Chapter 18

  I had already been expecting to find the Dimensional Shambler at the end of Pathfinder's yellow line. I was correct, but no amounts of my tangent-inclined imagination could have possibly prepared me for what awaited me.

  So, you know when you get super ambitious in one of the few times executive dysfunction isn't beating you down, and you decide to make a really elaborate meal? I mean, tons of fresh ingredients, a bunch of prep work, tons of steps, the works. Even though you're just cooking for yourself, you make enough for a small army because, in the moment you are convinced that you will heat your meal up over and over for leftovers. After a single plate, you pop the rest in the fridge so it's ready to be eaten for your next meal. Three weeks later, you open your fridge to put half of your uneaten pizza (still in the box) away because you're convinced you'll eat the rest for leftovers, but you find it won't fit because something's taking up too much space. So you remove the mystery container to find the super elaborate meal you made three weeks ago. You remember how it is supposed to look, but whatever this is, it's definitely nothing like you remember. It's bad enough that you consider just throwing out the entire container instead of attempting to wash it. You know what I'm talking about? Well, I'm sure some of you know.

  Anyway, what I found was the Dimensional Shambler version of my three week old forgotten elaborate manic cooking episode. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what a Dimensional Shambler was supposed to look like, but it sure as Hell wasn't this.

  Parts that I assume were supposed to be on the inside were on the outside. Parts that were supposed to be attached were carelessly left ten feet down the tunnel. What I would assume was an eye, mostly because I really didn't want to think about other spherical body parts it could have potentially been, was on the ground next to my foot. I couldn't even begin to imagine whatever the Dimensional Shambler had needed to go through in order to be turned into this pile of what I could best describe as the prop department leftovers after a Saw movie. I mean... I'd assume. I can't actually watch any of the Saw movies because I have a weak stomach. So if fake cinema gore can do that to me, imagine what real life giant piles of gore (now with fresh bile smell) would do to me.

  The only part of the entire scene that didn't make my stomach contents want to come back out for an encore of my dinner was the woman standing over the pile. Joan's face reflected what I assumed my face looked like, although as I've mentioned before I barely remember what I even look like since I kind of hate mirrors (mirrors is pronounced mī-s?lf).

  "Sweet sassy molassy Joan, what the heck did you do?" I realized how stupid my new attempt at a catchphrase sounded as soon as it left my lips.

  "I'm just going to ignore whatever that was. I didn't do anything, it was like this when I got here." She gestured to the three week old leftovers on the ground that used to be a Dimensional Shambler, or at least I assume it used to be.

  "I mean, I wouldn't be mad if you had enough power to do this on your own. It'd actually make me feel much better about..." I nearly mentioned the eldritch deity that I'd just finished talking to, but realized it'd be best not to tangent off of the current mystery just yet. "You really had nothing to do with this?"

  "I woke up on ground with my chains removed back in the room. You were nowhere to be found, and I felt that weird feeling that happens when things cross over from Gods know where. So I ran in the direction of it because I figured you were doing something really stupid that I'd need to fix... And I found this." She gestured to the Pizza the Hutt lookalike from Spaceballs in front of us.

  "That last bit was a little bit unnecessary, I don't always do stupid things that require your fixing." I winced at the harsh judgment she sandwiched into her recap. "But that aside, I can think of two possibilities for what this is. There's a good possibility and a bad one, which do you want first?"

  "It's not really time to play your cute little games, but I'll go with the good one first." She rolled her eyes because instead of just telling her my thoughts, I made it into the good thing and bad thing trope.

  "You think my little games are cute? And, Joan it's really bad form to pick the good choice first, everyone knows that."

  "I'm beginning to wonder why my first reaction to thinking you might be in danger was to run toward the danger." She groaned, but I could also sense a slight smile under her mask. She'd just been through a lifetime's worth of trauma shoved into five minutes, and she had no clue about the extra ten minutes of mind-melting terror I faced while she was frozen in time. The fact that we were able to fall back into our old routine created a much needed sense of normalcy. "Just tell me the good option already."

  "Fine. So, the good option would be that something happened when Clumpy here tried to pass into our world. Like they forgot to carry the one when doing calculations..." As soon as I gave the math reference, my mind immediately got sidetracked, "Wait, do people still do long division? There's that common core stuff now. So is there some sort of different way of dividing things? Please tell me my math joke isn't a failure."

  "It's a failure in more ways than I can count. Can we get back to the actual topic that might possibly involve our lives being in mortal danger, please?" Joan spent absolutely zero seconds caring about my math-related mid-life crisis.

  "Sometimes I wonder if you're not worse for my health than the things trying to kill us... But, anyway, the bad option is that something attacked the Dimensional Shambler. And if the Shambler looks like this, then that means the attacker had to be way stronger than grandma's meatloaf here... And since we just felt the Shambler come into existence not too long before we found this, that means whatever did this is probably still nearby."

  I might have undersold how bad my bad option actually was. In my defense, I was planning on delivering it first, but Joan had to be a psychopath and pick the good option first. Then I might have derailed our conversation three more times along the way. So we were equally at fault.

  "I don't think you're wrong. And I really hope it's the first option, because we were planning on needing four people to take on the Shambler, so we'd need an army to take on whatever did this." She looked over her shoulder down the tunnel toward the settlement. "And somewhere down that way are the people that tried to kill us. So if the super strong mystery monster didn't already kill them, we'll probably have to face them."

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "About that..." I wasn't quite sure how to explain what happened while Joan was frozen. But it'd be better to address it now so we could properly strategize.

  "Wait. You know something." Joan suddenly realized since I wasn't in the room when she unfroze that there might be a lot more to our situation that we hadn't discussed yet. "Where were you when I woke up, Clay?"

  I awkwardly scratched the back of my head as I realized just how insane my story would sound, especially since I'm just asking her to blindly believe me.

  "So, someone happened to kindly let us out of our chains. And they did something like distort the space inside the tunnel so Raif and Tara headed to the stairs instead of the settlement. And then they were going to kill Raif and Tara but I attacked them first so we had a nice little chat. And they told me they were Nyarlathotep the god of chaos. They talked like an absolute lunatic and kept saying Clay instead of you, which was kind of interesting at first but it got old really fast. And they aren't our ally, but they're not our enemy. But they've been ordered to kill us by that god, so I have trouble thinking that not our enemy part is stretching the truth a little bit. And Raif and Tara might have used my chit chat with Tep to escape through the locked door using that move that nearly got me killed at the beach. Then I got that something's coming into our dimension that should have just stayed home feeling, so I ended my chat and ran here. And then you said my games are cute."

  Joan just stared in both wonder and confusion.

  "So... There was something really really insane that you threw into the middle of that whole thing." She looked at me to confirm she heard right.

  "I know. They just kept talking super weird. Like... 'Clay is Clay, what does that mean? I wonder.' It was just plain creepy."

  "That's the part of your story you thought was most insane?" Her furrowed brow let me know that I had guessed wrong.

  "Oh! You mean having a talk with the eldritch god of Chaos? Yeah, that was really wild. They kept asking me how I could move and talk around them, like just being near me was supposed to crush my mind and body, but I was able to punch them and then have a really weird conversation." Thinking back, the many questions from that conversation started to rise back to the surface.

  "I can't really say how it works in this world, but just seeing one of the Outer Gods is supposed to drive a person to madness. They are supposed to be so far outside our abilities of comprehension that any attempts to comprehend them would just break a person's brain. If that's even close to being true in this world, what you're saying is really important." Seeing her spouting literary knowledge made me remember just how beautiful she could be. We got so caught up in our back and forths that it was easy to forget just how impressive her mind was... And how she's just as much of a nerd as I am, just in a different way.

  "Like in Kevin Smith's Dogma where Alanis Morrisette can kill people with her voice!" My eyes opened wide. "Wait! You mean Tep was supposed to do that to me, but I just chatted with them?"

  "I have no clue what your reference is, but that's at least the theory. I'd make some sort of joke about your head being too thick to be effected, but... I think we need to make note of this for later. Right now, we should probably head to the settlement and hope we don't bump into something strong enough to cause this." She gestured to the pile that resembled something Wednesday Addams would try to feed Pugsley, but the good Pugsley, the one from Addams Family Reunion with Tim Curry and Daryl Hannah. I think the actor's name was Jerry something. I wonder what they're up to nowadays. Probably playing World of Warcraft or something random like that.

  "Focus!" Joan brought me back from one of my more random tangents.

  "Sorry. He was the best Pugsley though."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about, but for Gods' sake, please don't explain it to me." She grabbed me by the sleeve of my Critical Failure graphic tee and pulled me down the tunnel in the direction of the settlement. "Do you think you can focus for long enough to get out of here? As much as I hate to admit it, I am relying on you to help me if we bump into something."

  "I'll try. No promises."

  We walked in silence for long enough that my brain was starting to feel like a cat scratching at the door to get out. I kept having to forcefully pull my attention back to the present, but it was nowhere near as easy as Joan made it out to be.

  My mind did eventually wander. Although, it at least wandered to something important. I still couldn't be sure if anything Tep had told me was the truth or if it was all lies, or some random mixture of the two. But there was something I could confirm while we made our way down the tunnel toward a place I really didn't want to think about.

  "Hey, Joan? Can I ask you something?" The sincerity of my question seemed to catch Joan off guard.

  "Uh, sure." She looked at me mirroring my level of sincerity.

  "About the ship... Before we came here..."

  "Yes?" I could tell she wasn't sure where I was going, but she looked concerned. She could sense that whatever I was about to ask was clearly bothering me.

  "Joan... I was..." I took a deep breath. "I was there, right? On the ship, I mean. You remember me from The Love Craft, right?"

  The question hung in the air just a little too long for my taste.

  Finally... "I don't know if I understand what you're asking, Clay."

  "It's not a trick question. I'm not asking in some sort of deep philosophical sense. I mean literally... Did you see me on the ship at all before coming here? Did we talk?" I pressed.

  "That's a really strange question. Of course we did. We talked on the deck near the name tag table. Did something happen with your memory? Did you forget?" Joan was clearly worried.

  My breathing finally returned to normal as a wave of relief passed over me. Her confusion regarding my question was due to the answer being so obvious, not because she had no idea what I was talking about. With that, I was able to push Tep's words to the back of my mind. They had only wanted to confuse me. They had wanted me to doubt myself. It was all part of their game.

  "No, it's fine. I was just being stupid. There's nothing to worry about." I smiled at her reassuringly. She did not seem too convinced, her eyes kept watching me as we continued down the tunnel.

  Finally, her hand found a metal hatch like one you would imagine on a submarine. This was most likely the door to the settlement.

  The thick metal door had a large wheel in the center of it. Like a giant steering-wheel-shaped doorknob, it appeared to automatically latch the door once it was closed. Joan turned the wheel and pushed the door open. A familiar sight came into view on the other side, barely lit by the occasional candle-lit lamp. We had arrived at the settlement. The heavy door latched behind us as we stood on the other side.

  The smell of death still hung in the air, but Riff had worked with a couple others to clear the space of bodies. Luckily it was not a task that I had been asked to assist.

  With no residents, the space looked even more unsettling than before. I was reminded of those liminal space images that were such a big craze on the internet. The massive hangar sized space with cave walls on every side, the poorly lit streets, the run down structures, and the complete absence of another living being.

  My heart ached. I wished badly for there to see some sign of life. I thought about Deep Juan and how he sacrificed himself for me.

  The painful memories had to be put on hold. Signs of life suddenly appeared surrounding us. Joan might not have been able to see them, but their bright red outlines from my Read the Room ability made it very clear that these lifeforms were not friendly, nor were they humanoid. Looking 360 degrees around us, I counted five shapes. One of the five was significantly larger than the others. The larger red highlight seemed to patrol outside of the four others that surrounded us, almost as if it were a general leading troops to battle.

  "Clay, what's wrong? What do you see?" Joan realized my panic, but was unable to see what surrounded us.

  But I could see very clearly what had been waiting for us. It had all been a trap.

  Fuck you Tep! You set this all up, you even warned me.

  "Tindalos Hounds... And one is an alpha."