by Chad Huskins
“Stop moving.”
More screaming from all around. Behind him, the man with the insect arms fell to the floor, and a set of false teeth fell out of his face, grinning up at them. The arms tried to climb the wall, and splashed into the water there. Soon, something came out of the water. It was large and gray and veiny and akin to a Venus Flytrap, only large enough to swallow a man whole. It folded its lips slowly around the man long ways, lifted him, and then squeezed its teeth tight. The man’s spine crackled as it was bent backwards, and he was finally squeezed enough that he popped like a packet of ketchup, his viscera spewing down into the thing’s gullet.
“God help us,” hollered one of Zverev’s comrades.
Something was beginning to stir inside of Shcherbakov. He came to realize he had been in a kind of mild shock and denial. He couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing. But, like a nightmare, it no longer mattered how unlikely it all seemed. An inborn fear of the shadows and things without definition began to climb up inside his brain. Adolescent fears that had been put aside thirty years ago now returned like old friends, or, more exactly, like old bullies. You thought you were finished with them, but no, never finished. Never for good.
The elevator chimed, and when the doors parted, Shcherbakov turned his gun on the thing stepping out. A woman, skinned alive, staggering around and shrieking like a banshee. Something was crawling either into or out of her vagina, and it whipped around like a cat’s tail, only about nine feet long and edged. She fell right in front of him, splashing down in the foaming water, and sank.
“God help us! God help us! God help—ack!”
Shcherbakov turned, and saw the man to Zverev’s left being lifted off the floor. Something had come up from that churning water all around his feet, slithered up his pant legs, and now blood was gushing out of his mouth. Zverev and his comrade turned and fired on the writhing tentacle, the latter firing twice before turning to flee.
Shcherbakov started towards them to help, but then heard something laughing behind him, and it was running quickly on heavy feet. Instincts of self-preservation took over, and before even looking he leapt into the elevator, just as the doors were shutting, and hit the button for the bottom floor. There was water in the elevator, too; on the walls, floor, and ceiling. And things…things swam all around him. It was like being at an aquarium, inside the transparent tunnel that went under water and allowed you to view all the marine life from within. Only this water was murkier, and he couldn’t quite make out what he—
Something splashed on the ceiling, trying to leap out. A creature with a long, cylindrical head, with dangling chunks of what looked like moppy hair and a chattering mouth with bleeding guns and hideous fangs. The mind boggled, yet still Shcherbakov knelt, took aim, and started firing.
It was a strange and almost humorous sight. Spencer stepped back as Zverev and his pal started firing on the tentacles that had a hold on their dying man. What was so funny was that Detective Hulsey, out of sheer terror, had leapt back against the far wall and started firing along with them. In an instant, they had all just joined the same team.
They didn’t see what he saw, though. Long, slithering serpents had climbed out of Shannon Dupré’s mouth, down her shirt, onto the floor and were now pushing her up, lifting her off the floor. The tentacles were now her legs, and she dangled from them by her mouth like a ragdoll, or like a dead trout hanging by the hook that caught it. More tentacles protruded from her mouth. Six. Now seven and eight. Now nine. Now an even dozen. Shannon still hung lifelessly from them as this new organism came shambling down the hall towards them.
Spencer fired in retreat, trying to hit Shannon but only managed to clip the tentacles that suddenly flailed in his way. Behind him, Zverev and his last remaining guard were disappearing down the hall, towards their room, and Hulsey was right behind them.
Spencer took a potshot at the one that had shot Kaley, missed, then turned and ran in the other direction as more flailing tentacles rose out of the water, cutting him off from the Russians and the detective. Something massive and dark swam in the water on the ceiling, and a long, lethal blade came lancing out at him. Spencer moved in time, fired wildly with the Coke bottle still attached. If his mind-map was accurate, there was a door at the end of the hall that had to be a staircase. Spencer burst through it, not knowing what waited for him on the other side.
A sight somewhat familiar, the staircase was a long, veiny throat that pulsed and breathed, only no flames licked out as they had at the house in Avery Street. There were angry red bulges along the walls like infected tonsils, some of them oozing, changing shape…and that murky water poured down from the ceiling, through the air, cascading this way and that, as though hitting invisible rocks and forming a waterfall right down the center of the zigzagging stairs. The water peeled away from the walls, moving weightlessly, expanding in the air, and inside he saw glimpses of motion. A tear in reality, in the very fabric of space-time.
Welcome to the Hotel of Horrors, he thought, almost giddy with excitement.
Spencer started down the stairs, and just in time. The door behind him slammed open and through it came the long black tentacles, testing the boundaries of the doorway before pulling its body through—its nucleus was Shannon Dupré, still limp and hanging from the tentacles she was vomiting from her mouth.
The stairs were coated with the trickling foam—The quantum foam between worlds, he thought, snickering as he slipped and tripped down the first flight. For a moment, he was lifted off the ground, then slammed back down, then pushed across the floor, as if gravity couldn’t decide which way it wanted to go. Yet again, he was feeling the effects of the physics of another world filtering through. The Shannon Monster was coming down the stairs at him, fumbling and tripping over itself, unsure of how to manage in a world with such obstacles.
Spencer whipped back to his feet, and halfway down the next flight of stairs those same geometry-defying limbs as those on the docks came reaching out. Sometimes, they more than reached out, they clung to the guardrail and pulled with all their might, bending the metal and no doubt trying to pull themselves through. The Others were trying to force themselves through the small opening and into this world. Taking this world’s virginity.
Something swam inside the wall. An immense dark shape. Spencer stumbled down two more flights of stairs before he heard hyena laughter coming from below. He looked over the guardrail. Ascending the space between each set of stairs was a creature that hurt his eyes to look at. It was a massive, constantly churning thing. It spiraled and became other things as it approached—now an octopus, now a spider, now a many-breasted fat woman long spindly arms, now an amorphous pile of sludge. Above, the Shannon Monster climbed down the stairwell, suspended in the air by its many questing appendages pouring forth from her mouth.
They were cutting off both his exits, top and bottom.
Spencer looked to his right, where a door led to the twelfth floor. He ran for it, yanked it open, and was immediately pulled in through the hallway by an unseen force, sucked in like a flea through a straw. He hit the floor face first before flipping over and over. The unseen force kept pulling him down the hall until he slammed against the far wall. It knocked the wind out of him, and he dropped his gun. He stood, snatching the pistol back up, and aimed it all around. There was nothing on this floor besides the dimness and the water running all around, in the air and on the walls.
The walls…were different. There were no more red doors with the gold horse emblem. Instead, there were classroom-style doors all around, and the white-bricked walls were lined with lockers, some of which had been knocked over. “What…the…?” One wall had a poster, reading YOU MAY LAUGH WITH ANYONE, BUT AT NO ONE: BULLYING IS NEVER OKAY. Another one said DRUG ASSEMBLY THIS FRIDAY. “What…the…fffffuck?” Farther down the hall, there was a banner that read ’CANES GONNA TRAMPLE THE COLONELS THIS WEEKEND!
The ceiling, walls and floor around the stairwell door looked like something
had smashed them together. Like someone didn’t quite know how an Erector Set is supposed to work, and tried jamming it together with their Legos. Two different kinds of architecture at war with each other.
Spencer heard hacking and coughing. He turned and saw a woman lying prostrated on the floor, a pool of vomit spreading around her. The woman had a long, green dress one with a black-and-white-striped blouse, a pile of books dropped to the floor, one of them called Pre-Algebra Prep. Spencer thought, A teacher?
The woman tried to sit up straight, then lurched forward and vomited again. Then, right before his eyes, she was disassembled and her parts hung in the air. It was sudden; Spencer merely blinked and it had happened.
“Well, ain’t that a bitch?” He chuckled.
Another massive shadow passed beneath him through the water. Spencer noticed that he had started to sink into that water. He was up to his shins. He had a feeling that, the farther he ran, the more he would sink. But he had to move now, he couldn’t stay here. He turned and jogged down the hall, where the floors and walls of CES were once again smashed together with the floors and walls of Tsarskiy Penthouses. He passed a few red doors until he came upon an elevator, and hit the button to summon one, fully expecting it not to work, but it opened immediately. He stepped inside—almost wading inside, the water now had a definite thickness to it—and punched the button for the lobby.
Someone screamed. Just before the door closed, he saw a woman wearing only her nightgown running at him. She was missing her right arm. As she approached, her left arm vanished. Just vanished. Then, her eyes vanished. No blood, no mess, just gone, as if someone had hit DELETE or started erasing her. Then she fell over—her left leg had disappeared. No fuss, no muss, just disappeared. She rolled over in that water, and Spencer saw her face vanish—it just turned blank, like a Mr. Potato Head without any parts put on, a flat piece of flesh. She tried to scream through that sheet of flesh, but only managed to made mmmmmmmmmm noises.
When the doors closed, Spencer blinked a few times. “Such a blank expression on her face.” He smiled, snorted, laughed, and then guffawed so hard he couldn’t breathe.
Something slid past his leg, and he stopped laughing and fired a single round into the floor. A black liquid spread across the water, and some of it floated into the air, living and coiling and searching for him.
Spencer pressed his back against one wall. He checked his clip, counted the bullets left, and started singing a classic by the Eagles. “Last thing I remember, I was runnin’ for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before.” Something was swimming on the floor, and something else was climbing out of the ceiling. He aimed his pistol at it, but held his fire, waiting. “‘Relax,’ said the night man. ‘We are programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!’ ”
I have to go back for her.
That thought was paramount in Leon’s mind as he watched the two men ahead of him try for one of the red doors. But then he turned away once something licked out of it and reached for them. They darted down the hallway until they went through a door leading into a stairwell. As the door shut on them, he heard them screaming.
Leon backed away from that door, and looked back where he came from. Nothing made any sense. He wasn’t in Cartersville Elementary School’s main building anymore, of that much he was certain. He didn’t know if he had managed to somehow go below into a bunker—Some of these old schools have old bomb shelters they’ve turned into underground storage facilities, he thought, knowing how ridiculous it sounded even in his head—or if he was unconscious and dreaming this. Those were actually the only two theories he was entertaining at the moment. How else could he describe all he’d seen? And Spencer Pelletier…how else could it be that Spencer Pelletier was actually here?
Someone was laughing above him. There was…something…on the ceiling. It swam leisurely with a motion akin to a backstroke. But he would be damned if it was human, or even a remote cousin to Homo sapiens, or even a carbon-based life form. Slowly, he backed away from it, then finally turned and jogged back down the hall. Suddenly, he was in no hurry at all. He understood he was suffering some form of shock, but he was okay with that, as long as it carried him back to Kaley…
Leon lost his way. He didn’t know when it happened, just all at once he was moving down one of the school’s corridors…and then, just like that, he was back in the hotel-like hall. The walls were breathing, the ceiling hemorrhaging fluids…for a moment he thought he saw the hallway curve up ahead, but then it straightened. He didn’t know where he was going. Lost. Utterly lost.
Then, inexplicably, he was back near the elevators. There Kaley was, where he had last seen her, lying near the elevator doors—What the hell are elevators doing in a school? His mind still wanted to know, even as he raced over to her. Leon knelt to examine, even as something long and slimy smacked him across the face, then licked down his back. “Okay,” he said, trying to be sensible. “Okay, so, she’s shot, Leon. She’s shot and you’re going a little crazy. Now what?”
The bullet had passed through her midsection. That was never good. Okay…okay, so what do I do? Leon tore off his jacket and wrapped it around the girl’s belly to stop the bleeding, then looked around the macabre scene—the man that had been entangled by the tentacles, and whose friends had fled down the stairwell, was still there. There was no life in his eyes, but his arms and legs were being toyed with by the tentacles that ravaged his body, as though he were some macabre puppet.
Leon blinked, and forced himself to look away. Focus, Leon. He remembered to check the A, B, C, D, and E’s—Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability/Deformity, and Exposure—of the girl. He put his ear next to her mouth, listened for breath. He checked for a pulse. Both were there, but incredibly faint. There was no blood coming from her mouth or nose, so that was potentially good news. He turned her head to the side to facilitate better breathing, for all the good it would do. He rolled Kaley slightly on her side to check for an exit wound, and found it.
There was unholy tittering all around him. Leon stood and hit the button to summon the elevator. The doors opened a few seconds later, and inside he saw a man lying on his back in the water, his eyes slightly opened, a bullet wound on the front of his head. Slowly, he sank and vanished. “Whatever,” he said, beyond caring or understanding at this point. Paramount in his mind was Kaley Dupré’s safety.
Leon knew that under ordinary circumstances it was never a good idea to move a gunshot victim, but these were no ordinary circumstances. Ever so gently, he lifted Kaley off the ground, then stepped inside the elevator and used his foot to kick the button labeled1. The buttons went as high as twenty. How could that be? CES didn’t have twenty floors. CES doesn’t have elevators, either, he reminded himself.
As the doors shut, he heard whispers, intense and angry. “He has her! He has her!”
He looked the small car over. Water all around him, clinging impossibly to walls. Tiny little things swimming in it, some of them coming to the surface, nipping at air, then vanishing back below. For the first time, he thought to ask out loud, “What—the—fuck—is—going—on?”
A tiny whisper. “Detective…Hulsey…?”
He looked at the girl in his arms. “Jesus Christ!” he breathed. “Kaley!”
“Detective…”
“Don’t talk. You shouldn’t talk. Just hang in there, okay? You’re gonna be all right, just stay with me.”
“I can’t…I can’t go with…you…”
“I said don’t talk, and I meant it!” Something shot out from the wall behind him, licking the back of his neck. He spun to look. Nothing there.
“They won’t…let me…they’re coming through now and…and…” She swallowed. “And now…they can finally…have me…”
“Nobody’s getting you, understand? Nobody. Not on my watch.”
“It’s okay…it’s okay…I think I’ll be all right…” She swallowed again, and blinked slowly,
sleepily. “I have to. I have to go to them…or they’ll always…come after us…”
“You’re not going anywhere that I don’t—” Something shot out from the ceiling, snatched at him. Leon dropped Kaley, reached for his gun in his waistline, and fired up at it. The thing squealed and slapped against the wall; it was a like an arm, but with open eyes searching the room for him. Leon stood over Kaley, protecting her, firing his gun until it was empty. The arm leapt out of the ceiling and then dove into the wall behind him, disappearing into the waters there.
Leon looked down, and saw Kaley had almost sunken completely through. His heart leapt to his throat. He saw a single arm, her dark-black skin standing out against the murky water. He reached for her, but the hand sank beneath, and his hand only splashed around in nothing. “Kaley? Kaley! No! Kaleyyyyy! No!”
Leon felt something pushing against the back of his eyes. It wriggled and danced and played with his nerve endings, sending searing hot pain through his face as the left eyeball popped out of its socket. Something was crawling inside of him, and it was getting out.
The elevator was moving excruciatingly slow, probably as a result of other physical changes happening to the building. But Spencer wasn’t worried. He was smiling again. When he felt her rooting around inside his head, it was like hearing a great truth affirmed. Nobody kills Kaley Dupré but me. But then he felt something else, a kind of surrender, and even a degree of what he would call fearlessness.
“Spencer,” she said, as if she were in the elevator with him.
“Where ya at, little girl?”
“I’m traveling.”
He didn’t ask what that meant; he figured he had a good idea. “You packin’ heat?”
There was something in her voice he’d never heard before: humor. “Have you ever known me to carry a gun?”
