by J. S. Volpe
* * *
“This would have been a lot easier if you didn’t have such a thing about gorgim,” Illyana said to Luornu as they made their way along the ridges in Spooky Swamp.
“I’m sorry,” Luornu said with a guilty grimace. “It’s just that my dad died in the war against the gorgim. He was in the Eighth Battalion when—”
“I know the story. You’ve told it to me before. And I’m not saying I don’t sympathize. I’m just saying that this would have been a lot easier if we hadn’t had to come through the swamp. I know a lot of unknown trails through the forests on the gorg side of the river. I used to take some of my old boyfriends over there to, y’know, make out and stuff. It was the excitement, I guess. The danger. It made everything that much hotter. You know what I mean?”
“Um, yeah,” Luornu said. Actually she didn’t. She wasn’t very well-versed in the ways of men and women. She had kissed a boy exactly once and felt so freaked out by it she refused to talk to him for months afterward. She figured she just wasn’t cut out for things like that. And even if she were, all the groping and lewd comments she’d had to endure since starting work at Moe’s a year ago had pretty much killed any interest she might have had in exploring male/female relations any further.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Illyana rolled her eyes. “I know. You can stop saying that.”
“Oh, geez, I’m making you mad, aren’t I? I’m sorry.”
Illyana raised her hands to the heavens and cried “Argh! Knock it off. I know you’re sorry. You’ve been saying it every five seconds ever since we entered this stupid swamp and every two when it was raining earlier.”
“I—” Luornu had been about to say “I’m sorry” yet again. Instead she stopped, eyes widening. “Oh!”
“What?”
“Look!”
Illyana followed Luornu’s pointing finger. Up ahead, less than half a mile distant, stood a large building, its form dim and spectral in the fine haze of drizzle that was all that remained of the thunderstorm earlier.
“Maybe we could stop there,” Luornu said. “I could use a rest. My legs’re killing me. All this slogging through mud is making them ache like crazy. It’s like walking with lead weights strapped to my legs.”
“Tell me about it,” Illyana said. “Come on. Let’s check this place out.”
They plodded on, and fifteen minutes later stood at the main entrance of the Happy Hills Sanitarium. They stared at the sign above the entrance, then looked in through the doorless doorway, then glanced at each other.
“You know,” Luornu said, “now that we’re right up close like this, I don’t know if I want to go in so much.”
“Oh, we are most definitely going in. I need a damn chair. Or better yet, a bed. It must be after two in the morning at this point.”
They entered the sanitarium and made their way across the flooded, mold-filled lobby. Luornu wrinkled her nose.
“This place is disgusting,” she said.
“Yeah, well, this is just the first floor. The upper levels probably won’t be so bad.”
“Unless there’re holes in the roof or something. With all the rain earlier, there might be water all over the place up there. Not to mention tons of mold.”
“Why don’t we find out first before fretting about it, okay?”
Luornu once again opened her mouth to say “Sorry.” Illyana perceived what she was about to do, and her eyes narrowed coldly. Luornu’s mouth snapped shut.
They found their way to the stairs and ascended to the second floor.
“See?” said Illyana, gesturing at the corridor lined with doors ahead of them. “No water. All that worrying for nothing.”
They headed down the corridor, trying every door they passed. All were locked.
“I wonder if someone lives here,” said Luornu.
“Why would anyone live in a dump like this? It’s a crumbling pile of crap in the middle of a swamp.”
“I don’t know. It’s just, does it smell funny up here to you?”
Illyana sniffed the air. “All I smell is the damp and mold from downstairs. What do you smell?”
“I don’t know. It’s like the place smells lived in or something.”
Illyana looked at Luornu as if she’d started speaking Green Elvish.
“What the hell are you talking about? ‘Smells lived in’? When did you become half bloodhound?”
She shrugged. “I’ve always had a pretty good sense of smell, that’s all. And this place smells lived in. It smells wet and moldy, yeah, but not the right kind of wet and moldy. It’s like…” She rolled a hand through the air in front of her as she fished for the proper description. “It’s like the wet, moldy smell’s been disturbed. You know?”
“Not really, Luornu dear.”
The corridor they were in ended in a T-junction. There they stopped, raised their lanterns, and looked down either arm.
Both arms were lined with metal doors with black-painted windows exactly like the corridor they had just come down. All the doors down the right arm were shut. But one down the left arm stood slightly ajar, though no light shone from within.
“Look there,” Illyana whispered. “Let’s check it out.”
“Um, why? Don’t we wanna go where aren’t signs of life?”
Illyana rolled her eyes. “We’ll just take a nice, quiet look. See what’s what. I mean, there’re no lights on, so there’s probably no one there anyway.”
They crept forward to the open door and stopped just outside it, listening. They heard nothing.
Illyana extended an arm and gave the door a gentle push. It slid smoothly open without a sound. Illyana raised her lantern.
The room was empty except for a dentist’s chair bolted to the middle of the floor and a naked humanoid figure that sat in the chair. They couldn’t tell at first glance what species the figure was because parts of it were missing. Lots of parts. It was definitely a male, though, since it had a penis, or what used to be a penis: The rather meager member had been cut in half straight down the middle like a banana in a banana split. The top of the man’s head was covered with long, coarse black hair, but there was no way to know if he had had a beard or any other facial hair, since most of the skin on his face had been sliced away, exposing the raw, red meat and muscle beneath. One of his eyes had been removed, and the other, a brown one, stared fixedly at a spot near the top of the wall to the right of the door. He was also missing his nipples, his right hand, and six toes on his right foot. Swaths of skin had been cut away in various places on his torso.
“Oh…this is…” Instead of finishing the sentence, Luornu turned and vomited.
The sound of her vomit pattering against the white floor tiles had a dramatic effect on the figure in the chair. He jerked as if he had been given an electric shock, and then he emitted a shrill, gurgling cry that went on and on while his one remaining eye jerked away from the spot it had been fixed on and swiveled toward Luornu and Illyana.
The scream stopped, and the man’s throat worked in silence for a moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then his mouth opened, the red glistening muscles and tendons of his cheek and jaw stretching and twisting, and in a tiny, feeble voice, he said, “Kill…nge…”
Illyana started to whirl around to flee from this grisly sight (not even realizing that if she did so, she’d only stumble over Luornu, who was on her knees behind her retching out a last few rills of clear fluid), but then froze as it dawned on her that she recognized the man’s voice. It took her a moment to place it, though; she wasn’t used to hearing it speak in such low, weak tones. Normally it boomed and shouted and jeered.
“B—Bastard Jack?” Illyana said, squinting at the figure, her nose wrinkled in revulsion.
“Kuh…kill nge…” Jack said again.
“Oh, Aioue,” Luornu moaned. “We have to leave. We have to—”
“Pretty girls,” said a voice at the end of the corridor. “Pink petals of life and vibrant.
I pluck them with smiles.”
Both Illyana and Luornu screamed. In response, what was left of Bastard Jack let out a high-pitched squeal like a pig in a slaughterhouse and writhed around in his bonds in a futile effort to escape.
The girls looked down the corridor. Standing there at the end of the arm of the T was the Snowman, a pair of handguns held down at his sides.
The big round mask tilted as he cocked his head.
“Happiness to see you, here and now. Like puffy clouds. Like chocolate.”
“Luornu,” Illyana cried, grabbing her friend by the arm and trying to pull her to her feet. “Run! We have to run!”
But Luornu made no effort to even try to stand up. She just stared in dumb horror at the Snowman as her friend dragged her across the floor.
“Do these words come from the future?” the Snowman said reflectively, walking slowly toward them. “Or from sideways time? This is a lie. It is all a lie. Only the boy and the girl and the love they can share is real.”
“Come on!” Illyana screamed, still pulling Luornu by the arm.
Luornu seemed completely unaware of her friend. Instead she stared in wide-eyed horror at the Snowman while she shook her head back and forth as if to deny what she was seeing.
“Reality is a dream,” the Snowman mused. “I have an embrace with its lush fakery and then I awake and I cry.”
Illyana kept screaming “Come on” over and over as she pulled Luornu down the hall, back toward the T-junction. In the dentist’s chair in the dark room, Bastard Jack continued shrilling.
“Do these words exist in realness?” the Snowman said. “Are these the secret messages he broadcasts to her from his universe away?”
Luornu was finally making an effort to stand up, pushing against the floor with her feet, but Illyana kept tugging on her arm and throwing her off balance.
“Stop pulling!” Luornu shouted. “Stop pulling! I need to get up!”
“Speeching is the key for making growth within the self,” the Snowman said as he continued walking slowly and implacably toward them. “Fresh your breath and smile and maybe she will love you. But her tongue is secrets. We are all fuzzy robots.”
He raised the guns at Illyana. Illyana froze, sure she was about to die.
“She’s got a boyfriend and she doesn’t like you!” the Snowman shouted. “What kind of world is it? It’s! Kind! Of! Crap!”
He fired his guns as he yelled each of the last four words. Their muzzles flashed with yellow fire in the dim hallway.
Illyana would have been dead then if it hadn’t been for Luornu. When Illyana had frozen up, less than a foot from the corner of the T-junction, Luornu had finally managed to get the leverage she needed to get to her feet. She sprang up as the Snowman asked his question about the nature of the world, and as he fired, she grabbed Illyana by the front of her shirt and yanked her around the corner.
“Run!” Luornu yelled.
They ran. Around the corner behind them, the Snowman’s formerly slow and leisurely footsteps broke into a run.
“Oh, such words,” he called out. “Some talk is spillover from secret elsewheres.”
Illyana and Luornu had made it only two-thirds of the way to the stairs when the Snowman rounded the corner and opened fire. The yellow muzzle-flashes threw brief, long shadows across the hallway walls and floor.
The girls hunched down and zigged and zagged as they raced toward the stairs. They heard bullets whizzing past, heard them embed themselves in the walls with flat smacking sounds.
And then they were around the corner and leaping down the stairs five steps at a time. Miraculously, neither of them had been hit by a single bullet. Behind and above them, the Snowman raced down the hallway in pursuit, the hard soles of his dress shoes clacking on the tiles. He was fast. Too fast.
When the girls reached the first floor, the Snowman had already halved the distance between them. They could hear him on the landing midway down the stairs.
“I hate these books!” he roared. A gun boomed. The girls were not in his line of sight, so for a second they dared hope that he had tripped and accidentally squeezed a bullet into his brain, or else had committed suicide in a fit of insanity.
But no: a moment later his footsteps began their descent of the last flight of steps, and he shouted, “Such melodramatic melodrama! Will he always stand by her? Which her is it? I have confusion!”
The girls raced down the hallway toward the sanitarium’s front entry hall, their boots sending up sheets of water with every step. As they neared the entry hall, they heard the Snowman reach the first floor and start splashing toward them. The gun boomed again. Again. Again. No shots hit their target.
“This is suck!” he hollered. “I blame authorial interference! Oh, how I am hating mediated realities!”
The girls sprinted across the entry hall to the front door. As they dashed through the doorway and back out into the swamp, the gun boomed again, and a chunk flew out of the doorframe above Illyana’s head.
“The messages are secret,” the Snowman said. “Can she hear them? Not all bombs go ‘tick-tick-tick.’ There is silence in bombs, too. They can be as silent as ninjas on floors made of feathers.”
“What the fuck is that fucking fruitloop talking about?” Illyana growled under her breath as she and Luornu made their way along the ridges in the swamp as fast as they could.
Illyana dared a glance back just in time to see the Snowman appear in the sanitarium’s doorway.
He stared at the fleeing girls for a moment, then laughed.
“I will not let you give me your sad goodbye. I come. The fun of the chase is ours.”
He charged after them.
