16 December 2007
Chapter 3: Capable
Matt flailed as he was hauled backwards, completely ensnared by a mass of writhing, gray appendages. The slick tentacles swarmed over his body, snakelike, constantly moving and tightening their hold as they dragged him across the grass. Jake could make out the main bulk of the creature, laying in wait in the shadow of a large tree trunk. He tried to reach out and grab Matt’s hand to anchor him, but he was dragged out of arm’s reach too quickly.
Without thinking, Jake whirled, extending a leg and kicking over a metal trash can at the foot of a driveway, sending it clattering to the sidewalk. He snatched the lid out of the air as the can fell, then rolled, spilling its contents onto the street. With a grunt, he sent the lid sailing at the beast with a powerful swing of his arm and flick of his wrist. It connected with a squishy, satisfying “thunk,” and Matt’s progress across the muddy lawn was slowed while the tentacles holding him shuddered and loosened with the impact.
Matt took full advantage of the situation, squirming and wriggling out of the grip of the multitude of snaky limbs, stomping some of them firmly with his clunky boots when the opportunity arose. Before long, he’d scrambled out of the thing’s reach, and it seemed to be gathering its strength after the shock of Jake’s makeshift weapon.
“So this is what you meant by ‘safety in numbers’?” Jake asked, accusatory. “Did you know this thing was after you? What the fuck is it, anyway?”
“I thought it was my imagination,” Matt replied, sheepish, knowing how stupid he sounded. The pair didn’t say anything further as they ran across the street and continued toward Jake’s building. They took turns looking behind them as they ran, and at first it seemed like the beast might have given up the chase. But the more they looked, they more they both had the same sickening realization; that it was sticking to the shadows, moving as fast or faster than they were, evidenced by the swirling mass of tentacles just barely visible at the edges of the yellow ovals cast by the streetlights. The frenzied whipping of shadowy tendrils reminded Jake of a cross between a floor-polisher and an old-fashioned string mop: strings swirlings around with dizzing speed as the bulk of the monster moved smoothly above them.
“Here,” Jake said in an authoritative voice, heading off the sidewalk and toward a wooden gate. They barrelled through, the gate whacking loudly against the fence as it was flung open, and in response the dog in the yard next door started up a frenzied barking. Matt slammed the gate shut and peered over the fence, but couldn’t tell if the creature was close. He tried to listen for it, but all he could hear was the dog.
“Take this,” Jake said, over Matt’s shoulder. He passed Matt one of two wicked-looking metal garden rakes, taken from a shed near the back of the yard. Matt accepted the wooden-handled weapon, held onto it firmly, and swung it a few times to get the feel for it. It wasn’t going to be easy to get it loose once he hit the thing with it, but it he hoped it would do enough damage that it wouldn’t matter.
“So what the hell are you,” Matt asked, his eyes fixed on the gate as he hefted his makeshift weapon, moving it from hand to hand, “some ex-military guy? The moment that thing appears, you turn into fucking Rambo.”
“I’m a history teacher,” Jake responded matter-of-factly, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for history teachers to battle slimy monsters. “You’re not exactly shrinking from the challenge, yourself.” He gestured to Matt’s mastery of the art of rake combat; he was twirling the garden tool effortlessly, as if in some kind of Hong Kong action flick. Jake held his own rake more solidly, both hands on the handle a good distance apart.
“Huh,” Matt replied, as if noticing what he was doing for the first time. “Weird.” The sound of the dog barking and yowling and struggling against its chain continued, keeping both of them on edge. Matt gritted his teeth and kept peering through the slats of the fence, trying to shut the noise out and concentrate on any movement.
“Shouldn’t we be more… freaked out?” Jake asked, moving quickly to the back of the yard to check other entry points. “I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever seen something like that before… it’s not like I ever believed something like that could even exist.” He turned back to Matt.
“Deja vu,” Matt said, locking eyes with Jake across the yard.
“Me, too,” Jake agreed. They held the gaze for a bit too long, and Matt finally looked away, uncomfortable.
Satisfied that there was no tentacle monster lurking outside the back fence, Jake came back over to Matt was standing, guarding the gate and shifting the weight of the rake restlessly from hand to hand. Jake looked over at a poorly-painted cement garden gnome and studyied it for a few moments, then looked back at Matt. After a pause, his eyes fixed again on the gnome.
“What?” Matt asked. “What is it? Is the gnome out to get us now, too? Damn, that dog is getting on my nerves.”
“Something someone told me once,” Jake said as he scrutinized the lawn ornament, “about how to tell if you’re dreaming. You pick something and look at it, memorize some details. Then look away for a moment, and look back. If it’s not the same, then you’re dreaming.”
“So,” Matt said slowly, “this is a dream?” He looked at the gnome dubiously. Someone had painted his pointy cap an unfortunate magenta.
“No,” Jake said, giving up the examination and turning his attention back to Matt. “Either we’re awake, or I’m such a detail freak that I keep everything straight, even when I’m dreaming.”
Matt picked out a loose tar shingle on the roof and memorized it, then looked away and back again, hoping it would be different somehow. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. Everything seemed to stay the same, and he started to feel silly. He was about to say as much to Jake, when he froze.
Something had changed.
“Do you hear that?” Matt said, in a whisper.
Jake gripped his rake tightly and stood still, shifting his head ever so slightly to orient his ears to try and find what Matt was talking about.
“I don’t hear anything,” he finally whispered back.
“Exactly,” Matt replied.
A hairy mass struck Jake heavily in the chest, sending him to the ground. The thing was warm and smelled musky, and was dripping wet with some sort of thick liquid. Jake’s head struck a paving stone despite his attempts to roll with the impact, and the rake went out of his grip instantly. He winced, and tried to push the thing off of him, though the strength had gone out of him temporarily, and his vision was blurred from the impact. After a few seconds, when his eyes started to cooperate, he made out what the thing was.
The dog. What was left of the dog, anyway.
Matt flung his rake away and scrambled to his knees to roll the bloody, mangled animal off of Jake. At first Matt thought it had been sliced open, but the raggedness of the wounds suggested an even more brutal action; it had simply been pulled apart. Jake’s brown sweater was soaked with blood and had chunks of hairy gore still stuck to it; he was laying with his hand pressed to the back of his head, and was breathing through tightly clenched teeth.
Matt felt something slithering on the ground beneath him, near his feet, and barely had time to spin around before he was pulled roughly off the ground and back into the embrace of the beast, which was gliding unnaturally over the wooden fence using its free limbs. Mat grabbed hold of his rake as he was dragged past it, but had was turned around, business end near his hand. He beat at the main appendage binding his ankle with the wooden handle, but it was awkward trying to hit it with the lighter end, and there wasn’t much effect.
“What’s so special,” he demanded, gasping, as he could feel more of the tentacles encircling him, “about me?” His shirt was pulled up as he was dragged through the grass, the twigs and small rocks scratching at him. But that feeling was paradise compared to the feel of the thing’s tentacles wrapping around his bare skin; it was beyond disgusting. The underside of the tentacles held thousands of tiny feelers, all moving independently, searching every square inch of him they could reach. For what, he didn’t know. The panic was rising in him and making it hard to think of much of anything.
As he was pulled close to the trunk of the creature, he could make out for the first time, in the fluorescent, back porch light, that it had no face. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. The creature was just a grayish, pinkish slab that split again and again into dozens, maybe hundreds of limbs, as if it were fraying in some hideous way. The skin undulated and rippled like the surface of a lazy sea, responding to each tentacles push and pull.
At first, Matt felt a bizarre feeling of relief that he wasn’t going to be stuffed into some large toothy mouth, but then remembered the dog and shuddered.
When he felt the infinite array of feelers again, sweeping over his body as the tentacles wrapped him up, he realized that it didn’t have one mouth, but millions, and they were all tasting him, deciding whether he would be a good meal. Matt hoped whatever happened next would be quick.
“Right,” Jake said gruffly, charging in, full speed, head down, smacking into the body of the beast right below where Matt was being held. The impact rippled through the thing like some demonic Jell-O mold, causing some of the tentacles to shake and lose their grip on Matt. Matt tried desperately to twist his rake around and get at some of the coils still holding him, but had to give up and drop it. He was too tightly bound, and couldn’t get any leverage.
The tentacles had come alive with movement, whipping frantically this way and that, forcing Jake to keep his hands near his eyes to protect them. Matt could tell that the delicate feelers were ceasing their investigation and pulling back inside the tentacles that were binding him.
Then, he felt the grip on him change as the appendages began to pull. Hard.
“Oh n–” Matt gasped out before completely losing the ability to speak, every fiber of him calling out in anguished screams. His body was on fire, centered in his joints and softer parts, as every part of his body seemed determined to move in a different direction at once. His skin chafed and tore under the supernaturally tight grip of the dozens of snaky limbs, all trying to claim him for their own.
Jake shoved the failing tentacles away from his face and reached for Matt, his face almost as pained.
“No,” Jake begged, reaching out to Matt. He felt a few tendrils loop around his legs and waist as well. “No…!”
Matt was able to catch a breath as the pulling subsided for a moment, and his various limbs grudgingly meandered back into their sockets with grinding, thick sounds. He could feel his ribs shifting position under his skin. He gulped hard, tears streaming down his face, his throat raw from the force of his scream.
Then he felt the slimy limbs all over his body adjust their grip a final time, in preparation, as if the last pull had only been to test Matt’ss weak spots. In a supreme force of will, Matt wrenched a hand free and reached for Jake’s. Even as they clasped hands, Matt could feel the pressure starting again, but he knew there would be no slow build-up this time. It really was going to be quick after all, which was something, at least. He closed his eyes and held tight to Jake’s hand, and let out a final scream.
He kept screaming as he heard a disgusting ripping sound, the sound of skin, flesh and bone being pulled apart messily, and the sound of Jake screaming as well, but in pure rage. A shudder passed through the myriad of tendrils holding on to him, and their grip slackened. Matt stopped screaming, and opened his eyes.
Jake was holding a thick length of tentacle in one hand, and was reaching with his other hand to grab another. The tentacle had been severed roughly, and still had ropey strips of yellow fat oozing out of the severed piece, connecting with a stump near Matt’s shoulder. There was a string of unusual bones hanging out of the core of the limb, connected not with a ball and socket but looped like a chain of bone. Matt gazed at it, transfixed, as it twitched. The thing also seemed to have no blood, for none flowed from either its severed limb or the stump from whence it came.
The pain in Matt’s body was gone, and he felt strangely disconnected from everything going on around him. He had a rush of panic as he realized he might be seriously injured and in shock. For his part, Jake continued to tear at the creature savagely, giving it a taste of what it had planned for its prey. Matt pushed tentatively at the bars of his now completely distracted prison, and the creature’s arms gave way easily, compared to the inhuman strength it had displayed earlier.
Matt looked down at his body, slowly coming into view as the tentacles were ripped away, pushed off, or just lost their will and fell. His clothes were torn and bloody, his skin scraped and cut all over. He put a hand to his chest and felt his hearbeat, feeling an incredible sense of amazement and wonder.
Am I alive? he thought.
The answer to the question came in the form of an errant tentacle, still some life left in it, which smacked him unceremoniously across the face, answering the question immediately.
“Okay,” Matt spat, tasting blood where his lip had been split. “That’s quite enough.” He darted a hand out and snatched the tentacle, pulling it back and wrenching it with both hands, finding a great reserve of strength. He felt the scaly hide give under his grip, and the flesh and muscle soon after. He squeezed as tightly as he could, with both hands, and the thing oozed between his fingers as it disintegrated. When he was finished, the limb was still attached, but the bone was all that connected it under the pulped mass. The rest of the tentacle was pulled down until it dragged on the ground, attached to the dead weight.
Soon, Matt and Jake extricated themselves from the monster’s clutches completely, and were able to put some distance between them and it. The two were both streaked with the stringy, greasy, yellow gore from the creature’s roughly amputated tendrils, and had numerous abrasions but seemed otherwise in good shape.
Their pursuer, though, was faring far worse. It looked like it had been shorn by a mad barber, huge patches of ragged stumps here, angry, pained groups of tentacles still intact there, and the whole creature seemed to be shaking in pain and shock. Lost parts littered the grass at its base, some still twitching their last.
“Filthy thing,” Jake said, coughing from the smell that was all over them. He rubbed the yellowish goo from his hands onto his black pants. “Ought to go back where it came from.”
“Most definitely,” Matt nodded, picking up one of the discarded rakes and hurling it expertly at the creature’s trunk. The rake spun end over end until it connected solidly, its metal teeth sunk deeply into the fleshy slab. The force with which it was thrown caused the wooden handle to crack slightly.
“Hear that?” Matt asked the thing.
“Doesn’t have any ears,” Jake reminded him.
“Unless it keeps those on its arms, too,” Matt offered.
“Running out of working ones, if that’s the case,” Jake countered.
The beast seemed to be collapsing in on itself, its battered arms pulling back into its main bulk and disappearing inside. It expanded and shrank, as if breathing, lost its squared-off slablike shape and started to look more like a haphazard mound of skin. The mottled pink underside of the thing had faded to a sickly, grayish yellow.
Matt and Jake looked at one another with broad smiles, but the smiles quickly faded. As each looked into the other’s eyes, a comfort, a familiarity washed over him, not only for each other, but for this situation itself. Paradoxically, that sensation of ease made them feel all the more strange and suspicious of each other.
“What now?” Matt asked, kicking a stray, small tentacle at the undulating mound. It sank into the body like one blob of mercury meeting another. The thing seemed to be rapidly losing its cohesion, and was spreading out onto the ground, blending into the shadows at the base of the fence.
“Don’t look at me,” Jake responded. “You’re the one who had this thing following you all night. I just helped ou—”
“What the fuck is going on?” came a loud, gravelly voice from behind them. In a gray bathrobe a size too small stood a mustachioed man in his mid-fifties, his face red and angry and his short black hair sticking up haphazardly. He was a bit round in the middle, the terry cloth sash holding the robe closed was tied a bit too tight, and bisected him into two roughly pear-shaped sections. He stood in the doorway to the house, and had a baseball bat in his hand.
“Oh, we…” Matt started, glancing back at where the creature had been. It had completely melted away into the shadows, as had its dozens of missing tentacles. All that remained was a beaten down patch in the garden near the fence, two rakes thrown about the yard, and open garden shed, and two bloody, dirty guys standing in the middle of it all.
“Sorry,” Jake said, taking one of the rakes and heading to the shed with it. “Something got a little out of hand, and—”
“You fucking young shits and your drugs,” the man growled, shaking the bat at them. “Not enough to have a good time, you gotta go crazy and start tearing stuff up. What kind of lives do you think you’re going to have, acting like this?”
“Really sorry,” Matt added, getting the other rake and taking it to join its twin. The man flinched as Matt picked up the rake, not sure what his intentions might be, but his anger was only briefly interrupted.
“The police are already on their way, assholes,” he said, slapping the heavy end of the bat into his palm. “You picked the wrong yard to play in.”
Matt noticed something, then. In the shadow of the concrete steps leading up to the back door, a dark shape was oozing up the side. When it entered the light, he could see it was a writhing puddle of gray, with lumps here and there where limbs had been.
“Hey, watch out!” Jake said, pointing to the side of the concrete steps, seeing the same thing. He and Matt both moved in closer to the back door, but the man raised the bat, threateningly.
“What am I, a retard? Don’t pull that shit on me!” he yelled, waving the bat back and forth, forcing them to move back a few steps. “You’re going to stand right there and not move, while we wait for the… for the…” He paused for a moment and looked down, feeling something gently rubbing on his bare foot. He squinted his eyes at it, thinking at first that it might be the neighbor’s gray cat.
When the ooze began to climb up his leg, he quickly discarded that idea. He tried to take a step back into the house, but found his foot firmly stuck in the slowly climbing goo. He changed tactics and took a few swings with his bat, connecting firmly with the corner of the concrete step, but this didn’t seem to stop the advance of the mysterious sludge.
Jake ran over to try and help, reaching out to try and scoop away the liquefied monster, but he got a bat taken to his outstretched arm for his trouble.
“Jesus!” Jake yelped in pain as the bat struck his forearm, and pulled back, holding his arm close to his body. The panicked man dropped the bat shortly after and tried to grab the door frame to pull himself away. His sweaty hands only held on for a bit before he let go, falling awkwardly to the hard concrete step. The stuff was then able to cover him quickly; he tried to push at it with his hands, but it just crept up his arms.
He started to scream in terror, at this point. Lights were coming on in the houses nearby, and Matt could see silhouettes appear in many of the windows, trying to see what was going on.
Matt ran in next, pulling Jake away from the man, who was now almost completely covered by the remnants of the tentacle beast and facing the prospect of not being able to breathe once it covered his face. He found it difficult to struggle any more, as the only part of his body that was able to move was his neck and head, which were shaking uncontrollably.
“Help!” the man cried out, desperately. “Help me! Get it off me!”
“Oh now, he wants help,” Jake muttered, rubbing his forearm and trying to think of what to do. He picked up the bat and tentatively pushed at the sludge that covered the man’s body. He found that it was solidifying… its surface starting to become thick and scaly as it was before. The man’s face was now fully covered, and he seemed to have stropped struggling. In fact, the lower half of his body, enveloped in the creature’s skin, appeared to be… melting. His legs were coming together, reforming into a now familiar, slablike, pinkish mass.
“No way!” Jake said, fighting off a wave of nausea. “That’s fucking gross!”
“Tell me about it,” Matt said in a low voice. He bent his fingers into a strange configuration and brought his hands together, raising them in the direction of the amalgamated man-beast. “We have to do put a stop to this.”
The motion was familiar to Jake, though he didn’t know why. Perhaps something he’d seen in one of his history textbooks? A movie? He instinctively took a step back.
An unearthly glow started to emanate from Matt, and swirls of dark purple and blue smoke started to drift out of the shadows to gather in hazy clouds at his feet. The smoke didn’t behave like ordinary smoke, and didn’t dissipate or wander in the little night breezes. In fact, it started to arranged itself into crisscrossed spherical patterns around Matt.
Matt braced himself, widening his stance and preparing for something. All at once, the little crisscrossed patterns of smoke seemed to ignite, the flames racing around the smoky rings until they converged at Matt’s hands, and then a a beam of dim purplish light radiated from his hands to fall on the creature. The thing quickly shifted position, shambling to the side in an attempt to get out of the path of the beam. Jake moved in closer, snatching up the baseball bat and making to give the thing a good whack back into the path of Matt’s light.
“There’s someone in there!” Matt scolded urgently. A sheen of sweat covered his brow, which was furrowed in concentration, and his blond hair shimmered with blue and purple from the lightshow in front of him. The beam seemed to increase in power, getting steadily darker but denser, and more closely focused on its target. This dark light was odd; Jake could see it, but it cast no shadows, seeming to bend around corners.
“I’ve got it,” Matt assured Jake, his voice echoing strangely. “The light.” He said without shifting his gaze from the creature. Jake glanced up at the porch light bulb. “People are watching.” Matt’s eyes glowed with a similar energy to the beam coming from his hands; one was blue and one was purple.
Jake took out the bulb with a swipe of the bat, making a satisfying pop and flash, and then the scene was immediately illuminated only by the unnatural light pouring from Matt’s hands. Jake could still vaguely see the current of energy pouring forth, but the quality was much like blacklight against a black velvet cloth. The creature’s body caught the unearthly light and blazed up every so often, but for the most part, the scene unfolded in near complete darkness.
Without the light pollution from the porch light, Jake could now clearly see a multitude of faces in dimly lit windows, trying to see what was going on. The next-door neighbor, a slim, red-headed woman, was stepping out of her back door in some hastily donned jeans and a rumpled t-shirt. Probably woken by the barking of her dog.
“Ace?” she called, tentatively, looking not into her backyard but over the fence to where Jake, Matt, and her unfortunate neighbor were gathered, in the shadows.
“Hurry this up,” Jake whispered urgently, flattening himself against the back wall of the house, standing in one of the man’s flower beds.
Matt was oblivious to Jake’s comment, focused only on the beast in front of him and the power that was flowing through his body. But as if in answer to Jake’s urging, a tiny fissure appeared at the top of the creature’s body, through which a bit of pink skin showed. Little by little, the fleshy gray coating was peeled down to reveal the dark-haired man, standing but apparently unconscious. Soon, the puddle of former-creature coalesced into a smallish heap on the concrete stoop, surrounded by a dark, ragged sphere of energy.
Matt took a deep breath then, and shifted the position of his hands. The rings of dark flame flared up and shot at the the thing as a brilliant bolt of blue and lavender. When the flame died down, quickly as magicians’ flash paper, the creature was gone.
[Leave a comment. Chapter 4 coming next week!]