Dust to Dust by Karina Halle
Out of the corner of my eye something was moving. I cautiously turned my head and saw a black, hairy spider the size of a fucking cat crawl behind a row of stairs, its solid body and foot-long legs disappearing one by one.
Holy shit. Forget the noseless man with the eyeball roaches – a spider the size of a cat was another thing entirely. My whole body immediately went numb with terror and I stood there for a long time, waiting for it to come back out, debating if I should turn around and head the other way.
But something was compelling me to keep walking forward and when I noticed the air starting to fill with fluttering snowflakes, I knew what it was. Where I was.
The Brooklyn Bridge was just around the corner.
I gathered up what strength I had and tried to shake the cold flakes off my shoulders. Taking in a deep breath, I walked as briskly and as quietly as possible past the area where the spider had disappeared.
I had to look, of course, as I walked past. I only saw shadows and in those shadows, the sickly gleam of hundreds of eyes clumped together, shining like quarters as they watched me pass.
My heart skipped a nervous beat but I kept going, feeling those spider eyes trail up and down my back like I was being poked by spindly legs. Now I was shivering nonstop, from the falling snow and that icky sense of doom you get when you walk through a spider web. Just multiple that feeling by, oh, a million.
I don’t know why I was drawn to the bridge, other than the fact that I’d seen it a million times in my dreams. Maybe, in the real world, we should have gone there right away. I wasn’t sure what I’d find here, in the Veil.
Unless Dex was in here, with me.
At that thought, my pace quickened and soon I had lapsed into a slow jog. As I passed by the lampposts they all started turning on, as if they were leading the way to him. I started to feel that danger notion of hope grow in the pit of my stomach and I ran faster and faster. I ignored the things that could have been hiding in the shadows. I kept my focus dead ahead.
As I passed by city hall, I could see the bridge was deserted and the pedestrian walkway was covered with a thin layer of snow. I slid a little as the path turned from pavement to wood slats but kept on going.
I was about halfway across the bridge, Brooklyn looming in the distance, when the air in front of me began to shift. I stopped in my tracks, the hairs on my arms standing up, my nerves popping from waves of electricity.
And there he was.
Dex.
My Dex.
He was standing a few feet in front of me, seeming to materialize out of the air. He had his grey newsboy cap on his head, dressed in a black t-shirt and black jeans and boots. The same thing he was wearing when Michael took him. But despite his monochrome clothing, he was in color. His eyes were mahogany brown and squinting against the sun as he scoured his gaze over the river, looking utterly confused, his skin tone flawless and lightly tan. And his features were warped by the moving air, which meant he was not in the Veil at all, but in our world.
I wasn’t sure why I was being shown this, why there was a rip between the worlds right here in front of me. But I’d be stupid not to take it.
My heart swelled. I had found him. I was his again and he was mine.
“Dex!” I said, my voice sounding weak and metallic despite the joy that was flooding through me.
But he seemed to hear it. He turned his head and looked in my direction, though not at me.
It didn’t matter. I took quick steps toward the shimmer, preparing myself to walk through, not caring how it would look to people on the other side, a girl coming out of thin air. I waited for the cold to intensify, for the pressure in my head to build, to feel like I was being sucked away.
Nothing happened.
I opened my eyes. I was still in the Veil. The shimmer was gone.
Dex was gone.
I was all alone.
But at least now, I knew where he was. I knew he was alive and out there, in New York City, and he was by himself. That was more than I could have hoped for.
Now I had to think of how the hell I was going to get back. I couldn’t count on another window opening up like that. Perhaps that was all it had been, a window to the other side, not a door.
I waved my hands in the air in vain hope that I would strike something, make something happen. I was frantic, panic pulsing through me, the idea that I couldn’t get to him fast enough.
Ada! I yelled in my head, hoping she could hear me on the other side. I didn’t know how long I’d been in the bathroom for in Bryant Park, but they no doubt were worried about me by now. I hoped she and Maximus were tuned in, listening, figuring out what happened and how to get me back.
Ada! Maximus! I yelled again, looking around me. It wouldn’t do, not here. I had to head back to the park, back to the washrooms. Otherwise they’d have no idea where I was.
I turned around and headed back along the bridge. I hated to leave Dex, even though I couldn’t see him I still knew he was there, but there was no way I could get to him this way. I’d have to get through to Ada and Maximus first, then all of us would have to hightail it to the bridge and hope to track him down.
Time didn’t feel like it was on my side. I started running again and this time my movement brought things out of the shadows.
I heard a hard, scratching sound behind me and looked over my shoulder to see a giant spider – and by giant, again, the size of a cat – come crawling down the side of a brick building. It leaped onto the ground and started for me.
A similar sound came from my right. I shot a furtive glance in that direction and saw two more spiders emerge, one from underneath a bench, the other out of a sewer drain, their foot-long legs straining toward me like blackened fingers.
Oh shit.
Now I was booking it, running through the dead streets as fast as I could go, my hair whipping behind me. I praised God for Manhattan’s grid set-up as I was easily able to zig zag my way toward the park. The city was a piece of cake when there were no taxi cabs and rushing pedestrians around.
I was only a block away when something came from nowhere and flew at my chest.
I shrieked and looked down to see the cockroach eyeball dig its pincers into my skin, the eye staring up at me with mad clarity.
Take me with you, the man’s voice said, though in my panic and confusion I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I’ll ward them off if you take me with you.
“Get off of me!” I screamed and the roach only dug its claws in deeper, filling my chest with shards of pain. Grimacing, I had no choice but to put my hand around the jagged, hard-backed shell, my fingers sliding along the pulsing veins of the optic nerve.
I yanked it off and threw it far away just as his other eye came crawling toward me. Without thinking I raised my foot and smashed the creature beneath my Chucks. The eyeball was resistant for a second before the pressure caused it to splatter into slimy goo beneath my sole. Somewhere, the man was screaming.
I went back to running, slipping slightly on the eyeball residue. Whether he could stop the oversized spiders, with their hundreds of one-inch eyes and forearm sized legs, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to chance it. The dead were known to lie.
Finally I found myself at Bryant Park and whipped past the bench that Maximus and Ada would have been sitting at. I knew they weren’t there though, I knew they had moved on. The question was, where?
The toilets didn’t exist in the Veil side of the world, for one reason or another, so I had to kind of guess where they would be. I looked around, up and down, for any signs of weakness in the air, any shimmers or wavers, but couldn’t see anything.
Don’t panic, I told myself, though the reminder was ridiculous. Of course I was panicking. I used to have panic attacks over making phone calls to Pizza Hut.
And, I wasn’t alone. The man was still screaming over his loss of eyes and was out there – sightless but angry. And the spiders, well it seemed I had lost them for the moment but I knew it was a
“Ada!” I yelled, knowing that I’d already attracted enough attention already. “Ada I’m here, I’m going to come through.”
But try as I did, I could not get the air to shift. I closed my eyes, concentrating until my head felt like it was going to explode. I focused off and on, pretending I was looking at one of those Magic Eye painting that were everywhere in the nineties, but even that didn’t work.
Shit, shit, shit. Why wasn’t it working? Was I just not trying hard enough?
I took in a deep breath and attempted to count backward from ten. When I came through from the other side earlier, I felt I had time on my side. Here I didn’t. I needed to relax and trust that it would happen. I needed to calm the fuck down.
I only got as far as four though when I heard the scratching sound of overgrown spider legs, a sound I hoped I’d never hear again. I looked over my shoulder to see five of them coming around the corner, heading straight for me, all their eyes on their prize, their pincers clicking against each other as if they were imagining eating me already.
Fuck this shit. I let out a small cry, knowing that it would be impossible now for me to escape. I swatted at the air, tears threatening to spill down my face. I was so close to Dex, so close to my world, our life, and I was going to get stuck here.
The spiders began to give off a low, guttural growl, like a drooling dog on the attack. I looked behind at them again. At their pace, they’d be at me in ten seconds. I glanced around for plan B – did I even have enough time to find a weapon to fight them off? – when I saw yet another problem.
A creature emerged from the side of one of the buildings. She might have been a woman in another life, but here she could barely be called that. She pulled herself along the sidewalk, the lower part of her severed off, guts trailing behind her like a flowing tail.
Her head was on backward. I could see bald patches through her ratty, dark hair, as she crawled toward me, skeletal arms and fingers reaching my way, worn down to the bone.
I would have probably thrown up at the sight of her if it wasn’t for the fact that I was about to be eviscerated by giant spiders in a few seconds.
“Perry!”
I whirled around in time to see Ada emerge from the shimmering air, across the park, near the coffee kiosk we had gotten our lunch.
I couldn’t afford to be mad at her for coming through, not now. She was saving my ass.
I yelled back and quickly ran past the spiders, trying to avoid them. One leaped straight for me, tackling me from behind. Hairy legs tangled in my hair and the sheer weight of it threatened to pull me down.
Screaming, I ripped around, stumbling wildly in an attempt to get it off. Somehow it did, painfully taking out strands of my hair as it did so, and let out a high-pitched whine as it fell to the ground. There was no time to dwell on it – I kept running and running, now keenly aware that the spiders were in hot pursuit, coming faster now.
Just when I thought Ada was about to disappear – she was growing fainter before my eyes – she ran forward and grabbed my hand. I could barely feel her grip in mine, her body somewhere between solid and liquid. Her eyes darted over my shoulder and widened. I didn’t dare turn around again.
She yanked me toward her with all her might and in an instant I was being sucked into the shimmer, the familiar pressure kicking out from the inside of my brain.
My ears popped and there was a moment of blinding light and screams before I found myself tumbling forward and falling down into the dirt.
Dirt. Brown, smelly, earthy dirt under my hands and knees. I breathed it in deep, taking a moment to be grateful for this world.
Then I looked up – remembering what this world was willing to accept. There was old lady on the bench across from me, reading a book and staring at me with her mouth open. I quickly looked around. Ada was standing beside me, offering her hand, her face both worried and sheepish. Behind us was the coffee kiosk, blocking our view from most of the park. It seemed that only the lady had seen me materialize out of thin air.
I let Ada help me to my feet, her grip solid again, and I dusted off my jeans before I gave the stunned lady my most winning smile.
“Magic trick,” I explained to her with a slight shrug. “Looks like we got it right this time.”
Then I led Ada away from her and to the other side of the kiosk. In seconds we were joined by Maximus, breathing hard from running across the park.
“What the hell did you do, Perry?” he asked, though he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it affectionately. “I told you.”
“I know you did,” I said. “But it worked! I found Dex! Quick, we have to hurry.”
He didn’t smile at that, nor did he remove his hand. “Ada had to go after you. I couldn’t stop her. If she hadn’t, you might have been lost in there forever.”
I swallowed hard and looked them both in the eye. “I know. I wish you wouldn’t have,” I said to Ada. “But you got me out and you seem fine too. You feel fine, right?” Good lord, I hope she felt fine.
She nodded and gave me a crooked smile, though I had noticed she was being more quiet than normal. I forgot that a trip to the Veil can you leave you slightly shell-shocked for a while.
“Did you really find Dex?” Maximus asked, turning my attention back to him.
“Yes!” I cried out, feeling the hourglass tipping over again. “I saw him and I think he heard me. It was like a window opened up and I was able to see into this world, but not cross over. He was on the Brooklyn Bridge. Alone.”
“Just like your dreams,” Ada mused blankly, still sounding a bit out of it. “Or whatever they were.”
“Exactly. I should have known to go there, but it didn’t occur to me. But he’s there. And he’s alive. If we hurry, maybe we can catch up with him. At the very least, at least we know he’s in the city and he’s got to be looking for us.”
Maximus sighed, though he was relaxing a bit. “All right. If you ladies are both feeling okay to hightail it to the bridge, I reckon it’s worth a shot.”
He could barely finish his sentence. I was already on the run, heading to Dex.
CHAPTER SIX
Dex
“Excuse me, sir, are you all right?”
The quiet but concerned voice brought everything into focus. I found myself staring into the eyes of a hipster. That was my first thought, anyway. She was wearing a plaid, short-sleeved collared shirt, had close- cropped hair and lime green glasses that didn’t seem to have lenses. Oh and a septum nose ring.
I blinked at her a few times, stupidly. Behind her the brown buildings of Brooklyn gradually appeared, like the whole world was being painted into place. Well, Brooklyn certainly explained the hipster.
It did not explain why I was standing on the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, hands gripped to the railing of the pedestrian walkway like a fucking loon.
“Are you tripping?” she asked.
The polite, earnest way she said that made me laugh.
I most certainly was tripping. I had no fucking idea why I was in New York City. In fact, I think I finally, finally lost my damn mind. I’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
“Doctor put me on new meds,” I lied. “Can’t seem to figure out how I got here.”
She smiled at me, a lot warmer now. I’d wrongly assumed she was a lesbian, now she seemed to be into me. “Where are you from?” she asked slyly, which only cemented the suspicion.
“Seattle,” I said. “I’m on vacation with my girlfriend,” I added quickly as I felt the blood drain out of me. Jesus crackers, where the fuck was Perry? How the hell did I get here? I had way too many questions to keep inside my brain and I was afraid that if I spent another minute with this woman, I was going to say something that would get me committed. Unless being tits-up crazy was suddenly cool. It wasn’t when I was young.
She smiled still, though not as open as before, shot down. “Cool. Well, hope you enjoy the city. And I hope your new meds work out.”
She gave me a wave and continued on her way toward Brooklyn, lost in the stream of people walking to and fro.
Now that she was gone, I could breathe. AKA, not breathe, AKA freak the fuck out.
Think, you idiot, I told myself, adjusting my cap against the glare of the sun. Why the hell was it so warm here?
And, once again, why the hell was I in New York?
I tried to think back and couldn’t remember anything except being in Portland at Perry’s parent’s house.
A flash of a familiar face came across my mind, but my instincts couldn’t be correct.
Why did I have the feeling that I saw my brother Michael at some point? That was as likely as Kim Kardashian’s ass being real. I hadn’t seen him since, well, since we were teenagers.
And yet I kept seeing him, as he would be today. A tall, dark, handsome asshole in a suit. Not as handsome as me, but close enough. And with the thought of him came this feeling that maybe I really was tripping out. Being alone in NYC, with no memory of how I got there, was bad enough, but it had nothing on the wash of dread that was sinking into my pores.
I shivered to myself and shook my head a few times, trying to shake it off, trying to shake some sense in. None doing. The feeling intensified, like it was just taking root and finding sunlight.
Before I really started to panic, I searched my pocket for my phone.
It was gone.
Shitballs.
I was alone in NYC, I kept feeling like the world was going to end at any moment, and I didn’t even have my phone, or a wallet. I only had my wits and I was starting to think those were in short supply.
“Dex!”
It was Perry’s voice, soft as satin sheets. I turned around, my eyes scanning the aloof people walking past but I didn’t see her anywhere.