The Tall Dog of Barrow Heights | Part 3

Part 3 The Second Drawing The three-dimensional world is ripped away, replaced by the lines of a child's drawing, shuddering crayon strokes against a white void as if the paper itself was afraid. Florence sits in her cage, knees to her chin, arms wrapped around her shins. She's drawn herself small, smaller than the pipe above her, smaller than her own dress, as if to disappear entirely. Above her, a crooked pipe drips blue tear drops into her upturned mouth. That pipe was all she had. The only thing keeping her alive after her father's heart gave out. She didn't know he was dead, and the footsteps had stopped coming because there was no one left to make them. She just knew the food stopped, and the water kept dripping, and the thing in the dark kept watching. The same darkness begins to move. The black scribbles near the edge thicken, layering over themselves, building density the way a child darkens a corner of a page by pressing harder and harder and harder, until the crayon snaps. Something steps out of it. Fur is rendered in short, vicious strokes. The ears grew, past its shoulders and long, precise curves, and the face. That elongated equine face with its too wide mouth and its perfect rectangle teeth, each one drawn individually, each one the same size, filling the grin from edge to edge like piano keys. A child didn't draw this. This drew itself. It's too tall for the frame. The skull breaches the edge and into the white void above, that empty nothing space where the drawing ends, and some other dimension begins. Its body is visible from the chest down. The vent, mantis like posture, the arms that hang well past its knees, the fingers that taper into points thin enough to pierce skin, but it's the eyes that chill me. Two hollow circles round and empty, like someone pressed pen to page and twisted until it punctured reality. It stands there, watching. It's studying my outline, empty eyes, crinkling smaller than wider. It grins. It's the look of a creature that spent a long time searching for something it's finally found. It lurches toward me, arm outstretched one. Oh, it stops, looks down. Florence has lifted her head to face the beast. The speech bubble above her is faint, the letters small and unsteady. "You're back, I didn't hear you." The tall dog's gaze drifts away from me with the unhurried patience of something that exists beyond time. It opens its mouth, closes it, its teeth, click, click. Did you stop him? Florence asks. "Did you make sure Dad can't hurt anyone else?" The tall dog's head dips, rises. "It's a slow, merry-and-net nod, a learned gesture. Can you help me out of here now?" She asks. It moves. One frame it's across the room, and the next, its face, presses against the cage, close enough that its teeth touch wire. "Here girl," it says. The long finger reaches up and taps the blue pipe above the cage, the dripping stops, and from inside the copper, a voice spills out that's tinny and distant. It's a girl. Crying. "Where are you, Florence? You and Dad were supposed to be back days ago." It's a six-year-old agnes, calling into the building's plumbing from some bathroom or kitchen, ten floors above. Not understanding what the pipes carry sounds so well. Not understanding anything except her twin is gone, and nobody will tell her why. "The police left all over the campsite, but there's no sign of you. I don't know what to do, Florence, that crying. I don't know what to do, Florence. He's gone long. We miss you." Florence's stick figure body vibrates with urgency, the line's blurring at the edges. "Aggness? Agnes, I'm here. I'm in the. " A branch like finger presses against her lips. The tall dog holds it there, gently, smiling. "With its other hand, it slides a drawing beneath the cage door. The drawing is its own. It's dense, nearly abstract, a thicket of dark strokes that make me sick." Florence studies it, and her expression shifts, her mouth flattening. The circular eyes widening. Her speech bubble narrows. The text inside shrinking as though she's lowering her voice to keep Agnes from earring. "You want Agnes to send the boy next door to the basement? Why?" The tall dog taps the page, Florence pulls the drawing closer, studying it through the bars. "Oh, Billy's Uncle is a police officer. I didn't know that." She looks up, brightening. "You want to show him the ways we can tell his uncle, and they can help me, is that it?" The smile widens. The nod comes again, slow, and stuttering. "Okay," Florence agrees. She turns toward the bite. She calls Agnes, she's all right, that she's hungry and scared, but safe, that she needs Agnes to do something important, to find the boy who lives next door and tell him about the basement, to come when the building is asleep, to find the entrance at the bottom of the stairs. Agnes's voice comes back, cracked and desperate. "Bring it, Billy. I'll cut myself." No, Florence's speech bubble is firm, though the letters inside it shake. The doll dogs kept me safe this long. We should do what it says. We'll see each other again soon, okay? "A pause. The pipe grips silence." "You promise?" Florence wraps her arms around herself, hugging the closest thing she has to her sister's voice. "I promise," the doll dog reaches up. It wraps one long hand around the pipe and pulls. The copper bends, winds, and snaps free from the ceiling. Her spatters across the cage floor, a few final drops, and then nothing. The creature tosses the pipe behind it, the way a child discards a toy it's bored with. It meets my eyes again, smiles, then turns. It whistles as it leaves, a throbbing melody in my head, and the sound of satisfaction. Florence stands at the bars. "Agnes!" she calls into the broken stump of pipe. "Agnes, can you still hear me?" "She grabs the bars, shakes them. The cage doesn't move. It was built to hold winter coats and boxed up memories, but it holds a six-year-old girl just as well." "Agnes?" Her speech bubble is enormous now. "Can anyone hear me?" The final panel holds, holds and holds and holds. It's just Florence at the bars, her mouth open, her arms reaching through the wire toward a pipe that's no longer there, toward a sister she'll never see again, toward a world she'll never rejoin, the drawing ends, there is no next page. I'm Link, and the paper slips for my fingers. For a moment I stay crouched by the cage, my forehead resting against the wire, breathing the stale air of a 90-year-old secret. So that's how Florence Hollis died, five days of calling into a broken pipe and drawing pictures no one would ever see, in a cage no one knew existed, beneath a building full of people who walked above her every single day, wasting away, slowly, and the tall dog let it happen. I press my hand flat against the cage, it ends tonight, I promise quietly. If my knees protest as I rise, my head swims, the whistling is louder now, powerful, battering the door like a gale. The tall dog is on the other side, it knows I'm here, it's been waiting since before I fell down the elevator shaft, it saw me in Florence's drawing almost a century ago, and it's been very patient. The knob twists, the door flies open, cracking the concrete wall, the whaling whistle pours through like a hurricane, I take cover, the basement trembles, for a second I worry the whole building might come down, but then the storm becomes a whisper, a voice crawls through the doorway, muffled, choked, unmistakable, "let me go," tither grunts, "no, my hands ball and de fists, the damn kid, I told him to find the pales, deliver the message and stay put, not follow me into this bloody nightmare, I'm charging into the room before I can finish the thought, it opens around my flashlight in pieces, rust, eaten washing machines are hunched in rows like tombstones, the floor slick with decades of condensation, my beam swings left, right, cutting trenches through the darkness, but there's no sign of the kid, "tyler!" a whimper answers, small, afraid, coming from the far corner, I train the light there and my hand goes still, a shadow sits with its back to me, it's folded in on itself, bowed like a dead tree, it's skull scraping the ceiling, long ears hanging past its shoulders, its outline shivers, edges, stuttering as if three dimensions can't hold it, patches of dark fur, bristle along its spine in irregular clumps, scribbled with the manic pressure of a crayon pushed past its breaking point, it's cradling something in its lap, stroking it with long patient strokes, the way you'd pet a cat, "get away from him," I raise the revolver, angling it, so the flashlight catches the barrel, but not the bend in it, "I've already put down one monster tonight, don't test me," the sound it makes is soft, like the laugh of a toddler who's been told something delightful, it rises slowly, limbs unfolding one after another, arms first, then legs, then spine, straightening in a sequence that suggests it learned down to stand. Bye-bye. watch him humans do it, and recreating the steps for memory, slightly out of order, like a sentence translated through three languages and back. Here in Cliseter, that voice, it doesn't belong to it, it's Tyler's. Come and get it! If you're into horror with the heavy dose of sci-fi, classified experiments, and things humanity was never meant to understand, check out my other podcast, The SCP Experience. Each episode pulls you into the hidden world of the SCP Foundation, where dangerous anomalies are studied, contained, and sometimes unleashed. These aren't just scary stories, they're classified nightmares. Click here to listen now, or search for the SCP Experience wherever you get your podcasts. My stomach drops through the floor, there's nothing in its lap, its hands are empty, those long stroking fingers were petting air, performing a pantomime of tenderness for an audience of me. Tyler was never here. It turns. The face is exactly what Florence drew, the elongated horse-like skull, the rectangle teeth packed too tightly into an ear to ear grin, so that's how you did it. My voice is steadier than I feel. Agnes, you kept her loyal for 90 years by copying Florence's voice through the pipes, but you needed Florence alive first, needed her to speak, to give you the raw material. I'm breathing hard, my flashlight trembling across its crayon outline. Because you can't create, you can only echo. You're a parrot in a cage, aren't you? A parrot that learned to draw by stealing a dead man's fingers and tracing a dead girl's pictures. It answers in my own voice. Echo, then, in Florence's, a six-year-old's, sopranos, bright and clear, and 90 years dead. Echo. Then, in a voice I don't recognize, a man's, deep, afraid. Echo. It stalks toward me in that same stop-brain lurch. Three yards in a blank, then still, then three more. Its arms, dragging behind it, knuckles whispering across the concrete. In each hand is a piece of paper. You're different. From the others. It tells me each word amputated from a different speaker. A child's voice says, "You're." A woman's voice says, "Different." A man says, "From." The effect is like listening to a ransom note read aloud. Its grin stretches, pushing past the boundaries of its face and keeps going, hovering in the air beside its head. "You've seen pain." A woman's voice, "You've held pain, a man's, then every voice at once, layered into a single grotesque cord." "You can hold me too." The smile retracts, sharpens. But first, it says in Tyler's voice, bright and cheerful, "I need something to eat." "Bastard." "I snarl. I'm scanning the room." The ventilation shaft that Mr. Hollis used has to be somewhere behind the far wall. But the washing machines form a barricade, and the tall dog blocks me from any gap wide enough to squeeze through. My back meets the wall. The machines hemmy in on either side. The tall dog stops two feet away, towering above like a crooked steeple. Its head tilts, like a bird regarding a worm, and it lifts the two drawings. "Choose!" The croaks in Agnes' voice. The first drawing assembles itself in my mind like a nightmare, building itself brick by brick. Tyler. The dog. His body bent backward over the creature's jaws, and behind it all stands Barrow Heights. Every window filled with a stick figure, every stick figure on fire or bleeding or worse. It's a building eating itself from the bottom up. The second drawing is simpler. It's me and the tall dog. It's wrenching my mouth open, one of its narrow legs, sliding down my throat. Its empty eyes, shuddering with cold ecstasy. You want a vehicle? The piece is finally click into place. That's what this has always been about. The shaman buried you here. Hollis dug you up. You've been trapped in this basement ever since. Feeding on children because their belief is the only thing pure enough to sustain. Whatever it is you are. But you can't leave, can you? You need a body to carry you out, a vessel capable of holding you. The smile widens. It holds the drawings closer. The paper trembling in its twig-thin fingers. Choose. I laugh. Here's the thing. In about eight minutes, the squad of pales is going to breach that wall, flood this basement, and reduce you to a footnote in a classified report. So it doesn't matter what I choose, you're already dead. You just don't know it yet. The tall dog is still. Its smile doesn't waver, but something behind the hollow eyes shifts, calculating something. I hold its gaze. The pales will come, I tell myself, they'll come and wipe this thing off the face of the earth. It won't end like before. It won't. It ended like this. I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs, rifled up. There's no gunfire. No boots on hardwood. No shouting. No magazines reloading. No signs of a six person squad doing what six person squads do. It's just the house. Breathing. A tremor runs through my armor. It starts at the base of my spine, climbs my ribs, and constricts around my chest. The suit peels back from my face, bubbling around my sternum, shuddering and tight, rhythmic pulses like it's grieving. Then somebody else just died. There's another tremor. I stagger, catching myself on the banister. Two. That's two more. My orders are to hold the stairwell, cover the exit, stay put. Fuck that. I take the stairs three at a time, loud enough that the rotten treads scream beneath me. Stealth doesn't matter anymore. Speed does. A voice crackles through the armor's psychic link, broken under water, fighting through whatever interference the house is generating. Alvarez? My breath. A cough then. Nice to hear from you, Juneau. I'm running now. Second floor. Landing. Third floor. There. My partner sits against the wall breathing hard. His armor is soaked in red. It's rippling in convulsive panicked waves like it's trying to seal wounds it can't find. There's too much blood. It's pulling beneath him, spreading across the old hardwood in a dark sheen. Jesus. I drop to a knee, throw my rifle over my shoulder and reach for him, but I don't even know where to start. God, I told you to stay put. He rasps. Must've forgot. Disobeying orders. Disps. He coughs, spilling red onto his own chest plate. Meet me or cut out for this team after all. His head dips forward. The green fades. He's lost consciousness mid-sentence. Not good. Next to him, three feet to the left is a person shaped pile of ash. The armor has already reclaimed its host, consuming the body, burning it clean, then emulating itself. Standard procedure. The suit doesn't let the enemy keep what it kills. Let's get you out of here. I grunt, throwing his arm across my shoulders and lurching to my feet. The weight is staggering. It's not just Alvarez, but his armor. The suit is bonded to him, but it treats my body like a foreign surface. Every point of contact feels like lifting wet concrete. My knees buckle, my spine compresses, 300 pounds easy between his dead weight and the living carapace wrapped around him, but I've carried worse. The light's burst in sequence as I pass, each ball with detonating like a firecracker. The house doesn't want us to leave. The wall's grown. The house lurches sideways. The whole structure torquing on its foundation has though something beneath it is turning over in its sleep. This staircase bucks, and suddenly we're falling. A tangle of limbs and armor cartwheeling down the steps. My skull connects with the banister, and we hit the bottom in a heap. I roll over, spit blood and enamel onto the tile. Then get up. I'm already reaching for Alvarez, already hauling him up, but this time it's easier. My armor has stopped biting me. The suit is cinching around my shoulders, my hips, my thighs, redistributing the load across my frame. It's helping me. It's the push I need to get Alvarez out the door and onto the lawn. I drop to my knees beside him. My armor shutters. A hard convulsive pulse that buckles me forward. My fists sinking into the dirt. Now, another death. If I've got the right count, that makes three. There's only one voice left on the comm link, and it's barely there, fractured, warped by the temporal interference into something I have to strain to even recognize. Bishop Stevenson. Alvarez, he's conscious again, just barely. He's got one eye open, the other bloody and swollen shut. His armor pulses weakly around his midsection, doing what it can as he levels a finger at me. "You can't save her." A line of red spills from the corner of his mouth, tracing his jaw. "It's over, Juno. The bishop's already dead, and she knows that better than anyone." My hands close into fists. "No. I know she was." I take off toward the house, ignoring Alvarez's shouts. "Don't worry. I whisper to myself as I hit the front steps. I'll make it home, Abby, just like I promised." The manner swallows me. I take the stairs at a dead sprint, and for the first time, my footsteps make no sound. The armor has synced with my movement entirely. It's absorbing the impact, silencing the treads, turning my 200 pound frame into something that moves like water over stone. We're operating as a single organism, and the organism wants to reach the second floor before the house finishes off another pale. Around the top of the stairs and stop. The bedroom is open. Inside, a man in a house coat lies bisected across the threshold. His torso is separated from his legs by a cut, so clean it looks surgical. The carpeting beneath him is dark and heavy, with what spilled out. The intestines melting into it like they're being actively devoured. My armor rides against my skin. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was flinching. I turn the corner. The hallway stretches ahead. a study door, a jar at the furthest Dund, between me and it lay two piles of ash, Kent and Shirley. I step around their remains carefully. The ash is still warm, smoldering. A voice drifts from the study, a woman's, it's measured, precise. The voice of someone accustomed to being the most dangerous person in any room. I press against the wall, edging toward the doorway, and through the gap, I catch movement. Black suit, black tie. The silver glint of a pocket watch, a hand closes around, Stevenson's throat. The fingers find the soft tissue beneath the bishop's jaw, with the ease of a woman's who spent her career tormenting things far scarier than human beings. "Pow, sofford me a choice," inquisitor Torson whispers, "and I chose you." If you were into horror with a heavy dose of sci-fi, classified experiments, and things humanity was never meant to understand, check out my other podcast, "The SCP Experience." Each episode pulls you into the hidden world of the SCP Foundation, where dangerous anomalies are studied, contained, and sometimes unleashed. These aren't just scary stories. They're classified nightmares. It's all dogs demand echoes and three different registers. Its fingers close around my head, wrapping from face to neck, each firm like a rebar rod. "Go fuck yourself," I rasp. It squeezes. My eyes bulge, I'm snarling, fighting, clawing, doing anything I can to get it off of me. It squeezes harder. The world goes white. A fracture opens somewhere above my left ear with a thin splinter and crack, and I don't realize I'm screaming until it's echoing off the basement walls. But by then, I'm already on the floor, dropped from its grip like a husk. My vision swims. Blood runs down my face to pool in my ear. Above me, the tall, docked straightens to its full height, opens its jaw, and screams, in my voice. I stagger upright, not understanding. It keeps going, and from somewhere behind the wall comes the thud of falling bricks, the clang, clang, clang, a frantic limbs racing through an aluminum vent. "Hold up, Mr. June!" Now, Tyler, he must have been waiting nearby, waiting for the pales to arrive on the ground floor, close enough to hear my counterfeit screams, "Don't!" The tall, dock clamps a hand over my mouth. It moves with me in its grip, skittering across the tops of the washing machines with insect dial ease up and onto the ceiling. We hang there. It presses us flat against the pipes, holding me against its chest like a ventriloquist it's dummy, and they can't manage so much as a muffled groan, below the ventilation grade clatters open. Tyler spills out into the basement, flashlight swinging. He's still in his pajamas, his feet are bare, the soul's black with grime. He's trembling so badly the light is useless, it shakes across the room and wild, meaningless arcs. "Mr. June!" He moves deeper into the laundry room, picking his way between the machines. The tall, dock watches from above. It waits until Tyler is past us, until his back is to the door and deep enough in the room. Then it drops, blocking the exit. It lands without sound, a two-dimensional shape, stuttering as reality tries and fails to properly render it. I hit the concrete beside it, the hand wrenched from my mouth, and I manage one ragged grunt of warning when Tyler turns. His flashlight finds us, his face goes white. The tall, dock rises behind me, unfolding to its full height. Its grin already twice the length of its face, unpressed against the ground, blood sheeting down the side of my head, and I'm trying to make my eyes say what my mouth can't. "Run kid, please, for the love of God, run!" He doesn't move. "Let him go!" Tyler's voice cracks on every word, but he stands his ground. He plants his feet, hands falling into fists at his sides, staring up at the thing that's been terrorizing him for months with the expression of a boy who's done being afraid. The tall, dock tilts its head, curious, amused. It scuttles closer, then stop frame-lurch eating the distance between them and sickening jumps. Its speech assembles itself from a graveyard of voices. It lifts me up by my skull. "You, blood vessel here!" It smiles parts, and the teeth behind it are red. "Don't lead you out!" It gnashes once, like scissors across cardboard. "Dinner time!" It lunges. Tyler's hand goes to his pocket with all the confidence of a Texas Ranger, but he doesn't pull a gun. He pulls an action figure, a four-inch Superman with a chipped red cape from years of being the favorite toy. He holds it up between himself and the tall dog like a cross. The tall dog recoils. Its daggers backward, its outline flickering like a signal losing reception. It drops me. I hit the ground hard, my skulls singing with fresh pain, and for one stunned moment, the most powerful entity I've ever encountered is retreating from a ten-year-old boy holding a toy. It's hope. The creature's allergic to it, and right now, Tyler overflows with it. "Silver!" "I roar. Blood in my mouth." "Run! Now!" He listens. He bolts between the tall dogs, spasming legs, and sprints for the ventilation shaft. But the monster recovers. It snaps back into focus. The stupid grin, trembling like it's holding back an ocean of rage. It wheels about, a long arm, uncoiling up to the boy like a whip. Tyler makes it four steps. Then the hand catches his ankle. He goes down hard, kicks, screams, he thrashes with every ounce of fury he has. The fingers are already tightening, already dragging him backward across the floor, and the tall dog is giggling madly now. I throw myself at it. My shoulder connects with. Nothing. I passed through the space where its torso should be, and crashed into a bank of washing machines. The impact, ringing through the basement like a bell, I scramble upright, gasping and stare at my hands. I went through it. It didn't dodge. It stood exactly where it was, and I passed through its body the way light passes through glass. The tall dog lifts Tyler by his ankle. The boy dangles, kicking, his pajama shirt falling over his face. The creature studies him the way it studied the drawings, with the patience that has nothing to do with mercy and everything to do with savoring. Its jaw unhinges. The rectangle teeth part to reveal a throat of absolute blackness, extending beyond the boundaries of its body. It lifts Tyler above its salivating gullet. No, please, no, I reach into my jacket and pull out what's left of the revolver. The barrel is bent 15 degrees to the right. The cylinder is cracked, firing it would be stupid. Even for me, it's more likely to behave like a grenade than a gun. But I'm out of options. My last bullet won't kill a class 6 entity, but I don't need to kill it. Just need a flinch. Two seconds of surprise, where its grip loosens, and Tyler drops into his feet, hit the floor and he runs. Two seconds, that's what I'm buying. That's my master plan. I bring the revolver up one handed, blood from my fractured skull blinds my left eye, cutting my field of vision in half. Tyler is dangling above the void of the tall dogs open mouth, kicking, screaming, fighting with everything a 10 year old body has to give. But it's not enough. Courage rarely is. "Hey, mud!" My voice comes out low and ruined. The tall dogs hollow eyes swivel toward me. Its grin frozen. "Trop it!" I squeeze the trigger. The revolver doesn't fire. It detonates. The barrel splits along the bend, the cylinder shatters, and the eruption of shrapnel and arcane discharge throws my arm backward with a force that nearly dislocates my shoulder. My armor surges over my hand in the same instant, a millisecond reflex. The suit, throwing itself between the explosion and my flesh, it catches most of it. A few fragments punch through, drawing thin red lines across my knuckles, but my hand is intact. And the bullet shatters. It explodes like a shotgun blast, cutting through the tall dogs outline in a dozen brilliant shimmers. The sigils, flaring as they search for something to burn, something to anchor to, something real. But finding nothing. The fragments punch into the wall with a hiss of dust. The tall dog doesn't even react. The grin is exactly as wide. The hollow eyes exactly as empty. It isn't even annoyed. I'm on my knees. I don't remember falling. The remains of the revolver are in my lap. The metal's still hot. My hands are shaking. I failed. Another broken promise. Another child dead. The pales are four minutes away. But it doesn't matter. The rifles will do exactly what my revolver did. It's going to eat Tyler Copeland. Then it's going to kill me. Then it's going to kill six pales who came here to help because I ordered them to. Then it's going to kill every man, woman, and child inside barrow heights. Slowly, the way it does everything. Patiently, cheerfully, whistling that bright little tune while the building burns around it. All because of me. All because I looked a 10-year-old boy in the eye and told him I'd keep him safe. The same way I looked at my daughter and told her I'd be home for her birthday. The tears come before I can stop them. They cut through the blood on my face, dripping my jaw onto the twisted remains of the gun. I failed. Again. Just like I always do. If you're into horror with a heavy dose of sci-fi, classified experiments and things humanity was never meant to understand, check out my other podcast, The SCP Experience. Torson releases her grip on Stevenson's throat. "Six offerings," she says, her voice conversational as she circles the bishop. "That's what I need. I've killed four of your underlings. You'll make five, but I'm still one short." My heart hammers. "Alveress, Torson doesn't know I dragged him out, that he's lying on the lawn outside, that he's still breathing." "The last bail," Torson grabs Stevenson by her hair. "Where are you hiding it?" The bishop chuckles. Torson's eyes narrow. "Go on, man. Share the joke with the class." "Jew." Stevenson spits a clot of blood. "That's the joke. He's the bail you're missing, and the fact you think he's still alive is the funniest thing I've heard all week." She smarks. "I guess the dipshit sliced his femoral climbing through the window. He probably blood out in the dining room ten minutes ago." "I went. Thanks, Bishop." Torson kneels beside Stevenson, producing a blade from inside her jacket. It's slender. A silvered stiletto glowing with pale sigils. Torson runs the flat of the blade along the bishop's throat. Her armor shrinks. It's bubbling. Trying to reach her neck, but can't. It's like it's afraid of the knife. "Let's indulge a hypothetical," Torson murmurs. "Let's pretend your bricky isn't quite the corpse you're selling him as. Let's say this June is still alive, armed, and somewhere in this house right now, scurrying like a rat in the walls. What orders might you have given him?" The blade tilts. Its edge finds the soft tissue beneath Stevenson's jaw, and a bead of blood wells up, sliding down her neck in a thin red line. "Orders," she weasers. "Look around. My squad is already in ashes. I'm about to join them. We've been outmaneuvered by a traitorous bitch with a magic knife." The blade presses deeper. "Careful, Bishop. If June was still alive," Stevenson continues grimly. "Pennite have already ordered him to save himself. He'd be long gone." My throat tightens. She's ordering me to leave, to save myself, to. Torson's blade catches Stevenson across the face, slitting her cheek wide. She pitches sideways, one hand flying to her face, the other bracing against the floor. "You think you're better than me?" Stevenson looms over the bishop, the dagger gripping. "Look around, cut. Your soldiers are dead, all because you've led them here, and you weren't good enough to keep them alive." Stevenson pushes herself upright, "They're dead because of you." She hisses through her teeth, "You betrayed the order. You called us here to die." Torson's jaw tightens. For a moment, the dagger trumbles in her grip. Then the rage smooths over, replaced by something worse, a false tenderness, as accurate as a practiced sociopath. She crouches beside Stevenson, runs her free hand across the bishop's blood-matted hair, almost motherly. "Oh, sweetheart. If you knew what the order does to its inquisitors, you'd understand. I didn't betray anyone. All I did was what the house required. You let it butcher a family, a mother, a child." Something flickers behind Torson's eyes. She snaps open her revolver, the barrel spins, empty. Every chamber is spent. The sigils burned out, the casing's dark. "I fired everything I had." She snaps. Six rounds into something that could have swallowed a thousand without ever noticing it. She closes the cylinder with a soft click. The family was already dead. The boy was in his mother's arms. She was holding him the way you hold something you know you're about to lose. Her voice thins. The house offered me a choice, feed it, and it would leave, or become its food and it stays. I chose to feed it, feed it bails. People who signed up to die, whose armor would burn them to ashes long before they ever had to endure the slow agony this sorry family suffered through. Stevenson's laugh is a broken, gurgled thing. There it is. You inquisitors all see us the same way. Nothing but walking corpses to throw at your problems, worthless, expendable. You see yourselves as expendable. Torsen snaps. The mask slipping again. "That's why you drink the bonding agent knowing it kills night out of ten. It's why the soul survivor looks miserable. Every single time. None of you wanted to become a goddamn pale. You wanted permission to die." The words land like a dagger to my chest. The bonding ceremony. I remember it. Ten recruits standing in a semicircle, each holding a steel cup filled with a substance like a living mercury. The facilitator's speech was brief. The armor will choose. If it doesn't choose you, the process is painless. "A lie. You could hear the screaming for miles. I drank because of my wife, because Lillian had died in a car wreck three weeks beforehand, and I couldn't imagine a life without her. The grief was inescapable. I made a lousy father. Abigail would have been better off living with her grandparents, better off with anyone else. While I drank deeply, and hoped it might be the last thing I ever did, nine cups hit the floor, nine bodies followed, and I walked out. The armor knew I offered the world nothing that I wanted to die. It knew, and it still chose me. I never understood why, but now I think I'm beginning to. Torson raises the dagger for a killing stroke. I pulled the trigger. The rifle kicks against my shoulder. The round catches Torson high in the left arm, spinning her sideways. The dagger flying from her grip, and clattering against the far wall. Her head snaps toward me, eyes flaring. For a half second, I see it, the thing inside her. The passenger, the house installed when she made her deal. It looks back at me through the windows of her skull with an alien intelligence. I pulled the trigger again. Click. A jam. Brass caught sideways in the ejection port. The bolt locked forward. Fuck. My finger scramble for the charging handle, trying to rack the slide, clear the casing, get another round into the chamber before. Torson is already moving. She's fast, first class inquisitor fast, even wounded, even with her arm hanging limp in her blood, painting a wide arc across the carpet. She closes the distance between us and two strides. I see her fist coming and can't get clear in time. But Stevenson can. The bishop moves from the floor like lightning given form. She grabs the inquisitors' wrist and wrenches. The joint cracks like a tree branch. Torson screams. She swings, hits Stevenson with her broken arm. The bishop drops, which he's already committed, already twisting her body on the way down, already redirecting her fall into a lunge. And her hand closes around the hilt of the dagger, where it landed against the baseboard. She drives it upward. The sigil blade enters Torson's chest just below the sternum, angled up. The silver glows. The sigils along the edge flare crimson, then white. Then a color I don't have a name for. Torson stops. She looks down at the hilt protruding from her ribs, then up at me. The red light and her eyes gutters. Dims. Goes out. Stevenson rises behind her, takes hold of the dagger with both hands. Pulls. The blade comes free in a wash of blood and dying light. Torson's knees buckle. "See?" Stevenson says. Her voice raw. Her good eye fixed on me as I finally cleared the jam and bring the rifle back up on target. "Torson told you he was a dumbass." Torson falls forward. Hits the carpet face first, doesn't move. Stevenson takes one step toward me, then her legs give out. I catch her before she hits the ground. My rifle clattering to the floor as I get my arm under her shoulders. "Hold on. I'm getting you out." "The house!" She manages. "It's collapsing. Digesting. No time for the stairs." "Window." "We're on the third floor." Her hand grips my collar. Her eye finds mine. The armor will hold. It always holds. I adjust my grip, pulling her toward the window at the end of the hall. The house is dying around us. The chandelier lets go of the ceiling and detonates against the floor in a storm of crystal and plaster. The walls are bowing inward. The wall paper splitting along seams that shouldn't exist. And beneath it isn't wood or drywall, but something organic, something dark and wet that pulses. The floor boards ripple beneath our feet. I'm half carrying, half dragging Stevenson, and she's doing what she can to help. But her strength is fading. I can feel it and the decreasing pressure of her fingers and the way her head drops against my shoulder between steps. We're ten feet from the window. The floor cracks. The boards split apart down the center of the hallway like a zipper, a void opening beneath them that swirls with something black and lightless. The house is consuming itself from the inside, and the chasm is widening fast, eating the hallway in both directions. Stevenson on one side, me on the other, shit. She's lying on a shrinking island of floorboard, the void rising around her like dark water. The far wall is already gone. The ceiling sags toward her, groaning. "That's Jackmate for me, I think." She says. She's on her back, staring up at the collapsing ceiling with something that might be relief. "Not bad, Torson." "No." I'm measuring the gap, six feet, maybe seven, widening. If I jump now, if I can reach her, if the armor absorbs the landing. Don't! Her voice is sharp. "Don't even think about it." She reaches into Torson's jacket and pulls free a red leather notebook. She throws it across the gap, I catch it one-handed. Torson's red book, the mission objective. "There!" Stevenson says. "Mission accomplished. I'll get the fuck out of my house." "Mission, that's an order, June!" Her voice cracks on my name. "It's your daughter's birthday, she's waiting for you!" Abigail. The ceiling is six feet above Stevenson now. Five. The void is lapping at the edges of her island like a tide coming in. "Please!" The word comes out of her like it costs, something she'll never get back. The tears are there now, cutting clean lines through the blood and grime on her forehead. face. This isn't an order. She's pleading with me. "Please. Just let me save someone tonight." I hold her gaze. "Yes, ma'am." I turn. I make for the window at a dead run, and I don't look back. I can't. I'm terrified of what I'll see if I do. The ceiling meets the floor behind me with the sound of a closing mouth. I dive through the window. The fall is long enough to think, long enough to feel the armor surging over me, hardening at the moment of impact. I hit the lawn like a dropped safe. The shock travels through me, but nothing breaks. The armor holds. It always holds. A detonation erupts from where the house stood. The shock wave flattens me against the grass, tears through the surrounding trees, snapping their trunks like matchsticks. When I lift my head, the hilltop is empty. No house. No rubble. Just the shallow depression in the earth where the foundation used to be. As if the house without sleep had never existed. An engine growls in the dark. The hearse materializes from the tree line, grinding to a halt on the gravel drive. The rear door hisses open. Alvarez is standing inside. One hand clamped to a side, the other gripping the frame for balance. His face is the color of old paper. He looks like a man who should be horizontal in a hospital, not vertical in a troop carrier. He looks at me at the empty hilltop, at the red book in my hand. My chest tightens. "I'm sorry. I couldn't. You tried." He says, offering his hand. "It's all that matters." I reach for it. This one, I say. I'm holding the second drawing. The one with my mouth open and the tall dog climbing inside of me. It's head tilts as if I've moved a chest piece to a square it didn't know existed. "I choose this one," I say, louder this time. "A deal's a deal. Let the kid go." The hollow eyes bore into mine, searching for the trick, the angle, the hidden motive. It won't find one. There isn't one. It's just me. A broken man with a broken gun and a lifetime of broken promises, standing in a basement holding out the only thing left he has to give. Himself. The tall dog reaches to its mouth. Its fingers close around Tyler, gently lifting him from the lip of its open throat. The boy is unconscious, limp. His pajamas shirt is dark with sweat, and his face is slack, but his chest is rising and falling, breathing. The creature sets him on the concrete. The way you'd sat down a glass you've decided not to drink from. I'm on my knees beside him in an instant. Two fingers against his carotid. The pulse is there. Fast, thready, but there. He's in shock. "You're gonna be okay, kid!" I whisper. A shadow falls across us. The tall dog's outline shivers like a heat mirage, as it slinks closer. Those long, twiggy fingers find my face, one hooking beneath my upper lip, another beneath my lower. "Here, inquisitor." They pull, slowly, widening my mouth. My jaw strains, my teeth ache. It keeps pulling wider than the tendons want to allow, and a dulled pop in my left jaw tells me something just dislocated. The tall dog lifts one leg. The limb is a single dark line, a shivering crack in the air. It slips it inside my mouth, and I feel pressure behind my eyes in my sinuses at the base of my skull. It burns. It lifts the other leg inside. My body convulses, my vision splits. One eye sees the basement, the washing machines, the unconscious boy beside me, and the other sees a flat, yellowed void, crayon lines stretching to infinity, and at the center of it, a smile with no face behind it. It's pouring itself into me, filling the spaces between my thoughts, between my cells, between the atoms of my blood. My veins are burning, my body setting itself on fire to fight off a cosmic infection. Tears streak my face. "Is this how you felt, Abby?" The fire in my blood reaches my lungs. "I can't breathe. The world is narrowing to a bright screaming point." "Is this how you felt when the ceiling came down and the smoke filled your lungs, and you called for me and I wasn't there?" The tall dog's grin slides past my teeth. It's hollow-wise disappear into my throat. "Is this what it's like to burn alive?"