They knew everything. Either my phone was tapped or that our minds were broadcast in the open, because we were only discussing the idea of resorting to hiring security guards when we were finally inside her cramped and broken-down apartment, behind closed doors and rotting windowless walls.
I felt bad for dragging the security guards into this mess. They didn't stand a chance. If I called the firm and requested a replacement, I doubted it would be any good either, but what choice did we have?
And how many men would we need to deal with this mess?
Security guards were trained to protect their client just by being with them—their presence alone should be enough to ward off any potential human assailants—the last thing they'd expect was having to fight against an eight-legged demon on the job.
"Let me see those wounds." Liz turned to me after she put the camera on the desk.
"Tend to yourself first."
"I'm fine. It barely touched me."
"What are yo—"
No, she was right. The blood stain on her T-shirt had dried. Somehow the bleeding stopped.
"You're not injured?" I asked her.
"Nope." She shook her head from side to side.
We were in a motel on the other side of the city. No one knew about our problem. Even the people who ran the place had thought we were father and daughter on a surprise vacation during the middle of the week, the father limping the entire duration of the trip. Our newly bought jackets—which I paid for—were thick and dark enough that the blood wasn't too obvious at a glance.
"Shouldn't you be calling your wife and tell her what's up? She might be worried about you."
"What could she do for me at this point? Even the military won't save us now."
I knew Liz wanted to say something, judging from the way she looked at the ground.
It irked me.
I didn't need her pity.
"Just say it. I don't care about age gaps so treat me like an equal,"
"I mean…" she paused for a moment. "Even when others can't help you with a problem, I think you'll feel better if you tell them about what you're going through. The least they can do is share your burden."
"I can say the same thing about you. Where are your parents?"
She didn't respond.
...
It was hard to believe that I was making some stranger I'd run into bandage me twice on the same day.
How much time do we have left?
Are things destined to end like this, with no rhyme or reason?
Is there no way out for us?
Now that I think about it. I don't know a single thing about you.
Didn't you start all of this, Liz?
I remembered. The red book on the pavement, the quivering lips, the soundless chanting. You started this whole thing.
But why are you out here dressing my wounds?
"It's not my fault." Apparently, she knew what I was thinking.
"But what were you doing on that sidewalk the day we first met?"
"You saw how the beast came after both of us."
"Then you wouldn't have any problem telling me what you were doing on that sidewalk, right?"
She paused again.
"A couple years ago," she said. "I fell asleep while sitting at a bench in the park. When I woke up, there was a book on my lap. The one you picked up for me when we first met."
"..."
"I don't know. The book was nothing but blank pages when I first opened it, but over the years, whenever I reopened the book new words would come up."
"Handwriting?"
"Barely legible handwriting, but it doesn't make a difference because it's all random symbols."
"And you carried it around for no reason at all..." Like the first time we'd met.
"The letters will show up more if I hold onto it," she said. "For some weird reason," she was looking at her feet now. "I had a feeling that the book might one day show me something useful. Maybe it'd tell me about my past."
"And what were you doing on that sidewalk when we first met?"
"Waiting for a friend. She's a classmate. We were supposed to hang out at that cafe but she never came. She called the next day to apologize—she said she couldn't go because her house exploded. Then you showed up."
"Her house exploded?"
"I don't know. Didn't ask her any follow-up questions because it sounded serious. She and her family were fine though."
"You know, you could get a patent on that book or something," I said. "It would help you make some money on the side."
"Other people can't see the letters. Only I can see them. Too bad I can't understand any of it."
"So when you touch it, new words come up?"
"They're kind of like symbols," she corrected. "Like Sanskrit or something, but others told me that's not the language. Anyway, just keeping the book close by will be enough. That's why it's always in my bag. Leave it in a corner too long and new symbols will stop showing."
So she kept the book to herself as much as possible just to see more writing appear. It was strange to see how someone could stick to a routine for years on end even though it wasn't going to do anything for them.
"But you never got any proper message from that book?" I asked her.
"Nothing. I tried to write some of them down on paper, took screenshots and uploaded them to online forums to see if anybody can recognize them, but people said they'd no idea what language it is. Some said it's probably made up."
"How much text are we talking about here?"
"Must be over four dozen pages by now."
"You wrote all of that down?"
"No, gr***pa. Just little snippets of writing here and there that I thought could mean something."
Then she continued, "Some said it could be a cypher. The symbols stand for letters in the alphabet, although up to this point I haven't found any repeated shapes so if that's the case, then it's probably based on more than one system, which means every letter could be represented by many different symbols. A guy on a forum even went out of his way and listed all kinds of ciphering techniques. I couldn't remember any of them because it was years ago. Something with Caesar cipher and Homophobic cipher."
"Homophonic."
"Uh-huh, that's the one. He listed a bunch of systems but then said he couldn't solve it because he couldn't find any meaningful pattern. That's why many people also said that it's gibberish."
"Like somebody made it all up?"
"Some even said that it could be some kind of made-up language or writing system but that's unlikely because it was just too random—"
"—You can stop now."
"... Sorry." The bandage she'd been covering me with was now overlapping to the point that it almost as thick as a mattress.
"Can I have a look at some of those texts later?" I said. "I don't know much about encryption but maybe I'll spot something."
"We gotta get the tape to the police first."
"What tap—"
So that was her plan. She recorded her apartment the whole time I was there in case the monsters would show up. She thought that the video would help us convince the police to provide protection.
"What if those things didn't appear on tape either?" I asked her.
"Let's find out."
She shot up from the wooden tiles—we'd been sitting on the carpet this whole time—went to the TV shelf and came back.
She flipped the device open and turned on the recording in front of me.
Four hours and twenty-two minutes into the footage.
Right to the moment there was a knock on the door and I sat up.
Another woman in a white shirt on top of a body of a spider. Almost three meters tall. I'd never seen so much hair on the stomach of a spider before.
And her face.
Wide eyes, almost fanatical. A silent, gaping, laughing mouth overflowing with frothing blood.
It phased through the bolted and chain-locked door as if nothing was there in the first place. And it came for me.
But Liz didn't hesitate for a single second. She ran towards me with the knife in her hand.
When I saw her get hurt, I felt a twinge in my stomach. In a way, we were in this together.
"We got evidence," she said.