John lunged for one of the chainsaws above the mantel. They were very much not just there for decoration (even if, as decoration, John thought they kicked serious ass)—they were always oiled and gassed up, ready to go. See, one thing John had learned about the various creatures they’d faced over the years was that almost none of them liked being sawed in half by motorized metal teeth. Simple biology, really.
John grabbed the chainsaw and performed a move he had spent hours practicing. In one continuous motion, he started the motor, spun, and swept it through Nymph’s midsection.
He met very little resistance. The whirring blade buzzed horizontally through the man’s belly … and then the top half of him was nowhere to be found. Everything above Nymph’s navel just dispersed. What had been his torso was now a swarm of fist-sized buzzing creatures, whizzing frantically around the room.
John looked back at where Nymph was standing and saw that half of him was still there—everything from the waist down remained where it had been, including the man’s expensive slacks and patent leather shoes. The legs started walking toward John on their own, then one of them whipped upward and kicked the chainsaw from John’s hand.
Disarmed, John lunged forward and grabbed Nymph’s lower body by its belt loops, intending to lift up the legs and chuck them across the room. Then they, too, began to dissolve, from the bottom up—Nymph’s feet dispersed into those flying insects, which still appeared to be made of black polished leather. The ankles were next.
John followed the flight paths and saw that the shape-shifter swarm was swirling toward the far corner of the room. There, they were quickly re-forming into something new.
Something made for fighting.
John saw teeth and claws and spiked armor.
John screamed, “DAVE! GET THE—”
But as usual, Dave was already five seconds ahead of the situation. He had the T-shirt cannon in his hands and was already aiming it at the rapidly assembling creature in the corner. Dave aimed carefully.
One shot, Dave.
The cannon’s payload was not, in fact, a T-shirt. It contained the Shroud of Turin—the legendary piece of cloth that the body of Christ was wrapped in after crucifixion. Experts were divided as to whether or not the shroud was real or a fake produced during the Middle Ages, an era when selling “holy” relics was all the rage. That was probably why John had managed to buy it for just $150 off eBay, which he thought was a good price either way (listing: $$$ ACTUAL SHROUD OF TAURINE—STAINED WITH SWEAT OF JESUZ—GOOD CONDITION—FREE SHIPPING—WOW!! $$$).
John was still uselessly clutching the hips of the rapidly disintegrating Nymph—his legs almost entirely gone now—and watched as Dave fired the shroud. It worked perfectly—the projectile unfurled itself in midair, the white cloth stained with the image of a knife-wielding Christ enveloping the creature.
The monster howled, the contact with the holy artifact burning it and binding it. John, still holding his remaining hunk of Nymph, ran over to it and with a scream of rage, mercilessly beat Nymph with his own ass.
The insect creatures dispersed. The swarm fled toward the open back door.
John dove toward a brass switch on the wall. He flipped it—
Flames roared from the four corners of the door frame. The bugs flew through the blaze and tumbled burning onto the lawn, shriveling up like lit tissues.
John watched them burn, and yelled …
Me
“And don’t make me ass you again!”
Amy made a skeptical noise and I said, “Just … go with it. That’s mostly what happened. It was really confusing.”
Amy said, “I can’t breathe, you’re squeezing me.” I released about 20 percent of the hug but kept my arms around her.
We had rolled up to the church at Mine’s Eye to find Amy sitting under the portico of the front entrance with Maggie Knoll, both of them looking like they’d just swam up out of the ocean. Maggie seemed sluggish, like she’d been drugged, staring off into space. She was shivering and seemed to know only that she was wet and cold and wanted to go home.
Amy pulled away and said, “She was down there, around the mouth of the mine. Hidden under the water.”
I said, “Really? How did she, you know, breathe?”
“They had an apparatus hooked up.”
John said, “I can see it now—she wasn’t drawing a picture of where she was going to be held. She was drawing a picture of what she would see—the view of the church, as seen from down there, under the water. Maybe she had dreams of it happening in advance or something.”
We were talking about Maggie as if she wasn’t sitting right there, but she made no effort to shed light on the situation. She had this blank look and I had the alarming thought that maybe she had suffered brain damage, from lack of oxygen or god knows what he (or it, or they) had done to her.
John said, “I was so close. Right here where we’re standing.”
I said, “To be fair, when searching for the lair of an unholy creature of the night, who would have ever thought to look around the haunted old coal mine?”
“I would have figured it out! The thing with Nymph got in the way. That’s probably what he was doing, leading me away from her.”
Amy was already walking away with Maggie. “Let’s get her home, her parents are probably worried sick. David, can you drive the Impala?”
“The what?”
I saw she was walking toward Ted Knoll’s cherry-red muscle car, which was parked behind the church—the car he had reported stolen earlier today. Amy climbed into the back seat so she could be there with Maggie for the trip, putting her arm around her and trying to keep her warm. Maggie laid her head on Amy’s chest and closed her eyes.
I slid into the Impala, John went to the Jeep. In the back seat, Amy closed her eyes, like she was just going to doze off back there. As if I didn’t still have a thousand lingering questions about all this.
I said, “So, you figured this out all on your own? How’d you even get out here? Who drove the car?”
She heard me, I know she did, but there was this long moment before she answered. Almost as if, say, she was quickly trying to come up with a cover story on the fly.
She said, “I came home from work, and there was a … thing there. Pretending to be you.”
“Wait, what? Holy shit, Amy.”
“I saw through it right away, it was all wrong. I tried to get away, but it put me in the car and took me out here. Probably was going to stuff me under the water with her and whoever else he collected.”
“Jesus. I … Amy, I should have come right back home, I should have known they would come after you.”
She closed her eyes again and said, “So, I got away and I was able to get her up out of the water and up the hill. Then I called you. That was it. I thought it would come after me but maybe it couldn’t. Maybe the church repels it or something.”
“You ‘got away’?”
She didn’t respond, even though it was clear I was asking for her to complete the story.
I said, “Amy? That’s really all there was to it?”
“Yeah that’s … mostly what happened.”
We rode in silence the rest of the way to the Knoll house, shockingly only about five hours after I had been awakened by the call from John. Now, if John was telling this story, he’d probably say that the moment we arrived, the rain stopped and the clouds parted, as if the weather changed for everyone else just to reflect our personal triumphs and failures. But it didn’t, it was that same drumming rain that had been slowly turning the town into brown gravy for the last month. I wondered if Maggie and her parents were going to have to celebrate her rescue by evacuating to higher ground.