Leaning back on the bench, she exhaled a sigh of relief.
The early evening sky was torn in pieces.
Six slashes ran across it. They pulsed with a strange yellow glow. The weirdest thing was that the slashes didn’t seem to be behind the stars, but on top of them. It was as if some gigantic monster had raked the fabric of the universe itself. And the universe had healed, but the scars remained.
The full moon appeared normal. But on the other side of the sky was another moon. The orb was sickly greenish. It writhed. It was covered in bright red eyes. The thing undulated, and she glimpsed a maw filled with rows of teeth.
She’d escaped the apartment, but she was still in the trap. The cage was just bigger. She’d seen enough Twilight Zone episodes to know a cosmic screw when she was in the middle of it.
She stood, carelessly bumping into a tall, angular man in a black trench coat. His face wasn’t human, but insectile. Her first instinct was to cower or flee. But that was what they wanted her to do. And she wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction. She pushed forth the most sincere smile she could manage while staring into the bug’s six hundred eyes.
“Pardon me, sir.”
The bug clicked its mandibles.
“No problem, miss.”
It walked up to the curb, spread its coat, and soared away. Diana dug her claws into her fractured sanity and refused to let it go. Even as she noticed that one of the cars driving down the street was an SUV-sized crimson slug and that the hot dog vendor on the corner was a monster in an apron with a paper hat on his squid-like head, she convinced herself, through sheer force of will, that there was nothing to be concerned about. She didn’t know if that meant she would be okay or if she’d just lost her mind. All she knew was that she wasn’t gibbering, and she’d take whatever small victory she could manage.
A hairy hand grabbed her shoulder. “Hey, there you are.”
Diana turned to the toothy jaws of Vom the Hungering.
“No!” she shouted forcefully as she punched him in the nose. Or at least the area of his mostly featureless face above his mouth.
“Ow.” Vom rubbed his head. “Why’d you do that?”
“You were going to eat me.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
His stomach rumbled, causing the earth beneath the concrete beneath their feet to tremble. He smiled sheepishly.
“Okay, maybe I was thinking about it.”
“This is bullshit,” she said. “I let you out of the closet. You were supposed to either eat me or let me go.”
Vom shrugged. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the rules. Oh, hot dog.” He lumbered over to the cart on his stumpy legs. “One foot-long, please. Extra everything.”
The squiddy vendor asked, “You got any money?”
“What? I’m good for it.”
The vendor wiggled his tentacles and folded his floppy arms across his chest.
“Hey, could you loan me a couple of bucks?” Vom asked Diana.
She duplicated the vendor’s stance.
“Oh, fine. I must’ve eaten someone with a wallet at some point.” He opened his mouth and reached down his own throat. He spit out a variety of random objects: an old lipsticka dog collar, a license plate, some buttons, and something small and squirmy that was apparently still alive.
Vom extracted a pair of wrinkled blue jeans from his bigger mouth. He rifled through the pockets and found a few dollars and some change. Enough to purchase two hot dogs. The sticky drool covering the cash didn’t bother the slimy vendor beast, who started working on Vom’s dogs. While waiting, Vom shoved the regurgitated items back into his mouths. Including the squirming thing.
“Don’t skimp on the sauerkraut.”
The vendor gave Vom the dogs. He offered one to Diana. She turned it down with a queasy twinge.
He swallowed the hot dogs in one gulp.
“You have something.” She pointed to the mustard-stained pant leg snagged on one of his fangs. “Right there.”
“Whoops.”
He slurped down the denim like a stray noodle.
They walked through the park, and Vom tried to explain what was happening. Normally she wouldn’t have been caught walking through a park alone after dark, but she figured that the ravenous creature beside her would discourage even the most determined mugger. Or not.
Nobody seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The giant bugs and slugs and misshapen things lurching on the city streets. Or the tears in the sky. Or the monstrous moon god. All these things remained unobserved by everyone else.
“Imagine the universe as a tesseract, a single multidimensional hypercube divided into thin, mostly self-contained slices. Now this model is, by its nature, flawed and incomplete. Mostly because each entity perceives its own slice to be the most important, simply from a lack of ability to perceive the other aspects of the complete universe which surrounds them. With me so far?”
“No.”
He sighed. “This’d be easier if you had some experience with multidimensional geometric theory.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t. Didn’t think it would be important. And I don’t think they even offered it at the college I attended.”
“Okay. We’ll go with the dumbed-down version then.” He spoke very slowly, using sweeping gestures to emphasize his points. “The universe is a very tall building with many floors but no elevators and great soundproofing. And every shred of matter in the universe exists on one of those floors.”
He paused.
“Have I lost you again?”
“I’m not an idiot. I can follow a metaphor.”
“Each floor is usually completely unaware of the other floors around it. Although sometimes, if one floor gets particularly noisy it might have an effect on nearby neighbors. And sometimes a floor will spring a leak or a window will open for a short while and things might get a little wonky for both floors until the anomaly corrects itself. And other times the floors get shuffled around and in the process something on Floor A ends up on Floor B, where it really doesn’t belong. See, there are connections between floors. Like ventilation ducts or Jefferies tubes or crawl spaces or whatever. Invisible gaps in the fabric of the universe that probably serve some useful purpose, but that also some beings use, unintentionally in my case, to cross floors. And our apartment is one of those trapdoors.
“But you don’t leave your old world behind. A part of it comes with you, no matter where you go. And so you and I are straddling floors. One foot in our own portion of reality and another in an alien perception we were never meant to have.”
“But why?” she asked.“ How does something like that happen?”
“Hell if I know,” said Vom. “Until I came into contact with your world, I was just a merciless destructive force, a mindless devourer.”
She flashed him a look.
“Hey, I’m working on it,” he said. “I didn’t eat you, did I?” “You tried.”
“If we’re going to make this relationship work, you’re going to have to get over that.”
“What relationship?” she asked.
“Like it or not, we’re bound together,” said Vom.
“Oh no we’re not.”
He gnashed his teeth. Since he had a lot of teeth, several rows of them, it made a hell of a grating noise.
“Hey, consciousness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There are all these complicated thoughts running through my head now, and some of them are very confusing. They don’t mesh together well. It’s like you. Part of me wants to eat you. But another part of me feels like that would be a lousy thing to do since you freed me from that closet. But another part of me thinks that if I kill you, maybe it’ll free me from this sliver of reality and I’ll get to go home where all I had to worry about was digesting anything that found its way into any of my two thousand fourteen stomachs. But another part thinks that maybe I don’t want to go back to that now that I’ve found a world where not everything is as simple as endless devouring hunger. But another—”