by Tim Waggoner
McGuire said something then, but her words didn’t register on Lori’s consciousness. She was still staring at the swaying blinds, thinking about Rauch’s opening and closing gill slits, and especially about his red pinky nail.
“Ms. Palumbo?”
McGuire spoke louder this time, and Lori’s head jerked in her direction.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if there are any details you can give us about the intruder. Gender? Race? What the person was wearing? Did the person say anything?”
It wasn’t one intruder. It was at least a half dozen, and they weren’t human. They were monsters made entirely out of shadows, with multijointed limbs and clawed hands. Oh, and they made these weird whispery sounds, like they were talking, but if they were, I couldn’t understand anything they said.
“None of the lights were on,” she said, “so I didn’t get a good look at whoever it was, and the person didn’t say anything. Sorry.”
McGuire’s lips pursed, as if she was irritated by Lori’s answer, but she dutifully jotted it down on her pad.
Lori regretted calling nine-one-one now. She’d done so in a panic, but now that she wasn’t gripped by mortal terror, she could think more clearly. What good could the police possibly do? If she’d hallucinated the shadow creatures, she needed a psychologist, not a cop. And if the things had been real, what could human police officers do to protect her? But that wasn’t the worst. The worst part was the gills on Rauch’s neck and his crimson pinky nail. By calling nine-one-one, she’d invited one of them into her apartment. She had no idea who they were, exactly, but she knew they were connected to the shadow creatures somehow.
Her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized McGuire. Was she one of them too? She looked the woman over from head to toe, trying to ascertain if there was anything odd about her. One of her nostrils was larger than the other, and she had a small scar at the right corner of her mouth. Neither feature was on a par with neck gills in terms of weirdness, though. It didn’t appear that McGuire was one of them. Unless she was simply better at disguising her true nature than Rauch was. But if she wasn’t one of them, wouldn’t she have noticed her partner’s gill slits? They weren’t the sort of feature that was easily overlooked. Maybe you didn’t have to be one of them to work with them.
McGuire turned to look at Larry.
“And you didn’t see or hear anything when you came in?” she asked.
“That’s right. I put my guitar down and headed for the hall bathroom. I thought I heard Lori crying. Her bedroom door was open – which I thought was strange since she never leaves it open when she sleeps – so I went inside. The bedroom was empty, so I knocked on the bathroom door. A moment later, Lori came out.” He shrugged then, as if to say he had no idea what had happened here tonight.
“And your relationship to Ms. Palumbo is…?”
“I’m her ex-boyfriend. We’re just friends now, and I’m staying with her for a while until I can get my own place.”
McGuire made a few more notes on her pad. She then looked to Lori once more.
“How would you describe the way your relationship to Mr. Ramirez ended?”
Lori frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Was it a mutual thing, or did one of you bring up the subject first? Would you say the breakup was civil or was it acrimonious?”
Lori exchanged a puzzled look with Larry before answering.
“Like Larry said, we’re friends now. Good ones. I know that’s rare, but….” A thought occurred to her then. “Are you asking if Larry was the intruder?”
“Not necessarily,” McGuire said. “But if Mr. Ramirez does harbor any resentment toward you, he might’ve been tempted to scare you as a way of getting back at you. And it could have had nothing to do with your breakup, could simply have been a practical joke that went too far.” She faced Larry once more. “Maybe when you discovered she’d already called nine-one-one you were too embarrassed to tell her you were the one who scared her. If it was you, this is your chance to confess before this goes any further. Admit you did it, apologize to Ms. Palumbo, and we all call it a night. What do you say?”
Lori wanted to defend Larry, to tell McGuire that he’d never play such a cruel joke on her, no matter how much anger and resentment he might have felt. He wasn’t that kind of person. But she couldn’t speak. Something that McGuire had said – one word, actually – had stopped her cold. That word was confess. McGuire hadn’t put any special emphasis on the word, but it had stood out to Lori nevertheless. She remembered what the woman – Goat-Eyes – had said to her. Confess and atone – or suffer.
Larry looked at her as if he expected her to stick up for him. When she didn’t, his expression fell, and he faced McGuire once more.
“I wouldn’t do anything like that to anybody, let alone a friend.”
McGuire looked at him for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. Finally, she nodded. “Have either of you touched anything since you reported the incident? The bedroom door? The patio door? The table or chairs?”
“No,” Lori said.
“Me neither,” Larry said.
McGuire jotted their responses down on her pad.
Lori heard the sound of boots on the wooden stairs outside. Rauch was returning.
He pushed his way past the blinds as he reentered the apartment. The lines of his gills were faint now, so much so that she almost couldn’t make them out. She dropped her gaze to his left hand. The nail of his pinky finger remained just as red, though.
Rauch stopped when he reached McGuire.
“The bedroom door was definitely forced open,” he said, “and the lock on the patio door is broken. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the deck or stairs. Nothing on the ground at the foot of the stairs, either.”
When Rauch finished speaking, his neck gills opened and closed one time, the action occurring so quickly, Lori almost missed it. She looked at McGuire’s face and then at Larry’s. Neither showed any reaction. Maybe she was seeing things, minor hallucinations brought on by the stress of everything she’d experienced tonight. But the shadow things hadn’t been hallucinations, though, had they? Rauch said both the bedroom door and the patio door showed physical signs of having been opened by force. If the shadow creatures hadn’t been real, then who or what had broken into her apartment?
“I’m going out to the cruiser,” Rauch said. He looked at Lori. “We need to get a crime scene tech in here to take photos of the evidence and dust for prints.”
The last thing Lori wanted was to have more strangers in her apartment tonight – especially if any of them happened to have red-painted pinky nails.
“Okay,” she said.
Rauch held her gaze a moment longer, and there was something in his eyes that she couldn’t name, but which disturbed her greatly. A coldness, almost a loathing, as if the very sight of her offended him on some deep level. Then it was gone, and he turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the hall. He didn’t close the door, and McGuire made no move to close it for him.
Lori was shaken by Rauch’s glare, and she wanted – no, needed – to get away from McGuire and from Larry, too. She needed a few minutes by herself.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she said. “There’s one in the hall. I can use it instead of the one in my bedroom.”
“No problem,” McGuire said. She smiled then, and Lori tried to gauge whether there was anything sinister in that smile. It seemed genuine, but how could she be sure?
She rose from the couch without returning McGuire’s smile. Larry looked concerned, so much so that she expected him to offer to escort her to the bathroom. But he said nothing, and Lori walked down the hall by herself. When she reached the bathroom, she turned on the light, stepped inside, then closed and locked the door behind her.
She took in a s
huddering breath and let it out. The madness that she’d encountered at FoodSaver had followed her home – not just in the form of the shadow creatures, but also in the form of Officer ‘Gill-Neck’ Rauch. If one of them was a cop, who could she turn to for—
Her thoughts slammed to a halt as something registered on her consciousness. She turned toward the mirror over the sink and saw there were letters on the glass, written with a substance she couldn’t identify. It was thick and greenish-gray, like snot, and it smelled like rotting vegetable matter. She held her breath as she read the words.
You know what you did. Confess and atone – or suffer. It was signed, The Cabal.
A small whimper escaped her throat, and she began to tremble.
Chapter Four
Lori found herself once more walking through a torchlit corridor. It took her a moment to realize that she was back in the Vermilion Tower, following the crimson-robed eyeless man who’d brought her here. She frowned. She’d been somewhere else, hadn’t she? Where – her mind cleared and she remembered the shadow creatures breaking into her apartment, remembered the police coming to investigate after she called nine-one-one. She especially remembered Officer Rauch and his highly disturbing neck gills. She remembered seeing a message written on her bathroom mirror, one she thought Rauch had left during the time he’d been away from the rest of them, checking her place out. She’d considered calling for Larry and Officer McGuire to come look at the message, but if Rauch denied writing it – which of course he would – she feared they’d think that she wrote it, and she’d seem even crazier to them than she already did. She’d cleaned the disgusting substance the message had been written in, wiped it off the mirror’s surface using a hand towel and then used toilet tissue to get off the remaining residue. She’d tossed both the towel and the TP into the small plastic trash receptacle next to the toilet and then returned to the living room without peeing. If either Larry or McGuire noticed she hadn’t actually used the bathroom while she’d been in there, neither said anything about it.
The crime scene tech – a gawky guy in his late twenties – arrived to do his thing soon after that. Lori had been relieved to see his left pinky nail hadn’t been painted. By the time he finished and left with the two officers, it was almost four o’clock in the morning. She was surprised to discover it was so late. She’d completely lost track of time. Larry closed the patio door, although he couldn’t lock it, of course, then returned to the couch, sat, and held her. She didn’t think she’d fall asleep, was way too wired, but she remembered feeling drowsy and closing her eyes after only a few minutes.
And now she was here, in the Vermilion Tower once more. It was weird. She couldn’t remember ever having a multipart dream like this, one that picked up exactly where it had left off. She didn’t want to consider the possibility that this wasn’t a dream, that it was some kind of…what? Alternate reality? If sure felt real. Cold stone beneath her bare feet, a damp chill on her skin…. She still wore the flimsy, see-through gown with no underwear beneath, and she once more crossed her arms over her chest. Modesty seemed foolish here, but it offered her some small measure of control, and she’d take what she could get.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
The eyeless man – who she was starting to think of as the Driver – didn’t stop walking or look back at her as he answered.
“To the Chamber of Revelation.”
The words meant nothing to Lori, and since she couldn’t see any other option at the moment, she continued following the Driver. It seemed they walked for a long time, but eventually the corridor ended at a pair of large doors fashioned from some nightblack wood that Lori couldn’t identify. Two thick metal rings were bolted to the wood – one for each door – and the Driver took hold of the ring on the right and pulled. She expected the door’s hinges to give loud creaking groans of protest, but they were silent, and the Driver easily opened the massive door as if it weighed nothing more than a papier-mâché prop. He walked in first, not looking back to see if she would accompany him or take this opportunity to make a break for it. She was tempted to do the latter, but she thought once more of the Nightway, of the vast dark plain it cut through, and of the unseen things that might dwell there. Running off now could very well be a form of suicide, and while dying might be preferable to what the Driver and his friends – the Cabal, if she could trust the word Officer Ralph Rauch had written in gray-green goo on her bathroom mirror – would do to her, she wasn’t ready to kill herself just yet. She knew the old superstition that if you died in a dream, you died in real life too, and while she’d always thought the idea was nonsense, it didn’t seem so to her now. Not at all.
She followed the Driver through the open doorway.
Whatever this place was, it was dark inside. The only light here was the flickering of torchlight coming from the hallway outside, and that was only enough for Lori to see the Driver’s red-robed shape walking ahead of her. It was cold in here, so much so that if there’d been enough light, she was certain she’d see her breath mist in the frigid air. She hugged herself tighter, more concerned about warming herself than concealing her breasts now, but the action didn’t help. She began shivering, and she was unable to make herself stop.
She had the impression that there was a large space around them, but she wasn’t sure why she thought this. She could hear no sounds beyond her own breathing, but she nevertheless felt the pressure of being surrounded by a great deal of nothing. Was this the reason she’d been brought here? Was this dark place to be her prison, punishment for whatever crime the Cabal thought she had committed?
A small red pinpoint of light glowed to life in front of her face, and she stopped walking to avoid colliding with it. It became brighter as she examined it, and as soon as she was able to make out the features of the thing that was giving off the faint illumination. She expected it to be some kind of insect, like a firefly, but one whose abdomen glowed red instead of greenish yellow. But no bug lay at the heart of this crimson glow. Instead it was a tiny humanoid figure, something like an infant curled into a fetal position. Its body was distorted, asymmetrical, arms and legs different lengths and thicknesses, features stretched out of true, flesh covered with tumorous growths. The small humanoid’s eyes were huge in proportion to the rest of its deformed body, and they were wide open and blazed with baleful red light, which accounted for the crimson glow surrounding it. How it floated in the air, she had no idea. It possessed no wings, and there was no sign that anything artificial held it aloft. No strings, no wire. The tiny thing’s body didn’t move – arms and legs remained motionless, fingers and toes didn’t twitch or wiggle. And there was no way to tell if the creature’s eyes were focused on her because of how they were glowing, or if it could see at all, for that matter. But she had the impression that it saw her just fine, and for some reason it didn’t like what it saw. She could feel hatred radiating from it, rolling off in waves like heat from a blazing fire.
More crimson pinpoints of light glowed to life around her, at their core other miniature infants, all deformed in various ways, eyes all shining red.
Firebabies, she thought, and the name seemed fitting. They were ugly and beautiful in equal measure, and she was both fascinated and repelled by them. She wondered if there was a word for this mix of emotions. If so, she didn’t know it.
At first there were only a few dozen, but more appeared, hundreds, thousands, maybe millions. They floated toward each other, packed tight together, and formed a single mass shaped roughly like a sphere. They rose into the air slowly, and their combined light illuminated the area around Lori in crimson. She was able to make out her surroundings, and she saw that her initial impression had been correct. She stood in a large open area like an auditorium, except instead of rows of seats surrounding her, there was an upward curving spiral ledge that circled around the chamber’s wall.
I’m within the horn’s inner core, she thought.
And she wasn’t alone.
The Driver was there with her, although he’d continued walking as the firebabies appeared. Now he stood next to the far wall opposite her. He had turned around and faced her, his red-washed features devoid of any emotion. He was far from the only robed figure in attendance, however. Others stood on the spiral ledge, shoulder to shoulder, all facing her. Their numbers began at floor level and continued upward, one after the other, around and around, going on so far that the mass of firebabies – which now hovered directly above Lori – couldn’t illuminate them all. The firebabies’ eyelight was more like that of smoldering red coals than a blazing inferno, and because of this, she couldn’t clearly make out the faces of the robed figures, even those close to ground level. But the shapes of their bodies varied widely, some looking perfectly human, others looking like…something else. Things whose limbs were too long, too short, too numerous, or more like animal or insect appendages. Their faces – what she could see of them in this light – were similarly twisted and alien. And while she couldn’t see it, she felt confident that all of the red-robed figures had one feature in common – a crimson-painted pinky nail on their left hand. She wondered if the goat-eyed woman was among those assembled here. The gill-necked police officer, too. She didn’t spot them, but she thought they might be here, watching her with the same cold, silent scrutiny as the others.
She heard a voice then, or rather a multitude of voices, speaking in unison.
“Confess.”
The word reverberated throughout the chamber, and Lori winced at the accusatory anger behind it.
