“Mierde,” Mendez muttered. He went to a shelf about knee-height, paused, then quickly took the green tube on it and moved it to the floor, wiping the hand that had touched it on his pants. He hoisted a leg onto the shelf and bounced a little on it, testing its strength. To Erik, he said, “Maybe we can climb—” before the wall opened up and swallowed him. Erik dove to try and grab at him and his arm sank into the wall up to the elbow. Panic flared in his chest as an icy pain shot from his fingertips up to his shoulder. Ian and Lauren were immediately at his sides, pulling on him, trying to free his arm. Erik cried out as the wall bit into his skin, holding him, surging up toward his shoulder.
“Get out!” he shouted. “Get out of here!”
“We’re not leaving you!” Lauren shouted back. She renewed her tugging efforts.
“I can’t—” The wall swelled up and around his shoulder and yanked him through and sealed up behind him.
The two left behind stood stunned, staring at the spot. In the pale glow of the room, tears glistened in Lauren’s eyes. Ian held the scrap of his shirt the wall had cut off.
Erik, like Mendez, was gone.
Chapter 11
After several moments, Ian looked at Lauren and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
She nodded slowly, turning around. Behind them, the room had changed again.
“Oh shit,” she muttered.
The glow had gone from a soft teal to a harsh red, and it was no longer coming from the stone altar in the center of the room. It was coming from the walls themselves, little flashing beacons of light as if they were in a can punched through with holes to let in the light of a terrible red giant star. All over the walls took heaving breaths, which rocked the shelves like small boats on an ocean gathering a storm. The various containers still sat on the shelves, but those shelves were in different places and formed I-shapes. The containers themselves were filled to varying degrees with dark red fluid.
She had time to think Blood. Oh God, those things are filled with blood before the jars started to tremble, then shake violently. The fluids inside splashed out and splattered the rocking shelves and the walls around the objects. The contrast of light and darkness through the blood was ghastly; it made the blood patterns appear to move on their own. Lauren bit back a scream. She felt Ian’s hand on her arm, tugging her.
“Come on!” he shouted. “The place is melting!” He was pointing toward the opening, the bottom corner of which was sagging like a glob of spit down toward them. The shelves began to lose shape, too, bending and dripping their substance onto the floor. The walls pulled down rivulets of the splattered blood and mixed with it. The air inside the room had grown stuffy and unbearable, thick with the unsavory scent of cooking blood. The sudden explosion of glass to their right startled Lauren into a scream, followed by a short succession of others as tiny slivers of glass slid painfully under the skin of her arm and cheek. Ian pulled her out of the way as several of the splintering objects popped and their bigger pieces fell off the melting shelves. Ian reached up toward the opening to the outside world, the edge of which had now dropped low enough to reach, and tugged down. The opening stretched further toward them. Lauren reached up too. The substance of the melting wall was hot beneath her hands and rough, like sand under the summer sun all day. She winced, but tugged hard. Between the two of them, they managed to pull the bottom edge of the opening down to waist-level.
Behind them, the stone structure in the middle began to crumble.
“Come on,” he shouted over the din of the melting, toppling room. “I’ll give you a boost!”
She hesitated a moment, flinched as something crashed behind her, and nodded. He locked his fingers at about knee height, the palms of his hands turned upward. Balancing herself with a hand on his shoulder, she stepped up onto his palm, then reached for the opening. She didn’t look out to what she was dropping onto; she felt him heave her over the edge and then she was falling. A jarring thud as she hit ground sent a shock wave of pain through her frame. There was another thud, and Ian landed next to her with a little groan.
She sat up. “You okay?” Her left arm hurt at the elbow, and the side of her knee throbbed.
Laying on his back, he coughed once and said, “Yeah, I think so. You?”
“I’m okay.” She got to her feet and helped him up, then looked around. They were back in the courtyard. The other buildings rotated occasionally and shifted an inch or so as if doing some gratingly slow dance. They seemed utterly unphased by the return of the humans or the melting of their fellow building. That, Lauren noticed, was because the building they had been in, the one with the symbols, was gone.
She took in a breath of sour, waxy air and still felt better than taking the horrible stink of that melting room into her lungs. A part of her wanted to cry or scream, but she was surprised to find that was a very small part of her. Some survival instinct inside had switched on, and she felt that to scream was to lose whatever tenuous hold she had left on her self-control. She couldn’t have that.
Instead, she forced more of that stale air in and out of her lungs and asked, “So what now? Where do you think Erik and Mendez are?”
“I don’t know,” Ian said. He threw up his hands. He looked closer to the edge of hysterical, and she felt for him—wanted to hug him, even stroke his hair, she realized. He looked lost. “I really have no idea.”
***
For a moment, all sense and thought was swallowed by white, and then a musty smell filled Erik’s nose. The white cleared like dissipating smoke and he saw Mendez sitting on hard ground, leaning against a rock wall, rubbing his forehead. To either side of them, the rock stretched overhead and down into darkness. They were in a tunnel. Erik recognized the tunnel, or thought he did. He felt sick in his stomach.
“Where are we?” Mendez looked around.
“Inside the Hollowers’ heads,” Erik muttered. He had been half-kidding, but it actually made sense. The Hollowers could manipulate his world; it wasn’t so far a stretch that they could manipulate other worlds, too. Where logic and reason and self-assurance might set his world right again, he had no frame of reference for “right” in this world. Here, they were really and truly lost.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that they’re probably doing to us in this dimension what they do to us in our own. Think about it—they thrive on confusion. They feed on fear and insecurity. They....” His voice trailed off, as his eye caught something horrible carved into the wall nearby, and from the low whistle at the outside edge of his hearing, he sensed that Mendez’s gaze had alighted on the same thing his had.
About ten feet down, carved into a smooth spot in the rough rock, was a mural crudely painted and framed in symbols. Before the drugs he’d been nuts about National Geographic, and a lot of the symbols were somewhat reminiscent of ancient languages—Aztec, Mayan, ancient Egyptian. But he was pretty sure these symbols weren’t from any kind of Earth language. They looked like a kind of cuneiform—not, he thought, that he’d know cuneiform from Colorforms, but that was what came to mind. A cuneiform of an alien race.
The pictures the ancient symbol-language framed were of a more modern cast. The mural was fairly complex and detailed, a contrast to the garish paint applied haphazardly to the surface. The figure on the left side was a Confederate soldier corpse astride a skeleton horse rearing on its hind legs. It was the same figure his father had tattooed on his arm, the same figure he had spent countless beatings memorizing the details of while spittle and sour beer breath hung like a dark cloud over his head. He had hated that tattoo, and the man it belonged to, for a very long time. Nowadays, he was more numb to the memories of the latter. The former, he was dismayed to discover, still inspired a kind of dread that had not diminished even in all those years since his father’s death.
In the mural, there was a figure being trampled beneath the corpse soldier’s horse. That figure reminded him an awful lot of himself.
There was more.
The mural background, a sparse forest of dead trees, extended from behind the dead soldier toward a number of inverted pyramids like the one that had swallowed them up and secreted them into the tunnel. The pyramids were painted in shades of blue, with Saturn-like rings around them and bases painted with ornate designs. Snaking tendrils writhed in and out of and in between the pyramid buildings. Erik thought again of the animals that possibly constituted the wildlife of the dimension, and hoped that Ian and Lauren were okay.
The branches of a tree behind one of the pyramid buildings reached up into a night sky, the black paint slathered around little sparking bits in the rock itself. That sky stretched into a new scene, one that looked painted by a child, albeit a very disturbed child; large, unblinking eyes, their pupils grossly out of proportion, floated over the heads of stick figures whose round heads were split wide open by actual cracks in the rocks. Red paint dribbled from the corners of those eyes and onto the heads of the stick figures. The blood—Erik knew it to represent blood—spilled along the ground into another scene. In that one, there was a long table, and on it were lined up the naked human bodies of two men and two women, their arms crossed like dead pharaohs on their chests. The men and one woman looked young, the body of the woman on the other end slightly larger and sagging in places. The leftmost man’s large forearm had a Chinese dragon tattoo Erik recognized. In fact, he thought he knew who each of those figures were meant to represent, and it sent a pang of pain through his chest. The figures had no faces; the rough rock was scored and chipped where the faces should have been and painted over in splashes of red. Still, he knew. And somehow seeing their bodies, pale and naked and otherwise untouched in contrast to the indicated mess of their faces, made the injuries more horrible.
“Holy mother of God,” Mendez said, getting to his feet. He went to the portion of the mural with the dead figures of Steve, Jake, Dorrie, and Mrs. Coley and touched it gingerly. Red dust came off on his fingertips. “What is this? What the hell is this, Erik?”
His fingertips followed further along the mural until he came upon something that set loose a string of Spanish which, by its tone, could only have been curses. Erik got up and went over to see what he had found. Mendez had gone so far as to pull his gun on the offending carving as if he could threaten it into receding. He paced, waving his gun at it. When Erik saw it, he understood why.
It was a figure of a woman torn wide open, a small woman with frizzy hair nearly obliterated by whatever had scratched away her face. From the gaping wound in her mid-section, there was a smaller figure—a small child—whose dismembered limbs were black with decay.
“What did they do to her? Oh God, what did they do?”
“Walk away, man. They’re just fucking with you. Come on, just walk away.” Erik grabbed Mendez’s arm and pulled him away from the mural altogether, tugging him down through the tunnel. The darkness receded at their approach, the feeble light always focused on wherever they were but swallowed up before and behind them.
“I’ve got to find her, man. I’ve got to find her.”
“We will,” Erik told him. “We will.”
“How?” Mendez re-holstered the gun. He didn’t state the obvious, that they were in a world inside a world outside the limits of anything in the known universe, that they were trapped and at the mercy of monsters who wanted them dead, who’d bleed them dry of emotions and then toss their husks to beasts from the places beyond the insides of closets and underside of beds. He didn’t state it because it hung there between them on the tail of his question, a kind of despair more complete and engulfing than any Erik had ever felt. He fought it with everything he had.
Erik didn’t know how they would find Anita, or Ian and Lauren, or a way out. But he’d be damned if he’d let despair swallow him up. When his father had tried to beat the soul out of him, he had turned to coke, and the despair had nearly killed him. He’d sworn never to let that happen again—not when the first or the second Hollower threatened to take away everything, and not now. He’d breathe, he’d count to a thousand or a million if he had to, and he’d keep moving until his legs wouldn’t hold him up if that’s what it took. Maybe it was a form of resistance to authority, or a super-sharpened sense of self-preservation. Maybe it was Casey. Likely, it was Casey—she was the best thing he had to live for. All he knew was that he’d be damned if he let those faceless fucking devils win without a fight.
“We will find her.” Erik said each word with deliberate clarity and authority. His tone left no room for question or argument. “You and I will get out of here, and we will find her.”
Mendez searched his face, seemed to find what he was looking for, and moved forward with renewed determination.
When they reached a fork in the tunnel, it was Mendez who said, “This way.”
“How do you know?”
Mendez almost smiled. “Breeze. There’s a breeze from this direction. Feel it? Nothing from that direction.”
Erik could feel it. It was the same stagnant air of the foreign dimension, but to Erik, it was a good sign. If it was a trick, he was okay just then with letting it be.
They walked a long time in the direction that Mendez chose, and Erik was just about to voice his first rumbling of doubt when he saw a small oval of light beyond the darkness in front of them.
“Look!” he pointed, and the two started running. The oval of light grew larger, and the breeze of stagnant air from the outside stronger. They were so intent on reaching the outside before the Hollowers sealed up the tunnel and plunged them into blackness that Erik didn’t see the bony, jointed appendage snaking down from the mouth of the cave until it had grabbed a hold of Mendez’s neck and tossed him clear onto the red ground. He landed with an “oof” and rolled over on his back. A trickle of blood ran from beneath his right ear and another from the corner of his mouth. The wind had been knocked out of him and he was gasping for air. It sounded like he was trying to say Erik’s name. He looked above the mouth of the cave at something and his eyes grew wide. He dived to the right as a lance of bone shot into the ground where he had just been.
“Mendez!” Erik shouted, and came running out of the tunnel. He stumbled once and nearly tumbled to the ground beside Mendez, but caught his balance and turned in time to see another long spike of bone cleaving the air toward him. He dodged and that time, he did lose his balance, rolling out of the way in a kicked-up cloud of red dust.
“Shit!” Erik scrambled to his feet. In seconds, Mendez was beside him. The cave had formed an opening in that long range of cliffs they had seen when they first got to this world. Shelves of rock jutted out and up for miles. Erik guessed they had ended up at least a few miles down the length of the range. There was no sign of the inverted pyramids and no sign of the courtyard stones.
What Erik did see—what both of them were drawn to stare at in horror—was the thing perched on the mouth of the cave.
The center of it was a swirling black mass like a dense cloud about twenty feet in circumference. From it, faces emerged and receded. Sometimes these faces were alien, and only identifiable as faces at all because of the inclusion of eyes and mouths. Some of the faces were human, but mask-like, frozen in the glazed-eyed, slack-jawed expression of the dead. At times, those human faces suggested familiarity, taking on Casey’s features for a moment or Anita’s, Dave’s or Steve’s. There was a terrible noise rising from that swirling center and those dead gaping mouths, the scream of a storm gaining momentum, the whine of wind and its rending powers of destruction. Erik thought he heard human screaming as well, and realized it was him.
The creature had several long, barbed, multi-pronged appendages that lashed at the air above its center. Erik supposed it was one of those lashing things that had flung Mendez from the cave. From either side of its center, spanning the length of the beast beneath those wildly whipping appendages, jointed spider legs arced up and out. Wisps of the black center swirled and spiraled around the legs, occasionally separating themselves and solidifyi
ng into bony spikes.
With one of those whips, it tore a forming bone-spike from the shin of one leg and hurled it at them. It landed between them. They both screamed.
Mendez raised his gun at the thing and fired. He hit one of the spider legs and black ichor exploded out and behind it. It roared, wobbling a little on the injured leg. Then the black of its center floated up to the wound and filled it in like clay. Mendez fired off a couple more rounds into the center of the thing, but succeeded only in hitting a face that resembled his own. He shoved the gun back into its holster again.
The thing rose on its spider legs to an imposing height. It roared again, and then leaped off the mouth of the cave.
The two stumbled backward in terror, then took off at a run along the cliff wall. Behind them, they could hear a rapid scrabbling, like a hundred feet clamoring over the red, rocky soil. It screamed, and Erik thought the faces inside it might be screaming, too. The air cracked above their heads and Erik thought he caught a whiff of ozone. He was afraid to look back, to slow his stride even so much as a little, but suspected that the whips of the thing had cut the air above them and changed it somehow.
A cold, stale wind blew against their faces. Thunder echoed through clouds that looked like smears of blood across a menacing sky. Erik wasn’t sure if it was the storm of charged air around the creature pursuing them, or if another separate storm was brewing ahead of them, but neither boded well for them. Beneath the thoughts of immediate death, of being torn apart by the swirling monstrosity behind them, he found himself wondering about acid rain and lightning in this place.
His chest hurt from the pace. The air his body necessarily sucked into his lungs tasted like exhaust and made his chest hurt even worse. His legs burned from the exertion of running through the thick atmosphere. It was nightmare-running, where one’s legs just couldn’t move him fast enough to get away. They wouldn’t be able to keep up a sufficient pace to outrun the thing for long. His eyes darted along the length of rock for some haven they could dive into before the beast behind them overtook them. Please oh please oh pleaseohpleaseohplease....
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