by Dan Jolley
Light eyes, blue, maybe green. Wide mouth.
She went to the trunk, opened it, got out two small bags of groceries, and disappeared into the front central door of the building. Access was only possible through one of the two central doors; all the doors to the apartments opened onto a long hall down the building’s middle. Simon almost panicked. He couldn’t see her anymore, had no way of knowing where she was, and his throat began to close up with anxiety.
He ran across the parking lot, almost on all fours in his haste, and came up hard against the back of her car, his breathing ragged and his eyes glued to her building.
Simon gasped with relief when a light came on in one of the second-floor apartments. A silhouette moved over the blinds, and he crawled around to the side of her car, trying to calm down a little. He drew his knees up to his chest and sat there, fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists.
Simon could feel the bones of his jaw loosen, and he ground his teeth together. He saw his mother’s face, so sad and disapproving whenever she caught him doing something wrong. He couldn’t imagine what she’d say if she caught him like this. I’m sorry, Mama. I’ve tried to stop, I have, I promise. He tried to think of something, anything but the woman, but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference.
“Ace of spades,” he mumbled into his knees. “King of spades. Queen of spades. Jack of spades.” Simon worked his way down to the deuce, then started with diamonds. At the ten of diamonds he felt in control of himself enough to stand up, so he made his way as quickly as he could around the building to the back side, and clung to the wall once he got there. Maybe...maybe if he just saw her. Maybe that would be enough.
The view was impressive. The hill hadn’t looked all that high from the street below, but the Crestwood View apartments weren’t kidding about the View part. A strip of grass about ten yards wide separated the complex from an almost sheer drop of roughly fifty feet, tumbling down to end at the street where Simon had begun his climb. A chest-high chain link fence ran along the edge of the drop-off, protection for careless toddlers and drunken college students. Simon crept out to the fence, trying to keep in the deepest of the shadows, and looked back up at the apartments.
The railings of the second-floor balconies leered down at him like multiple sets of teeth, and he felt afraid. His jaw was back to normal, and his hands unclenched after some effort. He rubbed the joints of his left hand, lingered over them, paused to work his ring finger back and forth. He pulled, and the knuckle popped.
Simon sank down against the rust-spotted fence and began to cry.
The urge wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been, not now. He could walk away. Walk away, find a quiet place, call his house, call his mother. She’d know what to do, know where he could go. Maybe...maybe she could tell him how to keep from...from doing it anymore. It wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all, and he knew it. How many nights had he screamed himself awake from the nightmares? How many nights since it first happened? He remembered the look on her face, in her eyes, remembered, ha, he couldn’t make himself forget, when she heard about what had happened at the neighbors’ house. He knew all the stories in the paper by heart. Every word.
He knew another word.
Addict.
Simon got to his feet, forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply. He touched his jaw, his eyes, and held his hands up in front of his face. They were thin and pale and normal.
“Can I do this? Can I just, can I just stop? Can I quit?” The sound of his own voice seemed very small and weak.
The light in the girl’s apartment came on at that moment, and Simon shoved his hands behind his back with a small whimper. A sliding glass door opened, and she came out onto the balcony, her golden hair turned dark in the moonlight. He stood, rooted, waiting for her to scream and disappear into the apartment—but she stayed there for long minutes, staring out at the city, before she turned and went back inside.
She hadn’t seen him.
Too bad for her.
His eyes hard white pinpoints, Simon crept across the strip of lawn, his torso long and pale and brushing the grass. His movements were quick and fluid and sure, and as his joints reconfigured themselves, things like heavy white worms writhed below his wrists.
* * *
Darlie Gilbert closed the glass door to her balcony but didn’t lock it. She planned on going back out as soon as her hot chocolate was ready, to relax in her white plastic lawn chair and prop her feet up on the railing. Darlie emptied the essentials from her purse, as she always did, placing wallet and keys and loose change on the kitchen counter next to the microwave, ready to transfer to another handbag. She had seven different ones and liked to rotate them.
Attached to the keys was a canister of pepper spray, an item her father had practically demanded she carry.
“If you insist on living alone,” he’d said, about four thousand times, “the least you can do is keep some protection with you.”
Protection from the big bad men out there. Darlie smiled to herself. She might not have been very tall, though she had always felt that five feet three inches was certainly tall enough, but Darlie was very nearly solid muscle, and wasn’t afraid of much. Still, no harm in granting her dad’s request.
She contemplated the young man she’d seen on the way in, the dark-and-handsome type who’d stared at her as she drove past. She hadn’t seen him around the complex before, but that didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t even sure who lived two doors down from her. Maybe she’d look for him around the laundry room.
While she waited for the water to boil she went through her voice mail. The first one was her boss at the art gallery, where she worked as Assistant Manager, a job which ranged from giving tours to arranging exhibits to helping with the framing. He wanted her to work an extra shift next week because of the new paintings from Janey Sinclair, which were scheduled to show up on Tuesday. She smiled at that, and felt a tiny thrill; she hoped Sinclair’s new pieces would be as electrifying as her previous ones.
The other message was from her father, who called her every few days, “to make sure you’re all right.” She listened to and deleted both messages. The kettle began its steam-driven harmonica chime.
As she poured the water into a Kermit the Frog coffee mug she heard a thump on her balcony. Frowning, she put the kettle back on the eye and moved to look around the corner, expecting to see one of the several stray cats that made their rounds of the neighborhood. Before she could tell what had caused the sound, she heard the latch click open, which only caused her a bit of puzzlement in the half-second she had to think about it. Then she rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room.
The Kermit mug crashed to the floor as her arm spasmed. Her lungs wouldn’t work, and she stood in the kitchen doorway in silence and watched.
Something that might have been a man stepped from Darlie’s balcony into her apartment and grinned at her. Eyes like two tiny search beams speared out from its face, set deep above an impossibly distended jaw that bristled with glistening spines. Its chest and legs were normal, but the arms were half again as long as a regular human’s, and the hands... Dead-white tentacles squirmed and writhed where the fingers should have been, ten undulating tendrils at least two feet long, each one terminating in a sharp, bony point. The creature spread its arms wide, and the finger-tendrils fanned out and lengthened until they tapped and scraped the walls and ceiling. Grotesquely, it wore normal clothing, a black T-shirt and charcoal gray jeans.
Darlie’s breathing stopped as she made a connection. The guy on the road.
“Yoo aghe ee doo ghis,” the creature said, and repeated the words, and she realized what it was saying: You made me do this.
It crouched, pulled the fingers back in and coiled to leap at her.
Darlie pulled the can of pepper spray off the counter and fired a stream directly into the creature’s eyes.
&nbs
p; Two seconds later both her ears began to bleed as every piece of glass in the apartment shattered.
The creature sucked in air for another scream and flailed toward her, but she backed up against the wall and fired again, and this time hit not only the creature’s eyes but also its open mouth. It screamed again, louder than a jet engine, than ten jet engines, and Darlie thought her skull would come apart.
As she watched, the jaw wriggled and retracted, became human again, and the creature shouted, “Ow! Ow! Shit shit shit shit!”
The writhing tentacles gouged runnels out of the walls and ceiling and tore gashes in the carpet as the creature jerked and twisted like a tornado. It ran and smashed its way back out through the sliding doors as if they’d been made of construction paper.
Just before it jumped over the railing of her balcony, the creature screamed, “Bitch!”
She stood with her knees locked and stared after it, and realized numbly that she still had the plunger pressed on the can of pepper spray. She took her thumb off it. She further realized she wasn’t completely deaf when she heard the neighbors banging on her door.
* * *
Simon hit the ground badly and felt the bones of his shoulder break. He heaved up off the ground and got away from the apartment as fast as he could, propelling himself forward as much with his extended fingers as with his feet. His eyes felt as if they’d been scooped out of his head and replaced with burning embers, and each breath he took drew acidic fumes into his lungs. He didn’t see the fence until he’d crashed into it, and didn’t remember its significance until he’d levered himself over it.
The slick grass of the hillside offered no traction at all as he fell. The rock outcropping he met halfway down could have provided a handhold if he hadn’t been agonized and blinded. As it was, his bad shoulder slammed directly into it. Another jet-engine scream tore out of him, abruptly cutting off when he bounced off the trunk of a tree. He felt his ribs splinter.
Simon rolled to a stop in the ditch along the street where he’d originally jumped off the eighteen-wheeler. All his insides seemed to have changed into tiny, sharp-edged rocks that ground together when he breathed. His vision began to clear, just the tiniest bit, but his eyes and mouth and lungs still burned unbearably.
He closed his eyes and tried to shy away when a car pulled to a stop on the street and headlights fell on him.
Two sets of footsteps approached. Even through the pain, the urge was still there, lingering at the back of everything with a needling, despicable insistence. His fingers were still extended, and with a feeble grasping twitch he tried to send them toward whoever made the footsteps.
A man’s voice said, “Oh...sweet God.”
A woman spoke, sharply. “We can’t let anybody see him. Come on, give me a hand here.”
Simon felt a sharp sting on his neck, separate from all the other pain, and his limbs went completely numb. Two people grabbed him roughly under the arms and legs and lifted, and he realized he’d been dropped in the trunk of a car just before the lid slammed closed and he blacked out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Images slammed through Janey’s mind in pain-rimmed jump cuts. Flash.
Sixteen years old, calling for her father. An unfamiliar car sits in the driveway. She hears the sound of chains through the open kitchen door, a shadow moves, and something like a tree falls on her head.
Flash.
She sits in a chair next to her father. Chains bind them both. They’re in the chairs Janey’s mother picked out when they bought this house. Janey misses her mother, and wants to call to her when she sees her father crying. Shadows move toward them.
Flash.
The men are huge, distorted, like ogres. When one of them pulls a gun it gleams small and slick in the light from the fixture overhead. Her father tries to talk, tries to beg, but the hammer cocks back and the barrel swings around, centered on Janey’s chest. Her father screams, and the air goes cold.
Flash.
The ogre with the gun clamps a hand to his own face and curses, and there’s something on the floor next to his foot, it’s small and wet, and he staggers and steps on it. The other men draw back from him, and he digs the gun into the skin between Janey’s father’s eyes and pulls the trigger. Janey’s throat hurts from screaming and crying and begging, and she can’t see because there’s something hot and wet in her eyes, and the gun turns on her and fires again, and a third time.
Flash.
Janey opened her eyes on darkness and aching pain, and started to panic when she couldn’t see. Her breath caught in her throat as she strained. She tried to focus herself by reciting the alphabet backward, but only got to W when the first wave of real pain crashed across her chest. The memory of the kid with the Uzi came back to her just as her night vision did. Her mind hitched, and for less than a second she was there again, back in the kitchen, lying on the floor next to her dead father. A flash, quickly faded. She groaned and tried to sit up, but collapsed onto her back.
She didn’t think any ribs were broken. The Vylar was intact, and the armor padding seemed whole. She took a deep breath, which rewarded her with stabbing pains, deeply felt but not—quite—debilitating.
Janey pushed with her elbows and managed to rise into a sitting position, and only then realized she had no idea where she was.
Oh my God. I traveled blind.
Stunned, she sat frozen for several moments. Shudders skittered through her body. Nauseated and weak, she did her best to put out of her head thoughts of what might have happened. Anyone who’d ever read any science fiction knew what was supposed to happen if someone teleported into a solid object. Janey didn’t know how accurate the stories were, had no plans to find out, and was horrified that she almost had.
She quickly patted herself down, took a fast inventory, and eventually decided all of her was still there, though she’d lost both the police batons. She unzipped the Vylar mask and rolled it up, exposing her mouth and nose, and took deep breaths regardless of the pain—but just as quickly pulled the mask back down. The smell of rich damp earth and the heavy, musty stench of mildew filled the air, but rolling over those two scents was the stink of human urine and feces. Janey wrinkled her nose and tried to take in her surroundings.
She sat on a packed, damp dirt floor, in a space maybe five feet high. Pipes emerged from very old brick walls to disappear both through gaps in the mortar and into the ceiling. The ceiling itself was composed of massive crossbeams and tongue-and-groove two-by-sixes, covered with mold and cobwebs. Against the far wall, maybe fifteen feet away, a squat water heater sat, housing a steady blue flame.
I’m in a cellar. She winced at the pain in her chest, knowing she would be a mass of bruises soon if she wasn’t already...and something touched her shoulder. She almost left the ground.
Janey whirled, a fist drawn back, and saw the edge of a ragged shape scuttle behind a brick support column ten feet away, the motion punctuated by a metallic clinking. A chain.
The sound knocked her back into the memory, blood in her eyes and two bleeding holes in her chest. Her stomach lurched, but she steadied herself, and soon the sensation faded.
Once behind the column, whatever had touched her remained still.
Janey crept forward slowly, eyes narrowed. The clinking sounded again, and she saw it now: a heavy iron chain connected to a bracket driven into the brick wall at the other end of the cellar. The chain dropped into the dirt, ran across the floor...and ended at the shape behind the column. Whatever it was didn’t move, and she heard its breathing, fast and shallow.
The cellar where Janey crouched was rectangular, about thirty feet long and half that much in width. Four brick columns rose out of the dirt to connect with the flooring above. A few cardboard boxes sat here and there on the floor, all of them placed near the water heater, far from the chain and the thing attached to it.
T
he chain clinked again, and the tattered, dark shape behind the column moved, just enough for one eye to emerge.
Janey’s spine froze over. Her pain entirely forgotten, she scrambled forward, bent almost double for the low ceiling.
A little girl hid from her behind the column. Dressed in decaying gray rags, she looked to be about ten years old. The chain in the dirt was welded to a thick iron ring around her left ankle. The girl stared at Janey with enormous eyes as she knelt before her, and Janey realized she could see her. Janey unzipped and pulled off her mask, ignoring the stench, let her night vision relax, and saw that a few thin threads of light made their way into the cellar through a square patch on one wall.
She brought the night vision up again, and saw the patch was actually a window. A window that had been bricked over. A few cracks had developed in the cheap mortar, and let in the weak, purplish luminescence of a mercury vapor street lamp.
Returning her attention to the girl, Janey kept her voice low.
“I’m a friend,” she said, and the girl grunted and moved away from her.
The girl never took her huge eyes off of Janey, but she jerked away even more quickly when Janey reached out a hand to her. The girl clutched something to her chest like a prized possession—held it the way other children hold blankets or teddy bears—and it took Janey several moments to figure out what it was.
Scratched and scarred, every line filled with dirt from the cellar floor, the girl’s prize was the black plastic bottom from an old two-liter soft drink bottle.
The full extent of what she was witnessing began to dawn on Janey, and she sat down heavily.
When she didn’t move for a bit, the girl came closer, still staring at her.
With a sense of dread, Janey tried again. “My name is Janey. What’s yours?” She smiled, her best, warmest smile, but the girl didn’t answer. She only stared, and jerked away whenever Janey moved her hands. “Can you say anything?”
