“Help her,” I said. “And save your energy. There aren’t a lot of safe places to roost and rest those wings.”
“On it.”
He flew to Roxanne’s shoulder. I saw a glimpse of him pecking at the bugs that were making steady progress towards her ear canal.
By the time I reached Peter, Green Eyes was there. Her tail wrapped around the wood, and her arms strained as she held it up.
Tiff, Eva, and Ellie were all in the same place. Ellie was managing the burden of her brother and still managing to keep Ellie from slipping, her shoulder offered as a foothold.
Kathryn… I was pretty sure I could make out Kathryn further below, standing on a window ledge, about two floors below me.
“Kathy,” I said.
She looked up at me.
“There are good odds that monsters will lunge out of those windows to grab you,” I said.
She started making her way to the side.
I headed to Ty, who was still struggling.
His breath fogged from the cold as he panted, accepting my help to drop down to a position about five feet lower than he’d been. There were wooden slats with spaces between, and a light shone from within.
The lights were on inside, some old fashioned, almost torches in sconces, the others were fluorescent, flickering constantly.
Ty found a position, holding onto slats that wobbled when he moved his arm, only one side nailed in.
“Is everyone stable?” I spoke, trusting my voice to carry in the near-silence.
I didn’t get much in the way of responses, but nobody said no. Their focus was on not falling, and the seemingly endless drop below us.
“There’s no relief here,” I said. “No respite. We need to move fast, get out of here before it gets to be too much.”
“Inside?” Peter asked.
I moved over, peering into a window.
It looked like a bad motel. A television was on, but showed mostly static, the image flipping over and over, flickering. There was a threadbare armchair, a wall with paint missing, and paint chips littering the floor.
Too easy.
I didn’t know what this place was, but the rules had to hold true.
“Let’s limit how much time we spend inside,” I said. “This place is meant to ruin us. Break us down and spit us out. If you see something that looks safe, assume its a trap.”
“We need to head northwest,” Alexis said, “Only two hundred feet. Cardinal directions should hold true.”
Only.
“Which direction was northwest?” I asked.
She held one arm out away from the wall, so she could point off to one angle, off to one side.
We’d have to go over and inside.
“Green Eyes?” I asked.
“What?”
Oh, she sounded pissed. She didn’t like having to come back.
“How are you managing?”
“Considering that I don’t have feet, and there’s only so many handholds?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Considering that.”
“I’m fine.”
“I think… we’re mostly okay, by virtue of being bogeymen,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll help you guys out where we can. Slow and steady is better than rushing. We just need to head a bit to the right, then we need to find a way in. Ask if you need help or if you can’t find a way. Okay?”
I heard one okay from elsewhere. I really hoped it was someone I knew, and not a stranger’s voice.
“This place is going to get to you,” I said. “Tiff, Ellie, all that stuff you were mentioning? Alexis? Your time on the streets? The longer you stay, the more you let down your guard, the more it’s going to dredge up that stuff. It’s going to put ideas in your head…”
“Let’s just climb,” Alexis said. “And hope we get out before we run into that.”
I wanted to say more, to prepare them, to explain the different things, but my arms didn’t get tired like theirs did.
“Okay, go,” I said.
I felt an almost genuine fear for the welfare of my friends, watching as they climbed. The building was so pitted and worn that there were spaces to hold on or stand on, but they were treacherous.
“My hands are tired already,” Christoff said.
“Callan died to buy us time,” I said, turning to check on him. “If there’s strength to be found, find it there.”
He nodded tightly.
Behind him, something slithered out of a window. A man with a centipede body from the waist down, long hair and beard, homeless guy chic, pale and skeletally thin, he had pale, rainbow-hued eyes like a bug’s to be found between eyelids that were stretched taut, unable to fully close over the orbs.
Ignoring us, he climbed the side of the building, and his upper body disappeared into a crack in the wall.
The lower body continued to climb and crawl after him, almost unending.
Six or so seconds later, the tail end of the lower body, bearing an earwig-like set of pincers, disappeared the way the upper body had gone.
When I looked from my oblivious younger cousin to Ty, I could see the alarm on his face. The fear at what Christoff had completely missed seeing.
How easy it would have been for the centipede man to just grab Christoff. A tug, a pull, and Christoff would be falling. Holding Christoff, he could have carried him off, and there was little Christoff could have done.
“Oh god,” Peter said, under his breath. “Oh god, this sucks. This sucks, this sucks…”
Roxanne shrieked, loud.
“Roxanne!” Kathy called.
“They’re crawling under my clothes. I…”
She screamed louder, a different sort of scream.
“Roxy!” Kathy said. “Pay attention!”
“They’re under my skin,” Roxanne said, almost like it was the least reassuring mantra in the world. “They’re under my skin, they’re under my skin, they’re under my skin.”
Her voice grew higher pitched and edged with pain, her body tenser, with every utterance.
“They’re in my skin. They’re inside me. They’re under my skin.”
When I looked, I could see the red lines tracing maze-like paths across her body. Here and there, something popped out, a tiny black wriggling form, traveled an inch or two over the outside of her skin, then burrowed again, blood welling at the entry and exit sites.
“There’s nothing there,” Peter said, flat out lying to her face. “Whatever you think you’re feeling, there’s nothing there.”
“This place is psychological,” Alexis said. “The book said as much.”
Roxanne shook her head, tightly. She wasn’t moving.
“I don’t know what to do,” Evan said, before pecking at one bug that had emerged, spitting it out. “She can’t hear me.”
“I can hear you,” Roxanne said, in a small voice.
The others were making forward progress. Roxanne was dead last, only just behind Kathy, who was struggling with the climb, and Peter, who wasn’t functioning well with one hurt hand.
“You can hear me?” Evan asked.
“Different rules,” I told Evan. “Less layers separating you and them. Besides, I don’t know how much innocence you hold onto, here.”
“Oh. Hi, Roxanne!”