You’re going to kill her, he thought. You’ll snap her neck.
His next thought: Would that really be so bad?
The Mushka-thing was relentless. It had waited a long time to claim its prize. Luke pictured the two dogs coming down in one of the Challengers. Had Al brought them? Maybe so. They would have been shivering and worried as the fathoms dropped, but they had each other. And maybe that’s all the Mushka-thing wanted—for them to be together again. To explore whatever lay behind the hole as one.
Luke couldn’t budge her. Functionally, they were one creature now. Physically fused together. Finally, heartbreakingly, Luke sat in front of LB. He stopped pulling her. He hugged her instead. Even as she was being tugged remorselessly toward her fate—one Luke could not derail—he hugged her fiercely. He kissed her nose, hot with shock. It was, he realized, the same standard of care he offered shelter strays. Every few months he would volunteer at the local pound, putting down creatures who were too old, too sick, too irredeemable or simply unwanted. A dozen, fifteen at a go. It wrecked him. He would stagger out to his car afterward, shivering, and cry. It was easier with animals who were loved; their owners, whole families, would stand around that cherished fur-ball as Luke ushered it out of this life and into the next. But strays were euthanized in a cement room where a single light bulb hung on a cord. They may have gone their whole lives unmothered and unloved. They didn’t deserve that. No creature did. The one thing that anyone should be able to count on receiving in their lives, love, had too often been withheld from those poor souls. And so Luke would comfort them. Each animal. He would spend a few minutes cradling them, rocking them, speaking softly to them. Sometimes they wouldn’t stop shivering, or nip his fingers. This hurt him—not the pain, but the fact that love and gentleness was so foreign to these creatures that they didn’t know how to accept it. Then he would kill them. It was not fair, and he hated himself for being the agent of that pure, inevitable fact. The world did not hold to any standard of fairness that Luke could comprehend. All his life stood testament to that. Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.
The Mushka-thing jerked. LB was wrenched backward again, yanked out of Luke’s grip. He slid forward and reseated his grip. He wasn’t desperate anymore. His fingers caressed those soft spots behind the jaw that all dogs loved to have rubbed. He rested his forehead against hers. He felt the thud of blood pounding in her skull.
The Mushka-thing reached back with one clownish rear leg. It snagged on the poster and tore it down.
The whispers assaulted Luke immediately. A yammering, mindless—
No, not mindless there is a mind behind all this
—riot. Those fishhooks sunk into his head again, skewering his brain.
The hole was the width of a manhole cover, but wider on one side; it resembled a mouth twisted into a murderous sneer.
He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.
LB’s body came alive in his grip, bucking in what Luke hoped was a final death-spasm. Her paws beat a frantic tattoo between his legs. White foam like beaten eggs emitted from the sides of her mouth.
“Oh no,” Luke said. It was all he could say, in the end. It seemed to say everything. “Oh no oh no oh no.”
The Mushka-thing was being sucked into the hole. Once its body made it halfway through, the pressure intensified exponentially; LB was jerked forward, at the mercy of whatever monstrous force existed on the other side. Luke kept pace with her. He stroked her head as gently as he could, but his hands were shaking badly.
Please remember this, he thought. Please remember that you are part of the goodness of it all and that, and that, oh God oh please girl oh no oh no oh—
LB’s body was steadily sucked into the hole; she could have been on a conveyor belt, such was her unstoppable ingestion. She had calmed by then, her struggles over. She peered at him with sorrowful, weeping eyes and bit down gently on his hand, as if that might anchor her to Luke. Her grip loosened by degrees, freeing Luke’s hand again. She gave him a hopeful look, as if this might all be a terrible dream they would both wake from shortly. Luke held on to her forelegs, her paws, the tips of her nails. She pulled away from him reluctantly, a kindergartner leaving the arms of her father on the first day of class. Fearful, yet perhaps understanding that this was the way of the world. Separations were unavoidable. These things happened every day.
She was snatched from Luke’s numb grip, the upper half of her body dragging bonelessly up the wall. She gave a puppyish, exhausted bark. Her head went through last, and it went soundlessly, leaving only the faintest ripple on the hole’s surface.
16.
LUKE GRABBED THE FLASHLIGHT and stumbled from Clayton’s lab, away from the horrible whispers coming from the hole.
His breath escaped in sharp whinnies. Oh, Jesus. Jesus. LB was gone. Worse—eaten. No. Eaten would be preferable. Chewed up and digested and gone, her suffering over. But she’d just been… taken. And whatever lay on the other side of that hole was worse than a million cramped dog crates or vicious dogcatchers or rolled-up newspaper whacks, worse than anything any dog on Earth had ever suffered.
And Luke was terrified that LB would suffer for a long, long time.
The main lab was quiet. Disembodied voices fluttered against his eardrums, the wing beat of moths. He shut his eyes and swayed unsteadily. He could feel it now. Madness hungering at the edges of his mind. Maybe it was for the best. He could just go gibberingly, shit-smearingly insane. Then he could wrap his arms around his chest and huddle in a corner, shivering and drooling, until whatever was going to happen, happened.
Luke swung the hatch to Clayton’s lab shut. The voices dimmed. He turned and immediately sensed something moving just below the flashlight’s beam. A shape bristled up the wall, seeking the light.
Mr. Hand. His old friend.
It didn’t look like anything that could once have been part of his brother. Pallid and gelatinous, sharp bones running under a horrible stretching of skin. It had sprouted additional fingers, too: it had eight now, giving it an arachnid appearance.
It walked up the wall and paused. It… stretched. A showy display, each finger lifting gracefully before settling back in place.
It looks like Thing, Luke thought with giddy, unhinged hilarity. From The Addams Family, that old TV show.