The Thing was waiting for Cassie when she came home from work.

It was a Thursday afternoon in spring. A few clouds artistically streaked the sky, just beginning to be turned orange by the coming sunset. Cassie parked her car in the driveway like always. Exchanged waves with Mr. Havner across the street, who was mowing his lawn. Gathered together her purse and the sacks collected in quick passes through the supermarket and the hardware store. Briskly marched up the flagstone walk, fumbled around so she could deploy her key. Unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. Actually a mixture of smells.. the strongest was not exactly unpleasant, but emphatic, like a large vat of meat pickled in sharp brine. (But not really like it at all..) There was also a noise, an almost subliminal burbling.

It was coming from the living room.

Leaving the door standing open behind her, Cassie took a couple of cautious steps, which was all that was needed to cross her front “hallway”. Her pumps squeaked on the hard wooden floor, seeming suddenly louder than usual.

She stepped around the corner, and there it was, squatting between the coffee table and the television. It had, she noted vaguely, pushed the coffee table slightly askew to have more room.

Both of the sacks and her purse slipped from her hands. From the sound of it, all 12 of the eggs and the glass jar of spaghetti sauce broke as they smashed against the floor.

She opened her mouth and screamed-

But rather.. she didn’t. The Thing glanced at her. Just glanced at her out of the corner of one eye. Somehow, even in the flaming panic of the moment, Cassie could tell it was not an angry glance, merely a mildly irritated one. Cassie’s mouth hung open for a long moment, and she realized she wasn’t going to scream.

She couldn’t scream.

She moved her lips, her jaw, her tongue, and nothing came out. Not even a squeak. She pushed air out of her lungs as hard as she could, jerking her head forward like one of the resident pigeons crossing the plaza in front of her office building, and all she got was a tiny sort of clicking noise down in her throat.

Run! Get help! Call the

Again the Thing glanced at her, again irritated, and she couldn’t move anymore. It was an instant thing and quite total. Her feet were rooted to the ground, her arms locked out in a gesture of surprise, her fingers slightly curled. Her heart beat, her lungs pumped oxygen in and out, but that was it.

She hadn’t had time to get her mouth all the way closed, and in one distant glacial corner of her mind, she suspected she looked like an imbecile.

It wouldn’t seem that under the circumstances it would matter, but it did, somehow.

She couldn’t even blink.

So she screamed inside her head for a long time, the echoes bouncing and rebounding off the inside of her skull.

Something was ringing.

It took a moment, but she identified it as her phone. After a last ring, the answering machine kicked in, and someone left her a brief message. It sounded like it might have been Tori.

The distraction lasted long enough to break her mind out of its death-spiral and flatten down into some new state. Saying she was calm wasn’t right at all, but it was closer than anything else. A flat shimmering sea of terror.

She stared at the Thing, it wasn’t like she had much choice.

It looked sort of like a huge purple-gray frog, topping out at maybe two feet high. But not really a frog. That was just the general impression. Smooth skin that was not one consistent shade, but thickly swirled with streaks and ripples. Spotted here and there with clusters of yellowish growths, islands poking up from an alien sea. It should have been horrible, it was horrible, but at the same time, Cassie couldn’t help but be reminded of some exotic flavor of ice cream, like the small tub of Mochaberry Ripple Supreme currently defrosting itself somewhere in the vicinity of her feet.

It was the Thing’s stance which was most frog-like. A set of powerful-looking hind legs, squatting comfortably in place, each ending in a large collection of nailless toes that spread wide. Between them dangled a tail just long enough to reach the floor, terminating in a cluster of pinkish bulbs. It looked like a collection of exotic tropical fruit hanging on a vine.

The Thing mostly had its back turned to her, but she could still see the eyes, or at least the corner of the one that had glanced at her. It was a slit, filled up with horrible swirling red-yellow. No. She corrected herself as she stared and stared. There were other colors there, behind the red and yellow, millions of them, that swirled around like the Thing’s hide, around and around, and went down and down...

Cassie still couldn’t move, but she was suddenly very dizzy. She defocused her gaze, and it slowly passed. When she brought the world back, she avoided the eye, and more details emerged. The Thing had a sort of sail or crest running down its back, fronds that rustled slightly when it moved. Spindly arms were crudely welded onto its body in only a rough approximation of the normal position, but the two attached hands sported long sensitive fingers. The fingers of a pianist or a brain surgeon, working on something, down there on the floor. It was...

It was...

Cassie had absolutely no idea what it was. At first glance, it was just a rough pile of child’s building blocks, standing a bit taller than the Thing itself, made of tinted translucent plastic instead of wood. Spheres and rectangles and pyramids jammed together haphazardly.

But no. The shapes were pulsing faintly. They were also only half-present, or turned inside out, or sporting impossible extra angles that poked off into infinity through the floor. And like the Thing’s eyes, there was movement, deep down inside the blocks, masses of glowing threads worming about, forming obscene shapes. Some of them had risen up, breaching the surface of their block, and were slithering aimlessly here and there across the floor, exploring the cracks between the boards. One of them had reached all the way to the coffee table, and wrapped itself around one of the legs. Others would try to wrap themselves around the Thing’s fingers, and it would casually flick them away. Cassie had a vision of one of the things crawling to her past the scattering of extra blocks, crawling up her leg...

She tore herself away from the thought, and desperately homed in on a new tangent.

Extra blocks?

Yes. There were several of them, sitting in an almost-pile to one side. They were all cold and lifeless and dark, and Cassie instantly grasped that they were waiting to be installed into the rest.

She could almost see where they were supposed to go, plugged into waiting holes in the pile.

The Thing poked and prodded at that pile with those marvelous appendages, turning and sliding components. Cassie became aware that it was making the noise she had heard earlier, before this nightmare had started. An unending string of preoccupied grumbles, barely vocalized.

The thing twitched a cube, and something twitched deep inside Cassie.

Another push, and the whole room twisted out of shape for a long queasy moment, before snapping back into position. A flowerpot fell out of the windowsill and shattered.

The Thing selected a block from the “uninstalled” pile, turned it this way and that, then tried to insert it into a notch in the main mass. It wouldn’t go, and the air, the very reality, shimmered threateningly around them. The Thing gave up its attempt, and tossed the block aside, expressing frustration in a way that was so human it almost made her want to laugh.

But if she started laughing now, she would never stop.

Then, suddenly, shockingly, there was a voice, a real live human voice, and Cassie would have screamed in startled surprise, if she had been capable of it.

“Hello? You here, Cass?”

Coming from outside. From the still-open door. It was her friend Kimberly, from the health club. She had said she might stop by.

Cassie had forgotten.

Footsteps coming closer; the familiar sound of Kim’s clunky black boots.

“Hello? Oh, hey there, girl. I was just- what happened here?”

No reply. Of course.

“Cass? What’s wrong? Are you- What the hell’s th-”

With a pang, Cassie felt Kim’s concerned fingers come to rest on her upper arm as the last words were spoken and the Thing snapped another of those glances at the two of them. (Even in the midst of her agonized guilt, Cassie noted a new detail; it had three of those slits, arranged in a pyramid shape above what might charitably be called a mouth.)

Instant silence.

Instant stillness.

Time passed. It wasn’t really silent. The Thing muttered. The old wind-up clock Cassie had won in that raffle ticked softly on its shelf in the corner. The Thing’s odor, if it truly was the source of the smell, wafted around the room, mixing with the food from the sack. The afternoon shadows stretched across the floor, and there came the far-off and muted sounds of the neighborhood, radio signals from a distant planet. Mr. Havner had finished mowing his lawn.

The Thing made a major adjustment, and for a moment everything turned to black-and-white.

Cassie really wished she could blink.

She wondered what Kim looked like, what expression was stamped on her dark features. Surprise? Anger? Fear?

No, not fear. Kim hadn’t been well acquainted with fear.

At least until now.

Cassie’s appendages started going softly numb, starting with the tips of her fingers and toes, and an ugly blackness crept into the edges of her vision. Strangely, she could still feel Kim’s unmoving fingers quite clearly.

What was truly terrifying was that the emotion beginning to get a firm grip on her mind was boredom.

Finally, the Thing gave a emphatic grunt of disgust and settled further back on its haunches, tapping those marvelous fingers on its pale splotchy belly. It had, it now turned out, three arms: from a fold in the middle of its “chest” sprouted a thick stumpy limb, equipped with a set of powerful-looking grippers. For a moment, Cassie knew, somehow, that it was seriously contemplating using this built-in club to smash the entire assembly apart. And what? Start over from scratch? Write off the whole idea a bad job and depart?

What if we don’t unfreeze when it goes?

As if it had overheard the thought, it glanced at them again. More than glanced. It seemed to truly see the two of them for the first time, and it shuffled around so it was facing in their direction, its tail slithering into a new position. Cassie saw what was in its eyes, and she wasn’t bored anymore, not at all.

She could feel everything again. She could move again.

No.

She was being moved, her body a puppet, jerked on invisible strings by an inexpert but irresistibly strong puppeteer. She took a couple of steps forward, her arm pulling free of Kim’s grasp, her toe kicking aside a glass jar of wood screws which rolled slowly away across the vastness of the floor. She began posing, bent over, bent back, arms pointing out stiffly at inhuman angles. A wobbly spin, and she caught her first glimpse of Kim, with her usual close-cropped black hair and matching eyeglasses, dressed in her usual sweater (The big "23" with "EASTSIDE HELLCATS" under it) and hiphugging jeans, one hand grasping nothing, the other holding.. a large hammer? Cassie was baffled, then remembered that it was her hammer, and Kim had borrowed it last week.

Standing there, holding a hammer, not being able to use it

She was now quite glad she hadn’t gotten a good look at Kim’s face.

Cassie was pointed in the Thing’s direction again, and her various body-parts clattered to a gradual stop. It stared at her chest.

That means it’s a man. Male.

Again she had to ruthlessly strangle the laughter before it broke out and broke her to pieces.

But she was wrong; it wasn’t her chest the thing was examining. Her hands came to life, and began to pluck at her blouse. Buttons were clearly an alien concept to them, and they finally gripped and ripped, tearing it free. She held out the pathetic remnants at full arm’s length, and they dangled down into the Thing’s reach. It touched the fabric with a curious fingertip, slid it back and forth between the equivalents of thumb and forefinger. Something passed up the cloth into her arm, something went through her, snapping her neck back and almost killing her.

Grrun.

The Thing made the noise, a sort of “so that’s how it is..” grunt. It stroked the blouse again, and again something passed up the garment, into Cassie.

Or into her clothes. A small startled squeak escaped her as.. something.. happened to them. Something..

Her clothes crawled around her body, leaving her limbs, pulling tighter, lacing themselves into new positions...

They made her feel... different than she had ever felt before. There were no words.. Warm and cool and light as air and heavy as iron

Her body came back to life. More posing. more bending and flexing.

Another spin, and she saw that Kim was still exactly where she had been left.

Cassie was dropped to her knees, her hands flopping to rest on her thighs, palms up. One of her sandy-blonde hairs had escaped from her ponytail and was now tickling against her cheek, maddening.

She was directly in front of the Thing.

It’s going to make me look into its eyes. The words rattled around the bottom of Cassie’s mind like lumps of lead.

But no, turned its attention back towards Kim. Cassie couldn’t see, but there were noises. Some were not hard to interpret (particularly the hammer being dropped), but others...

Kim appeared beside her, dropping into the same pose. Her clothes.. they were a collection of glowing white spiderwebs, laced across and around her torso in a pattern that was both regimented and utterly random, pushing and cradling her curves.

I’m wearing that, t-

The Thing made them both look at it.

Look deep into all three of its eyes.

Look deep past the yellow and the red.

They could not resist.

The colors were spinning and infinite, spread horizon to horizon, going down and down and down forever, all shades, hues they hadn’t know existed, dead colors, murdered colors, colors that hadn’t been born yet and they were pulled down down down and joy and pain and ecstasy an d she still couldn’t blink and colors colors Colors

Something popped in the back of Cassie’s mind, instant and painless and eternal and excruciating. The blocks of her brain shifted into a glorious new configuration, filling with glowing white spiderwebs.

The Colors didn’t go down forever after all.

It was the blinding orgasmic Truth which was eternal, the Truth that was now wrapped unbreakable around her mind, the Truth that she had so foolishly and blindly denied all of her miserable empty existence.

The Truth. The Thing was the most important Thing in the whole entire universe, from its beginning to its end. Its importance utterly dwarfed all other Things, most definitely including Cassie and Kim. Its needs and desires were the only ones that mattered in the slightest. Cassie would cheerfully run up to the top of the Bloy Building and throw herself off, if this act were to somehow improve the Thing’s position even minutely. She would throw herself off, and float down unharmed, if the Thing required it.

She fell ever deeper into her Master’s.. her Owner’s.. eyes, and Kim was there, and they wept and laughed together and wrapped around each other tighter and tighter, ruthlessly pulling each other deeper and ever deeper.

The universe ended and began again and they emerged from the Owner’s eyes.

They were kneeling on vast wooden plain that ran off into the far distance, where here and there looming fuzzy mountains were visible. A gigantic glass cylinder towered closer at hand, bizarrely filled with enormous bits of sharpened metal. But above all that, above everything...

Even with the Truth burning in her brain, it took Cassie a moment to realize what was filling the sky before them: the Owner, taller than mountains, taller than entire continents, his three endless suns burning down on them. It was too big, it was too much, her brain was imploding, and

Long purple-gray fingers adjusted a control in her brain, and she was fine again.

She turned and of course her sister Kim was there, and they smiled at each other, shining the Truth deep into each other’s eyes. (Cassie noted vaguely that while Kim’s hair now reached almost to her waist in a floating cloud and her clothes were a splintering diamond of light, she was still wearing her glasses.)

They crawled to the tip of the Owner’s nearest toe, kissed it, licked it.

At some level, far away, touching the Owner sent something through them, snapping their necks back and almost killing them.

It was far better than ice cream.

They got up, and turned to face their Task. It was.. if you turned the great Pyramid of Giza into giant colored blocks and electrified the whole thing, you wouldn’t have it, but you also wouldn’t be too far off.

They had only the tiniest vaguest idea what it was supposed to do, something about holding up a constellation or two, and thus allowing an individual known as the Grand High Muckamuck of Queep to crunkle correctly, but they could instantly tell it wasn’t finished. The gaps in the structure pulsed like open wounds, and the last blocks, the bandages, were waiting nearby. They wafted across the plain to nearest of them, their hair trailing behind them, toes brushing lightly against the grain of the wood. The first target was sort of red, sort of diamond-shaped, sort of indescribable. They ran their fingers along its thousand sharp edges, smelled it (gasoline and cinnamon), licked it (sunflowers and catfish and a icy winter’s day) and listened to the hyperwyrms twitch deep within, eager to wake up and gambol.

Another glance at the pyramid, and the place where it went was obvious, flashing and buzzing.

They lifted it between them, crossed the plain, slid it into place with a last twist, and the best click in the universe.

They twitched in the air, recovering.

Back to the pile, another block, more tests, another hole filled. With each addition the pyramid glowed brighter, and a satisfied hum jacked up another notch.

It all went fine, it all went wonderfully perfectly until the last one. The white one, with all the twistspikes and the extra notch jammed into the top.

They carried it to the top of the pyramid, where the only hole was left. They looked down into the hole, and they instantly realized the truth. (Just a small truth in this case, but a truth and an inescapable one nonetheless.) They exchanged a last sad glance, then Kim squirmed her way down inside the hole, and Cassie pushed the block into place. It struggled against them, but with Cassie pushing, and Kim pulling in just.. the.. right.. way..

It clicked into place. The entire world spun crazily end over end than righted itself with a sudden snap. The pyramid flared into full power and glory, reaching up into the sky and all the way down into the gnool. Cassie rose up and over it, seeing Kim’s shrinking figure within, hair spread out around her. Frozen. The hyperwyrms swarmed over her, filling her, pulling her down. Down into eternal mindless light and peace and joy..

Cassie turned and floated back to her Owner. His hand reached out, closed around her.

Thought drowned in a sea of peace and joy.

She paused and sniffed the air.

What the hell’s that sme..

“Hello, Tori.”

Tori shrieked in surprise and dropped the carrot she had been peeling. She spun around, spraying water, almost slipping and falling before her butt saved her by bumping up against the edge of the sink. She pushed her dangling brown curls back out the way with an automatic swipe of the hand.

There was a strange woman standing next to her in the kitchen.

Only..

“Cassie?” The word came out in a whisper.

The woman smiled, dazzling, her head tilted at an unnatural angle. She was a stranger after all. Her pale hair trailed out behind her in a long cloud as she floated closer.

Literally floated; her bare toes were just brushing against the linoleum.

Tori tried to scream again, and couldn’t. There was something behind the woman, around the woman, devouring the woman, three gigantic somethings, red and yellow and pulling Tori down.

Down and irresistibly down

Tori’s fingers let go of the carrot peeler, .

Not just red and yellow.

There were colors beyond colors, a million of them and a million more.

As Tori began to fall forward into them, the woman thrust our her cobweb-covered chest with pride.

“We were so useful, our Owner decided to pick up a few more of us before moving onto to his next job. A..” her eyes rotated impossibly in their sockets and her head flopped over to the other side “..vertical floob in Node 42z23x needs its primary pinfloofer recalibrated!”

Tori moved her mouth, no words came out, the stranger who used to be her friend Cassie replied anyway.

“I have no idea. But we’re going to go find out!”

Tori’s hands pulled off her sweater and discarded it, even as the rest of her clothes squirmed eagerly into new positions...

Beyond the last of the colors was the Truth, and the others were all already there, Amy, Mia, Candace from the library, that busty redhead with all the freckles whose name Tori didn’t remember, worked down at the video store, laughing and crying and singing even as their intertwined bodies were-

A giant purple-gray hand closed around Tori shutting out everything but the Truth.

Her eyes spun.

The Thing folded her up, and tucked her neatly away in its pouch along with all its other tools.