A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  “Hey, it’s the lucky lady! You know, your boyfriend’s a cutie-patootie. You should keep a closer eye on him.”

  Oh shit!

  He pushes Siobhán’s legs off his lap and stands, careful not to straighten all the way too fast. Siobhán uses the momentum from the movement to spin back up to her original sitting position and crosses her arms and legs with a flourish.

  Audrey steps smoothly around the couch and leans over, getting right in Siobhán’s face from the side. Siobhán ignores Audrey’s intense glare and watches sloths fight over a gnawed-on severed head on the screen.

  Audrey coldly says, “Find someone else, or I’ll jam my thumbs into your eyes, crack open your skull, and piss on your brain.”

  Siobhán raises her drawn eyebrows and gives a sarcastic frown then puts her big sunglasses back on and jabs them gently with her thumbs as if to test their effectiveness as armor.

  She uncrosses her legs, pulls two shiny, straight objects out of her boot tops, and stands, forcing Audrey to straighten up. Even without the crazy hair, Siobhán has almost a head on her. Audrey has never cared. Siobhán’s only a few inches shorter than Felix, actually, and he’s not short.

  Siobhán raises her hands from her sides a bit but stops abruptly.

  She leans closer like she’s examining Audrey’s face. It’s hard to tell with those glasses. She looks at Felix then back at Audrey. Siobhán tilts her head to the side and down and sighs, then raises her head and begins.

  Siobhán’s hands move quick and smooth and the objects come apart, flipping on hinges and glinting in the reflected light. Long, dark double-edged balisongs aka butterfly knives.

  They don’t look like metal. More like polished onyx with a kind of translucent opalescence that’s only visible at certain angles… but that doesn’t seem possible. Must be some custom resin or plexi-glas. Their curve is similar to a single-edged type but it’s a touch more severe and Felix notices they are sharp on what would be the safe edge, creating a slightly sickle-like hook. Both edges terminate in a nasty looking point. And there are two of them.

  She fans them expertly, flipping them between and around fingers, over her hands, then transfers them from one hand to the other with an aerial, stalling both on the upturned backs of her flattened hands, blades open.

  She doesn’t even seem to be watching what she’s doing.

  She angles her hands and lets the knives slide down the backs, whips them into her palms, fans them around the backs of her thumbs and closes both with a final flip-lock, then slides them into her pea coat pockets.

  “Blow me, ‘fugee,” Siobhán says then cocks her head and makes a smooch sound.

  Audrey didn’t look scared at all. Not even a slight flinch. She just stares at where Siobhán’s eyes must be behind her mirrored glasses.

  Siobhán picks up her bag and looks at Felix, then points at Audrey. “Now, this girl knows how to tell someone to fuck off. She’s a keeper.”

  She steps around Audrey and walks toward an exit door to the street. Over her shoulder with a hint of an accent, Siobhán says, “Later, boyo.”

  The “boyo” hits Felix like a slap and he flinches. He’s confused for a moment and forgets that he probably shouldn’t be watching Siobhán’s lovely rear end move in her silky jodhpurs as she nears the door.

  “There won’t be a later, gipsy cunt,” Audrey says.

  Siobhán reaches the door and leaves through it. In his weird daze, Felix can’t help but wonder what kind of “unmentionables” she’s wearing.

  5

  “What the fuck was that?” Audrey asks, staring at the road rushing toward them ahead.

  She’s speeding down Market Street. She only does that with Felix in the Swede when she’s upset. Calms her or something.

  That’s the first thing she’s said directly to him since the thing with Siobhán at the party. Audrey stormed smoothly through the home/free and dance area then went upstairs and Felix followed. She said goodbye to their friends. They protested her early egress. Felix also said goodbye and left with her.

  “What?” Felix asks, knowing exactly what. He’s back to fiddling with his camera. He has the eye patch viewfinder attachment on and he’s messing with more settings.

  “That weirdo whore back there! Do you know that fucking gyp slut?!”

  “‘Gyp slut’? Jesus, Audrey.”

  This is the other side of Audrey. When she feels genuinely out of control, she loses it. The slurs come out. Almost like a mean old woman. Audrey unhinged.

  She’s not really racist. She just goes for the sharpest, meanest words. Within reason. She doesn’t say anything really bad. Although, she does have a pretty large vocabulary when it comes to insulting other women.

  Audrey can get a tad jealous. Usually it’s unwarranted. Felix will calm her by repeatedly telling her it was nothing, because it usually is nothing.

  This time, he’ll do the same. That won’t change the fact he’ll have to deal with his tension toward Siobhán the next morning in the shower or in the bed after Audrey leaves. He’s a monogamous young man and that’s how a monogamous young man does business. Fantasy promiscuity. In his fantasy world, he’s still a male slut. Audrey is fine as hell to him, though, and they are quite “active”, so he rarely has to take it there.

  Siobhán was something else, though.

  He can’t shake how deep the arousal was. It was kind of like an odd variation on how Audrey makes him feel. Comfortable on a level no one else hits but with Siobhán it’s also uncomfortable at the same time. Definitely hard to describe.

  Luckily, Audrey’s mad enough that he probably won’t have to worry about trying not to imagine Siobhán while they do it tonight, due to the fact that they probably won’t be doing it tonight. Siobhán will be out of his system in one session, he hopes. Two maybe? Definitely three. Probably three, yeah.

  “I’ve never seen her before. She just sat down and started talking nonsense.”

  “It made perfect sense, Felix. She wanted to get some and you know it! Why were you even talking to her?!”

  “She was coked out of her mind. I didn’t say a word to her. She sat down and started babbling.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her to go away?!”

  “I was watching the fucking sloth movie, okay?!” Felix couldn’t think of anything better to say. Nothing true. At least that’s true, right?

  Audrey gets really quiet again. It’s like she just expects him to take it and take it until she runs out of steam. When he starts to stand up for himself, she sulks.

  Felix sees a small circular button on the lens without a marking. It’s almost flush with the surface and recessed just a bit.

  “Hey, am I the one who was dancing with other guys?” Felix chides, trying to shift the focus away from Siobhán.

  “Not fair at all. We both know half of those guys would be more dangerous if they were dancing with you, and besides, not one of them gets to touch. If you didn’t hate dancing, I would do it with you. I would rather dance with you, actually.”

  Felix feels really bad now as he finally realizes she might just act like she isn’t bothered by something because she cares about him. After hating himself real bad for a moment, he decides to consider maybe, possibly, trying dance lessons to surprise her on McValentine’sTM or her next birthday. Or the one after that, with my lack of talent.

  When is her birthday again? She never brings it up herself and he could swear it was different one year. Audrey doesn’t talk about her childhood at all.

  Maybe she really was an orphan, he thinks for about the thirtieth time. Maybe she doesn’t really know what her birthday was.

  He presses the recessed button.

  There’s a tiny jolt like haptic feedback or maybe just static electricity. He pans the camera out the window view speeding by. There’s no obvious change on his eye patch view.

  What does that button do?

  He sets the camera down and takes the manual out of the bag. In the viewfinder ove
r his eye, he sees an angled shot of Audrey fuming while she drives from his lap level. He tries to read the table of contents in the light from passing cars and streetlights. The different input from both eyes at once is disorienting. Felix closes his left eye and focuses on reading the manual.

  He can’t find that button described in the contents or in the diagram of the camera. As he flips through to find a more lens-specific diagram, he relaxes his left eyelid and lets it open some. He finds a diagram of the lens.

  Okay, this diagram would have to–

  Wait… What is that about?

  Audrey’s eyes look different. Very different. Her eyes are pretty dark as it is being dark brown, but right now they look jet black. And they’re… pulsing. With each pulse, the black spreads. The whites of her eyes are almost completely black already.

  Felix shakes his head and blinks a couple times. No change. Black and pulsing. Still holding the manual up, he closes his right eye this time for a better look at this special effect filter or whatever it is.

  It looks really real. Real-time match moving and rendering based on facial recognition or something?

  He raises his left hand and searches for the focus dial. He finds and adjusts it. The black pulsing gets blurry, then sharp again.

  Felix fumbles for the zoom lever and nudges wide by accident, then telephoto a few times. It zooms in a bit each time and he sees that the black is not just black. It’s subtly shimmering and iridescent. The whites are covered now and it’s still growing.

  What look like curved seams and holes appear all over her face and head in rhythm with the pulsing black in her eyes. There’s a dark mist gently wafting from her nostrils and a glow from up inside them.

  Audrey notices Felix holding the camera manual and whips her head toward him.

  “HEY, FUCKHEAD! YOU AREN’T EVEN LISTENING!” Her voice is becoming shrill and abrasive but has a roar-like added depth. It echoes and reverberates until it’s absorbed by the metal frame of the car, which hums in time with it.

  As this bellows from her mouth, her face and head warp and distort, breaking apart while burning and melting into organic chaos. Parts implode while others burst or just float in place where they should be while this happens around them. Other parts go translucent making the other combinations of effects vaguely or clearly visible.

  A cross-section of cheekbone and muscle melted away by an avalanche of bubbling liquid flesh. A triangular prism of ocular cavity dripping down to the teeth. A sliver of nasal cavity widens and stretches open exposing brain matter before rolling like mercury down into the throat area and showing a cutout of glowing, sizzling esophagus, larynx, and neck muscles.

  The glow and lambent smoke now coming from her mouth, nose, ears, and behind her inky, blue-black eyes is almost blinding and it goes between burning bright and flashing in a color he couldn’t begin to describe, other than maybe dividing black by blue and that by indigo.

  This all vibrates and glitches in rhythm with the persistent throbbing Felix realizes must be Audrey’s arterial pulse.

  What kind of sensor picks that up?

  It takes less than two seconds for this intense, blazing maelstrom to occur. No slowdown or frame hikes.

  This camera was worth every penny. The real-time audio effects are incredible too.

  After it “speaks” the distorted mess of light, smoke, and flesh calms a bit and looks back at the road.

  How much did it cost to slip this much effects tech into the camera itself… not to mention why would they with so many programs for “pro-sumer” postproduction?

  He zooms back out.

  “QUIT PLAYING WITH THAT FUCKING THING AND TALK TO ME!”

  The voice is louder this time and the distortions even more intense.

  Felix quickly takes off the viewfinder, detaches it, and throws it into the bag on the car floor. He exhales sharply and turns his head to complain–

  It’s all still there. Blurry, but there.

  Felix blinks hard a few times. A deep chill washes through his whole body and he shudders. He has just enough presence of mind to keep his face as neutral as possible but he can’t look away. Somehow, the blurriness of the bright, yet somehow dark, pulsing mess makes it even more horrifying.

  “THANKS FOR COMING BACK TO THE REAL WORLD, FELIX!”

  She notices his stare.

  “WHAT?! DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT! IT’S NOT FUNNY! STOP!”

  Felix finally tears his eyes away and locks them on the street ahead. For the first time since childhood, the view of cars rushing through the night all around them as they do the same is almost soothing.

  Careful not to see himself, Felix looks sideways at the reflection in the windshield of the swirling thing that was so recently his lovely girlfriend. The glowing and burning make it easy to see, even with very little light from outside the car.

  Felix watches the whole thing undulate rhythmically. He’s starting to feel nauseated and his head hurts. The organic glitches and cutout views swell and shrink. Every pulse of the thing makes his nausea worse and his head hurt more.

  “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

  When it scream-talks at him, both feelings multiply. His mouth fills with pre-vomit saliva. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe it away.

  “HOW MUCH DID YOU DRINK?!”

  The voice is too much. It vibrates through his skull and the pain is awful. It turns his stomach the rest of the way. Felix rolls down the window as fast as he can and leans out.

  “YOU BETTER NOT–”

  He does his best to project his stomach contents away from the car and is mostly successful. A car behind them in the other lane honks.

  “DAMMIT, FELIX!”

  Somehow its voice is worse every time. He heaves again. Someone in the car that honked laughs loudly and yells, “Lightweight bitch!” out their window.

  Fuck you!

  “FELIX–”

  It starts to speak but Felix raises his hand in a cautious pleading gesture. He hangs out the door and spits a few times.

  Felix sees the asphalt rushing by below him.

  How fast could they be going? They’re on a regular street. Couldn’t be that fast, right?

  “ARE YOU OKAY, BABY?!”

  The intonation tells him the thing is trying to sound concerned, but the voice is more shrill and booming than before and the vibration of the car frame is almost deafening as it absorbs it. His insides convulse a bit but there isn’t anything left to purge. It’s becoming unbearable.

  It’s so loud… why can’t I feel it vibrating, Felix asks himself in a distant part of his mind that isn’t overwhelmed by pain, sickness, and horror.

  “TALK TO ME!”

  He moans against the door then leans out and tries to heave again. The door is unlocked, he remembers that much. He’ll have to be quick.

  Who knows what it can do. Why hasn’t it attacked me yet?

  He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath then lets it out slowly.

  Felix looks over at it again to be sure. It gets brighter, darker, and weirder by the moment. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. He steels himself.

  “What’s there to t-talk about?”

  As quickly as he can, Felix unbuckles his lap belt and tries to open the passenger door but it sticks with a creak. He steals a glance at the pulsing inferno behind the wheel.

  The thing looks over and the twisted, melting face forms into the closest thing it can muster to an astonished expression.

  Lost my chance–

  I’m so dead!

  No–

  Try again!

  Felix slams his shoulder against the door and it swings free. He grabs the top of the frame and pulls himself up and out of the seat and flops his left arm up onto the roof.

  The HDV-426 falls out of the car and breaks apart into several snapping, whirring pieces of varying size and complexity. He doesn’t care at the moment, but it does help him realize they’re going faster than he thought.
/>   “FELIX!”

  That last scream makes his insides contract and his head hurt so bad he can barely see.

  Felix jumps.

  He tries to get footing and run to slow himself down like jumping off a runaway skateboard as a kid.

  Instead, his feet tangle immediately and he slams into the asphalt fast and hard, forcing him into a rough roll. His limbs flail and the pavement bruises and tears his flesh. He feels and hears a POP in his left shoulder and the distant part of his mind calmly decides it’s probably dislocated. Cars honk and swerve to avoid him as he rolls to a stop.

  Felix lifts his head off the asphalt and feels pieces of it detach from his face and shower down, glistening with blood. He looks down the street and sees the creature with Audrey’s body running from the stopped Swede and screaming his name. Even with a bunch of new physical issues to deal with, the sickness and pain in his head keep coming when he hears the thing wailing.

  Fresh injuries and all, Felix uses his good arm to haul himself off the street and he tries to back away from the approaching abomination. There’s a sharp pain in his right ankle and he collapses. He tries to stop his descent with the wrong arm and it crumples, useless.

  Felix slams temple-first into the pavement. His vision blurs and he loses consciousness.

  Felix shakes uncontrollably as he stands on the cold rubber floor. The sound of the thing going around the huge dome base is very loud and the vibration penetrates his bones but it’s still not quite as strong as before.

  He looks up. The apex is still too dark and incredibly ominous. It’s a feeling. No logic to it. Pure dread nonetheless. The liquid isn’t there at least. The apex seems content to gape like an abysmal maw at the moment.

  The whole chamber shudders and the hum of the unseen revolving thing gets louder again and the vibrations stronger. The chamber grows darker in time with this and everything is blurring heavily again.

  Somehow as it gets darker, Felix can see the inner surface of the dome more clearly. Only a glimpse really.