S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic

She wrote the names using a crow’s feather as a quill and animal blood as ink, as the book instructed. The names numbered thirteen and each had its own narrow scroll of parchment. She dropped these into a brazier where she’d burnt numerous molds and fungi in the weeks prior, as the book instructed. She prayed over the smolder as they ashed and crumbled.

In the bathroom of her tiny Section Eight apartment she fingerpainted glyphs and runes onto the tiles using a bloodbag she’d stolen from the hospital. The symbols needed to be precise, the work exacting. This offered ample time for her to reconsider, to change her mind. To pick up the phone and call the crisis hotline, instead.

But she’d made her decision long ago.

After the cops had pulled her out of that drug-fogged basement, after they’d told her she’d been doped up and tied down and raped by more men than she would ever remember, more than she could even count…

The others had formed a support group. After the shrinks had signed them out of observation, they’d tried to rebuild themselves. Of the six of them, she’d be the second suicide. Of the surviving four, one was homeless and only one had kept her job through the pandemic. Behold: justice.

Randall Hill had broken them and Reverend Tongue had eaten up their futures. Now those men were dead, but their accomplices walked free. A lot of people had made a lot of money through her rape. Québécois mobsters, cops, even a couple truckers and an everyday accountant. And beyond those that profited directly, how many more had known? How many had known and shrugged the knowledge off? And when the hideous truth showed its thousand-toothed visage to the people of Oceanrest, how many had faced consequence?

The number would rise higher soon enough.

One of the women locked down there had been a witch. A real one. That was how she’d learned about magic. In the White Room, a witch had taught her a handful of simple tricks. “Not everyone can see when it happens, not without…bad things happening. But if you see it, if you can, and if you know what it is, that means you can learn to use it.” And she had seen it and she had known what it was and she had learned it. One thing led naturally to another. One day, she found the book—or maybe the book had found her.

She didn’t recognize the woman in the bathroom mirror anymore. Through the drug-smog mists of that white hades, she’d lost nearly six years of her life. She recalled only frozen images, random event-memories gapped by spans of uncertainty. The drugs and the trauma conspired to worm holes through her mind; so many things had fallen through…

With bloodslick fingertips she painted the sigil of the goddess over her unfamiliar face.

(She Who Crawls Within)

Behold: justice.

She muttered the words, walking from bathroom to kitchen. “Ours will be a kingdom without end,” she whispered. “A cycle unbreakable.” These were important phrases for the spell. So, too, were the listing of the crimes. “Thomas Aberdeen, for protecting them from police notice. Luc Grenier, for profiting from my rape. Boo, for profiting from my rape. Jacques Lefevre, for aligning with Randall Hill, for bringing him into the mob, for empowering him. Pierre Poulin…”

The names numbered thirteen and their crimes against her numbered in the scores.

The glyphs painted, the words spoken, the crimes listed, she poured herself a glass of wine. She started with only four pills, prescription painkillers, which she swallowed with the entire goblet. She refilled the wine and rattled more pills free from the phial. Her final meal, bloody steak and a bowl of sauteed mushrooms, followed. The steak was her choice. According to the book, she could eat and drink anything for her final meal, so long as she consumed nothing but root vegetables, fungi, tubers, truffles, insects, algae, and water during the thirteen days prior.

But what was thirteen days in the shadow of so many lost years?

And what were the thirteen months before?

The ritual required at least three hours of work every day for thirteen months. It required other things, too. A ritual of this magnitude meant phases, different interlocking spells and practices, the kind of work that broke people. Fasting, feasting, binging, purging, self-harm…this particular ritual demanded a lot from its practitioners. It offered a lot, too.

The witch in the white room had told her that some people were born with magical aptitude but most weren’t. Not being born with a talent didn’t mean that one couldn’t learn it, but it made the learning more difficult. And the execution.

Next to the kitchen sink, she opened a Tupperware container. Buried in moss and fungus and roots, she dug up a knife. The knife had belonged to a dead man, once, as the book instructed, and had been used to kill, as the book instructed. She transferred the blade from the festering Tupperware to the stolen bloodbag, letting it taste the leftovers.

She drank a third goblet of wine and took more painkillers. Her guts squished and groaned but she gulped down the urge to vomit and continued the ritual. This last part worked on a time limit. She had only three days to perform the finishing touches, make the final decision, and enact the sacrifice. She had only sixteen hours left. That night would be the night.

The strain of using magic, combined with the thirteen days of lunatic diet, had drained her immune system empty. She’d woken that morning with a fever and it had worsened through the day. Her thermometer beeped her at 101 degrees when she checked, but she had no other symptoms. She had no cough, no sore throat, no goo-packed sinuses. She had a fever that hurt her bones and no other signs of illness. Maybe not a fever, then. Maybe a sign.

Someone below her started blasting loud music and she thought this was hilarious, though she wasn’t sure why. She laughed so hard she lost balance and collapsed into another of the mold-mottled walls of her apartment. Still giggling, she took another bottle of wine and the rest of the painkillers and shambled into the bathroom.

She wasn’t even supposed to be here. In the economic wasteland of Oceanrest, the Section Eight applications were so backed up they stretched all the way south to Portland. But someone, one of the doctors or psychiatrists who’d ministered to her and the others after Randall Hill’s operation collapsed, had greased the appropriate palms and filed the appropriate paperwork and now she had the ironic pleasure of dying unnoticed in a place nobody wanted to think about.

The last step before the sacrifice: the lighting of the candles, the final prayer.

With a cheap gas station lighter, she lit thirteen candles, all either black or white and no other color at all, as the book instructed. She listed the names and their associated crimes again. She whispered a hope for a kingdom of justice, thirteen executions handed down as the growth-seed of a new world. A surge of vomit curdled the back of her throat before she finished and she gulped it down, breathing hard. The book said nothing about how vomiting might affect the magic and she couldn’t take risks, now. She clenched her jaw against a second gut-spasm and heaved hot air out of her nostrils. When her innards settled back to minor complaints and squelches, she finished the prayer.

She took the knife from the bloodbag, now tacky with gore, and stripped off her clothes. The book said nothing about what to do with her clothes, so she left them there on the floor. Then she lowered herself into the warm and waiting water of the bathtub.

do not be afraid, a sweet and far away voice mused to her.

Through the furnace of her fever she felt a new warmth spread through her. She felt arms wrap her up. Two arms, four, eight, twenty, each appendage at once strong and gentle. Tears rimmed her eyes.

do not be afraid, the sweet voice repeated.

She nodded, feeling as safe and secure as a child in its mother’s arms. With a quick jerk, she drew the edge of the dead man’s blade along the underside of her forearm, wrist to elbow. Loops of carmine unwound from within her, dancing through the water. Through the fever and the goddess’ warmth, she felt no pain. She repeated the process on the other arm, sinking, now, into...what?

A throne of mushroom-cap bloomed beneath her. A crown of fingerbones, of tar and teeth, mantled her head. She wore a gown, black-hole dark. The goddess writhed around her, a cloud of teeming motes, attending her, tentacular. At her feet, a triumvirate of dukes. At their feet, an endless congregation, a crowd of genuflective worshipers singing praises in their silence, their hands and faces upturned to the sky.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Her hands splintered into thousand-clawed appendages. They branched and kinked like spiderlegs. They reached needle-thin through door locks, under windows, in the sliver-thin gaps between everything. Her will found them and unseamed them. Her many claws skewed their skin, unfolded their musculature, dissected their spines. She collected up their vertebrae and added them to her own.

ours will be a cycle unbreakable, the goddess whispered, a thousand crawling legs against her earlobe. a kingdom without end.

She sank and rose at the same time. She did not know when she hit the bottom nor when she reached the top.

“…when a guard making a routine round found Robert Robertson, Junior, dead on the floor of his cell. The guard said they’d seen the blood before anything else. Robertson had destroyed his own face, smashing it almost beyond recognition against the thick iron bars that caged him. Near the body, the guard found a note…” Matthew leaned into the mic, lowering his voice. “It read ‘I’ll see you when I wake again.’”

The studio fell silent for two long seconds.

“Chills,” Harry said. “Fuckin’ chills, man.”

“Y’know…” Bushel winced.

“Yeah?” Matthew asked.

“It’s just…these guys are really into the notes, am I right? It just—it seems to me that we’ve got way more effective ways to communicate these days.”

They laughed, lightened the mood.

In the engineering booth, a phone rang.

Deirdre’s fingers idly scritched Samedi’s head, the cat purring in her lap. Sprawled on her couch, she watched the last remnants of summer sun filter through the boards criss-crossing her windows. On the coffee table, a barely-puffed joint sat in an ashtray, a barely-sipped hard cider warmed to room temperature. Deirdre nearly never drank nor smoked, but the frequency of both activities had increased significantly across the previous year.

Her mind wandered, as it often had over the weeks since the Mask’s attack, back to the confusion of that night. Things still didn’t make sense to her. How had Paul and Victor recovered from their wounds? After she’d collapsed, it took Rehani almost a minute to rouse her. By the time she’d gotten herself back on her feet, she’d barely had the energy to move. Rehani didn’t know much in the way of healing magic—and what she did know, she’d already burned through the resources to use. Olly had tied up Robert Robertson while Nora had called emergency services and started cleaning up what little physical evidence the powerful ritual had left behind.

So what had happened?

What had happened to save Paul and Victor’s lives?

Abruptly, Samedi sat up and yawned. He stretched away from Deirdre’s hand and leapt to the floor. Switching his half-length tail side-to-side, he purred his way across the room to sit at the threshold.

Someone knocked on the door.

Deirdre rose from the couch. She found Olly on the other side of the peephole. For some reason she didn’t know, she glanced back at Samedi—but the cat had already padded his way back into the den. After another moment’s hesitation, Deirdre undid the locks and opened the door. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” they replied. “Can I, uh…come in?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Come on.” She stepped back.

Something was off.

“Thanks,” Olly murmured, squeezing through the gap. They peered around, thoughtful. “Huh.”

Deirdre worked the latches and bolts back into place. “Hm?”

“Just…I’ve never been here before. All this time, even when I was dating—” they paused around some flash of memory. “Even when I was dating Razz, I never came over here. I’ve never seen it.”

Deirdre gestured vaguely. “Welcome to my hut.”

In a sagging pullover cap, an antique shawl, and gray jeans, Olly resembled some vague archetype, a symbol, an omen. In chunky boots, they just-about tip-toed into the den. “Vic’s been acting weird,” they said, changing the subject.

“How so?” Deirdre asked, leaning against a flat of doorless threshold.

“Less talk around the dinner table, more time spent in the big office him and Ambrose used to share.”

“Was the talk around the table that plentiful in the first place?”

“There’s something he’s not telling us.”

“Maybe it’s not something you need to know.”

She noticed it, then, too late. The tension taut through Olly’s frame.

Olly turned toward her. “Do you all think you’re fucking Superman?”

Deirdre blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Fuck. Dee—”

“Deirdre.”

“—I almost saw you die.”

She crossed her arms at the words.

“Me and Nor’, all we have is you guys. Vic and you, Rehani, Paul…you’re it. And this thing almost took all of you.”

“We had to fight It.”

“I can’t believe—goddammit. You know what would’ve happened if you’d killed that guy instead of jamming him up?”

“The Mask would’ve gone away, waited for Its next opportunity.”

“Yeah. Exactly. ‘cause unlike you, It gets another chance to die. It can get a lot of ‘em.”

Deirdre’s defenses gave way. She slouched, frowning.

“Look, we can’t…” they hesitated. “It’s like Nora said, before.”

“You can’t keep losing people,” Deirdre remembered.

Olly sighed. “I’m sorry,” they said. “Sorry I came over here like this. Just. I think about it a lot. And Nor’s not really known for being able to handle her emotions. And she’s got a lot of them about this. So. Shit around the house has been tough.”

“Yeah.” Deirdre stepped into the room proper. “I’m sorry, too. I guess I didn’t…I dunno. But I’m sorry.”

A pause passed.

Olly eased their posture. “You know, you’re lucky we didn’t stay in the library.”

“Kids never listen.” Deirdre halfway grinned.

“Yo, I’m nineteen,” Olly replied. “And Nor’s seventeen. I know we’re not adult-adults, but I don’t think we’re kids.”

“You know who says something like that, right?”

A hint of amusement found its way onto their face. “Shut up.”

“A kid.”

Behind his glasses, Booker’s eyes ached. The orbs throbbed in their sockets, burning. Two days without sleep had rumpled him to the bone.

They’d captured Robert Robertson, Jr.

While trying and failing to reach the precinct on Virgil’s radio, they’d instead received a call from dispatch through the fog. Robert Robertson, Jr. had invaded a house and the residents had knocked him unconscious. They’d fractured his skull with a bust of Athena. Nothing about the situation had made much sense. The mansion owner, Victor Monroe, had fortified against the threat of Robert Robertson Junior; he’d installed floodlights on the roof and boarded up the windows. He’d all but turned the place into a bunker. But as Virgil had pointed out: none of that meant anything—a person had a right to handle their own property in their own way.

Still, something about it had rubbed Booker the wrong way.

For his part, Robert Robertson, Jr. had said nothing. He’d awoken with two cops and three EMTs in the back of an ambulance. According to one of the guys watching him, all he’d done was sit up a little bit and stare. He’d said nothing to the doctor who gave him x-rays and stitches, nothing to either of his armed supervisors, and nothing to the nurse. After discharge, Robert Robertson, Jr. had maintained his silence in the back seat of a squad car for the entire ride to the precinct.

Bob-Bob’s-son even kept a caged tongue through four hours of interrogation.

Luckily, they didn’t need a confession. Robert Robertson, Jr. faced a mountain of evidence tall and broad enough to blot out the sun. His sudden muteness wouldn’t save him from a jail cell, it would only make his life tougher before he ended up there.

John Bowman Booker parked outside of his condo building and blearily climbed the steps.

The whole day following the arrest blurred like a dream in his mind. He’d had paperwork to file, along with the detectives who’d taken over the case, along with Virgil, all of them frequently interrupted by phone calls, e-mails, and messages. They’d held a press conference. Virgil had given undue credit to Booker, Booker had given undue credit to Virgil. A reporter from the Oceanrest Chronicle asked why they hadn’t been with the police force maintaining security along the northern fringes of the city.

"I believed the exercise was a waste of department resources," Virgil had uttered into the mic. "So I went to the guy who was still working the goddamned case."

Booker keyed open the door to his home and lurched inside. He kicked off his shoes as the door shut behind him. Stopped at the fridge to grab a grapefruit soda. Stared at the appliance for several seconds, lost in molasses-slow thought and burnt out to the edges.

clack-clack

Booker twisted toward the noise. Had he heard a noise? His condo seemed vaguely blurry. He took off his glasses and pressed the heel of his hand into his sockets; replacing them, he squinted at the broad corridor of kitchen, dining room, and bedroom/bathroom intersection. He’d heard something, hadn’t he?

wwhhhrrrrr

He sagged toward the bedroom entrance, hand resting on the clasp of his holster. When the living room opened up to his left, he saw an angle of black flatscreen. Lights gleamed against its surface and shadowy figures swarmed across it. Booker froze. Blinked. When he peered over at the television, he saw only turned-off blankness, a reflection of himself caught in refracted glow.

clack-clack

He inched toward the bedroom. Hesitated.

“Relax, John,” Castellanos said from inside. “It’s just me.”

Booker remembered the puzzle box in Nick Robertson’s basement. He remembered the surreal stretch of days unraveling behind him. “Wh-what?” he stammered, stepping through the threshold, somehow still surprised to see her. She wore the same jeans and jacket, the same boots. Her hair looked fresher. She leaned against the foot of his bed, a classic Rubick’s cube mostly solved in her hands. Dazed, Booker blinked. “How?” he asked.

She grinned. “Did you think I was a ghost?”

“No,” he muttered, halfway to himself. Then, as a proper answer, he repeated, “No. Because…’cause you have documentation. A birth certificate, a social security number, a—a bank account…”

Her gaze lifted from the Rubick’s cube and flitted over to him. “You checked all that?”

“I—I did.”

“But you didn’t believe it, did you?”

He suddenly found a thickness in his throat. He cleared it, swallowed. “I…no, I didn’t. But.”

“But?”

He pursed his lips.

She rose to her booted feet. “What did you believe?”

“I—I knew you. More than five years, I knew you.”

“You still do.”

“None of this makes any sense…” his heart rate rose, his breath shortened.

She lowered the Rubick’s cube to her side and approached him with slow, languid strides. “Not to you,” she said, as if this clarified things. “Not yet.”

“You gotta tell me what’s going on, Al. Am I—am I losing my goddamned mind?”

A chuckle lit her features. “You’re not losing your mind. It’s kind of the opposite.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s better you don’t ask,” she stood only a foot away, now. Her dark eyes studied him. Her grin eased into a barely-there smile. “A long time ago,” she said, “you brushed up against something. You probably don’t remember all the details. But when it happened, you got noticed.”

“Noticed?”

She gave half a shrug. “Best I can describe it.” She took a liquid step toward him. Everything in the world looked blurry except for her. “But, generally… it ain’t a good thing. But you’re going to be okay, John. You’re going to be—” (nobody was ever really) “—okay. Know why?”

“Why?” he whispered.

She reached out with her free hand and touched the front of his shirt. Twisted it into her palm; gripped it. Booker saw nothing but her eyes. “Because I chose you, John,” she whispered in response, the words heat against his face. “I chose you.”

She pulled him into a kiss he felt through every vein and tendon in his body.

“…And that means something.”

When Booker awoke the next day, some time in a gray late morning, he remembered his return home only vaguely. He roused in a tangle of bedsheets, naked, and fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table. Clumsily, he knocked them off. Cursing underbreath, he moved to the floor slowly, palms-first. He found the frames and stood with a groan.

Un-blurring the bedroom, his gaze fell on the puzzle orb. Somehow it had ended up on the carpet. It looked worn, scuffed and scratched; it looked old. Pulling on a pair of boxer-briefs, he stepped over to it. His reflection appeared on its once-lustrous surface as a hazy fog, a figure barely distinguishable at all. Bending down, he picked it up and turned it over in his hands. Put it on top of the dresser.

And didn’t think about it again for several months.

The Mask shook, trying to pull loose the knife. Deirdre shook, trying to stop It. Searing micrometer by micrometer, the blade crept cell-by-cell free. In a competition of sheer strength and endurance, Deirdre would lose. Was, in fact, losing. Her periphery throbbed and blurred. Her eyes ached.

She had to push the Mask off of her, somehow. She had to shove It loose without having It yank the knife out of her. She had to do this because somewhere around the back of the mansion, Paul and Victor fumbled and crawled through growing bloodloss. If she couldn’t get back to them in time, they’d both die. She couldn’t let them die, therefore she had to push the Mask off of her; and since she had to, she had to be able to. In the prayerful sanctum of her mind where she spoke to Luna and Gaea and the universe, this was the argument she made.

But the universe didn’t listen. It didn’t care.

A spurt of blood escaped her innards as the blade shifted oh-so-slightly. A spasm tugged through her. She choked down a whimper. The Mask stared. (Did It grin? She couldn’t tell.) Its breath came long and slow, reflexive and supernaturally superfluous. Hers spiked, all dry heat panting through her nose. She kept her lips sealed tight against desperate, teeth-battering vocalizations. She didn’t want the Mask to hear her scream.

She tried not to think about the taste of copper tangling at the back of her throat.

With her back braced against the dense door, she lifted a foot and stomped down on one of the Mask’s boots. The Mask didn’t respond, but she hadn’t really expected it to after watching It recover from multiple gunshots. She’d done it just-in-case, halfway so nobody could say she hadn’t tried, later.

The blade shifted oh-so-slightly…

The door jarred open behind her. She and the Mask plummeted. The world disintegrated into light and sound, particles distilled in void. They tumbled together. The knife slipped free. Deirdre clenched her teeth against a cosmic throb of pain. In cell-shrieking slow-motion she and the Mask twisted through the air, orbiting.

They separated, though not by much.

Time sped up.

They crashed to Earth; to a marble floor. Deirdre’s throat burned with unscreamed scream. Her eyes caught hints and glimpses of Olly and Nora, but she couldn’t see anything else through the chaos. The Mask landed on Its back just over a foot away from her and her hands and knees.

Wisps of silver smoke rose from trails of salt and chalk. Magic thickened. Every hair on her body bristled. Even in her admittedly-weak sixth sense, she felt the static hum of power crackling between atoms.

The scream transformed into a shout as she opened her mouth and lunged at the Mask.

It jerked, seeming shocked, as she landed on top of It. She pinned Its knife-arm with one hand and drove the opposite elbow into the side of Its(their?) head. As bone met bone, a faint, muffled grunt escaped the Mask. Already out of breath, she reared back and slammed her elbow into Its head again. Its knife-hand jumped up and she lost balance. Her third strike faltered; she collapsed, thrashing against It. Her grip found the knife-wielding wrist. The Mask’s other arm slammed into the side of her ribs.

The floor hit her spine like a hammer. The Mask came down on top, Its(their?) shins pressed against her thighs, Its left hand against her collarbone after missing her neck, Its knife glimmering in candleglow and moodlight.

The impulse surged out of her unbidden. Even as her reality boiled and melted around her, as her pulse drowned out all other sound, Deirdre persisted. She locked eyes with the Mask’s lightless sockets. She threw out both hands, the last muscle-straining remnants of her energy coiled into a spell in her mind. The Mask drove the blade toward her sternum and—

—and froze.

Deirdre could feel herself shaking but could no longer distinguish individual muscles. Thick rust slicked the back of her throat. Her breath struggled through the mass of it. The tip of the knife hovered inches from her right palm. It twitched, wobbling side-to-side, searching.

She gagged. Swallowed.

A vaster spell engaged. Ritual cogs rolled into place. The dense energy humming through the cavernous hall rapidly condensed. For a moment, an utter and true silence held sway over the room. Deirdre’s pulse paused. The knife held still. All fell to pause.

Then the ritual went off.

The Mask seized, back arching, arms flung back. Its knife clattered across the floor. Squirms of ropey something seethed beneath Its body’s human skin. Its even-keeled breath gargled into snarls and yelps.

Deirdre panted, eyelids sagging.

The Mask jerked to the left, to the right, and fell still. After a second, It twisted around and bore down on Deirdre. Sliding into semi-consciousness, Deirdre responded too slowly to stop It. It grabbed her throat and squeezed. Even as she gagged and grabbed Its arms, she felt Its strength immensely waned. Arching her back, trying to make enough room to breathe, she searched with the nails of her thumbs for the soft flesh of his inner wrists.

The Mask unpeeled. Someone ripped It loose from the man’s head.

Bob-Bob’s-son glared down at her, eyes a rampage of burst capillaries. Sweat painted his features. Breath steamed from his flaring nostrils.

A bust of someone centuries-dead cracked the side of the man’s skull open. Bob-Bob’s-son keeled over sideways and collapsed.

“Okay,” Rehani panted, somewhere behind her. “Now we call the cops. You, Nora, go. Call 911.”

Deirdre groaned herself onto her hands and knees.

“Whoa, you stay there.”

She shook her head. “Paul,” she grunted. “Vic.”

Somewhere, a door thundered open. An outpour of whispers funneled down the exterior corridor of the mansion. She heard words and rasps but couldn’t make sense of them. She crawled forward.

“Ay!” Rehani yelled.

Deirdre’s vision hazed. The undulous shadows at her periphery tore at the filmreel of her gaze.

“You — stay — here!”

One of Deirdre's palms slipped on something sticky-wet and the marble rose up to meet her.

Booker rocked back on his heels, breathless, covered in sweat, soaked, with the barrel of his pistol pressed against the side of his head, his finger on the trigger. He’d thumbed back the hammer already (impossibly loud).

Seeing his reflection distorted in a dust-streaked mirror, he stumbled back and dropped the weapon. The gun discharged, hitting the floor, and clattered away. The gunshot filled the room like the shout of a wrathful god. The mirror shattered, the bullet splintering it to shards. Backpedaling, Booker tripped over the bottom step and splayed the staircase upwards. He stared at a lone angle of age-fogged glass still gilt-framed across the room; he stared at the image of his own eyes.

(do you remember—)

(“you’re going to be—”)

(—nobody was ever really okay)

He used a smooth wooden railing to pull himself up. His legs felt weak, his knees, unsteady. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a flap of untucked shirt. He looked away from the mirror-shard before putting them back on again.

His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He felt sick. His vision blurred and tunneled. His heart beat at his ribs like a desperate prisoner. He needed five things he could see. He needed five things. He saw—

In the basement of a dead man’s house, someone had built a shrine. A once-white sheet covered a piled pyramid of totes and crates. At its peak, an antique box sat, lid open like split jaws, old wood painted with white-out. At the foot of the dais, a spread of objects extended across the floor; one for each known Slasher victim…plus a couple more.

Booker fought to steady his breathing. He stood near the shrine, left arm locked, leaned against a dusty wall. He heard…nothing. His pulse drummed his temples, echoed in his skull. He heard…

A stair creaked.

Pushing away from the wall, Booker spun around.

“Christ,” Virgil muttered, a non-standard-issue pistol clutched in his hands. “Scared the shit outta me.”

“Virgil?” Booker asked, somehow shocked to see the man.

“I heard the gunshot. What happened?”

“I…” Booker trailed off. What the hell had just happened? “The back door was open. I thought you’d gone in already.”

Virgil’s gaze fell to the pistol on the ground. Lifted to the gilt-framed shard of glass. Drifted to the shrine. “What the hell…?”

“Yeah,” Booker muttered, still short of breath. When had he put the gun to his head? He hadn’t. He’d found someone…. Who? The minutes that had passed between the house’s back door and basement disintegrated like dreams. “Uh…yeah. I think this is pretty concrete evidence, right here.”

Virgil thumbed the safety lever on his big-mouthed pistol. He walked slowly toward the center of the room, keeping a distance from the sheet-cloaked pyramid next to Booker. “If it wasn’t for the fog, I’d say…” he hesitated. Holstered his pistol. Brushed his lips with his fingers. “Hell with it. We have to call this in. We need people down here yesterday.”

“We needed people down here forty years ago.”

“Only radio I brought is in the car,” Virgil said. “We’ll have to make the call, then circle back and secure the scene.”

Booker’s gaze had fallen on something from which it could not again arise.

How?

(because I rem—)

(—I chose you)

“Book?”

His ears rang. The basement blurred around him. The old puzzle cube seemed to glow from within; it seemed to crackle with restrained energy. He saw nothing else. On one face, four-by-four, all but a single square throbbed red. Did a heart beat inside of it?

“John!” Virgil grabbed him across the chest.

Booker blinked. He’d walked into the array of objects and had started to reach out toward one. A puzzle cube. How? His ears—

“John!” Virgil shouted again.

John Bowman Booker stumbled back, dazed. Virgil let go of him. The two men hovered near each other, unbalanced.

“What the hell was that?” Virgil sputtered. “Did you come all this way just to touch the fucking evidence?”

“No, I…” Booker pulled off his glasses, rubbed his face. Why had he reached for the—the thing? “I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s been a weird night.”

“Always is, with the fog. Now come on.”

Booker glanced only briefly over his shoulder as he—

a s c e n d e d

—the stairwell.

Deirdre moved backwards down the corridor and the Mask kept pace with her. Every time she thought It might lunge, she swung her bat to cut It off. She couldn’t hit It without triggering the mansion’s defenses; she needed It to hit her. But not until they’d crossed into the sigil in the center of the entry hall. And then she had to get back outside to help Paul and Victor and…

The Mask accelerated just-slightly toward her and she swung her bat.

Her breath came in quick pants. Sweat collected all over her. She’d watched the Mask repair Its own left hand, had watched It generate flesh and meat and skin in super-rapid genesis. Its healing abilities exceeded her own. Its lethality, too. With so much power, she wasn’t sure the mansion’s anti-violence defenses would even knock It down. The only advantage they had boiled in the magic Rehani waited to trigger.

How far away, now?

Following the angles of the library’s exterior, she tried to keep her movements smooth and even. It got harder by the moment. The Mask kept pace effortlessly, inexhaustible, Its vacant, unblinking sockets studying her, Its blade seeking even a sliver’s ingress. 

She stepped back, one arc’ing stride after the next. She had to get to the entry hall. She and Rehani had to contain the Mask. Then she had to rush back outside. Victor and Paul hadn’t sustained any immediately-lethal wounds, but they wouldn’t last the night if she couldn’t patch them back together.

So here it was: her and the monster that wanted to kill her, one on one for another sixty seconds before Rehani could do anything to help.

As they passed the library’s eastern entrance, the Mask stopped walking. A moment later, so did Deirdre.

The Mask turned Its head to peer into the piled archival labyrinth beyond the broad threshold. Nora and Olly waited at their offices in the center of the library. Did the Mask somehow know? It slowly moved Its gaze from the library to Deirdre and back to the library again. Its grip tightened around Its knife.

The Mask had never felt so much spellcraft inside a sapient structure, before. And so much of it so old. To have lasted so long against forces of entropy, mundanity, and chaos, they would have required semi-regular maintenance from powerful, disciplined practitioners. Great mortal spellweavers had ministered to this mansion/monastery/fortress, and the Mask held no doubt that they’d left defenses behind. But what kinds?

When It had entered, It had broken through a veil of invisible resistance at some expense to Its resources. That would have represented one layer. Another came in the form of an omnipresent pressure, a feeble-but-constant push against the host body/vessel back toward the outside. What else?

It followed the Lock stride by stride, studying.

The Lock carried a revolver in a holster but defended herself with a club(baseball bat) instead. Why?

As It followed the Lock down the hallway, a wide maw of an entryway opened up on Its right. The spellcraft beyond the threshold hummed in so many layers the Mask couldn’t tune it out of the vessel’s mind. The sensations leaked into the audiovisual processors. The (library? Bob guessed) glowed brightly; crackles of golden-white light seemed to flare in and out of existence.

Whatever waited in that room held great importance…

To some other entity.

The Mask spun and thrust the knife forward. Deirdre yelped, leaping back with a wild swing of her bat. A standing lamp toppled across the hall, bulb shattering on impact. Deirdre swung the bat again, still backing up.

The Mask stepped over the fallen lamp and followed.

How far to the entrance hall?

They backed down the corridor for a stretch of seconds lost in heart-race, the Mask mirroring her every move. Deirdre’s eyes ached. Her eyelids quivered. She hadn’t blinked in so long... 

The Mask stopped walking. So did Deirdre. It watched her and she watched It.

Abruptly, It turned around and started walking back toward the library.

Without thinking, Deirdre swung the bat one-armed into the nearest wall. The aluminum dented and cracked the surface, powder and paint chips spraying down. “Hey!” she shouted. Only a few strides away, the Mask came to another stop. Its—his? their?—shoulders lifted just slightly as It took deep, prolonged breaths. 

(Did the monster truly need to breathe, or was the reflex mere muscle memory?)

Deirdre shuffled forward, leading with the bat, elbows cocked. “I’m back here.”

The Mask turned slow-slow-slowly. She felt It appraising her. Examining.

She held the baseball bat ready. If she swung it, would the mansion’s defenses knock her flat? 

The Mask took a cautious stride toward her.

She backed up.

It tilted Its head one way and the other, as if It could read her better at some slightly-altered angle.

She took a deep breath, stepped back, and blinked. In the micro-flash of dark, the Mask moved up. When her eyes opened, It stood easily within swinging distance of her bat, almost within swiping distance of Its knife. (Had It stopped breathing or was that just her imagination?)

With a shaking inhalation, she backed away another step.

The Mask followed.

Moving foot-by-foot, adrenaline beading sweat all over her, Deirdre wondered why It had turned around. Had the Mask meant to return to the library? Had It moved only to discover her reaction? If so, what had her reaction told It? Why had It returned to the pursuit so quickly and easily?

The Mask’s flat (unimportant) visage betrayed no answers.

Deirdre felt the magic thrumming through her sixth sense long before she backed into the broad entry hall itself. It overflowed. The spellcraft leaked into the corridor; the bristling sense of it puckered her skin into gooseflesh. The coolness soothed. 

In the center of the grand entryway, Rehani stood, eyes rolled back white, face turned upwards, still and calm, her dreadlocks winding and tumbling down her back almost to the floor, her hands and fingers woven into a sigil Deirdre didn’t recognize.

Deirdre backed up, glancing every second between the Mask and Rehani, until she crossed the outermost circle of their chalked, salted, and painted arrangement. She slowed down, tapped the head of the baseball bat against the floor. “Come on,” she beckoned, backing farther into the wide assembly of glyphs and symbols. “Come get it.”

The Mask stopped outside of the protective circle. It stared. Deirdre stared back.

“Come on,” she repeated, whispering.

The Mask turned Its head toward Rehani, took her in, and returned Its blinkless gaze to Deirdre. It turned abruptly, followed the boundary of the protective circle to the double front doors, and stepped outside.

For two quick, steaming breaths, Deirdre stood there, watching, jaw loose with surprise.

Then she threw the bat down, yanked her revolver from its holster, and sprinted after the Mask. She burst through the double doors just as they swung closed from the Mask’s departure and skidded down the broad steps leading from the entrance to the driving circle fronting the mansion.

Crickets choired the night.

Beyond the rain-filled fountain, at the edge of floodlight brightness, the Mask walked slowly away. When she reached the asphalt, It remained visible only from the thighs down. Pulling up the barrel of her gun, she squinted at the estimate of Its center mass and squeezed the trigger.

The Mask’s movement hesitated, whether through injury or indecision she couldn’t tell.

“Yeah, run!” she shouted, firing another bullet into her shadowy estimation, “Motherfucker better,” and a third.

The Mask stopped, only Its boots truly visible.

It turned around.

She strode forward, pistol barking loose a fourth bullet. The Mask emerged from the darkness in mirror to her movements, Its void-cavern sockets blinklessly aimed her way. Coming to a stop a few feet beside the fountain and its age-molded angel, Deirdre broadened her stance and blew a narrow tunnel through the monster’s center mass. The Mask paused, losing Its relentless pace. Spots of too-dark blood spread out from the wound before Its supernatural resources could seal a scab. 

The Mask straightened Itself out and continued Its approach.

Another shard of lead screamed through the Mask’s body and It lost balance and staggered. A rush of thick, half-coagulated cruor spread out from the hole before the wound started to close. When the Mask righted Itself again, Deirdre adjusted her aim and squeezed—

The hammer clicked down on an empty chamber.

Her eyes widened.

(the wards didn’t protect her outside)

The Mask and the man lashed out with their knife and—

Deirdre leapt back from the first chop of blade, stuck the landing, and pivoted away from a follow-up. The Mask didn’t relent. Deirdre twisted from a third blow and lost her balance. Still teetering, her feet tripped over themselves as she spun to evade the fourth swipe. She stumbled and fell backwards, rolling. As she dizzily regained her footing, the Mask descended again. Caught off guard, she ducked below a long sweep of Its knife only to find Its boot filling her vision.

Her nose broke. Her face lit like a match-head, everything burnt. The fire blinded her. She scrambled, finding the stairs with desperate hands and knees. She threw herself up the steps until she could stand again. Went for the double doors. Gripping the handle (what was all that noise inside?), she—

She felt the Mask grab her left shoulder. Felt It slam her body against the other door. Felt the knife pierce her skin with a pop and cold-as-death slice-carve through her; felt the tip gore through her back and bury itself in the wood.

She couldn’t breathe couldn’t swallow couldn’t move couldn’t—

The Mask moved to pull the knife back out. Her right hand grabbed Its right wrist and squeezed. When Its left hand shifted away from her shoulder, she used her own left hand to grab that wrist, too. Her muscles quaked to keep It still.

It stared at her and she stared at It.

Her eyelids felt heavy.

Booker descended. Someone had left(turned?) all the lights on in the basement. Between the flickering bulb at the top of the stairs and the vast glow below, shadow prevailed. Booker kept his pistol barrel low. 

“You gotta be careful what kinda masks you wear, Mikey,” a man’s age-hoarsed voice muttered. “…sometimes they end up wearing us.”

whrrrrr

The brightness dimmed, buzzed, and re-asserted itself.

Booker reached the bottom of the staircase.

The floor of the room sloped subtly toward a drain. Book shelves lined the far wall. An antique full-body mirror, gilded frame and gilded accents, stood in front of the center shelf. Booker saw himself reflected in the glass before he saw the other man.

Nick Robertson, his back to Booker, cleaned a long knife with a stained rag. A mess of tarp and plastic wrap heaped at his feet. Streaks of crimson painted the black, blue, and clear materials. Booker didn’t see a body.

He raised his pistol. “Where is she!?”

Nick turned calmly around. He paused the movement of the rag. Something looked wrong about his face but Booker couldn’t tell what. “Who are you?”

“Oceanrest PD,” Booker produced his badge left-handed, flashed it, and stuffed it back in its pocket. “Get on the floor.”

Nick stared. What color were his eyes? (What an unimportant detail.) “Or what?”

“Is the gun not a fucking answer to you?”

Nick’s lips crawled apart to reveal a thrive of maggots—teeth. To reveal teeth. “That’s what it all comes down to, right? You have the gun, you make the rules. Gods, we are so much alike.”

“Don’t try that shit with me. Where’s Castellanos?”

Nick’s brow folded, wrinkling. “I don’t know who that is.”

“The woman who was just…”

“What woman? When?”

What woman?, Booker wondered. When? His gaze swam the basement. “Get—get on the floor,” he repeated.

“Or else you’ll do what?”

“Get on the goddamned floor!” Booker shouted. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

Nick’s wrong-writhing grin returned. “Oh,” he said, almost a chime. “There it is.”

Booker stared down the barrel at Uncle Nick. “Get on the floor now.”

“Oh, man,” Nick laugh-sighed. “What I would’ve given for a badge, you know? People respect a badge. They let it into their homes. Even a fake one can score a couple kills. How many kills can a real one net you, you think?”

Booker’s voice had lost its volume. “Shut up.”

“Spoken like a man who knows.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“You can shut me up if you want to,” Nick said, gesturing to Booker’s pistol with his gleam-clean blade. “You’ve got the power. One finger, a few pounds of force, nobody ever needs to hear me talk again. Right?”

“On. The. Ground.”

“Tackle me,” Nick spat. “Go on. Or are you scared I might stab you?”

Booker thumbed back the hammer. It sounded impossibly loud. It echoed. “You are under arrest for murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Get on the fucking ground.”

Nick put on a high-pitched, mocking tone. “ ‘You’re under arrest for murder and conspiracy. Get on the ground.’” He snorted, dropped the joke. “Please. This is a binary fucking choice. Only one guy’s walking out of here.”

Booker glowered.

“What, you want it to be me?” Nick chided. “How kind.” He stepped back. “Maybe it will be.”

Something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s face.

“You want a monologue?” Booker asked. “Go ahead. Give my partner some extra time to show up.”

Nick nodded, still writhing—grinning. “Yeah, right. Sure. Nice theory. ‘Partner.’ But we live as we dream, right?” He moved slowly but still somehow blurred. Nick sludged through space semi-fluid. With every rolling, distorted stride, his knife seemed to grow sharper, gleam brighter. “It’s funny. At first, what I did, it made me feel like a god. I held people’s lives in my hands. I took all their potential energy and devoured it. I ate a thousand futures.”

Booker followed Nick with his sights. He couldn’t distinguish the other man’s legs anymore. His glasses fogged with humid heat. “You like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?”

“What do you think makes a god, Detective Booker?”

Booker blinked. How did Uncle Nick know his name? After a half-second’s shock, he took a breath, tightened his grip around his gun, and didn’t answer.

“Is a god just a thing that has enough power?” Uncle Nick asked—except he no longer seemed to ask Booker in particular. “Does a god need an agenda, a plan, a point? Is it just power? To reckon with life and death? Because it’s so easy. Not the first time, the first time felt impossible, but after that…” a strange laugh barked out of him. “Do you know how easy it is to break something, Detective?”

“I do.”

“Do gods do what is easy, do you think?”

“No.”

“Do they do what is ‘just’ or ‘righteous?’ Do they get to define what those terms mean?” Uncle Nick sloughed away from him, shambling toward the mirror on the back wall. “Do they just play along with their whims and rewrite the press release later? Heh. Is that all a god is? PR?”

Booker decided to let the man talk. Nick had made distance and had lowered the knife to his side. He seemed less threatening mid-monologue than he’d seemed earlier. And every moment Nick spent talking, Cas—Virgil, Virgil got closer to the basement.

Hopefully.

(and where had Castellanos gone, anyway?)

“I felt like a god, at first. Killing those women.” Uncle Nick stood directly in front of the gilt-framed mirror. Somehow, Booker couldn’t understand his reflection. “But then…what does it mean to be a god? And what does such a small god do in a kingdom of so many vaster, darker gods?”

Booker blinked. His glasses had gotten too foggy. How? He squinted, tracking the vague shape of Nick through the lenses. “What are you talking about?” he asked, suddenly whispering, whispering and cold without knowing why.

Something was wrong with Uncle Nick.

“Did you feel like a god?” a gravelly distortion of Uncle Nick’s voice asked. “When you killed?”

Uncle Nick melted, his meat rolling off of him in steaming gobs, sloppily forming some new thing over his bones.

Booker stepped back, index finger moving from trigger guard back to trigger. He couldn’t make sense of Bob—Nick. Nick’s knife splintered into slivers and the handle followed and the hand that held it, all the way up the arm until the arm became seven slender tendrils edged and sharp-tipped. His face became a mask. (What did it look like? What an unimportant—)

“I—I—stay back!”

A pitched, multi-voiced laugh rasped out of the monster.

It leapt at Booker.

Booker closed his eyes and—

Shards of shattered glass cascaded to the ground. Plywood broke into splinters. The replacements the Lock had used to restore the damage the Mask had done before couldn’t hold up to Its punishment. To the Mask, the new fortifications felt as brittle as eggshells. It tore them apart.

In the parts of It still connected to the immaterial, ethereal, nether and occulted, It felt a Threat accelerate toward It. The Threat exuded an aura of adrenaline, fear and anger commingled. In scent and extra-sense, the Mask recognized him. Minutes earlier, It and the Threat had clashed at the site of another attempted entry. Footfalls, carefully quieted but still audible, forewarned the Threat’s imminence. 

The Mask stepped back from Its improvised ingress/entry and walked toward the corner of the mansion. The Threat strafed around the edge of the structure with his shotgun drawn. Expecting to find the Mask at the source of the glassbreak woodshatter, he swept the barrel of his weapon in that direction. He only noticed the Mask a half-second later, when the Mask had already started striding the distance between them.

The Threat adjusted his aim. The Mask moved to swat away the barrel, Its momentum already reserved for greater purpose. The Mask’s/vessel’s left hand hit steel. The Threat tried to counteract Its force. Their agendas/manifestations/movements collided. The cannon,handheld/handcannon/(shotgun, Bob’s knowledge provided) erupted molten-steel-chill death, sound/fury. The pellets shred meat from bone. The Mask/Bob lost most of Its/their left upper arm and shoulder.

The injury hurt. A wheeze escaped the Mask.

But pain didn’t matter. Even damage fatal to the vessel would only hurt until the Mask disassociated from it. So what was pain?

Gripping the shot-gun underbarrel with all the neuromuscular response remaining in Its/Bob’s/the vessel’s left hand, It used Its right to jam Its knife deep and deeper into the Threat’s torso. Deep and deeper and deeper, in and then up and then in and... 

The Threat strangled a scream and spat at the Mask’s (whatiftheresnothingunderneath) face. He let go of the shot-gun(shotgun) and reached for a holster at his hip. The Mask pulled loose Its blade and pushed Itself away from the Threat. The shotgun followed part of the way before thudding to the grass. The meat-shrapnel rags of Its left arm didn’t function. It needed time to repair.

The Threat stumbled back, seemingly surprised at the depth and suddenness of his injury.

The Mask approached slowly, Its focus diverted. It disassembled the moored pellets and replaced missing bone; It grew new muscle and re-sinewed the links and adhesions; It developed three layers of epidermis. It felt Itself grow stronger with the regeneration. It felt Itself grow weaker with the expenditure of resources. It had finite fuel available to breach the Lock. Every expense mattered.

As It lifted Its left hand back toward the Threat, the Threat blew a hole through it. The recovery had taken too long. The man (sapien/human) had loosed his secondary weapon/firearm and taken aim. The bullet tunneled through slender ivory and carefully folded networks of flesh. The rampage skewed its trajectory. Leaving the hand, it grazed the Mask’s/vessel’s reconstructed left shoulder and spun into the night. A second bullet followed to similar results. Then the Mask grabbed the sidearm/pistol’s barrel with what little the gunshots had left behind.

The Threat let go of the gun and moved to twist away. The Mask drove Its knife forward and up. The blade pierced the man’s upper right arm, found the humerus, and rode the bone-edge until it hit an armor-reinforced half-sleeve at the man’s shoulder and rip-popped free. As a result of the sudden collision of opposing momentums, the Mask lost Its footing. The man/Threat shrieked as he hit the ground, his right arm a burst of mortal wiring. The Mask stumbled backwards.

Another gunshot echoed in the vast dark. A lance of lead plunged through the vessel’s torso.

The Mask caught Itself.

The Seer sagged half-dead against the side of the house, blearily aiming another pistol at It. An aura of vast, powerful something pulsed around the Seer like miasma, both a threat and a warning. Instinctively-familiar whispers occasionally hissed out. 

No matter. Great, dark gods rarely cared much about individual cogs.

The Mask strode toward the Seer without pausing to recover. The Seer fired again. The bullet blew through the Mask’s/vessel’s torso(center mass), splitting softmeat and pooling fluids into the cavities. Functionally, however, it represented a relatively minor wound. 

The Seer lifted his weapon higher. Everything in the material/meat moved so slowly.

Before the man’s finger fully engaged the trigger, the Mask threw the remnants of Its(vessel’s) left hand into the side of his face. The force of the blow ripped two digits free from the mangled mitt and cratered the Seer’s skull into the side of the building. The Seer’s head rebounded, taking the rest of his body with it. As he sagged sidelong away from the mansion/structure, he fired his third shot. It sparked(ricocheted?) against the ground and vanished.

The Mask used Its mostly-useless left arm and mostly-missing left hand to club/bludgeon the Seer. The Seer swung his arms to parry and block, his pistol barrel wildly whirling. In the clumsy melee, the man clipped another finger loose from the Mask’s mangled palm. The pale thing gleamed under floodlight as it twisted away. The Seer paused for a quarter of a second in surprise. 

Everything in the material/meat moved so slowly.

A quarter of a second later, the Mask had drawn the sharp edge of Its blade across skin and muscle. A bright red stain spread along his right shirtsleeve, a cut in his right forearm provided a narrow glimpse halfway to the bone.

The Seer stumbled in loose-limbed retreat. He’d reopened the wound in his side (how had it closed?) and now had a concussion and an opened-up arm to contend with, as well. The whispering miasma hazing him intensified. The whispers grew louder, becoming rasps and hoarse breaths. Somewhere beneath, sweetness sizzled.

Everything, already moving so slowly, seemed to slow down.

The Mask tingled with warm excitement. It had never fought against something like Itself, before. Especially not in the meat/material realms/planes/so-called ‘realities.’ And while both vessels wore damage, the Mask suspected Its vessel wore less.

The Seer backpedaled (like a drunk, Bob’s barely-there mind provided), his lips a slur of mumbles. The whispers…

The Mask approached with the knife. Tapping into Its diminishing resources, It started to reconstruct the carpals and metacarpals It had lost in Its left hand. As It knit the appendage back together, the parts of It still connected to the immaterial, ethereal, nether and occulted sparked unexpected feedback. Another entity, close, seethed with—

A hard force collided with the side of Its head. The blow followed through with such velocity that Its vessel spun and lost footing. The Mask followed the movement until It could turn to see Its attacker.

“Motherfucker,” the Lock said, a club(baseball bat) in her hands. 

The Mask diverted resources to tend to the fractured skull bones and crushed brain-matter. It reoriented Itself to face the Lock. The whispers steaming off of the Seer faded. The man, himself, lost his footing and fell kneeling to the ground. He squinted over the pistol sights but couldn’t hold his gun steady. When he fired it again, it leapt from his hands. The Mask considered. Three strides, maybe a small struggle, and two quick movements of the knife would finish the Seer.

The Lock swung the baseball bat/club and the Mask stepped back, barely avoiding its arc.

It had already spent more resources than planned; It didn’t need to gamble more of them. When the Lock stepped back, It stepped forward to match her. Cocking the baseball bat, she swept a leg in a long arc behind her. It stepped forward to match.

On all fours, now, the Seer groaned. He reached for his gun.

“Don’t!” the Lock advised, glancing over at—

The Mask lunged forward.

The Lock swung the bat.

If she’d lost focus for any longer, It would have gotten the knife into her. But she hadn’t.

“Yeah, that’s right. Stay with me.” Behind the Lock, up a pair of short steps, a door hung open. The Mask felt aged stores of energy hum from inside. Still, It stayed on target. Meat and sinew wrapped the new bones of Its left hand. It fed rapid cellular genesis with hollowed pasts and claimed futures.

The Lock backed into the mansion. It followed, Key in hand.

Something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s house. (Was it bigger on the inside?)

The darkness made it seem cavernous. Squinting through his lenses, Booker still couldn’t see anything beyond the flashlight beam. That narrow lance of visibility gave the surrounding dark a weight, a density. A malevolence.

(Or maybe the house was somehow bigger on the inside?)

Booker tried not to shine the torchbeam too far ahead—who knew what eyes might notice him before he noticed them?—and moved slow-and-silently forward, knees bent, breath steady. He heard nothing. No floorboards creaked. No wind moaned through the framing. Even the evening insect-song had quieted. Only his pulse remained.

Until the skitter.

The noise reminded Booker of fingers drumming against a tabletop, but sharper. (Did they drum or did they drill?) It came from—upstairs? Ahead? He couldn’t tell. But the growing echo told him it grew closer…

He thumbed the hammer back on his pistol. Took a breath.

Something blurred across the corridor ahead, something big and fast on the periphery of the flashlight glow.

Booker raised the barrel. Took a breath.

taktaktaktaktaktak

Above? Ahead?

From his side, hands flew out from an unnoticed threshold. They grabbed him as he spun toward them. He shouted half a syllable before a cool palm found his lips.

“Quiet,” Castellanos whispered.

Booker disengaged the hammer, thumbed the safety back on.

Castellanos let go of him.

The finger-drum-drill sound stopped.

They stood in a bathroom. Castellanos stepped out into the hallway to check their surroundings.

“What the hell is going on?” Booker whispered.

As Castellanos ducked back into the room, she shrugged. “We’re solving the case.”

“Are you real?”

Castellanos blinked. “John…”

“Are you?”

“We worked together for five years, John. Was I real, then?”

“Is ‘now’ different?”

The soft chuckle that escaped her lips echoed briefly in the silence. “Do you remember in the condo—”

“What about the car?” he almost lost control of his voice, breaking the whisper. He caught himself.

She glowered. “If you’d let me finish?”

“Just answer me. Please.”

“The whole truth?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Leaned in close. “The truth is…it’s about time you expanded your notion of what ‘real’ really means.”

“What?”

“Now come on,” she whispered. “While It’s not paying attention.”

“What?” he repeated more urgently; but they were already moving. 

And something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s house.

They ascended the stairwell. Hadn’t Castellanos pulled him into the bathroom from a hallway? She had. Nonetheless, leaving the bathroom, they ascended the—(the descent)—the stairwell. Castellanos’ boots made no sound against the worn cement steps. Booker’s shoes clapped each stride.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, his voice clonazepam-calm despite his racing heart.

Castellanos kept climbing noiselessly. Fluorescent lights flickered. A dank industrial drip echoed.

He’d been here before.

Had he been here, before?

“Shh,” Castellanos finally replied. “Be careful.”

He wanted to ask ‘why?’ but the question hadn’t exactly proved helpful thus far. He didn’t press the issue. Sidearm held low, he followed Castellanos from a couple steps behind, listening for some other sign of life. A drip echoed. His shoe-soles smacked the stairs.

At the top of their climb, a broad, door-less threshold yawned open from a wide staircase landing. Castellanos withdrew a Rubik’s cube from her holster. It didn’t look right. Something glowed inside of it.

Had Booker lost his mind?

clack-clack

Castellanos stood on the opposite side of the garage-sized gap. “Ready?”

“Wait.”

The drip had changed.

“John…”

“Wait.”

Or it had never been a drip at all.

(slap-whimper)

slap-whimper, slap-whimper

He couldn’t move. “I—I…”

“John,” Castellanos urged.

He’d lost track of his pulse. His heart rampaged. His blood burned through him. “I can’t,” he barely breathed.

“John, look at me.”

Sludgy shadows danced in his periphery. Nausea rumbled through his guts. He couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t—

“John!”

He shook.

slap-whimper

Blinked. Looked.

Castellanos stood in the center of the threshold, framed in perfect symmetry. The Rubik’s cube floated inches above an outstretched palm. Something inside of it glowed. Crackles of strange lightning crawled across it, black and purple, white and blue. “I chose you, right? That means something. And it is your duty to—”

Whatever took her did it too quickly to really understand. It blew through the landing like a roiling cloud, a blur of limbs and body only half-material, and as it funneled itself through the wide gap, it left with Castellanos tangled and wrapped up in its mass.

Booker gave chase. He didn’t have time to think.

slap—

He passed the threshold and found an unlit hallway on the other side, hardwood floored, maybe a kitchen to his right. A dozen paces ahead, at the end of the narrow suburban corridor, a lamp hung over an open doorway. It buzzed and flickered, buzzed and flickered.

Struggling to steady his breath, Booker approached.

Wooden railings followed concrete steps down to a dead man’s basement. Vague light glowed up from below.

Booker descended.