Chasing the Moon

by A. Lee Martinez

  “You don’t wear any clothes,” she said. “Even if you appear like human beings, wouldn’t you be naked? I mean, why do they even perceive you as male or female to begin with? You aren’t really either, right?”

  They shrugged again.

  “Sometimes I wish you two were more helpful.”

  “If you want everything to make sense,” said Vom, “you’re only going to be continually disappointed.”

  They entered the bar, and she spotted her coworkers occupying a group of tables. They waved her over.

  “So glad you could make it,” said Ginger. “And these must be your friends.”

  “Yes, this is…” Only then did she realize that she’d overlooked coming up with normal human names for her monsters.

  In the few seconds it took for her to come up with John and James, they stepped forward and introduced themselves.

  “I’m Vom.”

  “Smorgaz.”

  Ginger said, “Those are interesting names.”

  “Albanian,” said Smorgaz.

  “I thought you looked Albanian.”

  Diana understood. Vom and Smorgaz were blanks, seen however the viewer wanted or expected to see themst as long as it was a conceivable alternative to seeing what they actually were.

  “I’m gay,” said Vom.

  “I’m gay, too,” added Smorgaz. “Flamboyantly.”

  Smiling, Ginger nodded. “I see.”

  Diana sat. Vom and Smorgaz sat to her left.

  This wasn’t going to work. She couldn’t relax with the monsters here. It wasn’t their fault. They were behaving themselves. But she couldn’t shake the image of Vom, in a moment of weakness, setting upon everyone, eagerly devouring them within moments. Or someone, in a moment of unusual clarity, might glimpse a clone rolling off of Smorgaz’s back. It wasn’t implausible. People were not uniformly oblivious. She could see that.

  Wendall watched her from a distance. When she sat down he moved to the far end of the table. And he kept nervously glancing at Vom and Smorgaz. He might not have been able to see them for what they were, but he could certainly sense something was off about them.

  She wanted to straighten things out somehow for the poor guy. He’d seen something mortal minds weren’t meant to see, and it was obvious he was having trouble reconciling himself to it. She couldn’t blame him for that. She wasted a few minutes trying to come up with a simple way to ease his troubled mind, but aside from telling him he wasn’t crazy and that the universe was filled with terrifying cosmic horrors, she was coming up short. That news hardly seemed reassuring.

  Just brushing up against this horrible secret had jostled loose his sanity. Confirming it could very well destroy it.

  Yet here she was, neck-deep in this madness, and she wasn’t doing nearly as badly. But maybe it was easier when you were all the way in. Perhaps a full immersion allowed her to adjust. Rather than seeing only bits and pieces of a half-remembered madness, she saw the whole thing. And that allowed her to accept it more easily, to bounce back.

  More likely, she’d already gone mad and just didn’t realize it. She found some comfort in that. Hitting bottom meant the worst was over.

  Diana didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. Not even enough to lie to herself about it.

  Her coworkers engaged in small talk. They made jokes. Vicki showed pictures of her kid. Ginger talked about a funny thing that had happened during her morning commute. That guy from the shoe department (Steve or Bob or Fred, she could never remember his name) recommended a movie he’d seen. It was a lively, perfectly harmless conversation.

  And it bored the ever-living hell out of Diana.

  Although perhaps boredom was the wrong word. Small talk like this was always boring, but everyone played along, pretending to be fully invested in the mundane trials and tribulations of human existence. The unspoken social contract went like this: you listened sympathetically to other people’s problems, and they listened sympathetically to yours. While she had enough faith in humanity to believe this wasn’t always an act, it didn’t really matter if you genuinely emthized just as long as you could fake it.

  She couldn’t fake it. Not the way she used to.

  It was, she knew, selfish of her. These were good people with real problems that mattered to them. Only a few days ago she’d shared those problems. Little things like paying bills, relationship difficulties, and traffic annoyances. She just couldn’t relate.

  It all just seemed so insignificant, so petty and trivial. It always had been, but now she couldn’t even pretend it wasn’t.

  She envied all the ordinary people in this bar. She despised them. The internal conflict, along with her effort to hide it, made her queasy. Diana didn’t know why she bothered. People were obviously clueless. If they couldn’t see the monsters among them, then why would they notice her disinterest?

  Meanwhile, Vom and Smorgaz were getting along just fine. Better than her. She had no idea how that was possible. They weren’t even human. Maybe that worked in their favor. That distance gave them a more objective viewpoint. Rather than judging humanity for the clueless race of cosmic microbes it was, Vom and Smorgaz could just enjoy it without reservation.

  Regardless of the reason, within the hour Diana found herself the odd woman out of the conversation. It wasn’t intentional. She had so little to contribute that the natural give-and-take of an ordinary conversation just slipped away from her. She sat at her end of the table, not even pretending to listen.

  Wendall sat at the other end. Only he seemed even remotely aware of the weirdness of the monsters. He’d turn his head and study Vom and Smorgaz from different angles. He’d squint and stare, and just when he managed to see them for what they truly were, he’d chicken out and look away.

  He couldn’t even look at her, much less meet her eyes. He left early. Then all her coworkers left, one by one, until she was left sitting at a table with only a pair of monsters to keep her company.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Diana didn’t feel like going home, so she found a pool hall and rented a table. She bought three beers and handed one to Vom, another to Smorgaz.

  “Drink it slow now,” she cautioned. “I’m not made of—”

  Vom had already eaten his, bottle and all. He hadn’t even bothered to open it.

  “I’ll rack,” said Smorgaz.

  Diana wasn’t very good at the game, but she handily beat the two monsters. Neither could sink a ball, even when everything lined up perfectly. They didn’t seem to care.

  Halfway through their third game she went back to the bar to get another beer for herself and one for Vom and Smorgaz to split. A tall, blond woman in jeans waited for her own order. The woman nodded at Diana. Diana nodded back.

  “They’re cute,” said the woman. “Your friends.”

  Diana glanced over at her monsters. She had no idea what the woman saw, but Diana saw a furry green eating machine and a giant rubber hedgehog. They were kind of cute. In a strange, not-of-this-Earth way.

  “You’re lucky,” said the woman. “I know a guy who is stuck with a slime-covered spider-thing.”

  Diana nodded. If that was her other option, she was lucky.

  The woman took her drink and started to walk away, but Diana stopped her.

  “Hey, can you see my friends for what they are?”

  The woman smiled. “Of course.”

  “And you’re not freaked out by that?”

  “Why should I be? Believe me, the stuff I’ve seen… it makes those guys look like a couple of teddy bears.”

  The woman went to a table where she was playing by herself. Diana followed her.

  “I don’t mean to bother you, but—”

  “But you’re new to this and had a few questions.” The woman leaned over the table and sank three balls in one shot.

  “I’m sorry,” said Diana.

  “No. Don’t worry. I understand where you’re coming from.”

  She lined up another shot. The cue ball zippe
d across the felt and knocked two more balls into pockets. Diana noticed that the balls all moved in odd zigzagging patterns. At one point the cue ball circled the eight ball twice before completely reversing direction and smacking another target hard enough to send it arcing through the air to land in a pocket on the far side of the table.

  “How did you do that?” asked Diana.

  “It’s all angles,” the woman replied. “I just like to use the ones most people ignore. I’m Sharon by the way.”

  “Diana.”

  She took Sharon’s hand. A zap passed between them. It startled Diana but didn’t hurt.

  “Sorry,” said Sharon. “That happens sometimes to people like us who have slipped just a bit into the beyond.”

  She made it sound so casual, so everyday. Diana found that comforting.

  Diana scanned the hall. There was a dog-sized housefly crawling along one of the walls.

  “Is that one yours?”

  “That’s just a phase fly. They’re all over the place this time of year. No, my partner isn’t here right now.”

  “Aren’t you worried?” asked Diana. “What if something attacks you?”

  “Why would anything attack me?”

  “Because that’s what they do, right? I think that’s what they do. I don’t know if I quite get it yet, but displaced monsters might attack you in confusion.”

  “I don’t really shine like you do. If anything, my bond has the opposite effect. I make most displaced entities uncomfortable. They tend to avoid me.”

  “That’s a neat trick. Don’t suppose you could teach it to me?”

  “I wish I could, but it doesn’t work like that.”

  Sharon joined Diana at their table. They played a few games while Sharon explained some things. Vom had tried to enlighten Diana, but there was a chasm of perception between them. Their situation was similar. Both were struggling to make sense of an alien universe, but it was the difference in the areas they defined as alien that made things difficult.

  The game of billiards was the perfect example. The reason Vom and Smorgaz had trouble sinking shots was that simple geometry was a bit confusing. They understood walking around solid objects, accepted the inconvenience of gravity, and could work with a one-way time continuum, but multicolored balls bouncing around a few square yards of felt was simply too subtle.

  It didn’t help that Sharon’s presence proved distracting. If Diana was a comforting melody that kept the monsters calm, then Sharon was a low-pitched hum, too soft to be heard but rattling them on a cellular level, making them queasy.

  Smorgaz smacked the cue ball with far too much spin. The ball leaped off the table, shattering someone’s beer bottle.

  “Dang,” he said. “Thought I had it that time.”

  Diana resisted the urge to smile and headed to the restroom. She was washing her hands when she heard a peculiar gurgle coming from the stall she had just used.

  “Did you hear that?” asked the short, black-haired woman beside her.

  “Must be problems with the plumbing,” replied Diana.

  The woman opened the stall door as the toilet began spilling water across the tile. “Gross.”

  Diana was getting a bad feeling about this. “Maybe we should get the manager.”

  A bolt of lightning erupted from the toilet. The woman was disintegrated in a flash. She didn’t even have time to scream. The crisp smell of ozone filled the smoky bathroom, and a giant eyeball floated toward Diana. That was all it was. A huge eye rimmed by a dozen tentacles. Strange energies crackled in the orb’s interior.

  Diana’s attempts to flee were hampered by the slick floor. She fell on her butt just as the eye creature unleashed a blast that blew a hole in the wall. She kept her head down and scrambled toward the exit. The eye monster looped a slippery tentacle around her ankle and pulled her back.

  The creature studied her with its single eye. She remembered that this monster, just like Vom and Smorgaz, didn’t mean her any specific harm. It was just lost, confused, and trying to figure things out, figure her out. If she remained calm she could provide it with the anchor it sought.

  “It’s okay,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay.”

  The eye narrowed, but it didn’t blast her, so she felt confident.

  Vom and Smorgaz flung open the bathroom door.

  “Don’t worry, Diana!” said Vom. “We’re here!”

  “No, it’s cool,” she said. “I have this under control.”

  But her defenders had already sprung into action, tackling the eyeball.

  “Hey, no! Stop!” she shouted. “Damn it, listen to me!”

  Sharon grabbed Diana.

  “It’s too late for that. You need to put some distance between them, let them work it out on their own.”

  “But—”

  Sharon yanked Diana out the door. The people in the pool hall stood in shocked confusion at the howls and shrieks coming from the restroom. Diana resolved to, first, always save at least a little bit of her magic, and, second, avoid public bathrooms in the future. She realized that the second resolution was nothing more than superstitious impulse, but it couldn’t hurt to keep to it.

  The foreboding crackle warned Diana to hit the deck just a moment before the bathroom exploded. She didn’t know what had happened to Smorgaz or Vom, but the eyeball hovered toward her. She stood, focusing her calming influence over the bizarre thing.

  Sharon leaped in front of Diana. Her claim to be disruptive to alien monsters must have been true because the eye retreated.

  Diana said, “Thanks, but I think I can—”

  Several Smorgaz clones jumped the eye from behind. “Damn it!” shouted Diana. “Everybody needs to calm the hell down!”

  The eye unleashed blasts at random. A sizzling beam cut a swath of destruction through the hall. Pool tables and people were scorched into piles of dust.

  She waved her arms and screamed in a futile attempt to get things in order. Instead she found herself looking into the eyeball’s destructive gaze. She didn’t have time to ponder the limits of her immortality as the creature prepared to obliterate her.

  A red beast leaped from somewhere. It swept Diana off her feet and tossed her over its shoulder. The eye beast unleashed its blast from point-blank range, but Diana’s furry savior was a blur, sweeping her from the line of fire.

  The red beast darted from one side to the other, dancing with unnatural speed and grace around the eye’s pursuing beam. Everything the ray struck, including several people, dissolved. Quickly her furry rescuer was trapped in a corner. The beam swept toward Diana and the beast.

  Several Smorgazes tackled the eye creature. They buried it under a rapidly growing pile. Flashes of light would lance out from deep within the mound of monsters, and one or two of Smorgaz’s spawn would disintegrate, only to be replaced by three or four more.

  All Diana could do was stare at the devastation the eye had unleashed. Everything was just gone. Erased like it’d never been there at all. As far as she could tell the creature’s blasts just kept going forever. The trench that had been dug into the floor went down into the darkness, and she was willing to bet the blast had come out the other side of the Earth and was even now traveling through space, cutting an endless destructive scar across the universe.

  The red beast shook Diana alert to more pressing concerns. She looked into its huge maw. Its head was almost wolflike, but not really. It had long ears like a rabbit’s, and two low-set black eyes. Its fur was long and wild. It opened its mouth, and she wondered if it was going to bite her face off.

  “Snap out of it, Diana.”

  The voice, buried under a savage growl, was almost unrecognizable.

  “Sharon?”

  Diana was almost too fixated on Sharon’s slavering jaws to notice her nod.

  “You’re one of them?” asked Diana.

  “No,” replied Sharon. “I’m not like them. I’m like you.”

  A chill ran through Diana. Because whatever
Sharon was, she wasn’t quite human anymore. And Diana was just like her. Only the realization that this was exactly the wrong time for this insight kept Diana from going mad.

  The monsters spun around, knocking over tables. The pile of Smorgazes atop the laser eye creature filled half the pool hall, and it continued to expand. This would just keep going on and on if she didn’t stop it.

  She dug deeper. She had some magic left. There was always more, she realized. She could never run out for long.

  She stepped forward and unleashed a thunderclap to get everyone’s attention. The Smorgazes and the eye monster stopped fighting.

  “Knock it off, you idiots.”

  The Smorgaz spawn whined. The eye hovered toward her. She sensed its confusion. It threatened to overwhelm her, but only for a moment. She stayed calm, collected. The battle of wills was short because the eye wanted her to help it.

  The world shifted. Everything went back to the quiet seconds before the pool hall had erupted into chaos. Because monsters didn’t exist. Or at least they shouldn’t exist in this reality, and this reality did a bang-up job of erasing their titanic battles. The damage was undone, the building repaired. But it was the people Diana found most confusing. It was one thing to erase their memories. It was another to reconstruct their flesh-and-blood bodies from the ground up. The eyeball monster had disintegrated at least a dozen people. Yet those same people were restored to life.

  She wondered if they were the same people or if the universe had simply built flawless duplicates that would carry on their lives exactly like the originals with no one the wiser. Not even the clones themselves. Invisible imposters manufactured by a reality fighting a never-ending battle against a relentless barrage of weirdness.

  Was she one of them herself? She had no way of knowing if she’d been killed in some previous incarnation. Maybe she was Diana mark two. Or three. Or fifteen. Maybe a strange dream she no longer remembered hadn’t been a dream at all, but the forgotten last moments of a former Diana.

  Vom the Hungering waved a hand in front of her face. “Hey, everything okay in there?” He tried snapping his fingers, but the fur made that difficult.