Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  “It doesn’t make any sense, Clay. The living will fight you. They can do that. We can’t possess everybody—some resist.”

  “That may be. But even now, it’s happening. And there won’t be enough resistance to warrant concern. If the revolution spreads, like I know it will, we’ll have the majority.” The detective’s eyebrows cocked menacingly. “And you know it.”

  Velvet did know. Even if a minority of the dead took on Aloysius Clay’s cause, if news of this spread to other districts, that number would fill the world in a heartbeat. She glanced into the trees and thought she saw movement in the undergrowth. Dim glowing orbs floated in the darkness.

  “Look.” Clay laughed. “Even now they’re surrounding us. Watching the end of all this. It’s my day, girl. It’s my achievement. And they want to applaud me. Come out!”

  He shouted for the ghosts to come forward to show themselves. Velvet stewed; she felt as though she’d explode. Her world was falling apart in a way she’d never imagined. She focused on nine figures moving toward them. In their phantom hands the waning light glinted from the damned crystal balls.

  The sight infuriated Velvet.

  She was murderous.

  She screamed and charged the woman’s frame, focusing on the spirit inside, the shimmer of smoke and haze that was Clay’s perverted, deformed ghost. She passed into the body and felt a chill course through her, as though she’d jumped into some icy river like those crazy people in polar bear clubs. She hung there for a moment before falling back out and onto the ground, where she rolled onto her back.

  The woman’s feet protruded from Velvet’s abdomen, her cackling still exploding from her mouth like machine-gun fire.

  It hadn’t worked.

  She couldn’t force his soul from the woman’s frame.

  The agony of failure rushed over her, and she thought she might be reduced to wimpy girlish sobs, until she heard the screen door slam open and saw Bonesaw’s bloody corpse emerge. He juggled the urn in his hands, the lid popping like there was boiling water bubbling just underneath.

  “This one?” he yelled sweetly.

  And though she knew she was cringing, Velvet nodded. She watched with amazement as Bonesaw opened the lid and dumped his own precious mother’s ashes in a wide arc. They caught on the breeze and turned into a cloud that coated the detective’s body in a thick layer of death. She sputtered and coughed.

  “That was all sorts of wrong, you know,” Velvet called in Nick’s direction, but she couldn’t help laughing. He nodded and raised an eyebrow saucily.

  She backed away and gave it another run. Clay was distracted this time, covered in the grime and rubbing his borrowed eyes. But as Velvet lunged, she felt the presence of two other ghosts flanking her, matching her pace, one a streak of cartoonish blue. They hit Clay’s ghost in unison and rolled across the lawn.

  Or rather, two of them did.

  She lay on the ground panting, Logan beside her.

  “Where’s Luisa?” she cried.

  Anxiety coursed through her. She imagined Miss Antonia’s story of the soul churning and couldn’t let that happen to Luisa. It might have been an irrational fear, but still, Luisa was trapped somewhere inside the detective’s body, Clay coiling around her, squeezing the life or ectoplasm or whatever from her soul, only to vomit her out like a bad meal.

  That was not happening.

  Velvet plunged her outstretched fingers into the body, clawing and connecting enough with the battling spirits inside that the woman began to jerk and spasm in wild fits as though she were being electrocuted. Velvet submerged her face inside the woman’s skull, half expecting to come nose to nose with Clay, gone full banshee, but all she saw was gray matter and blood pulsing through thick rubbery veins, the firing of neurons.

  “Come on out, Detective,” Velvet commanded of the woman. “Take your body back.”

  She didn’t feel the woman at first, with the raucous fight swirling all around her like wild hamsters circling a metal wheel, but then there was a shallow muted grunt.

  “Now! Run for your life!” Velvet screamed, trying desperately to supplant Clay’s hazy spell over the woman with enough urgency to startle her awake.

  Velvet pulled away, settling back against her ghost heels and staring down at the woman’s seizing form. Bonesaw panted over them. When she noticed, she flinched for a moment, the look in his eye reminding her of her last moments on earth.

  “I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he had asked, false concern clouding his vision like cataracts. Then his lips, as thin as worms, had pressed against the bloody tracks, smearing them rosy.

  Velvet shuddered at the memory, banishing it from her mind.

  Now the killer’s body sagged, and the urn shook in its sausagelike fingers. Despite knowing Nick was inside, that this monster before her was nothing more than a shell, Velvet was filled with hatred. She wanted to see Ron Simanski burned, like the effigies of the revolution, wanted to watch him turn to ash and blow away.

  A moment later, the detective rose from her gauzy slumber and clawed through the grass, detangling from the ghostly forms of Luisa and Clay, as though sloughing off a memory.

  It was as though Velvet were finally seeing the truth behind Fassbinder’s lies in all its deformed, stretched-out obscenity. Clay was a fully formed banshee, wriggling and writhing like a giant snake.

  Velvet toppled over, mixing into the fray. Luisa threw punches, and Velvet wrapped her legs around Clay’s slithering form as though she were climbing a rope in PE, and probably not as gracefully. A second later, a wailing Grover leapt on top of them, landing blows with his big furry fists like a champ.

  Velvet reached out to Nick. “The urn!” she screamed, bouncing against the grass as Clay bucked and growled.

  Nick steadied himself above them, holding the metal jar in one hand and the lid in the other like he was ready to clang them together as cymbals. Luisa held Clay down by the shoulders, while Velvet tried to wrangle the thing’s snakelike tail. Whatever evil had turned Clay into this monster, she couldn’t imagine.

  “Dude!” she shouted at Nick. “Before we all catch the banshee virus or something!”

  Nick scooped the end of Clay’s tail up, Bonesaw’s arm falling away and Nick’s own ethereal hand gripping the squiggly thing tightly. Velvet threw herself back onto her haunches and helped Luisa and Logan cram the banshee into the urn, scooping and shaking off the slithering tentacles, even as they slapped around their faces, their torsos. Clay’s head was the last to go, and he let out a long growling roar as Nick clamped the lid down tight and gave it a quick screw to lock him in good. After setting the urn down on the back steps, Nick took off Bonesaw’s body like a jumpsuit. It crumpled around his ankles in a wet heap.

  “Ew.” Nick shuddered and rubbed at his arms. “Was that as creepy as I thought it was?”

  “Yeah. Worse.” Velvet glanced toward Luisa, who lay on her back, stomach rising and falling rapidly. Exhaustion.

  Logan stood in the distance, stunned. “Man,” he said. “I’m glad that’s over.”

  Behind him the lady detective stood up and brushed the grass from her pants, shaking her head like she’d just seen a ghost—and, of course, she probably had (or at least, felt it). A ruckus like every tool in the shed had fallen to the ground at once preceded the young officer’s appearance in the doorframe. Velvet heard the screen door of the kitchen bang open.

  They turned just in time to see the very dead sheriff, eyes glowing like candles, unscrewing the cap from the urn.

  “No!” Nick screamed, arms stretching toward it.

  “Grab him!”

  But it was too late. The banshee flooded from the container like a genie, stretching out to its full length. Aloysius Clay towered above them. Hell, towered over the roof of the farmhouse, pole-thin and laughing riotously.

  “How long have we known each other, Velvet? You ought to know that I’m a little smarter than to be trapped by a move like that. I knew
you didn’t have the wits to take me on. I’m just happy to have such a fine, familiar place to start my rule.” The head of the thing surveyed the view. “New Brompfel Heights. Lovely. Where did you say your family lives, Velvet?”

  The words came at her like a slap to the face, and before she even realized what she was doing, she was on Clay. She slashed at him with her fingernails, kicked at the base of his stocky trunk, but he didn’t waver. He didn’t move in the slightest.

  “Poor Velvet,” he said. “Whatever will you do now? Join us, I suspect.”

  “Never!” she screamed.

  “I was afraid of that.” The banshee almost sounded disappointed, until the mad giggling began. “She won’t join us, friends.”

  Velvet dropped to the ground and saw four of the dead and injured cops shuffling across the grass toward them, each carrying a different vessel, a coffee can, a flour canister, a tin first aid kit, and a rusty toolbox.

  “No,” she gasped.

  Luisa and Logan gathered in close beside her. She jerked her head toward Nick, in time to see him pulling Bonesaw’s body back on like a jumpsuit and rushing to the silver minivan. He climbed onto the back bumper and heaved himself on top.

  “Now what’s he up to?” Clay muttered.

  Velvet didn’t have a clue, but he’d slowed the cops from bearing down on them with their little makeshift ghost prisons, so she didn’t care. All she could think was GO NICK!

  He struggled to right himself on the roof, a little wobbly in Bonesaw’s bloodless corpse, but defiant nonetheless. Nick spread out his arms and closed his eyes tightly as though in deep concentration. Velvet swiveled to see Clay intently glowering at the event transpiring before him, assessing. He didn’t utter a word, until …

  Bonesaw’s body began to bloat; his skin bubbled into wet blisters and a weird buzzing cut through the night. A moment later, Velvet watched as her killer’s body split nearly in two and exploded outward, filling the sky with the largest swarm of flies Velvet had ever seen.

  “Holy shit!” Logan yelled.

  Luisa heaved with laughter.

  Velvet smiled, sat back, and watched her killer disappear into a spray of blood and bone that basted the minivan red.

  It looked like freedom.

  It felt like it, too.

  Clay screamed as the flies came at him. Millions of them gnashed and ground the top part of the towering evil spirit into tiny travel-sized pieces. It was loud. Electric. A cacophony of crackling, buzzing, humming. Velvet was reminded of the power company substation near her elementary school, that low monotonous hum.

  But then the banshee’s tail whipped toward her, mingling with her form in the ether, and the flies descended, eating their way toward her. She could hear Luisa and Logan screaming, and in the distance, a heartbreaking sob from Nick before the flies covered her.

  Chapter 26

  Velvet thrashed amid the swarm, slapping and swatting, each assault as futile and ineffective as throwing punches in a pool of molasses. The insects clung to her like spandex, everywhere, so tight that she couldn’t tell where their tiny bodies began and she ended. She tried to tell herself they weren’t hurting her, they were just doing their job, serving their purpose, but if nothing else, they were buzzing her to death.

  The sound was deafening.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, the grinding whir of wings beat vile rhythms against her flesh. Tickling. Tormenting. Her internal organs rattled inside her, and she flew into another panic as she remembered how they’d flooded into her.

  Chewing. Twisting. Tapping their pointy legs against her insides.

  It occurred to her that they were inside her still, bloating her abdomen, pushing, looking for exits.

  Looking for her mouth.

  She screamed, and her eyes snapped open as a thousand little nightmares erupted from her throat, blasting past her lips into the darkness around her. A few lingered on her lips pecking horrific kisses, driving her to the brink of madness.

  Velvet choked and clawed at her throat. Sputtering to expel the remaining bugs from her mouth, she plucked a stubborn one from the tip of her tongue like a hair and shuddered.

  For a moment she thought she’d lose consciousness, but something in her distant vision caught her attention.

  Velvet thought she was seeing fireflies flitting about, tiny orbs of light dancing on the horizon, but then she realized she was witnessing the violent whipping of gaslight globes on their quaking, writhing hoses.

  They were in purgatory.

  She felt the gravity next, the pull of the floor. She was on the ceiling. Twisting, Velvet saw Clay bucking out of a mountain of flies as though being born. His internal glow flickered throughout his naked chest with each convulsion.

  It all came back to her in a rush of images.

  The bastard had wrapped himself around her when Nick’s flies had descended. Quick thinking on his part. Her heart sank, imagining the boy watching her being eaten along with the monster Clay had become.

  Clay.

  “Clay!” she yelled, and lunged toward him, her hands curling into claws. But as much as she stretched, she couldn’t pull free from the anchor of flies festering about her waist.

  Aloysius didn’t respond, but a smile spread across his face as he contorted and slithered and, finally, broke free from the dark brood, dropping like a lead weight past the dim lights and out of sight somewhere in the dark depths beneath her.

  “Dammit!” she cried out, and struggled all the more ferociously. Swatting at the flies, she was able to expose her hips and the top of her legs, but the more she looked at the point where her knees disappeared in the glossy insectile mass, the more frightened she became. The bugs weren’t holding her back, imprisoning her on the ceiling like one of those dangling glue strips.

  They were stitching her back together!

  With each rub of their tiny legs, more of her body appeared. It looked like they were secreting her flesh in little globs from their mouths and then spreading it around, solidifying it. Puked out of an insect’s guts! She felt her stomach heaving, bile rising in the back of her throat.

  “Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look,” Velvet repeated to herself, swallowing back her disgust.

  She flopped away from the horror and hung limply, focusing back at the floor, trying to key in on Clay. The more she squinted, the more she became aware of the room. Light glinted off metal, and a few phosphorous streaks scurried about. If she listened really hard, she could just make out a familiar sinister hiss.

  Of course, she thought. The maze of prison cells that made up the Cellar. And if the flies hadn’t abandoned their jobs like the rest of purgatory, then Clay had fallen straight into a holding cell.

  “I’m coming for you, Clay!” she screamed. “You won’t get far!”

  The second after the feeling came back to her feet and she was able to wiggle her toes, Velvet was falling.

  Plummeting.

  The air whistled past as she sliced through the inky darkness. She felt a few flies still working at her feet. It tickled, but she didn’t dare look for fear that they’d fly away and leave her with a pair of stubs where toes should be. She figured it was best to just trust them. Don’t think too much. And don’t scream.

  Well, not again.

  The swaying lights below grew brighter. Her insides tumbled. She wondered how long she would fall, if it would hurt horribly when she hit, and if she would be so lucky as to land on Clay, like Dorothy’s house on the wicked witch, and smash his ass flat.

  She wondered how she had so much time to wonder.

  Her speculation was cut short by an excruciating impact with something super hard and metallic. Pain ripped through her and she bounced a bit, airborne, before slamming back against it, sliding down sideways, and skidding on her butt across the gravelly floor of the Cellar. Velvet came to an abrupt stop against a wall of cell bars, the wind bellowing from her lungs along with some white squiggly memories. They flopped on the still-sha
king floor like worms, before dimming out and turning to ash.

  Across from her, the holding cell was in shambles. The iron bars had toppled over into an impossibly twisted rib cage. That she’d landed at an angle and not impaled herself on one of the jutting rods like a piece of meat on a fork was a miracle. The cell itself was empty, except for the hissing column of light emanating from the gaslight swaying above.

  Empty.

  Like, with no Clay in it.

  “Dammit!”

  Velvet tried to scramble to her feet, but ended up kicking at the gravel ineffectually and plopping back down on her ass. She’d just found her footing and was pushing upward on the bars behind her when a whisper blew past her left ear.

  Hisssssss.

  She gasped as a pair of claws clamped around her arms and pulled her roughly back against the cell behind her.

  “Who’s got who?” The raspy voice curled its way into her ear like a tongue. “I’ve got her, Aloysius!”

  The soft shurring of shuffling feet announced Clay’s approach. Grit and gravel popped, and the dim glow of soul flesh hung in the air, fox fire. Clay was coming for her, and this time he had no need of a body to hide inside.

  “Come to turn yourself in, Clay?” Velvet struggled against her captor, clawing at his talonlike fingers as she watched the aura in the darkness become more solid.

  Clay’s bare feet smoldered in the cracks of a dusty coating. The monster had found some clothing. A torn shirt and pants, but no glasses, no charade that he was her old friend, Mr. Fassbinder.

  That was over.

  His smile was brilliant and easy. It turned her stomach and made her fight all the more against the damnable prisoner behind her, pinning her to his own cell.

  “Now, Velvet, that’s no way to act. Pierre there has had a very rough day. All his compatriots have abandoned him and taken their rightful places in the daylight. How would you feel? Trapped in this pit? Oh, wait. But you are trapped and you just don’t know it yet.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she spat.

  “Feisty,” Pierre quipped.