Closer to him were the first signs of wildlife. Strange lush bushes grew along the length of the outer city wall, the tips and edges of their leaves glowing a light blue. The red flowers nestled into those bushes nipped and snapped and yawned at the tiny glowing particles that darted near and around them. Erik crouched down and reached a tentative finger toward a brilliant crimson bloom. It pulled back its center petals to reveal tiny, sharp-looking teeth and lunged at him. He pulled his finger back, awed.
Remembering the others, he looked around and saw them nearby, groaning and standing and taking in the city as he had. Behind them, a night so thick that no light penetrated it, including the subdued glow of the moon over the city.
“Wow.” Lauren joined him at the outer wall, her eyes wide and shining as she gazed at the city. In the moonlight, the blood on her top looked black. She scratched at the claw-mark on her arm absently. “It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s wild,” Erik said, a little breathlessly.
“A Dios mio,” Mendez said behind him.
“Do you think there are people here?” Lauren asked.
“Possibly,” Ian said, coming up beside her. “There are lights. Could be a sign the sentient species is still running the place.”
“I think we should look around,” Anita said. “That other race from the other world had their escape hatch or whatever it was open here for a reason. Maybe whoever wrote those words or made that artifact to send the Hollowers back to their own dimension escaped here. Or at the very least, maybe the artifact itself is here.”
Erik looked doubtfully at the black behind her. “How do we know it’s not out there?”
“We don’t,” she answered, then smiled playfully. “I don’t know about you, Erik, but I’d rather start in a lit city first, huh?”
“Can’t argue there,” he said, returning her smile with effort. “Let’s go.”
They approached the gates to the city, two panels of elaborate metal scroll work parted just enough to let something of human size through.
Behind them, the pitch black rumbled. Erik couldn’t tell if it was thunder, machinery, or the sinister growl of something angry at their intrusion, and decided he really didn’t want to find out. “We better move,” he said, eying the black, and slipped through the parted gates. Mendez and Anita slipped in after, followed by Lauren and finally, Ian.
“Should we pull the gate closed?” Ian’s hand rest on one of the metal curls in the scroll work
“I don’t think so,” Erik said. “We may need to get the hell out of here in a hurry.”
“Good point,” Ian said, and let go of the gate. “So, where to start?”
“Why don’t we just walk a bit through the streets, get a feel for the place? We’ve been striking out with buildings so far.”
They moved as a group, quiet and close to each other, each step careful, each gaze still tinged with awe. Their footsteps made clipped echoes that sounded stale somehow in Erik’s ears, as if the place had long forgotten how to process the sound of living things moving through it. They passed silent monuments of smooth stone, soaring arches and grand staircases leading to terraces above the main level of the city. No living beings that they could see looked down from the carved stone railings or stared from the shadowed corners of alleys and overhangs. There wasn’t anything Erik could identify as a street sign or marker, and the buildings, on closer inspection, upheld his initial impression of being largely similar, so he tried to fix landmarks in his head. He was starting to think of the city as a graveyard, with stone monuments to the long-gone architects who had built them. But there were no real signs of decay from disuse, and there were the lights. So where were the people?
He turned the word “people” over in his head. Were they people? Were they anything like his concept of people at all?
A bridge loomed over them, linking terrace to terrace, and the curved underside glowed a faint violet that teased and twisted the darkness beneath into shapes, but as they drew closer, passing under, passing through, nothing made a move to touch them.
In the distance, Erik heard another rumble like before, from beyond the gates of the city. It sounded closer.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Anita said.
“No,” Erik agreed. “It doesn’t.”
There was a groaning of metal and another sound, and this time, it sounded clearer; not a machine and not thunder, but something mobile and very large, something recently emerged from the darkness beyond the gates of the city. Something animal and alien, most definitely not Erik’s idea of “people” at all.
“Oh my God,” Ian breathed, and they all turned to see what he was looking at.
They could only see part of the beast outside the gate over the tops of the buildings, but that meant it was big, easily three stories. It was a soapstone kind of greenish-gray, veined with black. It had a grouping of pupilless black eyes set high in a massive head. A row of talon-like teeth, thick and curved, ringed a series of hanging stalks grouped beneath the eyes that swung like thick vines with its movements. It didn’t look like it had a bottom jaw; rather, a thick neck supported the head somehow underneath that curtain of stalks. Erik could see a set of leathery wings drawn close to its curved back. The rest of its body was obscured by the buildings. The gates rattled and groaned, and it roared again, swung its massive head, grumbled, and shook those stalks vigorously. It amazed Erik that the thing could shake so big a head so fast.
“I hope to God that’s not one of the city’s inhabitants,” Lauren said in a low voice.
“I don’t think it can get in. At least, I hope it can’t.” Ian took a step forward. “It’s huge.”
Erik looked around and, spying a terrace overhang completely in shadow, he said, “Let’s move out of its way. Here, under here.” The group moved together into the shadow. Erik backed up until he felt cool stone against his back. From their hiding place they could no longer see the beast, but they heard it rattle the gate again and utter a halfhearted roar. After what felt like an hour or so of waiting in silence, the rumbling receded. There were no sounds of footsteps or even of the flapping of wings. However it managed to move its great bulk, it was silent except for its low thunder-rumble.
Erik was just about to suggest they move on when they heard a kittenish mewling from the street. Its source, too, was beyond their sight line.
“Well, we know at least something is alive in this city,” Anita said.
“Whatever that was,” Mendez’s voice floated to him, “it sounds like it’s a hell of a lot easier to handle than that Goliath outside the gate.”
A tiny shadow stained the moonlit stones of the pavement. It was hard to make out a distinct shape, but it appeared to have at least four short legs. It mewled again, but the sound distorted as it drew out. It sounded strangled, crushed inside the throat making it. A moment later, whatever it was darted away.
Minutes ticked off as they waited to see if it, or anything else, would come back. Nothing did.
Erik felt a hand clap him on the shoulder in the darkness.
“I think it’s safe to move now,” Mendez said.
Erik watched him and Anita emerge as silhouettes at the edge of the overhang, joined a moment after by Ian and then Lauren.
The hand still clasped his shoulder.
He gave a shout and whirled around, squinting, trying to force his eyes to see what was in the heavy shadow behind him. There was nothing there.
“Erik, what’s wrong, man? You okay?” Mendez took a few steps toward him, but he waved that he was fine.
“Everything’s, uh...yeah, let’s go.”
He joined the others at the edge of the overhang, casting several glances over his shoulder to make sure nothing was coming up behind them. Outside in the moonlight, he examined his shoulder. Coppery smudges formed a distinct hand print on his jacket where he’d felt the hand. The fingers, he saw, were very long. There was a slight tear in the jacket fabric about where the fingernail
s would have been. He shuddered. Mendez, who had been watching him, touched the rip and muttered something to himself in Spanish that Erik didn’t quite catch.
“What happened back there?” Anita eyed his shoulder.
“Don’t know. Something touched me.”
Mendez looked at the overhang’s unbroken, silent shadow, and said, “Maybe it was a ghost.”
“Seriously?” Erik cast him a curious, side-long glance.
Mendez met his skepticism with a look that said he was most definitely serious. “Sure, why not? If ghosts are trapped souls and souls are energy, it is not so far-fetched to believe that when creatures in other worlds and on other planets die, their energy might sometimes get trapped, too.”
Erik considered it for a moment. The idea made his mind reel. How were they supposed to handle entities which were both alien and ghost, functioning in a world where the laws of physics and metaphysics might not apply as they did back home? What, in God’s name (or maybe, far outside of it) were they dealing with?
“Detective Mendez has a point,” Ian said after a while. “I mean, it really isn’t any crazier than anything else we’ve seen.” From the tightness beneath his words, Erik got a brief sense of the toll all this was taking on him, the strain to the sanity he was so afraid of losing. “This could be a graveyard world. Or for all we know, this could be the Heaven—or Hell—for an alien race, another dimension.”
Erik ran a hand through his hair and sighed. The massive implications made his head hurt. “I suppose it’s possible. Geez, alien ghosts. And that thing out there—I can’t even begin to....” He shook his head. He could hear the tension in his own voice, the weariness, and tried his best to keep it from creeping into irritation. “Okay, look, let’s keep looking around. My brain has just about reached its processing limit. I think you guys are probably dead on about this place, but I don’t want any part of some alternate Heaven or Hell. If those aliens or whatever sent their artifact here, let’s find it and find a way out of here.”
“Agreed,” Mendez said. The others nodded.
As they walked, Erik could feel the others’ eyes on his back. He thought Mendez may have told them to give him a little space. They were all tired, sore, beaten up, scared, hungry, and thirsty. They had all been through a lot. But Erik thought they recognized that he had shouldered the responsibility for them on top of all that, despite their protests. And that responsibility was monumental in a world so unlike anything they had ever seen. They hadn’t found water yet, nor could they be sure that any plant there wouldn’t cause them to die outright of poisoning or explode on the spot or something. There was no way home except by accident or the will of the Hollowers who had sent them away to begin with. They were looking for an artifact they had never seen before, on the off chance that it might still work after, what? Centuries? Millenia? And if they should find that particular needle in a haystack, they’d still need to draw the Hollowers out of wherever they were and time it so that they could use the thing before the Hollowers opened up portals to only God knew where. He had promised Casey that even Hell wouldn’t keep him from getting home to her. And it was a promise he had every intention of keeping if he could. He was just starting to run out of faith that he could, in the face of what they were up against. This wasn’t like the other times.
It was like closing one’s eyes and spitting, and hoping to hit that face on Mars.
He remembered a conversation he and Dave had had once about the odd coincidence of their having found each other. Dave had thought it was a lucky accident, but at the time, Erik believed that it might have been more. He thought then that whatever quality that had drawn the Hollowers to them maybe had drawn them to each other. He hadn’t thought of it so much as a guiding force like angels or even fate, really. It was just some quality, some extra sense that maybe even humans had to some degree that had helped them find each other. Maybe it had been some kind of cosmic yin to a yang.
But having seen other dimensions, whole other worlds not just outside his solar system but his whole known universe, he wondered. Maybe it was more than even an extra sense. Maybe there was some force as intertwined with the Hollowers as they were, and that somehow, maybe in visiting these worlds, they had become as intertwined with that force as they were with each other. Maybe, like Feinstein, that force wanted to be able to pass on help and knowledge, even in death.
That concept made him feel less lost, less hopeless.
Behind him, snippets of conversation made their way between his thoughts.
“...that only happens in horror movies....”
“Ghosts can’t do that. Besides, I think that’s only if you believe, or something....”
“...at least it’s quiet. We’re not being smacked around by tentacles and....”
“...haven’t found us yet....”
“...angels or demons, or maybe carrion-eaters. Who knows?”
“...tombstones for one crazy-big head. Can only imagine what the mausoleums are like.”
Erik noticed the soft gray wisps of mist just then, swirling around him and ahead of him. At times, the formations looked to him like faces before stretching or shifting out of shape. The mist felt cool and damp where it brushed against his skin. He looked down at his arms and noticed tiny pearlescent beads were left behind it the wake of the mist’s sweep. He brushed them off and they floated away and pulled apart.
The mist swirled in front of him again, whirling up in a mini-cyclone, then shaping itself into something vaguely humanoid. Impressions mimicked the features of a face: two half-dollar-sized indents for eyes, a small rise for a nose, a curve of a mouth.
Erik stopped. He ran a hand through his hair, and the mist figure simulated the action. He tilted his head, and the figure did the same.
He heard the others stop short behind him.
“What the—?”
The mist figure looked up at Mendez’s voice and the vague face of it changed. The round impressions of eyes shrank to slits, the bump of a nose and curve of mouth elongating into a snout. Its bottom draw dropped and stretched, and it unearthed a growl that blew the hair back off Erik’s forehead. They screamed, and were about to run when the mist figure fell apart and blew away.
“Okay, seriously, what the fuck was that?” Mendez was breathing hard, one protective arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“Ghost,” Erik said in between pants.
“No shit,” Mendez said. “Maybe it’s time to get off the streets.”
They backed toward a nearby staircase and made their way up two and three at a time. The staircase wound around the massive sides of an obelisk building, climbing higher than suggested from the street. Erik supposed it was the skewed physics of the place, that things found space to be where there didn’t appear to be any.
They reached a landing that turned out to be three stories up, looking out over the city wall to the landscape beyond. Erik could see the foliage-fringed edge of a dense jungle in the sand before that impenetrable darkness swallowed it in obscurity. Watching a low frond like a palm rustle in the sliver of moonlight, Erik thought it wasn’t such a dead world after all. That was, unless the only things living here fed on the dead. Remembering the plant outside the city and the beast from the lightless desert beyond it, that theory seemed entirely possible.
“I think I found a door,” Lauren said, pulling Erik out of his thoughts. He turned to see her standing by a slab of stone with a rounded top and an ornate x-shaped handle of silver where a doorknob would have been. It was free-floating somewhat close to the side of the building but not embedded in it. Erik looked around at the other terraces and saw from his new vantage point that many of them had such similar slabs near various buildings.
He went over to it, checked behind it, and ran a hand across its surface. It floated a couple of feet off the ground, but the handle was within reach. He wrapped a hand around it but hesitated.
“Go ahead,” Mendez said. “Open it.”
Erik glanced ba
ck at him and the others in turn. They were all nodding encouragement.
“Okay, here goes.” He yanked on the handle, and all hell broke free.
Chapter 15
The moment Erik pulled on the handle, the stone door swung easily open, and hell came pouring out.
A rush of mist, streams of silver air like he’d seen in the street below, came streaming out of the doorway space. It knocked Erik onto his back and pushed the others up against the railing wall. The mist emitted a high wail like the shearing of metal, and as it got free of the doorway, it began to split off into individual entities that tore frantically around the sky, circling each other. They gained definition, taking on the long-dead skeletal shapes of winged and horned things, of beasts with massive heads overlong muzzles lined with teeth, of things that reminded Erik of the pictures of angler fish he’d seen. There were things that looked to him like masses of eyes and masses of snaking, squirming appendages, there were fish-like things and things vaguely reminiscent of velociraptors. All of them surged and swam and darted across the sky, a smog of them blotting out the moon.
Then the banshee-screaming forms began tearing at each other, ripping into misty flanks with misty mouths, clawing misty underbellies, and the tattered shreds rained down on the terrified group of huddled humans beneath.
“Oh my God,” Erik breathed. “Oh my God.”
He felt Mendez’s hands beneath his arms, pulling him out from under the carnage. Then he was up and they were running down the steps, taking two at a time, gliding down the last few and pounding the black stones of the pavement as they ran back toward the gate. The screeching forms above had noticed them and were following them.
A slicing dagger of pain opened up between his shoulder blades, but Erik kept running. Another opened up along his bicep, and the scream so close to his ear urged him on. He heard cries of pain and surprise from the others as well.
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