He comes

It begins

It was still dark when Jake turned his bicycle into Snoggles Lane.

He'd been delivering the mail out here in the Burbs for ... he thought for a moment ... the last 23 years, and he was beginning to think he'd like to use a car rather than the bike. Or even a horse. But a horse wouldn't help much when it rained, which it seemed to do far too often these days.

He parked his bike in the driveway of Max and Matilda's place and walked up to their door. It was too early to ring the bell, so he just dropped the box -- or, rather, placed it gently -- on their doorstep. It seemed to have a faint green glow in the pre-dawn darkness.

Jake was happy to get rid of the thing. It was so light it seemed like it must be empty. Maybe it was a joke of some sort. But that glow -- that bothered him. That, and the feel of the thing -- it felt cold when he touched it, so cold it stuck to his fingers, but it also seemed to burn. He noticed the burning now, after he set the box down. His fingers were burning, worse than when he had the box in his hands. And something felt wet on his face, running down his cheeks. It was dripping on his shirt -- was it blood? In the darkness, he couldn't tell.

He stumbled down the steps, staggered past his bicycle, and tottered unsteadily across the road and into the woods.

An hour later, the sun rose on the scene. Jake's bicycle was still parked in the driveway.

Max

It was hot in the room. But Max lay in the darkness, shivering, the blankets clutched around him. The dream had bothered him -- bothered him a lot. It was all about that damn box.

The box -- he had thought it was his new sneakers, sent by Express Mail from Toronto, but it had been empty when he opened it. He'd been upset. Angry. He'd written a nasty note to DirtCheapShoes.com telling them what he thought of their service.

But then that dream ... in the dream, the box hadn't been empty. In the dream, it had been heavy, heavy as lead, and when he opened it, it was packed, packed to the top, completely filled with eyeballs. And they had all been looking at him.

And now, he lay in the darkness, afraid to go back to sleep, sleep which he knew would be filled with eyeballs.

And then he heard it. The silence. His closet, where he kept his gerbils -- it was totally silent. That wasn't right. The little furry ones were never silent this time of night.

Max set bolt upright and stared in the direction of the closet. And the darkness in front of him, between him and the closet, began curdling. Thicker, thinner, and then sticky, with lumps ... he tried to scream, but no sound would come. He tried to get out of bed, but he was tangled in the sheet; he couldn't move. And the darkness ... the darkness was everywhere...

Matilda

It was so lovely this time of year, with trees and flowers and chirping birds; Matilda loved it. She had the shades up and two of the kitchen windows thrown open as she got some breakfast for herself, and laid out some things for Max. It was the weekend, so he'd probably be late getting up; he'd appreciate it if the coffee maker was already set up and the fixings for pancakes were on the counter.

She heard a heavy step from the next room. Max appeared in the doorway, moving slowly, one slow step at a time.

"Oh hi, Max! Up early this morning?"

"I ... am ... up ... yes," said Max.

"Hey, let's do something this weekend -- want to go visit a park? Maybe a swamp walk? How about something romantic?"

"I ... would ... like ... to ... stay ... here ... and ... eat ... you."

"Well, I guess that's sort of romantic," said Matilda, uncertainly.

Max walked slowly across the room toward her, staggering a little as he made his way around the table. As he got closer, he opened his mouth. Matilda looked inside.

The neighbors 300 yards away heard the screaming.

Luena

Luena sat in the waiting room, hating the radio. She was trying to read, and the book had just gotten to an exciting scene. Jeneau, the protagonist, had fallen off her horse and was paralyzed. The physician attending her was her mother's lover, and he was in the middle of a delicate operation to fix Jeneau's spine and give her back her legs, when Jeneau's father burst into the operating room, bellowing and waving a loaded shotgun -- but she simply couldn't focus on the text. The radio kept derailing her thoughts.

It was a news program of some sort -- a stern sounding woman was going on interminably about some politician somewhere who had died in a train wreck, after which they'd found he'd been stealing from the Treasury, and he'd had 500 pounds of gold bars in his luggage. Luena hated politicians almost as much as she hated waiting room radios.

But then the woman's voice changed. It grew deeper, more resonant, and louder - the sound almost seemed to curdle in Luena's ears.

The light in the room turned dim and gray -- which made no sense, since the lights were all fluorescent, which can't really either dim or turn colors. The light from the window dimmed, too, and seemed to curdle -- it turned gray and lumpy. Yet there had not been a cloud in the sky when Luena came in.

The voice on the radio grew deeper still, and deteriorated into a meaningless buzz. The light from the window vanished, as though the Sun had been switched off.

Luena went to the window and looked out. Stared out, rather.

She began to scream uncontrollably.

George

This is not a herd of gerbils.

George read the report for the second time and then tossed it in the recycling bin.

"Hey hey what're you doing? You can't do that with 911 stuff, they'll have our hides!" Wouldn't you know it would be that moment when Captain Brenner would be walking by George's desk.

George sighed and walked over to the recycling bin. "Somebody called 911 to report a herd -- that's what they said, a herd -- of killer gerbils was trying to break in their front door. They said the house was surrounded. And they needed help right away. Because they're surrounded by killer gerbils." He handed the report to Brenner.

Brenner wrinkled his nose as he read the report. There wasn't much to it besides what George had said. The phone call had ended in the middle of a sentence. The last line of the transcript was "Oh they're bray" and then nothing.

"Sounds more like donkeys than gerbils. Gerbils don't bray. But we gotta check it out. Remember when that teenager got cornered by badgers up in Juneo, and the 911 operator just laughed at them? Something like that happened here, we'd all be on the street. So take Merkins and get out there."

Merkins

Merkins stopped the prowl car in front of what they'd been calling the "Gerbil house". He and George just stared at it for a couple minutes. "Shit," said George.

There wasn't any front door. In fact, there weren't any front windows, either. The entire front wall looked like it had been kicked in by some celestial ninja. Finally George broke the silence. "You know, this doesn't look much like gerbil work to me." He got out of the car.

The lawn was muddy, with a number of puddles scattered around. The puddles didn't look right -- they were red. Not just the color of red mud, but crimson red. George started across the lawn.

He stepped in a puddle.

His foot vanished into the puddle, followed by his leg, followed by a yell as the rest of him disappeared. A moment later he reappeared, yelled, flailed his arms, spattered red goo in a wide circle, and sank again.

Merkins crept up to the side of the puddle, which, aside from a few ripples, looked just like all the other puddles. It was about three feet across. He poked it with a stick. It appeared to be about an inch deep. The puddle-stuff on the stick looked (and smelled) exactly like blood.

Merkins took a deep breath and reached into the puddle. With luck, maybe he could pull George out.

But his hand just hit mud. The puddle was, indeed, only about an inch deep. George, Merkins thought, was much taller than an inch, and could not possibly fit in that puddle. He wondered what he'd put in the report he was sure they'd make him file about this.

Feeling in need of some reinforcement before he did anything further, he went back to the prowl car. There was a box of donuts on the front seat. It was new; they'd stopped at Bernie's Doughy Oh's on the drive up from the station. Merkins opened the box and looked inside.

He began screaming.

Captain Brenner

Archimedes Brenner had always hated his first name. But right now, he was hating the stack of reports on his desk much more than he'd ever hated his name. Like his namesake (famous for inventing calculus, then losing the rights to Newton due to a messed up copyright) he liked it when things made sense, and couldn't tolerate it when they didn't.

And right now, they were making far less than no sense at all.

As he was reaching for the first of the reports to read it yet again, an indescribably disgusting noise came from the hall. It sounded a little like a frost giant with pneumonia was blowing its nose, using a huge sheet of half inch thick lead plate for a Kleenex.

Brenner went to his office door and looked down the hall. Bert from the motor pool was staggering toward him. There was blood running down his face -- it looked like Bert's eyes were bleeding. Something wiggly was emerging from his left ear. In a voice that sounded the way a pile of burning truck tires smells, Bert bellowed, "He comes!"

"Oh no you don't!" said Brenner, as he slammed the door and backed across his office.

But as he sat -- or fell -- into his swivel chair (one of the perks of being a captain was a chair with a cushion on it), the air near the door started curdling. And then boiling. And then a rip started, and something started to come through.

"Oh no you don't!" yelled Brenner, opening the lower left desk drawer.

An appendage of some sort poked through the hole in the air. Brenner supposed it must be a head, since there seemed to be a leering hole of some sort in it which might be a mouth. Between that, and the seven or eight things that might have been eyes, it certainly looked even less like anything else it could have been than it did like a head.

"We here dedicated to that nation shall not dedicate, we should be here reprinted, so conceived, and dead, who here resolve that these honored dead shall have a firm writing surface!" the thing bellowed.

Brenner groaned and fell back in his chair. "Begone, foul chaos demon!" he cried.

But the thing ignored him. "And providing the Archbist who had ate of a French priest!" it leered, winking several of its eyes.

"This stops here!" said Brenner, in a softer but deeper tone.

"Lagrange's equations of mice are ubiquitous!" giggled the thing, and several more feet of its slithery twisty body emerged from the hole in the air.

Then it added, rather as an afterthoguht, "Firearms are equipped with escape tunnels!"

"You shall not pass!" cried Brenner, fumbling in his desk drawer for ... he wasn't sure what. Something a little more intense than his service pistol was going to be needed, that seemed certain.

"Mice are equipped with inductances and virtually all men are now available!" it replied, and four more feet of it emerged from the hole.

"This stops, right now," declared Brenner, with more confidence than he felt.

"In 1912, the abomination himself, also paired with Ubisoft and the injector!" replied the demon, and its first pair of tentacles emerged from the hole. They whipped around the room, chaotically feeling everywhere, perhaps in the hope of randomly snagging Brenner.

Brenner jammed his whole arm into the desk drawer. There was something here he needed, he was sure of it.

"TSR, however, were powered by the track and still need a sunken city. (citation needed!) Derleth's scheme, 'Great Cthulhu and time drivers,' that we can not have eaten mice with six!" screeched the demon, and all four of the tentacles which had emerged from the hole coiled around Brenner's waist. He groaned as his hand closed on something pointed in the back of the drawer. A metal star? Too late, he thought.

"Drivers race cars!" cried the demon, in triumph.

Brenner stood up. In a stern voice, he intoned, "Fool! You have at last spoken sense! And so you lose your power -- demon of Chaos, now you face the Law!"

With that he held the star of Lathander high, spoke the ancient words, and blinding light filled the office. The demon shriveled into a heap of old rubber bands on the corner of his desk. The rip in in the air was nothing more than a haze of cigarette smoke which had drifted in from the hall.

I always knew my Larping experience would be good for something, thought Brenner.