She forced herself to keep going, though, and when she reached The Respite’s front steps, she walked up them, each step taking a major effort. When she got to the door, she took hold of the handle and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t just tired. She was weak, too. She tried again, gripping the handle with both hands now. The blood coating her left hand made her grip slippery, but she pulled harder this time, and the door came open with a loud creaking sound.
She entered.
She stepped into a dark hallway, the only illumination the faint dingy light filtering through the small dirty window set into the door. The paint on the walls was flaking off, the plaster beneath cracked and crumbling, and the carpet under her feet was moldy and threadbare.There were numbers on the doors she passed, metal ones nailed to wooden surfaces. They’d lost whatever luster they once possessed years ago, and now looked as if they’d been burned into the doors. She could make out a few numbers, guess at others. 1-A, 1-B, 1-C, and so on. The air was stale, flat, dead, and she breathed through her nose, hoping to filter out any nasty particles that might be floating around her. She knew it wouldn’t work, though, that the best she could hope for was to minimize her exposure to whatever was in the air by breathing slow and shallow. The precaution made her feel a little safer, and even if it was an illusion, she’d take it, and gladly.
There was a smell in the air, one that underlay the mingled scent of mold and rotting wood. It was so different from anything she’d smelled before that her mind could find no comparison for it. The closest she could come up with was a crude approximation. It smelled black, and while she’d never experienced synesthesia before, she thought that, or something very like it, was what was happening to her. How else could a color have a smell?
This was the last point where she could turn back, her one and only opportunity to turn around, hobble down the hallway, push open the entrance door, and return to the street. Once outside, she could keep walking and never look back. She almost did it, and to hell with the consequences. Instead, she continued forward.
Halfway down the hallway, one of the unit doors was open. She pressed her left hand to her shoulder wound once more and walked toward the apartment. When she reached it, she stopped at the doorway and peered inside. The room was empty of furniture, but trash littered the floor. Empty beer cans and liquor bottles, crumpled fast food wrappers, syringes, and in one corner a dead rat. Chunks of plaster were missing from the walls, and graffiti covered the area that remained intact. Huge stylized letters formed words Lori couldn’t decipher, along with crude images of erect penises, swastikas, and anarchy symbols. The wall on the far side of the room had a large jagged crack in it that ran from floor to ceiling. It was two inches wide, three in some places, and it was pitch dark inside. Looking at it, Lori a felt a profound sense of wrongness, as if she was seeing something that should not exist. She thought of what Goat-Eyes had told her on the Nightway.
There are locations on your planet where the barrier between it and Shadow are more permeable than others. Oakmont is one such place.
A Thin Place, Goat-Eyes had called it. Lori was looking at proof of this right now – a crack in reality, one that opened into Shadow.
The man stood in front of the crack, regarding it.
“I come here sometimes,” he said. “Into this building. When it’s too cold out or when it’s raining too hard. Sometimes there are other people in the building. If it’s too crowded, I move on, look for someplace else. A couple of days ago, we had a real bad storm, remember? Rain, wind, lightning, the whole show. I hauled ass over here, and when I got inside, I was surprised to find no one else was here. I thought for sure others would come looking to stay warm and dry. I figured the storm must’ve come on too sudden for anyone else to get here, and I decided it was my lucky day, and I was going to have the whole place to myself. I picked a room at random – this one – went inside. And I found this.” He nodded toward the shadow-filled crack on the wall. “I’d never seen anything like it. It seemed kind of real and unreal at the same time, you know? I got closer so I could get a better look.” He laughed, shook his head. “Dumbest goddamn thing I ever did. See, there was something alive inside the crack. Something that wanted out. But they couldn’t do it on their own. They needed a kind of…anchor to take hold of, something they could use to pull themselves into our world. They used me as that anchor. They all rushed into me at once, maybe a dozen in all, and once they were inside, they made themselves at home. Coming into our world took a lot out of them, and they needed a place to hole up for a while and rebuild their strength. I’ve been walking around town the last couple days, trying to figure out what to do about these damn things. They’re wrong, you know? They shouldn’t be loose in our world. They don’t belong here. I wanted to find some way
