is wrong. When you see a man’s hands, and one has six fingers, while the other has five, this is wrong. When the voice of a singer suddenly goes flat or sharp, this is wrong. In all of these cases some expected beauty or symmetry has been marred. To picture what writhed and screamed and roiled in that ultimate cosmic darkness, you must imagine every possible form of wrongness applied to one vast object. Every way in which something can be asymmetrical, every way in which something can be ugly or chaotic or disgusting, every possible mode of distortion was instantiated in this living, howling thing that dwarfed the vision of all of reality I had seen just before closing the box. Towers of bubbling, laughing flesh with lichened teeth—nebulous fractal-ridden plasma that stank like vomit—a piteous childlike screeching that seemed to issue from the back of my neck—the sensation that minute drops of blood were burrowing through my pores and leaving my body—and all the time, I was vaguely aware of a horrible scorching heat on my face, and a dull agony as gray-black teeth sank into my nose. I tried to cry out, but the cry stuck in my throat, transmuted into a body-wide tremor, and the tremor spread outwards into my field of vision, swept over the hateful liquid void, and the thing I saw turned reflective, turned into a stretched and wrinkled mirror, so that what I looked upon was my own hideously distorted face, and the great amœbal eyes of this face stared back into my own, imparting the conviction that I was but one microscopic appendage within the transuniversal oceans of those eyes. The black man still held my face between his hands, but his mouth was at my ear now, and he whispered: “It’s sleeping. Don’t wake it.”
Then he let me fall, and merciful oblivion took me before I hit the floor.
I am awake now. It is dark. Only the light from streetlamps outside comes through the window, giving my room a faint, ghostly illumination. I sit against the wall, hugging my knees to my chest, the professor’s body keeping me company. Faint, breathy music suffuses the night, and odd shimmers interrupt the air before me like worms. I cannot look long at the space beneath my bed—I know the mirror hides there.
My fingers are sticky with blood and pus. I know from tactile exploration that there is a ragged hole in the centre of my face, and that deep burns scour my cheeks and jawline.
My eyes are intact.