Free Arcane II by Nathan Shumate (Editor) Page B

arm, and saw it pull back against the wall.
    “You can’t leave, can you?” Roy whispered.
    Before he could say anything else the door opened behind him and a woman from C4 stepped out. “What the hell was all that—” she began to say until she saw the thing through the open door. “My God, what is that?” she whispered.
    Roy glanced back at it, and he saw the void bubble up into an image of the woman just briefly before vanishing completely.
    “That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
    Roy frowned, glancing between her astonished stare and the thing trapped inside the apartment. Then the light clicked on.
    “Yeah,” he answered, a smiling splitting open his pudgy face. “It really is, isn’t it?”
     
    ***
     
    He kept it short and to the point. See something more amazing than you could possibly imagine , he wrote in his ad, and slowly the people began to come. He liked to keep the showings to between eight and midnight. His complex had always had a habit of looking a bit more sinister at night given the lack of working lights in the parking lot, the way the tall, narrow buildings loomed above people, some windows broken or boarded over, others covered with dirt or grime.
    Only the curious few came around during the first few weeks. They parked in front of the building and let Roy show them up to the second floor landing. With the money in hand he pulled open the apartment door and shined his flashlight on the gray-skinned thing, much to the surprise and excitement of his clientele. They always crowded around the door; the thing’s empty face emphasized more by the flashlight’s inability to penetrate its darkness.
    Then it looked to each of them, one at a time, and the flesh flowed into the face, replicated their current expression exactly, before moving onto the next. Once done it rested its head back against the wall, often sitting on the floor, and allowed them to gawk at it.
    Roy had been a bit nervous in the first showings. After all, the thing had a bedroom it could retreat into if it didn’t want people to stare, and Roy didn’t have the guts to go in after it, but it always complied—seemed, in fact, to enjoy the attention. A lucky turn of events, Roy thought.
    He began instructing people to lean their heads in to see the skeletal remains of the last tenant and then towards the mound of gray flesh in the other corner.
    When he shut the door the people squealed for more, asked him question after question. “What is it? Where did it come from? Can it get out of there? What do you think it wants? This is fake, right? No way that was real.”
    Roy answered all that he could before sending the people down the stairs and inviting the next group up to see for themselves. By the end of the first month he started getting upwards to thirty people showing up on Fridays and Saturdays to take a peak, almost all teenagers, many returning for a second view. The thing only replicated their face the first time, however, much to their disappointment.
    Every so often someone would try to make a break for the room, hurry past the door before Roy could notice, but he always managed to get his fingers around their collar and throw them back out. “I’m not allowing a death on my watch,” he told them.
    It didn’t take long before he began making more in a week off the apartment than he would have if he’d been renting out the place like normal. The word spread quickly, but only to those willing to fork over cash for a quick thrill. Roy never saw any higher authority bother to set foot on his complex, and he didn’t bother contacting any, not wanting to risk them trying to take it away from him. Who cares what it could do for science or humanity? he often thought to himself. He’d made the discovery, and he would be damned if they tried to ruin it for him.
     
    ***
     
    Roy awoke at two in the morning, gasping for air, fingers groping at his neck in a poor attempt to dispel whatever choked