A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  The photos are from different time periods and locations and they seem to begin in the middle of the nineteenth century. There are even a couple ferrotypes and a slightly blurred Daguerreotype. The drawings and paintings date back even further. Possibly hundreds of years.

  In every image there is a lovely young woman. In some images she is the subject or one of a few. In others, it’s like someone played Where’s Waldo? and found her in crowd shots.

  France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, India, China, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Cuba, Peru…

  That’s just what he can recognize from landmarks.

  It’s the same with the time periods.

  1830s up through seventies, eighties, nineties, and upwards into the twentieth century.

  In every image, she looks the same. Other than the fashion of the time and hairstyles, she looks exactly the same. Roughly twenty-five to thirty years old, deep brown eyes, glossy raven hair. Gorgeous but attainable.

  On a couple of images marked “1914”, this young woman speaks with a bald, mustachioed Serbian military officer in a palace. She turns and sticks her hand out to block her face from the camera’s eye.

  “–oaring… in a bright paisley sky…”

  After World War I, she is spotted in Prague several times. A few images of her in Palestine in the background of a family photo shoot. Then she’s in Switzerland consistently for a while.

  Then it’s all out of order for some reason.

  She’s having a conversation with Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain in a parlor in the early 1900s. Both men seem quite fascinated by what she’s saying. To go with that, there’s an image of her in one of Tesla’s big labs sitting in a chair. Fifteen-foot tendrils of electricity flash through the air around her like lightning and it looks like she’s laughing as a little girl might if surrounded by adorable puppies.

  “–oaring… in a bright paisley sky…”

  Out in front of a rundown hotel in Paris with a note of “1959”, William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin are stepping out of a ‘57 Peugot 403. Gregory Corso is standing on the sidewalk waving to the person behind the wheel of the car, a sleek Euro-beatnik version of that same young woman. Then she’s a colorful hippy in San Francisco and looks high off her ass on acid or mushrooms maybe. A little post-it on this one is marked “Duboce Park 1965”. Felix swears the Swede is in the background, parked by the sidewalk.

  She’s back in Paris in the next few, amidst overturned cars and police barricades. She’s on a bullhorn, then chucking a brick at riot police. “Mai 68”.

  Then she’s wearing a big coat and circled in red in a crowd shot marked “Christmas Eve, Moscow 1979”. She’s speaking with someone who’s partially obscured by a pillar. Another shot seems to go with this one. Its post-it reads, “Moscow 1988”.

  “–oaring… in a bright paisley sky…”

  In another black and white, She’s well-dressed and wearing a small clamshell hat and veil as she disembarks from a German transport plane on a landing strip. “1937” is written in faded blue ballpoint pen in the corner. There’s a full shot with the whole plane in view as she makes her way down the short stairs placed at the base of the door hatch. There’s a swastika on the vertical stabilizer. The next shot is a zoomed in close-up.

  “Audrey?”

  Felix is trying to grasp at what all these images mean. It seems obvious but he can’t get his mind around it.

  “–oaring… in a bright paisley sky…”

  He cringes again, remembering the stuck record he’s been tuning out.

  I take it back. That racket is not helping.

  With a dark image of re-photographed Polaroids in his hand, Felix crosses slowly to the turntable. The Polaroids look like they were laid out and re-snapped in a hurry.

  The notes read “south shore - Cayo Largo Del Sur, CUBA ‘73” and there’s a part of a finger in the edge of a frame on one of them. There’s a rough vertical ellipse of red permanent marker around the blurry sliver of finger and “OBRIST?” written in the same red on its edge.

  “–oaring…”

  Felix reaches for the tone arm.

  “…in a bright paisley sky–”

  He lifts it off the spinning record and sets it on its holder.

  ;’,.’.,’.,’,.’,.’,.–

  Felix catches a slight movement in his peripheral vision. He looks over at the monitors. On the two garden views, something moves in the shadows he saw in the corner–

  No…

  What looked like a shadow is actually a large, dark figure. It has a warped humanoid shape and it moves like it’s covered in or made of thick liquid. It’s extremely dark and deep black but it lacks the light sucking quality of the thing on Pier 39. It’s much larger too. It must be nine feet tall and four feet wide.

  This big, inky black figure has pulled away from the corner it was blocking and Felix can see what looks like a person’s dark-skinned hand on the floor near the base of what serves this horrible thing as a leg.

  Felix leans closer to the monitors and takes a step toward them. He kicks a shell casing across the floor and it tinkles against the base of one of the monitors. The monitors glitch and sputter and the faceless figure seems to lock its gaze on the black and white garden camera, effectively looking straight at Felix. That’s how it feels anyway. The movement of it looking toward the camera reveals a kind of vague luminescence in its depths.

  It’s like watching lightning flash over the deep ocean… on a moonless night… from a hundred feet below the surface. It’s kind of beautiful, actually…

  The black and white garden feed vibrates and shudders, then cuts out to static.

  Shit.

  Felix snaps out of a trance-like state apparently caused by looking at the figure too long. He shifts to the small color monitor. The figure is moving toward the door to the central yard. The movement is a relative of walking but there’s a flowing and jerking to it at the same time like it has a bad limp and it’s weighted down and hobbling across the bottom of a deep pool. As it lopes away from the corner it was blocking, a scene from an abattoir is revealed. Felix can’t help but cover his mouth as he takes in the mound of severed flesh, intestines, blood, and other fluids that very recently must have made up a human being. The garden, floor, ceiling, and walls in that corner are covered in blood and severed bits like someone took a buzz-saw or five to the victim and bits of bloody bone and viscera were flung every which way. He didn’t know what he was seeing before because on the black and white view the blood was just another dark grey. The color makes it almost unbearable to look at, even on the small screen.

  Felix could swear he sees a severed finger drip down from the ceiling and drop into the blood-slick intestines below.

  As the warped figure lumbers out of the color camera view, the image shakes hard then cuts out to bright blue.

  OH, FUCK ME!

  Felix takes a couple steps toward the entryway but stops himself.

  No! It’ll come through the laundry room– Laundry room is closer to the entryway– Fuck! Go for the window in the hallway!

  He backpedals and turns, rushing around the coffee table and monitor stack and into the hallway.

  He looks over his shoulder and considers grabbing one of the guns that’s left on the wall and using it but he’s never fired one before, doesn’t know if they’re loaded, and doesn’t know if they’d even work on this huge, nasty creature–

  Felix slips and tries to regain his footing but his feet slide out from under him at an angle. He slams into the hallway wall with his face and nose then shoulder and flops down to one knee hard and his body slaps against the wall.

  His upper lip feels warm and he realizes his nose is bleeding.

  Dazed enough to forget why he was running for just a moment, he looks down at what he slipped on.

  This end of the dark hallway is a messy slaughterhouse like in the garden and he can smell the metallic, coppery stench of drying blood from the spray and gory slop all over
the walls, ceiling, and the puddle of guts and snapped bones on the floor.

  In his haze, he notices that he slipped on the puddle and a loop of burst intestine. He smells the contents and it mixes with the smell of blood. He retches.

  Then he smells something far worse than that and feels a really odd vibration. It’s low and reverberates through the wall he’s still partially pressed against. He feels it in his fingertips first, then up his arm. It quickly becomes strong enough that he can hear it too from the laundry room opening down the hallway and he remembers why he was running.

  The window at the end of the hall is barred on the inside.

  NO! NO! NO!

  He looks down the hallway then back at the window. His eyes adjust just a bit more to the dim moonlight coming in and he sees that the window is in the top part of a metal door.

  YES!

  Felix is quickly on his feet and crosses to the door. He hears the hum behind him get much louder in one distinct step and the smell causes his eyes to tear up. He looks back and takes in a sharp breath.

  The figure has come in through the laundry room and stopped, slightly hunched with its head region cocked and resting up against the ceiling at an angle. He can’t tell if he’s looking at its back or front. It starts to turn and he realizes that was its back, but it doesn’t matter…

  The video image didn’t do it justice. Probably just couldn’t. Its form is a swirling mass of something between liquid, smoke, and squirming matte-black flesh and it seems to shift between these states and combine them sporadically. The flashes he noticed before aren’t as pretty when seen with the naked eye. More like dark lightning in a tornado of terrible energy. The closest thing to a constant in its ever-changing form and the reason it doesn’t matter which side was facing Felix are the creature’s eyes. There are dozens of them and they glow faintly all over the thing’s warping body. Concentrated on the head and chest areas but peppered less densely all over it. Varying sizes, from marbles up to tangerines. Some are cloudy and dead grey. Some a sickly orange. A rough dozen red ones range from bright and candy-like to deep and dark. The colored irises are unnaturally matte and opaque and some of the grey dead ones have elliptical bubbles of translucence in them. Some of the eyes stay in roughly the same place, but shift around like they are bobbing in the waves of living muck. The others close only to reopen in a different spot a moment later.

  As it turns around, the head region against the ceiling undulates and reshapes like animals in a sack or the awkward tumbling too many people trying to crawl across a floor in a big sleeping bag maybe. As if it’s filled with multiple limbs and joints straining against the humanoid shape. Almost like a belly pregnant with dozens of squirming, amorphous fetuses. Felix shakes his head to clear it. He doesn’t know if he could look away from the figure at all if Rudy hadn’t taught him to push through Wahrheit’s memory fogger. The effects seem related.

  He turns his attention to the five or six locks and three chains on the metal door. He fumbles through them and tries the handle but it won’t open. The hum behind him is getting louder and closer and it’s vibrating the door now but he can’t look back. He chokes back another retch as the smell gets powerful nasty.

  He closes his eyes for a moment and whimpers in complete terror, expecting a blow or slash any moment.

  Just be quick, you weird bastard…

  He shudders and feels like he might start urinating on himself.

  Then he realizes he’s about to die for no good reason in a trailer park in Colma… and he gets mad.

  You know what? You’re gonna work for this gut sack, motherfucker! Why? ‘Cause FUCK YOU, that’s why!

  Felix’s eyes snap open again, focused and desperate for a solution. There aren’t any more locks or chains.

  So what’s stopping it from–

  There’s a matte black security bar against the base of the door handle and stretching down to the floor at an acute angle, firmly holding the door in place.

  He twists the bar and pulls it, wrenching it free from the door and out of instinct he spins and throws it down the hall. It twirls a couple times through the air like a baton and glances off the creature’s upper left “shoulder” and this desperate act succeeds in making the thing step back.

  When it whips its bulbous, pulsing upper area back toward him, Felix is already out the door and up on the wood slat fence Wahrheit must have installed against the chain link one already bordering the trailer estate. He looks back just before dropping over. He burst through the door so fast that it hit the outer wall and swung back to a mostly closed position. The newly cracked window shows a dimly lit hallway and an old, white-haired man walking down it.

  Instead of contemplating the relationship between the non-existent couple in the magical window camouflage, Felix drops to the dirt and patchy grass below and starts running through a small forest of night-black trees on the periphery of whatever property he’s crossed into.

  21

  It only takes a quick look around as Felix runs out from under the tree cover to figure out he’s in the cemetery he was hoping to avoid. He can see some of the ghoulish flutter-stop creatures milling about between, on, and in the graves in the cemetery proper ahead of him.

  He looks back toward fence and notices what looks to be some sort of vehicle resting on the roof of Wahrheit’s main house. It’s like a small hovercraft with no balloon thing on the bottom. Even from this far, he can make out that it has a padded seat, thin antennae, and equipment with blinking lights similar in color and design to the stuff on the van he passed on the way in. Then he’s far enough away that the house and vehicle are out of sight, blocked from view by the layered tree branches.

  That must be how that damn thing got in past all Wahrheit’s defenses. From above. But how? And why?

  Felix sees the figure’s big head area pop up on the other side of the fence and he feels that strong desire to piss again but he just runs harder instead.

  His legs beat down hard as he runs. He wishes he could run so fast that he could just start flapping his arms and flutter up into the air high above where that thing couldn’t hurt him, taking off like an early airplane or bird like in some of his childhood dreams…

  But this is real and his only chance is across open ground. He needs to get back to the BART station and he’s pretty sure he’s going the right way. He reaches the cemetery proper and runs between the rows of graves.

  He takes a quick look back over his shoulder and sees the big, dark thing loping through the cemetery behind him. He decides to just take quick, unfocused glances so he won’t get tranced out by looking at it.

  As he snaps his attention in front of him again, he sees that some of the ghoul things have noticed him and are converging on him from all around. Their movements reveal their hollow stares and anguished, oozing faces as they get closer.

  His legs are burning but he tries to run even faster.

  The apparitions in front of him bunch up and he can’t avoid them. He runs straight through them and where his body passes through theirs and the other’s groping hands clutch at him, he feels colder than he ever has. He makes it through that group and zig-zags between more of the pale, glowing things, seeing them best as they lunge for him.

  Stealing another quick glance behind, he sees that, instead of lunging for the big monster pursuing him, the wraith things make way, quickly clearing a path and shrinking away from it.

  Even the scary things are scared of this thing! Run faster! Felix shifts his direction enough to reach a path running between the plots and runs down it until he has to cut through some more grave sections. Hillside Boulevard is less than a hundred feet away and the lights on the cars streaming by make Felix hopeful… until they start fading out. Now what?!

  The headlights on the cars then the street lights and within a few seconds every artificial light in the area fades and blinks out. The only thing stopping him from being totally disoriented by this is that his eyes are already adjusted to the
dark, but it takes away any obvious landmarks. And it’s fucking spooky!

  The cars keep driving smoothly down the street like nothing happened. A person walking down the sidewalk on Hillside doesn’t seem fazed either. Felix makes it to Hillside and runs straight across the street, stutter-stepping before the last lane on the far side to avoid being hit by one of the ninja cars.

  He sees the signs for D street and realizes he’s further south than he hoped, so he steers further north as he cuts through a Japanese cemetery on the other side of Hillside. He hops a fence into the cul-de-sac at the east end of D and beats his feet down it toward the station.

  His muscles are filled with acid now and his mouth is filling with saliva from the adrenaline and workout. A third of the way down D, he slows to a fast walk involuntarily. He just can’t keep up that pace.

  As Felix run-walks, he looks back down the strangely darkened street and sees no sign of the horrible figure. He doesn’t stop, but he’s very cautious now. Not seeing it is worse.

  Looking around at all the dark windows, he notices people in murky silhouette in their living rooms and kitchens just going about their business like it isn’t pitch black all around.

  There’s even a small swarm of darkened spiderflies fluttering and darting through the air above the houses that he can only make out from their strange movement and shape.

  Am I the only one in the dark? Is that thing doing this to me?

  Felix catches a change in his peripheral vision above and to his left and looks over.

  The dark figure is on the roof of a house a little down from him.

  It’s already in front of me! How?!

  He speeds up and cuts a wide path, crossing sheepishly to the far sidewalk as he advances toward the intersection of Clark Ave. As he rounds the corner, he watches the figure for signs of pursuit.

  It seems content to observe his retreat with its many eyes. Some are locked on, following him with a hollow yet piercing gaze while most of the grey, dead ones are lazier and try to keep up but have to swivel over in jumps. Some of the eyes struggle to find any visual purchase, lolling around with a sickening emptiness and lack of control, like those of someone just shot or bludgeoned in the head. The colored ones all give off a kind of psychedelic red haze, which disturbs the air in a pattern like a 3-D fractal.