"Inevitability. A timeline that decays even now. A chance to save something that would be lost. You don't have long left, April."
April stared at the man in the black coat who had stepped out from nothing behind Kroakli, her face and mind blankly numb. The monkey—the first monkey, of course, its red-orange patterned facial fur gleaming—held its head against his, mimicking his pose. It was the same conjunction of motion that she had seen before between the little creature and this man, who remained distinctive in his blue-tinged facial ridges and gaunt aspect. It was the same unconscious choreography she had noticed when they had both stared in at her through Michelle's kitchen window, except the man himself had not spoken, then.
She shouted at them both. "Don't have long until- I don't understand!"
He shook his head, sadly.
"Go back, April. Go home. Your return will not accelerate the decay. It is too late for that. Hold close what you can. I am sorry."
He lifted one arm, holding a hand aloft. Two of his fingers were extended.
She looked at them blankly. The moment held as if frozen, a long slice of a little eternity.
Then the room blazed white.
It didn't feel like the previous times that April had Travelled. Before, there had been a visceral sense of moving through a physical space, traversing border dimensions between the different worlds; the handbag tunnel, the whirlpool of glass shards. This was a far more violent affair; the equivalent of being a figure drawn out on a page, only to find yourself abruptly torn from the sketchbook by the careless hand of the artist. Corruption bled in at the edges, flooding her senses, a brilliant nothingness that poured in at her ears, her throat, her eyes.
As the surrounding reality fell away she felt Kroakli find her. The gelatinous body of the bizarre creature slapped her across the back as it clutched against her skin and clothes, clinging on for dear life to avoid being left behind. She could feel it pulsing, slightly warm against her, her only companion amid a hard white nothing. It was oddly comforting, in a surreal way. Sure, it might have been the companionship of a predatory alien slime, one that had after all birthed itself from her friend's corpse, but hey, everyone had flaws. The creature had also, after all, saved her life on multiple occasions. If she was correctly parsing the verbal salad that was its preferred mode of speech, its newly self-aware incarnation might even genuinely regret the instinctive actions of its animal predecessor.
She wasn't entirely sure she was ready to forgive it yet for how it had come to be, but for the time being she was simply grateful to have something relatively solid there, something to ground herself with outside of the stark void.
She wasn't sure how long she hung there, weightless, in that nothing. All reasonable assessments, based upon the typical trajectory of the forward arrow of time, would have indicated that it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. But despite this, as had the moment of pause she had experienced before the transition into the null space, the subjective experience seemed to stretch far longer. It felt like she had crammed an awful lot of introspective thinking into a disproportionately small amount of time.
When they did land back in physical reality, they did so with a jarring jolt. April tumbled onto a hard floor, limbs sprawling. Kroakli rolled off of her back, splatting wetly against the ground next to her before finding its footing. She rolled onto her back, her eyes focussing blearily, ready to assess whichever hostile environment she had been deposited into this time around.
It was fairly surprising when the hostile environment turned out to be her own apartment.
She was lying in her flat's hallway, just beyond the front door. As she sat upright she took in the familiar furnishings; a cheap plastic coat rack sporting a single nylon waterproof; the wooden shoe shelf, bearing a pair of slightly mud-stained slip-ons and her "night out" boots, scuffed from her misadventure in the red forest. Kroakli had perched itself next to that while it reformed, and a probing offshoot of its body appeared to be taking a mild interest in the substrate of the other world that remained caught between the rubber boot treads.
Looking up from the creature, April noticed for the first time that it wasn't the only thing out of place. Her flat had never been neat and orderly, exactly, but half of her belongings seemed to have been very deliberately disturbed since the last time she had been here. It looked like somebody had roughly barged down the entrance hallway, neither particularly noticing nor caring to set right any of her belongings that they had disturbed in the process. This trail of casual destruction lead her eyes back up to the front door itself, which...
"What the fuck?" she said aloud.
Kroakli burbled, still not yet reassembled into a humanoid form. "You do like that word so..."
The door had been smashed in at the handle, bowing the wood-veneer ply board inward in a neatly circular lump, splinters sticking out around the edges of the impact site. The door itself remained shut, but whatever was holding it there clearly could not be the original lock, because that had been broken open and snapped apart, the metal locking bar dangling in mid air from the splintered wood. Someone had forced their way inside her apartment.
"Have… I been robbed?", she wondered aloud, the idea feeling surreally mundane against the context of her previous few days.
"Krr- there have been several here, yes... we feel their chemical leavings. But it is not for our knowing if they left with anything besides accrued knowledge, the mind-growingness. That is something that we cannot sense."
She turned, looking at the creature properly for the first time since they had landed. Its false mouth was hanging open, a ribbon of torn blue flesh drawing out the lower half of a comically cartoon smile. The surreal tone of the scene grew yet stronger, before suddenly a switch in her brain seemed to flip, the reality of the situation coming into focus with a painful clarity.
"God. Oh, God. I can't believe you're here." She looked around at the interior of her flat, and began to pace. "I can't believe I'm here. I told myself I wouldn't come back. That I couldn't come back."
"Yet here you remain. Truly the mechanisms of this reality conspire to bring about the strangemost reachings of possibility… we have observed this tenfold of late. Despair not this fortuitous chancing. Is this not where you truly wished to be within your pulsing core? We know your kind feels much affection for its origins."
"God, no- no, not if I'm going to tear cracks in the universe just by being here."
"We recall the words of our strange visitor, who claimed your breaking was made by its hand. Yet, it spoke assurance that your return would not worsen this reality's predicament. Perhaps there was spoken truth in this..."
She stared at the creature, her own mouth now agape.
"Kroakli, I don't even know who the fuck that was. I mean, like, do you!?"
It tilted its head to one side. "It was a strangeness, the likes of which we have not known before. It was there and yet also not there; our pulsing senses mused through its strata and yet we felt nothing."
"He- he is what did this to me. Him and that fucking monkey, he- he as good as admitted it- hell, he did admit it! I don't know what he did exactly, how he did it or why. I don't know how this started at all, really, but I do know that I don't trust him any further than I could straight shoot his little Simian across a basketball court, into a strong headwind."
"Approximately 5.76 metres," said Kroakli after a moment's consideration, "dependent on specific weather conditions, the strength of your grip and limb proximal tendon actuations, krrr..."
She stared at it. "Are you fucking with me? God, I don't trust you, either. Fuck! Now not only do I have to worry about ending the world, but in the meantime I guess I have to make sure you don't fucking eat everyone before I even get the chance! God, this is insane. I mean, listen to me, I'm talking to a murdering slime right now."
"Yes, but we will not be doing any murdering for now, little worrisome April. You are right to fear our potent gorging, but the deal made is one we will truly stick by—in recognition of your utility, little world-stepper. It would please us to allow our cooperation in this, in the Travelling, our new freedom. To this end, we will not hunt your kind, nor prey upon this projective. And believe this, for outside even these words and their commitment, we are not... hkk- rrr... We are not wanting for it."
"What, had a change of heart? Didn't seem to trouble you before."
"Not a change of heart, no, but of mind. The self-viscera. Our newfound self remembers an echoing of humanity, and we make our kinship with this. We shall then seek other kinds of prey—these worlds do not run short of stock for hunting."
April was suddenly overcome by an insane urge to giggle. She clenched her teeth, biting back the impulse, but found that a small part of the suppressed laughter's quavering pitch seeped its way into her next words, despite herself. "I can't believe it. You've gone tame?!"
Kroakli was suddenly very close to her, very fast. The creature had been holding itself in its humanoid form, the height of its false head approximately on par with April's own, but as it swept over to her it stretched upwards. Now towering at 9 feet, its head obscuring the light as it craned itself over her, its tear of a mouth fell agape in its grisly imitation smile. She felt something hard against her back; the creature's spines had protruded from the ends of its arms, and it had looped them around her, the sharp points interlocking behind her head and neck.
"Do not mistake us," it said, levelly, "for livestock. We declare this little truce with your kin, as it suits and pleases us, but do not be deluded in this intention. Attempting to bind us, to constrain us, to destroy us will be met with our full viciousness. Rrrr... You know our capability in this."
April had broken out into a cold sweat. As Kroakli shrank itself back down to its usual stature, "smiling" nonchalantly, the feeling failed to dissipate. She took a few steps, backing away from it.
"Yeah. Yeah, sure."
Something moved out of the corner of her eye, the motion flashing in her awareness for a split second from the direction of the kitchen. April and Kroakli both started, turning towards the source.
"Did you see that?"
"We felt it. There is a wrongness that travels on the quanta of this reality. It was a moment's flickering."
She walked into the kitchen. Here, too, there were signs that her living space had been disturbed; the intruders had made little effort to hide their presence. The table was askew and cupboards were thrown open. Someone had knocked a lone onion to the floor—it rolled away forlornly as she nudged it with her foot. Seriously, what the hell happened while I was gone?
Increasingly nervous, she unlatched the door to her bedroom. Kroakli slipped in behind her as she crossed the threshold.
Her belongings had been cast into complete anarchy, and not the good sort of anarchy that was popular with her friends on social media, eager to dismantle institutions of the state. Instead, the dismantling appeared to have happened to the belongings on her shelves; paper was scattered everywhere, as well as miscellaneous piles of her personal items. Nothing seemed to be missing, but it had clearly been thoroughly turned over.
"They have been here also," stated Kroakli, a little redundantly.
"Yeah," said April, blankly, walking over to her computer desk.
Except it was no longer her computer desk, because the computer was gone. Somebody had yanked it out of the wall, taking the power cable but leaving most of the peripherals. There was a faint pale rectangle visible where it had until recently sat, its outline pressed into the carpet by a year or so of faithful service under her desk.
April groaned, and turned quickly towards her bed. Sure, they had taken her desktop, but maybe not...
Her bed had a storage nook built in underneath the mattress slats, and for some years now April had been using it to deposit various bits and pieces of her possessions that she did not want to throw away, instead enclosing them in shallow plastic crates that fit within the narrow gap between the bed frame and the floor. One of these had been moved slightly askew, but shaking it revealed it still had a certain tell-tale weight to it. It seemed her visitors had seen the upper strata of discarded burnt out lightbulbs and 2007-era ethernet cables and decided that the boxes were mostly full of trash that wasn't worth their time.
Luckily, that wasn't all she'd been keeping in there. She dug through the detritus to the bottom of one of the crates, and pulled out a thin black backpack, stiff with dust and months of disuse. Unzipping it, she retrieved a dusty Macbook from inside, tucked away unobtrusively in a padded sleeve. The laptop computer, still covered in stickers from her university days, had been overshadowed somewhat by her more up-to-date desktop PC. She doubted it could run anything more graphically intensive than the original release of Skyrim, but- But none of this is important right now. As long as I can log in maybe I can find out what the fuck is happening.
She plugged it into the wall with its accompanying charging cable, also retrieved from the bag, and thumbed the on button while Kroakli watched curiously. With a sigh of relief, she watched it light up with an electronic chime. She sat it on the bed while it booted itself up.
At that moment, her desk disappeared.
It didn't happen all at once; instead, a hard threshold of nothingness sliced through it, much as had happened to Charlie's head at the bar. She got a brief flip book animation of its interior wood-grain as the piece of furniture slid progressively out of reality. The corner of it lingered for a moment, hanging on the dead air, before it too vanished, leaving an eerily empty spot in space. It held there like that, just long enough for April to say, "what the he-", before it abruptly slammed back into existence, dropping silently into the volume it had only just vacated.
"Oh, that was interesting," said Kroakli.
She turned to look at the creature, which was peering at the desk alongside her.
"You saw that? What the hell was that?"
"We didn't see that," it said, turning to face her—although the direction it was pointing probably mattered to a creature with a false face. "We felt you. It is the breaking of yourself—the growing misalignment of your atoms. Reality flexes like muscle-meat, your self as its bone anchor. The motion permeates outwards, enclosing these surrounding projections. This object did not vanish itself, but was pushed out of phase with respect to you, a minor twisting of its envelope. Both you and it moved just enough to be missed in juxtaposed reflection. Such strangeness. It was not like this in the other worlds. Returning here has bound that strangeness to your being with a quickness, as metals bind to electromagnetic coiling. It snaps into conjunction around you."
April pressed one fist into her forehead. "Then he lied, the man we saw. It is getting worse. Shit. I have to get out of here."
Kroakli made a non-committal noise that trailed off into a protracted gurgling groan, before re-coalescing as speech. "Ghkrrrrr- grrr-- hrm. Uncertainty."
She looked at it, questioningly.
"It is not so much yourself that is doing the breaking. It is more like... the fracture happens around your breaking. Your unstable cells reel it in closer."
"Is there a difference?"
"...maybe."
"Well, that's not much help. I still- wait."
The laptop had finished its boot cycle. She eagerly tapped in a password, fingers tripping over the keys- she got it correct on the second try. The desktop loaded, and she double-triple clicked on her messenger app, drumming her fingertips as the ageing machine struggled to load the software, its cartoonish loading animation playing out repeatedly across the centre of the screen.
Finally, the window loaded. She clicked through to her contacts list, and-
457 unread messages.
"What the-"
April leaned closer, eyes wading through a small sea of little red numbers indicating message notifications next to her contacts. She scrolled down a little, then brought her cursor back up to the top, finger swiping furiously on the laptop's trackpad. She selected the icon labelled "MatryoshkaSlutt". Trace's account; her icon was yellow with inactivity, but there were 87 unread messages. April clicked, her eyes immediately jumping to the most recent text.
-youre safe. had police at my house again, they think i might know where u are. i wish i did. i know this wasn't your fault so i just hope your alive. please tell me when u read this. i think theyre talking to charlie again he knew shellie better than me. still cant believe this is real. please contact me-
Her eyes wide, April seized upon the scroll-bar, yanking it back up to the top of the unread conversation. She found Trace's first message and read in order this time, heart rate growing apace as her eyebrows climbed rapidly up her forehead.
april what the fuck happened
april your on the news
im being serious april what the fuck happened, theyre saying someone died
and your phone was there
april where are you
call me
april oh my god i think it was michelle
i dont even know her that well but
holy fuck it was michelle
april????????
where are you
call me please
if you even have your phone still fuck
please be alive
april please
Almost tripping over herself as she jumped up, she sprinted into the living room, catching herself on the bedroom door-frame to prevent herself from tipping over. Fumbling with the remote, she flipped on her television, frantically stabbed at the volume button to lower it to something less ear splitting, then keyed in the channel code for BBC News 24.
They were reporting some local story about gardening. Remembering that the message from Trace had been sent more than a day ago, and that news channels didn't tend to repeatedly loop content for her own personal convenience, she dropped the remote again, swore, and ran back to the laptop instead.
Keying in her own name into Google, she did her best to ignore the shocking reel of very disconcertingly titled Reddit threads and Daily Mail articles to click the top ranking BBC News listing. Kroakli bent its false head down behind her as her eyes skimmed across the page.
Woman found dead in East London flat
A woman has been found dead in a basement flat in the north-eastern London borough of Redbridge.
Metropolitan police say Michelle Gardener, 36, was discovered with severe injuries in her home on Tuesday evening. The flat, in which Ms. Gardener lived alone, was described by the force as having signs of a forced entry, and the death is being treated as suspicious. No arrests have been made so far.
Det Insp Harold Martin, who spoke to the BBC, said: "This is obviously a terrible event that has occurred and it will be a shock to the local community here in Wanstead. The Met would like to reassure the public that we have several lines of inquiry that we are pursuing, and are confident that we will be able to bring those responsible for this tragedy to justice as soon as is possible."
Police say they were alerted to potential disturbance at the residence by a 999 call that was placed within the property earlier in the evening. Ms. Gardener was reportedly already deceased when officers arrived on the scene.
'Ritualistic activities'
The police raised eyebrows in their statement to the press by suggesting that the condition of her body, which was described as "severely damaged", potentially suggested that the killing may have been performed as part of "ritualistic activities".
When questioned about a potential risk to the public, Det Martin responded: "Obviously I can't speak further on the specific circumstances of the death. What we can say is that it had the hallmarks of a deliberate act. With regards to the wider community, it is important to stress that we have no reason to believe that the public are in any sort of danger. We have several leads that we are pursuing, and in the interim we would ask people in the local area to stay vigilant, but to avoid any undue panic."
Some groups have criticized the police for making public specific details surrounding the death. Harriet Stern, of activist group Bluewatch Redbridge, said: "Here officers are guilty of fomenting public hysteria by propagating lurid details and encouraging sensationalist rumours. Once again the Met demonstrate they are unfit for purpose and should not be trusted with the public charter to Police our city."
Met seeking 'person of interest'
In their initial statement, the Met stated that details of the crime had to be made public in a 'timely' manner to aid in their inquiries. Police said they are seeking the owner of a phone that was found at the scene, from which the initial 999 call was placed. The phone's owner, identified as April Pearce, 29, has been missing since the time of the incident.
Det Martin said: "We want to be very clear to Ms. Pearce that our primary concern at this time is for her welfare, and we would like to request that she make contact with Met officers as soon as possible to confirm her well-being and assist us with our investigation. We are putting out this call sooner rather than later so that we can make contact with Ms. Pearce and ensure her safety as soon as possible." Det Martin further requested that any members of the public with knowledge of Ms. Pearce's whereabouts should come forward.
Ms. Pearce, who was previously known under the name Kieran Pearce before transitioning to female, was described as a personal friend of the deceased. Officers refused to confirm or deny whether she was being treated as a potential suspect.
Ms. Gardner was described by friends and family as being "a delight" and "a pillar of the local LGBT community". She is survived by her parents and sister, who declined to be interviewed for this story.
"Fuck," whispered April, quietly.
Almost despite herself, April clicked the back button in her browser, then selected one of the Reddit threads she had seen before.
↑ 864 ↓ r/news-uk • Posted by u/vartic94 16 hours ago
North London woman dead in "ritualistic" killing
thetimes.co.uk/article/north-london-woman-ritualist...
953 Comments
DrinkTheSeaside • 14 hr. ago
1 Award
This is what happens when we cut funding to police.
↑ 57 ↓ Reply Share
tyr174 • 10 hr. ago
That's 13 years of the Tories for you
↑ 9 ↓ Reply Share
GratefulUserOfTehEpic • 9 hr. ago
oh come on labour would be 10x worse no matter what starmer says
↑ 14 ↓ Reply Share
VandalChic12 • 7 hr. ago
I wish that were true. Tories are not anti cop, which is a shame because what this country definitely does *not* need right now is more public funds going to the pigs
↑ -3 ↓ Reply Share
tyr174 • 6 hr. ago
Oh yeah because I totally want less police with shit like this happening
↑ 6 ↓ Reply Share
jx457464 • 6 hr. ago
found the commie
↑ -2 ↓ Reply Share
VandalChic12 • 5 hr. ago
Fuck off. Also I'm actually an anarcho-syndicalist so, you know, wrong.
↑ 4 ↓ Reply Share
artyyy1984 • 15 hr. ago
Apparently the person they're looking for is a transgender. Wonder if this another Karen White situation 🤔
↑ 3 ↓ Reply Share
VanessaisXX • 13 hr. ago
Actually its a BLOKE
↑ 14 ↓ Reply Share
artyyy1984 • 12 hr. ago
True
↑ 7 ↓ Reply Share
Comment removed by moderator • 6 hr. ago
haloreachisgr8 • 4 hr. ago
its always the trannies
↑ -6 ↓ Reply Share
artyyy1984 • 3 hr. ago
This country has a problem
↑ -3 ↓ Reply Share
VandalChic12 • 4 hr. ago
Fuck off bigot
↑ 0 ↓ Reply Share
9 more replies
KnightOfSalem4 • 15 hr. ago
2 awards
Oh come on dude they don't even think she did it, just that she was at the scene. She was even the one who made the phone call to the police. Just because somebody is trans doesn't mean you can compare them to a sex offender. This is honestly just transphobia.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
↑ 24 ↓ Reply Share
GrantMichaelStock • 13 hr. ago
Yeah but read between the lines. "Person of interest", only other person in the flat, been missing on the run since. Also we don't know if he made the call, only that it was made from his phone. Could have been the victim who had it. Obviously too soon to know for sure but everything is pointing to it being the guy. In which case it's a good comparison.
↑ 45 ↓ Reply Share
artyyy1984 • 12 hr. ago
True
↑ 2 ↓ Reply Share
Comment removed by moderator • 9 hr. ago
artyyy1984 • 14 hr. ago
lol
↑ -14 ↓ Reply Share
"Fuck," April said, more forcefully this time.
She heard a slight clicking sound from behind her where Kroakli was situated, but the creature didn't say anything.
She clicked out of the webpage and skimmed the list of results from the past day. No matter how far she scrolled it all just seemed to continue—and there was her own name jumping out from the page, April Pearce, April Pearce, April Pearce, and a few generous scatterings of her deadname to boot. The latter tended to mark out the not insignificant proportion of society who seemed to take it for granted that she was responsible for what had happened to Michelle, although even in the nominally objective news articles and true crime forum discussions, the prognosis for her guilt didn't look particularly great, all things considered.
'And, are they even wrong?' she asked herself, putting her head in her hands. 'I brought this to her doorstep. I brought it-' She shot Kroakli a venomous glare, and it tilted its head to one side in a questioning gesture.
'But I can't even put the blame on it because it didn't know what it was doing. I was the one who, after being spat out of an alien jungle, decided to go running to her fucking doorstep to go get my fucking dick wet-'
"What is being now considered, contemplative April? It is hard for us, to pull information from this device; we do not have eyes in the way that you do..."
It still hadn't felt quite real. It had still felt like a nightmare, what had happened back in the flat—a horrible nightmare for sure, one that was now following her around in the form of Kroakli like a drooling dog, but something that should have by all rights have been confined to the interior of her own head. Not something this real- real enough to be plastered across the news, for the police to be putting out statements with her name on them-
"What am I even going to tell them," she said to nobody in particular, voice half hysterical. Her head was filled with outlandish scenarios; her sitting in an interrogation room trying to explain to a disbelieving Metropolitan Police sergeant about the Außenbandüberwach Ausschuss.
A faint sound of cracking glass emanated from one of the shelves across the other side of the room. April looked up sharply, Kroakli following the motion with a soft hiss.
On her bookshelf she had propped-up a series of framed photographs, depicting family holidays when she was younger, her graduation from school, her first day at the university she had ultimately dropped out from. The latter frame now had a circular chunk bitten out of its corner, slicing neatly through the glass. Petting at it, she waited for the missing segment to slide its way back into reality in the same way that she had watched the process play out for her desk.
Nothing happened. After ten seconds or so, she stood up and walked over to the photograph, picking it up from the shelf. The circular cut-out remained stubbornly there as she lifted it and moved back over to the bed. As she examined more closely, she saw that the remaining glass had cracked, a hair-thin line branching spreading from the missing segment and across the rest of the frame.
"It's... it's really gone? It's not just that I can't see it?"
Kroakli held out a gelatinous feeler, loosely resembling an open-palm. She handed over the broken photo frame, and Kroakli's blue flesh moulded around the sharp edge, rippling softly as it probed.
"This is a worsening," it said, finally, handing the photo frame back to her. "No more a little breaking. Not just misaligned from your own envelope, no, and not limited to the substrate of your own cells... This is a true world fissuring. The missing shard no longer exists, for you or any other, and it cannot be returned into being."
"What... what does it mean?"
"We don't know."
"Is it me? Is it because I'm here?"
"We don't know."
"I think... I think I have to leave. Now."
A sudden shrill alarm blared from the other room, and April started, almost jumping to her feet before she realised that it was the ringtone for her own landline. Swearing, she stood up a little more gingerly, then jogged into the kitchen, staring at the phone from three paces away while she squinted to read the incoming number. Her first thought was that it was the police, but- but no-! She recognized the displayed digits and snatched up the phone, stabbing the pickup button.
"Trace?!"
"April-!!"
A series of heavy, high-pitched wheezing sounds blared out of the receiver, heavily vocoded. April jerked the phone away from her head abruptly, bewildered, until she realised that the sound she was hearing was Trace sobbing—in grief? In relief? She wasn't sure, but she continued to hold the line open until there was a large enough break in the sound for Trace to get another word in.
"You're alive!! I thought-"
"Yes- yes I'm alive. I'm- Tracey, I'm-"
"M- Michelle's dead, April. She's dead- it's- have you seen the news? Have you-"
"Yeah, I- yeah I just. I just saw."
"She was killed!"
"Y- yeah."
"Were you there? April, what- what happened, April, the police-"
"I-" April put a hand to her forehead, her head spinning. "Trace, you- you don't think- you don't think I did it, right? I didn- I didn't kill-"
There was a deep sob from the other end of the line. "h- No, I- no of course not, April, I know you couldn't- You couldn't do that. I was just- I wanted to know you were safe-! They said your phone- they found it covered in blood, and I- April I thought you were dead, too-!"
Tears were falling from April's eyes as well, now. She was surprised she hadn't been wrung completely dry by that point. She managed to choke out some words around them.
"No, I- No, Trace, I'm alive, I'm fine. I just- How did you know to call me?"
"I saw- snff- I saw you come online, on- on the group chat, but you weren't answering so I-"
"What? I didn't-"
She carried the wireless receiver back into her bedroom, and glanced down at the laptop, still humming softly on the bed. Her messaging app had indeed lit up with a flurry of new notification icons, that, due to a lack of accompanying notification sound chimes, she had entirely missed.
She turned back to the phone, sniffing loudly. "I think- I still- I have you muted from, from when you kept sending me pictures of- of Italian chefs- I-"
Somehow both of them took this as the impetus to start crying loudly again, and so there were no further words for a minute or so. Kroakli walked around in front of her, using its human-like legs this time. Although the creature didn't usually have any particular expression on its mask of a face, it gave the distinct impression of not quite understanding what it was witnessing exactly.
Finally, Trace managed to speak again.
"Is- is Charlie there?"
"Charlie- what-" April frowned. "Why would Charlie be here?"
"You didn't see him?" Trace sniffled. "He- he said he'd hang out and- be watching your apartment building, he... he's been there since the police left earlier today. They- they broke into your door-"
"Yeah, I saw, I- Charlie's outside the building?"
"Yeah, I- I thought he would have seen you come in, but-"
"I didn't use the doo-" April cut herself off, realizing that that would be a difficult one to explain. "No, I- I didn't see him."
"I think he might be heading up- I said- he saw in the group chat when I noticed you come online, so-"
"I- What?" April glanced about the room, then stared down the hallway at the door to her apartment. "He's coming up here now?" She looked back at Kroakli, in a sudden panic.
"Yeah, he-"
"Sorry Trace, I've got to- got to go-"
"What? April, no, you need to tell me-"
April wiped the tears from her cheeks. "Trace, no, I'm sorry, I have to- I'm sorry-!"
"April?! I-"
She stabbed the hang-up button, turning towards Kroakli.
"Can you hide?"
The thing flexed. "Krrrr... can we hide? This is not a question—our skill is obvious in this. But why should we hide, as if playing the illicit lover faced with your jilted mate? There is nothing here to threaten us so-"
"Fucking- you want to be my 'mutual helper'? Then hide! Now!"
It let out an irritated clicking groan, but, surprisingly, complied. The humanoid form melted away back into a flat blue puddle on the ground, which then sucked itself away, around a corner and out of sight.
Almost as if it were timed to match, there was a sudden pounding from the front door. A familiar voice shouted in through the splintered web of wood around the broken latch.
"April!? April, open up!"
Charlie's voice was rough, and haggard in a way that spoke to some very sleepless nights in his recent past. April walked towards the front door, gingerly.
"Charlie?"
"April! April, you are there- open up!"
"Charlie- I don't-"
"April, open the fuck up!"
There was an edge of hysteria to his voice that she didn't like to hear. Then again, it wasn't particularly surprising, considering. Charlie had been closer to Michelle than even she had been, especially if you discounted the most recent months. She hadn't thought much about that; about how her friends might have been taking things, while she was busy being locked away in the Committee quarantine facility.
"I- I think the door is, it's blocked from the other side. The police-"
There was a pause from the other side for a moment, followed by a faint groaning sound. Did they nail the door closed from the other side? Whatever had been done to shutter it, Charlie was apparently undoing it with vociferous intent. The creaking sound crescendoed into a high pitched squeak, then a muffled bang, until finally the broken door popped open, revealing Charlie, his eyes wide with faint red splotches patterning the skin around them. His pupils locked with her own, boring into them.
"April! You're alive-! You... what are you wearing? You look- never mind." He shook his head violently.
April looked down at herself—she was still clad in the bizarre black formal clothes Tavistre had given to her for the Committee meeting—and then looked back up at Charlie. His voice had been monotonous with a strained undertone, like life had been thoroughly wrung out of him. He took a step towards her, expression a sort of inarticulate, possessed grief, and then walked right up to her, slamming his hands down on both of her shoulders. He looked down at the ground between them in apparent agony.
"April..." when he looked up at her again, he was crying. "Michelle's dead, April."
"I- I know, Charlie. I know."
"What happened?" He pulled his head up, looking her in the eyes again at close range. "April- were you there? Did you see-?"
"I..." April glanced down at the floor again. "I, yes- I. I was there, Charlie."
"What happened?!" he wheezed, voice and expression pleading. "Tell me, April."
"I..." April looked up at him, then away, lost for words. What was she supposed to tell him, after everything that had happened? How was she supposed to even begin to describe it all? She cast her mind back, trying to see if she could come up with a plausible explanation that made sense, but her frantic mind was drawing a hard blank. Everything from the moment that the Simian monkey had appeared at Sporks felt like a bizarro fever dream, and it was made all the worse by the fact that she had already lied about some of it.
Did she just tell Charlie the truth? She had said she would try, way back then, when he had dropped her off at her apartment. She had meant to stick to that promise, to uncover the root of the strangeness. But that was before... before everything.
While she dithered, a small crease had appeared in the centre of Charlie's forehead.
"Well?!" he said, shaking her a little.
"Charlie, I-"
"What?"
"I don't know if I can- it's hard to explain."
He dropped his hands from her shoulders, turning to one side and making a small, disgusted noise.
"Why is it hard to explain? Just tell me what happened, April. I have to know! What happened to Michelle?"
"I..." she shifted uncomfortably. "It's... it's complicated, and-"
He rounded on her, eyes wide. "Is what they're saying true, April?"
"What-
"Was it you? Did you kill her, April?"
A cold chill shot through April's stomach. His eyes were pale orbs, wide and bloodshot at he looked at her in grim speculation.
"No! I- Charlie, what the fuck, of course not- I didn't- I could never-"
"Because it is what they're saying online, you know?"
He made an about turn, and paced from one side of the hallway to the other, fingers knotting and unknotting.
"Charlie, I- I swear-" April put one hand to her chest, tracking him with her gaze. "I swear, I had nothing to do with…" she paused, brain spinning, then restarted. "No, Charlie! I could never have! We, we were attacked-"
"By who? Who attacked you, April?"
"I- It's-"
"You can't tell me? You can't tell me who killed her?"
"Well, I mean- it's just-"
"Because I just don't think that's fair, April. You know she was my friend before she was yours? More than a friend, even. You knew that. But I don't get to know what happened to her? Because it's 'too complicated'?!"
She reached out her own hand, tentatively putting it on his shoulder as he stood still for a moment.
"Charlie... I'm so sorry-"
"But not sorry enough to fucking tell me what happened!" He shrugged off her hand and rounded on her, shouting now, his face red. "What the fuck am I supposed to think, April!? All the shit happening with you lately, and now this?! Michelle dead, c- cops at my place, asking me questions about you? And meanwhile you've gone fucking AWOL, only to fucking- fucking show up back here- what am I supposed to think, April?!"
For the third time in a very short span April found tears falling from her eyes.
"Charlie- Charlie, please, I-"
"When you said you were going to find out what the fuck was going on, I believed you, you know? I let it fucking be, let you run off to Michelle, and now she's- gah!" He slammed his fist into the wall. It didn't break, but there was a hard thud as it bounced off the surface. Charlie waved the rebuffed hand around furiously in the air like it was a Polaroid he was trying to dry.
"I- was I fucking stupid, to believe there was anything else going on other than you being bat-shit insane? Jesus, April, did you kill her? Did you finally lose your fucking mind the rest of the way and just- just go ham on her!?"
April backed away from him, taking a few steps down the hallway towards the kitchen. Charlie followed her, eyes locked with hers and keeping pace. His hands twitched oddly at his sides.
"Charlie, I swear- I swear I had nothing to do with what happened. We were both attacked- it was- it was a… a creature, Charlie, and-"
"A creature?!" He laughed this time, and it wasn't a good laugh. "Let me guess, it was another fucking porcupine? I'm tired of your shit, April!"
He took another step towards her as she continued to back away. Quivering slightly as she took a step, her foot knocked against one of her scattered belongings, thrown to the ground by whatever careless police official had searched the flat in her absence. She lost her footing slightly, squeaked a little, and threw out one hand, palm against the wall, to steady herself.
Then something very weird happened.
There was a soft popping sound, and the air in the corridor appeared to warp, twisting subtly in a clockwise direction around a seemingly random point in mid air. That twist unspooled itself, but out from the tension it had wound up thumped a tight slice of nothing, about an inch thick, that slid down the hallway. The travelling wavefront intersected the walls with a narrow stripe of their own non-existence, demarcating a region where a portion of the projective fell sufficiently out of sync with April's own envelope to be rendered invisible. It passed seamlessly through Charlie, deconstructing and then reconstructing his internal organs, apparently without his notice. He continued walking towards April, glowering.
What he didn't fail to notice was a solid chunk of wall, at least a foot across, abruptly crack in half right next to April's hand, let out an ear-splitting THUNK, and drop out of reality, leaving a gap in April's wall like someone had attacked it with a sharp edged sledgehammer. April stared at the hole in the wall, then back at Charlie. The expression on his face told her that this too, like the vanishing chunk of photo frame earlier, wasn't limited to her perception.
When Charlie spoke, the anger had entirely fled from his voice, supplanted by the soft whine of a man who was entirely lost in the world.
"What the fuck?" he whispered.
At a loss for what to say herself, April took a step back towards him. "Charlie-"
"April, what was that?" He looked up at her, pleadingly.
"It's- it's hard to explain-"
"April, a piece of your wall just disappeared."
"Yeah, I- yeah."
"Is this like what happened at the bar?" his eyes were wide, filled with a mixture of incomprehension and the slightest hint of fear.
April nodded at him.
"April..." he took a step closer, stooping down slightly to scrutinize her face. He lifted a hand, and gingerly placed two fingers back against her shoulder, as if to steady himself, or to assure himself that she was still really there. "April, do you... do you have... magic powers?"
The last two words were almost a squeak. Once April's brain had successfully processed what he had said, she found herself surprised by how difficult it was to come up with an accurate answer. Did she have magic powers? She deliberated for several long seconds, before finally settling on, "no." More a disease or a hazard dogging her every footstep than a power, really, and probably more science than magic-based, regardless.
Charlie, unfortunately, seemed to have taken her hesitation as a sign that she was lying, because he was giving her the sort of frenzied stare she imagined people usually reserved for those they were pretty sure did have magic powers.
He whispered something that she didn't catch.
"What?"
She stepped closer and he spoke again.
"Did... did you kill Shellie... with your magic powers?"
"I- what? Charlie, no, I-"
"They said... they said it was like a ritual..." his voice was getting a little louder again now.
"Was... was it an accident? Or... or did you-"
"Charlie, fuck, I didn't kill Shellie, it- fuck! I had to watch her die, man. It was horrible, but it wasn't my fault-"
"I still loved her, in a way, you know. She wasn't for me, but- but it sticks with you." His eyes were staring at the floor, his face hollow. "So yeah, I still..." His voice trailed off.
April took a step forward, arm raised in a comforting gesture, as if she was considering drawing him into an embrace. "Charlie, I'm so, so sor-"
His fist hit her hard across the side of the face. It wasn't enough to knock her to the floor—Charlie worked out a lot less than the dudebro who had assaulted her back at the A. S. Eddington—but she still staggered back, reeling. Before she had a chance to recover he was back up in her face, shouting.
"And you killed her!" his breath was hot against her cheek, eyes wild, and she shied away reflexively. "You got magic powers and you fucking killed her!?"
"I didn't-!"
"Liar!" He lifted his arm backwards almost unconsciously, readying another strike. "She trusted you! You two were together too and I was fine with that. But then you go and you- you fucking kill her with magic! You fucking monst- AURG-Hhh!!!"
In the heat of the moment it took April's brain a while to catch up with the input her eyes; the sequence of unfolding events was sufficiently fast and unexpected that her visual cortex, capable predictive engine that it was, was unable to draw any clear through-line between the images it received, and was instead forced to reconstruct events from the ground up. As she stood blinking, leaning against the wall with a stinging cheek, she saw that Kroakli had come barrelling at Charlie from around the corner, hitting him squarely in the chest like a sack of bricks.
As Charlie staggered backwards, the orgoane moulded itself around him, clinging on tightly with its full weight. Its shape was amorphous, having catapulted into him as a loose blob of matter, but as it enveloped his upper body, binding his arms to his torso, the top half of its human form emerged out of the mass, jutting out sideways and dripping with loose globules of its own flesh, false mouth hanging open.
"Should we kill this one?" it said, leaning in towards April conversationally. "We would not take pleasure in this, as our forebear had much fondness in her memories of him. Kr... But we shall value your purposes foremost in our deciding, and he did strike you..."
Charlie, mostly frozen with shock, overcame it enough to open his mouth and scream, loudly. Kroakli extruded a blobby tentacle out of its back, and slapped it down wetly over Charlie's mouth. The sound grew muffled as his eyes bugged out of their sockets.
April finally found her own voice. "Don't- don't kill him!"
"As you wish. As we say, we will accommodate."
"And- and let him go, Kroakli!"
It made a thrumming sound. "We would do this," it said eventually, the voice its typical dry crackle, "but his intention was to attack. Surely you would not invite this little indignity, April bone-sapling. Let your meat be less tenderized still, grh-gkkt-" The last sound was apparently caused by Charlie's struggling gyrations pressing into the gill-like air slits that Kroakli sucked air through to fuel its vocal tract.
April considered for a moment, only briefly struck by how bizarre it was that she was apparently now giving the creature orders, before settling on some words. "Then, let go but keep an eye on him- Charlie, I'm so sorry."
Kroakli slithered down off of Charlie's torso. As the tendril gagging him was unplugged, Charlie pulled in a hoarse wheeze, staggered as the wet blue mass detached fully and dropped to the floor, and then Charlie himself fell, collapsing down onto the carpet amid the scattered detritus there. April took a step closer, Kroakli hovering, drawing up into its full humanoid form next to her. Its entire complement of spines had apparently been regrown by this point, slotting neatly into place across its chest where a human's ribs would have been.
Charlie had managed to pull in a breath, and was just now letting it out in the form of a sort of pained moan. He was staring at Kroakli like he had just seen some kind of demon, or space alien, which-
'Which he has,' April reminded herself. It was shocking, how fast the absurd had become normal; how rapidly the insane had become accepted as part of her everyday life. She figured that this must be how people, as a whole, were able to deal with sudden change, but it also felt like a window into how a madness must set hold; the craziness creeping in at the edges until you failed to realise just how far gone you were.
Until your friend was on the floor, staring up in terror at the shapeshifting monster you had brought home from another world.
"What is it?" Charlie hissed, his body rigid.
"It's, um." She bit her lip. "I'm sorry. This is Kroakli, and it- it shouldn't be here, really, I-"
"How soon you are to dismiss our utility, oh very limited flesh-bound April. We have many uses to justify a should. Was it not us that forestalled this assault upon your self-meat? How tender it is, your sarcous substance that we shield of our own volition- oh, see now how our helping is unbounded. All this for but a little world-stepping in return, at no cost to your own self..."
"What is it!?" cried Charlie, the words almost a wail this time, catching on his throat, his voice hoarse and strangled.
April bent over him, Kroakli hovering next to her, seemingly ready to pounce.
"Charlie, I'm so sorry, I- I told you things were fucked up, and weird, and..."
Charlie mouthed a few words faintly. April just barely made out, "yeah, no shit..."
"I'm sorry you got dragged into this. I'm sorry that Michelle- oh, fuck, Michelle..."
She spared a brief glance at Kroakli. The creature didn't exactly have body language, aside from the exaggerated motions it sometimes indulged itself with in its human form, but even so... the way its substance shifted and rippled, quivering in an ambient manner; it was something she was starting to get a feel for the rhythms of, perhaps even to read little impressions from. As she looked it over, Kroakli seemed almost... uncomfortable?
Maybe it really was starting to feel things for the humans it mimicked. Perhaps it had even begun to understand the impact of the actions of its former self, for all it tried divest itself of the association, it's inheritance from the mindless, violent thing that its current instance had been born out of...
She looked back at Charlie. His eyes were glazed over, and he seemed to just be staring at the ceiling now, only taking in April and Kroakli through the corner of one eye. April spoke at him anyway.
"It's all fucked, Charlie. I didn't... I didn't mean for this shit to happen. But now... now it's my responsibility, I think. I told you I would find out what's going on, and. And I still don't know exactly why this is happening, but I am closer I think, and-"
She paused, leaning against the wall to catch her breath. Charlie was watching her now, expression unreadable.
"And I think I know what I have to do. Because it's- it's the things I touch that- that this happens to."
She glanced at the hole in the wall, Charlie sprawled on the floor. At the horrifying confluence of slime and intention that was Kroakli.
"I have to go. I'm sorry. I think that's how I fix this. I have to- have to leave-"
Charlie opened his mouth. "April- April, I..."
She turned away from him. "Kroakli, let's go." The creature hissed by way of response, turning to follow, stepping lightly over Charlie's prone form.
He turned his head towards April, tracking her as she walked towards the broken front door.
"April... I'm... I'm sorry-"
The words were a low wheeze, but April heard them. She paused for a second before the door, hand outstretched, hesitating, half moving to make an about turn, to say something further.
Finally however she stepped forward, pulled it aside, and walked through, Kroakli stepping fluidly after her. She didn't look back.