The Return

by Bentley Little

  Glen took a deep breath to calm himself. He hadn't liked the idea that the future was predetermined, had been fighting the idea every step of the way, but the idea of facing this evil on his own, without the painting as a guide terrified him.

  Maybe he wasn't as immune as he'd thought. Not here. Not at the source.

  "I'm coming with you," Pace said.

  Glen shook his head. "No. No, you're not."

  "I'm coming, too," Melanie told him.

  "No," he said. He glanced over at Cameron, who was still sniffling and glaring in his direction. "I'll go in by myself."

  A low-level squawking burbled from the cell phone on Melanie's hip--McCormack wanting to put in his two cents' worth--but they all ignored it.

  "What about the generator? How are you going to bring it with you?"

  "It has a handle. It has wheels. I'll pull it."

  "Come on, now."

  "Listen to me. All we know about how to stop these things is what we learned from the painting. What I'm trying to say is, either this is going to work or it isn't. If I go in and I fail, at least you'll still be alive and maybe you'll be able to think of something else." He paused. "Besides, I'd like to stick as close to the painting as possible."

  "I agree," Melanie said.

  Pace sighed, shrugged. "All right. What's the plan?"

  Vince connected the cables, placed them on the proper side hooks, then made sure the generator's gas tank was full and started the engine. Pace tied his rope to the machine's handle, doubling it for strength. It was awkward and inefficient, but as effective as they could make it. They decided the generator would remain on at all times. All Glen had to do was pull the generator behind him and, when necessary, whip out the cables and shove them at any approaching monster. He took both of Pace's flashlights, holding one in his hand, sticking the other one uncomfortably into the waistband of his jeans.

  "Here," Melanie said. "I think we should keep in contact." She pulled the cell phone off her belt, clicked it off.

  "McCormack's going to be pissed."

  "He'll live." She asked Vince for his number, and he called it out as he ran to the pickup to get his phone. She punched in the number, his phone rang, and he answered. Melanie hooked her phone on Glen's belt. "We'll keep this line open. Try to tell us what you're seeing and what you're doing."

  "You think this'll work in there?"

  "It's worth a shot."

  They said good-bye, and he hugged Melanie, kissing her, telling her that he loved her, trying not to believe that this was the last time they'd see each other. To the others, he nodded.

  But how would he get inside? There didn't appear to be an entrance, at least not on this face of the malignant building.

  The holes.

  Yes. That was the way in.

  Muscles tense, ready for anything, pulling the noisy generator behind him, he walked up to the line of skulls encircling the center hole in the ground. To his surprise, it was not a bottomless pit or deep well-like chamber. It was only a shallow cavity in which lay a porcelain doll that looked like a miniature version of himself. The other two holes were equally shallow. One was completely empty. The other had a gray stone floor on which was drawn in white chalk a strange spiral symbol that he found unaccountably disturbing.

  "Pace!" he called. "Vince!"

  The two men came hurrying over.

  "Do either of you have a shovel in the back of your truck?"

  "Sure," Pace said.

  Glen pointed at the chalk drawing. "Cover that up," he said. "With dirt."

  "I recognize that symbol." Pace sounded apprehensive.

  "You don't want to save it, do you?"

  "No. No, I don't. We'll cover it up."

  "Melanie says she can't hear you," Vince said. "The generator's too loud."

  Glen put the cell phone in his shirt pocket. "Better?" he asked in a conversational voice. He looked back at her, and she nodded, held up her hand in an okay sign.

  "Fine!" she yelled.

  Glen turned toward the dark monstrosity before him. If the holes weren't the way to get in, how was he going to . . . ?

  He saw an entrance. It was tall and narrow, like a gap between sections of wall. Had it been there before? He wasn't sure, but he certainly hadn't seen it until now. He had the uneasy feeling that it had just opened up, that whatever was inside that place knew he was here and it was waiting for him.

  Describing what he saw as he pressed forward made him feel better. The heightened senses that he'd first experienced upon arrival had faded, and though he still did not feel the paralysis that Cameron had described, the air felt denser and even more oppressive. The sound of the generator seemed muffled, as though it were coming from behind a thick barrier, and he smelled a heavy dead odor of rot. The temperature as he approached the opening dropped precipitously.

  And then he was walking inside.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen, no place he had ever imagined. It had walls, a floor, and a ceiling, but there the resemblance to any other building ended. He saw no doors, no windows, no furniture, no recognizable architectural features. The materials used to construct this place were clearly from this world, but they were put together in ways that no human would have believed possible. Angles were neither straight nor rounded, the undulating ceiling slopped and dipped and rose in a manner that was profoundly wrong.

  He was in a long chamber that could have been a corridor, could have been a room, and thick freezing air wrapped around him like a tight blanket, making it hard to walk and difficult to breathe. Gritting his teeth, he pressed forward. Exhaust from the generator motor masked the rotting odor that permeated the building's interior, and for that he was grateful.

  "I'm in," he said, and proceeded to describe the chamber as best he could. He was not even sure if the connection was still open, but he allowed himself to believe that the two phones were still in contact and Melanie could hear every word he said.

  It wasn't dark, not completely. The far end of the chamber was shrouded in gloom, but the area immediately around him was merely dim. This phenomenon continued as he moved forward over a floor that seemed to be made of ivory or the enamel of teeth. The flashlight in his hand was on, and he swept the beam back and forth, looking for . . . something. He should be searching for one of those creatures, but he wasn't ready for that yet.

  He kept talking, hoping Melanie could hear him.

  Beyond a section of wall with oddly bulging protrusions was an opening, a slanting crack that looked as though a giant ax had broken through the wall. Beyond it was a hallway, and some interior compass told him that this was where he wanted to go. He stepped through, touching the wall as he did so. It looked like a rusty piece of filthy sheet metal, but it felt like sponge, and his fingers came away greasy. He wiped them on his pants.

  Although from the outside the building appeared to be six or seven stories high, he had not seen any stairs or any indications that there were other floors above this one. Indeed, as he advanced deeper into the structure, the ceiling seemed to get higher and higher. Soon he reached a point where the walls of the hallway continued upward into a blackness that seemed to have no end.

  He felt ridiculous lugging the awkward generator behind him. The idea that he would be facing a tribe of these creatures armed with nothing more than McCormack's noisy, crappy little generator and a pair of short jumper cables did not fill him with confidence. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to base their entire strategy on the interpretation of an old painting.

  But it had done right by them so far.

  Besides, why would there be electricity anywhere near the creatures' home? It was exactly what the monsters were trying to avoid. It was why they lived way out here in this primitive land. He had no choice but to carry his own power supply. The only electricity likely to be within miles of this spot was what he brought with him.

  He spotted light up ahead in the darkness. Electric light. An illuminated white-and-purple rectangle tha
t looked like it was a football field away.

  Electric light?

  No. It couldn't be. It had to be a trick, an illusion, something made to resemble electric light.

  Otherwise, they were doomed.

  He kept walking, moved closer, and finally saw what it was: a vending machine. A Delaware Punch vending machine. Was there such a thing? Had there ever been such a thing? He didn't know and it didn't matter, because this could not be real. The hallway ended, opened out into a much larger chamber, and he could see now that the vending machine was in an alcove made to resemble an old general store's porch. On either side of the machine, in rocking chairs, were his mother and father. He shone his light on them. Both looked the way they had at the moment of death, both stared back at him glassy eyed. For a brief wild second, he considered the possibility that this was the afterlife, that this building was where people went when they died, that there was no heaven, no hell, there were only these horrible beings, harvesting souls as they'd done since long before mankind existed. But he pushed that thought away. It was far more likely that these creatures were able to read his mind and extract images from it, or that this building acted as a kind of mirror, reflecting back the thoughts and fears of those who entered.

  Either way, this was not real. He would not fall for it.

  Pulling the still-running generator behind him, Glen passed the porch, not looking at the figures of his parents. The chamber he entered was darker, and as he shone his flashlight beam around him and above, he realized that it was because the room was gigantic. It was bigger than any stadium or convention center, bigger than even the exterior of the structure would seem to allow. He tried not to think about that, tried to focus his attention on the task at hand. The physics of this place frightened him--the impossible angles, the thick air, the fantastic construction materials--and he kept talking to Melanie, describing what he was seeing, what he was feeling, what he was thinking.

  In the beam of his flashlight, shadows moved, shadows shifted, though there were no objects before him that could have thrown any shadows. Beneath his feet, the substance of the floor changed from white tooth enamel to something black, warm, and rough that he could not immediately identify, but that seemed foul.

  He kept walking.

  To his left were scores of life-size porcelain figures that reminded him of China's terra-cotta army. To his right were man-size boulders that had been polished smooth.

  He kept walking.

  And then he reached it.

  A massive construction of bones and skulls and connective cartilage, a building within the building, several stories high, all graceful arches, elaborate spires, and minarets. A palace in hell.

  He stopped, flung the rope aside and moved back by the generator, withdrawing the cables. If the bone land in the tomb beneath Ricky's house had been imposing, this was overwhelming. Looking at the attention that had been lavished on the creation before him, Glen had no trouble believing that these creatures harvested humans solely for their skeletons. Centuries' worth of skulls had been stacked into an indescribable set of high columns, hundreds of identical leg bones fitted together into a front balustrade.

  The horrible thing was that there was a beauty to it all, a strange and terrible splendor that bespoke intelligence, elegance, sophistication.

  "Glen!"

  It was Melanie's voice, and he frowned as he looked down at his pocket. Had he accidentally hit some sort of volume adjustment on the cell phone?

  "Glen!"

  It wasn't coming from the phone. It was behind him. He turned around to see Melanie, Pace, Vince, and Cameron emerging from the gloom. They'd found another flashlight somewhere--Vince's pickup, perhaps--and Melanie held it, walking in the lead. He wanted to be mad at them, but the truth was that he was grateful. He hadn't realized until this moment how utterly alone he had felt.

  "There's a reason we're all immune," Melanie said. "And that reason is not to wait around for you to vanquish to monsters. We're all part of it, and we're with you."

  He put back the cables, hugged her, then reached out and touched the others, grabbing shoulders, shaking hands. He had been stupid to come in alone. He hadn't even been following the painting, because he'd decided to go without Cameron.

  "You guys're right behind me. How long did it take you to decide to come in? About a minute?"

  "Closer to a half hour," Pace said. "After we finished burying that symbol. It was another forty minutes or so after that that we finally came in."

  Glen frowned. "Seventy minutes? I've only been in here for fifteen, maybe twenty at the most."

  "You've been in here for over an hour," Melanie told him. "Maybe longer."

  He looked at his watch. It had stopped. The rules of time obviously did not apply in this place, and Glen found that extremely unnerving. Whatever these beings were, they apparently lived outside the boundaries of conventional physics.

  But where were they?

  He had been in the building for this long, had come this far, but had yet to see a single creature. Were they hiding? Had they left? Were they traveling about the countryside spreading death and destruction in their wake? What had happened to them?

  "We brought some additional firepower," Pace said. He held up a big awkward-looking gun. Vince was carrying the same thing.

  "What is it?" Glen asked.

  "Taser." Pace grinned.

  "How did you . . . where did you get it?"

  "A police car. It came speeding out from the side of this place, from that . . . I don't know what you'd call it. Those changing scenes or whatever they are. No one was driving; it just came barreling toward us across the dirt, and we jumped aside. It crashed into a tree, and we went over to make sure there was no one inside and no one was hurt. In the front seat, we found these. No rifles or revolvers. Just these. After that, we came in."

  "Do you know how to use them?"

  "Not really," Vince admitted. "Point and shoot, we're hoping. But I guess we'll find out for sure when it comes down to the crunch."

  "Speaking of which . . ." Pace motioned toward the elaborate palace of bones before them. "Shall we enter?"

  "Here." Vince handed Glen his taser, then grabbed one of the handles on the generator and lifted. On the other side of the machine, Pace held the taser with his right hand and picked up the other handle with his left. "This should make it a little easier."

  "You're still point man," Pace said to Glen. "Lead on."

  Gripping the taser tightly, Glen stepped forward across the warm black floor and stepped onto the raised veranda of bone. He felt a rattling beneath his feet as he passed over the skeletal remains of the dead.

  They walked through a vaulted doorway.

  Inside, it was more difficult to tell that the construction was of bone and cartilage. Whereas the individual elements that made up the exterior retained their original shape, in here they had been melded together seamlessly. The walls, floor, and ceiling looked solid. They also seemed slightly luminescent, making their flashlights redundant, but neither he nor Melanie shut them off.

  "What did you see on your way here?" Glen asked her. He'd been wondering ever since they'd shown up. "Did you see what looked like the front porch of an old general store, with a lighted vending machine on it?"

  "Delaware Punch?" Melanie nodded. "We sure did. What was that about?"

  He'd been hoping he'd been the only one to see it, that they'd seen something different, that it was some sort of image tailor made to reflect the fears and memories of whoever passed by, but that was clearly not the case. He took a deep breath. "And two dead people in rocking chairs, a man and a woman?"

  "Yes."

  "Those were my parents."

  No one knew what to say, and Melanie reached for his arm, squeezed it. Around them, the room shimmered, shifted. They'd been in some type of rococo foyer, but now they entered what looked like a throne room or a chapel, an elongated space in which all attention was focused on an object at the far end. Befo
re them was a stone circle, like the one in the last panel of the triptych, a round piece of gray rock adorned with incomprehensible symbols. Once again, Glen was reminded of a sun, and he realized that it was because the circle radiated energy. Only it seemed to be a source of darkness rather than light.

  The white walls and floor turned black, the ceiling faded to a sickly gray. The thickness of the air dissipated.

  Suddenly they were no longer alone. The lone room was filled with the purposeful movement of skeletons and mummies and shrunken heads and skulls, all with bushy orange hair. He didn't know where they'd come from, but they were creeping, crawling, gliding, rolling, moving across the room in eerie silence. He remembered the needlepoint his mother had been sewing in his dream, and her broken-record comment: "You failed/you failed/you failed . . ."

  He saw no living beings, though, nothing like in his nightmare, and although all of his instincts told him to run, he held his ground.

  "What are we going to do?" Cameron yelled, panicked.

  Still unsure of how to use it, Glen pointed his taser at a tall wrinkled figure with dirty bobbing hair that was rolling toward them and would be the first to reach them. It stopped, swerving away.

  "They're afraid of the electricity!" Glen announced. He gave Melanie the taser. "Point it at anything that comes close." He turned around, grabbed the cables from the generator. "Put it down," he told Pace and Vince. "I don't want you guys to get shocked. We'll make our stand here."

  A huge skull the size of an elephant's, all scowling sockets and fiercely grinning mouth, appeared out of nowhere, rolling into him from the side and knocking him down. The cables flew out of his hands, and the generator fell over, its engine dying. The heavy skull continued to press against him, trying to squish him, but Melanie shoved her taser into its right eye socket. It flew away instantly, shooting backward as though on a bungee cord.

  Pace and Vince had righted the generator and were trying to start it up again, but either it was flooded or out of gas, because the engine would not catch. A partial mummy--head and torso--emerged from behind Vince and tried to grab his legs, but Cameron saw it first, screamed, and Pace pointed his taser at the monster, making it hobble away. The silence in the room seemed all the more pronounced without the background clatter of the generator, and though orange afros were moving everywhere, the only sounds were their own breathing and grunts and the mechanical clanking of the motor as Pace and Vince attempted to start it up.