Reality is like a fruitcake; Pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface. Ancient things, older than time itself, smothered beneath the crushing interdimensional weight of what mortals, in their limited understanding, would call existence. These are the dark things: forgotten shadows of what once was but no longer is, malign dreams of what might have been yet should never be, and twisted phantoms of entities that never truly lived but nonetheless cannot die. Most horrible of these nightmares, if such a value could truly be measured, are the old gods. Locked away in the deepest, darkest pit like the hideous, redheaded stepchild of Creation shoved to the back of the cosmic closet to be ignored.
Some things refuse to be ignored.
To mix metaphors, the closet door in Gil's All Night Diner opened just a crack, and a nasty walnut slipped through. A nasty, rotten walnut eager to chip the tooth of all that was good and decent.
At the moment, Loretta was blissfully unaware of this fact. Just as she was unaware of the spectral terrier sitting in the corner of the kitchen, watching her clean the grill.
Napoleon did not fully understand his current state of existence. He only knew that most people could not see him anymore. He vaguely remembered chasing a jackrabbit across a street and getting squashed by a pickup. He remembered floating over the flattened body of a dog that looked very much like him, but obviously couldn't be. Then there was the light. It called to him in a chorus of playful barks and howls. The glorious scent of raw hamburger and sausage drew him closer. His canine mind knew that on the other side of that light was a paradise of unending mountains of liver-flavored treats and things in constant need of being peed on and slow rabbits. Though not too slow. He drifted into the light, but something made him stop. The jackrabbit that had led him to his untimely demise sat by the road. A rabbit was a rabbit, and Napoleon decided that this one was not getting away so easily. He descended to earth, and the light disappeared. He didn't notice.
He caught his quarry though he quickly discovered there wasn't much his immaterial body could do to it. Still, it had been a good chase, and that was enough.
Loretta scraped at a stubborn greasy blob with a spatula. Grunting, she shifted her immense weight from one side to another. Her ample butt shook as she chipped away at her chore, one stubborn, brown fleck at a time.
Napoleon studied the trembling rear end. Cheeks tightened and unclenched rhythmically, much like a pair of sumo wrestlers struggling beneath a cotton tarp. The dance stopped just long enough for Loretta to wipe the sweat from her face and take a long drink from the soda beside her. Then it was back to work.
Napoleon could have watched her for hours. Since dying, he'd become something of a people watcher. They were fascinating creatures, and he had yet to understand much of anything they did, except for eating, mating, and relieving themselves. And even the way they did that last thing was odd. But not understanding humans made them all the more interesting. Of course, there were other interesting things besides people. Slimy, green tentacles slithering from beneath refrigerators for example.
The dog jumped to alert and bounded between the thing under the refrigerator and Loretta. He growled as the tentacles slipped forward. When that didn't work, he barked furiously in an effort to show he meant business and to alert her to the danger reaching for her ankles.
She just ignored him.
Finally, he snapped at the end of a tentacle. He didn't expect to actually bite it and was pleasantly surprised when his teeth connected.
Dogs, even ghostly ones, understood very little of the true workings of the universe. Less than even human beings, if such a thing can be possible. Napoleon didn't know that the thing under the refrigerator existed in a cross-dimensional state, simultaneously dwelling across two dozen or so planes of existence. And that one of those planes happened to be the ectoplasmic sphere, thus allowing ghosts to interact with the thing. He only knew that he could bite this, and so he bit harder. He sank his teeth in the squishy flesh. It tasted horrible, but it'd been a long time since he'd tasted anything, so he relished it.
The thing under the refrigerator squealed.
Loretta turned to see a mass of tentacles whipping about in a twisting dance. It lashed violently from side to side. Napoleon's jaws slipped loose, and he was sent flying into a wall with enough force to crack the spine of a material terrier. Napoleon just kept going, passing out of the kitchen.
The thing under the refrigerator rumbled. The rusty Frigidaire rocked to one side, nearly tipping over. Tentacles grayed and shimmered as if they might fade away. They probed the floor and felt along the counters. A limb snatched up a blender and tossed it away. It shattered against the floor.
Something about the thing under the refrigerator scared Loretta, and she had never been easily scared. Regular battles with the walking dead had only made her more stubborn. The thing was unpleasant to look at, a slithering, slimy mass of unnatural horror, but she'd seen worse. It wasn't the form of the thing that bothered her. It was the almost psychic realization that this thing, whatever the hell it was, was completely alien. As far beyond mortal comprehension as anything could be.
And just as she knew this without knowing, she knew that this was just a tiny piece of the thing. Its whole body would smother the Earth, and there was nothing the thing under the refrigerator wanted more than this.
"Not in my kitchen, you heathen demon."
Pushing away her terror, she grabbed a hanging cleaver and hacked at one of the writhing tendrils. The blade sliced through greenish, boneless flesh. The thing screeched. The bit of severed tentacle fell to the floor and burst into flame even as a new tip grew for its damaged limb.
"Damnation."
Something moved beneath the floor. The tile rose and fell in liquid waves. The cabinets opened all at once. More tentacles poked their way through the back of the cupboards that, by Loretta's reckoning, had become blackened portals to Hell. This was entirely wrong. Hell was a Candy Land compared to the dark void the thing hailed from. Eyes and tongues and bleeding orifices covered the tentacles in no particular pattern other than chaos. Boils grew and popped, dripping a thick, yellow syrup.
Loretta made her way to the kitchen door, mere feet away. She ducked and wove between the misshapen limbs. One got too close for comfort until she backed it off with a strike of her cleaver. She didn't know what to expect on the other side of the door. She half-expected a giant eye or swirling vortex of nothingness.
Instead, she found Duke. Napoleon stood by his side, though she didn't see the ghost.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"It's in the kitchen."
"What's in the kitchen?"
She struggled to put it in words. There was only one description that came to mind. "Some thing."
Napoleon hopped in front of the door, unleashing a hail of vicious barks. At least as vicious as a terrier was able to bark.
Duke guided her aside with a gentle hand and pushed open the door.
There was nothing there. Nothing but the kitchen, some open cupboards, a broken blender, and a slightly askew refrigerator.
"It was here. Under there. In there. And there. In the floor. Everywhere."
Duke and Loretta searched the room top to bottom. There wasn't a single tentacle or hell portal to be found.
"I saw it," she said.
"I believe you, but whatever it was, it's not here now."
"But where could it have gotten to?"
Duke shrugged. He had no answers.
The storeroom door opened slowly, and Earl emerged, sleepy-eyed and sluggish. It was the middle of the day. He should have been sleeping. It took a hell of a lot to get the un-dead up before dusk.
"We are in some serious shit, Duke."
Earl collapsed, sprawling across a counter. Duke checked him, but he was asleep again.
"Is he okay?" Loretta asked.
Duke tossed the thin vampire over his shoulder and returned him to his trunk.
"What did he mean?"
"We'll have to wait till he wakes up again to ask," Duke replied. "But I can tell you one thing. It ain't gonna be good news."
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Napoleon spotted a lingering tentacle behind the refrigerator. The swollen, purple eye on its tip and the dog engaged in a short staring contest. Napoleon snarled. The thing behind the refrigerator vanished into a shadow and back into the cosmic basement.
With a virile yip, the terrier trotted back to Duke's side.