A soft buzzing drew me to the window, and something dark moved into the shadows. Night fell quickly and early here. It was only five o’clock, and the sun had mostly set. Even so, I could detect it. Black on black as it slithered like liquid forward, something dangerous, something hungry.
“Maria…” It whispered.
I leapt back in a panic, scrambling away as the creature threw itself against the glass, rebounding with a loud bang. I screamed and sprinted to find Eric. He was in the kitchen. He dropped the pan he held when he heard me, “Maria! Are you okay?”
I gulped and nodded, “Something is out there, Eric, something not human.”
This declaration might not get much credibility from a normal person, but Eric and I had been through some pretty abnormal circumstances. Erci tensed, “Animal or vegetable?”
I shrugged, “Neither, it seemed made up of shadows.”
“One or many?”
“I think just one.”
Maybe the reason why the previous owner wanted to sell this house so much was the fact that it was a magnet for the impossible. Just a month before, Eric, his friend Tom, and I had been chased through my home by a rabid bunch of were-potatoes. And then there was a whole flock of strange dragon-like creatures that had landed on the roof one day. Tom and Eric were the only ones who got to see that. And don’t even get me started on that swamp monster in the backyard. Long story short, we’d done this a lot.
He mopped his forehead, exhaling. “Okay, so we just wait until it goes away. So far, none of these things have been very intelligent.”
I rolled my eyes, leaning against the counter, “How come these things only happen when my father isn’t here?”
Eric shrugged, “He did see that swamp monster for a moment, but he thinks it was just a bear.”
“It didn’t think like a bear.”
“It wasn’t even hairy!” Eric chuckled, “Don’t worry, we’ll be safe inside.”
I coughed, “Uh, Eric?”
“Yeah?”
“It talked, in my head.”
Eric gripped the counter. “What?”
There was more silence. I helped Eric pick up the pan. “Have you ever wondered why these things always come to this house? It can’t be a coincidence. Is there something here that draws them to it?”
Eric grabbed the phone on the counter and lifted it to his ear, testing it in case anything went wrong. It was dead. “Well, that could be a problem if anything goes wrong.”
“I don’t think it would be much help,” I said. “Imagine this, ‘oh hello 911, we have a barrage of villainous vegetables hunting us across our giant house, any chance you could come arrest them…”
I stopped my recitation when he heard a noise outside the window. He crossed the room and peered out into the gloom. Three human-shaped shadows hustled through the bushes. I reached out with my mind but felt nothing.
“Are those the plumbers?” I asked apprehensively.
Eric shrugged, “Why?”
“I don’t feel any thoughts coming from them.
Eric frowned once again at my use of telepathy, but decided not to say anything at the moment, “Okay, so do we warn them then? Or let them take care of…”
A knock sounded across the house. I was going to answer it, but remembered what Eric had said and crossed the room to hide behind a wall. Eric put the pan down and went to the door cautiously. It was a long way to walk, and he was probably being way too cautious. So whoever was at the door knocked twice more before he neared the entryway.
Before he grabbed the door handle, a gunshot split the silence of the night. The door shuddered violently, and Eric sprinted away as two more gunshots buried themselves into the door, which shook and bent like it was going to split. By the time Eric reached me, gasping, it did: emitting three shapes into the entryway. One had what appeared to be a bucket tied to a rope in the dim light. Another had a pickaxe, and the final one, the plumber from earlier, gripped a gun in his hand. He grinned crazily.
“Run, run, run!” Eric shouted, grabbing my arm and pulling me away down two halls and to the nine grid rooms. Shouts behind us alerted us that they’d ‘caught our scent’ and were chasing us down.
Eric threw open the first door and went in, slamming both of them shut. He came to a halt. I stepped through the next door, “This seems eerily familiar.”
Eric held up a finger. “But last time it was vegetables, not gun-toting men.”
Biting my lip, I pondered our situation. “I wonder what those guys want.”
“I find it best to get away from the men with weapons before asking any more questions.”
Shaking my head, I opened the next two doors, “No, something is off.”
He followed after me. “Like what?”
“That monster has something to do with this.”
A whisper from a foreign source crossed my mind, drowning out Eric’s response, “I have not eaten in a long time, human. Nothing of consequence.”
“You sound hungry then,” I thought back.
Eric was speaking, but the Nijax’s thoughts drowned him out, so I couldn’t hear his words. He had opened the next two doors and stood there motioning me into the sixth square to exit upstairs.
“Hunger, unlike a human, may know! I have come to devour your mind. I am the Nijax! I will hunt and I will find.”
Eric’s words came into focus and sound, “Maria! Can you even hear me?”
“It is behind this!” I responded, hurrying after him as I heard the sound of mindless men pounding down the hall to the nine grid, “It sent them!”
Eric rushed up the steps. “What sent who?”
The man with the bucket rounded the corner above. I let out a yelp, and Eric grabbed my shoulder, pulling us down as the bucket flew over our heads, crashing into the wall. The man at the head of the steps reeled it in and swung it forward. Eric rushed up the steps ahead of me, and the bucket smacked him into the wall. Whincing, he got to his feet and grabbed the rope as the man began to reel it in again. Pulling hard, he dragged the man down the steps towards us and clocked him over the head with the bucket as he did. He did this all calmly, like it was an everyday occurrence.
I followed him up the steps as we moved on. Eric leaned against a doorway. “He was using a bucket in combat! What kind of psychos are these?”
“The dangerous kind,” I answered him.
“They knew where we were going,” Eric said more to himself than anyone.
I nodded in agreement, “That thing must have told them. The Nijax.”
“You keep talking about this thing. What is it?”
“It said it was hunting minds, it said it wanted to eat mine. I think it ate the minds of those men.”
“That would explain a lot,” Eric said, continuing on as something behind us mounted the steps, “but what about that plumbing conversation? Why not just break in?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a monster expert!”
The two other men clomped up the stairs behind us. Eric dodged into a small side room, empty except for a large hole in the floor that was yet to be fixed. The owner marketed this house as a fixer-upper, but it seemed more like a DIY project sometimes. The two men searched through the rooms, making tons of noise but not getting many results. I was starting to relax when I felt the cold presence. It moved stealthily through the corridors. It sniffed at the air; it was searching for me. I didn’t have any way to hide myself, I thought, panic welling up in my chest. I motioned to Eric. He crossed over to me, “What is it?”
“It can sense me, I’m sure of it.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, so he opted for a change in conversation. “We need to get out of this building and make our way to Thomas’s house. We can call your father.”
Before the conversation progressed further, the door fell inwards, and the man with the gun stalked in. His eyes rolled crazily in his head. His skin looked clammy, and his facial expression froze in a grin. He raised the weapon at Eric and squeezed the trigger, at least he tried to. In that moment, I forced every bit of mental power I had into that empty shell of a man. It was a chaotic battle, my mental power versus the Nijax. I had an advantage. The Nijax had its mental power split across itself and three pawns. I lost control of even my body as I pulled the strings of the thing before us, so I had much more to work with.
The man lurched forward through the hole, and I barely had time to disconnect myself from him before I was rolling forward as well off the edge. I caught a jutting out board, watching as he man crashed to the floor ten feet below. It wasn’t that far of a fall, but he had toppled headfirst.
I held my hand up, Eric reached down and grabbed it to help me up, but the board I grabbed snapped. Falling heavily to the floor below, I found that the man was not as hurt as I had expected. I jumped up to get away, but he grabbed my ankle. I kicked him a couple of times, then sprinted away as he struggled to his feet. Leaning in an alcove on a service stairway behind the kitchen near where I had landed, I waited, catching my breath.
I tried formulating a plan and hoped Eric would come down after me. Maybe he was taking the stairs. I smiled wryly at the thought that my father would probably have to believe us if he came home to a smashed front door and three men with weapons.
“Maria,” the voice called softly in my head.
I swallowed and kept moving down a hallway towards the front door. My best option was to get out of the house.
“Eric!” I called out with my mind, but he didn’t respond. I started to sweat. Why did everything seem to be going wrong suddenly?
“If you wish to see your family again, I’d suggest you come and find me, young one with such a strong mind.”
I gulped in air, feeling a little nauseous, I thought back quickly at this beast, “You are lying!”
“That’s right, Maria! I’m already outside, go out the back patio, and we can run to Thomas’s house!” That was Eric. He reached out to me from somewhere in the house, and I could detect the lie. He wanted me to leave him behind.
“I await you on the roof, young one.”
The voices faded away, and I leaned against the wall, gasping, and a sharp pain flew up my chest. I felt like I’d been thrown adrift in a dark sea. As much as I thought Eric was childish at times, he always seemed to know what to do, and now I couldn’t put one thought on top of another.
I ground my teeth and hit my head with my fist, feeling like I floundered in this dark ocean, looking to grab onto an idea, a plan, some way to survive. Instead, I opted for sitting down against the wall. I had a sudden flash of memory, of Eric and Thomas, wielding nothing but fire pokers, charging down to meet a horde of man-hungry potatoes. I stood up; no way I was going to do worse than a pair of idiotically brave boys. Marching up a flight of stairs, I grabbed an ancient poker from a long disused fireplace on the second floor. Ideas? Plans? They were overrated. I knew one thing. And one thing only: I would save Eric and not die; that seemed enough.
I followed the telepathic signals mindlessly towards the roof. The house had three floors, the third floor was only one room, and it was a sort of greenhouse on the roof. My father had been trying to get into it, but we couldn’t find the entrance. Now I found it easily following this deadly crumb trail left for me by an ancient mind-eater: kind of weird. The secret door was in the back of a closet with a staircase going up. I marched up heavily and entered the small green house. I climbed out of a missing pane of glass and stood carefully on the vast plateau of a roof.
In the darkness of the night, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew they would come. I paced forward and stood. Three lanterns sparked into life. I stood, glaring at the three corpse-like men and the shifting shadowy being, no Eric.
“Where is my cousin!?” I demanded my voice echo across the roof.
“Why would he be here?”
I gulped for air as the stuff around me seemed to grow more solid.
The Nijax mocked me, sending a telepathic signal sounding like Eric’s, “What? You thought the boy was here? You thought that if I did have him, I would leave him alive? I now have two minds on which I can feed. I will leave him just enough of his to make a good Priajax, one of my servants. You, however, I will drain every drop from!”
“Maria!” Eric yelled. He sprinted up behind me and came to stand in front of me, pushing me back. He yelled at the Nijax, “You, get out of here, leave! Go away! Largo de aquí!”
The Nijax let out a hiss of anger, roiling like a storm cloud. I pulled on Eric: “We need to run!”
Then the sort of cat-like shape struck out like a serpent. It only made it halfway to us, but something came out of Eric to meet it in the middle, and he was pulled forward, gasping and clawing at himself until he lay still at the shadowy shape’s feet.
“You monster!” I shouted, not caring how stupid it sounded. My eyes began to fill with tears despite myself, “What are you!? You are just an empty hole! All you do is devour!” I cast my stupid poker away and stepped forward.
“I am the shadows,” it thought towards me, “no matter what happens, no matter the cost, I will survive.”
I stepped closer, “Maybe it is time I stopped you then, you are a pathetic life form, something that only lives to continue its own existence, and you are afraid, afraid of death, so you bring it on others.
The Nijax hissed and arched back, “liessss!”
“No hiding from me,” I thought in its brain, “I’m a telepath!”
Eric stirred slightly, and he pushed himself up to his knees. The Nijax seemed not to have actually fed on him yet. I gasped with relief and looked straight into Eric’s eyes.
“Eric,” I said aloud, respecting his anti-telepathy moods even now, “do you trust me?”
Eric paused. I’d asked him this question once before when we first met, before I betrayed the same trust he had placed in me.
He nodded, “Yes, Maria, I trust you.”
“Enough!” the Nijax screeched in my head. The Priajaxes began to move, coming out of their stone-like postures. One cocked his gun as the Nijax curled up into a smoggy cloud, ready to strike again and finish what it started for good.
“If you trust me, Eric,” I said, “give in, don’t fight the Nijax.”
“But, but, Maria, I…”
The Priajaxes clomped towards me, “Do it,” was all I said. Eric set his jaw and nodded.
The Nijax struck. I could see it held back before merely snapping him up aimlessly. Now it smashed with all its fury; every drop of this strange creature’s evil life was forcing itself down on him, crushing him. Eric, though, did not fight. He let it wash over him. I sensed no resistance in him. When the Nijax had nearly devoured him, his skin becoming pale but no other indication of the mental battle I alone could see, I attacked.
I drove my mental force, seemingly puny against the Nijax, I pushed myself into Eric’s un-fighting body, winding past the Nijax up into itself. It had no defense for something like this, no defense against the willing victim. I felt for its control of the Priajaxes and cut that, I pushed myself all the way into it, filling it with every ounce of everything I was, my essence replacing its own, sending the Nijax far away, screaming in pain, yes, but also in fear.
“No!” the Nijax screamed in its head, my head, the Priajaxes’ heads, we were all one consciousness. “No! You cannot! You must not! I beg you, have mercy on me, I cannot die! I will survive! I will be strong!”
I gave one more shove, extending myself larger and bigger, sending the monster of darkness back away, far from any place mapped by man. I killed it.
• • • • •
Something touched my face. I sat up with a gasp, my lungs filling with clean, pure air. Eric stood over me, relieved. “You were barely breathing!”
I glanced around. I wasn’t on the roof. I lay on a couch in one of the numerous rooms with just an old, dusty couch. Then I saw the grandfather clock and the other cuckoo clocks above it and realized I was in the clock room (as Eric had named it), close to that exit onto the roof.
My father stood gravely over me as well. He listened as Eric continued. “We couldn’t hear you breathing, but your heart was beating, and you fogged a mirror.”
“I guess I was in a weird non-breathing coma,” I said, “not sure how all this telepathy stuff works myself.”
“Which is the main reason I said not to use it!” My father began, but stopped himself before he got too angry. He went back to pacing instead.
I looked at Eric and then at my father. Eric shrugged, “He got here right about the time the Nijax was about to crush me; he thought he saw some sort of flash up on the roof, so he rushed up there only to find me bringing you down.”
“I would have appreciated it if you hadn’t been so secretive,” my father said, once again forcing himself not to be angry.
Eric sat down on the other side of the couch as I sat up. My father turned to face both of us. “Okay, I’m sorry, but we have a lot to talk about.”
“I’m sorry, uncle,” Eric said, putting his hands on his knees, “I didn’t think you’d believe the part about were-vegetables, and I thought you’d be mad if Thomas and I knew about Maria.”
“Thomas knows too?” my father asked in a long-suffering way.
There was more silence.
My father sat on a chair he had dragged in front of the couch. “Okay, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve messed up, and I’m sorry. We’ve all messed up here: I probably the most. I was afraid that Eric might be scared of you, like so many were, or that if he told someone that, they would come and try to hurt you. I didn’t want them to take you away to some kind of freaky prison. I wanted to protect you, but I guess all I did was throw you in a different prison.”
He sighed heavily, giving up, not bothering to ask for my forgiveness. And suddenly, I saw a whole new side of my father. I saw that he had done all of this for me, not for himself. Not to protect himself from being the man with the freak daughter, but to protect his daughter from danger. I got up, crossed the room, and hugged him tightly. The three of us, bits and pieces of a family, were all coming together. No more distrust, no more anger. And that was better than beating a Nijax any day.