Forces of Change  by J.B. Lee Two misfits, outcasts, geniuses, savants. What could they possibly have in common that would promise to bring the world to its knees begging to be spared? A metallic roar deafens the unbelievers and promises death in its most terrible glory in this tale of discovery and obsession.

Katrina Olson was almost nineteen. She looked like any of a thousand young women; blonde, blue eyed, chunky, round-faced. Her walk was a little ungainly, her dress plain and unadorned. Nothing in her appearance set her apart from the crowd.
    Katrina Olson was born with a special gift.
    It went unnoticed until she was seven years old, looking over her father's income tax returns. She went through them page by page, wrote a total at the end.
    Her father was angry. He sat down with his daughter and a calculator and showed her step by step why she shouldn't play with Daddy's papers.
    At first he was irritated. Then he was puzzled. Amazed. And maybe just a little frightened.
    It was time for tests and visits to scientists and doctors.
    They were as astonished as Katrina's parents.
    No numerical calculations were beyond her grasp; no machine could match her for speed or approach her for accuracy. Geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus: less than child's play. How easily can you add two and two? Katrina could solve fifth order differential equations with half the effort. In under a second she could give you the value of Pi to any decimal place you requested.
    In all other scholastic matters she was essentially average; her mathematical skills were incredible, unparalleled. At the age of sixteen she entered college. She was a straight-A student, of course. Anything less would have been uncharacteristic of the young woman.
    Needless to say, she was something of a celebrity.
    She celebrated her eighteenth birthday with her parents and her brother Andrew, two years younger, who was both proud and envious of his sister. Much smiling, much joking, much laughter.
    That night Kat tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep. There was something she kept to herself, something that frightened and tormented her: the magic she had found in numbers was fading.
    It had been so long since she found anything new. Her teachers were tedious, her studies monotonous. The marvels of the Fibonacci series, the mysteries of the prime numbers, the magical proportions of the Golden Section: all of it old. Old and tiresome. In a mere eighteen years, she had sounded the bottom of infinity.
    Her talent, once a blessing, now became a curse.
    Not long afterward she met tall, dark-haired Adrian. Almost handsome, slightly awkward, rather nearsighted. Three years older than Katrina.
    Adrian Spaulding. Dren to his friends.
    Dren was not a student. He could barely balance his checkbook, much less drink in the mathematical vintages that were so heady to Katrina. There was a very good reason for his problem.
    As a child he saw numbers as letters: 6336 became GREG, 8743 was STAR. Once he saw the 247.48 in his father's checkbook become NAT.AS right before his eyes.
    It made him very suspicious of his parents.
    Eventually the problem was noticed, analyzed, diagnosed. Dren was sentenced to special classes to teach his brain to compensate for the neural confusion, to teach him the difference between letters and numbers.
    They helped. Made a little difference. Not much. Even the simplest arithmetic would always be a burden to Adrian Spaulding.
    He didn't care.
    The same genes that had robbed him of any mathematical aptitude also gave him his special gift:
    The average person reads slowly, word by word.
    A few read two, even three words at a time.
    Adrian Spaulding could read and memorize entire pages at a glance.

It was called block comprehension, it was very rare, and it made him a voracious, eclectic reader. Once read, not a single word was ever forgotten. Only numerical digits escaped his memory. He could quote entire novels, but every number he reeled off was suspect, unless the number was written out on the page.
    Such were the quirks of his unique faculty.
    A young man with block comprehension and common sense could have dazzled the world, even with these quirks.
    Common sense was not one of Dren's strong points.
    He was content to work in a menial job, as long as it paid enough to supply him with books. He learned to spend an extra minute gaping at any written material he was handed, so people wouldn't think he hadn't read it.
    So Adrian Spaulding wandered through life, unloading trucks, stocking shelves, sweeping floors, while in his free time he soaked up the works of Shakespeare, of Joyce, of Nabokov and Zoshchenko, of Thurber and Juvenal, of Ayn Rand and Stephen Hawking and Al Capp. He learned about induction coils, Thurlow Weed, the regium donum, stochastic music and the lumpen proletariat. He was the Holy Bible, the Webster's Dictionary, the Roget's Thesaurus, the Collier's Encyclopedia, The Stars My Destination.
    Sometimes people told him that he should go on Jeopardy.

Consider, then:
    A young woman, a mathematical prodigy, an unfulfilled need.
    A young man with block comprehension. An unfocused existence.
    Consider also a law of physics: opposites attract.
    Katrina and Dren became friends. And more than friends.
    His parents were divorced; they couldn't care less about his personal life. They had their own problems.
    Her parents didn't care for Dren, but reconciled themselves to their daughter's choice, secretly hoping her infatuation wouldn't last.
    Their hopes were futile. Within a month Katrina had fled the college dorm to live with Dren in his small apartment in Barrington. Her new e-mail address was kspaulding@hotmail.com, something that annoyed her father no end.
    Their feelings for each other deepened, as feelings will. Sometimes they wondered if they had been brought together by God, or by fate, or by destiny. Sometimes they wondered what the future would bring, as do all young people in love.

According to chaos theory, the entire universe is moved and shaped by trivial matters like these. There is no such thing as coincidence. A butterfly flits through a cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, coming to rest on a famous author's tombstone; its brief, erratic flight sets up a chain of events that culminate in a tsunami off the coast of Japan.
    Katrina could prove it mathematically, though only a handful of people in the world could comprehend her proof.
    Adrian could quote all the philosophies underlying the theory, from the purely intellectual conjectures of the ancient Greeks to the latest subatomic discoveries in the field .
    Chaos theory. The Butterfly Effect.
    A car breaks down, two people dash through the midnight streets in a misty rain, running for their apartment: a hundred thousand Providential butterflies could not change the world as much.
    With a crash of thunder, the drizzle became a lashing downpour, flipping the umbrella inside-out, soaking them both. Katrina swore as she clumsily splashed through a water-filled hole in the crumbling sidewalk. They passed condemned buildings with peeling signs painted on their sides, indicating their former glory: Berglund Furniture Co; Harms, Clore and Price, Inc; Loucks Building - Air Conditioned Offices.
    Nothing in this part of Barrington was less than forty years old. Most of it looked a lot older.
    "In here." Dren ducked into the recessed doorway of a small brick building, pulled Katrina in behind him. Panting for breath, dodging the runoff from the roof, they pressed hard against the door.
    A wooden door, locked and undisturbed for decades, waiting for a key. Or the right amount of pressure.
    Or the brush of a butterfly's wings.
    With a surprised cry, Dren fell through.
    As he lurched to his feet, lightning flared in the open doorway, revealing wall shelves jammed tight with books. In the sliced second of the flash Dren saw titles: The Golden Bough. Advanced Metallurgy. Electromagnetic Field Theory. Von Junzt's Nameless Cults in the Golden Goblin edition, something he'd read about but never read. More science books. Myths, legends and allegories. Even some books he had never heard of before. What was a Glaaki and why did it have several volumes of Revelations?
    Katrina pushed her way through the shattered door. "You all right? Come on, they'll get us for breaking and entering. Let's get out of here."
    For answer, he pulled out his pocket flashlight, shone it around the room. "Look." Thick cobwebs blanketed in dust. "I don't think anyone's coming home tonight."
    Katrina recognized some of the scientific equipment under its grimy shroud: a gold-leaf electroscope, a Van de Graaff generator, something that might be a Geiger counter. Some of it she'd never seen before.
    Dren recognized all of the scientific equipment in the room, though some of it was altered and configured in a way he had never read about.
    Katrina shivered. "Mad Labs Unlimited. What do you think this place was?"
    "Maybe this'll tell us." He turned to the shelf of notebooks, opened one at random. A journal. Halfway down the page, a date: February 6, 1956.
    Why not start there?
    Block comprehension did its work, hindered only slightly by the faded ink, the spidery handwriting.
    Then there was excitement. Discussion. Disbelief. Dren pointing at pages; Katrina studying them. More books were examined, more agitated gesturing and speaking, more discussion as the storm wound down to mutterings and grumblings and the dawn drew nigh. No one else in the world could have understood the contents of the yellowing journals, the life work of a man perhaps insane, perhaps dead, certainly forgotten.
    But Adrian and Katrina were special.
    The roar of the rain slacked off, allowing another sound to be heard. Soft yet piercing, a high-pitched tinkling not much louder than a whisper. The flashlight revealed a large tank of six-inch-thick frosted glass, maybe seven feet long and four feet high, placed against the back wall of the room. The sound came from there.
    Dren held back, puzzled, a little scared.
    Katrina was not afraid. She was curious.
    Curiosity led her cautiously toward the tank, toward the sound. Curiosity brushed off the coating of dust on the thin, clear glass top.
    Curiosity bade her look down to see the thing within, faintly illumined in its own dim glow.
    Dren stepped forward. "What is it?"
    She couldn't look away. Something deep within her was moved, amazed, overwhelmed by what she saw. "Beautiful." A whisper. "It's beautiful."
    Curiosity, of course, also killed the cat.

Katrina pulled into the lot, stopped the bright red Beetle under the faded NO PARKING sign painted on the crumbling stone wall, beside Dren's old Duster. Across the empty street a battered black locomotive snorted oily diesel smoke into the gray, overcast sky, clattered its way to a waiting line of tank cars. Antiquated, decaying buildings, most of them empty, faced the trains and the chemical companies beyond them. Industrial desolation, cold and ugly.
    A goth with spiked hair slouched against the rusted fence around the railroad yard, staring at her from behind imitation Ray-Bans. She recognized him from campus: Somebody-or-other Callahan. Weird but harmless.
    She wondered why some people even bothered to go to college. Not that she had been to class in weeks. Not since they found the mystery, or The Mystery, as she had come to think of it. It was too important.
    Worry showed on the young woman's face as she stepped from the little car, pizza boxes in hand, and walked up the short flight of rickety wooden stairs to the attic apartment. Things weren't going well. The weekly phone call to her mother had ended in an argument, as always seemed to be the case. Losing her job hadn't helped matters any. Maybe she should have kept that to herself.
    She hoped Dren might have made some headway in the research.
    The apartment was jammed with the things they had taken from the small brick building on Ambuehl Street. The machines, the books, and the massive terrarium. They had accidentally broken the thin top of the terrarium in transit; now, unmuffled, the sound of tiny, resonant bells filled the room. Dren was sitting at the desk, as usual. Reading Audel's Electric Library, Volume IV. Look, look, flip the page. Look, look, flip the page.
    "Gonna need your help with these books, Kat."
    Katrina watched him read with something like envy, then set the pizzas down on the cluttered coffee table. " hat was our last twenty dollars. We're down to pocket change."
    He didn't look up. "We'll get more."
    "Don't wait on my folks to send it. The school's been in touch and they're not happy. And they don't like you anyway." She walked to his side, put a hand on his shoulder. "They don't understand. No one understands."
    "You didn't tell them about it, did you?"
    She was amused by his conspiratorial tone. "No. It wouldn't mean anything to them anyway. All they're interested in is whether I'm getting enough to eat, and whether you're looking for a job, and whether I've been to church."
    "Church," he snorted. "Right."
    "They want me back in school."
    "Then go."
    "Why? They can't teach me anything there. I should be teaching them."
    He closed the book, set it aside. "Teach me instead. I've got to get better at math. So much of the journals is over my head. Hell, a lot of Audel's Electric Library is over my head. I can memorize the equations, but when I have to use them..."
    "It never bothered you before."
    "It never mattered before."
    "I'm a tough tutor, hon. Are we going to eat, or let the pizza get cold?"
    "This copy of Nameless Cults is an edited version, but it's still way out there. I read it this afternoon; easy to see why it got included in the library. There's a mythological being in it that matches our friend to a T. I'll show you the passage."
    "Recite it for me." She took a bite of pizza. Not bad, really. "I trust your memory."
    "Concerning Gtuhanai, called the Insatiable by the beings of cryptic Pleiades, brother of Cthulhu, son of YOG-SOTHOTH, who is the One Truth bonding time and space. The sorcerer Mezamalek did call it down from the stars, sending it against all opposition. Lo, in the grip of Gtuhanai armor and blade alike did twist and melt, slaying its bearer, becoming whirlwind body for the dread spirit. For Gtuhanai is the devourer of iron, the one who builds itself in bronze and iron. None but Mezamalek could learn its secrets. "
    Kat ate some more pizza.
    "Then I found this in the journals: 'Gtuhanai the Insatiable - destroyer god of the Aartnna, metal beings of Pleiades cluster, according to Necronomicon. Brought to earth by sorcerer Mezamalek ( Ivonis: Zon Mezzamalech of Hyperborean cycle?) , who used it against his enemies until his unaccountable disappearance. Always described as a metal vortex. Legend and myth, but there is truth to be found. Just the discovery of the force proves that. There has to be a way to harness it.' Jeez, yes, a way to harness it. It's no good to anyone unless we can find a way to control it."
    The girl looked over the moldy journals, the piles of antique books; looked back at the glass case, thinking of the wonderful, terrible thing caged within. "Wonder what happened to him?"
    "Mezamalek? He disappeared. Weren't you listening?"
    "The guy who wrote all this. Who put our little friend in its cage."
    "Who knows?" He closed the notebook with a slam. "I don't have any leads on the Ivonis. It wasn't in the books we found, that's for sure." With disgust he picked up a small black book from the floor. "The only Necronomicon I've found is this stupid paperback. It set us back five bucks and it's worthless. A mishmash of horror stories and half-baked Sumerian religion."
    "Umm." She had walked over to the case, was watching the object within it, as she had so many times since their discovery. After grabbing some pizza, Dren joined her.
    Within the terrarium was a lattice of interlocking metal helices maybe a foot high, all rotating at different speeds, intertwining with each other in a complex and harmonious fashion. An impossible fashion. Like a bizarre top it moved rapidly, unceasingly around the thick glass walls that contained it, ricocheting across its prison again and again and again.
    Its sound was not unlike charcoal crackling in a grill, but somehow organized, musical. A chorus of tiny wind chimes. A million microscopic music boxes.
    "A gift," she murmured, the flickering patterns of light from the thing reflected oddly in her eyes. "Waiting all those years. Anyone else could have found it."
    "Anyone could have. We did." He put his arm around her, drew her close to him. "It's ours. And it will make us rich. Then your folks won't be so worried about my job status."
    They stood together, watching the cryptic thing in the terrarium as it charted its aimless course. The metal helices were not The Mystery; The Mystery was the force that moved and motivated the metal. Something not magnetism, not gravity, not electricity. Something else.
    The nameless scientist who had discovered the force had imprisoned it, but could not control, define, or dismiss it. The journals were day-by-day descriptions of his efforts in those directions.
    Dren stepped away from Katrina, tapped on the glass. The swirling metal coils moved away from him.
    "I don't think it likes you." She laughed.
    Somewhere in the distance a train howled in warning, approaching the crossing at Halls Creek Road. Dren tapped again, more insistently. If the thing was aware of him, it paid no heed, but continued circling its glass cell.
    He wondered why he thought it should be aware of him. Electricity doesn't know the person who throws the switch. Light illumines the good and the bad alike. This unknown power was just another form of energy.
    Kat, remembering an experiment detailed in the journals, dug in her pocket, threw a penny into the tank. "Here's something for you, whatever you are."
    The animate metal spun toward it faster than the eye could follow. Then the miracle began, as the copper stretched and twisted, phased in and out of the whirling array until it, too, was a part of the dancing helix.
    It was a little bigger now. Its eerie chiming a little louder, a little different in pitch.
    Dren grabbed her arm before she could throw another coin. "Dammit, don't do that! Are you crazy?"
    Katrina glanced at him in a peculiar, unfocused way. "It was only a penny."
    Watching it convert the metal, she had almost grasped the principle of its motion, of the non-Euclidean geometrical functions it embraced. It made her feel funny, like looking over a precipice, like teetering on the edge of a cliff. Vertigo. Mental vertigo.
    The feeling frightened and attracted her simultaneously.
    Dren was still angry. "I don't care what it was. Every bit of metal you feed it increases its mass. If it breaks the glass, we're all screwed. God knows how he got it in there in the first place." With a visible effort, he composed himself. "You don't take this seriously enough. This is big. Too big to play with."
    She didn't hear him, was lost in the spinning, the motion, the angles of its elements. A straight line in two-dimensional space is the continuous change of one dimension in comparison to the other. But this wasn't two-dimensional space, or three-dimensional space, but n-dimensional.
    Her thoughts spun as fast as the shape in the tank. The nexus of the force was a aggregate of n-dimensional space, outside time. She saw the object as an arborescence, mentally mapped its alien angles against an cubical grid. Where it exceeded the grid, she calculated irrational numbers to fill in the gap, disregarding the rules of reality, open only to her instinctual grasp of mathematical functions.
    A little less than a year ago, she had prayed, hoped, wished that she might find something that would surprise her, something that would renew the magic of number. This was it. It was pushing her mathematical gift to its outer limits.
    "Kat? Katrina? You all right?"
    Dren had learned from the journals that both the molecular structures of all metals and the macrostructure of the thing in the tank were statistically similar. The unknown force was the ordering structure, the molecular similarity the reason it infected only metals. Now she realized that similarity was the modulus.
    "That's it," she whispered, gazing down into the depths of the diminutive metal dervish. The modulus is the logical key to comprehension of n-dimensional form. If the modulus is X, the structure of the helix at any moment is dictated by (X)n. Follow the lines of the helices into infinity and—
    "I see it, I see it, I see it!" Shaking, ashen-faced, she stumbled away from the tank, caught at the threadbare couch for support. Then Dren was beside her, helping her to a chair, his anger swept away by concern.
    "Christ! Are you all right? What the—"
    "Water," she croaked. He ran to the sink, came back with a glass of water only slightly tinged with the rust of the old pipes. She gulped it down without a second thought.
    "Pen. Paper. Quick. Before I lose it." Already the concepts were sliding from her. She had to get them written down. Had to, before they were gone completely.
    He grabbed his clipboard from the desk, watched uneasily as she covered the sheets with arcane mathematical symbols, wildly, frantically, explaining to him all the while what she was doing. He knew the terminology, but couldn't follow the calculations. In under a minute he was lost.
    "Stop. I don't know what you're saying. I can't do that in my head."
    "Sorry. I'll show you instead." She tore a blank sheet of paper from the clipboard, began folding it with shaking hands. " I know how it moves like it does. I just saw it. (X)n. That's the bottom line. Simple. (X)n."
    "Ex times en. Calm down, okay?"
    The paper was twisted, looped, coiled. Still the words poured from her lips. "Math is always simple once you understand the variables. What X and N are. Everything came clear. It's clear as mud. That's what Dad said when I told him about the Markov chain. I was ten. Clear as mud."
    Dren watched her in silence, not knowing what to say.
    "Wasn't that funny?"
    "Sure," he said, as Kat folded and folded the paper. There was a slight tremor in his voice. "Clear as mud. What are you doing with that?"
    The paper had become a small angular snowflake in her hands. "Watch. Presto."
    She pulled gently on its corners. It became a thin white line, disappeared completely.
    Dren gaped in astonishment. "Jesus."
    "That's not the force, it's what the force shapes itself with. The principle of its form." An alien principle. A theory that could only be revealed by confrontation with an alien reality. "Non-Euclidean angles. I wouldn't have thought it was possible in the real world. They'll have to add a new chapter to the topology books when we publish our findings."
    "Show me how to do it."
    "I told you I'm a tough teacher."
    "Show me."
    She showed him. It took a long time, especially since he had no gift for grasping number. But she showed him. And he did it too.
    Three dimensions, two dimensions, one dimension, none.
    Presto.
    And behind them, in the glass case, something unfamiliar to man, to earth, to the three-dimensional cosmos. One of its secrets had been learned, but only one. There were many more.
    That was the evening of the first revelation. Others were forthcoming. Each one with a price.

Deep in the darkness of the early morning, two days later, Dren woke with a start. He had been trying to correlate the legends in Nameless Cults and the Revelations of Glaaki with certain astronomical and metallurgic facts in the journals; like Niels Bohr, who saw the form of the atom in a dream, he had realized the truth about the power that moved and shaped metal according to alien geometry.
    Not in a dream.
    In a nightmare.
    Only a mind with his encyclopedic knowledge could have made the connections. He turned over, got out of bed, slowly, quietly, cautiously.
    Kat didn't wake up.
    Not immediately.
    She woke up when she heard the screaming.
    Dren was shredding the pages of the precious journals, shrieking at the thing within the case. "I know you can hear me, damn you. It isn't worth it, isn't worth it! To hell with you and the others!" Torn paper fluttered to the floor. He ripped out another handful of pages.
    "Dren, stop!" Kat grabbed him, restrained him. He struggled wildly, raised the notebook to strike her, then broke into tears. The ravaged notebook fell from his hand. He turned to her, his face twisted in pitiful emotion, still raving.
    "We have to stop the research. We have to stop it now. That thing...Gtuhanai, the Insatiable...you don't know, you can't know. Supernovae. The Revelations say the horror called Glaaki was made of a living metal...Ever read Gustaf Johansen's diary, Kat? He didn't know what they found, out there in the Pacific. All the angles were wrong. Like your little parlor trick. Folding paper, folding stone, it's all the same to them. He didn't know what they found, but I do...I do..."
    She heard herself pleading with him without knowing what she was pleading for. "Please, please, honey, it's all right. Please."
    "Johansen says the thing that attacked them was indestructible. They practically blew it up and it reassembled itself. Cthulhu, brother of Gtuhanai... You know how?" He sobbed uncontrollably. "You know how? It wasn't made of matter, it was just inhabiting it. Christ! Whole civilizations, whole worlds...They aren't gods. They aren't demons. They're energies. Von Junzt calls them the Old Ones. Old, yes, older than the earth. Fission. Fusion. Hydrogen to Helium, the solar phoenix. Gtuhanai." He pulled free of her grip, stumbled, collapsed.
    She got him to the couch, stayed there with him, consoled him, comforted him until he fell into exhausted sleep.
    Prayed to a God she didn't believe in that he'd be all right in the morning.
    And he seemed to be. He told her everything was fine. Of course he wanted to continue the research. He'd been shaken by some things, but he was all right now.
    He told Kat a little of what he'd learned. Some of the correlations between the mythology of the Old Ones and the scientific discoveries of the last three hundred years.
    He didn't, wouldn't tell her everything. The real nemesis of the dinosaurs. The reason the fossil record revealed different kinds of men, but no links between them. What lay beneath the melting polar ice caps.
    These were things she was better off not knowing. He wished he could forget them, too.
    "I don't know what happened. I just couldn't handle it."
    "You really scared me, Dren. I thought you—I thought you were—"
    "Stress. Too much study. I won't do it again, I promise."
    "You'd better not." She kissed him, her eyes closed. She opened them to see his dark eyes fill with tears. "Hon?"
    He wrapped his arms around her, held her close in a clumsy embrace. "I love you. Always. Remember that. I love you. I don't want to ever lose you."
    They spent two hours and a roll of tape piecing together the ripped bits of pages. Dren returned to the work with a new fire, a prophet's dedication.
    He had never had a clear and solid goal in life before.
    He did now.
    He knew exactly what his purpose was here on Earth.
    That was the day of the second revelation. Neither Katrina nor Adrian realized what it had really disclosed: the capacity of the force called Gtuhanai to change everything it came in contact with.
    Metals.
    Relationships.
    Minds.
    Souls.

Three weeks passed, as they studied together, Katrina and Adrian, their special gifts driving them ever further into unknown regions of knowledge as they tried to comprehend the thing in the glass tank. The city of Barrington was plagued with freakish occurrences:

A weird fog, almost a kind of light-absorbing quality in the very air, blanketed the slums for the space of an hour. It was blamed on some sort of leak from the chemical factories in the area, despite frantic efforts by their officials to deny that was the case.
    Dren had uncovered the reality behind the story of the world-engulfing darkness at the Crucifixion, reported in three of the four Gospels.

Strange globular lights were seen briefly in the night sky, forming constellations that struck unwarranted fear into the hearts of all who saw them; the next morning every cat in the city was dead, eyes staring, mouths open in snarls of terror.
    Katrina had discovered a higher subset of infinite space, controlled and defined by probabilities independent of the passing of time.

A famous violinist, in Barrington for a concert, was found in his hotel room, completely mad, babbling about bells and the music of the spheres. This was the precursor to a series of mental breakdowns among the artists, poets and musicians of the city, all of whom claimed to be besieged by terrifying visions.
    The few other tenants in the apartment building, mostly drug dealers and users, moved out. In haste.
    Dren and Kat never realized they had gone.

Earth tremors, mild but noticeable, were felt in such profusion that seismologists were called in to investigate. No clear conclusions could be reached.
    And in it all and through it all: traces of tintinnabulation, shaken sanity, haunting dreams.

Some of this made the papers, further alarming Katrina's mother Leigh, who was already upset with her daughter's inexplicable silence. In the past they had talked at least once a week; almost a month had passed since her last communication. That call had ended on a sour note, too, which added to Leigh's distress.
    There was no way to reach her at Dren's apartment. Kat had made her calls from a pay-phone, reversing the charges, and had kept up with her e-mail by using the computers at Boyd University. Leigh didn't even know where the apartment was, exactly.
    "I talked to some people at the school last night," she announced over breakfast. "They don't have any idea where she is, or what's happened to her."
    "How could they? I doubt that they keep tabs on every student." Ray Olson was logical, pragmatic, completely unlike his wife. "Especially when they quit coming to class." He returned to the paper.
    "You act like it isn't important."
    He set the paper down, resignedly. Obviously Leigh had decided that this morning was going to be a Discussion Morning. Those rarely ever went well. "If Kat doesn't want to keep in touch, that's her choice. She's an adult. Ever since she met that nutcase—"
    "His name is Adrian."
    "—Adrian, she's been acting like a lunatic herself. Nothing I can do about it. She knows the difference between right and wrong. She just doesn't care."
    "I'm going out there."
    "No you aren't."
    "Yes I am. She might be acting like a lunatic, but she's still our daughter. We can't just abandon her. I won't abandon her." She had raised her voice. Not a good sign.
    "It's a four hour drive, and what are you going to do when you get there? Yell for her on the street corners? Barrington's a big place."
    Andy walked sleepily into the dining room, realized that his parents were arguing, turned and walked back out. He had learned lately that it didn't pay to linger in those instances. Especially when the subject was his sister.
    As he got dressed for school, he kept tabs on the ever-louder conversation. It wasn't hard.
    "What if she's in trouble?" Leigh was standing and shouting now, of course. Inevitably. "What if there's something wrong? You know they're having earthquakes out there."
    Ray forced himself to stay calm. "Tremors. Minor tremors. There's been no damage and no one's been hurt. Sit down, hon, if you're going to talk to me."
    "I will not sit down."
    "Then I'm leaving." He got up, grabbed his coat. "I'm going to work. If Kat needs our help, she knows where we are. And you are not going to Barrington. That's ridiculous."
    Leigh watched him go, furious.
    "You think she's in trouble, Mom?" asked Andy from the hallway.
    "Your father doesn't think so."
    "Well, see you later."
    She grunted an answer, stormed back to the bedroom, muttering something. Andy walked out into the cold December morning, got in the late-model Chevy he'd been given for his sixteenth birthday, drove off.
    He passed Magellan High School without a glance in its direction. There would be trouble later, but he'd deal with it. He had an idea.
    Kat wouldn't listen to Mom and Dad.
    Maybe she'd listen to him. If he could find her.
    The Chevy sped on down the highway.

Dren and Kat were also out on an early morning drive, out to visit a donut shop not too far from the apartment. They parked the car in the empty Steak and Ale lot across the street, hid themselves in the alley beside the shop.
    Presently a woman showed up with the keys. And the money to begin the day. They went in right behind her.
    They left with a hundred and fifty dollars. Dren sent Kat on to the car with the money, went back inside.
    Nearly fifteen minutes passed before he came out, his cheek marred by four long scratches, sweat dripping from his brow.
    "It was all right to take it," Kat said again on the drive back home, as she had several times before. "We had to." She was dirty, her long blonde hair hanging down in unwashed strands, her clothes wrinkled and stained.
    Dren was also rumpled and filthy, his long hair uncombed, dark stubble on his cheeks. He had broken his glasses somehow and patched them together with scotch tape. "We had to. Don't worry about it."
    She suddenly noticed the blood on his face. "What happened back there?"
    "When?"
    "Did you hurt her?"
    No answer. Kat stared out the window, her hands tightening on the bag she held, remembering the fright in the cashier's bright, wide eyes. A terrible suspicion came over her.
    "Did you kill her?"
    "She saw our faces, she would have revealed us. It's nothing. After all, they're just human beings. Lesser animals. You know that's true."
    It was true. She knew that.
    Dren continued talking, never looking away from the road. "We're above them. More than they are. Gtuhanai has made us so. The Old Ones will understand."
    The Old Ones would understand. There was solace in that. She felt the tension within her fade, leaned against him with a small smile on her sullied face.
    She remembered the day she had realized that they had not found Gtuhanai by accident. The same day she had looked into the fractal core of the energy underlying time and space, the unfathomable energy called YOG-SOTHOTH in the book by Von Junzt.
    Silly, foolish book, written by a foolish, uncomprehending man. They had learned more than Von Junzt could have ever dreamed.
    Dren had been so happy, after she came to her senses, after she told him what she'd seen and learned. He had seen the truth days before she did, but had said nothing.
    "It was up to Gtuhanai to reveal it to you," he had told her, holding her close, "if It so chose." And if not, then Dren would have gone on to his destiny alone.
    She remembered how they had made love there before the god, with the sound of its celestial music all around them. The Great One had blessed them with each other.
    But before that revelation, memories were hazy. Muddled.
    There had been someone she talked to sometimes, someone besides Dren, her precious Dren, fellow servant of the Old Ones. And there had been some other place besides the apartment, hallowed temple of great Gtuhanai, who had granted them all this knowledge. It all seemed a long time ago. Before they had seen the madness that bubbled at the center of infinity, before they had heard the songs of the invisible lloigor, before they had seen the many-legged gharoides in the ancient land beneath the earth.
    And there had been some other purpose to their lives, some other reason they had come together. But what higher purpose could there be than the service of mighty Gtuhanai, the Insatiable?
    It was too hard to remember the things of the past. They had come too far to look back. She sighed in contentment and closed her eyes, wondered how she and Dren would look when the Old Ones returned with immortality for their servants. That was written in the Revelations of Glaaki. They would be clothed in glory.
    Soon now, they would break the glass that held their god. Soon, very soon, they would stand together and watch in wonder as Gtuhanai fed and grew. Soon now, they would hear the holy cacophony of their god's cataclysmic ascension.
    Then everything would change.
    It was the will of the Old Ones.
    Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now. They only waited on a sign from their mighty god that it was ready to clear the earth.
    The glass case could not have held It if It had chosen to be free. It was a god, after all. It had waited for them to come; waited for Its chosen servants that they might have a joyful part in the return of the designers and creators of their race. Until then, they must continue to study, to learn, to show themselves approved unto their god, servants that need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of Its dark truths.
    Two special people, born to special purpose. Born to change the course of the world.
    Could anyone doubt it?
    Dren reached into a sack, handed his beautiful, beloved princess a donut. A chocolate donut, her favorite. He had taken a few with him when he left. They ate together in reverent silence, thinking of the greatness yet to come.
    Back to Barrington and the apartment, to wait for the sign.
    To wait for apocalypse.

Andy walked across the campus at Boyd University, dejected. He had gambled everything on finding Kat, reasoning with her, convincing her to come back with him. There was a price to pay for this folly, too. That wouldn't have been so bad if he could at least tell his parents that his sister was all right.
    He was about to drive away when a tall, thin goth detached himself from his gothic crowd, came toward him. "Hey. Hey man. I'm Bob Callahan. They said you're looking for Kat Olson. "
    "I'm her brother."
    "I saw her about a month ago, out near the railroad yard. Going in an apartment building. Carrying some boxes."
    "You know her?"
    "Not real good, but sure, I know her. Everybody here knows her. She's sorta famous. Like a genius. You know, the math and all." He looked at Andy suspiciously. "You sure you're her brother?"
    Andy smiled. "Yeah, she's sorta famous. Where's the railroad yard?"
    In five minutes he was on his way. She might be gone, might have never even been there. Maybe Bob Callahan was lying, just having a laugh at his expense.
    He had nothing to lose by checking it out.
    The building itself was a shabby, deteriorating dump; Kat's red VW was the only car in the lot. It was hard to imagine her even entering the place, much less living there.
    A deep, clangorous din resounded from the attic apartment, annoying the few passersby. A metallic roar, rhythmic, reverberant and menacing.
    Andy scaled the wobbly stairs, tried the door. Unlocked.
    He stepped inside.
    "Sis?"
    Squalor greeted him. Clothes scattered all over the floor, along with pizza cartons and less identifiable debris. Papers, books, unopened mail strewn over every flat surface. And in the back of the room, the source of the sound, a thing like nothing Andy had ever seen. A maelstrom of twisted, spinning metal, nearly six feet high, clattering angrily against the chipped, splintered sides of the heavy glass tank that confined it. Small sparks flashed at random in its turbulent depths.
    He warily approached it. The gold chain around his neck jerked forward as if magnetized, stretching out toward the thing in the tank. The coins in his pockets were also straining toward the thing, along with his car keys. As he hastily stepped back, there was a angry shout from behind him, barely audible over the noise.
    "Sacrilege!"
    He whipped around, ready for a fight. In the doorway were two figures; gaunt, filthy, madness in their eyes. So changed Andy barely recognized them.
    Adrian.
    Katrina.
    The superior beings. Chosen bearers of arcane knowledge, servants of the Old Ones.
    "Kat! Dren! What the hell—"
    They came at him with unexpected speed, faces twisted in fury. He jumped back, dodged, stumbled in the trash on the floor and fell back against the glass case. The roar of the thing within doubled in volume, as if angered by the disturbance.
    Its acolytes seized him, dragged him to his feet, looking at him without a glimmer of recognition. Spun him around to face the monstrous metallic chaos. His neck chain snapped, disappeared into the savagely spinning vortex.
    The monstrosity's churning edges were only inches from his face. Ozone burned his nostrils, stung his eyes. Dren leaned over his shoulder, screamed "It has not tasted human flesh since the days of Mezamalek."
    They shoved him forward.
    Andy twisted in their grip, kicked with all his terrified strength against the side of the glass case, throwing himself backward, away from the thing. The already cracked and weakened glass gave way at last.
    The ravening god of the Aartnna, the unknown force from other worlds and dimensions, moved in its uncanny way out of the shattered cell, out into the room.
    Andy fell to the floor, frantically scrabbled away from the clanging, crackling metallic storm.
    For a split second Adrian Spaulding howled in anger, in fear, in betrayal. Then he was engulfed in the metal, in the whirling, slashing helices, in the mindless horror he had discovered. The thing he had tried to quantify and master, only to be mastered himself.
    All his knowledge, all his desires, all his special gift disintegrated in an explosion of crimson droplets.
    Such was the final transformation great Gtuhanai conferred on its chosen servant.
    Katrina was glancingly caught in the moving mass, flung across the room to crash heavily on the floor. Parts of her were missing, but she was still alive. Barely.
    Her eyes, strangely calm, turned to meet her brother's, her mouth formed a single word.
    "Go."
    He lingered only a moment, then turned and ran.
    Substandard aluminum wiring ripped from the walls, electricity sizzling within Gtuhanai as the metal was absorbed. Plumbing tore free from the floor. The metal beams in the building flowed like molten wax as the influence of the unknown energy continued to spread, changing everything it reached.
    Katrina, tired and numb, closed her eyes to the chaos. The nightmare was over, and she was a child again, writing on Daddy's papers. Daddy was angry. She heard his voice as clearly as she had all those years ago: " Kat, honey, there are some things you can't play with. "
    Twisting, changing shape, the ancient gas pipes burst.
    Andy saw the explosion in his rear-view mirror, stopped the car and wept.

Of course there were interrogations, theories, unsolved questions. There always are.
    Of course Andy's confused story meant nothing to anyone. How could it? The journals, the books, the notes Adrian and Katrina made were all destroyed in the flames.
    Of course there was no sign of the thing Andy described, the thing he begged them to find, the thing he claimed had killed his sister and her friend. The thing that couldn't exist, could have never existed.
    It was all a mystery. Case closed.
    The next spring there were more butterflies in Barrington than there had ever been before, flying, flitting, hovering on the warm breeze.
    "Mommy, Mommy," cried a little boy eagerly, playing in a vacant lot where once an apartment building had stood. "Come and see what I found!"
    His mother came running, marveled at the tiny thing her son had captured in a glass jar, watched as it moved slowly back and forth.
    Not a butterfly.
    Something else.

Copyright © 1999. J.B. Lee. All Rights Reserved.