The shadow only laughed. It laughed and it laughed. “Every fiddler, he had a fiddle, and a very fine fiddle had he,” it sang.
The Apostle pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am going home,” he said. “Feel free to stay here in this miserable, wet necropolis. Lord knows you’re perfectly suited for it.”
But it didn’t stay put. It never did.
It followed. All the way down the thin, winding trail. All the way back to the Apostle’s Volvo, parked along the newly installed columbarium. Its feet dragged along at a scrape. It breathed long, rattling breaths. Sucking wind, like it was dying all over again.
He got into his car. He turned over the ignition. In his rearview mirror was that horrible smile, dark and wide.
“Home again, home again,” it sang. “Jiggity jig.”
He shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the face was still there, ghastly and unwavering. He put the car in drive. He said, not for the first time, “I wish you wouldn’t look like that. Like him.”
“This is where I live,” it said, without blinking. It never remembered to blink. That was, the Apostle thought, the second worst part of the whole arrangement. The first was finding it standing astride him when he got up in the middle of the night to pee. It wobbled side to side as he took a left, clipping the curb in his haste. “Inside, inside,” it sang. “Burrowed deep, deep, deep, deep, deep.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “All right,” he said. “All right, I get it. Don’t sing.”
Nature, he’d learned, demanded a balance in all things.
Non omnis moriar.
For every discovery, there was a price to pay.
The beast in Devan Godbole’s bones was his.
Delaney was dreaming of holes.
The sky was black as sin. The earth underfoot was dead. The air smelled treacly and rich, like overturned dirt and lichen-kissed rot. She stood under the barbed shade of a leafless ash tree, the trunk hollowed out by clearwing borers. It was punctured with holes like a thousand winking eyes. Small holes. Large holes. Whole clusters of cavities, all black and empty. A pain persisted in her side. She rolled up her shirt, knowing already what she’d see.
A gash, claws dug deep.
A boring hole, raw and dark.
A clearwing moth fluttering, fluttering in her stomach.
The darknesstsked. It didn’t approve.Now look what you’ve done. We told you, we told you not to go near. We told you, we told you, not to play its games.Overhead, the branches rustled in a fetid breeze. She scraped at her stomach, desperate to have that terrible fluttering outside of her. It didn’t come away. It dug deep as a tick, fat and sated.
I am the thing that crawls inside.That strange, aeonian voice drowned out the leathery whisper of branches.I am the beast who burrows. I am the varmint who nibbles at your bones.
Wake up, Delaney Meyers-Petrov. Wake up and help me bring about an end.
***
Delaney woke to the lights clicking on. The room was too blue, the shadows too stark. Colton Price stood at the edge of the bed. She sprang up, clutching at her chest, feeling a little bit attacked and a little bit startled. Attacked, because he was wearing nothing but his boxer briefs. Startled, because his torso was piebald with bruises. He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t moving at all. He was staring, instead, at the clock on her nightstand, the blanket from the couch pooling around his feet.
The time read 11:58.
She could feel, now that she was coming back into herself, the dull thud of bass moving through her box springs. She groped for her implant, lost between the pillows, and fitted it to her ear. It beeped. Once. Twice. Three times. The third beep was met with blaring rock from the radio, the volume cranked as high as it could go. She recognized the beat, but it took her several more seconds to slot the lyrics into place.
Colton still hadn’t moved. The ’80s anthem screamed through the paper-thin space. Delaney lurched across the bed, twisted all up in her sheets, and groped blearily at the clock. Mercifully, she found the correct button. Silence fell. Her heart thudded hard against her chest.
“The last occupant of this room must have had the alarm set,” she said, though somewhere within her she felt deeply certain that wasn’t the truth. She didn’t want to think about that. Not now, with her stomach still turning, with midnight pressing its watchful face up against the window. At the end of her bed, Colton was silent, a slight twitch in his eye the only sign he was alive. She glanced up at him, concerned. “Colton?”
He started at the sound of his name, glancing down at her with eyes gone vacant. His pupils looked blown, and she nearly recoiled from the unblinking black of his stare.
“Colton.”
“What’s the time.” The delivery came out flat, a question without proper inflection.
