8

DOWN THE RABID HOLE

Simon gave us a while to realize that we’d never heard of anything remotely like what he’d just described. Or wait … maybe I had. I gestured at Prutko. “Is this guy a tulpa?” Tulpas are dream creatures come to life. They absorb the psychic essence of concentrated mass belief and somehow use it to form a material body. Opinion is divided as to whether tulpas are ghosts whose self-esteem is so low that they latch onto all of that stray wishful thinking out there and let it define them, or if tulpas are just some kind of random suck-ass phenomenon that doesn’t have any logical justification for existing, like black holes or ATM fees. What matters is that if enough people spend a lot of time believing really hard in a clown with a giant crab claw called Dr. Plucky, a crab-clawed clown named Dr. Plucky might appear one day. Tulpas are why the current urban legends about a video game creation called the Slender Man becoming real are so scary.

“What we’re dealing with may be some kind of tulpa variation.” Simon didn’t take his eyes off the whatever-it-was. “But these aren’t cases of something manifesting out of nowhere. The incidents have involved actual people or animals transforming into something else.”

“How many incidents?” I asked.

“Eight that we know of,” Simon said moodily. “But they seem to be increasing in rate and frequency. The first two were months ago. Then another three popped up weeks ago. And now three more have happened within the last two days.”

“You must be charting the locations where they appeared,” I said. “Have you found an epicenter?”

Simon gave me an approving look for what may have been the first time ever in the history of ever. “There’s no useful pattern as far as we can tell, except that all of the incidents have been within New York City.”

“Why did you say useful like that?” I asked. “Are there non-useful patterns?”

“We’re plugging data into computers that … Well, let’s just say that we have people in both the NSA and NASA. They gave us so many far-fetched and useless correlations that we wasted more time than we saved.”

“Is that guy in there really obsessive about video or role-playing games?” Sig interjected.

What she was really asking was whether his transformation was some kind of manifestation of his inner self.

Simon didn’t answer because a small shower of paint flakes fell from the ceiling. The corridor we were in was soundproof, and the foundation beneath our feet was solid, but something somewhere had caused a big impact.

Simon and I looked at each other. “You should probably give us some weapons now,” I said conversationally.

The lights went off, and it turned out that the walls of the prison corridor were covered from top to bottom with holy symbols, sigils, and wards drawn in luminescent paint. This became evident when the symbols started providing enough illumination to see by even if they did make the hallway look like a rave party. Simon wordlessly handed me a silver steel knife while taking a M9A1 out of his jacket. The guard who was with us handed Choo another knife, and while he was doing so, Sig removed another M9A1 out of his hip holster and Kasia took the cattle prod strapped to his other leg. The guard was still armored up and carrying a shotgun, after all.

The other roving guard was moving to join the sentry at the entryway when the heavy vault door tore out of its framing wall and knocked the stationary guard off his feet. I don’t know any way to make this sound believable, so I’m just going to say it: In the crude, newly opened passage was a huge freaking floating eyeball. It was about the size of a wrecking ball with big, thick open lids and long eyelashes, floating maybe three feet off the floor. I’ve met a lot of scary-ass things, but they were undeniably real and had a certain evolutionary logic; I could usually figure out how they ate or went to the bathroom or made little monster juniors. This thing’s creepy absurdity was an indifferent insult to everything I knew about existence.

The eyeball blinked, and the approaching guard went flying backward through the air, bouncing off the wall and skidding across the floor. The guard who had taken point in front of us opened fire with his shotgun, but the loads stopped dispersing and hung there suspended in midair. The way the metal pellets weren’t dropping to the floor gave me a bad feeling, and I slammed Molly against the wall so that I was between her and the eye thing. I wasn’t being chivalrous. I heal fast. Simon crouched and positioned himself behind the foremost guard while Sig and Kasia and Choo flattened themselves against opposite walls.

It was a good call. The eye blinked, the floating ammo disappeared from view, and the guard who had fired the shotgun was hurled off his feet as the metal grains flew backward too fast to see, smashing into his weapon and body armor. Simon stepped aside like a matador as the guard’s body flew past him, not seeming to notice the bits of blood spraying off him as several pellets grazed his shoulder. I charged the eye, yelling, “It blinks when it uses magic!”

I wasn’t looking forward to getting smashed by that thing, but again, I regenerated and the others didn’t, and if Sig blasted it while its eyelids were closed, it would be worth it. But the half-assed plan didn’t work. The next wave of force the eyeball generated was less powerful but wider. The glass doors containing mist and a naked sleeping male respectively both shattered into large rounded fragments, just the way security glass is designed to.

I was ripped off my feet but not thrown very far. Sig and Kasia managed to stay upright while everyone else went sprawling, but Sig’s aim was fouled. I was rolling into a crouch when Simon’s bodyguard, Mark, appeared in the doorway behind the eyeball. Mark had grabbed a shotgun from somewhere and began firing into that pulpy flesh. Something cold and jellylike hit my face from all the way down the corridor, and the eyeball dropped to the floor with a disgusting wet impact that I heard even with my ears ringing from the shotgun blasts.

Unfortunately, the mist that the eye had freed from a cell turned out to be alive. It also turned out to be acidic. The mist poured through the now-open spaces of the bars and engulfed Mark in a loud, screaming, skin-peeling hiss. Mark tried to reel back, but the mist traveled with him, swirling around him while he fired a pointless shotgun round into the ceiling. Mark didn’t have eyes or an epidermis by this point, and the mist was inside his throat, cutting off his protests.

I didn’t even have time to feel helpless. A long blue tongue came whipping out at an angle between the bars on my right and snared my knife hand. It was insane and probably against at least a few laws of physics, but when that tongue retracted, it did so with enough force to pull me toward the cell door. I was drawn closer to the egg-headed humanoid that had been staring at me without eyes earlier, but now it had a mouth that didn’t stop where a mouth should. The maw was gaping so wide that I couldn’t see the face that wasn’t behind it. There seemed to be a lot more teeth than I was comfortable with too, and they hadn’t gotten a lot of dental attention.

I braced a foot against one of the cell bars and turned. The motion let me switch the knife to my free hand. I didn’t have the leverage to hack the tongue in two, so I stabbed through the narrowest part and tore sideways. The rest of the tongue ripped free, and I ran for my life. The mist that had consumed Mark was coming at us, its gassy body narrowing into a tendril.

Whatever else that mist was, it was indiscriminate; it poured through the bars of the cell I’d left behind, toward the closer prey. I could hear the guy who’d used too much tongue shrieking in agony behind me.

An alarm went off, and as I ran toward the others, I saw why. At some point during all this, Choo had pulled a fire alarm. Water came pouring from the ceiling somewhere between a sprinkle and a torrent. At first, I thought the water was just diluting the acidity of the mist thing, or even dispersing it, but I heard a high-pitched squeal behind me like air being forced through the rupture of a very large balloon. It wasn’t a human noise. It wasn’t even a humanoid noise. The wisps of that living mist emerged back into the hallway, dissipating in a way that suggested thrashes and jerks.

When the mist thing was gone and the fire alarm had been turned off, I heard Choo ask, “What the hell?”

“This is a knight facility.” I could barely hear Simon’s words with the alarm still echoing in my ears. “The sprinklers are full of holy water.”

Normally, I would have asked Simon why he wasn’t dissolving too, but it didn’t seem like the right time. The knight who had caught bullets on his body armor was back on his feet, if obviously hurting. Even the knight who had been ping-ponged off a wall had managed to pull himself up and was checking on the one who had been knocked down by the vault door, but what was left of Simon’s assistant, Mark, was never going to move again. The guy had given his life protecting me even if I doubted that this was his primary goal, so I just stayed quiet while Simon signed for the remaining knights to summon a cleanup crew and take a head count of the civilians on the level.

“Civilians?” I asked when Simon was done delegating.

Simon pointed at the corpse of the giant eye thing. “If it’s like the others, that monster didn’t just pop out of nowhere. We’ve been holding a few of the people who actually saw these things transform.”

“Please don’t tell me that thing was an eyewitness.”

“We don’t have time to be cute,” Simon snapped. “This changes things.”

How could it not? But what I said was: “Changes things how?”

“I have to take care of a few things first. You’ve seen what you needed to see here. Let’s get some dry clothes and find something to eat.” Simon began walking down the hall, and, given the alternatives, we followed him.

“Why are you being so accommodating?” I couldn’t help asking.

Simon stopped for a moment and faced me again. He didn’t seem to notice that this put him right next to the body of his dead assistant. “Let’s be honest.”

Somehow Simon managed to keep a straight face after he said that.

“Okay.”

“If I could kill you without causing problems with the Round Table, I would have done it last year,” Simon said. “But you’re marginally more useful than annoying, and your Valkyrie’s … Sig’s … ability to talk to the dead is an even bigger asset here. Miss Newman wasn’t affected by that thing’s power word either, and I find that very interesting. She might be more useful trying to exorcise these things than our own priests.”

“Sucks to be Choo,” Choo muttered.

I didn’t like Simon’s tone. “We’re not chess pieces.”

Simon did look down at his assistant then. Maybe he was making a point. “We’re all chess pieces.”