by Richard Hein
I snarled something incoherent and hopefully defiant. It’s damn hard to get any traction when there’s nothing to push against, but I wrenched at my hand with all the fading strength I had. It only served to saw against the cord around my neck, and dark specks flooded to gray nothingness as the air was completely cut off. Fine. I didn’t care. If that thing got its little smoky claws into me, it wouldn’t matter. My hand drew closer to my jacket pocket. Everything was growing warm as my lungs burned. My fingers fumbled, caught, and slipped inside.
I drew out a rather innocuous toy squirt gun.
The neon green almost matched the old woman’s otherworldly eyes. I couldn’t quite tell where she was, given all the oxygen I wasn’t getting, so I twitched my wrist around in its general direction and hoped for the best.
It was smarter than it looked, someone’s sweet old grandmother with the world’s worst case of halitosis. It drove forward, a demon train leaving the station, and rammed me into the wall by the door. Lights exploded behind my eyes as it battered me again and again, ripping down one of Thomas Kinkade’s finest with my spine. The tendril around my throat slacked a little as the creature focused on my hand with the gun, slamming me against the wall until the drywall broke around me. The gun tumbled from numb fingers.
Well, crap.
This was twice I’d gone into a situation without the proper expectations, and twice I was getting handled like a thrift store doll in an angry child’s hand. The swirling green eyes fixated on me as I hung pinned to the ruined wall, marginally more upright than I had been, slightly more able to breathe than a moment before. My lips curled into a sneer as my now empty hand curled around and latched onto the tentacle, ignoring the greasy feeling as my fingers sunk into it.
It was time to go out fighting.
I wrenched. Braced against the wall, filled with that fury that had done me such a disservice at all my previous jobs, I roared as I yanked on that insubstantial appendage. The creepy old grandma hadn’t been expecting that. Whatever those things were, they were anchored in her mouth, or stomach, or pit of eternal despair, and she stumbled forward. Her arms pinwheeled rather comically, as if she could keep her balance. I grinned like a lunatic at the full moon, used the moment of slack to kick out my legs, and wrapped them around her waist.
It staggered back. The shriek it made clawed at my mind, the sound somehow still pulsing from its throat despite the writhing mass of dark tentacles. I hammered on her face with both my fists, beating out the rhythm of delicious anger as she stumbled back. Black gunk flew from beneath my twin hammers, though the flesh sealed up again nearly as quick. Those possessed were still human, and not at all invulnerable like creatures that came in whole-body from the realities beyond, though the more powerful they were, the more resilient they became. If you found yourself home to some of the worst things out there, of course, the differences were slight.
“Hi-yo Silver!” I cried, never letting up my rain of ineffectual punches. “Away!”
The creature stumbled to her right. I could feel the tendrils snaking around my limbs once more. I needed something heavier to club this granny down with. My fists were working to an extent, but I was starting to get a sinking suspicion I had bet on the wrong pony at the track. Time was ticking. With a roar I slammed it with my will, forcing a conduit between the possessing Entity and its home plane. Mentally I could feel little cracks forming there, and its hold on the woman began to buckle.
It powered forward, little stubby legs churning beneath the robe with far more speed than I would have given credit and reared back. I had a second to catch my breath as my head brushed a bunch of little photos dangling from the ceiling fan before she suplexed me right down onto an antique dining room table. My focus shattered. Being that this thing had chosen to infect a grandmotherly old woman, it was a very nice, very solid antique table that in no way budged beneath me. I let out a squawk like a dozen ducks being force-fed into a wood chipper.
The devilish green of her eyes pressed close as the tendrils began to pierce my flesh once more. It loomed over me, crushing me to the table with one flabby arm, slithering vines of barely-there darkness gliding along my arms and up my shirt. I stared up at the twisted visage, the poor woman who had been tormented into something unwholesome and demented. My fingers clenched. It had taken me by surprise, but this wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. My legs dropped free of her chest, pressed against her stomach, and I shoved.
It staggered back, doughy fingers slipping free of my neck. I gasped down fetid air as I could breathe once more, and let out a little groan as the tendrils popped free of my skin like diseased IV lines. The tentacles shuddered, undulating out of its distended mouth as the creature hunkered down to tackle me once more before she was battered across the room by a wave of unseen force. The monstrosity clipped the doorway to the kitchen and impacted the fridge, rocking it against the wall and shearing the door off its hinges. The sting of whatever had knocked it through to the kitchen burned at my skin, even from a few feet away, leaving my face and exposed stomach feeling like someone had just scraped me down with a rusted razor.
Kate stood in the center of the trashed living room, holding the squirt gun with awed eyes. The plastic tip glowed.
“That… was… amazing…” she breathed. Her eyes were lit up like an amusement park. She was standing like her left leg was hurting, and there was a colorful bruise across her cheek, but there was such a look of glee on her face. I could almost smile if my skin didn’t feel like microwaved leftovers. Her hand trembled. “It’s… not dangerous, is it? It uses magic.”
I glanced at the kitchen. The paint was peeling from either side of the door, curling upward as we watched.
“Harmless,” I croaked, sliding off the table. I didn’t have the energy to do anything more dignified.
“But it used magic. Is my soul a hotel for stuff like that now?”
“It’s a self-contained focus and conduit in one. You’re not in the loop on this one, so your soul is safe. Only an Entity can make something like that. Pretty handy.”
Kate snorted. “I hadn’t noticed. I think that’s three you owe—”
Black tendrils wrapped around the door to the kitchen. The creature hurled itself into the front room, arcing up and through the air, cotton bathrobe flapping out behind like an absurd cape. Its face was a mass of blackened lines, flesh knitting back whole. I snatched Kate by the wrist and trampled over through the remains of the front door. This was bad. I mean, obviously, but way worse than I’d thought. It had taken the full brunt of the shot and it was still coming at us.
“Down the stairs,” I said, dragging Kate behind me. I think she got the gist pretty quick, her steps out-pacing mine as she raced by. We rounded floor three just as something pink flapped by. The possessed granny slammed down onto the landing just ahead of us, its invulnerable knees not even bothering to bend to absorb the impact. Concrete fractured, the sound thundering in the stairwell. I swore and snatched at Kate’s coat just as that impossible mouth opened and a half dozen disgusting vines pulsed out toward her.
“Up the stairs,” I urged. Kate slung an arm behind her and hauled back on the squirt gun’s plunger. This time the creature was ready, hurling itself at the wall and clinging to it like a fly. The blast sent fractures through the stone of the far wall. The stairwell shook, sending a rain of accumulated grime down onto us. A shriek followed us up, wrenching at my ears and turning my insides to water.
I stuffed a hand into my pocket and yanked out my phone. Daniel’s number was most recent at the top, so I thumbed the call button and pressed the phone to my ear as we ran. Another few floors. I hoped there was roof access and a fire escape, or we were going to have some serious problems in a minute. I could hear that thing clawing up after us, leaping from landing to landing like the world’s ugliest acrobat.
Static. My little archaic readout said I had bars, but nothing was happening. There just wasn’t a connection. It hissed an untuned tube televis
ion I’d had as a kid, back when getting a station had meant some judicious use of tin foil on the rabbit ears and a little prayer. This was similar, except the connection failing felt wrong. Cell phones don’t give static, they just don’t connect. There was something off about the whole situation.
“Daniel, I don’t know if you’re there,” I shouted into the phone, on the distant hope that maybe he could hear me and the static was on my end. “Kate and I are in some serious shit right now. Send whoever you can to us.” I yanked the paper from my pocket and rattled off the address. The warbling hiss in my ear was not a comfort. “Kid, I hope you’re getting this, because we’re rapidly running out of options here. We’re heading to the roof. It’ll take too long for you to get here, so send someone with a mop to clean up this incursion.”
The display was dead when I peeled it away from my face. I folded it up and slipped it back into my pocket with a snarl, feeling as if someone had flushed my arteries with ice water.
“Does this seem wrong to you?” I said. Our footsteps echoed as we pounded our way upward. My lungs were doing their best to remind me I sat in a cubicle for a living these days, and it felt like someone was jabbing a couple of hot needles into my side, but we were outdistancing the octogenarian by a small margin. Kate seemed no worse for wear on our rapid ascent. Maybe she kept a gym membership. Or didn’t imbibe titanic quantities of booze and nachos.
“That’s a stupid question,” she said. We rounded another floor. I’d stopped counting after four when my body started aching. “You want to elaborate?”
I waved a vague hand back down the concrete stairs, to where I could feel our pursuer clambering up the rails and steps like the creepiest kid on the monkey bars at the playground. “Where’s the conduit? Did Granny Dearest there summon up one crazy monstrosity between knitting and Wheel of Fortune? Is she reaching out and messing with my phone? That’s possible to do, but it’s a focus sort of thing, and she doesn’t seem like she’d doing a lot of concentrating right now.”
Her silence matched my own thoughts. The gears were working. Something had set us up. The twins? It didn’t make a lot of sense. If they’d wanted to end us, there wouldn’t be a more convenient place than an entirely separate universe. Sending us back to die by another hand seemed sloppy. They hadn’t even wanted to have me take a job at first, though that could have been a feint, I had to admit.
We came to the small alcove at the top, old spray paint denoting the names of the youths that had frequented it at one point or another. I hit the door at speed, hoping it wasn’t locked. We burst out into the Seattle night. A true Seattle night, complete with the cold fall rain. A single yellow lamp hummed above the door as we stumbled out onto the roof. The door squealed shut behind us.
“There’s got to be a fire escape somewhere,” Kate said. We split and dashed between the whirring steel boxes I presumed did something with heating or cooling. My shoes splashed down through little puddles of collected rain as I ran to the edge that ran around the roof. Thunder rumbled on the horizon as my hands slapped down on the wet stone and I peered into the darkness.
Oh, that was a long way down.
“Nothing,” I called.
“Don’t tell me when you don’t find something, Samuel,” Kate said. I could hear the smile in her voice, despite the impending Granny-flavored doom hammering up the stairs. “Try and be a ‘bottle half full’ kind of guy tonight.”
I changed edges and peered down. Nothing again. I wiped rain away from my face and spun, heart thundering. Okay, we were going to have to go with Plan B then. I’d have to get back up close, tangle with that thing once more, and try to exorcise it. The tendrils weren’t its body, its vessel. This would require touch. I wasn’t sure how I was going to maintain my concentration while it was trying to rip my soul out through my soaking skin, but at least it was a plan.
“Uh, found it,” Kate said. I sprinted over as she slumped against the ledge.
It was a heap of tangled metal in the alley below. The bolts looked to have been sheared clean through, recent enough that the fresh metal within still shone. I slapped my palms down on the ledge and growled into the night.
“Tell me how you really feel, Samuel,” Kate muttered, but her face was pale and without humor. I slumped beside her. She held out the squirt gun to me, and I gave a bitter laugh.
“You saw how much good this did.” I hesitated a moment, but took it any way. Maybe it would buy a second or two. I held it up and turned it over in the faint light of the city around us. “Whatever got into her mind, it’s too powerful. She’s too far along into the process for this to be much effect. It’s already cracking. We might get one, maybe two more shots before the focus of it gives out.”
“You’re just a bright ray of sunshine here.”
“Hey, I’ve got a plan,” I snapped. “When it grabs me and tries to rip out my soul, you try to send it home.”
She turned and stared at me. “Come on. You can’t be serious.”
“You have anything better? I’m not going to let it snack on you while I exorcise it. You saw how long it took for you to try and send me. I’ll grapple it and try to throw it out. Crazy hard while something is ripping at your essence, but nothing else for it here. While it’s distracted, you give it a shot as well. One of us might get lucky.”
Kate fell silent. She ran a hand through her long tangle of black hair, letting the water sluice free.
“Samuel Walker, you’re a damn moron.”
I flashed her a grin. “A moron with a plan. You don’t even have a plan. You’re jealous of my plan.”
My steps drew me closer to the door. The rain was cold on my face. I shivered as I faced the portal the creature would come back through. I drew in a shaky breath, twisted, and met Kate’s eyes. They were dim orbs in the fitful light of the bulb above the door that housed our doom.
“In case…” I said, words trailing off. I stared at the door. The light above the door hummed and flickered. “If it doesn’t go well, try to knock it away from the door and go. Just get away.”
Silence was my answer. What more was there to say?
The creature burst through a heartbeat later, but my feet were already in motion, splashing across the roof. This was my city. This was what I did, a part of who I was. I might have taken a three-year vacation to the gray doldrums of a cubicle, but it was still in my blood. I roared as I threw myself at her, flying past seeking tentacles of darkness and barreled right into the old woman. We went up, a spray of rain arcing off of my body as I carried her off of her slippers. I slammed her down onto the roof even as the tendrils began to curl around me once more.
I was done with this. I’d let Kate drag me back into this world, but the truth had always been there, as sure as my heart was pounding like the thunder that played around us. This was my element.
I was laughing as my hands found its throat.
My will slammed forward. Every bit of anger swirled up. All my frustration, all my bitterness, all my loathing lashed out like one of its tendrils as I pushed. The tentacles undulating out of its distended mouth shuddered and paused, and those swirling green lights grew wide as I unleashed hell upon it. In that moment, it knew what I was doing. The rope-like masses redoubled their efforts, whipping at me, cutting at my flesh. Pain seared at my arms and chest as they parted clothing and skin alike. Warmth seeped down my flesh as blood welled, but I kept bearing down and opened the conduit between it and its home.
Visions flashed through my mind, buffeted by the pain. A volcanic landscape, hundreds of jagged peaks spewing molten rock into the air. Two suns hung low in the sky, sullen red and large. Hordes of shelled creatures roamed the blackened valleys between the mountains, herding between the veins of lava on dozens of tentacled legs. Seas of burning green eyes watched me.
It pushed back. Pain blossomed in my mind like a knife of ice had been rammed into my temple. I screamed, but it was lost to another flash of lightning and peal of thunder above. My arms were num
b from the grip I had around its neck and the assault of its appendages, and my fingers began to slip under the rebuttal. It lashed out again and again with its will, pounding me like the neighbor kid that thinks he might get to play drummer in a band some day. Rain dripped from my face down onto its pallid skin, into those unblinking eyes. The fire in them burned brighter, until I thought I might tumble down into them and drown.
We spun. Weight pressed down on me as the creature ground me down into the wet of the roof. Rain pattered into my eyes. Fingers raked at my cut chest while the tentacles reasserted their need to burrow into me. It didn’t even hurt this time as they pierced my skin. Cold flowed into me, or maybe the heat just decided to take a little vacation and flee. The mountain of its will slammed into my mind, and I let out a feeble groan.
“My turn,” Kate growled. She hurled herself onto the old woman’s back and snaked an arm around its exposed, wrinkled neck. She wrenched, bowing the monster’s back as it straddled my stomach. Tentacles tightened but didn’t pull free. The few that hadn’t infested my body whipped over its shoulder and tried to gouge at Kate, but the young woman hunkered down, dodging as best as she could.
Kate. My mind was hazy from the mental assault, but sapphire eyes punched through the fog. I had to help her avoid Lauren’s fate. Someone poured gasoline in my heart. It kicked, feeling like it had just shuddered itself in two. My veins erupted in fire. My lips peeled back in a snarl as my hand whipped forward, wrapped around the writhing mass of vaguely ethereal tentacles. I yanked right as I pulled the squirt gun from my pocket, pressed it into the bundle, and pulled the plunger with a howl that was lost to thunder.
