City Nymph (Complete)

[Eelskin]

10

The four of them walked in slowly and cautiously. It was too dark to see anything, and one of them, David, pulled out a flashlight. He shone it on the floor and around him on the walls- it looked like a small hallway. There were shoes on the floor next to the door and when he shone the light forward he could see a small kitchen through a doorway. He looked back at the other three, who were groping the walls, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the darkness of the apartment. He moved forward slowly, stepping lightly, and was pleased to find that the floor didn’t creak at all. He turned around to look at the three again, and he frowned. The door was closed. He hadn’t heard anyone close the door.

At the same time, Robert, one of the others noticed the same thing. He grunted and reached for the knob, only to find that it wouldn’t turn at all. God dammit. Did I lock this door by accident? he thought. He pulled harder, and it once again, didn’t turn at all. Frustrated, he struck it with the heel of his hand.

“Shit!”

“Stop it!”

“Quiet, you fucking idiot!” His friends all whispered frantically, but he barely heard them. “David, give me your flashlight.”

“What for?”

“Just give it!” He took the flashlight and shone it on the wall, only to find that the door was gone. The knob was still there, but it now protruded from the middle of the off-white wall with no frame or door around it. “…The fuck?” He shone it all around the wall, as if trying to find where the door had run off to. The other three had noticed the same thing and were looking around frantically, trying to figure out what had happened.

They were now standing in front of a smooth wall, except for the knob right in the middle. Looking around, they found that now the only ways out of the room they were in were a closed door to their right, and the kitchen. One of them, Mark, stepped slowly through that doorway, looking for a living room, still hoping to find something of value he could take. The others were still focused on the wall, trying to figure out where the door disappeared to. Mark looked to the left and the right, but saw no other passages. He turned back to where he had come from. “Guys, there’s nothing this—”

As Mark stopped talking as he looked into yet another wall, one that stood where there had been no wall before. He stood motionless for a good half-minute, then slowly reached out and touched it with his hand. It was real. He looked back behind him. The kitchen was still there, and there were no other doors in any other walls. He was in a box with no entrances or exits.

--

Back at the entrance, the three others continued to fell at the wall, not able to understand that the door by which they entered was simply no longer there.

“I can’t find the crack.”

“Keep looking!”

“There isn’t even any light coming from under it.”

“Mark?”

Robert turned around to speak to Mark, only to find that he was no longer there. The other two noticed at the same time and spun around, looking for him.

“Mark?”

Andrew was frantically whispering, but was beginning to panic and was not being as quiet as he thought he was being. “Mark! Where the fuck are you! Get back here now!”

David looked around and saw that there was now only one exit to the room they were in, a closed door to the right of where they had come in. He grabbed the shoulders of the other two. “Rob! Stay here. Drew and me, we’re gonna go through that door and find the way out. Stay here in case Mark comes back.”

Robert looked to the blank wall where he was sure there had been an open passage just a moment ago. He nodded uncertainly. David and Andrew walked to the door, and Andrew whispered loudly to David, “Man, quiet down.”

David stopped and glared. “Why? Mark’s fucking disappeared and we can’t find out way out. We’re not sneaking around like goddamn rats anymore. I’m going to find the door out.” And with that, he grabbed the knob and pushed the door open. It swung open silently and he walked through. Andrew followed.

They both entered into a room many times larger than should have been possible. They stopped walking and gawked at the ceilings, which were higher than the building had been. They turned slowly, looking all around them. They were unable to judge the distance to the far wall- it might have been half a kilometre or ten. In the distance they could see, walking very slowly toward them, a giant Amanda. She was looking right at them with an expression of confusion and annoyance. They stood still for several seconds, and it was Andrew who moved first. She’s moving really quickly… she’s going to be here in just a few seconds! he realised, and turned around to go back through the door he had come in by. David, snapped out of his shock by Andrew’s movement, turned and began to follow him. Andrew opened the door and flung it open, and the two of them ran back through.

--

Robert stood at the entrance, pacing back and forth, waiting impatiently for any of his three partners to return. He had been there for less than a minute when he heard a voice- a woman’s voice. He looked all around for someone in the small room, but didn’t see anyone.

“Up here!” He heard the voice, but still couldn’t see its source. “To your left!” He turned to the left and saw, sitting on a coat peg, mounted on the wall right next to where the door had been, was sitting Kristen, about 20 cm tall. “So who are you?” she asked. Robert stared, not knowing what to say. Kristen became impatient. “I asked you ‘Who are you?’ Are you going to answer me or not? What are you doing in my home?”

“This… is your home?”

“Doesn’t it look like a home? What are you doing here?”

“I’m… just… waiting for my friends.”

“The other three morons who came in with you? They’re fine. Now how did you get in here?”

“Uh…” Robert was far too surprised and not nearly bright enough to come up with a plausible excuse. “We, uh, found a key… and decided to come.”

Kristen’s eyes narrowed. “You found a key? Where?”

Robert began to panic. He was sweating a little and began to wish very strongly that his friends would return. Without thinking, he reached forward to grab Kristen off the coat peg. She tried to move, but wasn’t fast enough, and he held her up to his face to inspect her.

“Put me down right now or you will regret it!”

Robert took no notice and began to poke her with his left hand, feeling her hair, her breasts, her face. She feels real, alright. What the fuck is this? Is this some kinda illusion? He touched her face as she squirmed away, with distaste upon her face.

Kristen was disgusted. His breath reeked of alcohol and his hands were filthy. It was obvious that he didn’t break into people’s houses very often, as he would have left fingerprints everywhere. “Okay, that’s enough,” she said as he brought her close enough to his face to touch. She took advantage of the opportunity to punch him in the nose.

“OW!” he yelled as he let go of her. She didn’t fall- she simply floated in the air in front of him. He put his hand to his upper lip to see if he was bleeding. He was. He looked in shock at her. She responded my motioning in the air with one of her hands. She held a loose fist in the air in front of her, and she tightened it ever so slightly. As she did so, Robert felt a tightness around his own body. Not understanding, he tried pulling his clothes away from him. Kristen tightened her hand again and suddenly Robert couldn’t breathe. He desperately flailed his arms, trying to attack whatever he could, but there was nothing to attack. His face began to turn slightly red, and Kristen tightened her fist a third time. Robert’s knees gave out and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Then, suddenly, it was over. He inhaled as deeply as he could, and began a coughing fit. When he composed himself and looked around, he found that Kristen was no longer there. He didn’t know what to make of it- she was simply there one second and then gone the next. She simply wasn’t there. What just happened? he thought to himself.

--

Mark was feeling every spot on the wall, trying to find a trapdoor or mechanism he could use to get out. He couldn’t figure out for the life of him that door had closed so quickly, so silently, and so completely, but he knew it had to still be here somewhere. He had emptied the cupboards, knocked everything off the countertop, and was about to begin his third rotation of the room. He placed his hands on the wall next to the stove to steady his breathing when he heard a cracking noise. I found it! he thought. It must be somewhere here on the wall… then he realised that the sound was actually coming from above him. He looked up and saw that there was light coming in to the room through the corners where the wall met the ceiling. Confused, and with nowhere to go, he stood in the corner of the room and watched it come apart. With a crunch, the ceiling came off the tops of the walls, and an enormous eye looked down through the gaping hole at him. The eye got farther away, and he could soon see a face surrounding the eye smiling into the kitchen- though it wasn’t a smile he liked. Amanda lifted her right arm and he could see the ceiling- the entire ceiling of the room grasped in the palm of her hand. She grinned and opened it, and it fell down, out of his line of sight. For a moment neither of them moved, until a huge thud sound reached his ears from very far away. He gulped. He didn’t want to know how far that ceiling had fallen, but he knew, very clearly, that the room he was in was being held in the palm of this woman’s hand, very, very high off the ground. He gulped.

“So,” she said. “how did you get in here?”

--

Andrew and David ran pell-mell through the door as fast as they could. They didn’t stop to close it behind them, and they didn’t pause to notice that the room they were in wasn’t the room they expected to be in. They ran for a full ten seconds before they realised that the room they had expected to be in shouldn’t be nearly this big. David stopped first, and grabbed onto Andrew’s sleeve to keep him from running too far. At that point they both looked around them and noticed the enormous man standing several hundred metres in front of them. David looked around and realised that the room looked awfully familiar, except for the fact that it was fifty times bigger than it had been before. They were standing in the entrance to the apartment, and there, in front of them, was Robert, looking nervously around himself for something.

David turned around and took a step in the opposite direction yet again, when he looked to his right and saw that Andrew was beginning to float up off the ground. Andrew was staring back in horror, too much in shock to say anything. He watched for a moment, beginning to think that maybe he was beginning to go insane. He took a step forward- or tried to. His foot didn’t connect with anything when he brought it down. He looked down and saw that the floor was about a metre away and getting farther, though nothing was holding him up. “Drew! What the fuck is going on?”

“Fucked if I know! Why is Rob so goddamn big?”

“Robert.” A new voice was speaking now, a woman’s voice. Both tiny men tried to turn around to see who was talking, but neither one had anything to push against, and all they could do was twist in the air. Robert, however, heard the voice and looked in their direction. His eyes widened, then narrowed, then widened again as he recognised the two tiny men that were floating off the ground. Andrew and David felt two sets of enormous fingers grasp their midsections as they were plucked out of the air and they were held as the woman seemed to float in the air up toward Robert’s face.

Robert looked back at Kristen and then at his two miniaturised friends. He gaped. Kristen was holding the two men in her hands, she herself small enough to fit into Robert’s hand. “Now then. I think there are the friends you’re been waiting for. I want you to tell me exactly how you got the key to my home and where it is now.” Robert’s eyes went from Andrew to David to Kristen and back to David. “I’m waiting,” she reminded him.

“We mugged a guy for it!”

Kristen nearly dropped the two men she had shrunk. “You what! Who mugged him?”

“Uh…” Robert hesitated. Kristen grunted impatiently, and suddenly she was gone again. “Oh shit!” He yelled.

“Up here.” Robert looked up and there was Kristen, still holding the two men, floating above him. He looked around and realised that she hadn’t moved at all- but he was now a foot shorter than he had been! Kristen descended slowly until she was, once again, right in front of his face, seeming very slightly bigger than she had been. “Now- who mugged him?”

“It was Drew!” He pointed to the young man in Kristen’s left hand. Kristen let go of the David and he floated slowly toward Robert, who plucked him from the air and held him in the palms of his cupped hands. He couldn’t have been much more than an inch in comparison.

“Ok. Now… where is he?”

--

Amanda was holding Mark in her right hand by his feet. He was dangling upside-down, staring into her enormous face, and her grin had not gotten any nicer. She had put the room down on the piano and was now sitting on her bench, sticking out her tongue. Mark yelled in fear, and she licked him with a tongue just as big as he was, all along the length of his body.

“Come on, answer me. How did you get in here?”

Mark was far too terrified to answer coherently. He babbled and jibbered, sobbing uncontrollably at the same time. Amanda held him up above her face, opened her mouth wide and ever so slowly lowered him towards her perfect teeth. He began to struggle and writhe in between her fingers, until she stopped lowering him and said, “You know, if I drop you, where do you think you’ll fall?” She paused for a moment to let that information sink in, and then she opened her mouth wide again to lower him slowly once more. Mark closed his eyes and curled up into a ball as best as he could. She placed him in her mouth and closed her lips, rolling him around with her tongue. The heat and humidity were unbearable. He was struck against a row of teeth and groaned in pain, as he fought to breathe the air inside Amanda’s mouth. Suddenly he was flipped over and a splash of warm saliva covered him. He tried to grab onto her teeth so he could orient himself in the dark, but the saliva had made his hands too slippery to grasp anything and he tumbled over again.

Suddenly she stopped, as though listening to something only she could hear. He felt her mouth shift and a flood of light entered the space as she opened her mouth. He fell forward as her tongue tipped him out onto the palms of her hands- the shock of the light and the cold air almost knocked him unconscious, but he sat panting and breathing deeply, trying not to vomit. She brought him down and placed him on the top of the piano lid, next to the kitchen where he had been trapped earlier. Without saying anything to him, she simply walked away, toward one of the walls.

--

In the entrance, Kristen sat motionless on the floor, ignoring the two men next to her, still holding Andrew in her hand. Robert and David didn’t know what to think or do, and suddenly the wall behind them opened up. They spun around, and there, where the wall used to be, was the enormous face of Amanda. To Robert, she must have been 25 metres tall; to Andrew and David, she was almost a kilometre. They screamed.

Kristen, impatiently, waved her hand and suddenly they were silent. They continued to scream, but no sound came out of their mouths.

“Amanda, Richard is hurt. I need to you to go get him and bring him back here.”

“Sure. Where is he?”

“The corner of Van Horne and Park. How fast can you get there?”

“I can be there in a few minutes.”

“Good. Give me your hand.”

Kristen touched the tip of one of Amanda’s fingers, and Amanda began to shrink quickly. When her feet were no longer able to touch the ground, she simply hovered, still touching Kristen’s hand. After less than a minute, she was standing in the room with Kristen and the three boys, the same size as Robert. Kristen waved and a door appeared in the wall, at the same spot where it had been when the four intruders came in. They started. Amanda left out the door and closed it behind her.

Kristen addressed the three boys in front of her. “Weren’t there four of you?” They nodded, unable to speak. Kristen snapped her fingers and suddenly, Mark, dripping with saliva, was sitting on the floor, curled up in a ball. She snapped her fingers again and David was at his regular size, prone on the floor. “Now then. I want the three of you out of here. Immediately. If you ever tell anyone about what happened here, I will come and find you. As for your friend…” She held up Andrew, who was quaking in her palm. “He’s staying with me.”