Blackteeth Read online

  There was a small building at the end of the garden that was plainly a potting shed on one side and a greenhouse on the other with large glass windows to allow the sun to shine in on their seedlings. “There. Grab something from there and then the creek. Coming with me, or are you going to roll some dice?”

  Hesper didn’t wait for an answer. She looked around, determined all was clear for the moment, and went for the shed. The doors were unlocked and inside was a line of various gardening implements hung neatly on the walls. On the other side were potting tables lined with various pots and unidentified seedlings sprouting willy-nilly.

  She disregarded the gas-powered tools like the chainsaw and the cordless tree hedger and went for the line of shovels. There were spades, hoes, and rakes. She hefted a hoe that had two prominent prongs on the top of it. She dropped it and went for a pitchfork with predominantly pointy ends.

  Moss watched from the door, visibly confused. “Are you going to impale the cop with a pitchfork?”

  “Not unless he goes for me first,” Hesper said. She saw something out of the corner of her eye and dropped the pitchfork. She picked it up. It wasn’t all that long, possibly the size of a baseball bat. One end was the wooden handle. The other end was a heavy metal blade that curled to one side like the letter C. “What is this?”

  “Bush axe,” Moss said. “It’s used for underbrush.”

  “It’s cool that you know that,” she said and practiced swinging the tool. It was as if it had been made for her hand. Then she saw three machetes hanging on the wall. She put the bush axe in her left hand and grabbed one of the machetes. She swung it experimentally. “Nice. Good balance. Sharp edge. I approve.”

  Moss shrugged. “My summer job during high school was with a landscaping place.”

  “I don’t suppose you have the gun your dad talked about.”

  “He didn’t have a gun, just the Taser. He was bluffing,” Moss said flatly.

  “Grab a shovel then. Something you can swing. Something you’re familiar with. You’re going to need it.”

  “For what?”

  “Look,” Hesper said as she shifted the machete into her left hand so that she held both the axe and the blade there. She reached for a plastic bag with her right hand. She dumped it over and out came a replacement chainsaw chain in a heavy plastic cover. She ignored that part and handed the bag to Moss. “You’ll need this. Put your Taser in there. Also your phone. It’s not exactly foolproof, but if we fold it over several times, it’ll probably work.”

  Moss glanced over his shoulder. “The sirens are coming closer. Pretty soon they’ll be out here looking for us, and I don’t think they’ll recognize the difference between a bush axe and an honest to God weapon that’s meant to threaten them.”

  “Stay, then,” Hesper said as she slipped past him. “I’m not wasting time arguing with you.” She looked both ways and headed north. It took her about thirty seconds to cross a flat spot of grass once she was out of the gardens, and then she headed down a hill into a thick stand of trees on the top of an embankment. She paused and glanced back. Moss was right behind her with a distinct air of confusion. He had the Taser in his hand and was putting it into the plastic bag.

  The sirens stopped, and Hesper hoped that the Multnomah deputy would be busy explaining himself to them. He would have to think quickly. Blaming them was the best way he had. That way all law enforcement would be gunning for them.

  All the metaphorical doors had been slammed on them both.

  The tinkling sound of a small waterfall began to increase in volume as they moved away from the grounds of the lodge. Insects chirruped, and the wind rustled through the tall pines above them, moving pine needles against one another in a pleasant whisper. She pushed through the brush and came across the base of the waterfall. The water spilled down a rock ridge into a small but picturesque waterhole. On the other side she could see where the owners of Pinehurst Lodge had built a trail and a bench for which people could sit and look at the beauty before them.

  The water had been partially dammed on one side with artfully arranged river rock overgrown with moss so that it presented a lovely area of respite for the lodge’s customers.

  It should have made any normal person smile but internally Hesper cringed. All that water just about twelve inches away from her bare toes in the open flip flops. All it would take was one astute Blackteeth to anticipate that the prey had gotten savvy and was trying to shake them off. She could feel the splash of the water as an arm exploded out of the pool and reached for her, grasping at her ankles, slashing at her skin with its dark claws. It didn’t really happen, but it was only a heartbeat away in her mind.

  Hesper checked her arms and looked at her ankle. All of the cuts had scabbed over, and she could still feel the bandages on her back where the Taser barbs had entered her. That meant her blood wouldn’t mingle with the water if she went into it, it meant that the Blackteeth wouldn’t immediately know of her presence like they had the previous day. She glanced at Moss’s arm and saw that sometime after she’d gone to sleep, he’d tended to the scratches there.

  Hesper tried to take a step forward, and her muscles froze like ice in the deepest winter imaginable. The years that she had spent in hell had been focused on one thing and one thing only…escape. Now that she was stuck between a rock and a hard place, she was contemplating something so terrible that it made every inch of her being lock up in sheer terror. One step forward. One little step and her foot would touch the cool mountain stream that trickled past them.

  “What is it?” Moss asked, evidently aware of her reluctance.

  Hesper couldn’t bring herself to answer him. She wasn’t even certain that he understood what she was envisioning. How could Moss understand? She hadn’t explained it to him.

  “We’re in a corner, Moss,” she finally said. “The Blackteeth are hunting me for what I’ve done to them. They’ve had a taste of me and they know me. When my blood dripped into the Willamette River they knew and they came for me. Although it was probably serendipitous for them that they had one nearby, it still came for me without hesitation. That was what you saw yesterday. A Blackteeth coming for me. It took a chance because it could have snatched me under the water so quickly none of you would have realized what had really happened.”

  Moss stepped up to Hesper’s side and tried to see at what she was staring.

  “When they started to hunt me again, they found the trail or the scent from my blood, and found me again. That was when your father became one of their victims. It wouldn’t have been the first time some unwitting person got in their way. But you don’t realize something.” Hesper indicated his arm with the seemingly innocuous scratches. “They know you, too. You’ll never be safe again.”

  Moss glanced at his arm. “That thing grabbed at me yesterday at the rental truck,” he said. “It clawed me. I cleaned it up. Doesn’t look infected.”

  “They’ll hunt you to get to me,” Hesper said. “Now we don’t know who’s on their payroll. The guy back at the lodge is probably a real cop, and if so, he’s telling all the other cops we shot that woman, spinning his story so that he can get to us. They probably want me alive, but they don’t need or want you. If he’s got a chance, he’ll put a bullet in your head to shut you up. If he doesn’t have a choice, it’ll be the same for me.”

  Moss didn’t say anything.

  “There’s no other place to go,” Hesper said emphatically. She waited about ten seconds and added, “Except back to their world.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  To squeeze an eel too hard is

  the way to lose it. – French proverb

  Moss first looked at Hesper and then at the water. His brow furrowed and it was apparent that he did not understand what she meant. Hell, I don’t understand what I mean, she thought.

  “You and I are going where they live,” she explained flatly, “because if we stay here, we die. You die. I die. The Blackteeth win. We end up as a weird footnote
in some website about urban legends.” She bared her teeth at him and reminded herself that she hadn’t still hadn’t really learned how to smile.

  “How are we going to—”

  Hesper pulled the pendant from under her shirt. The shirt had a cartoon kitten sitting in a cardboard box, the caption reading “If I fits, I sits”, and for a moment she appreciated the irony. She held up the piece of stone to the dappled sunlight trickling through the pine trees above them. It glittered in the light and Moss frowned harder.

  “This isn’t just a pendant,” she said. “It’s a key. It’s a key to their world. I took it off one of them after I killed it. I didn’t know what it was until I saw how they traveled from one plane to another. Just to get back home, I murdered one of them.”

  Moss opened his mouth and nothing came out.

  “Yeah,” Hesper said. “That doesn’t sound any better than telling you about the Blackteeth, but look how that turned out.”

  Moss lifted his head and looked back up the bank, tilting his head. “I hear something.”

  Hesper grasped the pendant firmly. “You don’t have to go with me, but I think you’ll die today if you stay here. At least you’ll have a chance if you come with me. I know this isn’t what you wanted, isn’t what you envisioned for today, but it is what it is right now.”

  Moss glanced at her and then at the thick woods behind them.

  Hesper heard someone calling. “…Check over there, Burt!”

  She made a makeshift holder for the machete by cutting a hole through the waistband of her sweats and inserting the large blade through it. She held the bush axe with her other hand and concentrated on what she had to do.

  Behind them there was the rustle of people moving through the brush. They had perhaps seconds and then the moment would be gone forever.

  “Hold onto my arm, Moss,” she said. “Don’t let go. No matter what, don’t let go. I don’t know what will happen to you if you do.”

  Moss threaded his arm through hers, grasping her forearm tightly with his hand. “Where are we going?”

  “Their world, their plane, their turf,” she said. “When we get through, we’ll be in the water, but then I’ll be on dry ground as soon as I can, and then I’ll be running. Keep up because if there’s any of them about, they’ll try to kill us, and they won’t be hesitant about it.”

  Moss glanced up the hill, and Hesper’s eyes followed his. A glimpse of something khaki flashed through the trees. A man’s voice called, “Can you see them?”

  Hesper thought about goals. She thought about the steps she had made. She thought about hiding in plain sight and wondering if she would ever sleep the night through without worrying if she would wake up to the sight of a Blackteeth staring down at her. She’d had goals of getting past the ten years spent in perdition, and she’d had hopes about living a normal life at some point in time.

  None of that is gonna happen.

  With a firm yank on Moss’s arm, Hesper made them tumble into the water, and her stomach dropped a thousand feet in an instant. In the moment just before her head went under, she had a mental image of a random policeman emerging from the brush. He would see the rings of water from the splash ever-increasing outward and nothing else. They would wonder where they’d gone because the pool was no more than four feet deep and as clear as glass on a cloudless day.

  Then the moment of imagining was gone forever.

  Although Hesper had done it twice before, neither time had been particularly extraordinary. The first time had been as if in a foggy dream. The old woman had beckoned to her from the river’s edge, calling in a singsong voice that jangled along her nerves. However, she’d been taught to respect and obey her elders, and she’d approached without question despite the discordant feeling of disquiet. It was only when she was closer that she realized the old woman wasn’t any kind of woman she was familiar with, and Charlie had been snarling in a way that he’d never done before. The thing clasped Hesper by her wrist so quickly it was nearly a blur to the naked eye. She had been dragged forward. It was only when the water hit her face that she’d let go of Charlie’s leash, thinking in a very minute way that the dog would drown if she didn’t let go. Before long, she was cold and damp and trapped in a deep hole, listening to the screams of other children.

  The second time had been different but still so muddled and detached as if it had truly happened to someone else. There had been the constant repetition of prayer in her head. “Let this work. Let this work. Please, God, let this work,” resonated through her head in a never-ending mantra of words jumbled together. The water pressed at her skin, and there had been a moment of pushing as if her blood would fly out of her body by ramming its way out of her skin. She had been in the darkness one moment and then in the light the next, scrambling for the shore, forcing her way through the mud on the bank and collapsing on the grass. She’d pulled her feet from the water’s edge because if she had left them there, something might pull her back.

  The third time wasn’t the charm for being all that different. There was all encompassing pressure, and she could feel Moss’s hand grasping her arm so tightly it would leave bruises. The world plummeted around them in a rush of blackness and weighty compression. They moved but they didn’t move. The moisture pressed down on her as if a giant sat on her chest. It was a moment that lengthened endlessly, stretching out like a piece of taffy in a machine at a carnival. It folded and then folded again and it felt as if Hesper’s head would explode.

  Her head came out of the water, and she desperately gasped in air, aware that her eyes were open but that everything was dark. Beside her, she felt Moss’s warmth and the weight of his hand over her bicep. He yanked her close to him as she heard his head pop out of the water. “Fuck!” he yelled sputtering water. “What was that? What in God’s name was that?”

  “Shut up,” she hissed. She pulled at his arm. She instinctively went to her right and was pleased to find the water getting shallower. After a moment, they scrambled out of the water onto a dark shore, with her half pulling him behind her. All she could see, hear, or smell was blackness all the way around them, and it was oppressive as a wet woolen blanket draped over their heads.

  Hesper went still. Moss, clearly aware their circumstances were precarious, followed suit. She listened to water dripping from their bodies and closed her eyes because all was dark anyway. All was a mass of silence pressing down on them. There wasn’t a swish of cloth or the clatter of claws on the walls or the hiss of a creature as it prepared to attack.

  Hesper clasped the bush axe and listened. Moss’s fingers tightened on her arm but he didn’t move.

  Apparently, they were lucky because the area seemed to be empty of the Blackteeth. Hesper thought that it made sense since so many of them had been hunting them on the other side. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out where the two humans had gone. The only thing that had saved them was that they hadn’t considered the notion she might have returned to their world. It was something only an idiot would do. It was like Hansel and Gretel voluntarily climbing into the oven.

  When Hesper opened her eyes again, the rocks had begun to glow, and the area was backlit as if someone had wired it with soft bluish lights for the atmosphere of a grimly dark horror movie. She said very quietly, “Moss, close your eyes and let them adjust. You’ll get used to it. There are walls here that have a faint light, so it’s not all black.”

  She dimly saw Moss close his eyes. “Are we alone?” he asked in a whisper.

  “For the moment.”

  Hesper looked around slowly. Running would be great, but she needed to understand where she was located. The pools that the Blackteeth used looked very similar, however, there were symbols on the walls that differentiated each one. She didn’t know how to read the characters, but she understood that it was numbering of some sort. She quickly found the symbols on a nearby stone wall. The wall was warped with age and covered with a black ivy that grew everywhere in this underground hell
, but the symbols glowed faintly with the same light.

  Hesper slowly pried her arm out of Moss’s grasp and went to the wall. Brushing away the ivy that grew so thickly on it, her fingers traced the symbols and she nodded. “I know where we are,” she said. “That’s good. That’s very good. We can make it through a couple of miles of tunnels and then we can go back.”

  Moss appeared beside her. His eyes were open now, and he was studying the odd lettering. “What is that?”

  “Language of some sort.”

  “I thought that they’re monsters.”

  “They are monsters.”

  “Monsters with a language,” Moss said. “It looks kind of like Cyrillic.”

  “They’re not Russian or any kind of Slavic for that matter.”

  “But they’re not animals, either.”

  “I would argue with that,” she said quietly. “So would your sister if she was here.”

  Moss flinched at that, and Hesper immediately regretted her harsh words. She studied the wall and thought about the best way to get to where she wanted to go.

  “We can make our way through,” she said, “and if we run into one of them, we either fight or flee. We can move through the portals of the pools, but I don’t know where we’d end up. Even if we went back in this one”— she pointed at the pool they had just emerged from— “I don’t think it will necessarily go back to Oregon. I don’t even know if all of these go to places on Earth.”

  Moss stared at her, and it occurred to Hesper that she was getting tired of him staring at her as if she was a loon. “You’re saying these things are aliens?”

  “I don’t know what they are,” she said. She pointed. “We’re moving quickly. Follow me on my heels. If I drop to the ground, you should do it without hesitation. If I say jump, you should jump. I’m the only chance you have at making it through this alive.”

  Moss nodded slowly.

  Hesper didn’t wait for a conversation. She turned and began running. The sooner they got out of this place the better.