Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER SIX

The farther Diana walked, the more alien the universe around her became. She noticed more and more oddities. Like a tenstory building that floated a few feet above the ground. Or a dog with a human face being walked by a human with a dog face. Or the swelling and contraction of the pavement under her feet in a nearly imperceptible way, as if it were built on the back of a giant, slumbering monster.

That was what was so maddening. She couldn’t rule out any possibilities now. She’d never been a contemplative soul. Like most people, she had usually been too busy living her day-today life to dwell on deeper mysteries that she was certain she’d never understand anyway. She had just taken most things on faith and trusted that someone would figure it out.

Now she’d discovered the human race was little more than a mass of microbes squirming on a thin slice of reality they foolishly labeled “the universe.” The revelation that there was nothing special about humanity didn’t shock her. Not specifically. She’d always been cynical about that sort of thing. The idea that reality was all too big to even quantify in any meaningful way didn’t disturb her much either. Except, deep down, she’d assumed there was some inherent logic at work. Like ricocheting molecules congealing into planets and stars, dogs and cats. At least that made sense, even if it w’t very comforting. At least it put things in neat little boxes with neat little labels that she didn’t always understand but could rely on in terms of familiarity.

Too bad it had all turned out to be bullshit.

Instead she found herself in a world where everything was possible, without a mental filing cabinet into which she could collate her perceptions. Everything was one giant heap, too big to be swept under the rug, too noisy to shut the door on.

Too much imagination had never been a concern for Diana, but with her new perceptions a switch had been flipped. She envisioned the universe as being run by tremendous, godlike butterflies looking down on their creation and debating whether it was shiny enough to keep or whether they should just throw it away and start again. She pictured everything as a dream. Her dream. A never-ending fantasy that would start all over once she died. Over and over again. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe she was just a phantom in someone else’s fantasy world. Hell, she might have been a robot for all she knew.

Every possibility, no matter how disturbing, inconceivable, or downright stupid seemed feasible now. She cursed every single Twilight Zone episode she’d seen for planting the seeds of schizophrenia in her brain. Although it wasn’t technically mental illness if you were more aware, your sense of reality more expanded. Or maybe it was. Maybe all this was just her addled mind snapping, and she was just alert enough to realize it. She wondered whether you could be crazy and know it at the same time. Then she got pissed when she realized any answer she reached would be suspect by its very nature.

Diana mumbled to herself, targeting the first object for her annoyance that came to mind. “Screw you, Rod Serling.”

She paused, stopping before her apartment building. She hadn’t meant to come back here. She’d merely been walking without paying attention.

But here she was.

There was something comforting about the place. Something terrifying. Most terrifying was how comforting she found it. Like she belonged here now.

She entered the building, and everything suddenly felt better. The world outside was a strange, monstrous realm. The world inside was just as strange. So why did she find it less bizarre, less jarring?

The door to West’s apartment opened, and he stuck his head out. “Hey, Number Five. Can you bring me that package on the stoop?”

Having just passed the stoop, she hadn’t noticed a package. A glance over her shoulder showed a box wrapped in brown paper sitting behind her. She couldn’t have entered without tripping over it.

“Hurry it up, Number Five,” said West.

When Diana turned to pick up the package, it had disappeared. She walked back to the open apartment door and said, “It’s gone.”

“Better not be,” replied West with a snort.

From her vantage point the package was back in iplace. She walked toward it, each step taken with care and deliberation. With each step the package became lighter and lighter until it was transparent—then, just when she was within reach, it faded away. She walked back down the hallway, and when she reached West’s door the package was back.

He swaggered over to her. “Well, where is it?”

“It keeps disappearing.”

“Are you thinking about something else when you reach for it?”

“Something else?”

West’s heavy eyebrows furrowed. “You can’t think about picking up the package while you’re picking up the package. It’ll hear you coming that way.”

She nodded, more to herself than to him. “Maybe it’d be easier if you just got it yourself.”

He frowned. “That’s no good. It knows me too well. Can smell me from a mile away.”

So could she, but she refrained from suggesting a bath might be in order.

“If you don’t get that package, every living thing in Barcelona is going to die,” said West.

She believed him. Not just because she was in a state of mind to believe anything and everything, but because he said it so matter-of-factly, as if commenting on an annoying weather prediction. Oh, darn, the picnic is going to be ruined. Fiddledee-dee.

He vanished into his darkened apartment.

Diana decided that if she could save everyone in Barcelona, then at least she could say she’d done something worthwhile with her life. She moved toward the package.

It vanished.

Damn. It was onto her.

West’s voice came from the darkness. “Three minutes.”

“I’m working on it,” she called back.

“Well, it’s no problem. Not like anyone of any great importance is in Barcelona or anything. Not like the entire future of the human race hinges on the fate of one Spanish city.”

She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. West’s delivery was flat, and her gauge of reality was hardly reliable.

She stuck her hands in her pockets, whistled a jaunty tune, and sauntered toward the package. She attempted to occupy her mind with thoughts of turtles and jelly doughnuts. Why turtles and jelly doughnuts? She didn’t have a clue. Just the first two things that popped into her head. Out of all the things in her expanding universe, she questioned what these two objects said about her. It wasn’t that they were bad. It was just that they seemed an odd pairing, two things that didn’t go together. And she wondered what it said about her perceptions and logic that these were the two things that sprang to her mind as if they were the most natural combination in the world.

“Aha!”

Diana pounced on the package. It vibrated in her hands as if trying to vanish, but she held tight. Her distracting thoughts had worked. Almost too well, as she must’ve wasted a good minute or two standing beside the package before grabbing it, but she had it now.

“Nineteen seconds,” called West.

She ran in and handed him the paper-wrapped box. He took it and set it on a shelf beside several other identical boxes.

“Hummph,” said West. “Didn’t think you’d make it.”

She said, “So what about Barcelona?”

“What about it?”

“Is it going to be okay?”

“Should hold for another day or two,” replied West.

He shuffled over to an overstuffed couch and collapsed into it. “Something I can do for you, Number Five?”

She realized she was standing in West’s apartment, a shadowy realm in perpetual twilight. The décor, what she could see of it, was straight out of the seventies. The brightest thing in the room was a unusually large lava lamp that cast a greenish glow. The wax inside swirled in strange patterns. If she squinted just right, she thought she saw an eye floating somewhere within, and it glared at her.

A black-light octopus poster squirmed on the wall. It twisted and distorted like one of those bad motion-imitation pictures won as Cracker Jack prizes. And West’s couch swayed as if on board a boat, even though all the other furniture stayed put.

Yet the weirdness of this apartment was somehow less foreign and unsettling than the real world (whatever that meant) outside this building’s front door.

“What’s in the package?” she asked.

“There’s nothing in the package, Number Five.”

West jumped to his feet and marched forward.

“There’s nothing in any of the packages if they know what’s good for them.”

Most of the boxes hopped deeper into the shelf recesses. One leaned forward, challenging West.

“Oh, someone’s got an attitude, does he?” West’s voice rose. Not much. But enough to be noticed, which in itself was surprising enough to unsettle Diana. “Someone thinks he’s too good for the shelf, does he?”

The package growled.

“You’ll stay formless, and you’ll like it,” said West. “Just remember that once you take on flesh, it means you’ll have an ass for me to kick.”

West stared down the package.

“Well, I can see you’re b,” said Diana. “I’ll just leave you to… uh… taunt the boxes.”

She was a few steps out of the apartment and down the hall when West spoke up.

“It will get easier,” said West.

His face, covered by hair, was as unreadable as his voice, but she thought she saw his thick mustache twitch with the traces of a smile.

“The period of adjustment varies from individual to individual,” he said, “but it always gets better. One way or another.”

“One way or another?”

“Oh, you know. Crossword puzzles. Pornography. Video games. Knitting. Madness. Death. We all find a way of coping, Number Five.”

His dark eyes focused on a point on a distant horizon. He chuckled through a tight, closed mouth. Then an awkward silence, at least as far as Diana was concerned, passed between them. She suspected West didn’t even notice.

“Uh… thanks,” she said.

Something crashed inside his apartment. Grumbling, he went back to deal with the problem. She hoped Barcelona or Paris or whatever else would be okay, but it wasn’t her problem anymore. Her problem was waiting in her apartment.

And he was not alone.

Vom the Hungering sat on the sofa. The green-furred monster had something stuck in his mouth. His cheek bulged. She wondered if it was a whole pig or a small child and decided she’d rather not know.

The giant rubber hedgehog hunched beside the coffee table.

“I know I saw it go under here,” he said. “I think it ran into the kitchen,” said Vom. “Oh, hey, Diana.” He grinned. Glimpses of red velvet showed between his sharp teeth. He spit out the sofa pillow he’d been sucking on like an industrial-sized Life Saver.

“Sorry. Helps to keep my mind off my eating disorder.”

He returned the saliva-coated pillow to its spot on the couch.

“One day at a time and all that,” said Vom.

She was annoyed, but only for a moment. Having Vom devour pillows was preferable to anything else that came to mind. She could’ve lived without his slimy drool soaking into the upholstery, but it wasn’t her couch.

The hedgehog stood. He held a miniature version of himself in one hand.

“Oh, hello,” said the monster to Diana.

“Diana, this is Unending Smorgaz,” said Vom.

“Hi,” she said.

“Do you want to take care of this for me, Vom?” Smorgaz threw his miniature to Vom, who snapped it down in a single bite. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Diana wanted to sit down but didn’t want to sit next to Vom and his indiscriminate jaws. The air shimmered, and a recliner materialized beside her. She wasn’t sure if she had caused it or if the apartment itself had created the chair, but it seemed a moot point. She plopped into the recliner.

“Smorgaz, could you excuse us a moment?” she asked. “I need to talk to Vom.”

“Say no more. Think I’ll go for a walk. Anyone want anything while I’m out?”

“Could you bring back a few dozen pizzas?” asked Vom. Diana could’ve probably wished for pizzas, but eating magical pizzas conjured up from the nethersphere didn’t sound very appetizing.

“Sure thing. Do you want the pizza delivery guy too?”

Vom’s stomach growled. Literally, the mouth on his gut grumbled, licking its lips.

“No pizza delivery guys,” said Diana. “Or gals. Or puppies or kittens or anything like that.”

Vom frowned. “Can we at least get sausage on the pizzas?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, a dozen sausage pizzas coming up.” Smorgaz trundled out the door, but she stopped him.

“Do you have any money?”

“No.”

“How do you intend to pay?”

“Pay?” Smorgaz tilted his head at an angle and a most curious expression crossed his face. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the question.”

“You have to pay for them somehow.”

“I do?”

Unending Smorgaz glanced at Vom, who shrugged.

“She’s unconventional.”

Diana contemplated how Smorgaz planned on securing those pizzas, but, of course, he was a monster. Monsters didn’t carry cash. They just took what they wanted without thought for the consequences. That wouldn’t do. She couldn’t unleash a beast into the streets to terrorize every pizza delivery vehicle he stumbled across.

She pulled some cash out of her wallet and handed it to Smorgaz. “Just seven blocks south, on the Corner of O’Brian and Swaim, there’s a little shop that sells two medium cheese pizzas for a good price.”

“Only two?” whined Vom. “And what about the sausage?”

“Fine.” She gave Smorgaz another few dollars and some change to cover tax.

“What about garlic bread?”

Se opened her wallet to let Vom see how empty it was. He slouched and stuffed the pillow back into his mouth with a pout.

Smorgaz left.

While she organized her thoughts, Vom noisily chewed like a petulant three-year-old.

“Pork is meat,” he grumbled.

“Yes, it is.”

“Puppies are meat,” he said.

“You’re not eating puppies. Not while I’m around.”

“Have you ever eaten a puppy? They’re delicious.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t everything delicious to you?”

“I don’t care for broccoli,” he replied.

She stared at him skeptically.

“Just because I’ll eat it doesn’t mean I like it.” He leaned forward. “Anyway, when you get right down to it, everything in this universe is just a handful of atoms arranged in peculiar ways. Puppies aren’t different than pigs, carbon and nitrogen. It seems unfair to just eat one because of your own arbitrary cultural standards of acceptability.”

“Arbitrary, yes,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t change anything.”

“What about dogs? Full-grown ones, I mean?”

“No dogs.”

He opened his mouth, but she cut him off.

“Just assume that if I haven’t okayed it, it’s off-limits.”

Annoyed, he swallowed the pillow.

“It’s clear we need to lay some ground rules,” she said. “If we’re going to be stuck with each other, we have to figure a way to make this work.”

“Agreed.” Vom snorted. “I just don’t see why I have to make all the sacrifices.”

“My sense of reality has crumbled. I’m bound to a monster that wants to devour everything all the time, including me. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose my sanity eventually. So if I’m going to have to deal with all that, the least you can do is not eat puppies.”

Vom shrugged. “Fair enough.”

“What I need from you now is some explanations about how all this… weirdness functions. If this is the world I have to live in, I’m damn well going to understand it. For starters, I need to know why the hell that monster tried to kill me this morning and now he’s hanging around, fetching us pizza.”

“Do you want the complicated answer? Or the simple one?”

A three-inch Smorgaz climbed up the wall beside Vom. He nabbed it and stuffell going in one set of jaws while talking with another.

“The short answer is because of your connection with me, you aren’t quite in tune with your native reality anymore. It’s not a big deal, doesn’t really have a big effect on the universe. But it makes you a beacon, a shining light that draws the attention of certain misplaced inter-dimensional entities, such as myself and Smorgaz, seeking to reorient themselves in a confusing, unfamiliar world.”

“He was confused and frightened and that made him want to kill me.”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you. He was just attracted to the nearest thing that reminded him of home. It’s like he’s a lost rat that stumbled into someplace he doesn’t belong and he scrambled toward the nearest… rat hole he came across.”

She snarled.

“Maybe that came out wrong,” he said. “These rules aren’t universal. Plenty of alien things slip into your reality and either perish quickly or adjust without need of an anchoring force. But some are like me or Smorgaz, we don’t die, but we also function at such different levels that without something to ground us, we’d eventually probably do some very bad stuff. Mind you, most of that stuff would be the unintentional damage of a bewildered animal thrashing around in an ill-fitting cage.”

“So you must have known something like this was going to happen,” she said. “Otherwise, why would you have followed me?”

“I expected it sooner or later, but I had figured later rather than sooner. Just the same, I tagged along because… well, it’s not like I had anything better to do. And I like you. I like being around you. Being near you keeps me focused, relaxed, like a soothing melody.” Vom snapped his fingers. “Hey, that sounds a lot better than the rat-hole metaphor I tried earlier, doesn’t it?”

“Just a bit. Let me guess… now that I’m Smorgaz’s reassuring tune I’m stuck with him just like I’m stuck with you.”

“I’d avoid using the word stuck when Smorgaz is around. He’s a little sensitive. And when he gets this insecure he starts spawning like mad. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in clones before you know it.”

“You don’t have eyeballs.”

“Figure of speech.”

“That’s his thing then?” she asked. “Spawning?”

“Yep. That’s his thing. Nobody does it better.”

The sound of tearing carpet drew her attention to another pint-sized Smorgaz.

“Yeah, you should probably get used to that,” said Vom. “Even when he’s trying to keep it under control, he usually spits out at least one Smorgaz Jr. every ten minutes. The unintentional ones tend to dissolve after about an hour, but they can be a handful.”

The small creature raised its head and smiled at Diana as it shredded some carpet with its claws. Vom leaned forward as if to spring off the couch and pounce on the creature.

“Oh, I forgot the new policy. Is it okay for me to eat Smorgaz’s half-formed spawns? Or are they on the puppy list?”

She mulled it over.

“Oh, come on,” said Vom. “You can’t seriously have a problem with that? They’re destructive little bastards who were never meant to exist in this slice of reality and have a shelf life of an hour.”

His argument was hard to counter aside from some squeamishness on her part. But of all the things he could request to eat, this seemed most reasonable.

“Okay, okay.”

The small Smorgaz yipped and dashed behind the entertainment center.

“Just as well,” said Vom. “They have a weird aftertaste.”

There was a knock on the door.

Vom perked up. “Is that Smorgaz? Are those the pizzas?”

“Down, boy.”

“I call dibs on the four biggest slices.”

She suspected it wasn’t Smorgaz. He wasn’t a fast creature, and even if he had returned with the pizzas she wouldn’t expect him to knock. He lived here. She didn’t know what to expect, but it wouldn’t have been surprising to discover yet another weird monster entering her life. Instead it was a tall, goodlooking stranger.

It was weirder than a monster.

“Hi, I’m Chuck. Chuck from Apartment Number Two. Down the hall.” He glanced to his left, then his right, then down, then up. Then, just to be perfectly sure, he looked behind himself and double-checked his right flank again. “Could I borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Number Two?” she said. “Oh, that’s the apartment with the… dog in front of it, right?”

He nodded, put his finger to his lips. “Keep your voice down. It’ll hear you.”

She peeked out into the hallway. The scaly creature was curled up outside Apartment Two’s door, and it appeared to be sleeping. But it didn’t have eyelids, so its bulbous dark eyes were always wide open.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I just need some sugar. I’m baking a cake, and I’m a little low.”

“Cake?” said Vom. “What kind of cake?”

“Does it really matter?” asked Diana.

Vom scowled. “We get it. I’m a voracious omnivore. You don’t have to keep pointing it out.”

“Sorry. Didn’t realize you were sensitive about it.”

“Sugar?” repeated Chuck.

“One second. Let me go check.” She jogged into the kitchen, opened all the cupboards and drawers, but came up empty. Reality-warping magical powers at her disposal, and she couldn’t find a single sugar packet.

Vom poked his head in the kitchen. “Check your pockets.”

She found handfuls of sugar in her pants. She emptied a small pile onto the counter.

“Did I do that or did you?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Don’t suppose you have a cup on you?”

Vom opened the freezer and pulled out an irregularly shaped mug.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t mention it, but if lover boy happens to have an extra slice of cake lying around—”

“You got it.”

Diana scooped the sugar into the mug and returned to Chuck.

“Here. Hope this is enough.”

He took the cup. He glanced at the beast guarding his door, then silently mouthed a thank-you.

You’re welcome, she mouthed back.

She smiled, and he returned it with a warm, if slightly nervous, grin. He tiptoed down the hall and disappeared back into his apartment. When the door clicked shut, the dog hopped up and unleashed a long, high-pitched shriek. It sniffed along the edge of the door before snorting, retching up a glob of snot that it immediately gobbled down.

Unending Smorgaz trundled up the stairs, past the dog, and pushed his way past Diana.

“One side,” he said. “Hot pie, coming through.”

“Finally!”

Vom seized one of the boxes and jammed it halfway into his mouth, but he paused under Diana’s and Smorgaz’s watchful stares. Vom removed the pizza, set it on the coffee table, and slouched in a sulk.

“Oh, okay,” said Diana. “You can have one pizza all to yourself, but you might want to savor—”

Gleefully he snatched up the coffee table and swallowed the pizza box and a third of the table in one huge bite.

“This is a great pie. Love the touch of sawdust.” His attention turned to the second pizza.

“Are you going to eat all that?”