As the tentacle hits the bridge, the bridge twists up in holographic silence—but an instant later, the wind shifts and carries with it the sound of metal tearing and concrete cracking and horns blowing. Padmini’s apartment building shudders. And… now there are screams, Dopplered by distance but unmistakable. All the way in Jackson Heights, miles from Williamsburg even as the crow flies, Padmini can hear screams.
Then riding somewhere behind that sound wave comes a wave of… emotion? Anticipation? Dread and excitement. Something is wrong—but also right. All around her there is a sudden and intense rightness, shivering through the trees of her building’s backyard and thrumming up through the old frame house’s foundation. Dust puffs through cracks in the walls. She inhales the faint scent of mildew and rat droppings, and it’s disgusting, but it’s right.
At her desk she pushes herself up, driven to her feet by restlessness. In the same instant, not far off, a subway goes by along one of the elevated tracks. For an instant she is rushing along with the train, is the train: fast, powerful, aching for a coating of graffiti along her sleek-but-boring silver skin—and then she is just herself. Just a tired young graduate student, past her prime at the ripe old age of twenty-five according to fashion magazines, leaning close to the window of a borrowed bedroom and trying to understand how the world has suddenly changed.
All at once, her mouth goes dry with the instinctive awareness that something else is wrong, and this time it’s a lot closer than the East River.
Near. Here. Her head whips about almost of its own volition, almost as if something has taken hold of her ponytail and yanked on it to direct her attention where it is needed. There: the backyard. Not the one attached to her own building, which is paved over and contains only weeds and the rusted-out barrel of their downstairs neighbor’s former barbecue pit. The one next door. Mrs. Yu lives in that garden apartment, and she’s decided that a backyard needs a pool, probably because she used to live in Texas where that was a thing people did. It’s just a little aboveground thing, dingy and cracked after only two New York winters. At barely more than eight feet wide, it takes up nearly the entirety of the yard. Still, it’s a hot June day, so two of Mrs. Yu’s grandsons are hard at play in the water, giggling and squealing loudly enough to almost—almost—drown out the screams from Williamsburg.
And do they not notice the way the water suddenly changes color, as the bright blue plastic bottom of the pool transforms into something else? Something grayish white. Something altogether stranger than plastic. Something… moving, with a slow organic undulation that Padmini can see even through the rippling water.
No. They don’t notice because they are unironically playing Marco Polo, yelling at each other in a mix of Mandarin and English and splashing wildly to get away from each other. One’s got his eyes closed, the other is fixated on the first, and neither has put his feet down on the pool bottom. They’re small boys, but the pool is tiny, too. They’re going to touch the bottom eventually.
Padmini is up from the desk and tearing through the apartment to reach the door before she can think. If she did think, she would decide that she’s being foolish. If her conscious mind were fully engaged, she would tell herself that even if her sudden intense belief about touching the grayness at the bottom of the pool is rooted in any sort of truth, she cannot possibly make it to the ground level, and to Mrs. Yu’s front door, in time. She cannot make it through Mrs. Yu’s house quickly enough, if the old woman even lets her in without first wanting a half hour’s worth of small talk because Mrs. Yu is lonely, and into the backyard, before the boys touch the bottom of the pool. If she were thinking, she would convince herself that her sudden intense belief is irrational. (Really? she would ask herself in scorn. And what’s next, stepping on a crack really does break your mother’s back?)
But she knows it’s real. It has been given unto her to understand the mechanics of the whole business, so she instinctively knows that water is the helpmeet of the Enemy: not a doorway in and of itself, but a lubricant of sorts, facilitating easier traverse. The thing in the pool will do worse than kill the boys; it will take them away. To where and for what? Who knows, but it can’t happen.
So in her panic, Padmini pelts through the door of the apartment and halfway down the fourth-floor flight of stairs without so much as stopping to grab her keys. (The door swings wide open behind her. Aishwarya Aunty calls after her in startlement; her baby cousin starts crying. Padmini doesn’t even close it.) She puts her hand on the bannister and thinks, Now, must get there now—
—and because she is what she is, she envisions herself accelerating to get there, not magically but mathematically, through the walls and the backyard fences and air and space. The transit from point A to B would take
time, where
is the surface gravity of the arc of a hypocycloid—
And the instant she thinks this, a voice inside her head answers, Oh, that’s what you want to do. Okay, no problem.
Then the walls of her old building bend around her, warping, until she is not running down stairs but flying, more than flying, rushing through a tunnel as if she is a bullet and the whole world has become the gun—
And then she is running across grass, she is in Mrs. Yu’s backyard, she is at the edge of the pool grabbing one boy and hauling him out by the shoulders. He screams, kicking, and punches her in the face, knocking her glasses onto the grass. The other boy screams, too, for their grandmother. Padmini has the first boy on the grass, he’s safe there, the grass is solid ground and feels right, but the boy is still screaming and he kicks at her, grabs her hair, tries his damnedest to impede her as she tries to get up for the other boy. The first boy weighs all of fifty pounds, but he goes for her knee and then punches her in the belly. “I’m—” Padmini cries, but before she can get the next word out there is an entirely different kind of scream from the pool that stops both of them cold.
Mrs. Yu comes out onto the back porch, a bamboo strainer brandished in one hand. She stops and stares at the pool. They all stare, in fact.
In the pool, the other boy has stood up on the grayish-white bottom—which, close up, is not just grayish white but mottled, and some of it is scarred, because it is skin and not plastic or earth. And now tendrils of that grayness have whipped up from the bottom of the pool to wrap themselves around the boy’s legs.
After a moment’s horrified staring down at himself, the boy starts screaming again, this time splashing wildly to get out—but he can’t use his legs. As Padmini watches, the tendrils move up and over his trunks, up his waist. He swats frantically at them and they whip up to catch one arm, lickety-split, pinning it down. And his feet are gone, all of a sudden. They have vanished into the now-amorphous gray substance, which is bubbling and rising around him, swallowing him from the ankles up and dragging him under—
Mrs. Yu shouts and runs down to the pool. Padmini belatedly shakes off shock and runs over as well. Between the two women, they grab the boy’s flailing hand. The gray stuff is fearsomely strong as it pulls on him. Padmini pulls back with everything she’s got, but she is an overweight, overworked graduate student, not the Rock. The boy is terrified, his face staring up at them even as fingers of the gray stuff start worming up around his face. She can’t stand the sight of it. She doesn’t want to touch it, and indeed every particle of her screams against doing so because it is somehow inimical to her—and yet she cannot let this child be taken without using everything she’s got to fight back.