The Wrong Goodbye

“Don’t look at it!” I shouted.

“Don’t look at what?” Gio replied in alarm.

“No problem on my end,” Theresa said, though the bravado in her voice rang false.

I came upon the conduit so fast, I damn near fell in. Then Gio and I hoisted the ladder up through the hole, and tried to brace it against the one above.

But we were too late. A tentacle lashed out from the darkness, glistening in the watery light filtering through the plastic sheeting from the street, and swatted the ladder. It clattered across the room and skittered off the unprotected edge, tearing loose a sheet of plastic and toppling to the dirt lot a floor below. When it hit, it loosed a flurry of surprised shouts, and a pop-pop of startled gunfire. The police were closing in.

I aimed the sawed-off at the darkness, and it thundered in my hand. Then another tentacle wrapped itself around its barrel and yanked it from my grasp.

A wet dragging sound filled the air as Abyzou approached. I caught a glimpse of glistening gray skin, and felt a sudden pressure in my mind. Join us, it said. Join us and never be alone again. Luxuriate in ecstatic, excruciating want for all eternity.

I clutched my hands to my head, and tried to shake the thoughts. Only when I pressed tight my eyes did they ease, but even then I couldn’t banish them. Beside me, I heard Gio whimper and hit the ground.

“So hungry,” he muttered. “It’s so goddamned hungry…'

But there was no fear in his voice. Instead, he sounded full of sorrow. Sorrow and longing.

I fell to my knees. I knew if I didn’t do something soon, Gio would succumb, and he’d forever be one with this queen bitch of the underworld. But for the life of me, I couldn’t muster the will to stop her.

“Jesus Christ,” Theresa said, “what the fuck is wrong with you two?”

A wet fwack like hitting a waterbed with a baseball bat, and the cursed creature squealed. The pressure in my mind suddenly eased. Another couple, and I once more found my feet. I opened my eyes, and the pressure once more intensified, though not so badly as it had before. And what I saw amazed me: damn near seven feet of Afroed black woman going to town on a massive, squid-like hell beast with a length of rebar like it was some kind of unholy pinata.

If Abyzou had an ass, Theresa was seriously kicking it.

“You boys OK back there?” she yelled. Her voice was hoarse from exertion, and she was covered in green- black gore, but I could swear her tone was positively cheery. And still, she kept on swinging.

“Getting there,” I managed. “You?”

“Right as rain.” Fwack. “This bitch keeps trying to show me something,” she continued. “I can feel her rattling round my brain, trying to trick my eyes. Sucks for her they ain’t worked in years.”

“That’s my baby!” Gio cheered, though when I looked at him, I found he was facing in the wrong direction, his eyes buried in the crook of one elbow.

“Now, you boys got a job to do. I got this chick.”

“You sure?”

“Hell yes, I am. I’ma teach her a lesson for hitting on my man.”

Gio protested, but he was no help to her down there and knew it. So reluctantly, he came with. Since Abyzou had relieved us of our ladder, we were forced to take the stairs. I’d hoped we’d already avoided —or, in the case of Abyzou, triggered —any protections Danny’d enacted, but if I’m being honest, I knew damn well we hadn’t.

Each floor was separated by maybe twenty steps, with a landing in the middle. The stairwell was molded concrete, with no handrails, no windows, and nowhere to hide should trouble come. We crawled forward in utter darkness, worried with each movement some fresh hell would be unleashed. It wasn’t until we reached the landing I realized Danny’d been cleverer than that. After all, he didn’t need to kill intruders —just delay them. And this latest ploy of his would do exactly that.

See, that last flight of stairs leading up to the third floor was not so dark as the preceding stretch —and with thousands upon thousands of shards of skim to illuminate it, why would it be? Danny’d never struck me as one with much facility for magic, but it looked for damn sure like he’d been studying. God knows what trap he’d rigged up at the base of the stairwell, but summoning Abyzou had been a nifty trick —and this was no slouch, either. Countless shards of needle-sharp skim hovering in the stairwell, aligned like molecules in a crystal, each one aiming a pointy end our way. Each of them was so small, its glow was almost undetectable, but together, their faint phosphorescence reminded me of whitecaps on a moonless night, or of an early morning fog.

“We have to go back,” I said. “We have to find another way.”

“There is no other way,” Gio said. “We got no ladder. We got no time. The cops’ll be here soon, and you can be damn sure Danny knows it. Which means he’s gonna make his move, and quick. Here, take this.” Something hit me in the darkness. It was Gio’s bowling shirt. His Bermuda shorts followed shortly after.

“Uh, Gio —are you naked?”

“Relax, dude —I still got skivvies on.”

“If there’s a plan here, I’m not following.”

“Use my clothes to cover your exposed skin.”

I shook my head, and then realized he couldn’t see me by the skim’s pale half-light. “Gio, this won’t work. Skim’s too sharp. If you had a leather jacket, maybe, but even then there’d be no guarantee. And if I get so much as pricked, it’s lights out.”

“You don’t get it,” he said. “I got better than a leather jacket —I got me.”

“Gio, no. I can’t let you do this. You’re not among the living anymore —which means you’re not immune. This shit will knock you for a serious loop. I got dosed with a single shard, and I damn near didn’t come back. God knows what this many will do to you.”

Gio sighed, steeling himself. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “I ain’t worried about coming back. Long as my lady’s here, I’ll find my way. And as for God, I sincerely hope he’s watching.”

He was up before I could stop him. A short, fat man in boxer-briefs streaking wild-armed up the stairs, and screaming bloody murder all the while. The unlikeliest badass I’ve ever seen —and that includes his sightless lady- friend.

I had no choice but to follow after.

The shards of skim reacted like a swarm of killer bees when the plane was broken, homing in on him with laser precision. Each pinprick brought with it a bead of blood. Each shard that disappeared beneath his flesh dimmed the staircase slightly. Soon, there was no light left in the stairwell, save that which flickered like distant lightning within his flesh.

The flight was ten steps long. He made it five or six before he fell.

Then he was gone, swallowed by the skim’s forced slumber, and I was through.

The set-up of this floor was different from the other two. For one, half the damn ceiling was missing. Broken concrete exposed steel girders and night sky, and afforded me a glimpse of the storm clouds coalescing above us, blotting out what few stars pierced the city’s glare. On one distant hunk of crumbling concrete across the roof from where I stood sat a gathering of crows, their outline disconcertingly like that of a hunched old man.

This floor was also the only one to feature any internal construction. Metal studs framed out what looked to be a second, smaller pentagram before me, oriented opposite the one laid out by the perimeter of the building such that its outermost points touched the innermost of the larger one.

Two pentagrams set at odds to one another. Good and evil. Profound and profane. I wondered which the larger represented. I suspected I knew the answer.

Plastic sheeting was tacked over the metal studs, blurring the star-shaped room beyond from view. Beyond the plastic, candlelight danced, the light it cast through the plastic putting me in mind of a lantern’s glow.

I pushed aside a sheet of plastic and stepped into the room.

“Sam,” said the stranger with Danny’s accent, “so nice of you to join us!”

Us.

He said us.