In the long silence I realized with a start that she was going grey, brightly silver-blonde in the black; I wondered why I had never noticed it before. But I had never been so tall before, so old before, overtopped her by so much. My stomach was somersaulting. I had to get to the bathroom.
“I said I was sorry,” I said again. “I’m gonna go say sorry to the kids, and then I gotta shower, and then we’ve gotta talk about—”
“Well, why don’t you just talk down to me some more? Huh? Just ignore what I’m saying?”
“I’m not igno—”
“And you’re interrupting me! Did you think I was done?”
Only now was her voice starting to rise; sweat broke out on my forehead. It was like being a kid again. You’re not, I tried to remind myself. And don’t forget you have to be taken seriously about getting away. A little while. Don’t say why. Just come up with something. Just lie. Christ, she won’t listen to me at all, will she?
A shadow flickered across the hall behind her so fast I wondered if I’d really seen it. And then her face was shifting, slackening with shock, finally falling open in a scream. The shadow was there and true, black and sharp-edged across the floor. I turned at last and saw what was flying towards the window, and immediately wished I hadn’t—a shivering tangle of wrong angles and tentacles, as if everything had bones that had been broken and were about to jut from the skin, covered in dark, slimy skin, studded with glowing red eyes. It hit the window with a thud; the glass shivered visibly but held, streaked with cloudy slime and hairs.
I couldn’t even tell Mom to run, I just spun her by her shoulders, shoving her out of the living room towards the hallway, trying to get something solid between us and the thing, some doors, some walls, less glass. I got her into her bedroom and pushed her into the closet, like shoving a pile of warm dough. It was after me, had to be. Knew me. Didn’t know them. Had to stop it.
It was only then that her screaming formed words. “What was that? What was that? What was that thing?”
“Stay here where it can’t see you! Where are the kids?”
“What was that thing? Don’t let it get in the house!”
I shut the closet door, hearing first a bang, and then—oh, shit—the musical tinkle of falling glass from the living room. A multilegged shadow, all spikes and floppy appendages and translucent nodules, firmly struck the hallway wall, like an ink stamp. I cast about, left, right, left, right. Kids. Bedroom. Two quick steps: empty.
Check the backyard, last place left to look. But the door to the backyard was in the kitchen, and that meant going back into the hallway. The hallway where something was bumping and slithering along the shag carpet, hissing like a snake, a shrieky tortured breathing that made it sound like more than one thing. Maybe it was. Jesus, maybe the whole house was filled with them.
I slammed the kids’ door shut and looked for something I could tip in front of it, but the desk would take too long to drag and the bookshelves were too far away. Forget it. I yanked the window up and used a pen to rip a long diagonal slash in the screen, then clambered through it at speed, not glancing back. I skidded on the grass as I ran, hearing screams from the backyard.
Motherfucker.
The kids were pelting towards me, heading—thank God—for the street rather than the house, pursued by two low, bulbous pink things like scorpions that were pulsating patterns like TV static, almost but not quite distracting from the shining black claws. Carla grabbed me around the waist, sobbing and shrieking, as one of them leapt for her, missed, and clawed a chunk out of the tree up front.
I peeled her off and pushed her towards the twins. “Run! Don’t go back to the house. Run, get down the street!”
I couldn’t check to see if they were doing what I said, because the things were on me. I pivoted and ran back towards the front door. Shit. Nothing out here. Any weapons would be in the garage—a shovel, a crowbar, something. Would they even damage these things? Better than doing nothing.
I pounded back up the steps and flew through the open front door, where two of the black things with red eyes were systematically tearing the kitchen apart, which stopped me in my tracks—the noise, the screeching, the crashing and thumps as the cabinet doors fell off and the drywall was shredded. Behind me, the two pink things hit the closed door hard enough to make it judder in its hinges. Dumb things. Weak and dumb, Johnny had said, until the gods Themselves came back. But not so weak. Not so dumb.
I ran for the garage, already hearing something coming after me, and wrenched the door open, sliding across the hood of Mom’s Sunfire. No shovel, no crowbar; where were they? Buried somewhere in the junk? I snatched a rake from the corner, turned it handle out, and came back to the house swinging and yelling hoarsely, hoping they’d be drawn to me.
One of the pink things reared up like a cobra, its claws shining and flashing so that I could barely see for a second, and then fell onto the other one as I thrust at it with the rake. There was a sickening pop as some plate or scale gave way, a torrent of viscous slime cascading onto the kitchen floor. I retreated as they all turned, a thousand eyes focusing in multicoloured hatred, and pursued me across the shattered remains of chairs and table, couch and TV. That bought me a few seconds as they clambered frantically over the junk; I swung the rake again, caught one of the black creatures in the eye region, sending it reeling.
Something swished past my face, a projectile blob of hairs and venom that scorched the wall at once, sending up blue smoke. My chest seemed to catch on fire too—I started coughing so hard that I began to gag, and watched through tear-filled eyes as they approached, knocking debris out of the way.
“Get down!” someone yelled over the screeching; I dropped flat, and something whizzed above my head, exploding in a deafening cascade of white sparks. For a second I could barely see or hear, then realized something was heading for me, end over end—the couch frame, oh no—and I just managed to cover my face before it landed on me.
BY THE TIME I dug my way out it was all over. I felt as if my head had been wrapped in cotton wool. Through pink-smeared vision, Mom approached from the hallway, and finally the kids from the front door—thank Christ—all three unhurt, it seemed, though sobbing and shaking. I reached automatically for them.
“No, uh-uh,” I dimly heard Johnny say. “There might be things left in the house, hiding. Get out into the street, go find Rutger. Get ready to run.”
“Listen to Johnny, guys,” I heard myself say, through a wrench of loathing. Her fault. Her fault this had happened. Her fault I got dragged in, then my fault they did. But hers to begin with. Like we were all strapped to the mast of a sinking ship, the innocent and the guilty drowning together. “I’ll be out in a minute, after we check the house. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
They stared at her. At me. Their eyes were so full of betrayal and confusion that I wondered how I would be able to even speak to them when I could again, what words I could find except a senseless stream of apology. Or lies. But they filed out, and from the corner of my eye I saw Rutger, disheveled and harried-looking, in a dark suit, beckoning them.
“Up you get,” Johnny said, and I squinted at her lips as if it would help. We quartered the place for more monsters, finding nothing except their remnants—slime and chemical burns, stray hairs and broken claws, and the smashed remains of half the house. They had gotten down to the studs in places, the drywall peeled away like flesh from bone. Holes gaped in the ceiling, leaking ropes of torn pink insulation. I looked down and realized that one of my shoes was gone. How had that happened?
Back in the kitchen, I said, “What did you do? Was that magic?”
“Experimental weapon. Definitely not magic.”
“But you can do magic?”
“Listen, we’d better talk about what to do next, and quick.”
I swallowed, hard. She hadn’t answered the question, and she knew I knew. “There’s a next? What’s next? Look at the house, I... we...”
“I think I ha
ve a chance to fix this,” she said. “A slim one, razor-slim, but the best one for a while. I kept thinking: something’s coming. But where’s all the magic coming from? Are things thinning out? So I did some research and... signs are pointing to a window soon, a window in time, an alignment. Like all the doorways in a house moving till they line up in a row. It might be a short one compared to historical windows—maybe just a couple of minutes—but while it’s happening, the biggest and oldest gate in the world could open, and who knows what could get through. It could be everything. All of Them.”
“Not just the ones small enough to fit through the screen door, like now.”
“Yes. The big ones. The real gods. And other things. Other... but there’s a chance that I could, I mean, it’s not definitive...”
“A chance.”
“A chance that I could prevent the door from opening. In those few minutes. Slam it shut, lock it, and maybe keep it locked for a long, long time. I could beat Them there if They don’t know I’m coming. If they think I won’t go on the offensive.”
“That sounds pretty good,” I said. My voice felt as if it were coming from a long way away. I wondered if the attack, or her experimental weapon, had damaged my eardrums. “For the planet, I mean. That’s cool.”
“Nick.”
“Did you see where my shoe went? I’m not really... like, swimming in shoes. I have three pairs of shoes. So that’s like a... seventeen percent reduction right there.”
“Nick, you’re in shock. Sit down.”
“Is my math right? Did one of the things eat my shoe? Where did Rutger go? Where are the kids?”
“Sit. Down.”
I sat, heavily, on the lone unbroken kitchen chair. Those sonsabitches destroyed one room in her house. Unfair. What the hell kind of weapon had she used? I searched my memory and found a hole in it, a missing minute or two, funnily angled at the sides. I stuck a finger in my ear and twirled, looked down at my socked foot. A sparkling shard of glass had lodged in the dingy fabric, but I didn’t see any blood. Lucky. I carefully pulled it out, half-listening to Johnny.
“You said you wanted to help,” she said. “Come with me to the gate. I can’t do this alone.”
I laughed. “You do everything alone. What do you need me for? Or what do I need you for? To protect me?” Something popped in my ear, and everything sounded much clearer on that side.
She watched me for a moment, her face calculating, serious. Waiting for me to figure it out.
Leverage, I thought. Me as leverage against her, my family as leverage against me. And if They couldn’t get ahold of Mom and the kids to use, then they were safer away from us. But not me. I was still fair game no matter where I went. “Shit.”
Softly, she said, “I need your help. Isn’t that what friends do?”
“Of course it is,” I said automatically. But even as I said it I wasn’t sure if I was lying. We were friends because we had always been friends, but... why? What did she ever see in me, and what did she see now? We had fought about it, as kids; I had accused her of being a grownup in a child’s body, humouring me out of pity and habit, secretly preferring time with her grownup friends. And she had raged at me, cried. I had been shocked at my ability to hurt her, taking that—rightly or wrongly—as proof of her love. After all, I thought, no stranger had ever brought her to tears. But now I wondered if she had cried because she didn’t have any grownup friends. Because she had no one but me. Never had. When we were little she’d confided that she felt she had no one to communicate with, no community. Then, after meeting me, she had a community of two. Always us against the world. The world that demanded different things of us, but which we had always faced together.
I took a deep breath, attempting to pull myself together, and said, “When’s the thing? The alignment? Are those things going to come back? I have to talk to Mom, the kids, call the—”
“I put Rutger in charge of all that.”
“What? In charge of what? All what?”
“Don’t worry about that. Do you trust me?”
“Yes. You know that. But...” I waved a hand helplessly at the house. “What are we going to do about all... this? This isn’t livable. The management company is going to freak out. We—”
“I’ll deal with it,” she said firmly. “Here.” She turned and dug in her bag, coming out with her chequebook and a fountain pen. I watched numbly as she tore off a cheque and put it on the table next to me to scrawl a number—the zeroes tumbling, never seeming to stop—signed it, and handed it to me. It was made out to Mom. “To fix the house, for your rent, and for the work you’ll miss.”
I stared at it. She always got novelty cheques and this one was particularly bad, some old-styley dinosaur painting with a tiny-headed, big-mouthed T-rex attempting to maul a triceratops that looked like a rabid dog. Their pastel colours were insubstantial behind the bold, black strokes of Johnny’s writing. “So you’re... renting me,” I said.
“Oh, for God’s sake. As if you’re worth the late fees. You said you were coming anyway. It’s compensation.”
“Buying me, then.”
“Do you even know what that word means?”
“You picked a really excellent fucking time to talk down to me,” I said, feeling anger tower like a thunderhead, fed by the look of nonplussed defiance on her face, so sure she was in the right. I shoved the cheque back at her.
“N—”
“Look at this house! Look what They did to it! Or what you did to it! You know, you can write a cheque as big as the moon, it’ll never make up for this, for having this taken from us when we finally had something to take. And now you think money will fix it? Just like money fixes everything else? You want to deal with me the same way They dealt with you? Yeah, I can see who you’ve been taking lessons from. The truth is, you’ve finally found something you can’t buy your way out of! Something your goddamn money can’t fix for once!
“This is a life you’re trying to buy, Johnny, and a life isn’t stuff, the way you—you joke about buying researchers, the way you laughed about buying Rutger when you paid for his replacement. Maybe because you got bought, you think of us that way, I don’t know. I don’t care. And you know what? The bank won’t let Mom cash this fucking cheque anyway. It’s too big.”
Her eyes went wide. Very clearly I thought: I used to think I was in love with you. You, of all people.
I also thought: I wonder how long I had that speech building up. Most of it, anyway.
Influence clusters, contaminates, then maims; and it is made out of money. When you have money you think the way people with money think, because that’s the influence. Ordinary rich people buy homes, plural. The super-rich make homes everywhere. People like her, though, don’t need a home; they have nothing that they are worried about keeping, they know they can replace anything, literally anything, even if it is supposed to be one of a kind. She doesn’t have those voids that other rich people have, the ones they try to fill with paintings and cars. She doesn’t even try. She just lets the voids sit, and races past them trying to save the world. Even her house is a decoy, almost, isn’t it? Not like ours, a knowable thing. Inside her castle you never know where she is. You go looking for her, you can’t find her. I never knew why that was, only that she made it that way, and everything she wants made a certain way is made a certain way.
“What about cash?” she said, quietly.
“Did you hear one thing that I just said? It’s not about the money!”
“I’m trying to help!” she cried. “What, you think it’s better to walk away, leave them with nothing?”
“I’m saying the leaving is the problem! Why can’t we—”
“I’m thinking, Nicky, and all you’re doing is—is—is reacting! Like an animal! You think insurance is going to pay for this? I’ve talked to enough insurance companies to know they won’t. You want the kids out on the street? Hunted down by monsters? I’m trying—to—help—you!”
“Fine!”
We both ran out of steam, and she slumped, still braced on the table. I wondered why it looked so familiar, then remembered: Ben. The smashed aquarium. The delta of artificial sand, her curved back. I am not the only one who grieves here. No, we all grieve.
“I’ll get Rutger to do it in cash,” she said after a few minutes. “Go pack a bag.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet.”
The monsters hadn’t gotten to Mom’s room, where I kept my clothes, so I was able to shower and change, even shave—quickly and badly, without letting the shaving cream soak in enough. I still hadn’t found my other shoe, but my older blue-and-yellow Nikes were intact in the kids’ closet; I put them on, then headed for the front door just as Johnny came through it, almost bumping into her.
“What are you doing?”
“Uh,” I said. “I need to talk to Mom and—”
“I told you. Rutger took care of all that.”
“Say again? All what?”
“They’re still in danger,” she said. “I asked him to hide them till we get back.”
“What?”
She held up a hand, tiredly. “Please don’t start,” she said. “They’re not safe here. You know it, I know it, Rutger knows it, they know it. Do I need to go on?”
“No, but sometimes I’d really like to punch you in the face,” I said, through gritted teeth. “You didn’t let me say goodbye, you didn’t...all right. Where did he take them?”
“It’s better if you don’t know. In case.”
“In case of... oh, Christ.”
“Nick. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that my help looks like this. I would do anything for it not to. I’m sorry you didn’t get to say goodbye. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted them to be safe.”
You don’t love anything, I thought, clearly, as if the words had been spoken to me by someone else. You don’t know what love is. You didn’t think I needed to say goodbye because you don’t care enough to say it. What am I doing. What am I doing.
Beneath the Rising Page 10
