Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER THREE

She stopped shrieking after a minute.

It wasn’t the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn’t managed to repair itself. She’d left something behind in that apartment. Something she’d always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning, the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud sproing.

No, she eventually stopped screaming because she discovered that running and freaking out at the same time was exhausting. She doubted even an Olympic athlete could do it for very long. Also, she got stuck at a crosswalk, and it was hard to keep the momentum while standing there waiting for the light to change.

She sat on a bench and caught her breath. A glance back the way she’d come showed neither Vom nor West following her. She’d escaped. Too bad she’d lost her stuff, but there was no way she was going back for it. Her first thought was that it was just more crappy luck, but then she remembered that she’d avoided being trapped for eternity or being eaten by a gangly furry monster and decided it was the opposite. Things were starting to turn around. If she could escape unhurt from Vom the Hungering, everything else should be easy.

Leaning back on the bench, she exhaled a sigh of relief.

The early evening sky was torn in pieces.

Six slashes ran across it. They pulsed with a strange yellow glow. The weirdest thing was that the slashes didn’t seem to be behind the stars, but on top of them. It was as if some gigantic monster had raked the fabric of the universe itself. And the universe had healed, but the scars remained.

The full moon appeared normal. But on the other side of the sky was another moon. The orb was sickly greenish. It writhed. It was covered in bright red eyes. The thing undulated, and she glimpsed a maw filled with rows of teeth.

She’d escaped the apartment, but she was still in the trap. The cage was just bigger. She’d seen enough Twilight Zone episodes to know a cosmic screw when she was in the middle of it.

She stood, carelessly bumping into a tall, angular man in a black trench coat. His face wasn’t human, but insectile. Her first instinct was to cower or flee. But that was what they wanted her to do. And she wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction. She pushed forth the most sincere smile she could manage while staring into the bug’s six hundred eyes.

“Pardon me, sir.”

The bug clicked its mandibles.

“No problem, miss.”

It walked up to the curb, spread its coat, and soared away. Diana dug her claws into her fractured sanity and refused to let it go. Even as she noticed that one of the cars driving down the street was an SUV-sized crimson slug and that the hot dog vendor on the corner was a monster in an apron with a paper hat on his squid-like head, she convinced herself, through sheer force of will, that there was nothing to be concerned about. She didn’t know if that meant she would be okay or if she’d just lost her mind. All she knew was that she wasn’t gibbering, and she’d take whatever small victory she could manage.

A hairy hand grabbed her shoulder. “Hey, there you are.”

Diana turned to the toothy jaws of Vom the Hungering.

“No!” she shouted forcefully as she punched him in the nose. Or at least the area of his mostly featureless face above his mouth.

“Ow.” Vom rubbed his head. “Why’d you do that?”

“You were going to eat me.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

His stomach rumbled, causing the earth beneath the concrete beneath their feet to tremble. He smiled sheepishly.

“Okay, maybe I was thinking about it.”

“This is bullshit,” she said. “I let you out of the closet. You were supposed to either eat me or let me go.”

Vom shrugged. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the rules. Oh, hot dog.” He lumbered over to the cart on his stumpy legs. “One foot-long, please. Extra everything.”

The squiddy vendor asked, “You got any money?”

“What? I’m good for it.”

The vendor wiggled his tentacles and folded his floppy arms across his chest.

“Hey, could you loan me a couple of bucks?” Vom asked Diana.

She duplicated the vendor’s stance.

“Oh, fine. I must’ve eaten someone with a wallet at some point.” He opened his mouth and reached down his own throat. He spit out a variety of random objects: an old lipsticka dog collar, a license plate, some buttons, and something small and squirmy that was apparently still alive.

Vom extracted a pair of wrinkled blue jeans from his bigger mouth. He rifled through the pockets and found a few dollars and some change. Enough to purchase two hot dogs. The sticky drool covering the cash didn’t bother the slimy vendor beast, who started working on Vom’s dogs. While waiting, Vom shoved the regurgitated items back into his mouths. Including the squirming thing.

“Don’t skimp on the sauerkraut.”

The vendor gave Vom the dogs. He offered one to Diana. She turned it down with a queasy twinge.

He swallowed the hot dogs in one gulp.

“You have something.” She pointed to the mustard-stained pant leg snagged on one of his fangs. “Right there.”

“Whoops.”

He slurped down the denim like a stray noodle.

They walked through the park, and Vom tried to explain what was happening. Normally she wouldn’t have been caught walking through a park alone after dark, but she figured that the ravenous creature beside her would discourage even the most determined mugger. Or not.

Nobody seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The giant bugs and slugs and misshapen things lurching on the city streets. Or the tears in the sky. Or the monstrous moon god. All these things remained unobserved by everyone else.

“Imagine the universe as a tesseract, a single multidimensional hypercube divided into thin, mostly self-contained slices. Now this model is, by its nature, flawed and incomplete. Mostly because each entity perceives its own slice to be the most important, simply from a lack of ability to perceive the other aspects of the complete universe which surrounds them. With me so far?”

“No.”

He sighed. “This’d be easier if you had some experience with multidimensional geometric theory.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t. Didn’t think it would be important. And I don’t think they even offered it at the college I attended.”

“Okay. We’ll go with the dumbed-down version then.” He spoke very slowly, using sweeping gestures to emphasize his points. “The universe is a very tall building with many floors but no elevators and great soundproofing. And every shred of matter in the universe exists on one of those floors.”

He paused.

“Have I lost you again?”

“I’m not an idiot. I can follow a metaphor.”

“Each floor is usually completely unaware of the other floors around it. Although sometimes, if one floor gets particularly noisy it might have an effect on nearby neighbors. And sometimes a floor will spring a leak or a window will open for a short while and things might get a little wonky for both floors until the anomaly corrects itself. And other times the floors get shuffled around and in the process something on Floor A ends up on Floor B, where it really doesn’t belong. See, there are connections between floors. Like ventilation ducts or Jefferies tubes or crawl spaces or whatever. Invisible gaps in the fabric of the universe that probably serve some useful purpose, but that also some beings use, unintentionally in my case, to cross floors. And our apartment is one of those trapdoors.

“But you don’t leave your old world behind. A part of it comes with you, no matter where you go. And so you and I are straddling floors. One foot in our own portion of reality and another in an alien perception we were never meant to have.”

“But why?” she asked.“ How does something like that happen?”

“Hell if I know,” said Vom. “Until I came into contact with your world, I was just a merciless destructive force, a mindless devourer.”

She flashed him a look.

“Hey, I’m working on it,” he said. “I didn’t eat you, did I?” “You tried.”

“If we’re going to make this relationship work, you’re going to have to get over that.”

“What relationship?” she asked.

“Like it or not, we’re bound together,” said Vom.

“Oh no we’re not.”

He gnashed his teeth. Since he had a lot of teeth, several rows of them, it made a hell of a grating noise.

“Hey, consciousness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There are all these complicated thoughts running through my head now, and some of them are very confusing. They don’t mesh together well. It’s like you. Part of me wants to eat you. But another part of me feels like that would be a lousy thing to do since you freed me from that closet. But another part of me thinks that if I kill you, maybe it’ll free me from this sliver of reality and I’ll get to go home where all I had to worry about was digesting anything that found its way into any of my two thousand fourteen stomachs. But another part thinks that maybe I don’t want to go back to that now that I’ve found a world where not everything is as simple as endless devouring hunger. But another—”

“I get it.”

“The point is that once you gaze into the abyss—”

“The abyss gazes into you.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s a cliché. Everybody knows that.”

Vom frowned. “Damn. And I thought I’d made that up. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re stuck with each other, and we can’t go back. Me, a timeless devouring force and you, a delicious chewy morsel wrapped around a crunchy calcium treat.”

She moved a few steps farther from him.

“What?” he said. “It’s a compliment.”

She took stock of her situation. She was bound to a horror from beyond time and space, and she was probably going slowly mad because of it.

“Is the apartment still mine?”

“You bet,” said Vom. “It’s a package deal.”

There was a bright side at least.

“So what do you say?” He extended his hand. “Roomies?”

Noticing snapping jaws buried in the fur in Vom’s palms, she kept her hands in her pockets and nodded.

They walked back to West’s apartment building of horrors. She wasn’t crazy about living there, but she had no place else to go. She couldn’t call on any of her friends. Not with Vom and his endless appetite following her.

The building didn’t look right. She’d run away without glancing back upon her escape, but she saw it with new eyes this time. It was a jutting tower of strange angles, disappearing into a swirling green vortex in the sky. The brick walls shimmered and shifted as she walked closer, like one of those cheap 3-D card images that never quite worked the way the inventor had hoped.

The vortex growled, and the building shuddered, expanding and contracting. She climbed the short flight of stairs to the front doors. The creaky old doors opened without her touching the handles, and hot wind poured over her. She saw the portal as a huge mouth. One of thousands scattered across the cosmos, all part of a single impossibly huge creature dwelling across multiple realities. And all the people, animals, and even monsters like Vom were merely skittering atoms drifting between its toes. Although it probably didn’t have toes. Or if it did, each of those toes could crush a universe. Except for the big toe. That could probably crush several at once.

Vom walked inside, and she expected the lesser devouring monster to be devoured by the larger one. But it didn’t happen.

“Are you coming?” he asked her.

She pushed the inhuman thoughts away, gritted her teeth, and followed him. The otherness outside the apartment disappeared once she was across the threshold. The heat faded to a mildly uncomfortable warmth. The air was a bit humid, but nothing she couldn’t handle.

One of the apartment doors opened, and West stuck his head out. He sported an extra pair of eyes above the normal set. And his bushy beard writhed a bit. Not the beard itself, but whatever was underneath it, whatever passed for West’s chin. Not that she wanted to think about that.

“Still alive, Number Five?” he asked, though the answer should’ve been obvious.

She nodded.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any Monopoly money on you, would you, Number Five?”

She shook her head.

“Damn. The mole lords are not going to be happy about that.”

He withdrew into his room and shut the door without another word.

“He’s a crazy old bird,” said Vom, “but he’s harmless.”

Considering the source of the reassurance, Diana didn’t find this very comforting.

She noticed for the first time that every door in the building was different. Different size. Different color. Different style. Nothing in the building matched. The carpeting appeared to be assembled from a thousand discarded scraps. The walls were brick, then wood paneling, then stucco, then polka-dotted wallpaper. Nothing lined up in a conventional way. The hall seemed askew. The stairs curved downward, giving one the impression of walking down when going up. The doors tilted at odd angles, though never the same angle. And the numbers marking the apartments were all in different fonts. The entire building was like a hastily constructed model, put together from bits and pieces of other models by a maker who was only vaguely familiar with traditional design conventions.

She hadn’t noticed any of this before. Or maybe it hadn’t looked like this before. Maybe this was all a byproduct of her new perceptions. Either way, it weirded her out.

They passed the gruesome puppy beast in front of Apartment Two. The door opened a crack, and she glimpsed a shadowy figure.

“Hey,” the figure whispered.

The puppy snarled, and the door slammed shut.

The apartment was exactly as she’d left it. She’d expected it to be as twisted and skewed as the rest of her new universe, but everything was in order. Except that the coffee table had had a big bite taken out of it.

“Sorry,” said Vom. “Kind of hard to put on the brakes once I get going.”

He helped her push the refrigerator back against the wall. Someone knocked.

He answered the door before she could stop him.

A short blond woman in her forties and a hulking bat-like creature in a sweater vest stepped into the apartment.

“Congratulations.” She gave Vom a polite hug. “We just heard about your early parole.”

“Stacey, Peter. I thought you’d have moved out by now.”

“We’re working on it,” she said.

The bat gurgled.

“Now, Peter,” said the woman. “Be nice.”

The creature lumbered over to Diana. She recoiled from the grinning monster and his saber-like fangs. He thrust a lump wrapped in tinfoil into her arms. “Yours,” he said as drool dripped down his chin.

“Now, Peter,” said Stacey. “Is that any way to treat our new neighbor?”

Diana held the lump in limp hands. It was warm. And was it squirming or was that just her imagination? How the hell could she even tell anymore?

“You’ll have to excuse Peter. He always gets a little grumpy after a few hours of hosting.”

“No problem,” replied Diana.

Peter pounced on Stacey. He squeezed her in a tight embrace. They howled in one terrible harmony as his body collapsed into a frail mortal shell while she took on the bat-monster shape. The only difference was that now it wore a floral-print dress.

Peter smoothed the few strands of hair on his balding head. “That’s better. You must be Vom’s new warden.”

“I must be,” said Diana.

The Stacey-thing snatched the tinfoil lump and bit into it.

“We just got a new breadmaker,” said Peter. “The missus has been dying for a chance to try it out.”

“Pumpernickel,” cooed Stacey-thing. “Goood.”

“For Heaven’s sake, honey, don’t eat it all.”

She offered the loaf to Diana with a sheepish smile. Bread crumbs and bits of tinfoil were stuck between Stacey’s pointed teeth.

Diana politely turned the offering away. “No, thank you. Maybe later.”

“I’ll take that.” Vom snatched the bread and shoved it into the mouth in his potbelly.