Chasing the Moon (4 page)

“What made him different?”

“He had the stuff.”

“The stuff?”

“You know what I’m talking about. The stuff. The goods. The mojo.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means what it means,” said Vom. “When someone has the stuff, you just know it.”

“That’s not very helpful at all.”

“There are mysteries beyond even my ken. Listen. I’ve done this plenty of times. I know how this game goes. Some people open the closet right away. Others hold out for a while. One guy made it a whole century. But you are going to open this door one day. So why don’t we just cut the suspense and jump to the inevitable conclusion?”

Diana wanted to argue, but if what West and Vom had told her was true, then it really was unavoidable. The question wasn’t
if
she would open the closet. The question was
when
.

It took her four days to get bored enough to think about finally opening the door. Four days of watching television, of staring at the ticks of the clock, of obsessively searching every nook and cranny of the apartment for some form of escape, of waiting for the phone to ring and for West to tell her that he’d changed his mind and she was free to go.

No one would be coming for her because no one knew she was here. If she was going to get out she’d have to do it herself. And four days of steady rumination on the subject always led back to that damn closet.

She went to the refrigerator and demanded another turkey sandwich. Then another. Then another. Then she stopped thinking small and demanded a turkey. Then she just started
demanding “Food” and left it up to the refrigerator to supply whatever it felt like. She piled the sandwiches and turkeys and cakes and hamburgers and buckets of apples and haggis and everything else in the living room. When she ran out of room on the coffee table she started putting stuff on the floor. She threw everything in a huge messy heap. She didn’t stop until the mound of food filled half the room and was nearly to the ceiling.

She didn’t know if it would be enough to satisfy his appetite, but she was already tired of waiting. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life in this cage, dreading the inevitable. Better to just get it over with.

She threw open the closet door.

Bright green fur covered Vom the Hungering. His flat, wide head had no eyes or ears or nose. Just one huge mouth. Another maw split his potbelly. He was simultaneously lanky and pudgy. Her first instinct was that he was an old puppet, rejected from
Sesame Street
and banished to a limbo alongside moldy raincoats and wingtip shoes. It was only when he lurched toward her, both of his mouths licking their lips, arms raised, that she realized he was alive.

She smacked him across the head with a rolled-up magazine.

“No!” She scolded him gently, but firmly.

Vom snarled and reached toward her again.

“No!” She hit him again. “Not for you!”

He frowned, rubbing his snout.

She pointed at the pile of food. “That’s yours.”

Vom pounced on the meal, gleefully shoving down
everything. She was revolted and hypnotized by the sight and watched him goras imself for several minutes. He wasn’t slowing down, and she doubted he would be full once he finished—in another two or three minutes at most.

The front door was back. She tiptoed out into the hall and shut the door quietly behind her.

The puppy in front of Number Two wasn’t a puppy anymore. It was something else. Something vaguely puppyshaped, but with a malformed skull, giant black eyes, and a sucker-like mouth.

The creature looked up at her with its three huge eyes, wagged the tentacle sticking out of its backside, and whimpered.

Diana waited until she had slunk past the hideous creature before she ran screaming into the streets.

She stopped shrieking after a minute.

It wasn’t the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn’t managed to repair itself. She’d left something behind in that apartment. Something she’d always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning, the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud
sproing
.

No, she eventually stopped screaming because she discovered that running and freaking out at the same time was exhausting. She doubted even an Olympic athlete could do it for very long. Also, she got stuck at a crosswalk, and it was
hard to keep the momentum while standing there waiting for the light to change.

She sat on a bench and caught her breath. A glance back the way she’d come showed neither Vom nor West following her. She’d escaped. Too bad she’d lost her stuff, but there was no way she was going back for it. Her first thought was that it was just more crappy luck, but then she remembered that she’d avoided being trapped for eternity or being eaten by a gangly furry monster and decided it was the opposite. Things were starting to turn around. If she could escape unhurt from Vom the Hungering, everything else should be easy.

Leaning back on the bench, she exhaled a sigh of relief.

The early evening sky was torn in pieces.

Six slashes ran across it. They pulsed with a strange yellow glow. The weirdest thing was that the slashes didn’t seem to be behind the stars, but on top of them. It was as if some gigantic monster had raked the fabric of the universe itself. And the universe had healed, but the scars remained.

The full moon appeared normal. But on the other side of the sky was another moon. The orb was sickly greenish. It writhed. It was covered in bright red eyes. The thing undulated, and she glimpsed a maw filled with rows of teeth.

She’d escaped the apartment, but she was still in the trap. The cage was just bigger. She’d seen enough
Twilight Zone
episodes to know a cosmic screw when she was in the middle of it.

She stood, carelessly bumping into a tall, angular man in a black trench coat. His face wasn’t human, but insectile. Her first instinct was to cower or flee. But that was what
they
wanted her to do. And she wasn’t about to give
them
the satisfaction. She pushed forth the most sincere smile she could manage while staring into the bug’s six hundred eyes.

“Pardon me, sir.”

The bug clicked its mandibles.

“No problem, miss.”

It walked up to the curb, spread its coat, and soared away. Diana dug her claws into her fractured sanity and refused to let it go. Even as she noticed that one of the cars driving down the street was an SUV-sized crimson slug and that the hot dog vendor on the corner was a monster in an apron with a paper hat on his squid-like head, she convinced herself, through sheer force of will, that there was nothing to be concerned about. She didn’t know if that meant she would be okay or if she’d just lost her mind. All she knew was that she wasn’t gibbering, and she’d take whatever small victory she could manage.

A hairy hand grabbed her shoulder. “Hey, there you are.”

Diana turned to the toothy jaws of Vom the Hungering.

“No!” she shouted forcefully as she punched him in the nose. Or at least the area of his mostly featureless face above his mouth.

“Ow.” Vom rubbed his head. “Why’d you do that?”

“You were going to eat me.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

His stomach rumbled, causing the earth beneath the concrete beneath their feet to tremble. He smiled sheepishly.

“Okay, maybe I was thinking about it.”

“This is bullshit,” she said. “I let you out of the closet. You were supposed to either eat me or let me go.”

Vom shrugged. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the rules.
Oh, hot dog.” He lumbered over to the cart on his stumpy legs. “One foot-long, please. Extra everything.”

The squiddy vendor asked, “You got any money?”

“What? I’m good for it.”

The vendor wiggled his tentacles and folded his floppy arms across his chest.

“Hey, could you loan me a couple of bucks?” Vom asked Diana.

She duplicated the vendor’s stance.

“Oh, fine. I must’ve eaten someone with a wallet at some point.” He opened his mouth and reached down his own throat. He spit out a variety of random objects: an old lipsticka dog collar, a license plate, some buttons, and something small and squirmy that was apparently still alive.

Vom extracted a pair of wrinkled blue jeans from his bigger mouth. He rifled through the pockets and found a few dollars and some change. Enough to purchase two hot dogs. The sticky drool covering the cash didn’t bother the slimy vendor beast, who started working on Vom’s dogs. While waiting, Vom shoved the regurgitated items back into his mouths. Including the squirming thing.

“Don’t skimp on the sauerkraut.”

The vendor gave Vom the dogs. He offered one to Diana. She turned it down with a queasy twinge.

He swallowed the hot dogs in one gulp.

“You have something.” She pointed to the mustard-stained pant leg snagged on one of his fangs. “Right there.”

“Whoops.”

He slurped down the denim like a stray noodle.

* * *

They walked through the park, and Vom tried to explain what was happening. Normally she wouldn’t have been caught walking through a park alone after dark, but she figured that the ravenous creature beside her would discourage even the most determined mugger. Or not.

Nobody seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The giant bugs and slugs and misshapen things lurching on the city streets. Or the tears in the sky. Or the monstrous moon god. All these things remained unobserved by everyone else.

“Imagine the universe as a tesseract, a single multidimensional hypercube divided into thin, mostly self-contained slices. Now this model is, by its nature, flawed and incomplete. Mostly because each entity perceives its own slice to be the most important, simply from a lack of ability to perceive the other aspects of the complete universe which surrounds them. With me so far?”

“No.”

He sighed. “This’d be easier if you had some experience with multidimensional geometric theory.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t. Didn’t think it would be important. And I don’t think they even offered it at the college I attended.”

“Okay. We’ll go with the dumbed-down version then.” He spoke very slowly, using sweeping gestures to emphasize his points. “The universe is a very tall building with many floors but no elevators and great soundproofing. And every shred of matter in the universe exists on one of those floors.”

He paused.

“Have I lost you again?”

“I’m not an idiot. I can follow a metaphor.”

“Each floor is usually completely unaware of the other floors around it. Although sometimes, if one floor gets particularly noisy it might have an effect on nearby neighbors. And sometimes a floor will spring a leak or a window will open for a short while and things might get a little wonky for both floors until the anomaly corrects itself. And other times the floors get shuffled around and in the process something on Floor A ends up on Floor B, where it really doesn’t belong. See, there are connections between floors. Like ventilation ducts or Jefferies tubes or crawl spaces or whatever. Invisible gaps in the fabric of the universe that probably serve some useful purpose, but that also some beings use, unintentionally in my case, to cross floors. And our apartment is one of those trapdoors.

“But you don’t leave your old world behind. A part of it comes with you, no matter where you go. And so you and I are straddling floors. One foot in our own portion of reality and another in an alien perception we were never meant to have.”

“But why?” she asked.“ How does something like that happen?”

“Hell if I know,” said Vom. “Until I came into contact with your world, I was just a merciless destructive force, a mindless devourer.”

She flashed him a look.

“Hey, I’m working on it,” he said. “I didn’t eat you, did I?” “You tried.”

“If we’re going to make this relationship work, you’re going to have to get over that.”