Experiment in Terror 09 Dust to Dust (7 page)

I walked up and down the streets, keeping quiet and sticking to the walls of buildings, hiding in the shadows that formed despite there being no sun in the sky, just this grimy dead light that hanged above you.

For blocks there was nothing. The chill in the air lessened its hold on me, but my footfalls still had only a whisper of sound. I felt like I was walking inside a miniature city kept inside a jar, with only a few holes poked at the top.

I don’t know where I was going, my feet were not being consciously moved, but considering I had no other ideas, I just went with it and walked and walked.

Finally, I saw something.

Or, should I say, it saw me.

There was a grandiose building –a bank I think – with a row of wide, dusty steps leading up to stately-looking pillars, Grecian-style. At the top of the steps was a man, pacing back and forth.

At least I thought it was a man. As I came closer, my pace slowing, I could see some things were off about him. He moved with jerks, like a marionette puppet and his pants seemed too thin, too flexible, like he didn’t actually have any legs under there at all.

He also had no eyes and no nose – just black, crusted over cavities that I imagined would be bright red in another world.

I swallowed my revulsion. Then he turned his bald head toward me and I knew he saw me. Revulsion turned to fear.

Who are you?
he asked quietly in my head. To my surprise, there was a note of fear in his voice too.
I know you’re there.

I kept my mouth closed, wondering if maybe he couldn’t see me after all.

He reached into his suit pocket, then bent down and placed something on the ground. Two black and white creatures – insects – skittered down the stairs toward me. The closer they got, I realized they were giant cockroaches. But that wasn’t all there was to them.

The insects stopped a few feet away and my mouth dropped open. I took a step back, my hand flying to my lips to keep the bile inside.

The cockroaches didn’t have heads. Instead they had an eyeball each. Human eyeballs, staring right at me from skewed angles, their optic nerves forged onto the legs of the insects, like veiny armor.

Who are you?
The voice repeated, and now I knew he could see me.
Where did you come from?

It took a moment to gather my words.
I’m looking for someone. Can you help me?

The cockroaches skittered closer to each other, their legs making a
scritch-scritch
sound on the pavement that seemed impossibly loud in this airless world.

The voice laughed but when I looked up at the man who was still standing on the steps of the bank, he was motionless.

I can help you
, he said,
no more than you can help me. You are here where I don’t wish to be
. He paused and my gaze darted down to the cockroach eyeballs that were beginning to dance excitedly.
You could get me out of here. There are so many people I wish to see.

Was he starting to rhyme all Dr. Seuss on my ass?

I ignored his plea. Like hell I was going to help him cross over to my world so he could start haunting people.
I’m looking for a woman
, I told him,
she used to live in here
.

Here is a large world
, the man said, and the cockroaches scampered right up to my feet. I fought the violent urge to step on them and squish the eyeballs into the ground. But who knew what ire I’d draw if I did that. I needed to stay calm and play it safe.

Her name is Pippa
, I said. Or
was
Pippa. The last image I had of her was that she was skin and bone and she was dying. I could only hope she was still around, but if she wasn’t, then I prayed she was somewhere where she was finally at rest. If the man with the detached eyeballs was any indication, the Thin Veil was not a world where you found rest or peace.

I went on.
She said things would happen here, in New York
. To be more precise, she had said “That’s where I saw you, Perry. When I first used the Veil to look into your life. It’s where Dex and Michael were born, brought into this world. Where both Dex and I were put away. It’s the beginning of so many horrors. And I believe it will be the end.”

This is not New York
, the man said, even though I could see a glimpse of the Chrysler building through the glass office building opposite us.
This is not anywhere. You will find no one here except poor souls like me.

Suddenly the man started walking down the stairs toward me and while my attention was on his body, the cockroaches began to crawl up my legs. I shuddered and shrieked, swatting at them in automatic horror.

The man was sprinting now, yelling out in pain as I managed to knock the cockroaches to the ground and leap backwards out of the way. They reared up on their back legs and waved sharp incisors at me, ready to take a bite.

I screamed again as they came for me and turned quickly on my heel. I ran as fast I could through the grey streets, hearing his footsteps after me and the scratching sound of the insect legs as they scraped over the concrete.

Thankfully I didn’t have to run for too long before the man and his eyeballs seemed to give up the chase. It didn’t make me feel any better – if something like him was here, then what else was? But at least I was out of immediate danger.

Unfortunately I was no better off than before. The man had never heard of Pippa, and even if he had, he wasn’t about to help me find her. Perhaps I should have struck some kind of bargain with him – you help me and then I’ll help you. But who knew what would happen if I brought that monstrosity back to the other side with me. Probably not a lot of good.

I stopped and looked around. Something about the place was familiar, though I didn’t know how. Just a feeling I had. I looked around at the buildings, down the empty street, wondering why buildings were here but cars were not.

Out of the corner of my eye something was moving. I cautiously turned my head and saw a black, hairy spider the size of a fucking cat crawl behind a row of stairs, its solid body and foot-long legs disappearing one by one.

Holy
shit.
Forget the noseless man with the eyeball roaches – a spider the size of a cat was another thing entirely. My whole body immediately went numb with terror and I stood there for a long time, waiting for it to come back out, debating if I should turn around and head the other way.

But something was compelling me to keep walking forward and when I noticed the air starting to fill with fluttering snowflakes, I knew what it was. Where I was.

The Brooklyn Bridge was just around the corner.

I gathered up what strength I had and tried to shake the cold flakes off my shoulders. Taking in a deep breath, I walked as briskly and as quietly as possible past the area where the spider had disappeared.

I had to look, of course, as I walked past. I only saw shadows and in those shadows, the sickly gleam of hundreds of eyes clumped together, shining like quarters as they watched me pass.

My heart skipped a nervous beat but I kept going, feeling those spider eyes trail up and down my back like I was being poked by spindly legs. Now I was shivering nonstop, from the falling snow and that icky sense of doom you get when you walk through a spider web. Just multiple that feeling by, oh, a million.

I don’t know why I was drawn to the bridge, other than the fact that I’d seen it a million times in my dreams. Maybe, in the real world, we should have gone there right away. I wasn’t sure what I’d find here, in the Veil.

Unless Dex was in here, with me.

At that thought, my pace quickened and soon I had lapsed into a slow jog. As I passed by the lampposts they all started turning on, as if they were leading the way to him. I started to feel that danger notion of hope grow in the pit of my stomach and I ran faster and faster. I ignored the things that could have been hiding in the shadows. I kept my focus dead ahead.

As I passed by city hall, I could see the bridge was deserted and the pedestrian walkway was covered with a thin layer of snow. I slid a little as the path turned from pavement to wood slats but kept on going.

I was about halfway across the bridge, Brooklyn looming in the distance, when the air in front of me began to shift. I stopped in my tracks, the hairs on my arms standing up, my nerves popping from waves of electricity.

And there he was.

Dex.

My Dex.

He was standing a few feet in front of me, seeming to materialize out of the air. He had his grey newsboy cap on his head, dressed in a black t-shirt and black jeans and boots. The same thing he was wearing when Michael took him. But despite his monochrome clothing,
he
was in color. His eyes were mahogany brown and squinting against the sun as he scoured his gaze over the river, looking utterly confused, his skin tone flawless and lightly tan. And his features were warped by the moving air, which meant he was not in the Veil at all, but in our world.

I wasn’t sure why I was being shown this, why there was a rip between the worlds right here in front of me. But I’d be stupid not to take it.

My heart swelled. I had found him. I was his again and he was mine.

“Dex!” I said, my voice sounding weak and metallic despite the joy that was flooding through me.

But he seemed to hear it. He turned his head and looked in my direction, though not at me.

It didn’t matter. I took quick steps toward the shimmer, preparing myself to walk through, not caring how it would look to people on the other side, a girl coming out of thin air. I waited for the cold to intensify, for the pressure in my head to build, to feel like I was being sucked away.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes. I was still in the Veil. The shimmer was gone.

Dex was gone.

I was all alone.

But at least now, I knew where he was. I knew he was alive and out there, in New York City, and he was by himself. That was more than I could have hoped for.

Now I had to think of how the hell I was going to get back. I couldn’t count on another window opening up like that. Perhaps that was all it had been, a window to the other side, not a door.

I waved my hands in the air in vain hope that I would strike something, make something happen. I was frantic, panic pulsing through me, the idea that I couldn’t get to him fast enough.

Ada!
I yelled in my head, hoping she could hear me on the other side. I didn’t know how long I’d been in the bathroom for in Bryant Park, but they no doubt were worried about me by now. I hoped she and Maximus were tuned in, listening, figuring out what happened and how to get me back.

Ada! Maximus!
I yelled again, looking around me. It wouldn’t do, not here. I had to head back to the park, back to the washrooms. Otherwise they’d have no idea where I was.

I turned around and headed back along the bridge. I hated to leave Dex, even though I couldn’t see him I still knew he was there, but there was no way I could get to him this way. I’d have to get through to Ada and Maximus first, then all of us would have to hightail it to the bridge and hope to track him down.

Time didn’t feel like it was on my side. I started running again and this time my movement brought things out of the shadows.

I heard a hard, scratching sound behind me and looked over my shoulder to see a giant spider – and by giant, again, the size of a cat – come crawling down the side of a brick building. It leaped onto the ground and started for me.

A similar sound came from my right. I shot a furtive glance in that direction and saw two more spiders emerge, one from underneath a bench, the other out of a sewer drain, their foot-long legs straining toward me like blackened fingers.

Oh shit.

Now I was booking it, running through the dead streets as fast as I could go, my hair whipping behind me. I praised God for Manhattan’s grid set-up as I was easily able to zig zag my way toward the park. The city was a piece of cake when there were no taxi cabs and rushing pedestrians around.

I was only a block away when something came from nowhere and flew at my chest.

I shrieked and looked down to see the cockroach eyeball dig its pincers into my skin, the eye staring up at me with mad clarity.

Take me with you
, the man’s voice said, though in my panic and confusion I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
I’ll ward them off if you take me with you
.

“Get off of me!” I screamed and the roach only dug its claws in deeper, filling my chest with shards of pain. Grimacing, I had no choice but to put my hand around the jagged, hard-backed shell, my fingers sliding along the pulsing veins of the optic nerve.

I yanked it off and threw it far away just as his other eye came crawling toward me. Without thinking I raised my foot and smashed the creature beneath my Chucks. The eyeball was resistant for a second before the pressure caused it to splatter into slimy goo beneath my sole. Somewhere, the man was screaming.

I went back to running, slipping slightly on the eyeball residue. Whether he could stop the oversized spiders, with their hundreds of one-inch eyes and forearm sized legs, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to chance it. The dead were known to lie.

Finally I found myself at Bryant Park and whipped past the bench that Maximus and Ada would have been sitting at. I knew they weren’t there though, I knew they had moved on. The question was, where?

The toilets didn’t exist in the Veil side of the world, for one reason or another, so I had to kind of guess where they would be. I looked around, up and down, for any signs of weakness in the air, any shimmers or wavers, but couldn’t see anything.

Don’t panic
, I told myself, though the reminder was ridiculous. Of course I was panicking. I used to have panic attacks over making phone calls to Pizza Hut.

And, I wasn’t alone. The man was still screaming over his loss of eyes and was out there – sightless but angry. And the spiders, well it seemed I had lost them for the moment but I knew it was a matter of time before they’d catch up. They too wished to come out to the other side. Or to eat me. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be too fussy about it.