Chapter 19
To a passerby, Michael might have appeared to be sound asleep standing up. His companions waited, studying their new surroundings and trying not to get seasick. Objects seemed to change position when they looked away and then looked back; some things were audacious enough to move while they watched, although the movement was so subtle that they couldn't swear for sure that it was actually happening. Like that movie Dru was so crazy about, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Spike thought. Before the Talkies; black and white; German artsy-fartsy Modernist tripe, but he hadn't been able to drag her out of the theater until he'd promised to bring her back later and let her eat the organist. This place had that same feel: all crooked angles and tricks on the mind.
Michael opened his eyes and shook his head. "I'm not getting anything."
Well, I think it's safe to assume we're in another dimension." Kay crossed her arms nervously. "I'm guessing Toy Monster brought us here somehow during the interactive flashbacks."
"But why not Thu?" Fred asked. "And I didn't see her in the memory replay, either."
"She was happy."
They looked at Spike.
"Said it yourself, Mikey, it's harder for Possession demons to get their mitts on someone who's in a good mood. You saw the kid; she was havin' a damn good time strolling across town in the middle of the night. She was in her element."
Michael nodded, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and heaved a sigh. "Any suggestions? We can stay here, since this is probably near the entrance hole, and hope that the others can find us. Or we can risk exploring this place ourselves."
"Staying here makes more sense."
"I think so, too."
"I agree."
"How long was that?"
"Fourteen minutes."
"I think that's a new record for staying in one place."
"Yep. The last time we waited about eleven seconds."
It was a town utterly deserted. For five blocks they walked, counting intersections and noting landmarks - not that they expected them to still be there if they returned. The street signs were of no use; all were marked simply "Street," as though an imbecile had laid out the city. There was no visible sun overhead to tell direction, either. Everything was washed in the same brassy color of the sky. Spike felt a hand slide into his, and looked down into Fred's face. "Staying close," she explained, and squeezed his fingers.
"Levittown," Dilip observed. "Cookie-cutter houses. They're all the same."
They were almost identical; small, boxy structures painted grey or white, with small, bland lawns. A sprinkler started up in one of the yards, flinging water listlessly into the air. Fred had a pretty good idea that the water would taste rusty. Her eyes followed the path of the sprinkler's hose to the house, and widened when she spied a figure in one of its front windows.
Not a live figure, though.
A department store mannequin.
She suppressed a shudder.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," Kay joked half-heartedly.
Their street had been sloping progressively upward. Now as they crested this hill, they saw that the houses suddenly ended and gave way to a campus of some sort: large modern buildings, glass-fronted, perhaps two or three stories tall, connected by interlocking greens and parking areas. There was activity here - actual people walking around.
"Or what appear to be people," Michael reminded them. They made their way onto the complex quietly, seeming to blend in with the populace. It was impossible to tell whether the institution was collegiate or industrial, as the directory in front of each building was merely a garbled hodge-podge of letters, neither English nor any other language they recognized.
"Need directions?" an amiable-looking young man stopped and inquired.
Michael chose his words carefully. "Is there any place here where we could find a map of the city?"
"A city map..." The young man smiled. "Well, now, there are maps and there are maps. Hard to say which one would do you any good." A malicious glint came into his eye. He continued to smile, and the smile stretched, splitting slowly across his cheeks until the corners of his mouth reached his ears. "Just awfully hard to say."
"Never mind, then, Guv," Spike smiled back, and made a facial shift of his own. The young man's Cheshire Cat grin halted. He stared at Spike's vampire visage, took a few steps backward, then scurried off fearfully.
"Minion," Spike snorted with contempt.
"Guys," Kay said softly, "Look at the sky."
Above the buildings, the air was turning green. No more than a few miles beyond, black clouds formed and roiled, growing in size until the entire upper atmosphere in that quadrant of the sky was a dark, ominous wall. Some of the pedestrians on the campus noticed the "wall" and began to chatter in alarm; the rest seemed oblivious.
"Get inside," Michael said automatically. He gripped Kay by the arm and pushed her toward the building's doors. Dilip followed.
"Wait! What?"
Fred pulled at Spike and echoed Michael's command. "Get inside. It's a tornado."
The building's interior was devoid of people. Fred and Michael darted from door to door, tugging on handles and looking inside. Shit, Spike wondered in near panic, Where is it you're supposed to go in a tornado? Doorway? No, fuck, that's for earthquakes...
"Here's a downstairs," Dilip called. It was an open stairwell, built against a wall of windows. They clattered down it and found a large basement conference room. The windows here were set high on the walls, at outdoor ground level; unfortunately every wall had them.
How can they? Fred thought distractedly. It's physically impossible. The building above this room is so much wider! "Michael," she gasped, "Can you tell if this is a hallucination?"
"I don't know." He yanked chairs away from one of the tables and scanned the room hurriedly. "Push this table against that wall, under the windows. If the glass blows in we're better off underneath it than facing it."
One long table was shoved upright against the wall with an end in the corner; the other they flipped sideways and set against the upright one to form a tunnel. Before crawling into it they stepped on top and took one last look outside.
The wall cloud was closer than ever now, hanging menacingly at the edge of the complex. In the open space between two buildings, a semi-triangular shape lowered from the cloud's bottom edge. Many of the people had dropped to the ground and lay flat, but as before, others were apparently unaware of the danger, and no one seemed to have sense enough to move indoors.
"There's not time to do anything for them now," Michael said. One by one, the members of his group scooted into the table tunnel, and braced themselves.
If this is another mind-screw we're going to feel really, really stupid.
Their ears were filled with roaring. Smaller winds screamed and whined, but the blast of that roar was deafening. The light from the brassy false day disappeared.
When the windows exploded, Spike gouged his nails into the tables' wooden legs and dug his heels into the floor. Objects whapped around the room like so many pieces of corn popping, and he was thankful that they'd all left their stakes in the stairwell behind a tightly-closed door. The tipped-down table bucked in his grip; tried to leap away from them. Then he felt it jerk back into place and realized with relief that Kay was holding the table's other end, and the table above them as well. He could just make her out in the darkness, fisting her hands in front of her face and concentrating.
At last, finally, the wind began to die. Tarnished light filtered through the windows once more. The group sat in silence under the tables, breathing heavily, stealing Do-You-Think-It's-Safe-Now glances at one another. Then they emerged, picking their way carefully through the broken glass and Conference Room shrapnel, and made their way back up the stairs and outdoors.
The grounds had been swept bare. Anything not bolted or rooted was gone. The sky was once again its metallic, uniform color.
"There should be bodies," Fred whispered. "There were so many people…there should be bodies everywhere!"
"EVERYWHERE!" a voice boomed out, and a blow like a lightning bolt knocked them all off their feet. Something hazy and amorphous rippled in the air in front of them.
"That's it," Michael grunted, "The thing from my house."
"My house," the Thing hissed. A maw opened up in the foggy shape, and it spread blanket-like and loomed over Michael.
"Amateur."
The fog whipped around. Fred was standing, anger in her voice. Pindot pupils fixed on the entity, almost boring holes in it. Her voice had dropped an octave, and it could later be said with absolute certainty that blue was not her best color.
"Excrement. Dung of pigs. Your stench annoys me." She took a step forward and smiled wickedly. The entity curled in upon itself, pretzeling.
"You play at fledgling games. I devour worlds. I am ILLYRIA! Bow before me…"
The pitch of her voice rose suddenly, and in a nasal Southern twang she finished:
"…gelatinous grub."
"Fred!" Spike shouted. He flung himself toward her as the entity bellowed and shot an arm of vapor at her body. She stared at it, frozen, horrified. The instant before it hit her she went blue again.
The impact slammed her backward, smashing her into one of the useless directories. She sat stunned for a moment amid the debris, one shoe blown completely off and her blouse and skirt in tatters. Then she threw the mess aside, furious, and began climbing to her feet again.
Spike reached her and grabbed at her arm. "Blue, don't try it. It'll snap her like a twig!"
"It vexes me, Vampire." She shook him off. "How dare it challenge one of us! We held dominion EONS before it-"
Her steps turned awkward, like a marionette's, and Fred appeared briefly: "Oh crap, call her off!"
Illyria again: "-crawled from its putrescent spawning ground." She took another halting step and looked down at her legs, perplexed. Fred returned and flung her arms out to catch her balance. Illyria lowered them. Spike thought crazily that he was watching a blinking neon sign.
"I will smite this larva and smear its remains across my teeth."
"Not in the shell, you won't," Spike hissed, "This thing's an incorporeal. Like Pavayne was. Like I was. Like you."
He wasn't sure at first that she'd heard him.
But then the entity screamed, a shrill, high, piercing scream of terror, and Spike watched in awe as another fog a dozen times larger than the first welled up from the ground. The ghost of a body could be seen in its shape: bulbous, tentacled. Spectral eyes bulged and receded; a lipless mouth parted slowly. It hung motionless over the entity.
Then, with a snap, it ate it.