“Good. Don’t.”
“Will you shut up about the stupid closet already?”
“Suit yourself.”
He hung up.
“Ah, damn it.” Diana stared at the receiver, then the closet.
“Frustrating, isn’t it?” said the closet. “Imagine how I feel. I was spawned at the dawn of time and now I find myself bound to a small clump of transient flesh.”
“Bound by what?”
“Whatever decides these things. Primal forces that make even me piss myself. Or would if I pissed. It’s a complicated universe. Sorry if I can’t just summarize it in a pithy metaphor.”
The phone rang again. She took a moment to steady herself. Losing her temper wasn’t getting her anywhere.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” said West. “Ready to talk now?”
She sucked in a deep breath and replied in an even voice. “Yes.”
“Good. Here’s how it works. Inside that closet is an ancient entity known as Vom the Hungering. He’s actuallpretty decent sort, as ancient spawns go. But if you let him out of that closet, he will eat you.”
She lowered the phone. “You’re a cannibal?”
Vom chuckled. “Cannibals eat their own kind. I am a singular entity. There is only one Vom the Hungering, and that is me. And you are?”
She ignored the question. “You’re going to eat me?”
“Yeah, probably. Don’t suppose it helps anything if I apologize in advance.”
She put the phone to her ear. “Pay attention, Number Five. You are now Vom’s warden. You will not age or grow sick and you cannot die by conventional means.”
“Okay, this is sounding more and more like bullshit,” she said.
“Don’t interrupt. I have other responsibilities. If I don’t bring Number Three an avocado in five minutes California will fall into the ocean.”
“Yeah. Sure. Makes sense.” She admitted defeat and just listened.
“One day, Number Five, you will release Vom. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not a hundred years from now. But one day, when the crawl of eternity becomes too much for you, you will open that door. He will then devour you, go back into his prison, and wait for the next warden. That is just how this works. There’s no point in complaining to me about it either. I don’t have any control over any of it.”
“But—”
“I’m not even obligated to give you this information, but you seem like a nice young woman. So best of luck.”
He hung up, and she knew he wouldn’t be calling back this time.
She checked the apartment again. Ran her fingers along every wall, probed every corner, moved every bit of furniture. If there was a way out she didn’t find it, but just to be certain she checked one more time.
If West was to be believed (though she wasn’t quite ready for that) she was a prisoner and her only way out was death. And if she was immortal there was only one form of death available, to be devoured by a monster living in her closet.
She found a butter knife in the cabinet and ran it across her palm. It wasn’t easy getting the blade to draw blood, but she managed. The shallow cut closed immediately. There wasn’t even a scar left behind.
It was as far as she was willing to go right now. Maybe in a hundred years she’d be so bored that sawing her arms off with a dull butter knife would sound amusing.
Stay as long as she could. Leave whenever she was willing. She got it now.
She went back to bed. The clock radio on the nightstand counted the minutes. She turned the bright red numbers toward the wall and tried not to think about it. If she really was immortal she had all the time in the universe. It seemed pointless to obsess over every second. Dana turned the clock toward her and frowned. Twenty-two minutes had passed.
Twenty-two minutes.
She put the pillow over her face and reflected on infinity, breaking it up into twenty-two-minute chunks. Endless bits of twenty-two, one right after the other after the other.
The crawl of eternity indeed.
She got up and turned on the television. Nothing was on. Or maybe she just wasn’t in the mood.
“Can’t sleep either, huh?” asked the closet monster. “I hate that. Of course I only sleep seven minutes every other century. And believe me, that’s annoying. I have a lot of time to kill and a nap now and then might help.”
She turned up the volume.
“We’re the only company we’re going to have for a long, long while,” Vom said. “We can at least try and be civil.”
She stared at the TV, not really watching it, just thinking about the passage of time, listening to the tick- tick-tick of the clock on the wall. Where had that clock even come from, anyway? It hadn’t been there before. She was certain of that. She’d been over every inch of this place.
Diana muted the television.
“This isn’t fair,” she said. “All I wanted was an apartment.”
“You seem like a decent lady,” said Vom. “I’m really sorry that I have to eat you.”
She walked over to the closet. “You keep saying that, but if you were really sorry you wouldn’t. Then I could open this closet, and we could both get out of here.”
“Sounds like a good deal to me.”
“So you agree then?”
“Sure. No eating. I promise.”
She reached for the knob but stopped short of touching it.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t. And I’ll admit I’m not trustworthy. I did promise not to eat all the others. And I really meant it when I said it. But it just sort of happens. Not always though. There was this Spanish guy who I didn’t eat. Good guy, too. Lot of fun. I miss him.”
“What made him different?”
“He had the stuff.”
“The stuff?”
“You know what I’m talking about. The stuff. The goods. The mojo.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means what it means,” said Vom. “When someone has the stuff, you just know it.”
“That’s not very helpful at all.”
“There are mysteries beyond even my ken. Listen. I’ve done this plenty of times. I know how this game goes. Some people open the closet right away. Others hold out for a while. One guy made it a whole century. But you are going to open this door one day. So why don’t we just cut the suspense and jump to the inevitable conclusion?”
Diana wanted to argue, but if what West and Vom had told her was true, then it really was unavoidable. The question wasn’t
It took her four days to get bored enough to think about finally opening the door. Four days of watching television, of staring at the ticks of the clock, of obsessively searching every nook and cranny of the apartment for some form of escape, of waiting for the phone to ring and for West to tell her that he’d changed his mind and she was free to go.
No one would be coming for her because no one knew she was here. If she was going to get out she’d have to do it herself. And four days of steady rumination on the subject always led back to that damn closet.
She went to the refrigerator and demanded another turkey sandwich. Then another. Then another. Then she stopped thinking small and demanded a turkey. Then she just started demanding “Food” and left it up to the refrigerator to supply whatever it felt like. She piled the sandwiches and turkeys and cakes and hamburgers and
