is a tumbling rapids of churning water. Padmini cannot see the tendrils anymore amid the froth, but she is hyperaware of them as she pulls, and Mrs. Yu pulls, and even the first boy grabs onto Mrs. Yu’s waist from behind and pulls. “No!” Padmini shouts in defiance at the gray thing in between desperate gasps for air, but meanwhile she is thinking,
where f equals infinity if that’s how much force it takes to get this disgusting thing off the child—
It works. The thing’s tendrils slip free, and the boy comes skeeting out of the pool as if buttered and fired from a buttered-child cannon. Padmini takes the brunt of the blow, which is good because Mrs. Yu has osteoporosis. The boy bowls Padmini back, and though she lies winded on the ground with a small, sobbing child curled up against her, she is elated. Ecstatic! Who knows if the thing in the pool will stay there, or if she’ll be able to save anyone if it crawls out of the water and tries to eat them again. It doesn’t matter. For the first time in years, it seems, she’s done something not just because she’s expected to do it, but because she’s chosen to do it, and done the hell out of it besides.
“And don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here,” she gasps, grinning, without really hearing herself.
It is as if these words set off a bomb. She feels something, a wave of outgoing force, seem to tingle away from her feet and the crown of her head and her butt where it crushes the grass as she sits up. She can even see the wave as its energy crawls across the grass and over Mrs. Yu’s apartment building—and the old pool. There is a hiss from somewhere below the pool as this force moves across it. The water in the pool roils; the boy in her arms cringes and makes a sound of fear. But Padmini knows that this is a good thing, this change. She staggers to her feet (the boy is heavy), but by the time she’s up, she already knows what she’ll see. Mrs. Yu’s pool bottom has turned back to pale blue plastic. The portal to another place, where pool bottoms are made of devouring skin, is gone.
So Padmini wraps her arms around the weeping child, shuts her eyes, and privately vows to make an immediate offering at her tiny, neglected puja table. Well, the bag of fruit she bought last week has already manifested flies and might have gone moldy. Okay, she’ll offer incense instead, the really good stuff.
And a little while after all this, two very weird strangers show up.
“Good thing we came here first,” Manny says. He’s standing by the backyard pool that almost swallowed Queens. It’s just an ordinary pool now, but in the other world that Manny can see, the entire empty, twilit backyard (it never seems to grow fully dark in Weird New York, or fully light) is layered over with the massive, glowing parallel marks of something that has clawed at this place, and very nearly rent it open. The marks are healed now, just. Manny can feel their rawness. Worse, the air smells of strange, oceanic aldehydes, and somewhere else—not in Weird New York, but troublingly close by—he can hear the very faint, lingering roar of frustration from something immense and inhuman that almost broke through.
Back in this world, he can hear Mrs. Yu through the apartment window, still saying soothing things to her grandsons while she feeds them to calm them down further. The younger boy has taken no lasting harm from his encounter with the pool-bottom monster, though Manny’s pretty sure he’ll never be coaxed into a swimming pool again, and even bath time might be a problem from here forth. Not that he blames the boy. Manny’s creeped out just standing five feet from where it happened.
“Is it really a good thing?” Brooklyn asks. Mrs. Yu’s place sits on a gradual hill. They gaze out over endless backyards and houses, sloping away from where they stand. “We got here too late. If that young lady hadn’t figured out how to push this thing back into wherever it came from, we’d have gotten here to find all these people dead. Or… gone.”
Manny shudders at the thought. Some things, he understands instinctively, are worse than death. “I guess you’re right. She got lucky. We all have been, so far.” Though he does not add,