CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 

 

The light was shrinking.

It was only a shimmer, still seemingly miles overhead, but Kimberly was sure the mouth of the pit was closing. Like squinting at a star on a black night as clouds swept in, a tiny sparkle dimming around the edges.

The faster she climbed, the faster it contracted.

"Son of a bitch." Some trick of Gull's, arcane home security kicking in. Why he'd try to trap her after spilling all his plans, Kimberly didn't know. She'd beat the answers out of him soon enough.

For now, she had to run.

The stairs were uniform, polished, slippery underfoot. She stumbled twice, landing on hands and knees, and found herself staring over the edge into the void below. She couldn't make out the corpses down there, dead teeth chattering. She could still hear them, though. A tiny hoarse laugh made mocking by distance. "Don't slow down, Mrs Archer. You don't want to be here when the lights go out!"

She picked herself up and forced her feet to move, one lurching step after another. How many times had she circled the pit now? Fifty? A hundred? Enough so that her legs burned, her guts clenching, a stitch in her side turning screw thread tight with every breath.

She could almost make out the real world far overhead, the orange lampshade that hung in the centre of Gull's living room, the pebbled pattern of his whitewashed ceiling. But she was only afforded a narrow view, like looking upward from the bottom of a well, and that mouth was closing fast. She could see it clearly now, a wriggling of stone around the edges of the pit. The stairs that ringed the pit were shrinking, each step contracting until she was almost running up a shallow incline.

"Move," she grunted, "move, move!"

All around her was shadow, and some of that shadow was alive.

An airtight home, she remembered. Nothing got in. Nothing got out. Even as she ran she could see them from the corner of her eye – two shapes the size of cattle dogs skittering up the wall, blurs of segmented limbs and beetle armour. Not like the centipede-thing that'd clawed free of the cop's throat. More like what Fitch called the clicker, the beast that'd tried to tear her head off her shoulders in her back yard so many weeks before.

Two of them, rushing for the light. Keeping pace. Flanking her.

Hunting in herds, she thought, and couldn't keep the sob of desperation inside. One, she could kill, if she got very lucky. Two? Alone?

Maybe this was where it ended. Maybe...

No.

She hadn't put her boot up Gull's ass yet.

The walls were grinding like molars, stone shifting against stone. The world was reforming around her and she couldn't slow down, couldn't rest even for a moment. The light took shape overhead. The exit had once been ten paces each side but now it was barely big enough to climb through, and the stairs had contracted down so tight Kimberly was almost climbing a ladder, reaching up desperately to the next stair and the next after that, using them as rungs, breath coming in broken sobs, the light on her cheeks so close she could feel its heat, and the shapes were closing, the clicker-things nipping at her heels, pincers snapping on the soft flesh of her ankles, and she was screaming, screaming between her teeth as she climbed the last few feet, hands over the edge now, hauling herself up, and now that she was above the lip of the pit she saw the whole house contracting, the kitchen shrinking down, cupboard doors bursting open, the refrigerator shuddering as it squeezed everything left inside into paste, and she got one leg up, and the other, and her breath was a hot pulse in her chest, and-

She was halfway to the front door when the clicker snapped shut on her shin.

 

Mrs Rosenfeld paused, hands outstretched, blood running in sticky rivulets from her fingertips. "You girls hear that?"

The Raconte twins said nothing. They waited at their posts, calmly manning the extremes on each side of Gull's bungalow. Their hands, too, were outstretched. Unlike Rosenfeld, they weren't bleeding. No need to add the poison in their veins to the mixture.

She didn't need their opinion anyway. When was the last time two white girls had anything useful to add to a conversation? She'd heard the cry from inside. A sliver of panic escaping those perfect walls.

Anything loud enough to break free of Gull's home had serious power. And yes, now that she concentrated, she could feel something pulsing inside, like a guitar-string thrumming in the dark.

She knew that singular tone. "Mrs Archer?"

Her stomach dropped. She went to her knees, scrabbling to wipe the circle she'd painted from the pavement. No good - the ritual rolled on.

"Cut it out!" she called to the Raconte twins. "She's in there! Cut the line!"

Too late. The twins were gears in a larger mechanism and that mechanism was spinning faster and faster now, the words and the runes and the blood all mingled, twisted together into something with its own heartbeat, its own hunger.

Power was an animal held on a tight, strained leash. Let go of that cord for even a moment and it was liable to twist, sink its teeth into your throat.

The house was shrinking before Rosenfeld's eyes. The bay windows collapsed in a crash of glass. A roof-tile, squeezed by its neighbours, fired into the sky like a pistol-shot. Even the grass was rippling, earth sinking as foundations were crushed to powder.

All she could do was pray.

 

Kimberly hit the floor chin-first, teeth cutting deep into her tongue. She howled in pain, spat blood, kicked out.

The clicker was stuck fast. It'd bitten into the pale meat of Kimberly's calf, teeth closing on bone. Now it thrashed, its segmented body scraping trenches into the hardwood floor. Its legs – each as long as Kimberly's hand – drummed a hungry rhythm.

Not as big as the centipede thing that'd busted out of the dead cop's throat. Didn't need to be. It had the weight, it had the jaws. Its pincers were serrated, closing on Kimberly's knee, rasping across bruised flesh.

The pain was a hot flare that left Kimberly sobbing. She kicked out with her free foot but the creature was in too deep for that. It hung on with the tenacity of a yappy terrier.

A shudder of black across the ceiling. Its brother was coming.

And all around, the house still contracted, wallpaper curling and folding away like origami, the telephone by the front door now small enough to pick up between forefinger and thumb. Kimberly's shoulders scraped both walls of the entrance hallway and the door had somehow come closer, near enough that she could brush the doorknob with trembling fingertips.

Like Alice drinking that potion, she thought crazily, and kicked out again. This time her heel met the clicker's face. It reared back, serrated pincers tearing ragged gashes through Kimberly's calf.

She screamed.

It was pain unlike anything she'd ever felt, pain like fire exploding in her flesh, like bullets punching into bone. She scrambled back, blood soaking her socks, running down her calf, turning her shoe a livid red. The clicker thrashed, still embedded in her meat, needle limbs ringing on the floorboards, a thin spatter of Kimberly's blood falling from its jaws.

"Just..." Her scream rose to a howl of rage. "Die already!"

She pounded on the clicker with her bare fists, reopening the wounds she'd earned when punching through glass to grab the emergency fire axe. It didn't help. Screaming in outrage, she grabbing the telephone off the stand next to the door. The phone had shrunk just like everything else in Gull's home, and was now barely bigger than a dessert spoon. She smashed the end down on the clicker's back. Plastic shattered and she was left holding half a telephone receiver, a jagged dagger of Bakelite.

She found a gap in the clicker's carapace and jammed the sharp end of the broken receiver in as deep as she could. The clicker made a sound like the wings of a thousand furious cicadas buzzing all at once.

Yellow blood misted the air, her lips. She levered the broken receiver back as far as her strength allowed.

The jaws relented.

She kicked it away, scrambling for the door. A shiver of black across the ceiling: its brother scuttling, now down the wall, hiding behind a lampshade. She blinked, and it was gone.

A flash of chitin in the corner of her eye.

It pounced.

 

The bungalow contracted before Mrs Rosenfeld's eyes. Not a smooth shrinking, but rather a series of jerks and starts as if the invisible grip around the structure was struggling to keep hold. The ceiling shuddered and bent inward. The iron weathervane collapsed suddenly at a broken-neck angle, the bird cast in bronze at the peak reduced to a tight fist of iron.

The huge bay windows relaxed, glass somehow holding despite the incredible pressures. The panes folded inward, a kaleidoscope tessellation twisting down again and again and again, until they looked like the windows on a child's cubby house.

The whole bungalow was now the size of a one bedroom apartment, the door barely large enough for a child to squeeze through, the pebble path rippling like a flag in high winds.

Just like a boulder nudged from the peak of a tall hill, the ritual wouldn't stop until it reached the bottom. "God help her," Mrs Rosenfeld whispered.

Mr Gull's home had been built with stolen power. It obeyed that same power, followed the queen's rules. Mrs Archer wasn't the same. She didn't belong to anyone, and there wasn't a ritual Mrs Rosenfeld could invoke that would squeeze her down the same way.

A grown woman trapped inside a shrinking house. The thought made Rosenfeld shudder to her core. The way she figured, there were two outcomes. Either Mrs Archer got her act together and jumped out a window, or the house would contract around her into a ball of brick and timber and structural steel no bigger than a fist. Mrs Archer would be reduced to a thin slime squirting out from the gaps.

"God help her soul," Rosenfeld repeated. "Queen have mercy."

It wasn't much of a prayer. The matriarch of Rustwood had never been merciful.

 

The second clicker launched off the wall, splayed like a manta ray, pincers wide enough to engulf her head. Kimberly dove, rolled, her ruined calf banging against the skirting board. Her scream was high and desperate. The clickers were regrouping, circling, the rattle of carapaces on the floorboards like a grandfather clock going into arrhythmia, frantic, hungry, ready to strike.

The door was within reach.

She forced herself to stand and threw herself down the hall towards safety. The doorhandle was child-size, almost too small to turn, and the door itself stuck in its hinges. Everything was contracting, and for a moment Kimberly didn't think she could make it through. Her shoulders, maybe. Not her hips, not through that child-size exit.

A clattering behind her. A siren screech.

She had to try.

Kimberly clawed her way through even as the doorframe contracted around her, wood frame warping, the door itself splintering into neat halves. Her fingertips dug into gravel. She hauled herself along, one handful of dirt at a time, shrieking between her teeth as the doorway shrunk down like a noose around her waist.

One gasp of fresh, wet air. Gull's home had warped down to the size of a doghouse now, clamping shut around her knees, but she was still crawling, one leg free, now just one foot trapped inside, wood scraping along her ankle, digging down to the bone, and she screamed at the sudden shock of pain, jagged splinters like needles punching deep, and she pulled and howled and kicked out and-

The pain was gone. The pressure vanished. She looked back and saw the house had shrunk down to a tangle of toothpicks and miniature terracotta tiles the size of a basketball. It looked like someone had dumped a dollhouse in their back yard and stomped it inside-out.

A high screech carried through the rain. A crunch of chitin.

A single claw reached from the tiny dollhouse doorway. Then came a water-balloon burst of thick, yellow fluid, squirting from the miniature windows, shooting in squid-ink streams from gaps in the clapboards.

A lot of blood for such a small house.

Kimberly rolled away, gagging. The stink of the dead clickers was in her nostrils, sour at the back of her throat. She wiped her mouth with her hand but that only made it worse – when she looked down she found her arms spattered with gore, yellow past the wrist.

"The fuck," she gasped, "just happened?"

Footsteps on the gravel. She rolled over and looked up into the weatherworn face of Mrs Rosenfeld.

"Was wondering when you'd show up," the old woman said. She looked tired, just a collection of wrinkles and disappointments hung over a frame of bone. "Get up and quit crying. There's soup back at the Mission."