Weekly Drabble #212: Palm of Shadows (Patreon)

This week's selected prompts are 'anathema' from Framing Device, 'we all walk in her immortal shadow' from LystAiP and 'an odd shadow' from William M. With those, we're back in Chicago for the second week in a row, finally checking up on poor Detective McLeary. Poor, poor Detective McLeary. At least he's doing better?

~

Palm of Shadows:

It was dark when McLeary woke. At first, he thought it was night, but his half-aware mind, fuzzy from both painkillers and restless sleep soon realized that even at night, there should have been some light. The glow from diodes and displays of the machines in the hospital room, the light seeping in from the hallways and offices, but there was nothing.

Panic was his first response, a sudden deep terror that he’d gone blind, but he realized that he could still see. He looked down and could see himself, lying in a hospital bed. An IV ran from his arm to an infuser hooked to its rack. That was all the world that existed beyond the edges of his bed. Everything else was blackness. At first glimpse, it looked absolute – a simple void that stretched out into infinity, but Geoff could see that the darkness was moving. He didn’t know how that could be possible. To his eye, there was no variance in the emptiness beyond his bed. No differing shades of black, no shifting mists. Nothing that differentiated any single patch of it from any other, but yet...

But yet, it was moving, like the coils of a snake. The panic returned, but he tamped it down, sitting up. He resisted the ridiculous urge to call out. Whatever was doing this either already knew he was here, or it didn’t and if it didn’t, he certainly didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Not that he needed to as within seconds, his hypothesis was proven correct.

“Awake.” The voice that spoke was familiar, and completely incongruous with the setting. It was young and female, like that of any of a million other perfectly average women who lived within Chicago and millions more beyond the city. It didn’t sound like the voice of something that had existed before humanity ever evolved. It didn’t sound like something that had consumed worlds and watched entire species slaughter themselves in mad, pointless worship of it. It sounded human.

“Yes,” he answered. Knowing who was speaking actually did little to settle his nerves. “I’m awake. What is all this?”

The darkness pulsed like a beating heart, though there was no sound and no motion that Geoff’s senses could discern. “Part of me.”

“Which part?”

A knot of shadows that in actuality was neither of those things opened and Melinoë stepped through. Or at least, the part of her that looked human. She set one hand on the bed’s railing, the other held in a loose fight. “She found an insect in the house,” the creature whispered, as if talking to herself. “It was iridescent and green. She scooped it up, not to crush it, but to keep it safe.” She opened her hand. In the middle of her palm was a tiny hospital bed, and in it – sitting up just as he was – was an even smaller Geoff McLeary.

The sudden sense of existential impossibility made his head swim and the man had to grab the bed’s sides to steady himself. In Melinoë’s hand, the other McLeary did the same. “What happened?” the detective asked, trying to latch onto something more concrete than whatever paradox of time, space and reality was happening right now. “I remember...” he remembered the apartment building. The blood trails. The heavy footfalls. That... that thing, fused from dozens of people and looking for more to pull into its bulk. Hatasuki...

Joanne!

He lurched up straighter. “Joanne,” he repeated. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

Melinoë tilted her head. “It’s intact,” she said dismissively.

“She,” McLeary snapped back, his indignation overriding his relief for his partner’s wellbeing. “She’s intact.”

The creature wearing a human face blinked once, her expression blank – as if she didn’t understand what Geoff had just said. It was tempting to wonder how she could have ever passed as human for any length of time, but McLeary knew full well what the difference between then and now was. Then,she had cared. Among seven billion squirming, chattering creatures and trillions more across all of time and space, she had found a mortal soul that intrigued her. A mortal soul that had mattered to her, and one she had actually, inexplicably loved. Without that tether linking her to the brief, insignificant lives around her, she couldn’t be bothered to consider them any more than someone might think on the individual ants of a colony.

“What was it?” he asked. “In the apartment building.” He looked at her. “Do you know?”

She blinked again, her features becoming pensive, as if she were considering how to express whatever horror that thing was in something as clumsy as human speech. “Fleshmonger,” she translated. “They crave a corporeal existence. Once they enter this world, they find a host body, adding more flesh to it until they can no longer move. They gestate and rupture, releasing enfleshed spawn out to seek more bodies to infect.”

Geoff thumped his head against the pillow. “Fuck. I have to tell someone. We have to track that thing down before-”

“It was destroyed,” Melinoë told him. “After you passed out, your partner was able to alert your fellows. They found that fleshmonger, riddled it with bullets, crushed it with one of your metal toys and then burnt the remains.”

“Good. That’s-” McLeary froze. “Wait. ‘That’ fleshmonger?”

“Two more crawled through the veil,” she told him. “You should probably locate them before they pupate.”

Geoff closed his eyes, wondering – and not for the first time –  if a malicious god would be better than an uncaring one. He stayed quiet for some time. Melinoë said nothing, both standing at his bedside and enveloping it in shadow, a curious child holding an ant in the palm of her hand. He raised his head. “Why are you here?”

“Your attendants are clumsy,” she told him. “They were unable to repair your flesh.”

He remembered now. The run from the apartment building, that thing after them. So close to the exit and then... Hatasuki had shrieked a warning, but it had been too late. He’d felt fire all across his back that instantly turned cold and then he was spinning through the air. He didn’t even realize he’d hit the ground. Joanne had been screaming, unloading her last few bullets into the grotesque conglomeration of human bodies. He hadn’t heard her, hadn’t heard the bark of her pistol. Everything had been a grey, fading numbness. Outside the flashes of brief awareness as he’d woken in the hospital, the last thing he remembered was being dragged from the building and pulled into her car.

Carefully, he reached under his hospital gown, his hands moving up and down his back. He couldn’t feel even the smallest scar. Cold ran down his body. That thing, the fleshmonger... it had gotten his spine, but there was no trace of the damage. “You-” he began, but the eldritch creature cut him off.

“The others are noisy,” she told him. “They squawk whenever I’m here. Their fear slops and dribbles over them like rot from open wounds. Your partner has been even louder, spewing more repugnant human emotions. It crackles and burrs with raspy indignation and anger. Now that you are restored, I no longer have to endure the filth slobbering out of their minds.”

The man felt ice run down his spine. She scooped it up in her hand, not to crush it, but to keep it safe. God... Melinoë hadn’t just healed him, but she’d been protecting him? “Why?” he asked her. The darkness was starting to fade. He could just pick out the vaguest of details of his environment now. The arch of a doorway, the shape of a window.

“You are interesting,” she told him as if that explained anything. Maybe it did. “The disease in me,” she added, “is deep enough already. Disgusting, distracting, pulling at me in ways I don’t understand. I don’t want to feel it more.”

In different circumstances, Geoff might have been flattered that his death had the possibility of making Melinoë feel grief – the ‘disease’ as she called it, but he understood Chicago’s most prominent resident better than anyone else. Another person might have taken that as a good sign, that she was feeling things for other humans. They might have even mentioned that to her. McLeary’s mother didn’t raise an idiot.

Melinoë despised human emotions. She didn’t want to feel them at all, but she’d been human for too long, and she did. Grief was agony to the creature; it was something she’d never experienced before and Natalya’s death had left a hole in her. Suggesting that she could look forward to more human emotions, and even the hint that this was a good thing... that was the kind of comment that resulted in humanity’s extinction. If there are none of us left, there’s no chance of us infecting her with our emotions, is there?

Likewise, her comment about him being ‘interesting’ and therefore worth saving might be a good thing. Or it might be the kind of interest where you’d save an insect from a spider’s web. Or it might have nothing to do with him at all and Melinoë simply didn’t want to risk feeling even a twinge of human dismay over the loss of her favourite ant.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he told her. The darkness was almost gone. He could see figures on the other side of it; probably hospital staff and Hatasuki. “Thank you.”

“It should be more careful,” she told him as she faded into nothing, like a dream forgotten with the rising of the sun. “It is small, fragile and senseless. Repeated stupidity doesn’t engender survival or the sickness of sympathy.”

Translation: don’t expect me to save your dumb ass again, or feel bad if you get yourself killed. Fair warning, at least. “I’ll do better,” he promised, but whether Melinoë heard him, or he was talking to the empty air, he didn’t know. In the next moment, Joanne was at his side, along with a doctor, each of them with a million questions, most of which Geoff couldn’t answer.

But that was life in Chicago these days.