“What, Elise? What did you find?”
“I can’t. Don’t you understand? You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Please,” I asked her. “Help me here.”
“I can’t!”
It was then that her eyes grew wide and her body still. I followed her gaze over my shoulder and saw what she was looking at.
Something stood in the rock garden beyond the glass wall. Silhouetted without detail under the darkening sky. A gray-black statue of something with hulking shoulders and long legs, and a narrow head. The thing had to be ten feet tall.
What was it? There had been no statue there. There was nothing there.
And then it moved.
TWELVE
The statue leapt into the wall of windows, and glass shattered. The sound was ear piercing. Billions of shards blasting, falling, raining down. The glass now gone, a gust of valley wind stormed into the house, whipping at my jacket, my hair. And standing in the stormy void was some kind of animal, yet nothing like I’d ever seen. Then it opened its mouth and screeched a deafening cry. It sounded like jumbo jet brakes on a runway, more jarring than the shattering of glass that preceded it. It was a sound so terrifying it washed over me with a primal childlike fear.
A distant part of my brain registered Elise’s screaming. And I stood and stared, frozen in a trance of horrified surreality.
Millions of years ago, our ancestors used to battle for their prey, hunting deadly beasts in order to survive, and we inherited those fundamental instincts of survival. When we’re faced with danger, our systems switch over to primal instinct and tell us to do one of two things: fight, or run like fucking hell.
But I didn’t do either. My primal instincts malfunctioned and I just froze. What the fuck was I looking at?
Golden yellow eyes bored into me, animal-like, yet filled with emotion and something else . . . intelligence.
It had a head like a snapping turtle, with a sharp, pointed muzzle and a hideous mouth. Countless spinelike teeth filled the void and strands of clear stringy saliva joined the gaps between them.
Its gray-black skin was made of hard scales, overlapping each other in hundreds of tiny plates of armor. Its sinewy legs had backward-bent knees and ended in prehistoric clawed feet. One arm was stubby and ended at the elbow in a tree-trunk-like burl. The other arm was hideously long, with a hand that reminded me of a cave spider, with a small palm and long thin fingers tapering into knifelike claws.
But it was what sat around its waist that put the fear of God into me. Some kind of old rope braiding. And hooked onto it were three human skulls.
The thing let out another horrifying screech, and then it came at me.
It turned out my primal instincts weren’t entirely fucked after all. My handgun was in my hand before I knew it, and my finger was pulling hard on the cold steel trigger. I didn’t even yell “Stop” or “Do not move” or “Stop or I’ll shoot!” The handgun barked in my hands.
My 4506 Smith & Wesson is modified for .45 Super rounds. Rounds that’d turn walls into Swiss cheese. Rounds I was firing off at the thing coming at me. And they weren’t doing a goddamned thing. It was as if I were shooting blanks. The thing just kept coming, and coming, and coming.
I was confused. What was happening to the bullets? Where were they going? Then I realized I was shooting the thing right in the chest, black scorch marks popping up on the hard scales. The weapon just wasn’t effective. The creature kept coming at me.
I didn’t have anywhere to go, and even if I did, I didn’t have any time. The thing was fast, and by the way its clawed feet slid on the tiles, it could’ve been a lot faster.
“Run!” I screamed out.
I kept firing until my pistol went click, click, click. I’d emptied nine rounds of .45 Super, and it had done nothing except score the armor-plated skin.
I stood there horrified, breath caught, gaping up at the creature as it stared down at me with its yellow eyes.
The spider hand moved so fast I didn’t get a chance to react. And when it swept across me, it hit like a road train. If I had hit a wall, I’d have been dead on impact. But as it was, I slid down the corridor, down the steps, and toward the front door. And at that moment, that very door slammed open, and Chuck and Joe burst into the house.
Joe had his Glock out and Chuck was toting a five-round Remington shotgun in his stubby hands.
“In there!” I cried through gritted teeth.
They ran past me, and I gathered myself up. My right arm was numb to the bone, my fingers tingling.
Elise screamed again.
I scrambled after the two cops.
“What the fuck?” I heard Chuck yell.
“G-god damn,” yelled Joe, his mouth sputtering.
The thing was holding Elise off the ground behind the kitchen counter. Her bare feet were dangling, kicking at nothing. The enormous spiderlike hand wrapped around her entire body, pinning her arms to her sides. She was three feet off the ground, screaming, her legs kicking.
“Put her down!” Joe cried, and he fired off three rounds from the Glock.
Pop-pop-pop!
The thing didn’t even flinch.
The burl-like stump of its short arm unfurled. It wasn’t a fucking stump at all. It was a joint, and as the arm unhinged, a singular long, curved claw extended outwards like a blade from a pocketknife into an enormous scythe.
I grabbed the shotgun out of Chuck’s frozen hands and charged. As the scythe arm readied itself for an act of decapitation, I aimed over the counter and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun pounded into my shoulder and the creature whipped its head forward. It dropped Elise and turned, swinging its scythe arm over the counter. I stepped back and the blade whooshed past me. I pumped another round into the chamber.
I had pissed it off. Big-time. I could see it in its eyes. Then it began stomping around the counter. I shot it again, right in the chest.
The thing stumbled, but it didn’t stop. It kept coming, stomping toward me, walking on reverse-bent knees, prehistoric like, fury in its eyes.
The thing was fucking unstoppable. I pumped another round into the chamber and shot again. The gun barked out. The impact caught it in the shoulder and it stumbled again on the tiles.
I pumped another round. Shot it. Pumped another, and it leapt and swung its spider hand toward me.
The shotgun vanished from my grip. It flew across the room like a spinning chopper blade and disappeared through the drywall.
Then the Glocks started popping. Joe and Chuck were standing as if they were in a shooting range, and were emptying their clips into its head.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!
The thing was acting like it was getting hit by flies. Until one yellow, eye popped like a grape. Black blood and eye juice squirted out from the wound.
The thing reeled back and screamed an agonizing guttural cry. A sound from the depths of hell. A sound of nightmares. It must have carried for miles. On a clear night, it might’ve made it all the way down to the Valley.
It held up its giant hand in front of its face and charged Chuck and Joe like a bull on two feet. And I could do nothing but watch as the scythe whipped through Chuck like an axe through butter. Chuck’s body tore in half from the gut line. His torso rolled through the air. It was as if I were watching it in slow motion, guts spraying, torso rolling, then the slow motion was over, and Chuck thumped into the wall and splattered it crimson.
Joe let out a gut-wrenching cry and flung himself at the beast. His desperate attack lasted less than a second. The claw punctured through his chest and out the other side, hideous and stained with his blood. Joe’s ragged scream died in his mouth, only to be replaced by my own.
Then I ran for Elise.
I grabbed her up and spat the words, “Panic room!”
Pale, her eyes filled with fear, she nodded, and we scrambled for the corridor.
The thing growled. The clicking of its claws scratched on the tiles as it gave chase.
I pulled Elise down the corridor.
The thing hit the drywall and plaster shattered behind us. The house rumbled. The reverberation of the destruction was incredible. As if a war machine was chasing us down the hallway, the screeching roar of the creature like rusty tracks of a World War II tank.
“In there!” she cried.
We pushed into a room with a white bookcase, a desk and a PC. Elise grabbed the bookcase and pulled with her small body, her toes digging into the carpet. I grabbed on and pulled with her. The thing opened like a giant secret door, and behind it was another door, this one glass—the entrance to a room the size of a large closet.
She pulled the handle and the glass door clunked open.
The creature slammed into the open doorway of the study and took half the wall out.
“Go!” I yelled.
The thing leapt at us in one bound, tearing through the air like a silverback gorilla.
We were in and I pulled hard on the door. It hadn’t even shut when the creature slammed into it. The door threw us back, hard against the wall within. I lunged for the handle, and the steel lock thumped in place.
The creature slammed a shoulder into the door, and the panic room shook. An earthquake. The noise hit me like thunder in my chest, but the door held.
It hit again, thumping against the glass. Once again, the door held.
It screamed out, furious in its rage, head whipping around in the air. It took a step back. Its arm folded in like a pocketknife, readying itself, streamlining itself for a brutal blow. Then it crouched, its legs bunching into a pre-jump, and it sprang toward us. It threw itself into the door, a charging bull. I held my breath and pulled Elise into me.
Another powerful thump and the glass door smashed, a spiderweb pattern spreading over the glass. Plaster dust rained down in the study around the beast. Pictures tumbled off the walls, glass shattering.
The creature moved back once more, readying itself for another lunge—a blow that would surely cave the glass door in. Elise buried herself into me, hands clutching. It sprang again. I cried out. Elise screamed.
Once again an almighty boom erupted around us, shaking the room. The broken web spread to the edges of the door.
Then it moved back once more, readying itself.
I grabbed hold of Elise, closed my eyes, and held my breath, my heart beat thumping in my ears.
The hit didn’t come.
I opened my eyes. The thing was staring at me, inches away, its grunting breaths fogging up the glass from its two slit nostrils. Its turtle-like head moved up and down, sniffing at the glass door, one yellow eye looking at the lock, at the room, inspecting it. Black blood seeped from the hole where its other eye had been.
I was staring at a prehistoric creature. A real-life monster. I couldn’t understand what I was looking at, but it was in front of me, and my mind was comprehending its reality. It was real. The thing was real. A nightmare existed, and I was facing it.
Then it opened its spine-filled mouth, and from within the darkness of the stringy, spit-filled cavity, something purple-black emerged. A tongue, snakelike, covered in hundreds of tentacle suckers. The tongue pressed out across the glass like an arm of an octopus, the suckers rolling over the pane and leaving behind a trail of sticky saliva.
What was it doing? I could see emotion in its eye. The eye slowly closed in concentration. It was tasting it. Trying to understand it.
“My God,” I heard myself say.
“What’s it doing?” Elise whimpered, her hands clutching at my shirt, her face buried in my chest.
“Don’t look,” I whispered. “What’s this door made out of?”
“Bulletproof,” was all she said.
The thing stood to its full height. Prehistoric, monstrous, and absolutely terrifying.
It let out one more screeching roar. And then it looked at me hateful, furious, and then simply, vanished.
I blinked. The thing was there, and then it was gone. As if it had never been there at all. A nightmare, a ghost . . .
My skin crawled, heart pounding, my whole body trembling. My right arm was aching, my chest burning. But all of it barely registered. My mind scrambled to hold on to reality. I didn’t know what to think, or what to do. And so I did nothing at all. I just held on to Elise and we stood there in the silence of the panic room. I held on tight as she cried into my chest.
And then my own tears began to fall.
THIRTEEN
An hour must have passed since the attack. Maybe more, maybe less. I pulled my cell out of my pocket to call for help, then changed my mind. I’d done it half a dozen times already. The screen was cracked, but it still worked. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was I couldn’t bring myself to call for help. What would I say?
I couldn’t get my mind around what I’d seen. I wrestled with a logical answer, but couldn’t find one. I was in shock. In a state of overwhelming confusion.
If I called for help I’d have to lie. Because the truth was unbelievable. And did I really want to bring anyone else up against that . . . that thing? If anyone else died . . .
My confusion flashed to anger.
What the hell was it? It was so strong. So impossible. Nothing could withstand shotgun shells at close range like that. Nothing on Earth.
Elise and I were now apart, separated by barely five feet, both sitting with our backs up against the wall. We hadn’t said anything to each other since the attack.
I thought about Chuck and Joe. They were good people, good cops. Family men. And the thing had killed them with ruthless efficiency.
My fists were tightening. Blood was draining out of my knuckles. My jaw was clenching. I had been so helpless against it. I couldn’t do anything but watch as it killed them. Tears stung my eyes and I turned my anger on Elise. “Tell me what that thing is. You tell me, goddammit!”
Elise pulled her face up off her knees and looked at me. Her skin was so pale it looked as if the life had drained out of her.
“What the fuck was it?” I asked again.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes held mine for a long moment, then she lowered her head back down onto her knees.
“What was it?” I boomed, furious.
She didn’t react. She didn’t cry and scamper away. She just stared at me. “A monster. Something from another world.”
“Is that thing what you found in the garage? Did you make it?”
“No,” she said. “We didn’t make it. But . . . it’s our fault.”
“Tell me everything. And I mean everything, or so help me—”
She nodded almost imperceptibly, and then thought about her words. “The project . . . everything was going as we had planned. The X-ray vision was working and we were having meetings with Bach Optics. But then, a few days ago, Stuart asked us to run some tests on the edges of the electromagnetic spectrum. I wore the goggles, and Nicholas and Stuart were reading the data and setting the inputs. Stuart was messing around with the frequency when something happened.”
“What?”
She hesitated, then said, “I . . . I vanished.”
“What do you mean you vanished?”
“Have you ever worn VR before?”
“What’s VR?” I asked, impatient.
“Virtual reality.”
“No,” I said.
“You put on VR headgear and you submerge yourself into a virtual world. Well, that’s the best way I can describe it. My world changed around me. One second I was looking at all the radio waves in the air, and the next I was looking at something else entirely.”
“What was it?”
“A field.” Her eyes grew wider, distant, then snapped to meet mine. “A field of flowers.”
“Edelweiss,” I said, glancing away, the pieces clicking into place.
“Yes.” She looked at me. “Edelweiss flowers. There were millions of them. I was standing in the garage, and then I was standing in another world. A field of flowers. And beyond was a mountain backdrop of wate
rfalls. Colossal. Spectacular. And like nothing I’ve seen on Earth.
“Everything was bathed in sunlight, sparkling, twinkling like diamonds on an ocean. It was so beautiful.” She said the last quietly. “It was real. I ran my hands through the flowers. I could feel the cool breeze, the warm sun on my arms, my face. And then, as quick as it had come, it was all gone. I was back in the garage. And Stuart and Nicholas looked like they’d seen a ghost. Their jaws were hanging. Their faces pale.”
“You vanished?”
“To them, yes, I vanished.”
“What is it? What did you find?” I asked, but I didn’t want to hear the answer. The answer would be unbelievable. The answer would be absurd, and yet, how could I not believe after . . .
Fresh tears filled her eyes. “Another world, Detective Gamble. We found another world.”
I blew out a lungful of air and bumped the back of my head against the wall.
“I told Nicholas and Stuart what I’d seen. Nicholas wanted to tell someone. He wanted to take it to the military. He thought we should quarantine the garage.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“No. That didn’t happen. Stuart disagreed. I disagreed.” Her voice was filled with regret. “Stuart knew our project would be taken away from us. It was a discovery like no other. I wanted to be a part of it, so I took a medical and we checked for radiation. When everything seemed safe, we started making trips into the world. We started exploring.”
“And you pissed something off.”
She didn’t respond for a time. “I didn’t know. Until now.”
“So, last night?” I asked.
“Nicholas said he was done. He caught Stuart coming and doing his own trips into the world. Nicholas said he was going to tell his connections in the military and Stuart got angry. Nicholas said Stuart couldn’t stop him. We agreed to sleep on it and we all left. I think Nicholas returned to the garage to take it all. To take it all to his connections in the military. When I arrived at the garage this morning I found him dead, and Stuart was gone.”
Beyond the Spectrum Page 8
