Part III: King of Terrors

The Infernal Machine

Chapter 12: World Gone Black

Content warning: This story contains explicit content and supernatural sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.

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The shell world, Chamuh called it. He’d never told Isabel what the phrase meant and she hadn’t pressed him for an explanation. The king of owls appreciated the night and all its secret terrors better than she or any living person ever could — after all, he held court with them. He‘d warned her from the beginning that ghosts violated natural laws even the darkest of demons heeded, and that the depths of the open grave sank away into an abyss blacker than the moonless desert night. The two of them reveled in a shadowland of dead trees and abandoned playgrounds, the king and queen of midnight, but even they still surfaced into the daylight for air.

Daylight had never once touched the desolation that hung half a mile below Isabel’s pounding wings, and it never would. Someday the Sun would die and the stars would fade, leaving the universe to sink down and settle like dust across this wasteland. The world gone black. She filled her lungs with a single breath and plunged back down into the musty darkness.

The darkness gnashed its teeth and rushed skyward to meet her.

Her taloned feet skated the smooth glass wall; she hurtled down the length of the tower in a leaping, scurrying vertical sprint, her brown raptor wings arched overhead to guide her descent. The building shook beneath her bounding strides. Swirling shadows and crimson flashes swam behind the windows, keeping pace with her, leading their target — and a glistening black geyser erupted from the twenty-fifth story, straight ahead.

The worm coiled through a cloud of broken glass, a leviathan breaching, rearing back against the perpetual night, and Isabel gave her wings a hard flap to lift into the black-crayon sky above the high-rise. She aimed her shotgun one-handed toward the reeking chasm below, held her breath as she waited for the writhing python tongues to surround her, and pulled the trigger. The kick flung her clear of the ink-black swarm as a streak of gray ash lanced the air and filled the creature’s yawning mouth. The tongues hissed and smoldered, pockmarked with burning red light as they whipped back and forth through the drifting soot, and they shrank away between its convulsing jaws. Its bulk retreated through the broken glass.

Ghosts might be unnatural, but they weren’t invincible. Whatever else the shell world and its nightmare denizens embodied, they shared one thing with the dead: a ravenous, all-consuming desire to escape itself, to either claw its way out or drag everything else into the grave with it.

And ashes hurt it, same as they hurt ghosts. Good to know.

Isabel let go of the weapon and snagged the lever ring with one clawed finger to catch it and twist it back around, to pop the spent shell and chamber the next with a flip of the shotgun. That was the selling point, after all, when she’d spotted the old-fashioned, lever-action Winchester in Hope Springs’ abandoned gun shop: she needed a weapon that could pepper a ghost with sacred ashes, but also one that she could reload with just one hand, without leaving herself vulnerable between shots.

And that’s where this beast’s resemblance to a ghost ended. Her claws could fend off a specter, but the hungry shadows of this benighted realm would consume her with a touch. Even if she did leave a mark, one paper-cut slash would be poor consolation for getting swallowed whole.

She hung before a jagged glass pit in the side of the Delanne building, wings beating the stale air and her wide golden eyes taking in the rusted scaffolding that marked downtown Seattle. Abandoned townhouses and barren parks lay beyond, then the decaying suburbs and silhouette mountains that marked the edge of this underworld, looming stark and gray beneath the flickering dead-channel blackness overhead.

The windows buckled and shattered overhead. Darkness spilled down through a rain of glittering shards, its gulper-eel jaws gaping and its black seaweed tongues lunging around the winged woman below. Isabel arched backward into a somersault dive through the air that flipped her shotgun toward the creature. She pulled the trigger; another bone-gray cloud burst from the barrel to ignite its flesh while the gun’s recoil threw her into a fastball spin and sent her hurtling through the broken glass.

She tumbled across a curved executive desk, flopped facedown across a beige carpet floor, and lifted her ringing head with a glance about the empty office suite. Amber panel lights flickered overhead between the broken ceiling tiles, blinking here and there in turn to shroud the room in dancing shadows. She groaned and heaved herself to her feet.

Mahogany columns and varnished wooden panels stood out against the mirrored walls and glass partitions. Conference tables lay scattered about the suite, caked with white fiberglass dust and fallen tiles. She looked back at the desk that teetered on the edge of the broken wall and approached it with slow, cautious footsteps, listening to the creaking floor and the subtle sway of the building underfoot. A small black picture frame lay flat against the desk, and Isabel lifted it in her left hand with a squint.

He may have been decades younger, but she recognized the stubbled man with wavy black hair and a broad hawk nose who knelt close between a young blonde woman and brunette child. The nameplate on the desk confirmed her hunch: Michel Delanne, Chief Executive Officer.

The foundation shook. She grabbed the edge of the desk and braced her feet against the tattered carpet, breath held tight and waiting for the floor to give way. The moment never came, and she realized that the vibrations pulsed with a faint, steady rhythm from beneath the far side of the office, just beyond its glass double doors. She spun toward them.

Something huge and black tunneled its way through the corridor and smashed through the back wall with a raspy vulture screech. The worm’s gleaming black cavern maw gaped wider than the office suite; the building itself might have been brought to visceral life to devour its own innards, room by room. Isabel caught and swung her shotgun in another loop, yanking the lever ring, popping the last shell and loading the next. She let the picture frame clatter to the floor, aimed the gun, and fired.

The thrashing serpent-tongues burst into red charcoal cinders. She threw herself over the desk and between the glass shards in a wild sprint toward the horizon — and a dozen burning strands lashed across her back and around her wings. They seared her brown feathers like acid. The fringed barbs began to dissolve into a greasy black smoke as their lengths seeped through her plumage toward the vulnerable flesh beneath.

No time to think. No time to breathe. She clenched her muscles and let her momentum carry her over the edge and into a twenty-five-story plummet. Her nerves flared, her skin rippled, and a smoldering cloud of feathers flew free of her wings. And she toppled headfirst from the building, a scrawny, flailing stick figure whose naked limbs clawed through the air.

For Isabel, burns and cuts healed in a matter of seconds. Broken bones took longer: depending on the circumstances, the few minutes they might need could make all the difference. She assumed that discarded feathers healed faster than burns, but she’d never had a reason to test that theory before now. Besides, she didn’t have many seconds to spare.

Four, three, two…

The tingling ache of her skin quickened into a poison-oak itch somewhere deeper within it, a maddening prickle beneath her flesh that grew and grew until even the rising asphalt ceased to matter. Then her feathers burst through their follicles, her spindly form bloomed into sleek, avian grace, and her fresh wings caught an updraft to swoop high above the pavement. She beat her wings harder and spiraled back into the abysmal sky.

Isabel hung high above the Delanne building’s rooftop restaurant and watched as the monster worm, looking hardly bigger than a nightcrawler from this height, looped through the air, twisted its blind head upward with a roar, and dove back into the high-rise. It didn’t try to pull itself loose from the building. She hadn’t once seen it emerge more than half its length, except to leap from one floor to another. Whatever had dragged the institute down here also seemed to bind the creature to it.

Also good to know. But keeping it distracted meant holding its attention, and she hadn’t seen it emerge from the skyscraper’s shattered surface for almost thirty seconds now. She flipped her shotgun, caught the lever ring with one claw, and popped another spent 12-gauge shell.

Three shells down, three more to go. Isabel circled the rooftop with a slow, trembling breath and dove headfirst into the waiting darkness.

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