Cuppy smiled, arms folded as he looked out over a vista of sprawling color and twisting tunnels knotted together like churro twists.
"Come on, race ya!" Cuppy took off sprinting.
"Wait, the train is that way!" Chikita pointed to the Choo Choo.
Instead, Cuppy leaped right over the barrier and kept his feet rolling right over the water. A huge wake of spray erupted up behind the boy's heels as he ran right across the surface of the water. Chikita jumped onto the train and began running across its cars to catch up. Cuppy tore onto shore, grabbed a low-hanging set of monkey bars, and began swinging up and over, up and over, faster and faster.
"Heh." Cuppy smirked. He let go at the apex, and flew up high. He pressed his legs to a plastic tower, and kicked off, triangle jumping up in between two colorful spires that seemed to touch the sky. In a blink, he was perched on top, surveying the breathtaking view from his summit.
Chikita landed at the base of the jungle gym island and stared up at the elevated Cuppy.
"Don't get ahead of the lesson! Get down here!"
"Ok!" Cuppy called down, then jumped.
Chikita's footing felt squishy, and she looked down to see that she was on another trampoline platform.
"Oh no." she grit her teeth.
Cuppy cannonballed into the trampoline, and the rippling shockwave flung Chikita up and over the clay Foundation before them. She got herself stuck, headfirst, up past the shoulders, in a circular hole carved into the curving side of a blue tunnel.
"Tag! You're it!" Cuppy chirped, then darted across the grounds and disappeared into the cave marked #2.
Chikita, after a trio of mighty tugs, finally managed to yank herself out of the hole, and landed in an inelegant sprawl, tumbling off the edge of the clay basin. "Little bastard. Hey, where'd you go?" she circled the odd platform, regarding the numbered tunnels. She took a wild guess and entered #5. She passed through a long, dark tunnel that gave little indication of where she was or what she was moving toward, and the air was surprisingly chilly, like the cave the place resembled. The sounds of an arcade still echoed from deeper within the place, so she simply kept going forward, following the noise. The ceiling grew gradually lower until she was forced to crawl, and the ground under her palms and knees felt oddly squishy, sparring her strain. Ticklish things brushed her face and hair, which she correctly took for dangling streamers, and she finally passed through a square of them at the end of the tunnel. She came out of her crawl in a long hall lit by a low red glow, a mesh net forming a wall to her left, and a solid wall with zoo animal painting adorning it forming the barrier to her right. Beyond the net were more plushy platforms, tunnels, and slides. Thirty yards down the walkway, she came across a sea of plastic balls sectioned off by the net, at the base of several crazy, twisting slides of different obnoxious primary colors. The smells of greasy pizza and root beer permeated the place.
"Cuppy?" Chikita called periodically as she paced the hole. At the end, she turned the corner and came to an intersection of three doors, colored red, green, and blue.
"Hmmm." she regarded the doors. The lighter trick to determine wind flow was probably useless here, in the logicless world of the eccentric psyche. Perhaps Yukihana could be of assistance?
The katana glowed blue, trying to lock onto something to follow.
The air is distorted here, like his aura is being refracted through prism panels. Your guess is as good as mine. he answered.
There was something odd about the low-lit playplace structure. Such places weren't really supposed to be dark. Even though Chikita was from a time before fast food joints and their associated plastic tunnel playgrounds, the sight was eerie. Something...liminal. A memory triggered in Chikita's mind, something she'd overheard Holly talking about once.
"Liminal spaces tend to act as an easier breeding ground for ether fog to appear. If my theory is correct, and these anomalies have happened before, way back in the recesses of leftover memory from ancient times, those echoes may be the very thing that give us the feeling of unease in what should be perfectly harmless places."
Chikita wasn't sure why, but simply acknowledging what Holly'd said while standing in the very kind of place she'd been talking about felt like a bad idea. A speak-of-the-devil sort of taboo that might spurn the harmless, if mildly eerie, kid-paradise to start summoning some unknown horror. Chikita bit her tongue, trying to distract herself from the idea, goosebumps trailing up her toned arms as she stared again at the doorways.
Chikita shrugged and went through the leftmost door, blue - did they swap colors? - and immediately felt her legs slide out from under her. Then she was rocketing down a steep and winding closed-tunnel slide, the musty air filled with static. Her stomach lurched as she twisted, turned, and dropped, the ride seeming like it would never end. When it finally did, she spilled, disoriented, head over heel across a soft padded floor with the texture of covered foam. She straddled the edge of what ended up being a sheer cliff face down into a pale, milky funnel slide whose appearance suggested a tornado. Chikita gulped as she teetered at the edge. Catching her breath, she sidled the foot-wide framing encircling the square room, trying to find new footing somewhere across. The wall at her back was gone halfway through, and she pinwheeled her arms to keep balance. Falling, she hugged and clung to what was essentially a high-altitude balance beam.
"Damn runt, have some safety regulations in your dream worlds!" Chikita growled.
Finding the strength to stand again, she turned on the banister and looked across a huge gulf, with another framed doorway built into the far wall. A rotating, gearworks procession of cogs alternating clockwise and counterclockwise at random formed a dizzying obstacle course across the gulf. The support pillars carrying these spinning platforms went down into darkness, like towers of Babel, their bases engulfed by the deep darkness of divided red plastic tubs, like bottomless toy boxes. Next to the spinning gauntlet, a tangle of swing ropes formed a tricky skyway to the banister where Chikita stood. Cuppy swung to and fro from the hemp vines, Tarzan calling all the while.
Figures. I'm creeped out and he's having a blast. He better be fearless here, if he's going to claim this Backyard as his own. Hey, wait a minute...
She realized that Cuppy's momentum could not be stopped, and that he was about to swing right into her.
"Hey! Don't crash!" Chikita blanched.
"I can't figure out the brakes!" Cuppy sweat.
He sandwiched into Chikita, knocking them both off of the balance beam, and careening into the ominous funnel maw of the Charbydis slide far beneath them. They bounced hard in the curve, impending ultimately down, of the funnel slide, and spun helplessly down into the dark pit at its center, like emptied bath water circling and going down the drain.
They both dropped through the hole at its center, freefalling down a long plastic chute that went straight down, and shot out the bottom. Bellow was an Olympic pool-sized sea of plastic balls of every perky color, like the mother of all kiddy appeal ball pits.
Kerplunk.
Cuppy climbed the shifting, bobbing spherical waves, and found that he could ride the waves by floating on his back. Chikita, instead, was assailed with the indignity of sinking and drowning in a sea of child's play. The ball pit, though undeniably simple plastic, had the physics of super quicksand imposed upon them. Chikita found herself sinking down, down, inexorably down.
"Hey, take my hand!" Cuppy found a partially submerged square platform of harder purple plastic, like a stepping stone across a turbulent tide. He stretched out as best he could, but the strings he ejected managed only to snag the assassin's wrist. The undertow began yanking Chikita under, like an unseen great white shark hidden beneath the waves of the sea. Ultimately, where strings failed, Cuppy's fishing line sank under the plastic level and hooked Chikita's belt, yanking her back onto 'dry' land.
"That was close. What an eccentric way to be beaten. One thing's for sure, you're either on another wavelength all together, or you just don't heed possible dangers. This place reflects your innermost being, but it isn't yours just yet. Don't let your guard down."
As if in answer, the plastic balls began shifting. They weren't alone. Someone was in this carnival madhouse with them. Someone under the waves of orbs.
"What the?" Chikita trembled inadvertently, the plastic cube beneath her shaking and lashed by the spherical tide. Looking out across the pool of balls - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple - she could see a handful of other square plastic stepping stones providing safer purchase.
"Try to stay on solid ground." Cuppy chirped.
At random, individual balls began popping off sky-high with sounds like cannon shots, followed by bursts of smoke like gunpowder discharge.
"The hell's doing that?!" Chikita blinked.
Cuppy leaned over the stepping stone to get a good look. A ripple traveled through the balls, as if across a still lake. Then, one of the balls shot upward again, clobbering the boy in the face. He turned and regarded Chikita with a black eye.
"They're feisty." he said.
"Then why did you dream them that way?!" Chikita growled.
Whole bundles of plastic balls, compact together like giant beach balls, began bursting out of the pit. Some fragmented into spherical shrapnel that bounded off of the walls, ricocheting wildly. The pair jumped apart to opposite squares, and Chikita parried the rebounds with Yukihana. However, the sword merely nicked, unable to cleave through the balls. She was pushed off balance, and a circle of plastic balls bounced off of each other like lined-up pool balls. A blue one struck Chikita square in the center of the back. She arched and gasped, going down onto one knee.
"Am I doing this?" Cuppy asked himself. He noticed one of his legs was caught in the balls, held tight as if by a titanic grip. He heard shrill noises and looked as a giant fin of plastic balls soared across the surface toward him. With a great pull, he yanked his leg out of the vice just before the rolling ridge swept past him. It impacted the far wall of their circular enclosure, and left a dent where the fin broke apart as though the wall had been slashed by a heavy blade.
"Keep out of the balls!" Cuppy advised Chikita.
Chikita, shaking, held her back, grimacing. "You don't say."
A low, clownish giggle echoed up all around them.
"Keep out of the balls you say? That won't help you."
Instantly, Cuppy and Chikita perked up, scanning their colorful prison.
"Where are you?" they said in unison.
Could he be...?
Cuppy saw a small depression in the balls, as if an antlion had begun creating a shallow sand trap.
Then, the pit deepened, balls sliding endlessly down into the center, circulating on loop. The platform lilted.
Then, the sifting stopped.
"...?"
The platform Cuppy straddled exploded into the air on a geyser of churning, twisting balls as thick as a marble column, crumpling the block into itself and tossing Cuppy like a rag doll. The sudden shock and g force alone made him straddle the line of passing out, and as his body went limp at the apex of its flight, Chikita realized that the boy was going to plunge right back down into the ball pit proper. Gritting her teeth, she slashed an edged current of freezing air along the surface of the balls, kicking up a wave that caught Cuppy as he landed, and carried him across the pit, depositing him on another platform.
Is this a nightmare? A shade takeover? A rival for control of the yard? Chikita's mind cycled through possibilities.
Heads up! Yukihana warned.
A trio of balls pitched themselves at her from across the room. She deftly bobbed side to side, evading the fastball-speed projectiles. The balls at her feet churned, and she began blindly stabbing beneath the surface. A shadow rose high behind her, and Chikita turned to see a huge red boxing glove filling her field of vision. The punch clobbered her right in the face and tossed her across the pit, into the pool of plastic balls.
Out of the ballpit, a fetid smell like rotten salsa and bean-farts filled the air, a swell in the middle of the ballpit rising closer to the surface. The mottled, pock-ridden face of a literal boogeyman was the first thing to crest the sea of spherical plastic, long, stringy hair hanging over glowing red eyes, themselves perched above a horrifically large mouth, crowded by teeth that reminded Cuppy of some deep sea eel.
A bloodstained, rough-sewn poncho stretched partially over the large body of the creature, the sort that could be found in old Western movies with catchy one liners. A crazed look was plastered across the nightmare's face, and a brown ooze of chewing tobacco trailed down his cracked lower lip. In a gravely, disturbingly high-pitched voice, the creature announced itself.
"Cuco!"
Cuppy rubbed his head, cracking out his neck and readjusting his now-bloodied hood. He sashed a pair of stiff, netted string platforms that looked like tennis rackets to either of his feet. An exploratory step proved the functionality of his improvised snow shoes, and he casually walked across the balls, strolling right up to Cuco. He regarded the pale bugbear, leaning down.
"Hmm." Cuppy said.
"Cuco?" the monster growled.
Cuppy bent over and palmed the ratty head of the humanoid abomination. Then he, in about three pushes, shoved the beast back under the balls.
With a muffled grunt, the creature appeared to indeed disappear, spat out of Cuppy's reality for the time being. "Not right now, mister." He sent a flurry of strings into the pit, digging around for Chikita.
Chikita found herself in what seemed to be an anomalous house, having fallen through the bottom of the ballpit into a hallway. The place was dusty and dark, and uncomfortably hot. Perhaps in a desert?
This sensation. Adobe housing? Yukihana said.
"And the climate is way too arid. Not to mention," she held up a palm bearing a miniature ice swan that swiftly melted away, "unbearably hot."
Just, don't let your guard down. Yuki said.
Chikita picked a direction and started walking.
-
Cuppy's fishing line snagged nothing but balls. He could almost taste their static charge traveling up the wire.
"This is getting me nowhere." Cuppy sweat. "Chiki's not just playing hide and seek, is she?"
The float ball bobbed.
"Y'ello?" Cuppy asked.
The line yanked down, and Cuco erupted out of the pool, shoving and tipping the plastic platform over. Cuppy flipped and righted himself on the sea of balls, awkwardly trying to keep his feet together.
"Woah nelly." he uttered, finding his center.
Cuco sank under the waves, glowering eyes locked onto Cuppy. The boy embedded his strings deep into the pool, but it seemed bottomless and refractory on his senses. Then, an explosion of pain erupted in his right side and hip, as the child-eater pulled off a Polaris breach like a great white shark. His filthy jaws punctured deep into Cuppy's flesh and bone. He screamed, screwing up his eyes, but found the wherewithal to react. He jabbed the beast in the eyes, freeing himself midair.
They hung suspended in the air a moment, Cuppy falling back toward the ball pit, Cuco still rocketing straight up toward the domed ceiling. The boogeyman touched down first, and sprang straight down in a dive back at Cuppy. It spread its jaws wide, taking aim to chomp the brat in half this time.
As he fell, Cuppy loaded an explosive pellet and let 'er rip. The tiny bomb disappeared down the child eater's stinking gullet, and it grimaced and choked as the pellet lodged itself in his throat. A backwash of blue flash and black smoke exploded out of the beast's mouth and nostrils, along with a spray of blood.
"I am in control. This is my playground!" Cuppy said.
His personal gravity went sideways, and he landed on the wall. As the bleeding, coughing Cuco fell, Cuppy waved his arms like a flourishing stage magician, and the entire arena rotated freely. Cuco and his fall path toward the ball pit were suddenly below Cuppy. He leaped down off the wall and fell toward Cuco, a scissor blade poised to stab him through the chest.
Twenty feet, ten feet, five...!
Cuco swung his arms, and huge clumps of balls gathered around his boxing glove fists. They scraped and squeaked against each other, sounding like traffic-jammed balloons, and Cuppy saw arcing blue sparks crisscross the congregations in crazy freeway patterns.
Too late he realized that Cuco had generated massive amounts of static electricity using the balls as conductors. He only knew the hurt he was in for when Cuco chucked both electrified ball clumps at Cuppy. The boy was sandwiched between the electrified orbs, blue sparks and jets of black smoke bursting between the individual balls.
Cuco was satisfied as the boy emerged from his cocoon, hair frizzled up and charred cloak steaming, and landed in a pile on one of the platforms.
Cuco made a manic, lunatic smile that seemed wider than his jaw hinges should have allowed, cackled with malevolent glee, then dove beneath the balls to hunt the other one.
Chikita had just begun to reach for the handle of the hallway doors, when it burst open with that same obnoxious screech. "CUCO!"
A phlegmy laugh echoed through the hallway as Chikita's back smashed into another door at the far end of the hallway, bursting her into what looked like a child's bedroom. She noticed small crossbow bolts stuck into the walls with rings of black smoke around them, as if they'd been carrying a small explosive payload, and a large stained potato sack lying at her feet, a basketball sized hole torn through it and splattered with blood. Lying on the bed was a sheep wearing a fez hat.
Grunting in pain as she sat up, the splinters in her back bristling against her clothes, Chikita cocked her head at the sheep. Something shifted under the bed, and Chikita instinctively began crawling backward away from it.
The bed violently shook and rattled, as if possessed down to its very framework, and then all at once abruptly stopped. Congealed ooze began to leak out from under the four corners, and a bulge pressed upward against the sheets. A humanoid form, the cloth strained thin around the shape of a crescent moon smile with a few fangs poking through, began to rise, displacing the sheep, which trotted off with an annoyed cry. Chikita gripped her blade at her side, ready to draw, holding her ground. Then, just as a long gash was torn in the cloth, the blankets receded and deflated like a ruined soufflé, as though nothing had been there.
Swallowing, Chikita moved forward and began poking and prodding the filthy mattress with her sword.
Nothing.
She wiped the sweat from her brow, then turned around. Cuco's form exploded out of the floorboards in front of her and gnashed his teeth. The woman rolled out of the way, and the mattress was chomped straight in half, like a surfboard by a shark. Chikita flipped over into a crouch, drawing her sword. The thing was upon her in an instant, clamping its jaws over her neck - no, over Yukihana. Its eyes bored into hers as it pressed in, pushing Chikita's heels back over the wooden floor. Chikita channeled freezing cold through the blade, and the beast grunted and released, stumbling back and clutching its fangs as a motherfucker of brain freeze racked its skull.
Chikita swung her sword laterally at the boogeyman's neck. Cuco caught it effortlessly in its gloved hand, clutching the blade and holding Chikita in place. Tutting, Chikita froze an ice slick under the footing beneath them and spun, twisting Cuco off balance so that she was suddenly behind and below him, the monster losing traction and pinwheeling. She spun and swung out her blade to take off his head, but the beast dropped into the splits beneath her. Continuing the spin, Chikita swept out a leg to take the monster off its feet, but it almost gracefully backflipped away from her.
It landed perfectly, and gave a bow, echoing that same phlegmy giggle. Chikita took her eyes briefly off the confrontation to look at the emptied, torn sack, stained with old blood.
Is that... Chikita felt ill.
Yes. Yukihana confirmed, disgusted. The blood of children, long gone.
Chikita looked up at the beast, killing intent rolling off of her in aurora waves like a murderous glacier.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Cuco cocked its head, lopsided, twisted grin growing wider. Chikita could see scraps of raw meat still festering between its fangs. She slashed an edged current at the beast, and he deftly jumped over it, pulling off a midair splits as if to show off.
Can't dodge while you're in the air. Chikita thought, turning out her palm and firing a ballistic icicle spike. It nailed the beast in the face - or so Chikita thought.
Landing, the Latin boogeyman turned toward her, revealing the ice spear clutched lengthwise in its grinning jaws. Shaking its head at her, it closed its jaws full throttle, and the blue ice shattered to bits.
Chikita crouched low as well, her breaths visible as icy vapor trailing throughout the room. The bugbear actually seemed to get a little chilly, gripping and rubbing its goosebumped arms. Its grin faltered a little. Chikita channeled her cold through her brain, slowing certain impulses and disabling the limiters on others. Should an ordinary person play with the dials of the brain like this, they were likely to drop dead. As it happened, Chikita could not receive damage from frostbite, though it certainly gave her a headache when used like this. She wasn't happy to be pushed into this corner. Even so, she shrugged it off, and trained her assassin's eyes on the beast.
"Cuco?" it questioned.
Chikita was gone, leaving an empty outline of arctic mist scattering apart as if by a powerful gust of wind.
The monster's eyes widened, and it threw out its gloved hands to block the coming kill shot. A waist slash at incredible speed clashed with Cuco's guard, and he was sent flying to the other end of the hallway. At one end was a tall, old fashioned mirror that had gathered dust for generations. It rippled like a lake as Cuco plunged inside of it, disappearing and leaving the glass intact.
"What?!" Chikita balked.
She turned around warily, keeping her blade in prime guard position, scanning for the creature. It could phase through surfaces? Was it only mirrors? Beds? Closets? Perhaps wherever young children were afraid they could be ambushed by the things that went bump in the night?
She heard a creak behind her. Chikita turned around and saw the monster flying toward her with the same momentum she had launched him, a leg chambered to deliver a whopping roundhouse kick. Her guard was too high, and Chikita had the breath knocked out of her as the beast crushed the top of his leg into her abdomen, throwing her down the same hallway - catch and return.
The glass shattered to bits on Chikita's back, embedding themselves through her shirt and in her flesh. She hissed, and clutched the huge, deep bruise imprinted in her stomach. She dropped her katana, and looked up to see the Cuco drop in front of her from some kind of ceiling hatch, licking his lips as he towered over her.
"You can warp through any material you want, can't you?" Chikita asked the beast.
Cuco's manic grin was answer enough. It lunged to tackle and straddle Chikita, teeth flashing. Instead, its eyes rolled into the back of its head, face contorted in an unexpected bloom of pain, as Chikita heard a loud thunk. Cuppy's float ball struck the back of the boogeyman's head, hooked its scalp, and drew it back. With a huge reel, Cuco flew back down the hall, tumbling across the boards like a wipeout victim.
It stood, growling and holding the back of its bleeding scalp, red eyes trained on Cuppy. The boy blew a fallen lock of hair out of his eye.
"I never said I give up." Cuppy stuck his tongue out at the beast.
Cuco unhinged its jaw, a swampy gurgling sound playing in the back of its throat, and it expelled a huge sphere of dark purple flame, marbled with streaks of black, down the hall, filling its width, at Cuppy. Cuppy raised an arm, and a spiderweb of coarse, fibrous-looking string unfurled into the shape of a circular shield. The flames were extinguished instantly upon it. Cuppy smiled as he thought back.
-
"Cuppy, what are you doing?" Richie asked, looking at the puppet boy, standing on a stepstool, removing ceiling panels from the bedroom.
"Salvaging materials I can incorporate into my experiments." Cuppy said, ripping out a bundle of spongy gray stuff that left fluttering bits raining to the floor. A few fibers stuck to Richie's scarf. Richie plucked one off and regarded them. "What is this stuff? Some kind of insulation?"
"Some kind, yes." Cuppy nodded. "It's asbestos."
Richie went pale and muffled his mouth and nose with his scarf. "WHAT THE HELL?!?"
Next he knew, Cuppy was eating the hazardous material out of a bowl as though it were popcorn.
"Did you know asbestos is fire-retardant?" Cuppy asked Richie.
"Good for it." Richie blinked, grimacing.
Cuppy, either ignorant of or ignoring the sarcasm, washed down his meal with a long noodle of bungee cord, which he swallowed down like a piece of spaghetti, plastic hook at the end and all.
-
Cuppy smirked at the boogeyman. "That won't work."
Cuco growled, then dove under the floorboards, which rippled again before going still once more.
"Cuppy, he can swim through whatever he wants!" Chikita called a warning.
Cuco rose behind the puppeteer, salivating. Before he could move in for the kill, a loose board flew into the side of his face by a fine retractable string Cuppy had attached. It grunted and recoiled, clutching a split ear, then lunged again. Cuppy took out his sheers, ready to chop off the coming lunge punch. Instead, the arm disappeared suddenly in the air - the fist had gone through another portal. The exit was right at Cuppy's right jaw hinge. He saw stars and stumbled, toppling right through a larger portal Cuco had opened up next to him. The boy passed through, and fell into Cuco's grip. The boogeyman held the stunned moppet overhead like a bench press brag, then chucked him down through the floor, immaterial once more. Cuppy fell from the ceiling through the floor three times, an infinite loop of portals, until Cuco snapped his fingers and closed the floor portal. Cuppy finally landed hard on his back, hissing and arching from the equivalent of a multistory fall.
Chikita readied her blade and moved to help Cuppy should he need to, only to find that her feet had been sewn down.
"Huh?"
The message was apparent - Cuppy didn't want any help.
Cuco spread his arms wide, and a new, pitch-black, hole opened under Cuppy, dropping him into open void. Cuco jumped in after the moppet, and the hole closed behind them, taking the hunt to a lightless pocket dimension.
Cuppy floated as if through space, craning his neck this way and that looking for any landmarks, or the monster.
"Think you have home field advantage?" Cuppy wiped a speck of blood from the corner of his dopey smile.
He heard the zip of boxing gloves coming unlaced, and being discarded - it seemed the gloves were coming off this round. He was able to angle his body and rotate position, but he couldn't really swim through the murk or influence his direction or lack thereof. From behind, merciless claws ripped open streaks in his cloak and flesh, spraying his blood. Cuppy was pulled forward with the force of the talon stroke, hissing. Another drive by came diagonally across his front, gashing his shoulder and thigh. Another across the chest, then another up from hip to shoulder, a graze past his face that chopped off bloodied curls and left nicks dangerously close to his eye.
Cuppy's feelers were out.
Show yourself, coward. Cuppy thought, licking the blood from his cheek.
His strings felt motion above him, and he looked up, forcing his body to twist from the startup of his head and neck motion. Cuco grabbed him by the shoulders, knees pressed into his chest, and opened his mouth wide, purple fire glowing in the back of his throat.
Cuppy glared at Cuco before he was engulfed in the curtain of eerie fire. The flames suddenly broke as Cuco squealed, dozens of copper wires embedded in its skin, springing from Cuppy's pores like jellyfish venom.
"Caught you!" Cuppy chuckled.
Cuco began unfurling a mixture of gurgly growls, feral roars, and garbled, vulgar spanish at Cuppy.
"Don't be a sore loser." Cuppy spat in the thing's mouth.
His heart rate increased like a drum of war, and the engine of Cruciform Striga inside his core surged with redirected electric impulses. Huge arcs of electricity flew up the wires and into Cuco, freezing the monster rigid and playing hell with his nerves, muscles, and organs. Steam and smoke poured out of his screaming mouth as his eyes began to bleed.
Hot Squat
Now, the exit. Cuppy visualized a pair of cabinet doors, their surfaces turned inward, thirty yards in front of them. He disengaged the electric shock string, pressed his feet into Cuco's stomach, and moved as if to hug the boogeyman. Bungee cords with big plastic hooks exploded out of sudden slits in his palms.
-
From where Chikita was, wandering around trying to find the exit point from Cuco's dimension, she saw an old oak cabinet along the wall of a wine tasting room shudder. The doors exploded outward as a pair of bungee hooks struck forward like long cobras, and latched into the far wall. Cuco, driven by Cuppy's feet in his stomach, rocketed forward and was slingshot into the wall.
The monster doubled over, eyes bulging, and it hacked so violently that it projectile vomited a spray of vile ichor and slimy mucus. In the puddle of regurgitated filth was a baby's pacifier.
Cuppy, standing and rotating his shoulder cuff as the bungee cords retracted into his palms, regarded the pacifier with a sad expression.
"Even if you say sorry now, it's too late. I'm going to spank you." Cuppy told Cuco with uncharacteristic contempt.
The monster's claws twitched as it scrambled on the floor, trying to find purchase. A handful of talons pierced the floor and it stood, screaming rage. Another purple fireball flew at Cuppy, and enveloped a flying yellow pellet that the monster didn't even see the boy load. The pellet exploded into a blinding flare of yellow-white light, like staring straight into the sun. Cuco shrank back, clutching its eyes, and tried to run, using its ears and nose to navigate. If it could just regather its senses and escape into its pocket dimension, it could ambush Cuppy and finish him off in one hit.
Instead, it stumbled as its feet were bound by sutures anchoring it to the floor.
Silver sutures.
It turned around as the flash died down, saw Cuppy's abandoned cloak fluttering there, cast off. Where was the little brat?
Cuco felt a shadow pass over himself, and he looked up. Cuppy was above him, left arm cocked back. Steel threads sprouted in a circle all around Cuppy's wrist, then quickly spread and crisscrossed down his hand, weaving together. Soon, a silver cap filled with tiny holes was grafted to and enveloped Cuppy's closed fist.
Cuco couldn't dodge this.
"Steel Thread-" Cuppy slammed his metal fist into the side of Cuco's head, shattering fangs so hard they embedded in the floor and walls, "Thimble!"
Cuco was driven by his head into the floorboards, cratering them and sending bits of chipped wood debris into the air. Cuppy withdrew his fist, leaving a crater-like dent in the side of Cuco's head where the flesh was deformed into a ring around the jaw and cheek.
Cuppy stood and allowed the steel threads to unravel and retract back into his wrist, leaving bruised, bloodied knuckles exposed. He dislocated his shoulder performing that punch too.
Cuppy smiled. "Consider that a gift from the children."
The monster's twitching form dematerialized in black smoke, a pained "Cu..Co.." echoing through the abandoned house. The air itself seemed to clear, and the rancid smells subsided. It wasn't dead, but it seemed its energy had left this place. Cuppy felt an odd, fuzzy feeling pass through him, like he'd just walked through a wall of static.
Chikita carefully stood up, her battered body aching all over. Her back was ridden with glass shards and door splinters, and every little movement that shifted her shirt around seemed to twist each foreign body in her skin. Wincing, she scooped her sword off the hardwood floor, which was now missing more than a few boards. "Say uh, mind plucking the refuse out of my spine real quick?" Chikita said through her teeth, walking over to Cuppy in a jilty, stiff way.
Cuppy laughed to himself. She's walking like she's holding in a poop.
The reason for the gimpy walk became apparent when she slowly turned her back to the moppet, showing what looked like an elaborate abstract painting where the artist had little more than red paint and occasionally chucked woodchips onto the canvas.
"Yuck, that looks like it stings." Cuppy said, cringing a little as he sent his strings to carefully extract the glass and wood shards and suture together the wounds. Fetching her trusty sake gourd from her sash, Chikita drank long and deep the sweet elixir of pain-numbing fermented goodness.
Cuppy glared at the place where Cuco had been laid out. "I already knew about this jerk going in. One of Zeke's friends is Mexican, and I went to their sister's Quinceañera. An old grandma with a spongy brain was rambling, mostly just dementia stuff, but whenever she brought up 'Cuco', she'd get teary and start apologizing to a kid who wasn't there. One of her kids vanished from the crib a long time ago."
Cuppy popped his shoulder back into place.
Chikita lowered her gourd, nearly drained. "One way to shape your own Backyard is to think about and visualize your ideal world. What kind of world is it that you want to create, pipsqueak?"
Cuppy smiled. "A world where my friends don't have to check under the bed at night."
Chikita nodded. "Good goal. Maybe uhh, get the place lots of good lighting. Or sunlight even, maybe? Somewhere it's never dark?" Chikita spitballed, continuing to sip the happy juice from her gourd. Cuppy nodded. "Mm, good idea. Sleep is nice, but maybe if I make the night time pretty rather than scary, things will work out ok." Cuppy says. He closes his eyes in focus, and the sound of shifting plastic paneling and wind passing through the large playground tubes that had formerly made up the bulk of this realm echoed in an enormous space.
Slowly, the surroundings reconstituted, fading away like a mirage. Chikita felt soft grass brush her legs, and the comforting warmth of the sun overhead on her skin. A bright blue sky stretched overhead. Tall trees, all with branches low enough to be easily climbed, dotted the landscape, topped with a huge treehouse structure in the shape of a pirate ship. "This is my kingdom now. No baddies allowed." Cuppy said, eyes beaming up at the glorious treehouse.
As Chikita parted her lips to give some praise or offer commentary, she felt a powerful tug on her core, as if lassoed by a snare trap of gravity. With a lurch, she went flying backward across the grass, punching a hole in the air with her body. Cuppy trotted over and peeked through the Chikita-shaped hole in the air, and saw that the swordswoman was hissing and rubbing her tailbone against the base of a tree.
Cuppy followed her out, carefully stepping through the door in thin air, and helped Chikita up. Behind them, the hole was gone, along with Cuppy's dreamscape.
"I guess the bad guy thing applies to you too." Cuppy chuckled.
Chikita jammed the pommel of her sword into Cuppy's chest. "Be careful, you jerk!"
She stood and stretched, regarding the forest.
"Guess I got ejected back into the solid world." she mused.
"What was up with the Fiesta fiend?" Cuppy asked.
"Well, like I said, your personal Backyard is a reflection of your psyche. You could have dreamed him up since he was fresh on your mind, but it's just as likely he was the real deal, passing through. With infinite worlds, it's anyone's best guess. I killed someone to take their territory, and one of you will probably have to do the same with Luchesi if you want to remove him from the Backyards. The fanged asshole in there could have been competing with you for control, or maybe he was just exploiting the fissure to enter new feeding grounds. That house felt pretty desolate, I'd guess your yard briefly overlapped with an old Mexican ghost town, picked clean of prey."
"Or he dragged my yard over it." Cuppy thought out loud.
"The borders aren't exact. This entire complex is something you'd call an Interstice, a waypoint between tangible, earthbound reality, and the Backyards. It has real world physicality, but otherworldly phenomena can still leak into it. Famous spooky places like haunted castles and catacombs might count as interstices as well." Chikita said.
-
Chelsea stared blankly at her discharge pages, pale-faced and listless. She nodded, zombie-like, without hearing the words being spoken to her. She shuffled out of the hospital and snapped off the plastic patient bracelet, dropping it mindlessly in the gutter.
When she got home, fumbling with the keys, she stepped into the empty dark house. It was night and the rooms and hallways creaked around her. It had been too long left abandoned by its sole tenant. The air was cold and oppressive. She set a shower warming, and undressed herself slowly, each movement a methodical, robotic step. As the room began to fill with steam, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Exhausted, drained eyes circled by black rings stared back at her. She looked like she'd aged ten years.
Chelsea pulled her lower eyelid, looking herself over in the mirror. Crows' feet lined her face, and her hair seemed to have become discolored and crinkly.
"God…" she said, feeling like dry dust was going to pour out of her mouth. "What happened out there?"
Her head throbbed, and she pressed her fingers to her temples. She couldn't remember what had happened to her, or who or what her attacker had been. When she tried to dredge up memory, her headache intensified to the point it felt her skull would split in two. The only concrete detail of that night that she could still remember was the sight of Kelly's brutalized corpse with her smashed and impaled face. She wished she hadn't.
She stepped into the shower. The warm nozzle spray was a relieving pressure on tight-wound muscles and skin that had crept into gooseflesh. She ran her fingers through hair that had become unkempt and matted with cold sweat, eyes surveying the numerous special shampoo, conditioner, and soap bottles lining the shelves; all different fruity scents and moisturizing properties. A tub of red bath salt looked like coarse grains of sand from Mars. Chelsea closed her eyes and began to slide down against the wall. She was just so tired.
Her eyes fluttered open and she drew in a sharp hiss of breath as the shower spray became suddenly ice cold. Looking around, she realized that she was outside, naked and exposed, and that the water from the showerhead had become chilling rain from a cloud-muddled night sky. At her back was a gravelly parking lot crowded with trucks bearing motor boat rigs, and ahead was a long white dock floating on a swelling black river that looked a mile wide.
Where am I? Chelsea wondered, feeling slow and a little dead.
Despite herself, and as though she were a detached observer watching a script-bound character act out its role in a play or a movie, Chelsea walked, barefoot, across the wet, rough ground. She turned at the dock area, across a stone outhouse shed, and passed through an open gate between low concrete walls, stepping into a kind of strip mall culdesac.
"Chelsea…" a ghostly voice beckoned her.
Chelsea looked up and saw the pale face of Kelly, dressed in a thin white dress that was soaked through with rain.
"Kelly?" Chelsea said.
"I missed you, Chelsea." Kelly said.
Somewhere that sounded both far away and close by echoed - a scraping noise like steel claws across slate.
"I've got to go now…" Kelly said, and began drifting away out of the cul de sac.
"Wait, Kelly!" Chelsea followed, her legs feeling heavy and slow.
She found herself going down a desolate stretch of road toward a vertical lift bridge with two control towers that shone eerie red light. An empty lot was at her left, and a long pier at her right, wooden and rickety, rising twenty or so feet out of the river. Kelly stood at the walkway's end, frail hands holding the banister. She turned her face toward Chelsea, a mournful expression painting her eyes and lips.
"Kelly?" Chelsea asked her again.
Kelly wept tears of blood, like long dark streamers, and disappeared around the corner of a storage shed built into the pier. Chelsea jogged to the end of the pier and turned the corner, finding not Kelly, but a sorrowful-looking jack-o-lantern. It fell, as if it had levitated in midair, and splattered over the wooden boards, its little flickering light extinguished by the unrelenting rain. Chelsea cupped a hand over her mouth, feeling sick at the sight of the mashed orange rind and sloppy, scattered mess of pumpkin pulp. The face was crushed to so much gore, just like Kelly's had been.
Chelsea heard the boards creak behind her, and she turned around to see the jester blocking the threshold of the pier at the shore. Either arm was stretched out, claws extended on each finger, carving deep track marks in the rails as he stalked down the pier's length. His face was a waxy distorted theater mask bearing the Comedy expression. Pitiless, gentle blue eyes stared back at Chelsea from behind those plaster sockets.
"Hello, Chelsea." the jester said, continuing to drift toward her, dragging his claws along the wood.
"What do you want?!" Chelsea demanded.
"Oh, I don't know, Chelsea. Why don't you take a few shots in the dark, I'm sure you'll get the right idea." he intoned a thinly-veiled, seething hatred.
Chelsea turned toward the river, and her head swam with vertigo as the dock stretched up and away, the stakes and pillars it stood on rapidly elongating like a feverish mirage, the vast river zooming out and shrinking to a curvy dark blue line miles below. Chelsea turned away from the dizzying, gut-twisting sight, and looked into the raised, gleaming claws of the jester.
"Come to Luchesi, doll!" the jester's noisome tongue unfurled from the warped grin of his mask, and licked its lips lasciviously.
Chelsea recoiled as the monster swooped in on her, her back pressed against the rail. As she swooned backward out of the slashing claws, she tumbled and flipped off of the pier, heart hammering in her chest as her stomach lurched, and she pinwheeled her arms madly. A high-pitched scream cut the drum beat of the downpour, and she broke the river surface with a tremendous splash like a cannonball had just hit the ocean. A thousand ice knives plunged into her as she fruitlessly struggled and sank beneath the rolling white caps, her last breaths rising up and out of her as a staccato surge of huge bubbles. They popped at the surface as she plunged down, down, down…
She brushed the shower drain, jolted, and realized she was pressed into the corner of her shower, the drain blocked and the shower flooded above her head. The distorted echoes of the twisting river was the patter of the nozzle's discharge into the rising shower pool. Clamping a hand over her mouth, Chelsea jammed her hand into the drain and snagged long, tangled hair around her fingers, yanking the clog free. She broke the surface and gasped in a huge pull of air as the shower drained with a series of great big gurgles. She had fallen asleep and almost drowned in her own shower, god she felt like an idiot!
She left several towels on the ground to mop up the residual flooding, wringing her hair of water and wrapping another towel around her waist. Her reflection was still so zombie-like, but now there was a slight gleam of awareness in her once-lost eyes, signalling a cold undercurrent of unease. After the shock of coming out of her coma and readjusting to reality wore off, she began to experience the terror all over again. Kelly's destroyed skull kept appearing under Chelsea's eyelids every time she blinked. Now, it alternated with the pulpy remains of the smashed jack o lantern in her dream. It was like a bad joke, this close to Halloween, as though the dream incarnation of her attacker considered his killings nothing more than naughty pranks. She imagined the coming All Hallows Eve, with kids dressed as ghosts and ghouls, and the vicious man dressed as a jester walking among them, claws hungry for fresh meat. All those unsuspecting, defenseless little meals wrapped up like candy for him. The jester would have a ball trick or treating.
Chelsea couldn't bear to go back to bed. She knew those claws would plunge through her neurons and play her mind like a fiddle again the moment she faded out. If she was doomed to exhaustion come morning, she much preferred staying up all night to being terrorized in her sleep. This decision firmly set in her mind, she opened the sink medicine cabinet, rifling through various bottles of vitamins and supplements. She found the emergency caffeine pills hiding behind an aged and worn box of bandaids, the corner thinned to a hole. These babies were damn-near requisite in her line of work. The numbers they crunched and algorithms they channeled ate up mental energy as readily as their equipment ate up the power grid, and everyone within Mason's inner circle had pulled at least a few 48 hours shifts with no breaks. It was practically a rite of passage to cement one's dedication to the program. Yet, in all those many avalanches of work, never could Chelsea recall feeling more dead on her feet than she was right now.
She popped four of her little pick-me-ups, capped the bottle with an odd sense of catharsis, and replaced it in the cabinet. Then she closed the mirrored cabinet door, and screamed. The gaudy killer's reflection stared back at her, looming over her shoulder like an otherworldly predator whose shadow swallowed up its prey. His arm was resting on the wall, fingers tapping impatiently, his other hand on a hip that was cocked out in a way evocative of a sexy pose.
Needless to say, this didn't do anything for Chelsea.
As she whirled around, the claws came out, stabbing into the mirror on either side of Chelsea's face, boxing her in. Luchesi leaned in close, the tips of their noses brushing.
"Sorry, love." he sneered. "Those pills won't help you. You're still asleep."
In the critical care room where Chelsea lay, still hooked up like a vegetable, the bed frame began sticking as her hands gripped the rails, white knuckle hard. She began whimpering and groaning, then erupted into shrill screams as her body concluded. Her body bounced and writhed up and down on the bed, as if bucking against tremendous opposing force pinning her down. Alarms buzzed, and in seconds personnel would come bursting in to feed something into her IV and check her vitals. The episodes were getting worse.
Within the dream, Chelsea, slashed, battered, and naked, was held up on an arm that had stretched unnaturally long, like an orangutan's. Luchesi had her by the upper mandible, his hand, claws retracted, forced into her mouth, knuckles pressing into the roof of her mouth. He tilted his head at her, giggling. There were bite marks in her breasts and belly, the blood coalescing at her toes and dripping like a faucet.
"Even if I kill you in your dream, your real self will remain intact." Luchesi said. "But it will not wake. I'm not strong enough to take your soul just yet, but you won't be opening your eyes anytime soon. When I finish you off and this dream ends, another will begin immediately. You will simply continue to cycle through nightmares, as I grow stronger on your delectable pain and terror. We're going to be in here together for a very long time. I can prolong this foreplay as long as I like, till you turn gray and wrinkled. I'm so very close."
Close to what?
None of the medical workers could see it, but a crouched, dark form straddled Chelsea, its dark claws lovingly stroking her as it looked deep into her psyche with its deadlight eyes. Richie would have seen it, even if it remained invisible to the everyman. He would instantly recognize a fledgling shade, seasoning its meal. If given the chance, it could keep going indefinitely until it was ready - ready to be born. If that day ever came, everyone would see it then. They would see the bladed gauntlets 'Luchesi' had appropriated from Chelsea's recently updated archive of worst fears explode out her chest, as if from within. They would see the newborn claw Chelsea open and climb out of her, fully formed in the Checkered Slasher's likeness, solidified and validated by belief in its existence. What better way to ensure that belief than to milk a comatose victim for all they were worth?
"I haven't been keeping an exact count," the shade in Luchesi's form drawled, "but I'd guess this is around the thirtieth time. Your sweet fear ages like a fine wine, with each death, you become more enticing."
He took a prolonged sniff of her hair. Then, he clutched his gauntlet - the one forced upward into Chelsea's mouth - tighter. Her eyes went wide with terrified pleading. At the extremity of the recurring nightmare, she suddenly remembered every other time this monster had hunted, tortured, and killed her. She always did, right before the final blow. Every moment of remembrance was a more bountiful feast than the last. The shade's drool dripped down onto hospital blankets, but only shade survivors or psychics could see the stains.
"That expression is heavenly." Luchesi said.
Then he expelled his blades, which erupted instantly from the top of Chelsea's skull. Her physical body arched its back and screamed - then fell limp. Slowly, her pulse returned to normal.
…
Chelsea stared blankly at her discharge pages, pale-faced and listless. She nodded, zombie-like, without hearing the words being spoken to her. She shuffled out of the hospital and snapped off the plastic patient bracelet, dropping it mindlessly in the gutter.