chapter two

The egg is still there, rolling around the shower drain and vibrating, making a loud hummmmmmm against the tiles.

Shanks stubs out his cigarette in the sink while he inspects it from afar.

“Did you touch it?”

Pyre has elected to stay outside the room. If it grows teeth and claws and decides it’s hungry, he won’t be the first in line, no sir. “Twice,” he answers. “It felt spongy.”

“Egg shells are just hardened membranes anyway,” Shanks mutters. He takes a step closer to the shower. His bare feet make no noise against the tiles.

“How do you know things about egg shells?” Pyre asks.

Shanks shrugs, either to indicate that he spends time on internet dictionaries, or that his day job when not being a hotshot jazz musician is that of a chicken whisperer.

Granted, Pyre knows the latter cannot be true because he’s seen the television specials. Shanks spends more time touring than most people, drunk and covered in smoke and joking with the crowd so they leave tips on the top of his piano when the show is over. He follows the Dean Martin way of entertaining, but instead of pretending to sip at that glass of bourbon, he guzzles an entire fifth and calls for more.

Shanks gets closer, stops at maybe two feet from the open shower. He reaches out to touch the door, gentle.
The egg comes to a halt right next to the door, goes deer in the headlights still.

“I can see it curled up in there,” he says.

“You can see what?”

“The shell is thin enough. I can see it.” Shanks sounds scared. Or in awe. Or both.

The egg rolls back to against the wall, then rushes forward. Shanks startles and throws the stall door closed with a loud bang.

The egg hits the beveled glass hard and wet. It starts to roll around the stall in circles, squishing like a mechanical sponge wringer.

“Do something!” Pyre yells. He’s wedged between the wall and the bed but he’s standing, he can run away if need be.

Shanks stands outside the shower door, one hand braced on the sink and the other held out behind him, stretched towards Pyre. Like he’s trying to keep him back and safe, which is utterly insane.

“HEY KEEP IT FUCKING DOWN OVER THERE,” a man in the next room over shouts.

Pyre yells “Terribly sorry!” just as the egg rolls back against the wall and then slams into the door again. The glass shakes from the impact, wobbles on the metal track.

“Hey, stop it,” Shanks tells the egg. He’s borderline snarling, like he does when he has to deal with hecklers on television. Pyre puts his hands over his ears and tries to think.

It pauses, comes to a gentle stop against the door. Shanks squints and peers at it through the glass.

“Must you get so close?” Pyre asks. He’s all the way across the room and he still feels like he’s in the danger zone. “It might hatch and eat your face off.”

“You’ve seen too many movies,” Shanks mumbles. He taps a finger against the shower door, tap tap tap.

The egg rolls back from the door, wobbles a moment, slams forward again.

“Bullocks,” Pyre moans. He fumbles at his pocket, intent on his mobile. “We need Tohew. I should have waited for them instead of taking you, how stupid am I?”

“Not wise, man,” Shanks says. He’s still watching the egg, winces with every hit it makes.

“Oh? How is this not wise?” Pyre’s voice is climbing, he’s yelling now. “Tell me, you brilliant man, why shouldn’t I call them?”

“Why the hell would Tohew know what to do in this kind of situation?” Shanks yells back. “This thing would knock ’em over as soon as look at them.”

“Does it have eyes now?” Pyre asks, alarmed.

Shanks pauses. “Well. No?”

“Don’t scare me like that!” Pyre goes back to groping at his trouser pockets.

“Christ, I should have just left town last night,” Shanks says.

“Yes, you should have,” Pyre snarls. “But no time for morning after regrets, is there?”

Shanks gives Pyre A Look and the neighbor bangs on the wall again.

“I’LL CALL THE MANAGER, YOU HOMOS!“

“No need!” Pyre shouts back, “I’m certain he’s on his way presently!”

The egg slams into the door twice in quick succession, which causes them both to jump.

“Think it understands English?” Shanks asks.

Pyre rolls his eyes. He also presses himself as hard against the wall as he can, angles his body so he can run out the door if need be.

The door to the next room opens, slams. The neighbor stomps to Pyre’s door and bellows, “I’M GETTING THE MANAGER AND YOU GONNA GET KICKED OUT! FAGGOTS!” then stomps down the hall.

The lift dings. Pyre rubs at his face with one hand and watches Shanks pick up a bar of soap and tentatively take a step closer to the shower stall.

“What are you going to do with bloody soap?” Pyre hisses, and Shanks waves his hand at him without taking eyes off the egg at the bottom of the shower.

“Hey, little one,” Shanks says, soft and in a borderline sing-song, “Not gonna hurt you, just want to see what you look like, okay? You gonna let me say hi?”

The egg stops rolling around, goes still against the wall.

Shanks glances back at Pyre, shrugs, and puts his hand on the handle.

“Just want to look at you,” Shanks repeats, tenses.

The egg wobbles a bit, to Pyre it looks like it’s squirming. Then it rolls with unnatural speed at the door, crashes through it, glass pieces and shards flying everywhere, heading straight for Shanks’ legs.

Shanks jumps back and out of the way. “Fuck!”

The thing flies like a cannonball, low to the floor and breaking a qualified suburban speed limit. Pyre throws himself back against the front door as it cracks against the wall where he was, blows a hole right through it and into the next room.

A heavy squish, a crack, and then everything is silent. A splintering noise echoes inside the other room’s bathroom. Chunks of drywall dislodge and fall to the floor as an afterthought.

Pyre takes a tentative step to the hole. He examines it, ignores Shanks’ cursing. The hole must be two feet in diameter, he supposes.

He looks back into the bathroom. Shanks is sitting on the sink counter, resting his bare feet in the sink. There’s blood splattered on the floor and down the front of the cabinets.

“Will you live?” he asks just to be polite.

Shanks growls and kicks on the water with the heel of his foot. Blood is left smeared on the tap.

Pyre crouches back down to peer through the hole at the egg. It’s quivering and it looks like the shell is made of rubber, flexing with whatever that is inside’s movements.

A spiderweb of cracks are starting from the bottom and running to the top. They are stark in the fluorescent bathroom lighting the neighbor left on. He can see something dark and slimy wiggling around inside.

The full top quarter of the shell falls off onto the floor. Inside is a creature that looks like congealed seaweed blackened with soot. It writhes around and knocks more shell off, until it is only sitting in the lower half of what Shanks called a hardened membrane.

The creature is roughly the size of a human infant at one month. The top of it shudders and shakes as a bulge forms, rises upward, creates a head with no neck right on top. It’s a monstrous snowman from hell, but there isn’t any snow and there definitely aren’t any carrots around to use for a nose.

A slit in the center of the top mass slides open. Now an eye blinks and is aimed at the ceiling, Pyre tries to duck down even lower to get a better look without actually getting closer to the damn thing.

A squelching noise. A pop. And the eye rolls out of the open slit, hits the carpet.

The eye rolls around with its own momentum, comes to a stop in the direction of Pyre. He swallows, switches his gaze between the mess of a thing sitting in the remains of the egg and the eye like a tennis match. Forty love, in all its surrealism and migraine.

An opening appears under the eye hole comes into existence, shows some kind of yellow blunted saw tooth lining on the top and the bottom, a hole into a black abyss beyond that.

The mouth shuts, opens, shuts again. The third time on opening, something flexes in the darkness visible even to Pyre crouching three yards away.

It begins to wail.

“Oh Christ, what the fuck is that?” Shanks asks.

Pyre looks back, sees the man hop off the counter and try to tip toe through shards of glass. He’s dripping blood everywhere.

“The egg hatched,” Pyre explains while trying not to shudder. He gestures with both wobbling hands at the hole. “I don’t think it’s happy.”

Shanks gets to the carpeted hallway and crouches down beside Pyre. He looks at the creature.

“Hey kid, cool it,” he shouts.

Remarkably, the creature goes silent.

“What’s that thing?” Shanks points at the eyeball.

“I think it’s an eye. It popped out after the head part bit came up.”

Shanks squints at it, then shrugs and begins to crawl on all fours through the hole. Pyre grabs the back of his coat and tries to stop him.

“Don’t do that!” he yells.

The creature burps and sniffles, wiggles around on the eggshells. Through the sliver of space between the top of the hole and Shanks’ back, Pyre can see long but thin flippers detach from the creature’s mass and prod at the floor around it.

“You cool it too,” Shanks orders. He shrugs out of his jacket like an eel and proceeds into the next room, leaving Pyre holding an empty trench coat. “Everyone just be cool,” Shanks says.

The lift down the hall dings, and the angry voice of the neighbor carries out. “I told them fags to keep it down, good decent people like me need our sleep, but did they quiet down? NO THEY FUCKING DIDN’T!”

Another voice, male but a lower register and volume, answers. “I will take care of the issue presently, Mister Russo. Please direct me to the room.”

“I’ll deal with this, you deal with that,” Shanks orders. He look back.

Pyre scrambles to stand. He’s still holding the trench coat, so he drops it to the floor. After rubbing a sweaty hand through his hair, taking a deep breath, and pasting on the biggest smile he can manage, he jerks open his door.

The manager is a stout man with a buzzcut and tweezed eyebrows. Pyre’s hotel neighbor stands behind him, large and viking-like and wearing a glittering gold watch on his wrist that goes perfectly with his blue and white gingham pajamas.

The manager’s face is stern. The neighbor’s is ruddy-faced and looks like a moon.

“Hallo, we’re keeping it down now,” Pyre says, still smiling.

The manager takes only a moment to recover.

“Case as that may be, Sir, but I must insist on examining the premises. There’s been a complaint of breaking noises from Mister Russo here.”

“Break dancing? No, no, don’t have the bones for it, see?”

Pyre shows off his double-jointed thumb to illustrate. The manager recoils a step. He almost bumps into Pyre’s neighbor, who is glaring over the manager’s shoulder.

“You’re a idiot too?” Russo sneers.

A loud grawp noise happens behind Pyre, and Shanks shouts in surprise.

“Son of a whore! You try to bite me again and I’ll bite you back you little bastard!”

The manager tries to look around Pyre into the room. Pyre casually slides to the side to block his view.

“You have children in your room?” The manager asks slowly. His perfectly shaped eyebrows arch in question.

Pyre feels his smile slipping. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to paste it back on once it’s fallen. “No, no children. We’re not child-fearing folk, I’m afraid.”

Another noise, this time a garkle, and Shanks shouts “Arrgh” right after.

“Sounds like you got a kid in there,” Russo says. “Sounds like a prostitution ring.”

Pyre blinks at the man. The manager turns to look at him too, dots of red form on the man’s cheeks.

“You’re familiar with the sounds of sex tourism?” Pyre asks.

Russo says “uh” and the manager turns back to Pyre. His eyes are shining. He doesn’t look very happy.

The manager shifts to the other side and tries to peer past Pyre again. Pyre tosses himself bodily to the other side of the door frame to continue blocking. Now his shoulder hurts.

Russo stands on his toes to look over Pyre into the room, and he makes a gargling noise of rage deep in his throat.

“They broke into my room!” he shouts. He lunges for his own door and fumbles with the keycard into the slot to open it.

The manager can see the destruction now too because Pyre is gently hitting his forehead on the door frame with a series of thud thud thuds.

“I’m afraid the costs of repairs will be added to your bill,” the manger explains. “And you will not be allowed back next year, I’m sorry.”

For what it’s worth, the man does look sorry. Pyre nods his head, and Shanks opens the neighbor’s door from the inside to blow cigarette smoke right into the neighbor’s face.

“What’s shaking?” Shanks asks the man.

Russo stares for a moment, then roars and grabs Shanks by the shoulder to shake him. Shanks lets himself be tossed around like a rag doll, keeping his lit cigarette clenched in his teeth as his head snaps back and forth.

Finally he lets Shanks go, who slumps against the door frame with a dazed look in his eyes.

“You’re a fucking pansy mama’s boy,” Russo snarls at Pyre. He rounds on Shanks. “Perverted freak!”

“Hey, now you’re just slinging nonsense,” Shanks drawls as he hobbles out into the hallway. “He and I are both perverts, no mamas needed.”

“Faggots! In my room!” Russo’s scream of horror reverberates in Pyre’s skull, he clutches at the sides of his head to try to stop the headache from spreading.

“Spreading faggot juices everywhere!” Russo screeches.

Shanks presses his bare shoulder against the door frame and slithers against it.

“Sir, what are you doing?” The manager asks. His eyes are wide and he’s got his back pressed to the opposite wall.

“Marking my territory,” Shanks says, then steps away to contemplate it. “There, this one’s mine now.”

“You fucking– Wait, what’s that thing?” Russo shouts. He shoves past Shanks to stand in the open doorway to his room. “What the fuck is that?”

“You didn’t hide it?” Pyre hisses at Shanks.

Shanks shrugs. “Where would I shove it? Under the bed?”

The manager holds out a hand towards Russo, “Now, Mister Russo, please wait for a moment so–“

A sound like an industrial-strength hoover starts up from inside Russo’s room. The creature gurgles as background noise, Pyre takes a step away out of instinctual self-preservation.

Shanks can see what’s going on in the room and he takes a step back too.

“What the-” Russo tries to shout, then he collapses at the knees and is dragged backwards along the carpet into his room.

Pyre can see the creature now, mouth open wide, sawteeth glistening with a brackish-looking spittle. The mouth is bigger than it should be. The abyss down its throat is absolute, pitch black and all-consuming as it twists and contracts.

Russo screams hideously as his feet disappear into its maw, then his knees, then up to his waist. He windmills his arms and tries to dig his fingernails into the carpet, succeeds in leaving ragged and torn lines through the pile as he is sucked into the creature.

“Help,” Russo whimpers, then his entire torso slides down the creature’s throat, his shoulders pop, dislocate, what remains of him contorts like his bones are soup, and then he’s gone.

The creature snaps its mouth shut after Russo’s head, pats at the ground around it.

“Is it just me, or did that look like a cartoon?” Shanks asks.

The Hotel Manager faints dead away and lands on the hallway floor flat on his back with a very loud thump. The creature belches softly and extends the new flipper things out into the air, waggles them a bit.

“I think we need to leave,” Shanks says, breaking the silence. He’s leaning against the wall and staring at the murderous creature blankly. “We really need to get out of here.”

Pyre can’t agree more. He takes one step away from the room and into the hall, says “I absolutely have no argument about such an action, let’s get–“

The thing shrieks at them and Pyre freezes.

It lunges into the air, without rhyme or reason or the laws of physics involved. It lunges, and it clears the two yards from the doorway of the dead neighbor’s hotel room to Pyre’s legs, and it collides with Pyre’s knees and sends him backwards onto his ass.

The thing uses its flipper to pull itself up Pyre’s front, slipping and sliding and worming its way up, and it comes to a stop right over Pyre’s heartbeat.

“Mama!” it shrieks. The voice sounds like dead souls crying out, it’s some kind of sick-dread injector of sound coupled with the appearance of animated monster refuse, and Pyre has no idea what to do with it other than be absolutely terrified.

“Tohew can’t know,” Pyre says. The thing burbles against his chest and again coos “Mama” with its hundreds of screaming voices uniting as one.

Shanks comes back out of Russo’s room holding the eyeball gingerly in one hand. He juggles it a little, tries to pick off a piece of lint from the pupil. The creature squeals against Pyre’s shirt. Pyre feels like his muscles are going to snap like brittle twigs, they’re so tense.

“Come on, lets get this back into you,” Shanks says to it. He leans over and tries to push the eyeball back into the creature’s head. The opening it rolled out from is sealed over, the skin is resistant to Shanks’ overtures.

“Kid, take your damn eye back,” Shanks growls, and it pops back into the thing’s head instantly.

The creature rolls its eye around in its socket, blinks rapidly, then fixes its gaze on Pyre’s face.

“Mama,” it gurgles.

Shanks says, “Good, okay,” and runs back into the hotel room. He opens Pyre’s closet and pulls out a pair of hobnails, crams his feet into them. “I’m borrowing these.”

Pyre sits up, the thing clings to his shirt like a limpet. “But those are mine!”

Shanks picks up his trench coat from the floor as he staggers out of the room. He walks past Pyre, heads toward the lift, eyeballs the creature latched to Pyre’s front as he passes. “Yeah, not my style at all. Come on, get up. We need to get out of this fucking place.”