It probably would have been more intimidating if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle.
“Uh, man,” the cashier said, and I finally twigged to the scent of recently burned marijuana. The guy didn’t look scared. He looked confused. “Dude, what is . . . Did you see the lights just . . . ?”
I really hadn’t wanted to do this, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I made a little bit of a production of turning the “gun” to point at the liquor bottles behind the counter, gathered up my will, and screamed, “Ka-bang! Ka-bang!”
My verbal incantations have actually gotten more sophisticated and worldly over the years, not less.
I know, right? It shocks me, too.
The spell was just basic kinetic energy, and it didn’t really hit much harder than a baseball thrown by a high school pitcher—a regular pitcher, not like Robert Redford in The Natural. That wasn’t really enough power to threaten anyone’s life, but it was noisy and it was more than enough energy to smash a couple of bottles. They shattered with loud barking sounds and showers of glass and booze.
“Holy crap!” shouted the cashier. I saw that his name tag read STAN. “Dude!” He flinched down, holding his arms up around his head. “Don’t shoot!”
I pointed the paper bag at him and said, “Give me all the money, Stan!”
“Okay, okay!” Stan said. “Oh, God. Don’t kill me!”
“Money!” I shouted.
He turned to the register and started fumbling at it, stabbing at the keys.
As he did, I sensed a movement behind me, an almost subliminal presence. It’s the kind of thing you expect to experience while standing in a line—the silent pressure of another living being behind you, temporarily sharing your space. But I wasn’t standing in a line, and I whirled in panic and shouted, “Ka-bang!” again.
There was a loud snap of sound as pure force lashed through the air and the glass door to a freezer of ice cream shattered.
“Oh, God,” Stan moaned. “Please don’t kill me!”
There was no one behind me. I tried to look in every direction at once and more or less succeeded.
There was no one else in the store. . . .
And yet the presence was still there, on the back of my neck, closer and more distinct than a moment before.
What the hell?
“Run!” said a resonant baritone.
I turned and pointed the paper bag at the pair of video games.
“Run!” said the voice on the Sinistar game. “I live! I . . . am . . . Sinistar!”
“Don’t move,” I said to Stan. “Just put the money in a bag.”
“Money in a bag, man,” Stan panted. He was practically sobbing. “I’m supposed to do whatever you want, right? That’s what the owners have told us cashiers, right? I’m supposed to give you the money. No argument. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, my eyes flicking nervously around the place. “It’s not worth dying for, is it, Stan?”
“Got that right,” Stan muttered. “They’re only paying me five dollars an hour.” He finally managed to open the drawer and started fumbling bills into a plastic bag. “Okay, dude. Just a second.”
“Run!” said the Sinistar machine. “Run!”
Again, the insubstantial pressure against the back of my neck increased. I turned in a slow circle, but nothing was there—nothing I could see, at any rate.
But what if there was something there? Something that couldn’t be seen? I had never actually seen something summoned from the netherworld, but Justin had described such beings repeatedly, and I didn’t think he’d been lying. Such a beast would make an ideal hunter; just the sort of thing to send out after a mouthy apprentice who refused to wear his straitjacket like a good boy.
I took two slow steps toward the video game, staring at its screen. I didn’t pay attention to the spaceship or the asteroids or the giant, disembodied skull flying around. I didn’t care about the flickers of static that washed across the screen as I got closer, something inside its computer reacting to my presence. No. I paid attention to the glass screen and to the reflection of the store that shone dimly upon it.
I identified my outline on it, long and thin. I could see the vague outlines of the store as more shadowy shapes—aisles and end caps, the counter and the door.
And the Thing standing just inside the door.
It was huge. I mean, it was taller and broader than the door was. It was more or less humanoid. The proportions were wrong. The shoulders too wide, the arms too long, the legs crooked and too thick. It was covered in fur or scales or some scabrous, fungal amalgamation of both. And its eyes were empty, angled pits of dim violet light.
I felt my hands begin to shake. Tremble. Actually, they became absolutely spastic. The paper bag made a steady rattling sound. There was a creature from another world standing behind me. I could feel it, no more than seven or eight feet away from me, every bit as real as Stan, to every sense but my sight. It took a real effort to move my head enough to cast a single, hurried glance over my shoulder.
Nothing. Stan was shoveling various bills into a bag. The store was otherwise empty. The door hadn’t opened since I had come through it. There was a bell on it. It would have rung had it opened. I looked back at the reflection.
The Thing was two feet closer.
And it was smiling.
It had a head whose shape was all but obscured by growths or lumpy scales or matted fur. But beneath its eyes I could see a mouth, too wide to be real, filled with teeth too sharp and serrated and yellow to belong to anything of this earth. That was a smile from Lewis Carroll’s opiuminspired, laudanum-dosed nightmares.
My legs felt like they were going to collapse into water at any second. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t move.
Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing’s hostility—not the mindless anger of a fellow boy I’d needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin’s cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and so virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.
This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved too disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt—and what lay beneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt . . . stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark upon me, one that could not be wiped away.
And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.
And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered, in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, “What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?”
I tried to talk. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough air to push my voice up out of my throat.
Damn it. Damn it, I was more than some terrified child. I was more than some helpless orphan preparing to endure what someone vastly older and more powerful than me was preparing to inflict. I had touched the very forces of Creation. I was a young force of nature. I had seen things no one else could see, done things no one else could do.
And in a moment like that, there was only one thing I could ask myself:
What would Jack Burton do?
“I’m f-f-f-fine,” I said in a hoarse, hardly understandable voice. “That’s a mouthful, and I’m busy. D-do you maybe have a nickname?”