The Academy (37 page)

Eerie took another step forward, dropping the paper bag into her knitting basket and then clutching the basket handle in both hands.

“Don’t you remember, Alex? Hasn’t this happened already?” Eerie voice was distant, her eyes wet and unfocused. “Are you dreaming now, Alex? Isn’t it hard to tell?”

Alex shook his head, utterly dumbfounded. He had no idea what the girl was talking about, but at the same time, it made him terribly nervous. Something he had dreamed, maybe, a strange sense of déjà vu… he wasn’t certain. He was, however, certain that Eerie was standing too close to him, and he half-stumbled a few steps away.

“I don’t understand.” Alex felt hot, almost feverish. There was a strange buzzing sound that seemed to emanate from the back of his neck, like static from the base of his skull. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“Can you feel it already?” Eerie asked softly. “The slippage. Dislocation. Oh, so very lonely. Haven’t I already told you my secret?”

Eerie’s eyes were half-closed now, and her arms were wrapped around herself tightly. She stumbled forward, dazed, almost colliding with Alex in the process. He caught her awkwardly, trying to push her away and stand her upright at the same time, without much success in either endeavor.

“The Church of Sleep, Alex.” Her melodic voice was barely a whisper, and he had to strain to hear it. “Surely you’ve noticed. Don’t you fall asleep earlier and earlier, since you came here? Can you remember going to bed when you wake up?”

“Yes,” Alex replied, his throat hoarse, “and no.”

Eerie clutched herself even tighter, the folds of sweater pulled tight across her chest in a way that he found quite distracting. Her skin was flushed, and icy cold where Alex’s fingers brushed against her shoulder. She pressed her forehead against his chest, and he was afraid that she really would fall over, she seemed so out of it.

“And when you wake up, sometimes, and you feel like someone is there with you.” Eerie’s voice had lost all of its interrogative qualities, replaced with something that sounded more like a bald statement of fact. “And sometimes, when you wake up, you know things that you didn’t know before. But you’ll never remember another dream, now that you’ve come here.”

“H-How,” Alex stammered, “how is it that you know these things?”

“The Church of Sleep, Alex.” Eerie looked at him as if she had answered his question in full. “When we sleep, we are programmed. What else could sleep be? But who does the programming, and to what end? To where do they drive us?”

Li put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, and the strange atmosphere immediately deflated, Eerie retreating back from him hurriedly, as if she’d only now realized how close they were. Alex felt confusion as well as a profound sense of relief.

“Try not to overwhelm Alex,” Li said to Eerie, patting her on the head affectionately. “You can’t try and tell him everything all at once.”

Eerie’s shoulders slumped and she looked distraught, and for some reason, Alex immediately felt guilty. What was it with this girl? He didn’t understand anything. But his head was starting to clear, and whatever strange effect the girl’s words had on him was already fading.

“I’m sorry, Alex.” Eerie looked at him, unaccountably sad. “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“Everything is fine, Eerie,” Alex insisted. “Nothing bad happened.”

Eerie looked one way, then the other, and then leaned in close so that Alex could hear her whisper.

“I’ll help you out with something, then, to make up for it.” Alex felt a bit nervous with her standing this close, but this time he didn’t pull away. Whatever it was Eerie had to say, he was sure he wanted to hear it. “Walking in the snow, under a grey sky, you will wonder if it is okay. I won’t be able to say it, then, because I’m shy. Alex,” Eerie whispered, her lips so close to his ear that he could feel her breathe. “It’s okay with me.”

Eerie straightened back up, and then smiled at him. Her oval face lit up when she smiled, and he was struck by how familiar she looked, how nostalgic, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. Alex could only stare at her and wonder what any of what she said had meant.

Alex found himself shaking his head, trying to clear it.
Had
this all happened before? Why was it that he kept thinking about a cloud of golden butterflies, wheeling and diving in rough unison under the brilliant afternoon sunlight near Half Moon Bay? Had he ever actually seen that? Whose memory was it?

“Something bad is coming, Alex. Right now. It’ll hurt a bit,” Eerie said sadly, kicking at the ground absently, “but you’ll have to make it through without my help. Don’t worry, though,” she said reassuringly. “I know you will.”

Where Eerie had stood, there was only a cloud of golden smoke, dissipating in the wind, smelling delicately of sandalwood. Alex turned back toward the rest of the party, wanting to ask someone what had happened.

The party had become a still-life portrait. Sarah was frozen in midsentence, caught up in conversation with Renton and a black girl he didn’t recognize. Li was right behind them, along with Vivik, Todd, and two other guys that Alex vaguely remembered from class. All of them were rigid, silent, flesh-colored statues arrayed across the jumbled surface of the roof. Alex took a step closer, and realized that even the beer in the bottle Renton was drinking from was inert, held in perfect suspension in the neck of the bottle.

He heard a strange, metallic sound from behind him and spun around. Hovering in front of him, perhaps twenty feet above the roof of the building, a thing that he could not stand to look at directly loomed over him with its many terrible eyes, and screamed.

The scream was not like anything Alex had heard before. It was barely even a sound. He felt revulsion from the very depths of his being, and was immediately sick, coughing up bile as his stomach contracted and heaved. The sound the creature made was like a terrible reverberating siren, endless and punishing, battering his mind and thoughts into fragments. His chest and abdomen were racked with spasms, and his legs twisted and collapsed underneath him. He spilled onto his contorted back, unable to move, pinned down by the sheer horror of the thing, the noise, the horrible piercing shriek.

There was a sudden wetness on his face, and then he realized that his nose was bleeding. His vision blurred, and an impression of the thing seemed to be burned into his retina, so that every time he blinked he saw an afterimage of its horrible shape. The light refracted around it bizarrely, disorienting Alex, filling him with a formless and intolerable anxiety. The scream drilled into him, it ate away at everything around him, corroding reality. The world would not tolerate an existence like the one above him and in its desperate attempt to shed the abomination, the world itself was unraveling around him.

Alex felt it in the stone crumbling beneath his hands, in the crawling of his skin, everything rejecting the monster’s existence on a molecular level, like a cancer afflicting the world. The air hissed and smoked where it met the distended grey appendages and the building beneath began to shudder and fracture. It was translucent, but even the moonlight that eked through the glutinous mass was corrupted and ruined. The monster was so fundamentally abominable that Alex could not help but understand: the world around him was dying rather than accepting the existence of this thing, and if he stayed there too much longer, he would as well.

It took hold immediately, flashing through the front part of his skull like a migraine, the strange vertigo as his mind executed the implanted instructions, out of his control. He reached back without his hands, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, hidden in a place in his head that he had never thought to look before Rebecca had shown him how. Alex reached for the Black Door. It did not matter that he couldn’t move his body, that he couldn’t even blink. Even as the unrelenting horror beat down on him, peeling his soul away layer-by-layer, like an onion, he felt the Black Door creak open, frost crunching and tinkling as it slid wide.

The cold light burned as he breathed it in like smoke. It filled him, and then worked its way up out from the core of him, rigid and strong, a luminescent sheen that extended a few millimeters beyond his skin, sheathing him in frigid incandescence. Around him, the air hissed and steamed, agitated by the heat above and the utter absence below. He managed to get one knee underneath him, still aware of the tremendous pressure from above, the tension as his whole body tried to tear itself apart. But he forced the door inside open wider, and the flood of cold light supported him, pressure flowing outwards from within.

He made it to his feet, heedless of the blood the trickled down from his nose and the corners of his eyes. All along his skin, as the air passed through his lips, he soothed and slowed the air molecules, bleeding the heat off into the Ether. He pushed further, and reached outwards, stripping the surrounding atmosphere of its kinetic energy, siphoning it directly into the Ether, where it dissipated like steam. Alex couldn’t remember anyone teaching him how to do this, but he found it was surprisingly easy.

Alex raised his arms to either side of him, surrounded by a bubble of cool, still air, the stone frozen solid beneath him; a glimmering, blue-white light radiating from his chest. Frost crawled across the roof, radiating out from where Alex stood, beneath the horror of the thing in the sky. There was a strange, tinkling sound as the water molecules in the air coalesced and froze, and then fell to the ground, shattering musically on the stained concrete.

Alex was unaware of all this, as the horrible pressure from the thing above him beat down on his unprotected mind. Even though he was bleeding the heat and motion out of the surrounding area, he could not do anything about the crushing gravity the thing exuded, and Alex could feel his bones disintegrating under the strain with a sickening surety. His breath was a dense fog now, and it was impossible to see through the layer of superheated mist roiling at the edge of the bubble.

Alex pushed even harder, then, until his mind was filled with a cold radiance.

Then there was no more, or no further, and for a moment, he faltered. It was enough. The bubble collapsed around him and for a moment, he felt the full force of the thing’s scream again. He felt his legs crumple beneath him, and Alex collapsed backwards into Rebecca’s arms, who gathered him up like a child. The moment she touched him, the terrible pressure was gone, and the scream silenced, without as much as an echo, and he wanted to kiss her. Alex could see the illuminated script of the barrier protocol that Rebecca activated clearly, a copper dome of beautiful but unreadable words that arced over the both of them.

“Shh… Alex, it’s okay…” Alex realized he was screaming, and stopped. Rebecca hugged him tightly to her chest, her arms hooked underneath his own, supporting him. “I’ve got you, now.”

Her next words were louder, and clearly not directed at him.

“I’ve collected Alex, whenever you less sociable types want to earn your pay,” Rebecca shouted. She then grinned down at Alex, who was still trying to get his legs to hold him up again. “I hope you had a nice party, anyway.”

Alex discovered that, in Rebecca’s arms, he could look at the thing. It hovered in midair, writhing and amorphous, like a gigantic amoeba, extending tentacles and formless limbs in all directions. Some of them were elongated and ended in things that looked like mouths, if flowers had mouths – brilliant red and wet and on the inside, cellulose ridged with teeth hooked like thorns. Other limbs ended in strange, flower-like blooms, and at the center of each, there were a cluster of black eyes, like an insect. Around the periphery of the monster the air burnt and smoldered, disintegrating rather than come into contact with the horror. The entire world recoiled, Alex realized, and had he not activated the protocol, his body would have done the same.

A cluster of arms drooped down from the thing’s misshapen bulk, stretching in a way that made Alex nauseous. He felt panic as the flower heads bloomed at the end of the tentacles, exposing terrible black eyes and toothy, gaping maws. Where it touched the building it left behind a viscous trail of yellow-tinted slime, and the stone crumbled and sizzled where it dripped. Alex wanted to scream, but then he felt Rebecca in his mind, her hand on his chest, and the fear began to dissipate. He watched the arms descend down toward the barrier with an odd feeling of curiosity, nothing like the fear of impending death.

The limb was disintegrated before it made contact, dissipating into a mist of disconnected tissue, less like it hit a wall and more like it was hit with a wall.