But the creature had recoiled from him, maybe out of shock or fear. Yes, just like old Doc Frankenstein had recoiled from that shambling monstrosity he created. This thing was appalled by Hayes. He was white and bloated, a hairy and gas-filled fungus . . . symmetrically and anatomically obscene, a disgusting lower order. He had no love for Hayes no more than a scientist has a love for a large spider he toys with . . . but when that spider revolts, it must be crushed as a lesson.
Hayes felt all his hatred drain away.
The Old One was in charge again as must be. Its brilliant and globular red eyes stood stiffly erect at the end of their stalks. The prismatic cilia atop its starfish-shaped head glowed a feral purple, then orange, and then the same color as its eyes. It was pissed. It reached out and took Hayes, a wave of irresistible force slamming into his mind. His eyes went wide and his mouth ripped open in a scream as it took his brain, twisted it in its hands and began to squeeze the juice from it.
And then there was an explosion.
A gout of sparks and fire burst just below the thing’s head and it fell back, flapping its wings, making a high and keening sound that was either pain or terror. Sharkey had fired her flare gun at it point blank.
It was enough.
Hayes found the shotgun and brought it up.
And just as he felt a hot wave of searing energy come barreling from the thing’s mind, he pulled the trigger and the gun boomed. The buckshot struck the thing right in the head, shattering its eyestalks and eyeballs into a splatter of mucilage. It screamed and it squealed, rising up on those fanning wings and disappearing into the darkness, wailing in torment.
Yes, this is how the dog bites the hand that feeds, you prick, Hayes thought at it. You may have owned us once. You may have held our squirming destiny in your paws, but no more. Not now.
As if in answer to the creature’s agony, the swarm from below began to shrill with a screeching decibel that almost blew Hayes’ eardrums out.
Or was it from below?
Because standing there, leaning against Sharkey, he could see that high above the pit, up in that unfathomed blackness there were dozens of Old Ones drifting about, but looking distorted as if through a bad TV monitor.
“It’s not real, Jimmy!” Sharkey shouted. “It’s not at all real!”
And it wasn’t.
What they were seeing up there was a transmission of sorts. Like looking through a window into a distant room or peering through the looking glass into the crawling madness on the other side. Up there, those images were blurred and fluttering, a vision of some unknown and nameless dead-end of space that was populated by the Old Ones, maybe their home system and maybe some anti-world caught in-between. Another dimension, another reality, some pestilent graveyard beyond the bleeding rim of the universe. Only a glistening and transparent bubble separated the material of this dimension from that godless other.
But it must have been more than a bubble, for it was clear that they were not coming through. Just hanging there, circling that window like moths attracted by light. And Hayes knew they could see him, feel him there. Just as he knew they wanted through, that they needed through, but they were trapped, unable to swing open the door.
There were thousands of them there, hundreds of thousands, millions. They filled that vaporous window and the charnel depths beyond, a raging and droning hive trying to force their way through to consume and devour, to drain the minds of men dry, to turn the green hills into one immense alien hive. Hayes could feel them, even across those infinite distances, those trans-galactic gulfs of limitless space . . . he could feel their chewing, voracious appetites needing to gorge themselves on the latent psychic energies of mankind. For they needed what the human race had. But the barrier held them at bay and even those withering, ravenous minds could not tear through it . . . at least not by themselves.
So they gathered in a writhing, industrious mass, a living and boiling incarnate cloud of sibilance, an alien infestation. A million piping voices built up, a clangorous explosion of noise like scratching metal and broken glass and scraping forks.
If they got through, they’d leech the collective mind of humanity dry in a matter of days. Such a thing could not be allowed. It would be hideous beyond imagination.
And just as Hayes thought that this, the horde waiting on the other side, was the most horrible thing the human mind could conceive of, it got suddenly worse. For that hive began to part and something came oozing and worming from out of that entombed, cryptic blackness . . . a roiling atomic putrescence, a living nuclear chaos, a surging and verminous plasma that was gigantic and alive and crystalline. Yes, an extra-dimensional polychromatic abomination that filled space and filled the mind and sucked the marrow from the souls of men even as it burned their flesh to cinders. It was surging forward, its crystal anatomy flickering and pulsing with colors and brilliance and liquid fire.
Seeing it made Hayes’ stomach roll in queasy, peristaltic waves. If such loathsome and wicked beings as the Old Ones could possibly have a god, this was it. The ultimate horror. Hayes had to look away because this thing was burning a hole through his head. It was malignant and noxious and sinister, the enemy of all living things with any purity in their souls. Its mind was a smoldering reactor and its flesh was not flesh but light and smoke and melting crystals of filth, a crawling fourth-dimensional helix of radioactive plasma. This was the crystallized devil, the incandescent pestilence that crept in the dark and twisted corridors between the spaces men understood, the deranged color out of space that Lind had raved about.
This was it.
The Color Out of Space.
And if the Old Ones ever got through in numbers, that wasting cancer would come with them and it wouldn’t be just the earth in jeopardy and the minds of men, because that thing, that sentient cosmic virus, would chew a hole through time and space and matter, yanking the guts out of the universe in moist, noisome coils and feeding on them.
Hayes was understanding a lot of things finally.
He took hold of Sharkey’s hand and together they ran from it all, because human eyes were never intended to look upon these things. And as they ran, as their minds got out of range of that dimensional window or mirror or whatever in Christ it was, the image of that terrible place faded and went to static and then darkness. They both saw it go blank like a TV that had been shut off and they both knew that it had been powered by their minds and that made them think things they did not have time to properly consider.
For even though that cosmic TV had been shut off, that insane piping was still rising, reaching fever-pitch, a jarring and disharmonic storm of noise that was like hot needles puncturing their ears. And there was no doubt why, because the Old Ones, the hive from down in the lake were rising up out of the mouth of the pit in a chirring, buzzing cloud like giant palmetto bugs with great whirring wings, that dissonant and vociferous piping sharp as razors. They were gliding and dipping, gathering and dispersing, filling the city as they had millions of years before. The hive. The colony. Like a swarm of locusts they were coming to strip and rend and eat, coming to collect two more minds.
This is the swarm, Hayes thought, the memory of this is what reverted Cutchen to a frightened beast. The sound, the sight, the smell of them flocking like nightmare birds.
But there was no more time to think.
They were running, trying to find their way by flashlight and instinct and it seemed an impossible thing. There was no time to consider where they were going or what they would do when they got there. They passed between those cyclopean walls and dozens of the Old Ones gathered atop them like raptors readying to feed. Each time those things got close, Hayes and Sharkey put their lights on them and they scattered. At first Hayes thought it was some rhythmic pattern of flight they were employing, collecting in profuse throngs then scattering away in buzzing pairs. But that wasn’t it at all.