Monsters Attract Monsters

He slammed the car door shut as fast as he could.

Shoving his hand inside his pocket; he scrambled for the keys and then produced them a second later. His hands were shaking as he tried to insert the key into the ignition causing him to jab the surrounding metal around the hole scratching it ever so lightly. One last jab caused the keys to slip from his hand. He tried to catch them mid-fall ducking but slammed his head against the dashboard.

“Scheisse!” He swore.

Frantically he managed to scoop the keys up off the floor and this time got them into the ignition without a second failure.

The car, a sleek golden thing, burst out of the carport, It’s engine roaring like monster with his foot pressed flat against the pedal.

“Scheisse! Scheisse! Scheisse!!” He kept repeating.

There was the sound of thunder and glass shattering as the ground beneath the car shook violently causing him to lose control. He swerved yet daring to look back at the monstrosity emerging from the enormous hole it had made in the mansion. His families mansion. A three century old piece of architecture now to be abandon by it’s last rightful owner to the mercy of whatever the portal had let out. Stone and glass rained down causing a greyish dust to settle in the air.

The monster looked like a crab if a crab had bred with something from the blackest depths of the ocean. It’s many legs spiked and black; coated with a shiny substance like oil except that it consumed all light. It had two white shining(and yet not shining) eyes scanning the area before they settled on him. His heart stopped for only a second.
(1)

It had been a simple premise in the beginning. Discover new technology. Gain advantage over the enemies. Win the war.

Other divisions had been placed over new experimental designs of war planes, weapons and human experimentation among other such things.

He had the fortune to have been given the duty of developing what could have been a quick win to this massive, now globular war. Teleportation.

The earlier attempts were like throwing a dart in darkness with a target so far away, one could only admit it imaginary. Not him, his superiors would not accept failure. He would not accept failure. He would make the imaginary real, very real.

 At first he had no fruitful leads on how to even start. He tried injecting massive amounts of electricity into circular rings, rectangles and even triangles. Nothing worked. It seemed ridiculous, but what could he do? He varied the volts and size of the rings, he used every element at his disposal. He attempted creating teleportation rays but they did little but light up a dark room. One project included sound waves. Converting tangible mass into sound waves and then back into mass. That had been a messy failure. Many failures followed.

He poured over every scientific essay and documents that so much as hinted at anything to do with zero-time-space-travel. Nothing bred success of any sort as the essays of the educated and peer reviewed began to prove a waste of his time.

His superiors were starting to get impatient and believed the resources he wasted could have been put to better use elsewhere. He agreed but had no intention of voicing his failure. Failure was not an option.

(2)

Desperate, he eventually looked to science’s enigmatic father. Mysticism.

He poured over tomes which had been covered in dust for centuries from mad men claiming to have had conjured other worldly powers or some claiming mixing iron and bronze would produce gold while some claiming bringing people back from the dead by replacing their still and lifeless heart with that of a newborn babes. Nonsense, most of it any ways.

One book however held special interest to him. A book of numerology which talked about travelling between worlds using mathematics and a bit of alchemical theory.

Building the first Iron Ring had taken little to no time and smelting the runes had proven cost effective. It was not unlike his first tests with the electricity. He could almost slap himself with how close he had been at the very start. He had simply lacked the precise knowledge but he had been in the right area of thought.

The first experiments had been fruitful! The ring produced a greyish light and between the light was a green field covering in daisies only a couple miles away from the mansion. Further attempts had continued to be successful. Seeing into Traff Algar Square. The White House and even the streets of Moscow. All which had done so in the darkest hours(of the receptive points) to prevent the portal from being seen. The portal from the other side -or receptive point as he liked to call it- produced no light but still the image of a lab floating in the middle of the air would raise suspicions.
(3)

The brass had received the reports of success and ordered another Iron Wheel to be constructed.
This one not the size of car wheels that they had been testing but one the size of which would allow full battalions of troop transports to drive through followed by tanks. There were even talks of sky portals for the air fleet of Zeppelins. The Ministry of War had never been so excited.

The construction of the First Great Iron Wheel went very well.. until the test that is. The colonel who was supposed to be overseeing the operation finally appeared to show HIS glorious new addition to the German war effort.

They had no time to test the portal prior to the officials arriving. They were so excited they wanted to see the very first testing. The lab was filled with military officals and scientists awaiting the portals birth.

He gave the sign and one by one the twelve numbers lit up when the voltage was pumped into the metallic ring. Only when the twelfth number illuminate did anybody at the lab suddenly realise their fatal mistake.

Instead of the number III which represented Earth. The twelfth number on the Iron Wheel was II with the last two I’s which would have made it III being melded together, perhaps from the heat of the voltage having melted the shape. They had not tested this high a voltage yet but the size required it. It was too late to shut it down. The beast had been fed and the portal opened.

(4)

Instead of Berlin from which they had been ordered to open the portal to for this testing, this one opened into a black space that had a smell of decay. The foulness leaked through and flooded into the lab. So vile was it that some technicians threw up without hesitation. A dreadful cold followed that made him clutch his arms around himself. His breath gave off mist as did everyone else’s in the lab. Frost started to form around the Iron Wheel but the voltage didn’t stop. The technicians were still struggling to stop the power they were shouting at each other as 3 grown men were pulling a giant level down with all their might to no avail, It was frozen in place.

Silence broke the tension.

Sound drowned out from the world creating a peace unheard of. The representatives from the Ministry of War were shouting at the Colonel but no sound came from their mouths. The Colonel himself looked frightened.

Then there was light.

 Followed by chaos.

Lightning shot from inside the portal frying the simple bulbs which normally illuminated the laboratory. The only light left was the sudden flashes of white from the portal itself. Everyone was blinded by the sudden illumination and then the returning darkness which prevented eyes from adjusting.

Sound first returned to the world with thunder, then the screams accompanied with the sounds of flesh being torn apart.

Strange liquids rained down from the air causing him to run. He ran before his mind knew to react. His legs carried him mechanically. It didn’t matter, he knew this lab from heart and so did his feet. He had spent years in it; even before he began working for the Third Reich. He made it to the door, locked it behind him and never looked back. He ran from the terrible screams that emanated from behind it.

(5)

Metal crunched and wood snapped which told him that whatever came out of that portal would not yield to even a door reinforced with steel. His peers and superiors were all dead. He knew it. Only he had the chance to survive now.

The car jerked as he regained control. The iron gates of the mansion’s low brick walls were closed but he drove straight into them, ramming them apart. The car shuddered and swerved again nearly causing him to drive off the cliff leading up the mansion.

He did not know if that THING was still chasing him. He kept going as fast as the road curving up the mountain would allow him to. The car pulled into the final stretch before meeting to the villages road below.. He put his foot flat again gaining intense speed to put distance between himself and the mansion.

Then sound drained from the world once again as something white flashed before his eyes.

Everything happened so fast.

He tasted blood in his mouth. Not in any small amount either. He coughed out large globs of crimson onto the white snowy ground and opened his eyes. Beside him lay his car cut in half and on fire. He was at the base of the mountain in the forest surrounding it. Above the trees he could see atop the mountain to his ancestral home with the grey sky looming behind it. As whole as his car.

The mansion erupted once again as something -larger than the devil crab that had been chasing him had been- emerged from the volcano of iron and concrete. It looked like an albino shark. It floated across the sky as big as a submarine with dozens of teeth the size of fully grown men protruding from it’s reddish pink mouth.

(6)

He blinked and it was gone but above the dark green tree tops the not shining white eyes of his former pursuer had found him. Jumping to his feet, he felt a shooting pain in his left leg. He glimpsed down for only a second to see his pants ripped by the thigh and stained red. Regardless of the pain, he feared death more and began violently limping downhill ignoring how badly it hurt and the  further possible damage it caused.

The thing knew where he was. He could hear it easily displacing trees in it’s way, ripping them up from the roots or cutting them in twain with it’s sharp spiky legs. It was quickly catching up to him.

Just as he finally managed to reach the outskirts of the village did his left leg give out causing him to fall to the floor. He had no energy left as the sombre crustacean finally stood above him. He felt in his pockets as he looked up into it’s white eyes and pulled out a cross. He said a short final prayer and just as he finished one of the elongated legs pierced through his chest sending blood flying around his body. The creature retracted it’s leg mechanically, crimson red dripped down the tip of it onto the snow. It had done it’s duty and continued onwards towards the village.

Lighting cracked the sky as a grey snow gently floated down; slowly burying his bloodied body in ash.

(7)