But Larry remained frozen to the spot while saliva drooled from the corner of his lips; his mind had retreated into a black velvet cocoon of nothingness, locking out all stimuli.
Benny turned, sprinted for the truck and never looked back. Even when Larry’s screams started moments later, he somehow managed to start the engine with trembling fingers.
* * *
Hay Corner’s lone fulltime cop Travis Henderson was deep into a game of computer chess when the front wall of his modest office caved in after a too-intimate encounter with the front of Steve Wilson’s pickup. Amidst a cloud of tinkling glass and choking dust, Travis’ mind briefly flashed back to the famous scene from the movie The Terminator when Arnold Schwarzenegger had “come back.”
But when a babbling, white-faced teenage boy tumbled from the truck’s ruin and crawled to Travis on hands and knees and screamed once before he fainted, Travis knew that something serious had gone down. He managed to revive the youth a few minutes later , and puzzled together just enough from the boy’s insane ravings to send the highway patrol to the old Harmon place, where investigating officers discovered a scene rivaling an abbatoir gone mad.
After leading the suddenly docile, silent youth to a holding cell moments later, the boy crawled beneath the bunk. Curling into a fetal position, he sucked his thumb, staring at nothingness through glazed eyes. The youth was later identified as Benny Ringman. The young man was eventually transferred upstate and placed in a mental ward. He never uttered another coherent word, again.
* * *
Behind locked doors in his office at the county morgue two days later, coroner Evans switched off the surgical saw, and removed the skullcap from what was left of Larry Paultz’s head. On a stainless steel table nearby, two sets of mangled human remains sat piled in eerie, oozing silence, awaiting his examination. A strange, nasty odor issued from the remains in noxious waves, saturating the office.
Evans was about to examine Larry’s extracted brain when the phone rang. Wiping one latex-gloved hand on a towel, he picked up the phone. “Coroner Evans speaking. Yes, I’m examining the Paultz boy right now. No, nothing definitive as to cause of death yet, but I did find traces of alcohol in both sets of remains. No, no indication of drugs. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they were involved. You know how kids are, today. Yes, I’m sure the parents are anxious to know more. But with the bodies in such a terrible state, it may be difficult to determine exact cause of death. Yes. I’ll call when I know more.”
Evans hung up the phone, and smiled; he already knew the cause of death, and had known it all along. ”By their smell, shall ye sometimes know them near”, he quoted from the Necronomicon.
With urgency, he turned his attention back to the brain lying on the table. He could no longer be denied. Beneath his latex gloves, strange ripplings and swellings had begun. If he didn’t remove them soon, his native tissues would stretch and tear them to shreds.
After discarding the gloves, Evans bent over the brain laying on the examining table, and his fingers elongated into squirming, gray-green tentacles. On the tip of each, a tiny, sucking mouth drooled in anticipation. Delicately the tentacles probed, nudging the convoluted folds of tissue aside, seeking the source of the dead youth’s persona.
Evans’ eyes glazed in anticipation as his probing appendages neared the source. The death of the young was so much more sweet and savory; their emotions - - fear and horror among them, so much more intense. Already, he could feel the first frightened stirrings of Larry Paultz’s mind. This was the sweetest moment of all: when a mind regains consciousness but knows it is dead, and must relive past and present horrors, forever. Already, the victim’s mind was screaming.
After a couple of hours, Evans sighed like a druggie coming down from a high, and reluctantly withdrew his alien appendages. Placing the brain in a jar of formaldehyde, he hid it behind a large, sliding false panel in his private office next to scores of other “mementos”, some of which dated back tens of thousands of years. Due to the horrific nature of the young men’s deaths and their horribly mangled remains, no one would miss Paultz’s brain tissue. Both boy’s funerals would be closed casket affairs. Evans would savor this sweet, young mind time and time again.
Sighing, the thing masquerading as “Evans” glanced around its old familiar office, lamenting that he would soon have to take on a new identity in a new geographic location. It was always the same, thanks to the all-too-brief life span of the hated humans.
Returning to the sink, he washed his hands and glanced at the clock. Time to lock up for the day. He had an urgent errand to attend to; an oversight he should have corrected a year ago and would have, had he not been out of the country on urgent business related to Them. He hoped that he could achieve his task without the intervention of unwise, prying human eyes.
The shoggoth had proved a most unwise choice for guardian of the lesser gate at Harmon’s farm. Crudely effective, the gelatinous horror’s basic lack of “tact” had made the place a hotbed for those who must not see…exactly what the Great Old Ones didn’t want. He needed to visit the Harmon place tonight, move the shoggoth, close the gate, and reestablish both to a safer location. Now that Harmon, a minor human disciple of the Great Old Ones was dead, the outhouse was no longer safe.