But Mrs. Provost was coughing again and he felt the pricks of more barbs as they struck him. Suddenly the door seemed so very far away. How can this be? Gabriel wondered. He was running as fast as he could, yet he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was all so confusing. A horrible numbness was spreading through his body, and he slumped to the floor in the doorway, his nose just catching a hint of the smells of the Maine town outside.
But there was something else that he smelled, and it came from the woman. Gabriel felt her hands roughly grab at him and drag his body back into the hallway. If smells wrong, he thought as he slowly drifted down into oblivion, like something from the ocean.
Like something bad from the ocean.
Aaron couldn’t believe what he had committed himself to.
His thoughts raced as he let himself into Mrs. Provost’s home. I’ve got to be out of my mind. But it was too late now; he had agreed to help Katie search the abandoned factory, and that was what he was going to do. Who knows, he thought, maybe I’ll be able to figure out why I’ve been feeling so strangely, or where Camael’s gone, for that matter.
“Mrs. Provost?” he called out, walking toward the kitchen. He was hoping for something to eat before his Mission: Impossible began. It would be just as easy to make a sandwich, but he wanted to be sure his host wasn’t planning for something else. He didn’t want to annoy her; something told him that would be a bad thing.
The kitchen was empty, but he noticed a plate with a half-eaten meat loaf sandwich on the table. Aaron returned to the hallway and called again. “Mrs. Provost? Are you home?”
Getting no response, he decided to go upstairs and check on Gabriel. He would need to clean the dog’s wound, then feed him, and most likely make himself something to eat before embarking on his nighttime maneuvers with Katie.
“Hey, Gabriel, how you feeling, boy…,” Aaron said as he pushed open the door and stepped into the room. His eyes fell upon the empty bed, then went to the comforter on the floor, and he saw with a growing unease that it, too, was missing his best friend. Aaron stepped farther into the room, leaving the door open wide behind him.
“Gabriel,” he called again as he peered around the bed, finding nothing. He began to panic. Maybe the dog had injured himself so badly that he’d had to be taken to the veterinarian, which would also explain the half-eaten sandwich and Mrs. Provost’s absence. Aaron decided to give Katie a call, just to be sure. He turned to the doorway and stopped.
Mrs. Provost stood in the hall, just outside the door.
“You scared me,” Aaron said with a surprised smile. Almost immediately he knew something wasn’t right. “What’s wrong?” he asked, advancing toward her. “Where’s Gabriel—is he all right?”
The woman did not respond. She simply stared at him oddly with eyes that seemed much darker than they had before.
“Mrs. Provost?” he asked, stopping in his tracks. Instincts that could only be connected to the inhuman part of his identity began to scream in warning, “Is there something…”
The old woman’s neck suddenly swelled. She bent forward, coughed violently, and expelled something toward him.
The sword from his nightmare was suddenly in Aaron’s hand, and instinctively he swatted aside the projectiles. Most exploded into dust upon contact with the blade of light, but pieces of some fell to the hardwood floor, and he tried to make sense of what he saw. They looked like fat grapes, fat grapes with sharp-looking quills sticking out of them.
The old woman grunted with displeasure, a wet gurgling sound like a stopped-up drainpipe, and he saw that her throat again had begun to expand. Aaron swung the blade of white light, directing its powerful radiance toward what he had been fooled into believing was a pretty cool old woman.
“No more,” he heard himself say in a voice that did not sound at all like his.
The blade’s luminescence bathed Mrs. Provost in its unearthly light, and her throat immediately deflated, expelling a noxious cloud of gas. Her callused hands rose to shield her eyes against the searing light, and he saw something that chilled the blood in his veins—a second eyelid.
Aaron advanced toward her. “What are you?” he asked, his voice booming. “And where is my dog? Where is Gabriel?”
The woman crouched on the floor. His mind raced with the strangeness of it all, and he thought of the things frozen in the basement of the veterinary clinic. Is it all connected? he wondered, and a voice deep down inside him said that it was.
Mrs. Provost sprang from the floor, an inhuman hiss escaping her mouth as she lashed out at him, attempting to swat the blade away. The strangely sweet scent of burning flesh perfumed the air, and Aaron stumbled back, startled by the attack. The old woman screamed, but it sounded more like the squeal of an animal in pain. She threw herself from the room, clutching at her injured hand, where she had touched his weapon.
Aaron wished the awkward sword away and ran after her. Mrs. Provost was running erratically toward the stairs, as if she was no longer in control of her motor functions. He could only watch in horror as her feet became entangled and she tripped, tumbling down the stairs in a shrieking heap.
Aaron ran down the steps as the woman’s body spilled limply into the foyer. He knelt beside her and reached to touch her neck for a pulse. Her heart rate was erratic, and her hand had begun to blister, but other than that, she seemed relatively unscathed. A low, murmuring gurgle escaped from her throat, and she began to writhe upon the floor.
Aaron reached down and pried open her mouth, keeping an eye on her throat for swelling. He tilted her head slightly so that he could see into her mouth. Something in the shadows at the back of her mouth scuttled away, escaping down her throat. Disturbingly enough, based on the quick glimpse, whatever it was reminded him of a hermit crab he’d once had as a pet. He quickly took his hands away.
Something was living inside Mrs. Provost. Again, he thought of the frozen animals in the freezer back at the clinic, their bodies changed—twisted into some new and monstrous form of life. He wondered if they, too, had something hiding away inside them.
He touched the woman’s chin again, pulling open her mouth slightly. “What are you?” he asked, hoping that by using his preternatural gift of languages he could speak to the thing hiding away inside Mrs. Provost. If it worked on dogs and other animals, why not on this?
Her body shuddered, the flesh beneath her clothes beginning to writhe.
“What are you?” he asked again, more forcefully.
It started as a grumbling rumble in what seemed to be the old woman’s stomach, and he watched with increasing horror as the bulge that formed in her abdomen traveled upward, toward her chest—and then her throat. The skin of her neck expanded, and Aaron immediately backed away. He was about to summon his weapon of light when Mrs. Provost’s mouth snapped open and a horrible gurgling laugh filled the air, followed by an equally chilling voice.
“What am I?” it asked in a language composed of buzzes and clicks. “I am Leviathan. And we are legion.”
“Come,” a voice boomed in the darkness, echoing through the endless void that had become his being. “Hear my voice and come to me.”
Stevie knew not why, but he found himself responding, drawn to the powerful sound that invaded his solitude. It reverberated through his cocoon of shadow, touching him, comforting him in ways that the darkness could not.
“Oblivion shall claim you no longer.”