The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Crawford Tillinghast, a researcher of the “physical and metaphysical,” appears in H. P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond.” It is the first of several stories with the theme — to quote S. T. Joshi — of “a reality beyond that revealed to us by the senses, or that which we experience in everyday life.” John Shirley — who has also written several works of fiction with that as a subject, perhaps most notably in his novel Wetbones — uses “From Beyond” as a springboard for this imaginative tale. Shirley also recalls being enchanted by “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” around age thirteen: “I’ve used Lovecraft’s concept of psychic exploring in novels like Bleak History and Demons.” His original Lovecraftian stories have appeared in many anthologies including Black Wings II, World War Cthulhu, The Madness of Cthulhu, Searchers After Horror, Innsmouth Nightmares, Gothic Lovecraft, and periodicals such as Weird Tales and Spectral Realms.

Emmy-nominated Shirley is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning collection Black Butterflies and the highly regarded collections Living Shadows and In Extremis, as well as over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His latest dark fantasy novel is Doyle After Death. A collection of his Lovecraftian fiction is forthcoming. John Shirley was co-writer of the movie The Crow and has written television including scripts for Poltergeist: The Legacy. His Lovecraftian-themed lyrics for the song “The Old Gods Return” (and others) were recorded by the Blue Öyster Cult.

Just Beyond the Trailer Park

I seen that Mr. Tillinghast since I was a five-year-old boy. Now I’m almost twelve, I finally I know him.

Mr. Tillinghast got that old house of his granddad’s just cranked up off its foundations and moved over here from Benevolent Street because they was going to tear it down, him being behind on some taxes and it being ugly and not fitting in over there and ordinances. That’s what Providence town people said about it. So he got it up on those jacks they used, and had a big tractor-trailer pull it over here, next door to the Cumberland Glory Trailer Park. We’re out by the new Walmart. My dad said there’s a money end of Cumberland Avenue and a no-money end. We’re at that no-money end.

My dad said Mr. Tillinghast must have a big ol’ bucket of money to do that. Said he would talk to him. My mom was drunk asleep, I didn’t want to stay around with the TV broke and Mama snoring with her mouth open, so I decided to follow Dad down there, and he never noticed if I did that.

It was cold out, but no snow yet. When I went out the door I wished I had a coat on but it was lost in that mess on the closet floor.

I followed and I seen Dad talking to a man strapping boxes from the back of his big car to one of those hand trucks. The man was dressed in a sweater and slacks and a bowtie. First time I saw a bowtie except on Mr. Rogers. That man did not act like Mr. Rogers.

Dad said, “I could help you carry them boxes in, won’t charge you for that. But I do some handy work for cash, now ‘n’ then.”

“Don’t touch those boxes,” the man said. He had white hair cut real short, like he didn’t want to bother with it. Even though he had white hair he had a young face. But also when he frowned he looks older, hella older. You can’t tell a lot for sure about Mr. Tillinghast till you know him some.

“Well if there’s anything else I can do,” Dad said. “Glad to help. My name’s Lenny Forest. Live right next door.” He had his hands stuck in his pockets when he said it because it was cold. I could see his breath coming out like smoke. “I’m in trailer seven over there, in Cumberland.”

That’s exactly what he said, too. I remember everything, always. My mom says I’ve got a memory like flypaper. I remember what the emergency doctor said when I was two and I had that virus and I remember what people said when I was three and four.

When Mr. Tillinghast just frowned some more like he wanted my dad to leave, Dad said, “I sure was blown away, seeing you wheel this whole house out here. Look at that, you already got the crew to set it down on foundations, and she’s all set. Everything running okay?”

Mr. Tillinghast looked at the house with his eyes real squinty. “Fools didn’t get the pipes right. Water’s not right running.”

“You don’t say! I’ve done my share of plumbing and I got the tools. How about I hook it up for you, and you can pay me a hundred dollars, cash, if it’s done right and not before then. How’d that be?”

“And if you make it worse?”

“I won’t. But if I do, I’ll get people in to fix it.”

Even back then I wondered who that would be, who my dad could get in there to fix it. He was bluffing I guess.

“I have no time to fix pipes.” Mr. Tillinghast made a grunting sound. “So be it then.”

I never heard anyone say so be it but Mr. Tillinghast.

“You come in one hour,” he said, “and I’ll show you where the pipes are. You will come around to the back.” Then Mr. Tillinghast went on with hand trucking his boxes.

My dad turned around to go home and he saw me and got mad that I was standing there staring with my finger in my nose and yelled at me, “Get your ass home, Vester!” My name’s Sylvester, after Sylvester Stallone, but they call me Vester or Ves.

Dad was about to give me a smack but I ran home, wondering what was up with that man who trucked his big house into the lot on the other side of the maples. I was in a trailer park and I knew you could move those houses but I was amazed anyone could move a big one like that. It looked like it could tip over if you pushed it. Two and a half stories tall, and missing most of its white paint and all kind of squeezed together looking.

Now looking back, I wonder that Mr. Tillinghast trusted my dad, that day, because Dad had old sneakers on, and no socks, and his raggedy jeans and Iron Maiden T-shirt. It was cold but Dad didn’t have the sense to put his jacket on, and he was grownup. And he had all those tats on his arms and that beardy face. But then again, I found out later that Mr. Tillinghast didn’t trust anyone who wrote stuff down about him. You get some guy from a fancy-ass plumbing company — like Cumberland Glory has for maintenance — they always look like they’re writing things down.

Dad fixed that pipe all right and Mr. Tillinghast paid him and we went and had hamburgers and French fries and milk shakes that night. Sometimes Dad went over there and cut the grass on the lot, for twenty dollars, so the city people wouldn’t come and bother Mr. Tillinghast about the yard ordinance.

But I heard my dad say more than once, “That’s not a friendly man, that Tillinghast.”

My dad wasn’t always friendly neither, especially when he was smoking the glass pipe and drinking. He would do that and stop doing it and do it and stop doing it. He couldn’t just forever stop doing it. Sometimes he went to special meetings about it and then he’d stop smoking for a while. When he started again, my mom bitched at him about it and he would give my mom a “teaching smack” on the face. But then when he was in the stop-doing-it time, he was okay and he would do some work in construction. He took me to see The Expendables 4 at the mall when he got in a check, just last year. He’d drive me to school sometimes, because the bus stop is so far from here. I liked going to school and he told me once he thought it was good I liked it. “Me,” he said, “I never liked it. Wished I did.”

But he would start up smoking the glass again. So late spring last year, he got taken to jail, because of not wanting the repo to tow his truck off, and he hit that repo guy with the tire iron, and fought the police when they came, and broke a cop’s collarbone. They tazed him, and cuffed him, and I haven’t seen him since, except one visit with Mom.

He won’t be back till I’m twenty-seven because it was also some kind of probation violation, and because he was holding, and because of assault on a police officer, and assault on the repo guy, and resisting arrest.

My mom’s still around, but she likes to drink, and sometimes there’s pills, too. She’s asleep a lot. She has a boyfriend, part time, since last month. She goes to his apartment.

I have a sister, Dusty, who’s fifteen, but she left with Barron from Trailer 2, they took his dad’s old El Dorado and we haven’t seen them for almost a year. Mom hates Barron. She cries and talks about killing him when she’s about half a gallon into that red Carlo Rossi.

I saw Mr. Tillinghast many times, but didn’t talk to him till last year. I heard the humming from his house and the sound like way too many bees, but it didn’t bother me. Other people in the park said the humming and buzzing would shake their trailers and give them headaches. Mom didn’t seem to notice it but she used to live next to a stock car racetrack.

I could feel it when he was running machines that made the humming and that noise like too many bees buzzing. It was a weird feeling, but not so bad. It gave me dreams that were better than some movies I’ve seen. I called it the dream hum. I wasn’t even really asleep when that happened — just halfway. The hum and the buzz gave me ideas, too, but it’s hard to explain what they were. But I always liked to look in the back of televisions and radios and Bebe’s dad told me sometimes how they work and I looked up some on the school internet.

Now Dulesta Finch, she’s my Mom’s friend, from across the park. Her daughter is my friend Bebe.

On the Fourth of July, last year, I heard Dulesta say, when we were at their barbecue, that Mr. Greel who owns Cumberland Glory was going to send the police over to the Tillinghast house because he said it wasn’t zoned for some equipment, and that kind of gear could interfere with airplanes flying over. And she said she heard on the news some pilots were having radio trouble, when they were flying over here.

My dad was only a few months in jail, then. I was noticing him not being there, that night, on the Fourth of July. He used to take us to the free fireworks at the beach park every Fourth. But there was Dulesta’s barbecue and we had sparklers, me and my friend Bebe, who’s kind of my girlfriend but kind of not, and we had some firecrackers. Mrs. Finch got mad when we used a firecracker behind her trailer, it made her fuzzy little white dog hide under the doublewide and cry, so she yelled at us and we run off.

Bebe and I slowed down when we got to the fence between the park and the Tillinghast property. I was feeling wicked sick to my stomach, then, for running after eating too much barbecue and maybe something else that was just in the air.

Then I looked past the fence and I seen Mr. Tillinghast up on his roof. I could see him pretty good between the trees, because that time of year, it’s not so dark yet after dinner. He was putting some kind of metal mesh thing on the roof.

And then it came over me, like, Boom! I know what I’ll do.

I told Bebe I was going to go over there and tell Mr. Tillinghast the police were going to bother him. Warn him. Get his back.

“You are crazy to go there.” She shook her head. That always made her black braids fly around. “Don’t be a dumbfuck.”

“I’m going. The police are going to bother him just for nothing. He’s gonna get bagged! He helped us, he hired my dad!”

I was thinking about my dad. We never liked cops much and now I felt, about cops, just, Fuck you.

I started climbing over the fence.

“No, Vester!”

But I climbed over the fence and left her there and walked off. Maybe I was showing off some even though she said it was a bad idea.

I crossed the lot and walked under the trees and yelled up at him. “Hey, Mr. Tillinghast!”

He went all twitchy up there and I saw him grab at a chimney. He almost slipped off the roof.

“Sorry, Mr. Tillinghast!” I called. “I just wanted to tell you—”

“Get out of here, boy! You! Go!”

I felt slapped, when he did that.

I turned around and started to walk off, then decided that because Bebe was watching, from over the fence, I had to say something else. I turned and yelled, “They’re coming out to bust you is what!”

I was almost over the fence when he called again, from the house. “Boy! Come back here and tell me what the devil you’re talking about!”

He’s the only one I ever heard say, What the devil.

It smelled like mold and dust and burning wires and something else I never smelled before. That’s what the attic smelled like. Tasted like it, too, on my tongue when I breathed in.

Mr. Tillinghast was looking at me like he was thinking of taking a bite out of me. “They’re coming tonight? You are certain it was to happen tonight?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what she said.”

He looked at the ceiling, like he could see right through it. “I just put those insulation baffles on the roof. They will address the problem. The signals will not penetrate aircraft now.” I didn’t know what meant by address it. I’ve learned a humongous lot from the way he talks since then, though. (But I have to use spellcheck on this.) He gave me a big frown and pointed his finger at me. “But if the authorities come rooting through here, they will find devices that break a variety of their paltry regulations! Indeed, frequencies that might interest Homeland Security. Not that they should fear me but . . . one can explain nothing to those people. They see nothing but what is in front of their noses. And even that they do not see.”

(I told you, I remember everything people say.)

“Can you hide that stuff?” I asked.

“There is no time . . . That is — no time, working alone.”

“I could help.”

“That is a possibility — that is why I brought you up here. Your father was discreet. Are you?”

Discreet was another word I didn’t know then. But I could tell he wanted me to say “yes.” And I remembered he paid cash money.

“Yes,” I said.

“I shall reward you! You’re small, but— forty dollars?”

Forty! “Where you want to start?”

It was hard. The machines parts were larger than my mom’s old HP computer, and made of heavier stuff. Some were missing panels and inside them I saw vacuum tubes. I knew they were real old.

It was hot in there, and I was coughing from dust and my fingers was getting slick from sweat but I carried what I had to. We took certain machines down from the attic, all the way to the basement, and he set them up there. We had to make five trips.

By the time I was back down with the rest of the equipment he had four pieces of gear set up, wired together. I seen the wires looked really old, they were doubled and winding around one another and they had cloth on the outside. He stripped the ends of the wires with a knife and twisted them to each other’s with needle-nose pliers, so the units was all connected up. I was, like, what?

“Good, good, put that one on top of this unit, here. We’ll set up our camouflage antenna, ha ha, and it will be transmitting before they arrive.”

I know what camouflage was and I started to get what he was doing then.

Pretty quick the vacuum tubes were lit up and there was a smell of hot copper wire in the air. There was a big cluster of lightbulbs, all wired close together. Some of them were broken. There was a “transmitter” made of an old TV antenna and a hum came out of one of the machines. Mr. Tillinghast chuckled as he turned the humming part up as loud as it would go. That humming came and went but it wasn’t the hum from the attic.

We had set it all up between a bunch of dirty wooden boxes under a light fixture so low he knocked his head on it and the fixture broke and we were in the darkness. He switched on a flashlight so he could replace the bulb. While he did that he cursed with some words I never heard before.

Then he arranged the “units” a little more. “The key unit isn’t here,” he said. “But they won’t know that.”

Just when he got the arranging done, there was a banging on the front door above.

“Coming, coming!” Mr. Tillinghast shouted. He whispered to me, “Wait in the attic if you want to be paid right away. Otherwise — slip out the back and come back when they’re gone.”

I went toward the back door because, after all, cops was coming into the house. But I couldn’t help going around to the basement window, laying down in the dirt there and listening. I could only see a man’s shiny shoes and suit pants down there next to the equipment.

I heard Mr. Tillinghast say, “Very well, here’s my equipment! But why should the FAA come here?”

The woman said something about interference with the radios of jet planes passing overhead. And the other person, who had a deep voice, said he was a Federal Marshal and he had a warrant.

“You see the only transmission devices I have,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “When I patent this device I shall be wealthy! It will send radio signals through the center of the Earth! No satellite will be needed!”

Damn he was good at sounding like a cranky old nut.

The Marshal said, “I see!” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “I am sorry but we’re going to have to confiscate this equipment, Mr. Tillinghast. I have all the permissions right here.”

“What! My life’s work!”

“After it’s inspected, and pending approval, you can work on it in a safer location, sir.”

“The Devil, sir! And it is he who has arranged this! My equipment may indeed show the actual physical location of hell below the crust of the Earth! Do not look so incredulous! The Devil exists, sir!”

“I am sure he does, Mr. Tillinghast!” The man said that all chuckling.

“And when you pass into his realm, even should it be a hundred years from now, he will be waiting to chew on the bones of your soul, you pompous ass! Do you suppose the soul does not have bones? In that realm it is does, I assure you!”

I always loved the way Mr. Tillinghast talks.

“I’m going to ask you to unplug this equipment, please. Mary, could you ask the removal team to come in? They’d better wear gloves, this stuff is pretty old, could have lead or mercury in it . . .”

But in half an hour they was gone. I seen them just driving away in their van, with pieces of his granddad’s equipment and some stuff he took out of an old stereo.

I went to the back door. It was still a little open, and I yelled out, “Mr. Tillinghast!”

In a couple minutes he came puffing up, his face red and all sweaty, and he had a smile on his face that I think would’ve scared Bebe. “We baffled the fools, boy! They took my grandfather’s equipment — only the parts that don’t matter. Of course the key piece was destroyed.” He was digging out his wallet. “Long ago, destroyed. By an oaf.”

I asked, “They didn’t take the stuff that shakes makes that hum, the dream hum?”

“What’s that you say? Dream hum?”

He had the money halfway out of his wallet. He was staring at me like I just said I was working for the cops.

“I . . . that’s what I call it. When your equipment makes that noise like bees and that other hum and I feel a little sick but then I get a tingle in my head and then I start to have those dreams.” It all came out at once like that. I felt stupid.

“A tingle. Where in your head.”

I tapped my forehead, between my eyes.

“You feel it there — that is an indication of extrasensory activation of the pineal.”

I shrugged. I was wondering, back then, what a pine-eel was.

“Yes,” he went on, looking at my head like he might want to do one of those frog dissections of it. “The tingle. I know it well. One feels it between the eyes, inside the skull — but it originates deep in the vertebrate brain, between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain you see. At the pineal! Yes.”

I was looking at his hand. It was still frozen to that money.

“Oh, your remuneration!” He took the money out and handed it to me. “You did a fine job. We cut it fine but we fooled them, boy.”

“My name’s Vester.”

“Indeed? What is the derivation of the name?

“Derivation? Oh. It’s from . . . Sylvester.”

“Then why not go with Sylvester! I like it much better! Or Syl, perhaps?”

“Syl — I like that better.”

“Syl it shall be. This business of . . . dreams. What sort?”

“Like . . . at the aquarium.”

“You dreamed you were at an aquarium?”

“No. The dreams — sometimes I dreamed of giant things like the jellyfish from the Providence aquarium. But I seen big ones right in the room with me. But not exactly jellyfish. And a slow-motion exploding thing. Like in a video game if they show a explosion playback. You know?”

He was gaping at me. “Good lord. You saw all this over there, at the trailer park?”

“Yes.”

“Remarkable! Do come in, boy, we’ll have a glass of wine and discuss it.”

Wine?

I was suddenly wondering if I should trust him. Maybe he was going to get all handsy on me.

But we went in the living room, that had only two old chairs in it, that smelled like someone’s grandmother, and he poured us two glasses of something he called red port. I’d had beer before, and some of my mom’s Carlo Rossi, but not this. I liked it.

“Only one glass for the youngster, ha ha,” he said. He said ha ha that way when he was in a good mood. “This is old port, old like me. I like old things, apart from the productions of science. I am, like my father, an antiquarian yet I like technology that is quite modern — if only my grandfather had computers!”

Then he started telling me about Crawford Tillinghast, his grandfather, and how he was a genius but “a vile person, in himself” so that Grandmama — he pronounced it grandmahMAH — ran off from him when she was pregnant. She had a baby, who was Mr. Tillinghast’s father. A letter came to her from someone with a story about Crawford Tillinghast and someone who shot his machine because of what he saw. And Grandmama told Mr. Tillinghast’s father that the letter was true. It was a story of how he had a machine that used “resonance waves” to transport some secret frequency — that’s Mr. Tillinghast’s words. Secret frequency. He sent it right to the pineal gland in the brain and it allowed the person to see a world that’s all around us, real close, but you can’t see it.

“Yes yes yes, the servants were affected, they attracted a predator from that world, yes yes yes they died, but what of it? That was not Grandfather’s intention! All truly vital research entails risk! His research was unprecedented! It was of vital importance to science and then it was rudely interrupted. Such a tragedy. So much to explore!” He gave out a big sigh at that. “Of course, I have continued from precisely where he was forced to stop.” Mr. Tillinghast drank some more of his port and smacked his lips like he was tasting what he was thinking. “Consider, Syl! There is the microbiological world we all know of. Bacteria, viruses . . . Yet imagine how startled the first researchers were to realize these tiny creatures were everywhere! And then there was the hidden worlds of radio waves and X-rays and cosmic rays. Naturally there are other kinds of hidden worlds with organisms quite unknown to us and I do not mean the worlds to be found in other planetary systems! I mean a hidden world right here, Syl! Oh my grandfather knew — yet there’s so much Grandad Crawford did not know! Why, consider quantum effects and neutrinos. I have gone much further than he! I have superior equipment, I have annuities from Great-granddad’s oil wells, I have endless time for research . . . but I am beginning to grow old, child.” He looked at his hands. “Arthritis troubles me. And I do not trust physicians.” He gave me that weird smile again. I guess it should have scared me but it didn’t. “I shall need an assistant! Someone like you, who evidently can see the truth and not go mad! But perhaps youth is the key to keeping sanity when exposed to the secret world as youth is not mentally ossified.” (I still haven’t looked up ossified yet.) “Still — why not test this hypothesis?”

“Yeah. I guess.” I wasn’t saying much. I was, like, whoa, how did this guy get so talkative? He always seemed like he never wanted to talk to anybody. But I guess he didn’t have anybody he could talk to about this stuff before.

Then I seen he was looking at me like he was waiting for something.

When I didn’t say anything he said, “Well? Are you willing?”

“Willing to do what?”

“To test the hypothesis about your gland.”

I was looking at the front door thinking yeah, I should run for it . . .

He made a kind of “oh, sorry” noise in his throat. “To be clear — your pineal gland. Within your brain! Your ability to see the . . . you called them dreams. They are not dreams, however. You see, the pineal gland, though deep within your brain, is a kind of sensory organ, Syl. It has other functions, too, but when properly stimulated it allows you to see more than anyone else — a whole new world alongside ours! The Alternating World!”

“Oh. Yeah that’s okay,” I said. “Can I have a glass of water first?”

After moving all that stuff I was really thirsty.

“You can call me Oswald, if you like, Syl,” he said, as he powered up the equipment.

I sat on an old kitchen chair set up at one end of the attic facing the equipment. There were little wired up circles he called monitoring devices taped to me. He promised they wouldn’t hurt.

The attic was long and narrow and it surprised me how big it was. There was equipment in I had never seen, but I haven’t seen much. One piece had a screen that showed waves on it. There was something in the middle of the attic pointed upward that reminded me of a satellite antenna. There were windows in the walls at either end of the attic but they were covered up with sheet metal.

I was starting to feel scared. But I was thinking about him saying, You can call me Oswald, if you like, Syl.

That felt good. I liked being called Syl. Even my dad had always called me Vester. (Sly would’ve pleased my dad more, but so what). And I liked that Oswald was talking like a friend, like we were just as good as each other. So I stayed where I was.

Mr. Tillinghast — I can’t get myself to call him Oswald yet — was using a computer mouse to turn up a digital control on a screen, and as he did that I heard the bees start buzzing. Like the biggest hive you ever could imagine.

When Mr. Tillinghast spoke, he sounded like he was far away in a tunnel somewhere. “My system is based on my grandfather’s . . . I have his blueprints . . . but I have taken it to another level of power and control . . .”

The bees sounded angry. That sound made me shiver. The walls were vibrating a little so that some dust fell off. But then he switched on the dream hum.

I felt a little sick, for a minute. And then the tingle came. I felt it right between my eyes, and inside my head.

Then I seen a colored light that wasn’t coming from anywhere, really. It isn’t a color I knew. I don’t know how to say what color it was. Darker than purple but not dark purple. It went dim for a few seconds and then it got bright again, and then dim and then bright. Every time it got brighter I seen more things. More new things.

They were living things and they were flapping and floating. They were floating around these big pillars, like you’d see in a huge old museum building holding up the roof, but they seemed like they grew out of the ground way down below and they went on up above us forever. And the flopping floating things were floating between them. The floppers had these long strings made out of rubber or glass floating from the bottom, and one of them stretched out the strings to grab another flopper and pulled it close and sort of gobbled it up. Which made the gobbling one grow some bigger.

There were other things, too — they were slithering around the bases of the columns. These were like centipedes with hundreds of little feet but they seemed to be made of smooth soft-looking skin except it was gray-colored spotted with blue that wasn’t blue and they had human eyes on the front but no nose and mouth. This hose came out from under their chin and they ate with that. I seen they were feeding on stuff that was on the floor under our floor — see, I could see right through the attic floor. There was another floor, or a ground, under the attic floor, about three feet down, and these big centipedes slipped around on it like snakes. They were bigger than boa snakes. I seen something else, too — kind of like those seeds with little wings that go all twisting when they fall down from trees, but these went up and down, up and down, and they were as big as my hand and they would connect with one another into shapes that were like writing, and then they would erase that, flitter apart, and write something else.

All these things came through the attic walls and floor and ceiling, like it wasn’t there.

The buzzing sound was there but it was like I couldn’t exactly hear it — I felt it instead, in my bones and in my stomach and head. I couldn’t hear the humming anymore at all.

I heard Mr. Tillinghast’s voice all echoey say, “Your vital signs are elevated but you do not seem to have succumbed to panic.” (I had to look up succumbed at a dictionary site, later. I thought he was saying I didn’t suck or something but I didn’t see how that fit with the rest of it.) “You will have observed several organisms. Perhaps the blue-spotted slitherers are alarming in appearance, but they are harmless, and even friendly. They are aware of us — the more intelligent creatures in the Alternating World are aware of us, as soon as we are aware of them.”

“How can they be here and be so big and we can’t see them without your machine?” My voice sounded strange in my ears.

“Think of it this way: our universe happens in beats. Let us say that for every other one millionth of a second our universe’s reality does not exist; then it does exist, then it doesn’t, all in millionths of a second. Or cut the fractions even finer than that! Less than momentary — and yet our reality appears and reappears in the stream of time so fast we do not detect its going and coming — it seems continuous. Let us then say that this other world, which you are seeing now, vibrates in and out of existence, too, but it is here when ours is gone, and ours is gone when the Alternating World is here! The particularly potent resonance waves my grandfather distilled . . . and the even more powerful and malleable waves I have distilled . . . have rendered this world visible, so that we can see their appearance and ours at once — and made a great deal more possible, as you may learn, some day. It creates a tunnel between those two realities.”

I still don’t understand what he said. Not real well. But that’s what he said.

I was thinking about it — and then one of the blue-spotted slitherers reared up and looked me right in the eyes. Up close.

“Do not be afraid, Syl!” Mr. Tillinghast yelled. “He is friendly!”

I looked into the slitherer’s eyes. They were a color that was sort of like green but not.

Then the blue-spotted slitherer laid its head in my lap, and wriggled against my stomach, and looked up at me.

I don’t know why, but I scratched it on the head. It pushed back against my fingers to get some more. It liked the scratching.

“Good lord! They do not take to me so! You have made a friend!”

I was starting to feel dizzy; my head was hurting. It ached deep inside. My stomach felt like it was turning inside out.

It wasn’t the slitherer doing that. I just felt like I’d had that buzz feeling and tingling too long.

Then I was gagging. The slitherer slipped away and I felt sicker and sicker . . .

I heard a loud click and the buzz feeling stopped — I heard the humming and then it stopped, too. The room was rocking like a boat when the wind comes in. Then it stopped rocking and I threw up.

I tried to tell Mr. Tillinghast I was sorry for puking but he had helped me up and took the monitors off me and he said, “It is I who should apologize.” There was a ringing in my ears so loud I could barely hear him. “I was swept away, all too intrigued, by your apparently gifted pineal capacity, Syl! I should not have proceeded with the experiment so precipitously, but these opportunities come so rarely. Come along . . .”

He helped me down the stairs, which was good, because my knees were wobbly. He gave me some water and I said I wanted to go home and he said, “Certainly, of course, but Syl — please — may I trust you to tell no one? Remember that if you do speak of it they will take you to a doctor and give you some horrible antipsychotic medicine and you will not like it, I assure you.”

“I won’t tell.” He was right, no one would believe me. They’d think I was psycho. I couldn’t even tell Bebe. Not all of it.

So I went back to the trailer park. I didn’t see Bebe waiting around. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk to her yet. I went in our doublewide and it felt all strange there, the television and the smell of some real skunky weed and my mom sitting with some guy I didn’t know, like it was the strange world and not the one I seen in the attic. My mom’s lipstick was messed up and her hair was, too. But that’s not what was strange. It’s just that everything I seen a million times looked like I never seen it before. The cigarette butts in the ashtray looked like some horrible little dead animals.

She said the guy’s name was Merk. He just got here from California. He was a friend of her friend Belinda who moved to California.

“What up, little dude,” Merk said. He looked older than my dad, and drunker than my mom. He had long, bleached blond hair and tattoos of women who looked like whores. His eyes were kind of saggy and red. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other.

I remembered that this Merk was hanging around the Fourth of July barbecue. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other then, too.

Mom, sitting real close to Merk, didn’t look that happy to see me. “I thought you were out with Bebe.”

It was hard to hear Mom talking over the ringing in my ears.

“She’s . . . Bebe went home.”

I could tell I wasn’t supposed to be there so I went for a walk. The sky over the avenue was way overfull of stars. I didn’t think all of them were supposed to be there. Sometimes they slipped around and made the shapes of faces. When I looked at the ground, I seen slitherers slipping by. My ears were still ringing.

I seen something else, too.

It was standing out in the field between the park and Mr. Tillinghast’s house — it was a two-legged thing and it had this big fan of spikes around its neck like some guy in a metal band, and it had toothy tongues for fingers and it had a face like a goat but sort of dinosaur, too. It was about a hundred feet from me.

It looked at me with eyes like a goat. Looked right at me. I could feel it seeing me.

But then the ringing in my ears stopped and that thing went away, too. Just blinked out.

I was only scared of it after it was gone. I ran back to the Cumberland Glory and found Bebe on her front steps. I sat down below her and told her a little.

But not everything.

I almost didn’t go back to Mr. Tillinghast’s. I got more scared the next day, from what I seen in his attic. It was like, the night I seen it I wasn’t feeling like I was real, right then, and after, so I couldn’t be scared, because what could hurt you if you weren’t real.

But that was wrong.

I was real and they were real.

I thought, later, maybe it was like seeing stuff on dope. That happened the two times I smoked pot, the squirmy stuff that wasn’t really there.

But I didn’t think it was like those little weed hallucinations like wallpaper moving. And I wanted to know what it really, really was. There was something wicked cool about it. And I didn’t want to be in the trailer park because, what was there anymore? A month after that night, Bebe’s mom took her away. They just pulled up and moved out. Bebe texted me for a while but then my phone broke and my mom couldn’t get me another one right away.

I didn’t have any other friends around there. And that dude Merk was there most of the time. He was swallowing his blue pills and smoking and banging my mom in her bedroom. They didn’t care if I was in the trailer anymore they just shut the door and turned up his Van Halen.

So I went back to Mr. Tillinghast. “Can I help?” I asked when he came to the door.

“I am quite relieved to see you, my boy. Would you like to join me? I have a simple repast prepared.”

“A what?”

“Hamburgers. Would you care for one? I can easily make another for you. Afterward we can discuss electronics. I have some books to show you.”

It’s more than year since I wrote all that earlier stuff.

Merk is still here, living in the trailer now. When he takes off his shoes, his feet stink bad. He doesn’t wear socks. He has this really girly sounding laugh when he gets high or when he’s trying to laugh something off.

About eight months ago I told my mom I saw him feeling up a drunk lady at the bowling alley and she asked him about it and he made that laugh and then he came outside, when I was out there on the steps and he said, “Kid you don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you. But if you fuck up my thing I’ll fuck you up. You know?”

I laughed and he slapped me on the back of the head, hard.

I jumped up and tried to hit him back and he pushed me over. I got up and backed away and then I just left.

So I went to Oswald’s house. To Mr. Tillinghast’s laboratory.

We worked on the blueprints and I fixed the resonator with him. He needs my help for soldering. His eyes aren’t that good up close. He won’t go to an eye doctor. He doesn’t like how they write things down about him.

Oswald used the resonator many times. We went to the Alternating World, and some of it came to us. Spot, my slitherer, seems like he waits for me. He knows me good, and sometimes I hear his thoughts. He says he will always be my friend, that it was intended by the stars who speak.

Me and Oswald have learned we can breathe the air over there, in the Alternating World, and Oswald believes we can find things to eat there if we want longer trips.

Oswald showed me his bestiary, he calls it, of that world. He drew it himself. It has really good pictures of the flappers and the slitherers and the crepuscules and the linkages and the akishra and the dancing monoliths and the weeblers and the thing he calls the Baphomet. I looked up Baphomet online and I told him, that’s not exactly what it looks like to me. And he said, “I know, my boy. But it seems like a relative. The diabolic goat man, don’t you know.”

“Kind of like a dinosaur, too.”

“Rather more intelligent, I believe, than a dinosaur, in a malign sort of way. Fortunately we have the counter rings.”

The counter rings are actually more like bracelets. We put them on our wrists and they give out a resonance that keeps the Baphomet from getting too close when we’re in the resonation field. The Baphomet comes a little ways off and looks at us like he wants to taste us but he doesn’t come any closer. Sometimes if I look at him too long, he comes closer to me. Once I thought, “I wish you’d go behind something” and he did. Like he would do what I would think.

Here it is, almost Christmas. I am getting more used to the Alternating World, and less used to ours. Cars and cigarettes and televisions and cell phones all look sort of strange to me. When I saw people looking into their cell phones it was like I could see an eel coming from the cell phones, licking their brains, and it’s wearing their brains down like a hard candy. They didn’t know it was there, but I could see it.

One night last week I told Oswald about this eel thing, as we worked over a new amplification circuit, and he looked worried.

“Oh dear. That was a crossover beast.”

A crossover beast is one that can come into our world for a little while. To feed on things. Normal people can’t see them. There aren’t very many.

He scratched his nose and said, “It was an akishra. You shouldn’t be seeing such things in our world, without the resonator going — or without having used it quite recently.”

“I told you I saw them before without it.”

“But that was soon after you’d used it — you saw the akishra three days after you were here last! And out of the blue!”

“Yep.”

“So there it is. Well we may have to embrace the transition, after all — if you choose to. I will not make up your mind for you.”

He was going to tell me about the transition but then my new cell made a text ding. I should have said I gave my mom most of the money that Oswald gave me but not all of it. I made her get me a new cell phone with some of it. It’s pretty tight.

“My mom says I have to come home.”

“We shall speak of it later.”

So I started walking home, across the field.

I could see Christmas lights blinking on our trailer, over there. And lights in the little fir tree in the middle of the Cumberland Glory turnaround. Greel puts up those lights every year.

I knew Merk was there and I was fantasizing again about feeding him to the Baphomet. I could lure him up to the attic when Oswald wasn’t home. Dude, there’s shrooms up in that attic. Tillinghast grows ’em. You can get high.

Merk wouldn’t have the countering rings. But killing him might put Oswald in danger. You can’t just kill people. You could get bagged.

I looked up at the stars — and they started roiling around. I was getting the tingling and I started seeing things flying by up there. One of them I hadn’t seen before was like entrails with wings. It made me sick to see it. Another one was like a big ugly baby that was floating along eating some little furry animal and it was eating it alive.

There were the floppers up there, too, and the crepuscules and there was the slow-motion exploder that kept rewinding back and exploding all over again and there was The Yellow Fog That Hates. (That’s what Oswald calls that fog creature.)

I didn’t want to see that stuff, not then, and suddenly, between looking at the Christmas lights and seeing those flying entrails — I didn’t want to see that kind of stuff anymore.

I would miss the feeling I got from working with Oswald. But I had to choose my mom and my world. I had to choose Christmas and summer vacation and learning how to fix cars and having a girlfriend.

I got nightmares, sometimes, from Oswald’s attic. It seemed worth it, then, but now, looking at the Christmas lights, I thought, it’s not worth it. I need to forget that stuff or I won’t ever come back. Maybe I’ll get crazy like Crawford Tillinghast and get stuck in some place in my mind so they take me away and give me that antipsychotic shit.

Thinking about that, I really wanted to see my mom. I climbed over the fence by our trailer and then I saw my mom was driving away. I could see she was crying. I ran up and tried to wave her down but she wouldn’t stop and the side mirror on her old Chevy coupe clipped my arm as she went by. I don’t think she knew it. My arm wasn’t broken but it really hurt and I felt like I was falling in a hole.

I found the trailer door open and I seen Merk in there under my mom’s artificial Christmas tree, opening all the presents. He got most of them open already.

“You looking for shit to steal?” I asked.

He turned around, fast. He looked wicked hammered and mad. “She owes me money.”

“Not much to steal there. We haven’t got much. Steal from somebody rich, down the road.”

He stood up, and staggered, and fell back against the Christmas tree. Bash, it went over. Christmas tree bulbs broke. “Come here, kid, you little fucker.” He was getting up, pulling tree lights off him. “Fuck!”

He was standing in the middle of Christmas, kicking it.

I guess it was always kind of stupid anyway. Christmas.

I said, “Man I wish I could feed you to the Baphomet.”

He didn’t know what I meant.

I turned around and ran around the trailer to the fence, climbed over, jumped into the field, ran down the trail. Only then did it come to me, whoa, I made this trail, me alone, to Oswald’s house.

Then I was close to the house and yelling for him. For Oswald.

He came to the door and shushed me. “Do you wish to alert the authorities? Come in, come in, then. What of your mother?”

“She left. I don’t want to talk about that shit.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t use that vulgar, ah, lingo. Well, well, well. Come in, then. Perhaps we shall discuss transition.”

I’m going to write this out and leave it in resonant-blocking shield we have, and during transition it’ll fall right through the floor and land in the field. If you’re reading this then somebody found it.

I am not going to say too much more. I guess I got in the habit of being secret, like Oswald.

I’ll tell you a few things. We set up the fuel cells Oswald collected for the generator, to use after full transition, and we increased the output of the resonator, so that it does more than letting us see that world, and a little physical contact with it.

It can take us there all permanent so we don’t have to come back.

It can take the whole house, too. It’s a portable house, I guess. Like a trailer. But it rides vibrations into another world.

First we had to do what Oswald calls a preliminary attempt, while we still had a way to get back if we wanted. So, Oswald started up the machine and put it on the new setting that would really open up major big time to that world. We had to go transition careful so careful, shifting in space Oswald said, in a way that wouldn’t get the animals in the Alternating World stuck in our bodies and we’d show up in a place where there was room for the whole house. That was part of the preliminary.

But one thing went wrong. The Baphomet showed up, during that test, when we were almost completely into that world, and because of the wider resonation field, we opened a door for him, and he went totally right the fuck into our world.

And the walls were transparent, I could see them but they were like dirty glass. And I seen the Baphomet running over to the Cumberland Glory Trailer Park. He was running right to our house. My mom’s car was gone. But Merk was still there. I knew he was there because I knew I had called that Baphomet in some way, to go find Merk. I don’t understand how. But I did. Like that time I made him hide behind something. He went where I wanted. And he went to my mom’s doublewide because of me. And he went in it.

I couldn’t hear Merk scream, but I could feel it.

“Is something wrong?” Oswald asked me. His voice sounded normal now because we were becoming part of that other wave system. “Are the police coming? You seem to be looking through the walls.”

“No,” I told him. “Nothing’s wrong. But Oswald, if something gets through to our world from that other world, like something that could hurt people, because of us, does it just stay over there?”

“Have you seen such a thing?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Not sure.”

“If it came through it might do some damage but once we’re gone, the gap will close and it will be drawn through, back to the Alternating World, as the gap closes — a kind of energy suction. Are you concerned about someone?”

I looked away from the wall, and went back to looking at the monitor, to check wavelength ratios. “No. I’m not concerned.”

So right now, we’re taking a break, and I’m writing this last part up in this notebook, and then I’ll put it in the insulation covers, and let it fall to the field. And we’ll see what happens now, as soon as we finish the transition, and we go over there for good.

But Oswald and me, we are partners. Nothing will stop us.

And when we’re tired of that world, there are more.

But we can never come back here, Oswald told me. He said I have to choose.

It’s okay. Because, I choose that world, the Alternating World. I choose it, and whatever else we see. I choose the world of crepuscules and The Yellow Fog That Hates and the slow exploder and the slitherers and the floppers. I have a pet, waiting for me there. My own blue-spotted slitherer. Spot.

We have tools, and weapons. The Baphomet, I know, will be there, and it will kill me if it can, just like it killed the servants of Oswald’s grandfather.

I don’t care. It’s still better than my own world.

Almost anything would be better.