Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

West knocked on the door.

Diana knew it was West before she even answered, because his knock was peculiar. Two quick raps, a pause, and then a third harder rap. She thought about not answering, but the thought took too long to mature. She was already turning the doorknob when it hatched, and there was no going back by then.

West held a cardboard bucket of fried chicken against his hip. While he was always a disheveled soul, now his drab clothes were covered in brown and gray dirt. It coated his wild beard.

“You like gravity, don’t you, Number Five?” he asked.

Zap, sitting on the sofa, chimed in. “Gravity is highly overrated, if you ask me.”

She ignored the comment, but she did take a moment to mull it over.

“I’m for it,” she said.

“Good. I could use your help then.” He offered her the chicken bucket.

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

A lie. She was always hungry now. It was only the smallest portion of the ravenous compulsion that raged throughout Vom’s being. While it was rarely overwhelming, her appetite was never satisfied. But she was getting used to the hunger. A hunger she very deliberately did not indulge for fear of where it might lead if fed too well.

“I’ll take it if she doesn’t want it,” said Vom.

West’s mustache twitched, releasing dust particles into the air. “It’s not for either of you. I just need you to carry it for me, Number Five.”

He turned and walked down the hall, leaving a trail of sand in his wake. She followed.

She asked, “This isn’t going to end with me facing down an army of giant cockroaches with only a bucket of chicken to defend myself, is it?”

He shrugged. “Can’t make any promises, Number Five.”

They took a turn down an unfamiliar hallway. She was used to that. Maybe West was the only one who knew the building’s secrets, although she doubted even he knew them all, butshe was getting the hang of it. The trick was not to expect anything and to be ready for anything.

They ascended several flights of stairs that led to a door.

Despite her resolve not to be confounded, she was getting a little nervous. At the same time she was excited by the prospect of what lay behind that door, excited to peel back another layer of an increasingly strange universe. She didn’t quite believe there was no going back to a normal life, but while she was here she might as well find something positive about it.

West opened the door, revealing just another hallway.

She was disappointed, and that told her what she needed to know. She might have started out a reluctant prisoner of this weirdness, but something had changed. She didn’t know if she was getting used to it or if she was being corrupted by the madness always around her. Either way, the peculiar didn’t seem quite as peculiar as it once had, and the ordinary was…

She wasn’t quite sure what it was anymore.

Predictable? Reliable? Safe?

Boring.

And boring was supposed to be good. But Diana cringed, if only just a little, at the thought of going back to it.

West walked down the hall, and she followed. The air smelled sweet, but not in a good way. It was the sweetness of decay, of milk turning and meat two days past its expiration date. She’d always had a weak stomach, but it didn’t bother her.

A door opened and a pale thing stepped into view. It looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but with a featureless face. It wore a gray housecoat and had a gray scarf wrapped around its lump of a head.

The thing withdrew into its doorway as they passed. It shrieked, and nearly all the other doors opened. More dough people poked out their heads.

“They’re not dangerous, are they?” she asked.

“They’re wondering the same thing about you.”

She saw his point. Weirdness was relative. Diana and West were the strange invaders from another dimension, as bizarre and inconceivable as Vom and Smorgaz.

West knocked on a door, and another pale thing answered. It was as featureless as the other residents except for a single eye in its head. It was dressed in a similar, if not quite identical, manner to West. But its disheveled appearance was close enough that, even with their physical differences, it was obvious they were kindred souls.

The creature squealed and barked.

“Yes, yes, this is the one,” replied West.

The creature yipped. Once.

“Well, there wasn’t much time to find another,” said West. “You make do with what you can, right?”

The creature sized up Diana. It circled her once, tried to take the bucket of chicken from her, but she pulled away. It glared and growled.

“I doubt she’s a virgin,” said West, “but does that really matter?”

“It’s tradition,” said the creature.

Although it hadn’t said that. It had clicked, growled, and hissed as before. Diana had just understood it this time. Its inhuman language was suddenly laid bare. It shouldn’t have been possible. The syntax and grammar were so strange that a master linguist could’ve spent a lifetime deciphering a handful of sentences, only to realize that to truly understand the language would require having heard the first word uttered by the first gray sludge that slithered upon the shores of this world.

But she understood.

“It is written that the Great Thing prefers virgins,” said the creature.

“The Great Thing will take what it can get,” said West.

The creature snorted. It stomped away into its apartment.

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

“Just hold on to that chicken,” West said and went inside.

She hesitated. Maybe boring, predictable reality wasn’t such a bad thing. A glance behind her showed that the denizens of the building were watching her from the safety of their doorways. She doubted the frightened creatures would get in her way if she retreated to her own universe.

But she’d come this far, and her own building in her own sphere of existence wasn’t much of a shelter when it came to weirdness.

She followed West.

The apartment was normal. A bit cluttered but otherwise unremarkable. West and the creature stood across from each other. They were busy moving the furniture from the center of the room, including a rather large and heavy coffee table.

“Need some help?” she asked.

“Just hold on to the chicken.” West strained to drag the table to one side. “Your part is almost here.”

“And mind the throw rug,” said his pale, one-eyed equivalent.

The table must’ve been even heavier than it looked. It took them several minutes to drag it out of the way. When they finally pushed it up against some bookshelves, a hot gust of wind blasted from under the huge square throw rug that occupied most of the floor. It stank of that same sweet decay.

West and the creature stood on either side of the rug and rolled it away. Underneath was an inky hole that took up most of the floor. It didn’t bother her that the heavy coffee table should’ve sunk right into the hole while sitting on the unsupportive rug. Those sorts of physics didn’t mean much to her anymore. She certainly didn’t take them for granted.

But there was something down there. She couldn’t see it, and the air was dreadfully still. Yet in the darkness… there was… something.

The Great Thing.

She gazed into the abyss. It didn’t gaze back, being indifferent to her presence. Its apathy was hypnotic, consuming. This hole was the universe. Deep, unfathomable, and disinterested. It threatened to swallow her up. It wouldn’t have to do anything. It wouldn’t stalk or tempt her. It would just wait with endless patience until she cast herself into its hungry jaws.

“What are you waiting for?” asked the creature. “What is she waiting for?”

“The human mind grapples with the incomprehensible,” said West. “Give her a moment.”

Diana stepped away from the hole, and the world quaked.

“The chicken, Number Five,” said West.

Her feet slipped out from under her. She fell slowly toward the ground. When she finally hit the floor, she bounced and floated. The furniture hovered a few inches off the floor. Everything did. Except West and the creature, who managed to remain earthbound.

She threw the chicken into the hole. Tried to. It was difficult to do when things had stopped falling. Diana kicked off the wall, grabbed the bucket, and threw it into the pit. It drifted into the abyss. She floated aimlessly while the bucket disappeared into the dark.

“Is it working?” she asked.

“I told you we needed a virgin,” said the creature.

“Just give it a minute,” said West.

She stared at the void beneath her. If gravity came back right now, she’d be in for a long fall.

“Give me your hand, Number Five.”

West reached out for her. She took his hand. His skin was scaly, cold. Her first instinct was to pull away, but she ignored that.

A cold wind blasted out of the hole, and she was falling. She clung to West with a desperate grip, but there was no way he could keep her and himself from falling into oblivion. But he didn’t budge and, with a single tug, he pulled her to safety.

“Would’ve worked faster if she’d been unspoiled,” said the creature.

“It worked,” he replied. “Does it really matter?”

West and the creature unrolled the carpet, covered the Great Thing, and dragged the coffee table back into place. It all seemed perfectly ordinary, business as usual. Visit another dimension, feed a bucket of chicken to a big hole, fix gravity, go home. West exchanged a few words with the creature in private while Diana waited in the hall. West assured her she could go back without him now, but she had a few questions.

She started with “What the hell ="27">

“What’s in the hole?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That guy back there called it the Great Thing.”

“There are some who believe that a cosmic something dwells at the center of all realities. It does something important there. There are those who worship it as a god, although why anyone would worship a god they all agree couldn’t give a damn about them always escapes me. But that’s the Great Thing. While I don’t know what’s down in that hole, nobody else does either. I’m skeptical, though, because there are a lot of holes in this universe and while one of them might lead to the heart of everything, I have to figure most don’t.”

“Well, something has to be down there, right?”

He shrugged again. “Don’t know about that.”

“Something ate the chicken.”

“That’s an assumption. All I know is that there’s a hole and every so often, it’s necessary to throw a bucket of chicken into it to keep everything from floating away. What happens to the chicken, where it goes, if something eats it or if it just sits at the bottom of the hole with a thousand other buckets of fried chicken, these are things I don’t know, most probably never will, and don’t really concern me.”

“But why chicken?” she asked.

“You’ll drive yourself mad if you don’t stop asking unanswerable questions.”

“Bull.”

West stopped. He turned slowly with a genuinely perplexed expression.

“I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t just go with this. I think about this. I know I can’t understand it, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering about it. Curiosity isn’t a sin, and asking unanswerable questions is something human beings do from time to time.”

His beard writhed. He nodded to himself.

“Okay. That’s fair. Ask all the questions you want. Just don’t expect any satisfying answers.”

“I guess I can live with that. If I have to.”

He smoothed his beard, and the faint trace of a smile was visible under it. “Then you should do just fine, Number Five.”

They were back in their apartment building, and West prepared to part ways with her. She stopped him.

“One last question. Why did you need me at all for that?”

“Tradition demands that a maiden make the offer. It’s nonsense, of course, but easier to have you do it than argue about it with him.”

“That’s it? It’s just because of some dumb tradition?”

“Does there need to be a better reason?”

“But I could’ve died,” she said. “I almost jumped into that hole. I don’t know why, but I almost did.”

“Some people do.”

Reading West’s face was always difficult, but this time she could see exactly what he was thinking.

“You son of a bitch. You knew that I might jump.”

He lowered his head and mumbled.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I didn’t think you would, but I’ve been wrong before.”

“Is that what I am? Just another disposable resource? Something to be used and discarded just to make your life a little more convenient?”

“I didn’t want you to jump, and I could have taken the chicken myself. But I like you, Number Five.”

She stepped back instinctively.

“The things I do, somebody has to do them.” His shoulders slumped. “Or not. It’s not like any of it really matters in the long run. But I do them anyway because… because that’s what I do. And when I look out into that world of yours, I sometimes wonder why I do it.”

West straightened. As straight as he ever stood.

“Someone like you reminds me why. Someone with the strength of will not to jump into madness when most others would, who can ask unanswerable questions with unsatisfying answers. Someone who doesn’t give up.”

It was her turn to slump. “You’re wrong. I give up all the time. Giving up is what got me here in the first place.”

“No, Number Five. You’re wrong. If you weren’t, you’d be at the bottom of that pit, solving the mystery of the Great Thing. But you’re here, and that says something about you.”

“But what does it say?” she asked.

He ran his fingers through his thick hair and shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe that’s up to you to decide in the end. If you’ll excuse me, Number Five. I can’t sit around talking all day. Some of us have things to do.”

He closed his door.

She didn’t know what she thought about any of this, but if the decision was hers, she decided right then not to worry about it.