Previously: Jenny and Roland work in a vast, high-security facility. We join them in the middle of a regular visit to one of their contagious and dangerous patients. Relaxed, and well-rehearsed, they set about administering their medication, when they hear a voice.
New readers might want to start at the beginning, so click the button below. Previous episodes are continually being redrafted and improved/evolved, so existing readers may wish to get refreshed.
The corpse’s head hisses, “You can’t stop it. It’s already happened. I’m sorry. Oh well, you tried your best.”
“This isn’t pizza delivery”, replied Roland, “You’re in pieces, being probed, and whatever else, and you’re telling ME it’s too late. You’re like a nagging wife.”
“Like a match made in heaven,” says Jenny. “Oh nice, Roly, you’ve just stepped in some of her… her lady-paint tattoo-gloop”.
Roland looks at a small blob of patterned residue on the sole of his shoe. “Fucksake. Have you got a wet-wipe on you, Jen?”
Jenny has already unzipped a pouch on her suit. She pulls and rips off a foot of wipe. Not easy in thick gloves, but well rehearsed, “Here you go”.
“Fools,” interrupts the corpse, “What is this wet-wipe you lean your hopes and dreams on? The dank stain of your curiosity cannot be so easily wiped away with something wet. What force is a wiping from wet? Can a moist paper towel wet-wipe wipe away a God with its holy wetness? Cretinous meat puppet, you have no idea what you are dealing with.”
“Christ, does she have a volume control? Have you got another one, Jen?” said Roland, ”I’ve smeared it a bit up my leg.”
“This smear will rot your very existence. You make light of your current predicament, Roland. Soon we will be one again.”, said the corpse.
“Roly, you’re smearing it around the cell now.” said Jenny, “We’ll have to call the cleaners in again. They are going to LOVE that. On a weekend too”.
She puts on a sarcastic voice, and makes a phone shape with her hand, putting it against her visor. “Oh hi! Sorry to pull you away from your BBQ… is that the steam-clean-dream-team?…Yes I know.. Roland has trod in God-poo again… I know… Yes, he’s rubbed it into the carpet again.”.
“Oh my god will BOTH just shut the fuck up for one second,” replied Roland.
Jenny pinches her lips together to stifle her laughter. She catches a view of Roland through his visor, hoping to see him smile. Her eyes squint and she cranes closer to Roland to look at him.
“Roly, you’ve got some on you, You’ve fucking got some on you.”
“I know.”
“No, inside. Inside your suit.”
“Where? No. How? Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
Something has gone wrong. Roland looks down at himself inside the visor. Soft waves of the same symbols and patterns undulate up and down his chest and neck, rolling back and forth, up and down him, like the tide.
“This is impossible. Impossible. I just. I just.” says Roland, “This is impossible. We were so careful. Always so careful.”
“What do we do? I don’t know what to do?”
Roland has a moment to himself. His breathing is heavy inside the suit, fogging the visor. Roland closes his eyes, counts, and slows his breath until it demists.
“You know what to do. Keys are in my jacket pocket,” says Roland, “Half dry half wet, twice a day. Don’t forget. Go on, Jen.”
Jenny nods, swallows, and then moves cooly and quickly. Well-rehearsed, she spins the door release, plugs in the keypad, and enters the exit airlock, leaving Roland in the room behind her, without looking back. Once the door is closed, the decontamination process engages, and she then exits the second door. Once through the second door, she shuts and locks it, falls back against it, and closes her eyes, “You fucking idiot!”, screaming, and kicking her legs out in front of her like a toddler.
Roland turns away from the exit and faces the corpse on the table. He tosses the syringe gun on the floor, and pulls his arms inside the suit, unzipping it from the inside.
“Phew. Getting a bit warm in here.” Roland steps out of his hazmat suit and mockingly fans air onto his face, “So, how did you do it? Let me guess… Spooky magic?”.
“What is magic? What does it matter? It’s over for you. For all of you.” says the creature. “Your whole life has been mapped, planned, learned, played, and conducted for your role in my orchestra. You are just my key to the door.”
“Love a Metaphor, don’t you? I can’t even play the cowbell.”, Roland takes half a step backwards towards the exit. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had you naked on a bed. You remember?”. Roland speaks the joke but isn’t really selling the joke.
The creature does not respond.
“So, what do you do in your spare time then? Sport? Got any kids or pets?”. He takes another half-step back towards the exit. “I’m sure I asked you the same questions back then, but I was a bit shitfaced at the time.” He’s still not selling it.
The corpse starts to change state on the gurney. There’s a wet slurping sound, and body parts collapse in on themselves like they are being vacuum packed, then flatten out, liquefying into thick dark syrup.
“Nice trick. So no hobbies then? Family?”, Roland takes half another step backwards, eying up a red kill switch/panic button on the wall behind him, a few paces away.
The grim ooze splits and separates into thousands of blackened symbols, like oil on water, which pour over the side onto the floor, forming a large ornate puddle.
“Neat trick.” said Roland, “Go on, keep coming, cunt”, he whispers to himself.
A bubble forms in the patterned soup on the floor. Growing up and out, a head pushes through and rises out of the liquid, followed by shoulders, then two arms held together in a praying mantis pose. Within seconds, a huge, featureless, dripping figure towers over Roland, patterns and texts swirl all over it.
Roland sets off. Scrambling to the far wall towards the red kill switch. As does the creature. Roland's feet slip, squeaking, trying to gain purchase on the oily tattooed floor. The lanky creature moves to stop him. Feeling in that moment that the creature was upon him, Roland leaps for the switch, to punch the panic button. An oily hand grabs his arm, pulling it away before he can hit the switch, it pulls his arm further and further down, overextending then snapping Roland’s arm at his elbow. He screams.
The creature, still holding Roland’s arm, looms over him and exposes its head; like a syrupy foreskin or maggot’s head, with tides of hieroglyphics and shapes rolling over the surface.
Roland is done. “No more”, he says, and the creature releases its grip. Surprised, Roland spins around, windmills his good arm over his body, and smacks his palm onto the panic button. The room falls into darkness, red lights flash, and an alarm sounds. The cell starts filling with a mist from vents in the ceiling.
Exhausted, Roland drops to his knees and closes his eyes. The creature stands over him. The mist wraps and warps around them both, never settling, both repelling it. Warping through these jets of spray, and in a swift movement, the creature rips both Roland’s arms down, out of their sockets, to narrow his shoulders. Roland screams more. Hooking an arm under Roland’s ribs, the creature lifts him, raising Roland’s head to meet its own. Winded, Roland coughs and then cries out more, keeping his eyes closed.
The creature needs to eat. It pushes its face into Roland’s, their skin touching. Roland’s cries become louder, then muffled, as his head, then his mouth become slowly enveloped by the creature, gulping Roland’s head into the creature’s opening, like a worm feeding. There is a final dull, muted scream as Roland uses his last breath inside the creature. The creature kneels and consumes the rest of Roland.
The mist system stops. The silence is broken by the sound of an ignitor sparking. Tick, tick, tick, tick.
The cell bursts into fire. A flash thousands of degrees, melting the gurney and incinerating everything. Looking for an exit, and respite from the heat, the creature warps around the cell, slamming against the walls, desperately folding itself inside-out like a rolled sock.
It clenches its hands and arms and, driven by renewed vigour or pain, breathes and lets out a cacophony of voices, a thousand screams in a hundred accents, as cinders break away and float from its skin.
Thank you for reading!
This fortnight, my wife has a huge paint-by-numbers canvas on the dining table. While I was sceptical at first, it’s fucking amazing, if slightly terrifying. I look like a rotoscoped self-tanner.
S Peter Davies amused the wee-wee out of me, with his AI missive. To say that I don’t like AI is wrong, it’s very useful, and I’ve been dreaming of something like LLM since I was a kid. Outside of research, or commodification for commercial purposes, AI creativity is just so fucking bland that it pushed me to start publishing my writing again. So it’s all AI’s fault. Especially my sketches. The shonkier the words, the shakier the ink, the better.
OG Julian Simpson continues to show everyone how horror audio plays should be done with the next series of his Lovecraft Investigations. Plus he created Eleanor Peck, who I’m going to steal as a character the next time I play Delta Green / Call of Cthulhu.
After about 18 months of stop/start running the extraordinary “Impossible Landscapes” TTRPG campaign, my players have finished part 1. Bonkers fun. Jenny McCleary was responsible for the typesetting, graphic design and layout of the campaign book, and this short study of it is worth a look. And the book is astonishing in its own right, let alone as a game. Have you seen it?
Authors notes
The relationship between Jenny and Roland will continue to be revealed. It’s a shame they no longer work together.
Their short-lived mundane work banter was fun to write, and when the extraordinary becomes the business-as-usual day job, the question of "how was your weekend?" becomes much more interesting.
In a passing conversation with Agent H, he says that “humans are gonna human, even in the darkest times”. I told him I would steal the line. Mine now.
Episode 1 was originally a 10-year-old 700-word .txt file, about opening a hermetically sealed door in a secure facility. Dull as dishwater, but I loved the setting. It was expanded, edited down, and characters added, and it ended in an encounter. So it was quickly on the third draft when I pushed “send”.
Still packed full of errors, and schlocky notes, with a penny-dreadful vibe, but it was 1000 words, and it was reviewed and published, and I was relieved to just have pulled that elastaplast off.
Short stories of 4000 words or so, get written, redrafted, redrafted, edited, and edited again yada yada yada. On substack, when a story is split into episodic posts of 1000 words, each post needs its attention in the same way, and then some extra work each time a new episode bleeds out. The other option is just to write a whole story in advance. Which takes the fun out a bit. Plus I have a full-time job and a family for fucksake.
The standard was set higher for Episode 2, as it needed to go to draft 3 from zero. It also needed consideration for some sort of plot framework. Which didn’t exist.
It exists now, at least for the next episode or two. We’ll see where the unnatural rot spreads next.
If you know someone who might enjoy Between The Cracks, then do share on them there socials, or email.
Very much enjoyed this
Thanks Andy with a coffee.