Anomaly Flats Read Online Free PDF

and slammed the door behind her. She turned the lock and leaned back against the wood, shaking and panting and wiping sweat from her palms. “Holy hell,” she whispered, trying to catch her breath. “Come on, Mallory. Get a grip.” So Mrs. Roach had lied about the hotel’s occupancy. So what? It was weird, but it wasn’t a big deal. “I’m just going to murder her, is all.”
    She shook out her hands and stepped up to the pedestal sink. The mirror hanging above it was a simple oval, big enough for her to get a full view of herself. “Woof,” she sighed, dragging her hands through her hair and pulling at the dark circles under her eyes.
    “Life on the road does not agree with you,” said mirror Mallory.
    “Shut up,” said Mallory.
    She noticed a bump on her forehead, just above her right eye…but she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten it. “Stress is eating my brain,” she decided. She touched it gingerly. It only hurt a little, and it didn’t look particularly irritated. She counted that as a win. Then she turned on the sink tap, and brown water spurted out of the faucet.
    She sighed again.
    She waited for the pipes to clear, rolling a rubber band from her wrist and tying her hair back, inspecting for grays along the way. There were more today than yesterday—no doubt about it . She grunted and closed her eyes, then leaned over and splashed a handful of water over her face.
    Tap water had never felt so good.
    With the first splash, she forgot all about how a sky full of twinkling stars almost became an accessory to her death. With the second, the memory of waffles and mass poultrycide melted completely from her brain. With the third, even the thoughts of a door with seven locks and a mysterious thumping from a room that was supposed to be empty seemed to drift off into the ether. After a few more rinses, she was just Mallory—driven, lovable, crazy old Mallory, out in the world, just a step or two removed from her regularly-scheduled life.
    Then she opened her eyes and saw a cockroach squirming out of the drain, and that pretty much ended the fantasy.
    Mallory jumped with a cry of disgust and instinctively pulled the stopper closed. She pulled hard; the metal plug slammed down against the drain, slicing the cockroach in half.
    “Oh, God, I’m gonna puke.” She threw a hand over her mouth, hurried over to the toilet, and threw open the lid. But the vomit didn’t come. It seemed to lodge itself somewhere in the upper parts of her soul, her nausea burning through her chest and souring the further reaches of her stomach instead. “Well, I just want to die,” she decided.
    The water was still running. As she reached over and turned off the faucet, some part of her—some sick, twisted, sociopathic part—wanted to see the half-roach drifting in the pool of water, if for no other reason than to lord her dominance over the recently-murdered pest. A nuclear blast couldn’t kill a cockroach, but Mallory Jenkins could. There was a special sort of pride in that.
    She steeled her roiling insides and took a deep breath. Then she turned and looked down at the half-roach as triumphantly as she could. Her glory was slightly dampened by the fact that the half-roach was still moving. No…not just moving; squirming . It writhed through the bowl of steaming water, curling and uncurling and thrashing softly in the depths. Mallory’s eyes grew wide with fascinated horror as she drew nearer the disgusting scene to get a better look. With her chin just a few inches from the surface of the water, she realized that the thing she’d sliced in the sink wasn’t a cockroach at all.
    It was something else entirely.
    It was small, and black, and shaped almost like a cone. It seemed smooth and slippery, except for the underside, which was pocked with tiny circles that seemed to be able to grip the smooth, sloping sides of the sink bowl. It looked like the arm of a small, black starfish.
    “Not an arm,” she whispered,