Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

“Very good.” The voice chuckled. “Now I suppose you’re going to pull yourself back together and, how did he put it … kick my damned ass until I leave for good. Is that next, Albert, dear?”

Harper strained to open his eyes. Madame Raniella was nowhere to be seen. He was no longer in the delivery room, but further back in the past, sitting in a movie theater, the voice of the creature snarling behind him.

“This is where we met, isn’t it, darling? This is where you fell in love with me.”

Exactly as he remembered it.

“Is it all coming back to you, sweetheart? Is it?”

Harper remembered it all — being in a bad mood, going to a movie alone, not caring what he saw. He remembered throwing himself into the middle of the emptiest section of the theater. Remembered two women coming in and sitting directly behind him. The two talked throughout the film, but having his theater-going experience interrupted by the pair did not bother Harper for long. He was too busy falling in love with one of them.

“It never did dawn on you, did it, Al? A beautiful woman, with an interest in mystery novels, and gaming, and comics … a beautiful woman who voted the same way you did, who couldn’t wait to leave the theater and go to that new Vietnamese restaurant … how vain are you?”

Harper turned in his seat.

“Do you think I’m going to believe anything you tell me?”

“Baby,” the form of his wife said sweetly, lifting a hand to point a single finger at him, “do you think I care?”

An arc of blue-white flame erupted from her hand, cascading over Albert, roasting his skin, boiling his eyes. Remembering himself whole, inside his shower, he drenched himself, regenerating his body as he screamed:

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you care about, what you think, or what you have to say. Just get out of my daughter’s head!”

“Al, sweetie,” the familiar thing smiled. “What makes you think I’m in her head anymore?”

The Linda-like thing waved its hand and boils flooded forth from every pore of Harper’s body. Hundreds, thousands of them, they burst open, pus and blood bubbling up from each of them. Harper endured the torment for a moment, then rejected the plague, throwing it off as he had the earlier torments. As he did, the ever-changing landscape settled once more into the red and purple wasteland he first encountered. As Harper steadied himself, the Linda thing strode purposely into his field of vision.

“Very slow, sweetheart,” it told him. Hands on its knees, body bent to show all its parts off to their best advantage, the thing told him, “Too slow, really. I mean, seriously, what do you think can really come of all this?”

Before Albert could answer, the ground opened and swallowed him. He tried to leap away, but he could not compensate for the slam of crushing gravity sent to shovel him into the latest torment. As he fell below the surface of the dreamplane, the ground rushed in, sand and gravel and choking dust, not just piling atop him, but grinding against him, digging its way into his skin — tearing it from his body, shredding it. First one layer, then the second, hair torn away, scalp bloody, nails being etched, eye brows and lashes ripped out by the roots—

“No!”

Albert clawed his way to the surface, breaking the ground open with his back and shoulders. His head felt cracked; blood sluiced over his ears, down his forehead. His hands ached from clawing his way free. The Linda thing cackled as he gasped for air.

“You can’t do it, you know.”

“Do what?” Albert’s voice was a ragged, panting thing, weak and feeble.

“Beat me. Can’t be done.”

“Bullshit,” Harper said weakly. “Human beings been … kicking the ass of your, your kind for centuries.”

“True, perhaps.” Sitting on a large violet rock seemingly carved to resemble a great, rolling tongue, the Linda thing added, “But that takes actual faith.”

With a snap of its fingers, the thing unleashed a ravenous horde of insects to devour Albert. As quickly as he could shield himself, regenerate his flesh, the overwhelming waves of chittering creatures would find their way to him once more, begin chewing again, ripping again, tearing, slicing, stinging, gnawing—

“The moment Linda first sat down behind you,” the thing snickered, “you had no faith in your chances with her.”

Albert cleared his mind enough to summon a great wind to carry the horde away from him. He had nearly a full second’s respite before the Linda thing turned his body to glass and began tossing shards of rock at him.

“When she started to talk,” the thing laughed, shattering Albert’s left arm at the elbow, “you wanted her so badly. But you never believed you could actually have her.”

Concentrating, Albert was able to reform his body, but only for as long as his opponent allowed it. While he wiped at the sweat running down his forehead, half of it water, half of it tiny glass beads, the Linda thing took the moment to finish its thought.

“You don’t have the belief in you to get rid of me, sweetheart, and that’s what’s going to make this so much fun.”