The Lurker at the Threshold : A Horror Mystery by Brandon Berntson (books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

slow circles.  A strange, dream-like reality moved around him—all too real.

He tried to move off the stool.  The music was coming down a very long tunnel.  He turned, thinking if he could see the door it would help him to his feet.  He was able to move enough.  A figure stood in front of it.  He couldn’t see its face, a tall, dark figure with dim, luminescent eyes.  It didn’t seem to have a face.

“What . . . do I owe you?” he tried to say.

He reached into his wallet before the bartender, the first one, told him he’d paid already.

“Mac, are you all right?” the bartender asked.  “Leaving already?”

Capshaw looked up.  It was the Mad Arab again.  The man was smiling.  Capshaw tried digging into his wallet, but he’d already paid.  The bills were sitting on the counter.

“He makes a large path,” the Mad Arab said.  “But The Necronomicon is just the beginning.  Experiential knowledge.  That is what it craves.  It’s not enough to worship.  You must encounter the Outer God.  Face to face.”

He looked to the door again.  The figure was gone.  Nothing but his imagination, or so he told himself.  A series of warped images in succession moved in the air, phantasmagoria before his eyes.  It was like being yanked into an alternate reality.  He’d been fine before, studying the ancient text, but now he couldn’t help but wonder.  Did he think he was exempt from its warnings?  That he could resist?

“Mac, you need me to call you a cab?” the bartender asked.  Capshaw was relieved to see it was the bartender he’d seen when he first walked in.  “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m okay,” Capshaw said, putting a hand to his head.  “I think I’m coming down with something.”

The strange, warping reality bent the atmosphere again.

“Just need some air,” he said.

That was a good excuse.

“You sure?” the bartender asked.

Capshaw nodded and forced a smile.  His personality was being pushed aside, making room for another.

Ruins appeared in the bar.  Sand.  Something strange about the stones and archways.  He was in the Middle East, but his sense of time altered his sense of equilibrium.  He was farther away from Innsport than he realized.

The archways were too low for the likes of a human being.  They were small, as if the city had been built for children.

“Or reptiles,” said something in his ear.

The doorways, catacombs, entranceways, owned the sense that something had lived here at one time.  They might’ve been the same size as Capshaw, but they weren’t the same height.

“See?” the Mad Arab told him.  “This is one of many places throughout history.”  Capshaw couldn’t see him.  “You understand.  You see.  These are the ruins of the Nameless City.  We cannot allow it to be forgotten.  This is what the book is about.  I need your help, Mr. Capshaw.  I need your help preserving a history of the black earth.  You see how important it is?  I can go places, see things no one has ever seen.  But I need help.  I need you to help me preserve it.  For the . . . museum.”

He could see the Mad Arab smile in his mind’s eye.

“This is madness,” Capshaw said.

Abdul smiled.  “Perhaps.  Madness is its own form of enlightenment.  You will be rewarded by Yog-Sothoth.  Is there anything greater?”

The spell was taking him.  The monoliths defied reality.  Capshaw could see their history, the lush gardens they’d been, the reptilian people who’d lived here.

On the horizon, a mound of bluish-green orbs began to glow.  Orbs made of some substance, alien to earth.  It looked like a colony of egg sacs, but they weren’t eggs.  The buildings of Innsport hovered behind them.

He had to get away!  Away from the Mad Arab and the book.  It was more powerful than he’d thought.  He’d underestimated it.  Whatever was on the horizon was too large for him to see.  Its enormity dwarfed him.  It spilled from the past into the future, coming from the farthest reaches of space.

It had landed in Innsport.

Capshaw pulled himself off the stool and ran out of the bar.

The laughter of the Mad Arab followed him.

Chapter 8

Macky grabbed his lock-picking set from the desk drawer.  Sometimes you just got a feeling you were going to need it.  He left the office early the next morning, one of the few times he got there before Millie.  Duke and Newt had notified him of another murder.  He was on Humboldt and 63rd Street in the alley behind Hang-and-Dri, a laundry shop on the east side of town. Duke and Newt were with him.

It was Muncie Cross, one of the local officers at the precinct.  Cross’ body was face down in the middle of the alley, his dark blue hat a few feet away.  A pool of blood spilled from his head.  A blanket lay over the body.  Macky knelt, lifted one side, and looked under it.  He made no expression and put the blanket down.

Duke lit a cigarette from his own and handed it to Macky.  Macky took it and rolled it between his fingers.

People were milling about.  Word had spread.  Several reporters were jotting things down.  Cameras flashed.

“Get these reporters out of here,” Duke said, motioning to the people.  Other officers were guarding the area.  “Come on, come on.”

“There’s nothing to see here,” one of the other officers, Jolves, said to the crowd.  “Let’s show a little respect, huh?”

The people took a few steps back.

“Does this look like a connection to last night’s murder, detective?”

Frye W. Fields was a journalist for The Innsport Gazette.  He wore a light gray coat and hat.  He was a shorter man, clean, studious looking, with small round spectacles.  He carried a notepad and pencil, jotting things down with the casual air of an experienced reporter.  He