Aislyn stumbles back. “You can’t—You’re going to kidnap me? My dad’s a cop, I’ll—”
“Uh uh uh,” says the Woman in White. The two older women stop as the Woman in White moves between them and Aislyn, while Aislyn presses back against her house’s front door, panting a little with an incipient panic attack. But the Woman in White is smiling—as she turns and opens a door in the air.
Through an arched entryway is a small cavern lined with black, glittering walls. On the floor of this cavern, Aislyn can see another young woman, this one chubby and brown-skinned, with loose curly hair. She’s lying on the ground in this place, and she appears to be unconscious. She’s also covered in gross-looking sticky wetness of some kind.
“Oh no,” groans the Bronx-woman, going still with shock. “Veneza?”
“Always check your back seat,” says the now-grinning Woman in White. “I used to think that was a euphemism for making sure your ass was on straight! But no, it literally means check your back car seat; you people never make jokes when I expect them.” She sobers. “If you want her back with her shape and sanity intact, you’ll leave. And leave me with my friend here.” She turns a winning smile on Aislyn.
“And then you’ll destroy the city,” says the Japanese guy.
“Naturally. But I’ll at least make sure it’s quick and painless, all right? We’ve never wanted to cause suffering. That’s your people’s way.” She lifts her chin a little. “We can be civilized. You stand down. I bring my city into this world and use it to begin erasing this universe and all of its antecedents and offshoots. If you like, I can create a temporary pocket universe where some members of your species will survive the collapse, though of course without the support of nearby universal branches or a city’s power, it will eventually succumb to entropy. But it should last long enough for your brief, unidirectional lives to end naturally. Peacefully. We all win.” She beams.
The Japanese man scrunches his face in confusion and rapidly growing denial. “What?”
But the old woman, the Bronx, shakes her head. Her lips are pressed tight together. “That’s not how this fucking works,” she says. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t roll up in here and threaten to kill everything we love, and claim to be civilized while you do it.”
“Oh my God,” says Queens. She’s staring at the girl in the cavern, and her face is distorted with disgust. When Aislyn looks into the cavern to try to understand what Queens is so horrified by, she realizes belatedly that the cavern walls have begun to flex in a strange, arrhythmic way. When one of the walls shifts in an odd way, Aislyn glimpses something hard and ridged slide out from behind it. A comb? she wonders. She thinks it’s a comb. It’s black, like a comb meant for men or Black people. The comb’s teeth are irregular, and needle-sharp at the tips, and they curve a little. Inward, toward the young woman, almost like
teeth they are teeth not a comb teeth teeth teeth
And the place that the girl lies within isn’t a cavern at all.
A fold of the glittering (glistening, Aislyn realizes, her gorge rising; it is glistening with saliva) cavern wall shifts aside a little, to bare a narrow, vertically oriented throat that vibrates for an instant. The sound that emerges is not a voice, but a dead, flat throbbing tone. Ump. It flexes again. Dad. Ump.
It’s the Ding Ho. A Ding Ho has that poor girl in its open mouth, threatening to swallow her alive.
“You’re the most horrible thing in the world,” Queens says. She’s crying, but her fists are clenched. “Veneza isn’t even one of us. She’s just ordinary! Why would you hurt her?” She raises those plump fists, ready to fight. All three of the other parts of New York are tensing, crouching, preparing themselves to fight the Woman in White. To fight Aislyn’s only friend.
Aislyn clutches and shakes her head. It’s too much. She just wants it to be over already. So she shuts her eyes and clenches her fists, and wishes with all her might that every one of these dangerous strangers would just go away.
Everything then happens very quickly.
The thing emerges from the stairway tunnel slowly, more of a bulging forward than an active movement. Fast glacial. Ghostly in its shifting, fluttering white shapelessness. It’s easy to see the bones of the subway train that it used to be, underneath what it is now: a living, flexible, snakelike thing covered in a proliferation of white tendrils so thick as to resemble fur. That fur ripples back in waves, pressing against the tiled stone, easing the passage of the train through the narrow archway mouth in the same way that cilia move things through the small intestine. As Manny and Paulo watch, the elongated nose of the train oozes to the side, turning and questing about like a living thing on the hunt, reshaping itself by the moment… and finally focusing on Manny, Paulo, and the sleeping primary.
Paulo holds his cigarette the way Manny remembers holding a knife. He blows a hard puff of smoke at the train-beast, and despite a gap of yards, the thing flinches, its unearthly light flickering momentarily as the tendrils covering its nose die away. Underneath is the metal and wire of the former front train car, now horribly distorted into a bullet-like shape—but after a moment, tendrils from the unaffected portion of the car grow rapidly forward again. New ones sprout on the denuded nose, and within seconds the whole thing is as it was before.
Then a line seems to peel its way down the length of the thing, and it splits apart from the tip. Two halves of a whole. A mouth. And at their core, a black throat lined with jagged, broken-off subway seats.
Paulo curses softly, stepping back. There is fear on his face. Manny flexes his fists, stepping forward as fear for the primary eclipses any fear for himself. He still hasn’t thought of a construct, but there is a growl in his chest; all has faded into a red haze of instinct. “He’s mine,” he snarls. His voice has deepened, reverberating; Paulo throws him a startled glance. “Mine! You can’t have him!”
The train monster hisses like sliding doors, and splits further. Now it’s a mouth in four parts, wormlike and wrong. The lower mouths end in molars formed from the train’s metal wheels, now razor-sharp and spinning with manic, devouring speed. There’s even a tiny uvula back there, dangling above the wheels: a red pull-knob on a chain, behind which a cracked sign reads EMERGENCY BRAKE.
And, horror of horrors, it is talking. “S-staaaaand… c-c-clear,” it purrs, in a distorted, singsong electronic voice. “Closssssing… d-d-d-dooooooooors…”
But Manny does not stand clear. He stands to fight. And he is changing, too. He is bigger, suddenly, taller; he feels his button-down pop loose and his jeans rip as all at once his head and shoulders brush the ceiling. He clenches his fists and bares his teeth and no longer cares about pretending to be the good-looking, friendly creature others see. All that matters is the primary. All Manny wants, all that he is built to do, is protect him.
And as black fur and shimmering city-power sheaths Manny’s limbs, and as his shoulders broaden and grow heavy with superhumanly strong muscle, he has one last fleeting thought before he becomes in sum total the beast he has always been within:
I’m really going to have to watch some better movies about New York.
Then King Kong pounds the floor, and charges forward, fists raised, to do battle.