My Condo is a Turtle Tunnel — Part 6 (Finale)
Series — Mel and Gabriel must fight past the fearsome Gr'Drn, seal the breach, and save humanity from a sacrificial incursion. But the price for such a feat must be paid in blood...
The bridge shook beneath the padding footfalls of the creature. Stiletto-knife quills — gleaming crimson beneath the otherworldly sky — blanketed the beast's body, save for its hands, face, and prehensile tail. Leathery, crocodile jaws parted, and the Gr'Drn tasted the air with the slimy eel tail that was its tongue. Tar-black gums pulled back in a snarl, baring teeth like shattered China.
It paused, no doubt catching the potent smell of Ånd blood. A low growl followed, sending tremors down my spine. Would this be how I died: flayed on an ancient bridge, feet from my home?
The Ånd between Mel and me began to shake uncontrollably.
My hopes of escape evaporated as the Gr'Drn left the tunnel and stepped out onto the span; there was hardly any room on either side of the beast. Trying to skirt around would surely end with us impaled on its quills.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry for setting all of this off."
Mel sighed. "If you hadn't I'd still be trapped on the other side of the ringway. You brought me this." She drew a shard of Van's broken knife, tucked beneath her waistband. In one fluid motion, she drove the jagged metal into the neck of the Ånd between us and kicked him in the backside. It clutched at the wound, stumbling and staggering forward toward the advancing Gr'Drn.
"This way!" Mel pulled herself up onto one of the low walls, penning in the bridge. I clambered up after her, onto a ledge not much wider than my feet.
"Run!"
Mel had already taken off sprinting, arms outstretched at shoulder height for balance. The Gr'Drn meanwhile, seemed to zero in on the wounded Ånd, now on its knees, soaked in blood.
There was a subtle, almost imperceptible wind up as the Gr'Drn sank a half-inch onto its haunches.
Then a blur.
Viscera.
Screams, gnashing teeth, and the mangled torso of the Ånd, wedged between ravenous jaws.
The sound of its gruesome feeding sent me darting along the wall as fast as I could with the injury I’d sustained.
Every step sent a jolt of pain through my abdomen, causing me twice to nearly lose footing.
My feet already struggled to find purchase on stones polished smooth by howling wind, and the urge to look down into the gaping abyss below became almost magnetic.
I held my breath as I hobbled past the creature.
Something changed; it paused in its feeding to taste the air once more.
Could it smell my blood?
I froze, feeling my hammering heartbeat count out the longest few seconds of my life, before the creature returned to its meal.
I skirted by, dropped off the wall, hobbled the rest of the way across the bridge, and followed Mel into the blackness.
The dark was solid; the same viscous tar-like substance we swam through in the RingWay. As was the case within the depths of the black pool, unseeable entities bumped and brushed beside me. I imagined snaggletoothed tarpon and anglerfish, roaming in the void and hoping for an easy meal.
No.
I wouldn’t be consumed.
Not when I was this close.
My lungs strained. The overpowering reflex to inhale betrayed me, causing the inky black to flood my body. The more I choked and sputtered, the more I inhaled, thrashing like a drowning man at the bottom of the sea. My hand before me broke the surface of… something. I staggered out of the darkness, tripping over half spent candles and scraps of splintered wooden boards, before falling on all fours and retching black ichor on the cheap carpet. My carpet.
"Easy there, Dude," A familiar voice said in a thick Minnesotan accent.
I'd grown so accustomed to the red glow of that alien sky, the bright work lights left me blinking, and scrambling to shield my face.
"Get up, there's no time." Mel said.
"After all these years, you know? What a trip."
"Van—no time! I need Willow Charcoal."
"Got some right here." Van held out a thin black stick in his artificial arm.
Mel reached, hesitated, then paused; her curiosity temporarily displacing urgency. "What—um, how..."
"Oh this thing, eh? Damn bird tore the old one clean off. You know me though; slipped away, got a new one. Works great, too."
While I shuddered at the thought of a bird large and powerful enough to rip off a human limb, Van showed off the dexterity in his mechanical fingers by rolling the chalk across his knuckles.
"Van!" Mel snatched the stick, turned, and started scratching out hasty symbols around the edges of rippling shadow on the closet wall. Only in that moment did I realize I could actually see the RingWay embedded in the wall. "How long do we have?"
"Sorry?" Van asked.
"Until the creature comes back? How long do we have?"
"Until it's done feeding, I guess. Hard to say. It doesn't make a lot of noise, and we couldn't see it before." Why could I see it now? Was it a product of the concoction Mel gave me? Maybe it was a lingering side effect of the time I spent in that place...
"Then we need to move fast." Mel stepped out of the closet and slammed the door shut. "Where is the other entrance? The one you fell through?"
"I'll show you—here." I led her down the hall to the kitchen. "Inside the back of that cabinet."
She crawled inside and began to work, rattling off instructions over the clacking and scraping of the Willow Charcoal. "If I copy the exact same glyphs from the inside of your closet, the two ends of the turtle tunnel will merge. No more Gr'Drn in your condo."
"How does that work?"
"A little like two halves of a broken bone growing back together."
"How do I help?"
"Hold that closet door. Keep it shut with everything you've got."
"When do we let go?"
"You'll know."
The air in the hallway swam like a mirage. Thin spider silk tendrils drifted through the air, growing from within the spare room and spiraling toward the kitchen. "Like two bones growing back together."
Van had already started to pile furniture against the closet door -- which the Aethereal fibers seemed to pass through as if it were wide open.
"We need to hold it, yeah?" He asked.
"Until she finishes the ritual." I bent over and grabbed the edge of the pullout couch, dragging it across the room until it was square against the edge of the furniture pile.
Van threw his shoulder against the bookshelf beside the door, edging it into the gap between the Sofa and the wall.
"So she understands what all these symbols mean now?"
"Seems so. I guess she had a lot of time to practice.
"Suppose you're right."
A dull thud impacted the door, rattling the line of furniture.
"Shit."
"Mel, I don't mean to rush you there, but eh, I think we have a visitor at the door."
After a pause, she called back: "Almost there!"
Gr'Drn thumped agaist the wood once more, rattling the frame. Cracks sprouted from its upper corners, racing across the wall.
"It'll hold, right?" I turned to face Van, only to see the trapper backing away, slowly. "Right?"
He said nothing. My mind jumped back to those nights spent in silent fear, with that thing pawing at my bedroom door. It had held, barely. Of course, this was cheaper, thinner wood.
"That's it--I'm done!" She called.
Another impact. Splinters and plaster chunks fell. If Mel had finished, why was the Gr'Drn still here?
"I'm not sure it's working. Are we missing anything?" Van asked.
"They said the ritual needs a sacrifice to work. That must be it," I said, before yelling the question: "What did you sacrifice to seal the tunnel?"
Mel answered in a grim tone: "All of them."
Right as the Gr'Drn broke through the door with a deafening crash, a flash of coral-pink light bloomed in the hall. For an instant the creature stood, tall and terrifying. Passing straight through its chest were the enchanted threads, rooted in the glyphs Mel had drawn on the wall around the RingWay. They began to twist and swirl together, not unlike a thin and horizontal funnel cloud.
It stepped forward and spaghettified, swept away as if by the current of a flash-flooding river. I blinked, and the beast was gone, out of sight.
***
I couldn't truly appreciate what Mel had meant in the heat of the moment. Only after did I realize what she had done to stitch reality back together. The sacrifice was the ritual's result itself: an untold multitude of Ånd, left to be devoured by their eternal enemy.
I'm still living in my condo, but plan to sell it as soon as my financial situation allows.
When the moonlight hits just right, I can still see that shimmering strand, snaking its way through my home; the place where Mel wounded the universe itself, and stitched it back together.
Thank You for Reading!
I’ll probably have more to say about this story in the post mortem. I hope that long-time readers will notice a few call-backs to earlier works.
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Telling a friend about me is pretty cool too. Getting your words in front of eyeballs is honestly harder than doing the actual writing and editing…
Great ending!