A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  They pull into Glen Park station and stop. Felix and Grieves don’t budge. Felix considers running out through the doors but he’s not too familiar with Glen Park and doesn’t want to get caught so far from home and risk getting lost with this weird stranger on his ass. As the doors close, Felix feels a pang of regret at that decision.

  The train leaves Glen Park and speeds on its way.

  Grieves stands and walks to the doors and through them into Felix’s car.

  Felix backs toward the doors to the next car.

  Upon seeing Felix shrink away, Grieves stops in place. He seems to frown but it’s hard to tell with his peculiar attributes.

  His eyes pulse back and forth between the intense pupils and the dead shark eye black, seemingly unaffected by the angle of light now.

  Felix stops and grabs a pole.

  Grieves stands between two homeless men arguing about the relative attractiveness of a buxom redhead sitting a little further down the aisle. One man feels she should be proud and reassures her that she is beautiful. The other homeless man is far more intoxicated and feels that the woman should lose some weight and then find him some time to suck his ‘caaauck!’ The first man slaps the drunk-er one’s arm across the aisle, his own arm passing through Grieves’s midsection, and tells his friend to shut ‘the fuck’ up. Grieves doesn’t seem to have noticed and definitely doesn’t seem to care if he did.

  The young woman is embarrassed but looks like she’s been riding public transit for a decent amount of time and doesn’t seem too shocked or bothered.

  This world-class debate continues all the way to 24th and Mission station while Felix and Grieves have a staring contest that Felix can’t win. The train stops and the less intoxicated man rushes his friend out of the car onto the platform then turns and blows a kiss to the redhead, who blushes, smiles, and gives him a little thank you wave.

  The doors close and they continue on.

  Grieves takes a couple steps toward Felix, who backs to the doors and fumbles with them before successfully backing through them into the next car.

  Grieves stops again and his frown becomes more pronounced. If Felix is honest with himself, Grieves almost looks… hurt.

  Felix grabs a pole.

  They are frozen like this all the way to 16th and Mission, where the train slows to a stop.

  As the train doors open, Felix just wants to run out through them but the Mission, while he knows it much better than Glen Park, is still not close enough for comfort.

  People get on and off and the train is on the move again.

  Grieves takes another step toward Felix and he backs away. Grieves takes another and Felix keeps backing up, grabbing poles as he goes.

  Grieves’s frown becomes a glower. He looks mad now. His eyes stay black and pulse, increasing his vibration to a degree that his flesh is blurry. As this gets stronger, that impossible “bright darkness” radiates from his head and hands, darkening and illuminating the area of the car around him.

  If I could figure out a different way to think about it, I would. It’s fuckin’ weird, alright?

  Felix keeps backing up. He ignores the normal passengers’ confused looks. When he reaches the doors to the last car, he searches for the handle but can’t find one. Felix looks behind him and sees the driver shooting a surly look back at him over his shoulder through the window in his control compartment.

  Shit! This is the last car!

  Grieves storms up to Felix, backing him up flat against the driver’s compartment and forcing him to turn his head to the side. Grieves’s movement has an added time delay now that he’s upset. When he moves, trails follow him, flashing like still images here and there, then catch up, seemingly absorbed by his actual form.

  Grieves’s face is less than an inch from the side of Felix’s when he says, “It isss rudeto ig-nuh… ooore someone… Rudeto ignorepeepole… Not niiiceto av-void someone.”

  A shaking Felix sees the signs for Civic Center/UN Plaza and he gets an idea.

  “Yoou-‘re ver-ry ru-uude. Yesss, quoo-aight ru-u-oood.”

  Having said his piece (again), Grieves’s many distortions calm to a gentle pulse in his pupils. He stares at Felix, judging him or maybe waiting for a response?

  The train eases to a stop once again and the doors open.

  Felix steels himself and pushes himself off the wall, going through Grieves and seeing a smooth, quick tour of all the parts in Grieves’s head as he goes. The feeling is indescribable but Felix’s best effort would be something like getting your tongue piercing caught in a wall socket. He runs out through the closest doors onto the platform and makes it about fifteen feet before stumbling to a stop. He looks back and sees Grieves walking out through the open doors after him.

  Perfect…

  Grieves’s increased upset intensity is back and he continues to harangue Felix, “How inc-reddiblly rhoood-dd!”

  Felix lets Grieves get about ten feet out of the car before he spins and runs full speed for the next set of doors down the train’s length toward the rear, dodging confused passengers that are leaving the train through them. He makes it in just before they close and the train starts off again. Grieves just stands there, frowning as he watches the train pick up speed. Just before it would pass him entirely, Grieves walks toward the train. Felix presses himself against the windows to get a view of what he hopes is Grieves being left behind on the platform but Grieves walks into the rear section of the last car just in time.

  No! Come on!

  Felix pushes off the window and grabs a pole to steady himself while he bends over and tries to get a view down through all the cars. He sees the moving sphere of darkness a few cars down.

  Grieves is storming briskly through the train toward the first car, face ablaze with dark weirdness and mouth moving ceaselessly now.

  Felix dances in place, not sure what to do next.

  Powell station signs flash by the windows and Felix takes a deep breath and lets it out. The train slows but not quickly enough for Felix’s liking.

  Grieves has made it into the last car before Felix’s.

  When the doors finally open, Felix books out onto the platform and pumps hard to the stairs then up them two and three at a time. He looks back down at the platform over his shoulder and sees that Grieves has left the train but is standing still watching him as the doors close behind him with a puzzling expression. Is he actually smiling now?

  Felix is too over the edge to indulge curiosity so he keeps going without a second thought. He reaches the top of the stairs and hairpins around the other side of the stairs then hurries toward the turnstiles.

  The top half of Grieves’s head appears out of the station floor to Felix’s left. Grieves’s glistening eyes follow Felix as he passes, alternating between the beady pale orange and shark black as the movement picks up the light at different angles again. Now he almost looks amused?

  Felix takes his pass out of his pocket and sends it through the turnstile with shaking hands. He takes it from the other side and rushes through the station to the stairwell up to Stockton. He goes with the flow and reaches the street level.

  He looks around as he walks up the street past the Apple and Disney stores but doesn’t see Grieves.

  As he passes The Fashion Institute, he notices Grieves across the street. He’s sitting cross-legged on top of a Ghirardelli Store overhang, peeking around from the company symbol and following Felix with his eyes. He’s mumbling something but the distance and street sounds all around make it impossible to make out what.

  Felix speeds up and starts through the next intersection, looking back at Grieves as he goes. Grieves descends into the overhang, disappearing. Felix scans the area for signs of him and notices something off in the window display on the corner of the sidewalk on the northwest of the intersection he’s walking through. The display takes up the first floor corner of the building and vertical support structures are the only obstructions.

  Grieves is standing in the d
isplay but most of him is blocked by the outer tiles of the corner support structure. He follows Felix with one eye and tucks his body behind the corner interior. The slice of jaw Felix can see below Grieves’s one eye is moving, probably still mumbling nonsense. Grieves sees that he’s been caught and walks out through the corner of the building saying, “Fowned yoo-ou… Ffoundyou… found yooouu toooo–”

  His amused excitement makes him look even more disturbing and terrifying. Felix cuts through the intersection diagonally, crossing toward the northeast corner instead.

  Grieves descends into the sidewalk saying, “I’llfindyou aggehn… IwillIwillfin-dd you aggehn–” until his mouth, then the rest of his glowing, see-through head are gone.

  Felix cuts north up the sidewalk and sees Grieves’s head half poking out of the Macy’s Men’s Store sign above street level on the building he’s passing. Felix plays it off like he doesn’t see Grieves watching him and decides to try ditching him in the Macy’s proper across the street. It’s huge.

  A few cars honk as Felix j-walks across Stockton. He makes it to the sidewalk and rushes through the doors. Behind him, Grieves has come out of the sign and wall and dropped down to the street. Cars pass through him as he calmly crosses the street, practically beaming.

  Felix runs through the cosmetics section toward the elevators. He takes one up to the second floor and hurries through the different departments. He sees a pillar with a full-length mirror and hides behind it.

  As he scans the floor for Grieves, he also keeps a look out for suspicious employees.

  A booshie woman walks by and stops with her back to Felix at a scarf rack. Grieves’s head appears in the floor near the woman’s shoe, looking away from Felix.

  Felix backs up and ducks behind circular rack thick with clothes. He peaks around it.

  Grieves rotates his head in Felix’s direction.

  Felix bolts for the restrooms through the short forest of dresses and jackets, crouched to stay out of sight. He opens the men’s room door, ducks inside, and watches through the crack in the door until he’s satisfied Grieves didn’t follow before letting it close all the way.

  I probably look super crazy. Hope no one is in here.

  Felix looks behind him to make sure he’s alone.

  He is not.

  There is a bald, naked man standing in the restroom with his back to Felix and he’s leaning his head against the first toilet stall. Felix flinches at the sight.

  What now?

  There is a black burn mark on the right half of the man’s back. It almost looks burnt from inside somehow. His body looks normal but it’s vibrating and humming. Upon closer inspection, Felix realizes the man isn’t leaning; his whole body is at a slight angle but seems to ignore gravity. The arms are at rest at the man’s sides but at that angle, they would be hanging slightly in front of the body, not perfectly aligned with it as they are. Felix looks back at the door and winces.

  Catch-22…

  Felix quietly says, “Hello?”

  He takes a step closer and sees that the man’s legs are fused into the floor at an angle just above where the ankles would be.

  Okaaaay.

  Felix leans to the side to try to see the man’s face, but his head is fused into the toilet stall wall like his legs. The left side of it ends just in front of the left ear, cutting down from the crown to along the jawline. Felix flinches again.

  He gets closer and examines the vibrating body. He sees another burn down the man’s right forearm and one on his neck. Felix feels a strong urge to touch the man, just to see if he’s there at all. Or will it go through like Grieves? He extends his shaking hand toward the man’s left shoulder but hesitates.

  “Ah, fuck it,” he decides and goes for it.

  Felix’s fingertips start to turn translucent and little arcs of strange energy from the body bite at them. It feels like his fingers are asleep but there’s an added sensation of something resembling extreme cold.

  When Felix touches the man’s shoulder, all at once the vibrating and hum stop and the body detaches from the head and leg fuse points. Blood pumps and squirts out from the freshly severed parts and the body falls to the floor of the bathroom. The faceless, footless body jerks and twitches violently against the floor, causing more blood to spray and spurt.

  Felix jumps back, flattening against the bathroom wall.

  Something hits the floor in the first toilet stall with a wet slap. He reluctantly bends down to see what it was.

  It’s the man’s face from the bridge of the nose at an angle up to a bulbous section cut from the front part of his head, minus the width of the stall wall. It must have detached and flopped down flat on the ground. The eyes are moving back and forth but with no will guiding them and they look mostly empty. One moves with less control and keeps twitching to the same side unnaturally.

  Some eye socket muscles must have severed on the eye closer to the stall wall and there must be just enough brain left in the front to… Felix feels extremely ill and the room is rotating like a centrifuge, pulling him backward against the wall. He doubles over, twists, and vomits against it. He spits a couple times then crosses back to the door, hugging the wall once he’s past his sick and watching the writhing mess as he goes. He opens the door but closes it most of the way immediately. Grieves is in sight. He’s looking around, eyes changing as they catch the light. Felix closes the door all but a crack and looks back at the thing behind him. Its spasms are still strong and the blood keeps coming. He looks through the cracked door and sees Grieves staring at the bathroom.

  “This is not happening.”

  He lets the door close all the way and tiptoes back toward the toilet stalls, now trying to ignore the bloody, bucking mess in his peripherals. The last stall won’t open when he pushes on it.

  “Occupado,” a smug, yuppie-sounding voice says. “You gonna clean up your fucking puke, man? That shit’s disgusting. Maybe you should go drink somewhere else and pass out under a tree or something.”

  Felix ignores the man in the last stall and enters the middle stall next to the one with the face/head chunk in it then steps up onto the toilet and crouches down. He closes his eyes to focus on listening.

  Abruptly, Felix hears Grieves’s hum as he enters the restroom, then his heavy-booted footsteps. The footsteps become wet-sounding and then there are sounds of sliding and dragging. The face chunk stall door creaks a bit and Felix opens his eyes.

  He looks down and sees one of Grieves’s bloody boots and bloody prints leading to it. More blood is trickling down Grieves’s lower pant legs onto his boots and pooling on the floor in parts. The bright blue dust gently snows down into the frothy blood too, resting like cocoa on a cappuccino. There’s a sound like strained urinating now and Felix sees blood drizzling down the sides of the toilet and start to pool on and around the base. There’s way too much blood.

  Felix is far enough gone that his curiosity overpowers his fear for a moment. He rises up from his crouch cautiously, steadying himself on the stall walls, and looks over the top.

  Where he expects to see Grieves’s weird, grinning face, the diagonally cut head at the top of the still-writhing body is rolling back and forth with the jerking body motions. The glistening severed part hemorrhages blood from around the base of the cleanly cut rear brain sections and out of the intact ears. Felix can see the bloody nerve roots in the bisected molar that lined up with the stall wall and the jagged cross-section of red-slick jawbone.

  Felix takes in a sharp breath.

  The head turns toward him reflexively and it seems for a moment like it is looking toward him, impossibly.

  Felix jolts back and his right leg comes off the toilet, his foot touching down in the growing pool of blood. He slips off the toilet and comes crashing down on the floor of the stall on his side and slamming the stall door against its lock, rattling the whole stall setup.

  “Hey, what the fuck, junkie?!” the yuppie exclaims.

  Felix is eye-level wit
h the floor of the first stall and he sees the angled head chunk, now surrounded by the pool of blood and eyes still half-hollow and lolling around.

  The yuppie says, “Maybe you should go jump in front of a bus! That might do the trick, you worthless monkey!”

  Grieves’s face appears upside-down at the bottom of the stall wall as he bends down at an impossible angle. His head shakes and blood drizzles down his face and into his big eyes, mixing with the fluid which already drools from them and dripping this lovely mixture down onto Felix’s right forearm and the pool on the floor. He looks excited.

  “Pry-vah-seeee shou-lld be re-sspected… Priiiiii-vasc-y sssh-oood be– re-specktedd. Fou-nnd youIfoundyou… Imp-ooou-lite to sta-re.”

  Felix yells, “Shut up!”

  Grieves recoils and frowns.

  The yuppie retorts, “Don’t come near that door! I’m calling the police, you mongrel piece of shit!” Digital tones and a nervous fart can be heard as the yuppie carries out his defensive maneuver. Felix picks himself up, careful not to slip again, swings the stall door open, stumbles out of the stall, and limps to the restroom door as fast as he can. Then he’s out through it and runs through the store to the escalators, then down them round and round in a mad dash for street level.

  22

  Felix bursts out through the doors of the Macy’s and looks back for any signs of Grieves behind him as scrambles toward a yellow cab cruising down Stockton toward Market. The driver gives him a cautious look so Felix straightens, trying his best to look normal. Apparently it works, because the cab slows and stops.

  Fighting his desire to fling himself into it, Felix walks with as little “holy shit get me out of here” showing as he can muster. He gets in and sits on the padded bench seat. The cab drives on down Stockton.

  Felix watches out through the rear window and sees Grieves materialize out of the wall of the third floor of the department store and fall smoothly to the street and land in a crouch. When he touches down, all of the blood from the body in the restroom cascades off of him all at once, most of it actually passing through his body on the way to the ground like he intentionally allowed it. This makes Felix think of samurais in movies whipping their sword to clean the blade.