Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  Just as with his face, his forearms begin to split.

  Inside his left arm, there’s another mouth, and it starts screaming too. In Patsy’s voice. Run, Maria! He can’t control it!

  The thing that was Shaun gasps NO! and stumbles closer.

  Get away, she says, but she can’t even hear her own voice over the many, many others that join Patsy’s, yammering over top of her. Run run help me not her help me RUN…

  Worst of all, she hears the ear-shredding screams of a terrified little girl.

  Folds of skin slide out from underneath Shaun’s shirt, from inside his sleeves, pour out like foam from an overflowing cup.

  His face is a shattered nesting doll, a peeling onion of mouths and eyes. His arms, too, peeling back like corn husks as he reaches toward her, his soft shell rolling back to reveal clots of squirming fingers, gobs of knotted flesh between them mushrooming out into even more faces, the empty eye sockets abruptly filling with eyes, bright mites flowing through the creases between the tumorous blooms.

  He’s filling the space between wardrobe and bed, sealing her in. She peels herself out of her paralysis, stabs him in what’s left of his face.

  The knife sticks in his molting forehead as if plunged in a grapefruit. It draws no blood. Above and below it, his head yawns apart. The knife slips into the widening hole and vanishes somewhere inside him.

  She scrambles onto the bed, flailing pillows out of the way as every bit of Shaun’s mutating body begins to unwind.

  He comes undone, a thing made of unreeling tapestries, every panel sewn together from writhing, bleating human remains, every single tortured sheet unrolling.

  You belong here. The words waft out of his partitioning face before the length of his body splits and yawns wide open.

  One of the thousand voices she hears screaming must be her own.

  What had been a body, however chimerical, is now a tunnel gaping down into another space, a spiraling channel into somewhere completely outside the confines of reality, its walls formed of peeling patches of skin knitted and merged in suppurating layers, of thrashing limbs, of lolling heads, of flopping genitals, of twisting intestines and latticed bone, all fused in brain-bending Picasso distortion.

  She could laugh. She does laugh. The thing fills half the room, every part of it like a window shade flapping open, like fleshy tongues of carpet unrolling, speeding to a blur, every new fractalling tendril opening out and uncoiling, spewing even more patchworks of flesh. The babble of voices echoing out of that otherwordly tunnel of fused-together body parts has reached such a crescendo that she can no longer make out any individual one.

  Somehow she’s crawled backward onto the floor by the bedroom door, as a curtain of swarming skin covers the ceiling in a single motion like the tossing of a sheet, as a twisting tendril of flesh slithers out from beneath the bed, its tip opening in a polyp of arms that rises to embrace her.

  She scrambles backward into the hall. The tendril formed of grasping arms lashes at her like a striking snake. Her cries have moved beyond words.

  She’s up and running, down the hall, down the stairs, out the door, into the night.

  twelfth square

  Outside, the bright streetlights cast the neighborhood in friendly amber. In the distance, Maria hears traffic. Closer, the springboard sound of a basketball hitting a backboard, the game she heard before continuing into the night, in someone’s floodlit driveway.

  From the house behind her, not a sound.

  A pickup truck turns onto the street, pulls up to the curb by the first house on the right, engine idling. The headlights momentarily blind her—she steps hesitantly out of Clive and Francene’s yard, feeling as if she just woke from a nightmare to discover she’s been sleepwalking.

  She can see redhead Jillian and her peach-fuzz bearded boyfriend, necking in the cab of the truck right where Jillian’s grandma could see her if she chose to look.

  She wants to warn them but her mind can’t wrap around what to warn them about. What did she see in that house? Did she see anything at all? Her heart could be sprinting in place.

  She turns.

  The house stands silent, front door sensibly shut, lights on behind the dark curtains in the windows.

  A rustling catches her ear, and she backpedals to the road until she can see its source. Clive and Francene have a juniper beside their house that they’ve allowed to grow up until its crown crops just beneath their bedroom window. The branches are waving back and forth, ever so slightly—but even as her heart attempts to leap into her mouth, she can feel the quickening breeze.

  A new flicker of motion makes her glance back up at the living room window, on the second floor, on the left side of the house, above a neatly trimmed hedge of cedars, black boxes in the night illumination. Again, the curtain in that window moves. Is moving.

  Maria peers closer. The way the fabric is moving.

  What she sees in the window, illuminated by the truck headlights, is a continuous glistening sheet, sliding up the glass. It flexes and expands until the window goes black.

  Maria backs away as the rustling in the trees grows louder, joined by new noises from the back yard, as something starts moving in the hedges that shield the basement windows.

  An exit plan is forming in her head. Get back to her house, grab her keys, get to her car, roar as far away from this place as possible, pausing only to pick up Davey from his father’s apartment. She’ll take him by force if she has to, somehow. And then just keep driving. What’s one waitress job? She can always get another. And she’s blessed enough that she can always find a place to live, even if it means shacking up with someone disposable for a while.

  A voice whispers, Maria.

  She can’t tell from where.

  She’s off at a sprint.

  thirteenth square

  When the telephone rings, it’s as if a banshee breaks the silence in Benjamin’s dank cavern of a house.

  He’s lain in his own bed under the covers most of the day, shivering, but not because of any cold. He wants the courage to spit in those green eyes that sought him out in his hidey-hole. He wants the courage, the rage, to say to that smugly predatory face, You have no right, to seize that smug head in his bare hands and squeeze that all-too-knowing stare out of existence with his thumbs.

  He wants to put the bricks back in the wall that’s been blasted through. But the most he has the strength to do is hide and hope the rock he’s under gets left alone.

  The phone shocks him out of his withdrawal. He’s so deeply shaken, San Andreas fault shaken, that he’s only in the most passing way noticed that Patsy’s afternoon call never came. He has not wondered why, or what might be wrong.

  Patsy. He needs to ask her what’s gone on down there, why Shaun the Drug Addict has taken notice of him.

  The phone continues to shrill, a deafening nag worse than any his long-gone mother had to offer him.

  He pads into the kitchen with increasing hurry, so used to the dark he navigates without need to see his way, wanting as much to quiet that hideous ringing as to hear from his partner in spying on the neighborhood’s sad dregs.

  The receiver is cold in his grip. When he picks it up the noise is astonishing, like someone’s called him from a room where everyone is shouting.

  The volume dims as he places it to his ear, but as he speaks Hello! Hello! into the phone, it takes many seconds before he can hear Patsy talking to him.

  Her voice sounds strange in the receiver, like she’s having trouble breathing. And even once he can make her out she’s hard to hear. Though he can’t fathom why, she’s whispering, even though it sounds like she’s still in a crowded room, a cocktail party where hundreds of people are speaking softly.

  What? he asks.

  You have to come to the window, the woman’s voice whispers. You won’t believe your eye.

  new stitching

  If he could still breathe, Lance would breathe a sigh of relief when the bright motes stitch h
im back into the seamless sheet of the greater body.

  He’s never been a beast of strong will or secure mind, governed from childhood by primal, petty instincts, a creature crushed beneath his father, forced to grow unnaturally in what little space remained under that flabby oppression. He has no identity to clutch to beyond the scrub of hate, cannot hold his own against the torrent and doesn’t even try.

  And yet in the expanding corpus of the quilt, hunger trumps all, and the desires of its individual parts become guiding urges, adding eddies to the current, that scrabble and claw into tributaries.

  Perhaps it’s only chance that his gibbering remains are among those disassembled and rearranged segments that push out through the crack in the utility room window.

  Yet as he and his companions slither as one across the weatherman’s backyard, grope not quite blindly toward his own home, this tributary of fused-together flesh gains momentum, gains purpose, speeding even faster as he leads the squeeze through the hairline gap beneath the garage door, faster yet as he tracks the muted sounds of emphysema-roughened moans and animal grunts.

  He finds them naked in the den, their shriveled, sagging flesh bared and animated with full rut, his mother on the couch on all fours, his father kneeling behind her, red-faced, veins bulging in his neck just as they did during a prelude to a beating.

  Neither has time to squawk a syllable as the tide washes over them, as Lance’s hands find his mother’s neck, as his mouth locks with his father’s mouth.

  The bright motes unbind them and Lance is inside his mother and father and both are inside and part of him, and all the pathetic and mean secrets they kept from one another are known for one brief moment before they’re all absorbed and swept away.

  fourteenth square

  The higher powers are not smiling on Maria.

  Neither her purse nor her keys are on the lamp table by the door where they’re supposed to be. Nor are they on the coffee table in front of the TV. Nor are they on the spare chair in the kitchen. What the hell did she do when she came home, before she found Francene’s body?

  She finds them on the desk in Davey’s room, her keys glittering like stray treasure beside a stack of coloring books he hasn’t touched in years. She vaguely remembers thumbing through the books and daydreaming before heading down to start laundry.

  She snatches the keys and she’s sprinting again, breath hissing through her nose. Her mind alights briefly on the headless not-corpse in the basement, regrets there’s no time to hide it, to somehow make it go away. But if someone finds it, if someone wants to ask her about it, so be it. If God really does love her she’ll be far away from here by this time next day, with Davey sleeping in the passenger seat.

  She dashes outside, keeping her mind restricted to the practical, the need to leave, not letting herself dwell on the unexplainable. Stay focused, get away, get to Davey. One foot on the sidewalk, she pauses to wonder if she should bother locking the house. A hand waves to her from the grass alongside the driveway.

  Her mind tells her someone’s lying there, though she sees no body. The arm waves again, protruding straight up from the ground, a pale, thick and disconcertingly lively flower.

  A second arm lifts up nearby. And a third, this one terminating in a smooth knob at the wrist rather than a hand.

  Someone else starts to scream.

  The pickup truck’s shock absorbers groan and squeak as it rocks back and forth with tremendous force. A mass of churning, meaty darkness blots and flattens against the windows of the cab. The girl’s screams continue, muted underneath. The waving headlights sweep a road flooded with travesty, a boiling river of wet glistening eyes, gasping mouths, floundering limbs.

  What the fuck!

  From the house on Maria’s right, that boulder-muscled hulk of a cop has come out onto his front deck, his scalp reflecting white beneath the halo of his crew cut, wearing only his boxers, his coal black Glock 22 clutched with both fists.

  Her own yard is smothered in serpentine motion. Inside the truck cab, the girl is still screaming, though her voice sounds like it’s coming from down a long hallway, someplace far distant. The passenger window rolls down and something pale and inhumanly long wiggles out of it.

  The cop swears again. His gun cracks and flashes.

  Hundreds of limbs, a forest of arms, rise up from the cop’s yard, from Maria’s, in eerie synchronicity. They sprout beside her car. They grope out from underneath it.

  She hears a laugh, Shaun’s laugh. One of the arms holds up a pale bag of flesh that fills into a woman’s blond head. The woman whose body lies in her basement. Francene’s head bares teeth, her jaw unhinging to stretch her mouth in a baboon’s insane scream.

  Maria runs straight toward Patsy’s house, where she saw no animated remains raise their hands. She aims for the treeline behind, the railroad tracks beyond.

  Behind her, more gunfire.

  new stitching

  Francene knows anger. She knows betrayal, she knows rage, she knows the urge to murder. For good or for ill, she has known these things for years, and kept them buried deep.

  Now they’re all that’s left of her.

  The thing that used to be her son claimed both her and her sham of a husband just hours after Clive brought him home from the rehab center. So funny, so funny, when he started wailing that he couldn’t resist any longer, they thought he meant the drugs. But, oh, the thing their boy was addicted to, one taste and hooked for life, it wasn’t drugs. Oh, how soon they learned.

  Since then Francene has been nothing, a speck of plankton swallowed by the whale, not even a party to the cruel game of bait and lure to which her body had been put to use. Until this spark, this ignition that renders her a particle of positive charge, drawn with increasing power to a negative target.

  When she was gobbled by the monster, her husband did nothing to keep it from happening, nothing to fight it, nothing.

  When the monster came for Maria—he fought for her, used what was left of his will to delay the strike, buy her time to escape, break her son’s crumbling will. Not her. He fought for Maria.

  Francene’s anger swells. Her hunger snowballs.

  The prey is on the run.

  The forest of arms bends toward Maria’s retreating back like flowers pursuing sunlight in time lapse. The pool of flesh gushes as the limbs swarm after her.

  The bulk of the chaos she’s part of surges in ravenous bloodlust toward a different morsel but the impulse spreading through the tide of flesh has no hold on her. Francene rides her own frenzied engine, her wrath outpacing the momentum of the greater body. She hardly feels the plucks of stitches parting, nerves separating.

  This time, her beautiful rival won’t be spared.

  fifteenth square

  Benjamin can’t tear himself away from the window.

  As Maria the Mistress runs, the Uniformed Wifebeater clutches his gun and wades into what looks from Benjamin’s perspective like churning floodwaters, only it’s too pale, too patchwork, too alive and deliberate in all its motion to be water or any other form of fluid.

  Through the disc of his monocular vision the entire street seethes with twisted life. The mouth of Hell has vomited up all its squirming scrapple of damned.

  The cop shoots again, shouting in a voice uncharacteristically high-pitched. The visual makes no sense at all: hands clutch at the cop’s waist like he’s a rock star attempting to stride across a crowd of rabid fans. Something like glitter sparks between the scrabbling fingers. Then the cop drops straight down as if a trap door opens under his feet, disappears up to his bare heaving chest in the chaos, shrieking nonstop as his arms flail wildly.

  Then, as if he were an iceberg melting, his head, his shoulders, his muscle-knotted arms simply drift apart—one arm slapping the air, the other with the gun firing straight up, his face contorted like a pug, still shrieking, as each part drifts at speed in different directions, separated by feet, by yards, still moving, still alive.

  I
told you, a voice whispers. The best show of your life.

  He drops his binoculars. They break on the hard oak floor.

  A woman’s voice. Watching, always watching. Never one of us.

  He peers back into his darkened cavern of a house. Patsy?

  The woman laughs, softly, and her voice is joined by another, and another, a chorus of mockery.

  We know all about you now.

  Never one of us.

  Always watching. Always peeping.

  He thinks he hears weeping. He thinks he hears Patsy’s voice, a moan of warning. Something plucks at the hem of his dressing gown.