A Package Diverted at Mercy Station

The little man stood there, wriggling exta-dimensional burden clasped between his hands. He looked at Gray, and his mouth positioned itself into a questioning pout. Gray looked back, and his mouth opened impulsively, vocal chords forming the guttural sounds his lips would change into words.

“You’re late.”

The little man, still pouting at Gray, heard this, and his eyes widened. His lips pulled back in what Gray first thought was a snarl before he realized it was an expression of fear. As the words further sunk in to the little bright-colored thing’s mind, the whiter he grew. His clothes paled, somehow, hot oranges and yellows dripping off, leaving only a bleached gray image of a little haggard demon. The little thing shook its head, blinking and swallowing with great rapidity. Then it spoke.

“My… My lord…” Its voice was like the grating of coarse sandpaper on metal. Gray winced. But the little man said no more. Its eyes rolled up into its head and it fell back, dropping to the floor in a heap. The package slithered out of its hands.

Gray stood staring at the pile of flesh and clothing for a long moment, mouth open, hands placed in front of him in a position that might, at another time, be used to communicate the idea of calm, and caution. It was the first time he’d come close to feeling anything like shock in, well, further back than he could remember. For a moment his subconscious held on with incredible fervor, wanting nothing more than blank-eyed incomprehension, but then the rational mind in Gray forced that desire down, beating it wearily back into whatever dwelling it had crawled out of. He would not refuse to see, to understand.

The little man (if that’s what he’d been; Gray was somehow resistant to the idea that the thing was human, had ever been human) was dead. The color of its flesh dripped off the way it had dripped from it’s clothing, the way its flesh was dripping from its bones even now. Dripping not like the steady, fluid drops from the tip of an icicle during the last days of winter, but like pine sap from a severed limb. It was too slow to see if he looked for it, but from the corner of his eye it happened fast enough. The bulges and hollows that formed the horrible sea of migrating flesh made Gray want to close his eyes, close them now; if he didn’t he felt he would go blind.

But Gray didn’t close his eyes. He simply passed his gaze over the dead heap on the train station floor; a heap his inner mind knew would eventually disappear completely, leaving no trace of the being and whatever it had brought with it from whatever world it had come from. He passed his gaze over the dead thing and rested it on the package.

It lay on the cool concrete, all sides facing up. Gray squinted at it, trying to trace its outline. He couldn’t. All at once, the package was every possible shape. A line, a flat square, a box, a cylinder, a sphere. All at once, all of its sides were inside out, edges facing this way and that, vertices vibrating and undulating in and out of existence. He wondered, briefly, if he would be able to pick it up. Then, scolding himself (You can’t pick that up, it ain’t yours, it ain’t right. Belongs to the man in the wall, you leave that thing alone), he swallowed and looked back toward the dead thing.

He had been right, it seemed. The mangled mess of clothes and flesh and whatever passed for bone in its homeworld was indeed disappearing, but not in any way he had been expecting. It seemed to ooze directly into the concrete, the whole mass squeezing itself through microscopic pores in the rocky surface. And already it was getting smaller. Apparently what magic the thing held when it delivered its daily package, the magic that allowed it to go unnoticed as it did its duty, continued working after its death, because Gray heard no unfamiliar sounds in the station. He saw no one break step, no one shooting any curious glances at him or his dead thing. No one else could see. No one else would see.

And even so near the swirling masses of people filling Mercy Station at that moment, Ken Grayson knew that for once, he was completely alone.