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spookyspaghettisundae · 14 days

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Too Afraid to Protest

With a twist of the keys, the lock clicked into place.

Evening’s growing dark turned the window panes of the store’s front door into reflective surfaces. Maisie Williamson, owner of Amazing Maisie’s Beauty Salon, lost herself in the mirror image of her store.

It looked great. She looked great, too. Felt a way to match.

It had been a good day.

Little did she know what awaited her that eve.

She flipped the sign on the storefront windows.

WE’RE CLOSED.

Maisie’s feet were killing her, despite her feel-good comfortable sneakers. A short night’s rest and a long day had been making her eyelids as heavy as lead for the past hours since noon. Oh, how she yearned for a hot bath and her cozy bed.

The tips they had earned all day made up for the toils. The words of encouragement, the good news she had heard for herself and others… it had just been a great day all around.

She shuffled about her empty store, ensuring everything was in its proper place. Words from conversations and compliments still echoed in her mind.

With a smile on her lips, she wrapped up her last chores, locked up all cash in the safe, and finally slipped on her winter jacket.

In the back office, where she paused, her hand hovered over a pack of cigarettes on her desk. Habit made this motion natural, but she resisted the temptation.

Maise had been keeping that unopened pack around to keep resisting that temptation. It had been working out well enough.

Instead, she grabbed her pack of spearmint chewing gum, and popped a stick into her mouth, before rolling up the wrapper between her fingers.

The smile on her lips still, she shuffled on out to the back of her store, shutting off all lights along the way, until the entire salon had gone dark.

Time to go home.

Just as she reached the salon’s backdoor, she froze. The balled-up wrapper from her chewing gum reminded her—she needed to take out the trash, as Lily had probably forgotten to do that.

Again.

With a sigh, she turned around and to the other door nearby.

The door to the basement.

Its brass knob was cold to the touch.

It was always cold down there.

The brass knob squeaked. The old door creaked. She descended into darkness.

The fluorescent tubes downstairs flickered to life, with significant delay after flicking the light switch, while she thumped down every wooden step, with a cheery rhythmic bounce to it all.

Maisie was eager to go home. That the previous tenants of the building had believed it was haunted, well, that was the farthest thing away from her mind in that moment.

She was in such a good mood, she didn’t even harbor any resentment for Lily forgetting to take out the trash. Maisie snatched up the tied-up two plastic bags and swiveled, ready to leave with the same fluid motions that had taken her down into this cold, cold basement.

Those movements ceased. All happy thoughts of that bath and warm bed vanished in the blink of an eye.

Her heart skipped a beat.

A wave of alien warmth washed over her. As that surge of sudden warmth clashed with the cold of this basement underneath some Seattle city building, the colliding temperatures flushed her body with uncomfortable heat.

Yet Maisie froze.

Her lips stopped smacking from chewing gum. This time, she was frozen in shock. From a mouth agape, the wad of chewing gum fell onto cold, concrete floor.

A shimmering orb of brilliant light had appeared in the middle of her salon’s basement.

Hovering inches off the ground, it was made of pure light. Like she was looking into the shattered splinters of the sun. Floating triangles, refracting the light, circled in the clustered shape of a large sphere.

And the strange phenomenon, it… chimed. A beauteous melody, accompanied by a steady hum that thrummed all the way down to Maisie’s marrow—the sphere chimed. A mystical music emanated from the sphere, as breathtaking and serene as the apparition itself.

Maisie stared into the light of this… Anomaly.

It flashed brighter yet as a man’s silhouette appeared. He stumbled into the basement from the sphere’s blinding light. An unfamiliar shape that defied instant recognition, as she would only register later on what she was looking at.

He wore armor. Ancient armor, with shoulders shielded by metal pauldrons, and a breastplate articulated in rings to guard the man’s chest and belly, all the way down to feet clad in strapped sandals.

From head to toe, he was covered in blood. His eyes bulged, wide with terror. And a seething rage curled his lips.

When he lunged at Maisie, she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Her scream did nothing to stop the man. The trash bags dropped from her hands and she flailed helplessly against his iron grip. The man in ancient armor, covered in blood, wrestled Maisie around, and her sneakers scraped against concrete as he dragged her, pulling her away from the glowing sphere.

A hand as coarse as sandpaper clamped down over her mouth, and the taste of grit and copper soon admixed with the flavor of spearmint on her lips.

Only now did she recognize the sword in his hand—tipped by a crimson-caked blade, now raised to her neck, a silent threat to what he might do to her throat if she didn’t stop screaming or struggling.

On instinct, she went limp in the ancient warrior’s grip, and he dragged her farther yet away from the glowing orb in her basement, pulling her into the shadows behind a set of shelves, where even the fluorescent tubes failed to shine. He dragged her down with him, and they cowered in the gloom, seeing the gleaming sphere only through the little spaces afforded by items lining the shelves.

Her heart pounded with dread. The impossibility of this all had long shut off all conscious thought. The man held her tight. Squeezed her mouth again, as if to remind her not to scream another time.

Yet he lowered the blade in his hand, retracting its deadly edge from her neck.

Just when another figure emerged from the glowing sphere.

This new, second silhouette looked nothing like a human. The shelves between them only further obscured its strange shape.

To the beat of her pounding heart, its bulbous head jerked around. Against the backdrop of shimmering light, a ferocious maw opened, and revealed rows of shark-like fangs. Glistening until that maw snapped shut like a bear trap.

Spindly limbs contracted and flexed, then the creature’s back arched violently.

It screeched at the ceiling.

A raged screech. A horrific, alien screech, nothing like any animal was capable of emitting, at least not in Maisie’s imagination. So hateful and deeply twisted that it froze the very blood in her veins.

On the creature’s forehead, something blinked. Blood-red.

Not an eye but a light. A lamp, or a lantern. It pulsed.

Was it attached to its head somehow? Or part of it?

The red light pulsed as the creature emitted guttural sounds, pouncing on cardboard boxes, and spraying their artificial insides all over the place. Bottles of makeup and glitter exploded where the beast thrashed around in the basement, in search of its human prey.

The man in ancient armor stayed still. Kept his hand clamped around Maisie’s mouth, and she knew better now than to struggle anymore—he was hiding from his beast, and may have saved her life in doing so.

That was the only coherent thought she could form in those breathless, horrified seconds.

The beast’s thrashing claws tore through the basement, destroying more boxes, knocking over cans, and obliterating a different fixture of shelves like it was nothing against the monster’s raw power. The shelves’ contents flew all around, and stray debris shattered a fluorescent tube, followed by spraying sparks from exposed electric conduits.

The monster emitted another guttural sound in response.

Then it sniffed. Sniffed the air.

The man’s arms tensed, but the grip of his hands on Maisie loosened.

The world exploded into chaos again as she was sent flying—shoved aside, thrown almost. She tumbled against the wooden steps of the stairs, their sharp edge digging into her lower back with painful impact.

The beast swiveled to face its prey. Its misshapen head darted back and forth between the woman prone against the stairs, and the ancient man covered in blood, brandishing his sword against the monster. Another ear-piercing screech escaped its toothy maw. The man in ancient armor yelled in fury—indignant rage—with his sword raised, and defiant of the creature’s sheer monstrosity.

In the shimmering light of the glowing sphere, it was clear now: the monster was twice his size and mass.

No thought guided Maisie as she scrambled, slipped, tripped, fleeing up the stairs with reckless abandon. Acting on pure survival instinct, she ran, thumping back all the way up, skipping several steps as she escaped.

The last thing she saw of the man in ancient armor was him leaping at the monster with his sword’s tip pointed at the creature. The creature in turn had far more reach with its spidery limbs, all ending in razor-sharp claws, and lunging at the man with dreadful speed.

Without ever looking back, the wet sounds of blood splattering blended with shouts of fury and screeches of feral rage, as the ancient man and the horrid creature clashed in Maisie’s basement.

She slapped and cursed and finally ripped the backdoor of her darkened salon open, fleeing into the back alley, where—

Light.

Blinding light engulfed her. The cacophony of helicopter rotors deafened Maisie, and drowned out any noises of carnage echoing up from the bowels of her salon’s basement.

People shouted at her. Flashlights shone into her eyes, forcing her to alternate between squinting and screwing her eyelids shut. The shadowy figures of people dressed in black overwhelmed her entirely.

She tried to run past them, past the silvery rifles pointed at her, but someone seized her in another hold like the man in ancient armor, wrestling her around, then shoving her past, where she tripped, and another person caught her before she fell, only to shove her farther along.

Before she knew it, she was being evicted from the premises. An uncomfortable gloved grip around her arm squeezed and tugged and pulled her along, past thumping jackboots and jingling metal.

Under the floodlights from a helicopter hovering above Seattle’s buildings, casting the alleyway behind her salon in bright light, amidst a small army of figures in modern black armor and terrifying masked helmets, Maisie was shoved one way, then the other, unable to parse what anybody was telling her.

Yelling at her.

“Move!”

“Get her outta here on the double! Secure the neighboring buildings!”

Soldiers in black ushered her away. Others stormed past, jackboots tromping as they marched in a jog, futuristic weapons raised, and flooding into her salon’s backdoor.

“Go-go-go!”

Before she knew it, she was shoved yet again, forced down into the backseat of an unmarked, black van.

A beautiful red-haired woman, dressed sharply in an expensive-looking navy-blue three-piece suit, stared Maisie in the eyes with a smoldering intensity that stood at odds with her otherwise calm demeanor, and a fearsome smile—a sharp contrast to the chaos she had just been whisked away from.

“Hi there.”

A soldier slammed the van’s backdoor shut, muffling the noise of helicopter rotors and militaristic orders being barked back and forth outside.

What would follow Maisie’s questioning was a series of unpleasant instructions.

Maisie needed to forget whatever she had just witnessed.

Or there would be consequences.

Serious, serious consequences. For herself, and the rest of the world alike.

For now, and the days to follow, she was far too afraid to protest.