Tom Pawlik: Beckon

Malcolm Browne—Thomas Vale’s business manager—lay dead in the other room in front of Thomas Vale’s massive stone fireplace. Loraine Browne, along with the Huxleys and the Dunhams, had already left for the evening and had probably gone to bed some time ago. George would deal with them later. In fact, he probably wouldn’t need to do a thing.

But for the moment, all was quiet in Thomas Vale’s mansion. So George sat there in the darkened office, waiting for Vale to return.

He felt little emotion, numbed by Miriam’s death. Some part of him suspected he might soon join her, and that thought no longer filled him with apprehension. His wife had faced her end with courage. A courage born out of a faith that he now knew was more than empty religion. He would mourn for her when this was over. But for now he just needed to be patient.

He swiveled around and stared out the window into the night. The moon was nearly full and had already risen high into the night sky and lit up the whole countryside.

Shortly after midnight, the silence was broken by the sound of footsteps. George could hear them coming up the stairs. He listened closely. They were hurried and uneven. Someone was frightened and perhaps injured. And George could also hear the sound of labored breathing.

The footsteps reached the top and were now coming down the hall. George spun around to face the door. Moonlight streamed from behind him and lit the room with a dim but usable glow.

A silhouette appeared in the office doorway and stopped. George heard the breathing pause a moment and then resume.

Vale felt for the light switch and flipped it on. His shirt was drenched in blood, his face ashen with dark circles under his eyes. His hands were trembling, and he was sweating. Profusely. Yet he didn’t look at all surprised to see George there.

George nodded toward Vale’s bloodied shirt. “It looks like you ran into some trouble. It’s a good thing you’re immortal.”

Vale scowled and lurched into the side room where he stored the perilium. George listened carefully for the sound of his reaction when he saw the refrigerators. The mangled, empty refrigerators.

A full twenty seconds later, Thomas Vale emerged from the room, his eyes looking glazed and unfocused. He clutched one trembling hand in the other. “What do you want?”

George’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me?”

“How much do you want? Ten million? Twenty?”

“Money? You think I want money ?”

“What, then?”

George raised the shotgun and aimed it directly into Vale’s face. “I want my wife back.”

Vale’s breathing grew more labored. “It wasn’t… my fault. It was her… choice.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll settle for watching you die.”

Vale glared at him. “What did you do… with it?”

George shrugged. “It’s gone. Every last drop. I flushed it all down your own toilet.”

George watched Vale’s incredulity turn to hate. “You… have no idea what I was… offering you.” He was sucking in air hard now. “The chance to be… young again.”

George leaned back in the chair. Vale was no longer fearsome—now frail and thin, wrapping his arms around himself in an attempt to keep from trembling.

“When did you become so arrogant,” George said, “to think you had the right to live off the deaths of innocent people like this? As if there would never come a reckoning.”

“Off your… high horse, George,” Vale said. “You know what you’re capable of. We’re… not so different… you and I.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Vale,” George said. “What are you afraid of? After all these years of cheating death, it’s finally catching up with you. How does that feel?”

Vale opened his mouth, trying to respond, but his voice was already gone. He could no longer stop the tremors. Nor hide the symptoms of his impending fate. Both hands quivered violently. His arms began to tremble and then his legs.

He turned in a feeble attempt to leave. George imagined it was to find a place to hide. To keep George from witnessing the convulsions and so to rob him of that last bit of satisfaction. But his motor skills were negated now by the onslaught of his death.

George watched it spring upon him like some kind of predator as Vale crumpled to the floor—a trembling, contorted mass in its grip. His spine arched as his muscles contracted with violent spasms. His legs and arms stiffened at odd angles. Tremors racked his body and his head flung backward too, as far as his neck could bend. His jaw clenched tight as white foam frothed between his teeth. And George could see one of Vale’s yellow eyes through the black snarls of hair, wide open in terror. His body flopped and jittered on the wooden floor, almost like a fish in the bottom of a boat or like some grotesque windup doll.

George drew long, slow breaths, fighting the urge to look away. It was a more gruesome spectacle than he had expected, and at length he could no longer stand to watch. His eyes moved to the clock on the wall.

Thirty seconds…

Forty-five seconds…

A full sixty seconds before the tremors finally abated and Thomas Vale lay still in a twisted heap.

But for the gagging rattle deep in his throat, it had been a silent, protracted death.

Elina peered at the spherical objects in the light of the flare and could now see they weren’t rocks at all. “What are they?”

“Egg sacs.” Jack’s voice grew shaky. “Like the one I saw before.”

Dwight kicked the smaller shell fragments. “Then… I’m guessing these are bodies of the males. Maybe the ones who get eaten after mating or something.”

Elina shuddered. “Mating?”

Then the flare went out and darkness fell around them. Elina reached out for Jack, but the only sound was their breathing, echoing through the chamber.

Complete, smothering darkness hung on them like a death shroud. Then out of the inky black void, Elina heard the tapping sound she’d heard in the other chamber, and it sent a shiver through her body.

Jack lit another flare, and the brightness of its orange light filled the nesting chamber… with the exception of a large shadow that emerged from a tunnel on the far side. An enormous black shape hauled itself into the room.

The beast paused just outside the circle of light, clicking its fangs together as if trying to get its bearings. Or trying to locate its prey.

Elina fought to keep still, remembering what Vale had said about the creature’s being able to smell fear—sensing it somehow in its prey. She sucked a long, slow breath into her lungs and held it.

But at that moment the beast lurched toward them. Its armored legs pounded across the stones in great, jerky strides and its jaws opened in a deafening shriek.

Jack yelled, “Get back in the tunnel!”

They spun around and dashed the way they had come with the creature lumbering after them. Elina’s foot twisted on the shell fragments littering the floor and she tumbled to the ground. She felt a hand on her arm and saw Jack leaning over her, holding the flare.

“Come on!”

He tugged at her arm, trying to help her up, but it was as if time had slowed down as a huge, twisted shadow appeared behind them.

Suddenly Dwight leaped into the kirac’s path, holding another flare in one hand and a pistol in the other. He fired off several shots directly into the creature’s mouth, but the bullets only served to enrage it further.

The beast lifted one of its forelegs to strike.

Jack pulled Elina to her feet just as the giant queen impaled Dwight through his chest and pinned him to the ground. It reared up and hissed. Dwight’s limbs quivered as blood poured from his mouth. One arm reached frantically for his gun but instead found the canvas bag Jack had dropped in the scramble toward the tunnel. He clutched it as the beast wrenched him sideways with an angry growl.