Beyond the walls of sani.., p.9
Beyond the Walls of Sanity, page 9
YOU’RE GOING TO BLEED TO DEATH, YOU KNOW. THIS IS AN AWFUL WAY TO DIE IN A DREAM.
MAPS SCORE: 32
C-46
You inspect the walnut cabinet. It’s easily as wide as your outstretched arms and a head taller. The lower section has two doors on it, and there is a light chain running through the handles. The chain is bound by an old keyed padlock, like something you’d see on a conquistador’s chest.
The upper portion of the cabinet is also accessible by two broad doors, but they (and the rest of the upper cases) is glass, which, at the very least, lets you see what’s in the cabinet. The upper section is locked with chain and padlock too.
Would have been nice to know about the padlocks, you think as you rattle the old locks. Neither accidentally falls open when you tug on them.
You look around for something heavy. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of thick books on the nearby shelves. You grab one that has a unflattering picture of a train engine on the cover. It’s as thick as your head and it’s almost too much for one hand.
Use both hands and bang that book against the lock on the lower cabinet.
Go to C-47.
Use the book to attack the lock on the upper cabinet.
Go to C-49.
C-47
It’s a little bit like swinging a sledgehammer. Once you start the motion, it’s hard to stop. The book slams against the lower padlock and bounces off. You nearly drop the book on your foot. When you examine the lock, you notice the hasp is coming loose of the wooden housing. The lock itself looks utterly undamaged by your efforts, but if you smack it again, you might be able to knock the whole assembly off.
Hang on. Drop that book and you’re going to end up with broken bones.
I’ll be careful, you think.
Go to C-51.
Maybe you should reconsider this whole plan, and try something else.
Go to C-52.
C-48
It’s a pocket door, and you jiggle the latch to open the door.
You wish you had a flashlight. You used to have one on your keychain, but you’re not carrying your keys right now because you walked to your therapist’s office, didn’t you?
(Or is it because you’re actually in a hospital bed somewhere, and you’re missing more than your keys? Or is it because you’re somewhere else entirely, and someone ese is in charge—someone who doesn’t need keys to open doors.)
The room reminds you of a root cellar or a warren dug by some kind of nocturnal animal. The floor is packed earth, and there are roots sticking out of the walls. The room—well, let’s call it what it is: a cave. The cave narrows at the back, and you think something might be huddled in the corner, but the shadows are deep enough that you can’t be sure.
Forget it. You know a trap when you see it.
Go to C-46.
Aren’t you curious? This is your deep subconscious, after all. What could possibly harm you down here? Isn’t it possible that what you hope will save you from the mental break you’re having is in the back of this cave?
Sure, it’s possible, but . . .
Go to C-54.
C-49
Hang on. There’s a lot of old glass on the upper portion of the cabinet. Are you sure you want to be smacking it with a heavy book? What if that glass breaks?
It’s not going to break.
Go to C-53.
Oh, right. That could a bad idea. Maybe you should find a smaller book.
Go to C-52.
C-50
You know the statistics, and therefore, Dr. Nebs knows the statistics. Of the three people on a standard Asset Resource Management field operations team, Openers have the worst attrition rate. Followed by Guides. Closers are close to thirty percent. With the way the office rotation works, you don’t get the same time very often. Working relationships are hard. Personal relationships are even harder.
“What about friends outside of work?” Dr. Nebs asks.
You laugh at that. After a moment, he joins you.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was a silly question.”
“The Night Office doesn’t hire anyone that is well-adjusted or who can make friends easier. They want loners and outcasts, because no one will miss those sorts of people when they get their souls sucked out their nostrils or their brains popped.”
Dr. Nebs doesn’t disagree with you.
“Look, I trusted my team. You have to when you are out there. If you don’t, it’s likely that all of you will die.”
“Isn’t trust hard when one of them could be under the control of a space jelly?”
“Sure. That’s why you have to be vigilant. That’s why the Night Office wants me to take this assessment. You have to trust the people who work for you. If you can’t, well, you’re good and fucked. We’re all fucked.”
Dr. Nebs nods thoughtfully. “Do you trust me?” he asks.
“You’re a product of my imagination, so I’m not sure if that question is even relevant.”
He leans forward. “Do you want to know a secret?” he asks.
You look around, trying to figure out if this is some sort of gag.
“You’re up for promotion,” he whispers.
“What?”
“You are.” He nods eagerly. “I can sense it.”
“You’re a figment of my dreaming mind. You don’t have access to my senses.”
“I’m more than I appear,” he says.
“Somehow I doubt that,” you say.
Dr. Nebuchenezzar looks around conspiratorially. “Listen,” he says. “You have to trust someone, right? Why can’t it be me?”
Go to C-74.
Dr. Nebs sits back in his chair and crosses his arms. “You don’t believe me,” he says, sulkily.
Go to C-95.
C-51
You swing the heavy book, and it hits the lock with a satisfying thunk. However, gravity has its grip on the book, and your swing continues right into your shin, which makes a very audible cracking noise.
Well done. At least you missed your foot.
You lean against the wall. Your leg hurts a lot, and when you glance down—ooh, that’s not good. Your foot is floppy in a way that feet aren’t supposed to be floppy. You’re going to require medical attention.
A SHATTERED SHIN IS GOING TO SLOW YOU DOWN. YOU CAN’T OUTRUN SHOGGOTHS WHEN YOU’RE ON CRUTCHES.
MAPS SCORE: 42
C-52
You look at the stacks along the wall. Maritime shipping logs, a bunch of exotic flora catalogs from micro-nations you’ve never heard of, and repair manuals for old steam engines.
The last stack has a number of books about homesteading: making your own tools; growing your own food; killing in all the ritual ways. That sort of thing.
Nestled in this stack is a copy of Metaphysical Lockpicking by Durien Kennollipiae. You do that party game trick where you extricate an object from the middle of a tall stack without knocking everything over. You always were good at being patient and having a steady hand.
The book was published in 1928 by the E Ashmule Historical Invariance Society. Based in Boston. The book’s lighter than you expected it to be, and when you open it, you discover why.
It’s a fake book. Well, it used to be a real book, but someone glued the pages together and then hollowed out the middle. You’ve got a book like this at home, in fact, but yours was fabricated as a shell. This one is homemade. You’re a little disappointed because the title sounded intriguing, but when you see what has been hid in the book, your disappointment vanishes.
Nestled in the compartment is a keyring with two keys.
Given the title of this book, you’re not terribly surprised that the atlas cabinet would be hidden here.
Feeling clever, you return to the cabinet.
Use one of the keys on the lower cabinet.
Go to C-55.
Use the other key on the upper cabinet.
Go to C-57.
C-53
You smack the lock with the book. Nothing happens. You smack it harder. Nothing happens. You line up and smack it really hard with the book. And, well, lots of glass shatters. You were half-expecting this, so you let go of the book as soon as you feel it crunch against the cabinet. This saves your hands from the shards of glass. Some of it bounces off the nearby shelves. Some of it—
—Oh dear. You’ve got glass in your belly and in your legs. Oh, that’s a lot of blood. No, don’t pull it—
Now you’ve done it. That looks like a major artery has been cut. You’re going to bleed out in less than a minute. Do you think you can find your way back to the entrance in that much time?
NEWSFLASH: YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE IT AS FAR AS ‘F,’ WHERE YOU WILL DISCOVER A FIRST EDITION COPY OF PETER FREUCHEN’S BOOK OF THE SEVEN SEAS. YOU’LL GET BLOOD ON THE DUST JACKET AND YOUR LAST THOUGHT WILL BE TO WORRY ABOUT HOW TOUGH IT’LL BE TO GET THAT STAIN OUT.
IT’S IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT THE PHYSICAL WORLD CAN BE AS CRUEL AND NASTY AS FANGED MONSTROSITIES FROM DYING STAR SYSTEMS.
MAPS SCORE: 25
C-54
If you turn sideways, you can fit your shoulders through the door. Leading with one arm, you squeeze partway into the cave, reaching for the back. Your fingers brush something soft.
Almost there!
You strain a little more, pushing with your feet. Your hand moves a few centimeters farther into the hole. You can get a better grip on whatever this thing is and—
And it sits up and growls at you.
You panic and try to pull your hand back, but the creature is fast. It bites your fingers, and—sweet mother of gherkin pickles!—that hurts. You scrabble with your feet, trying to extricate yourself from the hole, but—
The pocket door has slid out of the wall. It’s nestled against your belly. You can’t back out, because the gap is much smaller now.
Your feet drum on the floor of the alcove. You try to snatch your hand away from the biting critter, but there’s not that much room in the cave. It bites. It gnaws. Oh, it has a taste of you now. That’s not good.
It—
WELL, YOU CAN IMAGINE WHAT IT BITES NEXT AND WE DON’T NEED TO DWELL ON THAT, DO WE? HOPEFULLY, YOU’LL PASS OUT BEFORE IT EATS YOUR EYEBALLS.
MAPS SCORE: 32
C-55
You unlock the lower cabinet. It’s dark and musty in there, and for a moment, you hesitate, wondering if you are going to find feral mice or bibliophilic shrews nesting in the old books. Reaching cautiously, you hook the edge of one of the large folios that are resting in the lower cabinet.
The book tumbles out. It’s in sad shape. The binding breaks when the book hits the ground and the cover sloughs off. The pages are a mess. Most of them are either overgrown with some kind of fungus that really likes paper and the dark. The rest have been gnawed heavily by those very mice or shrews you were worrying about.
The second and third books aren’t much better. The farther down the stack you go, the better shape the books are in. It’s all atlases. There aren’t any journals here.
At least you know where Oresti’s journals aren’t, don’t you?
Go to C-57.
C-56
A ham sandwich is tasty, and we don’t fault anyone who picks it over a rigorous psychological profiling. However, in an hour or so, that ham sandwich will be gone, and the universe will still not give a shit about you.
Twelve hours later, you’re going to crap out that sandwich, and then it’ll be like it never happened.
The universe will continue to ignore you.
Vaguely satisfying, isn’t it?
BUT AT LEAST YOU HAVE LEARNED THAT YOU PREFER A SANDWICH TO SAVING THE UNIVERSE. THIS IS A SIGN OF A SOMEWHAT BALANCED MENTAL STATE.
MAPS SCORE: 50
C-57
The lock on the upper cabinet is stiff, but you manage to get the key to turn. You have to yank the lock a few times to get it to open, but it does. You flip up the hasp and open the glass doors of the upper cabinet.
The books in this section are in amazingly good shape, considering how far back in the bookstore you are. You examine them carefully, peering at the spines. Most of them are hand-bound, and the markings on the spines are faded to near illegibility.
Near the bottom of the stack on the right hand side, you spot a trio of books that all have the name “Oresti” on them. Huzzah! This is what you were looking for.
You slide them out of the stack and place them carefully on the floor. They are folios, hand-bound and hand-sewn. The paper is heavy parchment. They are the original journals that Pedro Oresti made of his journeys in South America.
Your fingers tingling, you open the first one.
Go to C-58.
You’re not sure what you’re looking for, and so you trust providence and start with the middle journal.
Go to C-60.
You figure the last journal is going to have the info you need.
Go to C-62.
C-58
The first journal details his explorations of the Amazon Basin from 1946 to 1948. He was following the route taken by Henry Bates, nearly a hundred years early, when the English naturalist was exploring the great river. Oresti’s journal is filled with watercolor paintings of trees and birds, much like Bates’s journal must have been.
An hour later, you admit that it is interesting reading, but the most danger that Oresti has faced so far is drinking water from the river and getting swarmed by bugs.
Try the second journal.
Go to C-60.
Try the third journal.
Go to C-62.
You’ve read enough.
Go to C-64.
C-59
“Of course,” Dr. Nebs says smoothly. There is a flicker of emotion on his face, but it doesn’t last. “Do you feel that you were successful in the Closing?”
“I came back, didn’t I?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
You think about his question for a moment. “Yeah, I think it was successful.”
“Even though the rest of your team didn’t make it.”
“Well, I—sure, that sucks. But we all know the risks. We all know that—eventually—we won’t come back.”
“You didn’t try to save them?”
“Of course, I did.”
“Did you try hard enough?”
You keep your temper in check. “I resent the implication of that question.”
“Which implication?”
“That I didn’t try to save them.”
“Are you feeling guilty about your effort?”
“No. Damnit. I’m not feeling guilty.”
“So you liked watching them die?”
“That’s not it at all,” you insist.
“What is it then?”
You take a deep breath. You take several, in fact. “You’re asking me leading questions,” you say.
“Isn’t that my job?” he replies. “Don’t you want me prying into that part of your brain where you don’t want to look?”
“Yes, but—no. No, that’s not how this is supposed to work.”
“Oh, so you know how it all works now, do you?”
“No, I don’t know how it works. I just know that you aren’t supposed to be so fucking antagonistic.”
Dr. Nebs spreads his hands. “I’m part of you. Maybe you should examine the source of this anger.”
“I don’t—I’m not angry.”
He cocks his head. “You see angry. Do you need to calm down?”
“I’m fine,” you insist.
Go to C-63.
“I don’t like this line of questioning.”
Go to C-71.
C-60
The second journal looks more promising. Oresti is traveling down the Pacific Ocean side of South America, and he’s getting sidetracked by rumors of strange medicines and esoteric cults. In one section, he travels up into the Andes to locate a tribe of Indians who still practice the old rituals. There’s a holy ritual he hopes to observe, one that involves human—
The next dozen pages are torn out.
You flip through the rest of the journal. He makes some references to what he witnessed during that night when the “Voerdamnikenari” made contact with the Ithqua Inoxtl tribe. “I have seen beyond the edges of this world,” he writes, “And I do not know how any of us can pretend that we are alone in the Universe. There are beings out there who would do us harm if they could reach us.”
This sounds promising. You decide to check out the third volume.
Go to C-62.
C-61
“The Night Office has been dealing with shoggoths for over a hundred years,” Dr. Nebs says. “In that time, the official directive has always been to burn them as soon as you can.”
“Which makes it tough to do any, you know, field research.”
“You’re not a researcher. You’re a Closer.”
“Sure, but don’t you ever wonder if we could—perhaps—shift the mortality rate of field operatives?”
Dr. Nebs folds his hands over his notebook. “Of course. Recruitment of new . . . flesh . . . is not very cost-effective.”
“Exactly. Look at the Postal Service. They do very well with employee retention, and institutional knowledge is a critical part of keeping their costs down. The Night Office could do with a little more ‘retention.’”
“Do you have something in mind?”
“We should capture a shoggoth.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“We’d have to set a trap.”
Dr. Nebs scribbles something in his notebook. His motions are fractured. He’s agitated by this idea, you think.
