The Empty Ones (28 page)

But he didn't disappear.

He just bent even further, completely in half. The back of his head rested against the backs of his heels. A bouquet of bones sprouted from his stomach, spraying blood. The bones snaked upward in a dozen directions, before articulating and bending downward like spider's limbs. They continued growing until they dug into the wood. The rest of Tub's body grew progressively more limp as the bones expanded, until he was just a sack of soggy flesh. The bone legs hit solid ground, and took the weight of his body into the air. Tub hefted up and swayed there, below the bone-spider, just a wad of pendulous weight hanging like a human ball sack.

He opened his mouth and screamed.

I peed. So much.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

1978. London, England. Meryll.

What did I do? Oh Jesus god damn what the hell did I just do?

I only touched his hand. I didn't mean—

How could I have even—

This isn't happening.

Tub shot me, and I'm dying right now. I'm hallucinating as the blood leaks out of my brain.

The thing that used to be Tub scuttled toward Carey, its thin, bloody bone legs clacking across the plywood. The limp wad of skin that used to be Tub's body quivered with the movement. Somehow, he was still able to scream, a high, terrified, and unceasing wail. He would scream until he was out of breath, take in just enough air, and start screaming again. Carey rolled backwards out of the way of the charge, but not quickly enough. One of the bone spears stabbed through the back of his jacket, pinning him to the plywood stage.

I didn't mean to do that to Tub. I just wanted to knock his teeth in a little bit, maybe castrate him—nothing like this. But when I touched him, it was like with Gus: He just made sense to me. He didn't want to hurt those girls—the others like me; that was true. But he did it anyway. He got good at it. He spent a lot of time learning how to play them, how to twist their emotions, how to act the father figure while still convincing them they were lonely. By the end, they'd do anything for him. I would have done anything for him. I
did
do anything for him. And Tub was ready to throw me away. He set out the traps, pulled the girls in, sucked them dry—and then he killed them.

Like a spider.

That was the last thing I thought when I touched him, just before he started changing.

I finally realized that I was just standing there, mouth open, staring uselessly as Tub squatted over Carey and drooled something black from his mouth. It dripped onto Carey's shoulder and started sizzling through the leather of his jacket. He twisted away from it and managed to get the arm out of the sleeve, but the other was still stuck to the stage.

He was going to die, because of me.

Maybe if I touched Tub again, and I thought of how he was supposed to be—his gray beard, his round chin, his ribs sticking out of his sweater—I could undo this.

I ran forward and grabbed the nearest bone-leg. It was slick with gore and warm to the touch. There was something running down the underside of it. It flexed when the leg moved. Tendons, I guess. I tightened my grip and I thought of the Tub I knew. I tried to put all the anger and betrayal out of my mind. Just Tub and those terrible eggs he made on Sunday. Just Tub and his weirdo jazz records. Just Tub and his smell, like cherries and tobacco.

The bone slid out of my hands, cutting through my palms. It was sharpened at the tips. Then it raised up and lashed out, cutting a deep gash through my arm. I fell. I screamed. I looked around for help, and caught Randall's eye. I wished I hadn't.

That stupid sense of relief I had when the foresight hit me—“he likes me!”—that was gone.

He looked at me like I was a pile of sentient dog shit that had just knocked on his door, trying to sell him magazine subscriptions.

Fine. I'll save your friend's ass on my own then, jerk.

The Tub-spider had its front two legs raised, poised to stab down through Carey's back. Most of its weight was shifted rearward, balancing precariously on a piece of plywood on the end of a sawhorse. I kicked a boot out and caught one of the spider's legs, throwing it off balance just enough to get its attention. It started to turn toward me, but there were no joints left in Tub's actual body. The legs had to rotate that limp bag of face all the way around just to see what had hit it. It took a few seconds, and that was all I needed. I hopped up and stomped down, right on the edge of the plywood. It bounced and jumped off the sawhorse. Both of us went tumbling into the dark, cold mud beneath the stage.

There were little sparks flitting around in the black. Dizzy. I must have hit my head on a rock or something on the way down. I jumped back up and reached for the stage, but it was like being in the ocean at night: I couldn't figure out which way was up. I kicked off of a lump and fell on my side. Bog in my mouth. Tasted like shitty Scotch. My hands just sunk when I tried to push myself up. I could hear the Tub-spider scrabbling around behind me. Something scraped against my boot and made my foot feel wet. Blood, probably.

A thin crack of weak light from above. No time for second thoughts. I jumped for it. My palms slapped wood. Something was pulling on my boot. I pulled back. But I had no traction. I was sliding, back into the dark with that thing.

That thing I made.

Then there was Carey. I'd never been so glad to see his goofy face, all wrong angles and bumps. He was on all fours, shrugging back into the sleeve of his shredded jacket. He looked up and saw me. I smiled. I held out my hand.

He didn't take it.

I reached out for him—

I'm right here, jackass. Be a gentleman and help a lady up.

He threw himself backwards and crab-walked frantically out of my reach.

None of that old, thinly veiled teenage-boy lust left in his eyes. Before, he'd always looked like he wanted to toss me on the ground and fuck me, every single second we'd been together. It had gotten kinda creepy, to be honest. But it was better than this.

Now he looked at me like I was a leper.

From below, the spider pulled. From above, there was no help. I slid backwards. My fingertips pulled up splinters from the wood. Then they lost their grip entirely, and I went backwards into the pit.

*   *   *

Shit. Shit! You rotten-ass coward, what the hell are you doing?

Meryll was counting on me, and I couldn't even put out a hand. It wasn't a conscious decision, I swear. I wasn't even thinking about what she did to Tub, and the possibility of her turning me into, like, a testicle-scorpion or something with her touch. I just got up, and then she was there trying to grab me—a mysterious hand reaching out to grope my face—so I backed away. If I'd had time, I would have saved her.

I
would
save her.

It's not too late.

I crawled to the edge of the hole that Meryll and the bone-spider had fallen in. Couldn't see a damn thing.

Wait, no—movement!

Shit! Movement!

I ducked just as a jagged length of bone speared the place where my head had been. I laid on my belly and tried to shuffle backwards. I didn't get far before the legs started appearing. Slick red shafts of bone coming up from the darkness, moving with that slow spider grace. They spread out to every side of the hole and hefted. Tub's withered body eased into view, his mouth still screaming, his eyes rolled back in his head, looking at nothing.

Shit. Shit. Shitshitshit—

I sang a little song to myself, and every lyric was “shit.”

The spider spread its legs wider and lowered its body, getting ready to pounce.

I pushed off the stage and tried to run, but I tripped over something.

A rusty brown length of rebar, with a round bit of concrete at one end.

Tub's cane.

“Hey, Tub,” I said, gripping the shaft in both hands. “I got something of significance for ya.”

I dove straight into the hole, right below the bulk of the spider. I thrust the cane out in front of me as I fell, and it sunk deep into Tub's withered, hanging face.

I hit bog with a sound like squeezing an empty mustard bottle. I awkwardly shifted around on my back and looked up through the stage. I could only see the spider above me as a silhouette, barely distinguishable from the cloudy night. It twitched and spasmed, made that sound like somebody trying to scream after getting the wind knocked out of them. Then something that felt like a wet garbage bag full of ham hocks fell on me.

I gagged and swore and pushed Tub's mangled body off me. I retched into the muck for a bit, then felt around for Meryll.

If she was hurt, we'd get her help. If she was dead, we'd get her a proper burial. If she was fine, we'd make out.

But she was none of those things. She was just gone.

“Hey,” a voice called from above. I could see the outline of Randall's dipshit face peering down after me. “Are you spider food, or what?”

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

2013. 1.7 Miles Off of Unnamed Rd., Puebla, Mexico. Kaitlyn.

I've never been in one of those sensory deprivation tanks, but this is how I picture it: not cold, not warm. Aware that you're floating, but unaware of the water you're floating in. My sense of self is blurred—the surface of my skin feels indistinct. At once it's here—so close—and there—so far. I'm spread thin, diluted by the water. Above me, the night sky is full of stars. An impossible number of stars. There's nowhere on Earth you can see this many. There's more light than dark. But it isn't pretty or romantic. There's something up there that scares me.

The ocean is still. No waves, no sound. I move my hand—at least, I think I move my hand—but even that causes no ripples.

I know what comes next. I've had this dream before. Something stirs in the dark waters beneath me. Hundreds of feet, thousands of feet—thousands of miles?—below. The stillness begins to give. The water swells around me. All around me, as though something the size of the ocean itself is coming up.

I know this ocean goes on forever.

Whatever lies beneath must go on forever, too.

And it sees me. It's coming for me.

I wait an eternity. The thing in the water is so far away, but it moves fast. Time crawls, but then you look back on how much of it has passed, and it seems like an instant.

The waters around me break. They slosh steadily at first, then grow chaotic and violent. My diluted body is tossed around, folded on itself, spread apart, and whipped into a frenzy. I used to get scared at this point. I knew the thing from below was close now, that it was almost here. But I'm not scared anymore. Or, rather, I'm more scared of the stillness. Of it continuing how it is, forever, and my body slowly merging with the ocean until there's nothing left of me. Most of all, I'm scared of living another minute under those cold, cold stars.

Whatever is coming up from beneath me, at least it's not the stars. In fact, as it gets closer, something strange seems to happen. The stars twinkle. Their light was always steady and unbroken, but now they flicker. Some even go out. The waters are rising all around me now, lifting into the air. Physics dictates that they should be pushed out of the way as whatever this massive thing is emerges. But there's too much of it. It's too late, and there's nowhere for the water to go. Together, the water and I are flung toward the sky. As we lift into the air, the stars drift apart. No, not drifting. They're moving away from me, like a school of fish separating around a shark. They're afraid of the thing in the water, but they're also afraid of the water. I
am
the water, though. And now, I understand, so is the thing.

We break through the sky.

We are in another place. A place that is not this place, as impossible as that is to understand. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt, but if I don't think about it, it makes perfect sense. This place that is not a place is nothing like the place that I know. The angles don't work. Time doesn't flow. I try to move, only to find that I've already moved; I stop moving, only to find that I'm just starting the movements. This is a place made of places. A billon places stacked on one another, woven through each other and fused together to make a new place. A shape like a pyramid that is also a sphere. And all throughout this place there is light. Writhing tubes of cold starlight that snake through the other places, burning wherever they touch. There is no central hub where they meet, just an endlessly dense network of tentacles, twitching like living lightning. They grip the edges of the pyramid-sphere and they pull, twist the shape until it buckles and turns inside out. Now it's a sphere that is also a pyramid, and the other places shake. Some of them disappear entirely, only to be replaced by new places. But the light survives.

It sees me now. The tentacles stretch in my direction. They whip and writhe, grope and lash, and are almost on me. I try to shy away, but I only find myself back where I started. I realize I've already left, even though I've always been here. A fork of light branches off the nearest tube. It touches my leg. It's in my veins. It's burning through my synapses. It's like winter air, emanating from my bones and out toward my skin. I try to scream, but I already was screaming, and I will never stop.

Then the light pulls back. It snaps back and forth in a way that reminds me of a wounded animal. There's something dark creeping up the forks from where it touched me, making its way down the central shaft, joining the others, and spreading.

Corruption.

The light is making a noise, or it always had been, and I just never thought to hear it before. It sounds like static. It sounds like waves. It sounds like screaming.

 …

I jolted awake, which was a bad idea. It felt like somebody had replaced my bones with tin foil. There was something in my mouth, the texture of cottage cheese and the taste of undercooked steak. I spat out a wad of coagulated blood. I looked at the red chunks oozing down the front of my shirt, and threw up.