Bleed

by Ed Kurtz

  “Oh my God,” she mewled.

  Footsteps pounded heavily behind her. She gasped and rushed down the porch and across the front yard.

  “You’re dead!” King bellowed close behind. “DEAD!”

  Then a chilling howl filled the night air.

  King bleated, “…the hell?”

  He yelled. Something slammed, hard.

  Against her better judgment, Sarah stopped where Walt’s yard met the road and turned back toward the house. The door stood open and the bright foyer shone out. King lay on his stomach in the doorway. Crouched on top of him, someone—something—flailed their arms, raking at his back and neck. It howled and shrieked and cackled madly. Sarah shuddered, frozen with fear and bafflement.

  In the light of the porch and foyer, she could see that it was bright red.

  A full body suit? No, that lunatic is just covered in blood, like me.

  King blubbered and shouted under the maniac, struggling to crawl away but making no progress. In seconds his shirt was shredded and the attacker was clawing at his exposed skin. Laughing. Grinning like a villainous clown.

  Even at that distance, Sarah could see its brilliant white teeth gleaming in the porch light. By the time it thrust its face into King’s back, gnashing at the flesh with its teeth, it dawned on Sarah that it wasn’t merely covered in blood.

  It had no skin.

  Red and white tendons stretched where cheeks should have been. Bunched cords of muscles twisted and retracted with every move it made. The slippery crown of its exposed head glistened in the light, dripping fluid on all sides.

  The creature snapped its head back, throwing viscous ropes of blood and saliva from its mouth. Its bright, wide eyes turned on Sarah and it resumed its horrific smile.

  Sarah pivoted to face the road, planning to break into a run.

  Instead, all of the light in the world was snuffed out as she crashed into the dewy grass behind her.

  31

  Amanda couldn’t determine if Walt was still breathing or not. It didn’t seem to matter that much, whichever the case. She would still be in agony and facing a grim future, such as it was.

  When the monster’s face was illuminated by a weak shaft of moonlight in the attic, Amanda knew that she was about to die. The wicked smile told her that much. The bloodied, skinless abomination was free now, no longer dependent on Walt to butcher its meat and feed it. It could take care of that nasty business all on its own. And it was bearing down on its next meal—Amanda.

  She winced, shut her eyes, and screamed. The creature laughed at her, chattering its teeth with loud, quick clicks. It moved slowly, stiffly. Not yet accustomed to its legs.

  She knew now those awful stalks in the pod were limbs.

  Then it passed out of the light and back into the darkness. Amanda could only hear its approach from then on out. Gluey, squishing steps on the beams and panels, drawing ever nearer.

  But the steps abruptly stopped at the ruckus that erupted at the bottom of the attic stairs. Thumping, clattering, squeaking of shoes and gasps and shouts.

  The monster tittered. Hee hee hee.

  Amanda screamed again.

  And then it was gone, down the ladder. Out of the attic and out of sight. Whoever was down there—no one else was left, who could it be?—provided a sufficient enough distraction to prolong Amanda’s life. But for how long?

  She waited and listened. Pounding steps, a pair of them.

  Huffing and snuffling. A man’s voice hollering threats.

  You’re DEAD!

  The creature howled. The man shrieked with pain and horror.

  Food for the abomination.

  Poor son of a bitch, Amanda thought.

  For a long time after that, there was nothing. Not one sound drifted up into the attic from below. She started to theorize.

  Perhaps it killed the guy, ate its fill and took off for parts unknown. Maybe it’s gone, really gone. All that’s left is getting the hell out of here.

  She wasn’t sure that she really believed any of that. But it certainly sounded nice.

  “Walt,” she called. “Walt, can you hear me?”

  He didn’t stir.

  “Walt, you’ve got to wake up. Wake up, Walt.”

  “Hnm?”

  “Walt?”

  “Wuh.”

  Amanda let out a long sigh. She realized that it did make a difference, after all. If Walt died then and there, she could never escape. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed his help.

  “Where are the pliers, babe?”

  “Pli-uh…?”

  “Focus, babe. The pliers. Where are the pliers?”

  “Gwen…plaine…” he mumbled.

  “Snap out of it, Walt. We’ve got to work fast.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Gwyn. Plaine.”

  “Fuck.” He’s totally out of it. Probably concussed.

  She stretched her arms out on either side and felt around in the darkness for something, anything, to pick up and throw at him. She came up empty.

  “Now what am I going to do?” she asked no one.

  ***

  At least an hour later, Amanda heard shuffling from inside the house. It came back. If indeed it ever left. She’d expected as much.

  It moved around noisily, snuffling and groaning. Something got knocked over. Then, when it sounded like it was directly underneath her at the foot of the attic steps, the slurping began. The creature was feeding.

  Amanda wanted to cry, but she was all cried out.

  The creature was still loudly slurping and gulping when exhaustion finally overtook her. She dropped into a deep, restless sleep.

  32

  “Walt.”

  The voice sounded muffled, like it was coming through a brick wall.

  “Waaaalt.”

  He heard it, though. But he felt incapable of responding in any way. He was too tired and in too much pain. His head was throbbing, his muscles sore and stiff. Whoever it was, Walt just wanted them to go away and let him sleep.

  Fingers gently brushed his cheek. The fingertips were tacky and coarse. Warm breath spread over his face. It smelled of old pennies.

  “Gwynplaine,” he whispered as he opened his eyes.

  The bare, glistening musculature of Gwynplaine’s broadly smiling face loomed over him. He could hear the slick noises of the sinews moving against one another as the smile broadened. And it wasn’t in the hall any longer. It was looming over his bed.

  “You’re free.”

  “Yessss.”

  “How?”

  “It was time.”

  “Wow.”

  He tried to hoist himself up but his elbows faltered and he slumped back against the pillow.

  “Oof. I feel awful.”

  “Amanda hurt you,” Gwynplaine spat.

  Walt narrowed his eyes and, remembering, looked at his hand. It was well wrapped in bloodstained bandages.

  “You?”

  “Yessss.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hurtssss.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  It continued to grin, in spite of his admission of pain. Or perhaps because of it. Somehow that seemed more likely to him.

  “Amanda,” he said after a long silence. “Is she…?”

  “Attic,” Gwynplaine rasped. “Sleeping.”

  He exhaled and faintly smiled. He was terrified that he was going to hear otherwise, that Gwynplaine killed her and ate her flesh hot and raw. Then he considered his mangled hand again. She’d sliced right through it with his own cleaver. Lopped the fingers right off. That was not something Walt supposed a man could grow accustomed to.

  “You sleep now,” it said.

  Walt was not one to argue. He watched with drowsy eyes as the bizarre being strode slowly out of the room. Naked for want of clothes or skin, and leaving shiny red footprints in its wake. More astounding than that, however, were the two heavy crimson sacks swinging from its ch
est as it shambled off. Dark red nubs protruded from the center of each of them.

  Breasts.

  Walt stared. Gwynplaine was a woman, after all.

  ***

  The woman across from Sarah whimpered in her sleep. One look at her gnarled black ankle told the story. It was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and the darkness spread all the way down to her toes. There was no way she was going to be able to save the foot, much less most of the leg.

  Of course, that was assuming the poor woman ever got out of there. As things stood, the prognosis was not good. Sarah had come to before the break of dawn, confused, afraid, and more than a little nauseated. She was immersed in near total darkness, all but the small square of yellowish light that partially illuminated the woman chained to the nearest support beam. Immediately, Sarah had leapt up to try and help her, realizing right away that this had to have been the woman whose screams she’d heard. She must be in the attic. But when she rose up and lurched forward, a cold grip yanked her back and down to the hard crossbeams on the attic floor. She, too, was chained.

  By Walt? Or by that loathsome thing that attacked—killed?—King? Sarah much preferred marking that part down as a shock-induced hallucination, but deep in her heart she knew that was not true. She saw it, all right. In all its nightmarish, blood-encrusted horror.

  Now, hours after sunrise and still chained to a sturdy oak post, Sarah languished across from an insensate woman she did not know. She also didn’t know how either of them got there, nor what was to become of them.

  And then there was the appalling mess on the other side of the attic.

  Illumined by the light leaking in from the holes in the roof, huge, membranous flaps of tissue, splayed out around a hole in the floor. It looked like someone crawled up through the hole and lost their skin on the way. The amount of rusty fluid drying all around it was suggestive of blood, anyway. Sarah shuddered to imagine what it was and how it got that way.

  It was clear enough that it had something to do with the creature that killed King. Where it came from, perhaps. Maybe, she considered, it hatched there.

  What the hell was Walt up to?

  Growing monsters in the attic? Summoning demons from Hell? At this point, nearly anything seemed possible to her. Her own imminent death at the hands of that creature somehow seemed the most possible of all.

  She scrunched up her face, fighting back the tears that were threatening a deluge. Instead she changed her focus to the injured woman with whom she was sharing her unenviable accommodations.

  “Hey. Hey, lady. Can you hear me?”

  The woman did not move or make a sound.

  “Lady. Pssst.”

  Nothing.

  “My name is Sarah. Sarah Hall. Well, Sarah Blackmore-Hall, if you want to be anal about it, but I’m not feeling so great about the old family name just now. I guess you know tons more about what’s going on here than I do, but I’d stake everything I’ve got that my worthless piece of crap brother is behind it. Do you know him? Name’s Walt. If you do, I’m sorry for you.” She sighed. “But I guess if you’re here, you know him all right. Unless you were kidnapped or something. He didn’t just snatch you, did he?”

  The woman mumbled something incoherent. Sarah’s face brightened. She’s awake!

  “What was that?”

  “Mm’s grrfrin.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t catch that…”

  The woman turned her head without moving anything else, just rolling it over like a bowling ball until they were facing one another. Sarah narrowed her eyes, taking in the stranger’s features. She was quite pretty, despite how ragged she looked.

  “I’m his girlfriend,” the woman said quietly.

  “No shit.”

  “Was. Two, three years. I don’t…I don’t know what…what happ—”

  With that, the woman broke down. She softly cried for several minutes, making no attempt to disguise her grief. Sarah didn’t know the woman’s full story, but she could guess at most of it. It was obvious enough: after a couple years of romantic bliss with the world’s biggest creep, good old Walt finally came clean and showed his true colors. Truer colors than he’d probably ever shown anyone, replete with torture, kidnapping, probably murder, and a bit of horrific voodoo madness. And now here she was, whoever she was…

  “What’s your name?”

  “Amanda.”

  “My college roommate was named Amanda.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But she was awful. Just awful.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can tell you’re not, though. I didn’t mean…”

  “S’okay. No hard feelings.”

  Amanda immediately followed that with an agonized squeal. Sarah instinctively lunged forward to help her, only to pull the steel rope taut, hurting her own ankle in the process.

  “Ow!”

  “Careful. You don’t want to end up like me.”

  “Did he do that? Walt, I mean?

  “No. That was my own fault, really. I was trying to figure a way out, fell head over ass and snapped it in two.”

  “Oh my God…”

  “Got him pretty good, though.”

  “Walt?”

  “You bet.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Sliced a few fingers off with his cleaver. He won’t forget that. Even if he kills me, he won’t ever forget that I got him back for it.”

  “Jesus,” Sarah moaned.

  Amanda screwed up her face, quiet in her patent anguish.

  “Did you…see it? The monster, I mean?”

  Sarah grimaced. Somewhere in the back of her mind she’d hoped she imagined it, or that it was only a person and she misjudged what she saw. Amanda’s matter-of-fact question put that to rest. There was a monster. And it was roaming free.

  “I guess I did.”

  “It didn’t attack you?”

  “I saw it kill a guy, I think.”

  “Oh, no…”

  “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, but he wasn’t with me. He was just some inbred redneck who followed me here. He was going to…well, you know. Probably kill me when he was done.”

  Amanda gave a sour laugh.

  “Well, what do you know? I guess the devil does favors sometimes.”

  Sarah trembled. They were both silent for several minutes thereafter. It was Sarah who eventually broke the silence.

  “Amanda?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What is it?”

  “The monster?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suppose only Walt could tell you that. Or maybe he couldn’t, I don’t know. All I know is I had a perfectly sweet and gentle guy until he moved into this goddamn haunted house.”

  “Haunted?”

  “Not literally. I don’t think. See, there was this stain on the ceiling…”

  ***

  Amanda told the story to Sarah, as much as she knew. For her part, Sarah listened quietly and intently, her face constantly betraying her horror and near disbelief. Indeed, had she not seen the glistening, blood-coated thing with her own eyes—much less the stomach-churning charnel house it had made of the hallway below—Sarah could never have believed something so outlandish, so nightmarish. It was fodder for paperback horror novels with lurid, gory covers, but nothing that could ever actually transpire in the real world.

  Except that it could. And it did.

  At the conclusion of Amanda’s terrible tale, Sarah buried her face in her hands and wept.

  “Poor Margaret,” she sobbed. She never knew the woman, never would, but she grieved all the same. No one deserved a fate that awful, not even Walt. “How could this happen, Amanda? How?”

  “I can’t tell you, darling. I suppose this house has got some pretty nasty secrets.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “I’m just so sorry you ever had to meet my brother.”

  Sarah’s eyes spilled over again. Amanda’s did, as wel
l.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  33

  “What is your name?”

  She laughed. Walt had been glaring at her for a half hour now. He remained in bed, recuperating, while she—the creature—perched on the high back chair in the corner with her knees up to her chin. Watching him.

  “Gwynplaine.”

  “But that’s just the name I gave you.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Haven’t you got one of your own? I mean, you came into the world able to speak, grew into an—an adult, I guess.”

  “Yesss,” she hissed. “I am nearly done.”

  Nearly done, Walt thought. Like a roast in the broiler.

  He gazed at her face, studied the fine strands of her exposed muscles and tendons, her omnipresent rictus grin. It was an eerily knowing face. It betrayed knowledge and experience Walt was not sure he wanted to be privy to.

  “You were around before all this, weren’t you? In some weird way?”

  She smiled thinly and nodded once.

  “What were you called then?”

  “Does not matter. That is past. Now I am Gwynplaine.”

  “Gwynplaine was a man,” Walt protested, his mind involuntarily turning up the grotesque image of Conrad Veidt in the role of the perpetually grinning freak.

  And then, her grin faded; a rarity. She moved her jaws back and forth, deep in thought.

  “Gwyn,” she decided.

  “Like Gwendolyn.”

  “Gwyn is good. Only Gwyn. I am Gwyn.”

  “All right. You’re Gwyn, then.”

  In spite of himself, he smiled.

  ***

  He slept for most of what remained of the day, waking only when he turned in his sleep and jammed the fresh stumps where his fingers used to be. In those instances, Walt snapped awake with a shout; Gwyn was at his side each time in seconds, hissing comforting words in his ear as she ran her sticky fingers through his sweaty hair. After everything that happened in the night, from the chaos in the attic to the astonishing development in Gwyn’s case, it never occurred to him that he failed to show up at school that day.

  It did occur to the administrative staff in Principal Byrne’s office. They were forced to scramble for a substitute at the last minute, an inconvenience brought about by the unusual call the secretary received from a gravel-voiced woman at half past seven that morning.