Shadows Out of Time

I looked into voids between universes. I saw the chaos outside ordered space-time, or else within it. Maybe they were the same thing. A dreadful entity drifted into my field of perception, out beyond the murky vortex. It might have been huger than a galaxy or small as a cluster of balloons, depending on perspective and distance, or, again, both at once. It looked like a mad tangle of dripping hawsers, frayed and knotted, twisted around pulsing globes of many sizes. It might also have been the eviscerated organs of something alive but foreign to human knowledge, writhing in a last pained convulsion. It looked like all that, and it changed as I gazed. I had the feeling I saw some shifting cross-section of a being whose terrible whole I’d never be able to imagine or perceive.

It hung in that turbulent vortex above the island. Our souls shook before it. It radiated a malign avid craving, and yet it was somehow impersonal, cruelly indifferent. It was capable of wiping all life from the earth the way I’d wash the pesticides off a grape before I ate it.

Tindall called its name again. His voice was ecstatic. The rock samples around him glowed brighter, blue-white and then a hot fierce violet. His trousers began to smoke and char. He didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re too late,” Connie whispered in horror. “We’re too late. Run!”

I hesitated. What could I do? Would I stop anything, change anything, if I tackled Tindall bodily? Even killed him? I didn’t know, and as I looked up at the roiling abomination Tindall had summoned, I knew one thing; I dared not charge into that circle.

“Run!”

We did just that, side by side, like rabbits from a dog. We reached the water-side, pushed out our canoe, and instantly capsized it like a pair of clumsy idiots. We swam for the landing in desperation, though what good we were thinking that would do us, I couldn’t tell you. We reached it and hauled ourselves out of the water.

Back on the island, it went wrong for Tindall. Maybe he bungled his invocation chant. Maybe he’d been fatally mistaken ever to use the rocks of Leng in his ritual. Maybe they made a bridge across time to the remote aeons that had formed them.

There was a thunderous, fiery blast. By instinct Connie and I held our breaths. Stinking, poisonous air that might have belched from a Bessemer surged over the water and over us, making our sodden clothes steam. We closed our eyes and pressed our faces into the landing. I think we’d have been seared blind if we hadn’t. Our hair crisped. We felt the clothes on our backs singeing.

On the island, the rocks from Leng exploded, seethed into vapor, and Tindall was consumed in what I hope was less than a second. He vanished; he was just gone. A second clap of searing air rolled across the island and the river. Connie and I endured it, seared, deafened, and when everything seemed quiet and dark, I dared to look at the island with its rows of menhirs.

The vortex in the air had closed. The horror called YogSothoth had gone, or anyhow was fenced out of ordered space-time again, not that it comforted us much when we’d just had a direct view of how fragile that fencing is. If a half-baked warlock like Tindall could breach it, create an opening…

We made it back to Connie’s car. Turning on the roof light, we inspected each other. Except for blisters and burned hair, we seemed all right. Connie looked down at herself, and the remains of her silk pantsuit.

“Ruined,” she said, in a state of shock. “It’s damn’ well ruined.”

I don’t know who laughed hysterically first. We might not have stopped if the sound of police sirens hadn’t brought us back to earth. We’d have questions to answer, and our condition, plus the grass on our clothes, made it impossible to deny we’d been on the island. Plenty of people would have seen that blast, heard and smelled it, some of them on the campus.

We didn’t, I realized, have to explain anything. The simplest, most innocent account would be best, and we could even tell the truth, within limits. We’d been testing the rock samples, and began to suspect Dean Tindall was planning to use them in an experiment that could be dangerous, to support pet ideas of his own. We’d been to his apartment — Haru could confirm that — and then to the island on the chance that he was working with them there. We’d arrived just as the rocks were becoming incandescent, and fled. We barely made it back across the river before they exploded.

Some people who had looked directly at the blast were blinded. Others who breathed the vapor spent days in hospital with damaged lungs. One, an asthma sufferer, died.