Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For the first time Diana didn’t push her dresser in front of her door when she went to sleep. She had never expected it to be a deterrent to the monsters that shared her apartment, but it had been a psychological bulwark against the tide of madness that threatened to engulf her. It could no longer serve that purpose. She was fairly certain she was crazy already, or at least well on her way.

She awoke staring into a giant tentacled eyeball.

“Hey, you’re awake,” said Zap.

“I’m awake.”

She climbed out of bed. Zap handed her a robe.

“Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure.”

Diana wondered how long he had been staring at her but decided not to ask because there wasn’t really a good answer to that question. She’d have to set some boundaries for the new monster, but that could wait until she had some breakfast.

She took a quick shower. When she pulled back the shower curtain Zap was hovering over the toilet. He handed her a towel.

“Get out,” she said quietly.

“Yes, maam. Right away, ma’am.” He darted out of the bathroom.

She got dressed, brushed her teeth, combed her hair. The monsters were all waiting in the living room. Vom and Smorgaz sat on the couch. Zap floated in a corner.

Staring at her.

That was going to get old real fast, but before she could confront him the doorbell rang. She didn’t remember having a doorbell before, but maybe it was new.

It was West. “Do you have a minute, Number Five?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have six minutes?”

“Sure.”

He counted on his fingers. “Might take up to seven minutes, now that I think about it.”

“I have the time,” she replied.

“Good. Follow me.”

She followed. Any excuse to get out of the apartment. She couldn’t shake the sensation that Zap was still watching her.

West read her mind.

“He can’t. The building occupies a null point in space-time. A being like your friend cannot see through its walls.”

“That’s good to know.”

West took her downstairs, turning right at a split in the hallway that she was certain hadn’t been there before. A layer of gray filth coated the walls. As they went farther and farther down the seemingly endless corridor, the grime grew blacker and thicker until the sludge under her shoes made a sticky squish with every step. She looked over her shoulder, but an inky darkness crawled along behind them. This was not a metaphor. She could see tentacles and gnarled limbs reaching out, dragging the shadows at a slow, steady rate. She wondered what would happen if they caught up.

West must have read her mind again. “They’re nothing to worry about. All talk.”

She heard them then. Distant, disquieting whispers speaking in insensible languages.

“I wouldn’t listen too closely if I were you,” said West. “You have a strong constitution for this sort of thing, but they can still screw with you.”

Being told not to listen only made it harder not to. Most of the whispers didn’t register, but several voices tried to spoil the endings of movies for her. They failed, probably because the darkness seemed a little behind on the latest cinema.

Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Norman Bates is the killer. Rosebud is a sled.

They reached the end of the corridor before the voices could get to anything more shocking. The door was covered in the same grime. West wiped it from the lock, drew an old-fashioned key from his pocket, and unlocked the door. It opened slowly, and a chill swept from the darkened room on the other side. Hissing fearfully, the shadows retreated from the hall.

He passed over the threshold. Diana paused. She was placing an inordinate amount of trust in a guy who had tricked her into a cursed apartment. She was fairly certain he wasn’t human. He might have been at some point, but now he was something else. Something inscrutable, indefinable. Vom and Smorgaz were monsters, but at least they were up-front about it. For all their dark impulses and inhuman qualities, they were more accessible than West.

He spoke from the interior. “This way, Number Five.”

The hall behind her stretched off into infinity. She got the distinct impression that if she tried to walk down it without West as her guide, it would swallow her, trapping her in an endless walk. She didn’t know where that information came from, but she didn’t doubt it. Her only choices were to tarry here outside the door or go inside. She’d come this far. It was a little late to chicken out.

She pushed open the door, expecting a chamber of horrors beyond mortal ken, but it was only another apartment. It was dusty and cluttered with boxes and junk pushed against the walls. The furniture was old and battered. Stains spotted the carpet. The whole place smelled musty and stank of stale pizza rolls.

Music came from somewhere. It filtered through the walls. The distant, atonal tune could’ve easily been mistaken for random noise but buried underneath its discordant melody lay a hidden harmony that beings from beyond time and space would find comforting. A purely human mind would’ve found its sanity knocked a smidge ajar in ways that wouldn’t have been immediately obvious until it discovered its crippling fear of red shoes and obsession with banana pudding. But Diana only found the music strange and disquieting. And just a touch beautiful.

This should’ve shocked her, but she had already suspected that she was a little bit crazy at this point. She’d seen too much not to be. Sanity and insanity were just words anyway, and only lunatics obsessed over silly little things like words, she’d decided.

A tall, twisted lamp flickered. Diana wasn’t even aware she was reaching for it until West grabbed her by the arm.

“Don’t touch anything, Number Five.”

For only a moment she saw the lamp as something else. Something indefinable but baleful. A foreign thing that lived to devour whatever souls fell into its flickering trap.

“Mind the rug,” said West.

Just a few inches from her right foot a yellowed oval of carpet slowly, almost imperceptibly, crawled toward her. If she stood perfectly still it might reach her in an hour or two. The scratched old coffee table stalked her with the same lack of speed. The paintings stared at her with hungry eyes. The piles of boxes against the walls teetered ever so slightly, trying to work up enough momentum to bury her alive.

Everything here wanted to kill her. Or worse.

“Just stand there,” said West. “You should be fine.”

r, but="0em" width="27">He walked to an old recliner. He waved his hand in front of the chair and a phantom materialized. It was a withered, malformed creature with skin indistinguishable from the chair’s cracked vinyl.

“Say hello, Number Zero.”

The figure opened its mouth. The lips moved. Eight seconds later, the sound crawled across the room to reach her ears. The word was faint, scratchy.

“Hello.”

Zero turned its head toward Diana. Its eyes were two tiny white dots. There was no malice in its expression. Only vacancy.

“I trust I’ve made my point, Number Five,” said West.

She didn’t know what that point was, but she nodded. Anything to get out of this dark corner of discarded insensibility.

West wasn’t fooled.

“Number Zero wanted power,” he said. “I tried to warn him of the consequences of it, but he wouldn’t listen. And now here he dwells until the end of this universe. And quite possibly until the end of the next one after that.”

She nodded again.

West’s hairy eyebrows furrowed, and he snarled. For the first time, she saw his teeth. They were pointy. Like a shark’s teeth.

“Don’t just nod, Number Five. Listen.”

“I am listening,” she replied. “I just don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”

“They never listen. Why do I bother?” He shook his head. “They never listen.”

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “Everybody is so goddamn mysterious all the time. Nobody just comes out and tells me anything. They always just hint and warn and say cryptic nonsense. Why can’t anyone just tell me straight out what they mean?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe you’re just trying to make it more complicated.”

This time West nodded.

“It’s not easy, Number Five. Not easy for me to remember. Remember the way it used to be. Remember the way you see the world. It’s been a long time. A long, long time…”

His gaze drifted across the room, fixed on some far-off place.

“Number Zero was like you,” he said. “He thought he could accumulate all the power in the universe without anyone noticing. He thought there would be no consequences.”

West frowned. His beard writhed ever so slightly. “There are always consequences, Number Five.”

“Uh-huh.” Diana nodded politely. “With all due respect, what the hell are you going on about? I’m not accumulating power. I’m just trying to avoid getting eaten by the unholy menagerie you’ve stuck me with. I took an apartment and had my life turned upside down. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t. And don’t try to feed me any of that karma or subconscious-desire bull. If life worked like that I’d have gotten a winged unicorn when I was six, and I’d be an astronaut who hunts vampires in her spare time.”

West said, “You are not an ordinary person anymore.”

“Maybe not, but I’m going to stay as ordinary as I can despite all the strange monsters and supernatural bizarreness your universe is throwing my way. Now can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”

The thing in the chair (she couldn’t think of it as a person or as ever having been a person) gurgled at her.

“No offense,” she said.

West smiled. “I think there’s hope for you, Number Five.”

“Damn right,” she said. “I can beat this thing.”

He chuckled drily.

“Nobody beats it. The crushing weight of madness is a burden no human mind can carry without strain. All victories are temporary, all defeats inevitable.”

“That’s a cheery thought.”

“Just calling it like I see it.”

“Well, if I can’t avoid it, why bother warning me at all?”

“Because I like you, Number Five. I see something in you that I don’t see in many.”

“And that something is?”

He shrugged. “Something. If I could’ve given it a better label, I would’ve.”

They left Apartment Zero behind. The journey back wasn’t nearly as unsettling.

“I never said you’d be trapped in the apartment. I wouldn’t imagine you will suffer the same fate. There are too many possible dooms in these worlds that I doubt either of us could suspect or imagine the one that will come for you.”

“Great,” she replied. “Because I’d hate for it to be something predictable and avoidable.”

“Be careful, Number Five,” West said. “But not too careful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.” He smiled at her, and she was so taken aback by the expression that by the time she recovered her senses he’d already shuffled back into his apartment.