The Sound of Broken Ribs(72)

She came out of the office and shuffled as speedily as her heavy frame would allow toward the front door. She plastered a smile on her face. Yanked open the door.

There was no one there. The firework-popping noise had disappeared, but it still sounded as if someone were banging on the door. Boom, boom, boom, it came. The harder she listened the closer the sound grew. She figured this was a different kind of firework going off—the difference between, say, a handful of firecrackers and one of those big encore cannons.

Underneath the booming, something like a scream.

She looked right, toward the entrance to the property, and found nothing but trees and gravel driveway.

Then she remembered the author—Lei Duncan. She must be out there at her cabin setting off fireworks.

All by herself?

And in the middle of the day?

Pam stepped outside, closing the door behind her. She eased down the stairs. Gravity had not been kind to her over the years, and because of that, she’d learned to walk down steps sideways to give her boat-sized feet plenty of surface area to keep her balanced.

She was out of breath by the time she stepped onto the gravel of the driveway.

A high squealing, not unlike that of a whistling firework, drew steadily closer, was rocketing toward her.

Around the nearest cabin—#2, because, although it was closest, it was the second to the right; whenever asked about this, Pam would shrug and say, “Don’t ask me. I just work here.”—came a woman, all pin-wheeling arms and screaming mouth. This woman was not Lei Duncan, and for the briefest instant before the thing following this stranger came around the cabin, Pam thought, “Oh, great. Duncan must’ve blown her hand off playing with fireworks and here’s this lady come to tell me about it.”

But then the monster revealed itself and Pam Baker forgot all about Lei Duncan and fireworks. All of a sudden, the only thing Pam Baker could think of was chocolate cake, which she craved every time she was nervous. And what was sheer terror other than an enhanced, acute anxiety?

The author H. P. Lovecraft came to mind, as well, with all his indescribable horrors. She’d always found his writing lazy. Because everything can be described. Even if doing so broke your mind.

The creature ran on all fours, but its arms were twice as long as its legs, so its movements were more of a swing than a run. It was taller than Cabin #2 and more than twice as long as the cabin was wide. Behind the fleeing lady, with her big boobs bouncing and swinging—her tits were almost as big as Pam’s, although the woman’s waist was more than likely a size six to Pam’s size sixteen—the monkey-like, thin-as-a-barber-pole, black-skinned, sickle-clawed beast mounted the cabin like a stud does a mare. The roof collapsed and the cabin itself exploded under the thing’s weight. Splinters and other debris rained down around and onto Pam. Even in her shock and terror, she understood that the creature didn’t look heavy or wide enough to accomplish this kind of destruction. Because, even though it was huge—and seemingly getting bigger by the second—the destruction it created was bigger than the sum of its parts. In video game terms—the thing’s hit box was twice as big as the character itself.

Perched upon the rubble of Cabin #2, the monster’s yellow teeth, big as human fingers, parted and it loosed a roar that was both an ear-piercing shriek and bowel-slackening rumble. The only thing near resembling the roar that Pam had experienced was the screeching tone of Godzilla in those old Japanese movies. But that wasn’t quite right either. Because, while the creature’s roar did sound something akin to Godzilla, its voice was all its own. In a world where there was nothing new under the sun, Pam Baker thought this monster’s voice was the first original thing she’d ever come across.

The lady and her floppy tits rushed past Pam and up the stairs. Pam was too interested in the thing studying her to invest much more than a glance at the lady, but she looked like hell. About as bad as one would expect a woman being chased by an otherworldly monster to look.

Pam could have moved. She could have tried to flee. But something other than fear rooted her in place. A morbid curiosity. A need to know what this thing was and where it had come from kept her from turning and running.

Besides, she was already out of breath, and her heart wasn’t really racing as much as it was struggling not to come in last. If she turned and rushed up the stairs, her ticker would likely explode in her chest like the cabin had under the creature’s weight.

“What—the fuck—are you?” she panted.

The monster stepped from atop the ruined cabin and toward where Pam stood in awe.

I am Pain.

“Where do you come from?”

I am of the Void. A place known to my kind as the Roaming.

“Radical. Where’s that?”

Here—let me show you.

For the span of a human life, in the time it takes entire galaxies to spawn, Pam Baker was swallowed whole and shown the universe. There was a time when she remembered being devoured, having known what a mouse in the throat of a garter snake must feel like, and then she was stardust. She stretched out into the Void, past the Halls and into the Roaming, where she became what she had always been—her memories.

Knowledge of unknowable weight smashed her against the rocks of Forever. The lamentations of loved ones suffused her with terrible emotions. She felt every tear and breaking heart belonging to those who mourned her loss.