“HOLY MOTHER of God,” Stanford breathed.
Alan reeled away from the light and the horror it revealed. From somewhere in a corner of the room, Stanford heard him retching. But even in his horror, Stanford could not stop the physician in his head from analyzing the bodies. The faces had been removed with surgical precision. There was no sign of trauma to the surrounding skin. The wounds on each victim were clean, with no ragged edges to suggest the hacking and slashing one would expect to find in such butchery.Stanford swung the flashlight around the room. In the steady beam he saw that the walls had been painted with blood. Odd writings of some sort were painted across the walls and ceiling. In the flickering beam of their flashlights, Stanford and Alan could see that the writings had been painted in the victims’ blood.
*
“They were some kind of runes, pictograms that showed…crazy things…I couldn’t…” Alan said. He paused, looking once more over to Stanford.
And now the physician smoothly picked up the narrative. He had a wealth of horrors of his own to relate.
“They were similar to cave drawings,” he said. “At least that’s what I felt at the time. But the details were amazing. The whole room, from floor to ceiling had been covered in…in these drawings. I studied them for as long as my stomach let me...”
*
In the gloom of Apartment Seven, Stanford’s flashlight had revealed a depth and complexity in the drawings that boggled the mind. That such stunning detail and obvious skill should accompany such unspeakable depravity was unimaginable. Crimson adorned the walls with extravagant care. There were other colors; yellows, purple blending into black; grays and browns stolen from the tormented and ruptured bodies nearby; a canvas realized from the torture of innocents, the desecration of living bone and sinew. In the pictograms he could make out representations of planets, suns, whole galaxies. Stanford even recognized the Milky Way. But there were other objects, things that Stanford didn’t recognize, something he took to represent a black hole... He couldn’t be sure.
Another wall depicted a calamitous war, a conflict that seemed to span the stars. The mosaic covered the entirety of one wall and part of the ceiling in its sanguinary intricacy. While still another wall displayed the journey of a group of beings, somewhat streamlined in shape, their long tentacles trailing from the depths of the seas to the edges of space.
Each drawing had been executed in the finest detail. And each detail told an intricate story of its own. Looking closely, Stanford could see no evidence of a brush, no sign of actual brushstrokes which would have revealed the hand of the artist.
In one particularly arresting image, a being that resembled a massive, anthropomorphic cobra stretched forth a clawed hand. The image showed the giant being’s hand closing around a solar system, the sun at its center.
The third planet from this sun was undeniably the Earth.
“Alan, look at this,” Stanford hissed.
But Alan was gone. Stanford looked around as he heard Alan’s footsteps pounding up the stairs toward Jillian’s apartment. Panic, held back for so long by his macabre interest in the abomination before which he stood, exploded now at the thought of being left behind. Turning, he fled that place of torment and death as if Satan himself were on his heels.
*
Stanford paused.
He has to tell them about the rest, he thought. It’s his story, his burden to bear, God help him..
But Alan sat with his fists clenched in his lap. His head shaking, as if the memories he held in his head constituted another, more private form of torture.
In a way, Stanford realized, they probably did.
When Alan finally spoke again, it was with the voice of a man who has seen his hopes cruelly smashed, trampled before his very eyes. He stared; his blasted gaze focused on some distant point, far from the dining room table and the people gathered around to hear his tale.
And Stanford realized that Alan Whitmore was still trapped at the Tarrytown View Apartments.
“When I got to her apartment…”
*
The door was wide open. The lights were out. Alan stopped, as a chill wind caressed his bones. A tight, suffocating fear constricted his chest. But he had come too far to turn back. He stepped over the threshold and gasped as cold air snatched at his breath.
The apartment was as still as a grave.
“Jillian?” he said.
His voice barely rose above a whisper. Silence reverberated loudly in his ears. Alan swung the flashlight beam around the room, hoping to find some sign of Jillian’s presence. In the light thrown by the flashlight’s beam, he could see that the place had been left relatively unscathed. There was little sign of violence. Only an overturned coffee table revealed anything out of place.
“Jillian?” Alan spoke, louder this time.
Some part of him screamed that he was far too late.
No, he thought.
Maybe she’d left some clue as to her whereabouts. Maybe she had anticipated that he would attempt to find her and had left a note or… some kind of message.
In the dark, he tripped over something and stumbled. Before he could catch himself, he fell to the floor. His flashlight bounced out of his hand and rolled under the couch.
As he reached to retrieve the flashlight his fingers closed around a hand in the darkness.
Alan froze. His breath halted in his lungs. Then he scrambled away from the cold contact, his heart racing, a scream building in the back of his throat.
It’s her hand. It’s her hand and she’s dead and she’s sitting here in the dark…
After a moment, he quieted the voice that chattered in his head, threatening to drive him insane. He forced himself to breathe. Crawling back toward the couch, he slowly groped around for the flashlight taking care not to touch the hand. He found the flashlight and pulled it out from beneath the couch. Its beam had switched off. Alan shook it furiously, his frantic movements producing an animal grunting as he chanted under his breath;
“Please please please please…”
A burst of light from behind him suddenly illuminated the corpse attached to the hand.
It was Wanda. Jillian’s best friend Wanda Perlman.
She was naked. A gunshot wound had torn away a large chunk of her neck. Her curly brunette Afro was stiff with dried blood.
She had been dead for some time.
“Is that…?” Stanford whispered.
He had just swung around the doorframe. He was puffing, out of breath after madly scrambling up the two flights to find Alan.
“Is that her…?” he asked again.
Alan shook his head. “No. It’s…my friend Wanda.”
Wanda’s eyes were open and staring. With a grimace, Alan reached over and gently closed them. He knelt there for a moment, as Stanford caught his breath. Then he stood up and headed for the kitchen.
“Alan…she’s gone,” Stanford said.
But Alan needed to be sure.
They found her in the kitchen.
She was sitting propped up against the far wall, near the back door. Her lower legs were covered with blood. Blood had stained the jeans she wore, darkened them until they’d turned black. Her hair was plastered all over her head, stained red from an open gash that revealed the white of her skull.
And she was still alive.
Her eyes were open and focused when Alan stepped into the kitchen. His knees went weak when he saw her there. Then he nearly screamed when he realized she was looking at him. Life, awareness shone from her, like a bright beam slicing through the darkness, piercing through to Alan’s core as he stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
The reflection from Stanford’s flashlight glinted from her eyes. And for a moment, Alan’s heart leapt up into his throat.
“Jillian…”
“Don’t…” she croaked. “Alan… don’t come any closer.”
Her voice stopped him cold in his tracks.
“Oh my God,” Stanford breathed.
In the flashlight’s beam, it was clear that Jillian had been horribly injured. Her head wound alone should have been enough to kill her. Stanford drew the light down her body. In its glare both men could see the grotesque gunshot wound that had penetrated her upper abdomen.
“She’s been shot,” Stanford managed to blurt out.
But something was very wrong. From the amount of blood she had lost, she should have died long ago.
Alan took another step into the kitchen, his mind threatening to come loose from its moorings.
All the blood...
“Jillian… I came to get you, Jillian. I came here to… I found you,” he said.
He inched closer again. But Stanford grabbed his arm.
“Alan… wait a minute.”
But Alan threw him off savagely.
“Don’t,” he said.
As he turned back to Jillian, Alan extended a hand toward her.
“Don’t touch…”
And she screamed. A mournful shriek filled with horror and…
…hate…
….anguish.
The scream froze Alan’s blood in his veins.
Jillian lifted her head and smiled up at them. It was the leer of a gargoyle, a demonic glee seemed to fill her eyes in an instant. Through broken teeth she spoke, a hissing, sinuous whisper that issued from lips that had been chewed, worried and gnawed through.
“Do you like what I’ve become, my darling? Come closer, Alan. Don’t leave me here like this. I need you, my beloved. I neeeed yyooouuuuu.”
Stunned, Alan made a sound in his throat, like a gasp of surprise. He jerked, as if he’d been shocked by a sudden electric current.
But he took a step forward.
“Yeeeessss my darling. Come to meeeee.”
Stanford felt his hair standing on end as he stared at the thing on the kitchen floor. And suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to raise his gun and blow it away, blast it into oblivion. He had never imagined there could be such a feeling of naked revulsion. But his Luger clattered to the floor from nerveless fingers. He could only watch in horror as Alan took another step.
“Alan… Oh no,” he groaned.
Alan was now within arm’s reach of Jillian where she sat crumpled, propped against the back door. Her legs might have been those of a department store mannequin. Only her head, neck and arms seemed capable of movement. She opened her arms in welcome as Alan knelt to embrace her. Her muscles had atrophied, shriveled to thin sticks which dangled loosely from her shoulders. Her fingernails had grown black and long as claws.
In a flash of intuition Stanford had it; Jillian had been paralyzed from the waist down. Her legs were splayed out at an unnatural angle. One foot was turned inward, broken, immobile, dead. As Alan held out his hand, Jillian reached out to grab it. He had been mesmerized by her eyes, enchanted somehow. He closed his eyes as he leaned forward to kiss her.
But then Jillian stopped.
With a hideous wrench she slammed her head into the door. Again and again she struck the door with the back of her head. She screamed again, this time in fury. And the scream seemed to shatter the immobility that had gripped Stanford. With a jerk, he fell forward, gasping. Alan opened his eyes. He recoiled, seeming to see Jillian for the first time. Retching in the half-light thrown by Stanford’s flashlight, he fell to his knees.
But this time he did not try to touch her.
Jillian opened her eyes again. A tear slipped down her cheek as she looked at the two men.
“Alan, listen to me,” she said. “ I can’t keep it up much longer. I need you to listen.”
“Jillian…?”
“It was one of those black spheres, Alan. They came here using one of the black spheres…that fell… everywhere. Some of them came out of the alley behind… behind the building. There was a group of homeless men and women out there, sleeping in the alley, and they took them. One of them came inside to get us. It came to me…into my mind. At first I thought I was going crazy. When it spoke to me, began telling me things…I thought I had just…”
She grunted. She reached up with her left hand and pulled her long, blackened nails across her cheek, raising wet, red slashes there as her blood flowed.
Alan hissed at the sight of her self-mutilation.
“Stop it, Jillian,” he begged. But she shook her head.
“It tells me things,” she said. “It makes me do things. Wanda and I killed all those people downstairs.”
“No. No, Jillian, you couldn’t…”
But his voice trailed off as Jillian turned her gaze upon him. Madness and hatred seemed to rage out of her bruised eyes as she struggled to push herself upright against the door. She grunted with the inhuman effort of shifting her dead weight. Her eyes jerked fitfully.
“Look behind you,” she whispered.
Reluctantly, Alan and Stanford turned.
The wall and ceiling behind them were covered with human faces.
Alan made a sick sound at the back of his throat. Stanford stared in horrified wonder at the blasphemy beneath which they stood. Nearly fifty human faces adorned the walls of the kitchen. The faces had been sewn together to form a kind of macabre tapestry, a mural made of the faces men and women, old and young of of the damned. The tapestry covered the wall so completely that hardly any of the wallpaper showed through.
“We did it together,” Jillian said.
Alan whirled around to face her as she spoke.
“Wanda… had one of the Yloi in her head… and we did it together.”
Jillian began to cry. Deep, heaving sobs tore themselves out of her throat.
“They think it’s “art.””
She laughed. And the sound of her pain dug into Alan Whitmore’s mind like a poison- tipped dagger. He could hear her contempt for the thing that she had become. It lashed like a curse across his nerves.
“God, I dreamed you were looking for me and…and you came. You came…” Jillian moaned. Her voice dissolved, melting bitterly into the flow of her tears as Stanford moved closer. But almost without transition, Jillian turned her eyes to mark the older man.
“Don’t come any closer. It wants one of you. It’s keeping me alive now, but it needs a new host. Something about this world…keeps it from leaving on its own. It’s not…not as strong as it should be. It needs to transfer into a new body. Don’t touch me!” she screamed.
Stanford stopped.
Jillian eyed him for a moment before turning back to Alan.
“They need us right now. They need our minds and our bodies to exist here. But soon they won’t. Soon they’ll change the whole planet to suit them. Then you’ll all be slaves. The thing inside me… “
Jillian stopped. Her eyes grew wide, vast white circles of pain.
“Stop it, you bastard! “ she screamed.
“Jillian!” Alan howled.
Jillian slumped against the wall for a moment. Then her eyes opened again. And now Stanford could see that she was exhausted. Whatever she was struggling with was draining her.
“His name is Sa’Atha,” she said. “He’s weak, not as strong as some of the others. He… it can’t free itself.”
Alan was weeping openly now. Tears streamed down his face as he stared at the thing writhing on the kitchen floor.
“Someone, a man, came back after…after Wanda and I…hurt those people. He shot her, took her Yloi by surprise. He was able to kill them both. Then he came after me in here. He shot me. That was two days ago.”
Two days, Alan wailed.
They had slept, exhausted, for two days on their way into Westchester.
“Sometimes, when a human dies with an Yloi inside their mind, the Yloi will die along with the human, unless they can jump into a new body right at the moment of death. Sometimes they can make the dead live again. But here, something is preventing them from using their full strength. Something is… blocking their power.”
Alan was unable to respond. Jillian’s agony had rooted him to the spot. Her suffering had pushed him to the edge of madness.
But Stanford was able to think. And he had questions.
“What are they, Jillian? What are these Yloi?” he said.
Jillian stared at him for a moment. With a dry, husky chuckle, she relaxed against the doorframe. Then a harsh new voice, issued from her mouth.
“We are death, you primitive ape. Death for your entire species. I am Sa’Atha Diyesri y Fend. In my own right I am your master.”
Stanford felt a sudden chill as the Yloi spoke. Jillian seemed to relax even further, almost seeming to fall into a deep trance as the voice of Sa’Atha Diyesri hissed forth once more.
“We are the Yloi. And just as we have cast your world into chaos, so shall we reshape it to suit our merest whim. Your world will fall as others have fallen. Your people will serve as chattel to the Peerless Empire.”
“If your Peerless Empire is so all-powerful, then why haven’t you been able to leave this room?” Stanford said with a shudder. He realized that he was speaking with a being from another world. But he was also hoping to buy time by goading Sa’Atha into revealing more of the nature of the aliens’ plans.
“Vermin! Come closer to me and feel the clutch of my hand!”
Jillian’s arms reached up to grasp at Stanford. But they fell back, useless against her sides.
“Jillian?” Alan said.
His voice was quiet but purposeful as he called Jillian’s name again.
“Jillian, please…fight it. Fight him.”
At that, Jillian opened her eyes. But this time she did not move her head from where it rested on the door. A fragment of a smile touched her lips.
“Oh, Alan. I’m so tired. I knew you’d come. I…I’m so sorry. We were so stupid…”
“Shhh,” Alan hushed her gently. He reached to touch her, lay his finger on her lips.
But Stanford held him back once more.
“Something’s wrong. Something’s keeping them from Becoming. That thing that appeared in the sky…back when…back when this all started. The Yloi call it The Herald. It’s part of how they reshape the worlds they…that they Reave. SaAtha told me that.”
Jillian’s voice was growing fainter. To Alan she sounded lost, adrift somewhere between pain and horrified wonder.
“He’s told me so many things.”
“Jillian,” Alan said gently, desperately hoping to keep her awake. He was trapped, unable to approach her, to help ease her pain, and unable to stand seeing her suffer at the hands of the being who had done this to her.
She moaned as the malicious thing inside her clenched her features into a grimace of agony.
“Oh God!’ she gasped.
“Stop it!” Alan cried. "Stop that!"
Jillian’s hands scrabbled at the filthy linoleum beneath her. Suddenly, her breathing grew labored. The cords of her throat stood out like thick, ropy vines as she struggled to speak. Her head swung up. Dire urgency now resounded in her voice as she glared at the two men above her.
“When the black spheres came down, they were a part of the Herald. It was made up of billions of them. But the other part of it was supposed to continue… It’s supposed to…to reform our whole world, so that they can take over. But someone…something has hidden the other half from them. The Fend are afraid…”
She paused, her breath coming in gasps.
“Stop it! Stop it you dirty bastard!” she cried.
With a lurch she struck her head against the wall again. And when she opened her eyes once more, Alan could see that she, the part of her that remained, that had somehow managed to hold on this long… that part was dying.
“They know that only a dangerous foe could conceal… something so powerful. Every… every human they possess is searched for knowledge concerning its location. But they can’t find it. They need it to finish us off. Without it they’re only half as strong. It acts as a focus…focus for their power…”
“And my race will trample the bones of humanity into the blasted soil of this misbegotten shoquash! The Horn will sound the death knell for your species!”
Jillian screamed again. But with killing effort, she reestablished control of her body.
“Alan, they’ve destroyed thousands of planets. They’ve exterminated billions…”
Jillian shook her head, back and forth, fighting the thing inside her.
“I have him!”she growled. “We’re bound together somehow and it’s killing both of us. Oh GOD! IT HURTS! HE”S HURTING ME!”
In the closeness of the kitchen, the sound was piercing, heartrending. But Jillian stared forcefully at Alan through eyes filled with pain and determination. She extended a hand toward him.
As she gestured, Stanford felt something, some subtle passage like wind or air or…
…thought…
…power, a wave of energy, unseen but sensed the way heat energy rises from flowing between Alan and Jillian.
Alan’s eyes widened for a brief moment. With a cry, he covered his head as a thin trickle of blood poured from his nose and ears.
Then he quieted. His hands dropped to his sides as he stared blankly into space.
Stanford was overwhelmed by the impression that something indescribably potent was happening. Something deep and fragile, yet powerful as love itself had passed between the two of them.
Alan shook; caught in the grip of something that resembled a seizure.Then the moment passed and Jillian slumped, her chin resting on her chest. A thin line of drool dripped from her lips and hung there. She looked like a lifeless marionette, thrown into a corner and cruelly forgotten by a malicious child. His head dropped into his hands. His fingers gripped the skin of his face tightly, as if he were attempting to rearrange the structure of his skull as Jillian whispered, exhaustion and hope at war in her voice.
“Please, Alan, I’m so tired. I don’t want to live this way. Please.”
Alan’s shoulders shook with the force of a silent promise.
For a moment, no one spoke. Stanford sank to his knees, looking back and forth between the two of them. He was lost in incomprehension. What was happening was beyond him.
Suddenly Jillian’s head jerked up again. Her eyes flared as she screamed at them.
“It’s in the Weave now! The Horn is moving. It’s moving… between realities. Oh…! It hurts so much!”
Alan stood then. And he retrieved the shotgun from where he’d dropped it. With a loud ratcheting sound, he jacked a round into the chamber.
“Alan?” Stanford asked.
The look on Alan’s face terrified the aging physician more than anything he’d yet witnessed.
The younger man was smiling. Even as tears coursed down his cheeks, Alan’s eyes were alight, burning with the fires of extremity as he cocked and aimed the shotgun.
“Move out of the way, Richard.”
“ALAN!”
“Richard...move!”
“Alan, we can help her!”
“Oh, God! Please, Alan! I can’t… He’s hurting me!”
“Richard, goddammit MOVE!”
“Alan, I love yooouuu! /… feed your bodies to the shreke and tear your souls to shreds!/ Alaaaannnn, pleeeeeessseeee!!!”
Alan shoved Stanford out of the way and raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
“I love you, Jillian,” Alan croaked.
There was a flash of light, the shattering crash of thunder, followed by a cry of grief that resonated long after the thunder’s echo died away.
Then silence.
*
To Be Continued...