“So, maybe he did it to frame me? Just to be a dick? Look around—cruelty doesn’t need a reason.” I looked at Amy. “It’s like those whales.”
Once, Amy and I watched a BBC documentary series about sea life called The Blue Planet, because sometimes you just run out of stuff to watch. There was one scene where the crew tracked a gray whale and its newborn calf up the Pacific Ocean. These whales carry their babies for thirteen months, then after giving birth, they have to laboriously migrate thousands of miles north to find food. So, they’re slowly swimming up the California coast to Alaska, mother and baby side by side the whole way, like characters in a Pixar movie. But then, a pod of fifteen killer whales comes along—a pack of hunters, silently coordinating as they stealthily surrounded the doting mother and her baby. They swam in and started pushing themselves in between the mother and the child, separating them, and then jumping on top of the calf to try to drown it (remember, whales are mammals that breathe air—they’re not just spitting up at the surface for fun). The mother frantically tried to push the baby back up, so it could get a breath. But the killer whales just kept at it, for six hours, pushing the sputtering calf down and down again, while its mother watched. Relentless. Finally, they started biting at the infant, the churning water around them blooming bright red.
Then came the twist ending: as soon as the baby was dead, the killer whales just … swam away. They took a couple of bites out of it and just let its dead, broken body sink to the bottom. It turned out they weren’t hungry; they had just killed a child in front of its mother, purely for fun. The final shot was of this mother whale, drifting aimlessly in the middle of the ocean, utterly alone. The killer whales swam off to live the rest of their lives healthy and happy and completely free of any consequence. There would be no justice for what happened, or even revenge. No one would console the mother. She was now completely devoid of purpose, in an endless, cold, uncaring ocean.
Amy had nightmares about it for six weeks after.
She sipped her tea and said, “Fine, but let’s assume for the moment there’s more to it. What’s his goal?”
I shrugged. “Maybe just what he said. To feed or breed. Or both.”
John said, “And he kept taking the Master’s ‘food’ to the pond, which happens to be at the mouth of the old mine. So, being a highly trained expert in this subject, I’m going to go way out on a limb and say that the thing he’s trying to feed is in that mine.”
I asked Amy, “And you’re sure you didn’t see anything while you were there?”
“Well, there was this gigantic serpent with a million eyes and a thousand butts but I didn’t think it was important so I didn’t mention it.”
“That’ll be enough sarcasm, young lady. That’s not helpful.”
John said, “How did you get away, again?”
“I had my stun gun, the one you gave me. I waited until David, or the thing that was pretending to be David, wasn’t paying attention and then I zapped him. Right in the crotch. Over and over again. Then I grabbed the girl and we ran up the hill. It didn’t follow, like I said.”
Why is she lying?
John said, “Is there any chance it let you get away on purpose?”
“You guys seem to find it impossible to comprehend that I could have managed an escape without your help.”
I said, “Come on, you know what we’re saying here. I can’t shake the feeling that everything we’ve done has been in service to what he wants. That this is all part of his plan.”
“Either way,” said John, “you know at some point we’re going to have to go back to that mine.”
“Unless,” I said, “that’s what it wants, and we’d just be opening Pandora’s box.”
John said, “Now I’m sure there’s a porno called that.”
“Okay, so how long until Ted goes to the cops with his story?”
“If we’re lucky, he waits and gathers more information first. If we’re unlucky, he’s talking to them right now. If we’re really unlucky, he doesn’t go to them at all.”
“Why would that be unl—oh, right. It means he intends to come gunning for me in a rampage of cold-blooded vengeance. So, uh, we’ve got to figure all this out before that happens.”
“Okay, I’ll get this next cup of coffee to go.”
* * *
John wanted to stop by his house to “let his dog out” and neither Amy nor I pointed out that the unspoken second half of that sentence was, “And also do some of the drugs that let me stay awake for fifty hours at a time.”
Amy and I waited in the Jeep. Once we were alone, I said, “When you were talking to my doppelganger or whatever—how long did it take you to figure out it wasn’t me? I mean, you had breakfast with it, right?”
For the second time, Amy looked briefly like she’d been caught. She tried to play it off and said, “Not long. We ate and made small talk for a bit, but I was uneasy the whole time. You had a third arm but I figured maybe I’d just never noticed it before.”
“I’m serious, Amy. You and I know each other better than we know anyone else in the world. It’s creepy to think you could talk to a fake me through a whole meal before figuring out what was happening.”
“You were acting weird, but how weird would somebody have to act before you started thinking ‘supernatural imposter’ instead of ‘oh, they’re being a little weird today’? You just seemed like…”
She stared at the rain for a moment.
“Like what?”
“Like you were in a really good mood.”
“Okay.”
“You said you had fixed the leak in the roof.”
“Well, that should have tipped you off right there.”
I expected her to laugh at this, but she didn’t.
John reappeared at his door and, looking frantic, yelled that we had to come in and see something. As always, I felt that emotion for which there is no word in English—a momentary anticipation of something either incredibly dangerous or incredibly stupid. Whether he had found in his home a dozen mutilated corpses or a tomato that was sort of shaped like a dick, John would announce it in the exact same way.
We entered to find Diogee in the corner playing with something—snapping at it and batting it around with his paws. I thought at first it was a little wounded sparrow or hummingbird, but it was, in fact, one of the insect-like flying creatures that had previously been part of Nymph’s human “body.” It was wounded.
Amy said, “Don’t let him eat it!”
I said, “Yeah, it’d probably make him sick, who knows what that thing’s guts are made of. Don’t touch it with your hands, either—find something sharp you can use to stab it from afar. John, which spears do you still have?”
Amy said, “Wait.” She ran into the kitchen and came back with a clear plastic pitcher. “Grab the dog.”
John was able to pull the thrashing dog away from its prize and Amy coaxed the little insect creature into the pitcher. She replaced the lid and John ran duct tape around the lip.
Amy said, “I need a knife or something, so we can cut air holes for it.”
I said, “Who even says it breathes air?”
John said, “More important, who’s to say it can’t squeeze out of a hole, even a tiny one? Or that it can’t spit venom or something? No, until we figure out what we’re dealing with, let’s err on the side of keeping it sealed.”
John sat the pitcher on his coffee table and we all gathered around. It was hard to get a look at the creature, in the way that it’s hard to look at the little bits of lint floating around in front of your eyes—it could almost perfectly blend with the background when it wanted to. Occasionally, it would drop its cover and for just a few seconds we’d glimpse its true body.