New vistas unfolded before Jane's eyes. All of the hours spent studying the brushstrokes and color compositions of masters past had barely prepared her for such wonders. What she explored went far beyond painting. Something close to whole new medium was at her beck and call.
The set of traditional dimensions now seemed a limitation. Lines of blood wrapped around each other in elegant complexity: up and down, forward and backward, side to side. Every stroke added new qualities to the pattern, entire worlds flickering in the charnel fog.
This is incredible.
No thought of rest crossed her mind, every ounce of her being craving to see more. She at last touched on the impossible, too devoted to even care about explanation, satisfied by the sheer experience.
I can't wait to show this to Daria.
The blade's edge hovered less than an inch in front of Daria's face. She remembered that such a sight should cause fear.
"You ought to consider yourself lucky," Pat gloated.
"Just let me go. I won't say anything," Daria mumbled. "This never happened."
Pat had intercepted her in the hall leading to the foyer, and pinned her against the wall with a single heavy arm. She offered no resistance. Her mind still reeled from the sight of what had been brought into the world.
"Whether you go or stay doesn't matter. It's already begun. You have no idea what you just saw, do you?"
Daria stared into space, her skin alive with an awful crawling sensation. She half-heartedly tried to focus on Pat, his malformed features blurring together.
"You know," he whispered, salt-tinged breath in her ear, "many of my kind would have killed to take part in this moment. To see what we're doing. And you have no idea. So damned typical of humans."
The knife dropped from sight and Daria felt the sharp point against her neck. It pressed deeper with steady force until skin broke and thick blood trickled down from the wound. Pain registered as dull surprise, her body unable to make any reaction. The floor shook as primordial feet took their first steps into the physical world. Corruption's stench settled into her skin, into the walls and carpet.
"Just let me go." No panic broke her voice, monotone and distant.
"Whatever I do pales in comparison to what the star spawn will wreak by its very presence. You have family here, girl? They'll see the same thing you did, but they won't have the option of looking away."
"Excuse me? I want to go home."
"You won't have a home to go back to pretty soon."
Shrill cries, not made by any human throat, echoed through the office. Pat scowled and shot a look down at the warehouse. He tossed Daria to the floor and ran into the shadows.
She lay there, conscious of the blood still welling out from her neck. Probably just a surface wound.
Daria struggled back up and walked quickly to the exit, thinking only of her room back home. She'd go to sleep and wake up the next morning. As simple as that.
Jane's ambition increased as impossibility became reality at her hands. The original pattern, already astonishing, promised even greater heights. Someone had once told her that artists created the reality beyond the perception. She'd never thought much of it until that night.
The form was perfect. Variation existed in the color as well, the blood taking on different hues depending on when it had been applied, gaining the chromatic complexity of a Rothko. What it lacked, however, was contrast. Her pattern floated in a void, the stone on which she'd begun her work having expanded into an absence.
Jane did not look away from the pattern as she put down her first paintbrush. She continued focusing as she opened up her supply box.
Concentrate—you can't screw this up.
She wrenched her eyes away to check the available paints. Taking a vivid orange from the pack, she poured some of it onto her palette. That allowed for some more variation, but it needed a bit extra, something bright to balance the darkened blood. Jane added a dab of yellow and stirred it until it reached the shade she imagined.
Making sure the chosen colors lay thick on the brush, Jane took the vision given to her and made it her own.
Daria sprinted past the parking lot and across the empty street, her mind nearly blank. She did not so much as try to regain balance when her feet slipped and she sprawled on the clipped grass of an office lawn.
Prone, she heard only her own breathing. Echoes of fear urged her to keep running, but her body protested. Daria crept forward until she reached a nearby oak, hoping for shelter in its thick roots.
I'll just lie here for a while until I don't have to think about it anymore.
Not even the smell of the leaves and the grass overcame the sense of abomination deep in her flesh, tangible in the earth itself. On some level she knew there was, in the long run, no such thing as escape. Perhaps that didn't matter so much.
As long as I don't see it again.
Movement in the Foundation's parking lot caught her attention and she shrank back, as if trying to embed herself in the soil. Malformed figures ran inside to parked cars. The sight's absurdity was lost on her exhausted mind.
Engines rumbled to life and headlights turned on as the cars fled the lot. Daria closed her eyes again, not wanting to see the walls break and the beast emerge.
A tremor of artistic doubt troubled Jane. She did not second-guess the choice of color; rather, a less tangible problem marred the pattern, its complexity and beauty no longer as evident.
Probably just means you're getting used to it.
With renewed vigor she pursued the peculiar angles and dimensions known only to her, even as they started to flatten out and simplify. Where she once traced paint through a void, the wall's rough stone surface began intruding on the immaterial canvas, the solidity and mass flickering like an old filmstrip.
You can do this.
Her work receded like the memory of a dream. Every passing moment mired her deeper in the mundane world of basic shapes and dimensions.
Wait, stop! God, Buddha, whoever it is that let me see this, I'm not done yet!
Jane redoubled her efforts, hands scraping against stone as she tried to access the strange space she'd so recently seen. Failure only inspired wilder efforts, tiny fists slamming against the stone.
This isn't fair! I was making it better, and you just take it away?
Faced with the silent masonry, an impossible scrawl of blood and paint spattered across its surface, Jane kept trying to regain what she'd lost.
Daria took a queasy lurch back into the waking world. The memories flooded her mind in an instant: mental snapshots of toxic green skin and deformed petitioners. She doubled over, dry-heaving. The very thought of that monstrosity broke everything she knew of reality. Every assumption of reason and order gone in an instant, laid bare as a vain and feeble attempt to understand the unknowable.
She couldn't even dismiss it as some dream or hallucination either, her recollection too vivid for such attempts. The monster's glistening bulk seemed to spread out, cancer-like, from that single memory to touch on everything else.
I need to talk to someone, to Jane.
That lone realization broke through the corruption, and her exhausted body turned cold with a new fear. She'd fled the moment she saw it. Finding Jane never even crossed her mind, buried under her all-consuming need to escape, to be free of it forever. Worse, she knew she'd run again if the situation ever repeated.
"Oh my God."
She'd only wanted a few last weeks with her best friend, a return to the lazy and interminable summer between sophomore and junior years. A chance to make up for the tumult of the last year, brought on by her greed and desperation.
You haven't really changed. You're the same as before.
Looking back at the Foundation office, a few lights still on at the front, she noted that it stood whole and untouched. There was no way the monster could have escaped without tearing out a sizable chunk of the place. Pat and his compatriots had also fled. Only a trace of the once overpowering foulness remained, a fine layer of filth over the Earth.
It's gone.
Was it? She couldn't be sure, but the signs seemed to indicate as much. Then again, who was to say what indicated anything?
Jane might still be there.
The possibility hovered in her mind. She checked the time on her watch—1:43. It had been hours since the event. Daria didn't even want to speculate as to what such a creature might do. The mere sight of thing would cause a panic. The lack of screaming mobs and burning buildings offered hope.
She approached the office with halting movements. Each step she took met with inner resistance, the instinct to run trying to keep her back.
It's probably safe. If a Godzilla-sized monster was on the loose, you'd probably notice it.
Forward motion became harder as she neared the door, the creature's smell stronger in that place. The boots on her feet turned to weights.
Jane's probably okay. Maybe she just came and left. Maybe she's had another sleepwalking episode and she needs help somewhere else, somewhere away from here.
She looked down at the sidewalk as the stench worsened.
As long as I look down, she thought, I won't have to see it. It'll just eat me or squash me, or whatever, and I won't have to think about it anymore.
Daria's groping hand found the handle and turned it. The door opened and she entered, feet pressing on the beige carpet. She already knew she couldn't bring herself to go back to the warehouse. The trap door, however, was in the office section.
Remembering that it was locked, Daria went behind the reception desk. Pat's open binder lay on top, displaying papers covered in elaborate diagrams and arcane letters. She searched until she stumbled across a set of three keys on a ring.
Daria grabbed the keys and braced herself. Still looking down, she felt her way down the hall and tried not to breathe in too deeply.
This whole place is contaminated now. No one will ever willingly go here again, she thought, without knowing precisely why.
She forced her head up once she reached the last room before the warehouse. A flick of the light switch revealed the trap door. Daria approached the entrance and got on her knees next to it, her heart pounding so hard she felt it in her skull.
You don't know what's down there.
Blocking all thoughts, she tried the keys. The second one fit, and the lock clicked with a single turn. Daria looked away as she pulled it open. A rank and bloody smell belched forth from the pit.
Oh God, no. Please no.
"Jane!" she yelled, desperate for a response.
Daria thrust her head into the pit. Phosphorescent lights in the room below revealed Jane's familiar figure. She knelt at the end of the room, facing the wall.
"Can you hear me?"
"Daria?" Jane called back. "I had it. I really wanted to show you." She sounded like a lost child.
"It's okay," Daria said, taking cautious steps into the basement. "Are you—"
She almost ran back up at the sight of the corpses suspended from the ceiling, their wounds open to the dank air. The dried blood was as thick as jam on the floor and walls.
"Jane, what happened?"
You didn't do this, you didn't do this.
"It was right in front of me. And then it just went away. I don't know what happened."
"What killed these people?" Daria asked, terrified of the answer.
"Huh? What are you talking about? It was right there!"
Jane finally turned to face Daria, her eyes trembling.
"We need to go," Daria said.
Taking Jane's wrist with one hand and picking up her box of paints with the other, Daria guided her friend up the stairs. Jane's protests soon fell into silence, and she followed in numb obedience. Once out of the basement, Daria closed the trap door and locked it again for good measure. A bedraggled Jane watched in confusion.
Daria embraced her, heedless of the gore.