"Cuppy, I'm home!" Freyja called, letting herself into the apartment, dragging a sack of scavenged parts behind her. "I got your shit. Cuppy?"
It was already early morning of the next day, the hunt having been pushed through the night by Freyja's preoccupation with sifting through the scandalous newspapers. Luckily, her lupine night vision had rendered this a non-issue. Tracking items that she couldn't define by a specific scent, however, had no workaround. The extremity of the time dawned on her when she found a crude sticky note, courtesy of Cuppy, reminding his roommate that it was a school day.
Freyja shrugged and kicked up her feet. Even if it had been a pile of ashes once, the apartment complex was standing now, and it beat sleeping outside. She would think through the spooky implications later.
Cuppy was unusually punctual for his morning class - Social Studies - and took the opportunity to leave a deviled egg on Miss Yule's desk. Not on a plate, just there on the unprotected desk.
The tidy woman with short, straight black hair regarded the egg with a questioning look that faded away into a mental shrug. She took her place at the whiteboard and rapped her yardstick across the desk to signal the class's attention. The hectic antics and childish jeers from the crowd hushed down, and class began. Cuppy was sitting at his assigned desk in the front row, center-stage, hands neatly folded over his books and binders, a polite little student look on his face. For such an odd boy, one thing Cuppy wasn't was a poor listener, but Miss Yule was stumped regarding how he retained the curriculum material when his mind seemed to be off in the clouds all the time. All the same, she was hardly into the lesson plan for the day when her rehearsed lecture was cut off by the warning bell sound notice of a coming school announcement. She bit her lip, and sure enough a school-wide update came through the speakers.
"- students are to avoid strangers wherever possible, and refrain from lingering after dark. Please remember to stick together in groups and report any suspicious activity to your teachers or to the police. Your safety is our top priority." the speaker went on.
Cuppy heard the shuffling whispers of gossip at his back as his classmates exchanged stories of the alleged serial killer stalking Station Bay.
"They found three more bodies in the park."
"If you can call them bodies."
"I heard he has big claws."
"When do you think they'll catch him?"
So on and so forth.
The announcement ended with a reminder to also avoid any and all fog banks or stray clouds of mist, due to the toxicity of the escaped underground vapor that the government was working diligently to excise. Miss Yule seemed to stiffen at the mention of that, and Cuppy's fine-tuned acoustic strings, concealed and all but invisible for their small size, picked up the vibration of the teacher's heartbeat quickening. He didn't have time to analyze what this might mean before the class resumed, and their textbook review segued into a current event lecture on the underground tunnel that was supposed to supply power to Carne Island out at sea. The power line ran directly under the bay to the island from beneath the city streets. As the lecture progressed, Cuppy realized that it described the red tunnel he and Richie had encountered the leprechaun in, attached to the sewers. Surely enough, Miss Yule went on to make it strictly clear that the public was not permitted in this tunnel, for their own safety. She made a point of emphasizing that she would be sorely disappointed if any children from her class were caught making trouble down there.
We're well past that. Cuppy thought.
Discounting the warning regarding the slasher killings, the contents of the school day's itinerary all seemed to connect back to the strange fog and distortions. The narrative had been steadily narrowing into this idea that Station Bay was endangered by the leakage of toxic gas which could cause otherworldly hallucinations of monsters, and that children were to abandon the idea of trying to witness these creatures. Where had all the precautions been until now, between the first leak Richie saw, and the public's official recognition of the hazard?
Did the leaks bear any connection to the tunnel? O'Gravy was snared by that spontaneous fire construct back then, an event that remained unexplained. Maybe if whoever had amended the disbursement of knowledge in school to include warnings on the fog had also added the red tunnel to the list of taboos, it could be linked to the same agenda, one that might explain why O'Gravy was there, and why the attacking fire was locked onto him the moment he was. Maybe someone knew about the fog portals, and the things that came out of them. Maybe they were trying to contain them.
The image of Mason standing like a suited boogeyman over the bunyip circulated through Cuppy's mind. How could he have forgotten? Someone already did know about the monsters in and from the fog. He and they had made a point of disposing of the creature's carcass, and coercing Cuppy and Freyja's silence.
Yet, something so singular and alarming as that encounter felt like a fuzzy memory from a fading dream. So too, in fact, did his and Freyja's close call with the jester. He could recall the brutal murderer's beautiful angelic face, and the way his claws gleaned in the moonlight, but there was a total disconnect between the factual knowledge that they had nearly been killed, and the kind of traumatic reactions one would expect them to have as a result.
The jester, the fog, the monsters, the red tunnel and the fire - all of it swirled around in Cuppy's mind like an eddy. The common denominator between everything - he felt - was the Backyards.
But what exactly were they? Nothing could be recorded of that strange realm if memory was leached from the explorer the longer and deeper they stayed. Richie had lost several memories, Freyja two years' worth, and Cuppy seemingly his entire life. Somehow, there was comfort in that thought, at least in comparison to the specter of the possibility that his existence had been fabricated. He had touched on the possibility before that the creatures stalking the sewers were only trolls through one or a few people's perspective, and that all the contents of the fantasies of mankind could empty into the waking world from a collective dream. At the time, it hadn't occurred to him that no exception was stipulated for himself. With only the seeming knowledge that he was Cuppy, he hadn't so much as second-guessed his amnesia. The concept that there were memories, floating out there in dimensions unknown and waiting to be scooped back up to validate his existence, allowed him to push his fear to the side. It wasn't strictly too that he was just another monster created by an unknown power. In fact, it wasn't even a given that the mythical transients were creations at all. Or perhaps, some were and some weren't. Maybe the fog was a byproduct signaling the arrival of such artificial creatures? Or perhaps things dreamed up by visitors to the Backyards could detach themselves from it, and come here? Was the cereal killer just another one of them, like Cuppy might be? Or was he a traveler stripped of identifying memories - like Cuppy might be?
The possibilities were staggering. But nothing would be learned by thinking in circles. The apartment would be perfected soon enough, and that would secure their base-level needs. Richie would beat up the cereal killer, Cuppy had faith in that much, but the strings Cuppy had implanted in Richie had long since stopped sending tingling feedback from across the vast, unimaginable gulf. If Richie had fallen through the Backyards again, there was a chance his memories of Cuppy themselves would be obliterated, if not already, then on the return trip. Should Cuppy go look for him? Try to wander into the wandering corridor under the spell of a self-imposed trance? Would he even be able to let the eyes of his mind relax and wander, so as to find it, under the weight of fearing for Richie's safety? Even if he could, wouldn't he just be deprived of his memories too? His personality traits? His very sense of self? That would bear little distinction from having his soul plucked out. Maybe the bed sheet ghost Richie encountered - and other things in Cuppy's cloudy subconscious, dark things, angry things - were mobile forms of the Backyards themselves, wrapped in the guise of hungry entities set adrift.
There had to be exceptions though, loopholes or something. Not every memory was gone in 100% of all cases. Richie still recalled the dense ivy and the psychic comfort of Freyja's kindred presence, as well as the terror of running for his life from the jaws of the giant alligator behind him. In fact, that excursion had remained completely intact in Richie's mind, acting as the dreadful prologue to his assault by the cloaked man in cobalt. He had said something to Richie too, hadn't he? Something to do with Richie's childhood. With his past.
Cuppy felt like he had some of the pieces - but not nearly enough to make out the big picture. While he idled, thinking about how to begin connecting the disjointed pieces of esoteric information, another explorer sprang through the liminal planes of existence overlapping and swirling together with the one Cuppy currently inhabited; an explorer who had already found an insurance claim against the adverse psychological effects of the elusive Backyards. What was more, the border was wavering, coming and going like the lapping waves of the tide on a beach. If the sand was Station Bay, then the weathering sandbar about to break apart to admit the waves was the line between both realities. Within the shallows, microcosms of beasts fought for survival…
Rolling green hills with a thin forest at their back, and a steep slope that was almost a cliff at their front, stood dreamily under pastel clouds. Wind ruffled bright blades of spring grass, and the hills began to rumble. The Japanese woman in the crescent shirt surmounted the hills from the woodland, sweat-slicked and adrenalin-fueled, and looked back over her shoulder at the titanic thing sidewinding its way toward her. The trees parted like the damaged and bent stalks of reeds as a massive serpent expelled itself from the brush, pitted nostrils flaring and its slitted pupils curtained under a crown-like ridge of spines at its brow and flat skull. The serpent's coils were thick like a stout oak trunk, and its powerful body was coated in slick coal-black scales. A forked tongue wafting toxic fumes of evaporating venom darted between pronounced recurved fangs, tasting the air after its fleeing quarry.
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The woman looked back down the steep slope, where it angled into a sea of twisting bramble. A rotted log, overgrown with lichens and colorful slime mold splotches, lay on its side in the tangled snare, a hole opened up in the top like a door in a plain of spikes.
She took her chances, jumping down the sheer dropoff as a jet of caustic purple venom was spat after her in the vein of a king cobra's spew. The sizzling gunk flew just over her shoulder, cutting through a few trailing strands of blue hair as she plummeted. She braced herself, tucking her legs in close and twirling Yukihana below herself to stab into the ground and help absorb the impact. She crashed feet-first through the narrow hole in the log, collapsing part of the wooden rough. It was damp and dark inside, and cramped enough as to force her to crouch or crawl for long sections of it. The scaly beast was not far behind, its long body thrusting itself over the slope and swan-diving down into the log after her. She saw the pulpy dark plum colored interior of its mouth as its jaws separated and spread open wide at an angle that was almost perfectly straight. Drops of venom were seeping up through the hollow point syringe holes of its fangs, breaking away like rain droplets thrown from its mouth in the rushing of the wind around its falling form. The woman threw her free arm toward the breach in the log she had widened, and sealed it closed together with a thick iceberg. There was a thunderous crash as the basilisk collided with the ice construct, the tip of one of its fangs poking through, making boiling noises as it ate away at the ice, dissolving it gradually into heated water vapor. The woman turned and forced herself left through the log, following its angle down a gradual decline guided by the entrapping bramble vines. Behind her, the rotted edges of the log gave way, and her iceberg was dislodged, crunching into the floor of the arboreal tunnel. The snake furiously pounded its broad, flat head against it until it was crushed to flecks of sleet. It squeezed into the tunnel after the woman, but found the log narrowed too tightly in areas, forcing its jaws closed with no leverage to break the log open and snatch the human scurrying away like a rat in a tube. Missing, it retracted its form from the log's initial opening, and scanned the fallen tree corpse for other weak points. Vast swathes of it were wrapped in thorny vines like studded chainmail armor, denying entry. Where knobby branches and protrusions poked up through the bramble, the basilisk slithered over the grassy bank at its side, prodding and probing for target areas it could break through. Its infrared thermal vision saw the woman's unusual heat signature shuffling through the log. Her warm core body temperature was a constricted radius encompassing a small area of her chest and torso, radiating out from her heart. The rest of her silhouette was wrapped in a dark blue that indicated a near-total absence of heat - a living cold spot. She was more cold blooded than the reptilian behemoth itself.
As the snake beared down on the chinks in the log's armor, periodically bashing in circles of roof to strike at her with gnashing fangs, the woman blasted plugs of ice into the holes rapidly, shuffling and dodging all the while. Her breaths were getting short, and her heart rate was quickening with the escalating strain of eluding the serpent. She needed to find an opening to retaliate and go on the offensive before she was backed into a corner, but she had no leverage inside the damaged log. She heard a scattershot of snake venom rain down on the log in a dozen different places, eating through tangles of thorny vine and sloughing tree bark. She touched her hand to the underside of the log's roof, spreading a layer of ice to reinforce the dissolving cover. It wouldn't hold long. Then, she saw a break in the log, a severed tunnel end where it was broken in half, and a static funnel of bramble curved down into the earth like a burrow. Twilight sunlight shone down on the opening, where the flooring was a trail of soft grass cutting through the thorny sea.
She rushed to escape down the diagonal chute into the earth, but the basilisk sensed it had come to the moment of truth for capturing its prey. It blocked the woman's retreat by slamming its tail - ending in a club-like rattler - through the end of the log segment, caving in the roof and denting the soft soil beneath the log. The massive segmented tail was taller and wider than the narrowed exit point itself, and could not be bypassed. Worse, the armored carapace of the rattle meant that neither freezing cold attacks or sword strikes, limited as they were in this cramped space, would penetrate deeply enough to recoil the snake. She scooted back as the tail thrashed and crashed wildly into the log over and over again, crushing it further up its length and collapsing wood debris inches behind the woman's retreat. The tail blocked off that end as the basilisk reared its head and broke through the other, punching through an eaten patch of pulp its venom had softened.
The woman was sandwiched. Feeling claustrophobia and the onset of raw panic tickling her senses, she waited till she felt the warm gust of its noisome breath, and saw the soft fleshy lining of its mouth again. Then, she conjured and fired a pointed icicle into its maw, stabbing the roof of its sensitive mouth, eliciting an angered hissy roar that shook the ground. The ice spike melted in the caustic haze of venom vapor, as the frothing toxic liquid collected and condensed in the beast's maw.
"Oh shit." she grimaced.
The basilisk launched a fire hydrant torrent of boiling venom into the log, filling it like a rushing poison flash flood. Birds scattered from the sides of the hills that cradled the mini valley of bramble set into their side like a flat tier as a great section of soil and grass exploded outward like a thunderclap, fumes and scattered debris flying in every direction. A rough sphere of thick glacial ice flew out the collapsed side of the hill, cloaked in a caul of purple mist trailing behind it, the residual venom eating shallow divots in the instant frozen armor. Within, the cryomancer felt her stomach drop as she fell into the canopy of amazonian jungle river bends below.
At the school, Cuppy broke away from his friends' cafeteria table at lunch to go visit the rabbit pen kept in the central courtyard. He had volunteered some time as the class pet flock's caretaker, and rather enjoyed letting the dumb little things nibble lettuce leaves and snack pellets out of the palms of his hands. Their pink noses twitched, and it somehow reminded Cuppy of clockwork gears turning. He had left his brother back at home to sleep off the hole the jester punched in his chest, and the sense that Richie was struggling with something was still eating at him. He missed Freyja the last day, and the gap in time felt so much longer than it was. All in all, he felt a cold emptiness. Loneliness, maybe?
It was a feeling that Zeke and Simon weren't equipped to assuage. Board games and card games were too complicated right now, too much thought. The rabbits were simple. He petted one's hindquarters and watched its ears twitch about.
"You understand me, fuzzy minions." Cuppy praised the munching lagomorphs. "I'm sorry you have to derive nutrition from your own poop."
They appreciated the sentiment, surely.
Cuppy felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen, and then the rabbits tensed up as well, hunkering down in low crouched, grunting, and breathing heavily. They were scared shitless of something. Cuppy released his thin clear threads again, spreading a web of vibrational feedback throughout the grassy enclosure. They picked up the drops dripping from the curved metal spout of the water feeder attached at the side of the cage, the plinking noises echoing like hushed thunderclaps. A soft breeze moved through the cage they stood in together, but the strings felt no breaths or heartbeats but those of the colony, and Cuppy himself. There was a noxious smell though, a musty smell he didn't like, like moldering shed skin and regurgitated bones. There was an undertone of malice under their feet, as though something in a color filter framing their location was moving across the screen of a film they were in, superimposed for a greater audience to see, but felt only in passing by those within. The shadow of whatever it was passed through they're layer of being, and its phantom presence was enough to trigger primal unease.
"Cuppy? Are you alright?" Miss Yule asked from outside the mesh of the rabbit pen, carrying a thermos.
"The rabbits are bothered by something." Cuppy said.
"Is something wrong with them?" she asked.
"I don't know. Come see." he welcomed her into the pen as he silently withdrew and retracted his string network into his fingertips.
One of them brushed the tip of Miss Yule's nose, and her eyes looked briefly alert, focused hard as though she were perceiving something more. She stayed like that in the threshold of the enclosure, scrutinizing the air, then regained her sense of environment. She moved in to address the colony's affliction.
"They're startled by something, that's for sure." she said, stroking one of the rabbits down the back. "I'll have the groundskeeper take a look at them, keep watch for a bit. If they don't calm down soon enough, I'll call the vet. It could just be a coyote or something they smell passing through the school grounds, but I don't want to rule anything out."
"They'll be ok, right?" Cuppy asked.
Miss Yule looked at him thoughtfully. "Of course."
The bell signaling the end of lunch hour rang, and the mass migration to classes began again. Soon, the courtyard between school buildings would be crowded with throngs of shuffling students again.
"That's your cue. Go on now, get to class, I'll take care of things here." Miss Yule assured the boy, and ushered him out.
Not long after the stampede had trickled and died, and the clock chimed the hour off in the distance, Miss Yule felt a sudden calmness fall over the pen. The rabbits were still, no longer grunting or acting restless. Some had begun to resume feeding or drinking water, and others were hopping about aimlessly. One, however, had gone rigid and dull-coated, before falling over on its side in an instant rigor mortis. Miss Yule touched the fallen rabbit and was shocked to find it was stone-cold, and its heart was dead in its chest. Cold, animal panic and terror was frozen in its big black staring eyes.
Miss Yule shuddered, then noticed thin trails of mist were beginning to hug the ground. She could hear sinister hissing within. The cellphone at her hip shook violently, and she withdrew it to see that the Tracer network was freaking out, trying to get a lockdown on something. That something was right in front of her. A feeble red glow in the shape of a thin transparent circle flickered once or twice around the wispy trails, but always faded out of existence again, lost as it tried hopelessly to navigate to the epicenter of the distortion. There was no one spot the Tracer could affix itself to, the ether frog's sphere of influence was decentralized this time. Miss Yule was seeing only temporary ribbons into the world brushing hips with this one.
She felt lightheaded and faint, staggering backward and clutching her head as the sounds of crashing waterfalls and calling tropical birds rose in her ears, and the cloying humidity of equatorial water vapor stuck to her skin. She fell backward into a large pile of loose hay, and her body sunk out of sight, called to an ambiguous zone of reality composited from the intersection of two or more universes. Called to the Backyards.