He didn’t seem to notice any of the stop signs he went past, but Andrew decided it was probably better if they just got to where they were going as fast as possible, so he didn’t say anything. They went past the pizza place, past the library, past the vacuum shop, past the park. A rainbow-colored streak of light passed over Josh’s face as the glass tower passed into their rear-view mirror.
“How close are we?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “Can you see it?”
Andrew was about to say no when he saw a blue shape pop up over the top of a nearby building. They pulled into a parking lot and got out of the car. Now that they were closer they could see the creature more clearly. It looked like an enormous dandelion seed caught in the breeze, a long stalk hanging from a mass of spinning threads.
“It doesn’t have anything to grab with,” Andrew said. “What if this isn’t the right one?”
“It’s not like there’s dozens of these things running around, Andrew.”
They looked at each other.
“Shit,” Josh said, but Andrew wouldn't stop there, he kept talking.
“Look, this is the only one we saw. Let’s just deal with it and worry about other stuff later.” Andrew took the salt container out of his backpack and popped the tab. He looked up at the creature. He wasn’t sure if his familiar could reach up that high, and even if it could, Andrew wasn’t sure if it would be able to wrestle this thing down to the ground.
“We have to lure it down here,” Andrew said. “We’ve got to make it come after us.”
Josh took off his backpack.
“All right.”
He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled as loud as he could.
The creature froze in place. Slowly, it flipped over, so that the stalk was on top and the tentacles drooped down like seaweed. It floated down to where Andrew and Josh were standing. The closer it got to the ground, the faster it traveled.
Josh stepped to the side, so that the van was directly behind him. Then he started yelling.
“Right here! Come over here!”
It grazed the ground fifteen feet away, pulled up, and headed straight for the two of them. Josh jumped to the side and pushed Andrew in the opposite direction— his familiar grabbed a light pole and pulled him to safety.
The creature crashed into the van, shattering the windows and sounding the alarm. It floated backwards, slowly, for about three feet, and collapsed. Andrew ran around it, spilling salt behind him as he went. He completed the circle just as he emptied the container. The creature rose back up into the air, but it couldn’t cross the line.
Andrew just watched the thing floating there.
“The other one… the one in the attic— it just disappeared after it was trapped. Another one of those gates opened up and it just went away.”
“All right,” Josh said. “Let’s wait a minute.”
They waited. The creature stayed where it was, bobbing up and down like a cork floating in the ocean. The car alarm was still ringing, bouncing off the walls of the buildings around it.
“I don’t think this is working, Andrew.”
They waited a little longer. They heard an engine. Josh ran out to the sidewalk and saw a police car a few blocks away, coming towards them.
“Shit.”
He ran back to Andrew.
“We have to hide.”
Andrew looked up at the creature.
“Andrew, we have to hide right now.”
Andrew stared at it for a moment longer before he turned away. The two of them ran out of the parking lot; they hid in the sunken entrance of one of the factory buildings, a glass door with a brick tunnel leading up to it. They peeked out and saw a police car parked in the middle of the lot. The two officers were shining a flashlight on the wreckage of the van and talking to each other.
One of them took a step backwards. The heel of his shoe passed within a foot of the circle. The creature slowly turned in the officer’s direction, tracking him carefully as he examined the wreckage.
“Maybe it’ll go away,” Andrew said, under his breath, more to himself than to anybody else. “Maybe they’ll just write a report or something and leave.”
The other cop took a step backwards, skirting the edge of the barrier. Andrew turned his head. Josh was looking right at him.
“Use the familiar.”
Andrew glanced between Josh and the creature, confused.
“Like this,” Josh said. He pointed at the two officers. “Don’t hurt them,” he said. “Just hold them still.”
The familiar dropped down from Andrew’s arm and bounced off of the pavement like a rubber ball, traveling the length of the parking lot in two long leaps and exploding into a mess of confetti the moment before it landed. It wrapped itself around the two cops and hoisted them up into the air, covering their bodies like mummy wrapping. They couldn’t even turn their heads.
Josh left the doorway and walked towards them. Andrew ran after him. When they got closer they could hear the cops talking, their voices muffled by layers of tentacles. One of them was old enough to be his father, the other was much younger. For a second, Andrew actually thought that it was Pete, that he hadn’t recognized him and done something else on top of whatever mistake he’d made that had brought him here in the first place.
He turned away, walked away slowly. Josh stepped in front of him.
“What’s the matter with you?” Josh whispered. “We’re not hurting them, all right? They’re just going to be a little scared. They can’t even hear us, we’re not going to get in trouble.”
Andrew closed his eyes and opened them again. Josh was still whispering, but Andrew heard another voice. At first he wasn’t sure if it was real, or just another echo in his mind.
“The sky is so different… I’d forgotten…”
Everyone stopped talking.
The voice was slow and careful; its words had purpose behind them. It was coming from the creature. Josh took a step closer and saw the outline of a human face pressing against its skin from the inside.
“I was looking for the sky when I opened up that man, really, that’s all it was, that’s where you find the sky in the other place.”
The younger cop whispered something Andrew couldn’t make out; the older one didn’t say anything. Josh looked at them, looked at Andrew. He felt a wave of something he’d felt when he’d seen his brother die, and brushed it aside. He was dreaming now, he was in a place where everything was easy. He walked over to one of the officers. There was a bulge in the mass of tentacles around the man’s hip, his holster. The tentacles slipped away as he reached for the gun, and wrapped back around as he pulled it from its holster.
He pointed the gun at the creature. It was still talking.
“The new horizon was spinning around the old one and I didn’t know how to get behind it at first…”
He pulled the trigger. The roar hit his eardrums and ran down through every inch of his body. The kick from the gun sent his hands flying to one side and he missed.
The sound shocked Andrew back to life.
“Josh, what are you doing?”
The creature was still talking.
“…that I was caught inside of a giant making…”
Josh pulled the trigger again.
“… where… the where is the important part, it changed everything, it changed me…”
The gun made a sound when it fired, but it wasn’t as loud as before, and when it hit the creature, it didn’t make a sound at all. It shattered slowly, tiny eggshell cracks spreading from the point of impact, and soon it was just a collection of glowing blue scraps lying on the ground, fading to nothing.
Josh stared at the circle, then at the gun. He put it down on the ground, slowly. His hand was shaking. He couldn’t hear the car alarm anymore.
“I did it…” he said. “I did it…”
“We should run,” Andrew said.
&n
bsp; Josh turned his head towards the police officers. They were still just hanging in the air, silent except for their breathing.
“Yeah.”
He could still feel his hands shaking.
#
They ran as fast as they could, and by the time they got back to the park, they were completely out of breath. They sat down on the bench on top of the gazebo and looked at each other. The sky was a dark blue and the trees were black shapes surrounding them in every direction.
“It hurt that person,” Josh finally said, the words tripping over each other as they came out of his mouth. “It would have hurt somebody else. We did what we had to.”
Andrew looked at Josh, then away from him. The edge of the horizon was beginning to turn pink.
“It talked,” Andrew said. “It had a face and it talked.”
They were silent for a while longer.
“I should’ve taken the gun,” Josh said. “My fingerprints are on it.” He stood up, walked to the edge of the gazebo and leaned against the railing. “We still have to find where it came from. We have to do that, don’t we?”
Andrew didn’t say anything. Suddenly, the familiar appeared off in the distance, falling through the air and leaping from the ground like a comet. It reached them, slithered up the stairs, up Andrew’s leg, around his shoulder. He felt it through his clothes, freezing cold and then white hot, sharp like a bed of nails.
He stood up.
“Yeah. Tomorrow night.”
They left the park walking in different directions, and made it home just as the sun came up.
#
Many miles beneath the surface of the earth, directly below the gazebo where Andrew and Josh had spoken to each other, a small empty space was filled with gentle electricity. Shadow’s heart wouldn’t start. She tore it apart and put it back together again; slowly, clumsily, it began to beat. She felt the blood rush up through her neck, down to her fingertips.
She opened her eyes.
CHAPTER 15
#
They kept showing the video on all the news stations. You could watch the unedited version on the internet and see the man get ripped apart. When morning came along, the tourists and the college students had all left town and the only people left in the hotels were the crazy ones, the hippies and the new-agers, and a few other people who absolutely couldn’t afford to leave.
Andrew didn’t know for sure if he was going to school until the last minute, and his grandmother watched him as he walked out to the bus stop. The morning passed the way it usually did. After lunch there was a tornado drill; the kids all went out into the hallway and curled up on the ground next to their lockers. Andrew met Josh in the attic immediately afterward. He’d already been working for about an hour.
There were three locations covered by the protection spell. One of them was Andrew’s house, but that hadn't been activated yesterday. Of the other two, one hadn't either and the third had. Josh was sure that if he could see where everything was he could figure out where the third location was relative to the other two. They went down to the library. Josh checked out a road map and spread it out on the table. He took a protractor out of his backpack and made a few measurements.
“There,” he said. “It’s not that far from where we went with Tom.”
A lump gathered in Andrew’s throat and he looked away. Josh stepped around him and looked him in the face.
“We don’t have any time to feel bad about that now, all right?”
Andrew looked back up and nodded his head.
“Come on,” Josh said. “I have a spare bike at my house.”
The bell rang. Josh and Andrew slipped out through the window when the librarian wasn’t looking.
#
Josh took the lead and Andrew followed. They passed gas stations, department stores, restaurants. They rode on the sidewalk as long as they could and hopped onto the train tracks just as the sun began to set. The tracks followed the interstate; thousands of headlights came and went, and when they rejoined the road, there was nothing but trees on one side of them and farmland on the other.
“This is it,” Josh said. They pulled over.
Andrew looked into the woods. “We should wait until it’s dark. So that we can see.”
They hid their bikes under some bushes and sat down under an oak tree a few yards from the road.
“There aren’t going to be any excuses this time,” Josh said. “There’s no way we’ll be able to explain where we went.”
Andrew didn’t say anything. He wondered where Shadow was.
“I mean, how would we explain it? What would people say if they knew what we were doing?”
“I know,” Andrew said. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
They waited until the sun had finished setting before they took their pills. There was a chain-link fence about twenty paces in from the side of the road. A thin blue ribbon was hovering above it, weaving through the branches like a string of Christmas lights, as far as the eye could see in either direction.
“Do you know what those are?” Andrew asked.
Josh shook his head. He got closer to the fence and found a set of rusty hinges with a chain and a padlock wrapped around them. He was still trying to figure out how to open the door when the lock fell open.
The blue lights overhead dimmed until they could hardly see them at all. Another, stronger light was shining deep inside the forest. Josh and Andrew opened the gate and moved towards the light. They didn’t know where else to go.
#
Mike was leaning in the doorway, staring at his shoes. Luke pulled his hand away from Thomas’ forehead and lifted it up into the air. He seemed distracted.
“Michael.”
Mike looked up. “Yeah?”
“Find Rob. I just allowed two children to enter the perimeter. I want them brought here so that you can skin them while our host watches.”
Mike glanced over at Thomas to see what his reaction would be. He didn’t bug out or anything, didn’t even flinch, but he stiffened up a little. That was a start at least. Maybe Luke had the right idea.
“You got it.”
Rob was upstairs in the library trying to find a book he could still understand. Mike went to go get him.
#
They left the house and went out into the woods. Rob went first; he stomped on the dry grass, shoved branches out of the way with both hands. Michael walked behind him.
“Keep going.”
Rob looked back and forth. “I don’t see them.”
“I don’t see them either, but I know where they’re headed.” He pointed at the blue glow shining through the trees. “Little kids are like magpies. They’ll move towards the light.”
Soon they found them, two boys, about a hundred feet away from where they were standing. They were staring at a blue spider with seven legs. Six of the legs were touching the ground. The seventh was reaching out and back over and over again, like a finger continually flipping a light switch. The familiar was waiting patiently behind them.
Michael touched Robert’s shoulder and whispered into his ear.
“They have a pet. Walk back around about twenty paces and meet me by that tree with the dead branch hanging off of it. Leave a salt line behind you. You do have some salt, right?”
Rob pulled a cardboard container out of his back pocket and pointed at the label insistently. Mike rubbed his eyes.
“Good. Good for you.”
They walked away from each other, and met up again by the tree, completing the circle.
“How are we going to get them over here?” Rob asked.
Mike pulled out a gun from the inside pocket of his jacket and pointed it at Robert’s stomach.
Andrew and Josh were turning away from the spider when they heard the gunshot. They looked at each other, then towards the noise. They heard a man’s voice.
“Please… help…”
They followed t
he sound and saw a silhouette in the darkness, a large man lying on the ground, clutching his stomach with both hands. Andrew stayed where he was; Josh took another step closer. The man slumped over. Josh ran over to him and touched his body. When he pulled his hand back there was blood all over his fingers.
The air got cold. Mist drifted up from the ground, and suddenly it got warm again. There was a sound like a giant balloon popping, a bright light. Andrew closed his eyes and threw himself to the ground. The air filled with fire.
When Andrew opened his eyes again, Josh’s coat was lying on the ground a few feet in front of him, burning. The branches around them were filled with small fires, lighting up the clearing. He saw three people, Josh, Robert, and a man wearing a long coat that he’d never seen before. Robert was standing where the body had been, Josh was standing behind him, and the man in the long coat was pointing a gun at Josh’s head.
Robert turned towards the man in the coat, furious. His clothes were covered with patches of black ash.
“You shot me.”
Michael ignored him. He grabbed Josh’s collar with his free hand and pushed him towards Andrew. He pointed the gun at the both of them.
“You two are coming with us.”
“You shot me,” Robert repeated.
“Talk to the boss about it. He’ll probably be happy you did something useful.”
“You think I’m stupid.”
Michael turned back towards Josh and Andrew. “There’s a trail behind us. Start walking.”
Neither of them could move. They just stared at the gun. Mike took a step forward.
“Mike,” Robert said.
Michael turned around. Robbie hit him in the face with a log.
He fell, and Robert fell on top of him, pinning his arms to the side of his body. He hit him in the head with the back of his hand, knocking him unconscious.
He used his finger to draw something in mud on Michael’s forehead. He picked up the gun.
“Everybody thinks I’m stupid.”
He stood up. Josh was moving again now; his shoulders were shaking. Andrew was still, but Robert could see the moisture in his eyes, reflecting the firelight.
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