Essay Ten: A Spiritualist’s Guide to Something Not Right
The waiting room was nothing short of panic. Crying children, screaming adults, and a bunch of very worried, very powerless medical staff. Paintings all along the walls had started devolving into something grotesque, and some were getting ambitious about how many physical dimensions they could occupy. There was a large fishtank in the middle who’s waters had turned an icy black, obscuring forms that seemed much large than the glass cage they were in. Every once in a while someone would run past the glass, and something would thud against it from the other side, pushing intently as it tried to reach what it no doubt considered prey. The glass was holding, although it had a little more give than seemed physically possible.
“See, the next time someone asks us why we keep that snarky chatterbox herb-addicted narcissist around, we point them at stuff like this,” Dusty groaned. The other two just nodded. “Spooks, do you mind?”
Bones nodded, and reached into his pocket, pulling out a worn-looking piece of paper. Rubble and Dusty slapped their hands over their ears and opened their mouths wide, waiting patiently. A few panicky passerby gave them weird looks, but otherwise ignored them. Then Spooky put the slip of paper between his thumb and middle finger, and snapped them. The effect was immediate and deafening. Literally. There was a loud pop, and a short ringing sound, and everyone in the room who wasn’t covering their ears or casting the spell found that all sound had just dropped out of the world.
Except Spooky’s voice. “Alright, ladies and gentleman, if you could kindly stop what you’re doing, or not doing, pull your fingers out of your ears, yes the ringing is normal, and listen up. I don’t have the time, patience, or crayons to explain what I just did, but don’t worry, your hearing will come back when I’m done. Sir, please put the chair down. If you knock me unconscious you’ll be deaf literally forever. Yes that’s rather rude of me, but still. Alright!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together and giving the group as pleasant a smile as he could manage. A few people flinched. Rubble just rolled his eyes and limped off. “Panicking isn’t going to get you anywhere, and if you’d be kind enough to notice, you all seem in good health. Ok, bad choice of words. No worse off than when you got here, let’s go with that. In the hallway behind us, you’ll find a girl in a Crystal Prep jacket with Nurse Redheart, who will happily evacuate you to somewhere on this floor without screaming artwork. They’re still checking the other floors,” he lied, “In a sweep of the building. Please stay calm and stick together. We’re the closest thing to professionals you’re going to get.” He put the paper back between his fingers, and snapped again.
Once the audience had their hearing back, the yelling began again. Now all of it seemed to be directed at Spooky, who took it in stride. Many people demanding that he do something about the paintings, or wanting to know how he took almost all of their hearing away. There was a bunch of shouting and pushing, until a loud thud drew their attention, as Rubble sauntered back with a new walking stick, dropping a large dead stuffed rabbit in front of them. They all went as quiet as if Spooky had cast the spell again. “I killed that. With a walking stick. Yes, me, the crippled guy. Yes, that’s flesh and blood under there. If you wander off behind us you will find the orderly or whatever that this rabbit beat unconscious with his face. Now, if one little gimpy kid can do that, and another can literally deafen a room with a snap of his fingers, do you really want to sit here and argue about who’s better qualified to handle this situation, or would you like to wait around and see what the third guy can do with a can of spray paint?”
Dusty glanced at him sideways. “I don’t have a can of spray paint,” he argued. Rubble just raised an eyebrow at him. Dusty held his gaze for a few seconds, then sighed, pulling out a couple of miniature aerosol cans out of somewhere, and shaking them vigorously. “Ok, fine. Maybe one or two.”
“How’d you get those in here?!” one nurse demanded.
“...really? That’s your question?”
“...”
“Thought so,” Dusty grunted. “Alright, everyone, kindly make like lemmings and march into the hallway behind us. Ignore the blood, most of it is the rabbit’s. Look for the blue-haired chick with goggles and the nurse, they’ll find you somewhere not… well, not here.”
The crowd seemed to have settled some, mostly due to the giant rabbit corpse they were doing their best to skirt around, and followed directions as Spooky gently ushered them away from the waiting room. When the last of the stragglers had sauntered off, Spooky sighed. “And people wonder why we need a PR guy.”
---------------------------
It was an hour or so later, and pretty much everyone had cleared out of their little section of the hospital. The boys had taken a moment to sit down, finding a somewhat-undisturbed sitting room where the paintings had only just started wriggling, so they could brainstorm. “Right, so we can assume that Treble and the girls are off… somewhere not good,” Rubble reasoned. “Things are ugly in some places, not so much in others, which means there’s probably a ground zero somewhere.”
“Which, knowing our illustrious talking head, is exactly where he and the girls are right now,” Dusty groaned. “Indigo still working on evac?”
Rubble nodded. “She texted me a little after we cleared out the waiting room, wanting to know where the hell to bring everyone. I told her somewhere untainted and easily defensible. Last I heard she was talking to Redheart about holing up in the cafeteria. Thank god this isn’t a surgical ward or something. What the hell section are we in, anyway?”
Spooks eyed a nearby sign, then smirked slightly, giving Rubble a sideways glance. “Rehabilitation.”
“Oh FUCK you,” Rubble growled, as Dusty laughed loudly at him.
“Hey, I’m not the one who built this place,” Spooky shrugged. “Look, back on track. Let’s bullet-point this. Point One: Weird shit is happening in remote parts of the hospital. Point Two: One of our team is AWOL with two civilians. Point Three: we have reason to believe this phenomena has an epicenter, which we suspect is where Treble and the other girls have disappeared to. Either they’re trapped in a room somewhere with something really awful, or something really big is going on somewhere else and it’s just stretching out to here.”
Rubble sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Man, it feels like the Fall Formal all over again. Weird shit in the walls, hallways that don’t go anywhere. You think that nasty fucker what took half my foot off came back?”
“Well, we never did find out where he fucked off to,” Dusty considered. “But why would he walk off with three underpowered people? Of all of us he showed the most interest in Spooks, even after he bit a hole in your leg.”
“Agreed,” said Spooky. “If something like that was going to come back for me it would just walk in a straight line till it found me. Considering all the sitting in one place I’ve been doing, he should have found me by now if they were looking for me. What we need is information.” He considered Rubble carefully. “Any chance you could get your dad to scout out the place?”
“Dude I haven’t felt him all day,” Rubble lamented. “Either he went home and… fell asleep, or something? Do ghosts nap? Either he fucked off for a few hours and has no idea what’s going on, or something is keeping him out. I mean, this isn’t much of a place for the living right now, I can only imagine what it’s doing on other planes of existence.”
Spooky’s eyes widened in a familiar, unfortunate expression, and he sighed wearily. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he groaned, digging through his coat again. He pulled out a long metal pole bent in an L-shape, with some weird carvings on it.
“The fuck is that?” Dusty asked. “And why are you all grumpy-pants now?”
“What Rubble said. Other planes of existence? Do you not remember the long-ass lecture on psychonauts I gave you guys?” Spooks groaned.
“Um…” RM said slowly. “Which one was that? You kind of give us a lot of weird science-magic lectures and we aren’t exactly the smartest of men.”
Spooky tapped the stick a few times, until it started humming slightly as it resonated. “THIS,” he said, waving the metal thing, “Is a divining rod. It resonates with dimensional disturbances. It’s like an EMF meter for other-dimensional shenanigans, hence why it’s humming right now. The psychonaut lecture basically boils down to nasty things from other universes who like to hop around the marble bag and fuck other people’s days.”
Rubble nodded as realization dawned on his face. “Ok, yeah, I remember that one. The… hunter, the scientist, the predator, and the… what was the last one?”
Dusty looked uneasy, bordering on ill. “The psychopath. Weren’t you saying that they were the most common?”
Spooks looked wearily at his divining rod. “Yes. Yes they are. Ok, this means one of three things. One, our friends have been eaten. I find that somewhat unlikely, as I would have gotten some kind of sense of Treble dying. Don’t ask, it comes with the whole ‘talks to dead people’ thing. Number two, the psychonaut, if that’s what this is, has some kind of pocket-universe where it’s road-testing the rules of our universe, and Treble and the girls fell face-first into it. Three, the others are actually doing just fine and on another floor, where they’re cut off from us and we’re the only ones in any danger.”
Rubble rolled his eyes. “And how likely is that third one, if at all?”
Spooky thought about that for a second, then stood up. “We better get moving before they start getting, I don’t know, digested or something.”
“Lovely,” Rubble groaned. He shook his bad leg as he stood up.
---------------------------
“Sefask,” Treble said in a hushed voice, quietly tossing a cigarette at another beast. The latest one they’d encountered hadn’t seen them yet, giving Treble the opportunity to sneak up on it. The cig bounced harmlessly off it’s hide, barely getting its attention, before it burst into a cloud of gentle white smoke, enveloping the creature. When it cleared, the beast was left swaying back and forth on its hooves slightly, before slumping onto the ground with a stupid grin on its face.
Treble motioned for the girls to come out of hiding and follow him, as he walked around the beast, approaching from a broad angle so as not to startle it. The creature regarded him lazily, then rested its head on its hooves.
It would have been cute if not for all the bone. Almost boar-like, it had a flatter face and longer, thinner tusks that stuck out at a wide angle. It’s back was similarly plated to the first creature they’d met, but done properly this time. Overlapping, similarly shaped plates of bone rolled gnetly on its back, held in place by flexing tendons. The creature seemed to be a giant mass of muscle with a bone shell. It gave Treble a lazy look as the boy slowly waked towards it, eventually stopping only a foot or so away. He knelt down and reached a hand out, letting the creature sniff it. The almost-boar gave his hand a few snorts, then leaned his head in to be petted. Treble obliged.
“Ok, since when are you Beastmaster?” Sunny grunted, crawling unceremoniously through some side brush she’d hidden behind at Treble’s behest.
“It’s a pacification spell. Doesn’t work if the thing’s already decided to kill you, mind, which is why I wanted to sneak up on it. And where’s Sugar?” he demanded, poking his head up and looking around.
He found Sugarcoat quietly sitting on a ‘tree’ stump a few yards away, waiting patiently. “I’m just going to hang out here until you leave your friend behind.”
Treble nodded, stood up slowly, and left the beast alone. “Right, so the woods are horrible. The ruins are filled with god-knows what that wants to eat us. And we haven’t seen creepy chick for hours-”
“My name is Iskilia,” said a voice nearby, and Treble turned sharply on his heel to see their huntress friend leaning peacefully on the now-sleeping monster, petting its head. “And I must say I am impressed by your resourcefulness and your tenacity. Your tactics could use some work, although I imagine such limited resources as you find yourselves with lend not to greeting every opponent with open conflict. Needs must, I suppose. Incidentally, it seems you have already met my brother,” she added, patting the sleeping creature’s head.
“...that is your brother,” Sugarcoat said slowly. “Of course it is. Are the other beasts we’ve run afoul of also your brothers?”
“Yes and no. They are all my brother. Or, parts of him. He simply sends out bits and pieces. The whole of him is rather large, you see, and so moving about is rather cumbersome,” Iskilia explained. “He considers you, if not worthy, then at least entertaining opponents. Although my mother did tell him that you all needed to be alive to find the way out of here, she failed to make the distinction that ‘alive’ and ‘healthy’ are two different things. You might run into a few more extensions before you reach the center of this plane.”
Treble sighed, slumping onto his butt on the ground. The ‘boar’ stirred in its sleep. “Of course, why not. Any chance you could just like, get us off this floor and back into that stairwell thingy? We’re-” he stopped at a loud cough from Sunny, “-ok, I’m fairly confident the door we’re looking for isn’t on this floor. Or plane. Or whatever.”
If Iskilia had eyebrow, she would have raised them. “Of course. Right this way,” she answered, standing up and walking away.
“...seriously?! Sunny demanded. “You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier?!”
“You did not ask,” Iskilia said quietly, with a hint of humor.
Treble decided he kind of liked this chick.