“Let me take my daughter, please. I can hear her crying.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Margot. “She’s stable for now. I called the front desk and told them to get an ambulance. They should get here soon.”
“Hospital’s just down the street.”
“Maybe you could go tell them to hurry it up.”
“I ain’t going nowhere until you folks give me back my daughter.”
“We’ll all just have to wait, then.”
“Fine.”
Margot closed and bolted the door. She picked up the receiver for the room phone and hit buttons on it, trying to dial out. She cursed, and I knew the connection was either lousy or nonexistent.
I turned back to Ma and took her hand. She was so scared. Something was happening inside her, something I couldn’t see.
“Make it stop,” she gasped.
“I can’t.” I didn’t want to mess with her head any more than I already had today.
“Please, help me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She answered me with sobs. I sensed a part of her still just wanted the power in the cuff to release her so she could finally die a natural death, so she didn’t have to put up with the crazy, endless, unchanging ungrowth her life had been since she’d been stuck with it. Another little part of her wanted to hope for a normal life again, wanted to live, and grow, and think without all the noise of an incomprehensible universe slowing her down. She wanted to feel safe. To feel loved.
I gripped her shoulders gently with my clawed fingers and leaned in close, pushing my lips to her wailing mouth. Her mouth promptly closed, pressing our lips together. At first I felt a twinge of cold dread in the pit of my stomach. In fairytales, kisses could cure poison. In movies, kisses could distract the good guys from pain and the bad guys from carrying out their nefarious plans.
I knew this wasn’t a fairytale or a movie. This was my Ma. My Ma, whose life was very messed up, and who didn’t need another reason to feel confused, to hate me or hate herself. I just wanted her to feel good. To feel loved. To feel like she wasn’t alone in the cruel experiment of nature that had changed us from what we were meant to be and made us both into something grotesque. However time and space had managed to rob her of progress and hold her in perpetual stasis, she was still just a seventeen-year-old girl, and maybe always would be.
She tried to say my name. I tried to say, “I love you.” I knew she heard me in her thoughts. Our lips moved together, and over each other. I’d never kissed before, and I was awful embarrassed at how sloppy I was. Her hand lighted on the back of my neck, and her thumb trembled as it stroked the hair behind my ear, back and forth. Electric chills and heat prickled down my spine. I could tell she hadn’t kissed before neither, and she liked this. I let myself relax on top of her, let my tentacled jowls caress and kiss the skin of her face and throat as they traced the contours of her cheeks, chin, nose, and ears.
“Eustace Kelly!”
I rolled off Cassie-Jo with a start and banged my head on one of the legs of the counter holding up the bathroom sink. I clutched the throbbing spot on my head, half-groaning, half-laughing as I scrambled to sit up. Judging by the unrelenting tightness in her face and narrowed eyes, Margot wasn’t amused. I stopped laughing and cleared my throat. “I think her pain’s gone now, or whatever it was.”
Cassie-Jo stared up at the ceiling with an almost wistful expression, eyes a little brighter than they had been. She smiled. A real smile.
I opened my mouth to warn Margot she should leave us here, leave town without us before the Elder Thing got here. “Margot—”
The walls of the building shuddered, and the sharp pop of bricks and glass exploding made Margot and me both jolt. I jumped to my feet and stuck my head out of the bathroom. The now-crumpled front half of Margot’s silver Ford F-150 stuck through the far wall where the window and door had once been, pushing the two queen-sized beds together and displacing the table a good five feet.
An arm with a colorless picnic blanket for a sleeve squeezed a bullet from his gun out the driver-side window. I pulled my head back in the bathroom and Margot ducked the opposite direction into the shallow closet space as the bullet thunked into the drywall between us.
“Shut the door and lock it!” She raised the rifle and fired two return rounds, shattering more glass.
I obeyed, slamming the bathroom door behind me and hitting the loose thumb lock I knew was useless. I took a step back, trying to think as more shots exploded in the room behind the door.
“It was me,” Cassie-Jo said quietly.
“What was you?”
“I didn’t think he’d kill himself. I just wanted him to stop and let us go, like I said at the hospital.”
Margot growled, her voice muffled. Struggling.
I closed my eyes and licked out with my mind and my energy to find Earl’s.
“Eustace, don’t.” Cassie-Jo’s voice was so soft I barely heard her.
“He’s gonna kill her, kill all of us,” I growled back. I saw him in my mind, boiled down to a neon collection of particles in space and time. He wrestled my foster mother down while clamping an ether-soaked cloth to her face. When Margot stopped struggling, he let her slump to the floor. He picked up her rifle and pointed it at her head.
My stomach churned as my mind slithered into the nerves in Earl’s skin, and I perceived his every sensation from the suppressed ache in his old knees, to the thumping of his heart, to the cold thrill of his frustration, rage, and fear. He feared being found out. He feared losing us and the secrets we knew about the mine to a world he only cared to exploit as much as he could make it bleed. He’d murdered many a man and woman, even before the mine. Some he killed in terrible, perverse ways. I couldn’t see it all because his calculated fury at Margot’s interference was so damn loud and hot.
I pumped my energy into him with the intent of subverting every rational thought in his mind until he couldn’t remember his own name, let alone say it.
Nothing happened.
I felt his lips pull apart in a sneer as though they were my own. He laughed aloud, though I heard him in my head louder and clearer. “You wouldn’t kill your own papa, would you, Eustace?” I squeezed my mental fist again, harder, and the connection snapped. Searing pain ripped through every nerve in my body and I fell on the floor between Cassie-Jo’s feet and the toilet, writhing and shrieking in pure agony I’d never known before.
The eldritch tendrils of energy I’d put out folded back in on me. Reality and meaning were ripped from my mind, and I felt a maddening compulsion to claw my own eyes out and lobotomize myself. I wanted to numb myself to the things in the darkness of space I could not comprehend that I was being forced to comprehend. My fragile identity as a living thing with a rational form and delusions of indivisible qualities began to dissolve. I wasn’t simply a tiny speck swirling by chance in the cold heart of space, I was a soulless blob of matter and energy bound to be liquefied and re-constituted in a near-endless variety of futile forms until the universe collapsed back in on itself or flung itself so far apart everything stopped cycling and moving altogether.
Cassie-Jo sat me up and wrapped her arms around me, pinning my clawed hands to my chest to keep them away from my eyes and rocking me as I continued to scream. I remembered her hiding me from the Elder Thing in little crevices of the coal-lined pit, suckling me, feeding me bugs and the occasional bat or bird that drifted inside until I was six years old. She never ate anything, but I was always hungry. Neither one of us had a stitch of clothing to share, and we were always sticky, cold, and covered in coal soot. She’d figured out that the Elder Thing hibernated good and deep right after it impregnated her, so she finally got the courage to leave the mine and take me into the closest town so I’d have a family to live with. Then she disappeared back into that hell hole to keep the monster amused, or satisfied, or whatever she thought it needed so it wouldn’t hurt other people. To keep the cuff fro
m doing whatever it did to her when she stayed away too long.
I heard Margot’s rifle pop and knew Earl had finished her. He’d come for us next. I couldn’t move, couldn’t make my mouth form words. All I could do was weep and flail. Drool rolled down my chin.
“Maybe I’m not as smart as you, but I think it’s a lie,” Cassie-Jo said in that calm, distant voice as she rocked me like the babe I once was to her. “I’m scared, Eustace. I don’t want to be something else. I want to be me. I don’t want that thing to change me, but I know it’s too late. But maybe if I let it happen, if I let all the change come, I’ll still be me somehow, someway. Then we’ll both know it’s a lie, something the aliens use to drive us crazy and nothing more when they want things they can’t have.”
She pressed her clammy palm to my forehead, and I felt the chaos drain out of me. The pain in my head and its caustic effects on my body slowly faded. I felt heavy as lead in Cassie-Jo’s arms, and twice as dumb. But her love for me buzzed through me, filling the void my own energy had ripped in my thoughts.
I’d never thought my being born was a good thing, or at least, that it had any kind of purpose. Now I wanted to believe I was born so Cassie-Jo wouldn’t be alone. So she’d have a chance. It was ridiculous, preposterous. Just my short-sighted, human teenage hormones or whatever. But I felt she and I belonged together. I gave her a reason to keep living, and she gave me a reason to care, a purpose in fighting for our identities rather than letting us both get swallowed up by the dark. Because our circumstances weren’t natural, Cassie-Jo and I were on the same level. We were the same species, becoming the same species, inside and out. If we faced the entropy of our lives together, we might just survive all this crazy shit and find some peace.
I heard the bathroom door shudder.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice weak and rattled by the pain she had absorbed and managed to dissipate somehow. “I have to go now, baby, so Papa don’t hurt you.” Her lips kissed my forehead, and her embrace fell away as I sank once more into the abyss of unconsciousness and uncertainty.
***
My tentacles and bumpy skin were still expressed when I woke up. The cuts in my chest had healed over, though, so I clawed the sutures out. I found a couple of bullets lying next to me. Guess Earl shot me in the head for good measure. I’d never healed like this before, not like Ma did—like Cassie-Jo. Her healing touch must’ve helped me after she’d gone.
I opened the bathroom door to see red and blue lights washing over the walls and Margot’s truck through the broken window. The room was dark, and light was fading from the sky outside. I’d been out a long time.
Margot’s petite feet in fancy purple Chacos stuck out between the nearest bed and the wall separating the bathroom from the rest of the room. I couldn’t stand to look at her, lying in gore with a bullet hole in her skull somewhere. Her death was my fault. I didn’t want to face it, couldn’t deal with it right now.
I didn’t know why the fiend hadn’t found me after so many hours, or why no one else had moved the car. I wrapped a couple of towels around my hands to protect them from the broken glass and climbed out between the truck and the window. I was poised to run away before the emergency people could catch me, but I saw that Margot’s truck wasn’t the only thing wrong in the little town.
A dead police officer lay cuffed to the wheel of his car, head slumped forward, with blood dripping off his dark hair. Two other police cars were empty, lights spinning, with no sign of where their operators went.
Smoke from fires on distant streets showed that the motel wasn’t the only site of madness and violence, although it may have been its epicenter. People screamed and ran to and fro, some clawing at their heads and faces like something had gotten inside them that needed digging out. A woman walked down the street stark naked, covered in blood and gore, carrying a man’s severed head and two smaller ones by the hair in one hand and a woodcutting axe in the other while she shrieked obscenities and gibberish. Then I realized it wasn’t gibberish at all. She was trying to articulate the language of the Elder Thing.
I tried calling out for Cassie-Jo in my mind, but she didn’t answer. The Elder Thing answered instead. A huge, moist paw seized my throat from behind, gouging the nape of my neck with its many-clawed fingers. It hoisted me off my feet and slammed me down on the cement so hard it knocked the wind from my lungs. My skin crawled with the icy throb of eldritch energy licking out from his aura. The Elder Thing made me sick to be alive, confused to have conscious thoughts, ashamed to believe that anything about my puny existence mattered or endured.
This was the first time I’d really seen what he looked like. In the twilight his skin was milky and grayish, slicker and crustier than mine appeared now. A long, thick beard of tentacles knotted on itself in betrayal of his exertion where it hung off his skull. A massive bat-like wing, or a pair, flapped and crumpled against his back in a way that made him look like a displaced aquatic dragon. Emotionless eyes the color of egg yolks peered at me and through me, directing his power into my mind, my being, and my very flesh. And he was damaged. He was a bipedal creature that had been reduced to slithering on his hands and belly instead of stalking upright.
“I only wish to be whole, to return to the stars,” he whispered to my mind in that strange, old tongue. “Do not fear for your mother. No harm will come to her. She has been returned to me and will soon be made to bear me another fodderling in your place. Go now, and I will spare you.”
“What happens to her when you become whole?” I asked in my mind. “What’ll happen when you don’t need her to feed you her babies no more?”
“The change will take her, and I will make her my queen.”
“You ain’t a good liar.”
He squeezed my throat, and squeezed the tendrils of his will that he’d woven thick around my mind. “Your exploits and your thoughts have revealed to me the great error in my methods, and it pleases me that you may spread elsewhere the seed of the Old Ones that lies within you. But if you interfere again, I will suck away your life force to rejuvenate myself. Leave this place, and never return.”
He released my throat and his harrowing presence withdrew from my thoughts. I rolled on my side, vomiting on the asphalt. Using his forelimbs and undulating the muscles of his torso, the fiend who had half-sired me dragged his shriveled hind limbs and tail in a labored side-to-side roll, like a snake, down the street until he disappeared into the untamed foliage where civilization ended.
Slime oozed from my pores. I gripped the waistband of my shorts to keep them from sliding off and forced myself to stand. I didn’t know if I believed that the Elder Thing would spare Cassie-Jo like he’d said when he got what he wanted. Hell, I didn’t know if he’d spare Earth. But all I’d been able to offer the woman I loved was a slow, agonizing death in answer to her pleas for relief. I’d been as cruel to her as he was. I’d known all along what I needed to do to set her free, but I’d been too afraid to face it. As long as that fiend lived, she didn’t stand a chance. If I truly wanted to end her suffering, I’d have to kill him before he could regenerate, before he could kill her, or change her… whatever that meant. If I wanted it to end before he ravaged her again, I had to go now.
My thoughts called to her once more, “Cassie-Jo, where are you? Where’d they take you? Are you back at the mine?” I needed her. But she wasn’t there. Her thoughts had withdrawn, and I couldn’t feel her.
***
I found the naked lady in a pool of her own blood behind the gas station across the street, eyes and mouth wide open in a grin of terror. She’d fallen on her own axe. The heads of the man and two children she’d carried lay strewn next to her. She reminded me of my own Ma in the worst way, and I couldn’t decide whose fate had been the lesser evil. I slid the unknown woman’s eyelids closed and whispered, “I did this. I let the monster out of that mine. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to promise I’d put things right again. It was too late for her and her loved
ones.
The power struggle between my human and alien natures had always been bigger than me. But it had taken Margot’s death and the destruction of this whole town for me to accept that I couldn’t keep the seed of chaos within me from robbing others of their life and their peace of mind. The Elder Thing wanted me to spread that chaos. I vowed to myself that after I killed him, his destruction would die with me. I wouldn’t procreate, and I’d spend the rest of my life helping my Ma cope with her muddled existence. If she found some peace, I might be able to live with myself. My stomach knotted with disgust and anguish as I twisted the axe free from the dead woman’s abdomen to take with me.
The asphalt petered out into trees, and the small town faded behind me into the dark, wild hills of Appalachia. Twilight cast the woods in deep shadow, and everything seemed too loud to my senses. Insects blared. The nitrogenous stench of plant rot overpowered the sweeter scent of wildflowers, pine, and bleeding maples. Gritty soil bit into the strange skin of my feet through my shoes as I climbed.
The Elder Thing had left a trail of slime that gave off that fishy paint-thinner smell. I followed that trail, not even trying for stealth. He’d sense me with his aura if I got anywhere close to him. Sudden pain burst through my skull and spine before I could even see him. I stumbled to a halt, fighting to keep on my feet. His darkness squeezed me, seducing me to drop the axe and turn back, to embrace the freedom he’d offered me. But I no longer feared my own destruction. I feared for my mother, and for the world I’d betray if I shrank back from this fiend anymore.
He gurgled his final warning aloud. Then the foliage rippled with his movements and I heard the wet crackle of his skin as he continued to drag himself away. I remained paralyzed, shrieking my frustration after him.
I shut my eyes and squeezed at the Elder Thing’s ethereal tendrils with my own. Another shock of pain seared through me. The axe slipped from my grasp and I stumbled sideways, wrapping both arms around a tree to keep myself from falling. Despite his physical injuries and whatever had severed him from the cosmic ichor he needed to survive, my own power was no match for his. How had Cassie-Jo managed to use his own power against him, to hurt him so we could escape the other night?
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