Cold: Chapter Sixteen
In which you meet Angela Martin, werewolf hunter turned werewolf, and...things...happen.
Just a quick reminder that you’re reading horror. Reader discretion is advised with this chapter.
Chapter 16
“So that’s where we’re at,” Clyve said. And now Angela Martin had the whole story: the sacrifice on the beach, the cult’s cryptic warning to me, my adventures in the Dreamlands interrupted by Nyarlathotep just as I was getting somewhere with the investigation there.
We sat at a table in a bar that I was given to understand the werewolves used as a kind of headquarters. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea of werewolves, let alone werewolves as the “good guys” who hung out at a bar. But here we were, and I had to admit, if werewolves had a bar, this would be the bar that werewolves would have. If I were to describe the décor, it wouldn’t be “trying to look like a dive bar,” it would be “Dive Bar” in capital letters. Mismatched tables and chairs scattered on a stone floor sticky with old beer. A small stage in one corner. Walls of dark stained wood. Neon beer logos, tacky pictures of hot women on the walls. An ancient jukebox that still had CDs in it. Two pool tables scuffed and stained with miscellaneous liquor spills. And the bar itself – long, dark wood, lined with hard metal stools, the back crammed with liquor bottles.
The bartender – that was a different story. A platinum buzz cut over eyes that looked like they’d seen worlds begin and end and begin again. She had stories to tell, and I wanted to hear them. But not now.
“What I don’t get is…why onyx?” Angela mused.
Angela Martin, former werewolf hunter, now werewolf – now that was another story I had to hear. Again, not the time. Dark hair cut short with bangs, fierce eyes, a nose sharp enough to open a bottle, and a mouth that hadn’t laughed in a long time.
“I dunno,” I said, “but I think it’s a key to this whole thing. Maybe not the key, but definitely a key.”
Angela nodded and sipped at her drink, which I recognized as the noxious lemon-scented petroleum these werewolves called the Shine, because of the pun.
“Well, I think Clyve here was right. We need to go raid Lovecraft’s bookstore. The good news is that the pack bought the bookstore after…well, after he died,” Angela explained. Another story I had to hear. But still not the time.
“I took a ‘know thy enemy’ approach,” said Edwin, the werewolf pack’s alpha that I’d been introduced to at the beginning of all of this, approaching the table. “Sorry, couldn’t help overhear. Truth is, Angela’s been a pretty invaluable resource since she joined us.”
“Had to be,” she said. “Had to make up for…all of it.” Here she looked down at the table and got quiet.
Edwin put a meaty paw on her shoulder. “You have.”
The beer I’d been drinking made its way through my pipes in the usual way, sending a signal that it might be time to visit the restroom. I excused myself and headed to the back, where an all-gender restroom waited behind a scratched metal door.
I opened the door and entered the bathroom. A shadow sat on the battered metal sink, perched there. I saw its outline, but it wasn’t until I turned on the bathroom light that I got a good look at the thing.
Or the thing got a good look at me.
Sitting like the statue of some strange idol…it looked a little like a child with pitch black skin, and the eyes…so many eyes. Eyes covered its face, its shoulders, its arms, its hands, its chest, its legs, its feet, eyes that glittered with ice, eyes that stared. The child crouched on the sink, silent, staring ahead, staring at me.
My breath caught in my throat and I stood frozen against the closed bathroom door, face to face with this abomination, with this impossible creature, with all of its eyes.
In the space where the creature’s mouth should have been sat a large red eye, and I watched in fascination and terror as that eye split, horizontally, in half. The eye smiled, and viscous fluid dribbled down the creature’s chin. And in the space where the eye split, where the liquid dripped, a space of pure nothing, of black, impenetrable darkness, a reaching, endless void that pulled at me. I stumbled forward, toward that eye, toward that mouth, toward that hole, and I felt myself losing control, losing myself, losing any conscious notion of who I was, where I was, why I was there. Static, black static, static made of millions of tiny, microscopic eyes, filled my vision, and I heard chanting, and I recognized it as the chanting of the Cold One’s cult at the coast, right before the sacrifice.
And that recognition probably saved my life. I regained a tiny sliver of control, forced myself to stumble backwards, to find purchase on the bathroom door, to feel the reality around me and reject the void, to stare at the hole in the ragged middle of that horrible, dripping eye-mouth, to push any thought of giving in away from my mind.
“You can’t have me,” I gasped at the creature.
“We will,” came a voice made of a million screams, a child’s voice but also the voice of all of the cult’s sacrifices in their horrible dying moments when the liquid helium poured agony into their bodies as they writhed and froze.
I blinked, and the creature vanished, and I found myself, shaking and hyperventilating, standing against the bathroom door.
“Fuck me,” I said after a minute. I recovered my senses, did my business, washed my hands and face, and left the bathroom.
“You ok, Ken? Been in there a bit,” Clyve said. “Whoa…” he added after seeing my face, I assumed. “You look like—”
“I’ve seen a ghost?” I said. “Doesn’t begin to cover it.”
I did my best to describe what I’d seen on the sink, though my voice shook and I struggled with the specifics. That nightmare child would stay with me for a while.
“Holy shit,” Clyve said. He helped me sit and got me a fresh drink, something hard this time. I shot it back and let its warmth dull the edges of what I’d just seen.
“What do you think it means?” Clyve asked.
“That we need to hurry up and beat these guys,” I said.
“Yeah,” Angela said.
And then, slowly enough that I could see every moment of it happening, Angela’s entire body dissolved. I watched in horror as the skin of her face sloughed off, as the muscles beneath liquefied, as the bones turned to dust, as the matter that had once been her head collapsed into her neck, as her neck collapsed into her torso, as her torso billowed downward, blood and viscera seeping onto the floor, until what had once been Angela lay in an undefined puddle of gore.
Clyve and I both screamed and jumped back from the table.
“Want her back?” a voice said from behind us. I turned to find the bartender, her neck bent at an unnatural angle, a Joker grin torn into her face, blood spilling down her cheeks, her teeth visible through the tear. She spoke as a puppet speaks.
“Stop this investigation right now. Tell me you’re going to stop, and I’ll give her back. And I’ll give this one back too, and she won’t even have a scar.”
The bartender then laughed, a shrill, psychotic laugh, and I knew exactly who the puppet master was.
Next Chapter→
Image from here. Not AI.
The creature with too many eyes perched on the bathroom sink was something I actually saw in a dream. I woke up and immediately had to write it down. Such a vivid, creepy image, I knew I had to put it into a story somewhere. And here it is!