(A sample from Crawlspace.)
© 2009 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
7:19 PM The Warehouse
HE OPENED his eyes.
The Spyder had stopped. In the glare of its headlights Tommy could see a bank of tall rank weeds and up ahead a glint from the river. The abandoned warehouse waited just like in Tommy’s first dream of it.
Miss Quinn switched off the headlights and stepped out. Tommy carried Agnes out. She was still asleep and in his arms she felt limp and relaxed and more precious than anything else he’d ever imagined.
‘The Professor knows about this place,’ Tommy said.
Miss Quinn shut the car door. ‘The Professor’s dead.’
‘He sent in reports.’
Miss Quinn stretched her limbs. She started toward the warehouse. ‘We won’t be long. I need something here. And I want to call ahead.’
INSIDE THE WAREHOUSE it was just the way Tommy saw it two weeks ago. They crossed the main floor and climbed the steps to the office.
In the office Miss Quinn snapped on the naked desk lamp and punched numbers on her phone. Tommy laid Agnes onto the leather couch.
‘Ouf,’ Agnes gasped.
‘Hurt?’
‘A little.’
‘I’ll get you to a doctor soon.’
Agnes shook her head. ‘It doesn’t feel that bad. Anyway, we’re outlaws now, right? On the run?’
‘I guess. Something like that.’
Agnes smiled and recited,
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
Miss Quinn spoke into her phone. ‘That’s right. We need a safe place.’
OUTSIDE ALONG THE RIVERBANK the weeds swarmed with millions of insects hopping, scuttling, flying. Moths rose up and beat against the bright window to the office.
Tommy and Miss Quinn walked back to the Spyder. She wore a dress and carried a suitcase. Her hair was done in a new way and her makeup looked different, too. Tommy wondered how easy she remade herself. She sure didn’t look like a science teacher anymore.
He could smell her now, too. All the Crawler stink she was spreading in the night air. God she smelled good. Tommy snuck in a good deep whiff of her as she put the suitcase in the back of the car. She turned to him and he stepped away, embarrassed. ‘You’re sure you won’t come?’
‘There was a guy in the Team, got burned once by one of the guns,’ Tommy said. ‘I remember. Papers said it was hopeless.’
‘Come or stay. But they’ll find you here.’
Tommy looked back toward the warehouse. ‘She couldn’t stand a long drive. It would tear her guts out.’
‘Take this at least.’
Miss Quinn pressed a small white card into his hands.
‘Go to that address if you get out. You’ll be safe there.’
‘Good-bye Miss Quinn.’
Miss Quinn leaned over and took his chin and kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue pried his lips open and roved inside him. Tommy strained against her.
Kissing Miss Quinn wasn’t like kissing Agnes. It wasn’t like kissing any human girl. Miss Quinn’s tongue and lips did things no human tongue and lips could. And Tommy’s own mouth answered in kind. It was like nothing he’d ever dreamed of, this insect-human kind of love. Then he felt Miss Quinn’s tongue sliding back over his tongue deep down his throat. It felt like she was pushing something there, and Tommy’s throat spasmed and swallowed something like a small lozenge or pill.
She drew back and let him go. Tommy leaned against the car, panting. His head went round and round.
Miss Quinn got into the Spyder. She gave him a last flash of a smile and winked. ‘Don’t ever say it wasn’t fun.’
She backed the car away toward the main road. Tommy turned back to the warehouse.
TOMMY went inside the warehouse. He walked across the main floor. He snapped on his flashlight and looked at the burn spot on the concrete where the Man from the Motel had charred and Changed and died.
He shut off the light and climbed back to the office. But he didn’t go in right away. Instead he paused at the door and looked in through the window.
Agnes lay on the couch, her eyes closed. She seemed asleep and at peace. Maybe she was dreaming happy dreams.
Tommy turned back away from the office.
‘I ought to leave her,’ he said. ‘I ought to go somewhere and call a hospital. Maybe they can do something to help her. Maybe Papers was wrong.’
But he knew Papers had never been wrong. Not about something like that.
One Burn and you’re done for.
Inside the office a moth beat its wings against the bare bulb of the desk lamp.
Tommy came in and sat in the big oak desk chair. He unbuttoned his shirt. Under his shirt his chest was pitted with a hundred bright red wounds.
Agnes said, ‘Oh God, Tommy – what did they do to you?’
He looked over at her. She lay looking at him. He shrugged. ‘These aren’t from tonight. They’re from a long time ago.’
Agnes got to her feet and knelt before him. She touched one wound, then another, with her fingertip.
‘The Professor injected me with the Jelly. It helped me Trace them. A real gift I had, they said. Every one of these is a Crawler I led them to. That one was the first. Four years ago. We burned him with the Burners. I was twelve years old.’
Agnes kissed the wound. He leaned over her and breathed in her smell. She smelled nothing like Miss Quinn or any of the Things – any of his kind. She smelled good in another way.
What was he really, he wondered. Was he Thing or human. Could he choose which kind to belong to, or was the choice already made for him? He felt the white card in his pocket. So many questions to ask.
Something was stirring deep inside him. It was like a sort of hunger. No. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before.
It felt really bad and dangerous. And good.
‘Tommy,’ Agnes said, ‘make love to me.’
Tommy stared at her. ‘No.’
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘You don’t know what you’re asking. If I got excited – if I Changed—’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t care.’
‘You’re not even okay to travel.’
‘Tommy, I don’t care what happens to us tomorrow. I don’t care if they catch us and lock us away for a hundred years. You’re my first boyfriend, Tommy. Make love to me tonight.’
‘I can’t! Agnes, you have to trust me. And do what I say.’
‘What?’
‘Tie me up, Little Aggie.’
She laughed. ‘Why? Are you kinky, Tommy?’
‘I’m not kidding. You have to, or else … you just have to, okay?’
He held out his wrists. He looked at her just as serious as he could. She shook her head, then smiled to herself and nodded.
She started tying him.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way, Aggie.’
‘But, don’t you know … you’re in my power now?’
He got a sudden sense of danger. Danger – and arousal. ‘Little Aggie, don’t mess around with this. I’m warning you.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
She pulled up her long white dress and straddled him. She kissed him and reached for his zipper.
‘You can do it,’ she said, huskily into his ear. ‘Please, Tommy. Please?’
He couldn’t resist. He started to kiss her back.
‘That’s right. Kiss me, Tommy. Kiss me.’
His arms, tied behind the chair, started rippling. He could feel them … bumps forming … tentacles and jointed insect-limbs protruding.
He moaned, ‘No, Aggie … no…’
She ground her crotch against him. His body rose in answer. He couldn’t stop it. In a moment he knew he would enter her. But he would enter her in ways she couldn’t even dream. The thought stabbed him with misery and deep joy.
‘Tommy, whatever you fear, I’ll face it with you – whatever it is we’ll overcome it – I love you, Tommy.’
She was kissing his face and his face felt like it was darkening, growing scales – the things plunged into her thighs and sides. And she twisted back her head in shock, with fear – she opened her mouth – she started to scream—
WATER was swirling down a white porcelain sink. Drops of red blood were spilling down the drain.
A moth was fluttering around a bare bulb on the wall, beating against it. Hands were washing blood off in the sink.
The hands were reaching for a white towel and drying themselves, leaving blood stains. The figure was moving out into the office—
Tommy looked across the office to the couch. On the couch lay the body of Agnes Renfield, naked, dead, mutilated. Half of her was missing and her torso was caved in on itself.
Tommy knelt by the couch and opened a book.
Tommy read the inscription. He shook his head. ‘No, this one’s yours. Here’s mine.’
He placed her book open beside her dear dead face. He smoothed her hair and opened his copy of the book and read.
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees…
OUTSIDE, the night was cut by the stab of headlights approaching down the long broken drive. An old Chevy pulled up. A group of men climbed out. A Team.
There was a mature man in his 50’s with an air of command. A nerdy man held a sheaf of papers. A nattily-attired man sat at the wheel. A fat man whose coat bristled with gadgets sat beside him. And in the back seat there was a Kid, too.
It was Eddie.
The fat man handed out the Burners. The Commander signed them all to make no sound. They crept up to the open warehouse doors. The Kid clung close to the Commander, sheltering in the man’s long topcoat.
A sound floated down to them. It was a voice. It echoed from the open door to the warehouse office out over the main floor.
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
The men quietly cocked their Burners and moved inside.
THE SCUFFLING SOUNDS of shoes from the main floor didn’t stop Tommy reading. Neither did the smell that came to his acute olfactory nerves – the smell of human things.
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed–
Tommy stopped. His voice choked and he couldn’t go on.
He looked around behind him.
Four men stood in the door. Burners ready. The Kid, Eddie, pointed at him.
‘That’s him,’ Eddie said.
The Commander gave the order. ‘Burn it,’ he said. He used the same tones the Professor always had.
Tommy saw the Burners blaze as one. The red rays shot out dead for him – straight into his eyes—
TOMMY’S body jerked and twisted under the rays. He got mad in the end and smashed a hole in the office wall. And he started to Change. Bumps rippled under his skin. Tentacles burst out of his sides. His head melded with his trunk and his legs fused and his skin roughened like bark, oozing with Jelly. His body closed off into plates of beetle armor – his bulbous black insect eyes glaring as he burned.
The rays splashed everywhere about the office, igniting it – burning its walls black.
In the midst of the conflagration came the Commander’s voice. ‘Power off.’
The blaze died away.
The Thing’s black eye socket charred black. Bits of the remains littered the steel floor of the office. The office was burning. The couch was burning around Agnes’ corpse.
The Commander ordered, ‘Get the knife.’
The man with glasses laid out his surgical gear and got busy. Out of the remains one tiny, pearlescent egg dropped. A little bigger than a grain of rice.
The man with glasses said, ‘Only one. An unusually ti, tiny one.’
The Commander bent and examined it. ‘Freshly planted. No more than a few hours ago.’ He handed it back. ‘Seal it and send it in.’
Police sirens were growing far away.
‘Better get moving,’ the Commander said. ‘Leave the girl. Leave them together. Let the sun do its work.’
He turned to the Kid. ‘You did good tonight, Eddie.’
The Kid stared at the remnants. He rubbed his chest. His top two shirt buttons were open and he scratched at a little red wound, fresh, no bigger than a needle prick.
‘Still hurt?’ asked the Commander. Eddie nodded. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.’
‘How many more of them are there, Commander? More of these, these Things?’
The Commander sighed. ‘More than you can ever imagine.’
‘I met this one. I talked with it. They said its name was Tommy.’
The Commander followed the others out of the ruined office. The Kid lingered. He stared at the remnants.
At the door the Commander looked back. ‘Come on, Eddie.’
They left. They crossed the main warehouse floor and went out into the sunlight. They stored the Burners in the gym bags, stowed the bags in the trunk, got in the Chevy and drove away.
Behind them the fire spread in the office over the charred remains of Tommy and Agnes.
Θ
