Unexpected sponginess underfoot made John stumble as he was plunged into darkness. Putting out a hand to steady himself, his fingers brushed against wood and wallpaper that turned slimy beneath his hand, and he pulled his hand away and wiped it on his trouser leg. Uselessly, it transpired, because his hand was completely dry as soon as he removed it from the wall.
Up ahead, he could make out Deidre and Flint walking briskly, their strides sure and easy compared to John’s ungainly gait. Despite the pitch blackness of the passageway they were clearly visible, albeit with a muted, pearlescent quality, as if he was seeing them on a very old, slightly out-of focus television set. They almost seemed to glow, but in some strange way that didn’t extend any illumination beyond their own bodies. John could already feel a headache coming on as his brain tried to reconcile all the impossible things it was witnessing. He kept thinking he saw flashes of too many teeth and Mitch’s strange, dark eyes in the shadows. But those were probably just his eyes playing tricks on him, trying to see something in the absence of anything.
Hopefully.
“Can he— that is, that thing. Can it follow us through here?” His voice sounded strangely loud in his ears, but muffled at the same time. As if someone had run white noise through his words like a thread pulled through fabric, then amped up the volume of the result past ‘11’.
Flint and Deidre paused, the lanky man shooting an enquiring glance at the little old lady. Deidre gave a most unladylike scoff and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Of course not. Quite apart from its apparent physicality, I would not allow it to come into my house. The very idea!”
“He’s here, though,” Flint said, gesturing towards where John was stumbling blindly along. A spark of pain flared behind John’s left eye with every syllable crashing into his ears, and his breathing came in ragged wheezes. He felt as though he was running submerged in wet concrete rather than air.
“Of course. I let him in; this is my space, after all.”
John paused, clutching his knees with hands that shook. Nausea twisted in the pit of his stomach, moving in time to the sharp, stabbing pain that had lodged in his brain like a tent spike, but he’d caught the important information from that conversation despite the haze of discomfort.
“Then we should... stop for a second... and plan how to get... it to leave... the bank,” he managed to squeeze the words out through gritted teeth, staring blindly down at where he really hoped the ground was. He couldn’t even see his feet, swallowed up by the darkness, only feel the tingling sensation of pins and needles prickling beneath his skin.
“Don’t stop moving, dearie. We can talk while we walk.”
“Just... need to catch my breath...” The glowing forms of Deidre and Flint drifted soundlessly closer, or maybe they did make a sound and it was simply downed out by the rattling, wet noise of John’s breathing. He did his best to take slow, deep breaths, inhale, exhale, but his head kept spinning regardless.
“Wouldn’t recommend it, sheriff. Air’s much nicer outside - this muck won’t do you no good.”
“I really must insist we keep going. You can’t stay here.” The ground beneath John tremmbled, nearly knocking him down, and when he reached out blindly for the walls his hand sank into warm, tacky ooze. It took more effort than it should to pull it back out, and when he tried to take another step his feet were heavy and slow. John really hoped the wet, sucking noise that accompanied his step was just his imagination.
“Where...?” He trailed off with a wheezing gasp, his lungs too painful to manage the end of the sentence. All he could focus on was putting one foot in front of the other and the dizzying lights dancing across his vision.
“It’s not really a ‘where’. More like a ‘was’. We’re in between - yes, that’s it dearie, keep going.”
“Between... what?”
“Just between. We, that is to say Flint and myself—“
“And the city-slicker.”
John nodded blindly, their words alternately drifting through cotton wool filling his ears and brain and hammering further spikes into the space behind his eyes. He tasted blood and peanut butter toast.
“Yes, and Mack of course, we are most real in between spaces. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of people like you, John.”
The darkness was creeping in at the edges of his vision, blackness hungrily stretching filmy gauze over the edges of Flint and Deidre as John stared uncomprehendingly at them. He knew they were speaking words, but his brain couldn’t seem to parse exactly what they were saying over the buzzing in his ears.
“Oh dear. I think he might be particularly sensitive, Flint. We might need to get him back where he belongs. Now.”
As she spoke, Deidre reached out and began feeling along the wall. Unlike John, she and Flint could see the hallway stretching away in both directions. Not how it had been in real life, of course, but things rarely were in these spaces. They couldn’t be. And that meant, of course...
Her fingers closed on a hidden doorknob. For a moment her old bones betrayed her as she strained to open the mechanism, old spindles and bolts made stiff by worry, age and unreality, but at last, with a click and a thunk, the knob turned and the door swung open.
John’s breathing eased as sudden light spilled across the corridor, revealing thin, worn carpet the colour of long use and few washes. Pushing himself up from a floor that was suddenly, definitely, only a floor and firmly anchored to the earth beneath it, he stumbled out of the darkness and into the bank’s sterile embrace. An abstract art piece, all greys and muted browns and ochres, greeted him on the opposite wall, hanging lop-sided on it hook. When he turned around, its twin was the only thing that met his eyes, the only sign of the door having ever existed being a small key Deidre tucked back into her dress’ bodice. Well, that and the fact he was now in one of the first floor halls with a faint buzzing in his ears.
“We need a plan.”
The words simply solidified what had been running through all their minds, making it real, forcing it to take on a shape. Unfortunately, not the shape of a ready-made plan, but a shape nonetheless.
John rummaged through his utility belt, a frown creasing his brow for a moment before he triumphantly extracted his mobile. Several mints came with it, tumbling onto the floor and rolling away across the carpet.
“That thing has got to be cursed. And if we can break it or disrupt it...” He trailed off as he scrolled through his contacts, raising the phone to his ear.
Beside John, Flint shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again, shooting nervous glances down the hallway. Even when he’d touched the gem, he’d been able to feel something, a sickly, creeping sensation crawling up his back and raising the hairs on the nape of his neck. The feeling had gone in the safety of the in between space, but now he felt uneasy. The air seemed charged with tension, like a bar just before someone threw the first punch. Just... waiting.
“Russ, oh thank goodness. Look, I’m having a little bit of an emergency...”
Flint tapped Deidre on the shoulder, resisting the urge to crouch slightly in order to avoid looming over her. He’d done it once before and his shins still ached at the memory. Different ideas of politeness, apparently, as Deidre had pointed out as he’d lain on the floor, curled up and clutching his legs.
“Since this is your place and all, can you just force the vermin to vamoose, ma’am? Tell it to hit the trail and take a hike?”
A momentary flash of emotion flitted across Deidre’s face - pain, sadness, regret, gone too fast for Flint to be sure. “It’s not mine any more. Just as it’s not yours or Mack’s.”
“No, I don’t have any rue. No, I can’t just ‘go buy some’, Russ, this is a spiritual emergency!”
“It weren’t ever ours, though. Hell, t’weren’t even a bank when I came through. But you own the place, built it.”
“But as you say, it’s a bank now. No more mine than the spaces in between.” Deidre reached out to brush fingertips over the walls, a flash of old green wallpaper rising up through the bland beige paintwork under her touch, only to vanish as she lifted her hand. Nothing more than a memory.
“Hyssop? What the heck is hyssop?!”
The two turned to watch John as he started to pace, free hand waving as he struggled to contain his growing panic. Flint’s eyes kept darting back to the ends of the corridor. His fingers tapped out a nervous rhythm on the butt if his pistol, unsure if he’d need it. Hoping he wouldn’t.
“I’m at work, of course I didn’t bring my selenite wand with me. Who even— oh. Yeah, well I work at a bank. Boss’d go apoplectic if I turned up with it.”
Something made a tiny scratching noise near Flint’s feet. He looked down as Deidre’s thin fingers closed on his, stopping his anxious tapping and holding his hand tightly.
A mint rolled through Flint’s boot and continued down the corridor.
“Okay, okay, yeah. Right. I think I can—“ The thin, distant sound of a scream reached their ears and John paled, words dying in his throat. He glanced at his watch. Only just gone six - Mitch wouldn’t have cleared out the customers before coming down to check on him.
“Thanks Russ, look I’ve got to go—!” He gabbled the words even as he fumbled the end call button, his feet already moving towards the stairs.
“I’ll go have a peek downstairs, get the lay of the land,” Flint said, letting himself lose tangibility and drift downwards. The concrete and metal skeleton of the building felt strange as it passed through him, although the rising sense of nausea might also have been caused by approaching whatever had come out of the gem. He gritted his teeth and willed himself to fall faster.
John and Deidre barely had time to acknowledge Flint’s words before he had slipped beneath the carpet, so they focussed on running. John slammed hard into a wall, knocking the breath from him as he misjudged the corner and rattled the various art pieces hanging on the walls. Evening sunlight streaming through the window beside him blinded him as he turned, and he blinked away the afterimages as quickly as he could.
“Oh fuck.”
“Mind your language, dear— oh good Lord, what a terrible gibfaced scoundrel!” Deidre screeched to a halt as she caught up with John, only to take a hurried step backwards as she caught sight of Mitch lumbering down the corridor towards them. Each footfall raised dull grey clouds of something that was unlikely to be as innocuous as dust, the thudding sound of impact echoing dully through the corridor.
Mitch’s face was fixed in a terrifying rictus, the mockery of a grin displaying teeth that would have seemed more at home in some deep-sea monstrosity than between too-thin human lips stretched wide across a pale face. Black lines like veins stretched from the corners of his eyes and peeked up from beneath the collar of his incongruously immaculate security uniform, and the faint buzzing in John’s ears intensified as Mitch came closer. The radio on Mitch’s shoulder looked fused with his skin, glistening with an organic, oily sheen where it protruded from the side of his neck.
John took a step back. Met the wall.
A wet grunt came from Mitch, and John saw his muscles tense and ripple. As his erstwhile friend’s stance shifted, John made to turn. If he could keep ahead of him, John knew, he could circle back around and get down the stairs, help the customers if they needed it. Or he could get out the fire escape, if he wasn’t quite fast enough to keep ahead for that long. But he had a good fifteen feet of head-start, and he was quick. Confident.
John blinked. A thunderous noise, like a thousand feet hammering the ground in an all-out sprint, pounded into his ears and Deidre gave a horrified shriek beside him. The buzzing in his ears was impossibly loud, and he could feel Mitch’s hot breath on his face, see beads of sweat on his face as the thing careened towards him with impossible speed.
Flint poked his head through the first floor carpet as Deidre screamed, and his head snapped around to the direction of the sound just in time to see the thing from the vault slam into John. All thoughts of the people panicking below, the doors that wouldn’t open, vanished as John’s mouth opened in a shocked ‘o’ and he flew backwards out of the window.
For a moment there was only the sound of heavy breathing and the crackle of breaking glass. Then, with a slow inevitability, the creature turned its eyes on Deidre and Flint.