What the Hell Did I Just Read

  I said, “Wait! What if we refuse to vote? What if everyone refuses—”

  “Then the Master will gorge on a double portion. Is your vote for your Amy? That is a vote to sentence a child to an eternity of torment. How will your Amy live with that choice, I wonder?”

  I said, “Take me instead. Let both of them go, and take me.”

  He did that smirking head-tilt thing douchebags do. “Come on, even you must know that your meat is tainted.”

  John said, “I vote for both of them to go free!”

  I said, “Yeah, me, too!”

  “That is not one of the options.” Nymph looked at his wrist. He was not wearing a watch. “Forty-five seconds! Of course, the confounding factor is how little Maggie’s parents will vote. Perhaps, anticipating that you, as selfish assholes, will vote for your Amy, they will as well, knowing that then at least one can be saved.”

  John said, “Wait! I vote that the monster eats you.”

  I said, “I vote that the monster eats itself!”

  “THOSE ARE NOT THE FUCKING CHOICES. Thirty seconds.”

  I said, “All right, I’m voting Amy goes free.”

  John said, “No, the monster is right, even if Maggie’s parents vote the same, there’s no way Amy can live with herself knowing she’s alive because some other little girl is getting chewed up forever.”

  “There’s no way she can live with herself if she’s dead. And you’d be surprised what a person can get over if given enough time to think up rationalizations.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

  I said, “John, you have to vote! Wait, does Diogee get a vote?”

  John said, “I vote for—”

  My phone rang.

  The screen said it was Amy. I answered.

  “Amy! Is that you!?!”

  Nymph’s mouth snapped shut in mid countdown. He had not been anticipating this.

  Amy said, “Hey, I’ve got a little girl here. She’s fine, but I need you to come and get us.”

  “Amy! Listen to me! There’s something after you! You and the little girl both! You need to—”

  “I’ve taken care of it, we’re fine, we’re at that church by the old coal mine. Oh, and I need you to stop by Walgreens and pick up my prescription, they said it’s ready. And can you get me a bag of those chocolate-covered pretzels while you’re there?”

  John

  John heard Dave say, “Amy, is that you?” and felt the world shift on its axis. Nymph, standing there with his Gordon Gekko suit and slicked-back hair, sneered and turned in Dave’s direction. The call had clearly not been part of his plan. John saw his opportunity.

  John lunged for one of the chainsaws above the mantel. They were very much not just there for decoration (even if, as decoration, John thought they kicked serious ass)—they were always oiled and gassed up, ready to go. See, one thing John had learned about the various creatures they’d faced over the years was that almost none of them liked being sawed in half by motorized metal teeth. Simple biology, really.

  John grabbed the chainsaw and performed a move he had spent hours practicing. In one continuous motion, he started the motor, spun, and swept it through Nymph’s midsection.

  He met very little resistance. The whirring blade buzzed horizontally through the man’s belly … and then the top half of him was nowhere to be found. Everything above Nymph’s navel just dispersed. What had been his torso was now a swarm of fist-sized buzzing creatures, whizzing frantically around the room.

  John looked back at where Nymph was standing and saw that half of him was still there—everything from the waist down remained where it had been, including the man’s expensive slacks and patent leather shoes. The legs started walking toward John on their own, then one of them whipped upward and kicked the chainsaw from John’s hand.

  Disarmed, John lunged forward and grabbed Nymph’s lower body by its belt loops, intending to lift up the legs and chuck them across the room. Then they, too, began to dissolve, from the bottom up—Nymph’s feet dispersed into those flying insects, which still appeared to be made of black polished leather. The ankles were next.

  John followed the flight paths and saw that the shape-shifter swarm was swirling toward the far corner of the room. There, they were quickly re-forming into something new.

  Something made for fighting.

  John saw teeth and claws and spiked armor.

  John screamed, “DAVE! GET THE—”

  But as usual, Dave was already five seconds ahead of the situation. He had the T-shirt cannon in his hands and was already aiming it at the rapidly assembling creature in the corner. Dave aimed carefully.

  One shot, Dave.

  The cannon’s payload was not, in fact, a T-shirt. It contained the Shroud of Turin—the legendary piece of cloth that the body of Christ was wrapped in after crucifixion. Experts were divided as to whether or not the shroud was real or a fake produced during the Middle Ages, an era when selling “holy” relics was all the rage. That was probably why John had managed to buy it for just $150 off eBay, which he thought was a good price either way (listing: $$$ ACTUAL SHROUD OF TAURINE—STAINED WITH SWEAT OF JESUZ—GOOD CONDITION—FREE SHIPPING—WOW!! $$$).

  John was still uselessly clutching the hips of the rapidly disintegrating Nymph—his legs almost entirely gone now—and watched as Dave fired the shroud. It worked perfectly—the projectile unfurled itself in midair, the white cloth stained with the image of a knife-wielding Christ enveloping the creature.

  The monster howled, the contact with the holy artifact burning it and binding it. John, still holding his remaining hunk of Nymph, ran over to it and with a scream of rage, mercilessly beat Nymph with his own ass.

  The insect creatures dispersed. The swarm fled toward the open back door.

  John dove toward a brass switch on the wall. He flipped it—

  Flames roared from the four corners of the door frame. The bugs flew through the blaze and tumbled burning onto the lawn, shriveling up like lit tissues.

  John watched them burn, and yelled …

  Me

  “And don’t make me ass you again!”

  Amy made a skeptical noise and I said, “Just … go with it. That’s mostly what happened. It was really confusing.”

  Amy said, “I can’t breathe, you’re squeezing me.” I released about 20 percent of the hug but kept my arms around her.

  We had rolled up to the church at Mine’s Eye to find Amy sitting under the portico of the front entrance with Maggie Knoll, both of them looking like they’d just swam up out of the ocean. Maggie seemed sluggish, like she’d been drugged, staring off into space. She was shivering and seemed to know only that she was wet and cold and wanted to go home.

  Amy pulled away and said, “She was down there, around the mouth of the mine. Hidden under the water.”

  I said, “Really? How did she, you know, breathe?”

  “They had an apparatus hooked up.”

  John said, “I can see it now—she wasn’t drawing a picture of where she was going to be held. She was drawing a picture of what she would see—the view of the church, as seen from down there, under the water. Maybe she had dreams of it happening in advance or something.”

  We were talking about Maggie as if she wasn’t sitting right there, but she made no effort to shed light on the situation. She had this blank look and I had the alarming thought that maybe she had suffered brain damage, from lack of oxygen or god knows what he (or it, or they) had done to her.

  John said, “I was so close. Right here where we’re standing.”

  I said, “To be fair, when searching for the lair of an unholy creature of the night, who would have ever thought to look around the haunted old coal mine?”

  “I would have figured it out! The thing with Nymph got in the way. That’s probably what he was doing, leading me away from her.”

  Amy was already walking away with Maggie. “Let’s get her home, her parents are prob
ably worried sick. David, can you drive the Impala?”

  “The what?”

  I saw she was walking toward Ted Knoll’s cherry-red muscle car, which was parked behind the church—the car he had reported stolen earlier today. Amy climbed into the back seat so she could be there with Maggie for the trip, putting her arm around her and trying to keep her warm. Maggie laid her head on Amy’s chest and closed her eyes.

  I slid into the Impala, John went to the Jeep. In the back seat, Amy closed her eyes, like she was just going to doze off back there. As if I didn’t still have a thousand lingering questions about all this.

  I said, “So, you figured this out all on your own? How’d you even get out here? Who drove the car?”

  She heard me, I know she did, but there was this long moment before she answered. Almost as if, say, she was quickly trying to come up with a cover story on the fly.

  She said, “I came home from work, and there was a … thing there. Pretending to be you.”

  “Wait, what? Holy shit, Amy.”

  “I saw through it right away, it was all wrong. I tried to get away, but it put me in the car and took me out here. Probably was going to stuff me under the water with her and whoever else he collected.”

  “Jesus. I … Amy, I should have come right back home, I should have known they would come after you.”

  She closed her eyes again and said, “So, I got away and I was able to get her up out of the water and up the hill. Then I called you. That was it. I thought it would come after me but maybe it couldn’t. Maybe the church repels it or something.”

  “You ‘got away’?”

  She didn’t respond, even though it was clear I was asking for her to complete the story.

  I said, “Amy? That’s really all there was to it?”

  “Yeah that’s … mostly what happened.”

  We rode in silence the rest of the way to the Knoll house, shockingly only about five hours after I had been awakened by the call from John. Now, if John was telling this story, he’d probably say that the moment we arrived, the rain stopped and the clouds parted, as if the weather changed for everyone else just to reflect our personal triumphs and failures. But it didn’t, it was that same drumming rain that had been slowly turning the town into brown gravy for the last month. I wondered if Maggie and her parents were going to have to celebrate her rescue by evacuating to higher ground.

  Amy took Maggie by the hand and led her up to the front door. John and I followed. Ted and Loretta both came to the door, for one morning the couple having reconciled in the face of the outside threat. Loretta threw her arms around her daughter and Ted threw his arms around them both.

  I said, “Did Nymph appear here? Demanding you and Loretta pick which girl gets saved?”

  Ted said, “No,” and Loretta shook her head.

  Huh. So that had all been bullshit.

  He said, “You get the son of a bitch?”

  John said, “Let’s just say he won’t be coming back around. Not after he made such an ass of himself.”

  “He what? Is he dead or not?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ted said to his daughter, “You hear that, honey? He’s all gone. The bad man is gone. You’re safe.”

  She pulled away from her father. “No, he’s not! He’s right there!”

  Maggie turned and pointed directly at me.

  BOOK II

  An Excerpt from Fear: Hell’s Parasite by Dr. Albert Marconi

  To understand what occurred, we must ask ourselves a simple question, one which is surprisingly difficult to answer:

  Why do we, as humans, have eyes?

  Your natural response would be, “To see things, you doddering old fool,” but as an answer, that is incomplete to the point of being incorrect. Your eyes fool you on a daily basis because they, quite simply, were designed for a very specific (and for the most part, obsolete) purpose. Remember, the vast majority of species on this planet do not have sight and get along just fine without it; you have no evolutionary need to become aware of the world’s general appearance. You, as Homo sapiens, have eyes primarily so that you can find and kill other living beings.

  The prey we hunted—gazelles and the like—have eyes mounted on the sides of their heads, so that they can see predators coming from all directions. Ours face forward and grant us depth perception, to measure the distance between ourselves and our fleeing dinner. The true, deadly purpose of human sight is also the reason the color red attracts our attention; it is the color of blood, the sight of which would have instantly sent up an internal thrill of alarm or elation, depending on the circumstance. Thus, today you see that hue screaming for your attention from stoplights, fire trucks, and fast-food logos—a calculated appeal to your hardwired bloodlust.

  All of this is to say that our sight is very limited, precisely because it is skewed to serve a few specific functions, all of which are geared toward one singular goal:

  Survival.

  Thus, data that is not immediately relevant to that mission is filtered and discarded—you may have “seen” a thousand automobiles on your commute to work this morning but you will be unable to bring a single one of them to mind—unless, of course, a particular vehicle had swerved into your lane and caused a near-death experience. It is literally a form of tunnel vision, the limits of which you are largely unaware of moment to moment. It is therefore not difficult to circumvent this sense we call vision; even the common flea can effectively vanish before our eyes merely by jumping. It does not take any special intelligence or talent to deceive us. We would do well to remember this.

  Now, extend this concept to the way in which you “see” the world in a metaphorical sense; the internal idea you have of the universe as you would describe it to an inquisitive alien. Remember, the brain and consciousness also evolved with survival in mind, to the exclusion of all else. Thus, your mental perception of the universe suffers from this same tunnel vision—it is in no way geared toward producing an objective view of reality; it only produces a view of reality that will help you survive. You will “see” the universe that you need to see. This is not a metaphor; it is an indisputable, biological fact born out of necessity.

  Whether you “see” the universe as pure or corrupt, peaceful or violent, just or unjust, is largely determined by what you need to believe in order to motivate yourself to continue living for another day. Your perception of reality is therefore also very easy for other beings to hijack for their purposes. Think of the relationship between a cult leader and his followers. He will isolate them and make them believe they are an island in a sea of depravity, that signs of an eminent apocalypse are all around them. If he is adept at his task, members of the flock will readily lay down their lives in defense against this phantom threat. Ask them why, and they will state that their fatalistic beliefs are merely the result of unbiased, objective observation of the world around them. They are telling the truth! They just do not grasp the fact that they do not believe based on what they observe; they observe based on what they have been tricked into believing.

  And so it goes for all of us.

  8. ATTACK OF THE FUCKROACHES

  Me

  John took a bite of a walnut and chocolate-chip pancake and said, “Assuming the little girl wasn’t just confused, what does Nymph gain by imitating you when he goes to kidnap her?”

  I said, “Trying to find logic in anything They do is like asking what motivates glass to cut your mouth when you try to eat it.”

  We were at Waffle House, which I felt was a big step down from Denny’s, which had been our comfort food refuge for years going back to high school. Our Denny’s had never reopened after it burned to the ground a few years ago during an event we refer to only as “The Incident.” Losing Denny’s was one of those things that I wouldn’t have thought would create a hole in my life, but it did (though still not as much as when all the stores in the area stopped carrying Mountain Dew Code Red last year). We’d worried that the Waffle House had gotten f
looded out already, but not only was it open, but the waitress claimed the chain is so famous for staying open during disasters that FEMA has a “Waffle House Index.” They can actually judge the scale of a natural disaster by how many Waffle House locations have closed in the area.

  Amy was nursing a cup of hot tea, and had made the comment that she was never going to eat waffles again.

  I said, “Would you have preferred Taco Bill? I think they’re still open.”

  “Can’t stand the smoke. And the only thing I like there is those frozen things. The Choco Taco.”

  John said, “I wonder if there’s a porno by that name.”

  Amy said, “And I disagree. About there being no logic. We need to find out exactly how and why it does what it does. Everything operates by rules. Everything has limits, everything has a weakness. You just have to understand them.”

  I noticed that the three of us had in turn referred to Nymph as “he,” “they,” and “it.” I said, “Just to reduce confusion, let’s all agree to refer to Nymph as a person, even though we all know he was not actually a person and was some kind of, uh, swarm of bugs that serve something else. The ‘Master.’ For now, we’re going to refer to him as a man, just for simplicity’s sake.”

  John said, “Well, he’s not even the problem at the moment, right? The more immediate issue is if Ted goes looking for more evidence and every sign points to you having kidnapped his child.”

  I shushed John and gave a nervous look around. “Dude, we are in public right now.”

  “We’re in Waffle House. Half the people here are probably murderers. So, if he can imitate anybody, why not turn himself into her mom, or dad? Wouldn’t that make the abduction easier? Going as you is no different from going as himself, you’re a stranger to her. Plus, look at you. No little girl is going to follow you anywhere. It’s a horrible disguise.”

  “So, maybe he did it to frame me? Just to be a dick? Look around—cruelty doesn’t need a reason.” I looked at Amy. “It’s like those whales.”