Vol.4 Ch.69 – Nightmare Fuel
Chapter 69(xD) – Nightmare Fuel
The thing on the first floor of the library had been horrid, certainly, but compared to Caulder's excesses it had barely been a footnote.
Sure, the thing had clearly been human at some point, maybe even multiple humans, but it hadn't seemed fused together for the express purpose of torturing the people it consisted of the way the Red Rider and the Stitched Angel had. It had seemed coherent if not lucid, not like it was caught in a fever dream of anguish. But what waited on the second floor was worse. Much worse.
The building was a library and, accordingly, the thing on the first floor had been a librarian. But there was another group of people that belonged in a college library: Students. And what awaited them on the second floor had clearly been students, once. Or perhaps it was fairer to say that they were studying even now.
It wasn't a cult, not a group of madmen studying the dark arts for personal gain. That would have been bad enough.
Instead the things looked like a horrid mixture of everything you don't want to find in your room late at night and everything you don't want stuck to your leg after wading through a swamp. They looked like man-sized leeches, fat and black and slimy, but they had pairs of thin, sharp legs along their lengths like centipedes and the jagged, grasping mouth parts of a spider. The only thing breaking up the pure black of their bodies were the red eyes sprinkled haphazardly above their mouth parts. That would have been bad enough. Man-sized centipede leech spiders would have been about three dimensions of Nope too much for Ophelia. But it got worse. Of course it got worse.
Because the reason Ophelia could tell so clearly that they were man-sized was that each of them was, though not by their own power. Instead, each of the creatures had their leech-like maws attached to the back of the head of a person, or at least something that had once been a person. From where she was standing she could clearly tell that the things had bitten chunks of bone off the backs of the people's heads, the leech maw sucking directly on the brains and the spider-like mouth parts firmly wrapped around the human's head.
The people were dead, they had to be, but they were still standing, and standing straight despite the enormous leech thing attached to them. Their eyes were dead and empty but the red eyes of the leech things were aware, the things turning to face Ophelia and the others as one.
“Every single last one of the Nopes,” Cassie said as he drew his blade.
**
“Evelyn!” Not-Alexis shrieked in a perfect impression of the girl it was mimicking, the pain and shock sounding genuine. “What the hell?!”
“That thing's not Alexis!” Evelyn yelled, already backing off from the thing in case it attacked again.
Aurora was staring at her but Mariana at least was staring at the Alexis thing, her eyes darting around with more focus than Evelyn had ever seen in them.
There were still a few cyborgs around but most everybody was now focused on Not-Alexis cradling an allegedly broken arm and on Evelyn, the one who had done that to her.
Evelyn felt that this might have gone really badly if not for the fact that...
“Drop the charade,” Elaine said, her voice colder than Evelyn had ever heard it. “We know you're not Alexis.”
The thing paused, going still in a way humans weren't capable of. It didn't just hold still, it just stopped. No breathing, no blinking, just stillness. When it finally spoke its voice reverberated in a way that was wholly unpleasant, Alexis' voice sloughing off its own the way a snake sheds its skin. “What gave it away?”
“You mean, aside from the giant claw you tried to strike down Aurora and Mare with?” Elaine asked, pointing one of her crystal swords at the creature while, off in the distance, another three of those swords were cutting up cyborgs.
“Naturally,” the thing said. “You would never have noticed this if you had not already been looking out for it.”
“We can communicate,” Elaine said. “And someone from the other team reminded me that Alexis is with them.”
“Interesting,” the thing said. “I was assured that your communications technology would be compromised here.”
“Apparently your jammer isn't good enough for our tech,” Elaine said. “You know, you seem really eloquent for an Outsider.”
The thing smiled, stretching Alexis' face into a horrid grimace, splitting apart from ear to ear. “So far you have been facing the creations of the Dark Mother and the King in Yellow. They are adept at manipulating living flesh and dead flesh, respectively. The Crawling Chaos' followers, however, manipulate minds, which would be rather difficult for mindless brutes, no?”
“Now how do you know what we've been fighting?” Elaine demanded. “How long have you been with us?”
“Now that is the question, no?” the thing said with another one of those horrid grins. “But to answer your first question, it only stands to reason. The Vassal who rules over this continent only manipulates the powers of the Flesh Birther and the Bone Binder. He is scared of my Master, scared of minds he cannot control. Of course, when someone so deliberately avoids my Master, it only makes Him more curious.”
“And how does that lead to attacking us?” Elaine asked.
“Honestly, if the little redhead hadn't started probing me I would have been happy to just follow along until you found the portal below. We can still do that, you know?” The thing's form shifted back until it looked like a perfect copy of Alexis again. “I pretend to be your little girlfriend and you all get to pretend to be shocked when I rush past all of you and that Knight down there before he can shut off the portal. If you want compensation, you can even drag me off to a quiet room and do all the things to me that you've been too scared to try with the real Alexis.”
Evelyn saw Elaine's hand tighten on her sword and her jaw set in anger. If that thing thought it was tempting her it had another thing coming.
“So you're scheming against Caulder then?” Elaine asked, not quite keeping the anger out of her voice.
“I'm just here to scout,” the thing said. “Whether I am working against him or not remains to be seen.”
“I see,” Elaine said, and Evelyn caught something out the corner of her eye that made her go very still so as not to give anything away:
Evidently Elaine's swords and the others had finished cutting down the rest of the cyborgs and Elaine had angled the swords to point directly at the creature.
“However there seems to be something you failed to take into account,” Elaine said.
“And what would that be?” the thing asked.
A stupid person would have made a quip and then let the swords loose but Elaine wasn't stupid. A crystal sword struck the creature's back so hard it blasted out the front, right between Not-Alexis' breasts.
“You attacked my girls,” Elaine told the thing jerking with a sword stuck in its torso. A moment later, two more swords embedded themselves in the creature.
For a horrid moment Evelyn wondered if maybe this had all been an elaborate illusion and Elaine had just impaled the real Alexis but then she noticed that the creature wasn't bleeding. And it wasn't dropping, either.
“That was an excellent attack,” the thing said, its voice now fully inhuman. “Ruthless, cold. But not enough. And evidently, negotiations have broken down.”
The thing's form melted, the last remnants of its Alexis mask sloughing off and revealing what the thing actually looked like.
Its skin was black and glistening like tar but other than that it looked human. Mostly. From the neck down it looked like a human with every distinguishing feature sanded down. No genitals, no nipples, the hips, waist and chest just ambiguous enough to look neither fully male nor fully female. Its arms were just a little too long for its body, its fingers a little too long for its arms. But the real problem was the face.
It had no mouth. No ears either. And between the eyebrows and the mouth that didn't exist the thing had a hole, a deep dark chasm that looked like it had been drilled into it. Inside that blackness swirled eyes. Not orange goat eyes, but eight blood-red pinpricks circling each other constantly.
“Catch me if you can,” the thing said with the mouth it didn't have, then stepped sideways and was gone, like stepping through a curtain, except the curtain had been reality.
**
Tips:
Parasitic creatures that drain the minds of their hosts. So long as they have a host they are capable of casting Outsider witchcraft and can channel a personal shield to protect themselves.
If their host's brain is used up or the host's body is destroyed they will either attempt to find a new body or, if none are readily available, will vanish into a pocket dimension.
Great, Cassie thought, already summoning up his ice magic to defend against any Darklight constructs. “You fought these things before?” he called after the angels.
“Creatures of the Crawling Chaos tend to be rare,” Kaja called back, already with her bow in hand and an arrow nocked. “And they come in far more varieties than those of the other two.”
“So that's a 'no' then?” Cassie translated.
“Yes,” she said. “Please guard against its spells.” Then she raised her voice: “Everyone, overload their shield bubbles and cut down the hosts!”