Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Run . Never stop .

  They had boxed him in at last. Where could he run to now—into the trees? With all the freshly made Green Hands abandoning their cars, hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them closing in on his position from all over the city—perhaps, by now, every inhabitant of this city—they’d simply fan out and surround him. It was only a matter of time.

  It was finally time to stop. Maybe it would be better to cease to exist, at any rate . . . put an end to this nightmare existence.

  That was what his mind said, but his body followed the biological imperative to survive, and he was already lunging out of his car and rushing toward the nearest of the darkly squatting houses whose properties formed the cul-de-sac. The first point of egress that presented itself to him was the garage adjacent to this house. The overhead door was shut, but the beams of his car’s headlights showed him a door to the side of that. He turned its brass knob, found it unlocked, ducked into the garage, and shut the door after him. He flipped the latch in the knob to lock the door, then faced the gloomy cavern he had entered. Just enough illumination from his headlights made its way through the overhead door’s little windows to reveal an array of gardening implements hanging from a rack bolted to the wall. Rakes, hoes, long-handled spades, and a pitchfork with five curved tines. He took this down and balanced its weight in his hands.

  He could only hope that at least temporarily he had thwarted his pursuers, who wouldn’t know which of these houses, if any, he had stolen into.

  His victory was briefer than he’d thought. Where the garage’s back wall met the house proper, a door was flung open and a man appeared in its threshold. Gray-haired, big-bellied, wearing a comfy Homer Simpson T-shirt and sweatpants and a grin like a gleaming scythe blade. And green hands, as if they had been dipped in some phosphorescent chemical. Without a word or exclamation, without any accusation for Zetter’s trespassing—indeed, his smile seemed to welcome Zetter joyously—the gray-haired man jumped down the two steps from the house to the oil-stained cement floor of the garage and came at the intruder with luminous fingers spread wide.

  The man all but flung himself onto the tines of Zetter’s pitchfork as he swung it around in front of him. The five prongs entered the man’s jowly throat, and that stopped him in his tracks. He even blurted, then started gurgling, and pawed at the air like an insect with a pin through it, though his grin didn’t so much as twitch. Zetter jerked the tines free, but before the man could stagger forward he jabbed the pitchfork into his lower face, tearing through flabby cheeks and stretching his lips back from his grinning teeth. Again Zetter tugged the prongs free, only to stab them into the man’s face again, higher this time, into his eyes. The squelch of his pierced orbs and the scrape of bone made Zetter’s stomach roll onto its back, but he held tight to the pitchfork’s shaft and followed the homeowner to the garage’s floor. His brain impaled through the orbits of his eyes but still wearing that Cheshire Cat smile, the gray-haired man convulsed violently as though he clenched a live power cable in those bright white dentures of his. Zetter kept him pinned to the floor, putting weight on the pitchfork’s handle. Finally the man was still, and Zetter let go of his weapon, stepped back panting. The tines were still stuck in the dead man’s skull, the handle bobbing close to the floor.

  Zetter considered using one of those gardener’s spades to hack off one of the man’s glowing hands and use that to light his way into the blackened house itself, but already both of the dead man’s hands were losing their pale luminosity. Zetter recalled the hand of that boy crushed by the truck at the rest stop, some months back.

  Vague shadows passed in front of the murky little slit windows in the garage’s overhead door. He heard the brass doorknob rattling. Without wasting any more time, Zetter rushed past the body of the first person he had ever intentionally killed (the first? part of his mind questioned) and plunged through the doorway the homeowner had appeared in. He shut this door and locked it behind him, too.

  The interior of the house would have been entirely dark, had it not been for the shining green hands drumming at all its windows.

  They hadn’t been tricked as to which house he had entered. They surrounded this one, probably more and more of them coming by the second, streaming onto the obscure back road from all those vacated cars bejeweling the streets of the city. They slapped the flats of their hands against every ground-floor window, the combined green light showing through curtains, shades, venetian blinds. But why didn’t they find themselves rocks, bricks, other objects to swing against the glass? Even a fist might break a window. Windows seemed to foil them, or confound them . . . maybe even made them timid about applying force. All this time Zetter had thought it was simply their inability to break the safety glass of his car’s windows, but now he realized it was something more than that, something unaccountable. A window was a portal that showed you another place, beyond the place you were in. Perhaps they were even reverential toward windows.

  He didn’t want to put any great trust in this theory, though. Even if they were impeded by windows in some strange way, they might still shatter one unintentionally through all their slapping against the panes. He needed to make himself more secure. The house had no second story, but . . . a basement? The door to a basement, if it had one, would be in the kitchen. So, by the misty greenish glow that penetrated the house, he found his way into the kitchen and there located a door that, when opened, revealed a darkness with the mildewed smell of an underground place. He descended the first few steps and shut the door behind him, but found that it didn’t lock. He cursed internally. Yet what choice did he have now? Better to keep descending. Maybe there was a small room he could lock or barricade himself in; at the very least, a closet to conceal himself in. Maybe there were more weapons, even guns.

  Or maybe he had painted himself into a corner that no biological impulse for survival could prevail over.

  The cellar was in deep yet not total gloom, for once again that fungal green illumination entered through several small windows spaced along the walls, at the level of the ground outside. Even here, maybe squatting low or even lying on their bellies in the grass, the Green Hands drummed their hands against the glass.

  A billiard table stood in the center of the main room, which was a playroom with an old sofa along one wall, a hanging dartboard, and a refrigerator perhaps stocked with beer. Zetter picked up a pool cue and held it like a spear while darting looks around him. An adjacent, smaller room showed a water heater hulking in the corner, and a washer and drier against one wall.

  The tattooing against the cellar windows, and those upstairs—he could hear it through the low ceiling—increased in tempo, grew wilder, until surely the glass couldn’t take much more and every window would explode inward simultaneously. Yet then, suddenly, it stopped altogether. Everything was still.

  Had they given up, then? Had the glass truly defeated them?

  The green glow had subsided along with the drumming, swallowing Zetter in a darkness he actually welcomed, but now the glow returned. Instead of thumping against the windows, this time the hands pressed flat against them and remained there unmoving. Were they going to try to push the panes out of their frames, instead of smashing them? Zetter couldn’t tell if any pressure was being exerted.

  He turned and stepped into the laundry room, which he found had its own door, standing fully open. He closed it, but again it had no lock, proving itself useless. He looked about for things to use to barricade it shut . . . for all the good that would do against a crush of bodies, once the Green Hands got inside. For sooner or later, one way or another, they must. The windows down here were too small for anyone but perhaps a child to crawl through, but the windows upstairs, not to mention the doors, were another matter. And they might have no compunction at all about smashing down the doors.

  It was while checking to see if he could disconnect the washer and dryer, to push them against the door, that he glanced up at the single tiny window in this room and s
aw not only hands pressed against its dirty pane, but the squashed nose of a little boy’s face. A little Asian boy of about five years. Grinning like a larval Buddha.

  Zetter had grown breathless from his exertions, and from terror, so when he shouted at the child’s face his voice was ragged. Close to cracking, close to weeping.

  “Why me? Huh? I’m nothing special! Why me?”

  The child stared as if into his core, but of course made no reply. Despite or because of this, Zetter kept on.

  “If I did something . . . if I did something wrong, I didn’t mean it! Okay? I’m sorry!” At last he broke into sobs. “I’m sorry!”

  A crease in the center of the boy’s left palm seemed to widen and deepen, showing black inside, like a little toothless echo of his grin.

  Zetter thought the tears that had welled up in his eyes were distorting what he saw, until he realized that the lips of this little vagina-like slit were pulsing irregularly. Then a tiny head pushed out of the bloodless opening . . . pushed straight on through the window pane as if it posed no barrier at all. It was the head of an insect, with feelers probing the basement’s damp air. The head was luminous green, even the two great eyes.

  Horrified into silence, though tears still trailed down his cheeks, Zetter watched as the rest of the insect struggled out of the portal in the boy’s palm, like a moth emerging from its cocoon. It wasn’t a moth, however, but a large wasp, entirely colored that pale phosphorescent green, slick with slime or mucus. It flicked its wet wings as it poised there, on the inner surface of the cellar window.

  Before the wasp could take to the air, Zetter threw open the laundry area’s door and leaped back into the playroom, meaning to slam the door shut and trap the wasp in the smaller room.

  He found, though, that the air in the playroom was filled with swarming, soundless wasps, swooping and circling, glowing as beautifully as the fireflies he would catch in a paper Dixie cup in his backyard as a child.

  Zetter began shrieking in the voice of panic, an animal-like sound he had never made nor heard before, waving his arms madly in an attempt to bat the wasps away from him. But they converged on him, covered him as he blindly stumbled for the stairs that led back up to the kitchen. The wasps crawled on his clothing, snagged in his hair.

  All the while, the green hands remained pressed to the little basement windows, the black orifices in their palms still gaping open, like watching eyes.

  Zetter tripped over something, fell forward, caught himself before he could crash to the floor, all the while wildly slapping at his head and body. In spite of his efforts, one of the wasps scampered down the back of his collar. Another crawled halfway into his left ear. Before any of the others could sting him, however, one of the insects in his hair scrambled down his forehead and injected its stinger directly between his eyebrows, as if to punch open a pinhole-small third eye there.

  Zetter jolted up straight as if electrified rigid, his eyes bulging wide. This reaction transpired in but a fraction of a second. His left hand had been raised in front of his face to swat at his head again. In that microsecond he saw his hand frozen there before his eyes, and it appeared as a negative image of itself, but colored the same phosphorescent green as the wasp that had stung him.

  And then Zetter’s hand was gone—along with the rest of him—as he blinked out of existence.

  Part Two: Other Worlds

  The Green Hands

  0. Out of the Blackness

  Though he couldn’t say why, when he came to consciousness he was surprised to find himself alive. Then again . . . was he alive? After all, might ghosts feel a kind of consciousness?

  Yet surely ghosts couldn’t detect scent. The air he drew into apparently corporeal lungs (and ghosts didn’t need to breathe, either) was damp, with the taint of mold and old mud. Maybe the lingering effects of some past flooding. He thought of flooding because he seemed to recall he was in a subterranean place. Yes, a cellar. His back was pressed to this cellar’s cold stone floor—unless it was a slab in a morgue, or in a burial vault, that he lay on instead.

  He sat up slowly, bracing his hands on the cold surface, sliding them around in the utter darkness. No, not a slab; indeed, he sat on a floor. But he knew nothing of the dimensions of the room he occupied. The walls and ceiling might be very close, or miles away for all he could tell as yet. He considered testing the space around him by calling out, and hearing how his voice sounded—whether it was tightly contained or echoed away into the distance—but he was reluctant to call attention to himself. He might not be alone here, and he had a vague impression that not long ago he had been pursued by others—others who meant him great harm, or at the very least meant to alter him in some way he did not want to be altered.

  Standing upright now, he felt at his body and acknowledged that he was wearing clothing, though he couldn’t picture what it looked like. Now that he directed his consciousness to his feet, he understood they were shod. Timid about bumping into some unseen object and tripping—maybe even falling into a well or down a flight of stairs to a yet lower level—he at first just shuffled around in a close circle, peering into the void that encircled him in the hope that he’d catch at least a glimmer of distant light, one spot where the blackness shaded hopefully toward gray.

  Nothing of the sort, though. He was therefore left with no choice but to select a direction in the directionless black and start moving in a straight line so as not to simply circle back on himself. When he came to a wall, as surely he must, then he would have some grounding, and he could feel his way along it—eventually, it had to be, to a door.

  He only hoped that this door, when he came to it, wouldn’t be locked. For might he be trapped now, in this place where he had apparently taken refuge from those unremembered Others?

  He got himself started, with tentative little steps like those of a very old person, holding both his arms straight out ahead of him, waving and groping like the probing antennae of a giant, blind cave insect.

  Shuffling steps, shuffling steps. This was definitely no close space. Eventually, ahead of him he heard the patter of dripping water, and as he continued along the dripping came alongside him, so that he could detect a faint echo as the drips plopped into an unseen puddle on the floor. Then the dripping fell behind him and was gone. Silence again except for his cautious scuffing steps.

  He had no idea how much time had elapsed since he’d begun moving. A half hour? An hour? Longer? Nor did he know how long he had been down in this underground place, where he had hidden from the Others.

  At one point, something alive scuttled across the top of his left foot. It was big enough to be a rat, but he had the impression of more legs than that. He let out a yelp, which echoed off into the gulf, and he broke into a run for several yards, afraid that there might be more such creatures, maybe even a whole swarm of them. But he got himself under control, reminding himself of hidden wells and sudden flights of descending stairs.

  Then, there it was: the faintest, ghostly suggestion of light straight ahead. He wasn’t imagining it; when he blinked his eyes or experimented by shutting them, the pale gray glow disappeared. Had he been lucky in his choice of direction, or if he’d headed a different way would he have still encountered light, perhaps even sooner? It didn’t matter now: all that mattered was reaching this source of illumination.

  As the light grew slowly more distinct—and accordingly, he was able to walk toward it at a quicker pace, without his previous trepidation—it brought with it other things that also increased in intensity. For one, the scent of mold he now took for granted was being replaced by an outdoors kind of smell, of open air and perhaps countryside. And what bore along this scent was a cool breeze . . . just a whispery hint at first, but growing steadily into brisk gusts that penetrated into the cavernous chamber he had awoken in. Whenever these irregular gusts rose up, they whistled through whatever aperture—be it door or window—gave them ingress.

  The light was now strong enough for him to m
ake out litter on the floor around him: brown leaves mummified into crumbling fragments, which crunched under his soles along with a grit of dirt that had blown in over an untold period of time. Still, the light didn’t define this immense space any more than total darkness had. He still couldn’t make out a ceiling if he looked upwards, nor walls around him. The ceiling was too high up, the walls to the rear and sides of him too far away. And yet, he had seen no columns to support the ceiling of this unthinkably vast room. No furnishings. No features that might define its purpose. This structure struck him as a place that had been gutted and abandoned a long time ago, or else built a long time ago but never finished or occupied.

  A clean outline of bright light took form from the previous diffused glow. It was a doorway, open to the outside with no door hinged to it any longer, if there ever had been. The dead leaves formed a carpet here, which he waded through ankle deep.

  He came to the threshold—twice as tall as himself—and stood framed in its outline, to gaze out upon the scene presented before him.

  A little beyond where he stood, a flight of stone steps—as bone pale as the inner and outer walls of this structure proved to be—wound down the steep face of a hill like the spine of a buried dinosaur. These steps passed between bald outcroppings of rock and were overgrown with long, leached yellow grass that eventually swallowed the base of the staircase altogether, where the foot of the cliff met the shore of a sea or enormous lake. Small misshapen trees with gnarled black bark grew here and there atop the hill, close to the structure, and tenaciously clung to the severe slope, their dead brown leaves mostly blown away by the chilly gusts off that body of water.

  These details he only absorbed later, however. What first commanded his attention, and filled him with quaking awe, was the sky. Though he could grasp no memory of his life before attaining consciousness in this empty building, not even his name, he knew that he had never before beheld a vision like the one now revealed to him.