CHAPTER THREE

Major A. Shrike

Field Notes – March 8, 1995

Subject A: Caucasian Male

Designation: Kingfisher

Age: 4 years, 5 months

H/W: 38”, 42 lbs

Blood Type: O+

Known allergies: None

Known defects: None

Observed: Shows extroversion. Normal verbal skills & coordination.

Subject B: Caucasian Female

Designation: Crow

Age: 5 years, 7 months

H/W: 41”, 40 lbs

Blood Type: AB-

Known allergies: None

Known defects: Slight myopia in left eye. Low iron levels.

Observed: Intoverted. Unable to assess verbal skills. Subject rarely speaks.

Introduced first stimulus today: Logic puzzle using a locked box and disassembled key. Subject A showed interest first in the key pieces, but grew frustrated after 14 minutes. Subject B observed Subject A until he abandoned the puzzle. Subject B stared at the pieces approximately 2 minutes before assembling the key and opening the box. Subject B then offered the cookie inside the box to Subject A. At this point, the stimulus was removed and subjects were separated.

***

Lydia pulled Esther to her feet far too quickly for her stomach to acclimate. Esther heaved and threw up whatever was left of her lunch, breakfast, and what she feared was an organ or two.

“Really?” Lydia said, dodging the vomit.

“S-sorry,” Esther mumbled weakly. A tunnel had begun to close in around her. The edges of the world were dark, inky black. The lights overhead were far too bright and painful.

“Don’t pass out now,” Lydia said as she march-dragged Esther across the parking lot. “Wait until we make it to the car.”

“Car?” A large, white object hovered in the inky blackness. To Esther, it was a white steed waiting to carry her away from all the madness and pain the night had inflicted upon her.

Time passed in flashes of sensation after that: plush, red upholstery that reminded Esther of the church carpet; cold night air whistling through a half-open window; a glimpse of stars, too close and too dazzling; the squawk of a police scanner; the bumpy texture of wool against her cheek and, at long last, the feel of a pillow beneath her aching head.

“…Couldn’t leave her. She saw its true form,” a voice was saying.

“Yeah, but—”

“—police would have her committed.”

“Not really our problem.”

“I know. But she saw it. And she saw me.”

The voices were shattered pieces of a night that Esther would remember forever after, even if she couldn’t put all the pieces back in the right order.

Something warm and furry hummed on Esther’s chest. She opened one eye to find herself pinned by a large, gray cat with orange eyes like two harvest moons rising from the fluff of its cheeks. The cat stirred when she did, adjusting its haunches. A name tag jingled under its chin. Esther read it and groaned. “Hairy Belafonte. Nice.”

“We mostly just call him douchebag,” a chipper male voice said.

“That’s kind of mean.” Esther tried to sit up, but Hairy wouldn’t budge.

“Wait for it,” the unseen man said. He was somewhere behind Esther. She could hear the click of a keyboard and faint music.

The cat turned and stuck his butt in the air three millimeters from Esther’s face before digging all ten of his front claws into her chest.

“Hey…ow ow ow! Stop it, douchebag!”

“Told you,” the guy said.

Esther shoved the cat away and sat up. Though unfamiliar, the space around her was in no way threatening. A brick wall covered in band posters and handbills rose up on one side. The opposite wall was lined with bookshelves whose contents were stacked to fill every open space like puzzle pieces. Tall, four-pane windows at the front of the room let in a warmer, diffused version of the light cast by the streetlamps outside. The place had a slightly musty scent, like a library tinged by sporadic affairs with incense.

Judging by its yellow and green floral print, the couch Esther was lying on had been roaming the earth since the days of disco. It was comfortable, though—a worn old thing instilled with the same earthy aura as its habitat.

Esther stood unsteadily and saw that the apartment stretched further back to include a kitchenette and an office area with a banged-up metal desk. Sitting at the desk, face aglow from a laptop screen, was a gaunt man with dishwater blonde dreadlocks spilling out the back of a white bandana. He wore faded jeans and a tee-shirt with the name of a local Thai restaurant on it.

“Good morning,” the guy said, glancing up from the laptop. He didn’t stop typing. A wall of text filled the screen, character by character. Esther knew better than to ask what it was. Some kind of code or program, she reckoned—though the guy looked like he belonged at Burning Man, not in front of a computer.

“Where am I?” Esther asked.

“Rose Rock Records,” the guy said. Click click click click. His fingers were a blur. Esther noted with some alarm that he had not blinked once the whole time she’d been watching him. “Or rather, the luxurious living quarters above said record store.”

His voice was inconsistent with his appearance. He looked no older than thirty—a hard thirty, to be sure; his skin was rough and there were the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes—but the person speaking had more mileage than that. A hint of foreign inflection lurked in his accent.

“Who are you?” she blurted.

The typing stopped. The man looked up at Esther, giving her his full attention.

She almost wished he hadn’t. Gazing into his eyes, she felt centuries staring back at her. She’d heard of the uncanny valley before: when something could be so close to human, but flawed in its flawlessness so that it was disturbing rather than convincing. That’s what it felt like to look into those eyes.

“I’m Zedekiah. Zed, for short,” the guy said. He stated it as though it were a textbook fact, widely known and accepted without need for elaboration.

“Zed?” Esther stared him up and down. “You don’t look like a Zed.”

He glanced down at his scrawny body. “I think this one was actually called Kyle or something like that. But I’m not Kyle. I’m Zed.”

Esther tried to make sense of what he’d said, but she wasn’t up to the task. Her head was pounding, and everything had the transitory feel of a lucid dream. Nothing was solid. It might all fade and she’d find herself in her dorm bed or (she shuddered) back in the abandoned book store.

Her heart raced as she looked around for something to lock onto: something true, something real. A blue coat was draped over a banister at the back of the room. Esther walked over and put her hand on it.

Footsteps thudded on the stairs, descending from a space overhead where pipes on the back wall vanished through a hole in the ceiling. Esther got a whiff of soap as Lydia entered the room. Her hair hung damp and shiny. She wore sweatpants and a gray, long-sleeved top.

“You’re awake,” Lydia said.

The room felt smaller with her in it. It wasn’t so much that Lydia was a large person—though Esther suspected she would stand eye-to-eye with any of the girls on the university basketball team. She had a gravity that redirected all the surrounding energy toward her, like a heavy marble resting atop a taut membrane of silk. Esther found herself in a decaying orbit, drawn inexplicably to this strange creature with the haunted green eyes.

“Well, then.” Lydia said, when Esther said nothing. “That bump on your head looks bad, but the swelling should go down over the next twelve hours.”

Esther touched her head and winced.

“You’re lucky,” Lydia said as she brushed past Esther and went to the kitchenette. A pot of coffee sat on the two-burner stove. Lydia poured a mug.

“Lucky?” Esther asked.

“Yes.” Lydia sipped from her mug. “That thing was going to eat you.”

“You saved me,” Esther said. This was a fact—a true thing she could hinge her consciousness to so that it might lift her up out of the fog.

“Well…” Lydia took another sip and glanced at Zed. Then she looked back at Esther with a brief, guilty grimace. “Don’t thank me. I used you. As bait. I suspected that Chris was a killer, but I had to be sure.”

“Bait?” Esther was sinking again. The fog closed in.

“Good grief, Lydia.” Zed sprang up and poured more coffee. “Work on your bedside manner. At least offer the poor girl a drink before you go full disclosure on her.”

“I don’t want anything,” Esther said, pushing away the mug that Zed was trying to hand her. “What was he? Chris…the killer, I mean?”

“A dog demon,” Lydia replied. “Probably summoned ages ago and left to run wild. It might have killed its master. They often do.”

Esther looked to Zed for clarification, but he just shook his head.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“That’s where the werewolf myth comes from,” Lydia said, interrupting Esther. “Where most were-things come from, actually.”

“So you can sleep well at night knowing there’s no such thing as a werewolf,” Zed said. He gave Esther a wink.

“Who are you people?” Esther asked.

“You people?” Zed looked offended. “My dear little redheaded tartlet, you’ve only just stumbled into the lair of the coolest heroes this side of the Justice League.”

“Tartlet?” Esther repeated with genuine offense. It sounded like something her father would call the less wholesome women in the Bible.

“I meant like the dessert,” Zed said. “Sweet little cake, you know? Crumbly with sugar on top?”

“Zed, stop,” Lydia said. She stared out the front windows, looking more feline in her watchfulness than the fat gray cat who was sitting at her feet. “We aren’t heroes. This girl was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Esther. My name is Esther Rainey.” At last, this was something she could feel sure about.

Lydia turned her cat-like gaze upon Esther. “We aren’t heroes,” she repeated. “We just know a little more about what’s out there than most.” She nodded to the space beyond the window. Esther knew the gesture was meant to encompass more than the gritty old brick buildings and the spindly trees growing out of squares in the sidewalk.

A small jolt shook the floor, followed by a rumble that made everything feel wavy for a few seconds. Zed ran to his laptop and began clicking away.

“Four point one,” he announced. “Forty-three miles northeast. Five kilometers deep.”

Lydia pursed her lips. “Interval?”

“Six hours since the last one,” Zed said.

“You’re tracking the earthquakes?” Esther asked. The news didn’t bother reporting anything smaller than a 4.6 anymore.

“Not really,” Zed said. “The quakes are a symptom, not the culprit.”

“What, you mean like fracking?” Esther had seen that word tossed around by eco-friendly types. She was fuzzy on the details, but she knew it had something to do with the way energy companies got natural gas out of the ground.

“No,” Lydia said. Then, to Esther’s puzzled look she added, “Look, it’s too difficult to explain and, trust me, you don’t want to know. If you’re feeling better, I’ll take you back to campus now.”

Another grain of panic dropped onto the mound that had been piling up inside Esther ever since her date had turned into a monster. She felt like somebody had thrown on the lights in a black aquarium to reveal all kinds of horrifying things swimming in the depths and then told her to jump into the water.

Zed shot Lydia a look over the laptop screen. “At least make her some breakfast first.”

With a huff, Lydia went to look through a cabinet above the apartment’s tiny sink. “There’s oatmeal. You want oatmeal?”

“No,” Esther said. “Please, could you just tell me what’s going on? I almost got eaten by something that shouldn’t exist. I think I deserve some answers.”

Lydia crossed her arms and looked to Zed.

He shrugged. “You’re the one who brought her back here. Handle it.”

“Fine.” Lydia grabbed her coat off the banister. “We’ll talk on the way. Oh, and Zed?”

He raised his eyebrows. Lydia mimed holding something up to her mouth. Zed reached into a drawer of the desk and took out an inhaler. He tossed it at Lydia, and she stowed it in her coat pocket.

Esther thought it was strange. Lydia did not strike her as the asthmatic type.

The white steed of Esther’s fever dream turned out to be a 1973 Lincoln Continental.

“A floating brick,” Lydia called it as she backed it out of a parking space behind the record store.

“Yours?” Esther asked.

“It belongs to Ronnie—um, Veronica Sheppard. She owns the store. Runs the place, too. She let me borrow the car for the night. I’ll have to pick her up at her house once I’ve dropped you off.”

Now that she was outdoors, Esther was able to get her bearings. The record store was on Main Street in the the oldest part of town, north of campus. The buildings were mostly austere prairie brick mixed with Art Deco doors and signs. The streets were empty save for drifts of leaves that blew along the gutters. The pre-dawn light froze everything in a quiet bubble, like the day was holding its breath.

With no traffic, Esther knew the trip would be short. Only a couple of tree-lined miles separated her from her dorm and its overwhelming normality. She vowed to get the most out of her last few minutes with Lydia. “So—”

“Inugami,” Lydia said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“The thing that tried to eat you. It goes by many names, but the Japanese word for it is inugami. I like the Japanese terms. They have names for any kind of monster you can imagine.”

“Oh.” Esther tried to reconcile the casual use of the word monster with the world as she knew it.

“‘Monster’ is not exactly right,” Lydia said, as if she’d read Esther’s mind. “‘Demon’ isn’t either. They’re beings from outside our plane of existence. Some are more advanced than we are. Some, less. Many are dangerous. Others just want to be left alone. Some are simply victims of circumstance. Refugees. Exiles.”

The day’s first light touched the top of the campus clock tower. Esther’s dorm, a mass of utilitarian concrete, was but three blocks away. “How come I’ve never seen anything like that before now?”

“You probably have and didn’t know it,” Lydia said. “The things that live long lives among us aren’t the biggest or the baddest. They’re experts at hiding. Zed, for example.”

Esther felt a swell of triumph for having her suspicion of the uncanny computer wiz vindicated. “What’s Zed?”

Lydia blew out a long breath. “He explains it better than I can. Put it this way: the body you see is a shell. Zed is the soul or whatever inside of it. He’s kind of a parasite.”

Esther wrinkled her nose. “Like a tapeworm?”

The tiniest hint of a smile dented Lydia’s cheek. “No, not like a tapeworm. Well, maybe if a tapeworm could talk and take over the body and make it move.”

“But what about the body’s real owner?” Esther asked. “Or is it just a fancy meat puppet with dreadlocks?”

“It’s a real human body. It breathes and sweats and ages just like you. Its original owner vacated the premises—some homeless kid who got beaten to a pulp and left for dead. He was a vegetable when Zed found him, so Zed took up residence.”

“Huh.” It was the only thing Esther could say. She was out of her depth.

Lydia stopped the car outside Walker Tower. “This is you, right?”

Esther glanced up at the dorm, then at Lydia. “You watched me yesterday.”

“I watched Chris watching you,” Lydia said. Then, like it was an afterthought, she added, “Your instincts are good. You knew something was wrong. You noticed me. Most people don’t.”

How could they not? Esther stared openly at her new acquaintance. She’d been silly to think Lydia was the Grim Reaper. She knew that now, but there was still something about Lydia that suggested danger. Maybe it was the way she held herself: too still, like a tiger about to pounce. She was all potential energy bound up in long, lean limbs.

“What are you?” Esther asked—possibly the strangest question she’d ever asked anyone.

“Human.”

“Bullshit. You took down that umami or whatever way too easily.”

Lydia took out her inhaler. “Mostly human,” she said, before taking a puff. Her chest rose and she closed her eyes, holding her breath for a few seconds before letting it out in a low sigh. “It’s complicated.”

She said it with a tone that let Esther know the subject was closed for discussion. Esther opened the door, but stopped with one foot on the sidewalk. “Will I see you again?”

“For your sake, I hope not. I only came to campus because I knew something was using this place as a hunting ground.”

“But you live in town, right? Above the record store?” It came out more hopeful than Esther had intended.

“For now,” Lydia said. “Goodbye, Esther Rainey.”

Next Chapter: CHAPTER FOUR