It was sweet to bathe in that bright, raucous communion. She had called the desk man that she was coming out, and for a couple of hours various friends whom the word had reached strolled in to greet her. She luxuriated in her pitied celebrity, received little gifts and gave back emotional kisses of thanks.

It ought to have lasted longer, but the night was an odd one. Not much was happening in town, and everybody seemed to have action lined up in Oxnard or Encino or some other bizarre place. A few stayed to work the home grounds, but they caught a subdued air from the place's emptiness at a still-young hour. Patti took a couple more Valium and tried to seem like she was peacefully resting in a lobby chair. To fight her stirrings of unease, she took up the paperback that was among the gifts given her-she hadn't even noticed by whom. It had a horrible face on the cover and was ent.i.tled At The Mountains of Madness.

If she had not felt the need of some potent distraction, some weighty ballast for her listing spirit, she would never have pieced out the Ciceronian rhythms of the narrative's style. But when, with frightened tenacity, she had waded several pages into the tale, the riverine prose, suddenly limpid, s.n.a.t.c.hed her and bore her upon its flowing clarity. The Valium seemed to perfect her uncanny concentration, and where her vocabulary failed her, she made smooth leaps of inference and always landed square on the necessary meaning.

And so for hours in the slowly emptying lobby that looked out upon the slowly emptying intersection, she wound through the icy territories of the impossible, and down into the gelid, nethermost cellars of all World and Time, where stupendous aeons lay in pictured shards, and ma.s.sive, sentient forms still stirred, and fed, and mocked the light.

Strangely, she began to find underlinings about two-thirds of the way through. All the marked pa.s.sages involved references to shoggoths. It was a word whose mere sound made Patti's flesh stir. She searched the fly-leaf and inner covers for explanatory inscriptions, but found nothing.

When she laid the book down in the small hours, she sat amid a near-total desertion which she scarcely noticed. Something tugged powerfully at memory, something which memory dreaded to admit. She realized that in reading the tale, she had taken on an obscure, terrible weight. She felt as if impregnated by an injection of tainted knowledge whose grim fruit, an almost physical ma.s.s of cryptic threat, lay a-ripening in her now.

She took a third-floor room in the Parna.s.sus for the night, for the simplest effort, like calling a cab, lay under a pall of futility and sourceless menace. She lay back, and her exhausted mind plunged instantly through the rotten flooring of consciousness, straight down into the abyss of dreams.

She dreamed of a city like Hollywood, but the city's walls and pavements were half alive, and they could feel premonitions of something that was drawing near them. All the walls and streets of the city waited in a cold-sweat fear under a blackly overcast sky. She herself, she grasped, was the heart and mind of the city. She lay in its midst, and its vast, cold fear was hers. She lay and somehow she knew the things that were drawing near her giant body. She knew their provenance in huge, blind voids where stood walls older than the present face of earth; she knew their long, cunning toil to reach her own cringing frontiers. Giant worms they were, or jellyfish, or merely great clots of boiling substance. They entered her deserted streets, glidingly converging. She lay like carrion that lives and knows the maggots' a.s.sault on it. She lay in her central citadel, herself the morsel they sped toward, piping their l.u.s.t from foul, corrosive jaws.

She woke late Sunday afternoon, drained and dead of heart. She sat in bed watching a big green fly patiently hammer itself against the pane where the gold light flooded in. Endlessly it fought the impossible, battering with its frail, bejeweled head. With swift fury and pain Patti jumped out of bed and s.n.a.t.c.hed up her blouse. She ran to the window and with her linen bludgeon killed the fly.

Across the street, in a window just one story higher than her own, sat Fat Face. She stood looking back for a moment, embarra.s.sed by her little savagery, but warmed by the way the doctor's smile was filled with gentle understanding, as if he read the anguish the act was born of. She suddenly realized she was wearing only her bra.

His smile grew a shade merrier at her little jolt of awareness, and she knew he understood this too, that this was inadvertence, and not a hooker's come-on.

And so, with a swift excitement, she turned it into coquettry, and applied her blouse daintily to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She would make her fantasy real and by tenderness would heal the horror that had dogged her life. She pointed to herself with a smile, and then to Fat Face with inquiry. How he beamed then! Did she even see his eyes and lips water? He nodded energetically. With thumb and forefinger she signaled a short interval. As she left the window she noted the arrival, down on the side walk, of a gaggle of hydrotherapy patients, several with leashed strays in tow.

This bothered her, and she washed more slowly than she had meant to. Their arrival not only potentially inconvenienced her interview-it also put her in mind of the collector, and the memory laid a chill on her s.e.xual enthusiasm. She came down slowly to the lobby. It was empty. The streets lay in a Sunday desolation such as only rarely befell this part of the city. Suddenly, all she wanted was a party. To h.e.l.l with kinky charities. And as she stood at the window, a carful of her friends pulled up to the curb, and waved her to join them.

Almost she went-but then noted that Sheri's sister was in the car. She shuddered at any so near a reminder, and waved them off with a smile. Then she stepped out onto the sidewalk. No. Those patients with their strays had made the building too creepy for her. She turned toward her favorite bar. Arnold darted from his booth and made a grab for her arm.

She was edgy and quick, and jumped away. He seemed to fear leaving the booth's proximity, and came no nearer, but pleaded with her from where he stood: "Please, Patti! Come here and listen."

Like a thunderbolt, the elusive memory of last night now struck Patti. "Shoggoth" was eerie, and that whole story familiar, because they were precisely what that letter had been all about! She was stunned that she could so utterly put from her mind that lurid doc.u.ment. It had spooked Sheri badly the night before she died. It had come from Arnold-and so had that book! That was the meaning of his look. The red, moronic face glared at her urgently.

"Please, Patti. I've had knowledge. Come here-" He darted forward to catch her arm and she sprang back, again the quicker, with a yelp. Arnold, thus drawn from the screening of his booth, froze fearfully. Patti looked up, and thrilled to find Fat Face looking down-not in amity, but in wrath upon Arnold. The newsman gaped, and mumbled apologetically, as if to the sidewalk: "No. I said nothing. I only hinted ..." Joyfully Patti sprang across the street and in moments was flying up those stairs she had climbed once before with such reluctance.

The oppression she had first found in these muted corridors was not gone from them-the quality of dread in some manner belonged to them-but she outran it. She moved too quickly in her sunny fantasy to be overtaken by that heaviness. She ran down the fourth-floor hall, and at the door where Sheri had knelt giggling and she had balked, she seized the k.n.o.b and knocked simultaneously with pushing her way in, so impetuous was her rush toward benign sanity. There Fat Face sat at a big desk by the window she'd always known him through. He was even grosser-legged and more bloat-bellied than his patients. It gave her a funny shock that did not change her amorous designs.

He wore a commodious doctor's smock and slacks. His shoes were bulky, black, and orthopedically braced. Such a body less enkindled by warm spirit might have repelled. His, surmounted by the kindly beacon of his smile, seemed only grandfatherly, afflicted, dear. From somewhere there came, echoing as in a large, enclosed s.p.a.ce, a noise of agitated water and of animals-strangely conjoined. But Fat Face was speaking: "My dear," he said, not yet rising, "you make an old, old fellow very, very happy!" His voice was a marvel which sent half-l.u.s.tful gooseflesh down her spine. It was an uncanny voice, reedy and wavering and shot with flutelike notes of silver purity, sinfully melodious. That voice knew seductions, quite possibly, that Patti had never dreamed of. She was speechless, and spread her arms in tender self-presentation.

He leapt to his feet, and the surging pep with which his great bulk moved sent a new thrill down the lightning-rod of her nerves. On pachydermous legs he leapt spry as a cat to a door behind his desk, and bowed her through. The noise of animals and churning water gusted fresher from the doorway. Perplexed, she entered.

The room contained only a huge bowl-shaped hydrotherapy tub. Its walls were blank cement, save one, which was a bank of shuttered windows through which the drenched clamor was pouring. She finally conquered disbelief and realized a fact she had been struggling with all along: those dozens of canine garglings, and cat shrieks, were sounds of agony and distress. Not hospital sounds. Torture chamber sounds. The door boomed shut with a strikingly ponderous sound followed by a sharp click. Fat Face, energetically unb.u.t.toning his smock, said: "Go ahead and peek out, sweet, heedless trollop! O yes, O yes, O yes-soon we'll all dine on lovely flesh-men and women, not paltry vermin!" Patti gaped at the lurid musicality of his speech, struggling to receive its meaning. The doctor was shucking his trousers. It appeared that he wore a complex rubber suit, heavily strapped and buckled, under his clothes. Dazed, Patti opened a shutter and looked out.

She saw a huge indoor pool, as the sounds had suggested, but not of the sane shape and bright chlorinated blue she expected. It was a huge slime-black grotto that opened below her, bordered by rude, sea-bearded rocks of cyclopean size. The sooty, viscous broth of its waters boiled with bulging elephantine shapes ...

From those shapes, when she had grasped them, she tore her eyes with desperate speed, long instants too late for her sanity. Nightmare ought not to be so simply there before her, so dizzyingly adjacent to Reality. That the shapes should be such seething plasms, such cunning, t.i.tan maggots as she had dreamed of, this was just half the horror. The other half was the human head that decorated each of those boiling multimorphs, a comic excrescence from the nightmare mess-this and the rain of panicked beasts that fell from cagework above the pool and became in their frenzies both the toys and the food of the pulpy abominations.

She turned slack-mouthed to Fat Face. He stood by the great empty tub working at the big system of buckles on his chest. "Do you understand, my dear? Please try! Your horror will improve your tang. Your veil shall be the wash of blood that dims and drowns your dying eyes ... You see, we find it easier to hold most of the shape with suits like these. We could mimic the entire body, but far more effort and concentration would be required."

He gave a last pull and the row of buckles split crisply open. Ropy purple gelatin gushed from his suitfront into the tub. Patti ran to the door, which had no k.n.o.b. As she tore her nails against it and screamed, she remembered the fly at the window, and heard Fat Face continue behind her: "So we just imitate the head, and we never dissolve it, not to risk resuming it faultily and waking suspicions. Please struggle!"

She looked back and saw huge palps, like dreadful comic phalluses, spring from the tub of slime that now boiled with movement. She screamed.

"Oh, yes!" fluted the Fat Face that now bobbed on the purple simmer. Patti's arms smoked where the palps took them. She was plucked from the floor as light as a struggling roach might be. "Oh, yes, dear girl-you'll have for bridesmaids Pain and dread, for vows you'll jabber blasphemies ..." As he brought her to hang above the cauldron of his acid body, she saw his eyes roll jet black. He lowered her feet into himself. A last time before shock took her, Patti threw the feeble tool of her voice against the ma.s.sive walls. She kicked as her feet sank into the scorching gelatin, kicked till her shoes dissolved, till her feet and ankles spread nebulae of liquefying flesh within the shoggoth lord's greedy substance. Then her kicking slowed, and she sank more deeply in ...

end.