Chương 410: Book Eight, Chapter 77: Unfolding

I could use words like "explode" or "melt" in a situation like this. I might invoke visuals of molting insects, growing plants, or decaying bodies. I could do all of these things, and I would never be able to describe what I saw the man in the boat do. At first, I was confident he was transforming. It was simple. I had seen that before. I had once watched Antoine turn into a werewolf out of the corner of my eye while pretending not to. I had seen statues come to life.

These eyes had witnessed many impossible things. But what I saw happening to the man below deck defied all description because it wasn't even possible. My mind literally couldn't perceive what was happening. His size was changing, sure. That was easy enough. Or maybe, his true size was being revealed. But when the ropes tying him to the chair began to loosen as if falling through his body without breaking, I had to assume that he was some sort of spirit. But that wasn't right either.

It didn't look like they had fallen through because he was intangible. It looked like they had simply gone around his body from the middle out. It made no sense. My brain couldn't comprehend it. Because my brain could only comprehend three dimensions, and this man's body was far beyond that. I remembered being in high school and having a teacher try to explain to the class how the dimensions worked. Not dimensions like other versions of the world or pocket universes, but dimensions as in length, depth, and width.

Those were the three ways that we observed things around us. But if we were two-dimensional, we would only see length and width, and if a three-dimensional creature were to stand in front of us and step to the side, it would disappear from our vision. That was what I was seeing. The man was being consumed by another dimension. His body was going everywhere, as if it were exploding, except that wasn't exactly what was happening.

It was more like it was unfolding in front of me, a mass of organs, viscera, and limbs that were all connected, but not in ways that I could perceive. He was unfolding further and further.

"Back up the stairs," I said loudly. I had half a mind to tell my cameraman to stay down there just for the footage, but I thought better of it.

"We need to get to land," I said.

"I'm on it," Anna said.

"I'll take us to a nearby marina. Hopefully, we can avoid the gunmen." Oh, right. The guys with guns. They weren't so scary suddenly.

"What's happening down there?" Antoine asked.

"He's getting… bigger," I said stupidly.

"I saw that," Antoine said, "but what is happening? I'm not sure I understood what I was looking at." I kind of wanted to slap Antoine just to get him to stop asking questions. He was going to make my character look stupid because he was trying to get me to give information I didn't have. We were all losing our cool. I took a few deep breaths and tried to act as if I had a grasp of the situation.

"I don't know what's happening to him down there, but I have a feeling it's not going to stay down there," I said.

"Is there a life raft on this boat?" I asked. I already knew the answer. Everyone did. There was one of those emergency dinghies with a tiny outboard motor on it tied up at the back of the boat. Unfortunately, Carousel had seen fit to give it a five-hundred-pound weight limit written in big bold letters on top. We needed something bigger, and there was only one way to get it. I only needed Anna to realize it.

"Yes," Anna said after a moment of thought.

"I have one up here on deck, but the bigger emergency inflatable's down below."

"Where down below?" I asked.

"It's in a cabinet down there," she said.

"It's right by the door."

"I'll go grab it," I said as I moved toward the door.

"Stand back." This was pure improvisation. We needed a larger emergency craft, and it was believable that Anna might have one somewhere, but we would have to take a risk to get it. We were going to have to look at what the man down below was becoming. No matter how we cut it, whoever opened that door below deck had a good chance of dying. At least if it were me, there was a chance I could stick around for a while afterward and help out. I crept down below. My cameraman followed.

It was kind of sweet of him when I thought about it. I opened up the wooden door, and what I saw on the other side continued to defy my understanding. I was staring into a large mucus-covered throat. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. It was still unfolding, but whatever it was, it was a creature, an enormous one. Its entrails had folded over the boat almost like a tarp being stretched over sticks to make a tent.

Muscle and saliva stretched over the things inside the cabin. I didn't have time to understand what I was looking at, but I knew being inside of a large extra-dimensional creature was generally considered a bad thing. Luckily, the interior of the boat wasn't so big that I had to go that far to find the cabinet next to the door, open it, and grab the large, bright orange canvas bag inside. Bobby said that his team had survived on the river with one of those that they found in an airplane.

Not a bad idea to improvise one into existence. The interior of the creature continued to unfold, forming around the boat's architecture, imbuing it with life, sickening wet life. I quickly closed the door, turned, and ran up the stairs, my cameraman following.

"What did you see?" Camden asked.

"Are you familiar with the story of Jonah in the belly of the whale?" I asked.

"Yes, kind of," he said with a scrunched-up face.

"It looks like we're about to have a retelling," I said. Behind me, I could hear the door rattling as the throat continued to expand and take up more of the boat. What would become of it, I could only imagine, would be an enormous head.

"How far away from land?" I asked.

"Only a few miles," Anna said. She was taking the boat as fast as it could go, but it wouldn't be fast enough.

"What the hell is happening?" Roxy screamed as she stared down at the deck of the boat. Red, gooey viscera was starting to leak up from the cabin below, latching onto the wood as if it were scaffolding. The boat was being incorporated into something terrifying as the biological matter unfolded in space and time around it. Still, Anna pushed the engines to their limits as the red matter started to grow and skin began to form over it.

"We're going to want to get into the lifeboats very quickly," I said.

"What do I do?" Anna asked, starting to panic as the boat began moving to the will of its new master, some unfathomable creature being wrapped around it.

"Well, it's not like you need to keep your foot on the gas," I said.

"Go, go, go." I could see the land getting closer, and we needed to cover every mile possible toward it before we abandoned the ship, or whatever the ship was becoming. The upper and lower decks began to fill with organic matter, such as muscle and what might have been brain tissue. A hinge-like jaw started to develop on the front deck as a mouth formed. We all scurried to the back of the boat, and Bobby quickly triggered the emergency raft.

It inflated quickly and fell behind the boat as we all jumped into the wake. Cassie, though, stayed behind for a moment, grabbing the smaller emergency vessel for herself. She jumped onto it as she left the back of the boat. She didn't manage to stick the landing, though. She fell off the side, but she wasn't lost. She managed to grab up and pull herself aboard the little triangular boat. The rest of us swam toward the big orange life raft.

Behind us, Anna's boat continued powering forward, the motor being the last part of the ship to be consumed by the growing organic matter.

"What the hell just happened?" Roxy screamed again as we climbed into the raft. I didn't have a good explanation. I had seen stuff like this before, but still, I was having trouble converting my knowledge into my character's knowledge, so I just gave up. My character would be a film buff in his own right.

"It's like something out of a horror film," I said.

"An extra-dimensional creature." We watched as the boat powered farther and farther away, and I hoped for a moment that it would just keep going straight until it hit land and blew up. But all that was dashed against the rocks was hope when the boat suddenly dove beneath the surface.

"We need to paddle to land," Camden said, but he was thinking small. It was Cassie who was ready to meet the moment. She had gotten the motor working on her little emergency craft and pulled up alongside us.

"Need a lift?" she asked. Her boat was barely bigger than a pool toy, but we would take it.

"In fact, we do," I said as my assistant, who had been there the entire time, staying out of the way, grabbed one of the ropes on the emergency raft and handed it over to Cassie, who immediately started piloting us toward land. We managed to get some good distance that way. First Blood, however, was not over. Fortunately, we had learned a lesson from our time on the river and were wearing life jackets. We probably looked goofy, but even Carousel had to respect the flotation device's power.

Drowning us would be a lot harder. But it did have other options. Suddenly, a large bulge appeared in the water as something humongous swam underneath us.

"Does that thing go any faster?" Antoine yelled.

"It's at full power!" Cassie screamed back. Then she turned around and looked at us.

"We don't make it," she said softly, and even though the engine was roaring, I heard her just fine. And she was proven right moments later as a creature whose head was shaped like a boat emerged from the water right underneath us and sent us flying dozens of feet into the air. We had actually made it pretty close to shore, but not close enough. The creature's head hung out of the water, connected to a body of writhing masses that, to my eyes, looked like a cuttlefish trying to imitate a snake.

The underlying shape of the boat was still visible in its head, and its mouth opened sideways straight down into what would have been the main cabin of the boat. All we had left to do was swim for it. I knew it would be targeting me because of my low effective plot armor, and I doubted that even with my decent Hustle, I could outswim it. The creature dove back down underwater. Curiosity compelled me to get a good look at it. I submerged my head just to get a good look.

I prayed that when I opened my eyes, all I would see was darkness. That was preferable. But what I saw was the monster that had once been a man. It was continuing to unfold, but as it did, its form varied wildly. At first, I had taken it for some type of distinct species of eldritch being, but as I stared at it, I was less convinced. The body was so random, so many parts just limply hanging together. Its biological mass grew exponentially, but randomly. Of course, the creature didn't make sense for other reasons.

Parts of its body would disappear out of nowhere and then reappear elsewhere as they went in and out of the third dimension. It was like a visual puzzle, and I was trying to see what it might be, but the more I stared at it, the more convinced I was that there was no final picture. There was no one creature that could contain all these parts and explain away what I was seeing.

Maybe in the fourth dimension it would look perfectly normal, but to me it looked like a cancerous form of life not meant to exist or be perceived. It had no habitat or evolutionary explanation. It couldn't be explained by science. All it could do was flap its jaws and swim toward me.