''Make it STOP!" I begged.

Her brows shot up like she was offended. "Pardon me, Ann?"

OH, FOR f.u.c.k'S SAKE! "Make it stop, Miss Kezzy, PLEASE!"

She tapped her foot for a minute, then said, "In nomen of Yog Sothoth, may totus exsisto silens!"

The waterfall howling stopped.

Hannah and me convulsed on the slimy floor for awhile, but finally my ears stopped ringing and I got my head back together. "Miss Kezzy. The things making that noise...they're under those slabs, aren't they?"

"Yes, Ann. Some are Shades of Joseph Curwen's enemies, or current raisings of brilliant men whose interrogation had not been completed upon Curwen's death. Typically, Curwen would put down a Shade after raising it; hence, reverting it back to its original essential salts for future use. Others he would raise simply for the pleasure of torture, after which he would destroy them forever with corrosives. That's what he did with the Shade of Abdul Alhazred, for he didn't want to risk the chance of some other warlock stealing the poet's salts for his own gleaning. There are also some mistakes here, which Curwen never put down simply because he enjoyed the grotesqueness of their imperfect condition."

"Mistakes?" I asked.

"On rare occasions the essential salts of a procurement would be imperfect, or tainted by an overlooked a"or deliberatea"contaminant. The Shade might then be raised, for instance, without limbs, or with switched limbs, or externalized organs, or any other manner of defect." Kezzy pointed to one of the slabs. "That one there, Zenas."

"Shuh thing..." Zenas stuck his fingers in two of the holes in a slab, and lifted it off like it was styrofoam.

"Bring your lanterns, girls, and look in..."

We took our time doing it 'cos neither of us wanted to see what was in the hole. I finally got my courage up and did it first, leaning over, then taking a breath, and looking down.

At first I didn't see anything, just a circular cement pit twenty feet deep. The sides of the pit were slimy with moss or mold. "There's nothing...," but then I squinted and did see something, sitting at the very bottom.

"This is the Shade of the Honorable Goodman Briden," Kezzy said, "a notably zealous judge in the Salem Courts of the late-1600's. Briden was the first to be suspicious of Joseph Corwan's character, which then forced Corwan to flee the town and change his name. Curwen deliberately tainted the judge's salts in order to cause his Shade to be raised vacuus tergum, meaning skinless."

I made out a form which I then recognized as the top of a man's head. I thought I heard a slapping sound. Then the head moved, and a face looked up.

A skinless face.

The face was red and veiny; you could see all the muscles, and the big white lidless eyes. I almost hurled.

A wet slapping noise fluttered up. What is he... Oh, f.u.c.k!

He was beating off...with a skinless d.i.c.k.

"After so much time, many Shades go mad, like Judge Briden here. Male Shades not put down tend to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e perpetually, for there's little else left to do."

Then those lidless eyes looked right at me, and he shrieked.

Zenas put the lid back on, then lifted off another.

"Girls," Kezzy said, pointing into the next pit. "Joseph Curwen paid grave-robbers a princely sum for the bones of this man..."

Me and Hannah looked down and saw this old balding guy with a big bushy gray beard.

"Who...who is it?" Hannah asked.

"One of the wisest men to ever live," Kezzy said. "Ladies, meet Galileo. You do know who Galileo is, don't you...Hannah?"

Hannah looked like she was about to faint. "I, I...uma"oh, s.h.i.t!"

Kezzy's eyes burned like hot coals she was so mad. "You don't know who Galileo is? Hannah! You're a disgrace! Your ignorance is unsurpa.s.sed!" She tapped her foot.

"I think he was Italian," I blabbered.

"Oh, oh!" Hannah stammered. "Is he, like, like, the guy who invented pizza?" Kezzy glared. "Zenas. Get your c.o.c.k out."

"Wal, I'd be happy tew," the meat-rack said and hauled it all out. He started flapping it up and down.

Kezzy's face came right up to me. "Ann. If you can't tell me who f.u.c.king Galileo is, Zenas will turn Hannah's a.s.shole inside-out with his d.i.c.k."

My brain started spinning. Galileo? I knew I'd heard of him but... He was some guy from olden times, from Italy, but that's all I knew. Hannah was blubbering while Zenas a"hard already a"started to pull her pants down.

"Ann! Help me!"

"He was, likea"oh, he was a guy who, like, looked at s.h.i.t with telescopes and s.h.i.t!"

Kezzy sighed and called Zenas off. "Your answer, Anna" feeble though it may bea"is correct. Galileo revolutionized math as a component of natural philosophy and, even more important, created astronomical tenets that verified the heliocentric system."

The only reason I pa.s.sed astronomy in high school was 'cos a"well, you can probably guess...

From the pit, this Galileo dude yelled, "Nel famoso di Paradiso, rilascio me!"

Kezzy grinned and waved, "Bye-bye, bye-bye," while Zenas put back the lid.

A different accent shot up from the next hole," Vous mechant sorcIIre! Mai une maudire Atre sur vous!"

Kezzy giggled and said his name was Felix something, the fifth, I think. The guy had been a pope in the 1400's, or maybe she said anti-pope, whatever that means. "Zenas," she said, "give the Padre something to liven up his papal apartment," and she laughed and laughed while Zenas pulled down his pantyhose, hung his hairy a.s.s over the hole, and started dropping foot-long t.u.r.ds on this guy. The guy bellowed.

In another pit was some guy with his legs where his arms should be, his arms where his legs should be, his head where his a.s.s should be, and his a.s.s sitting on his shoulders, and in another pit there was this pretty good-looking girl a""The comeliest of the Devonshire witches," Kezzy said a"but she had no arms or legs. They hadn't been cut off, they just weren't there. Curwen had done something to this one's essential salts to make her that way, for "carnal fun and games," Kezzy said.

Me and Hannah were both dizzy from looking at these things, and I was glad that Kezzy didn't make us look into every pit. My stomach was squirming. "How long have these things been here, Miss Kezzy?"

"Why, for hundreds of years, of course. What you must understand is that Shades don't die since, in an obvoluted way, they're already dead. Only Alpha House sisters have been down in this holy place since Curwen's physical death. The magic of the Old Ones is why they've remained alive all this time."

Hundreds of years, I thought. Just sitting down there, stinking, decade after decade, century after century... "Why not just put them out of their misery?"

Kezzy walked around, her heels tapping. "While it's true that the overall majority of the Shades no longer have any use, their misery is the point. To put them out of their misery, Ann, would contradict the wishes of our benefactor. This will be crystal-clear to you, in time." She sat up on the stone slab in the middle of the pillars. "Curwen discovered secrets upon secrets, girls. And rest a.s.sured, he is among us now." Zenas took the Al Azif translations out of the knapsack, and then he flicked a cigarette lighter and lit something inside this tin ball with holes in it. The ball was on the end of a chain.

But what had she said? Curwen was among us now? "You mean Curwen's ghost?" I asked.

"His discorporation," she said. "The spirits of evil men are particularly potent, Ann. But, yes, you've seen Curwen a number of times. He prowls Alpha House with regularity, especially in vicinity to Pledge Week."

Now Zenas was swaying the tin ball back and forth on its chain while smoke came out of the holes.

"Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d!" Hannah blabbered.

I saw it too. Behind the smoke, like something half-real, I could see Curwen standing there, in the same old-style clothes I'd seen him in those nights he came into my room.

"Through the torture of Alhazred's Shade, Curwen received the true translations of Al Azifs most powerful pa.s.sages, and he pa.s.sed all that knowledge on to us. To Alpha House. Ascending Nodes, Descending Nodes, Ye Casting of ye Divell's Mark, and many many more,"

"That night at the gazebo," I said. "That wasn't Zenas the whole time, was it?"

"No, Ann. It was Zenas loaning Curwen the use of his body, to fully experience the delights of o.r.g.a.s.m. Curwen's quite a randy warlock. I was able to effect this by reading the Ritus Imitor, which I will do again tonight." Her eyes sparkled in the lantern light. "But it won't be Zenas's body that Curwen's spirit will borrow."

Then I remembered what she'd said earlier.

Tonight...we're going Monstering...

Hannah clung to me, in tears. "What's she talking about, Ann?"

My voice was a dark croak. "She's gonna put Curwen's spirit inside a monster...then we get f.u.c.ked by the monster..."

Kezzy just kept grinning. "Take off your clothes, ladies."

We were pretty much zombies by then. After all that had happened up to now? And after what we'd seen in those pits? We dragged our clothes off, staring at nothing.

I was afraid to ask but I asked anyway, "Where's the monster, Miss Kezzy?"

"Oh, it's here. But the more efficacious question would be... what's the monster?"

Zenas was lifting another lid.

Just the idea of it made me and Hannah crouch back into the corner. But for some reason, Kezzy turned her head away from Zenas, and she was grimacing.

"Prop the lid against the wall facing away. G.o.d, how the sight of the Sign disgusts me so...

Sign? But then I saw that the next lid had these marking on top of it, star-shaped outlines with funny stuff written in them. I looked at it buta"

"Oww!" I yelled. "That makes my head hurt!"

"It's the Elder Sign," Kezzy told us. "We had to draw one on that particular lid...to keep the cell's guest quelled. The reason that you've gotten a headache from it is due to the fact that you and Hannah both are in the infancy of your metamorphosis from regular girl...to Alpha House girl."

I didn't know what she was talking about, but the headache stopped the second Zenas turned those star-shapes away from us. I could think again, and I remembered her question. "So, Missy Kezzy...what is the monster?"

She didn't say anything at first, because this slopping-like noise along with a gurgling came from the open pit. It got louder and louder, until...

Something began to crawl out.

Me and Hannah screamed.

"This is not a Shade, ladies," Kezzy said. "It's a Shoggoth. It was not raised, it was transported to us a" "

"From where?" I shrieked when I got my first look at it.

"From a para-planar interstice, which is easier just to think of as another dimension. It was brought here a long time ago, in the 1760's...by Joseph Curwen, who successfully utilized one of Al Azifs most spectacular pa.s.sages."

When the thing got itself all the way out of the pit, it just sat there, kind of throbbing, and behind the stone slab near the pillars, I could still see that smoke coming out of the tin ball, and behind the smoke was the ghost of Joseph Curwen.

The ghost smiled.

But the thing from the pit? It was just a big pile of slop. When I squinted, I could make out details 'cos there was something about it that made my vision shift. The only comparison I can think of is to say it looked like a pile of Super b.a.l.l.s a" you've seen them, the kind that are clear but have sparkly stuff inside a" only the b.a.l.l.s were all held together by slime.

"A Shoggoth is an ent.i.ty specifically manufactured for labor and war," Kezzy went on. "They are composed of inorganic matter a" called nether-plasm."

"It looks like it's made out of bubbles!" Hannah cried, hugging me.

"The 'bubbles' Hannah, are fissionable polyps that fuse into whatever physical shape is needed. This is a small Shoggoth, though many different cla.s.sifications exist. The largest are now the size of office buildings." Kezzy actually rubbed her own b.o.o.bs while looking at the thing. It just sat there, kind of bubbling.

"It's a pile of slop!" I yelled. "How is that thing gonna f.u.c.k us?"

"Watch," she whispered, and then the pile started to shudder, and then,...

It started to rise.

I felt stiff as a statue while this pile got bigger before our eyes. I guess elongate is the word. It was like one minute there's this bubbling pile of Superb.a.l.l.s on the floor and the next minute that pile is...

Standing UP.

In another couple of blinks we were looking at this radiating glop that had sort of taken the shape of a mana" er, not really man but an upright thing that stood on two legs and had two arms and a head.

But it was still made of all those clear Superb.a.l.l.s.

"What are all those b.a.l.l.s?" I asked, "Are they like... cells?"

"In a manner of speaking." But Kezzy couldn't take her eyes off the smoke, or the image of Curwen's ghost. "The aforementioned polyps. They're fissionable spheroids of ingeniously devised material, ethereally integrated, a non-metallic alloy, so to speak. The most useful morphological configuration is that of a bipedal ent.i.ty. Wait till the spheroids fuse... And while we're doing that, we have to determine which of you goes first."

"Goes, goes," Hannah stuttered, "ga""

"Which one of us gets f.u.c.ked by it first!" I yelled and, believe me, I knew what was coming. "Go ahead, Miss Kezzy! Let's do it the fair way! Let's flip a coin!" Holy s.h.i.t, I was so p.i.s.sed!

Kezzy's grin was like some evil African mask. The coin glittered. "Call it, Ann."

"f.u.c.kin' tails!"

The coin spun in the air, clinked on the floor.

"Awwwwwwww. Heads, Ann." Her eyes beamed at me. "You lose."

"Of f.u.c.kin' course!"

But in the time it took for me to get shafted again, all those Superb.a.l.l.s kind of melted, taking on more and more detail, until...

"There, ladies," Kezzy celebrated, "is your monster."

I screamed again but Hannah pa.s.sed out right away. All those Superb.a.l.l.s had turned into a monster, all right, and it was standing right there in front of us now. But after the change a" the fusion a" it wasn't clear or slimy anymore. It looked like a man made of raw meat. You ever see a Johnsonville brat before you cook it? Almost blood-red with all these splotches of white fat mixed in? That's what the monstera"this Shoggoth a" looked like: a six-foot-tall man made out of Johnsonville brats all mushed together.