Chasing the Moon Read Online Free PDF

of reality and another in an alien perception we were never meant to have.”
    “But why?” she asked.“ How does something like that happen?”
    “Hell if I know,” said Vom. “Until I came into contact with your world, I was just a merciless destructive force, a mindless devourer.”
    She flashed him a look.
    “Hey, I’m working on it,” he said. “I didn’t eat you, did I?” “You tried.”
    “If we’re going to make this relationship work, you’re going to have to get over that.”
    “What relationship?” she asked.
    “Like it or not, we’re bound together,” said Vom.
    “Oh no we’re not.”
    He gnashed his teeth. Since he had a lot of teeth, several rows of them, it made a hell of a grating noise.
    “Hey, consciousness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There are all these complicated thoughts running through my head now, and some of them are very confusing. They don’t mesh together well. It’s like you. Part of me wants to eat you. But another part of me feels like that would be a lousy thing to do since you freed me from that closet. But another part of me thinks that if I kill you, maybe it’ll free me from this sliver of reality and I’ll get to go home where all I had to worry about was digesting anything that found its way into any of my two thousand fourteen stomachs. But another part thinks that maybe I don’t want to go back to that now that I’ve found a world where not everything is as simple as endless devouring hunger. But another—”
    “I get it.”
    “The point is that once you gaze into the abyss—”
    “The abyss gazes into you.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “It’s a cliché. Everybody knows that.”
    Vom frowned. “Damn. And I thought I’d made that up. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re stuck with each other, and we can’t go back. Me, a timeless devouring force and you, a delicious chewy morsel wrapped around a crunchy calcium treat.”
    She moved a few steps farther from him.
    “What?” he said. “It’s a compliment.”
    She took stock of her situation. She was bound to a horror from beyond time and space, and she was probably going slowly mad because of it.
    “Is the apartment still mine?”
    “You bet,” said Vom. “It’s a package deal.”
    There was a bright side at least.
    “So what do you say?” He extended his hand. “Roomies?”
    Noticing snapping jaws buried in the fur in Vom’s palms, she kept her hands in her pockets and nodded.
    They walked back to West’s apartment building of horrors. She wasn’t crazy about living there, but she had no place else to go. She couldn’t call on any of her friends. Not with Vom and his endless appetite following her.
    The building didn’t look right. She’d run away without glancing back upon her escape, but she saw it with new eyes this time. It was a jutting tower of strange angles, disappearing into a swirling green vortex in the sky. The brick walls shimmered and shifted as she walked closer, like one of those cheap 3-D card images that never quite worked the way the inventor had hoped.
    The vortex growled, and the building shuddered, expanding and contracting. She climbed the short flight of stairs to the front doors. The creaky old doors opened without her touching the handles, and hot wind poured over her. She saw the portal as a huge mouth. One of thousands scattered across the cosmos, all part of a single impossibly huge creature dwelling across multiple realities. And all the people, animals, and even monsters like Vom were merely skittering atomsdrifting between its toes. Although it probably didn’t have toes. Or if it did, each of those toes could crush a universe. Except for the big toe. That could probably crush several at once.
    Vom walked inside, and she expected the lesser devouring monster to be devoured by the larger one. But it didn’t happen.
    “Are you coming?” he asked her.
    She pushed the inhuman thoughts away, gritted her teeth, and followed