crawl away from the sticky, rasping grip, the way the claws of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park might have felt.
“What has the child told you?” it whispered.
“What child?”
“You know of whom we speak.”
Nothing you don’t already know, I thought. Nothing new. Nothing you haven’t known for, what, millions of years? And why would I tell you anyway? “No, she hasn’t told me anything,” I said after a second.
“As I thought.” Another crackling hiss, like the cockroaches in the museum. The hand fell away and I stumbled back towards the doorway, rubbing my arm on my apron and yanking on the handle, which creaked and failed to open even under my full weight. It emitted a faint purple glow, sickeningly wrong and yet familiar, the light I knew from a dream, growing brighter the harder I tugged. Finally I turned again.
“The child called us,” it said, drifting closer; I stared at the floor, where the ragged ends of the robe, outlined in silver light, hovered above the tiles. “We heard it in our slumber. A new thing has come into the world. No human should possess such a thing. Even her. She does not know its true power. And still she called.”
A sickly mist fell from the thing, just visible in the thin band of light. What had she said? A contagion, spreading, like the spores of a fungus... I thought about it settling on the plastic bags of bread and buns and tortillas and croissants, sinking through the wrappers, sending black threads into the soft white contents, filling each pore with a little droplet of black, the light all wrong, the sky that was not the sky.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She will not give it to us willingly. But it is the way of the world for power to go to the powerful. Not to the weak. It is... inevitable.”
It was still coming; my back hit the door. But there was nowhere else to go. I didn’t dare close my eyes and lose the tiny bit of light; to be in complete darkness with this thing—never, I would go insane. Maybe that was what it wanted.
“Take it from her,” it whispered.
“No.”
“You have seen it. You know it. Bring it to Us. Speak to her, ask her to see... reason...”
“Reason? What reason? She’s got no reason to turn that thing over to you.”
A long silence. But if it were going to kill me, it would have by now. Right here, right now, in the darkness. All it would take was that scaly, stinking hand at my throat.
“We will reward you greatly,” it whispered. “To bring it. Or to destroy her.”
“Destroy her? You’re asking me to kill her? What the fuck, if you can’t have it, no one can have it? No. I won’t. I can’t and I won’t. Fuck off. Let me out.”
“There would be... rewards... we have... great rewards...”
“You’ve got nothing for me. She didn’t have to tell me shit about you for me to know that.”
Darkness, the icy edge of a limb extending. I shuffled sideways along the door, headbutted a metal shelf hard enough that red stars exploded behind my eyes, and then the hand was scraping along my face, hard, sticky, moving from jaw to forehead. I froze, lids now clenched shut, picturing the appendage popping the unprotected jelly of my eye like a paintball.
“Have we nothing?” it hissed. “Nothing to offer? Everything will be taken from you, human. Understand us. Remember. Everything will be taken from you.”
And then it was gone—my face set free, the lights shamefacedly creeping back into life. I stared wildly around at the untouched bread, at the clean floor. Nothing. No dust, no footprints. The handle behind me gave so suddenly I fell out of the room, catching myself at the last moment. Riva from the bakery stood there with one of the other stockboys, a kid I didn’t know. They were staring at me.
“Are you all right?” Riva said, confused. “Nicky? What happened to your face?”
“Nothing, I... the lights went out and I fell...”
“The lights went out?”
I shook my head, rubbing my cheek. The skin hadn’t been broken, but I could feel welts, hot, rising as thick as licorice ropes. “They’re fine now, Riva. It’s okay. Maybe we could, uh, get Mike to put them on the maintenance schedule for next month or something.”
I nudged past her, grabbed my clipboard from its slot, and filled in lines and lines of bullshit numbers. It was as if fear had emptied