by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
My story started with a girl. Isn’t that always the way? Her name was Kimberly, but her friends called her Kimmy. We had been exchanging texts and e-mails for a few weeks. Nothing serious, not yet, but things felt like they were moving in the right direction. The potential was there.
This was back in the Time Before, back when I still had a name and a Social Security number and close to three quarters of a million dollars in the bank. I was a senior marketing manager for a company that supervised the postconversion process for 3-D movies. It sounds exciting, I know. In reality it was a bunch of bleary-eyed programmers sitting in dark offices, arguing about plate differentials and variable focal points. I spent most of my time smoking cigarettes on the balcony and taking online personality quizzes. Let the nerds do their thing. I was just there to sell the finished product.
It took some work, but Kimberly finally agreed to meet me for drinks, frozen strawberry margaritas at the El Coyote. The restaurant was booked solid, but we managed to claim a booth near the bar, both of us yelling to be heard. Kimberly got lit off her first drink and told me she was writing a novel. She bobbed her head when she talked, nervous and birdlike. At one point I told her that Sharon Tate ate her last meal on earth right here at the Coyote, just a few booths from where we were sitting. I tried to make a joke of it, but she recoiled like I had slapped her. Girls. You never know what’s going to set them off.
I bought another round of margaritas, but when I returned to the table, Kimberly was already shrugging on her jacket. This was fun, she said. There was something crooked in her smile, something ugly and insincere. I felt a familiar prickling sensation just behind my eyes.
She kissed the air beside my cheek. She said, Let’s do it again sometime.
That’s when the headache came on in full, a roaring jet of white-hot pressure. I’ve always had what my mother used to call a “touchy” nervous system, prone to tension headaches and migraines, but I knew right away this was different.
The pain rolled over me in waves, each one stronger than the last. The room darkened, my field of vision constricting to a narrow pinprick of light. I gripped the sides of the table, my knuckles turning white, willing myself not to scream. From somewhere far away I heard Kimberly (Kimmy to her friends) asking if I was all right, if I needed any help.
After that, things got a little fuzzy.
I awoke on the floor, my body curled around the base of the table, one cheek flush against the cold metal surface. Several waiters loomed over me, their faces pale and frightened. My headache had mercifully faded to a dull background murmur. I tried saying I was fine, that I didn’t need an ambulance, but the words came out wrong. There was a sour, coppery taste in my mouth. Blood. It was smeared across my teeth, running from the corner of my mouth. I had chewed away part of my cheek.
Kimberly’s seat was empty.
I asked one of the waiters where she had gone, thinking she was probably in the lobby, explaining the situation to a manager. Or maybe she was already outside, waiting to flag down the ambulance when it arrived.
“I dunno, man.” The waiter shrugged, embarrassed, not quite meeting my gaze. “You were saying some pretty weird stuff.”
—
Stay awake long enough and you can straddle the line. One foot in our reality, the other in theirs. If you’ve ever gone without sleep for several days, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably caught glimpses of their world. It’s the place where colors bleed, where light doesn’t hold its shape.
I call it the Golden Hour. It’s when I do my best hunting.
—
Somewhere along the way, they must have figured out that I was onto them. That I was closing in on the truth.
They came for me first.
Back then I had a nice little spot staked out in Tent City with all of the homeless. It was prime real estate too: a Chinese takeout joint on one side, an all-night Laundromat on the other. I wasn’t stupid; I knew downtown could be dangerous, but in those days there were only a few of the truly big ones wandering around, and they were easy enough to avoid if you kept your eyes open. Besides, there were close to two hundred of us cordoned off in those two blocks, a crush of humanity, faded tents and makeshift campsites spilling across every sidewalk. I figured that had to count for something. That’s how green I was: I still believed in concepts like safety in numbers.
And I had a partner. Dave Stacks, a nervous kid with sleeve tattoos and watery blue eyes. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Dave had come from Grand Rapids in a cherry-red Datsun, bringing only two boxes of clothing and an electric guitar. But these were the streets of Jim Morrison and Brian Wilson, of Axl and Eddie, and no one here gave a shit about a perfectly serviceable bass player. It was an old, boring story. The Datsun was the first thing he sold, the guitar the last.
In those days, I would talk about the creatures to anyone who would listen. Most people ignored me, but not Dave. He was quick to understand and eager to believe. He would listen for hours, wide-eyed, bobbing his head in agreement. I taught him everything I knew about our enemy. Their hunting patterns, their preferred methods of camouflage. It turned out Dave had a knack for spotting them, and it wasn’t long before he was seeing a creature on every corner.
We divided each night into shifts. One person sleeping, the other standing watch. It seemed to work well enough, and entire weeks passed without incident. My tension headaches went away. For the first time in a long time, I began to feel safe.
Then one night I woke up halfway down the throat of one of those fucking things.
I could feel its esophagus constricting as it worked me down, inch by inch. The creature was grunting happily, a gentle piggy sound, its eyes rolled back with pleasure. They looked like two dull white marbles.
I tried to scream, but the pressure around my chest was enormous, forcing the air from my lungs. I looked around wildly and saw Dave sitting cross-legged a few feet away, his back against the Laundromat wall, his brows furrowed in confusion. A shard of bright green glass was buried in his throat, part of a broken beer bottle. Dave’s shirt was wet and glistening black in the moonlight. I felt a momentary flash of confusion. How had the creature even held the weapon? It had no arms or legs; it was little more than a long, serpentine neck, flowing down into the sidewalk. There was still so much I didn’t understand about their kind.
Dave was staring right at me, unblinking. He must have screamed. I don’t know why I didn’t hear it.
The crushing pressure intensified. I could feel my rib cage shifting, the bones grinding together. The creature must have realized I was awake. It was trying to force me down. To swallow me whole.
I worked one of my arms free and clawed at the creature’s snout. Its skin was surprisingly soft, almost velveteen, and cool to the touch. Cold-blooded, then. I filed that information away for future use. Farther down, at the junction where the creature’s body fused with the sidewalk, its skin hardened and took on the dusty color and texture of dry cement.
The creature arched its neck, lifting me off the ground and slamming me back down. The back of my head cracked against the concrete, filling my vision with white-hot tracer rounds. My jaws clacked shut and I tasted blood. Its nubby little teeth dug against the small of my back.
Once more the creature lifted me and brought me crashing back down, but this time I was ready. I reached out, straining for Dave’s body. My fingers closed around his shirt, sticky with blood, and I pulled him closer.
The creature snorted hungrily.
My hand closed around the shard of glass lodged in Dave’s throat. It was stuck fast in the gristle. I worked it free, slowly, methodically, knowing I would get only one shot at this.
The shard popped free with a wet sucking noise, just as the creature lifted me skyward and slammed me sideways against the brick wall. I found myself staring into one of the monster’s milky white eyes. It was watching me with an uninterested expression, almost bored. I drove the shard into its eyeball, as dee
p as it would go.
The creature let out a muffled roar, more surprise than pain. I mashed the shard deeper, the pupil running like jelly between my fingers. The creature’s jaws relaxed, its tongue working desperately as it tried to expel me, to vomit me back onto the pavement.
I held on tight. I wasn’t going anywhere.
—
Finding her address wasn’t difficult. A house on Kirkwood, right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, in a neighborhood filled with broke old hippies and rich young assholes. I got there a few minutes past midnight, but the driveway was empty and no one answered the door.
I decided to wait in my car.
It was crazy, I knew that, showing up unannounced in the middle of the night. Maybe it was crossing some kind of imaginary line. But what else was I supposed to do? Kimberly wouldn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t return my texts.
And all I wanted was a chance to explain myself. To show her I was a nice, normal guy. The kind of guy you bring home to meet your parents. And if I had said some weird stuff during my little (not a seizure don’t call it a seizure) blackout period…well, who could blame me for that?
Besides, she was the one who left me in that restaurant, convulsing on the floor. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. What kind of person does that? As far as I was concerned, she should be apologizing to me, not the other way around.
The hours ticked by. I killed the radio to conserve the battery. My breath frosted strange patterns on the glass. I’d left the house without grabbing a jacket. Stupid. I did find a bottle of Ketel One in the backseat, somehow already half empty. I didn’t remember opening it, but that was the least of my worries. I drank deeply, letting the warmth radiate throughout my body, leaving my limbs heavy and useless. There was pressure behind my sinuses, but the pain was manageable.
I stared at her house, waiting for a car to pull into the driveway, for a light to appear in the upstairs window. The world was swimming in and out of focus, all shapes and suggestions. The white stucco façade became a wall of flashing static, the windows dead pixels. Every time a car passed on the street, its headlights left contrails of bleeding color.
My gaze drifted higher, toward the second-floor balcony. There wasn’t much to see up there. A few Target lawn chairs, halfheartedly arranged beneath a faded sun umbrella. A ceramic ashtray overflowing with butts. A women’s ten-speed chained to the railing. Nothing else.
Except that wasn’t quite right, I began to realize. There was something else on the balcony. I had been staring at it this entire time.
Something shifted. That’s the best way I can describe what happened. One moment it didn’t exist, and the next it did. Its skin was pebbled, covered with bumpy little spines and ridges, perfectly camouflaged to match its surroundings, like some kind of overgrown chameleon. The creature solidified with an audible popping noise, its form snapping into focus. My first guess wasn’t too far off: the thing actually looked like a goddamn lizard, with a long, flat head that tapered to a narrow point and sunken, diamond-shaped eyes. Its skin had split apart in places, revealing jagged bone protuberances, twisting outward from its brow like antlers. It stood pressed against the patio wall, balancing on its muscular hind legs, perhaps twelve feet long from tip to tail.
I held my breath, not even daring to blink. I was dimly aware of a spreading warmth between my legs, but I didn’t care. I slowly set the bottle on the floorboard, careful to keep my gaze fixed on the creature. Somehow I knew that if I looked away, even for a second, I would lose it forever.
The creature swiveled its head around and, for a moment, held my gaze. Its eyes were muddy green, flecked with shooting streaks of gold. Its lips curled back in an exaggerated yawn. The inside of its mouth was an explosion of small, serrated teeth, all pointing in different directions, like headstones in a cartoon graveyard. Its gums were bone white, cankerous and diseased.
I blinked and the creature bolted.
Try to understand: these things move in the space between heartbeats. Faster than the human eye can follow. When they’re in motion, the world judders and skips like an old movie projector. You have to try to anticipate their trajectories, to slide your eyes along a parallel line and hope for the best. If you’re lucky, you might catch just a flicker, the barest suggestion of motion. I call them “pings,” like the radar pings in some old submarine movie.
The creature vanished from the porch, blinking out of existence. I caught a lucky ping as it landed atop the recycling bin by the street corner, its skin instantly changing color to match the hard blue plastic. Then it flickered out of existence again, its body somehow shifting upward this time. There was one last fleeting ping, the spectral residue of the creature’s serpentine body coiled around the top of the nearest telephone pole, and then it was gone, ghosting into the night.
Like it was never there at all.
I was lucky; I know that now. Once it realized it was being watched, the creature could have turned on me. It could have launched itself through my windshield, could have torn out my throat with a single, savage tug of its jaws. But instead it turned and fled.
Most of them don’t.
—
The creature is still rooting around inside the Roosevelt, but now it’s slowing down. Its neck jerks and bobs as it chews methodically. I’m not quite sure what their kind feeds on—human suffering? psychic trauma? snacks from the minibar?—but it’s obvious this particular meal is just about over.
I have to act soon. A full belly means the creature will be lethargic, its reflexes dulled. I’ll never get a better shot.
The old, familiar pressure begins to build, a freezing ice pick lodged just behind my sinus cavities. Another headache. I’m not surprised. Every hunt begins the same way, with a dull, pounding roar between my ears. In some distant part of my mind, I feel an old memory trying to claw its way to the surface. It’s an image, a snapshot of a kindly, round-faced doctor. This is the hard part, the doctor is telling me. He writes down the name of an online support group, encourages me to get a second opinion. He places one meaty hand on my shoulder. All the while watching me with a look of practiced sympathy.
I shove the memory aside. I can’t afford to let anything break my concentration. Not when I’m so close.
I have to steady myself. Focus and control. I carefully unwrap the scarf from around my wrist. The gingham pattern dances across the fabric, marching columns of red and white. I hold the scarf against my face again and this time I can smell it: that familiar tropical breeze, warm and inviting, with just the faintest hint of coconut and spice. It’s so unexpected that tears spring to my eyes. I had thought the scent was gone forever. I thought I had lost her.
Batman has finished throwing up, but he remains hunched over the trash can, hiccuping slightly as he struggles to catch his breath. His face is glossy with sweat, the skin waxy and swollen. It makes him look airbrushed, like a caricature portrait. Like he’s not even real.
Pain flares between my eyes, the ice pick rotating a few more degrees, but I barely feel it. I climb to my feet and start toward him, binding the scarf around my wrist as I go.
“You all right, man?” I call out.
As I approach, Batman’s legs buckle and he nearly pitches over. He braces himself against the wall and belches again. The muscles in his upper arm tremble. Up close, his costume is shockingly cheap, the sort of thing you’d buy the day before Halloween, when the racks are empty and all the best costumes are gone. There’s a sour smell coming off him in waves, bourbon and sweat and whatever’s left of his lunch.
I place a friendly hand on his back to steady him. “Whoa, easy there.”
“Geddis fuggin thing off,” he mumbles, tugging at the plastic cowl.
“You got it,” I say cheerfully as I slide the machete into his side.
The blade goes in easily, slipping between his ribs with almost no resistance, almost to the hilt. He makes a low noise, halfway between a gasp and a sigh.
Across the street, t
he creature’s head whips around. Staring right at me.
The hardest part is always getting their attention.
—
Once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere. Curled around the arches of a gas station on Western. Crawling along the walls of the Scientology Celebrity Centre, clustered like bloated ticks. Huddled beneath an overpass in Commerce, hundreds of them, their lidless eyes rolling madly in the shadows.
Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? This isn’t a warning, or a call to arms, or anything like that. The invasion is over. The war already happened, and our side didn’t even bother to show up.
Jesus, is it any wonder that we lost?
—
I pull the machete free. The blade is wet, but there’s no arterial fan of blood, no cartoon geyser of gore. Batman simply sinks to his knees, wheezing and holding his side. I hear someone scream, but the sound is muted, far away.
I run.
Now people begin to notice the dying man in their midst. A ripple of shock and panic passes through the crowd. Then it’s pandemonium. Parents grab for their children. Tourists stumble blindly into the street. Tires scream and horns blare. I duck and weave down the sidewalk, cradling the machete to my chest, and the crowd parts before me.
Out of the corner of one eye, I spot the creature. It’s still on the far side of Hollywood Boulevard, but it’s matching my pace effortlessly, loping along on all fours. It cycles through objects and structures, becoming part of the buildings, the traffic light, the souvenir cart, the crosswalk. Changing form and shape faster than my eye can follow.
It’s trying to head me off. To catch me out in the open.
I change direction and dive back into the crowd. There is a flash of motion in my peripheral vision, but it’s only the scarf around my wrist, flapping in the wind, a vein of bright crimson trailing behind me.