by Ronald Malfi
After much searching, she finally decided on a large oak that sat crookedly on the sloping valley floor. It would be difficult to climb it and tie it up there, she knew, but there were plenty of branches to grab and handhold, plenty of places for her to step around—
She heard someone behind her. Turning, she nearly tumbled down the hillside, but managed to grab onto a tree branch at the last second. Simultaneously, she felt a rumbling in her groin, felt the hot urgency of urine rush through her. Uttering a sharp cry, she dropped to the earth, knocking her head back against the tree.
Half-masked by foliage, Simon stood in the valley below, staring up at her. His eyes had mutated, were now a startling blue. He stood huddled like a hunchback, his slender form contorted and misshapen. For the first time, it occurred to her that her ignoring him had begun to twist his physical presence. The less she thought about him, the more deformed he became.
“Simon,” she heard herself whisper.
“You came back,” he called up to her, only his own voice did not rise above a whisper. Mostly, she was hearing him inside her head.
“You scared me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I’m quiet.” He moved along the valley floor, remaining concealed by the shrubs. “Never’s been quiet without you, too.”
“Sorry,” she said, “I’ve been busy.”
“Growing up,” he said.
She nodded slowly. “What’s the matter? What happened to you? You look funny.”
“Funny,” he snickered. He coughed and spat onto the ground. “I’ve been busy too.”
“Have you?”
“Want to see?” She could make out a grin. “I’ve been busy for you.”
“What is it?”
“Something I found. I’ll show you. Like old times, right?”
She swallowed a hard lump of spit. Absently, she found that her sudden urge to relieve herself had vanished as quick as it had come. It was Simon’s power over her, she knew. He possessed what she possessed. He had powers of his own.
“Come,” he said, and turned his back to her. He began ambling through the thicket, his gait hindered by a slight limp.
Setting the tree swing down at the foot of the giant oak, Kelly crab-walked her way down the hillside and jumped down into the valley. Upon hitting the ground, the world seemed to shift all around her, to take on the bright, plastic colors of the fairy tale world she herself had created. And for a moment she was no longer Kelly Kellow, but Kellerella, Princess of Never.
No, she thought, and shook the notion from head. That’s not me thinking that. It’s Simon, taking control of my mind. He wants me to think it.
Her legs pushed her forward through the forest. Ahead of her, Simon snaked along, his form flickering in and out of the foliage as if he were deliberately trying to elude her. After several minutes, she emptied out onto the cleared path and got a better glimpse of Simon. His skin had soured to a dull gray, the comb of his spine a series of crooked protrusions weaving down his back. Cobwebby strands of silver hair fanned out from choice places along his back, neck, scalp, arms, and legs; they undulated with each step he took.
He’s no longer perfect, she thought. Without me to regulate him, without me thinking about him, he can be and look like whatever he wants.
They reached the embankment to the gingerbread house and Simon turned to face her. His face looked small and flecked with minute scales. His lips were dry and cracked, laced with fine threads of blood vessels. A stench clung to him—foul and corrupt, radiating from him in moist waves. She recoiled at his sudden proximity, which made him crack a ghoulish grin.
“What is this?” she said.
“Don’t you trust me?” His grin widened. There was suddenly something reptilian about him. “We used to be such good friends, you and I.”
“What?” More forceful this time. She thought of Gabriel, of how he’d looked the day she’d kissed him on the cheek, and of the picture he’d drawn of her in the pink princess gown.
Kellerella…
“Come,” Simon muttered and crept up and over the embankment.
Kelly had it in her mind to turn and run at that moment—but her feet suddenly refused to comply. Instead, she found herself scaling the embankment and dropping down to the other side, caught in surprise by a gust of freezing air.
At her foot lay a dead raccoon, its belly torn down the middle, its innards spread like butter across its fur and the pile of dead leaves on which it lay. Fat, yellow maggots squirmed in the gore; flies had taken up residence in its half-open mouth. A sharp, jagged piece of slate rested nearby in the leaves, slick and sticky with gore. Sticking out of the animal’s shredded belly were the remains of a several white plastic forks.
Groaning, she shuffled backward and nearly fell, unable to take her eyes off the carnage before her. A scuttle of large, black beetles dispersed from beneath the small corpse and scattered for the cover of the underbrush.
“God…”
“For you,” Simon said. There was a hint of joviality in his voice. He tiptoed around the carcass, his bare feet kicking up flecks of sod, and hopped behind a fence of berry bushes. “Like the story of the children lost in the woods,” he said. “To find your way back again.”
Again she wanted to turn and leave, but couldn’t. She wasn’t fully in control of her body, she knew; that somehow Simon had latched on to a hidden handle inside her brain, and was now dragging her through his insane funhouse. She followed him, managing to keep a distance at least, and only paused once upon seeing a second gutted raccoon strewn on the ground. This one’s arms and legs had been spread and speared to the earth with plastic forks, its face smashed and torn down the middle. She felt something lurch inside her, bent, and vomited a stringy paste onto the ground. Her whole world began spinning again. She heard Simon’s voice, but couldn’t tell if he was actually speaking or if she was hearing it solely inside her head: You’re not alone now, Kellerella. Now we’re both freaks on the hill. Ugly, ugly freaks on the hill.
“Keep moving,” Simon grunted and Kelly’s feet obliged.
He led her around a scattering of stones, laid out in a seemingly functional formation, and she nearly slid in the mess of a third carcass—this one larger than the first two. Though there were no visible wounds to it, she knew it was dead, could tell by its stillness, its rigidity, from the sightless bulge of its eyes. Its mouth was stuffed with something—some cloth, it looked like. And then she knew what it was: her father’s socks. The thing had been suffocated with socks.
She stopped walking, her head bent and hair streaming in her face, one hand out. “No,” she said, “stop. Stop this, Simon. What is this, what are you doing?”
“No stopping,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” Scared, she found herself very close to tears.
“All this,” he said, extending his scarecrow arms, tendons knotted and bunched at the elbows, “I did for you. I can’t stop thinking about you, Kelly. I can’t stop it. Because I’m always inside your head. It’s not so easy for me to forget.”
“And you’re changing,” she half-whispered.
“Better,” he said. “I’m more real.”
“No. That’s wrong.”
“Doesn’t matter. Wrong doesn’t matter. It’s what’s here that matters, what’s real.” And he was right. “Come on,” he said, “there’s more.”
“I can’t—” But her legs jerked her forward and she pushed on toward the gingerbread house.
Like Simon, the house had changed. It had once been a beautiful thing, something from a child’s dream, coated in sugar and blooming with colored candies. Now it looked like an old shotgun shack in some remote part of the world. Its walls were stripped wood and bulging with knotholes, crawling with vein-like vines. Its roof was a canted slab of clapboard, hoarded from some dismal junkyard. It windows held no panes—only uneven hollow squares, seemingly cut jagged with a penknife. The door stood open: a black maw. Something hung by a trail of vines
from the doorframe, dangling in midair, battered by the wind.
Simon crossed down the walkway and entered the front door, pushing the dangling object aside and setting it in motion. Kelly noticed droplets of moisture fall from it and splatter on the wooden floor of the shack: blood. The thing dangling in the doorway was a decapitated squirrel, gutted and mutilated like the rest, and suspend in the air by a tangle of vines. Again, she felt her gorge rise. Struggling to keep her balance, she planted one hand against the side of the house. It was fibrous and leathery and felt very much like flesh. Repulsed, she drew her hand away.
Simon’s pale form passed before the open doorway. “Do you want this to end?” he said. “Follow me if you do. Or it will just get worse.”
“I…can’t…” She was sobbing freely now.
“You built all this,” he said. “Now you’re afraid to face it, to look at it? Just as you’re afraid to face me? To look at me?” He snickered. There was nothing funny about it. “Just like your parents,” he finished.
From inside the shack she heard what sounded like a muted whimper. Simon’s face, its left side hidden behind the frame of the doorway, moved to face her again. Head cocked downward, the ghost-boy glared at her from beneath the misshapen ledge of his brow. His eyes glowed with calculation, with intelligence. As if she’d been living in a haze of unreality, Kelly suddenly realized the absurdity of this creature’s existence. The realization dawned on her, hit her so hard across the face, that she almost laughed in spite of her surroundings. And at that instant, she thought she saw the shack waver…thought she could actually see the trees on the other side, right through the walls…
That’s what you’re afraid of, she realized. You’re afraid of me eventually destroying you. And the longer I don’t believe, the less you exist.
—You can’t think without me knowing it, Kelly, his voice erupted inside her head like a thousand gunshots. And you’re wrong: the longer you don’t believe, the more freedom I have to become what I want.
Like an opponent, she stared him down in the doorway. He grinned at her, his mouth cluttered with shredded teeth and purplish gums covered in sores. Shaking, she pushed forward down the walk. When she reached the doorway, she pressed herself against one side and brushed by the decapitated squirrel, trying not to look at it. Somewhere in the stifling darkness ahead of her, she heard Simon chuckle to himself.
Inside, she found that the shack was much bigger than it appeared. In the absolute darkness, she found she couldn’t even make out the opposite wall, and sensed that it went back at least fifty feet. Even her slight footfalls echoed all around her. In that echo, she could also sense the height of the ceiling: tremendous…towering above the trees.
Impossible, she thought.
But wasn’t it all?
There was a definite stink here—it seemed to swim in the air, hungry to cover as much ground as quickly as it could. It infused itself inside her nose, causing her to double over and gag. Each gag boomed in repeat throughout the massive room. Though she’d never experienced such a stench, she somehow understood that it was directly related to death, and to the slaughter of small, bleeding things. Just ahead, Simon’s white form slowly faded into the darkness of the room like a ghost. Seeing him in this light, it was easy for her to question his authenticity. Yet this house—and the stink—only reinforced him, made him more real than he’d been to her thus far.
Sick from the smell, she shuffled further into the room, the outside light almost completely gone now. At her back lay a single panel of sunlight coming in from the doorway and reflecting on the ground. That was all.
Again, she heard that soft whimper—an injured animal. And riding above that sound, so low and steady that it had been indistinguishable until now, she could hear a muted buzzing, like caches of electrons slamming into one another. As she progressed into the room the din grew steadily louder. Flies, she thought then. This room is filled with giant buzzing flies.
“What else is here—?” Her voice boomed and shook the walls. She quickly shut her mouth.
—Back here, Simon said in her head.
She took a few more steps. Now, her eyes starting to grow accustomed to the dark, she was able to walk with a bit more confidence. She brushed by something warm and stiff and shuddered. At that moment, a dim red light began pulsing at the center of the room, and she saw that what she’d brushed was another dead animal, this one too mutilated to distinguish. It had been sliced into membranous sheaths and draped from the ceiling, from one wall to the other, its body drying in the autumn heat like sheets on a clothesline. Its furry hide was saturated with a horde of giant flies, each buzzing and clicking and chirping to a solid wave of static. Flailing backward, her right hand shot out and grazed the fleshy hide, painting her with warm blood and causing her stomach to heave once again. The world spinning before her eyes, she went crashing to the floor—
—and for an instant it felt like wet ground, like solid earth beneath her—
But it was flooring. Wood. She could feel it, even as she pulled herself into a ball and forced her stomach muscles to relax. Looking up, her vision refocusing, she could see Simon’s gaunt silhouette pulsing in the sudden red glow of light at the center of the room. The light itself seemed to be coming from the actual floor, most prominent between the slats in the floorboards. Simon, his back to her, was occupied with something. She noticed things on the floor at his feet: more plastic forks, three of the four prongs busted off each of them; several discarded food and drink containers filled with a dark liquid; a collection of tools and utensils, including an old hammer, a screwdriver, a long carving knife, and an unwound wire coat-hanger. And what looked at first like small stones.
Those are skulls, she realized. Those are skulls of small animals at his feet.
Simon stepped aside and Kelly saw something shudder in the gloom behind him. Something big. Some animal.
“Get off the floor and come here,” Simon muttered, not looking at her.
“What is that light?”
“The heart of Never,” he said, glancing at the pulsing red light coming up through the floorboards. “This place is getting stronger. It’s almost alive.”
“No.”
“Get over here.”
She felt herself rise and duck beneath the slaughtered animal veil hanging from the ceiling. The red pulsing light was like a suffocating heat all around her. Sweat broke out across her face and neck, down her arms and legs. The faint need to urinate passed through her like a virus.
“This is how much I’ve been thinking of you,” Simon said. This time when he stepped out of the way Kelly could see that the shifting thing behind him was a dog. A large dog, huddled and tied to the wall, one of its paws up beneath its chin. It was injured; a dark puddle of blood spread on the floor beneath it. “All this planning,” Simon said, “all this thought and work and trouble. All so you could find your way back home to me.”
“What do you want from me?”
He spun and faced her, his features crazy and distorted by the red glow beneath the floor. “I want you to let me have it all,” he seethed. “I want you to give it up to me, allow me to be whole. There’s enough power in your head to give me a life outside of you and outside of these fucking woods. I want you to give me that power.”
“I want to go home,” she managed, her voice trembling.
He turned and crept over to the selection of tools lined along the floor. Bent to one bulbous knee.
“You’re growing and I’m staying the same,” he said. “What do I do when you finally leave? What do I do a year after you leave? Five years? Twenty years?” He selected the hammer, hefted it in his hands. It looked almost too heavy for his brittle arms to lift. “I’ll be stuck here. I don’t want to be stuck forever in these woods. You made me, Kelly.”
“Stop it,” she sobbed.
“You have enough power in your head to give me life. I want that. I want you to do it.”
And although her mind was r
eeling with thoughts, she found she could no longer speak. Shocked into silence, she could only watch Simon’s disfigured form twirl the hammer over and over again in his hands.
“Speak,” he said.
“I…I can’t do that…I can’t give…”
“It’s nothing you need to know how to do,” he said. “I can help you do it. It’s not something you need to practice. Just let me in your head, in your mind.”
She shook her head. She could still taste the vomit at the back of her throat. “No,” she managed. “That’s not what I mean.”
He glanced at her from over his shoulder, eyes slit.
“I won’t,” she said. “You’re not real. And what you’ve done…Simon, you’re evil.”
Slowly, he rose. He appeared as a skeleton amidst the illumination of Christmas lights. “You create me,” he growled, “then want to throw me away.”
“I’m sorry.” She felt tears spill down her face, felt her hands begin to shake. “Simon…”
“If I’m evil, you made me evil!” he boomed.
“That’s not true!”
“I can make you change your mind,” he said. He took a shuffling step toward her and extended his hand holding the hammer. Instinctively, she flinched. “Take it,” he said. “Do it.”
“No—” But her hand was already out, had already grabbed the hammer. She held it now in her own hand, turning it over and over and over, just as Simon had been doing moments before. “How…?”
“I can do whatever you can do,” he said. Then, in a near-snarl: “Almost.”
“You can’t make me move—”
With a jerk, she raised the hammer above her head, her arm wooden and stiff. She gasped then erupted in a fit of sobs. “God…”
“God has nothing to do with this. You’re my god. When you created me, Kelly, you instilled in me your power.”
“You can’t kill me,” she managed through her tears. “It would kill you too.” She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but somehow knew it to be true.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, stepping aside to reveal the injured dog once again. The dog’s head swung from side to side, a deep growl starting in its throat. It was shaggy and huge, its fur dense with mud. “I’ll make you do things, though. Bad things. Things you won’t want to do.”