by Mauro, Laura
No, Alessa thought, breathless, you’ve got it all wrong, Casey has it all wrong, something here is very fucking wrong…
“You should’ve seen her, Alessa,” Casey said, with a faint grin. “She’s got this bag of medical shite with just about everything you can imagine inside – needles, bandages, big plastic bags of water…”
“…saline,” Shannon said, by way of explanation. “Which I’m not really supposed to have, by the way, so don’t say a word.”
“She’s probably got a little surgical kit in there too, maybe a foldout travel scalpel and…hey, Alessa, you all right?”
No, she thought. Her eyes flitted between Shannon and Casey, frustratingly earnest in their sudden concern. And there was the panic again, cresting inside of her like a great wave. It was almost a relief to sense it there, familiar as an old friend. “That’s not…” she began, but the words were clumsy on her tongue and she had to stop. It hurt to swallow; she felt as if she might choke on the accumulation of mucus and panic in her throat. “What about Tom?” she blurted, and even as the words escaped her mouth she was terrified of the answer. Because either Casey was lying or Alessa had gone insane, and Alessa wasn’t sure which scared her more.
Casey and Shannon exchanged glances, mutual alarm evident in the identical trough of their brows. “I don’t know,” Casey said, a little bemusedly. “I guess he went home? I think he split after you started doing your Linda Blair bit. Alessa, are you okay? You look really bad.” She extended a slow hand, palm flat, fingers splayed.
Alessa’s heart was a stuttering drum, arrhythmic and far too loud. Her nerves were thunderheads waiting to discharge. She felt very much as if she was about to explode.
Casey’s palm was inches from Alessa’s forehead when she shot out an arm, catching Casey’s thin wrist and wrenching hard. Delicate bird-bones ground in her grip. Casey let out a yelp, tugging hard, but Alessa was stronger, and panicked adrenaline lent her a power she hadn’t thought herself capable of. She didn’t want to hurt Casey, but she needed to know what was real, and the smooth, human warmth of the other woman’s skin grounded her firmly in the here and now. She was not lying on the carpet in a derelict flat, or stumbling through a tunnel in the dark, or trapped in a tangle of her own blankets while a Shade masquerading as her friend drew ever closer.
“Alessa!” Shannon spilled from the armchair to her feet. “The bloody hell are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” Alessa said. It came out like a sob, and she hated herself for it. “I’m so sorry, but she’s lying, and I can’t…Casey, I need to know that you know. I need Shannon to believe me. Please tell her the truth. She can help us if she knows.”
“Jesus shit, Alessa, you’re hurting me!”
“Tell her the truth.”
“What are you talking about?” Casey’s teeth clenched in sudden panic, her eyes wide beneath wildly arched brows. She wriggled ineffectively in Alessa’s grasp, tugged and writhed like a rabbit in a snare. “What truth? Alessa, let go, we can talk properly about this if you just stop…”
“You know what I’m talking about.” She could almost smell Casey’s fear, bright and sharp like a fresh wound, and part of her wanted that. She wanted Casey to know she couldn’t mindfuck her like this. “I’m taking about Tom. I’m talking about his guts on the patio. The Shade, Casey, don’t tell me you don’t remember because you were right bloody there.”
She heard Shannon approach before she felt her, fingers prying Alessa’s firmly away from Casey’s wrist. Her thumb twisted painfully. She hissed through her teeth, staring up at Shannon with genuine hurt and surprise. Her sister’s expression was as blank as a brick wall, and she might as well have been one, placed between Casey and Alessa, impassable, impenetrable.
“You might be sick, but that doesn’t give you free reign to be an arsehole,” Shannon said. “Try again, Alessa. Calmer this time.”
“Tell her,” Alessa implored. Her chest seemed full to the brim with fluid, pressing on her lungs, making it impossible to draw a full breath. “Please.”
“I’m sorry, Alessa,” Casey said, cradling her injured wrist to her chest. She was visibly shaken but couldn’t hide the reproach in her gaze, the anger bubbling beneath the rigid set of her shoulders. I was only trying to help, she seemed to be saying. You didn’t have to go all psycho on me. “I can see how upset you are but I can’t just pretend I know what you’re on about. Humour me here, yeah?”
Alessa sank back into the sofa. A trickle of sweat slid between her shoulder blades, tracing the downward trajectory of her spine. She looked over at the window, the curtains drawn so as to keep out the light. The perfect dark little sanctum, she thought, as Casey’s hallucinatory transformation slipped once again into the forefront of her mind.
“You do know,” she said, calmer this time. “You said so yourself. Before Shannon came. You said that even if it were three on one, it would’ve slaughtered us. And then you said we couldn’t be certain that Tom’s dead. And then…” and then you turned into a Shade, she didn’t say, and the vividness of that particular memory cast a horrible doubt over all that preceded it. “I think I passed out after that,” she finished.
“Why would Tom be dead?” Casey asked, a little too gently. It was the tone of voice people used to talk someone down from a ledge.
“The Shade attacked him! He tried to take a photo, and…don’t do this to me, Casey, it isn’t fair. Fuck’s sake, Casey, if it never happened, how do you explain this?” She kicked off the blankets to reveal her bare legs. She drew her knee up, displaying her torn calf. Shannon scanned Alessa’s leg, trying to reconcile her strange injury with Casey’s claims. Alessa stared at Casey, searching her face; how will you deny this? How does this fit into your version of events?
“Alessa,” Shannon said, after a moment. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Look,” Alessa snarled, jabbing an angry finger. “Where do you think these came from? You’ve seen enough bite wounds in your time, Shannon, what do you think these…”
She looked down.
The skin of her left calf was smooth. Only a faint bruise remained. Frantically, her fingers scrabbled for the ridge of an old scar, seeking the heat of ruptured skin, but there was nothing except for three days’ worth of faint, spiky stubble and beneath that, a purplish splotch which might have been weeks old.
“Alessa…” Casey began.
“My jeans,” she demanded. “Show me the jeans I was wearing last night.”
“They’re right here,” Casey said. She pointed to the radiator adjacent to the doorway, upon which a pair of damp, dark blue jeans was slung. The legs were perfectly intact. No rips or tears. Not so much as a speck of blood.
She rose sharply from the chair, startling them both. She swayed a little as she shoved past them both, smelling the sour odour of her own feverish skin as she wrapped her arms around herself. "You need to go,” she said, snatching her jeans from the radiator. The waistband was still damp, but she tugged them on over her shorts all the same. “Both of you.”
“I can’t leave you alone,” Shannon said. “Not in this state. You’re not well, Alessa…”
“You can do what I bloody well tell you to do.” Her voice was shrill as she fumbled with the button fly. Her hands seemed numb, her fingers unwilling to obey her orders. “Just go. Both of you. I can look after myself.”
“You…”
“Get out.” The sheer effort of it made her stumble; the wall caught her weight, and she managed to right herself before Shannon could make a fuss. “If you don’t go, then I will. I don’t care if I’m sick, I will walk the streets until you’re both gone.”
Casey’s face was pale, expression blank, but her eyes betrayed her heart. She was afraid; whether of Alessa’s sudden violence or her fragile condition, or the truth in her crazed ramblings, she was afraid, and Alessa wasn’t sure how she felt about this sudden fissure in Casey’s armour.
“I’m going to call you.” Shannon waved a
n accusatory finger, eyebrows raised in indignation as though she’d been wronged somehow. “On the hour, every hour, and if you don’t answer me - even just to tell me to piss off - I’m going to send the police round. Is that clear?” She was still jabbing furiously at the air when Casey finally gathered the wherewithal to shepherd her out into the hall, away from Alessa. When the click of the front door came at last, signalling their exit, she let her limbs go slack, collapsing in a barely-contained heap of limbs and sweaty hair. Nose pressed against the sideboard, inhaling the smell of musty carpet and old paint, she closed her eyes and made the world go away.
*
T ime is fluid. Sometimes, she thinks she might be dreaming, and there’s a strange freedom in those hazy, liquid moments. The opportunity not to think, or to care, but to observe. To float, untethered, no longer bound to the anchor of her anxiety.
Familiar faces wax and wane, coming in and out of focus. They speak in voices which don’t belong to them. Once, wandering dazed past the living room window, she catches sight of her own reflection – distorted, as if seen through moving water – and there beside her, fat and smiling, is her father.
She draws herself up. Her window-self follows suit, moving with the careful slowness of one whose joints are beginning to rust. Her dad says nothing at all. He’s wearing the suit they buried him in – grey pinstripe, wide lapels, his Godfather suit, he used to call it. After his death they’d had to alter the suit to fit his diminished frame, but here, in the window, her father is the same abundant, fleshy cask of a man she remembers from before his illness.
He’s not really there. Her body realises this before she does; her heartbeat does not quicken, nor does she reach for him. The Shade bite has done something very strange to her brain chemistry, and the boundaries between dream and reality have been smeared like fingerprints on a windowpane. She can’t even really be certain that the argument really happened, save for the visceral, physical memory of her hand tight around Casey’s wrist. And, strangely, that doesn’t scare her. There’s a certain liberation in understanding that one’s madness has a source, a font from which all her confused hallucinations and feverish imaginings have sprung. The toxicity of the Shade’s teeth, running rampant through her bloodstream. Her eyes meet her father’s. Whatever strange force is replicating him has neglected to fill in that bright, beautiful spark in his eyes, that vibrancy her father held doggedly onto even as his body slowly destroyed itself. Still, she smiles, pressing two fingers to the space adjacent to her heart, and he smiles back.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him. Her throat feels terribly swollen, her voice a watery gurgle. It reminds her of him in his last days, struggling for air even as his lungs filled with fluid. “I’ve made such a mess of everything.”
When the sun peers out from between the clouds, he fades first to a pale chalk outline, and then into nothing. And she folds her aching body onto the sofa, slips her forearm back over her eyes, and lets him go. For good, this time. Goodbye, dad, she thinks, the buzz of her mobile on the table rattling deep inside her brain. I’m sorry I never got to say it to you. I know you understand.
Sometime later, she wakes curled in the bottom of the bath, the shower head spraying a fine mist of cold water down upon her. Tom is peering over the lip of the bath, blood-smeared and beautiful, fingers curled around the enamel.
“You can’t go to the hospital,” he says, though his mouth doesn’t move, and his voice seems to emanate from deep within the plughole. She scoots sluggishly through the shallow puddle, dragging her heavy skull until her ear is poised over that black hole in the floor of the bath. “What would you tell them?” he asks. “Would you tell them about me?”
She tries to reply, but her voice is lost, swallowed up by the gaping drain. The words splinter, shattering into brittle pieces, and all that’s left is an echo, faint and growing fainter as Tom’s body shifts, warping like a reflection in turbulent water. And then it’s her mother standing there, wearing only a thin, gauzy yellow dress. Her nakedness beneath is startlingly obvious, but she’s oblivious, or perhaps she simply doesn’t care. Alessa can see everything: the concavity of her abdomen, the vicious protrusion of her hipbones; the space between her legs is as smooth and sexless as a doll’s. She’s a pale gold spectre standing beside the bath, staring with something akin to pity at her damp, curled-up daughter.
“That girl is dangerous.” Her mother’s voice emanates from the plughole, and Alessa knows from the disdain in her voice that she’s talking about Casey. “She is not your friend. I want you to understand that, Alessa. I’m only looking out for you. You know that, don’t you?”
The smell of rain-wet pavement filters in through the open door. They’ll get in, Alessa thinks, struggling to peel herself from the bottom of the bath, but her mother’s firm hands clamp down on her shoulders and she’s too weak to fight, sinking down into the water. Her sore, exhausted body relents with grateful ease. Let them come, she thinks, turning her face away from the door. Away from her mother. Heavy lids slip down over gritty eyes. She doesn’t want to be this tired anymore. She doesn’t want to live in fear. If they’re coming, let them come.
They don’t come.
*
A lessa woke with a start in the kitchen, holding a half-pint of milk in one hand. The milk tumbled to the floor, spraying out across the lino. Her bare feet left wet track marks; her damp clothes stuck uncomfortably to her skin.
Her head thumped like a bass drum in an empty room.
She rubbed her eyes with the balls of her palms. There was nobody else around, no sign of Casey or Shannon. Nothing to prove they’d even been there except for the complete absence of any stray plates, cups or magazines. Everything was in its place, or at least, the place Shannon had determined it should reside. She had always acted as though she could tidy everything back to normal, induce a state of harmony armed only with a Hoover and a tin of furniture polish.
She got down on her knees and scooped up the plastic milk bottle, laying kitchen towel down on the lino to soak up the milk. It would start to stink if she didn’t mop the floor properly, but that was an effort she physically couldn’t make just yet. She made to stand, clinging desperately to the worktop with the tips of her fingers as her legs failed spectacularly to propel her upwards. Her brain was an overinflated balloon pulsing in time with her heartbeat. When she finally staggered to her feet she pressed her hot face against the worktop, waiting for the pulsation to subside, or for her head to finally explode.
Distantly, her leg throbbed.
Standing there, spilt sugar grainy between her cheek and the worktop, she searched the dark cavern of her memory for the time she’d lost. There were brief flashes of colour and motion, fragments of sound like an aural jigsaw in which all the pieces were jumbled. She remembered bright sunshine pouring through the window, bathing her supine form in its protective glow. She remembered her father, her mother, Tom’s voice emanating from the drain, a sudden burst of fever so intense she had crawled into the bath and lay beneath the trickling showerhead until the wildfire beneath her skin had finally gone out. It was like watching pieces of film spliced together at random, incomplete and nonsensical, and a coherent narrative was nowhere to be found. She had been curled on the hallway floor, and now she was here, and the chasm between those two facts was vast and fragmented and terrifying.
Across the room, her phone vibrated. Slowly, she lifted her head, seeking the source of the sound. It was in the centre of the tiny dining table, hemmed in by clean washing on all sides. She unlocked the phone on the fourth try, swearing under her breath at her own useless hands. Two missed calls from an unknown number. No missed calls from her sister, according to the display. Shit, she thought, perching on the edge of the table. She must have answered. Shannon always followed through on her threats, and if Alessa had failed to answer her calls the police would have battered the door down by now. Just what had she said, in her delirious state, to keep her fretful, angry sister at bay?
<
br /> The time on her phone read eleven twenty-three AM, which startled her – just how much time had she lost? What had she been doing for the last several hours? The gaps in her memory were wide and confusing; she couldn’t shut down the panic squeezing her stomach, a too-tight belt fastened taut around her abdomen.
“That girl is dangerous.”
Casey. Everything came back to her. She’d thought Casey had the answers. And she did, but Alessa was no longer certain she wanted to hear them. Only a few days ago she wanted to know more, to know everything, but now it seemed like enough just to know that the Shades really existed. The rest of it seemed to lead down the rabbit hole, and the more she discovered, the deeper she found herself. Alone and trapped in the dark, with the Shades lurking on all sides, and only Casey for guidance.
Alessa headed into the warm, quiet solitude of her bedroom. The curtains were drawn and pale light filtered through the pink-orange fabric. She stretched out on the bed, easing her tight muscles, the rusted hinges of her joints complaining as her limbs pentacled outwards. She would think about it all later, she told herself, letting her eyelids slip shut. Her eyeballs pulsated in their sockets, dry and hot, and she draped an arm across her forehead, casting a pleasant shadow.
As she let herself drift, she pretended it was summer, and that just outside the window was a glorious turquoise sea rolling gently in to the shore, just like in that poster: the one she’d been staring longingly at a few minutes before the bomb.
*
S he felt a little clearer when she woke. Her sheets were soaked through with sweat, but at least she wasn’t shivering any more. She wondered if the fever had broken, or if this was merely a lull. The pain in her muscles and steady churn of her stomach suggested the latter.
The display on her phone read 15:41. Maybe she could just go back to sleep, sweat out the sickness. Maybe sweat the madness out too. She could forget the entire thing and pretend everything was normal. Pretend the Shades weren’t real. If she worked hard at getting better, would they lose interest in her? She’d have nothing to offer them; they’d have to move on. Find someone new to torment. And yes, perhaps they’d drive that person to the brink of madness too, but at least it wouldn’t be her.