This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.
There he was, standing face to face with the janitor. All around them, snarling beasts with odd numbers of legs and eyes circled as the mist faded and the stars above them shined brighter than he had ever seen them shine before. Michael stood there, thinking about all the things he’d seen and realized that his odd and strange life was flashing before his eyes, and on over the back of his neck, making him shiver in all the wrong places.
One of the creatures snarled at him as it made another circuit.
The trollish looking beast, now half human and half janitor watched him without making a sound or even a noise. The man-beast seemed to regard him with distaste, or was it even disinterest, slumping to the side so as to appear to be staring through his left shoulder. He shook it off. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter at all.
A creature, a strange combination of a black panther, ravenous viper, and a six-foot-tall raven-thing lashed out. It jumped Michael and knocked him to the ground.
Michael took out a small umbrella from a back pocket that definitely didn’t look big enough to hold it, and jammed it in the creature’s mouth, hitting the open button. The creature’s mouth split open and expanded with the umbrella, sending it reeling off to whimper on the ground in just enough time for a second one of the little demons to jump him.
Michael was able to fend off the creature with a punch to the side of its immense head. As it hobbled back, it stumbled on its undersized hind legs. A third one jumped over the second, landed square on Michael’s shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Just as Michael’s back hit, the creature used the forward momentum to flip over, and land on him again, this time with its butt in his face. One fierce fart later, and he jumped in the air, intending to do the trick again, but it never made it to the ground. Instead, he just hung there in the air. It took Michael a moment to realize the janitor had grabbed the creature in mid-air and held it there in the air. It was unable to reach the ground, grab anything or gnash its teeth on anything worth gnashing.
Simon, what there was of his mind, threw the creature aside, breaking its back against the wall, and the side of him that was now a monster in its own right, let out a screaming yell, then gibbered for half a moment, crouched, and cleared his throat. He grabbed Michael and leaped out of the hole that was now in place of the testing facility. He landed a hundred feet from the hole, and Michael marveled at how careful the creature was being with him.
He expected to be dead.
Simon laid him down, next to his car, and then stood there, panting.
They could hear them, the creatures pulling themselves up and out of the facility. It wouldn’t be long before they were surrounded again.
One of the creatures popped its head up. Simon turned around and flew off, his arms flailing in rubbery directions, landing on the creature’s head. Simon was as large as a car himself and punched his fist down and into one of the creature’s eyes. It popped like a grape, and the fluid flowed over the janitor’s ragged coveralls.
Another one popped its head up from the great hole in the earth, now a bastion for evil natured creatures. Michael pulled from a concealed shoulder holster, a silver-tipped pistol that appeared alien in nature. He pulled the trigger. It had been designed for use by creatures with three suckered fingers. He fired it, blasting the creature with silver light that caused it to vanish without a trace.
Smaller creatures were now starting to spew up and out of the circular crater in the ground. They had mutated into something closer to ants with sixteen legs each, hard and black, about the size of a large shoebox, maybe something boots might come in. Michael stepped on one of them, and it splattered into five or six more creatures, the same in shape, only fewer legs. He blasted them, each in turn and jumped on the hood of his car. They had surrounded him.
Simon wasn’t faring much better than Michael was. Thousands of the tiny creatures covered him, each taking great piercing bites into his flesh. He threw them off, and rolled around, flailing in all directions. The wounds from his bites covered him in a foul black ichor.
Simon screamed, no longer able to speak the words he needed, and slumped down to his knees, willing himself to just sit there and take it, for them to tear him apart, certainly that would be the answer, the thing that would bring him peace.
Michael didn’t want to receive one of those bites for anything. He kicked the roof of the car, and the sunroof began to open, but there wasn’t time. He wished he hadn’t because the little creatures were just falling in there with him.
He hit the engine, cranked the car to life, and revved it up, the little bugs were starting to get the better of him, nipping him here and there. He slapped them away, and then stood up, to blast a larger creature coming out of the hole, pushing with great thin legs as it shook slime from its great huge wings. The creature exploded in the light, spraying its foul green lunch from another world all over everything.
At that moment the portal below flickered. It danced, and shimmered, almost closed for good, but then the ground shook with an enormous pulse that knocked everything to their feet.
It flipped Michael’s car over, and it landed on its wheels again.
The blast blew out from the portal. The creatures, the blood, everything except for the hole, the portal itself and Simon seemed to get sucked back through.
Michael ran to Simon and picked him up. He was shivering but normal otherwise. There was still some slime from his creature form on his forehead. Another pulse and he might not be so lucky. He looked over the edge, leaving Simon behind for a short period.
He watched as the portal flickered.
“It’s not long now,” he said. “It’s either going to go critical or fizzle out, you never know.”
It pulsed again, but it was a false alarm.
“I haven’t got long.”
Michael helped Simon up, and half walked, half dragged him to the car.
He plopped them in and revved it up. They were going to have to come up with a plan. He was going to need some help.
He pulled out, and once up to sixty-six miles an hour, he flicked the switch and the car vanished from the side of the road and reappeared a hundred miles away at an abandoned warehouse where he kept his office. At least that’s where it was this week.
He pulled in, and Simon followed him blearily up the steps to a small office, in the middle of the otherwise abandoned building.
The office had it all.
It had the half-frosted glass door with the lettering. It was totally, and blissfully computer-less, though he did have his gadgets here and there. It had an old-style rotary phone, sitting on a telephone book that was so old it was almost completely faded white. The office walls were covered from floor to ceiling with great and gloriously dusty bookshelves.
Behind Simon’s desk was the most interesting shelf, he called it his curio cabinet, even though there wasn’t any glass there. In the curio cabinet, there was a wide variety of items from every culture he’d encountered so far. He had alien artifacts as well as stuff from Earth. There were spiritual items as well as electronic gizmos. There was a helmet covered in gold next to a trio of shrunken heads, each clutching a sharp diamond in their teeth. Next to that were voodoo dolls, alien tech sensors, a lava lamp for the hell of it in purple and red. One of the oddest pair of things he’d ever acquired was the living undead zombie heads of Felix and Faustus. The zombie’s heads were each seated on a small dinner plate to keep the orange pus that was leaking from their necks from getting on the books.
Felix turned his head the moment Michael came into the room. “Well well well, if it isn’t the man with three first names then, back for another go?”
“Shut up Felix.”
He ignored the talking head as it sat there, rotting on his shelf, covered in maggots that Michael knew were nothing more than a trick of the mind designed to freak people out.
Faustus looked around but wasn’t impressed. He stopped when he saw Simon. “What’s with the stiff over there?”
Michael raised an eyebrow. “His name is Simon. He’s a Janitor.”
“He’s been touched, you know,” said Faustus.
“I know.”
Michael pulled open a drawer and rifled through it. Not finding what he was after, he pulled the whole drawer out and threw the entire thing aside were junk and old pens splashed to the ground.
Felix turned his head on his plate and twisted his remaining eye back at an unreal angle to watch what Michael was doing. “It’s not in that drawer, It’s in the red book this time.”
Michael had just finished turning out another drawer out when he looked up at Felix. “The red book eh?”
Felix tried to nod, and almost toppled off the shelf.
Michael jumped forward and climbed the first two shelves near the floor so that he could reach the red book, which was a large three-inch-thick tome, covered in dust.
He opened the book and saw within it a set of goggles, made with real eyes, bloodshot and darting that regarded him with fear, and a syringe filled with an orange liquid that seemed to glow with its own faint light.
He grabbed the goggles, and put them on, looking through the darting eyes at Simon. He took the syringe, and held it up then, as if he were blind, and not trusting the eyes he was looking through, he stepped forward, and took Simon’s arm.
“What are you going to do with that?”
The eyes were darting hard left and right. It made Michael wobble.
He took the syringe and watched Simon’s arm.
“It’s the toxins from the gate. This can slow down the transformations. There could be another pulse at any time, and the next time, you might not make it.”
He plunged the syringe in, seeing now the floating purple and orange spots floating in the eyes of the goggles. He shot the liquid into Simon’s arm.
The scream was unreal. Simon thought he was hearing someone else do it. It sounded like someone trying to scream while gargling three feral cats and a bucket of fried chicken.
There was still a little bit of raw strength there, and he struck out and toppled onto the desk, sending papers everywhere.
“Good one Mike,” said Felix.
Simon stood up, and began to transform, clutching his arm.
“Oh yeah,” said Felix, “make him change early. Nice. He might get worse next time now.”
Simon stood and roared, his mouth splitting as his head began to change and his hair began to grow and muscles became better defined. His shirt tore, and he clawed his hands across the bookshelves sending cheap paperbacks in all directions. He jumped through the door, luckily open, and bounded out into the open warehouse.
“Crap,” said Michael.
“You better get him quick Mike,” said Felix.
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s good you’re the only one at the office. It’s hard to fire yourself.”
“I’ll have to remember that. Firing myself once in a while might feel pretty good.”
He’d chased a lot of zombies in his time. He’s chased them over garden fences and into the back yards of many a housewife looking in on her above ground pool full of kids while there was nothing else left to do but go after them with a shotgun. It was the best way to kill zombies, so no judgment there. You had to make sure their heads came off or you were screwed.
Michael was running flat out, as fast as he could. He was keeping up with Simon though, who had flung into a rage.
“Crap.”
He dodged a low hanging branch as the troll-like beast half lumbered, half catapulted through the back yards of several nearby houses to the warehouse. He wondered if he could catch him. He wasn’t breaking a sweat yet. The number of aliens he’d chased through these woods, only to lose them as the ship took off, the number of zombies, which seemed to keep cropping up, and then there was the werewolf, but you couldn’t call that a clear case of lycanthropy. The snout wasn’t right. He didn’t believe it anyway.
He jumped like he had so many times before and found his footing on a ledge that he didn’t even have to look at anymore as he crossed it. He flew past the creatures, diving to the left, and down an embankment that faced a nearby park where everyone would be out in the open. The hill was edged with a twenty-foot layer of the forest, and on the other side was a park with four baseball fields that all faced each other.
Michael landed at the edge of one of the baseball fields. Was the High School not playing here anymore?
In the middle of centerfield stood Simon in the moonlight. His skin was gray-green, and silvery, glistening with a thin layer of slime that seemed to ooze from his skin and coat it. It glistened. His work shirt was torn, and the overalls were hanging on him. Any shoes he might have been wearing were long gone. Simon now had large and oversized claw feet. His hands, though sharp nails protruded from the fingertips, were deft, and almost delicate. The fingers were long and strong. His muscle structure reminded Michael of a wrestler after a recent fight with a bowl of cocaine, and the teeth just didn’t make any sense. It was almost as if they got wilder and wilder based on how crazed Simon was at the time. He seemed more like a vicious troll than a zombie.
Michael shook off the zombie line and stepped out into the field from the first baseline.
Simon turned around and howled in his direction.
Michael froze, closed his eyes and lowered his arms to his sides.
He imagined the beast calmly returning to him, and Simon recovering enough to come back to the office with him. He was doubtless going to have a call by the time he got back there, and he did not want to miss it, He knew he’d need some help pretty soon.
He stepped forward, and Simon leaped forward, landing right in front of him.
Michael almost stopped breathing, and turned his palms out, allowing Simon to smell him, hoping this was like meeting a dangerous dog.
He wished he had some bubble gum with him. Though cheese would be better.
Simon stepped back and lowered his head once after getting a clear sniff of Michael. He blew a wad of snot and phlegm into Michael’s face, and after a last and final sniff, he blew Michael’s hat off with ribbons of the stuff.
Michael winced but otherwise stood perfectly still. He’d seen a friend of his, Mathers, last year try this same thing with a gargoyle in Central Park, and it had cost him his life, but he needed Simon. He could feel it.
When he opened his eyes, Simon Dunbar was standing in front of him, shivering in the night air.
“How much time?” he asked.
“What?”
“How much time have I been… it?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“Can you help me?”
“I think so. Come on.”
Simon hobbled next to Michael. Maybe the trollish piece of him could slough off the more dangerous elements of the chase, but it hurt later.
Together they walked off the field, and up onto the main street that cuts through the neighborhood, so they could get back to the warehouse.
“Simon, right?”
“That’s me. You’re a janitor at the facility?”
“Yes. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“I know. If it makes it easier, I know all about them. The Sublight Group, I think, right?”
“Yes.”
“I used to work for them. Experiments in dimensional travel. It looks like they were trying to open a portal.”
“They have been doing that a lot lately.”
“What, other portals? That wasn’t the first?”
“No.”
“Does anything ever come out, like this time?”
“Not usually. I’ve seen space, and other planets, strange landscapes, usually it’s just a blue star or something, over a planet covered in trees and grass.”
“Nothing intelligent?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen. Until tonight, the most intelligent thing I’d ever seen was something like a polar bear with a huge central tusk, like a rhino or something like that. It was coming up through its bottom jaw. Well, that’s true for the portals anyway.”
“Was it furry?”
“Yeah, white just like a regular polar bear except for the horn and like a flat double nose. They kept that portal open too long looking at it, the machine’s never worked the same since.”
“Was it erratic, or what?”
“It was just shaky. That’s the best way to describe it. Shaky. It was one of those things, you know?”
“Like what?”
“It’s just a window. It’s a window with the most interesting things in it, the only problem is there’s a thousand-foot drop if you try to climb through it.”
“Deadly?”
“Serious deadly.”
“One step through and it tears you apart anyway. We had a strike team in the facility. They were acting all-important, and stomping around like they owned the place. It was three months ago, they opened the portal, and everyone walked through. We could see them on the other side of it.”
“What happened?”
“When they stepped through, they turned around, and couldn’t see the portal anymore, it just wasn’t on their side at all.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. We sat there and watched them, trying to get them back, but they never saw the portal again. It just wasn’t there on that side. We watched three of them get killed by some kind of pterodactyl, and the other ones, we watched as they stopped breathing. The atmosphere just wasn’t right. It took a long time.”
They turned the corner up towards Michael’s warehouse.
“Do you think you can help?” asked Simon.
“I think I can. I’m not sure. The only thing I’m sure of is that I think I’m going to need you. You were right on that portal, and a piece of you has been changed by it and you survived. Do you remember anything from it?”
“You mean besides the monsters?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I do. They had one on the other side this time.”
“A portal generator?”
“Yeah, and they were looking at us the moment we were looking at them. We both had them turned on at the same time.”
“What are the odds of that?”
“Like a million to nothing,” said Simon. He rubbed his arms.
“You have any clothes at that warehouse of yours?”
“Yeah, I’ve got lots of stuff.”
They entered through the back door. This used to be an old television studio before it closed, there was a small costume room and something like a two-car garage sized area full of rolling racks full of clothes.
“Take your pick. I’m going upstairs to get some coffee going. Pick out two or three things, and a shoulder pack you like. Anything that fits, you are welcome to it.”
Simon nodded.
“We want to make sure you have some options if you bug-out again, so make sure you get shoes as well.”
Simon nodded again, and Michael left him there, alone to look through the clothes.
Simon sat down in the middle of the room and sobbed for a moment on a large oriental rug. As much as he’d seen today, he wondered if the rug might fly should he know the magic word.
He shook it off, and stood up, looking at the racks of clothes. He decided to ditch the over-all look. He picked out a couple of sweatsuits with hoods, a load of underwear and socks, a couple of baseball hats, several pairs of shoes and a cheap suit. There were more expensive-looking suits over there, but this one was comfortable and understated. He put on one of the sweatsuits and noticed the shower room just off the wardrobe here. He availed himself of the showers, and then donned his sweatsuit again, grabbed his shoulder bag, kind of a smart satchel with lots of pockets, and made his way up the stairs to the smell of perfect coffee.
“Well, if you’re going to be like that Mike, then to hell with it,” said Felix as Simon entered the room and sat down.
Simon reeled, not just at the fact that it was a gross and decapitated head sitting there talking, but that there were two of them, and nobody around thought this strange at all.
He was greeted with a cup of coffee, and he noticed that the talking zombie heads on the shelf were sucking their own coffee through straws.
“Where was it going?”
“Simon, these are Felix and Faustus. Don’t be alarmed.”
Felix turned his good eye to Simon. “How’s it going? I hear you transform into some kind of beast.”
“Troll, I think.”
“Right, Troll Man, yeah.” Felix took another sip of coffee. “Crap Mike, that’s hot!” he said, and then burst into hideous laughter. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”
Faustus turned both his eyes, for he still had two, and blinked a friendly hello to Simon, but did not speak.
Simon took the coffee and a cookie or two from the table. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m still working that out, but we don’t have much time. I know there’ll be another pulse soon, and I think we need to get back into town before that happens. We’ve got to do whatever we need to do to shut off that portal, and clear that area. I’ve called in a strike team to surround the facility and keep people from getting too close.”
“What kind of team?”
“An effective team.”
“I think we’re due for a pulse or two before, maybe a micropulse.”
“What’s that?”
“What you’re having now. Take off your shoes.”
Simon was starting to shake.
“Not again!”
He took his shoes off, threw them in his satchel, and then faster than ever, he transformed into the troll-like creature, this time much more smoothly and he looked a lot cleaner, without ripping the clothes. His hair was wild and long but fell back in long black-green locks behind his ears.
He stood there looking at his arms and legs, feeling his hair.
“Michael?”
Michael looked back at him with both eyebrows raised.
“Simon?”
The voice there was normal.
“Is my voice… is it clear?”
“Clear as a bell, my friend.”
He slumped into Michael’s chair, and broke it to pieces, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
“Sorry about that!”
He got up, dusted himself off and looked around.
Felix rolled his eye.
Faustus kept drinking his coffee. One of his eyes was twitching from it. The eyelid had flopped off on the other side, so there was no help there.
Michael pushed over a wooden box, might have had the ark of the covenant in it at some point, and Simon sat on it. It didn’t break.
A great gong sounded in the air.
Simon looked around. “Dinner?”
“No, a phone call.”
