“You’re the grossest thing in the world.”
It was good to see her smile again. Might be the last one I’d see for a while. She finished her sandwich and wiped her fingers slowly, one by one, with a napkin, not looking at me. Then she said, “You guys should leave town.”
“That came out of left field.”
“Only if you weren’t paying attention. Drozanoth knows where you work now; why wouldn’t it know where you live? It might escalate, since you claim you refused its offer. They don’t like to be refused.”
“I did refuse it!” I said, startled. I felt as if she’d slapped me. “What, did you think I’d lie about that? To... come over here, grab the reactor, and run? Jesus Christ, Johnny. What do you think of me?”
“I think you’re in danger,” she said, as if I’d said nothing at all. “Think about it for a second, Nicky. You’re alive. Why? Because if it can’t fuck me up, because I’m the only one who knows how to make the reactor, then maybe it can apply strategic pressure to someone else. Someone close to me.”
I stared at her. Strategic pressure? Did that mean what it sounded like?
“It’ll get stronger, it’ll summon more magic to use,” she said. “And your chance to get away will get slimmer and slimmer. Imagine being in an empty room and being asked to write a novel. You can’t, of course. But supposing paper starts to blow in under the door, suppose it starts building up, supposing one day you get a pen...”
“So right now, it’s in the room, it’s... getting enough paper to... do that?”
“Yes. There’s still a chance, there might be a chance, to get away—and if you’re far enough away, it might not be able to find all of you right away. It might decide to save its energy and turn its attention entirely back to me. You’d be safe.”
“Strategic pressure,” I said, through a slowly closing throat. I couldn’t believe I had just dismissed Them as incompetent mobsters. “Using me as leverage against you, because it knows we’re friends. And since I said no, then...”
“Using your family as leverage against you. They’re not rocket scientists, Nicky—they’re brutal and crude and not very bright—but they understand pain. They know it well, after all this time.”
They understand pain. I’d known that from the start. How? Everything will be taken from you was a promise, not a prophecy. “All right,” I said. “I’ll... I’ll go talk to Mom about it.”
“I can help. I can get Rutger to help. We can find somewhere to hide all of you.”
I nodded, not really paying attention. Things were moving too quickly for me to keep up with. The kids were still in school, could we pull them out with a week left? Mom’s job, who would cover her shifts? If I missed work, Gino would be as much of a dick about it as possible, and I would lose my job. How long would we need to hide? Who would check the mail, who would look after the lawn? The city would cite us for weeds. They’d done that before. The neighbours would call bylaw on you. Maybe Mrs. Li could watch the place…unless that put her at risk too...
“If we called the police,” I said slowly, “and said that... you had a stalker, and left all the magic and gods out of it...”
“They can’t do anything.”
“How do you know?”
“What do you think they would do?”
“Well, they... I...” I stuttered into silence, feeling like an idiot. Of course they wouldn’t. What could they do, against something like this? Assign her bodyguards? Trail her around? “But there’s other help out there, right? You said you called them.”
“I called for information. They’re not qualified to deal with something like this.”
“They’re not qualified? How the hell are you qualified? You’ve never dealt with anything like this before, you said you read everything in books. Maybe there are people out there who… like you said. Like back in the day. Who could shut the doors again when they’re being forced open. We should let them deal with it, we should—”
“I meant it,” she snapped. “They can’t. They’re more like librarians, they gather information about Them, that’s all. I don’t need librarians.”
“Hell no. You’re in way over your head if even half of this shit is true. You need an army, you need—”
“Listen,” she said, sounding strained. “I know you want grownups to rush in and deal with this. But they’ll only make things worse. Trust me. They won’t know what to do, they won’t even know where to start. No one does except me. And if they get involved and throw barriers in my way, I don’t even know what’ll happen next, and I’m the only one who can figure it out.”
I fell silent, stunned not only by the assertion but by her arrogance, even though I knew I should have been used to it by now. She sounded convinced, convincing. As if I had needed any more evidence after what had happened in the storeroom.
“All right. I’ll talk Mom into it somehow. But don’t call Rutger in just yet. I need to think,” I said.
“He’s not here. I asked him to run some errands.”
“What? I just heard him in the hallway.”
She looked up, rabbit-alert. In the silence, as you’d expect, as if in a movie, we both heard the long creak of a door opening. Which shouldn’t have been possible; no door in her house ever creaked. She was too sensitive to that kind of noise.
“Stay here,” she said, sliding off her stool.
“Like balls I’m staying here.”
CHAPTER SIX
WE MOVED INTO the empty hallway. Nothing. Just a hard, cold breeze where there should not have been, and a faint whiff of something both disgusting and familiar. “Oh, holy shit,” I blurted before I could stop myself. “If They get in here...”
“Yeah.” She put her hand flat on the wall, as if checking for a pulse. I shook my head, wondering why that should be the image I thought of.
I followed her at a fast dogtrot to first her workshop, where she unhooked the shoebox and tucked it under her arm, and I admitted that I was shocked to find it still there, then to Ben’s room. I felt safer as soon as we were bathed in the cool, green light, unsure why. I went to the tank and put my palms on the glass. Behind us, she dragged a gigantic toolkit up to a table, the box painted in battered black enamel just visible beneath dozens of old scratch and sniff stickers.
“They’ve been sleeping for a long time,” she said. “Waiting, even the ones who don’t know it, for the signal to come through. Drozanoth set off an alarm in 1945, when the Americans used the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it thought They should come back before we destroyed each other and They had no one to rule. But They couldn’t enter then, and it made Them angry, growing more restless by the day, swimming up through sleep. Or over. Or... They don’t really live beneath anything, above anything, physically. They live... over there. Sleep over there.”
“So we must have changed the code on the door,” I said. “The last time They came. To keep Them out.”
She shook her head, cracked open the toolbox, and got out a set of screwdrivers with heads more complicated than anything I’d ever seen. “They’ll figure something out, I know They will. New, fresh magic is coming in from somewhere and Drozanoth wants nothing more than to turn the key when the time comes. And the time is coming. It might have the means to do what it wants soon. And it wants Them back. Wouldn’t you?”
“I find it extremely scary that I can hear you capitalize Their name,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Fucking this up,” she said. “But I was working on the surface calculations last night and...I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make it again.”
“What?”
“They can’t have it. They can’t take it from us. They cannot.”
“John, wait. Don’t. If that’s the only—”
“Here, toss this into the sonicator and press the red button.” She was disassembling the reactor with startling speed, her hands a pale blur, pausing only to hand me a tangle of wires with a thumbnail-sized computer chip embedded
in the middle. I glanced down as I took it; the inside didn’t even look that complicated. I realized I had been expecting a mystical glow, like the Ark of the Covenant, or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. She smoothly stripped the wires and tied them into knots, took out a gleaming circle from the center and set it on the table.
When I came back from the sonicator, she was almost done, the reactor just a metal shoebox again. Several components seemed to have disappeared entirely; I wondered where she had put them.
“Even if it could be recreated I don’t want Them to try,” she said, hefting the circle in her hand, a dense brick of circuitry with gobs of clear epoxy on the edges and a spherical cavity in the other. “They’ll have to settle for having me, if they can’t have the reactor. And They can’t have me either.”
“Says you.”
“I know. But it might give you time to run.” She took the brick to a fume hood in the corner and pressed buttons till the plastic cover came down and an open flame erupted from a spigot in the middle of the cabinet. The brick sputtered and caught, a greasy, tall fire drawn into a long streak from the fan. Her breath slowed while we watched it burn. Not just shattered to bits, but eliminated from the world entirely; not even the memory of its pattern remained now.
I thought: Why even tell me these things, why draw me deeper? A child’s bedtime story for a child you wanted to scare into insomnia, the story dug up from some unholy library book. I know those gods, now that you have named Them. You are not the only one They know. Tentacles, in board games. Books bound in human skin in jokey horror movies. Statues and a buzzing chant at the start of The Exorcist. But now you’re telling me all that is based on something. As if the truth of Their existence were the piece of grit inside a pearl, coated with years and years of denial and the deaths of witnesses, until finally all that was left was a palatable white surface that we could make movies and games about, write short stories about, without fear of repercussions from anything trapped so far down in the gem. So you say, knowing I have no way of contradicting your story, that I never have.
“And you think no one else in the whole world, ever, could re-invent that thing,” I said.
“No one else could ever come up with it, no.”
“You know what you’ve got?” I said. “A really healthy sense of self-esteem. Like we talked about in school. Like, a battleship-class ego.”
“Thank you.” She shut off the flame and we watched the clouds of black smoke spiral up into the hood. Her face was still, calculating. “The...”
Her voice trailed off. I turned, knowing what was in the room just as before: there was no way you wouldn’t know. Neurotransmitters millions of years old cried out in fear as it drifted into the room, leaving a black smear on the door. We had destroyed the reactor just in time, I realized. My God, in five minutes it could have laid its actual hands on it. As if Johnny had known this would happen. As if she knew just when...
She whispered, “Too late. You could have taken it while we slept, Drozanoth.”
It hovered feet away, dripping and hissing as before, a dirty black sheet of translucence and impossible darkness in the center of the room, teeth gleaming in the featureless face. “Too late? We have held counsel, much has been made clear.” Its voice was a stream of clicks, like in the store room, like the collected speech of a thousand random noises. The stench was unbelievable. I put my wrist over my nose. “And greetings to you,” it added, making me flinch. “I see you are together again. Very wise.”
“Don’t talk to him. You can’t be here,” Johnny said sharply, voice hoarse, as if she had been yelling instead of whispering. “Even if you survived the crossing. There isn’t enough...”
“There is. And ever more. With every passing moment. Cannot you feel it all around you? Time!” it gasped, and made a creaking noise I took to be laughter. “I had forgotten the thrall of it. To be subject to time again. It is no wonder your puny minds fly into dark places. You will never evolve past that.”
“It’s gone, the reactor is gone. It’ll never be remade.” She backed up, gesturing me to follow, getting the table between us and the thing. I moved as if on stilts, unable to feel my legs. “You have no reason to stay. Get out of my house.”
“Hear me out, child,” Drozanoth hissed. “You do not know what it did. What it can do. If you give it to Us—”
“No!”
“You think you cannot be persuaded this time,” it said, still floating closer. Below the ragged edge of its skin, bilious mist dripped onto the table, melting the metal, fouling the air.
Was that a threat? Was it threatening her? Us? This time? I whipped my head around, but Ben’s was one of the few rooms of her labyrinth that only had one door. Behind me, Ben faintly pounded on the glass—how could that even be heard through such thick material?—making a rhythmic squeal and bump as his arms reached out for Johnny and failed to shield her. I knew how he felt.
“No, I can’t,” Johnny said. Her voice sounded very far away. I looked at her in alarm and saw that she was clinging to the table with one hand, keeping herself upright. “The laws of physics won’t alter at your whim, monster.”
“Monster. You don’t know the meaning of the word. That will change.”
“Not if I can help it. So get out of my house. Get out of my fucking house!”
“Of all sentient creatures in the universe, you, child, have least claim to give me orders,” the thing said, and laughed—a screech that made my skin ripple, like the scream of a wounded animal. “Do you not? Deny it. Deny it.”
It had nearly drifted, burning, through the center of the table, and I recoiled. I hadn’t realized how close it had gotten; we were backed all the way to the bookshelves, nowhere to run. The remaining junk on the table jumped and glittered as it approached, the metal surface blurring at its passing, as if the monster were immensely hot, immensely heavy, a different class of being than anything on Earth that could float. This was no innocent jellyfish or butterfly but a hovering mass of poison as hot and dense and dangerous as depleted uranium. Or not even comparable to something as banal as that. Nothing we knew. No element. No phase of matter.
“We suggest you work on it,” Drozanoth went on, an antenna or feeler extending from a wet slit in its front, reaching for her with trembling tendrils, glowing at the tips like an angler fish’s lure. “With haste, not with leisure. It is for Us. Not for you. Not for your kind. You have made it for us, and you did not even know it. Till now. Till I have come, bearing this gift.”
She froze, the feeler nearly to her face. I snatched at the back of her t-shirt and yanked her away from the thing, stumbling heavily into the bookshelf, which teetered but, weighed down by cinderblocks of math and biochemistry texts, did not fall.
“Because I will return,” it continued. “You must finish before then.”
“I’m telling you, I can’t.”
“Won’t,” it clicked, the feeler still groping in the air. Its pale yellow light looked sickly and wrong in the rich glow coming from the tank. “Can’t, or won’t, child?”
“Both!”
It paused, bobbing lightly, and then howled something at her in a different language, slimy and hissing. But Johnny understood, because she rose screaming from the floor like an arrow, hands claws. Drozanoth dodged easily, sending her crashing into the side of the table; tiny wires and pieces of shattered plastic rained to the floor. And then it was floating towards the tank. Towards Ben.
It happened before I even drew breath to scream—the crack of dark light that smashed open the glass, the tidal wave of its contents crashing over us, my arms crossed in front of my face, books raining onto me, their impact softened by the foot of stinking saltwater over my head, gone in a heartbeat, and then Ben—his huge, golden eyes meeting ours—grappling for a pitiful moment with Drozanoth before being ripped to shreds almost at Johnny’s feet, splattering us with blood, ink, and water.
“Can’t, or won’t?” I heard through ringing ears as Drozanoth vanished.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I GOT UP painfully; I was soaked through to my briefs, and my body refused to cooperate. Had we been submerged for a second? Sheer luck that we hadn’t inhaled. Shaking, I crossed the room to Johnny, nudging aside huge shards of broken plexiglass, stunned and dying fish, crushed coral. The sand that had flooded from the aquarium formed a beach, once white, now black and blue with the pulped remains of Benjamin Franklin, Science Octopus. Johnny was folded over in a pool of ink, not weeping, just gasping for air. I squatted next to her, bracing a hand in the cold, wet sand for balance. The only sound was the roar of water escaping down the floor drain, bubbling as things got wedged in the grate.
The room was destroyed. Even the ceiling had not been spared, cratered as if hit with gunfire. A thick hardcovered textbook had been driven into the wall—two feet of reinforced concrete and nanoceramic. Drozanoth showing off its power. The lights flickered uncertainly; I wanted nothing more than to run before they died and we were left in the dark. But I couldn’t leave Johnny, and there was no way she was moving.
I looked down to see that she had filled her hands not with Ben’s poor flesh, but a dead mantis shrimp, its riotous colours barely faded. Her face was a mask under the short, wet shards of her hair. Under her soaked t-shirt—though I told myself not to look—I could already see bruises angrily forming, black as tattoos. She had a bad, raggedy divot on her upper arm, maybe from a book, maybe from a piece of the glass. It wept fat drops of blood down to her elbow, soaking into her shorts and mixing with the ink.
Drozanoth didn’t want to hurt her. It could have hurt me, but instead it went for Ben, who could not even defend himself, who never even saw it coming, who had not understood what we were doing. It wanted to make a goddamn point.
My throat closed off with grief and rage. Fucking unfair. How fucking dare that monster. Ben had done nothing except be loved by Johnny, and for that he died. What had we gotten ourselves into, where something like this could happen in a matter of seconds? Without a moment of hesitation, without even so much as a warning. Or maybe—thinking of Johnny launching herself at Drozanoth over the table—there had indeed been a warning. Just not one I could understand. We were in so far over our heads that for a moment I could not even breathe.
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