Almond (ONC2021)

Chapter 11 - The Last Dance

I'm not sure how long I was out. With a groan that would impress an eighty-year-old, I stood from the couch. The booze and pills had helped—moving all the sharp individual pains into one body-wide dull ache. I blinked, wiped my eyes, and then noted the profound change to my environment.

The room was bathed in a brownish-orange hue. Over each of the windows there was now a semi-opaque layer of...something. I got up, scanned the room for murderous Muppets, and then limp-toed to the closest window.

In the movie Jurassic Park, the dinosaur DNA was recovered from a mosquito encased in amber. Whatever now coated the windows was very much like that—a citrine-colored resin smeared across the entire frame. I couldn't see through it, but the sunlight could filter in, similar to stained glass windows in churches. Against my better judgment (because at this point what difference did my judgment make?) I ran a fingertip across it. It was hard and smooth, like a polished gemstone, except for evenly spaced ridges that made it resemble the skin of an almond.

That's what each window now looked like—a crystal almond.

It wasn't just the windows. The back and front door were also encased and there was a thinner layer on every single lightbulb so that the entire house was awash in the orange gloom. I did a slow lap around the second floor and found more of the same.

Every window. Every door. It was like I was suddenly living in an orange snow globe.

This was too much. I'd accepted that monsters were real and that ALmond was immortal. I'd played along with this demented scavenger hunt and fought the good fight. Whatever madness this orange resin was for, I wanted no more part in it. Even though Spuds had warned it was pointless I opted then for running away.

I went to the back door and gave the coating a tenuous tap with Drivehammer. No effect. It didn't even really make a sound, as if the resin absorbed the resonation. I progressed from there with sequentially more powerful blows, until I was baseball bat-swinging with all my might. Each time Drivehammer just bounced harmlessly away, the handle vibrating so much that my hand began to hurt.

The resin was indestructible.

I was trapped.

Now that bravely running away was no longer a plan, well, I had no plan. I looked around the orange-tinted room. All that was left was to find the last almond—literally a needle in a haystack.

That's when the music started.

A rising score from an electric keyboard, followed quickly by a melodic electric guitar and drums, repeating the same beat. It came from the television despite the power being turned off. It floated out of the very air. It impossibly filled the entire house.

"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly. An oldie but a creepy. No song ever gave me the willies quite like this one. I was intimately familiar with it as my mother had been a pretend hippy for a few years. Figures that ALmond somehow chose this song.

To add to the psychedelic atmosphere the bulbs in every lamp and overhead light began turning, as if twisted by unseen hands. The resin coating on each created a slow, rotating light show, like a lava-lamp reflection across the walls, various blobby hues of almond-orange lazily drifting just fast enough to be slightly disorienting. I was suddenly living in a 1970's concert acid trip.

It was just as Spuds had warned. The music had started—the soundtrack for the last sprint to find the final almond. The grand finale. That's why the creature had picked a song I was familiar with. I knew it was a long song, probably clocking in at just over seventeen minutes.