The Glass Orchid

[sasha]

                                                                             Part 1 – Prelude

“What do you make of this?” Tom asked, reaching across the table to hand me the figurine.

I set my coffee cup down and took the object from him. I turned it over a few times and shrugged. “Not much,” I said. It appeared to be a glass paperweight of abstract form, from one angle resembling a partial globe, from another a fanciful orchid. I hefted it, and shrugged. “Interesting. Nothing you couldn’t pick up at any Hallmark store.”

He was staring at me with an intensity I thought out of proportion to the apparent banality of the moment. “Look again,” he urged.

I returned his gaze with a quizzical lift of my eyebrow, then resumed my examination. It was a smoky, translucent charcoal color, flecked through with bits of black, and polished to a high sheen. The contours were mostly smooth and rounded, but where the bulbous lobe of what might have been a blossom necked down to the base, a series of sharp, raised ridges radiated outwards. Lining the semicircles of what resembled a cutaway globe, tiny pyramidal spikes jutted out like so many shark’s teeth. And from that angle, I saw it. When the light hit it just so, two of those dark inclusions on either side of the narrow ridge became a pair of eyes.

“A face!” I exclaimed. “It looks like a face, with a gaping, open mouth!” I laughed a little uncertainly. Handing it back to him I asked, “Where did you get it?”

He didn’t reach out to take it, so I set it down between us. “At a little curio shop in New York, somewhere around 79th Street,” he replied a little distantly. “I don’t recall exactly, I was just killing time until the museum opened.” He stared past me out the window. “A face,” he echoed. “A nasty one, at that.” He met my gaze with an expression I couldn’t quite fathom. “It’s an evil face, Neil.”

I thought this an odd statement, moreso because of his vehemence, and I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. I thought a little humor might lighten the moment, so peered down at the figurine and said, “A face not even a mother could love.”

He didn’t laugh, but smiled, more out of courtesy than amusement, I thought. “You’ve known me a long time, Neil,” he said. “You know me to be a pretty grounded guy, right?” When I nodded, he sighed and fiddled with his mug. “So if I were to tell you that odd things have been happening since I picked it up – would you believe me?”

I shifted a little uneasily. “I don’t know, Tom,” I said truthfully. “It all depends on… on how odd.”

“For one, Kepler’s been acting strangely,” he said. At the sound of his name, the old yellow cat jumped up into his lap with a chirp. Tom gently tugged at the animal’s tail, and the cat settled down with a contented purr. “He’s been restless and jumpy ever since I brought the thing home.”

“Cats get restless and jumpy, and do strange things sometimes. Ours won’t touch mice, but brings us grasshoppers instead.”

He didn’t smile. “Then there are the nightmares…”

“We all have nightmares, Tom.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but these are in a class by themselves. And they all involve that thing,” and he gestured to the figurine on the table. “And at night – I hear things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know – little sounds. Furtive sounds, like something trying to move about silently, but not quite succeeding.”

“Kepler…”

“No. He sleeps beside me. And he hears it too.”

I leaned back in my chair to get a grip on the situation, a situation in which I was beginning to suspect I was over my head. “Just what are you getting at, Tom?”

He said nothing for a few seconds, as if he were carefully choosing his words. Finally he inhaled and slowly replied, “Look, I know how crazy this is going to sound. It sounds crazy to me. But…” He glanced towards me with an expression of pleading desperation, then shook his head and looked away. “It’s almost as though… it’s like I’m starting to think that that… that thing is alive. Alive, or possessed. Animated somehow.” He concluded with a shuddering sigh.

For a moment the only sound breaking the silence was the coffee maker burping up a bit of steam. “Jesus,” was all I was able to say. “Jesus, Tom – just what the hell have they got you working on?”

“You know I can’t tell you that,” he replied.

I nodded and picked up my cup. I couldn’t be sure what he was doing, but I could guess. Tom knew more about solid-state physics than I’d ever pretended to. His knowledge of the subject went beyond encyclopedic – it was instinctive. We may have been peers, but I’d spent a lot of time on the trail looking at the back of his head.

I’d known that he was on a different plane ever since we’d been teamed together to develop industrial-grade diode-pumped lasers. Each step was a struggle for me; but to him they were intuitive. While I’d be poring over spectral lines and absorption curves, he’d be cobbling up something in the lab to get a few rough measurements close enough to point the way to the next round of experiments. It had been an exciting time for us – free to do pretty much what we wanted, as long as we could convince our handlers of a payoff. They’d voiced no objections when we hung a pair of loudspeakers on the wall, and only the weakest of protests over our choice of the Mahavishnu Orchestra as the soundtrack for our quest to wring ever-more optical power from lumps of stone and glass. We were even allowed to write the occasional paper (they had to be vetted, of course, by the corporate attorneys), and made a bit of a name for ourselves in the small community of mid-level industrial scientists publishing at the time.

Then Sandia Laboratories had picked up on our work, and lured Tom away. Tom didn’t publish much after that. Sandia immediately erected high walls around his work, but they were unable to conceal the fact that in addition to weapons research, they were trying nothing less than to duplicate the processes occurring in the heart of the sun, using high-powered lasers to initiate sustained nuclear fusion.

“I know,” I finally said. I held my mug in both hands to warm them. “Shiva…?”

He said nothing, but I thought he glanced up a little too quickly. “The Destroyer,” he answered with a wry grin. Shiva, the name given to a prototypical firing squad of lasers, all of them bearing down on a single pellet of hydrogen fuel. Shiva had begat Nova, and I was guessing that through Tom’s efforts Nova had begat yet another generation. Then his smile vanished, a crease of frustration furrowed his brow, a dark cloud momentarily blotting out the sun. “I really can’t talk about it, Neil.”

I smiled. “Then don’t,” I told him. “But this,” and I gestured towards the glass figurine, “this talk of evil faces and animated voodoo dolls and things that go bump in the night… it’s got me a little… concerned.” I sipped at the now-tepid coffee. “I burned out on physics without ever leaving the private sector. But you’ve been playing for the majors, how long now?” I set the mug back down. “We’re not young hotshots anymore. Sixteen hour days don’t suit us like they once did.”

“You think I’m losing it?”

I looked into his eyes. There didn’t seem to be any resentment in his voice; in fact I thought I detected in it a whiff of relief – even hopefulness, perhaps. “Tom, I don’t know. All I know is we’re both on the far side of sixty, you’re still working in a pressure cooker, and now you’re starting to obsess over faces in clouds.”

“It’s more than that, Neil. It’s not just bad dreams brought on by overwork, or an overactive imagination that can’t shut down at night.” He leaned forward and fixed me in his gaze. “It moves around on its own. In the morning it’s not always where I left it the night before. Last night I’m sure I’d left it on the windowsill. When I awoke this morning it was on the night stand.”

I was determined to provide a rational alternate explanation. “I’ve gotten up to pee in the dead of night and done things I have no recollection of in the morning, but the evidence is there when we get up.”

“I can’t prove that I’m not sleepwalking or something,” he conceded, “But Kepler seems to hate the thing as much as I do.”

“Then why don’t you just get rid of it?”

“Because I don’t dare let it out of my sight!”

I could only stare at this last admission. While I contemplated it, he continued, “This morning when I saw it had moved – or had been moved – during the night, I picked it up to examine it… and… and it…” Then he stopped, as if unable to bring himself to complete the thought.

“What?” I prodded.

“Honest to God, Neil,” he said shakily, “I swear to Christ, the thing bit me.”

An icy chill ran in a wave from the back of my neck down my arms, erecting the hairs as it went. My scalp prickled, and I found myself briefly wondering if he were prone to erupt into violence, and what I would do if he did. “It bit you?” I repeated. I hadn’t meant for my skepticism to so nakedly show through, but there it was.

He showed me his hand. There, in the fleshy cove between his right thumb and forefinger, curved an intermittent arc of tiny scabs. He turned his hand over to reveal a similar ring.

I didn’t know what to say. For some reason, I was reminded of a troubled young woman I once knew, an administrative assistant at the school where I did my graduate work. We’d gone out a few times, and after I’d innocently wondered about a few scars on her arms, she’d admitted to being a cutter. A few glasses of wine later, she opened up further about past abuse, and didn’t take well to my guarded, uncertain reaction. The relationship ended before it ever got to its feet, and I lost all contact with her after she resigned a few months later.

I fiddled with my cup. “You don’t think you might just have grabbed the thing too tightly?” I asked. I knew it was lame, but it was all that came to mind.

He sighed, and I was relieved to hear him say, “I don’t know… maybe. It’s possible. It sure makes a lot more sense than…” he closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temple. “I swore it twisted around like a snake and clamped down on me. But that’s crazy, right?”

I tried to choose my words carefully. “It is,” I said slowly. “That doesn’t mean you are. But it might not be a bad idea to consult a professional.” This didn’t seem to go down too badly, so I went on, “Maybe this would be a good time to take a break from whatever it is you guys at Sandia are working on. Leave of absence or something.”

He blinked a few times behind the thick lenses of his bifocals. “Maybe you’re right,” he said after a moment. He seemed almost relieved. “Maybe the work is starting to wear me down. Maybe what I saw…” and here his face darkened again. “No. That was real. Neil, you didn’t see what I saw – what we saw. What we measured.” He shook his head. “Data doesn’t lie.” He seemed to be rambling now, and with alarm I thought he was becoming unfocused. “After the implosion, the deuterium pellet seemed to go somewhere else… it changed… some kind of rotational transformation… spin reversal… as if… as if we’d burned a hole through Time…” He swallowed and peered at me over the tops of his glasses. “Who knows what might have crawled through that hole?”

“I don’t know what to say, Tom,” I said softly, trying not to let my tone betray my fear for my old friend’s well-being. “This is all a little out of my league.”

“I know.” He removed his glasses and wiped his face with his hands. “And I know how all this sounds.” For the moment, anyway, he was again the old Tom, the one I’d known thirty years ago. He put the glasses back on and pushed them into place with a forefinger. “I’m neither surprised nor offended if you take what I’m saying as the ravings of an old experimental physicist from halfway around the bend.” He cut off my protest with a gentle wave of his hand. “So let’s put this to the test. Let’s get some data of our own.”

“What kind of data?”

“Simple observation, nothing more. If you could stay for a few days…”

The invitation caught me off guard. Tom was an old bachelor who’d never married, but I had a wife to consider. At first I felt the request to be an imposition, even though Marcy was strong and independent and our children were grown and scattered across the country. On the other hand, not only was Marcy accustomed to my occasionally impulsive amateur scientific sleuthing, she might even welcome some solitude to work on her painting. “Let me check with Marcy,” I ventured. “I’ll swing home, sound her out, and if she’s okay with it I’ll pack an overnight bag and spend a few nights here.”

“Thanks, Neil,” he said. The relief and gratitude in his voice was as palpable as that in his body language. “I really appreciate it.”


                                                                             Part 2 – Phantasm

Just as I’d thought, not only did Marcy have no objection to the plan, she was delighted by the prospect of having a few days to herself. She shared my concern for Tom’s mental state, and even offered to send me off with some freshly baked goods. While I packed, she threw together a batch of the oatmeal-raisin cookies she knew Tom was so fond of, and when I descended the stairs with a duffel bag she met me at the bottom with a warm Tupperware tub full of them. She gave me a playful swat on the rear after I kissed her, and sternly warned me not to return home without giving her enough advance notice to clean up the paint in the spare room she used as a studio. I climbed into the car refreshed by her untroubled normalcy and the homey reality she brought into my life, and returned to Tom’s place right around dusk.

What I saw upon my arrival crushed the optimism left by Marcy’s aura, replacing it with the sadness and dread Tom’s demeanor earlier in the day had engendered. Newspapers had been spread out over the table in the kitchenette. His back was to me, but I could see he gripped the figurine with a gloved hand, and with the other a diamond rasp, with which he was filing away the toothlike protuberances lining the two semicircular arcs.

“Tom?” I said.

He jumped. “Oh! I didn’t hear you pull up.” He laughed a little shakily. “You startled me.”

“What are you doing?”

He hesitated, like a boy caught sneaking in after curfew. “I – I was de-fanging our little friend, here.” Then the gears of his mind seemed to mesh and he continued with more confidence. “Just as a precaution. If I am responsible for the cuts, then this’ll make it harder for me to do it again.”

I was unconvinced, but said nothing, and he resumed his filing. Then there was a high-pitched *tinggg*, and Tom muttered, “Aw, shit.”

“What happened?”

“I chipped the thing. Look,” and he held it up for me to see. He’d broken off a sliver of glass about half an inch long, leaving a ruler-straight edge in one of the arcs. “Now it’s really going to be pissed at me!” and even I had to laugh when I saw the wink and grin with which he’d said it.

He rose, crossed to where the sliver had landed, where he stooped and gingerly picked it up; but rather than toss it into the trash as I’d expected, he set it on the counter and rummaged overhead until he found and withdrew a small glass jar, the kind in which pre-packaged kitchen spices are often sold. To my baffled concern, he unscrewed the lid, dropped the shard into the jar, and recapped it. He caught my skeptically questioning look.

“Don’t say it, Neil,” he said. “Try to keep an open mind. Wait until morning to pass judgment”.

I dropped my eyes and watched Kepler groom himself in the doorway to the living room. “I’m not judging you, Tom. I’m concerned, but I’m not qualified to… to make that call.” I looked back up at him and gave a little half-smile. “We’re here to conduct an experiment, right? To collect data. Let’s let the data speak for itself.”

His face brightened into a broad smile. “Just like the old days. You hungry?”

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but since Tom’s culinary talents were on a par with that of many bachelors his age, we ended up ordering take-out. Marcy’s cookies didn’t complement particularly well the spicy Szechuan chicken and the variety of vegetables we ate out of cardboard boxes, but the single-malt whisky he broke out did, and after a few rounds the cookies seemed a perfect capper. He put on some music – Brahms, this time – and we played Remember When long into the night. We were both a little drunk when we finally decided to call it quits. I thought he seemed particularly glad I was there, which made me glad to be there as well.

He entered his bedroom and shut the door to undress, but returned a moment later while I was spreading out my bedroll on his couch. “I forgot something,” he said, and crossed the living room to the kitchen. He came back with the figurine in his gloved hand. “Humor me one more time,” he said. “I don’t like turning my back on it.”

“Wait,” I said. “Leave it with me. Data, remember?”

He hesitated. He didn’t seem particularly happy with the idea, but reluctantly agreed that the best chance for me to experience whatever had been happening to him would be for him to part with the figurine for the night. He placed it first on the coffee table in front of the couch, then changed his mind and set it on the bookcase beside the stereo. When I asked him why, he averted his eyes and muttered something about not wanting it too close to me – just in case. I said nothing, but he read my silence correctly. We said good-night, and retired to our respective beds.

I always sleep poorly in unfamiliar surroundings, and while I’d visited Tom many times over the years, this was the first time I’d crashed on his couch. The smell of the pillow was not that of my own. The hum of the refrigerator was pitched differently from mine, and came from the wrong direction. The security light over his garage glinted off the figurine silently staring at me from across the room, and cast unexpected shadows that eerily writhed and shifted whenever a light breeze rustled the foliage in front of the window. Sleep was difficult to come by. I found myself on high alert, listening to and registering all the little night sounds I’d long since learned to ignore from my own bed. I could hear Kepler padding by on occasion, and just as I was beginning to sink into the lightest of slumber, he leaped up on the couch to investigate me. I scratched his shoulders, but instead of settling down he jumped back down to resume his watch. It was probably another hour before I began to drift back down into unconsciousness, and fall into an uneasy, low-grade sleep.


“It’s alive, Neil,” he says. “See?” And he proudly holds up an amorphous, squirming Thing, a translucent gelatinous horror pulsating and writhing and gnashing its onyx teeth in an attempt to get free.

“For God’s sake, Tom, get rid of it!” I cry, a chill of revulsion shuddering down my spine.

But he just smiles. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

Marcy sits cross-legged on the floor, patting Kepler. “Good Kitty,” she croons. “Good Kitty. There’s a good Kitty. Kitty Kitty Kitty,” and she breaks off a piece of oatmeal-raisin cookie to offer the cat. The cat rears up and squats on its haunches so it can take the cookie in its front paws. “Why, thank you, Marcy,” he says with a slight British accent, and delicately begins to nibble at the offering. “This is really quite good, you know.”

The figurine is on the coffee table, motionless, bathed in sunlight streaming in through the living room window behind me. I lay on the couch in my bedroll, watching it. From this angle it looks like a black orchid. It begins to slowly rotate around its vertical axis, resembling by turns a hunchbacked tortoise, a cutaway model of the Earth, and an evil, demonic face. A wet hissing sound emerges from its gaping maw, and with horror mingled with disgust, I look away.

Here I abruptly awaken. I am alone on Tom’s couch in the silence and the gloom, shadows from the light outside crisscrossing the walls. I glance towards the stereo looking for the figurine, but to my consternation, it is not there. Kepler sits there instead, uttering a frightened distress mew, and I look frantically around the room. My eyes drop to the coffee table, and with a shock I see it, the figurine, not two feet away, open mouth facing me, silent and motionless, as if in wait. I try to reach out to it, but I seem paralyzed, as if my limbs weigh tons, or as if despite my desire to move I cannot generate the will to do so. Only with the greatest of effort can I direct my arm to stretch out towards the figurine. Just as my fingers brush the base, it twists with a snarl, its glassine jaws snapping viciously at my hand. I recoil and try to scream, but can only manage a feeble groan…


…and with that I broke through the uppermost layer of sleep to emerge finally into true wakefulness - or at least wakefulness as I thought I knew it. I was lying on my back, tangled in the bedroll and damp with sweat. I worked myself partway to a sit, and looked around the room, trying without success to deny that I was hunting for the figurine. The barest beginning of a gray dawn was trickling in through the windows, filling in the shadows cast by the garage light. I looked to the stereo where I’d last seen the object. But it wasn’t there. I reflexively drew in a quick breath and held it.

From beneath the coffee table, Kepler’s low-pitched, throaty cry caught my attention, and I peered under the table at him. He was in a crouch facing away from me, staring towards the bookcase. I followed his gaze. The figurine lay on the carpet directly beneath the shelf on which Tom had placed it just before retiring.

I extricated myself the rest of the way from the sleeping bag and swung my feet down to the floor, intending to return the figurine to the bookcase. Kepler would have none of this, though, and bolted from his hiding place into the kitchen. I crossed the floor to the object, approaching it from such a direction that my own shadow would not obscure it. Even now I was still groggy enough with sleep that I wasn’t 100% certain I was truly awake.

When I stood by the figurine I looked down at it for a second. On a curious impulse, I said “So, did Kepler knock you down there, old boy, or did you make the trip yourself?” I didn’t want to admit it, but I realized I was steeling myself to pick it up. I bent down and curled my fingers around it.

I felt a sudden sharp sting as something sliced into my forefinger, and with a gasp and startled cry I dropped the figurine and snatched my hand back. Blood oozed from a slit in the side of my finger, and I reflexively stuck the injured digit into my mouth. Then I remembered how Tom had broken a chip off the object while filing its teeth, which undoubtedly had left the razor edge on which I’d just now cut myself.

That was what I chose to believe, anyway…


                                                                             Part 3 - Interlude

“What happened to your finger?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him rise, even though he’d slept with the door open. “Christ, Tom,” I said, “Have I got to put a bell around your neck?”

He grinned, but wouldn’t be put off. “What did you do to your finger?”

I extended the forefinger to show him the cut. It had already stopped bleeding. “I nicked it, Tom. That’s all.”

Without his glasses, his eyes looked weak and watery, surrounded by the dark bags of loose skin that age so generously endows us with. His thinning hair was in wild disarray, his cheeks rough with gray stubble. But his gaze bore intently into my own. “On the figurine?”

I nodded. “On the sharp edge you left when you broke it.”

He gave a slight nod of concession. “Was it still on the shelf?”

I paused. “No,” I finally admitted, gesturing to where it still lay. “It had fallen onto the floor.”

“Fallen,” he repeated, and smiled slightly. “Any dreams?”

I nodded again, but said nothing.

“Bad ones?”

“I’ve had worse,” I allowed.

“False awakenings?”

This caught me off balance, and it must have shown even before I answered. “Uh, yeah,” I managed to get out. “But I’ve had them before, too.”

“Still,” he ventured, “three rather remarkable coincidences, don’t you think?”

“Hardly remarkable,” I countered. “I never sleep well my first night in an unfamiliar bed; and we’d been discussing this… situation for a day, and you have to admit, it’s pretty grotesque. Also, we’d been drinking.”

He spread his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “Shall I fix us some coffee?”

“Oh, God, yes,” I said with feeling. The sleeplessness atop the alcohol was beginning to encircle my head in an ever-tightening cinch.

After dressing, Tom loaded up the coffee maker while I rummaged about the ‘fridge for something that might pass for breakfast. I managed to find a half-dozen eggs not too far beyond their expiration date. The addition of an onion and the remains of the previous night’s fried rice made for an acceptably filling omelet-like concoction, which we ate over casual conversation, politely agreeing not to acknowledge the elephant seated at the table with us. But eventually we could ignore it no longer.

“So,” Tom declared after pushing his plate away with a great, satisfied belch. “Do we have enough data yet from our experiment to draw any conclusions?”

I held the coffee mug with both hands, my elbows on the table straddling the remains of my own breakfast. “I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “I’ll grant you that I had a pretty strange, disturbing night, but I’m not ready to chuck a mundane explanation for it all in favor of your theory, which by your own admission is pretty whacked out.”

He sipped at his coffee, the rising steam fogging his glasses. “Fair enough,” he said.

“I mean, bad dreams are just bad dreams. False awakenings are not uncommon. Kepler probably knocked the figurine off the shelf, and I cut myself on a piece of broken glass. I can’t accept a supernatural explanation for all this when there are perfectly natural ones to choose from.”

“I’m not necessarily advocating a ‘supernatural’ explanation,” he parried. “You know enough about physics to realize that what we don’t know about the universe far outweighs what we do.”

“Absolutely,” I concurred. “But I still trust in Occam’s Razor. The simplest, most mundane hypothesis is the horse to bet on.”

“So what would it take to convince you?”

“Question is, what’ll it take to convince you?”

His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

I leaned forward. “I mean, you are all but convinced that this thing is somehow animated. You alluded to some anomalous data in your work, something about cracking open another dimension. String theory is all about higher dimensions. It hasn’t yet produced any testable predictions, but it’s mainstream science, not tarot. So I’m not prepared to say categorically that it is utterly, totally impossible that you released some entity that somehow got into that – that slab of silica in the next room. I’m much more inclined to go with, You, my old friend, have been working too hard for too long, and are of diminished capacity to ward off the frightening delusions that bedevil every man lying awake at 3:00 in the morning.” I paused to catch my breath. “All the same, I’m not going to try to argue you out of your conviction any more.”

He glanced away with a look of tired resignation, nodding his head slightly. “I can’t say that I blame you,” he said. His eyes flicked back to mine. “I hope asking you to stay wasn’t too presumptuous.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Not at all. Without believing it myself, I am going to assume for the moment that what you say is true, and proceed to a solution from there.”

He brightened. “Ah,” he chuckled. “The old Proof by Contradiction trick!”

I laughed. “Something like that, yes.”

“What exactly do you propose?”

I let the silence hang in the air for a few seconds to build suspense before answering, “An exorcism.”


                                                                             Part 4 - Coda

And so it was that three hours later we stood huddled in our jackets, ankle deep in the stale snow blanketing the ground at the edge of Tom’s woodlot, admiring the six-foot high pyramid of dry firewood we’d laboriously created. A few smaller piles lay scattered strategically about, cached ammunition in the event the bonfire died down before the completion of our ceremony. Tom carried the figurine, and the jar with the splinter.

“Are we ready?” he asked me.

“Go for it, man,” I said.

He handed me the figurine, and after removing his gloves produced a book of paper matches from his coat pocket. He struck one, but it went out immediately. He struck another, nursed it into life, and touched it to the tinder. He lit another, and another, starting the fire in a total of three places around the perimeter of the stack. He replaced his gloves and gingerly took the figurine back from me.

“Not yet,” I said. “Wait until we have a good bed of coals.”

“I know,” he said. “The same way we melted beer bottles on those camping trips when I was a kid.”

The fire crackled and the flames danced higher and the smoke chased us around for the next half hour or so. We continually fed the blaze from our auxiliary piles, not because it was in any danger of going out, but because, like most men, we’d never outgrown our childlike fascination with fire. When the base of the pyre glowed bright orange and shimmered with the heat, Tom squatted and tossed the figurine into what looked like the hottest part. The structure around it partly collapsed, burying it in white ash and red ember. Straightening, he said “I guess now we wait.”

We continued adding firewood, and as time passed the act of feeding the fire took on the feeling of sacrament. Fire is primal - along with earth, air, and water one of the fundamental elements of the ancients. We became acolytes silently tending our ad hoc temple amidst the pop and crackle of the flames. There was no need to speak, for not only did each of us know what had to be done, there was simply nothing more to be said. It struck me that had we somehow been able to transport here a Neolithic hunter from 200 centuries earlier, he would have found the ritual as familiar and comforting as we did. For his part, Tom seemed relieved to be taking action, and I hoped that this psychodrama we were performing would sufficiently free him of whatever demons might be tormenting him. The unburnt wood hissed and bubbled as the resins within boiled out. The radiant heat compelled us to open our jackets, and I was in the process of breaking a long stick into short ones when a loud pop made us both turn towards the fire.

What happened next took place so quickly that my memory of the sequence of events can only be considered approximate. The figurine had apparently broken apart from the heat, for a chunk of it had actually propelled itself out of the fire, and now sat hissing and steaming in the snow. At the same time a jet of yellow flame shot out from where the fragment had been ejected, roaring like a blowtorch. A wind suddenly arose, driving the smoke around us and into our eyes, and shaking loose a rain of debris from the canopy overhead. A half-dozen jays shrieked with alarm and took panicked wing. I looked up to follow their flight, and saw that the column of smoke was not dispersing, but coalescing into a writhing, shifting protoplasmic form that seemed illumined from within. There was a sound, a howling, that I assumed at the time to be the wind resonating within the trunks and limbs of the trees; but as I recall the look of fright and awe on Tom’s face, I wonder about that now. The form appeared to be extending a pseudopod down towards us, but a final gust of wind deflected it, and the form dissolved into a twisting, roiling vortex ascending to the treetops. In seconds, it was over.

I looked over at Tom, who was looking at me with a wide-eyed dumbfounded expression of amazement and terror. “What the fuck was THAT?” I blurted.

It took several seconds to compose himself before answering. A faintly triumphant calm was smoothing his features when he replied almost smugly, “That was the genie in the bottle.”

I realized I’d been holding my breath, and let it out slowly. “Is it gone?” I asked.

He looked back up towards the gray sky. “I think so,” he said. “For now. It’s gone back Outside.”

As if from a long way off I heard myself ask, “Do you think it will be back?”

He took a long time to answer. “I don’t know,” he eventually said. “We showed it the way In.
It found its own way Out. But as to its intent…”

He didn’t finish his sentence, but withdrew the jar from his pocket, removed the lid, and shook the sliver into the fire. He watched it for a few seconds before tossing the jar and lid in after it. He was still gazing at the bed of coals when he finally spoke.

“Who knows?” was all he said.

[winddance]

"wow" was all she said

[sasha]

may I take that as a positive?

This is a cleaned up version of something I'd posted at the old AC. It was actually based upon a dream I once had (pretty much the same dream Neil had in the story after his false awakening).

[winddance]

yes a definite positive. something beautiful and scary you can't look away from.

[sasha]

In that case, thank you!

I adored HP Lovecraft as an adolescent, and I wanted to write an homage in his "cosmic horror" vein, but with a more contemporary edge - and with the volume turned way, way down - no squirming tentacles, rotting zombies, or bat-winged demons. For all his originality, HPL wasn't exactly subtle.