Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Abby hitched with sobs in his arms. Paul was beginning to feel strong again, stable again, despite his trembling hum.

  The black foam, like some otherworldly protoplasm, seemed to have a mind of its own. It was obviously endeavoring to totally encase Maureen’s body like a black rubber scuba suit. Only patches of her showed through the thick tar. Where Maureen against the wall had looked to be floating in space, now space in a liquid extension had reached out and was assimilating her.

  It was this place, too, Paul thought, glaring around him past Abby’s head. He remembered again the Rim Corp ghost. This ugly, disheartening place had a power in it. It had helped to nurture the monster, breast-feeding it on plastics and poisons. Paul remembered the song Factory by Bruce Springsteen. The factory took your hearing and it gave you life.

  Men walked out its gates with death in their eyes… and somebody was going to get hurt tonight.

  Abby raised her face from Paul’s wet neck. “Are you gonna draw that circle?”

  Paul sighed, reluctant to leave this safe embrace. Their pubes were pressed together but zippered apart. He remembered that despite their occasional antagonism, he and Abby had often flirted in a sarcastic way, exchanging innuendos, Abby teasing him with a luring smile. Of course it was stupid, unreasonable, but they might not…might not get out of this alive, and…and he was, after all, still a virgin. Despite what he had told people, his cousin Ray included, even going so far as to say he had been partially impotent the first time—a nice touch. Ray was the closest person in the world to Paul and Paul had seldom ever lied to him. He had fully admitted to him his drug use and occasional dealing during that short and misguided period of his life. But he had lied about the sex. His experience had progressed as far as performing oral sex before ending, but had remained ended for about five years. Half a decade. Of hunger. Now it seemed he would never be consummated. His only “little death” would be the real thing. They said that the threat of death often made people horny…

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah.”

  Abby slipped gently out of his arms and he let her go. He felt a little bitter, though he knew it was crazy. She was staring nervously at the black wall and Maureen, who was fully engulfed and hardening, a statue-like projection of the plastic, which had ceased flowing. If a hand had come through, what was to prevent the entire beast from ripping through?

  “Paul, you’d better hurry, it might come through the wall.”

  “I have to charge a stick first… I dunno, a broom handle.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Until I feel it. I don’t know.”

  “You can’t do it without a magic wand?”

  “Can you light your cigarettes with your thumb?”

  “Maybe we should run for the paint room—it’s just me and you now.

  We’ll take the pentagrams. If it’s locked we’ll just hold it off with the pentagrams until twelve…it’s only about an hour.”

  “It could be a big risk.”

  “Paul, look at that wall! It came right through!”

  “Yeah, its hand, but it won’t show its face—it’s afraid of the pentagrams. We should be safe if we keep from the wall. It’s just an hour.” Yes, then Abby’s husband and the others would return. Next of kin.

  “I don’t know, Paul. Are you going to charge up a stick or what?”

  Eying her broom spear, Paul wagged his head. Charging a broom handle. Well, what was there to lose?

  “Paul, I have an idea; will you paint a pentagram on my back? And then I’ll do you.”

  “Good idea.” He remembered earlier this long, long night Steve joking that Paul should have the pentagram tattooed on his forehead.

  There was an idea. “Check this out,” he told Abigail, and came up with some rags. He ripped an old white T-shirt into strips, selected two. Abby watched him paint with appreciative reverence, and allowed him to knot the first band around her head. The second headband he tied on himself.

  “Now we’re ready for action,” he joked.

  He turned her around, painted a giant star on her back. With white paint she adorned the back of his black T-shirt. They looked like extras from some TV show’s stereotype of a street gang.

  An hour. They’d survived this long…it didn’t seem much. Paul doubted his chances of casting a powerful enough circle force field, especially with his ability to concentrate so distracted. Maybe the best they could do was simply make themselves as unappetizing a meal as possible. An hour…

  An hour ago Maureen and Jean had been alive.

  “Let’s sit down a minute.”

  “I can’t.”

  Paul sat on his work table. Abby came beside him but was looking over his shoulder.

  “Don’t look at her,” he commanded.

  Abby sat beside him after clearing a space, but drew her dangling vulnerable legs up in the Indian sitting position. Paul had put a cigarette in his mouth, offered her one, but she shook her head. He patted his pockets for his lighter, glanced around him at his table top. “In my coat,” Abby said, without offering to move there herself.

  Paul went and dug in pockets, produced a white disposable lighter.

  Paul relished smoking, and felt an almost soothing gratitude now. Time for a break. Survival was always hard work.

  Paul stood staring at the lighter in his hand, grimacing with intensity.

  “What is it?” asked Abby.

  His eyes lifted to the ceiling. Pipes, occasionally blossoming into metal flowers that were water sprinklers. “The sprinkler system. If I set it off do you think it will set off an alarm at the fire station?”

  Abby pushed herself off the table, her knotted legs flying apart, sprang onto her feet. “Yeah, it will—right? Do it, Paul, hurry!”

  “Help me pull a table under it.”

  “That table over there is right under one!”

  Paul skipped to the table that Donna had been using, vaulted onto it.

  Straightened and held up the lighter in one movement.

  The floor exploded, wood flying like water as if a whale had reared from unknown depths below. The lights sputtered out, leaving only the emergency fluorescents. Abby had been standing on the floor not far from the explosion. Whether she went down from the concussion or from tangling herself up in her instinct to flee, Paul didn’t know, and he could only stare down in horror from his platform as she fell on her side, and as a spectral white hand of terrifying size at the end of a bony white arm appeared from the smashed crater, closing around Abby’s ankle. She tried to scramble to her feet, screaming, but it tugged and she fell on her belly.

  It dragged her to the hole. Abby kicked at the hand with her free foot.

  Abby didn’t cry out for Paul’s help; that would have required more thought than her brain could now manage. Paul leapt from the table even as he knew it was too late.

  A second hand appeared, holding a loop of rubbery black power cord.

  Abby was near enough now for the loop to be slipped over her head. The head of the creature reared up from the crater.

  Paul skidded to a stop. Jesus.

  The sweet child’s face, insipidly smiling. No tea kettle scream, no withdrawing from the pentagrams abounding. Two screwdrivers were imbedded to their ambery transparent hafts in the boy’s eye sockets. It had blinded itself, but knew where they were. There was no blood on its face, not even that thick syrupy fluid from before. It let go of Abby’s ankle to aid the other hand in twisting and twisting the two ends of the black power cord.

  Abby gurgled, bounced, as if electric current was pouring into her.

  The boy reached to its right eye, delicately took hold of the screwdriver handle there, and plucked it out. The eye was gone; no crushed remains, just a frame of eyelids with no picture. The hand brought the screwdriver high over the head…

  Paul turned and bolted. He ran toward the cardboard storage room, tore through the hanging canvas curtain. Behind him he heard the hand come down, a crunch
, and Abby’s gurgles reached a strained strangled high note before they bubbled away to silence.

  Paul hoped to silence, anyway, but it was useless to stay and find out.

  This was his last chance to escape while the creature was otherwise involved. In a few moments it would have nothing else to distract it from pursuing him alone.

  There was no hesitance in the cardboard labyrinth; he charged straight down the central path, his feet pounding on metal plates laid down to prevent fork trucks from falling through the ancient timbers.

  Now Paul had reached the hall containing the small rear elevator. Here they had found Steve. Here a staircase led upstairs and another led downward. Paul hit the latter steps and pounded down them. In his fist he still gripped Abby’s lighter as if it were the handle to a gun or knife.

  Paul hit the bottom and with no lapse in momentum turned into the short hall that a moment later took him into the back dock area. Rock music from the molding room behind him was like claws on the back of his neck until he ripped through the hanging plastic strips that kept the cold of the dock from pouring into the plant. Now, finally, he stopped to look behind him through the watery strips. Thank God the lights down here hadn’t blown, though the dock was still dark, old unused molds resting on pallets, other mechanical shapes hulking, and the air indeed very cold in here from their metal sleep.

  He lunged to the dock doors. The trash compactor was out there. He had instantly formed this vision of hiding behind a mold, letting the creature peer into the compactor blindly to see if he hid there, then rushing out with a broom or something to drive it into the compactor. Then, crunch…like so much discarded plastic. But the dock doors wouldn’t open, or even budge.

  The paint room. It opened off this room. It was his only remaining possible escape route.

  Paul didn’t bother hitting the light switches, plunged right in. A strong, thick and offensive smell of paint. It was like having paint poured into your nostrils, trickling down the back of your throat and on into your stomach. Rows of large metal drums, labeled, and more numerous smaller cans on benches and tables. There were cans of strong-scented lacquer thinner, paint catalyst, other substances. There were no windows, only some air vents, and the one door tucked away in a corner that led directly outside to fresh air and freedom.

  Paul moved to the door full of desperate and hopeless anticipation.

  He didn’t see any sealing resin as he neared the door. They had talked so much of this door being unsealed…it was impossible for it not to open!

  Paul’s hand closed on the knob. The knob only moved a fraction of a turn, taking up slack. Paul rattled the door, thumped his shoulder once against it. “Fuck! Fuck! ” he hissed, enraged and nearly crying at this final insane, mocking joke. The door rattled. It wasn’t sealed with resin. It was simply locked by human hands, and he didn’t have a key.

  Paul sagged against the door, still squeezing the knob. “Goddamn you, you fuck,” he sobbed in self pity, and reached up to swipe the foolish and useless pentagram band from his head.

  Shit. Paul whipped his head around to face the direction of the rear dock area. If the creature came now there was no other way out of this room. He’d be trapped. He mustn’t box himself in. He couldn’t return to his department, but he had to get the hell out of here now.

  Past the rows of drums, toward the door. He knew that just as he reached the door the creature would step out from around the corner face-to-face with him. It didn’t. He’d made it to the dock area. Tucking the lighter in his back pocket, he glanced around for a real weapon. Nothing much longer than his knife, so he unfolded that. Behind the plastic strips Billy Idol sang Dancing With Myself. Paul was afraid to go through them…but he had to, and now, because he was still trapped here. He could see his breath puffing out of him like his spirit abandoning him in vaporous chunks. He sucked in his breath and forced his body to move.

  Now he had more of a choice. He could go up the back steps to the cardboard room, or out into the molding area. Both prospects were equally dismal. After a moment he decided to venture out into the molding area. If it came for him here he could retreat to either the front or rear stairs, depending on which was nearer or safer. Also, he wanted to get his hands on one of those metal pikes the molders used to break up the plastic “buns” they placed outside the door so the noxious fumes that emerged wouldn’t remain in the plant.

  Paul crouched low, peeked out into the molding area. Empty post-ops and deflashing tables, stilled molds and presses. Like a soldier, factory guerilla, Paul dashed out and found cover behind a rack of parts. From there he dashed into post-ops and ducked down behind a box atop another box behind the tables. He scanned the ceiling for sprinkler outlets.

  Nothing immediately close. The music was so fucking loud, but at least it would cover his movements. He knew he should drag a table under a sprinkler and set it off but couldn’t will himself to expose himself like that when he was doing so well just as he was.

  Paul craned his neck. The hole the creature had burst through the floor would have to be in the ceiling over in the machine shop area beyond the molding rooms. He couldn’t see it from here. He’d assumed that the creature would pull its entire body up through…but what if it hadn’t? What if it had dropped back down? Everything seemed still down here but for the music. Maybe it had followed him through the cardboard room but then on up into the sanding room. Just an hour, maybe less by now. If only he could elude it for one fucking hour. He knew this place better than it did, right?

  Pike, pike, come on…he always saw them around. Ouch—shit. As he had shifted position his knee had pressed down on a screw on the floor.

  Flicking it away, he noticed the bottom of the box he was hiding behind.

  It was soggy, saturated with dark red liquid. His heart took a tentative step back inside him. A quick glance around, then Paul rose and took hold of the edges of the box piled atop the soggy box. It was light to lift away, only half filled with parts.

  Paul had never liked this post-ops kid; he was a smirking punk-type with a beer-bellied swagger and mocking manner, sarcastic, laughing at stupid little Paulie behind his back, Paul was sure. But Paul felt no joy at seeing his dismantled body parts piled atop each other in a box amidst cushioning Styrofoam popcorn. Also, the boy’s head looked like the skin had been filed away in areas, and numerous holes suggested a drill had been employed, which was likely since a drill gun was imbedded fully through the palm of a dismembered hand, the long bit protruding out the other side. Paul dropped the box he was holding and spun away, grabbing hold of a table edge as if grasping the tail of his fleeing sanity. He fought down a retch that was actually half retch and half mindless cry of horror.

  He almost succeeded, but the forces within were too strong to contain and volcano-like the vomit shot up and out of him.

  The creatures reared up from the degreasing tank, the chemical broth splashing over the sides and dripping from the creature’s soaked clothing and plastered hair. Paul looked around at it sharply, cried out as he vomited and fell to his knees.

  The creature was pulling itself out of the tank, hooked a leg over the side. Strapped upside-down to the front of its body was Abby’s corpse, tied with that long black power cord. Her legs went around the monster’s neck, where they were lashed together with the plastic-like tape used to seal boxes upstairs, more of which helped to secure her body to the creature’s waist. Due to this awkward arrangement it was having trouble climbing out of the tank.

  “Oh God, God, God help me!” Paul sobbed on hands and knees, shaking violently. He wasn’t discarding his own faith, but it was the instinctive thing to say. Through streaming eyes he could see the screwdriver handle protruding from Abby’s spine. “Kill me!” he growled at it in furious challenge, his throat rasped raw from his vomit. “Just fucking kill me you fuck!”

  The being had made it out of the tank, but turned in another direction instead of coming at Paul. Was it truly blind after all? Paul got to his
feet, but teetered, unsteady, and numbly peered through the racks after the spidery giant.

  He couldn’t see it well now, but there were sounds.

  The jet of black foam sprayed right through the racks, knocking some parts out of them, missing Paul by only several feet. A few drops spattered his shirt and arm, burning him. Paul ducked and covered his head with both arms as the powerful spray, like water from a high pressure hose, was shifted sideways, still blasting on through the shelves and falling across the table tops. The jet was broken up by obstacles in the racks and Paul was spattered on his arms and back and hair. He cried out long and high in fear.

  It had activated the hose-like “head” from the black foam molding area, used to insert into the molds, but it didn’t seem possible that the foam could be ejected with such force and distance, in so concentrated a stream.

  The jet tapered off, ended.

  Paul bolted from his squatting position like a runner on the track.

  The foam was again launched after him.

  Paul hit the floor, rolled, came up and dove behind another rack. The foam spray separated him from the hallway directly opposite where he could escape upstairs. He couldn’t believe the head was firing the foam this far, but it couldn’t go on forever. All he had to do was make that hall when the chance came. Then the hoses to the head would prevent the creature from following with its weapon. Now the monster was aiming the head from side-to-side, moving it in circles, painting the racks, hoping to hit Paul somehow in the process, but he was sheltered well enough for the moment that only hot droplets speckled him.

  From the bottom shelf of the rack he hid behind Paul dragged a box of dusty discontinued parts. He slipped out Abby’s lighter, flicked it, and held the flame against the cardboard in several places. He gave it time to take hold. Why not add to his risks; how worse could it get? At least if he died he would take it with him—if it could be killed. But he had to get those sprinklers activated.