13 – Interacting with the Opposition

The Historical Gallery and Cultural Museum hadn’t changed much since Erika’s last visit. They had to put a wall back together here or there, but Erika hadn’t actually caused all that much damage to the place. The authorities shut down the entire building later that evening, citing ‘gas leaks’. This indicated that some intruders might have gotten in despite her shutting down the portal. If they had made a mess, cleaners had long since tidied it up.

The incident made her wonder how they handled such matters. The Adjustment had mentioned working clean-up jobs before, but surely the spider wouldn’t be able to handle large incidents on her own. There must be a team of people, probably normal humans, who simply got paid enough not to blab. But that got Erika wondering even further: how did people get hired for that kind of position? Were they recruited, Men in Black style? Did they apply somehow, perhaps not knowing exactly what they were submitting their resumes for?

Or maybe people like The Hanged Man just went around gaslighting some poor cleaning service into thinking everything was normal. ‘Oh, no, of course that sapient mass of black sludge is just tar agitated by vibrations in the ground. Massive maggot carapaces? No, it’s just sculptures that broke. Mind the living rock monster—it’s just an animatronic, but it’ll stomp you flat if you get underfoot.’

The logistics of it all might have been fun to delve into if not for the everything else.

“Why are the… Is… Are babies the bullets in this gun?” Carter asked, staring at an odd painting on the wall.

“It’s art,” Erika said. As Daniel and his sister had done, she and Carter were meandering about, taking their time, and generally trying to avoid attracting notice. “Maybe it’s some deep, meaningful commentary on how too many children are a threat to civilization…” Erika stopped at the next painting and stared, trying to find the words to describe what she was seeing.

There was a disfigured face with a long tube coming from its ovular mouth, the chest of the creature looked somewhat like an ass, and a disembodied hand grasped a suggestive-looking shaft off to the side. Engineered components attached to the creature formed vague breasts, or perhaps they were egg sacs. Another figure, half-melded with the first, really only had eyes and more suggestive, half-mechanical shafts coming out of its head and mouth. The whole thing was monochrome with no hard edges, melding the figures into the background, containing no clear boundaries between the organisms and the setting.

Freud would have had a field day with the artist… or with her, potentially, if she was projecting more than she thought she was.

“Either that, or the artist was just a freak,” Erika finished, tilting her head from one side to the other as she took the painting in for a moment longer. “I’d hang that in my room though,” she decided before moving on.

“I think I like machines better when they aren’t all… fleshy.”

Erika shrugged, walking past a train sculpture with teeth. “I wonder if the artist of all these pieces created the statue I broke, or if the cultists just thought this gallery was a great place to hide their statue since it also looks strange.”

“It looks different now, compared with how you described it after your last visit,” Daniel chimed in, making Erika wiggle her earbud around. Half the time, it sounded like he was on the other side of a brick wall, the other half, it sounded like he was shouting in her ear.

“So you said. I’ll just have to see for myself. It should be just ahead if they didn’t move it,” Erika said, trying to look like she was talking more to Carter than her earbud.

There were people around. A fair amount of them, in fact. Every one of the gallery’s rooms had at least one other person standing about, gawking at whatever art was on display. Feelings of paranoia itched in the back of Erika’s mind every time she noticed one of them even giving her a passive glance. None had tattoos like the monk or the Cheshire Cat woman, thankfully, but any of them could be one of those masked cultists with their mask simply off for the moment.

“When Beth and I were here, there was some strange woman interested in the statue.”

“Strange how?” Erika asked, resisting the urge to press the earbud in like she was some secret agent.

“She wore a kimono, her feet were out, and she had yellow eyes. I highly doubt she was human.”

“Paid attention to her feet, did you?”

“What? No. That was Beth, not me. She called them grippers. I think she’s been brain-rotted by… everything, really.”

Erika teased him with a disbelieving hum, but didn’t press the matter. She narrowed her eyes, looking for anyone dressed strangely. Something about a woman in a kimono sounded familiar, but not recently. Maybe she had seen someone wearing a kimono a month or two ago, but she couldn’t quite recall when—meaning it probably wasn’t that important, or it hadn’t been at the time.

“She didn’t follow you, or anything like that?”

“Not as far as I could tell. She wandered off toward the statue. Beth and I headed straight for the exit. Like I said, she was interested in the statue, not us.”

“Then she probably won’t be here again unless she’s showing up every day to study it.” Daniel and Bethany had come here a week ago, while Erika had still been in The Castle’s asylum. That felt like a long time for someone to be lurking around, especially if they weren’t someone guarding the statue.

That didn’t stop Erika from subtly glancing at every person they passed, looking them over for strange clothes, unusual eyes, or feet.

“Nothing odd,” she said as she stepped into another room of the museum, one with a large patch of fresh wall where a cultist might have crashed straight through it. She and The Stalker had interrogated a cultist here, and the statue was only a room away.

But, as Erika approached, she stopped, turned, and shrugged. “Time to go, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Carter agreed after a short, uncertain pause.

Erika looked down at him, hand in hand, and tried to puzzle out why she felt odd. They had only gotten here a few minutes ago, but it was time to go.

“Wait,” Daniel said. “What are you doing? Did you see the statue?”

“Statue?” Erika paused, looking around. One more room and she would be at the statue. She turned toward it, took a step, and stopped once more. “I… think I left the oven on.”

Carter gave her a tug on her hand. “My clocks need winding.”

Daniel barked in Erika’s ear, making her grimace. “Stop. I need you to listen to me very carefully: I am at your house. Your oven isn’t on. You didn’t even cook anything today. Something is making you want to leave without investigating the statue. Remember why you’re here?”

“The statue,” Erika confirmed. She tried to take a step forward, but found her legs entirely unwilling to obey unless she moved away. “I can’t… It probably isn’t anything interesting—”

“Erika! Maybe you’ve been cursed. You can break anything, right? Find what’s doing this and stop it.”

Erika stopped a step back, and didn’t move forward again. She immediately found herself able to concentrate better, though there was still some minor haze like she needed to leave. With her experience breaking The Warrior’s cursed cubes, she didn’t think this was a curse. It didn’t feel right for a curse, but it wasn’t completely dissimilar.

It wasn’t her being cursed, but the area. Slowly stretching out her hand, but without the intention to walk forward, and she felt it: a thin film in the air, as if she were reaching from a dry room into an overly humid spa.

Taking Carter by the hand, Erika hurried over to the opposite side of the room, away from the magic in the air, and stopped in front of an artwork titled Biomechanoid Landscape that she didn’t even try to describe or think about. She solely focused her thoughts on the film.

Someone had put something up to ward away anyone approaching.

Anyone? Or just her?

Erika glanced down at Carter, reassessing. He wanted to come here and help out, he wouldn’t have wanted to rush off and wind his clocks of his own accord. So it wasn’t solely focused on her. Daniel and Bethany had gotten close, so was it targeting supernaturals?

The answer to that question came in the form of an elderly couple, meandering through the gallery. Erika couldn’t prove that they were normal humans, but as they made their way around the artwork in this room, they crossed near the opening to the next and abruptly turned away, heading off in another direction.

“You and Beth had no trouble visiting the statue, right?” Erika asked Daniel, pressing the earbud into her ear.

“Not that I noticed.”

“Then this is something new, since your visit.”

“Can you get through it?”

“Probably,” Erika said with a glance back over her shoulder. There was nothing obvious in the air or around the doorway, but she had felt that film. If she could feel it, she could break it. Her eyes drifted down to her wristwatch, then on to Carter holding her hand. “I’m not sure I should break it. It will attract attention.”

If she were on her own, she wouldn’t hesitate half as much, but with Carter here, when it came time to dump the ripples, one of The Mummy’s henchmen could show up in a hurry.

“I can help,” Carter said, looking back at Erika. “I can push your power off into the future.”

Erika eyed him, less confident than he sounded. She knew he had been working with The Fixer, learning how to properly use his abilities, but to her, he was still just Carter. However, she knew he had been feeling… somewhat helpless as of late, never brought along to things like this. Skipping her initial instinct to reject his offer outright, she asked, “How far into the future?”

He paused for a minute, then pulled out his birthday pocket watch and stared. “One million, forty-one thousand, three hundred fifty-two.”

“Seconds?” Erika asked, making sure.

“Yes. I might be able to go further if I strain, but not so much further that it would really matter.”

Two weeks, or a little bit less. “And the ripples will happen here? Or wherever you are at the time?”

“Over there,” he said, pointing toward the doorway.

“So as long as we’re not here in two weeks…” Erika trailed off, wondering if the risk was worth it. This museum was really their only lead on The Mummy that didn’t involve her breaking things to deliberately attract attention. The real question was whether she could learn anything here. She wasn’t a mage, she wasn’t a researcher, she wasn’t experienced enough to know when she was looking at something suspicious.

She was just good at breaking things.

“I’ll know if it doesn’t work,” Carter said, tugging on her arm. “But it will work. I can help.”

Erika took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and nodded. “Alright, but you be ready to run if I say so. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” Taking Carter by the hand, Erika walked back to the other side of this gallery segment, right up next to the invisible line around the doorway. She waved her hand through the air, feeling that grease-like film wrap around her fingers at a certain point. “Ready?” she asked, making sure that he hadn’t suddenly decided that his clocks needed winding again.

“Ready.”

Erika grasped, curling her hand into a fist. The action itself was probably unnecessary, but it was the psychology of the situation that helped; Erika was so used to breaking physical things—even when she broke more esoteric ideas, such as the link between her and her false ID cards, she still used a physical card to enact that breakage, but her tests with The Warrior’s curses showed she could break those curses without actually harming the physical cubes.

It took a moment. She swept her hand back and forth, feeling the odd ebbs and flows in the thickened pocket of air. Something inside her, deep and primal, called out to her in a way that was vaguely familiar, but far more conscious now—a weakness, a flaw in the way the protective barrier had been constructed. Similar to The Banker’s stop spell, the barrier wasn’t complete and all-encompassing. Violating its enforcement in a way that Erika was certain only she could accomplish would shatter it.

Erika stepped forward. The film wrapped around her, and she felt a vague, urgent sensation of needing to be elsewhere. It lasted for a mere second before Erika’s violation broke the effect.

Carter sucked in a breath behind her, not having taken the step into the spell with her. He closed his eyes, scrunching his forehead in concentration. Erika let him work, watching her wristwatch as it started to accelerate after capturing the ripples of her breaking the spell, only to slow back down again as Carter did something. Erika wasn’t able to identify what, not with her limited ability to interact with time, but Carter eventually opened his eyes with a satisfied smile on his face.

“One million, thirty-eight thousand, four hundred thirty-five seconds. I did it.”

That wasn’t as far into the future as he had said a moment ago, but Erika supposed it was still about two weeks forward. She ruffled his hair, earning herself an outraged squawk. “No problems?”

“There was…” Carter started with a frown. “The moment it broke, it tried to do something. I think you ruined it, but I still pushed whatever that was off into the future. That’s why I lost two thousand, nine hundred fifteen seconds.”

“Maybe some warning to whoever created it?” Erika said with a sudden chill up her spine. She hadn’t even thought that the spell might call out to its creator. “You’re sure you got it all?”

“Ninety-four percent sure.”

“I’d prefer a hundred, but since I didn’t even know you could do that, I guess it will have to do,” Erika said, smiling despite her worry at Carter’s fresh pout.

“You should look around quickly even if everything seems good. Never know when someone will happen by.”

Erika’s smile twisted into a scowl as she pressed on her earbud. “Shouldn’t you have warned us about the spell sending out an alarm?” she asked as she and Carter headed toward the Semblance of Man statue.

“I don’t know anything about magic!”

“You play video games.”

“Not as many as Beth…”

“Then get her on the line,” Erika grumbled, letting her arm drop to her side.

The next room in the museum was familiar. Erika didn’t think she had dreamed about it, but it felt like it was only yesterday that she had stepped inside with The Stalker and poked around. All the murals on the walls were just as she remembered—and just as Daniel’s pictures showed—but the central statue was the one difference.

Before, it had been a chrome, almost skeletal figure. Now, it looked more organic, like the artist had come back for attempt number two after having browsed through a catalogue of medical textbooks. It was still a statue; nobody would mistake the carved material for a corpse trussed up to look like a piece of art. It just had more to it now.

“Well?” Erika said to Carter. “What do you think?”

“It’s creepy.” Despite his words, he stared as if it were one of his prized robots.

“Yeah, but do you sense anything about it?”

“Not really.”

Erika hummed and, after moving a full loop around the statue to see it from all angles, she reached out over the rope barrier and dabbed her finger against the base of its ankles.

There was another film around it, a thin sheet of oil clinging to it. “It’s definitely supernatural, somehow,” she said, rubbing her fingers back and forth. “I can’t really tell what it might be, though.”

“Maybe just break it?” Daniel said.

“If the location is important, they’ll just bring back another one, won’t they?”

Walking around the statue twice more, thinking all the while, Erika quickly realized that it was staring directly at the same wall that she had once walked through to reach the domain of the Mother of Maggots. The mural painted on the wall, one of several cultists gathered around a central figure, had somehow split apart—or just widened—to admit entry after that postman prayed to the statue.

There was another film here, hanging over the mural. After a quick run-around, touching all the other murals and finding nothing, Erika returned to the first and pressed her hand against it. Once again, she didn’t know what she was feeling—there was no obvious effect like The Banker’s stop, the cursed cubes, or the barrier around this room.

If this was the way into that other realm, then wasn’t it just a fancy door?

Reaching into her pocket and retrieving a bobby pin from her armory, Erika started tapping it against the wall. She didn’t try to break into it, not wanting to cause a flood of maggots into a crowded, public place, but she wanted to see if she could feel any metaphorical keyhole that the bobby pin might slot into.

It only took three taps before the pin physically slid into the wall. There was no hole for it, no visible lock that could have held the pin, and yet, it slid inside all the same.

Carefully, as if she were handling the wires of a live bomb, Erika pulled it back out. Only when it was fully out of the wall and there were no maggots swarming over her did she release a breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding.

“I hear you, but I can’t see what you’re doing. Did something happen? Explain, please?” Daniel asked.

“Something definitely could happen,” Erika said, stepping back from the wall.

She didn’t know with absolute certainty that she would be able to access that other realm, but she felt like it was a possibility. That required a good think beforehand. She had already made things worse once, breaking those chains to get The Fixer out of there, and she had no intention of doing so again.

At the same time…

“If The Eclipse isn’t going to meet with me, maybe I need to take matters into my own hands.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Not sure yet. All I know is that there are probably a lot of things on the other side of this wall that probably shouldn’t be allowed to leave it.” Erika hummed to herself, feeling a little giddy. “Do you think your dad or Rick know how to make napalm?”