Authors: A. Lee Martinez
But here she was.
There was something comforting about the place. Something terrifying. Most terrifying was how comforting she found it. Like she belonged here now.
She entered the building, and everything suddenly felt better. The world outside was a strange, monstrous realm. The world inside was just as strange. So why did she find it less bizarre, less jarring?
The door to West’s apartment opened, and he stuck his head out. “Hey, Number Five. Can you bring me that package on the stoop?”
Having just passed the stoop, she hadn’t noticed a package. A glance over her shoulder showed a box wrapped in brown paper sitting behind her. She couldn’t have entered without tripping over it.
“Hurry it up, Number Five,” said West.
When Diana turned to pick up the package, it had disappeared.
She walked back to the open apartment door and said, “It’s gone.”
“Better not be,” replied West with a snort.
From her vantage point the package was back in iplace. She walked toward it, each step taken with care and deliberation. With each step the package became lighter and lighter until it was transparent—then, just when she was within reach, it faded away. She walked back down the hallway, and when she reached West’s door the package was back.
He swaggered over to her. “Well, where is it?”
“It keeps disappearing.”
“Are you thinking about something else when you reach for it?”
“Something else?”
West’s heavy eyebrows furrowed. “You can’t think about picking up the package while you’re picking up the package. It’ll hear you coming that way.”
She nodded, more to herself than to him. “Maybe it’d be easier if you just got it yourself.”
He frowned. “That’s no good. It knows me too well. Can smell me from a mile away.”
So could she, but she refrained from suggesting a bath might be in order.
“If you don’t get that package, every living thing in Barcelona is going to die,” said West.
She believed him. Not just because she was in a state of mind to believe anything and everything, but because he said it so matter-of-factly, as if commenting on an annoying weather prediction. Oh, darn, the picnic is going to be ruined. Fiddledee-dee.
He vanished into his darkened apartment.
Diana decided that if she could save everyone in Barcelona, then at least she could say she’d done something worthwhile with her life. She moved toward the package.
It vanished.
Damn. It was onto her.
West’s voice came from the darkness. “Three minutes.”
“I’m working on it,” she called back.
“Well, it’s no problem. Not like anyone of any great importance is in Barcelona or anything. Not like the entire future of the human race hinges on the fate of one Spanish city.”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. West’s delivery was flat, and her gauge of reality was hardly reliable.
She stuck her hands in her pockets, whistled a jaunty tune, and sauntered toward the package. She attempted to occupy her mind with thoughts of turtles and jelly doughnuts. Why turtles and jelly doughnuts? She didn’t have a clue. Just the first two things that popped into her head. Out of all the things in her expanding universe, she questioned what these two objects said about her. It wasn’t that they were bad. It was just that they seemed an odd pairing, two things that didn’t go together. And she wondered what it said about her perceptions and logic that these were the two things that sprang to her mind as if they were the most natural combination in the world.
“Aha!”
Diana pounced on the package. It vibrated in her hands as if trying to vanish, but she held tight. Her distracting thoughts had worked. Almost too well, as she must’ve wasted a good
minute or two standing beside the package before grabbing it, but she had it now.
“Nineteen seconds,” called West.
She ran in and handed him the paper-wrapped box. He took it and set it on a shelf beside several other identical boxes.
“Hummph,” said West. “Didn’t think you’d make it.”
She said, “So what about Barcelona?”
“What about it?”
“Is it going to be okay?”
“Should hold for another day or two,” replied West.
He shuffled over to an overstuffed couch and collapsed into it. “Something I can do for you, Number Five?”
She realized she was standing in West’s apartment, a shadowy realm in perpetual twilight. The décor, what she could see of it, was straight out of the seventies. The brightest thing in the room was a unusually large lava lamp that cast a greenish glow. The wax inside swirled in strange patterns. If she squinted just right, she thought she saw an eye floating somewhere within, and it glared at her.
A black-light octopus poster squirmed on the wall. It twisted and distorted like one of those bad motion-imitation pictures won as Cracker Jack prizes. And West’s couch swayed as if on board a boat, even though all the other furniture stayed put.
Yet the weirdness of this apartment was somehow less foreign and unsettling than the real world (whatever that meant) outside this building’s front door.
“What’s in the package?” she asked.
“There’s nothing in the package, Number Five.”
West jumped to his feet and marched forward.
“There’s nothing in any of the packages if they know what’s good for them.”
Most of the boxes hopped deeper into the shelf recesses. One leaned forward, challenging West.
“Oh, someone’s got an attitude, does he?” West’s voice rose. Not much. But enough to be noticed, which in itself was surprising enough to unsettle Diana. “Someone thinks he’s too good for the shelf, does he?”
The package growled.
“You’ll stay formless, and you’ll like it,” said West. “Just remember that once you take on flesh, it means you’ll have an ass for me to kick.”
West stared down the package.
“Well, I can see you’re b,” said Diana. “I’ll just leave you to… uh… taunt the boxes.”
She was a few steps out of the apartment and down the hall when West spoke up.
“It will get easier,” said West.
His face, covered by hair, was as unreadable as his voice, but she thought she saw his thick mustache twitch with the traces of a smile.
“The period of adjustment varies from individual to individual,” he said, “but it always gets better. One way or another.”
“One way or another?”
“Oh, you know. Crossword puzzles. Pornography. Video games. Knitting. Madness. Death. We all find a way of coping, Number Five.”
His dark eyes focused on a point on a distant horizon. He chuckled through a tight, closed mouth. Then an awkward silence, at least as far as Diana was concerned, passed between them. She suspected West didn’t even notice.
“Uh… thanks,” she said.
Something crashed inside his apartment. Grumbling, he went back to deal with the problem. She hoped Barcelona or Paris or whatever else would be okay, but it wasn’t her problem anymore. Her problem was waiting in her apartment.
And he was not alone.
Vom the Hungering sat on the sofa. The green-furred monster had something stuck in his mouth. His cheek bulged. She wondered if it was a whole pig or a small child and decided she’d rather not know.
The giant rubber hedgehog hunched beside the coffee table.
“I know I saw it go under here,” he said. “I think it ran into the kitchen,” said Vom. “Oh, hey, Diana.” He grinned. Glimpses of red velvet showed between his sharp teeth. He spit out the sofa pillow he’d been sucking on like an industrial-sized Life Saver.
“Sorry. Helps to keep my mind off my eating disorder.”
He returned the saliva-coated pillow to its spot on the couch.
“One day at a time and all that,” said Vom.
She was annoyed, but only for a moment. Having Vom devour pillows was preferable to anything else that came to mind. She could’ve lived without his slimy drool soaking into the upholstery, but it wasn’t her couch.
The hedgehog stood. He held a miniature version of himself in one hand.
“Oh, hello,” said the monster to Diana.
“Diana, this is Unending Smorgaz,” said Vom.
“Hi,” she said.
“Do you want to take care of this for me, Vom?” Smorgaz threw his miniature to Vom, who snapped it down in a single bite. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Diana wanted to sit down but didn’t want to sit next to Vom and his indiscriminate jaws. The air shimmered, and a recliner materialized beside her. She wasn’t sure if she had caused it or if the apartment itself had created the chair, but it seemed a moot point. She plopped into the recliner.
“Smorgaz, could you excuse us a moment?” she asked. “I need to talk to Vom.”
“Say no more. Think I’ll go for a walk. Anyone want anything while I’m out?”
“Could you bring back a few dozen pizzas?” asked Vom. Diana could’ve probably wished for pizzas, but eating magical pizzas conjured up from the nethersphere didn’t sound very appetizing.
“Sure thing. Do you want the pizza delivery guy too?”
Vom’s stomach growled. Literally, the mouth on his gut grumbled, licking its lips.
“No pizza delivery guys,” said Diana. “Or gals. Or puppies or kittens or anything like that.”
Vom frowned. “Can we at least get sausage on the pizzas?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, a dozen sausage pizzas coming up.” Smorgaz trundled out the door, but she stopped him.
“Do you have any money?”
“No.”
“How do you intend to pay?”
“Pay?” Smorgaz tilted his head at an angle and a most curious expression crossed his face. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the question.”
“You have to pay for them somehow.”
“I do?”
Unending Smorgaz glanced at Vom, who shrugged.
“She’s unconventional.”
Diana contemplated how Smorgaz planned on securing those pizzas, but, of course, he was a monster. Monsters didn’t carry cash. They just took what they wanted without thought for the consequences. That wouldn’t do. She couldn’t unleash a beast into the streets to terrorize every pizza delivery vehicle he stumbled across.
She pulled some cash out of her wallet and handed it to Smorgaz. “Just seven blocks south, on the Corner of O’Brian and Swaim, there’s a little shop that sells two medium cheese pizzas for a good price.”
“Only two?” whined Vom. “And what about the sausage?”
“Fine.” She gave Smorgaz another few dollars and some change to cover tax.
“What about garlic bread?”
Se opened her wallet to let Vom see how empty it was. He slouched and stuffed the pillow back into his mouth with a pout.
Smorgaz left.
While she organized her thoughts, Vom noisily chewed like a petulant three-year-old.
“Pork is meat,” he grumbled.
“Yes, it is.”
“Puppies are meat,” he said.
“You’re not eating puppies. Not while I’m around.”
“Have you ever eaten a puppy? They’re delicious.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t everything delicious to you?”
“I don’t care for broccoli,” he replied.
She stared at him skeptically.
“Just because I’ll eat it doesn’t mean I like it.” He leaned forward. “Anyway, when you get right down to it, everything in this universe is just a handful of atoms arranged in peculiar ways. Puppies aren’t different than pigs, carbon and nitrogen. It seems unfair to just eat one because of your own arbitrary cultural standards of acceptability.”
“Arbitrary, yes,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t change anything.”
“What about dogs? Full-grown ones, I mean?”
“No dogs.”
He opened his mouth, but she cut him off.
“Just assume that if I haven’t okayed it, it’s off-limits.”
Annoyed, he swallowed the pillow.
“It’s clear we need to lay some ground rules,” she said. “If we’re going to be stuck with each other, we have to figure a way to make this work.”
“Agreed.” Vom snorted. “I just don’t see why I have to make all the sacrifices.”
“My sense of reality has crumbled. I’m bound to a monster that wants to devour everything all the time, including me. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose my sanity eventually. So if I’m going to have to deal with all that, the least you can do is not eat puppies.”
Vom shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“What I need from you now is some explanations about how all this… weirdness functions. If this is the world I have to live in, I’m damn well going to understand it. For starters, I need to know why the hell that monster tried to kill me this morning and now he’s hanging around, fetching us pizza.”
“Do you want the complicated answer? Or the simple one?”
A three-inch Smorgaz climbed up the wall beside Vom. He nabbed it and stuffell going in one set of jaws while talking with another.