Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“That’s it,” he said. “I’ll call you when we’re ready. Until then, stay in this immediate area.”

Leaves rustled yet again; startled, Pel turned to see Grummetty and the other gnome-no, little person-approaching. The other was a young man with a sparse blond beard, wearing a dark green hooded robe. Grummetty was attired just as he had been in Pel’s basement, three days before.

Pel was about to say something, to point the little people out to Rachel, who didn’t seem to have noticed them yet, when the ground shifted slightly beneath him.

Startled, he glanced down at his feet, then looked at Rachel and Nancy.

They had felt it, too-Nancy was staring at him, and Rachel had raised her head from her mother’s shoulder and was looking about, puzzled.

Thunder roared overhead.

“What was…” Nancy began.

Then the ground burst open beneath them.

Pel’s first thought, as he began to fall backward, was that Ted was right after all. None of this was real; it was all a dream, and now he was waking up. The dream’s superficial appearance of sanity and logic was disintegrating, and it was going to turn into the more usual irrational dream nonsense, or maybe a falling dream, maybe he was going to fall through the ground and fall for what would seem like hours, and then he would wake up, and he would be back in bed at home, where nobody had ever walked out of his basement wall with stories about spaceships in people’s backyards or evil world-conquering wizards.

Or maybe he was falling out of bed, for the first time in years, and he would wake up on the bedroom floor.

Instead he landed on very solid, very cold, hard-packed ground, landed on his backside and one elbow. Nothing vanished or changed shape or behaved like anything in a dream-except for the head that had thrust up through the earth and knocked him off his feet.

It was black and smooth and hard, with great blazing red eyes and pushed-back pointed ears. More than anything else, it reminded Pel of the terror dogs in the first Ghostbusters movie-but it was larger. Much larger.

Much, much larger.

The head, which was all he could see, looked about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

It stank, like fresh sewage.

And no matter how much Pel wanted to think otherwise, it really didn’t look like a special effect. It looked real.

Rachel was shrieking, one piercing wordless yell after another, as she watched the thing thrust itself upward. Black dirt seethed around it, and even over the shrieks Pel could hear the grinding noises it made.

Nancy started screaming as well, as she backed away with her daughter clutched tightly to her, but she used words: “Pel, no! Pel!”

Pel scrambled to his feet and backed up a step, watching the thing.

It was in a pit now; its movements had broken in a circle of dirt about twenty feet across, and the dirt had fallen inward, away-to somewhere . Pel wondered where. Did the thing have a burrow down there?

One of the huge trees beside the clearing swayed, and wood cracked somewhere.

The head was not shaped like a dog’s head, not now that he could see it all; the snout was much shorter, proportionately, than any dog’s. Pel tried to find a comparison-the demon atop Bald Mountain, in Disney’s “Fantasia,” perhaps? There was a resemblance, but that was only an approximation.

The thing didn’t look like anything he had ever seen, not really-not in real life, not in movies, not even just in his imagination. The muzzle wasn’t human; the rest of the face wasn’t really anything else.

A demon ape, perhaps? But no ape ever had floppy ears like that.

The head tilted back, the lower jaw pulling free of the crumbling dirt, and then the mouth opened. Pel braced for a roar or a bellow or a shriek.

None came. Instead of sound, new horrors spilled out, little black things that crawled and flapped and fluttered, things the size of a cat or a bat or an insect. They scampered and scuttled, knocking clods of dirt aside, rustling and thumping, but none squealed or grunted. The only voices Pel heard were human.

Thunder rumbled again; the daylight dimmed further.

People were shouting, Pel realized. He looked past the horrors in the pit and saw people on the far side, the crew of the Ruthless , and Raven and his comrades. They were crowding back against the woodshed, calling to each other.

Something hit the back of Pel’s head, hard and sharp; he heard wings flapping, felt them beating against him, felt the rush of air, and he smelled rotting meat. He started forward, then turned.

The thing struck again, its claws tangling in his hair-it was glossy black, with wings and talons, and it was flapping and struggling, moving so fast that he couldn’t get a good look at it.

It was obviously kin to the things in the pit, the things that had come from the monster’s mouth, but it couldn’t have come from there, there hadn’t been time for any of those to have reached him.

He slapped at it, knocked it away, and it lunged at him again. He knocked it away again, knocked it to the ground, and this time he stamped on it.

He heard bone snap. He stamped again.

The thing was like a lizard with bat’s wings, a big lizard, with fangs and talons and a four-foot wingspan. He had broken one wing, near the base, and it scurried for cover, limping slightly and dragging the broken wing behind it.

He turned for a glance back at the pit; dozens of creatures had poured from the big one’s mouth, and now other things, things like snakes or great worms, things like a cross between a snake and a squid, were burrowing up out of the surrounding soil that the big one had loosened up in surfacing.

Pel started to turn, to head for the woods, but now he saw where the bat-lizard had come from- there were more of them, in the trees, and in the underbrush, and there were other creatures, things like furry dog-sized spiders, like fanged black stumps walking on pulled-up roots, like gigantic black rats. Oily fur glistened darkly, white teeth gleamed, eyes of red and gold and cat-green shone.

There were scores of them, all coming silently closer.

“Oh, shit,” Pel said, his muscles tensing as he backed away slowly.

The shouting and screaming had faded somewhat, had blended with the grinding of the immense creature in the pit and the rustling of the creatures into a dull cacophony, and Pel heard the sudden loud crack clearly.

At first he thought it was a tree-limb snapping; he looked up, startled.

The shouts had suddenly ceased. He turned and looked across the pit, past the huge glaring head, at the people clustered around the woodshed.

Susan Nguyen was braced against the wall of the shed, her big black purse hanging open from one shoulder. She had a short-barreled revolver clutched in both hands, held out in front of her, pointed straight ahead. Something like a large black monkey lay face-down on the ground in front of her, oozing thin purple fluid.

Even from this distance, Pel could see she was trembling.

And most of the others were staring at her.

Still trembling, she heaved the gun a few inches to one side and took careful aim at the head in the pit; it was turning slowly toward her.

She fired, and her hands jerked with the recoil. Pel didn’t see where the shot went; he heard the gunshot and saw the flash, but that was all.

“Come on!” someone shouted, tugging at Susan’s arm.

Pel suddenly realized that there were fewer people over there than there should have been. Squire Donald was gone, and Prossie Thorpe, and maybe others.

“Nancy,” he shouted, “run for the shed! Around the pit! They have the portal open!”

Nancy was already moving, carrying Rachel. Pel started after her.