by Chad Huskins
“I trained all of this, da.”
“Then you ask for small concessions, like releasin’ a few hostages. The next move is to offer the hostage-taker things—legal counsel, medical treatment, all that jazz.”
“Yes, we do all of this.” The stocky man hadn’t even flinched. He was very confident his men would blow Spencer away if he tried so much as to raise his weapon.
“Then, will you give me a small concession? Just one small favor, an’ then I promise I’ll drop my gun.”
One of the men took a small step towards him, as if reminding him of the Uzi trained on his face. The others weren’t even blinking, yet all had cold enmity sketched on their faces. They want to see me suffer so bad they’re nearly jizzing their pants.
Now, the stocky man, being smart enough to sense ulterior motives, raised his own pistol and leveled it at Spencer’s head. “What concession?” he said.
Spencer looked over at Kaley Dupré. “Just let me empty my gun into her.” The little girl looked up at him, eyes wide with surprise. She started to stand, but one look from the stocky man froze her in place. He shrugged. “Or…you could do it yourselves. Just punch her ticket, then I’ll drop my gun an’ I’m all yours.”
The stocky man looked between Spencer and the girl. For a moment, he appeared conflicted. Oh jeez, please don’t tell me he’s some kind of family man type of gangsters, feeling a sanctity towards women, and all that. If that were the case, Spencer would have to do it himself, and risk taking a shot to the face. Either way, it beat ending up on one of their slabs.
“I shoot her,” said Stocky Man, “you’ll drop your gun?”
“An’ then we can talk like gentlemen.”
The leader looked at Kaley, who was starting to stand despite the man’s commanding gaze. He looked back at Spencer. “Why would you want that?”
Spencer shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, you’re reverting to old hostage negotiation tactics and stalling. I’m getting colder, an’ I’m not gonna wait until I’m too numb to make my move. Punch her ticket, and then we’ll talk.”
“Spencer…” said Kaley, backing towards the porch. “What’re you—”
All at once, the Russian with the bullet hole through his arm bit out a curse, something equating to “Fuck it, I’ll do it!” and he turned his Uzi on the girl and squeezed the trigger. By the time Stocky Man shouted “Net!” it was already done. A barrage of bullets passed through Kaley Dupré. She stumbled backwards, screaming…and fell through the front porch steps.
When the stall door opened, Kaley screamed in terror and fell back away from Mrs. Cartwright, her hands up in a ward against bullets. She fell across the toilet, slid off the seat and fell awkwardly onto the floor, splashing into waters that Mrs. Cartwright undoubtedly could not see, and leaping right back out of it and wiping herself down, like she might if ants had crawled all over her skin.
In that other world, she had fallen away from the man aiming his gun at her, had felt the cold passage of little bugs burrowing through her, but ultimately she landed on the steps, and an instant later she passed through them.
The disorientation was maddening, made her almost vomit. It was like…like…like when you go to lift a yellow gallon of milk, thinking that it’s full, but when you lift it you find it empty, and, having overexerted yourself, almost fling the gallon up and go staggering back a bit. This was like that, only a thousand times worse. Everything around her was like that—the snow beneath her feet suddenly wasn’t snow, but a slippery surface she glided across, and the tile beneath her feet was suddenly more solid, the toilet and all the objects around her, so much more there.
The only constant was the watery coating of both worlds, the foam, and the things swimming underneath.
“Kaley Dupré!” shouted the formidable Mrs. Cartwright. “What in the world are you doing? Are you—” She cut herself short, obviously seeing the tears crawling across Kaley’s face, and the mask of fear contorting her face. “Oh…oh, baby. Are you…all right? Are you having a fit?” A month ago, Kaley had broken down crying in her fourth period class, and it was at that point that all the teachers had been informed about what had transpired in Atlanta months before. “You poor, poor thing. Come here, sweetie. Come here.”
Mrs. Cartwright spread her arms.
And Kaley gaped in terror. Behind her teacher, something had climbed out of the depths. A nest of writhing tentacles, all of them of various shapes and sizes, from a squid-like thing to a malformed penis, from a broken tree branch to a twisting, barbed vine.
Mrs. Cartwright sensed something wrong, too. At least, Kaley thought she did. Hadn’t Kaley seen the seed of wariness in her eyes a moment before the tentacles found a crack in the air?
The air around Kaley turned cold, and there was an inward sucking noise. Kaley was pulled towards it, and shot both her feet out to brace against the stall’s walls. Some noise rent the air, a chittering and hissing that came from everywhere. And that stench! That foul, foul odor that filled the bathroom, like something belching up the contents of a septic tank. Kaley gagged. Her eyes watered. Through that watery vision she saw Mrs. Cartwright’s end.
The tentacles had made their way through, and just as Kaley’s teacher turned the one that looked like a malformed penis snatched at her neck, squeezed, and twisted until her face became purple. The squid-like arms grabbed hold of arms, legs, torso, and one of them shoved itself into her right eye socket. They’ll rape your throat and your eye sockets, Spencer had said of the kind of people the At-ta Biral and the Mafia employed.
Mrs. Cartwright only had time to let out a single whimper. The tentacles seemed as powerful as a boa constrictor but were as fast as a rattlesnake. She heard wet snapping noises, watched Mrs. Cartwright split at the waist, and saw her teacher look down at her with her one remaining eye as it happened. As the creature rose from the floor, the tentacles clenched harder and spun around and around Mrs. Cartwright, twisting off her arms and legs, the muscles and sinew hanging on until being stretched so far they too snapped loose. The creature that emerged was churning the water; a great cascading foam was all around it. Kaley wanted to shut her eyes, but it was so visually arresting that she couldn’t move, and she could feel Mrs. Cartwright dying inside of her, the tremendous fear…
…and the Other!
The overlapping flaps of black flesh and rolling eyelids were manifold. It was still rising and still churning, portions of its body folding in on itself, almost like it was eating half its own body before regurgitating it again. An Other, a swelling behemoth, only half of its upper portion having been exposed—Kaley felt sure there was more, far more beneath the swirling waters—and it was looking for a way up, a way out. It had found a gaping hole, and wanted through.
The suction of air was still pulling her towards it. It was like something Kaley had seen in a sci-fi flick, where the door on an airlock had been blown open, and the people inside the spaceship were being sucked out into a vacuum.
Back in Russia, she was standing up, half of her body above the lodge’s porch, half of her below it. The Russian hit men were looking at her, almost none of them moving. Someone shouted something in Russian, then turned on his heels and ran. The rest of their guns were trained on her. Most of them were unable to blink. Even the big, stocky one that had felt a father’s sympathy for her stood there beside Spencer, gun aimed at the psychopath’s face, unable to do anything but gape in a mixture of confusion and revulsion at what his eyes were showing him.
Spencer, smiling, remained ever so still. Kaley could feel him getting ready, his mind and muscles already primed for the pounce. Some part of her knew what he was going to try—hadn’t she seen it in his mind, a glimpse of his experimental cunning coming to the forefront?—but she had chosen to ignore it, had elected to shut out those portions of his mind because she didn’t want to see what he was thinking. Not ever.
Reflexive, like when I caught the boy in my arms and hugged him. He knew it…or he suspected it…or at least hop
ed for it…
All of this crossed both of her minds as Kaley fought from being sucked into that gaping wound in reality, which the many-limbed Other was fighting to force open. Wider and wider, pushing up through the floor, through the water, through the air itself! It rose, higher and higher, revealing limbs that were humanoid but gigantic, with joints that bent in obscene ways. Mrs. Cartwright had now been twisted and pulled into so many small pieces, most of which were pulled beneath the surface. The behemoth rose to touch the ceiling of the girls’ bathroom, yet so much of it still remained hidden in the Deep…
“…almost there…” came the whispers, from everywhere and nowhere. “This way, my brothers. I’ve found her. I’ve found the way out.”
The tentacles. They were licking her now, tasting. One snatched at her.
When this happened, Kaley established a connection—a horrible, grotesque connection—that dwarfed the agony she felt whenever poking around Spencer’s mind. The horrors inside of Spencer Pelletier’s heart were nothing compared to…compared to…What is this? Stars wheeled over end. Then, there were no stars at all. She saw, through the Other’s eyes, a universe of shadowy, tenebrous things that lived in nothing but darkness. A perpetually black universe filled with massive organisms, all of them putrid, all of them vying for control, and all of them relishing the fear they exerted on others. The Others were all chattering, hissing, sometimes screaming, and all of it built to a great infernal fugue where her own voice and identity were lost.
Against her will, she plumbed deeper and deeper. It was like trying not to think about dolphins; the more she didn’t want to go there, to the Deep, the more she was drawn in.
Organic things…churning…oppression from other organic things…pushing them down, down, down…and down…a constant battle for supremacy…rape and slaughter…relishing the fall of an enemy while indulging in an eternal prurience…twisting the heads and limbs off of things Kaley’s size, like tearing the wings off of a butterfly for pure amusement…being locked away…locked away in darkness…forced to search for the keyhole for all eternity…from birth, on through senescence, and on into death, then rebirth again…a prisoner…a prisoner…a prisoner…
And there was a supreme hatred for the one that put them all there, all of them forced into this eternally macabre dalliance. So many hideous things, so many creatures feeding off fear, all of them locked away in this dimension. Was it Hell? Was it something else? Whatever it was, Kaley reeled back from it. She shut her eyes, and tried to block it all out. Her mind went in a million directions—thinking of her mother, Spencer, the frightened little boy hiding upstairs, Detective Leon Hulsey, the cold tundra of Siberia, Mrs. Cartwright’s horrible fate—before finally she landed on Shannon, and focused. Somewhere, along that long, sensitive strand of webbing, she could touch her sister. It was stable, and powerful. It was as though Kaley had lost her balance in the dark, but had merely reached out for something familiar to steady herself, something substantive, like a banister or table’s edge.
She found Shannon, and Shannon found her.
At Cartersville Elementary School, Shan had just started sifting through her backpack, searching for an eraser, when she suddenly got this creeping feeling at the back of her head.
“Shannon!” Kaley screamed.
Shan went bolt upright and stared straight ahead. For her, it was as though Kaley were in the same room with her, crying out for help. “Kaley?” she whispered. What happened next was a series of quick-fire communications, all of which happened in the span of a second.
Kaley: I need you to shut your eyes.
Shan: Why?
Kaley: Trust me.
Shan: Okay.
Kaley: Relax your heart, relax your mind. Give me something to believe in. Something besides fear.
Shan: Believe in?
Kaley: Yes!
Shan: Like what?
Kaley: Anything! Just take my mind off the fear.
Shan: I think I have something.
It was so quick, almost as reflexive as Kaley’s own reactions to catching the boy in her arms, or evading the bullets.
Shannon—sweet, sweet Shannon—knew exactly where to take them. Before their change to a new school. Before they had moved. Before what happened in Atlanta. Before the Rainbow Room and Dmitry and the vory v zakone and Spencer Pelletier and the awful, awful death of Officer David Emerson in that house on Avery Street, before any of that had happened, before their mother got seriously hooked on painkillers, meth, cocaine, and any other substance being slung around their street.
Verdant green fields. Rolling hills, with fresh daisies spilling over the tops of each. North Georgia somewhere. They had been with their Aunt Tabitha one Sunday after leaving church. Their mother was off on a date with Reggie or Cedric or one of her dozen other almost-husbands. And both Kaley and Shannon were glad for that. Big Sister held Little Sister’s hand—Shan was her responsibility, always had been, always would be—and together they dashed off towards an old well. It was boarded up for safety (a boy had fallen in two years before and broken his leg), and nearby there was an old horse stable, crumbling and leaning. They dashed between the boards of the old fences, climbed up on top of the collapsing roof against Aunt Tabbie’s protests, and wrestled in the flowers before picking some of them out, arranging them in a bouquet for their precious aunt, the woman they both secretly wished had been their mother…
The smell of thsoe daisies and sunflowers hit her like a wave. Whether or not that old data had been stored in Kaley’s or Shan’s brain, and was now being re-transmitted down to both their olfactory nerves, Kaley didn’t know. All she knew was that it counteracted the smell of the bilious behemoth almost instantaneously, producing yet another level of reality, just as she had done for the boy.
Kaley was in Siberia, staring vacantly at a group of armed thugs, while also bracing herself against the forces of some other world at the second-storey CMS girls’ bathroom, while also experiencing the horrors of some universe she had never dreamt of and didn’t wish on her worst enemy, while also holding hands with Shan and frolicking generically like on some postcard, or in some ad you might see on TV. Families First: That’s Our Commitment to You. Paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The tentacle around her ankle, the same one that had made a connection and summoned images of some twisted, sister universe to this one, suddenly went limp. A few seconds later, it slipped away, and the Other’s mental grip of her also relented. Kaley opened her eyes, saw the creature retreating beneath the waters, even fading, its black, oily color turning to grey, then transparent, then solid again, now transparent before finally sinking beneath the waters. The air no longer felt cracked, though the hideous odor was still lingering, and seemed to have clung to the walls.
The winds died down. There was no more vacuum, no more suction. And no more Mrs. Cartwright. Kaley started crying. It was the same as before, the grief she’d felt over bringing about the death of Officer Emerson, the man that had tried so hard to help. I killed them! I killed them both! What am I? What have I let through?
“Kaley?” whispered Shannon.
At Cartersville Middle School, Kaley was lying on the floor of the bathroom, sweating, convulsing, shuddering, her lips and eyes going through spasms, and tears rolling off her cheeks and merging with the murky waters. Lying as she was, those waters came up around her ears, her eyes, almost through her nostrils.
Being under the water, that thin, filmy membrane between this world and some other, Kaley could hear the whispers. They became clearer. I always heard sound carries better in water, she thought vaguely. But this is something else entirely. The whispers were overlapping one another, many voices fighting to be heard at once. “The other…the other makes her stronger…the first one draws her to us…the second one makes her strong enough to fight back…we must kill the second…yes! Yes! Destroy the second!”
“Kaley?” It was Shan, still sitting in her desk at CES, still sear
ching for Big Sister in her mind. “Kaley, do you hear that?”
With quivering hand, she reached up to the toilet seat and pulled herself up. “Y-yes…yes, I hear it.”
“Kaley, who are they? I couldn’t see them.” That’s because I blocked them out. I didn’t want you to see. Shannon seemed to catch on to this, and said, “What do they mean? The whisperers. Who are they? Who’s the second and the first?” Back at CES, Shannon had to keep her voice down. She wasn’t strong enough in her own power to communicate with Kaley by thought alone, she still had to speak and have her voice carried along that Connection, that vast network of spider webs.
“I don’t know,” she said. But Kaley did know. She knew who the “first one” was. Not even on an instinctive level, but on a logical one. Who else draws me to do this, to open these doors when I’m near him? she thought. And who do I cling to to pull me back? Kaley’s mind was suddenly reeling again with the visions she’d seen from that other universe. Such darkness…and so much reveling in sadism. However, like a dream, it was fading with each passing moment. It was like her brain had an emergency switch for such overloads, for which she was very thankful.
One thing lingered, though. Prisoner. As Kaley fought to get to her feet in the bathroom stall, the word lingered in her mind, and looked out at the snow-driven world of Siberia. Just a few feet from her, Spencer was still kneeling, and still smiling. The other men were still staring at her, stunned. All of this had happened within the span of sixty seconds—all of it, from the gunshots to the Other to Mrs. Cartwright to…
Mrs. Cartwright. Kaley’s legs went weak at the memory of her teacher, helpless in that angry swarm of limbs, crushed and pulverized in an instant, then pulled below the water just as fast. She only wanted to help. I could feel her empathy. She was genuine, never phony. She just wanted to help me. She had such pity…