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"Pssst!" came the voice from the alleyway, echoing off the brickwork like the scrape of a shovel blade. "Hey you! Got milk?"
Frank turned to greet the voice, and a sharp rebuttal was about to roll off his tongue when he saw his newest acquaintance. Instinctively his hand tightened on the handle of his briefcase, although there was nothing inside the case but an empty thermos. "I . . . uh . . ." he began, staring up at the hulking man who leaned against the brick wall as if he could no longer support his considerable weight. The man, at least seven feet tall, was dressed in odd rags which would look more at home in a leper colony. His hair was a black tangle from which tendrils dangled into his face, nearly obscuring a pair of fierce, animalistic eyes which glinted in the darkness with a strange sort of glee.
"Come on. Nice fella like you . . .," said the huge man, heaving his weight off the wall and taking one step forward on a massive army boot, "looks like he needs some . . . liquid refreshment."
"Milk?" choked Frank, cold sweat turning his skin to clammy fish-flesh. "What -- wha --"
The huge man reached into his filthy clothes, and Frank nearly fainted with terror. His vision swimming, he desperately tried to move back, but he stumbled into a parking meter and collapsed onto it like a crutch. This is it, he thought. I'm going to die for the contents of my briefcase. He's going to shoot me and I'll be dead and and oh god oh god I'm going to die --
The man produced a syringe from within his rags. The sight of the needle disturbed Frank more than a gun could have, and he gave a choked squeal. The street around him was dark and empty. Nobody heard him.
The needle was huge and rusted, more suited to a shelf in an old cow barn than to any medical facility. Its cylinder was silver, its contents cloaked. The huge man's greasy skin retracted into a ghoulish smile.
He grabbed Frank's arm with one apelike hand and pulled with tremendous force. Frank's logic centres began to work, and between inarticulate gasps and pleas, he managed to force an argument out of his paralysed throat.
"If it's money you want -- take it! I don't -- I don't want any trouble, I --"
"Shut up!" yelled the huge man, slamming Frank's hand against the wall behind him, causing him to drop his briefcase to the ground. He screamed again, and the huge man punched him in the face.
His vision blackened as the back of his head came into violent contact with the brick wall. Dazed and bleeding, he slid down the wall and fell in a heap on the filthy ground. The huge man stood over him, a demented colossus, and began reciting words that echoed off the brickwork and buzzed like an angry carrion-fly inside Frank's mind. He slipped in and out of consciousness as the strange, garbled chant rang around him.
"S'alak ph'anaga vothmog ithiak vulgtmm! M'galach vthmm! Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Vulthmog fhtagn!" the man yelled, and proceeded to scream incoherently. It did not sound like a human scream -- it was grating and harsh, the sound of rusty machinery, and it filled Frank with an unknown dread. The towering man jabbed Frank in the neck with the syringe.
Frank could feel the cold contents of the needle pour into his flesh, numbing, intoxicating, infecting him even as he screamed in utter horror and made a desperate attempt to crawl away. He could hear his attacker's vile, buzzing laughter as he dragged himself out of the alley, coughing and choking, his chest filling with the cold unknown substance.
The feeling spread upward into his face, as if shards of ice were passing through his bloodstream. His vision started to blacken again, and the last thing Frank saw was the pavement as he collapsed into the foetal position, paralysed and ever so cold.
He woke up to a room of white -- not his own. He opened his eyes fully and waited for them to focus. A glowing rectangle beamed down upon him -- a fluorescent light which hummed softly to the beeping of the machines by his bed.
A hospital. Frank craned his neck over the edge of his pillow to better view his surroundings. A tinge of pain shot through him, and immediately he put his hand to his neck and felt the surgical tape stuck to his skin. The wound! It was bandaged, but that meant it was real, it wasn't a dream!
Frank suddenly felt very woozy, and he collapsed back into bed despairingly, terrible thoughts spinning through his head. It was heroin and he was now addicted . . . no, it was the AIDS virus . . . dear God, no! He put his hands to his head and grimaced. This couldn't be happening!
He heard the sharp clack of footsteps in the hall, but he was too engrossed in his own horror for the fact to register. His mind was a confusion, a chaos of whispers and dreadful, buzzing thoughts. He felt tears welling up behind his eyes -- he hadn't cried since he was a child.
"Mr. Laurence?" asked a kindly voice. Frank slowly pulled his hands from his face, almost afraid to look.
The woman who stood in front of him was quite obviously a doctor, and a frozen terror returned to Frank. She was going to give him the bad news, tell him he was infected or poisoned or addicted . . . "Oh God . . ." he groaned.
"Franklin Laurence?" asked the doctor. She was a very skinny, prim-looking woman with curly hair and large glasses which hung around her neck by a neon plastic strap. She looked like someone from a cough-syrup commercial.
"Yes," wheezed Frank.
"My name's Sarah Collins. I treated you when you came in yesterday. There was some blood loss, but nothing serious. Do you have any idea what happened to you?"
"I wish I didn't," said Frank.
"A tenant called the police. They found you on the street," said Dr. Collins. "They looked around, but they couldn't find anyone."
"He must have ran," wheezed Frank.
"Officer McCloud would like to speak with you in a moment, but I think I have some good news for you."
Frank suddenly felt a pang of hope, a nearly unfamiliar sensation. "Wh . . ." he began.
"We ran some blood tests, and there appears to be nothing wrong with you. You may have fainted from shock, however. There were no drugs in your system and no viral traces either, if you're worried about such things. You're a lucky man."
"But . . . but . . ." began Frank. Then he realised he didn't know what he would tell her. Still, he was greatly relieved.
"Yes, Mr. Laurence?"
He shook his head. "Nothing," he said.
The doctor shuffled out of the room, and a stocky, balding man in a police uniform entered. "Franklin Laurence?"
Frank nodded.
"Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?" asked the cop. Frank shook his head, and the officer took a seat in a chair near the bed.
"My name's Albert McCloud, Black Rapids Police. I found you on the sidewalk downtown last night. Lucky thing, too."
"Yeah. Luck," mumbled Frank.
"Do you want to tell me what happened last night?" asked Albert, sliding a tape-recorder from its case on his belt.
Frank told him. Everything from when he left work and began walking home to his apartment, taking the same route home as he'd always taken, up to the attack, and the injection, and the hideous cold substance which had knocked him out. Albert sat pensively, occasionally asking Frank to detail what had happened, but mostly letting Frank continue on his increasingly-agitated narrative.
"You say he injected you with something cold, a liquid," said Albert. "Do you have any idea what this could have been? Did you see anything?"
"No. But he said it was milk."
Albert laughed, and quickly stifled himself. "Milk?! The tests say you weren't injected with anything," said Albert.
"I was, dammit!" yelled Albert. "Haven't you found anything? Aren't you even looking for this nutcase?"
Albert attempted a harried smile. "We can't look for him until you give us a description."
Frank sighed and described the towering lunatic as best he could. Finally he asked, "Did you find anything at all?"
"Just a briefcase with an empty thermos," said Albert. "Yours, I presume?"
Frank nodded, exasperated.
Neither of them could figure out a motive for the attack. Nothing had been stolen -- Frank's wallet was still there, still with fifty dollars. Nothing was missing. It was completely random, completely purposeless, and it filled Frank with a sort of general hatred and fear. There was something wrong with a world in which this sort of thing could happen.
He grimaced. The buzzing of the fluorescent light was grating on him. It reminded him of something . . . s'alak ph'anaga vothmog ithiak vulgtmm . . . m'galach vthmm . . . Iä, Iä, Shub-Niggurath . . . vulthmog fhtagn . . .
He jerked to full alertness with a sudden gasp. He shuddered at the memory of the words.
"What? What's wrong?" asked Albert.
"N-nothing," said Frank. "Can I go? I've got to get to work. . . ."
But as it turned out, Albert had already done the good deed of finding Frank's business card in his wallet, calling his boss at Quality Management, Inc., and telling him what was going on. Frank now had real reason to fear -- there would be rumours and speculation, and Frank's productivity would be halved just from taking the time to answer all the ridiculous questions he knew would be forthcoming. Still, if he got out of the hospital, he would still get the day off for a nice three-day weekend. He decided he would spend it locked inside his apartment.
After Albert left, the doctor returned. Frank was free to leave after filling out the usual paperwork, which took almost an hour. He threw on his dirty business suit, received his briefcase from the front desk, and took a cab home.
The evening wore on, and Frank, pacing aimlessly in his tiny apartment, became more and more uneasy, filled with a general sense of anxiety and malaise which caused him to take sidelong glances at the fully-locked windows and doors as if half-expecting to see that grinning, greasy face again. The sky became red and then purple, and Frank found himself shivering with a vague terror.
He at last threw himself onto the couch and attempted to read his copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, but the inspirational words swam in front of his face, almost seeming to rearrange into less inspirational words. Iä! Shub-Niggurath fhtagn! He threw the book down in revulsion.
The sky became a cloudy wall of black from which no moon or stars dared appear. Frank had never really noticed the wind rushing in through the cracks in the walls before, but now it seemed pervasive and even taunting. It seemed to speak to him in cracked, guttural tones, chanting unspeakable things, collections of syllables that had no place in the world other than in ancient racial memory. It was three in the morning before he was able to sleep.
When he did sleep, he dreamed. Blackness resolved itself into shapes, dark vertical bars which became tree trunks. The smell of earth and dry leaves crept into Frank's nostrils. It was strangely comforting, reminding him of camping and childhood.
But there were other smells too -- the smell of woodsmoke carried on the wind from some unfathomable place, and the black, foul stench of something long dead. Even here the wind talked. The dead trees rattled their branches against each other in mocking laughter.
Frank knew he was far away from any human civilisation. He glanced upward at the sky, but no constellations appeared. Only a curtain of black, rolling cloud. He took a tentative step into the wilderness, feeling the dry crackle of branches and leaves under his bare feet.
There was a distant noise, as loud as thunder. But it wasn't thunder, it was some kind of scream or roar, crackling and buzzing like an electrical charge. As he listened, the noise came steadily closer through the woods. Frank wanted to run, but somehow he knew there was nowhere to go.
He threw himself awake then, still hearing the creaking of the trees and that final crackling roar. He gasped for air and finally looked at the clock. He had been asleep for only an hour. Unable to get back to sleep, Frank paced his apartment until sunrise.
At noon, Frank sat at his kitchen table, prodding at an unresponsive bowl of granola, desperately trying to ignore the distant whispering which haunted him. The doors were still locked, and the fall air was still whistling through the wall-cracks, still calling at him. Iä, Iä, Shub-Niggurath
. . . dark goat of the wood . . .
"Shut up!" screamed Frank, swiping the bowl off the table. It shattered against the wall and splattered milk all over the floor. Milk . . .
Frank immediately ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. Bad milk, he told himself. After cleaning up, he wandered back into the living room.
The air of his apartment became heavy and thick with the scent of firewood and ancient decay. It was nature . . . fertile and barren, pure and corrupt . . . he had to get out of here. He scrambled toward the phone and dialed Quality Management. After being put on hold for an eternity, he finally was put through to his boss. Mr. Pratchett always worked Saturdays.
"Mr. Pratchett!" gulped Frank.
"Frank? Is that you? What happened to you?"
"No, nothing, I'm okay now."
"The police told me you'd been stabbed!"
"It's minor, really, just a pinprick!"
"Are you sure? I mean . . ."
"Yes, there's no problem."
"Er . . . if you say so. You sound a bit . . . off."
"I'm fine, I assure you . . ."
"Frank . . ."
"I want to come in today. To make up for missing yesterday."
"I'm not sure that's such a good idea, Frank. You should be resting."
"No, I'm getting . . . claustrophobic, I have to get out of this place."
"Sure, Frank. If it'll make you feel better --"
"Yes! See you there." Frank slammed the phone down. And it was then that he realised that to get to work, he had to leave his apartment. A cold sweat broke out on his back as he contemplated walking down that empty street again . . .
He grabbed the biggest kitchen knife he owned, sharpened it with a whetstone, and hid it in his briefcase. And then he called a taxi.
Neil Pratchett had a strange, worried expression on his already-lined face as he watched Frank shuffle towards his cubicle. The man's suit was mudstained and he walked with a bent shambling gait, casting worried, haunted expressions at everything around him as if he were expecting the walls to collapse. Neil cleared his throat and stepped forward to talk to his employee.
Frank sat down in his cubicle. The Miller contract -- he simply had to work in the liability clauses and it would be finished. It had taken weeks to get what was here. He switched on his terminal and began typing into the word-processing program. "Quality Management takes no responsibility for any injury* or property-damage* . . .," he wrote, hoping to sort everything out with footnotes once his head was more clear. He realised he was in desperate need of coffee.
He sighed, rubbed his temples, and returned to look at what he'd written.
"She cometh from beyonde the Stars to bringe Growth, to sowe the seeds of Life, She of the Thousand Young, Shub-Niggurath the Dark Mother, ph'nglui x'ianoroth mwlg'phnaa," said the text.
"No!" he cried, pounding the keyboard furiously. "No, goddammit, no!" The air in the cubicle was hot and heavy, almost oily in its oppressive thickness. He suddenly felt as if he were being watched, and spun around angrily.
"Frank?" asked Mr. Pratchett, peering over the wall of Frank's cubicle. His eyes gravitated to the gibberish on the screen. Frank slammed the terminal's OFF switch and the screen flickered into blackness.
"Are you okay, Frank?"
"I'm perfectly fine," said Frank, sweat pouring down his face. "Why do you ask?"
"You seem a little . . . stressed out."
"Oh, I'm fine, heh, heh. I just need some coffee, that's all."
"Tell you what," said Pratchett slowly, backing away. "I'll get it for you. You just stay right here, okay?"
"Huh!" barked Frank. "Stay here, yes."
"You want sugar with that?"
"No, thank you," said Frank, madly scribbling on a piece of paper. He had to work his thoughts out somehow, rid them of this disease, do something, anything to keep busy.
"What about milk?"
Milk! "NO!" screeched Frank suddenly. Milk of the black goat . . .
Frank suddenly found himself in that forest again. The sky was a smoky red, and the dead trees were etched over it in bold lines, slowly creaking back and forth like withered old men in rocking chairs. The woodsmoke was stronger here; it filled the air with a visible haze.
He was overcome with the desire to run, to run somewhere, for he could hear that crackling roar again, a hideous sound in the deep forest that came slowly closer and closer with each interval
. . .
"No, no, no, no!" Frank screamed. "Stop it!" He leaped from his chair and fled from his cubicle, hands over his face. Ignoring the shocked stares from his coworkers and an astonished Pratchett, he bashed into the fire-exit and ran through the parking lot, the sound of the fire alarm not quite masking the noise of the taunting whispers in his head.
Oblivious to everything around him, Frank ran home, casting away his suit jacket and shirt in the process. Covered in the cold sweat of abject terror, he screamed inarticulately as he sprinted down the sidewalk, causing onlookers to back away in their own sort of fear.
The cityscape looked so much like a gigantic forest, trees of metal and concrete looming over him, seeming to sway and pulse with the throbbing in his head. Evening was approaching, and the sky was taking on a rusty colour. Frank ran into his apartment and slammed the door behind him.
He then collapsed to his knees. "What's going on?!!" he shrieked.
The whispering of the trees and the wind answered him. Shub-Niggurath, black goat of the wood, mother of a thousand young . . .
The forest was calling to him, the vision of leafless trees haunted him every time he closed his eyelids, and the smell of smoke and noxiousness pervaded the air all around him. He couldn't concentrate on reading, for all the words looked the same and said the same thing. He wrote on the walls with Magic Marker, but could write nothing more than what he expected he'd be able to. Shub-Niggurath, Shub-Niggurath, Shub-Niggurath . . . He eventually settled for simply pounding on the walls with the markers until they broke, weeping and crying with absolute despair.
It was early the next morning when Frank's answering machine clicked on.
"Frank Laurence? This is Dr. Collins from the lab. Officer McCloud said that you kept insisting that you were injected with something, and he suggested we run another blood test. We did, a second time, and they were all clear of drugs and microbes, but then we ran a DNA test, and . . . er . . . Mr. Laurence, I think you'd better get to the hospital, quickly. There's . . . something wrong . . ."
But Frank was gone. He was hardly seeing the cars which swerved to avoid him as he straddled the highway lanes, sprinting down the road, stripped to the waist.
"Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Hahahahahhahaaaa!" he shrieked to the morning sky, his frail body shivering, doused in the frozen sweat of fear and terrified exhilaration. He ran past the city limits, and when the highway curved, Frank kept going straight, fleeing out into the pine forest which surrounded the city. He was no longer in control.
He blindly smashed into the trees in his frantic chase, gouging flesh from his body, grinding tree bark into the wounds. He was lashed with live branches and stabbed by dead ones, and yet he didn't feel them. He screamed his exultation as blood poured from his torn mouth, and sprinted on through the pathless forest, oblivious to the thorns and roots which tore at his legs.
He ran, far out of human civilisation. Morning turned to afternoon, and afternoon became evening. Still he ran on, his shins stripped to the bone. But he would not die of blood loss, no, she had seen to that. The sky was a dry, rusty red, and Frank could now smell the smoke and the corruption he remembered.
Evening segued into night. The voices urged him, called him on, but now they seemed to have a definite source, up ahead in the blackest woods.
Immediately renewed, Frank tore on through the brush. He smiled, his eyes half-closed in triumph, unseeing the clumps of bushes and trees he tore through. His body was stained red and crisscrossed in hideous patterns like scrawled, spidery runes, and he marveled at Shub-Niggurath's precision, laughing to himself through cracked lips.
At last he could see the flickering red of a fire, and Frank followed it on a straight line. He screamed, "Ia! Dark Mother! I have come!" And the voices welcomed him as he came into a clearcut circle with a huge bonfire roaring at the centre.
There were others here, surrounding the bonfire -- these were the voices which called to him. The huge man with the black hair was here. His rags were gone -- the only recognisable part of him was his head, perched atop a hideous bestial frame. He no longer walked like a man -- he loped around like a beast on all fours, screaming and screaming.
The others screamed, too -- they could no longer be considered human. Most of them could not walk as humans walked -- their legs were twisted or missing or congealed into tentacles. Their arms were withered or tentacled or flippered like hideous animal crossbreeds. The voices told Frank what he already knew . . . they were stricken with a plague, a cancer, an uncontrolled replication and growth of cells, alterations of genetic code . . . transmutation . . .
Frank laughed hysterically, noticing that his voice had begun to take on a buzzing, crackling sound. He was already changing . . . all he had to do was wait . . .
The cultists suddenly wound down, their hoarse screams and wails fading to only a murmur, and then they ceased altogether. And then the creaking, the ever-present whispering of the trees and the wind, and the hissing and roaring of the bonfire . . . stopped. Only a dead silence could be heard. Frank could hear only his own breathing, laboured and hacking, and even this faded soon. The silence became ominous, even oppressive. Frank's eyes widened in terror and joy.
She had arrived. Frank was only aware of a huge, formless presence, shrieking through the forest at impossible speed. She made no noise at all; not a single branch snapped, not a single leaf crunched. He was almost unsure how close she was, until she shrieked a thunderous, buzzing cry. She waited mere feet away.
Frank began laughing, his mind torn open. He collapsed to his knees in surrender. "For Shub-Niggurath," he whispered, and suddenly his vision went black -- he was choking, drowning, a cold, thick slime seeping into his pores . . . The milk of Shub-Niggurath, the source of life . . . uncontrolled spawning, uncontrolled replication . . .
Days passed.
Frank now waited, wrapped in a dark cloak, concealing a body which no longer appeared human. He could no longer breathe, but then, he didn't need to anymore.
He could hear the clacking of footsteps . . . high heels, by the sound of it. He grinned madly as he stood up from the infected filth of the alleyway trash. He loped into the street, his mission clear in his mind. A rusted hypodermic syringe glinted in the darkness, gripped in Frank's twisted, boneless fingers.
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Created: August 14, 2001; Updated: August 9, 2004