Short story 29

“What’s the worst one you’ve seen?” Jacob asked, lying next to me with binoculars in hand. The young man had spent most of the trip moaning about the drizzly weather of mid-Wales, so it was good to hear him sound a little interested in the work.

“Hard to say,” I replied. “You know those big beach umbrellas?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw one of those get blown into a kid’s birthday party once. The old man goes up to pull the cord to stop it from knocking a few tables over and next thing he knows, its wrapped around him and he can’t get out. So his wife goes to help, and then a brother and a cousin…” I shrugged. “Mimics don’t normally get exposed to so many people. It would be like dropping a lion in an industrial meat packing factory.”

“What made it so bad?” he asked. “Did it just eat a lot of people?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “Six adults and three children. Thing is that mimic would have been lucky to get one meal a year naturally so… well, it ruptured. Whole thing just burst and it injured itself. By the time we got there we found it wounded in the pool, screaming like a banshee, while it fought against all that food it refused to let go. The kids were already half-way to soup but some of the adults were still alive and screaming. It was like watching slow cooked ribs fall apart under the fork.”

“I see why that’s bad,” he said, momentarily falling silent as he pictured the carnage for himself. “Are umbrellas common?”

“Anything that moves in the wind is a candidate because some mimics use the weather to change up their hunting grounds,” I said. “Of course it ain’t ever that simple. All we can do really is look at reports of missing people and follow up. They’re patient, that’s for sure.”

“Any as big as this fella,” he said, gesturing to the chapel on the plains below.

“I’ve heard rumours,” I replied. “From some of the old guard. Back when the world was bigger and there were less people to fill it. I guess it was easier for these things to hide back then. We have a few reports from old sailors about things may have been mimics. Shipwrecks that glittered with gold and the promise of loot. No one can say for sure. The information age has hit these things hard. And of course, we’ve hit them harder. But no, personally I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

“Fucking weird,” he muttered, eyes straining to pick out the faint hint of motion that drove the chapel forward. “Moves so slow you barely see it.”

“About that,” I said, “let’s get in for a closer look. I want to know more about how this thing locomotes.”

-

The ground was porous, like someone had gone over it with a thousand knitting needles, punching holes straight into the ground. Curious, I took a piece of thin wire filament out of my toolbox and unspooled it into one of the openings. When I pulled it back out, it measured six feet long.

“Well that explains the locomotion,” I said. “Reminds me of a starfish.”

My apprentice was stood behind me. I could feel him anxiously glaring at the chapel. He’d been nervous the whole time we were walking towards it.

“It’s stopped,” he whispered. “It’s… it’s looking right at us.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little creeped out by the way the building slowly rotated to face us. Maybe it was just the way the door and windows lined up, but I couldn’t help but see its façade as a face. Not an evil one, either. Just a stupid one, like the kind of face that sucks a mollusc out of its shell deep in the ocean - a mindless piece of evolution driven by hunger and nothing else. Minds like that don’t have malice. Resisting them or pleading with them is like begging the wind to change direction.

Slowly, the church began to advance.

“That isn’t right,” I grumbled, standing upright as I urgently began to put my things away.

“What’s it doing?” he asked.

“What do you think?” I snapped. “Its hunting us.”

“You said they were ambush predators!” he cried. “You said they’d never actively hunt a person. That I’d have to be an idiot to get caught once I knew what it was!”

“Shut up and get me the duffel bag with a blue tag,” I told him. “This isn’t the time to argue.”

The boy walked backwards, refusing to take his eyes off the building.

“For fuck’s sake Jacob!” I cried. “It doesn’t go over half a mile an hour, turn around and look properly!”

You could tell he wasn’t happy, but he did as I said. A few moments later he returned with the bag and I rifled through it to get a hold of what I wanted.

A hand grenade.

“Will that kill it?” he asked.

“Mimics are usually soft on the inside,” I said. “But honestly? I don’t know. Never killed a building before.”

I pulled the pin, let the spoon flick loose, and tossed the grenade straight through the open door of the chapel. Five seconds – I counted them out. But nothing happened. Nothing changed. I’d expected a muted thump, or perhaps something even worse, something gorier, but there was no noise at all and I found that fairly unnerving. The only change was that the chapel finally stopped advancing.

“Is it hurt?”

“If the grenades went off, it has to be hurt,” I said. “Then again… does it look hurt?”

The building rotated ninety degrees and began to grind slowly away from us. Behind me, Jacob began to whoop and cheer with joy.

“Take that!” he cried.

But I didn’t feel so confident.

-

It was unlikely we would lose the chapel and have to find it all over again. The desert of Wales describes an enormous expanse of arid stony land, unsuitable for anything except grazing. It wasn’t a literal desert (if anything it never stopped raining), there just wasn’t much around to see or do outside of a few lonely buildings and abandoned quarries. Most plant life consisted of hardy lichens and fuzzy moss along with dense thickets of bristling grass. It was hilly, for sure, but I didn’t think we had to worry about a building sneaking up on us, so I didn’t bother giving chase once the chapel moved away. Instead I sent us walking North to a nearby campsite where a few hikers had first reported it eating all of their friends.

Jacob was less inquisitive now. He hadn’t liked seeing the chapel up close and, truth be told, neither did I. Most mimics I’d encountered were small. Estimates from other field agents like myself had them as typically no larger than 12kg, subsisting on rats and mice and other vermin. They might nab a child here and there, and sometimes we’d get a real doozy like a carnivorous closet in some ancient BnB. But the tabletop game image of mimics was desperately overblown and I’d never personally laid eyes on anything like that chapel slowly grinding its way towards us. Mimics weren’t animals, and they weren’t plants either… to see one move around like that…

I didn’t like it.

The campsite, once we reached it, sure as shit didn’t help. When I’d heard about the hikers I figured they were tricked into going inside the building but the broken tents and pulped remains told us otherwise. At least two people had been crushed during the night… I could see that clearly from the collection of canvas and pureed flesh that lay on the outskirts of the site. They were the first victims, I’d been told. Just like the tracks I’d seen before, their deaths had been achieved with what looked like thousands of knitting needles punching through rock and soil – and in this case, bone and muscle and fat and skin. They must have been sleeping, I decided, when the chapel simply rolled over them with glacial slowness.

As for the others? That wasn’t so simple. Tents were slashed and pulled apart. Bones, still pink and wet, lay scattered around the fire. This looked more like the work of a pack of dogs than a mimic, who usually left little behind except for bleached bones so clean you could mistake them for some kind of museum display.

“They must’ve tried to help each other,” I said as I counted out the fifth ribcage. “Like that story I told you about. That’s the only way I’ve seen mimics rack up this kind of body count. They trap one guy and his friends come to help and it just… it just escalates. Most of them inject digestive enzymes like an arachnid, sometimes that includes a few basic poisons that act on the nervous system. That could account for it, maybe?”

Jacob didn’t respond, at least not to my question. I stayed crouched where I was for a few more minutes, staring at the carnage, before he spoke up.

“It crushed their skulls.”

“What?”

“Look,” he replied, holding up a pile of bone chips in his cupped hands. Slowly, he let them all fall through the cracks in his fingers like sand until a few larger pieces remained. He took one and passed it over and I instantly recognised the bridge of a nose. “They’re all here. It crushed them… practically ground them into powder. All in one place as well. It’s almost ritualistic.”

“No it’s not,” I replied. “Mimics don’t do that. They don’t think and they sure-as-shit don’t do rituals.”

“So how do they know what to imitate?”

“Come on,” I snapped. “Let’s get back to the car.”

-

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, and I could tell he’d been working up the courage to challenge me on this for the last hour of the hike.

“What question?”

“How do mimics know what to imitate?” he asked.

“Well… they don’t reproduce, if that’s what you mean.”

“What do you mean they don’t reproduce?”

“They don’t fuck. They don’t lay eggs. They don’t even grow or gain weight after feeding. They’re not animals so they don’t reproduce. On top of that, we have records of things that weren’t mimics becoming mimics,” I replied. “A car, for one. There was a closet in the London Natural History Museum that was most definitely not a mimic on the 9th July 1991, but which still proceeded to eat three janitors by the 13th of August that same year.”

There was a brief moment of silence before Jacob’s voice suddenly rang out across the wind-swept plain.

“What!?” he cried. “Are you telling me these things just… just appear?”

“Don’t know,” I shrugged. “Not my job to know. That’s a different department. But… but yeah. Things, everyday things can, apparently, just turn into mimics.”

“So like what? My backpack could become a mimic? At any time?”

“Maybe?” I replied. “What you should be worried about is so can your dog. So can you. It’s rare, but it can happen. Sometimes they don’t even know. It just… boom. It just happens. You wake up and your wife isn’t there and you don’t know why, but you suddenly have a funny looking scare on your chest and your tummy won’t stop rumbling. I think we have three in containment at the moment.

This time Jacob didn’t respond. We walked the rest of the trail in silence while he wrestled with the implication of what he’d just learned. There is, at any time, probably less than fifty mimics in existence but once you realise that there’s nothing stopping one from popping up in your cereal box, or taking over your car or your bed… yeah, it can get a little tough to sleep at night. Maybe I shouldn’t have dropped it on him like that, but my own nerves were playing up something awful out on that stony trail and I just wanted peace and quiet. Already the sun was starting to dip and the sky was full of greying clouds. We’d enjoyed some fairly decent weather so far but now it looked like our luck was running out and for some reason, I didn’t much fancy seeing that damned church coming at us while hidden behind the night and a slate of grey drizzle.

Instead I focused on settling down for the night in that kitschy little bed and breakfast we’d scouted on our way up. Sure, we had a long drive ahead of us but I was thankful the walking part of the day was over.

Oh how wrong I was.

At first I thought we’d reached the wrong patch of gravel because, as I crested the hill, I quickly noticed that there was no sign of my car’s roof. But no, I realised, the trail was recognisable. That tree in the distance was the same one I’d made a note of when we parked up… Has the car been stolen? I wondered incredulously. Surely not in a place so remote?

As my legs carried me further and the rest of the lot came into view I soon realised the answer was somehow even stranger.

My car had been crushed flat. Pulverised, might be the better word. It looked more like a stain on the ground than a four tonne pickup truck. A better account would be to say that it had been picked apart by a thousand tiny ice picks until its footprint was nearly as big as an eighteen wheeler. It was so bizarre that Jacob looked down at it for a few moments before asking,

“Where’s the truck?”

“That clever fuck…” I muttered, not quite sure of how to answer. Not that I needed to. Jacob put two and two together from just looking at it for long enough.

“No no no,” he said. “You told me they aren’t smart! Ambush predators,” he cried. “Fucking ambush predators! That’s what you told me!”

“Get it together!” I snapped. “Did you think every job was a walk in the fucking park!?”

I hoped the stern treatment would whip some sense into the boy, but it didn’t work. Instead of calming down, Jacob began to cry and swear and shout all sorts of abuse at me and the agency before falling over himself and landing on his arse, tears brimming in his red-rimmed eyes. For a second there I wanted to slap him, but that was when I realised he’d stopped all noise and taken to staring right past me.

I turned and saw the chapel about fifty feet behind us and my skin crawled with disgust to see it so close. It’s motion was so silent as to be a whisper and my brain rebelled at the idea that this thing was looming larger and larger. But there was no denying the sight whether it made any sense or not.

I grabbed Jacob by the collar and hauled him to his feet, even as he sobbed. Thankfully, he reflexively latched onto the bags I stuffed into his arms while I pulled out a map and took a look for the nearest sign of civilisation. It was odd, but even with that chapel going no faster than a yard every few thirty seconds, I could feel it like an itching on the back of my neck. Something about a ticking clock can make even the simplest tasks difficult, and I had to struggle to keep my concentration as I figured out our position and drew a straight line to a nearby farmhouse.

“Come on,” I said, tugging at Jacob’s arm so he would turn from the chapel and start to follow. “It’s Wales, not Siberia. We can make it out of here, walk the whole way to the nearest town if we have to.”

Jacob, having finally calmed, cast a glance over his shoulder and shuddered. I already knew what he was thinking, even if never said it.

No one wanted to walk that far with that thing coming up on our tail.

-

“Where does it go?”
The sun was down and we had no choice but to set up camp in an open field. Part of me wanted to hide, to march to the nearest bit of woodland off in the distance and find a hole in the ground to stay out of sight. But I knew damn well that was a bad idea. Our best hope was to keep an eye on this thing, and at its current rate of travel and the two mile gap we’d put between us and it, I figured we had about four hours before we needed to get going again.

And I was going to make sure we could keep our eyes on it for every second of that time. Or at least one of us would. We both needed to sleep, Jacob especially. So for now, having settled down by a small fire with very little cover, I told the boy to catch some shut eye while I watched.

“Where does it go?” he repeated, and I tore my eyes away from the horizon to look back at him. “They don’t reproduce. They don’t grow. But you can’t destroy matter, right? So all the stuff they eat, where does it go? Like that umbrella you told me about. What was it going to do with all those people?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “If it hadn’t pushed itself and gotten greedy it would’ve probably just dissolved its first catch and, at some point later, shit out a caustic white substance that weighs a fraction of the original meal. That’s all that would have remained. But as for the rest of it? We don’t know,” I said. “Come on. You have to at least try to get some sleep.”

“It’s fucking freezing,” he whined, pulling his coat closer around his chest and neck. “I’d give anything for a tent.”

I almost told him that it hadn’t done the hikers much good, but I stopped myself. It would have only freaked him out and besides, I watched him take my advice and close his eyes.

When I looked back the chapel had disappeared. For a second there it made the breath catch in my throat, but the shock didn’t stick around for long. I’d known for a while now that the chapel wasn’t a simple thing. It had cut ahead of us all the way to the car and trashed it. That was the kind of tricky behaviour you wouldn’t even expect from an apex predator like a bear or a mountain lion. I didn’t much like it, but I started to wonder if this thing was going to get the better of us.

Knowing what I did about mimics and how they fed, the thought of this thing catching us didn’t make me feel like relaxing one little bit.

I found myself hoping Jacob made it through all this. He’d asked a pretty astute question back there. Where does it go? I hadn’t lied, either. We didn’t know. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t guess and oh boy, the guys at the agency had guessed galore. The longest running theory was that we just didn’t see mimics reproduce but like a bad excuse, that was starting to fray the longer we held onto it. Ninety years and counting and not one example of a mimic being born in lab conditions? Of us even finding the slightest evidence of that behaviour out in the wild? A nest? Some eggs? Anything!? And why the hell didn’t they weigh more after feeding? The more we documented them and the more we learned, the more elaborate the scientists had to become in explaining it all.

The second theory, the newest and what was soon becoming the most popular, was some kind of infection or fungus or something. We’ve dissected enough of these things to learn a thing or two. Hell, the boss back at HQ has a vivisected mimic-pencil sharpener preserved in amber as a desk ornament. It’s pretty neat. And what these dissections show is that mimics keep a lot of the original object. They splice nervous systems and strange discombobulated muscular fibres onto hard inanimate structures and somehow it just works. As to why they seem to pick the right objects at the right time? Maybe they don’t. Maybe this shit’s everywhere and it just needs the right conditions to flourish. Maybe your computer mouse is trying to turn into a deadly predator but it just can’t because every time you use it, it agitates all those little microbial construction workers and it all comes falling apart.

But the smarter amongst you will realise this still doesn’t answer Jacob’s question. It might be the how, but it doesn’t really do the why. I mean, after all, where does it go? They don’t have stomachs. Not really. They’re like arachnids. They suck this stuff up and it just… goes.

Somewhere.

We think.

There’s one more theory. People don’t talk about it, not even in the agency, but I think push come to shove, just about any field agent worth his salt would admit to it being the most likely explanation. The scientist who came up with it disowned his own theory just a few days after first posting it to the message boards but I always suspected it wasn’t because he thought it was naff. He just didn’t like it being tied to his name. Can’t say I blame him either.

Anyway, he posited that mimics aren’t separate organisms at all. That they’re a projection of something. The reason why they pick specific objects is because there is an intelligence behind them, behind all of them as a matter of fact. They aren’t independent organisms, they’re more like proboscises attached to a single source. That’s why we can’t find where the digested food goes, he says. It’s getting sucked out of the physical world in front of us and redirected somewhere else.

The thought of every mimic ever caught being nothing more than a tentacle belonging to some unseen force, it fit a lot of facts but it sure as shit didn’t make that scientist any friends. The implication that this thing is intelligent, that it has some kind of memory and might remember us agents, what we do… We don’t talk about it much.

No one likes to think these things might be able to hold a grudge.

-

When I awoke it was to the sound of Jacob screaming and for a few brief seconds, I expected to see blood splashed across the floor. It just made sense to me that that kind of gut wrenching squeal would come with a great big helping of blood and broken bones. Instead, when I opened my eyes and scanned the horizon, I was greeted with an even bigger shock.

The chapel was about thirty feet away.

I threw myself onto my feet and suppressed the feeling of revulsion that swept over me. Letting that thing get so close… God I felt like I’d woken up to a big fat hairy tarantula crawling right towards my mouth. All I had to survive were my wits and my senses and I’d practically thrown both away by letting myself fall asleep without first waking Jacob to stay on watch. Still, no use giving into hysteria, I decided. I stood where I was and caught my breath and calmed down, even as the chapel continued to grind towards us.

Up close that thing was almost grotesque. I don’t know how to put it except that it was messy. The thatch roof was frayed and peeling, and every white-washed brick looked somehow misplaced. The building itself was easily four hundred years old and must have predated silly ideas like blue prints and architecture. It was surely cobbled together piecemeal by rural villagers centuries ago until some other force had animated it. Its many arching windows reminded me of the clustered black eyes of a spider, lacking any sign of symmetry and intelligent thought. It was stupid but it really did make me think of something pulled outta the ocean trenches, like a venomous little anemone. Even as I looked, up close at last, I could see the slightest hint of pulsating webbing behind the dusty stained glass. Veins, perhaps, used to pump blood around this impossible creature.

Behind me, Jacob was hyperventilating but at least his crying had stopped. Without me telling him, he started to reach down and grab his bags off the floor, which was good. As much of a disaster as this trip was turning out to be, at least he’d bounced back after his first freak out.

“Throw me that bag,” I said, pointing to the duffel he held in his hand. He did and I reached in to take out yet another grenade.

This time the chapel did not stop. I considered throwing the explosive any way, trying to hurl it straight through one of the windows now the door was shut. But our supplies weren’t infinite. And it’s not like it made a difference last time.

“I don’t understand,” Jacob cried. “It stopped last time! It was scared! What’s changed?”

“I don’t think it was ever scared,” I said, snatching my things up from the floor as the chapel came closer with every second. “We might be able to keep ahead of it now, but it’s a long hike to the nearest farmhouse.

“Come on,” I added sternly. “If we’re quick, we’ll get there before nightfall.”

-

“Jacob,” I said, nudging him with my elbow and gesturing to the nearby cliff. The stepped rocks made for a surface that was close to vertical, but which could easily be clambered over, one by one, by a person without any gear. “What do you think?”

He glanced over at the chapel that trailed relentlessly behind us. It had not stopped for three hours and neither had we, and while we could not be sure of exact measurements, I was certain that slowly, maybe at no more than an inch per hour, the distance was closing.

“I feel like I need a break, even if just for a few minutes, to clear my head. If it forces that thing to reroute and buy us time to catch our breath, it’s worth it,” he replied.

“I agree,” I said, stepping off the trail and heading towards the cliff. Both Jacob and the chapel followed.

Any other time in my life and I would have looked at a series of five foot climbs as nothing to worry about. Scaling fences and gates is part of the job, and while I’m hardly an athlete, I’m not out of shape either. But something about stopping to gauge the distance, and then awkwardly pushing myself up one elbow at a time… slowing down felt risky, and coming to a complete stop to climb a vertical distance felt outright crazy. I just had to hope it would all pay off in the end.

Jacob caught up with me quick enough on the first little step. Without taking even so much as a breath, we both grabbed a hold of the next ledge and began to haul ourselves up. By that point I was sweating and very clearly out of breath, and Jacob wasn’t faring much better, but we’d already climbed a good distance and I couldn’t resist the urge to look back and see how the chapel would handle our diversion.

I wished I hadn’t.

The chapel didn’t even slow. It scaled the first step as easily as it moved across open terrain. How it did it, I can’t be sure. It lumbered the front of itself up at a 45 degree angle, and then slowly went all the way vertical. Unlike us, it did not stop at each ledge. The flat surface was too small to factor in for something that size. And unlike us, it didn’t seem to find fighting gravity remotely difficult.

For a moment there, I caught sight of its underneath and glimpsed a crawling mass of spidery legs that writhed over each other in an impossible swirl of glistening black. It repulsed me, like watching a starfish’s thousand little suckers grope and fumble for purchase on a glass tank. Unlike Jacob, who had responded instantly to the chapel, I faltered as the thought of falling into that hive of clicking shapes paralysed me with disgust. It didn’t last long, but every foot of distance mattered. Our plan had backfired, badly. The chapel had no issue with vertical surfaces whereas we did. We had stumbled into one of the few scenarios where, if we weren’t quick, that thing would quickly run us down.

“Get your fucking ass going!” Jacob cried, and I snapped out of my mortal panic and rushed over to the next ledge. Without giving it too much thought, I threw my backpack away along with any other supplies I carried, and dragged myself up and over the stony outcrop. I was barely on my feet when I heard the sound of my belongings being crushed. I only had one last ledge to go, and already Jacob was at the top of it all, reaching down to help. Fighting the urge to look back one more time I ran and jumped and went to grab his forearm. My hand clasped firmly around his wrist, and together we began to haul me up while my feet scrabbled for purchase on the stone. Along the way, my toes slid into a crevasse and while it helped me push a little farther, it was uneven and my foot slid too far down into the wedge. To my horror, when I tried to tug it free, it wouldn’t come.

“I’m stuck,” I cried, surprised to hear myself sound so afraid.

Jacob knew what to do. Both hands wrapped around my arm, he pulled with all his strength and I gave it everything I had. We both understood the situation implicitly – it was better to tear my damn foot off than let it slow us down by even a single second.

It came free in the end, but not without injury. As I rolled over the final ledge and tried to crawl back up onto my feet, I saw that I had lost a shoe and most of the skin along my ankle.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” I hissed, tentatively reaching out to touch it. It needed dressing. It needed wrapping. It needed disinfecting. Do we have ice? I wondered, before suddenly realising I was in shock and thinking stupid things.

Thankfully, Jacob put one arm under my shoulder and was already hobbling me along before the chapel crawled over the final outcrop, righting itself with a thunderous crash. After a few steps I found my foot could bear a little weight, and so I began to hop away on my own. I had to ignore the terrified expression on Jacob’s face when he looked back on me and the chapel from up ahead. He didn’t even have to say it. I knew it as well as he did.

The chapel had closed over half the distance.

-

“I’m getting too old for this,” I said as I limped along, breath ragged as I fought to keep pace with Jacob.

“You’re not even forty,” he grumbled.

“Yeah but every fuck up made so far has been made by me,” I hissed. “The cliff. Falling asleep on watch…”

“You said the others weren’t like this.”

“They’re not,” I said. “Not even close. If…” If you get out of here alive. I stopped myself from saying it but the damage was done. The silence between us hung heavy for long enough to let me know Jacob had absorbed that one little word and all its hidden meanings. “Look,” I said. “You don’t need to worry about the job when you get out. There ain’t nothing out there that’ll bother you after this. You’ll still need supervision but you can rest assured you’re personally up to the task.”

“So you’ll give me a good reference?”

“Fuck yes,” I said. “Best of the best.”

I wanted to broach the topic of how Jacob would contact the agency on his own. What passcodes to use. What names to ask for. But I could see he was still stressed, so I didn’t push it. As it was, Jacob kept drifting ahead of me. Sure, I was putting in a good effort but at best I was only delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later I’d be caught, and it’d be best if the guy knew how to make arrangements all on his own.

“Do you still have that grenade?” Jacob asked.

Surprisingly, I did, having returned it to my pocket and not my bag. Probably not the smartest thing to do, I figured, but then again I might just prefer having a nasty accident instead of falling under that monster’s tread.

“Yeah,” I said. “But it ain’t gonna work, you know that don’t you? Whatever’s in those doors, we can’t touch it.”

“I’m not thinking about the doors.”

Jacob gestured to another rocky hill in the distance.

“Another cliff,” he said. “This one we’d have to go down. I know that thing went up nice and easy but… I mean, it must be unstable going down one, right?”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that thing has vulnerable than when it’s sliding down rock at a near ninety-degree angle. We just need something to pry it loose.”

-

Going down a set of stepped cliffs was no easy feat with my bad ankle, but my urgency was such that I didn’t mind basically falling the several feet down each one and landing on my hands and knees. It hurt like hell, and on the second one I knocked my head so hard I wanted to roll over and be sick. But it was better than the alternative, and even as I fumbled to reach the third, the chapel crested the highest ledge and its shadow fell across me.

“You ready for this?” Jacob asked. He was stood up, grenade in hand, having waited anxiously for me to catch up two ledges down. “You said five seconds, right?”

“Yeah I’m ready,” I said, like I was somehow impressive. My part in the plan involved crawling as hard and as fast as I could down each rocky step while hoping to hell I didn’t kill myself. It was Jacob who had to wait until the chapel was as close as possible before plopping the live explosive on the shelf above and legging it just like me, hopefully avoiding any injury. Truth be told, calling it a ‘plan’ might have been a little generous. But you have to understand, we hadn’t been able to stop or even think for more than a few seconds at a time.

The chapel came onwards, and as soon as I heard the flick of the pin, I began to move, lowering myself feet first while I anxiously counted to five in my head. Soon enough Jacob followed after me and, to my amazement, grabbed my collar with one hand and hauled me alongside with him. It was an incredible feat of strength, even if I wound up breaking three ribs and a fair few fingers as we both basically underwent a controlled fall. I can’t say how far we got, or whether we were protected by the rocks or distance, or what. But after what felt like a painful eternity, there was a muffled thump and we both looked up to see the chapel leaning forward at a strange angle.

“Shit.”

I think it was me who said it. From the looks of it, the plan had worked, and the enormous building had lost whatever grip it had on the stone and was now beginning a head-first plunge down the jagged rock face. But we had neglected to consider that we were right in the damn thing’s path.

I considered tucking myself into the rocky outcropping and hoping that the building would roll right over me without harm, but even just a fleeting glimpse of its blackened limbs flailing around in a desperate hope for purchase made me think otherwise. I could easily imagine those needle sharp proboscises snagging my skin and dragging me down with it. Jacob, however, came through. He never stopped pulling me by the collar and in the end he threw me sideways. I say throw, it was more like a tumble off to the side. But I don’t think you can appreciate how hard it must have been for him to do. He saved my life in that moment, getting me out of the way so that the chapel went tumbling past leaving us both unharmed.

By the time the dust cleared we were both left bleeding and bruised half-way down the rocky steps, looking at the chapel as it lay on its back squirming like a horse-show crab stuck in the sun. It had millions of limbs buried under that floorboard, most as wide as needles, some as thick as a thumb. Where they came from or how they were organised, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t even like looking at them. They made my skin crawl. Still, I began to laugh as we stared at it trying to rock itself back upright, smashing its roof and walls to bits. If it kept at it, it would soon kill itself without any help from us.

Jacob started to cheer and this time I decided to join in.

-

We made our way down the cliff, and by the time we reached the bottom the chapel had stopped rocking and some of its legs had started to wither. I’d never seen anything like it, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that the mimic had decided to abandon the chapel entirely. I watched as it slowly withdrew its legs back inside the floorboards and out of sight, and I had the sense we were watching this thing accept its final defeat.

“Fucking hell,” Jacob cried, stepping forward as he strained to pick out the strange sounds coming from behind the glass. “I think it’s dying?”

“That or going back where it came from,” I said, soon expecting a flurry of questions. Jacob was definitely curious, and this time I’d have no problem sharing all my thoughts with him.

Only the questions never came. When I finally made eye contact with Jacob he was looking paler than ever with eyes as wide as marbles. By the time I saw the pulsating web of flesh that crept around the back of his head, slowly flowing around his ears like melting silly putty, it was too late. There was a sound like a rubber band snapping and he was snatched backwards, hurtling through the open door of the chapel like a sideways bungee jumper.

He’d been grabbed from over a hundred feet away.

Whatever had happened, it was the mimic’s final act. As the door slammed shut, it folded the last of its legs up into its insides and all movement ceased. It was, and of this I’m incredibly sure, an act of spite. One that not only shocked me with fear, but left me feeling like my chest was going to crumple in on itself. I hadn’t liked Jacob much at the start, but I would’ve been dead long ago without him. And he’d shown himself to have great potential. I’d already begun planning how I would help him rapidly rise through the ranks of the agency. With any luck, he’d have a career that lasted decades and took him right to the top.

All of that was gone in less than a second.

Despite knowing him for less than a week, I’m not ashamed to say I cried.

-

The chapel was brick and mortar by the time I returned with help. We traced it to some abandoned village years ago and the researchers would go on to spend months pouring over its tracks and hunting habits. Most of the evidence came from my first hand account, and so I was taken out of field duty for well over a year while being asked the same questions over and over again by slightly different people. It’s weird to say, but I was celebrated. Jacob was awarded some posthumous medal and his parents fed the usual bullshit story about some kind of gas leak. I made sure they rigged the story so it looked like he died doing something heroic, shutting down some valve before it blew up a few residential houses. Still, it didn’t sit right with me that the true nature of what he did would never be known. Maybe that’s why I’m posting this… I’m not sure.

Since the chapel I’ve been trying to get the agency to formalise the idea that these things can be intelligent. From there, I hope I might even be able to get them to acknowledge that there’s even more to it than that. A lot of fuss was made over the mimic withdrawing, but it was treated as a kind of spontaneous death. I’m not convinced. It was like it went slithering back to where it came from, and what worries me is that I think it took Jacob with it.

Possibly even alive...

I only tried once to go back into the field. My partner—an experienced guy like myself—made sure it was only a little job. Apparently some grad students were complaining about missing specimens in their secure pathology labs. We quickly traced it to one of the tunnels in the rat’s habitat – the kinda thing no traditional scientist would ever even consider looking at. But we knew. One glimpse at it and the powdery white discharge all around it let us know.

A simple job.

Easy too.

But it was the note I found, lying down in the matted saw dust and shit that’s stayed with me. The handwriting was desperate, but I recognised it as Jacob’s nonetheless.

It’s not eating our flesh, it read. But it still hurts so bad.