The Chronicles of Inky

The incursion alarms blare along the corridors of the Maze, and, just beneath them, I hear the breathy hiss of our sanctum’s blast door sliding open.

He’s back. The monster is back.

Blinky stirs beside me, and then his eyes saucer open and he’s up and rushing the door, skimming his pleats across the floor. He glows crimson, a hard angry color, and his voice, when it comes, comes hard and breathless. “Breach!” he screams, to no one in particular. “Fucking breach motherfucker! Breach! Breach!“

I sigh, and look over at Pinky and Clyde. They’re just coming awake, their eyes still thick with sleep. Pinky’s coat looks a little dingy, as usual; it’s an occupational hazard of being pink. Incursion pursuit is hard, dirty work.

By the time I look back, Blinky is already out the door. He makes a hard right and disappears down the corridor, screaming incoherently. Of all the ghosts I’ve worked with, none have enjoyed their work as much as Blinky. The sameness of it, the pain, the futility — none of it gets to him. He loves the chase, pure and simple.

I float out after him, and pause, listening. I can hear the wokka wokka wokka of the monster’s progress through the Maze, but it seems to come from everywhere at once. I guess, and turn left. The walls stream by, blue and featureless, glowing with a mild phosphorescence. I’ve been traveling these narrow corridors, skimming just over the surface of this jetblack floor, for nearly thirty years now. I know them by heart, by sight, by smell.

The corridor turns left and I follow it, silently counting the pod seeds as I pass over them. So far, all there. The monster hasn’t been down this way yet, apparently, but it won’t be long. He’s grown ruthlessly efficient over the years, able to ingest the contents of an entire Maze — two hundred and forty of our unborn children — in less than two minutes. Not if I have something to say about it, rings a voice in the back of my mind, but it’s an old, tired voice, a voice worn down to a shallow nub of its former enthusiasm by years of hard experience.

A right, then another left, and now I’m in the West Long Corridor, one of two that stretch North/South across almost the entire length maze. He’s been here. Most of the pods are gone, and I see glowing spots of ectoplasmic gore where he’s been sloppy in his consumption, where the vital fluids of our children came squirting out of his great maw as he ground them into pulp. The old rage kindles in my breast, and I pick up my pace. I am a incursion specialist; I contributed none of my seed to these eggs, and never will. But, nevertheless, these are my children.

I come to an intersection, look left, and see him, barreling towards me.

He’s huge, an eyeless, featureless yellow orb that fills the entire height and width of the corridor. His mouth opens and closes rhythmically as he skims down the corridor, swallowing pods. Each disappears into him with a sickening crunch, and I feel the anger and the hatred geyser up out of their places within me, fill me utterly. He is an insatiable yellow sociopath, says the voice, no longer whispering: shouting, now, raving. He must be stopped. He must be killed. I bank left and barrel towards him, moving as fast as I can. Maybe, just maybe, we can end this now.

But he’s fast. Too fast. He takes a hard turn and disappears down the south corridor, and, as he moves, I see that Blinky is close on his heels. “Corner!” he screams. “We’ve got him. Head him off!” I hang a left and then another, U-turning back the way I came, making for the furthest extremity of the Maze’s Southwest quadrant. If Blinky actually manages to hound him into that corner, then he’ll find my coming at him from the other direction. Trapped. Nowhere to go. Dead.

But a nagging sense of foreboding has begun to gnaw at me. There’s something wrong, here. I can’t say what, but a thin mist of disquiet has settled over the bloodlust, and suddenly this plan seems like a mistake. A very bad mistake.

I take the last left just as he appears around the corner, Blinky close behind. We have him now. He is in a narrow corridor, caught between us, with no avenue of escape. Blinky lets out a strangled scream of triumph, and I feel the joy rising within me as well. We’ve have him. We really have him.

But then I notice a large orb, floating in the corner, pulsing brightly in the uncertain light of the corridor. It seems familiar, somehow, and then more than familiar: terrifying. I can’t say why, but the sight of that orb — that Energizer, says the inner voice, suddenly robbed of its righteous anger, suddenly small and tremulous — calls up an atavistic fear in the deepest reaches of my heart.

The yellow beast dashes toward the orb and swallows it. A wave of cold runs down my body, and I feel myself changing. Something is happening to Blinky, too. He’s turned completely blue: not my shade of blue, not the pleasant cyan that used to turn all the girls’ heads back in school, but a dark, unpleasant blue, a blue that speaks of fear, and weakness, and death. I look down at myself. I am the same color.

I stop, and spin around, and run. I can neither explain nor condone this sudden cowardice, but that makes it no less real. Even the sudden scream behind me, the high, strangled voice that sounds only vaguely like Blinky’s, does not slow my pace. I flee down the corridors, taking turns at random, wanting nothing more than to get away.

But the beast is right behind me. I can hear its hard, toothless gums slamming together, smell its hot, fetid breath on my skirts, sense its hissing progress. It all comes back to me as I flee: the energizers planted in the maze by whatever agency sent this yellow horror, their ruinous effect on us, our inexplicable inability to remember their existence after our death; and then the death itself. The pain. Oh great Ghost, the pain.

Ahead of me, a warp door: if I can get through it, across to the other side of the Maze, make a few quick turns, then perhaps I can hold it off until this terrible fear, this abominable weakness, wears off.

I am nearly there. I can feel the cool, stale air of the teleportation void, smell the faint ozone stench of recent use. The first dim embers of hope kindle within me. I will make make it through, I will escape; and, later on, when I have found my courage again, I will come after this round, vile creature like nothing it has ever …

Its jaw clamps into my backside, then. I feel the pain as a sudden numbness, followed by unspeakable, unbearable agony. A scream rips free of me like a sentient creature, like a small part of me trying to escape. The monster chews his way through my body, and I feel it disintegrate, collapse into itself, and perish.

I am no longer.

And yet … I am. I feel myself rise above the scene, floating free; the color has drained out of the world, and everything — the walls, the beast, the remains of my corporeal body — is flat and colorless. Whatever I have become moves rapidly through the maze, away from the scene of my murder, on invisible, spectral winds. I am caught up in the motion, powerless to do anything but watch, and wait.

The winds bear me back to the center of the Maze, and drop me at my post. I lie there, helpless, until a new body begins to knit itself together around me. It is like being born again, a pain different from that of death, but no less intense. In a matter of moments, I am whole.

I look around, and find Blinky, newly encased in a fresh red shell, rising and hurrying toward the door. “Let’s go!” he screams. “He’s on his way to the Northwest Quadrant. Pinky and Clyde have him cornered. Move, motherfucker!”

I gather my wits about me as best I can and follow him out, exultant again. The beast is cornered; we have him now. It’s only a matter of time.

But there is a faint trill of disquiet in my mind as I hurry through the Maze, and I wonder at it: a feeling that there is something in that quadrant that will thwart our efforts. That the chase is not over; that it will go on for a very, very long time.

That it will go on forever.