As he followed them, he could already hear a strange, rhythmic vibration, like ritualistic chanting. Both sides of the street were filled with burnt cars and garbage. Off in the distance, he could still hear gunshots. A few screams. Another police helicopter flew overhead, shining its light over the street, seeing him, pausing briefly, and casting an angelic beam of bright light on Kyle, until finally it grew restless and moved on to whatever riot was going on blocks away. Not close but not too far either. Never too far.
He had awoken to darkness just a few hours before. The power had gone out again, and in the heat, he could not fall back asleep. With nothing on TV but the usual reports of unrest, he decided to go for a walk. At the door, the security guard, half asleep but startled enough to see someone -- anyone -- up at this hour and wishing to go outside, nodded his head in generic acknowledgement. Just going through the motions.
“You know you can’t go out there.”
“The power’s out,” Kyle said.
“You know they’ll throw your ass in jail or shoot you.”
“Curfew’s for kids looking for trouble. I’m just going for a walk.”
They looked at each other for some time until finally the underpaid guard shrugged and let him pass outside, into the night. The air was hot, and he could smell fire, smoke, exhaust, all the signs and remnants of an upset world. Not that he cared. He didn’t care much before the riots and the looting started, and he didn’t care anymore now.
As he strolled down the streets, walking past boarded-up stores and bars that he had frequented, he felt the genuine thrill of solitude as he walked these forbidden streets alone, no sounds but the crunch-crunch-crunch of broken glass under his foot. In the middle of the street was what looked like the taped outline of a human figure, along with a small splotch of red smeared across it. Boredom was just as dangerous as anything else, he thought. He had heard stories of people jumping from buildings, finding new ways to end their locked-up existence as the world around them burned and fell apart. It was always going to fall apart, he thought.
And then he heard them. Other footsteps, crunching quickly across the same streets paved with broken glass as he did. He watched from the shadows as they hurried on past him. Maybe they saw him? He wasn’t making much of an effort to hide, but they walked with purpose, as if they were gravely late for something. They were civilians dressed in riot gear, donning gas masks, baseball bats and batons. They weren’t heading toward the riots. They were headed someplace else, with purpose, in the night, under curfew. Boredom is a dangerous thing. Then he smiled and followed them with as much stealth as he cared to commit to.
They led him down empty streets that grew narrower, and streetlamps became fewer and fewer. The lamps had already been dimmed because of the brownouts. In spots of darkness, he could see nothing and occasionally bumped into a random piece of debris. He wondered how they glided down every street so effortlessly. But it was late, and he was tired. The hot slog of the night grew more intense as he followed them. They were dressed in black and seemed to blend into the darkness of night, and they were headed someplace far more interesting than he was originally. He had been stuck inside for weeks. Months. They all had. The curfews from the riots had placed an indefinite hold on everyone’s life, and the days blended until time itself seemed to stop and move at warp speed both at once. Movies and TV shows were binged and then were binged again. People died and others were born, and few bore witness to any of it.
The night stunk of wet garbage and piss, and he wondered how long he would follow them before he got bored and tired and decided to turn back. But he looked back, and his block of the city was still dark. Nothing to do but go on, he thought. He had heard of random fast-food places and bars open illegally at night, illegal speakeasys that served bored and society-starved patrons. Fresh pizza, not frozen. Good drinks. Women. In the flesh. But these were all stories, things people at work whispered about to pass the time. No one had actually gone to them, only known someone who had. Or thought they did. He was hungry now, thinking about it.
In the dark, he was making far too much noise for them not to hear, but they didn’t seem to care. Follow us, said a voice inside his head. He had grown accustomed to talking to himself. In the mirror. At the dinner table. At the TV. He assumed everyone had. Surrounded by millions yet alone all the time. That’s what it felt like now to him. But at the very least, this new pursuit of interest had made him forget about all that, and so he continued to lurk close behind them.
He watched as they stood, the four of them, standing in front of what looked like an old, dilapidated Catholic church and school. Abandoned for years. Maybe longer. The four of them stood in a straight line, watching it, as if waiting for a signal. Something to call them. And then the four began to walk toward the building. Here, everything was dark in every direction. How could they see so clearly in the dark? he thought. Their movements were effortless, yet in this deep darkness he could barely see his own hand. It reminded him of his trips to the countryside when his parents would take. At night they’d go outside, and there’d be nothing but the stars, so far from city lights and noise. Just the immense emptiness of the universe above them. But there were no stars or moon tonight to guide him. All the people with money had moved out to the countryside until the countryside was no longer that at all. But of course, he didn’t have that kind of money. Few did. And so, in the blackness of night, he followed them.
As he approached a nearby broken window where he saw the other four enter, he heard what he thought was a low humming. Constant, like a machine, but almost organic, human. Like a religious service. As he stepped through the window, he could already feel a gust of warm, moist air. Hotter inside than out. It felt like someone had kept the furnace running all through the summer. He wiped his brow. Inside, he could find no trace of them. He heard no footsteps, only the sound of the humming growing louder. The floor seemed to shake with it. A generator? Then he smiled to himself. A nightclub. Of course. Probably hidden away in the underground level. No cop or neighbor would ever think to look in here. The neighborhoods were full of dozens of abandoned, boarded-up buildings. In his mind, he imagined a million things going on at night far more interesting than his life.
Whispers. He could hear something above the humming. Whispers and low voices. He took out his phone in the darkness and used its light to guide him down the long hallway. On both sides were empty lockers, a few torn bookbags. A door was open to an empty, cobweb-filled classroom with desks that had not used for years. Longer even. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that he began to feel uneasy about this place. But he was inside now and turning back after everything would have been his biggest loss yet. He certainly wasn’t tired.
The hallway led to a staircase. Up a few levels, and down even more. They must have gone downstairs, he thought. And as he descended, he could smell something rotten, foul. No doubt some animal had come in, gotten lost or trapped and died. Or several. It smelled like several to him. The humming grew louder, so much so that it began to hurt his ears, and it no longer sounded like humming now. It sounded like a voice of sorts. A constant, deep hum. More whispers. They were close, and he wondered if they already knew he was down here with them. As he stepped onto the basement level, the floors felt slick, as if they were covered in oil or grease. It was hot down there. And it stunk. Homeless people, maybe? he thought. Shooting up in peace. Who the hell would come down here anyway? Me, I guess. He smiled, but as he did so, he heard the whispering again, more urgent this time. Sometimes it seemed as if they all whispered in unison. Down the hallway he could see a faint red glow and followed it. A fire, maybe? The further in he went, the less sure he was that it would be any kind of midnight rave or secret nightclub. It might be something more dangerous than that.
He entered a very large room, and in the dimness of red he could see long tables and metal chairs, something that must have once been a cafeteria. Searching for the source of the red glow, he looked around until, further ahead, he could see a dim shimmer of sorts on a stage. A school stage most likely for plays, he thought. He could see the silhouettes of the four figures through the red. But his eyes played tricks on him. Maybe he was tired, or maybe it was the flickering of a candle they had lit in front of them. But the wall seemed to move, and the closer he looked, the less it seemed like a wall and more like flesh-moving flesh. The four moved closer to it and pressed their hands against it. More whispers. Kyle hid behind one of the tables and watched. The humming began to grow louder, and as he watched he noticed that it wasn’t coming from any generator or machine. And it was not coming from anything human. No, an opening grew in the wall, and the larger it grew the louder the humming sound became. One of the four extended their arm into the crevice and let out a loud scream that was full of pain at first, then grew into something that sounded more like ecstasy, almost sexual. Then they retracted their arm, and in the darkness, Kyle could not see it. More whispering, and then something that almost sounded like laughter.
Another figure took off their shoe and stuck their foot into it the hole, and again cried out in both pain and pleasure. Kyle watched as yet another one of the figures got down on all fours on the stage. There appeared to be some arguing between them, the first time he’d seen any type of discourse between the group. One of them seemed to by trying to stop them, but the other two held them back. Then, the figure on the floor proceeded to stick their head into the hole. This time he could hear muffled screaming, but it was not that of ecstasy. It was of pure horror, pain, anger. Hate. Growling and snarling. The others on the stage tried to grab their companion and pull them out, but it seemed as if they were stuck. The body writhed in agony and convulsed like the frantic tendril of an octopus, until finally the being withdrew from the wall. The others stepped back and gasped.
Kyle could not see clearly in the redness. The person on the floor got up, slowly walked towards one of the other members, grabbed them, and pushed their face to his. Then there was more screaming, and the two others ran off the stage, ran past Kyle who was yet to budge from his hiding spot under the table, then ran down the hallway to the stairs. Kyle froze in terror. He couldn’t move. His mind tried to make sense of what he was seeing but there was no logic to the grotesqueries being played out in front of him, he the only audience to this hellish play. The two figures seemed joined together now, and as they turned around, they seemed to look out in Kyle’s direction. Then the humming became deafening as the hole opened up wider, and the two walked into it, hand in hand.
Kyle screamed and ran down the hallway. A few times he slid on the strange liquid on the floor, and just as quickly he got up and held onto the railing for dear life as he ran up the stairs. The humming became more distant as he did so.
He had awoken at some deep hour in the night, before the first blue tint of dawn rose over the city, and he had screamed aloud. In his dreams, he could still hear the humming, see the walls move and pulsate, see the hole opening larger and larger until it consumed not just the church, but the city, block after block, crossing oceans, consuming stars, until all was in a crimson, fleshy darkness.
He felt nauseous, weak. His heart would not stop pounding with irregular beats. Try as he might, he could not calm it. On TV, the governor was talking about bringing in the National Guard downtown. People were ignoring the curfews and they sought stricter punishments. No one seemed to care anymore. People didn’t want to listen anymore. They had listened their whole lives and nothing had happened.
Kyle could see pillars of smoke during the day, the red glow of raging fires at night. He knew that his restlessness and his nightmares would continue. He knew had to go back to look at the hole again.
He did not remember how he had found it. He had seen the dark outline of the abandoned church, recognized it somehow in the moonlight, then made his way in. The path downstairs was easier to follow this time. Again, he could feel himself perspiring in an already hot night. Hotter, it seemed than the fires outside he had passed. Burnt police cars. Melted street signs. Again, he could smell the sweet and foul stench of rotting flesh. And then he heard the humming, low and constant but powerful. Saying what? Was it speaking to me? Was that how I had found it? When he reached the bottom he felt the familiar slickness, and walked delicately upon it as he followed the dim redness down the hall.
And there it was in front of him. On stage, playing to an empty room. In the dim redness, he could see the fleshly texture of it moving in different directions expanding, contracting. Almost breathing. The hole in the middle pulsated. It was different this time. He was alone. He had thought of the two people who had transformed before his very eyes on that stage. They had walked into the hole as it expanded and swallowed them both. Where did they go? What was beyond it? Kyle could feel it staring at him. It contracted in and out, and the same monotone humming grew louder, as did the translucent redness that eliminated from the stage. Some part of Kyle told him to run back up those steps. That to go forward meant there would never be any turning back. But he knew the dreams would call for him again. They had led him here to this place. To the hole. And here it was, waiting for him. He walked slowly toward the stage and could feel the heat of it as if he were walking toward the mouth of a volcano. The stifling air came out in sudden gasps, as if it were breathing.
He stood alone on the stage with a powerful desire to touch the fleshy wall expanding in front of him. Inside the hole, he could just make out a deep red, glowing hot like fire. He wanted badly to touch the surface of it, the curiosity in him almost sexual at this point, touching some new strange exotic flesh that could bend and change the flesh of others. He had seen and done everything in his life, and he was tired of it all. He was tired of the world rotting outside, falling apart, human drama that never seemed to end because no one wanted it to. The same familiar, pains, wrongs, loves, hates, loss, birth, death, begin again. He was tired of it all and wanted something new. So, he extended his arm and reached out to touch the surface.
He stuck in his arm, and could feel the strange sensation of pulsating, moist flesh all around it. Slow at first and then deeper. He could feel the heat become increasingly intense the further he pushed his arm in. All around it, he could feel the organic hole move and swirl around his arm. It stunk like bile. At first, his arm began to tingle, then burn, and suddenly it felt like something was grabbing his arm from the other side, pulling him in deeper, closer, until his face was nearly up against the hole. He pulled back, and wondered if there was anyone in the darkness behind him at that moment, watching in horror just as he had. He stuck his foot up on the wall and used it to propel him backwards, and finally he was able to free it. As he fell back on the floor, he watched the hole close up again, and as it did so, a low, monotone moaning came from it, and he could feel a gust of warm air blow through the orifice. Then he looked down. Where his arm had been was now a fleshless stump of bloodied muscle, and where his hand should have been, was now what looked like a claw. He watched it outstretch before him, moving but not at his command. It was a limb alien to his body. He could smell the stink of it, the smell of rot and shit and hate. He wretched on the floor.
The floor beneath him rumbled as the moaning from the hole grew louder. Then louder. He hoisted himself back up with his one normal arm and began to run. Earthquake? He thought. Or an explosion back up top, on the streets, from a protest? Either way, he didn’t want to be left down here for the ceiling to collapse. He didn’t want to be stuck down there with the hole, alone. He saw the two others go in. What if they came back out? What if that was them pulling on my arm?
As he ran out of the room, hiding his deformed arm that moved against his will, he asked himself: What’s on the other side?
Back at the top, the world had gone unchanged. Across the street, a car burned, its metals and plastics slowly melting in the heat. He could hear gunshots in the distance. Far, but not too far. He smiled. At least everything was normal up here. He took off his shirt and wrapped his arm in it, hoping to avoid any attention on the way back. Not that anyone would notice anymore. Not here.
He made his way back home as a steady rain fell upon him, washing the ash and the blood from the street down the gutters, down the drains. His arm burned as he walked, and at times it seemed as if it were moving, as if the very flesh itself was crawling along his new limb. On one street, Kyle saw a man whose face was hidden in the shadow of
his hoody. The man stopped and looked at him. The man looked at Kyle for some time, and when he saw the arm Kyle was trying to hide. He smiled, then walked on, saying nothing. As he turned around to watch the man disappear, he swore he could see movement from underneath the man’s clothes, as if a snake or animals were crawling around his body as he walked. And then he was gone.
He awoke on his bed, covered in sweat, and found that his arm had returned to normal. Slowly he pulled it out from his blanket, stared at it, flexed it, smelled it. It obeyed his every command; it was his again. Had he dreamt it all? No, he could still remember the feeling, the burning of his arm, the sensation of being pulled into someplace darker, deeper. The world outside was still the same. Outside he could see columns of smoke belching up into the cloudless sky, SWAT and TV station helicopters circling over this space and that. Gunshots fired. The new normal.
The room grew hot, and after he had maxed out the air conditioning, he opened the window and stuck his head out. He could not breathe, and he found himself drenched in sweat. Was he sick? Had the hole given him some kind of…illness? He sat back down as he trembled with fever and watched reports of violence, people shot dead on the streets, morgues running out of room for the dead. More riots. The news seemed to spill out from his TV, surrounding him, and he could feel the violence in his room as if it were something tangible. He could feel anger growing within him, a hatred, and as he sat there, he watched as his arm began to bleed, slowly at first and then faster and faster until it was covered in blood and puss and slime. The smell of rot and sewage came back, and in just a few minutes he once again saw the claw before him, moving, twisting. But this time he did not try to hide it. He did not panic. Instead, he sat back and watched it move. His heart raced with adrenaline, and he could feel his anger, his pure hate growing within him.
He stood up quickly, picked up a lamp, then pounded down on the TV set as he screamed:
“SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
The TV went up in sparks and smoke, and broken pieces scattered on his stained, carpeted floor. His claw curled and almost seemed to look at him. The room was quiet now, and he could smell the stench of whatever his arm had become. It smelled like that orifice he had left behind in the basement of the church. It stunk. There was a knock at the door, then another. They barely registered above the sound of blood rushing in his ears. If it even was blood. He put the arm up to his face. It was both his and not his, and as it swayed hypnotically, he tasted it. It tasted like shit.
Knock, knock.
He could feel his temper rise up again, rising up into something that he never knew he had inside, as if every vessel, every limb, every cell in his body boiled with hate and anger and rage and all of this made the room spin, and he was not sure if it was something wonderful or horrible. Perhaps it was both. And it wasn’t just within him, now. He could feel it in the air, smell it. It carried across the room like a gentle breeze, and then he could almost see it, blue and red lines of electric currents, channeling through his room, into him, out of him, going out the door, out the window, into the cavernous tunnels of the city that now burned and spit blood and smoke and bullets. He walked over to the window and saw the current. Circling buildings, people, traversing them, entering them. Had anyone noticed? he wondered. Had it always been here, like this, around us? Growing?
Knock, knock.
The rage came back to him, guided him, and he felt himself storm to the door, open it, and saw a man he thought he recognized. A neighbor? Security? His face was blurred. It looked like his neighbor. Were they friends? Did the man see his arm? Would he scream? Would he care? Inside him, Kyle could feel a hot, steely fluid rush through his blood, as if he was hooked into an IV bag of magma. The man at the door began to raise his voice, but Kyle could not discern the words. They sounded like the teacher from the Charlie Brown cartoons. Charlie Brown. He lifted his deformed arm and smacked it over the face of the man. The living flesh of it seemed to spread to his neighbor’s face, his eyes. Down his mouth. He’s a clown, that Charlie Brown. The man started choking on the flesh oozing down his throat. The neighbor fell to the floor in the hallway, and instead of covering the scene of the crime, Kyle closed the door, then collapsed onto the ground as his vision dimmed to black.
Kyle awoke to a strange, crimson darkness. His head throbbed, and on there on the TV was nothing but snow. The broadcast had been dead for hours. He looked at his arm, and once again it had returned to its “normal” state. If that was normal, anyway. His room was still overturned, and he could see the cracked outline of his fist that he had put into the plaster earlier that day before he saw his neighbor. The neighbor. He had left him outside. He opened the door, and there was nothing. But the hallway seemed dimmer, and he could smell the stench of raw sewage all around him. On the hallway radio monitor, he heard a subtle static, just low enough to be heard. It seemed to rise and fall like waves crashing on the surf. Or someone breathing.
As he walked down the hallway, he could hear strange sounds emanating from behind the closed doors of this neighbors. Behind one door, he heard was must have been something -- or someone -- growling. It was the neighbor’s door, the one that had pounded on his door earlier. He had no dog. He put his ear to the door and heard inhuman growling behind it, then stepped away quietly, trying not to rouse whatever was on the other side of the door.
The lights began to dim as he walked down the hallway. At the elevators, the doors seemed broken, and they closed and opened and shut repeatedly. No one was in them. On the floor of it, he could see a strange pool of black liquid on the floor, with what looked like a footprint dragged out from it. Gone now. And so, Kyle took the stairs.
Walking down the twenty flights of stairs, he heard distant, pained moaning echoing beyond closed doors, but along his trek downward he saw no one. The lights continued to dim as he approached the bottom, and he hoped they wouldn’t go completely dark. Normally, they would have backup generator lights. But nothing here was normal, not anymore.
As he opened the door to the lobby, he nearly vomited as the stench overwhelmed him. Ahead on the floor, he saw the bubbling remains of what could have been a man. Or a woman. Or a dog. He wasn’t sure. It moved like red larva jelly. All the TV screens on the wall were snow. He walked up closer to the jelly that moved and breathed, and, as if by some kind of recognition, Kyle’s arm changed again, and as he touched the surface of the jelly, he could feel the energy beneath it, the pain, the agony, the pure wanton rage that boiled out from it, germinated up his arm, into him. He felt sick and aroused both at once, and as he pulled away, he looked over at the security booth. There he saw three security guards with fleshy masses for heads hold down a fourth person, a young lady who was screaming and screaming and no one came to help. She looked at Kyle, began to scream for help, then saw his deformed arm, and only screamed louder now at the hopelessness of her situation. One of the “guards” lowered his swirling, gestating head and began pushing it into her face, harder and harder as she screamed, until it seemed their faces were joined together. She had stopped screaming now and just cried. Small, defeated whimpers. The other two guards began taking pieces of their own “heads” and rubbing her body with it. The slime seemed to move on its own, attaching itself to her body. As Kyle stood back and watched, he could see the four of them were becoming interconnected now, some sort of twisted whole, becoming bigger. Then he heard the strange hum that he had heard from the hole underneath the church. The church! He had to go back. What he would see or what he could do, he did not yet know. But some invisible divine force beckoned him. He would not -- could not -- resist it, and so he walked past the gestating being, once four, now one, and closed the doors behind him.
The streets were on fire. As always. Bodies lay strewn across broken glass and bubble gum wrappers. Someone had taken the time to plant a giant cross in the street and light it on fire. He didn’t think that anyone went to church anymore. He passed frightened eyes on the street. People running from some new storm they didn’t understand. He felt they all would soon. He walked by a car where a woman’s face was melting against the side of the driver’s window. Blood and black pus streaked down her face. He assumed she was dead. But as he walked by her, she opened her eyes -- red and empty and pupil-less -- and smiled at him. And she watched him with those empty eyes until he was out of her sight.
He had not expected to see a line coming out of the church, but there it was. Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe more. Standing and waiting, some screaming, some crying, some were cutting things into their arms or their foreheads. He walked past them all and they did not seem to notice or care. Already, he could smell the bile, the rotting flesh from the hole. He could feel its heat even before the doors were open. It was everywhere now, the smell, the heat. The rage. But maybe it had always been that way. Maybe only now were they all waking up. The buildings around the church seemed to sway and move on their own, their movements elastic as if they were not concrete structures but organic, moving. Alive. He wasn’t sure if these thoughts were profound or childish, or if they were even his anymore, but he stopped caring the moment he opened the doors to the church and disappeared behind them.
In the pit of the basement, he stood and watched the line of them, all waiting patiently. The hole was bigger now, and the fleshy components of it seemed to have grown and expanded. The entire basement seemed to move. Tables and chairs moved slowly across the floor, up the sides of walls, on their own. The floor beneath him slithered back and forth. Those who were not in line knelt in communion of their New Order. They seemed to hum and moan along with the sound coming from the hole. The heat was nearly unbearable. Some had taken off their clothes and stood or knelt naked. Some of them writhed on the floor, trying to become a part of it. Kyle looked ahead and saw a mother and father -- the features of their faces gone and washed away and blank -- drag their screaming child with both hands and pull him towards the hole. The child fought against them as best he could, tried to push back and plead, but the mother and father did not relent and dragged him until he was at the surface of the hole. The sphincter of the hole opened, and as they entered it, they pulled the child along with it, screaming until the hole had closed behind them.
He heard screaming upstairs, shouting and sounds of gunfire, but the group here did not seem to notice or care. Their eyes -- if they had eyes anymore -- were focused on their new god, their new salvation. One by one, they slipped into the hole and disappeared. And as each one entered, the fleshy “body” of the hole grew. It grew along the walls and the floor. It climbed the stairs, until it had reached the top. There, the ones above still waiting would open the doors and let it out, out into the world. Spreading. Growing. The people would not fight it. They had nothing left to fight for. They would welcome it. They would open their doors and windows. They would open their mouths and their eyes. They would open themselves up, and It would come.
His arm began to hurt, and as he looked down, he could see the fleshy, organic rot bubbling around his arm, spreading, pulsating to the beat of the hole, its breathing. He held out his arm for all the other worshippers to see, and they parted like the ancient seas and let him approach. As he stepped onto the stage -- that was no longer a stage but flesh and blood and things that moved that had no name -- the hole opened before his eyes, and he could feel the magma heat of it on his face. He smiled. The crowd chanted and hummed in prayers of awe behind him as he walked up to it. And as he walked into it, he knew the hole had always been here, it had always been waiting for them, growing larger each day, waiting for humanity to despair, waiting to fill the holes in their owns hearts and souls. Waiting for them to find their new god. Waiting for old worlds to end and new ones to begin.
He closed his eyes and stepped in. And as he opened them on the other side of the hole, he screamed and laughed the way only the mad do as It looked right back at him. Into him. Through him. And then there was nothing, just as there had always been.
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