by D. S. Ritter
Traffic kept Sam pretty busy for the next three hours, pushing her break back past nine. It gave her time to think about what she could do to block up the hole. Things didn’t slow down enough to call in her break until eleven, but at that point, she still hadn’t come up with anything. She decided she’d go on break, take the golf club and see what was in the basement to work with. As she went down to check the hold for things she might get away with using, she spotted something standing beside the cistern. For a moment, she thought it was just a shadow, but then, it shifted and she realized with a jolt; it was a person in a black hooded cloak. She almost didn’t believe it. Who dressed like that?
“Hey!” she cried, “get away from there!”
The figure turned, but the hood drooped so far over their face, she couldn’t see it at all, only shadow. She spotted a big ancient book, a tome, clutched in their arms. They almost dropped it as they scrambled toward the stairs. Sam heard their footsteps and the hiss of the door as they made it to the street above.
“Freaking weirdo,” she said, peering at the cistern, thankful it was still closed. Last thing she needed was people messing with this thing, let alone misguided LARPers.
The hold had almost nothing she could use, except a bunch of bags of “chemical thaw,” essentially road salt. While the bags were heavy, about fifty pounds each, and would do the job, she was pretty sure someone would notice a big pile of them sitting out before the first flake had even fallen. She locked up the hold and went out to get a quick bite before work started again.
When she got back from getting pop and chips at the gas station down the street, the traffic stood backed up to the second floor again, and an irate man stood halfway out of his car, glaring at the gate machine. Sam barely had time to radio in before she started helping customers.
“Hey, Seven-One,” crackled the radio, “you’ve got customers at your gates.”
“Seven-One to HQ, I know, I’m back from break.”
“Ten-Four.”
And Franklin wondered why Sam hadn’t told management about the monsters. They were on the other end of a camera. Half the time, quick response took fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes, she’d be eaten. Plus, they’d probably assume she'd made it up to go have a smoke break or something, despite never having been a smoker.
The relationship between management and the union was rocky at best a lot of the time, with management under the impression that their workers would do or say anything to take advantage, and the workers feeling the same about management. Was any of that true? Sam didn’t wasn't sure, but she knew enough to tell her trainees that while management could be friendly, it was smarter not to confide in them like you would your friends. And that Empire Parking was an absolute gossip mill.
Her phone chirped with another text:
Carter E:
Any monsters yet?
Her eyes practically bulged out of her head.
Sam D:
Franklin tell you about that?
Carter E:
Thought he was high. Monsters?
Carter E:
Take a picture next time or sumthin. Youtube!
Sam D:
I srsly hate you guys. Evrybdy knows now?
Carter E:
Pretty much.
Sam sighed and put her phone back in her pocket. Now, the whole company probably thought she was nuts. At least she had Franklin’s word backing her up, but she hadn’t intended for everyone to find out about the weirdness going on in Seven-One.
As it got on to one and the traffic slowed to a trickle before the bar-close rush, Sam noticed a young man walking up. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms were scarred with what looked like burns. She tried not to stare. “Can I help you?”
He smiled kind of sheepishly and it made him sort of attractive. He had shaggy, dirty blond hair and hazel eyes and there was something about his face she liked, though she couldn’t put her finger on what.
“So, I’ve got a bit of a problem,” he said, rubbing a hand through his messy hair. “I just got off work, and I don’t have my wallet.”
Sam frowned. “Can you ask anybody at work for the money?”
“I asked around, but payday’s tomorrow and everybody’s short.” Sam was waiting for him to ask to get out for free. And then things would get nasty when she’d have to tell him no. “I’ve got a cousin who’s going to drop off the money, so is it okay if I hang out here for a minute?”
What a relief. “Yeah, sure, no problem.”
He stood around outside the structure, texting for a few minutes, and she did her job and her best to ignore him. But, twenty minutes later, she had nothing to do and he was still there, so she started a conversation to make things less awkward. “So, you work around here?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling again. “I’m a line cook over at the Antwerp Cafe.”
The Antwerp wasn’t really a cafe, at least by Sam’s standards. It was high end and had opened two months before, on a busy corner. It was one of many restaurants that had tried to settle there over the years. Most of them didn’t last longer than six months. “What kind of food do they do there?”
“We’re doing a sort of Euro-Asian fusion? Really cool stuff. Like, I don’t want to brag, but I mean, our chef’s got this real vision, you know?”
Sam nodded, though she wasn’t sure what Euro-Asian fusion cuisine would be like. But, who didn’t like hearing someone talk about something they really loved? They talked about the restaurant, and working downtown for a while, but the guy’s cousin still hadn’t come and it was getting close to quitting time. “God, I hope he’s not bailing…” he said, looking at his watch.
At this point, Sam felt some sympathy. “Let me see your ticket.” The total was going to be something over ten dollars, which sucked. She sighed. “Look, I can cover you.”
“What? No, I can’t ask you to do that.”
She smiled. “You didn’t. It’s okay. Maybe you could pay it forward.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“I will pay you back, I promise.”
Her face got a little warm. “Well, I’m pretty much here all week so…” He wouldn't pay her back. How many people said those kinds of things, maybe even really meant them, and never did? She’d already decided not to care she wasn’t going to see that money again and ride the high of having done something nice for someone else for as long as it lasted.
It surprised her when he reached into his pocket and handed her a key chain with a key on it. It was heavy and surprisingly cold. “Here,” he said. “You can give that back when I bring you your money. My name’s John.”
“I’m Sam,” she said, staring at him.
“Nice to meet you, Sam. I’m going to go get my car.”
Sam watched him go feeling almost giddy. She looked down at the key chain and found a solid chunk of metal, hewed smooth with some words pressed into it, though she couldn’t read them. In the center was an open, Illuminati-like eye. It was weird as hell, but she didn’t care. She was still reeling from how nice John seemed.
“Come into the restaurant sometime,” he said, once he’d driven down to the gate. “I’ll get you a free appetizer or something.”
“That’d be nice,” she said, sliding her credit card into the machine.
“See you later, Sam.”
“See you, John.” He drove away, leaving butterflies in her stomach, which was both exciting and dumb. Nothing was going to come of it, except maybe a plate of fried zucchini chips or something. Even so, the encounter had been nice, whatever it had been.
Chapter Five
The nightmares were becoming a problem. Sam woke up Sunday afternoon in a cold sweat to find she’d left the bedroom light on again. Every time she closed her eyes, monsters. Under the bed, in the closet, when she moved the shower curtain. Some were the size of rats, some the size of rottweilers, all a mess of ooze and claws and teeth. She knew her tiny studio apartment wasn’t big e
nough to hide these terrors, but her subconscious would not be convinced. “Fuck off, weird shit,” she yelled into her pillow.
The sun shined through her second-story windows, casting the shadows of the blinds on the carpet. The couple in the apartment above was fighting, and somewhere, a dog barked. Things were as normal as they could be, given she lived in a world where monsters with guts like pudding existed.
As she made her cereal, she wondered if it was some horrible university science experiment gone wrong. “Who do you even report that to?” she asked herself, knowing it was really a question for the internet.
She took her laundry, including her uniforms, down the coin machines in the basement. The dank atmosphere put her a little on edge, but that was pretty normal, even before the weird stuff had happened at work. Another girl had been assaulted in a laundry room in the complex, so it wasn’t crazy to feel a bit paranoid.
She dumped the basket of clothes into the machine, poured a cap full of detergent and shut the lid with a bang. Shunting her dollar into the mechanism brought the thing to life with a grinding lurch.
Returning to the apartment, she sat down in front of the computer. The resources on reporting a mutant, or whatever the hell the things had been, were minimal. Most search results lead her to a series of conspiracy websites that were poorly written and full of ads for porn and dating services. All in all, it was an icky, frustrating exercise. Eventually, she wandered over to social media.
At some point, her phone chirped.
Franklin M:
You going to the thing tonight?
The “thing” tended to be beers at a restaurant in Depot Town, a regular standing engagement among the night shift.
Sam D:
I guess.
Franklin M:
Sweet.
Sam knew why he was asking. They were going to want to talk about the monsters. Could she blame them? It was pretty weird, and, well, messed up. But, what she didn’t want was to get there and have nobody believe her.
She wasn’t disappointed there hadn’t been a sighting the night before, but at the same time, proof would have been nice. If anything, she might have sold a photo to a tabloid or something and maybe finished off her car payments.
The day crawled on. She watched a movie, cleaned the tiny apartment, scrubbed the bathroom with its discolored tiles like coffee-stained teeth and got the laundry out of the dryer. As she folded it, she found little holes in one of her uniform shirts. Monster blood must have gotten on it, and for whatever reason, it had not reacted well to the washing machine.
“Fuck,” she said, tossing the shirt on the bed. They were probably going to make her pay to replace it. Also, holy crap, acid blood.
The internet had proven a poor resource in the fight against evil, so Sam turned to another resource. She got ready and left a little early, stopping off at a cramped little bookstore in Ypsilanti. Back when she’d been going to Eastern, she and her friends would stop in now and then and browse all the weird books, crammed into the tiny space.
It was a total fire trap, with boxes and piles of books just stacked wherever, and almost no room to move around. Rumor had it there was a basement and a backroom, but the entrances had disappeared, buried in a mountain of pulp.
The man who ran it seemed kind of nuts, but Sam didn’t think she’d ever met anyone more knowledgeable about books. He was middle aged and preferred loose-knit sweaters that were a vomitous mass of color, and he read everything. When she came into the store, he didn’t glance up or say anything, just shifted subtly.
“I’m looking for a book,” she said, picking her way toward the desk where he sat, which, like everything else, was lost in books. “Or, I guess I’m looking for information.”
“What kind of information?” He didn’t bother looking from the old, musty volume open before him.
“Information about monsters.”
“Fantasy and horror section’s over in that corner.” He gestured vaguely in a direction.
Sam shook her head. “No, I think I need something a little more, occult. Like, real monsters.”
“Real monsters?” This seemed to get his attention, and he saw her for the first time.
“Like, with tentacles. Have anything like that?”
He stared at her for a moment, and she could almost see the card catalog of his mind shuffling. “In the back,” he said, slipping a bookmark between the pages and closing the book. She followed him over piles of old paperbacks, around a tilted globe propped up on an old biology book, and into a shadowy area of the store.
The books he pulled down from the top shelf of a rickety bookcase were covered in dust and had thick pages. Really old school stuff. They were not your average textbooks. More like tomes, like the one she’d seen the LARPer clutching.
“You said ‘tentacles?’ Slimy? Furry?”
“Slimy. Definitely slimy. And full of like, green goo.”
“Yuck…” he pulled a heavy book with a black spine and thumbed through it. “Something like this?”
The page contained an ink sketch of the dog-like creature that had trapped Franklin in the hold. The lettering underneath was not a language Sam recognized.
“Yeah, that’s it! What does that say?”
The bookseller shrugged. “How do I know? The guy who sold it didn’t know either. It’s probably some obscure cipher.”
Sam peered at the page. The book was thick and she could only guess what else was inside. “How much?”
He clicked his tongue. “Not much of a market for this kind of thing, but this is an antique…” The man gave her a once over. “Ten dollars. Leave a contact for your next of kin and I can get it back if you die.”
Sam stared at him and he grinned a little.
***
The usual gang had already assembled at a large table on the back porch at Sidetracks, engaged in a range of conversations.
Franklin and Carter were there, as was Kim, Carter’s college-student girlfriend. Yolanda and Jesus, recent college graduates, clustered at the far end of the table, discussing a club in Detroit, and Heather and her boyfriend, Drew were talking politics and types of beer.
Sam felt her cheeks redden as all conversation died when the table noticed her. “Hi, guys,” she said, pulling out a chair.
“So,” said Heather, raising an eyebrow. “How are you?”
Sam stared at her, a little off-guard. “Fine? How are you?”
“Good,” said Heather, trying to appear casual.
There was an awkward pause. Everyone was silent, and Sam looked at them, not sure what they expected.
“Spill about the damn monster, already,” demanded Heather.
Sam’s eyes met Franklin’s, and he shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”
“So,” asked Jesus, leaning in, “were you guys just stoned out of your fucking minds, or what?”
Sighing, Sam pulled the leather-bound book out of her bag and laid it on the table. It fell open to the page with the sketch, and she pushed it toward the middle. “It looked like this.”
When Franklin saw the page, he jumped up and knocked his chair over. “Dude, what the fuck?”
A nearby waitress frowned and almost came over, but the rest of the table got Franklin to sit back down. “That’s the thing, though,” he said in hushed tones. “That is the fucking thing, man. What is that book?”
They passed it around now and looked at each page with a quiet solemnity pretty alien for the group. They came together with a mind to bitch about management, customers and the old guard, employees who had a tendency to look out for themselves and screw everyone else around them. This was far off the beaten path for a Sunday night.
“I don’t know what it is. The guy I bought it from doesn’t know.” Sam paused only long enough to order herself a beer. “The other messed up thing is this monster I saw before, like a blob with teeth? That’s in there too. I haven’t gone through the whole thing yet, but the pictures in there… God. It’s fucked
up.”
“How old is this thing?” asked Kim, poking the book like it was a dirty old shoe.
Sam shrugged. “Old. The writing looks old as hell. But how is that in there? Like, I figured this was some sick lab experiment or like, a mutation or something. I think the thing was living in the cistern in the basement at Seven-One.”
Everyone was quiet. The book, and Franklin’s reaction had made this thing real, and that made them uncomfortable. Sam sipped her beer, feeling kind of down. “There’s been some other weird stuff too. Like, yesterday, I found a weird guy over by the cistern. Like, he was dressed to go to a renaissance festival or something, and he had a book, like that one.” She paused as memory came flooding back. “Oh, fuck, and that Joe guy. I found him asleep by the cistern the night I had him for training.”
“Joe?” said Yolanda, “He is weird as hell. They found him asleep in the bathroom at Seven-Three. Didn’t get fired. They brought him back to the office, and he said some weird shit, they wouldn’t say what, and they let him go home.
“I don’t know why they aren’t firing his ass.”
This seemed to bring the group back to more familiar ground as they debated whether there was something seriously wrong with Joe, or if he was just toasted all the time, and how unfair it was management let this slide. This conversation seemed to cheer them a little, but the new reality still lurked over their heads. Eventually, the group fell quiet again.
“What are we going to do?” Kim had hit the nail on the head, and Sam got a bit of a surprise when everyone looked at her.
“I have no idea,” she said, taking a gulp of her beer. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and nothing else is going to happen.”
“You need to look through this book,” said Carter, leafing through the aged pages. “I don’t think this'll be the only thing coming out of the hole.”
The sketches in the book grew increasingly gruesome as they went. They featured disturbing, nightmarish visions of what only scarcely resembled creatures, and though she still didn’t understand the language, she could see the writing degenerating into a shaky chicken scratch. The more she saw, the more the darkness just beyond the brightly lit porch seemed to encroach on the party.
