She smiled, and he returned it with a warm, if slightly nervous, grin. He tiptoed down the hall and disappeared back into his apartment. When the door clicked shut, the dog hopped up and unleashed a long, high- pitched shriek. It sniffed along the edge of the door before snorting, retching up a glob of snot that it immediately gobbled down.
Unending Smorgaz trundled up the stairs, past the dog, and pushed his way past Diana.
“One side,” he said. “Hot pie, coming through.”
“Finally!”
Vom seized one of the boxes and jammed it halfway into his mouth, but he paused under Diana’s and Smorgaz’s watchful stares. Vom removed the pizza, set it on the coffee table, and slouched in a sulk.
“Oh, okay,” said Diana. “You can have one pizza all to yourself, but you might want to savor—”
Gleefully he snatched up the coffee table and swallowed the pizza box and a third of the table in one huge bite.
“This is a great pie. Love the touch of sawdust.” His attention turned to the second pizza.
“Are you going to eat all that?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“It’ll only be a few hours,” said Sharon. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
Calvin didn’t look up from his book. “Think I’ll skip this one, if it’s just the same to you.”
“Everyone will be disappointed.”
He dog-eared the page and set the book aside to help her put on her coat.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” She winced.
“I am the lord of beautiful anarchy, aren’t I? So I don’t use bookmarks, and I don’t attend every annoying pep rally Greg feels like throwing just because he’s bored.”
“Now you’re just being snarky.”
He helped her on with her coat.
“You know how he adores you,” she said. “How they all adore you.”
“Have you ever been adored by four dozen people at once? Trust me. It’s not as cool as it sounds. Anyway, if I showed up to all of these events, it’d stop being special.”
“I guess you’re right.” She leaned in, gave him a polite hug. “Try to stay out of trouble now.”
“I think I can manage on my own for an evening. Just going to hang out with the guys.”
She paused. “So soon? Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“I’m not allowed to have friends now?”
“You have friends.”
“Greg and his loonies are not my friends. At best, they’re coworkers. Although really I do all the work.”
“Yes, you do. It’s just… you know how crazy things can get when you get together with the old gang. Just promise me you’ll take it easy.”
“You worry too much. Not like it’s the end of the world.”
She patted him on the chest. “Make sure that it isn’t. Not yet anyway.”
An elderly woman with wild gray hair, the nub of a green crayon clutched in withered, clawlike fingers, scrawled an endless string of numbers on the hallway just outside Benny’s door.
She glanced up from her work and smiled. Her eyes glinted with madness.
“Hello,” she croaked.
Calvin nodded at her. Benny’s mere presence had this effect on people. He improved the efficiency of their squishy biological brains until they functioned like obsessive-compulsive supercomputers. This poor woman was working on an equation that disproved the universe. She had at least forty more years of scrawling to do, though.
He knocked on the apartment door, and a fat worm with translucent skin showing pulsing, multicolored veins answered. Limbs ringed his body in peculiar asymmetry. Most ended in hands, though two were just stumps and one served as his nose. He wore a baseball cap secured to his “head” with masking tape. The rules for greater eldritch horrors varied. Calvin had no trouble passing for human, but it had less to do with his appearance than with his separation from his more otherworldly self.
The worm, on the other hand, required a disguise to avoid driving mortals mad. It didn’t take much: a T-shirt, a hat, sunglasses. Just something for the human mind to grab on to. Calvin wondered if the disguise itself created an illusion or if humans found the idea of a Benny, a giant, glistening maggot in a Raiders cap, so absurd that their peculiar brains decided to just accept it and move on. The end result was the same.
Benny said, “Cal, what kept ya?”
Calvin held up a grocery bag. “I stopped off for snacks.”
He stepped inside, but before Benny closed the door Calvin told the woman, “You dropped a decimal point around the corner.”
Frowning, she shuffled off to correct the mistake.
Calvin handed the snacks to Benny. “You should probably move before you cause irreversible damage to that poor woman.”
“I’d like to, but where am I going to find another place this good? Plus, it’s got rent control.”
Benny slipped into the kitchen to put the beers in the fridge. Calvin had a seat next to Swoozie, who was playing video games.
Even among eldritch horrors, Swoozie was one of the most incomprehensible. Her body was little more than a random collection of colors and alien geometries. She’d molded a pair of mismatched hands to hold the game controller, but the twisted fingers had a hard time reaching all the buttons.
“Shit,” she said as she guided her pixilated hero off a cliff.
Swoozie was lousy at video games. Hardly surprising since she was barely connected to this universe to begin with. She was like a puppeteer trying to control a marionette via a very, very long string and a telescope. And right now she was like a woman trying to use that marionette to control a second puppet composed of a few electrons dancing across a television screen. Sometimes Calvin envied Swoozie, who was almost free of the trap they were stuck in. And sometimes Calvin figured it had to be worse for Swoozie than for any of them. Like having to walk around with a bucket on your head for eternity.
“Press the A button to jump,” said Calvin.
Swoozie’s digital protagonist jumped the chasm. She hooted, and the sound caused the wallpaper to peel.
“Hey, watch it,” said Benny.
“Sorry.”
A virtual gargoyle swooped down and decapitated Swoozie’s hero. The corpse collapsed in a heap.
“What the hell?” growled Swoozie. “Get up, you stupid bastard.”
“Humans can’t live without their heads,” explained Calvin. It was easy to forget that.
“That’s crap. I don’t see why I have to be saddled with such a silly weakness just because humans don’t have the imagination to realize that their limitations are not required for a video game character.”
“These games are marketed with a human audience in mind,” said Benny.
“It’s discrimination.” Swoozie reached around space and grabbed one of the beers from the fridge without getting up from her seat. The hole in space she pulled the beverage from didn’t disappear right away. It just hovered there.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Benny. “What the hell did I tell you about respecting the space-time continuum in my home?”
“Oh, just sweep it under a rug or something,” replied Swoozie.
Calvin reached into the hole and grabbed a beer of his own. Benny glared.
“What?” Calvin smiled. “It’s there. Why not use it?”
The teeth in Benny’s circular mouth twirled counterclockwise. His version of a frown.
“So what are we doing tonight?” asked Swoozie.
