“You can’t help. This is just going to make things worse for me,” she said. “I want you to leave now!”
He unbuckled his belt, whipped it off, and pried with the buckle at the loose board.
“What’re you doing?”
“Trying to understand this.”
He managed to pry the board up sufficiently that he could grip it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled it back farther and put an eye close to the gap he had made. A flash of light, and he saw an unfamiliar night sky with too many stars and a glowing red cloud occupying its southern quadrant. Hovering at an unguessable distance between him and the cloud was a dark wormlike structure. He had the impression he was looking at something of immense size.
Another flash of light, then another, and another yet…
In the intervals between flashes, he was afforded glimpses of different vistas. Many he was unable to quantify, their geography too vast and bewildering to be comprehensible. Those that he was able to comprehend all possessed the quality of immensity. Great reaches containing strangely proportioned structures. By the time he pressed the board back into place, he thought he understood the house. A sketchy understanding, but the basic picture was clear. The doors were programmed (he could think of no better term) to admit you to different portions of the house; but before you settled into the room to which you had been directed, you saw the place through which you transited, or perhaps it was simply another place that you might have transited to. A place removed from or perhaps inclusive of the house. There was much he was unsure of, but he was sure of one thing—the doors could be reprogrammed.
Grace continued to warn him away, but he refused to listen. Wishing it were sharper, he pushed the tongue of the belt buckle against the seam beside her neck, denting it slightly. He pushed harder, lodging the point in the dent and jamming it down with both hands. The seam writhed and suddenly deflated; the bands holding her retracted without a sound, appearing to flow back into the boards behind her. She let out a gasp and staggered away from the wall.
“The doors,” he said. “They can be adjusted…calibrated to take you away from the house. I’m not sure what this place is, but it embodies physical principles. Mechanical principles. Maybe…”
Grace planted both hands on his chest and sent him reeling backward. “You’re not hearing me!”
“I’m telling you how to escape,” he said.
She tried to shove him again, but he caught her hands.
“You’re not hearing me,” he said angrily. “I’m trying to help you. The uglies…they manipulate the house. And they’re stupid, right? Everyone I’ve talked to says that. So if they can do it, the chances are you can manage it, too.”
Grace twisted away from him. “You don’t know! You’ve only been here a little while. No time at all. Most of us have been here for years.”
“But you haven’t tried, have you? All you’ve done is mope about. Why don’t you take a moment and…”
“Do you want to die? That’s what’s going to happen.”
“Just listen and I’ll go.”
“I heard what you told me, all right? I’ll check the doors!”
“And watch the uglies,” he said. “When you’re with them, watch what they do with the doors.”
She started to speak, but instead stared past him, looking at something over his shoulder with fierce concentration. There was no sign of fear in her face, though fear, Shellane understood upon turning, must be responsible for her intensity of focus.
Three of the uglies had come into view around a bend and were crouched as if in preparation for an attack, squeezed together by a narrowing of the walls. Two of them resembled the men imprisoned in the cells, but the third, the biggest, was identical to the man who had pursued Shellane through the woods. Severely deformed. Jagged orbits shadowing his eyes, a darkly crimson mouth visible behind a toothy jack o’lantern grimace. Shellane braced himself for a fight. Despite Grace’s assertion that they were strong, they looked spindly and frail, and he believed he could do some damage. But rather than charging at him, they began to whimper like a chorus of terrified children, gaspy and quavering. The one on the right lifted its head to the ceiling, as if seeking divine assistance, and gave forth with a feeble ululation. Urine dribbled down its leg. The others hid their eyes, but continued to peek at him, as if not daring to turn away from the cause of their terror.
They were afraid of him, Shellane realized. No other explanation satisfied. He took a step toward them—their whimpers rose in pitch and volume. Definitely afraid. He caught Grace’s hand, tried to pull her away. If they could get clear, he thought, he would have time to come up with a plan. But she yanked her hand free and dropped to her knees, then sank into a reclining position, her eyes averted, like a child who sees the inevitable, some terrible punishment, and seeks refuge in collapse.
The uglies still seemed afraid, but Shellane’s confidence had been weakened by Grace’s surrender. Nevertheless, he steeled himself and ran at them, waving his arms, shouting, hoping to drive them off. They scuttled away, yet when he stopped his advance, they, too, stopped, huddling together, plucking and clutching at one another like fretful monkeys. He made a second menacing run. Once again they fell back, but not so far this time. A touch of curiosity showed in their crudely drawn faces and one of them growled, bassy and articulated, a bleakly mechanical noise, like the idling of some beastly machine. Two lesser yet equally chilling growls joined in guttural disharmony with the first, and he lifted hands in a defensive posture, knowing now that he would be forced to fight.
But it was no fight.
In a few shambling strides they were on him, a wave of bony edges and jagged, blunt teeth that carried him down, enveloping him in a bitter stench. He managed to land a single punch, striking the chest of the tallest. Like hitting a wall of granite. Then he was tossed, kicked, slammed into the boards, worried, scratched, bitten, and kicked again until he lost consciousness. When he woke, once he managed to unscramble his senses, he found he was being dragged along by the feet. Head bumping, arms flopping. He heard Grace scream and struggled to wrench free, but the hands gripping his ankles were irresistible. He twisted about, trying to find her. Caught a glimpse of her being carried aloft, held by the collar of her jacket in one long-fingered gray hand. Bile flushed into his throat. The effortful grunting breath of the creature dragging him seemed the sound of his panic. He closed his eyes and summoned his reserves, focusing, contriving a central place in his mind from which he could observe and judge what, if anything, might be done.
They came to a door. The creature released one of his ankles; through slitted eyes, Shellane watched it press a forefinger in sequence against the raised seams clumped together on the wall. The door opened and they were sucked inside. Flashing white lights disoriented Shellane and, despite himself, he cried out. His tormentor bent down to him, its insult of a mouth—wide enough to swallow a ham—widened further in a smile, its tongue dark red and thick, like a turtle’s. Beneath the ridges of its orbits, its eyes were visible. Gleaming not with reflected light, it seemed, but with the animal sheen of a rotted deliquescence. It slashed at his face with its thumb. A warm wetness spread across his cheek, and he realized it had sliced him with its thumbnail. It seized him by the shirtfront and he was lifted up, dangled over a gulf—it appeared that a boulder had hurtled down from heaven or the heights of whatever place this was, smashing everything in its path, creating a central shaft in one of the tenements, leaving a hole roughly twenty feet in diameter. The shaft its passage had made fell away into shadow, walled by a broken honeycomb of exposed rooms and splintered black boards. Before he could fully absorb the sight, the creature swung him as easily as he himself might swing a cat and let him fly out through the air. A desperate cry tore from his throat. The ruin pinwheeled. The pull of gravity and death took him at the top of his arc. Turning sideways as he fell, he saw a gaping darkness rush up at him, and the next instant he slammed into something that drove wind from his chest and light from his brain. Only after regaining consciousness a second time did he understand that he had been thrown completely across the gap, and that the uglies, bearing Grace with them, had leaped across after him.