Page 32 of A Very Monstrous Desire

Theo shook his head, wondering as he did so how the hell he was going to get through the night and ready for the battle the following day. A battle that may well involve the rages.

Theo paused there in the faux-Earth bathroom for some time considering that and when nothing came easily to mind, he simply cleaned himself up, splashed some water across his face, and when he emerged, he tried to keep his voice as even as possible.

“How do you live like this?” he demanded. “Knowing there are all these things waiting to attack you?”

“There are less of them where my people are,” Baku said.

“You killed them?”

“Removed them.”

“But here they run wild?”

Baku was pulling various bits out of the store cupboard. Theo spotted a fresh set of clothes and what looked like soap. That cheered him in a way that his desperate musings in the bathroom had not.

“It is the same in some parts of your world,” the monster said. “Do you not have bears and lions and other such predators?”

“I guess…”

“They too would kill you. They too are monsters.”

“They’re animals…”

“It’s the same thing.” He passed the clothing to Theo. “We’re all animals.”

“I don’t like it here,” Theo admitted.

“Before this assignment I too had avoided these lands. They have worsened in recent years. The rages encourage it.” The monster growled. “I have long wished that we could make rips between distances in the same way we can make rips between dimensions.”

Theo started at those words because it suddenly occurred to him that Baku could do things with the inter-dimensional rips that the people in his world couldn’t, and why the hell had it taken him this long to realise what had happened in those first moments after he arrived in this dimension?

“How did you do it?” he demanded.

“Do what?” Baku asked.

“You closed the rip I came through.”

“Yes.”

“How?” Theo demanded.

The monster lifted his wrist where he wore what Theo had assumed was a Garmin-like device. Clearly, he had been wrong about that!

“I can use this device to open and close the rips between our two worlds,” Baku said. “The rips I create are artificial rips though and they will always close in on themselves given enough time. The frequency that opens them must be maintained and given that there must be a device nearby to do so…” He shrugged. “It is rarely possible.”

“Artificial rips?” Theo shook his head. “I don’t understand. Are you saying that there are rips that aren’t artificial, that they’re natural?”

“The ones plaguing your world?” Baku nodded. “We did not create those. We can close them though.”

“We have a substance that patches them a little,” Theo said.

“The substance you speak of vibrates at a similar frequency.”

“If we could close all the rips…”

“We close all that we can,” Baku said. “But there are many. We need to stop them from forming at all, for each new rip creates others, like ripples across the dimensions.”

“How?” Theo demanded, suddenly imagining the rip next to his flat closed once and for all. “How can you close them?”

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