The Bone Triangle (20 page)

Instead, I quietly put my sunglasses on and leaned forward. I expected Gutter Jim to snatch my ring and attempt to vanish into his domain. The sunglasses would not allow it, however. Using them, I could turn the grate over the drain into rubbery, flopping bars and push them aside, entering his domain. We’d talked before, and I hoped he wouldn’t take offense.

Once the sunglasses were on, I leaned over the drain and peered down into it. A burning orange light met my eyes. I squinted as the darkness, the grate, and the sunglasses all combined to make it hard to see. Then, at last, I realized what I was looking at.

I ripped the sunglasses from my face and looked again. Yes, there could be no doubt. It wasn’t Gutter Jim down there.

I was certain in my heart that I was looking at the Beast.

The rip wasn’t quite the same shape as most of them. I was used to spherical patterns, but this one had an irregular outline. It looked more like a tear in a piece of tar paper. Behind the tar paper was a light that rippled and resembled flame. Perhaps it
was
flame, but I couldn’t tell. A common property of rips between worlds was the distortion of vision.

But one thing I was sure of, the Beast was there inside that rip. It was looking at me even as I examined it in return. I knew it had to be the Beast, rather than some other alien, because it was
huge
. So huge that only a single eye was visible. That eye had to be four feet in diameter, surrounded by the flame-like edge of the rip. The iris was a shimmering greenish-gold. The pupil alone was a foot across.

Dangling directly in front of the great eye was my ring. It glittered in the yellow-orange glow of the rip, which shone up out of the drain like firelight. I suspected the Beast had attempted to devour it, but had failed due to the properties
of such objects. Wanting to determine the nature of the thing it had tasted, it had then moved its mouth away. Shifting to place an eye to the rip, it tried to see what it was that resisted its hunger.

I fell over backward, then struggled to my feet. I strained to stand up, my stiff knees popping after having crouched there over the storm drain for hours. Dangling from the string, the ring tinkled and clicked against the asphalt.

I cursed and scrambled away, uncertain if the creature could somehow still reach me. Most men would have run until they collapsed. But when I stood only ten feet from the glimmering opening in the street, I managed to get control of myself. Every time I’d seen this creature, it had been limited to a rip of short duration in a single spot. If I was fast on my feet, I should be able to avoid it, even if it tried to open a new rip under me. Cartoon had told me that the creature came out only occasionally to feed. I hoped that was because it could not summon the energy to cause a rip to appear more often.

A thousand thoughts and questions surged in my mind. What
was
this thing? Where did it come from? Did anyone control it, or was it an independent entity? There were no answers, so I tried to push away the questions.

“Hello?” I asked aloud, addressing the thing in the dark hole at my feet. I doubted it could hear me, or that it would respond if by some miracle it could comprehend my speech. But I felt the urge to attempt communication anyway. It was better than stepping around the drain in wide circles, terrified.

To my surprise a response
did
come, but not from the drain at my feet. Instead, a voice rose up from behind me.

“How rude,” the voice said.

I whirled. The ring flew on its string, flashing with reflected light. A figure squatted there in the street on top
of the nearest manhole. After a moment, I realized he wasn’t standing
on
the manhole; he was standing
in
the manhole. As I watched, he rose up out of it. It took only a moment for me to recognize him. It was Gutter Jim.

I felt unnerved by my own success. I’d attracted both a lord of the Community and the Beast at the same time. “What’s rude?” I managed.

“You’ve teased the Beast. Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to torment animals?”

I stepped away from both the drain containing the Beast and the man who now stood atop the manhole. I hadn’t seen him step upward, but he had risen to the level of the street nonetheless. It was as if for him, the manhole was a tiny, circular elevator, and he’d just ridden it up to street level.

“It’s an animal?” I asked. “Is it your pet then, Jim?”

He watched the drain more closely than he watched me. I got the feeling that despite his confident speech, he was unnerved by this being that devoured people in the night. We both watched the flickering light of the rip as it played through the grate. If I hadn’t known what was down there, I would have thought someone had lit a fire in the sewers.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “But you attracted it somehow, and me. What did you use for bait?”

Thinking of the ring, I slipped it away. “A minor artifact,” I said.

“Ah, I see. That’s how it is with you rogues. A lord wouldn’t have the guts to risk even the slightest object of power. We horde them in vaults, rather than dangling them down storm drains. What was your purpose?”

While we talked, something odd began to happen inside the storm drain. I heard a noise at first—it was an unnatural
sound, a
sucking
sound. The light shining up from the drain dimmed. Was it dying away? Was the rip closing? I wasn’t certain. I took another step away from the drain, however. Both Gutter Jim and I stared at it, even though we addressed one another in quiet voices.

“I was looking for you, not the Beast,” I said. “I’d hoped to gain your attention.”

“You’ve succeeded. But I think you had more in mind than that, rogue.”

“What do you mean?”

“You meant to trap me in the drain. You wanted the Beast to feed upon a lord. I know you, what they say about you. You’ll not rest until you bring our kind down.”

“Paranoid delusions,” I said.

“Maybe, but I still don’t trust you.”

“We have something in common, then.”

Gutter Jim chuckled darkly.

I figured as long as he was in a talkative mood, I might as well ask some questions. “What do you know of the Beast? And if you don’t control it, who does?”

“You’d like me to say it’s Meng’s pet, wouldn’t you? I’m not fond of Meng, but I won’t lie. It’s no one’s creature, Draith. In fact, I think it is the
opposite
of an animal. I think that in the Beast’s alien mind, you and I are the animals. Quite possibly, it is correct in this assumption.”

I glanced over at him, surprised by his cryptic statement. His eyes remained fixed upon the drain, and they widened a fraction as I watched him. I turned back to face the Beast.

I looked back just in time. I should have never looked away. I saw now that the light of the rip had dimmed because something was coming upward from the drain. This protuberance was long and tall. As I watched with my jaw sagging, it lifted up the grate and dropped it aside. The metal
clanged onto the asphalt. The sound was tremendous and shattered the quiet night.

At first, I had difficulty registering what I was seeing. I imagined that men who’d witnessed such things in the past might have gone mad or found that their hair had turned white from fright. The appendage rising up out of the drain appeared to be a pale finger of flesh, the tip perhaps as thick as a man’s wrist. But below the tip it quickly fattened to be as thick as a telephone pole. It kept rising up and up, blindly probing the summer air. A dead odor of mold and rot washed over me.

I moved farther away. It was an involuntary response.

“Can it reach us?” I hissed. “Can it get out of there?”

“I don’t know.”

The tentacle—for that’s what I now realized it was—continued to rise. At the visible base, where the largest purplish suckers clustered and worked at the air as if sniffing, the thing was as big around as a tree. The bulk of it towered over us, some fifteen feet high. As it continued to extrude from its world into ours, it bent over and began to probe the environment with cautious stabbing motions. Like a blind man searching for a lost article, the tentacle lowered and began slapping at anything it encountered. A row of trash cans went over with a crash. A weathered picket fence creaked, then buckled, each picket snapping with a rippling sound.

I turned toward Gutter Jim again—but he was gone. My eyes dropped to the manhole cover he’d been standing upon. It looked three shades darker than before, as if it wasn’t made of rusty metal, but rather the stuff of midnight. Even as I watched for perhaps two seconds more, the metal shifted and solidified, reminding me of a disturbed puddle of water that falls still after a man’s foot has splashed into it.

Headlights flashed in my face then, and a horn blared. I stared at a car that came speeding toward me. I caught a glimpse of the occupants, three young men, possibly in Vegas for a bachelor party or a getaway weekend.

The car swerved to miss me, the tires screeching slightly. They weren’t going all that fast, and it wasn’t even a close call. They were easily going to pass by me. I felt a moment of relief, knowing another stint in the hospital wasn’t in my immediate future.

But a moment later the car ran right into the giant tentacle that probed the street. Or rather, I realized in retrospect, the tentacle dipped down to catch the car as it went by. Somehow, it had sensed the vehicle’s passage. Perhaps any quickly moving object would have captured its attention. The car stopped dead with a bang, followed by the tinkle of safety glass, which fountained and fell into the street in a glittering spray.

Injured by the impact, the massive tentacle was torn open in a dozen spots, but not severed. It dripped and ran with dark gore. Liquids flowed into the car, dribbling on the stunned passengers. The tentacle quickly circled the car, top to bottom, in a loop of its own length. Then it convulsed and began to squeeze the wrecked vehicle’s midsection. The windows starred, then popped, as the roof caved in. The doors were all sealed by the tentacle’s girth, but one of the men tried to crawl out of the broken windshield. I watched in growing horror as his foot was caught. The collapsing car’s roof had closed on his ankle like steel jaws with shards of glass for teeth.

My first instinct was to turn and run. I considered it for a second, but the keening cries of the people inside the car stopped me. I ran toward them instead.

I didn’t have my .32 anymore, having lost it in the world of white crystals. It wouldn’t have helped much in this case,
anyway. The tentacle would only have been stung by my tiny bullets.

Not knowing what else to do, I jumped onto the hood and grabbed hold of the young man who was trying to escape a grim fate. The whole car lifted up under us a few moments after I did this, and we floated into the air together. Then the hood tipped, and I almost fell off into the street.

“You have to get your foot out!” I told him.

He was about my age, a small black man with a thin mustache. He looked at me with brown eyes filled with horror and disbelief.

“You have to cut my foot off,” he said, looking at the monster that was lifting the car with a loop of its flesh. “Get something, man.”

I shook my head. There was no time for sawing through bone. “Pull!” I shouted at him, and he pulled. He raved in pain but kept trying.

Seconds later, the car tipped farther to one side and that actually helped us. We fell from the hood of the car, but I didn’t let go of his hands. It was our combined weight that ripped his foot loose.

We crashed to the pavement, and I dragged him farther away. He howled and limped with a twisted, dangling ankle. It was broken and the shoe was gone, but the foot was still hanging there. We stumbled away together.

All throughout, I noted with chagrin that no one had come out of their houses to see what was happening. There were approaching sirens now, so someone must have called for emergency services. I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful for this small courtesy or angry at the lack of help.

When we reached the opposite curb, the man in my arms passed out. It was just as well, I figured.

His friends in the car had stopped screaming, and I assumed they were dead. The midsection of the vehicle had been crushed to half its original width. Blood, slime, and dark fluids flowed down the tentacle and dribbled from the tires. They pooled up and flowed down into the storm drain. The horn had been triggered at some point, and was now locked into a continuous, blaring howl. It sounded to me like the car’s death cry.

Before the first emergency vehicles arrived, the tentacle dropped the crushed car. It wormed into the side windows and found the bodies inside. It dragged them out, one at a time. The corpses were greedily pulled down into the storm drain, where they vanished. I knew that down there, in the darkness, they would be sucked through the rip and devoured. I clamped my hands over my ears and averted my gaze so I could not hear the ghastly sounds that followed.

When the police and a wary ambulance crew arrived a few minutes later, the Beast’s tentacle had withdrawn. They asked me questions, but I only stared at them in response. They’d seen this dazed expression in the Triangle before, I gathered, because they soon left me alone.