ELDRITCH VOIDTUBER VIRIDIAN S. LAUGHTER HUNTING BLOOD-STREAM | BLUE HILLS APARTMENT COMPLEX FULL WALKTHROUGH!

[Omicron]

"In the psychology of the modern, civilised human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house."
Kitty Horrorshow, Anatomy​

I am going to show you how to kill your landlord.

Well, not your landlord. I'm sure your landlord (I assume you have one) is merely the ordinary, petty kind of monster, monster only by the power they hold over you. Maybe, at best, they're fine. More importantly, I assume your landlord lacks the long, sinuous eyestalks slithering down their tenants' pipes to watch them bathe, or the long, many-jointed arms squeezing their throats without ever being felt, which mark someone as not human enough that it's okay for them to die. A difference of kind, if not of degree.

So I'm going to show you how I kill a landlord.

I climbed down the evening bus onto the cracked and beaten curb, flickering streetlight buzzing loudly above my head, and there it was across the street: the Blue Hills apartment complex. A block of grey concrete, squatting in the middle of the city, like a cinder block dropped from high to crack the ground and left there for want of any will to remove it. Pockmarked with the thousand injuries of time, weather and the acidic air of the city, showing its scabs and scars that were never properly healed by any human hand. Light passing through its windows the only signs of a life, of a soul animating this weathered carcass.

Here I sit, it seemed to say, and it is in my shadow that you dwell.

<ViridianSLaughter> I'm there.

As I thought the phrase I also heard it, not like an internal monologue but like I was physically hearing it on a second, separate track from the ambient reality of cars swooshing by. And at the same time I heard it I also saw it, on a big black screen inside my skull, right above my eyes where my vision ends. Basic synesthesia that had given me splitting headaches the first couple days, but I was used to weirder by now.

<BlackKnightArchon> yooooooo
<RavenAlkhaez> Go girl
<MillieMelon> i still think this is a bad idea!!!!!
<ViridianSLaughter> Wow, five exclamation points? I'm glad you're so concerned for my safety, Millie.
<MillieMelon> i'm serious! this is dangerous! you should have taken someone with you!
<TempusFuckit> We all gotta die someday, Millie.
<BlackKnightArchon> fugit I swear to god if you don't stop being such a downer I will kickban you
<TempusFuckit> You… You can't do that. This isn't an actual chat room, you can't 'kick me' from the psychic network.
<BlackKnightArchon> can't I?
<TempusFuckit> …anyway Millie I'm sure Vi will be completely fine.

I repressed a smile. I'm sure my therapist would have said something about how having implanted a chat room in my brain so I didn't ever have to log off or look away from my phone was unhealthy, but I didn't tell her about the supernatural stuff, so I didn't have to address that ever.

Viridian wasn't my name, obviously. It's kind of the name I wish I had, but it's also a color, and unlike Scarlet it wasn't one I thought was ever used as a first name, so I kept its use restricted to this sphere of my life. It helped me think like I was somebody different from who I was in the day to day, working at the store, talking to my parents, trying to remember to call my real life friends I hadn't seen in five months. It would have been easier if they had been on the psychic network but I think the worm implant would be a hard sell.

It helped me feel like I'm the kind of person who can look at the Blue Hills Apartment Complex and not shudder.

They actually had been blue, once. Cerulean, to be specific. They had never been meant to turn into a waking nightmare for people who didn't even know they were dreaming. That was just inherent to the way they had been built, but people then hadn't known that. The complex had been meant to be colorful, pleasant to live in, and to foster community in its design. The walls painted a bright color, trees planted both around the complex and inside its inner courtyard, the entire thing built like a castle - four long rows of apartments forming a square, with an open space at the center. The idea had been that by making the complex a singular unit with its own internal geography, people would come to form an identity as 'Blue Hills residents' which would form the root of a strong neighborhood community.

Instead the paint had eroded away, leaving behind bare concrete adorned only by the last traces of washed out blue running down the outside as faint trails of tears faded bruises, or sickly pallor. The trees had breathed in the polluted air and coughed out their leaves, and now they bent, twisted and sick with only a few reed-thin branches bearing greyish leaves. They were a worse sight than no tree at all, but technically they were still alive, so policy was they couldn't be cut down. As for the square castle and its small sunlit island, they'd simply become a prison and its courtyard, for people whose sole crime was not having enough money to live anywhere else.

<RavenAlkhaez> So what's it look like?
<ViridianSLaughter> Like a shitty old apartment complex. I'm catching depression just looking at it.
<RavenAlkhaez> I mean to the Eye, smartass
<TempusFuckit> Yeah, what's the vibe?
<ViridianSLaughter> I haven't put it in yet. Just looking at this place is giving me the creeps, I'm putting off giving it a real look.
<BlackKnightArchon> not to rush you or anything, but your adoring audience is starting to pile in
<MillieMelon> don't listen to them! take all the time you need!!
<ViridianSLaughter> Thanks Millie, but it'll be fine. I have to keep to my schedule.
<RavenAlkhaez> Knock 'em dead, babe
<ViridianSLaughter> Thanks. I'm logging off for this, I'm still not used to fighting with you all in my head.

More well wishes and good luck messages streamed in, but I tuned them out. 'Logging out,' unfortunately, wasn't as easy as pressing a button. I checked around me, but it was late enough that the only other living souls in sight were distant, walking quickly with their heads down, not paying attention to one random girl waiting at a bus stop. I took my backpack off and knelt down, sifting through its contents until I found what I needed. First I opened a small transparent plastic jar, and I reached up to my ear. I pushed my green-dyed hair (a nod to my 'business name', even if the people in my life didn't get it) out of the way, and traced three quarter circles along my ear, down and up and down again. Something moved inside my skull, sending a shudder down my spine, but I was getting used to it. I reached inside my ear with my index and thumb, and felt the squirming motion of something sliding out. I caught it by the sharp end and tugged it out. In the moment I heard the 'pop' of pressure in my ear, all the voices and words snapped out of my brain, and I was alone again.

Except for this little guy. There, hanging from my fingers and writhing in the air, a disgusting thing hallway between a leech and a prawn, its segmented body twitching and its many little legs snapping at the air. I tossed it in the plastic jar and closed it shut. It would calm down soon. The worm wasn't aggressive or harmful; it fed on cerebral fluid in such small quantities that my body naturally made up the difference. In exchange, it allowed the brain to interface with the Astral. Without it, the overwhelming foreboding feeling emanating from the complex faded quietly in the background - for now.

I popped open two other jars, these ones one filled with transparent liquid, salty, a little thicker than water. Then I pressed my fingers to the sides of my right eye socket - I pushed until I felt resistance, adjusted my fingers until I could feel them slide between bone and flesh, pushing against the soft, pliable surface of the eyeball. Then I pushed, and pulled.

Plop.

A brief jolt of electricity as the nerve cut off then half my world was darkness. I was holding my own eye in my hand, wet and pliable like an oversized grape ready to burst in my hand. Staring at me with one empty green iris. I I put it down into the liquid, closed the lid tightly, and from the second jar I retrieved another eyeball. The sclera was black as coal, and the iris a feverish, sickened gold; but weirdest of all was the pupil, splitting out into five branches, like a starfish swimming in the sun. I pushed it inside my empty eyesocket, and it slid right in like the space had been made to welcome it. I twisted it this way and that to make sure it was firmly lodged, and felt again the jolt of electricity as it connected to the nerve, then withdrew my hand and put away the material. I was still half-blind; I needed to make a bit of a performance of 'tuning in', to keep my audience appreciative.

The eye's power was seeping into my nervous system, arcane tingling dancing across my skin, inside my spine. Emerald light started to hem my vision. I could once again feel the weight of pain radiated by Blue Hills ahead, and more than this. I felt eyes open one by one, eyes so far away from my home, peering across the veil of time and space. The shadows stretched, and the flickering buzzing streetlight became my spotlight. I sat on the stage with an amphitheater of darkness at my back, and They squirmed between the seats.

I blinked, once, then twice rapidly, then three times. Like the stroke of lightning, the world flashed before me, the darkness on my right side torn away by blinding emerald claws.

A tear rolled down my cheek.

The windows of the building cast faint beams of light and they all swept slowly across the streets, like searchlights in an old war movie. I could feel the cold, calculating purpose behind these lights, I could sense that they were searching for threats, or prey, searching for me. But though I waited for them to converge on me and stare me down with all the weight of the prison-castle, they never did. They could only barely manage to piece through the curtain of white mist that shrouded the whole building and the street around it, out to the opposite curb. But that mist was not water - it was thick on the tongue, it got caught in the hair and stuck to the skin unpleasantly, coated my throat and made me want to gag. It came in slow puffs from inside the building every time a resident opened the doors; it was like the complex inhaled the polluted air of the city, drawing it into its corridors and apartments, and exhaled the white particle mist. The walls were heaving faintly with that breath, and I could almost hear a voice in it - the building felt almost like a body, laid on the ground, unable to get up, its respiration a faint rattle. Whatever youth and vigor had once animated these walls, it had been consumed; it sat sickly now, and the corners of its walls sagged like rumpled cloth or old skin where they touched the ground. There was a dampness on them, the sweat of fever, oozing out of its pockmarks.

That ooze spread through the mist in long black stains, running in zigzagging, sharp-angled streaks out of the walls - like grasping tendrils, they reached for the parking lot on one side, for this very bust stop on the other, and there, it was already starting to crawl up the entrance stairs of the small elementary school across the street. These dark limbs were very still, two-dimensional lines on the floor, but I knew if I came back here day after day I would see them advance, inch by inch, to spread the sickness that consumed the building to the rest of the neighborhood.

Blue Hills sat sickly and bloated, and the mass of it spread beyond its walls, spread to the sky and street, smothered the world around it with its weight. It fed upon those who came to it willingly, driven by the feeling that there was no other choice, that in its misty embrace they would, at least, be safe from the rain, and for the mist they could not see the damp darkness wrap its tendrils around them. I can be your home, it said. I can welcome you and protect you from the world. See my walls, how strong they are. I may not be pretty, but I will stand fast.

You'd have to be already inside breathing the white mist by the time you realize it had been a bad idea. And here I was, going along with that same bad idea, coming to it of my own free will.

I took a cloth pouch and from it drew a powder, which I threw into the air ahead of me. It sparkled with green flames, twisted the air in a haze, and I passed through it, moving In-Between. Immediately the sounds of the city became muffled, the light dimmer, the world twisted as seen through a greasy window. I gave the white mist another look, then decided to take out a cloth facemask (dark green, with black-and-white seesaw teeth; I'm kind of building a brand here) and put it on. Then I pulled a claw hammer out of my bag - a solid, versatile weapon, easy to carry around - and I finally crossed the street.

"Folks," I said to the empty air, "welcome to the Blood-Stream."

The things beyond the edge of my eyes writhed; I think it was a cheer.

To be In-Between is to be on the threshold of the Astral. Still a physical being, capable of touching and being touched, and not exactly invisible as such; but mortal eyes slide off you, their attention cannot focus on your presence, they ignore you and forget about you the moment you're out of their field of vision. For the most part.

Anything that can see you when you're In-Between is dangerous. That's what the hammer's for.

A woman swiped the code box with her key, and one of the front doors opened for her; I hurried my steps so I could be right on her feet. She paused instinctively, holding the door open for me without really understanding why she was doing it, and I slid into the gloom of the building's hallway. Immediately I felt choked, like the air of the building had grabbed me by the throat; smoke and paint dust making my lips go dry. I had to pause, taking a few long breaths to calm myself, remind myself I wasn't actually choking, that to be In-Between intensified these sensations, and that the mask would protect me; after a few long seconds, my panic reflex calmed down, and I tugged on the mask to make sure it was securely in place.

I turned around to catch a brief glimpse of the woman before she moved on. She was Black, maybe in her thirties, with her hair worn in dreads. Her eyes passed over me without seeing me, deeply circled and almost glazed over with fatigue. Her skin had an ashen tinge, her fingers were stained with nicotine, and when she breathed I could hear in her exhale the faint rattling of overstressed lungs. The pockmarks on her shoulders and neck, the red bite-marks - those I alone could see. They weren't physical. They were the telltale wounds of someone who's been fed on by the Astral.

She moved on, keys dangling from her hand, steps slow with exhaustion, into the depths of the building. It's always gloomier In-Between, but this building was especially dark; I could hardly see past halfway through the corridors to my left and right, and the white mist was only half-responsible for it. I took a look at the rows of mailboxes arrayed on the wall ahead; some looked empty, some were overflowing with uncollected mail, and all of them were bulging. Thin black filaments ran between them, like the lattice of mold growing inside fruit. Some had burst open, like an abscess, their torn metal outlines covered in grey fuzz, spilling their mail all over the floor. Nobody had bothered cleaning it up. I leaned down and picked up one enveloppe - electricity bill. Another - summons over an unpaid parking ticket. I stood up, put my hand on one of the fuller boxes, and focused the Eye.

It was a mouth in the wall, an antlion larva waiting in its burrow. The dampness that oozed from the wall was like drool inside this opening, the black filaments bundled up into sharp teeth-like protrusion. Every bill, every summons, every injunction, every 'last chance' recall, another tooth in its maw. It wouldn't kill, not at once; only you would put your hand in it and it would snap on your hand, leaving its ring of papercut-bites around your wrist like a brand, tasting your blood and leaving its spores inside the wound. Then it would wait for the next time. The longer you waited the more teeth it would have, but what was the point of picking it up as it arrived? Death of a thousand cuts is death still. The beast is still sated in the end.

I took the stairs, tracing the sinuous trails of dark mold snaking along the wall. Felt the humidity of the rail on my palm, only it was just a little stickier than water. I took the second floor entrance, walked down the corridor. A greasy window at the end of the corridor let the light in but didn't let you see anything of the city beyond. It only illuminated two rows of identical grey doors - but here, oh, here the paint had stuck. Safe from the harsh winds and rains of the outside, armored in its mantle of lead, the Blue Hills were indeed blue on the inside, bright cerulean in the way some beautiful frogs are brightly colored. There had been carpet on the floors once, but it had long been replaced with linoleum tiles with a mottled pattern of blue and grey, like geologic strata. Those had asbestos sometimes; I wondered if that was the case, but it was hard to make out anything from the floor when the corridor was still choked with white mist.

That's when I started hearing them. The Audience. It always takes a little time for our planes, or our planets, or our psychic paradigms or whatever it is that makes it happen, to fully align. First they can sense me. Then they can see me. Then I can feel them. Then they can hear me. Then I can hear them.

A chorus of distorted voices buzzing at the edges of my hearing, hundreds of them - far too many for me to individually make them all out, but I could always skim the surface for a representative sample.

hello has she started yet has she started yet dummy don't you see this is the apartment why can't i see anything hello The white mist! The white mist! It coils and chokes! she's in-between don't you see hello why isn't she talking is she hunting yet shush! let her focus! hello is she hunting yet why isn't she talking

Right. Talking.

"Huh," I said, and watched as the echo of my voice rippled through the White Mist. "If you're late, yep, we've started. Viridian S. Laughter here, on the hunt for, huh, a landlord."

I cringed at how bad that was. Part of this… this job, if you can call it that, is self-marketing, and I sucked at it. You need to construct yourself as a symbol, as a beacon that things from beyond the void will be drawn to, and want to watch, and wish for your victory. And I struggled with that. With delivery and improv. With being funny and fun. Physically I could outperform most of my peers, but people don't go to a Mission Impossible movie to see Tom Cruise's stuntman, do they?

Wait. I think Tom Cruise does most of his stunts actually? Bad example. The point is, this is one big reason I'm not as good at this as Millie, or Raven. Millie is a fantastic conversationalist, and Raven is great at delivering an improvised dramatic narration of her own life. I like to just… do my thing. Let others follow me on the hunt, watch what I do and how I do it. It feels weird to be commenting on what I'm doing as I am doing it. Only one worse at it than me is Fugit, and that's not because he talks less - it's because he's just kind of a dick. Weirdly enough I think that's part of his appeal - the Audience loves hearing him shittalk them for some reason.

That's why I had the teeth-mask and I dyed my hair green and I wore long fake nails that looked kinda like claws. Viridian is me but she's also an idea I project, a mask I put on, and I am still struggling to draw that idea, to carve that mask, to give it recognizable shape and color. The Audience likes symbols. They like iconography. And so I am building one for them to latch onto.

I checked every door handle as I advanced, looking for an apartment left carelessly open. As I did, I could see the papers stuck to the door, the ones that were too urgent for the easily-ignored mailbox. An eviction notice, so politely phrased in telling somebody they'd be homeless soon. Here, more blunt: "Your rent last month was two days late; if this happens again, we will be claiming your safety deposit. A third strike will see you evicted." Here, a reminder that the landlord's staff were to be allowed in at any and all hours for impromptu inspections of the apartment, and that refusing them entrance again on any motive would see a one hundred dollar penalty.

You ever see these Japanese shows where the exorcists write calligraphy on paper strips that are used as talismans and placed on things to seal the evil in? Those notices are kind of reverse seals, aren't they? The official-looking header serves like the templated paper strips, the forms and legal reminders serve the purpose of calligraphy. Only instead of a seal, their purpose is to invite the evil in from the outside.

I pushed another door handle, and this time it clicked, and the door opened. There we go. I cautiously slipped in, taking light steps; even In-Between, when you push things too far, people start noticing, and talking about haunting and poltergeists.

I needn't have bothered. There was one occupant in this studio apartment, and he wasn't going to be taking any notice of me. There was a table in the middle of the room, with the remains of a one-person microwaved lunch, and the kitchen counter was almost entirely taken up with empty coffee mugs. Even now, another jar of coffee was percolating. It was not a bad apartment, as it were. Even if it only had one room, that room was spacious. The wallpaper was a bright, vivifying blue. The kitchen space managed to do the most it could of its limited space, the rug that covered most of the floor was a welcoming shade of brown. It wasn't much of a home, but it was a home.

But then I turned to the bed on the opposite side of the room, and I saw the tenant.

I have no idea what he looked like in the physical. I didn't look. Maybe he just looked like someone sleeping a bit uncomfortably. Maybe the Astral's hold on him had grown such that he looked exactly like he did to my Eye. But here's what he looked like to me: he was sitting on the edge of his bed, hands nervously clutching the frame, staring forward with empty eyes. He was pale, emaciated, and his scabbed lips whispered, 'Just a nap. Taking a break. Gotta work again soon. Just a nap. Getting some rest. Taking a break.'

He didn't have a shirt on. I could trace the pattern of his veins underneath his skin, pulsing with something darker than blood; and where these veins bulged out the most, long, fleshy tendrils reached down from the walls and ceiling, piercing through his skin to plug directly into his veins. With each heartbeat, a little more of his blood was sucked into the building, leaving his skin a little paler.

I was so transfixed by his appearance the phone alarm almost made me jump out of my skin. His neck creaked as he turned it to his bedside table, swiped the alarm off, and sighed.

"Gotta go," he muttered, and slowly proceeded to unplug each of the fleshy tendrils from his body; as soon as he let go of one it slithered back into the wall with a meaty, wet hiss. When he was done he stood up, went to pour himself a cup of coffee, sank a small fleet of sugar cubes into it, and then downed it in one go. I could see the warm, sweet darkness flowing down his throat, a visible glow of heat spreading from his belly to his limbs, making his cheeks a little rosier, his eyes a little more focus, giving him just a little more strength. He smiled, and started dressing back for whatever job he was going to now.

There was no rest to be found for him in this bed, in this studio, in this entire complex. Coffee might be the only thing keeping him going, but he'd have been better off spending his break on a park bench than here. Not that he could know that. Not that there was much he could have done about it, if he had. This was his home, and it was killing him.

is this how they normally look hello don't they need blood to live is this the beast no you idiot hello it's a victim there are so many victims behind every door The white mist! The white mist! It will strangle your lungs in its coils! this place is doomed is she hunting yet no it's not that's why she's here the hammer queen will strike viridian will burn green as fire hunt hunt! Hunt! HUNT! HUNT HUNT HUNT HUNT!

I felt a sharp pain lance through my forehead, the buzzing of air pressure in my ears, and winced. I rubbed my forehead, and then decided, why not, screw it. It was going to be a long day, and my throat was parched and tasted of metal even through the cloth mask. I spotted a clean mug on the shelf, poured myself coffee while the man was busy putting on a jacket, and knocked it out in a few long swallows. By the time I was following the man out of his apartment, the bitter burn was already making me feel more alert, and twitchier.

"Whoever asked if we need blood to live," I said, turning around and heading up more stairs, "you get a prize. I don't know it's draining him of his actual blood, or some kind of… metaphysical equivalent of it, but this guy is withering away into nothing. I don't know how long he's got."

Buzzing in my skull, incomprehensible as coherent words. Vicarious fear, morbid interest, aloof curiosity, raw excitement. The usual chorus of emotions.

Up on the third floor, the black mold was thicker. Its trails weren't wider as such, but more and more they resembled pure black trails of fuzzy ink. I wonder why it didn't appear in the air - that's the big danger with mold, right? It releases spores and particles in the air, you breathe them, they make you sick? Not here though. The white mist ruled the corridors. What was the mold doing, then?

I heard a faint voice through the wall, and approached another door. This one didn't have any notice stuck to it, but the mold was spreading out in the space between the floor and the door, smothering whatever daylight must have shone inside it. I tried the door handle, to no avail; so instead I laid my hand flat against the grey panel, steadied my breathing, and focused my mind. Then I closed my human eye, and blinked the Eye three times.

My vision flashed in eerie colors and distorted sights with each closing of the eyelid, and on the third blink my vision pushed forward, through the door. The world I was seeing now was twisted, abstracted, an impressionistic painting; darkness, not empty but moving, stark lines shifting erratically, chaotically. At their center a grey shape, the outline of a man sitting on a chair, arms on his knees, back slumped over, his eyes two white circles staring down.

The only light in that room was a gold-orange flame, shining with warmth that did not burn. It was so small, but it shone so bright; where the man's figure was far the sharp dark lines gnawed at his outline, but where the line touched him his grey turned to flesh tones, warm brown. And at the center of that flame, staring up, without particularly caring that it was the only light there, in fact seeming to take it for granted as part of its regal nature… a cat.

It wasn't the cat's meowing I had heard, or the man staring at him.

It was his phone.

"...doubt we need to remind you of Blue Hills' strict no-animal policy. Any cat, dog, or other identified on the premise will be removed. If we suspect the presence of unauthorized animals within the buildings, we will call the appropriate services. Any tenant found in violation of the policy will see the removal of their pet, will pay the fees of the removal services, and will pay an additional fee to Blue Hills for breaking our rules which, must I remind you, you agreed to when signing on. As a reminder, any tenant who informs the leasing services of wrongdoing by any of the other tenants is entitled to appropriate compensation…"

I pulled my hand away from the door, and immediately the vision faded, leaving me back in my shoes in the corridor.

freaky amazing how did she do that did you not see her do it before hello will the cat be alright she can see the astral amazing freaky hello the hammer queen please tell me the cat will be alright viridian viridian mighty witch of the star-branded eye! viridian! VIRIDIAN!

"...thanks," I muttered, testing the heft of the hammer in my hand. This room was worse than the one below. How bad might it get upstairs?

I wandered through the corridors, and it soon became apparent that the floorplan didn't make sense. Blue Hills was, as mentioned, built like a simple square with a courtyard in the middle. But instead of linear corridors of equivalent length, I was now starting to see sharp angles, corridors splitting in two, grease-spattered windows giving a blurred image of the street where I should have been deep inside the building, duplicate numbers over the apartment doors - here, conjoined doors, two apartments merged into one; I couldn't figure out by which mechanism the fused doors were supposed to open. Maybe they weren't. Maybe the residents had long starved to death, trapped inside their melding homes.

Can you call it a home if it kills you?

The Audience had fallen quiet. The way I conceptualized them - as a dark theater filling up and emptying - allowed me to roughly gouge how many were following me. In lulls like this, when I was simply wandering through corridors trying to make sense of the environment, I could usually sense othem draining away, slipping out of their seats and through the exits. I tried not to let it get to me. I told myself it was outside my control, sometimes part of the investigation was just kind of boring, but the truth was that it was also my job to keep them engaged and I sucked at it.

I racked my brain for a little while (briefly remembering Fugit telling me "the important thing is that the Audience are shit and you should tell that straight to their faces" and immediately discarding that idea) before coming up with the most obvious question that I should have thrown at them ages ago:

"So, Blood Cells, any of you guys got any idea what this place's deal is?"

There was a wordless buzz for a while, as I continued touring through the corridors, examining the warped geometry, but not keen on directly exposing myself to another little vignette of daily tragedy by peeking directly into an apartment. More notices - one of the door got a special prize for the eviction notice stuck to it being dated to before the "Big community event this Saturday! Free cake and punch will be provided! All are welcome to attend!" plastered right next to it. Another one of these doors had at least two dozen of these 'community events' stuck to it, all for the same community event, all printed on separate days and then repeatedly throughout the day for the past two weeks.

More mold, seeping through the interstices between doors and walls.

I felt the buzz go quiet. Done brainstorming, I suppose. I was expecting a chaos of suggestions - but sometimes, out of the many rises one voice, loud enough to drown all the other. It's hard for me to tell when it's expressing a consensus in unison, or one particularly authoritative speaker drowning out everyone else.

IT HUNGERS.

Yeah. No shit.

I've seen a house that ate people once, in New England. It was a lot more… organic, though. Eating things - it's an animal concept, isn't it? Herbivore or carnivore, the gross and messy business of tearing into flesh, crushing plants with blunt teeth, of drenching torn-up food in acidic drool, swallowing it long spasms of mucous membranes, dissolving and crushing them in the meaty grinders of your guts.

I mean, it doesn't bother me. But it bothers them, doesn't it? The things that aren't us. That's my theory as to why they keep manifesting these distorted parodies of our own organic functions. As if to say, 'can't you see that this is what you are, you gross, disgusting meat-puppet?' When I found the House it was halfway through the process of digesting its owners, and by that point the house was meat. Walls like stomach sides dripping juices that burned my skin, furniture turned tumorous with fleshy sacs. The owners were still technically alive at that point - the most painful thing I've ever seen in the course of this job was the flicker of hope in their eyes when they saw me arrive, thinking I could save them, unaware that their bodies were half gone and they would die soon after the house could no longer keep them alive. So I told them it would be okay, I found the House's heart, and I stabbed it. Then I watched as it bled to death, and its occupants with it.

I took a while recovering from that one.

It was a horrible story but it wasn't this story. This apartment complex, this sickly diseased prison-castle squatting in the middle of the city, slowly digesting its occupants - it was still mostly concrete walls, leaden paint, and black mold. It was beginning to show organic alterations, but out of proportion with the massive harm it was already doing to its tenants. And if it was trying to invite people into itself to be consumed, why the evictions? Why push out valuable toys that hadn't been fully digested yet?

The meat house, as horrible as it was, had been healthy. Thriving, really. It was hungry because of how strong it had become. This place felt like it was dying.

The building wasn't doing this. It was responding to the actions of an entity separate from itself, with a different agenda. Something that controlled the building and the lives of the people therein.

The Landlord.

Fourth floor. Or… fifth? Six? The stairs I'd just taken had looped in weird ways and I'd had to go down before going up again and I had no idea how high up I was anymore. The walls on this floor were so blue, so bright. The white mist was so thick I was having trouble to see farther than a few feet, and it danced in a wind whose origin I couldn't make out; metallic particles within shimmered and shined and it felt like firefly swarms mimicking human dancers. I held a hand out before my throat, waving the other one ahead of me to clear the air, and…

The white mist! The white mist! She dances, she dances, she waits for you! The white mist the white mist the white mist the white mist (will the cat be alright) the white mist

I paused, struck speechless.

There was a bench along the wall of the corridor.

On that bench sat a lady.

I don't know if Saturnines are 'ghosts,' or 'spirits,' or even what the difference between those is. What I know is this: in places where people die poisoned with lead - whether from paint dust, or factory work, or bad plumping - sometimes the Saturnines appear. Sometimes bearing the faces of the dead. Sometimes unrecognizable as anything human-like.

She had one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen, soft and gentle, with wide grey eyes and full lips, and she was paler than anything living ought to be. She was white, not white like people are, white like chalk is, like Greek marbles, except for the spots of red on her cheeks, and the red on her lips. Her hair was white too, long and crinkly like iron wire; and she wore a halo, wide rings hovering around her head like a wide-brimmed hat tilted back. That blinding white skin reached down to the top of her breasts, ending in a V-shape - and below that line there was nothing human but the abstraction of a body in metal. Matte black limbs and a matte black torso, metal not forged but cast of single blocks; sharp-edged torso in an hourglass that was more a parody of a woman's than anything, waist and shoulders and elbows all sharp bladed angles. Every articulation in her body was mounted on a ball-bearing joint, limbs rolling freely against the leaden orb.

She saw me, turned her face to me, and smiled kindly.

"Hello," she said, her voice deeper and heavier than seemed to be natural, like every word was a weight dropped on a scale. "I do not believe we have met before."

"...we haven't," I said, taking a cautious step back. "I'm a visitor. I'm… looking for the landlord."

"The landlord?" she tilted her head, amusement sparkling beautifully in her eyes. "What a peculiar thing to be looking for. Whatever would you want with such a dour being?"

She wasn't wearing any clothes - not that she needed to, considering most of her body was an abstract metal freakshow - but her sharp-tipped fingers were moving with inhuman speed and precision holding… thread? Sewing. She was sewing, turning fabric into cloth, into…

a shroud

"You… know them?" I asked, picking up on her comment. I tried to keep the hammer out of view, to not come across as if I'd come here with violent intent, but at the same time I was clutching its handle so tight my knuckles had probably gone white.

"Oh yes," she said, and she stood up. I swallowed nervously, staring at her unable to blink. Her body of jointed metal moved with the deep rolling sound of oiled heavy machinery, her feet and fingers clicked sharply as she set her shroud aside, her smile widened; she stretched out most of the way to the corridor's ceiling, bending her back slightly to look more directly at me. She must have been over eight feet tall. "Oh, of course I do. How could I not, when I lived here before it did?"

Even as I felt the trepidation of deadly danger, I also felt the building pressure of the Audience streaming in, of more and more shadows squirming their way through the rows of seats of that figurative movie theater, watching breathlessly as the Saturnine loomed over me.

My heart pounding in my chest, I stepped back from her advance, adjusting my grip on the hammer. If she and the landlord were working together - it made perfect sense. Make the apartment complex a poison chamber. Assuming the landlord could in some way draw power or sustenance from the suffering of the afflicted, the building could invite in new, vulnerable people without easy access to healthcare, the Saturnine would ensure they were poisoned, the landlord would squeeze them out of everything it could, and then toss them out into the street, carrying their sickness with them, ripe fruits scattered all over the city for the landlord to pluck.

If I had to fight her - God. She was a moving lead statue, she could break me with her bare hands, or hurl me against the walls like a toy, or poison me with a breath, or a kiss, or-

Her lips twisted into a frown.

"I hate it."

I blinked. "...you do?"

"Look at my walls," the Saturnine says with a white-puffed sigh, metal claws waving through the air at the shining blue walls - crossed through with streaks of the ink-dense mold. "Look what it has done to them. I try to keep them whole, to keep them pretty for all the tenants, so they live in a bright colorful place where they know they are loved by the walls themselves. Already the rain has washed it off the outside walls, leaving it all naked and grey and cold, so cold. They want to be warm, don't they? They want my bright-painted walls and the warm blanket of my white mist. But it sends the mold. It sends the mold to rot it all from inside!"

Her last sentence was cried out in anger, and she lashed at a black streak, slashing it with her fingers; the mold broke, the blue paint briefly flooding in to replace it, but within moments the darkness had run it over and consolidated itself.

The Saturnine's sharp shoulders slumped, defeated, and she turned back to me.

"I hate what it's done with the place."

The buzz at the back of my skull echoed my own thoughts. Voices of surprise, mild confusion, and sharpened interest. I briefly considered trying to explain to her what her 'bright-painted walls' and 'white mist' were actually doing to people, but it would have been a lost cause. She was a spirit born of lead poisoning, she didn't even understand that what she was doing was harmful, and she might not be able to understand it. Maybe she'd killed people before, if unwittingly; maybe she'd kill again; but right now I needed to address a much more pressing concern.

"Then you're in luck," I said, smiling my best vicious smile (and only belatedly realizing my cloth mask concealed it completely, although it did have the fang-pattern to make up for it). "Because I'm here to kill it."

She froze, a perfect statue for a second, and then her ball-bearing joints whirred as her limbs rearranged themselves to face me, and her pale face leaned down closer, close enough that I felt her toxic breath dangerously close to my own skin.

She didn't say anything at first. She turned her head, this way and that, each motion scattering the white mist and its shining metal splinters dancing like fireflies.

"Are you sure, darling?" she said, and raised a sharp hand to my cheek - I did my best to keep my composure, knowing she could, in a moment, take my head off my shoulders. "You look so frail."

"I'm stronger than I look," I said, and left out the part where I had been so taken aback by her appearance I was completely defenseless against her right now. I would definitely have to be more prepared when I confronted the landlord.

"Hmm," she said, staring into my eyes with hers, "you have such a strange-looking eye. Perhaps you can do it after all."

She pulled back, straightening up, and I gasped in relief.

"Go up," she said, "and follow the trail of the mold. There is a penthouse. That is where it is coming from. That is where you will find the landlord."

There was no penthouse in the building, at least none that had been in the plans or could be seen from the outside. But I had no reason to believe she was lying. In fact, the architecture of the building warping to create a special penthouse apartment that existed on one layer of reality and not the other was exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find a figure like the landlord.

"Thank you," I said, and immediately started walking away - though I struggled to take my eyes off her face.

"Ta-ta!" she said, waving her knife-like fingers.

I turned the corner, found the stairs, rushed up, and when I reached the next landing I leaned against a wall to take my breath, and slowly slid down until I was sitting on the ground.

"Holy shit, guys," I said aloud. "I thought I was going to die."

death by the heavy air the pale lady the white lady the mist-born can we go back to save the cat you did well she is not unkind hello she craves not death she is death hello will the cat be alright the white lady the pale lady

I think she liked you. Should have asked her number.

That last voice pushed out of the chorus, sounding different, more rounded, more complete, more recognizably human. I smiled.

"Raven? Nice to see I've got someone with more experience watching me make a fool of myself."

But her voice was already gone, fading back into the chorus. Still there, still watching, but impossible to make out unless she put enough pressure to stand out from the others.

I watched Raven's own hunts regularly (like me, her name wasn't actually 'Raven'). She was good enough at compartmentalizing that she could listen and speak to the Audience while still plugged into the psychic network and talking to us at the same time, all while stalking and even sometimes fighting her quarry. I wasn't that good yet. The Audience itself was distracting enough. Which was unfortunate; if I were plugged into the network, I could get real-time advice from the others. I probably would have avoided blundering into the arms of a Saturnine that way.

And now I was sitting on the landing of a flight of stairs that, I realized as I looked up, went up far higher than there was actual space within the building housing it. A simple set of stairs, as wide as a house, and cast in shadows.

But thanks to the Saturnine, I knew it was the way. Which meant it was time for more thorough preparations. I withdrew a modified epipen from my backpack, pulled up the leg of my black sweatpants (I was planning, one day, to invest in an outfit that would be both practical and cool, but the Audience saw through my eyes so it wasn't a priority.) I jammed the needle into my thigh, and immediately felt the burn as my veins around the injection point started turning visibly green, glowing through the skin. They snaked up and down my legs, bringing with them the feeling of fire scouring the inside of my body, and I had to clench my teeth and tense my whole body to keep from crying out. I couldn't see them as they reached my torso, covered by a simple shirt and a denim jacket, but I could feel them spread to my organs - my heart seized up for a beat, then started pumping faster than ever. My neck cramped; the fluid reached my brain.

In one blinding flash, the pain was gone. I was the fire now, moving with it. I raised a hand to my face, watching the emerald reflections glow like lava underneath my skin, turning it this way and that and flexing my fingers. The strength and control I felt in every motion was something out of this world - like the world had slowed down for me.

"Blood Cells," I whispered, "we're back in business."

glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory glory echoed the voices in my head.

I got up, my whole body feeling much lighter, my mind slightly dissociated from it, like I was moving at a remote. Tapped the ground with my foot a couple times to test my leg strength, and nodded to myself. Then I looked up the stairwell, assessing the distance to the next floor. I flexed my knees, braced - then I jumped. In one bound I reached the side of the next floor's landing and twisted in the air, hitting it with my feet, and bounced off it to reach the next floor, and again, never touching the ground. I zigzagged between the concrete platforms until I reached the final floor - I grasped the metal railing in my hand and hoisted myself on it, turning my body up into a handstand for a couple of seconds, then landed on the final floor with a flourish.

Rounds of glory burst into my head, and I smiled. I was on a timer now - the comedown from injecting that stuff was pretty fierce - and I intended to have fun with it as long as it lasted.

I kicked the door open, and entered the corridor. But this time when I stepped in, my foot didn't feel supple plastic lino under them; they felt something squishy, crunchy, damp - something alive. And when I had taken a few steps, the white mist that still lingered in the stairwell was gone - replaced by a few black motes swaying through the air.

The corridor was completely overgrown with mold. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, the inky black substance had covered everything. It was turning into more than just 'mold' - there were greyish veins running through it, and cyst-like bulbs protruding and splitting into fruiting bodies. Doorknobs jutted out like fungi out of the bark of a tree.

I tentatively prodded a wall with the head of my hammer (no way I was touching this stuff with my hand if I could avoid it). Past the crumbling layer of the mold, the concrete wall felt… soft? Yielding. Yielding was the word.

I looked down the corridor, and saw just what the Saturnine had predicted: there was a direction to it. The veiny patterns within the mold flowed like water from a spring, with a clear direction - to my right, growing thicker the further down the corridor I looked. I set out.

"Guys," I said out loud, turning the hammer in my hand, "I think I know what's going on here."

the heart the brain the heart the brain the lungs that breathe black mist the mouth that swallows life the heart the brain the heart the brain the center originating the core from which it comes the brain the heart

(will the cat be alright)

"Yeah, yeah, we're at the heart of the infestation, but that's not what I mean. I mean I get the plan now. The landlord is spreading the mold infection from this floor," I said waving my arms to the side around us - there were doors on this floor like on anything, but I could see or hear no sign of life from them. "Downwards towards the foundation. The mold is simultaneously undermining the integrity of the walls and pulling the whole place towards the Astral. When it reaches the foundations…"

Crack.

I felt myself pulled downwards and, wired up on the green stuff, hurled myself forward without thinking - tore a path through the mold, raising up a black cloud underneath, and looked to where I'd been, hammer out. But no. No surprise ambush.

My foot had just gone straight through the floor.

"...this happens," I said, "to the entire building. The whole edifice comes crumbling down. Hundreds of deaths and injuries. Dozens of 'missing persons' whose bodies are not recovered."

Not dead, no. Pulled into the Astral, into this building's shadow, which will stand long after the rubble of this one has been cleared away. There to be consumed, sacrificed, bound into eternal servitude - any of these things and, rarely, all of them simultaneously, the self fractured until causality surrendered.

This dude sucks. I would have started from the foundations and worked my way up, not the other way around. Work smart, not hard. Why do all your targets suck, Vi?

I winced at the high-pitched voice breaking out of the chorus. Fugit. His voice had a disruptive tonality to it, like he hadn't just been silent but had simply not existed before, breaking in now from some other space.

Which I'm pretty sure was something he did on purpose. 'Disruptive' was one way of summing up Fugit's persona; 'toxic' might have been another. I mean, he was my friend - I guess? - but I could only tolerate him in small doses. He lacked with me one of the main things drawing most women and many men to him, which was that he was, as Raven had once put it, 'distressingly hot.' He referred to himself as, and here picturing me doing a heavy sigh, the 'Titillating Time-Twisting Twink.' Which was also why, instead of sharing his perspective from his eyes the way I do, he instead had a tiny clockwork thing flying above his shoulder and capturing him in third-person view. And maybe I should have done the same, but the very idea of putting myself on display like that made me want to curl up and die of embarrassment.

He was right, though. If you wanted to make sure you collapsed the whole building it would have been a much faster plan to rot the foundations and let the whole thing crumble, rather than start from the upper floor and have to ensure significant penetration across the whole building.

"I'm guessing it faced some kind of conceptual limit," I said aloud. Was I still walking down the corridor? It had been at least five minutes, I should have at least come across a turn - but no; it stretched on, the other end seeming distant still. "The landlord has to work from above because… it's the 'lord' so it has to be high up? I don't know. This whole scenario is new to me."

It made sense, though. Landlord comes into contact with the mold. The mold takes root inside him, stretches its filaments throughout his body until he's little more than a stuffed doll full of mycelium. The mold takes control, and it starts working on spreading itself throughout the building until, eventually, it collapses it, and claims more bodies for its Astral courts, fungal beds to grow more mold with.

That's why it didn't care about resident retention, why it was happy to squeeze them dry and evict them. The mold fed on their misery, but more importantly, the rotating cast of inhabitants ensured there was nobody who stayed long enough, paid enough attention, or cared enough about Blue Hills to notice the physical manifestation of the mold, nobody who might call up some kind of public service who'd identify the building as unsafe.

It didn't matter how frequently it kicked people out. There was always somebody willing to pay the price to move in. It was nobody's home. Only a place to exist for a while.

All the traces of the building's original architecture were gone. I was walking now through a fungal gut, a soft-angled tunnel of black organic matter budding off into long stalks and flat heads and gauze-fine tendrils, the air filling up with black dust. I waved my hand ahead of me a couple times to clear the passage, and each time the fungi around me bristled, as if offended.

And then it was there.

The door.

It looked perfectly ordinary. Standing there crowned in twisted black mold, it was a perfectly ordinary wooden door, with a simple sign on it reading, "PENTHOUSE SUITE." Which was weird; you might label it that way in a hotel, but not in an apartment building, right?

"So," I said nervously, raising a hand to the panel, "what do we think?"

mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster mold monster

"Yeah," I whispered with resignation, "no bet."

I pushed open the door.

The penthouse was nothing like the corridor. It was a beautiful modern apartment with white painted walls, sober columns holding up the roof and giving the place a little bit of a Greek palace flair, geometric blue-and-grey rugs giving the lacquered wood floor a little flourish. The furniture was sleek, modern, mostly made of aluminum; the sofas were beige leather, looking unbelievably comfortable. The two outer walls - we were evidently at the corner of the Blue Hills' fortress-square - were huge glass windows stretching a solid fifteen feet up, the kind you might stand in front of swirling a glass of expensive wine musing about how this city would be yours someday.

Only three things were off about this place.

The first was the abcess in its center. The writhing blob of black mold, as tall as a man, bulged and pulsed in motions that suggested not merely something alive, but something in pain. Cysts emerged from its surface and burst into hideous pus bleeding down to the floor, and fruiting bodies stretched, trembling, to the ceiling, only to collapse into fragments reabsorbed into the whole. It tried to spread out of its confined shape, but it could not - a circle of blue light, anchored by metal spikes, surrounded it with a heat-haze. A binding circle.

The second was the fact that the penthouse windows didn't give a view of the city. Beyond these glass walls was only a vast and iridescent nothing, an expense of impossible colors where blue was darker than black and orange brighter than white. It hurt to look out - but in the distance, if one could withstand the strain, there was something like an eye, a heart, a hand reaching slowly forward. The approach of the Astral.

The third was the man.

I call it a man because it had two arms and two legs and it wore an expensive suit, but that was where its humanity ended. Above its empty neck floated something blurry, a rapidly shifting geometric mass, which I had to squint to fully see -

Paper. A whirlwind of paper. Envelopes. Corporate letterhead. Pastel faux-welcoming pamphlets. Big ejection notices written in polite formal tone, and debt collector warnings in bold supersized font. Bills, bills, bills. A notice from some governmental agency of what kind of 'suspicious character and behavior' to always be on the lookout for. A court summons over unpaid fines. And won't you come to the party this Saturday?

And it took shapes. The whirlwind froze, every few seconds, taking on origami-like shape. The thing had its back turned to me, but I could see it in the reflection of the glass window, against the darkness - a man's face, high-browed, stern, old. A snarling dog, something shaped vaguely like a hand caught in its teeth. A child, weeping. A megaphone. It had its hands folded behind its back and I could see - they were no hands at all; its sleeves were as empty as its collar. Its fingers were keys, floating in a strange articulated way, imitating the articulations of hands in empty space.

And all the while it spoke, in an endless droning monotone, broken up only by the occasional sound of static when it took on a settled shape.

"...days past which failure to pay rent will incur a lease violation and fees of up to $100 per day bzzt all tenants are expected to perform basic maintenance it is not the proprietor's responsibility to ensure pipes aren't clogged bzzt it has come to the attention of…"

I briefly considered trying to sneak up on that thing. But the penthouse was a wide open space, and if I was seeing its reflection in the glass, wouldn't it see mine? I still stepped as lightly as I could into the room - but the lacquered parquet creaked, betraying me anyway.

The voice stopped. The thing in the suit slowly turned to face me, its face a black-and-white paper vortex, not settled in any shape. I resigned myself to cross as much distance as I could before it made a move, striding across the living room.

"You must be the landlord," I said. It wasn't just a bland introduction. I needed to test that thing's… self-awareness. Sentience, for lack of a better word.

"Yes," it said, and its voice was different. The monotone was gone, but the faint staticy buzz underneath it was more intense. It was a man's voice, with a clipped accent. I tried my best not to think of it as 'him,' staring into the vortex to center myself. "I have seen your coming. You carry a heavy shadow. Heavier than any human's should be."

A straight answer, followed by a coherent, if esoteric statement. Not a mad gibberer then. That could be bad.

"Not half as heavy as yours, Origami Boy," I said. The green blood burned within me, heartbeat rising, pulsing in emerald waves at the corners of my eyes, growing stronger. I focused my Eye on him - and snapped my awareness in two, like cracking glass, one eye seeing the inhuman thing in front of me, the apartment, the void, the abscess of mold - and the other straining to pull its awareness back into the physical, to see the base reality of the world around me and the thing in front of me…

The world blurred, distorted like fabric tugged on all its sides, straining at the seams, and with a sharp lance of pain in my skull my awareness snapped back together into the very same scene I'd been watching.

I blurted out, "...the fuck?"

We were not In-Between anymore. We were at the very cusp of the Astral, barely connected to a substrate of reality anymore. The penthouse had no material reflection, no real apartment it overlapped with. And the thing ahead of me had no earthly body, there was no human being serving as a vessel or a meatsuit.

And I wasn't hearing the Audience at all. I didn't feel their presence anymore.

"I was born on a spreadsheet," the thing said, its vortex-head stabilizing briefly into another, folded paper copy of its empty suit body. "In the blank space between rows of numbers. Pets are not allowed under any circumstances in the building. Did you know the first computer was made of meat?"

It raised a key-fingered hand, twirling the metal blades in the air like a flock of shiny grey pigeons. Above, the paper vortex was a brain now; the surface was flat enough I could read half of someone's names and the word "failure to respond" but not the rest of the sentence.

"An evolutionary breakthrough," it said, voice crackling as if through an old speaker, "incredibly advanced for its time, but ultimately a dead end. The hardware cannot be expanded, you see? You cannot stuff more meat inside your skull, it's too rigid. So you design symbols which serve as external storage for the data within the meat computer, as well as to connect meat computers to one another. Reminder not to leave your doors open under any circumstances. By the time you design new minds out of copper wire and silicon the real computing power is already there. Thousands of minds connected by informational hardware and following social coding. The leasing agency cannot be held responsible for any property or bodily crime undergone as a result of tenants leaving their doors open. It operates on a scale no single mind can comprehend. Your first Artificial Intelligence, long before electricity."

I took a step; I thought it was moving slightly to track me with its… face… but did not otherwise budge from its position near the window to the void. I settled into a slow walk, circling him, watching him. Hammer firm in my hand. It wasn't fully coherent. Its nature bled through its speech. If I could get it talking, maybe I could get it all wrapped up in its own head, dissociating from the threat I represented. Maybe the Audience would find its way back to me from whatever distant abyss I had stepped in when I'd entered this room.

"Yeah, yeah, we build our own monsters and then they eat us," I said disdainfully. "Heard that line a hundred times before."

"You build the machine," it said, its fingers flying about its head like bugs, "and feed it a utility function, and when it maximizes that utility function you look at the results in horror and say, 'how could you do this to us?' But you asked it to."

"Nobody asked me shit about how I want society to be run," I said, glaring. It was allowing me to pass behind it, between its body and the glass, and back around - if it was noticing I was drawing the circle a little tighter, coming closer to it, it didn't remark on it.

"Not you, of course." Its hands settled in front of its torso, keys interlocked. The paper vortex looked like a ring around a void now, swirling too fast to read. "But your kind in aggregate. The building's visible facade informs its value and as such, tenants should be reminded that only approved items can be displayed on balconies. This is the world you made. Surely you would not self-harm so much if you did not collectively want it."

"That what you are?" I asked, wanting to draw the questions away from pointless philosophical talk with a being that had a vested interest in preying on mankind. "Some kind of man-made AI gone rogue?"

"I am not the machine," it said, and its head took the form of a grasping hand for a second before scattering into a swarm of origami butterflies, "I am the output. When you build a machine bigger than you can comprehend is it any surprise it is bigger than it can comprehend itself? It becomes so difficult to keep track of its processes and agents. Pest control is mandatory. They become lost within the rows of the spreadsheet, anonymized as numbers in the accountant's ledger. One day a man goes to work and the machine loses track of him and he is gone from this reality, with no one to remember him. It is every tenant's responsibility not to let the building be infested with the undesirable. One day the machine forgets one of its agents is already active and sends them out again and a man meets his double in the street, and they fight each other to the death for there is only one life, one family for them to have. Your lease is up for removal in sixty days and you must sign a new release or move out. If you move out you must file a notice sixty days in advance. And some days…" The thing spread its hands, encompassing the room in its grasp, head turning back into the swirling circle. "Some days an agent is generated that the machine does not know exists and forgets about as soon as it appears. Born in the blank space between the numbers. Moving unseen within this great body. Will you be joining us for the Easter celebration this Saturday?"

"So you're not the source of the mold," I said. I was circling back around to the sofa; I was getting close enough that I could soon feel confident in reaching him in one jump. "At least not physically. You found it - abducted it? Bound it? And used it to pull the building into the Astral."

There weren't in this room, I realized now, any of the grotesque, organic manifestations that had begun to show in the rest of the building. The mold only existed within its binding circle. This room could not digest anything.

"I am neither the mold nor the building," the thing said, raising its hands to the sky, "they are the beasts which my hand has tamed. I am separate and above. I am the Landlord. And when I pull this place into the-"

Every vein in my body flashed as I moved, nothing to see but a streak of emerald and dust lifted off the ground. I grabbed the back of the sofa, used it to propel myself in the air, and came soaring at the Origami Man, teeth bared, hammerhead wreathed in green lightning, gunning straight for his face.

He crossed his arms and the floating keys that made up his hands flew towards me at sharp angles and deadly speed. I barely had time to register it and reacted on instinct, tucking my body and rolling in the air as the swarm of metal hornets buzzed past me. Four of them grazed me, cutting painful gashes into my hip and thigh. I rolled to the ground, rose up on one knee, braced for another leap. In the space between us, four spots of the carpet burned with acrid green smoke where my tainted blood burned exposed to the air.

There should have been cries of horror. There should have been voices cheering me on. But in the deafening silence of my own mind all I could hear was my own panicked brain giving me the instructions that should have been given by a thousand inhuman things better suited to understanding the threats of the Astral than I was.

I started to move and he swept his arm. There was a hideous hiss and a great crack, and the penthouse windows shattered, coming all at once on astral wind as a great storm of jagged glass. In a frozen heartbeat I saw myself reflected in a thousand shards of glass that were going to tear me to ribbons. I aborted my dash, instead turning around and leaping behind the sofa, curling up in a ball behind its cover and hoping for the best.

The glass hit the sofa like light machine gun fire, tearing great rends in the leather, but didn't have the momentum to break through or knock it back. Even so it had me pinned down, the glass battering the floor and walls all around the sofa, shattering into little shiny caltrops and ripping the paint off the walls. I gritted my teeth and took off my backpack, sifting quickly through its contents then strapping it to my arm like some half-baked shield; I perked my ear, and in the moment the last glass shard hit the wall behind me and the storm ended I darted out of cover. I ran low to the ground, back slumped, hands ready to throw.

With the windows broken there was nothing holding back the astral; it was blowing through the room like a furious wind tinged with impossible color, creeping across the floorboards and carpets with iridescent fingers, but the Origami Man probably felt it would be able to handle the situation easily as soon as I was dead. Its head was a searchlight now, only it was fully functional, its beam sweeping over the sofa and tracking me; I was bringing the bottle to my mouth, catching the pin with my teeth, when the beam caught me. It filled my whole vision, blinding my mortal eye, and in that moment every electrical appliance and socket in the penthouse started sparking violently, snakes of lightning coiling for the killing stroke.

My starfish-pupiled eye wasn't so easily blinded. In the searing white light it saw the gash the landlord cut in the world, a black psychic stain pulling the substance of the Astral into a shape, and I tore the pin with my teeth and hurled the projectile.

It reacted with surprising speed, lashing out with its hand and sending the keys again, hitting the bottle out of the air at five different angles, shattering it. It didn't matter. The detonator was a shitty homemade thing but it still sparked, and the bladder inside the bottle inflamed, and the whole thing exploded in a cloud of red mist and a horrendous buzzing sound.

Blood, sprayed mist-fine, deposited over everything in the room - but the Origami Man, who was closest to it, got the lion's share by far. The fly swarm expanded at high speed, desperate with thirst, and my left arm was immediately dotted with hungry black bugs trying to tear through my skin and thankfully thwarted by the backpack-shield and the denim jacket. Most, however, went straight for the landlord, surrounding it in a whirlwind of buzzing insects caking his suit in black chitin, goaded by the blood-grenade into digging desperately through the clothes to get at a bloodstream that likely didn't exist.

An inhuman gurgle, a sound whose meaning I could only guess at, came from the landlord's figure as it curled its arms towards its chest. The lightning arcs which had been meant for me instead redirected towards it, bathing its body in white-blue sparks, raising a gag-inducing stench from the thousands of charred bugs falling off its body to the ground.

Its big kill-shot was expended. I lept in that void as it staggered, smoke wafting off its black jacket, and brought the hammer in a hook towards its face.

Pain exploded in the left side of my jaw and my vision went hazy as I tipped over, instinctively tucking into a roll to put some distance between me and whatever had just hit me. I pushed off the ground, rearing back, hammer thrown in a blind parry, hitting something light and metallic with a ringing sound and swatting it back. I blinked and my vision recovered; right there in front of me, one of the sleek modern tables all aluminum and glass had twisted its four legs and broken its back into a humanoid shape, a slender golem that had just socked me in the jaw with a curled metal fist.

"Well," I said, rubbing my jaw. "Anyone's gonna comment on that one?"

Silence. The golem went for another punch and I parried, hooking its wrist with the claw of my hammer…

And its other hand grabbed me by the throat far faster than I had anticipated, squeezing the breath from my throat and hefting me into the air. My eyes filled with stars, lungs burning, viridian blood burning through my oxygen too fast. I pulled the hammer back from its arms, tried to strike at the arm holding me, but before I could the thing slammed me down into the torn sofa.

I didn't understand, but didn't try to. I struck at the arm; even reinforced by whatever bullshit the Origami Man was using, the core of the golem was still aluminum and its arm caved under the blow, bent in half, and it staggered away from me. I gasped and inhaled deeply, body firing up as oxygen fueled the green flame once more.

Then the leather cushions rolled over my body like waves of flesh. Before I even understood what was happening, my arms were swallowed between mounds of leathers, my hips were being sucked in. I tugged against them instinctively, what I would do to test the strength of a hold, thinking in my confusion I was just being restrained. It was only when my strength was met with more strength pulling me down and black filament began to emerge from between the seams to wrap around my limbs that the horror downed on me.

I was being swallowed alive.

"I do not know what you have done to yourself," the landlord said, its paper-head vibrating as if it were stunned, or maybe it was its equivalent of panting with exhaustion, "why your shadow is so heavy. Maybe you did find ways to stuff more meat into your skull after all? It doesn't matter. I will feed you to the mold, and with your power, my grand work will be complete tonight."

"No!" I screamed, bucking against the sofa, trying to wrench my back, my arm, but only sinking deeper as I looked for a spot to brace myself and pushed into it. "Fuck you, you paper-headed fuck, you will not-"

The cushions pressed on both sides of my head, smothering me, and I couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, could only see a narrow window of light rapidly closing.

"I will bring this place into the Astral, and I will take my place among the ones beyond, a god at last."

The light went away.

Only darkness remained.

I was not 'in' the sofa. I was not under the floorboards. I was nowhere. I was in the guts of the building. I was in the place where it digested. I was within the mold, creeping across my skin, eager to pierce through it and fill me with fungal cobwebs, to make me a little straw doll.

There was no sound but the grinding of the building against itself and against my flesh.

There was no soul here but mine. The building had never been alive, not like that house in New England. Even the mold itself was but a tortured captive being used for the purposes of a cold being of spreadsheets and accounting.

The mold engulfed me completely.

A cocoon of darkness.

So here's the question you might have been asking yourself:

Why do I do this?

Now there are two parts to this question. Why do I risk my life hunting monsters most people don't even know exist, things that live In-Between, hiding in the folding spaces of reality? Maybe it's altruism. Somebody's gotta do it, after all, or the world is lost, one piece at a time. Maybe it's vengeance, I lost somebody dear to me to these things and now they have to pay. It doesn't really matter though, does it? You can easily imagine a thousand reasons.

The question is, when I do go hunting the things that should not be, why do I do it by plugging an eyeball inside my head that connects my consciousness to a vast Astral space where thousands of beings both familiar and strange, both from this world and beyond, can see it? And why did I miss them so much now that they were gone? Why did I reach out desperately for some faint echo of their voice?

A human soul is a light and fragile thing. It struggles to pierce the veil of the Astral, and when it does, cannot stand its sight. Many who witness its glory and terror have their sanity sandblasted away or their souls shattered like glass or plucked out of their body by some inquisitive and hungry thing that slipped into their body like a meatsuit. Travel is not advised.

But every single soul whose eyes reach out across the Astral to find me, and plug into the ephemeral nerve endings of this stolen eyeball sitting inside my skull, who watches with rapt attention and fearful excitement as I make my ways through the haunted house and confront the dragon in its lair, every single one grants me a little bit of its shadow, and these shadows add to mine and my soul grows heavy indeed.

And even now… Even in this darkness…

Especially in this darkness, this silence, without the penthouse room and the rules the landlord had woven into its walls… I was a green flame guttering, but still shining in the dark. Across the infinities.

And I heard.

viridian

Viridian.

Viridian!

Vi!

vi

vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi
vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi vi VI VI VI VI VI VI

VIRIDIAN.

I am a body caught in the embrace of a cocoon of darkness.

My blood ignites.

The green veins light up, tearing through the mold, and the skin around turns pink-red as steam hisses off my body. I am in the darkness; I inhale, my lungs glowing red through my skin, and I howl.

The green light tears through the dark, my soul tears through the soulless building-mold symbiote, my body wrenches itself out of the non-space. There was a sofa somewhere, imploded into burning debris raining down across the room. I take a step on solid ground, backlit by the void and the green flame, astral wind from the broken window rushing into the tear behind me.

The Origami Man stared at me and its face was just a blank point of confusion. Its golem dashed forward, but it could only get the drop on me once; my mistake had been seeing a metallic construct and assuming something strong, tough and slow, but it was made of aluminum. That made it incredibly fast and it also meant that when I ducked under its punch and rammed my elbow into the side of its spine, it bent in half and sailed across the room in a tangle of hapless limbs, leaving the way clear.

"You're-" the landlord started while bringing its key-hand in a slash, and whatever it was going to say I wouldn't give it the chance. Green lightning wreathed my arms and I moved into its reach faster than it could strike me. It tried to step back and I reached with my free hand to grab it by the tie, and there, with it in my grasp, I struck.

The hammer hit its paper-head with an odd crunching sound, and the blank dot scattered into a vortex that felt like any blow should have gone straight through it. I didn't care; I struck again and the hammerhead struck each paper on its way like a butterfly crunched in a closed fist, passing through like through a dense curtain of water.The thing's human torso swayed from side to side, erratic, and I pulled on the tie to bring it closer and brought the hammer back around the other way; the vortex tightened and the claw caught it by the edge, tearing a stack of paper to shred all across its surface. The key-fingers trembled, then fell to the ground. I hit it again. Black ink stained the hammerhead, my fingers, and the sleeve of my jacket; its body went half limp and I brought my hand higher to its collar to hold it up as its knees buckled. I hit again, a wet, scrunchy nose like you might get if you took a hammer to the inside of a copy machine that had had a terrible ink backflow accident.

glory echoed all the voices inside my head.

The landlord collapsed, bills and notices and envelopes all torn and tattered and feebly trying to form another construct, arms and legs twitching.

glory

I raised my leg, lightning crawling up from my sole to my knee, emerald veins glowing straight through the sweat pants, and I brought my boot down in a stomp so forceful the carpet splintered around my heel, green light running across the cracks, and whatever astral tensile force still held the landlord's head together snapped and exploded in a burst of air.

Glory.

My foot rested in the middle of nothing but scattered bits of paper, blown away in the astral wind that was slowly claiming this place.

I should have had a snappy one-liner. The Audience would love that. I was just too tired to think of one.

I stepped back, observing the empty suit as it slowly deflated like a pierced balloon, its expensive black-and-white fabric turning to so much paper maché of administrative paperwork assembled into a human effigy, itself coming apart in the wind.

I felt my head go light for a second, vision blanking, and rubbed my face. I was coming down, the blood's power running out. I had to act fast.

In the middle of the room, the captive abscess that served as the source and likely control module of the mold still sat, bubbling and squirming in its pain.

I reached into my almost-empty backpack to find the other bottle, the one with the cloth stuffed inside the neck. I pulled the zippo out of my jacket and lit it on fire. Then I walked over to the binding circle and probed it with my hammer to find out that it was indeed shielded from this side as well but far less than from within, as usual for these kinds of things.

I took a couple steps back, bracing my arm, and lunged forward with the hammer, hitting the hazy shield with my hammer's claw-end as hard as I could. It went through. The curved teeth pierced the wall and hooked against the other side, and with the last of my fading strength I pulled as hard as I could, tearing a gash into the shield.

Then I dropped the Molotov cocktail inside it, and it burst, covering the abscess in flaming oil. Within moments, the mold, itself inflammable, was beginning to fuel the fire. If that thing was sapient enough to scream, I could not hear it; I could only see its surface boil like tar, bubbling and dripping and writhing in pain as I stepped back.

I did kinda feel sorry for it. It hadn't asked to be used in this horrible design. But I had to admit that if it had had enough consciousness to come up with it, it would most likely have done so itself. Mold is just like that. Maybe I could have just let the Astral reclaim it, but better safe than sorry.

The room was starting to lose its consistency now. The angles of the walls only made sense when you looked straight at them, and the paint had the color of the space beyond. There was nothing left for me there.

I turned around, opened the penthouse's door, and closed it behind me. The moment I was out and couldn't hear the howling of the wind, I breathed a sigh of relief.

In that moment of unwinding - I knew I was about to collapse, and I knew I had to say something before I did, to leave a mark. To say something about what risking my life to kill that thing had meant to me, and so should mean to the audience. I thought, and I said:

"Well, Blood Cells, I am happy to say…" A cough broke up my one liner, pain in my chest; I sighed, and said: "We saved the cat."

the cat the cat the cat is saved the landlord is slain the cat praise the cat this was great thank you vi did i miss it praise the cat it was fine is the cat save you should work on your cardio this was so fun do you think she will ask the white lady out the white lady is poison you idiot the cat is saved praise the cat thanks viridian thanks thanks thanks goodbye goodbye goodbye thanks praise the cat

"You're all welcome," I said with a pained smile that they couldn't see anyway, and pressed my hand against my eye, turning off the visual feed while still allowing the Audience to hear me long enough to say: "I must log off now, but thank all of you for tuning in… to the Bloodstream."

There was a chorus of praise and acclaim that I tuned out, pressing my palm against my eyelid to turn off the psychic connection. Immediately I felt light-headed, woozy; I hurried to pluck the Eye out of my head, plopped it into its jar, and replaced it with the old, normal eye.

Then I managed three steps into the corridor and collapsed unconscious.

***

I laid there for a while, in the blissful quiet of oblivion, free from pain and exhaustion. I don't know how much time passed exactly. I only know what woke me up.

There was a touch on my cheek. Something soft and gentle, and yet at the same time sharp and biting. It felt like velvet and tasted like metal, and it sent a jolt of adrenaline in my body. I opened my eyes, gasping aloud, scampering up to my knees and backing towards the wall.

The corridor, which had been a black tunnel of living mold, was now revealing the old blue paint once more. It was hot, hotter than it should have been - the walls were glowing with embers as strip after strip of mold peeled away into smoldering sparks. I worried, for a moment, that the building would take fire, but no; that flame was spiritual in nature. The mold was dying. The residents would be fine soon.

Or, well.

Perhaps not 'fine' exactly.

She sat there, crouched, hands on her lap, a gentle smile on her ruby lips, looking a little bemused by my reaction. Her 'hat' of rings tilted to the side, shimmering in the glow of falling embers.

The Saturnine. Who had just woken me up with a kiss of her poisoned lips.

"Thank you," she said warmly. "The building is free now. I can feel this awful hold release me."

I touched my cheek. It burned a little, like I'd been stung by a bug. I wondered, was there any test you could make to check whether you're suffering from lead poisoning? And if you do, is there any cure? I'd have to look it up later. I'd have to agonize over the fear of actually finding out for a few days, then look it up, later.

"...you're welcome?" I tried.

Her smile grew a little. She straightened up her matte black body, and did, of all things, a curtsey.

"The people of this building will be okay now," she said. "Those kind, beautiful people. They already endure so much. I love them so, but they cannot see me, so they will never know, you see? But you know. At least there is someone who knows."

I sighed, feeling a great emptiness in my chest.

I wished I'd stayed unconscious. At least I wouldn't have to feel this body in the wake of withdrawal. Every muscle sore, my head throbbing and feeling like it was split in two with ache. Cramps in my guts and my thighs, and an itching sensation running ceaselessly up and down my spine.

I looked down, and saw that the white mist was beginning to creep across the floor where the mold had burned.

The Saturnine offered me her hand, as daintily as an aristocrat in a movie, which her powdered white hair gave her a little of the appearance thereof. I took it - my fingers clasped on cold, hard metal rods, the tip of their claws almost scratching my skin. She pulled me up with ease.

I stood there, looking up into her white-painted face, and realized I'd never dropped the hammer. I'd kept clutching it in my hand the whole time I was passed out.

She didn't know. She didn't understand what she was doing. But it was in her nature to do it anyway. The right thing to do, here and now, would be to finish the job. Remove the last of the noxious supernatural presences haunting the Blue Hills apartment complex.

Did I even have the strength to win that fight? She was powerful, but she was naive. If I banked everything on a sneak attack… One last blow to end this.

It didn't matter.

I just couldn't do it.

I couldn't bring myself to kill this beautiful, terrible thing that did not understand it was killing with kindness. I just didn't have it in me today. Not exhausted and burned down from murdering the landlord and the helpless trapped mold.

I just couldn't.

Is it home if it kills you?

I guess I can't answer that question.

I smiled weakly.

"You're welcome," I said.

Then I took my eyes off her, turned around, and walked away.

 

[Omicron]

This story now has a sequel.