“But it’s cold and rainy.”
“So? You’re not Mom!”
“Okay, jeez, sor-ry!”
“Hnf!” went Courtney, all huffy-like. She did, though, stop long enough to get her hoodie. Then she was gone, clomping down the hall.
Mel rolled her eyes. Some people just couldn’t be happy. If that was what it meant to be almost-a-teenager, she’d rather stay a kid. Lying about Santa that way, too, wow...
She slid from her own bed, leaving behind a scatter of crayons and an activity book with a picture half-colored-in. Why did the kitties do their staring-at-nothing thing?
Then sometimes get all weird and go racing-chasing around?
Aunt Vera, when asked, had only shrugged and said it was because they were cats and all cats were a little bit crazypants. Mel figured she was probably right, but, it was more fun to treat it like a real mystery.
Cats could see super-good, way better than people, especially in the dark. Maybe nine whole times better; ninesight to go with nine-lives. What if they could see more, not just better? What if they really could see things that the rest of them didn’t even know were there?
Skipping over to her jumbled pile of luggage and toys, she popped the clasp on the sturdy black plastic case with the FBI and CSI stickers on the lid. Soon, she was geared up and ready to go, a vest with official lettering on the back and utility belt worn over a lab coat, night-vision goggles hanging around her neck, and a headlamp blacklight strapped to her forehead just under the bill of a cap to match the vest. She slid a pair of mirrored sunglasses into place, checked the mirror on the closet door, and flashed herself a double thumbs-up.
“Detective Investigator Special Agent Mel is on the job!”
She paused in the hallway, looking around, sweeping a penlight in slow, cautious arcs. Musty-dusty motes danced in the thin beam. Her sunglasses made normal rainy-day indoor shadows into even darker darkness, turning the already-kinda-spooky old house into what really did seem like it could be a crime scene.
Or haunted.
A skinny, crooked flight of stairs at one end of the hall vanished up into third-floor total blackness, and it was way too easy to imagine someone hiding there, watching her.
Someone...or something...
Mel shivered a little, partly enjoying the thrill and partly wishing she hadn’t teased Courtney about Slenderman after all.
From downstairs, she heard music, the big-band old-timey music her aunt and uncle liked. They were probably in the kitchen, Uncle Joe reading the paper and Aunt Vera doing one of her puzzles.
Up here, it was quiet except for the tick-tock of a tall clock. Its pendulum, swinging back and forth, made a streaky-brassy glimmer in the gloom.
Another glimmer shined at her, two glimmers really, two eerie rounded glowing glimmers. She realized they were eyes, cat eyes, peering out from under a table that held some music boxes and a vase of flowers.
“Here, kitty-kitty,” Mel said. “Want to be my detective helper?”
The eye-glimmers narrowed. Mel figured that was a nope. She caught a quick flick of movement at the edge of her vision and turned to see another cat, a fluffy pale puffball that could only be Queenie, darting along the carpet-runner and going whoosh fast up the crooked, skinny stairs.
“Let’s find out what you’re after.” Removing the sunglasses, Mel folded them shut and tucked them into her lab coat pocket.
Then she settled the heavy battery-laden night-vision goggles into place on her face and flipped the switch on the side. The lenses lit up video-game-green. The eyepieces hummed with a faint tingling sensation she felt in her cheekbones and temples.
Under the table—Aunt Vera called it an occasional table, which made Mel wonder if it was occasionally not a table at all but became something else—the rounded glowing cat’s-eye glimmers now looked bright as the headlights of an oncoming car. She saw the greenish-white flash of teeth, too, and heard a low, warning yowl.
“Ishtar?”
Whoosh and up the crooked stairs Ishtar went, too, following Queenie. Her black coat was almost invisible even with the night-vision. Mel made her way after them, trying not to bump into or knock anything over. The reflection of her penlight flowed like silvery water across the glass of picture frames, the tall clock’s front, and a collection of snowglobes on a shelf.
These steps weren’t carpeted, but were wooden and creaky. Mel climbed with her free hand trailing along the old carved banister. She’d been up there before, of course, during some of her previous explorings.
One room had been the art studio for Uncle Joe’s younger brother, who went crazy or died—or went crazy and died; she wasn’t quite sure on the details—long before Mel had been born. All sorts of his paintings and sketches and stuff were still in there. They were, she thought so at least, pretty good...if also kind of freaky and gross.
Another room, the round room at the corner of the house where it rose in a towery-turrety thing, had belonged to Uncle Joe’s sister, the one who’d run away from home when she wasn’t much older than Courtney was now. A teenager, and probably just like Courtney, too; sure that she knew everything and was all grown up and could take care of herself, she wasn’t a child, gah!
The rest of the family didn’t talk about it much, but when they did—usually at gatherings after the grown-ups thought the kids had gone to bed or were otherwise occupied—the stuff they said made it sound like there was more to it even than just running away from home in a snit.
Like maybe drugs were involved. Or stealing. Or a bad boyfriend.
“Or murrrrr-derrrr,” Mel whispered.
But that was a mystery she didn’t think anybody would let Detective Investigator Special Agent Mel look into. They’d just say it could wait until she was older.
The doors to both of those rooms and the smaller linen closets and storerooms had been left slightly open so the cats could go in and out. In the dim green haze of her night-vision goggles, Mel recognized the unmistakable thickset body of Ulthar sitting in the doorway of the turret room. His back was towards her, and his striped tail swish-whished behind him on the floor.
Queenie, whose white-and-grey fur made her show up almost too well, was doing the same exact thing in front of the art studio. Mel couldn’t spot Ishtar anywhere now; the black cat must have gone into a room.
“What do you guys see?” she murmured. “What’s in there?”
Obviously, neither of them answered, or even looked at her. Mel crept closer, wishing she had the good real kind of night-vision goggles like spies or the army might use...with infrared spectro-thermo-whatever...so she could see in the dark as well as the cats did. Or X-ray specs; X-ray specs would be cool.
Remembering her blacklight headlamp, she switched it on too. It shed an even eerier radiance, a strange misty thunderstorm purple that lit up electric-brilliant on various spots, splotches and speckles of what she figured must be old paint or something, because it probably wasn’t really, like, blood.
She edged up to Queenie, ready to jump aside at a hiss or snarl. When none came—Queenie only kept staring, making the nose-wrinkled yuck-face again—Mel nudged the studio door open a few more inches with the toe of her sneaker.
Some light came in from outside, around the sides of the curtains and shades. Cloth-draped easels and blank canvases loomed pale like strange ghosts. An uncovered, half-finished painting, one of the freaky-gross ones, showed what looked like an extreme close-up of an eyeball with different color gummy-worms curling across its glistening surface. In the combined night-vision/blacklight, it looked way majorly seriously weird.
“There’s nothing,” Mel whispered to Queenie. “Except the wormy eyeball picture, which, okay, yuck-face, I get it. But there’s nothing else in here.”
Still, and still obviously, Queenie didn’t answer. But, when Mel made to go into the room, the fluffy cat swiped with claws out. They snagged into Mel’s sock and jabbed sharp pinpricks into her ankle. She sprang back with a yip just as Q
ueenie tried to dash underfoot. Mel did a crazy little hop-skip dance not to step on her, succeeded in that much, then tripped over her own feet and went bellyflop onto the floor.
The fall didn’t hurt, but her head whiplashed forward with a whack-crunch so hard she saw sparks and stars, and that did hurt. For a second, she thought she must’ve cracked her skull open, like her parents always warned would happen if she rode her bike without a helmet.
She only didn’t howl or start crying because the landing had knocked her breath out in a big oof-cough. Pinwheel spiral fireworks whirled and spun, seeming both in front of her watering eyes and behind them. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a ring of cartoon tweety cuckoo birds going around, too.
Her forehead trickled wet—oh jeez was she bleeding? As she pushed herself to a sitting position, the weight of her goggles and headlamp shifted, making a tinkly clatter of falling tiny plasticy bits—oh jeez worse, did she break them? Her hands flew up quick to check, grope-patting, and she winced and yipped again because that hurt too, pain-darts needling into her face.
Whimpering some, starting to sniffle, Mel rocked back and forth on her butt. She blinked, tried to wipe her eyes but couldn’t because of the goggles, tried to take off the goggles and set off more stabby-needly pain-darts. She squinched her eyes tight-shut, which at least made some of the colorful fireworks go away.
There was a hum in her ears, too, a faint, ringing buzz that she could more feel than hear. It reminded her of being at the dentist, when they polished her teeth with the spinny thing.
What if she really was hurt, really bad? What if she was going to pass out or something? How long would it take anybody to notice and come looking for her? How long would it take them to find her? Maybe the cats would go and get help—
Or was that only dogs? She remembered stories on the news about dogs that called 911, and once even a parrot...but not so much cats. Cats, one of the bigger kids at school liked to say, would be the pets that ate the lips off old ladies in the commercials who fell down and couldn’t get up.
“Don’t eat my lips off, you guys,” she said in a woozy-sounding mutter. “Queenie, okay? I know you don’t like me but I didn’t step on you, did I? Ulthar? Ishtar?”
She peeked, one eye open to look for the cats, and thought at first somebody had turned the lights on up here. Then she thought she must have busted her night-vision goggles after all, because instead of shades of video-game green, the hallway was awash in a weird prickly-white glow. The white was speckled with staticky flecks of grey and black, an ancient-TV-set kind of effect.
When she opened her other eye, the view didn’t change, except that now she could see more, and better. If better was the right word for it; it hardly looked like the ordinary third floor anymore. The hall was still there, sure...and the doors to the various rooms...but...
But, actually, the longer she peered at her surroundings, the less it seemed like she was even in the same house. The faded wallpaper and wood paneling were etched with moving lines – long, skinny squiggles in neon shades of pink, yellow, and blue. The floorboards, upon which she still sat, looked totally solid and normal, but something like liquid smoke or thick rainbow-sheened oil rippled up from underneath them, the way waves might rise and subside through gaps in a half-submerged and falling-apart footbridge.
Ahead of her, in the doorway to the turret room, Ulthar either hadn’t even moved when she fell down, or had gone back to what he was doing before she’d noticed. He was still sitting there, still with his tail swish-whishing, still making the yuck-face at nothing. Now, though, she saw the ginger-stripe tabby outlined in brilliant orange, and twin glowstick-colored rays of light shot from his eyes like laser-beams.
“Ulthar?”
His ear flicked, but he didn’t turn. His whole attention stayed riveted on the turret room. Queenie, meanwhile, was back in her same spot at the studio door, just as if Mel had never nearly stepped all over her...and Queenie, too, had a shining outline, though it was fuzz-blurred by her fluffy fur. She looked like she was in front of a bright-white full moon.
And Ishtar...a black cat in the blacklight with an ultra-black halo, moving lean and low and swift down the hall...leaving a streaky trail in the air behind her as she went.
Ishtar was following something, stalking it, and Mel recoiled with a shudder as she suddenly saw what it was.
Blob-spider-jellyfish was the best she could come up with.
She touched the side of her head, just under the edge of the goggles, and wondered again how badly she’d bonked it.
Words kept trying to push themselves into her mind, words she didn’t know and didn’t like the sound of.
—undulant, amoeboid, mucilaginous, quaggy, geloid, viscous, protuberant, effusion—
It...oozed.
Oozed and squished.
Reached out with gooey string-feelers and rolled the—
—globular mass—
—gross wet snot-bubble of its body along them...pushing with a cluster of spindly leg-things that stuck out the back...and inside the—
—translucent glutinence—
—kinda see-through jelly were these dozens of—
—tumorous ocular nodules wavering with fine hairlike cilia—
—lumpy, knotted, hairy twists of gristle she realized might be its eyes.
Mel sucked in a breath, ready to scream. If it was a nightmare, so what? Let her wake everybody up, let Courtney laugh at her and tease her from now until forever!
If it wasn’t a nightmare...if she was seeing things because she’d cracked her skull open, so what? Scream anyway, and they’d come for her, find her, take her to the doctor, make her better.
Except, before she could scream, Ishtar’s luminous bluer-than-blue gaze found hers. The black cat meowed once, a sort of musical but urgent warbling chirp. Then Mel felt cloud-soft fur brush her arm, felt the nudge of a whiskery nose, both felt and heard the busy rumble of a purr as Queenie twined and rubbed against her side.
None of the cats had ever wanted to cuddle or nuzzle. Mel was so surprised she almost forgot about needing to scream, though she sure as heck did not forget about the—
—semi-fluid quivering monstrosity—
—yucky awful blob oozing toward the stairs, where several more of them squished and flowed, overlapping, mushing together, bulging, squeezing, stretching. Some were smaller than a cupcake, others were too big to fit in the staircase...but that didn’t matter because they passed right through the walls like the walls weren’t there...they drooped through the ceiling and wallowed up out of the steps the way whales did, only without the spouting and tails...
Queenie climbed onto her lap and started doing the pushy-paws kneading that cats did. Her purrs rumbled louder. Her claws pricked at Mel’s lab coat and jeans. She bumped her head against Mel’s chin.
Startled by, and not quite trusting, this unexpected display of affection, Mel hardly dared move for a minute. Then she hesitantly raised a hand and ran her palm along Queenie’s back, making the cat arch and push harder and purr even more.
The cats saw them, the blobby things in all their—
—multihued slickness of mucoid tissues—
—horrible, horrible jellyslime colors.
This was what the cats had been seeing all along. This was what their ninesight showed them.
This was what crawled sluglike all through the whole house. All through the whole world! And people didn’t know.
People didn’t know!
Those oozy blobs might be anywhere. Might be right by a person, under them, over them, on them! Creeping through them the way they crept through solid walls!
Ulthar strolled toward her, did a biiiiig stretch and yawn, and sprawled flop at her feet. Between her and the stairs. Between her and the mounds of wobbly goop squelching silently—or were they squelching silently? Just because she couldn’t hear them...
They knew, the cats. The cats knew. They understood now that she was seeing what
they did, what most people couldn’t or didn’t.
A deep-body shudder started way down deep in Mel’s bones and guts.
Both Ulthar and Queenie purred and acted all super lovey and cute. Like they wanted to distract her from the—
—amorphous coagulant loathsome protrusions of extradimensional abominations—
Meanwhile, Ishtar paced the hall, long and sleek as a panther, sparing only a slitted glowing-blue glance of warning Mel’s way. As if to tell her to not say anything, not react in any way, not let on that she could see what the cats saw.
But, why? Didn’t they want people to know? What if those blob-jelly things were dangerous? Or was it because they were dangerous? Crazy-killy dangerous, for people if maybe not so much for cats?
Because something bad might happen, if the blob-things sensed or realized Mel saw them, too?
Because then they might...be able to...what?
Reach her? Touch her? Get to her somehow?
She thought suddenly of the wormy eyeball painting in the studio, and the other freaky-gross artwork Uncle Joe’s brother did before he died. She thought of Uncle Joe’s missing sister, the one who’d supposedly run away from home.
What if they’d been able to see...?
And the jellyslime blobs had found out, and did something to them?
That was silly, though. The only reason she could see any of this was because of her night-vision and blacklight. Which somehow—after she whacked her head with them on and maybe broke something in there—gave her ninesight like the cats.
It occurred to her, as she petted Queenie and Ulthar curled around her feet and Ishtar reared up on her hind legs to swat at something dangling down the wall—
—elongating in supple and pendulous pseudopodic tendrils—
—in long gluey, goopy strings, that all she had to do was take off the goggles and headlamp. Then she wouldn’t have to see these ucky things anymore. They’d go away.
She grabbed the goggles by the sides again and felt another needling zap-shocker of pain, as if part of the electronics inside had jabbed into her skull, wires stuck like splinters. It stung and sizzled. More wetness trickled down her forehead. But the pain and the bleeding couldn’t be as bad as what she was having to see, and deal with, and think.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 8
