I believe. I believe.
“Let me go,” I said.
A long hiss, almost laughter. I turned my head away from the fresh torrent of stench, the tangled mass of ugliness inside the hood. And the white, straight, shining teeth—I had seen them for a fraction of a second, and that was long enough. My skin kept trying to crawl away from the sticky, rasping grip, the way the claws of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park might have felt.
“What has the child told you?” it whispered.
“What child?”
“You know of whom we speak.”
Nothing you don’t already know, I thought. Nothing new. Nothing you haven’t known for, what, millions of years? And why would I tell you anyway? “No, she hasn’t told me anything,” I said after a second.
“As I thought.” Another crackling hiss, like the cockroaches in the museum. The hand fell away and I stumbled back towards the doorway, rubbing my arm on my apron and yanking on the handle, which creaked and failed to open even under my full weight. It emitted a faint purple glow, sickeningly wrong and yet familiar, the light I knew from a dream, growing brighter the harder I tugged. Finally I turned again.
“The child called us,” it said, drifting closer; I stared at the floor, where the ragged ends of the robe, outlined in silver light, hovered above the tiles. “We heard it in our slumber. A new thing has come into the world. No human should possess such a thing. Even her. She does not know its true power. And still she called.”
A sickly mist fell from the thing, just visible in the thin band of light. What had she said? A contagion, spreading, like the spores of a fungus... I thought about it settling on the plastic bags of bread and buns and tortillas and croissants, sinking through the wrappers, sending black threads into the soft white contents, filling each pore with a little droplet of black, the light all wrong, the sky that was not the sky.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She will not give it to us willingly. But it is the way of the world for power to go to the powerful. Not to the weak. It is... inevitable.”
It was still coming; my back hit the door. But there was nowhere else to go. I didn’t dare close my eyes and lose the tiny bit of light; to be in complete darkness with this thing—never, I would go insane. Maybe that was what it wanted.
“Take it from her,” it whispered.
“No.”
“You have seen it. You know it. Bring it to Us. Speak to her, ask her to see... reason...”
“Reason? What reason? She’s got no reason to turn that thing over to you.”
A long silence. But if it were going to kill me, it would have by now. Right here, right now, in the darkness. All it would take was that scaly, stinking hand at my throat.
“We will reward you greatly,” it whispered. “To bring it. Or to destroy her.”
“Destroy her? You’re asking me to kill her? What the fuck, if you can’t have it, no one can have it? No. I won’t. I can’t and I won’t. Fuck off. Let me out.”
“There would be... rewards... we have... great rewards...”
“You’ve got nothing for me. She didn’t have to tell me shit about you for me to know that.”
Darkness, the icy edge of a limb extending. I shuffled sideways along the door, headbutted a metal shelf hard enough that red stars exploded behind my eyes, and then the hand was scraping along my face, hard, sticky, moving from jaw to forehead. I froze, lids now clenched shut, picturing the appendage popping the unprotected jelly of my eye like a paintball.
“Have we nothing?” it hissed. “Nothing to offer? Everything will be taken from you, human. Understand us. Remember. Everything will be taken from you.”
And then it was gone—my face set free, the lights shamefacedly creeping back into life. I stared wildly around at the untouched bread, at the clean floor. Nothing. No dust, no footprints. The handle behind me gave so suddenly I fell out of the room, catching myself at the last moment. Riva from the bakery stood there with one of the other stockboys, a kid I didn’t know. They were staring at me.
“Are you all right?” Riva said, confused. “Nicky? What happened to your face?”
“Nothing, I... the lights went out and I fell...”
“The lights went out?”
I shook my head, rubbing my cheek. The skin hadn’t been broken, but I could feel welts, hot, rising as thick as licorice ropes. “They’re fine now, Riva. It’s okay. Maybe we could, uh, get Mike to put them on the maintenance schedule for next month or something.”
I nudged past her, grabbed my clipboard from its slot, and filled in lines and lines of bullshit numbers. It was as if fear had emptied everything else out; I was an animal, running scared. But the bills still had to get paid. I clicked myself into robot mode and forced myself to get back to work.
The horror faded after a few hours, the mundane duties that had become second nature by my third year in this job: checkmarks and clipboards, lifting boxes, stacking produce. There was a litany running through my mind in the voice of reason, the voice of Peter Mansbridge, a gentle, rational voice. If the thing wanted to kill you, the voice said, it would have. It would have killed you. It therefore didn’t want to. And it could have, easily. You felt that strength. Look at our fragile bodies, with our squishy tubes and internal skeletons, no claws, no fangs. It kept you alive. Because it needs you. It wanted you to do something and you refused, but it didn’t kill you when you refused. And so. There must be something else it wants. It offered a reward before it offered a threat. Remember that. Tell Johnny that. Don’t forget.
As if I could forget. Its words had seared into my memory—if someone X-rayed my skull they would see everything written on there, like a branded steak in a commercial. And the words would not be in English but the dark language that was its first tongue. English was probably not even the thousandth language it knew.
AT THE END of my shift, I took the bus home, got the car, and let myself into Johnny’s house, both hoping and not hoping that she’d be home. I hadn’t really wanted to come; I had wanted to go home and be with Mom and the kids. Someplace safe and normal, free from magic and monsters, someplace I wouldn’t be watched. But it seemed more and more now that what I wanted didn’t matter. I had to tell her what had happened first. Tell her about the deal I had been offered.
Inside, I felt woozy, dizzy, reaching to steady myself on the walls as I wandered to the main kitchen, tracking the sound of the red coffee machine. The pleasant smells of melting cheese and fresh coffee wafted down the hall.
She looked up, apparently unsurprised, juggling something from a plate to a pan. “Grilled cheese,” she said, waving the spatula at me. “Want one?”
“Maybe in a minute,” I said. Four pieces of bread. She knew I would come here. “Stomach doesn’t feel too good.”
“Go get a yogurt from the fridge. That’ll settle it.”
I did, then perched at the counter to watch her flip her sandwich. It smelled like kimchi—she liked all sorts of things in her grilled cheese, olives or apples or tomato or Cool Ranch Doritos, with kimchi and fries being particular favourites. I cracked open my yogurt—one of her weird flavours, passionfruit and lemon. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know what a passionfruit looked like. I ate it anyway.
“John,” I said. “Listen, I just came to tell you about that... thing... it cornered me at work today.”
She went very still, hand halfway to her sandwich. “Let me clarify that in a way that gives me useful data,” she said. “It found you at a place that you have not seen it before, a place with other people nearby, and confronted you directly, though not—I assume—in view of witnesses?”
“Yeah. All of that. It must have been waiting in the storeroom. I didn’t ask, but I assumed no one else saw it. I didn’t hear any screaming.” I scraped my spoon in my empty cup and looked at her, a hectic red glare under her eyes that I was starting to recognize as absolute bolting panic, just barely hidden by her iron will. It was as if her fear was the ocean a
nd her rationality a tiny submersible, one of those round ones with a two-foot-thick viewport just an inch or two across, only looking at the world through that lest it be crushed, able to resist the pressure specifically because of it.
I began, weakly in the face of that panic: “It... it wanted...”
“Did it offer you a covenant?”
“What?”
“Try to make a deal?” she said sharply.
“Yeah. Tried. It asked me to get them the reactor.”
“In exchange for?”
“It just said ‘reward.’”
“And that was it? That was all it said? Nothing else?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, after it said it would reward me and I still said no, it sort of threatened me instead.” I closed my eyes, remembering—oh Jesus, the stink, the darkness, the line of blue light on the floor, the pressure of the air as its limb approached me, that I should never have been able to sense. “It said everything would be taken from me.”
Her shoulders slumped as she stared down at the counter, like her reply might be coded in the millions of tiny dots in the granite, a secret language just like Theirs. I knew what it would say, I had read the same thing in the ragged edge of the thing’s garment: unhappiness, everything good in me emptying out like a lake over the edge of a cliff, vanishing into the dark and the cold for years, nothing ever returning to me. To conquer, she said. Not occupy. Of course They would not want to live here as equals. It was not in Them; I knew that now.
I took in the softness of the blonde at her temples, how thin the veins were there; the curve of her lips, the angles of her hands, the sleek sweep of her back under the cheap cotton polo shirt, the gloss and curl of the lashes. My nose knew every molecule she gave off, because that is what love does, turns you inside out until you are nothing but a pile of nerves and senses—the sweet, hay-like smell of her hair, the cherry of her cheap lipgloss. Makes a million dollars in a month and spends precisely one dollar and nine cents on her cosmetics in about the same time.
Could I possibly tell her that I had been asked to kill her rather than let the reactor be used? No. No words for it. And, I thought, she had probably figured that out already.
“Everything will be,” she finally said. “And everything will be taken from me, too. All of us. All of the world. That’s what it meant.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what They do,” she said, slowly. “Because Their evil takes that form: taking, destroying. Because that’s all They want. They know we want this. That’s why They want it. Because anything we love is something They want to take away.”
“But—”
“It’s got to be that the doorways are thinning. Maybe not opening, not yet. Conditions must be lining up for them to be able to open, though. There has to be something. Historically, there’s always been something. A... volcanic eruption maybe, an earthquake. Something big. Something soon.”
“And what happens then?”
She shook her head, a sharp snap like she was dislodging a fly, and reached for her cooling sandwich. “I told you. You read the mythologies, a pattern starts to emerge. You have to remember that history, which they say is written by the winners, is in fact written by the survivors; you can’t write shit if there’s nothing left after you win. Look at Sumeria, look at the whole Middle East, look at half of South America.”
“What... am I looking at?”
“Patterns. Repeated, like wallpaper. The big man rises, boosted by the gods, till something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong, because the gods are finicky fuckers, they’re like my Aunt Edna on meth, they scream when you move the doily on the coffee table. A renovated shrine, a skipped sacrifice, a missed syllable in a hymn—everything suddenly becomes a blasphemy. The city is destroyed, or the country is destroyed, in moments, but so violently and visibly that horrified witnesses can describe it from miles away. Every last man, woman, and child killed, all the animals burned, the rivers erupt and boil, the buildings toppled, the sky torn apart. Sometimes there’s a crater, sometimes there isn’t. What happens when the gods are no longer on your side? You’re not the big man any more. You’re nothing. And everything is taken from you.”
“That isn’t happening here,” I said firmly. “It could have killed me. It shut the door and turned off the lights and grabbed me, and that was all it did. That must be all it can do right now. Nothing was stopping it.”
She looked away, and a silence drew out. “Making the reactor woke Them up, I think. But now They’re getting ready for bigger things. Their powers are… we don’t have good words for it. Not in any language. And that thing is more of a scout than an ambassador, if it’s who I think it is. It likes to make deals, they say.”
“You… know it?”
“I think it must be Drozanoth. No one else watches Earth enough to know what to watch for.”
“It just watches?”
“It’s a powerful igigi, one of those who wander under the waste, created in Dzannin, Apprentice to Azag-Thoth,” she said quietly. “So its teacher is the worst and strongest of Them, and one of the oldest. It’s had many apprentices in its time, but Drozanoth is the one that watches and waits for a chance to let its masters back in.”
“Like... those fuckin’ houseflies that wait right outside the door.”
“Just like that. It knows humans, humanity, it’s seen enough to derive the patterns we make. The way things change just before the world surges toward something new. If everything is thinning out, then simply thinking about the reactor might have shocked it into action—like a goddamn airhorn.”
“Science as an airhorn. Great.”
“Not science. More like... possibilities. And this is just from the old readings, you know.” She groped for words, chewing, waving her hand in the air as if writing on a whiteboard. “Some things are like a light in the darkness to Them, tiny but real, because it’s so dark where They are that any light seems incredibly bright. And the more ways it could change things, the brighter it seems. It was like that for writing, and the wheel. And the atom bomb. It can see a little ways into the future, not far and not well, but it sees possibilities the most clearly. Goddammit. Goddammit.”
“The... bomb?”
“Yeah, it, I... I just, is there a way to keep talking without sounding totally insane? I don’t know. Who’s the best judge of that? Not Them. Not me. Maybe you? I don’t know.”
“Not me.”
I wondered if the thing was running some scheme it’d run before, like some kind of... little-known magic Mafia. I knew the story from Hollywood. The mobsters don’t go to the poorest neighbourhoods, because what can they steal, who can they get protection money from? You bust up a pawn shop, the owner simply vanishes overnight. No, you wait until a bigshot comes into your neighbourhood, or you cruise the ones where the bigshots live, and you pick the biggest white-painted wedding cake of a house, and you roll up with your Tommy guns and your goons, and you say: That. I want that. I have found something that is worth taking; and that is what I will take.
Limitless, clean power. That was what they wanted to take from us. All the same, the human race would be fine without it, wouldn’t we? I mean, eventually we’d poison the air and kill the oceans, run out of oil and coal, but there was always nuclear and solar and wind and hydro, and they hadn’t tried to destroy those. The entire world already used Johnny’s solar panels for power, mounted on the flexible nanoceramic she’d invented when she was five, which was also everywhere and in everything. Most of the plastic out there was one of her bioplastics, or that bamboo polymer stuff, and she had built recycling plants to break existing plastic down not just to bits but molecules, ready for re-use. Already it was clear we’d never be knocked back to the Stone Age. And as for nuclear—Johnny declined to even re-engineer the CANDU power plant when they asked her, saying that the power output for the amount of waste they got—she demonstrated by crawling under her lectern—was perfectly fine without any sort of q
uantum shift in efficiency. I’d written an essay about those reactors for school. Hell, I’d cited her. We’d be fine. If the mobster had wanted the reactor with the intent of ransoming it back to us, I couldn’t see who’d pay. No one in the whole world.
“It’s bluffing,” I said. “It’s got no hand to play. It’s just trying to scare us.”
“We’ll see.” She crammed another bite of grilled cheese into her mouth, pieces of spicy cabbage plunking back into her plate and leaving blindingly red splotches. “Want the other half?”
“No thanks.”
“Are you sure? It’s good. And the kimchi’s not that hot. I get it from one of my grad students, her mom makes fifteen or twenty jars at a time and sells it to all her friends.”
“Nah, I’m good. Asian hot—you know, Thai and Korean and stuff—that’s a much different hot than Caribbean hot.”
“Yeah?”
She looked relieved to have a break from the subject of Them, so I gamely kept going. “Yeah, we’re all habaneros and weri-weris, those little ones in the fridge that you thought were cherries the one time?”
“I would have died.”
“Probably. I used to be able to eat a lot of that kinda hot before Dad left. He did most of the cooking. The twins used to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast that were orange from hot sauce, hotter than I could eat. Grace brand. Tiny little hole in the bottle, much smaller than a Tabasco hole, because you sure as hell did not want more than a couple drops in your food. Dad, he’d mash whole peppers into his curry and we all had to eat it or go hungry. And then when Mom started doing most of the cooking, it was all salt, no pepper. She never liked things as hot as he did.”
“So your capsaicin tolerance went way down; interesting. The kids too, I bet.”
“Yeah. They can’t even eat the red sauce that comes with Mexi-Fries at Taco Time now.”
She laughed out loud, the colour returning to her face. “I love that sauce. I wish they sold that sauce in bottles.”
“You’d do shots of that sauce.”
“I’d drink that sauce over ice like a highball.”
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