"I'll make sure it's at a good one hundred degrees," she assured him with a solemn face. He laughed, bent down and planted a light kiss on her forehead.
"I gotta get ready for work now, but you can do anything you want while I'm gone."
"Anything?" she mused to herself. Amanda tapped a finger on her chin and innocently let slip the covers into her lap.
Tony had half a mind to jump into bed, but the clock was ticking. He hurried out of the room before he ignored the clock's wise advice, and left Amanda smirking on the bed. She decided getting up was a good idea for her, too, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The young woman winced when her sore muscles protested the quick movement. She rubbed her stiff shoulders. The creature had done a number on her last night. She went to take a shower while Tony breakfasted and put on his usual leisurely suit without a tie. Before he left his room for the final dash to the office, Tony remembered to bookmark and close down the window tabs. Amanda would be bored enough to come into here and search the tubes, and he didn't want her to get any wrong ideas. For extra security, he even deleted his browsing history to cover up his tracks.
"All right, I'll probably see you at lunch," he told the young woman on the couch. She was fast flipping through the channels and finding there was nothing on.
"Did you want me to cook you anything?" Amanda called back. Tony paused at the door and glanced over to his kitchen.
"You'd probably have to go to the store. My cupboards are pretty empty of everything except cereal and canned soup."
"Like always," she teased, and she looked over her shoulder to give him a big grin. "But maybe I'll walk to the store and see if I can't pick us up some more variety of food, at least for dinner and lunch."
"Sounds great." Tony glanced at his watch and cursed himself. He was late. "See ya!"
"Bye."
The door closed behind him and Amanda carefully listened for the sound of his footsteps to disappear down the hall. When she was sure the coast was clear, she got up off the couch and made her way directly to Tony's bedroom. She seated herself in his chair, brought up his browser and was disappointed to find all his security measures were in place. Unfortunately for him, however, she knew him too well to believe he wouldn't leave some bookmarks to use later. She also knew how to manage a browser much better than her boyfriend.
Amanda opened the bookmarks window in the browser, and saw what she was looking for. The sort-by option. She sorted by the most recently modified and in less than a second she had all the pages he had bookmarked regarding those old newspaper articles. Then she got to work using her own notepad to investigate his investigation, and find the answers to her questions about this hideous creature.
Her eyes browsed over the dozens of pages looking for keywords she had written down on the notepad. Missing. Shadows. Noises. The floor. All those were in her focus, and she was not disappointed in her search. The articles were full of such goings-on, much more than the old gentleman at the gas station had intimated. She shuddered at the lurid descriptions of vanished hikers and sightings of dark shadows. One visiting explorer had even been found naked and disoriented several miles away from the cabin. He raved for several days about the creature beneath the earth and other such terrifying warnings. In between his fits of madness were brief periods of lucidity, and it was at these times where the story was pieces together.
By the man's own account, he had sought shelter from the night in the hunting cabin. Alone and with only a flashlight to give him comfort, he had bedded down for some rest on the floor. After an unknown time, the man had been awakened by a strange, unfamiliar noise. He recalled sitting up and listening while a soft noise of shifting dirt grew louder and louder. The man had taken up the flashlight for protection, but nothing prepared him for the sight he beheld. It was that of a long, dark snake which slithered forth from the boards surrounding him.
Unhinged by his fear and instincts to flee, the lone hiker admitted he had no recollections after that. The next he'd known was his feet swiftly taking him from that cabin. In the interval his clothes had been torn and he held his now-broken flashlight. Though he was without memories, there remained with him an an overpowering sense of dread. Then, according to the newspaper article, the stranger had fallen back into his madness.
Amanda paused in her reading, and ran a hand through her thick hair. She could very well relate to such dangers, and wondered about contacting the gentleman. The article itself was twenty years old, so that would be possible to meet and ask him a few questions. Unfortunately, as she continued on to the end of the article there proved to be one very important fact she had not yet learned. The man had been consumed by his insanity, and he committed suicide several days after being found.
The young woman leaned back in her chair, stunned at the surprise finish to such a strange and frightening tale. The description and attack of the monster mirrored her own experiences, and she wondered, not without foundation, if such an end awaited her. A cold chill went up her spine as she was reminded of the creature's appearances to her. The first had been as terrifying as the man had related, but the one from last night had been quite different. The creature had seduced her in a much less forward manner, and she had fallen to its advances with greater speed. She couldn't help but ponder if the next encounter would follow with her breakdown, and she would end up the same as the hiker.
"Come on, old girl, get yourself together," she tried to rally her spirits. She had to take courage in the fact that she still had her mental faculties intact, and the monster had shown no signs of causing her any physical harm beyond some sore muscles. "Just gotta focus on this stuff and then maybe it'll go away."
Amanda resumed her research and tried to keep herself from becoming disheartened by the accounts. She was so distracted by her perusing that she didn't notice the hours march passed her. The world moved on while she sat there searching through the online articles. After a particularly long newspaper clipping about a pair of missing hikers, she absently she checked the time on the computer.
Much was Amanda's surprise when she found the time to be eleven. There was only an hour before Tony returned for lunch, and she had nothing to present to him for a meal. She cleaned up the browsing history, thankful she, too, could hide her tracks from his less computer-savvy eye, and then dashed out of the room. She did a quick browse of the cupboards and confirmed what Tony had earlier told her. There was hardly enough food to feed one person, much less two. That certainly explained why he'd offered takeout as a meal option.
There was nothing she could do with the few boxes of cereal and hard bread, so Amanda opted for a store run. She had her purse with her and plenty of money to buy anything she wanted. However, she first needed something convenient to carry back the groceries, and she found her bag would be the perfect container. There was just the small problem of cleaning out the contents, which was easily done by dumping the whole lot of it onto her bed. Amanda was about to toss the bag over her back and be off when her eyes caught sight of something unusual laying on the sheets. She stooped down and grabbed the strange item, then held it up to her face.
It was a small rock, completely black with jagged edges all around its rectangular shape. By appearances the stone should have weighed at least a few pounds, but she found she could easily balance it atop the ends of three fingers. There was nothing particularly strange about the rock but for the unexplainable way it had wormed its way into her bag. She also couldn't recall seeing such rock anywhere along the trail.
Unfortunately inspection was for another time, as she was on a tight schedule to get to the grocery store and back. Then there would be the actual making of the food and having it all ready for when Tony came for lunch. She set the rock down on her nightstand and hurried out the front door. All the way down the sidewalk, weaving in and out of people, Amanda sought to make a list of food she could make for her boyfriend. She didn't notice she was talking aloud until she whispered out a wholly unrelated word in her re
ading of vegetables.
"Broccoli, spinach, rock-" Amanda stopped so abruptly that there was a small pileup behind her. She received her share of scowls from the people in the collision, but she didn't heed any of their mutterings regarding her rudeness. Rather, her mind was very much stuck on why she had spoken of that rock. Amanda couldn't understand what had made her thoughts conjure up the stone she had found. If she'd been listing off minerals instead of vegetables, she could have seen some connection, but not on her grocery list.
Amanda was jolted from her musings when someone brushed passed her. She realized she was standing there in the center of a busy sidewalk and earning a great amount of scrutiny. The young woman blushed under such stares, and dodged into the nearest alley. There was some relief in standing beneath the shade of two tall buildings and watching the swarm of humanity follow its path along the sidewalk.
This was the first time since the incident that she'd been out amongst so many people, and she found herself strangely ill-equipped to run with the crowd. The people passed by her in such a fluid movement of arms and legs that she was distinctly reminded of the fiend who stalked her nights. The mere thought of the creature excited her senses, and she found herself aglow with heat. The feel of those soft, strong arms wrapped around her writhing body. The motions as they pushed and pulled against one another, fighting for dominance in their passionate love-making.
Amanda pushed down those thoughts. They did her no good. She had to focus on finding some way of getting rid of the thing, not tempting herself with lustful needs toward it. She mingled back into the crowd and went on her way to the store. Her bag was filled with plenty of foodstuff for Tony to survive by himself for at least a week. For herself, she wondered if she didn't need to go back to her apartment the coming night after dinner. She wouldn't be able to stalk Tony's progress with his research, but she'd written enough down on her notepad—
Amanda stopped dead in her tracks in the store parking lot. In her hurry to get to the grocery store, she'd forgotten to hide the notepad which had her own notes. She hurriedly checked her watch and found she had about fifteen minutes before Tony got back to his apartment for lunch. It took her ten minutes of walking to get to the store. The time was close, but not impossible. She needed to get back there and hide that pad before he found it and started asking her a lot of uncomfortable questions.
The young woman quickened her steps and sped through the crowds. Her thoughts were consumed by the worry that Tony would surprise her by arriving early, and her snooping would be found out. At one point she absently buzzed by the alley where before she had stopped, and she happened to glance at a nearby shop window.
Then she froze. Her heart stopped beating. Her eyes grew large and frightened.
In a brief glimpse, just a sliver of a moment, Amanda swore she'd seen the creature hanging onto her back, those horrible tendrils clinging to the top of her bag. As though she were a madwoman, she wildly turned her head left and right to glimpse any signs of the thing. The creature was not to be seen. She felt no weight except for that of her bag. Her head whipped back to the display window. Nothing but her backpack was behind her. Her heart settled, but not her mind. She would have promised upon the graves of her parents that the thing had been there, peeking out from around the bag's straps.
Amanda stepped up to the glass and the noisy crowd around her disappeared into the background. There was only one focus, one thing that mattered. Slowly she reached up a hand and brushed her slender, quivering fingers against the cool window. There was nothing abnormal about the glass, but she feared something worse. She feared it was she who was now abnormal. That somehow, by the touch of that thing, there was something infinitely wrong with her. Perhaps the creature's toxins were driving her slowly to madness, an insanity as deep as the hole beneath the lonely cabin.
Then Amanda was bumped by a passerby, and she was jolted from her singularly dark reflections and fears. She glanced behind her and realized she was receiving many more stares from the crowd than on her last pass by this shop. Far off she could even glimpse a police vehicle, and inside the officer watched her with a careful eye. Her face ablaze with a heavy blush of embarrassment, she hurried on her way back to Tony's apartment.
Even with her short distraction, Amanda found the apartment empty. Tony had not yet returned. She put her bag on the counter and hurried into his room. The notepad was untouched beside the computer, and she quickly hurried it into her own bedroom. The pad was hidden beneath all the clothes she had tossed from her bag, and now she could finally breath a sigh of relief. That is, until she glimpsed the nightstand beside her bed.
The rock was gone.
Amanda blinked, sure she was seeing things again that were not true. However, her action didn't force the rock to reappear. The nightstand was still empty, and the rock still inexplicably missing. She went to work looking for the small stone, first by looking behind the small table and then underneath the bed. There was no sign of the rock anywhere. Amanda jumped in fright when she heard the apartment door suddenly open and a voice call out.
"Hello?" It was Tony come back from work. "Amanda?"
"I'm just in here," she called back. She abandoned her search and rushed out to meet him in the hall. They nearly collided into one another, but he saved them both by grabbing onto her shoulders before she could smack into his chest.
"I like a girl eager to see me, but this might be overdoing it," he teased.
"I was just in the bathroom." Amanda then nodded over to the kitchen. "I picked up some food from the store, but I didn't start cooking because I wasn't sure what you'd want."
"Well, let's see what options we have." Tony replied. He wandered to the counter and dug through the plastic bags in her larger bag. "Lots of stuff here, but it might take some time to cook and I got my lunch cut short today. The boss needs me to do some snooping into a case. How about we make ourselves tuna sandwiches? That should tied me ov-" His attention was suddenly arrested by something at the bottom of Amanda's canvas bag. He dug his hand into it and pulled out the rock she'd been missing. "What's this?"
Amanda's face paled, and before she could think what she was doing she snatched the stone from his hand. He was even more surprised by her action, especially when her fingernails cut into his hand.
"Ow!" he yelped. Tony wrapped his good hand around the wrist of the other and watched as a thin stream of blood rose up from his palm. "What'd you do that for?"
"I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to?" Amanda didn't realize her nails were that sharp, and she raised her hand to get a look at her fingers. They were longer and more pointed than she remembered. Judging from the length passed her last nail painting, they had grown a quarter of an inch since the last time she'd looked at them.
Amanda tried to hide her hands behind her back, but Tony caught the one without the rock. He pulled it toward him, forcefully, but not hard enough to hurt her. She didn't struggle, anyway. He'd seen the look on her face, so there was no point in denying that something was amiss. Though he was untutored in the fineries of nail-polishing, he knew the fine points on the end of her fingers were not typically how she handled herself.
"Did you do something different to them?"
"No, I just painted them a few days ago." Amanda couldn't understand it, and because of that she was scared.
Tony tried to keep his voice calm, collected, but inwardly he was both excited and frightened. This was some of the proof he needed to show his editor, but just a sliver. He needed more proof, something larger, to convince his editor. The old paper-man was stiff and disbelieving, not the type to be superstitious. Tony wished he was, for that would make his task so much easier.
"Well, maybe the paint fell away. We're making a fuss over nothing." It was a suggestion that held true possibility, but neither believed that it reflected reality. "But I...I've got to go somewhere in a few days. Something for the paper." It was a brazen lie, of course. Tony didn't want to tell his girlfriend that it happened to invol
ve him traveling across the county around Arkaham Mountain. If he found anything at the mountain, some definitive piece of evidence to substantiate his story of the monster, than the trip would be worth the effort. "But you can stay here if you want. There's plenty of food now and the spare bedroom isn't being used." He'd meant to keep her close at hand so he could watch for any other changes from her encounter, but he was disappointed when she shook her head.
"No, I wouldn't want to stay here without you. Besides, I need to get back to work Wednesday and it's a lot easier going from my apartment to my job than it is from here."
"Are you sure you won't stay at least a week? I'll be lonely without you." Tony meant what he said, for he did care about her. To emphasize his point, he pulled her against his chest in an affectionate hug. She gingerly set her fingers on his chest with her free hand, but the other she held behind herself. The young woman didn't want him looking at the rock until she had another chance to inspect it.
"I'm sure you'll be fine, but how about I give you a promise? If I get scared, I'll come right over and talk with you about it." She giggled at her own idea and Tony followed her with his own chuckle, but there was something in his eyes she found disconcerting. "Is something wrong?"
"What? Oh, it's nothing. I was just thinking about how I was going to keep you to that promise." Tony's thoughts didn't reflect his words. The young man had been pondering what would scare her enough to come running to him, and how she had so easily conjured up that reason for coming back to his apartment. He wondered if she hadn't already experienced a few unsettling dreams, waking and sleeping, that had caused her alarm. To distract her with his ruse, he leaned down and pecked a kiss on her cheek. "Maybe with a suitable punishment if you don't?"