by C.G. Banks
smell. The one that was here now.
As he stood still in the hallway, someone came bursting in through the front door. Rebecca’s mother screamed when she saw him standing there, and Eddie held out his arms as if warding away spirits.
“She’s not here,” he said quietly.
They spent the next hour waiting on and talking to the campus police. First the Spanish exam fell by the wayside, and then the English too. Rebecca’s mother was inconsolable, and not long after the first campus police car arrived, her father (who’d arrived a step behind her mother) became the man Eddie had always thought him capable of. He yelled and threatened lawsuits, refused to discuss anything logically, reduced everything to a conspiracy. Eddie, meanwhile sat on the couch among the chaos of the accusations, the hysteria, and the methodical plodding questions of the officers. It took a long time for them to explain to the Webster’s that their daughter was not ‘officially’ missing until 48 hours elapsed. She could be at a friend’s, studying for an exam in one of the three libraries on campus. She could be anywhere.
They asked Eddie questions and told him to make sure he didn’t get lost. He barely made it out to his car.
His vision began to swim two blocks from his apartment, and he took out a row of mailboxes three complexes down from his own at the corner of the street. He appeared not to notice as he ground the car to a stop, its rear section sticking out precariously in the left lane. Anyone on the street would have seen his surely drunken form emerge from the automobile and watched as he stumbled up the stairs and into the darkness of his apartment.
He vaguely remembered collapsing across his bed, but what happened next was a muddied jumble. It had all the aspects of a dream, or more rightly, a nightmare, but its quality was different than the others, more rooted in reality. He slowly distinguished a figure that stood in his bedroom doorway, looking at him malevolently. And once Eddie’s eyes locked on the other, he felt himself lifted out of bed, actually floating across the floor until he stood beside the figure. It motioned with a coiled, muscled appendage more octopus than human toward the opposite wall, a wall which swam with random and interlocking colors from floor to ceiling, making the whole room a kaleidoscope. And as the colors bled together, motions became slowly observable within the weave of the wall. The patterns coalesced into figures of memory as Eddie watched with a mixture of fascination and horror…
…getting up to leave the classroom after staying to copy notes for a zoology class he’d missed earlier in the week. The only other person in the room the professor. Gathering his books from the desktop, Eddie suddenly hears a sound as if someone were ripping apart a mildewed jacket. The acrid smell that already occupied the corners of the room grew large. Eddie watches the professor contort crab-like over his desk, his lips peeled back as if trying to disgorge some solid mass from his throat. The vile smell intensifies. And Eddie sees the thing raise its molting head, sees the lunacy racing violently behind the yellow-slitted cat eyes. Sees the long tongue dance out along the jagged row of teeth. Saying “Sleep, schlaf, duermete” in a rapidly incomprehensible jumble of languages and grunts. Eddie also watching as his dream-image’s head falls back to the desktop, but not before catching notice of the lopsided calendar hanging from the wall with the first two days of February crossed off—
--and the incessant knocking increased. Eddie tried to get a fix on just where it was coming from. He now stood below a rise of stairs, large shrubs pushed up to his back, but he could only tell their presence from the moonlight shadows that inked the lawn. He was as disembodied as a ghost.
When the apartment door opened Eddie saw the hulking shadow waiting below the staircase. Its misshapen head was seemingly too much for the thin neck, its legs no more than spindly chips of darkness rooted in some more infinite murk. And Eddie saw, helpless, when the thing rushed inside the apartment, slamming the door shut and knocking one of the numbers to the sidewalk.
The next conscious thought came upon waking to the bedroom floor. Nothing but darkness engulfed him. He staggered to his knees and crawled into the tiny bathroom, turning on the light and washing his face long and hard. He changed his shirt only because his grandfather’s service revolver was at the bottom of the drawer, and carefully checked the chambers. All were full. He walked into the disarrayed living room and kicked around until he found what was left of the phone book. After a short search he found the address he needed and left his apartment to conclude the only business he had left.
Edward Bentley was pronounced dead by the Louisiana State Coroner’s Office at 4:48 that morning. The owner of the home he’d forced his way into was shaken but none the worse for the war that’d ensued in his hallway. Thomas Salmon, the math professor, told State Police he’d been awakened by the sound of breaking glass in the living room. By the time he’d gotten to the hallway outside his bedroom the maniac had been inside. They’d struggled in the darkness and somehow, he told them (his hands nervously gripping a towel he used to dab at his brow) he’d managed to wrestle the gun free and shoot his assailant in self-defense. And yes, he did know the dead man. He was a student of his. The boy’s ID had proven what he’d already suspected. Dr. Salmon had him in the early period, Tuesday and Thursday.
“Why do you suppose he broke into your home?” one of the detectives scratching away at a notebook asked.
“No clue,” the man said. “I never had any trouble with him. I only know his name; we never spoke outside of class. Maybe his grade…"
“His grade?”
“Yes, final grades were posted today. I’d be willing to bet this had something to do with it. Why else would he attack me, especially here in my home?”
“Grading day, huh?” The detective looked up. “’S amazin’ sometimes, ain’t it?”
The professor shrugged his thin shoulders. “Like I said, I can’t imagine why else he’d do such a thing.”
“His girlfriend’s missing too,” the detective stated quickly, peering deep into the professor’s eyes to see if anything moved there. Nothing did. The detective said her name.
“I’ve never heard of her,” came the calm reply.
The questioning continued while Eddie’s body was removed from the house and packed into the ambulance. The dwindling party in the front yard and the ones meandering back to their own houses on both sides of the street watched as it rolled quietly away. When it turned right at the STOP sign, the detective snapped his notebook shut. The conclusion of the interview was short; the professor was told to stay available. Of course he nodded his agreement. Where else had he to go? The detective handed him a card with a telephone number on it in case the professor thought of anything else. When the last car pulled out of his driveway he was left standing in the doorway, a very old and very scared man beneath the glow of his porch light.
A low, growling laugh welled up from deep inside the beast as it scanned the now deserted street. The molting form slunk back into the house, inhaling the last lingering essence of blood that still wavered about. Slouching back to the bedroom, its body undulated into its true form as its shadow grew bloated and dripping on the wall. Each step left a sopping hole in the living room carpet, holes that festered and crawled with tiny worms and larvae. At the foot of the bed it stooped its crumpled shoulders and thrust the clot of rusted nails it used as a hand into the carpet, pulling up with a great roar. A trap door lay open to a black pit. The light from the bathroom illuminated a single wet step, sweating with filth and crawling with bugs.
On this step sat one of Rebecca’s torn and bloody shoes.
The beast started down, pulling closed the thick trapdoor behind it to silence whatever screams might follow.
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