Charles and Toby had managed to get Sally back on her feet when they heard an ancient motor cough and sputter into reluctant life. The trio turned and watched as the bay door of the middle channel started to rise.
There was no earthly reason why the door should have been moving. The building hadn’t had power in more than fifty years. Charles looked over at Toby and said, “Is that you?”
Toby shook his head without taking his eyes off the rising door. When it reached the top of the track, there was a moment of fragile silence in which any number of things might have happened.
Sally said, “Maybe we should—”
And then the world exploded.
It was a wet explosion. A tidal wave of cold lake water that rose high enough to touch the ceiling of the warehouse before it came crashing down to the floor.
Although Charles, Sally, and Toby were far enough back to avoid the initial blast—the force of which could have caused them serious injury and possibly death—they were close enough to get completely doused in the secondary splash.
The water spread to all points of the warehouse, as though trying to flee the scene. Charles understood the feeling. In the last fledgling light of the day, helped in large part by the open bay door, he could see that the middle channel was a flurry of activity, the water churning and splashing.
Before he could voice a warning, an enormous shape began to rise out of the channel, filling the space like some nightmarish submarine.
“Holy fuck!” Toby shouted. “It is a ghost shark!”
It was and it wasn’t.
The thing that emerged from the water wasn’t like any sea creature they’d ever seen before. It did look something like a shark—the head was conical, the eyes were cold black marbles, and it had a mouth full of serrated, triangular teeth—only instead of a single dorsal fin on its back, this creature had two, angled to either side like the rabbit-ear antenna on an old television. It had the scythed tail of a shark, and the same grayish-blue skin, but that was where the similarities ended.
It was fifty feet long—larger even than the prehistoric megalodon—and as the creature butted against the sides of the channel, like it was stuck, they could see something on its underside, an armoured node resembling the fingers of a bony hand clenched into a tight fist.
As the creature continued to twist and struggle in the tight confines, they quickly realized it wasn’t stuck. It was trying to get out of the water.
As they watched, the node on the creature’s belly opened and eight chitinous legs extended outward. They anchored themselves to the sides of the channel, and the creature began to rise slowly out of the water.
Charles stared at the creature, frozen with fear. He found it impossible to believe that something so monstrous, something so alien, could have ever walked the earth or swum in the seas. But as he watched the creature clamber onto dry land, he supposed it had probably done both of those things.
He noticed something else, as well. A small detail that almost certainly hadn’t been part of the creature’s already unusual physiology when it was alive.
Even though most of the water displaced when the creature surfaced was either glistening or sliding across its thick hide, some of it appeared to be dripping through its enormous body. As if it wasn’t entirely solid.
Although at that moment it seemed solid enough as it came scuttling toward them.
Toby reacted instinctively, pushing out with his TK. The creature came to an abrupt stop, as if it had suddenly become stuck in an invisible tar pit. Then, with a frantic shake of its massive head, it just as quickly became unstuck and continued to advance.
When Sally saw that Toby couldn’t hold the creature back, she realized it was up to her. Reaching out with her mind, she tried to scan the creature’s thoughts. If Toby couldn’t stop its movements, then maybe she could halt them at the source. Even if she couldn’t stop the creature indefinitely, it might buy them enough time to get out of the warehouse.
For Sally, reading people with her telepathy was both routine and unpredictable. Even though every mind was different, the human brain was familiar territory for her.
Touching the mind of the creature, though, was like sticking her hand into a mystery box, one that might contain tissues or tarantulas. It was scary at first, like trying to read the mind of any animal—a flurry of lightning-quick responses, not so much thoughts as instinctual reactions to stimuli. In this case: the water, the warehouse, and the three humans that probably looked to the creature like Happy Meals on legs.
Sally tried to get a grip on these quicksilver signals, but they darted through her mental fingers like a school of minnows. One thing was clear: the creature didn’t like her probing its mind. She was aware she had slowed its approach, though she hadn’t stopped it outright. The creature scuttled off to the side, as if being led away by the nose. Then it snapped its head to the side and course-corrected back the other way, its crab-like legs tapping a frantic tattoo on the concrete floor.
Sally could feel the creature pushing her out of its mind. It had almost succeeded when she became aware of another presence, another set of mental hands joining her own.
Toby.
Working together, they infiltrated the creature’s mind, Toby laying down telekinetic anchors while Sally wove a telepathic web to ensnare its thoughts. The creature reacted even more strongly than before, struggling with all its mental will to evict these uninvited visitors, but they were dug in as tightly as ticks.
Charles couldn’t see any of this with his ordinary eyes. What he did see was the creature, no longer charging toward them. It now stood frozen in its bi-corporeal tracks about twenty feet away, whipping its head from side to side, mouth snapping open and closed.
“I think we’ve got it,” Sally said.
“Yeah,” Toby said, straining. “But what are we supposed to do with it?”
“Can you kill it?” Charles said.
Toby gritted his teeth. “It’s already dead, Charles.”
“I mean, can you neutralize it? Can you send it back?”
“We can try,” Sally said, but she sounded unsure.
The two psychics exchanged a look made up of equal parts determination and uncertainty. They didn’t have to say anything to each other about what they were about to do next. The conversation occurred in their minds.
Using their combined abilities, they tightened the psychic net around the creature. It reacted as they expected—by struggling even more frantically. When it was alive, it wouldn’t have had a lot of natural enemies, and now that it was dead (or undead) it had fewer still. It had probably never been challenged like this before, certainly not by the lesser beings it had previously only known as food.
Sally and Toby were banking on the idea that attacking the creature in this manner would cause it to lose interest in them, and become more concerned with getting the hell out of Dodge. To choose flight instead of fight.
To their mutual surprise, it seemed to work.
When they released their hold—just a little bit—they felt the creature start to move away … back toward the lake.
The psychics experienced a moment of relief that was immediately cut short when they felt themselves suddenly jerked off their feet—psychically and physically.
Charles watched in awe as the creature retreated toward the concrete channel. As it began to clamber back into the water, Sally and Toby suddenly snapped forward like they’d both been shoved hard from behind. They landed on the ground and began to slide across the floor toward the creature.
Apparently the psychic net worked both ways. Even as Sally and Toby had loosened their grip on the creature, it had responded by digging in some mental hooks of its own, and now it was pulling them in after it. No matter how much they struggled, none of them could break free.
The creature began to sink back into the channel, then surfaced again and rose completely out of the water, propping itself up so it hung in middle of the open doorway like a giant sea spider.
Charles wondered what it was doing—then the creature’s mouth dropped open and he didn’t have to wonder anymore.
The creature wasn’t dragging Sally and Toby back into the lake. It was going to reel them right into its mouth. One last meal to-go before it returned to the abyss.
Charles looked around for something he could use as a weapon, and spotted a pile of old rusty rebar lying in a pile against the near wall. He picked one up and went running along the concrete path next to the channel. He slowed his pace as he approached the creature, but as he suspected, all its attention was focused on Sally and Toby, who continued to slide rapidly across the floor toward the channel.
As Charles reached the edge of the doorway where the creature was suspended, he thought back to the water droplets he’d seen dripping through its body. The psychic net seemed to have an additional effect, one he was now close enough to see.
It had made the creature take on a completely solid form.
Charles raised the rebar over his head, then swung it down and smashed it against the motor that controlled the door.
Although the juice powering it was paranormal rather than electrical, it was still a machine, and it didn’t like being bashed in with a piece of rusty metal. The motor made a tortured screeching sound and coughed out a spray of sparks. Then smoke. A lot of smoke.
The door let out a small creak—almost like a warning—then came flying down the track. It crashed into the creature, slamming into it like a giant guillotine.
Even though the channel wasn’t deep, the creature might have survived if the door had simply knocked it back into the water. But in its panic to escape, the creature tried to move out of the way and the door struck it amidships, driving it sideways into the mouth of the channel. The creature was too big to fit that way, and its head and tail were snapped upward with a loud crack of breaking cartilage.
It was dead, Charles thought—or dead again. He watched the carcass slide into the channel, losing corporeal form as it sank into the dark water.
He looked over at where Sally and Toby lay together in a heap.
Toby grinned as he sat up with Sally squirming in his arms. “My catch of the day!” he said triumphantly.
Sally struggled out of his grasp and stood up. “More like the one that got away,” she said, slapping the dust off her suit. She gave Charles a weary look. “I’ll be in the car.”
Toby stared after her as she walked out of the warehouse. “So much for intense experiences bringing people closer together.” He looked at Charles. “I thought we were made for each other. Birds of the same psychic feather.”
Charles went over and helped Toby to his feet. He tried to think of something supportive to say.
“Plenty of fish in the sea.”
Toby stared at him. “Are you being funny?”
Charles shrugged. “It’s been known to happen.”
He clapped Toby on the shoulder and they walked back to the car.