Pandora's Gates
A Tale from the Book of Dark Memory
by: Joseph Armstead
“…the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value…”
-- The Second Law of Thermodynamics
"If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the Fall into Sin and knew what Nature was like before the Law of Entropy invaded it, we would already be living in Heaven."
-- Walter Lang
“Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality."
-- Emily Dickinson
Somewhere in the distance, off in the fog just beginning to burn away over the tree line on the hillside, birds of prey were screeching their protest to the passing of the night. They weren't through hunting yet. There was still more prey hiding in the undergrowth that they could kill.
The waters rushing under the arches of the stone bridge were the color of liquified dinosaur-skin, mottled, reptilian and darkly fascinating. The waters gurgled and frothed where they slapped against the cobbled surface of the retaining walls along the river's banks and a chilly mist rose from off the surface as its five mile-long expanse warmed to the rays of the rising sun.
It was a bleak and foggy northern California winter and in the town of Pandora's Gates, an unincorporated, rambling seven mile square township sitting at the edges of a valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. The mountain was a 2571-foot peak towering above northern California’s Marin County, and a sluggish dawn came with the familiar nagging unease of waking arthritic joints.
The town square was a couple hundred yards off from the bridge, known as "Blake's Crossing" after the owner of a local millworks on the eastern edge of town, and the pyramidal gothic steeple of the Redeemer's Church of the Lutheran was still smoldering, orange flashes of dying flame and pearl-colored smoke lazily wafting off the scorched tiles and timber. The bridge forded a fifty foot-wide river-tributary called “El Reptil Rojo”, a snow-fed freshwater river that wound its way inland, past the mountain’s base, from the forest-enclosed waters of Alpine Lake, one of the Marin Municipal Water District's major reservoirs.
Charlotte Badalamenti, Alec Krayer, and Gabriel Michaels leaned against the railing atop the waist-high wall of Blake's Crossing and they stared with beak, haunted eyes out on the wooded valley beyond the town limits. Their clothes were smeared with dirt and ash, their trousers and light coats ripped and slashed, and the flesh of their faces was marked with carbonized detritus from the fire that had raged most the night. Charlotte Badalamenti shook her wild tangled mane of chest-length auburn hair and slivers of glass rained onto the stones at her feet. At either end of the arching eighty foot-width of the bridge, the wreckage of an automobile rocked and creaked slightly under the insistent push of the winter wind. One car, badly crumpled from a powerful impact, lay on its passenger side. The other was flipped over onto its roof, torn rubber tires facing the sky like the broken legs of an overturned tortoise. Glass and pieces of broken chrome metal were scattered everywhere, like razor-edged confetti.
The streets emanating out from the opposite ends of the bridge were empty and the windows to the shops lining the narrow streets were all broken, the contents of some of the store display windows spilled onto the sidewalk.
Scattered about were a couple dozen dead bodies, all ages and sexes, nude, remnants of clothing in tattered strips at their wrists and ankles, all of them stripped of their flesh, with only purplish, glistening, exposed muscle encasing their organs and skeletons.
Clouds of flies and gnats hovered over the corpses.
The trio on the stone bridge were the only people stirring on the streets of Pandora's Gates.
"How long do you figure we've got?" Alec Krayer asked, his deep voice cracking from weariness and smoke inhalation. Krayer was an unremarkable man of medium height and build with whitish-blond hair that was thinning at the crown and in the back. He was looking down into the river's waters as they ran under the bridge somewhat distractedly as he fingered the slide of the silver .44 automatic magnum pistol he held. He wore a black leather glove on only one of his hands and it was with that gloved hand that he rummaged into the loose pockets of his leather trenchcoat and pulled out a fresh clip for the automag. The bullets in the clip were large and made from a gleaming scarlet metal. He looked at them appreciatively and ejected the spent clip from the big silver gun. It fell into the water below with a small splash. He then slapped the fresh clip home and allowed himself a small, grim smile as he cocked the slide. He’d been calling himself a “journalist” for quite a few years now, but, with his gun again in his fist, he realized he was still the same outlaw private detective who’d once haunted the mean streets of San Francisco that he’d always been.
Charlotte suddenly coughed. It was a harsh, wracking noise that hinted at esophageal lesions, thick mucous and the damnation of disease. Both men watched her with expressions of deep concern and anxiety. She coughed again and it seemed worse, the cough sending a spasm along her spine and she bent over, convulsing.
She heaved wetly and a gush of greenish-white goo streamed from her trembling lips. Alec reached over to wrap and arm around her in comfort, but she frantically waved him off as more of the thick, goopy wetness rushed past her throat.
The growing puddle at her feet was filled with handfuls of small writhing slugs.
Barely hiding his disgust, Alec began stamping on the creatures, mashing them into smears.
The large man on her right looked away and his face momentarily broke into a wrinkled mask of sadness, as if he were on the verge of tears, that was quickly recast into stony, grim resolve.
Charlotte shuddered and drew in a heaving gasp of air as she righted herself. The wave of sickness that seized her had passed. She sniffed loudly and made a point of not looking down at the mess at her feet. Alec quietly blew a lungful of air past his lips as he shook off his revulsion and concentrated on rubbing Charlotte’s back. She gave him a red-eyed, grateful nod, then returned her attention to the horizon off the bridge.
"It’ll be maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes. No more than that," Charlotte muttered dispiritedly. She made a face as she adjusted the heft of the bulging khaki backpack she shouldered. She was playing idly with a cigarette pack-sized electronic device that trailed a spiraling cord to a gray vest she wore under her bronze colored, quilted nylon, down-filled coat.
“You sure that parapsychologist’s flashlight of yours is actually gonna DO anything?” Alec asked skeptically.
“The ‘Fase P’ generator is proven in several anomalous field incidents involving revenants, or what we normally call ‘ghosts’,” Charlotte answered, “but I have no idea whether or not this thing will have any effect here. This is a new situation. No one who has ever been involved in a Kaggerman Alert has ever survived to talk much about it.”
“Oh, THAT’S reassuring,” he muttered crossly.
“Look, the creatures are manifesting themselves in OUR reality, in our physical dimension, which means they may very well be susceptible to our laws of physics,” Charlotte quickly explained. “The Fase P is the best tool we’ve got right now, all things considered.”
The “Fase P” was the gadget she wore, described in parapsychology textbooks as a flux-state, oscillating ELF (extremely low frequency) field projector. It actuated changes in localized electromagnetic non-ionizing radiation using electrical discharge amplified by stimulated emission of pulse packet radiation, hence the acronym “F. A. S. E. P.”.
“If you don’t mind my asking, Charly, what does it really DO?”
She shrugged and said, “Think of it as a really hot taser stun-gun designed for ghosts, okay?”
“Yeah, but this thing isn’t a ghost. It’s more like a collection of demons…”
"Let it go, Alec. Damn! What matters is we'll be ready," Gabriel Michaels, a thick-set bear of a man with a head of moderately long, graying hair said as he chewed around an unlit cigar. His amber brown eyes were slits in the wrinkles of his face as he stared into the brightening sunlight that poured down upon the town. "They know they've got competition now. They know this isn't going to be a cakewalk. They'll be more cautious and abandon the brute force tactics from last night. They'll be confused and they'll make mistakes and we'll have 'em, then."
Charlotte made a disapproving noise and commented, "So YOU say."
Gabe Michaels was an operative from the SSCA, the Scientific Security Criminal Anomalies agency, a bureau of criminal investigation under the auspices of Homeland Security, the FBI and the DOJ. He was a trained biophysicist and forensic scientist, not a cop, not a field agent, and the entire situation at Blake’s Crossing was far beyond anything he’d ever dealt with before, but he felt compelled to bolster the confidence of the two people standing with him on the bridge. He needed them to be brave. He needed them to be strong.
He needed them in case he fell apart under the pressure.
"Trust me. I've done this before," Gabriel said. "They're off-balance now, unsure of what to do. That's very much to our advantage because they're the strangers here. It's our turf. They're not aware of our limitations."
"I thought I just said that so far as I know, no one has ever survived a Kaggermann Alert. You want to get your story straight? And since you mentioned it, what exactly ARE our limitations?" Charlotte asked snappishly.
"Listen, there have been a couple survivors from Kaggermann Alert situations. Damn few. But it’s possible to beat these things. Focus on that. And only one limitation matters, Charly. We're human," Gabriel growled. "And you know what that means. You know how they'll come at us."
She sighed and breathed one word into the crisp, ash-laden air. "Temptation."
"Temptation," Gabriel agreed solemnly.
“And how in hell will they manage that trick considering we’re standing in the midst of a graveyard slaughter zone? I mean, we’ll know if we start hallucinating …,” Alec argued.
Gabriel sighed and looked irritably over to Alec. “Well, I guess if you start getting turned on by the thought that you’re surrounded by decomposing dead bodies in this wrecked, burnt-out ruin of a town, then you’ll know they have you. Clear enough?”
Alec blinked, startled by the image in spite of his tough guy facade. “Oh, Jesus… that’s so wrong.”
The wind picked up, the limbs of nearby trees swaying and dry pine needles rustling as the breeze quickly grew more insistent, threatening violence.
“They’re coming,” Charlotte wheezed softly. In a moment she unsteadily raised her thin arm and pointed downstream.
It was a violet-pink dot rolling through the air, an irregular shape tumbling end over end some thirty feet over the undulating surface of El Reptil Rojo’s cool waters. Occasionally as it moved, dream-like and flying over the landscape, something long and serpentine would snap whip-like from the body of the ball and then reintegrate itself back into the spinning lumpy form. As it traveled it emitted a ragged, nerve-jarring wail that sounded like an angry wildcat being disemboweled.
“The Amniodyke. The thing that calls itself ‘Hurakan’,” Gabriel whispered. “I figure its still about a couple miles out from us.”
“I just want you both to know that I lied. I’m not ready for this,” Alec admitted to no one in particular, voicing his fear and fatalism with sarcastic bravado.
“Shit, man, if you were ready for something like this I’d be running away from your crazy ass,” Gabriel commented.
“Whatever, guys,” Charlotte muttered. “Think you could keep the chatter to a minimum? It’s a tad distracting and if I’m going to commit group suicide with you, I’d like it to at least be dignified.”
“Grumpy, grumpy,” Alec chided.
They watched the Amniodyke approach, riding the air like an invisible highway, and as the shape approached they could see flashes of electrical current periodically sear and scar its uneven surface.
The thing was big, really big, even at a distance.
The day began to darken, the sunlight dimming to the gloom of twilight, and the wind became colder and more insistent as it drew nearer.
***
It had started with Pamela Dorrance-Grove, multimillionaire dowager and sole remaining heir to the fortune of William Godfrey Grove, a real estate and retail sales tycoon, former head of Grove Industries, Unltd..
Pamela was a hard woman, aloof and archly superior, believing she was born to a station far above the average inhabitant of the valley in which the Grove family made its home.
She had been a physically beautiful woman, blessed with a lush, curvaceous body men immediately desired and a face, wreathed by a wavy mane of raven-black hair, in which resided piercing almond-shaped green eyes that challenged and seduced the male animal that peered into their depths.
She had been married twice before at last finding her truest match in a mate, one Nathaniel Nelson Dorrance, a shipping company owner from Oregon who’d relocated to California’s Marin coastal woodlands, escaping the scandal of a sexual liaison with an under-aged Oregonian heiress. Nathaniel had been a hard-drinking, muscular man with a hair-trigger temper and a sharp tongue whom was often observed unabashedly ogling any bosomy woman within sight. He made no apology for his vices and excesses. Yet he treated Pamela like royalty, with a measure of respect of which few thought he was capable.
They had been married for no less than three years before Dorrance had introduced Pamela to the joys of leather lashings, rope-bondage, and forced sex in front of select audiences. They had no children. Children would have interrupted the drama and fury of their passionate, illicit lifestyle.
For Pamela it had been a wonderful time. She could not have loved her husband more.
Meanwhile, the town of Blake’s Crossing had grown from an insular colony of wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs to a township housing a textiles mill, a shipbuilders’ engine factory of the Merlin-Ravelli line, and, of course, two vineyards on the eastern edge of town, property of the Merrano family. The town prospered famously for over seventeen years.
Along the way, though, something had happened. The couple had discovered the writings of Friar David Ian MacGolfin, a fallen Jesuit monk, a morphine-addict, a member of the Scottish Expeditionary Society, who had been a comrade and confidante of the infamous explorer Charles Calendar Colludus during Colludus’ incursion into the dark territories of Cambodia during the latter part of the 18th century. It was a journal, stained and dirty ink on aged pages, wrapped in a blood-spattered leather binder, and it had been brought to Nathaniel Dorrance’s attention by a ship’s captain who’d been sentenced to hang for several heinous “crimes against propriety” rumored to have involved children and blood sacrifice.
In the journal, Fr. MacGolfin repeatedly referred to something called ‘the Chimera Link’ and to the existence of demonic beings from beyond Space and Time that he called ‘Infernals’. MacGolfin claimed they could be summoned into our world from their own dying, corrupted universe with the utterance of an incantation over the unholy Chimera Link object.
At first, Dorrance had believed the journal to be the ramblings of a lunatic. But then, one winter’s day, a messenger from a ship docked in San Francisco harbor brought him a package containing an unusual artifact.
It was an oval-shaped crystal the size of an ostrich’s egg set into a velvet depression in an aged bronze box.
The man who gave it to Dorrance called it ‘the Chimera Link’ and handed Dorrance a fragile slip of paper with four words scrawled on it in a lunatic’s trembling, broken script.
Baal. Tox. Q’aresch. Zphere.
One night, alone with a very skeptical Pamela, Dorrance had opened the bronze box holding the white crystal egg and he’d muttered those words. They’d thought they’d simply get drunk and have a good laugh over their childish venture into the world of the supernatural.
They had been tragically wrong.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, dressed only in thin, diaphanous togas, they had watched something happen they’d only imagined in dreams, the kind of dark, unsettling dreams born of self-hate and alienation, and their perception of the true face of the world in which they lived was forever altered.
They had watched the spiders dance. Rock had flowed into liquid and spiders were born from the running stone and their hard-shelled flesh glowed in the candlelight as they danced.
Upon uttering the hypnotic phrase “Baal, Tox, Q’aresch, Zphere” the crystalline egg, the Chimera Link, had quickly dissolved and flowed from out the bronze box that held it. Hollow distant sounds echoed from the depths of the shadows inside the room and the candles flickered as a cold wind blew through the room, a draft wafting from the deep valleys and chasms of a dying land beyond the world we know, and the metallic grinding of gigantic gears, like the mechanisms of a huge clock, resounded from someplace beyond their vision.
The running, roving puddle of the Chimera Link, like some blind albino pseudopodinous amoeba, suddenly subdivided into many separate smaller puddles that solidified and hardened and took on the unlovely shapes of large stone spiders.
They hadn’t believed what they were looking at that night. Reason told them that such things were not possible.
The spiders had scuttled blindly across the floor, bumping into one another and climbing across one another in their near-hysterical stampede, until they finally took up positions around where Dorrance and Pamela sat.
The white spiders, their jointed legs hard and unyielding as the stone from which they were birthed, had climbed into their laps and, by way of small hooked talons at the end of those glistening alabaster legs, quickly latched themselves onto the couple’s torsos.
The feel of those multiple tiny hooks snapping into their naked skin was torture itself: they felt cold and hard, and they burned when they broke the skin, sending miniscule electrical shocks into their chests and abdomens. It was like swallowing metal needles. It was like bathing in razor-wire. It hurt --- quite a lot.
And, to their growing surprise and their eternal shame, they had liked it, they had wanted it, they had craved yet more such tiny agonies.
They had been too frightened to move, too horrified to scream, as more and more of the spiders had clustered onto their exposed flesh.
The feeling had brought them unbearably close to orgasm.
They could taste the heady wine of their own blood stewing in their open mouths.
They teetered on the edge of madness.
There was, they discovered that night, more to come.
The next surprise came striding imperiously from out the empty places between the shadows and the light in the room, as if there were clear physical divisions between where the light from the candles faded and the dark places, where the light didn’t reach.
They came…
They received two visitors. One was a skinny, dirty ragamuffin of a man, his nearly nude body twisted by the constraining leather corset enclosing his torso and his face and exposed buttocks pierced by rings and metal bars under the tattered cloak in which he draped himself. He moved with the nervousness of a bird, all twitches and jerks, and he seemed to be as old as history itself yet infused with the vitality of a healthy young bull in the heat of full rut. His penis was an ugly thing that was perpetually tumescent, hard as a plank of wood and there was a chrome ring affixed through the swollen glans. He never stopped chattering about “the transcendence of stolen agonies” and was prone to fits of childish tittering. The other was a woman, unusually tall, broad, porcine and naked except for a wide leather belt into which the ends of a pair of golden chains were fixed into loops. She was a bald, fat Amazon with skin the color of old parchment, yet her flesh was clear and unmarred, revealing her physical age to be in her early twenties, belying the mass of wrinkles around her sightless, lidless, pale blue eyes. Blind and mute, the woman’s belt had chains that were attached to the spread, distended lips of her vulva, her vagina clearly displayed and opened wide enough to display some of the ridged pink inner flesh leading to her womb. Her torn genital flesh continually oozed a small trickle of blood. It was a gynecological nightmare.
They had called themselves by one shared name: “the Anmniodyke”.
They had taught Dorrance and Pamela many, many vile things they could do to enhance their experiences of the limits to which human flesh could be subjected.
That was the beginning of an age of darkness that descended over the town of Blake’s Crossing and changed the lives of everyone therein.
The nature and the frequency of the secretive sex parties they had once hosted changed, the passions and urges being satisfied therein becoming increasingly darker and more alien. One party blended into another, sometimes the carnal affairs lasting a full week at a time, people came and went, some alone, some as romantic couples, but all leaving forever changed, scarred and somehow stained. Many of the couples who left the parties never spoke to one another about it again. They divorced, they tried to forget they had ever participated, they ran away and changed who they were fearing that they’d one day be recognized by some other fallen soul who touched and seduced by the dance of the white spiders. The townsfolk, most of them merchants and carpenters and factory workers, talked about what happened at the sprawling Grove mansion in frightened whispers.
Soon the family business began to flounder, as Pamela and Nathaniel paid far too much attention to the endless quest for sensual exploration and fleshy satisfaction overshadowed their drive to attend to their responsibilities.
The shipbuilders’ engine works plant closed, unable to retool to accommodate the building of the newer, more modern diesel turbines for wartime as American involvement in the Second Word War came to pass.
And then more ill fortune had come for Nathaniel Dorrance in the form of a brain tumor that cut him down in slow stages, taking his hearing, taking his legs, taking his vitality, and eventually rendering him an embittered eunuch.
When he had finally died, a gaunt, pale shrunken shadow of his former self, Pamela went just a little mad.
Pamela had become a forty-eight year old widow who enjoyed watching young women with crude metal piercings routinely sodomize bound young men with crudely carved, ivory strap-on implements.
And she had still been enslaved under the sinister graces of the Amniodyke.
She still relied on the thing she believed to be her only salvation in the loneliness of her abandonment after Nathaniel Dorrance’s demise: the sight of the white stone spiders crawling across scarred flesh.
Such was her world for another thirty-three years.
The summer of 1979, the week after her eighty-first birthday, was when Pamela Dorrance-Grove crossed the line and brought true horror to Blake’s Crossing…
That was the day when she had wrapped up the evil, awful gift she’d inherited from the travels of Friar David Ian MacGolfin and tried to send it back out to sea, giving the bronze box and the white crystalline stone it contained to her attorney to carry far away and back to the unindustrialized territories of Eastern Europe. She had wanted it lost. She had wanted it gone. She was done with it.
She had made the awful assumption that what she had in her possession was a thing of a singular and exceedingly rare nature.
It was definitely rare, as it turned out, but as for being “singular”: hardly.
There were half a dozen more Chimera Links abroad the globe.
And they’d spoken with one another…
The Chimera Link had a mind of its own. It didn’t want to leave the town of Pandora’s Gates.
That night, in 1979, something from the other side, something from the entropy-impaired, materially-despondent, dying universe sleeping fitfully within the clouded depths of the Chimera Link crystal, emerged without being called, answering a summons of its own instincts.
Anger.
Nine people had died that night, stripped of their flesh, eyes torn out from their sockets, abdomens ripped open and their contents smeared about their scattered bodies like perverse attempts at finger painting. All attempts at investigating the crime, a spectacular event considering it happened in a town of only twenty-eight hundred people, reached no conclusive end. No clues, no apparent links between the victims, no pattern to the selection of the victims, and no witnesses nor even rumors to indicate the poor unfortunates had been in any way at-risk.
It had been, to all outward appearances, a horribly senseless and random crime.
It was never solved.
No one had considered the possibility that something alien, vile and rapacious had stalked abroad the night and indulged in its most homicidal fantasies in a fit of pique, angered at being cast aside by an old woman’s whims.
No one had considered that the thing, whatever it was, had inhabited the decayed, rotted, cancer-riddled remains of the corpse of Nathaniel Dorrance.
But Pamela had known… and she’d known why.
In the depths of her soul, the white spiders had still been dancing…
She’d died a month after that.
It hadn’t mattered, though. The messenger had delivered its message successfully. For another twenty-six years, the descendents of Grove family, the cousins, the children of Nathaniel’s brothers, remained the keepers of the strange bronze shoebox.
And seventeen hours ago, one of them had found the fragile desiccated pages of the awful journal of Friar MacGolfin.
After over a quarter of a century of silence, someone had said the words “Baal, Tox, Q’aresch, Zphere.”
Yes, that was how it had started.
Jesus turned a blind eye to the town of Pandora’s Gates and the Devil didn’t want it anymore.
Entropy wept.
***
Jesus may have turned a blind eye to Pandora’s Gates, but, fifty-seven miles up above the surface of the planet, OSP-43J, 44K and OSP-Epsilon 6, acronyms for “Orbital Surveillance Passover”, flew in synchronous orbit over the North America continent under the auspices of the NSA and the DOJ, watched vigilantly for certain energy signatures on the land below. The satellites flew in a triad formation, linked together as one flying orbital unit by locked relational logistics microwave sensors. A computer within each satellite was always aware of the location of all the other satellites in the unit by microwave-beacon signatures. This did not allow the satellites to drift away from one another and there was always visual redundancy should one or more satellites in the group become damaged.
The triad of flying spy-eyes was more Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings usually depicted by a double-faced head, each face on that head looking in the opposite direction, than Jesus.
Satellites OSP-43J, 44K and OSP-Epsilon 6 were scanning Canada and the United States for special energy signatures particular to flare-ups from anomalies known by the term “Kaggermann Alerts”.
Kaggermann Alerts were strange spikes of radiation associated with the use of the Chimera Link. The U.S. government, particularly the National Security Agency, the Office of Scientific Reconnaissance, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, were all aware of the fallout from an unusual 1970's technology-based Black Project that ended in horror and bloodshed.
Once upon a time, a special department of the U.S. government called “XPETE”, the External Projects Technical Engineering laboratory housed at a facility called Facility A-11 or “Outwater Glen”, actually had physical possession of one of the dread Chimera Link crystals. They obtained the crystal courtesy of a secretive old man named Kaggermann, an inventor, who had actually been born Stefan Wilhelm Hauptman, who had been a member of the Nazi Party in the Second World War and who had worked as a “cleansing administrator” at the notorious Buchenwald death camp. Hauptman-Kaggermann had escaped, courtesy of the ODESSA network, to live in Nova Scotia for a while and then later in New Mexico, in possession of the crystal by way of Der Fuhrer’s “Black Order” unit in the SS, the Ahnernerbe.
XPETE had tried to harness the heretofore unknown power of the Chimera Link, a device that opened an inter-dimensional gateway to a distant world and Facility A-11 descended into chaos and slaughter, invaded by dark alien beings only called “Infernals”. Over seventy soldiers and scientists were slaughtered that awful day and the Chimera Link disappeared into the New Mexican badland territories. The XPETE project was destroyed by press leaks and media revelations relating to the Kaggermann episode. When Congress caught whiff of what had happened when the XPETE team had activated the artifact, they crucified anyone and everyone who had anything to do with the project and mandated the creation of a watchdog force to contain any future damage activation of the artifact could cause.
In the twenty-seven years since the Link had disappeared into the American West, the Scientific Security Criminal Anomalies agency had been created to deal with crimes related to the use of the alien artifact.
And the triad of orbiting watchmen satellites kept a constant lookout for the opening of the dimensional gateways that loosed The Infernals again upon our world.
Gabriel Michaels had traveled the California back roads to the township of Pandora’s Gates because OSP-Epsilon 6 had screamed a red alert warning to SSCA’s monitoring department.
He had not in any way expected or been prepared for the nightmarish madness rampant on the streets of Pandora’s Gates.
His eyes still locked onto the approaching object rolling just above the horizon, he lightly slipped a hand inside Charlotte Badalamenti’s arm and gently nudged her away from Alec Krayer.
“How bad is it?” he asked reluctantly.
Charlotte’s gentle face wrinkled into a wry expression as she answered, “Oh, about as bad as can be imagined, considering I’m infected with an alien transmorphic virus…”
Gabe hissed a frustrated plume of air from between his teeth and said, “C’mon, you know what I mean. The pain, the damn slugs or whatever they are that you keep throwing up, your mental state… should Alec or I take over handling the Fase-P projector?”
“Do either of you know how to run it?” she asked pointedly.
Gabe shook his head “No”.
“Then why are we even talking about this?” she concluded. “Don’t worry. I’ll do what I have to do when the time comes, no matter what it is or how much it may cost me –- or you.”
“I’m sorry. I had to ask. This is pretty damn important,” Gabe said tensely.
“It was my own damn fault”, she said after a brief, uncomfortable moment. “I never imagined that any of the old woman’s playmates were anything more than just sex slaves and perverts. I thought they were just into S&M and B&D. Thought it was a lot of silly black magic-sex magic ritualism. Never thought that it represented the first wave of a secret invasion or anything. It never occurred to me they were Hosts for some sort of parasitic organism from beyond the Barrier. Here I was walking into a situation I’d never experienced before and I came in with all kinds of dumb-ass amateur assumptions already made…”
“Not your fault. I didn’t know, either. No one ever mentioned this kind of stuff in the Kaggermann Alerts before,” Gabe commented.
“I should have checked. I’m a goddamn scientist! I should have forced Krayer into getting more info before he dragged me out into the field,” she said, “but his enthusiasm and rage for justice just kind of overrode all my normal precautionary behavior.”
“Krayer’s obsessed. He sees himself as some kind of a crusader,” Gabe said. “He needs to hunt down and confront an enemy he sees as getting away with murder.”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Charlotte began slowly, “They WERE getting away with murder. Nearly sixteen years of unsolved homicides in the Marin County and East Bay areas. Thirty people missing, maybe more. Eighteen found ritualistically dismembered. He’s not far from wrong. Plus he lost a close friend, a brother-at-arms no less, and he’s not going to let it pass. I’m not so sure I’d be any different.”
“You’d have checked out the playing field a lot more thoroughly instead of just jumping in with both feet and guns blazing,” Gabe assured her.
“For someone I met only about thirty-eight hours ago, you seem to think you know a lot about me,” she remarked.
“So tell me I’m wrong,” he said.
Charlotte shrugged and took a single step away from him as she noticed Alec Krayer staring at them both with a coldly clinical, and slightly paranoid, expression.
***
He’d been tracking the thing since the first time he’d been exposed to its influence, five years ago in a San Francisco B&D Dungeon owned and operated by a wealthy computer technology baron out of Silicon Valley. He’d been a reporter for a local counter-culture magazine, a former private investigator who’d become disgusted by the things he’d discovered about his amoral clientele, and he had followed up on a lead he’d pulled from a four-color flyer posted on a construction site fence in The Mission. It had advertised an event called “Screaming Steel Sin” and it listed a website address, “www.bizarresineating.org”, that he’d checked out. Instead of the usual rather dull and routine allusions of leather-play and rough-trade sexual dominance, the flyer had offered the event enrollees “a very real glimpse into a scientific dimension of alien pleasures -- GUARANTEED”. No way he could turn that down. His curiosity was piqued and his editor was frothing at the mouth to get a story like that in the next issue of the magazine.
The flyer had a Photoshopped, computer-generated illustration of a quartet of white spiders on it.
It shouldn’t have come to anything more than just media-hype and the standard airy-fairy New Age sexcapades the San Francisco Bay Area was famous for, but things turned out much different, and much darker, than he had imagined.
Alec Krayer had, in a basement after-hours club near the waterfront, watched a blindfolded nude woman on her knees beg for something hiding in the shadows to “set her soul aflame”. In a long rectangular room decorated like a cross between Lucretia Borgia’s boudoir and a Venetian opera house, Krayer had sat at a semi-circular table with nine other people, all wearing simple black-cloth Mardi Gras masks (shades of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” he’d thought, at the time), and watched as a skinny, androgynous supplicant in silver robes had knelt and opened an antique brass box and exposed the translucent milky-colored stone inside it to the dim light.
One of the other people in the room, though he hadn’t known her then, was Charlotte Badalamenti.
Someone, he hadn’t seen who, had intoned the words “Baal, Tox, Q’aresch, Zphere” and struck a brittle musical note on a triangle or some other metal percussive instrument.
Something painfully electric and sensually addictive activated inside his mind and body at the intoning of those nonsensical words.
He’d watched, amazed and fascinated, as the crystal had devolved, melted, into a scurrying, scuttling, swarming mass of alabaster spiders, each the size of a large man’s hand.
The stone spiders had swarmed over the body of the kneeling woman.
A snaking crack of brilliant white-hot light had split the open air above the kneeling woman and something that looked like rolling, oily ink spilled out from the glowing floating crevice. It immediately had sought refuge in the room’s darker shadows. The kneeling woman kept pleading with it, entreating it, to touch her, to use her, to have its way with her flesh…
And in a horrible moment forever etched on his memory, he’d watched as her skin had begun to unravel from off her body while an eyeless, mummified, dried-up thing dressed like a medieval court jester, a prancing rotting corpse with a live rodent’s head as a codpiece, huge and with its jaws snapping voraciously, greedily ate her flowing flesh as it left her body, exposing muscle and ligaments and yellowish pockets of fatty adipose tissue.
The white stone spiders were dancing on the blood-spattered floor…
It had been real. He had sensed that everyone at that table had seen the same thing as he, felt the same things as he, were being assaulted by waves of revulsion and fear and a twisted sexual attraction for the tableau. He’d been able to smell the coppery scent of her blood, the musk of her copious sweat, heard the tearing noises of her skin unwinding off from her limbs, the wet mucousy lappings of the ribbons of skin as they sailed through the air, and the satisfied baritone grunting of the dead jester-thing as her flesh rolled into the gnashing mouth in that bestial, basketball-sized rodent face on his crotch.
Alec Krayer had spontaneously vomited and run out from the basement dungeon in blind panic.
Moments later, Charlotte Badalamenti had joined him on the street outside, in the midnight air, hot tears running down her trembling face, and the two of them had made a pact to keep what they’d seen a secret…
Worse, they both shared in the shame of knowing that, as they’d watched that reconstituted dead man from the shadows cannibalize that woman’s flesh, they both had shared in a group orgasm that had taken their breaths away.
And then, years later, they’d heard about what was going on in the town of Pandora’s Gates, they heard about Pamela Dorrance-Groves and her strange sin-ridden parties, and they heard rumors about a bronze box that held a monstrous white crystal.
They knew they had to go there. It was a dark and shameful pilgrimage that resurrected nightmares and personal demons that had haunted them since that night in San Francisco, at Screaming Steel Sin.
And in the depths of their tainted souls, they knew the white spiders were still dancing…
***
“Why’d you do it?” Alec demanded of Charlotte.
She blinked, irritated and surprised at the question, and looked away as she answered.
“Didn’t know I had a choice,” she said.
“Of course you had a choice. We could have chosen anther way. The damn creature infected you because you stepped forward thinking it would spare everyone else in the town if you allowed it to seed the transmogrification key in you. But you KNEW that it wouldn’t spare anyone! Why should it? The Amniodyke has been in control of this community for almost half a century. The sick, evil roots of the Chimera Link run deep in this place!” Alec said stridently.
“We are dealing with a violently aggressively invasive, intelligent, sensory and sensation-addicted, alien hive-mentality,” Gabe interjected. “There’s no way anyone could predict what the thing would or would not do if we didn’t at least consider meeting its demands. Essentially, this was, until the homicidal culling began, a hostage situation. She took a chance. It didn’t work out. Water under the bridge –- no pun intended – and we need to move on.”
“Was I fucking talking to you, Mr. Federal Agent?” Alec remarked.
“Jesus, man, this isn’t the time!”
“The transmogrification key is essential for the Amniodyke to retain control over this community,” Charlotte answered. “The Infernals, the power behind the Amniodyke and the Chimera Link, the alien devils living on the other side of that dimensional divide between this world and the next, demand the beast be subservient to their larger and deadlier plans to subjugate our world. I did what I thought was right!”
“So how long do you think you’ve got, you know, before you turn?” Alec pressed.
“It’s been nearly four hours since I was infected. I could turn at any moment. But I don’t think it’ll be an issue,” Charlotte said.
“Why not?”
“Because the Amniodyke isn’t going to let any of us live that long,” she said morosely.
“Jesus, it’s almost here,” Gabe barked grimly.
Off the bridge, at roughly the height of a three-story building, it was approaching with slow relentlessness, rolling and tumbling through the air in an ugly and graceless simulation of flight. The ragged, nerve-grating wail it made as it approached became louder and set their teeth on edge. The awful creature was agitated and wrathful, sounding like all the nightmares of a sanitarium made real.
It was made of florid, pinkish-red flesh, or at least something that approximated the texture of flesh, and as it drew closer they could see all the repellant details of its structure. It was the size of a bank vault and generally oval in shape. On first impression it resembled an electron microscopy photograph of a cancer cell, swollen and inflamed and trailing wire-like streamers and tentacles from an unstable central mass, but that was not what the Amniodyke truly looked like.
It was really made up of a shifting, gelatinous patchwork puzzle of human torsos and disconnected limbs and faces frozen in expressions of horrific agony, all connected by scar tissue and stretched ligaments. Its surface continually shifted and reformed as things emerged from or sank back into its mucoid depths. It changed until it resembled a giant human embryo that grew pseudopodinous appendages, or it was an SUV-sized chunk of maggot-infested meat covered with swelling snot-bubbles and large extrusions of petrified, pitted bone matter.
It smelled like roses and rotted meat over hot feces.
It had a man-sized flexing wound on its anterior face that spewed a gray, misty gas thickly into the air as it pulsed and rippled.
It was hypnotically fascinating in a perverse and fleshy way, teasing the eye and perplexing the mind with is corrupted complexity.
The civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley had once worshipped it, calling it Mara and Varsavarti. Zoroastrians once had called it Azi Dahaka. It was the vomit of a pus-ridden Heaven, too warped and unmade for service in Hell and not fit for dissolution in The Void.
It was the angry psychic hard-on of a thousand killer-rapists.
The Amniodyke. Child of The Infernals. It was the spawn of Pamela Dorrance-Groves’ undying perverse lusts and her secret self-hatred. Vindictive, cunning and insane, it was all the shameful secrets of the town Pandora’s Gates manifested in flesh.
And it was eternally, rapaciously hungry.
“Uh, Charly, now would be a good time to use that Fase-P projector or gun or whatever… yeah, like right now, uh-huh, this would be a good time to use it, baby,” Alec Krayer sputtered in a hushed voice.
“Yeah, yeah, almost, soon… Gotta get the charge up to maximum frequency,” Charlotte mumbled, looking down at the gauges on the device.
“Charly, ‘soon’ ain’t gonna cut it, you need to get that thing cooking NOW…,” Alec hissed, almost afraid of the sound of his own voice in the presence of the strange, ominous creature.
Gabe Michaels stepped forward, his stride firm but his body trembling as he looked up at the creature, and he loudly intoned, “Baal, Tox, Q’aresch, Zphere!”
The Amniodyke stopped its forward momentum, momentarily confused.
“BAAL, TOX, Q’ARESCH, ZPHERE!” Gabe repeated in a resounding bellow.
He was answered. In a voice that resembled nothing ever made by a human throat it was all reptilian sibilance, the amoral boredom of immortality, the arrogance of psychosis and the raw edges of endless hysteria as it screeched, “UNBELIEVER! HERETIC! FOOL! THEE HAST NO RIGHT TO UTTER THE INVOCATION OF THE HOLIES…!”
“It talks?” Alec commented aloud, speaking to no one in particular, “the fucking thing talks<<<>>>”
“QUIT MESSING AROUND AND FIRE THAT THING, CHARLOTTE!” Gabe shouted.
<<<<“no”>>>>, a tiny female voice said giggling around a mouthful <<<>>> wriggling, snotty wetness, “not going to do it… just want to touch it, just want to feel its hotness on my skin… pretty, so pretty, so perfectly naked… not going to do it.”
Alec and Gabe turned around to see Charlotte Badalamenti hunched over, a dark wet stain of mucous running down the front of her chest and stomach, a mass of wriggling slugs sliding down off her torso, plopping onto the stony floor of the bridge beneath them. Her eyes looked feverish and unfocused, seeing vistas far beyond the range of normal human vision, her mind transfixed by a view of a landscape at the end of a tunnel leading to the broken end of <<<