Just then — could it possibly be by the agency of that beast? — a giant oval lens opened in the pearly mist that cloaked the cemetery. From this elevation we could see right over the high perimeter wall. Far beyond the roofed gateway where the creature lingered, beyond where I knew the city’s wide shallow river curved, part stony, part vegetated, I saw part of the raised riverside roadway and many of the apartment blocks, their concrete faded yellow or faded rose.
“Traffic!” Yes, others saw the same. Shimmering, cars and trucks and buses were driving along the highway, undisturbed by any trampling behemoth. No police vehicles nor ambulances were racing, emergency lights flashing. Nor trucks of armed soldiers. Normality, so it seemed. A vision of this part of the city as we’d seen it just an hour or two before.
Or as it was right now, yet in some other reality.? The lens closed up, having taunted us.
“We’re no longer part of that reality!” I said to Henkel.
“We shall talk of this later,” he told me.
Zsuzsa was still sobbing inconsolably. The Australian adolescent was trying to behave like a man, although I saw him quiver. We needed protection.
I pointed at what appeared to be the topmost ten meters or so of a Gothic cathedral amidst trees, the railed area around it apparently choked with bushes.
“Could we take shelter in that spire, for instance?”
“Most of the mausoleums are locked,” observed Gabriella.
“A spade can break a lock.”
“Forget all those pseudo-buildings,” said Henkel. “Anywhere with only one entrance is a trap. We’d be fish in a barrel.”
Of course he was right. The yearning to be inside protective walls had made me stupid. My orderly world, my past, was melting away like wax. What twisted shape would result?
Henkel conferred with Gabriella sotto voce, and we set off, presently to arrive at a tall gap where a wall several meters high, inset with caskets, confronted an equally high blank wall, coarsely plastered with concrete except where the covering had cracked off, exposing bare mortared stones. This narrowest of alleys extended for maybe forty meters, and only one body’s width, terribly claustrophobic — what if something appear at the far end when you were halfway along? To relieve slightly the intense gloom, quite a few lanterns, each containing a battery-powered Pope candle, hung from caskets at various heights. Our field marshal ordained that we should each take one of the feeble lanterns with us, along with our gardening weapons — maybe, if lucky, we might later take the monster by surprise.
And so we came, passing by grieving statues, to a most unusual part of this singular cemetery. Although we were still quite high above ground level, we entered a labyrinth of several balustraded levels linked by stairways, walled with more caskets. On a dismal midway level Henkel decided that we should settle ourselves upon the paving stones.
“We shall take turns to be lookouts at the up-stairway and at the down-stairway. I think the kraken may find those stairways a hindrance. If it does come from one direction, we shall escape the other way.”
To sleep eventually on the hard stone floor in our fairly lightweight clothing? After no food or drink? Meanwhile, doing nothing but wait?
“Signora Vigo,” asked Henkel, “are there water taps nearby in the area outside, to fill flower vases?”
Seeming uncertain — does a tour guide pay much attention to taps? — Gabriella asked Rudolfo, whose response was obviously positive.
“Ask him to go, Signora Vigo, to show where. Jack Ballantine, would you go with two or three others to bring water back?” Yes, give the shocked lad something to do; already he was nodding yes.
“But what do we carry the water in.?”
“Why, in vases which you empty and rinse out. Mijnheer Ruyslinck, will you go too? And Mr. Goldman, to keep watch?”
“No,” said his wife Betsy.
“I’ll be all right, honey.”
“But the other Italian guy knows the cemetery.”
“Precisely for that reason,” said our field marshal, “he must remain with us as a source of information in the temporary absence of his superior.”
Just in case Rudolfo met his death vilely outside.
As soon as this little expedition departed, to loud prayers from Jimmy Garrett, Henkel came and sat by me.
“So,” he asked softly, “you think there may now be two separate realities? In one reality our world has been invaded by these multiple iterations of krakens, on various scales? And in the other reality, another world carries on as normal?”
“It was you who mentioned recreating the primitive earliest state of the universe. before physical laws became fixed. A sort of no-time when a different sort of universe could have burst forth and inflated instead.”
“And maybe that universe did come into a parallel existence, remaining faintly linked to our own universe by early. I think the correct word is entanglement.”
“By and large I know what that means, but I’m only a bureaucrat, as you pointed out.”
“Never mind, at least you know something! Maybe as much as I know. If our physicists have recreated that earliest stage of the cosmos in miniature, does this permit a kind of bridge between two possible cosmoses? Or rather a hole, which can be forced open by a powerful and evil intelligence?”
“How do I know!”
“Miss Hughes, surely it’s better to think rationally along such lines than to imagine that hell has invaded us, especially as that creature corresponds to no religion that I know of.”
“At least we won’t die deluded.”
“We mightn’t die. If those krakens are all linked, and are aspects, avatars, of the same entity, we might come across a tinier iteration of the beast and stamp on it!”
Was our field marshal himself deluded, or was this for the sake of morale?
“If they’re all aspects of the same, what did you say, evil intelligence, that must be one very highly developed intelligence.”
“Compared with which we are stupid? Maybe so, maybe not. But maybe we are very stupid to bombard the consituents of matter into a state which hasn’t existed since the dawn of creation, alien to the universe we know today. Stupid to meddle with the fundamental basis of reality. Maybe that’s how the rift happened, when something broke through — something which may even have been able to touch our world in the past by entanglement, though not as sustainedly as now. Supposing that at the beginning the cosmos divided, one of the twins pursuing our own everyday course, the other cursed twin torn away from its mirror image into a ghastly dimension or between-dimension where vile intelligences arose hungry for the substance of our world. How the invaders are reveling now.”
I thought that Henkel too was reveling somewhat in rhetoric, but I had to ask, “What about the normality we saw through that lens? Which cosmos is that in?”
“I think that was an illusion, a lure to attract us back to the gate, as if we are sheep. The kraken is experimenting with us.”
“If the creature can create illusions. and you saw how impossibly it pulled the spine out of. ” I couldn’t continue.
Thomas Henkel patted me on the shoulder. “There now, be brave. As you have been until now. If the kraken possesses such powers, which seem to us paranormal, well, it isn’t exerting them all the time.”