Pulphouse Fiction Magazine 17 by Dean Wesley Smith

Author:Dean Wesley Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing

There was her loafer in the middle of the vast white floor. Her legs felt like two jellied sausages as she slunk to the sink and looked into the mirror. The reflected urinal was starkly silent. The ceramic floor was clean and dry. The marble cubicle was subway-train free. No flood. No terrifying coelacanth.

Alice grabbed the other key off the sink and held out both hands in front of her: a key in each, and brandished them at the urinal. “I’m going. You hear me, whatever you are. Just go and flush someplace else.”

Out there she could dissemble and lawyer herself out of anything. In here she knew the truth. This place was just what they said it was: a portal opened in here somehow by the demolition.

Who put it here and who used it before it all went bad?

No time to wonder. The tile floor thrummed through her sole and her sock. The urinal exploded into the room. Imagination? No.

Water lifted her: hair, clothing, and feet. Buoyant and desperate not to drown, she clamped her mouth shut and writhed until her lungs wouldn’t hold anymore. Ice drilled through her brain like a screwdriver into the concrete in a crackhead’s basement. Bright light burst in her brain. Excruciating pain. A kraken-sized black shadow.

And then? his long warty body wound around hers.

“Frabbida,” he said.

She flailed at him with her useless keys. They made streaks of fire in the brightness but they didn’t wound him. He forced his coils tighter and tighter around her. He stank like vomit. His teeth were going to rip her apart and devour her.

She’d been here before with this nightmare, freezing her solid, making her scream until she woke up her boyfriend. If she let him out and all the other nightmares with him, he’d be real. They’d sewer themselves into the world until day became night.

That’s what the construction had done. It had created something new.

Evil thoughts, evil dreams alive in waking day. Twisted memories. She couldn’t let that happen. If she never came back, it didn’t matter.

The bulbous lamps of his eyes were right above his teeth. She drove both keys deep into his brain.

Light exploded around her. The roaring noise returned, and the rushing feeling, the ache in her lungs. The pressing coils were gone.

Alice breathed, as seawater vomited out of her mouth, as filthy tiles solidified under her. She coughed, she breathed. She lived.

Brown, dingy stacks of Dixie cup boxes now piled to the ceiling, a roll of TP stuck over a plunger, a grotty pedestal sink draped with a stain-spotted towel.

Clean it up and make it dirty again.

This was the real place. A bare toilet she didn’t dare think about, the smell of Lysol and Drano and yes, old diapers.

Alice smiled and looked at the dented safety pin. “The diaper room key to cosmic plumbing,” she breathed.

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