by Peter Nealen
I was immediately enveloped in darkness and swirling mist again, but this time it seemed thinner. I could make out shapes in it, and could see Tall Bear only a few feet away. He looked like he was wrestling with something, and losing. A gigantic shadow was bent over him, forcing him to his knees. I could see him weakening from where I was, and he wasn't much more than a silhouette in that unnatural fog. “Frank!” I shouted, my voice strangely muffled, even compared to the prayer I'd uttered only moments before. “It's a spirit! You can't fight it with your hands! You've got to pray, and you've got to mean it!” I then suited actions to words, and started in on a litany of protection for Tall Bear, as loud as I could bellow it.
It had the desired effect. The shadow shrank, just like the one that had attacked me, and in moments, we had it fleeing. I was at Tall Bear's side, pulling him up by one arm. “Let's go, champ,” I said. “The other side's only a few steps away.” Up close, I could see his expression; he still looked scared and bewildered. I was starting to think that was the whole point of the cloud in the first place, and that the spirits and spooks floating around in it were there to keep people out of Ophir. That would explain why I could see a lot better on the way back out than in.
Of course, in keeping with my theory, it turned into slate-gray pea soup as soon as I turned back toward Ophir. I could barely see Tall Bear, and I was holding onto his upper arm. But I knew which way to go, and in three steps we were back out of the mist and into the town.
Now, I hadn't gotten all that good a look at the place before I'd charged back into the cloud after Tall Bear. So I wasn't quite prepared for what I was facing. Bowesmont had been sinister, largely due to its emptiness and the weird disorientation that we'd experienced halfway through the town, never mind the monstrosities lurking in the shadows. Ophir made Bowesmont look normal. This town didn't look like it was even in the same universe anymore.
The sky was the color of a bruise. Black, purple, and gray clouds lowered over the town. There was somehow enough light to see, just barely, but it looked like twilight. The clouds weren't just blocking the sun; it was almost as if there was no sun there to be blocked anymore.
What light there was was shifting, swirling, and a sickly color that defied description, seeming to shift from blue to purple to green. It didn't help the fact that the town looked warped. Seriously, the buildings and houses didn't look right. The grain elevator that dominated the skyline alongside the water tower was now a sort of wasp-waisted gothic tower, and the water tower was worse. The houses looked like they were in a sort of demented carnival's funhouse mirror, with walls either sucked inward or bulging outward, sometimes depending on when you were looking at them. Some of them looked scaly, as if covered in rot or dried mud, others appeared to have become covered with moss or lichen. None looked remotely normal.
The town wasn't nearly as empty as Bowesmont had been, either. There were people walking around on the streets. They just all looked completely lost and confused. A few of them wandered aimlessly across lawns and gardens, almost as if they couldn't see where they were going. A child sat on the curb and wept. An old man was just walking in circles. Another younger man was just staring up at a twisted streetlight, yelling gibberish at the top of his lungs. There were plenty of other people out on the street, but they were all in roughly the same state of confusion.
There was more than just people out and about, though. There were other shapes, lurking in the darker shadows off the street, in the bushes and the alleys. While I couldn't get a good look at any of them, and they mostly seemed to have the right numbers of arms and legs, they didn't look exactly human.
“Well, this is...disconcerting,” Tyrese said. Tyrese's “British understatement” always seemed a little odd coming from a black guy with a shaved head, but in this case it just kinda fit. There was nothing we'd been through yet that was going to adequately prepare anyone for this. I'd never even heard of something like this happening, much less seen it. Even Silverton had still been recognizably part of the real world, even at its worst.
For several minutes, we just stood there, our backs to the writhing wall of cloud we'd come through, just taking in the mind-bending scene in front of us. How were we even going to find Blake in all that? The town was crazy, the people were crazy, and I was pretty sure there were monsters waiting in the dark to eat us once we ventured deeper in.
“Now what?” Charlie asked. His tone was even and businesslike, and even his wild chops and mohawk no longer disguised the professional underneath. His usual exuberance had taken a back seat, and now it was a grim-faced warrior who faced the unknown. “Just an off-the-cuff guess, but I'd say that Ophir isn't exactly going to be sticking to its previous layout now...not that the maps we've got are all that detailed to begin with, but if the whole town is this messed up, I doubt it's going to be all that easy to navigate regardless.”
“Probably not,” Father Ignacio agreed, “but we've got to start somewhere. And since this looks like it might still be the main street, I guess we'll start here.”
Since nobody had any better ideas, we started down the street, keeping to a slightly more tightly-spaced line as we went. Our shadows twisted and danced around us as we walked.
We came closer to the old man walking in circles. “Excuse me,” Eryn ventured, reaching out to him. “Can we talk to you for a moment?”
He stared at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes. “It's all here,” he said. “It's all gone. The color is sour, you know.” Eryn backed away, and the old man went back to staring at his feet and walking in circles.
“Whoo, boy,” Tall Bear said. “Is the whole town that far gone? Or did this guy's mind just snap with all this freakiness going on around him?”
“Just on a hunch,” I said, pointedly looking around at the people aimlessly wandering, beating their heads against trees or walls, lying staring at the black and purple sky, sitting and just crying or screaming at the top of their lungs, “I'd say it's probably everybody. Which means we need to hurry up and do what we came here to do, before we end up joining them.” It was a possibility that I hadn't really wanted to think about, and from some of the looks I got, nobody else wanted to, either, but I was under no illusions that we were necessarily going to be immune to whatever influence had driven the inhabitants of Ophir mad.
As we continued up the next block, I got a better look at a few of the inhuman shapes lurking in the shadows, and got a bit of a shock. I expected them to be stalking us, but the warped, misshapen travesties that I could see looked like they were just as confused as the regular people who were out on the street. The thing that looked like two very differently sized people had been cut in half long-ways and put together with only one half of each was sitting in a puddle, staring at us with three eyes and drooling. Another block along, two pale figures with too many joints in their spindly limbs kept bumping into each other, as if they were trying to walk past each other and couldn't see what they kept hitting.
“This is seriously freaking me out,” Eryn whispered to me. “What is going on here?”
“I have no more of an idea than you do,” I admitted in a similar whisper. “This is very, very weird.”
“Why don't any of the people seem to notice the monsters?” Charlie asked.
“Offhand?” Edgar Ramirez ventured, “I'd say that something is influencing both the people and the monsters. I think it's fairly clear after Bowesmont that there's more than one spook at work here.”
He'd barely finished speaking when we stepped past what might have been a hedge in the real world, but here had turned into a mass of either tentacles or intertwined, scaly branches covered in cobwebs. Another one of the monsters was crouched behind it, and sprang at us with a juddering howl as we came into view.
Tyrese was the closest, and whipped his Bar 30 around quickly enough to get a single shot off at point-blank range as the thing charged him. The .30-06 roared, drowning out the raucous din of babbling, crying, and screaming that filled the stre
et for a second.
The creature, which I suddenly realized had no head, stumbled backward, clutching at itself. It was dressed only in a ripped pair of jeans, and after a moment, I noticed that its face, which was otherwise completely human, was centered on its breastbone.
Tyrese kept his rifle pointed at it, but held his fire. It wasn't attacking anymore, but was instead sitting on the ground by the hedge, which was writhing a little in a disturbing sort of way, crying piteously. It looked up at us with no comprehension in its very human eyes. It was as if it didn't understand why Tyrese had shot it.
I stepped up next to him, keeping my Winchester leveled at the thing. “Careful, Ty,” I said. “It could be a trick.”
“Maybe,” he said thoughtfully, “but somehow I don't think so. I think it's just as messed up as everything else in this town, and it really doesn't know what's going on. But that's not the reason I'm not shooting it.” I spared him a quizzical glance. He didn't take his eyes off the creature, but he spotted my look just the same. “Take a good look at it, Jed,” he said. “That was a man once.”
That got my attention. The more I looked at it, the more I could see, with mounting horror, that he was right. This wasn't a flesh golem or any Otherworld beastie that I'd ever heard of. Whatever it was, it was alive, and apparently in torment, aside from the .30 caliber bullet hole that was leaking very red, very human blood.
“What could do that?” I asked hoarsely.
“To use your turn of phrase, big, bad medicine,” Father Ignacio said from behind me. “Come on. If we can find what's doing this and put it out of commission, maybe whoever this was might get a chance at his life back.” We pushed on into the distorted nightmare that had once been a town. No one quite turned their back on the weeping monster until it was out of sight.
The next couple of blocks were just as bizarre as the first two. The houses continued to be strangely distorted, a few only looking like dimensionally twisted, surrealist versions of regular frame houses, others looking like piles of bones or rocks, or even some kind of bizarre, house-sized living creatures. I was pretty sure I even saw a couple of candy houses, like something out of Hansel and Gretel. I stopped looking up at the water tower after I could have sworn it started growing a face.
A shout suddenly drew my attention. It wasn't especially strange in and of itself; there were a lot of people and...other things making a lot of noise, too much noise for a single shout to stand out too much. But I recognized the voice. It was Blake.
I started moving forward more quickly, looking for him. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people out on this block, milling around in the street, shouting nonsense at each other in increasingly agitated voices.
The crowd was actually blocking the entire street, and looked like it was made up of a good chunk of the town's population. I caught a snatch of Blake's voice again, and pushed into the crowd. “Come on!” I called to the rest. “He's in here!”
The people in the crowd were shouting and gesticulating, though they weren't really getting violent. I couldn't even tell who or what they were yelling at, and being close enough to make out words wasn't any more enlightening. None of it made any sense at all. They also weren't keen on being shouldered aside, though they weren't fighting me; they just resisted being pushed aside, trying to stay in place and wave their arms. It was like fighting through a human thicket, rather than actually fighting a mob.
Tall Bear and Ian were beside me, helping me to try to push a path through the press. “It's like they're stuck somehow,” Tall Bear grunted, pushing at an overweight man who kept flailing around, though his gestures weren't exactly blows. “Their feet don't want to move.”
“Not only their feet,” I replied, dodging a swinging arm only to get clipped in the ear by another. “It's like something's woven them into a hedge or something.”
“It's what did that that has me more than a little nervous,” Eryn said from behind me.
“You and me both,” I replied with another grunt, as I shouldered my way past an elderly gent with a wild look in his eyes, who was standing stiff as a post as he spewed nonsense words at the teenager only a couple feet from him, who wasn't paying him any attention. The fat woman beyond him was practically a fleshy wall in and of herself.
After an interminable two more yards full of agitated, yet strangely immovable, people, I got a glimpse of close-cropped red hair, and heard the familiar shout again. It was definitely Blake. The only problem was, he was making about as much sense as the rest of the crowd, by which I mean absolutely none whatsoever. He was caught up in whatever was turning these people's brains into mush, too.
I had to get past two more human obstacles before I reached him. He was yelling at the morbidly obese, orange-haired woman wearing too much makeup in front of him, who appeared to be yelling at his right shoulder. I shouldered past her and grabbed him by the arm.
“Blake!” I yelled in his ear, without much hope of getting through, “We've got to get out of here!”
It had about the effect I'd expected. He didn't even look at me, but kept yelling nonsensical, disconnected sentences at the fat lady. When I tried to tug him along, he was as rooted in place as all the rest.
I don't know why, but I was struck by a sudden sense of urgency, as if we would be caught in this dark, twisted dreamworld of a town if we didn't hurry. Maybe it was just a gut feeling, maybe the spookiness was starting to get to me, or maybe my guardian angel, whom I know as “Sam,” on account of the fact that he's manifested to me in a shape remarkably similar to Sam Elliot, was whispering inaudibly in my ear. He rarely interferes, and the handful of times he has, it's been a world-shaking matter of demonic influence. Apparently, whatever was happening here, it wasn't enough for him to get directly involved, which, given the severity of what we'd already seen, struck me as a little strange.
I handed my rifle and the chainsaw, which was hanging from an improvised sling over my shoulders with the blade guard on, back to Charlie. I needed my hands free. I bent down, shoved my shoulder into Blake's midsection, and heaved him off the ground in a fireman's carry. I was expecting him to fight me, but he just kept shouting and waving his arms, as if he was still engaged in the insane argument he'd been engaged in a moment ago.
“Make a hole!” I called out over the din. The rest started to push their way through, though it was just as difficult as before, especially with Blake's arms and legs waving around to either side of me. A few people were getting clobbered, no matter how much I tried to avoid it. It took a lot of effort, and we were all panting when we finally came out of the crowd into the open street.
Except it wasn't the street anymore, or at least not the street where we'd started.
We were in a park of sorts, with gnarled, horror-movie trees looming above us. Windows shone on the edges of the park with a sickly green glow that promised all sorts of unnatural horrors if we looked in them. We had no idea where we were. Blake was still raving incoherently. But it was about to get worse.
“Jed,” Eryn said, an unusual tremor of fear in her voice, “what is that?”
Chapter 11
Almost as soon as I slapped eyes on it, the figure faded into the dark again. I only caught a glimpse, but I got the impression of a tall, gaunt figure, with antlers growing out of its head.
“I don't know what it is,” I said, “but I'm not sure we want to find out, at least not right at the moment. I can't help but notice that it ducked out of sight as soon as we spotted it.”
“I saw that, too,” Ian said. “I think we just saw what's behind all of this.”
“What makes you say that?” Tall Bear asked.
Ian shrugged. “It's not paralyzed or confused.” Ian might not talk much, but that doesn't mean he isn't sharp.
“It's behind us, now,” Miguel said quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the nattering of the crowd. Having Blake over my shoulders kind of precluded a quick glance back, but I expected as soon as I looked, it would be gone.
/> “Everyone keep your eyes peeled and your weapons ready,” I said. “We're going to have to try to find our way out of here, and I don't expect to make it without a fight.” I felt bad about not being in a position to contribute to that fight, but somebody had to carry Blake, and since I'd called in everybody's help on his behalf, it kind of felt like my responsibility to carry him. “I wish I knew what to use against that thing, but I haven't got a clue.”
“Just keep together, don't get ahead of the group, and if you start to feel yourself slipping, say something,” Father Ignacio said. “Whatever it is, it may be powerful, but we've got even more powerful forces on our side. Just remember that.”
Unfortunately, the park or whatever it was was rather devoid of familiar landmarks. The trees blocked any view of the water tower or the grain elevator. “We've got to get out of this park,” Charlie said, looking around with a frown. “We've got chainsaws; we could start knocking trees down if nothing else.”
“I'm not sure that would work all that well at the moment, Charlie,” Eryn pointed out. “If this thing can shift us around like it just did, I expect that it can turn these trees into something a little more...active, let's put it that way.”
“Not necessarily,” I added with a grunt, as I shifted Blake's weight on my shoulders. He was still moving around just as if he was still standing upright carrying on his conversation, and it was making it difficult to carry him even the short distance we'd covered in the park. “It might have just influenced the crowd to move while we were occupied shoving our way through. Turning a tree into an animate creature is a whole other ball of wax.”
