Chasing the Moon (17 page)

A tall, twisted lamp flickered. Diana wasn’t even aware she was reaching for it until West grabbed her by the arm.

“Don’t touch anything, Number Five.”

For only a moment she saw the lamp as something else. Something indefinable but baleful. A foreign thing that lived to devour whatever souls fell into its flickering trap.

“Mind the rug,” said West.

Just a few inches from her right foot a yellowed oval of carpet slowly, almost imperceptibly, crawled toward her. If she stood perfectly still it might reach her in an hour or two. The scratched old coffee table stalked her with the same lack of speed. The paintings stared at her with hungry eyes. The piles of boxes against the walls teetered ever so slightly, trying to work up enough momentum to bury her alive.

Everything here wanted to kill her. Or worse.

“Just stand there,” said West. “You should be fine.”

“Say hello, Number Zero.”

The figure opened its mouth. The lips moved. Eight seconds later, the sound crawled across the room to reach her ears. The word was faint, scratchy.

“Hello.”

Zero turned its head toward Diana. Its eyes were two tiny white dots. There was no malice in its expression. Only vacancy.

“I trust I’ve made my point, Number Five,” said West.

She didn’t know what that point was, but she nodded. Anything to get out of this dark corner of discarded insensibility.

West wasn’t fooled.

“Number Zero wanted power,” he said. “I tried to warn him of the consequences of it, but he wouldn’t listen. And now here he dwells until the end of this universe. And quite possibly until the end of the next one after that.”

She nodded again.

West’s hairy eyebrows furrowed, and he snarled. For the first time, she saw his teeth. They were pointy. Like a shark’s teeth.

“Don’t just nod, Number Five. Listen.”

“I am listening,” she replied. “I just don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”

“They never listen. Why do I bother?” He shook his head. “They never listen.”

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “Everybody is so goddamn mysterious all the time. Nobody just comes out and tells me anything. They always just hint and warn and say cryptic nonsense. Why can’t anyone just tell me straight out what they mean?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe you’re just trying to make it more complicated.”

This time West nodded.

“It’s not easy, Number Five. Not easy for me to remember. Remember the way it used to be. Remember the way you see the world. It’s been a long time. A long, long time…”

His gaze drifted across the room, fixed on some far-off place.

“Number Zero was like you,” he said. “He thought he could accumulate all the power in the universe without anyone noticing. He thought there would be no consequences.”

West frowned. His beard writhed ever so slightly. “There are always consequences, Number Five.”

“Uh-huh.” Diana nodded politely. “With all due respect, what the hell are you going on about? I’m not accumulating power. I’m just trying to avoid getting eaten by the unholy menagerie you’ve stuck me with. I took an apartment and had my life turned upside down. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t. And don’t try to feed me any of that karma or subconscious-desire bull. If life worked like that I’d have gotten a winged unicorn when I was six, and I’d be an astronaut who hunts vampires in her spare time.”

West said, “You are not an ordinary person anymore.”

“Maybe not, but I’m going to stay as ordinary as I can despite all the strange monsters and supernatural bizarreness your universe is throwing my way. Now can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”

The thing in the chair (she couldn’t think of it as a person or as ever having been a person) gurgled at her.

“No offense,” she said.

West smiled. “I think there’s hope for you, Number Five.”

“Damn right,” she said. “I can beat this thing.”

He chuckled drily.

“Nobody beats it. The crushing weight of madness is a burden no human mind can carry without strain. All victories are temporary, all defeats inevitable.”

“That’s a cheery thought.”

“Just calling it like I see it.”

“Well, if I can’t avoid it, why bother warning me at all?”

“Because I like you, Number Five. I see something in you that I don’t see in many.”

“And that something is?”

He shrugged. “Something. If I could’ve given it a better label, I would’ve.”

They left Apartment Zero behind. The journey back wasn’t nearly as unsettling.

“I never said you’d be trapped in the apartment. I wouldn’t imagine you will suffer the same fate. There are too many possible dooms in these worlds that I doubt either of us could suspect or imagine the one that will come for you.”

“Great,” she replied. “Because I’d hate for it to be something predictable and avoidable.”

“Be careful, Number Five,” West said. “But not too careful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.” He smiled at her, and she was so taken aback by the expression that by the time she recovered her senses he’d already shuffled back into his apartment.

Diana hesitated before knocking on the door. This was a weird building, and everyone who called it home was chained to that weirdness. She’d met only a handful of the residents. They’d all seemed nice, but having all of them crowded into one apartment was perhaps more abnormality than her mind could take. She knew she was going to go mad someday. West had practically guaranteed that, but if she was going to lose her mind, she’d rather put it off for as long as possible. At least one more night.

She pondered what horrors awaited her on the other side of that threshold. Alien beasts? Time warps? Smooth jazz? She couldn’t begin to guess. Except for the jazz. She could hear the muffled tones of easy-listening sax. That alone was almost enough to convince her to turn around and forget the whole thing.

Her monsters changed her mind. They were all so eager to
party. She couldn’t pull the plug on the evening. Even eternal other-dimensional entities could get bored. Hanging around the apartment, playing cards and watching TV all day had to get old. And a gaggle of monsters in desperate need of a good time would probably be trouble in the long run.

She knocked. Stacey answered the door. She was hosting the horrid bat creature at the moment, and Diana was surprised at how readily she accepted this and annoyed at how unthreatening she found the misshapen hulking woman. Stacey-thing smiled as widely and friendlily as a mouthful of four-inch fangs would allow.

“Diana come to mixer,” she said in a guttural growl. “Diana bring friends.”

“Yes, I hope that’s okay.”

A hacking, wheezing racket shook Stacey-thing from deep within her spasming torso. It sounded painful and looked agonizing, and Diana assumed it was a convulsion before she figured out Stacey-thing was chortling with delight.

“More fun, more merry.”

“See? I told you they’d be cool with it.” Vom sniffed the air, even though he had no visible nostrils that Diana could see. But he didn’t have eyes either, and that never seemed to bother him. “Do I smell snickerdoodles?”

“Baked fresh,” said Stacey.

Murmuring approval and excitement, the monsters went inside.

Diana held up a loaf of misshapen banana bread. “I don’t have much baking experience,” she said by way of explanation and apology.

Stacey seized the offering and gobbled it down. “Banana bread good,” she said, spewing crumbs. “You come in now.”

Diana had expected the apartment to be a remnant from the fifties to fit with the Ozzie-and-Harriet style of harmless congeniality that Stacey and Peter so effortlessly embodied, but it was remarkably functional and modern. Everything was straight out of the upper end of a Pottery Barn catalogue. Except for the bizarre masquerade masks hanging all over the walls. They were all different shapes and colors, many with twisted and odd designs. S heof them had eyes in them that stared at her, following the action around the room. She pretended that was normal, and maybe it was at this point.

The party was dead. The only guests were Diana’s monsters, and they were crowded in the kitchen, devouring cookies and probably baking tins, silverware, and whatever else they could stuff in their mouths. Although Zap didn’t have a mouth, so how he was eating anything was a mystery she left unsolved.

“Guys, be careful,” she said.

“Oh, let them enjoy themselves,” said Peter, rising from the couch. He wore a festive Christmas sweater vest, and he was smoking a pipe.

“So glad you could make it.”

“Glad,” repeated Stacey-thing.

“Did I get the time wrong?” Diana asked. “I’m not early, am I?”

“No, as a matter of fact, you’re fashionably late.”

“Fashionably,” said Stacey-thing.

“And I see you brought a treat. You really shouldn’t have.”

Diana shrugged. “It’s not very good.”

“It smells absolutely delicious. Perhaps I’ll try a piece next time.”

Stacey-thing stuck out her long, blue tongue and let some of the slimy banana bread fall into her hand. She offered the soggy lump to Peter.

“Good,” she cooed.

“Thank you, dear, but I’m saving room for dinner.”

She licked her hand and fingers.

“Are people usually late to these things?” asked Diana.

“No, not usually,” said Peter. “Usually no one shows up. Except for Keith in Apartment Seven. Have you not met him yet? He’s a terrific fellow. Why, if he existed, I’d be tempted to set you two up. A single young lady could do a lot worse.”

Diana just nodded. Honestly, being set up on an imaginary blind date didn’t sound too bad. If it worked out, she could see herself with two imaginary kids and a fictional dog named Dusty. They’d summer in a floating condo and winter in Shangri-la, take vacations in a hybrid realm where Paris, Disneyland, and Atlantis all merged into one wondrous place. Sometimes she and Dusty the Wonder Dog would solve murders and uncover sinister Martian conspiracies.

The fantasy was running away with itself, but she indulged for a few more seconds.

“Is Keith not in the bathroom, dear?” asked Peter. “Him not sitting on couch last time I not see him,” said Stacey-thing, squinting as she turned her head in an awkward direction.

“Oh yes. There he isn’t.” Peter pointed to a spot, then
pointed to another spot. “Or maybe how. not right there. Well, I know he’s not here somewhere. Why don’t you have a seat while I make you a drink? I should warn you. My martinis are legendary.”

Diana, locked in a rigid posture, sat on the sofa. She placed her hands on her knees. She tried to relax, but this idea hadn’t panned out. She hadn’t expected much, but this was promising to be the third or fourth most boring party she’d ever been to.

“Nice weather we’re having,” said someone nearby.

She glanced around but saw nobody. She looked to the nearest mask, and the bloodshot eyes looked back at her. “Did you say something?”

The eyes blinked, then rolled around in what she interpreted as a negative response. She was just guessing, but she assumed that if the eyes could talk, they would have just answered.

“How is the outside world?” asked the voice again. “Did they ever get around to impeaching Nixon?”

Peter was mixing a drink at the minibar while Stacey-thing was entertaining the other monsters in the kitchen. Diana couldn’t find the source of the voice, but she decided that she didn’t care either. It was just one more inexplicable event. She’d experienced plenty of those recently. Too many to even bother cataloguing at this point.

Stacey passed off hosting of the thing to Peter, who lumbered over with a martini glass delicately clutched in his giant claws. “You drink.”