The Creature Came Through

The darkness in Clivilius was not absence. It was substance — thick, pressurised, hostile to the light Beatrix produced from her phone with bound, trembling hands. Wind stripped the air of orientation. Dust invaded her lungs and coated her tongue with a taste that belonged to no place she had ever breathed. She had been in this dimension for less than a minute when she understood, through a sensation that bypassed every cognitive process and spoke directly to the base of her spine, that something was already aware of her presence and was deciding what to do about it.

The growl arrived below the frequency of hearing — a vibration in the ground, in the bones of her knees, in the architecture of her chest. The torch beam caught a mass of black fur and eyes that reflected nothing because they had evolved to need nothing reflected. The strike was surgical. One claw, drawn across her forearm with the controlled precision of an organism that knew exactly how much damage it intended to inflict. Not enough to kill. Enough to open skin, to draw blood, to establish that the territory and everything standing on it belonged to the thing in the dark.

The Portal interface demanded a destination while the second growl closed the distance the first had measured. The casino storage room appeared on the screen and Beatrix's body rejected it before her mind could form the word no — a recoil so total it constituted its own selection. Luke's study appeared. Warm light. Books. The geometry of a room that meant safety. She chose it because it was the only image in the cycling menu that her nervous system recognised as something other than threat, and because the creature behind her had stopped growling, which meant it was no longer warning — it was moving.

Its claws caught her leg as she leapt. The pain was immediate, deep, and accompanied by the knowledge that the thing had closed the distance between its position and hers in the time it had taken her to make a decision. They entered the Portal together — a woman and a predator that had never encountered a boundary between dimensions and that processed the transit not as passage but as pursuit continued through unfamiliar medium. Luke's study received them both. Books detonated from shelves. The creature screamed — a sound that belonged to no animal Beatrix had ever heard and that filled the room with a rage whose intensity suggested the transit had hurt it, or confused it, or both.

Light was the only weapon the house contained, and Beatrix discovered this through the desperate empiricism of a woman who had nothing else to try. The study bulb caused the creature to recoil. The bulb exploded. Darkness returned and the creature with it. She ran — through a hallway she had walked once before under entirely different circumstances, into a living room where she crashed over a kayak and hurled camping supplies at something she could hear but not see, down stairs she took two at a time with wounds leaking blood onto every surface she touched. Each light switch she found bought seconds. Each bulb that held gave her distance. The creature adapted, tested, pressed — an intelligence that was learning the rules of a new environment in real time and that was faster at learning than Beatrix was at running.

The backyard sensor light activated on her movement and the creature passed through the door behind her, its fur grazing her leg with an intimacy that stopped her heart for a full beat. It tested the boundary where the sensor's reach met the darkness beyond — lunging, retreating, calculating — and a car horn on the main road startled it long enough for Beatrix to get back inside and slam the glass door. She did not lock it. There was no time. She ran upstairs, turned on every light between the ground floor and the kitchen, pulled a knife from the block, and dropped behind the island bench.

Blood pooled beneath her on the kitchen tiles — from her forearm, from her leg, from places she had not yet identified. The flex-cuffs still bound her wrists. The red dress was shredded at the hem and soaked through with something that was not entirely rum.