Free Arcane II by Nathan Shumate (Editor) Page A

frayed carpet, and the normal clutter and disarray of everyday living. Roy saw all of this as he set foot in the apartment, but what he didn’t expect was the person standing in the hallway leading to the bedroom.
    Roy froze in surprise, glad he’d brought the gun he’d developed a habit of carrying around wherever he went, but the odd nature of the thing he stared at stopped him from pulling it out. At first he’d have said it was a nude man staring back, head tilted a bit to the side, studying Roy just as thoroughly as Roy studied it, but the thing’s skin was dark gray, almost dripping wet, oozing down the body yet absorbing right back through the feet. It had no genitals from what he could tell, but the general shape appeared to be more like a man than anything else.
    In the center of the head Roy saw a deep abyss, the skin pulling in on itself, only the thin outline of a head visible, but as Roy watched, the abyss began to vanish, gray flesh bubbling up until he could see a miniature replica of his own face staring back at him for a few seconds before it melted into the empty darkness.
    He pulled out of the apartment and slammed the door shut before the thing could move. Roy stood on the outside of the door, heaving, feeling his heart racing, hoping he didn’t have yet another heart attack right around the corner.
    He hunched over, let the world return to focus, let the blind panic fade until the rational side of him was back in control. The situation itself didn’t appear to be rational to him, but unless he wanted to just board up the door and leave the matter be, he had to do something.
    “Okay then,” he whispered, pulled out his gun, and pushed open the door again.
    The thing stood along the wall now, but it made no motion towards him, watching him instead with its empty face. Roy inched carefully into the room with his gun up. It tilted its head down towards the gun, back to Roy’s face, and before it could do anything else Roy fired off three shots into its mid-section. All three smacked wetly into the flesh, forming small holes that quickly filled back over with gray skin. It glanced down at the damage briefly before returning its head to Roy.
    “What the hell are you?” he asked. The thing didn’t answer, at least not in words, but Roy felt a fierce buzzing in his head. It didn’t hurt, and the idea came to him that the thing was trying to talk to him, but Roy wasn’t physically capable of understanding what it said.
    Keep things simple, he thought to himself. Ignore everything but what you know for certain. “I need you out of this apartment,” he said to it.
    The thing didn’t move. Roy looked beyond it, towards the kitchen, and in the far corner he saw what looked like a large mound of dry, gray sludge. It looked, he thought, like maybe the corpse of one of the things he stared at. On the other side of the room he saw what he could only assume were the remains of the previous tenant. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but a skeleton surrounded by tattered strips of flesh were visible, and piled all around it he saw aged, dusty-looking books.
    He was so caught up looking at the corpse he almost didn’t see the thing move, pushing off the wall, watery fingers reaching out to him. Though it still had no face Roy detected the animosity. One of its hands grabbed hold of Roy, the skin freezing and wet, immediately numbing his arm.
    He fired off everything he had, most of the bullets smacking through the arm that held him, and he damaged it enough to yank himself free. The back of his head cracked sharply against the wood on the outside landing. He pulled his feet out right as the thing reached for them. The second the gray fingers touched the open door beyond the apartment they sparked with fire and melted into nothing, and the creature pulled back, buzzing fiercely in Roy’s head with what he thought was a cry of pain.
    That thought made him smile.
    He stood up, no noticeable damage to his