“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.”
“What relationship?” she asked.
“Like it or not, we’re bound together,” said Vom.
“Oh no we’re not.”
He gnashed his teeth. Since he had a lot of teeth, several rows of them, it made a hell of a grating noise.
“Hey, consciousness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There are all these complicated thoughts running through my head now, and some of them are very confusing. They don’t mesh together well. It’s like you. Part of me wants to eat you. But another part of me feels like that would be a lousy thing to do since you freed me from that closet. But another part of me thinks that if I kill you, maybe it’ll free me from this sliver of reality and I’ll get to go home where all I had to worry about was digesting anything that found its way into any of my two thousand fourteen stomachs. But another part thinks that maybe I don’t want to go back to that now that I’ve found a world where not everything is as simple as endless devouring hunger. But another—”
“I get it.”
“The point is that once you gaze into the abyss—”
“The abyss gazes into you.”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s a cliche. Everybody knows that.”
Vom frowned. “Damn. And I thought I’d made that up. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re stuck with each other, and we can’t go back. Me, a timeless devouring force and you, a delicious chewy morsel wrapped around a crunchy calcium treat.”
She moved a few steps farther from him.
“What?” he said. “It’s a compliment.”
She took stock of her situation. She was bound to a horror from beyond time and space, and she was probably going slowly mad because of it.
“Is the apartment still mine?”
“You bet,” said Vom. “It’s a package deal.”
There was a bright side at least.
“So what do you say?” He extended his hand. “Roomies?”
Noticing snapping jaws buried in the fur in Vom’s palms, she kept her hands in her pockets and nodded.
They walked back to West’s apartment building of horrors. She wasn’t crazy about living there, but she had no place else to go. She couldn’t call on any of her friends. Not with Vom and his endless appetite following her.
The building didn’t look right. She’d run away without glancing back upon her escape, but she saw it with new eyes this time. It was a jutting tower of strange angles, disappearing into a swirling green vortex in the sky. The brick walls shimmered and shifted as she walked closer, like one of those cheap 3-D card images that never quite worked the way the inventor had hoped.
The vortex growled, and the building shuddered, expanding and contracting. She climbed the short flight of stairs to the front doors. The creaky old doors opened without her touching the handles, and hot wind poured over her. She saw the portal as a huge mouth. One of thousands scattered across the cosmos, all part of a single impossibly huge creature dwelling across multiple realities. And all the people, animals, and even monsters like Vom were merely skittering atoms drifting between its toes. Although it probably didn’t have toes. Or if it did, each of those toes could crush a universe. Except for the big toe. That could probably crush several at once.
Vom walked inside, and she expected the lesser devouring monster to be devoured by the larger one. But it didn’t happen.
“Are you coming?” he asked her.
She pushed the inhuman thoughts away, gritted her teeth, and followed him. The otherness outside the apartment disappeared once she was across the threshold. The heat faded to a mildly uncomfortable warmth. The air was a bit humid, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
One of the apartment doors opened, and West stuck his head out. He sported an extra pair of eyes above the normal set. And his bushy beard writhed a bit. Not the beard itself, but whatever was underneath it, whatever passed for West’s chin. Not that she wanted to think about that.
“Still alive, Number Five?” he asked, though the answer should’ve been obvious.
She nodded.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any Monopoly money on you, would you, Number Five?”
She shook her head.
“Damn. The mole lords are not going to be happy about that.”
He withdrew into his room and shut the door without another word.
“He’s a crazy old bird,” said Vom, “but he’s harmless.”
Considering the source of the reassurance, Diana didn’t find this very comforting.
She noticed for the first time that every door in the building was different. Different size. Different color.
