Dreams In The Plush House

Dreams In the Plush House From the notebooks of H.P.Lushcraft, edited and re-typed by Simon Barber. It is true what they say: that I have blasted the body of my best friend to its constituent atoms with a colossal charge of aluminised RDX high explosive - one great enough to break the windows of the nearest cottage, three miles away on that lonely moor where the deed was done. But it had to be: I pray to the gods of the outer dimensions that it was enough, and that it was done in time ! For otherwise I shall be seeing Josiah Mytholmroyd again, and I will recognise him despite what he has become. Josiah was an artist: I was an engineer, though since cubhood we had been the closest of friends despite our differing natures. We grew up together in the small grey-stone town of Osgaholme, tucked beneath a wing of the towering moor that writhed its stone-thewed way up to the Border and the newly rebuilt wall that Hadrian first built two centuries before. Both our families were of that place: bloodlines ran long and deep rooted, back to the days when the Northland was home to species now long extinct. In my canine features and his there was the proud "Osgaholme Look", the slightly reptilian cast to the features that was the gift of many bold damsels who sought out dragons in their lairs. Both of us have bony nodules under our fur, where our long-distant ancestors bore splendid spinal crests. But it was no shadow out of the past that stretched out its padded paws to seize my friend. Indeed, we had both left the clear air of our native town, with its cheerful priestesses and healthy open-air ceremonies each season on the great stones of the moortop. To the South we both fared, to start our careers in the wider world. And for two years we scarcely saw each other, he to his Art and me to study Vague Engineering (a variation of Precision Engineering, but more laid-back.) Letters became fewer and more routine as our schedules filled, until it had been six months since we had spoken. The telephone rang in the small hours of the morning. I had retired what seemed like a few minutes earlier, after a full evening at the local pub, the Merry Terrorist. My head swam as I reached towards the shrilling phone, ready to pour wide-awake invective down the optic fibre for anything less than a full emergency. "Helmsley," came a gasp. "Now.... or it'll be too late....". There was a heaving, gasping sound, as if he had just run a marathon, and his tongue was hanging out in heat stress. For I recognised Josiah's voice at once, despite the strange - change that seemed to have come over it. "You MUST come. You know the place ? The one I told you about in the last letter ... the new house ... the one I was doing so well in ..." He broke down, and again came that odd gasping breath. I looked at my watch: three ten a.m. Outside the window was flowing with icy rain: the address in my databook translated as thirty miles away. But my ears went down like our wolven ancestors' at the scent of a lurking sabretooth as I recalled what I had almost forgotten: Josiah was not a late-night person. "Stay there," I said firmly. "I'll be right over."

Half an hour later, the wheels of my trike hissed on the wet tarmac outside an unfamiliar house. Despite the urgency of the summons, I took a minute to calm my nerves and look around at the sleeping street under the orange late-night glow. Rain hissed and spat on the white-hot expansion nozzle of the bike: tarmac burned with a fatty crackle as the hydrogen peroxide seeped out of the hairline crack in the T-Stoff line that I had been meaning to fix for a week now. Josiah had rented the odd house of the street. Number Twenty A was unlike the others, unlike the stout grey stone houses that reminded me of home. Gods, but the place was new ! I shuddered at the raw bareness of the place, its ageless angles grated hard against my sensibilities. Unknown centuries had passed, long years of brooding, stony silence had lain on this land - before ever this place was built. "It must date back only to the nineteen-seventies..." I regarded the PVC framed windows with horror. "Gods! That's only a few generations... there's folk who saw this place built, who're still alive ...". I steeled myself, and strode towards that dread portal of veneered chipboard that loomed featurelessly before me. Some doors I knew had the calming passage of Time graven on them, in reassuring shell scrapes, or the long-since rusted dots where a foe's flayed hide had been nailed there in the carefree days on old. I knocked, suppressing a shudder at the thin boom my scaleknuckled paw made on the twentieth-century thing. The knocker was of plastic, not yet even blushing with the decades. Above me, the reproduction carriage lamps glowered down mockingly. There was not even the familiar looming shadow of a Gambrel roof to break the monotony. Footsteps answered, slow, dragging steps that seemed to take eternity to reach the door. With a soundless sweep of stainless steel hinges forged in the dread smithies of Taiwan, the door opened. "Helmsley..." the voice was a strangled tone, thick-sounding and muffled through a thick hood: I could barely see his face. Only his eyes were visible, and I realised he was wrapped in bandages almost like one of the mummified felines folk dig up in Aegypt, till the funereal deities get annoyed and make them put them back "You came ... but .. I ... I didn't dare bring you into this before ... bring anybody in ... but it'll happen anyway .. got to be stopped.." His voice was rising and falling in odd jerks, as if it wanted to be a high-pitched squeal, that he was forcing back to some semblance of normality. "You, I can trust ... this has to be ... ended. Here." "Jose!" I grabbed him as he staggered: he flinched away, shrinking from my touch. In that one instant, he had felt oddly soft, as if his fur had got much thicker beneath the robes than I remembered. "What's wrong ? You sound terrible - I'll get a doctor." "No !" For a second his voice was strong. Then he pulled the door shut on the night, and I shivered as I looked around the room. Josiah had told me about the "fantastic inspirations" he had been getting in the place he had rented so cheaply. But his notes had soon become guarded, and the last few had only wanted to talk over old times back in the North country. There was something strange about the room. I looked around, my fur rising under my clothes. It was nothing the eye could really focus on - but there was a bizarre sensation that the angles of the floor and walls all came together in exact ninety degree joints, as

if the architect had been wholly ignorant of the wonderful spatial dislocations a real house had - or had chosen to deliberately suppress them. Josiah slumped on a sofa, which seemed almost as new as the house itself. "The whole thing is," he said wearily "that is there's almost nothing definite and concrete I can tell you - it's all damnable hints, and suggestions, and coincidences. But .. I'll have to start at the beginning." He stared around the room, its plasterboard walls seeming to leer mockingly at us. "The place was cheap, you know that. I wanted somewhere near Town - with plenty of room to work in. The Agent sent me the keys, and told me to look round - there was something in her voice I didn't like. But, it WAS cheap." "I first saw the place in sunlight, bright sunlight. It's a nice neighbourhood: you've seen the houses around it ? When I got there the place was - well, it was as if it was just waiting for me. I didn't mind it not having any of the usual features - you can get private firms to dig tunnels and such, install secret doors and close off attic rooms, no problem. So I came in - and I stayed." He gave a shudder. "It all went unbelievably well at first. You recall that piece I told you about, the three by four metre tryptich, "The Feaster From The Dark ?" I finished that in two weeks flat, working here. I sold it, too - and I decided to take a long lease on the property. Then I really started to work." He rose, and shuffled towards a wholly rectangular door, that led into a dining room. As I followed, I noticed something odd about his gait, as if he was wearing shoes that were far too big for him and again I wondered about why he covered up so. He stopped in the centre of the room. "You remember how I used to have to go to bed early, I just couldn't stay awake after midnight ? Played havoc with most of the temple services, I know. Oh, the caffeine and Benzedrine I used to get through....... but that all changed. I found myself painting up to all hours. It was - different. I'd sort of half fall asleep, but my hand kept working - sometimes I'd just wake up, and find myself on the floor. Always - there." He pointed to a spot in the corner of the room, by the window. Looking closely, I saw that the peculiarly pink nylon carpet was scuffed and worn away, despite being well away from where you might expect anyone to walk. As I turned round to face him, out of the corner of my eye I almost saw something. You know, those stop-motion films, where you see plants blossoming in seconds ? Imagine if you filmed a wet blanket covered in cress seeds, sprouting stealthily in the darkness, white groping tendrils reaching up. Searching. It was like that - but nothing actually moved. Nothing actually happened. Only the .... the sensation, of how it would be, if it very silently and suddenly began to move. Josiah stopped, and from beneath his hood he fixed me with a bleak, penetrating gaze. "You saw it too ? That's the spot I keep finding myself drawn to - I go to bed upstairs, and wake up there. And the Dreams ......" "Sometimes it's not so bad. I'm walking through a landscape, and it's like a badly developed film. All the colours are just that bit off - there's nobody there. But sometimes - there is." He grabbed my wrist, and almost dragged me out of the room, slamming the door shut. I noticed that he left the light shining brightly on that place. "I dream, Helmsley, but it's not LIKE a dream ! I see -

rounded, soft things, and the colours they have - it's nothing like I've seen in any sane five dimensions. They .... they squeak." "Squeak ?" I felt the fur on the back of my neck beginning to bristle. He nodded. "And there's a castle. It looks all right from a distance full of underground passages, dug right into the earth - the gargoyles, even, look fine till you come right up to them. And the geometry ..... is DIFFERENT. The ground floor is on scale, but the upper stories - each one gets smaller as you climb, as you see from the outside. But from the inside, you know it's not really like that. Each upper storey is angled further and further away from our reality, so the topmost tower looks as if it's a kilometre away and it is. But not in the place you think !" "It was only last week, the dreams changed. I found myself going right into the castle. The walls are pastel hues, and the great and terrible stairways are of injection-moulded plastic. It was full of sounds. Squeaks, and giggles, and a horrible soft bumping noise from behind the locked doorways. Higher, every time I went higher - and then I was almost at the top. There was a barred gate, and something beyond it - something I just had to have. It was as if hundreds of people were standing right behind me invisibly, holding their breaths - all looking expectantly at my back, willing me to go through the doorway. But I'm not going !" He collapsed back in the chair. I expected to hear him panting for breath with emotion, but all I heard was the creak of the sofa. For a heartbeat's space, I felt that I was alone in the room - there was such a terrible and total silence, between his words. "You, Josiah, have GOT to get out of here." My ears dipped as I faced him. "I don't care how good it is for your art - this place is killing you." The figure on the couch gave a weak laugh. "Oh. Oh, don't I just wish that was all of it." There was that strange and utter breathless silence. "If I go, it won't help me. I just know I'll find myself back here again - They didn't say so, but I know, now. And ...." he gestured to the bare walls. "When I knew you were coming, I burned the works I'd made recently. They'd got into them, you see. And someone else will fall into the same trap - maybe someone they can make more use of." I sprang to my feet. "You can't Know that. Come away, now, and we'll find a priestess - someone who'll know what to do." My grip was firm on his shoulder - and then there came the horror that crashed my wetware completely, as for the first time in my life I fainted dead away. For my grip had sunk deep into a spongy, soft boneless mass, and dislodged the hood from that which had been Josiah Mytholmroyd. Fear had felled me, horror awakened me. There was a timeless stretch, where I looked up at the light shining in my eyes. I was in that room, that nylon-floored place where the corner lay unquiet on the twentieth-century house. For an instant I lay petrified, then jerked myself out of there with the urgency of an ant struggling out of a burning glass' focus. "Josiah !" I shouted. There was no reply. From room to room I raced, frantically searching - from ground floor to fibreglasslagged loft, I was alone. Hurrying to the door, I saw that the first glimmer of grey dawn was in the sky, and that my trike remained faithfully outside. "He must be on foot," I told myself, then stopped, frozen once

more in shock. The chain was still on the door. He had not left me that way and both the kitchenette door and all the windows were similarly bolted. But he was gone. I left the house, first scouring it for evidence. In the garden was a burned mass of paper and plastic where he had destroyed some works that he had recently produced. I stood there, the filthy scent of burning plastic stinging my nose in the rain-wet dawn, and thought about our long friendship. Someone must know about this, I decided - and I decided to find out. The housing agent was being most cooperative, I decided, so I slackened the barbed wire holding him down. Normally, I manage without the techniques I learned in the Cub Scouts, but most days my best friend hasn't been taken by a force that someone let him walk right into without a word of warning. "I'll talk ...." the hyena gasped, as I let go of his throat. "The house is safe - there's not a physical thing wrong with it there's nothing illegal about it..." I gestured again with the soldering iron. He swallowed nervously. "But ... we've had trouble with it before," he hurried on "Nobody stays for more than a few months, and there were a few suicides. Not IN the house, but folk who'd just left it. Rather suddenly. So, as a policy decision, we decided not to decrease its rental potential by .." his voice ended in a shriek as I applied persuasion. "I'd like whatever history you have on the place," My voice I held level, as I looked down at him. "And it'd better be everything - because if I find out you're holding back, I'll take you there and leave you. I'm sure you know where." It's amazing what people can do for you, given the right motivation. Back on the trike, I returned home to bath and eat, and took stock. Just as I was finishing breakfast, there was the thump of the day's post arriving on the doorstep. I leafed through it - and froze. The handwriting I recognised instantly, though the postmark was the day's before. Feeling through the packet, I recognised the shape of the strange diaries that Josiah had always used. And opening it, I began to be afraid. Very afraid. "January 12th. A dark day. Was working on epic scale "Devourer from The Blackness", when something odd happened. Part of the canvas seemed to grow translucent - as if I was holding it up to the light. But the view I can see is NOT what's on the real far side of this ! Will ask next door if their pentacle is leaking. Strange, though looks quite unfamiliar. My model didn't see a thing. Felt ill at ease all day." "January 14th. Phone call from art sales director, demanding to know why I'd changed the designs from that agreed. I told him I hadn't - we argued for awhile. Went round to see him after lunch, full of righteous indignation. Horrors. He's right. There is something there, peeking slyly round the back of the fifth ghoul on the left, that I didn't draw. But I did - the style's mine, and the rest of the composition seems to have almost flinched away from it, as if the canvas had puckered

up to let it squeeze into the picture. Apologised, and promised to draw more carrion over it to cover it up. Gave me quite a shiver. Dreams again. Where from ?" "January 20th. Woke up again in the corner, paint brushes still wet, head aching like I'd had ten pints of Kreakstone's Kamikake. Thing on canvas. Goddess ! It's like nothing I've ever drawn before. Maybe primal memories seeping up from somewhere ? I looked at the colours, and at my palette - and realised. I don't know how to produce colour like that. Nobody does - I hope !" "Jan.22 . Am played out with painting: nothing but things that are best left undreamed of come out of my brushes. Decided to take up sculpture instead: plenty of scrap metal around. Can use the patio as workshop, and surely rusty steel can't be twisted into what comes into my dreams - and out of them ! Into town twice today. First time round, bought big oxyacetylene cutting torch. The house seemed Happy, for the first time since New Year ! Realised I'd forgotten everything else I'd gone in to get. Torch is a bit big and clumsy for the job, but it was an impulse buy. Saw it, just had to have it, you know ? I'm sure I'll find a use for it." There was a break, where pages had been torn out. Only two more entries were left in there - both dated yesterday. As I read them, I was struck by the deterioration - and more, the curious TRANSFORMATION, of the handwriting. Had I not seen in that one soulsearing instant what doom had come at last to Josiah, I would be puzzling about nervous diseases or other sane and explicable causes. But as I read, I understood. "Feb. 15th they are almost here now. Last night I caught a reflection in the mirror - right behind me ! Not when I turned round, of course. That's how they do it. I should have guessed, last week. Every time I took up the torch to practice, I got bored - much too quickly ! Attention span - they're breaking it up, I hear their squeaking even now. And if I didn't use the torch, why was the cylinder half empty ? Or DID I use it ? SHE comes to me every night now. There is no way of keeping her out. This place - she told me what it was built for, and what they intended to do with it. The regular walls won't stop them - even the special wall was only meant to keep them from breaking through till everything was ready. She is soft, all over. Except for her eyes, where she wears contact lenses - I saw her without them, and even in the mirror ....! From two dimensions to three .... into my dreams, into the picture, feeding on being thought about. And last week I knew it wasn't a dream - there was pink fur on the sheets, I could still scent where she'd lain. And I knew where they'd been before. What was it that everyone in the last half of the twentieth century identified with ? From two dimensions then, into three. And whole temples reared to them in daylight, though nobody knew what they really were. But I found out. Goddess, but didn't I just ! The temple in Europe was destroyed, but there were - backups created, in secret, where they could come through again, as soon as they gathered strength. She says they're strong again. But they want to keep some of us, just the way we are. She says I'll be one of them soon, and I'll go down and wait - until I can open the Gate for them. That's why I can't leave - I'm mostly made of the same stuff they are now, have

to stay near the Opening like a plant in sunlight. Even though it's not sunlight, and it's coming from below." Feb 15th - afternoon. It's getting dark outside. I didn't think it'd happen so fast - the change is accelerating ! It won't be in the corner of the room I wake up tomorrow - and it won't really be me, any more. Helmsley will know what to do .... ask Hepworth for the picture, so he'll SEE." There was only a scrawl at the bottom: it was undated. "Helmsley - for the sake of everything, if it's not me you talk to - if I say it's all right, if IT says sorry to trouble you - KILL IT ! It's still got enough real matter in it, before the Change is finished - after, you won't be able to. And if you find me - after remember the seived sponge. It'll take more than that. Will put this in last post, pray you get it. You've got to Understand ! Hepworth suspects, but doesn't believe. Analyse the concrete - check the GATE !" Here the diary ended. And just as I pulled my trike leathers on, came the thump of the second post, with the estate agent's information. I looked at it. And knew how little time there was left. "Hepworth" was Josiah's art director: his address was listed in the front of the diary. I pulled off the autobahn still doing a hundred and twenty K, and was in front of his office just as he was opening it up. "Josiah Mytholmroyd," I looked him in the slitted eye. He took one look at me, and his goat ears went flat. "You're a - friend - of his ?" I gave a grim nod, and his nostrils flared nervously. "Come in. He said he'd got a picture you were to look at - said it'd explain things." He shivered as he led me into the back room. "You understand, it's not the kind of thing we exhibit in public." There was a covered canvas hanging in an alcove: Hepworth just pointed at it and withdrew silently. I had already seen the worst - or so I thought. But as I pulled the cover away, I realised I had been deceiving myself. On the surface, it was an everyday street scene - ghouls feeding under a gibbous moon, tentacled citizens coruscating fantastically to each other in a cheerful manner. But then I looked again, and the details crawled out of the background like worms out of a flooded lawn. There were - things, gleefully lurking round every corner, on every rooftop. Sometimes they were just hinted at - a protruding fluffy rump, a heart-shape rune glimpsed through a darkened window. But in the foreground, hidden from view of the rest of the cast, something stared boldly at the "camera", as if the time for hiding was almost over. It was - indescribable. Short, rounded, pink, soft as a bathroom sponge - its unnaturally plushy form was moulded in mockery of a female shape, and its chubby paw beckoned the viewer seductively. This was what had come to Josiah in darkness - and I knew that it was no figment of a diseased imagination, but DRAWN FROM LIFE ! That night, I returned to the house, prepared. I took up the carpet in the shunned dining room, and discovered what I had dreaded. The concrete underneath was smashed to fine gravel, and my entrenching tool made short work of it. Houses of that age were not built with a metre and a half of solid concrete under internal floors. But this one was - and I

nodded grimly as I fed a chunk of the unexpectedly dense stuff into the pocket analyser I had borrowed from the Vague Engineering department. "Barium and iron shot aggregate," I read out on the screen. "They use it for reactor shielding." And for what else, I asked myself rhetorically. I knew I was about to find out. I uncovered the body of my friend at the bottom of the plain concrete layer. He lay on what at first I took to be a plain grid of reinforcing rods, an empty set of gas cylinders and a cutting torch next to him. He was light as I lifted him: he had no scent but a musty odour, as of cotton waste beginning to mildew. Around him, the iron bars were almost cut through - and they were iron, not steel, as my analyser confirmed. "Pure, unalloyed, cold iron," I felt my ears drop as I stared in disbelief at the readout. "I've never even seen it in an engineer's catalogue - there's no demand." But then I recalled the other uses cold iron was reputed to have, against things that steel blades were powerless against. Looking down into the excavation, it reminded me of a castle portcullis: the frantic, final exhortation written in Josiah's diary came back to warn me. That was a Gate, all right, and it would only take a little more work to open it fully. With that thought firmly fixed in mind, I steeled myself to do what had to be done. The corner shop was closed early, so I made my way to the unlit Girl Scout hut on the corner of the playing field. Breaking in quietly, my conscience twinged even as I dropped a handful of gold sovereigns into the charity box. Rummaging in the supplies locker, I extracted about sixty kilos of stabilised P.E.T.N., some cyclonite blocks, and the requisite detonators and blasting cord. They would never notice it was gone - but if I failed, then they would all find out - sooner or later. An hour on the trike, driving slowly, brought me to the first hill crest looking out towards our ancestral Northlands. I could go no further - Josiah's body was looking more unnaturally fluffy by the minute, and I recalled his warning about the "seived sponge". If you take a living sponge and force it through a fine seive, the sundered cells will reunite once more into its own form - I prayed to the howling dark between the stars, that I was in time to destroy this thing, before it rose again undying ! "Josiah," I looked down at the foreshortened face for one last time, remembering out cubhood playing on the wide moors and smokefragrant altars of our home. "Old friend - goodbye." With that, I placed the last cyclonite slab over the top, and wound another length of blasting cord around it. When detonated, the massive charge would blow inwards, with a force sufficient to trigger an old-fashioned fission bomb. It would just have to be enough. I hope and pray it was ! As I stood there on the moor, my ears ringing from the colossal blast a thousand metres away, shielded by an overhang from the rocky debris raining down, my thoughts were not restful. Laid to rest though my friend was (or so I still hope), this business was not yet at an end. I thought of what the property agent had said, of the records he had sent. Far on the outer rim of the world had this horror awoken, to

spread first its image and then to rear its temples. First in California, then in Florida, and then - tentacles had stretched back across the world. There had been such - images - brought to life in as convincing manner as mortal men had best managed, made flesh in mechanism and costume. Gods ! If only they had known ! If those who had walked those plastic streets had been granted one glimpse of what lurks and gibbers behind it all, of the softness and squeaking that lies behind life, waiting to squeeze its paws through towards us. If they had only known, they might have gone mercifully mad then and there . A luxury I am denied. For the facts speak for themselves. Of one Hiram Laxenbirger Jr. the Third, who had come to our land carrying dark secrets and the wealth long-garnered in nameless ways. Of how he had the house built - only, it WASN'T A HOUSE ! It was a hatchway - a false shell covering what mattered, the Gateway that he had caused to yawn. Yet that gate was built closed, for the things that are beyond it are impatient, and take it ill that mortals impose upon their schedules. So the barium and cold iron, intended to hold the lid on for a few short years - and that site was destined to be the heart of plushiness in our land, before the War that brought all such things to an end. For years the Gate had been closed, except where sensitive minds had lain too close. And then Josiah, the artist - how they must have giggled and tittered, down there ! There was creative energy and to spare: they had fastened on him and grown strong, while their Cuteness waxed strong enough to punch through iron and concrete, reaching up to take him as one of their own. The police took my story, and as they always do, believed every last word of it. I am told that the place is being torn down, and I for one will not be sorry to see that Newness gone forever. But if only I could be sure ... we mortals are such damnably curious things. If I could only go down there and see with my own eyes that the half-severed rods of iron are seamlessly welded shut, that the concrete is poured once again, and that it is spiked with enough radioisotopes to mercifully kill anyone foolish enough to linger there, at least for the next few centuries. But if just one technician stays behind - if he falls asleep, and nobody spots him in time.... welding torches may cut as well as weld, and gates may open that should forever be closed. [End of account #342]