David Wong - John Dies at the End

“You didn’t tell me to bring a-”

He held a hand out to shush me and ducked into a side door. We both stepped into a large room that, in the dim glow from the window, looked like a library of shelves mostly filled with odd shadowy shapes that were not books. I saw what looked like a bundle of cobweb hanging from the ceiling and reached out to brush it aside-

POP!

A shower of blue sparks flashlit the room. A bone-rattling electric sting flared up my elbow.

The fixture on the ceiling blinked once, twice and then bathed the room in light. About a foot in front of me was what looked like a bundle of wet string, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It didn’t look so much like a jellyfish as a man-o’-war, the slimy things that float lazily on the ocean surface and let their stringy tentacles hang down in the water. The creature drifted slowly up to the ceiling, toward the light. It wrapped its tentacles around the fixture and, to our utter astonishment, began frantically humping it like a puppy on a bunny slipper.

The lights dimmed, finally flickering out to darkness again. The room was silent except for the soft rattling of glass vibrating against metal with each of the creature’s spastic thrusts.

“You ever seen one of those before?” John whispered, somewhere in the darkness. Above us, a little blue spark jumped from one noodly tentacle to another with a soft FZZZZT sound.

“I like to think I would have mentioned it if I had.”

“Uncle Drake shot it, didn’t seem to bother it much.”

“He could see it?”

“Yeah. It’s real.”

So that put it in the category of the mutants at the mall, and not the wig monsters and shadow people. I’d have to make a spreadsheet somewhere to keep track.

And don’t forget, just because Drake can see it, doesn’t mean another stranger from around town would. Lots of chances for a cop to get infected in this town. Ask Morgan Freeman .

Now there was another train of thought badly in need of derailing.

I said, “You got your lighter?”

John flicked his Zippo and cast a pool of weak yellowy light around us. I glanced around, saw that only a couple of the shelves contained books, worn paper backs with white fold lines. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, somebody named Terry Pratchett. Babylon 5 novelizations. The first, third and fourth Harry Potter novels. Jim must have figured three was the most he could allow without risking turning Amy to witchcraft.

The rest of the shelves were crammed with stuffed animals and junk. I saw a row of plates on little wire stands painted with the faces of Star Trek characters.

The creature on the ceiling didn’t react.

“Well,” I said, letting out a tired breath, “I was hoping it would attack your hand. I guess it’s the electricity it likes and not the light.”

John slapped the lighter off and said, “I thought about opening a window and just shooing it outside.”

“Uh, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” I thought for a moment, wondering vaguely if I had remembered to turn on the porch light back home. “Can it, like, pass through walls?”

“It hasn’t yet.”

“Follow me.”

We stepped out into the hall and I closed the door behind us.

“Okay,” I said. “As long as nobody ever opens that door…”

“Right. We’ll put a sign on it or something,” John said, the first problem solved. “The weird thing is down here. Check this shit.”

We went across the hall and he gestured into an ancient bathroom, complete with enormous cast-iron tub and a yellowing vanity with a cracked mirror. A steady stream of drips plunked from the faucet. A pair of scissors were wedged under one of the knobs, presumably to keep the valve from running freely. He punched the switch and the light flickered on, this one apparently unmolested.

On the floor was what looked like a clear plastic bag, filled with a marbled pink-and-yellow substance, about the size of one of those giant bags of dog food. There was writing on the side in an odd, angular font.

John said, “That lock was bolted from inside. We had to jimmy it to get in here. Water was running in the sink, toothbrush laying on the counter with dried toothpaste on it. That window is painted shut, so there was no way out of the room. So she was in here and then she wasn’t. And she never left the room. Right?”

The lock was one of those little slide bolts like you’d see on old public toilet stalls. The “jimmy” of the lock had been accomplished by smacking the door, probably with their shoulders, until the little metal loop on the door frame popped out of its screw holes. I leaned over and inspected the window. It looked to have been sealed long before I was born. Not that it made a difference; even if Amy had locked the door and crawled out of the window for some reason, dropping fifteen feet or so to the ice below, how would she have gotten the window shut behind her?

“Can you think of a way that somebody could get that door locked from the other side? Like if they snatched her and then slid the bolt closed behind them?”

What you’re asking , said the irritating voice in my head, is whether or not you could have done it, Dave .

Bullshit. Forget that. I was sure my bout of missing time, during which a bullet had left my gun, had nothing to do with this person who suddenly went missing on the same day. Two completely separate events. In fact, the event I was repressing was probably Amy coming to my house to borrow a bullet, and me calmly handing it to her.

“Sure,” said John, “you could probably get the bolt slid in there with the door closed. Give a guy twenty minutes, a bent wire coat hanger. Let him try it about forty times. What would be the point, though? Just to mess with us?”

I nudged the bag on the floor with my foot. Dense liquid, a bag of sludge. He said, “The writing on the bag, that’s a weight, right?”

“I guess.” I leaned down. “Forty-four-point-four-two kilograms.” I scratched my head. “I give up.”

“You, uh, think that’s her? In the bag?”

“Ew. No, let’s assume not for now. That’s just gross.”

“You think the jellyfish ate her?”

“Bones and all?”

“We’re talking about a tentacled flying lamp fucker, Dave. What are you prepared to call unlikely?”

I stepped out of the bathroom and wandered down the hall, passing a room stacked with cardboard boxes and some broken chairs. There was another door that had been nailed shut, that seemed to lead out into midair.

John said, “You know what that is? They used to build these old houses with doors that just led to a big drop, to fool burglars. They’d label that door TREASURY or something like that. The guy busts through the door and finds himself falling straight down. They’d put spikes or something down there. They used to call it an ‘Irish Elevator.’ ”

“Or, John, they tore a balcony off here years ago and just never bothered to take out the door.”

We passed a bare guest room that smelled of dust and old varnish, then at the end of the hall came to a door standing open with a band poster stuck to the inside, a group called VNV Nation.

I leaned into a chaotic bedroom, crammed with furniture and carpeted with wrinkled clothes. Posters on every wall, bands I’d never heard of and one of a shiny Angelina Jolie as the Tomb Raider. There was a very nice laptop computer, a Mac, propped up on a pillow on an unmade bed.

“The computer,” I asked, “it was like that when you got here?”

“Yeah. We didn’t touch a thing.”

On a nightstand off the bed there were four empty plastic bottles with orange juice labels and half a dozen brown prescription bottles. There was a box of Froot Loops on the floor, open.