by Tim Curran
She sat up in rage and horror and the world became chaosit was a maelstrom that whirled and whirled, forever spinning downward in a great vortex, sucking everything down into it, even the glass palace and the blue sky above it and, ultimately, the stars that hid behind it.
That was the last she knew before the terror began.
Day Three
1
When Bria got up that morning around ten, her guts were doing a slow liquid tango in her belly. It felt like they were crawling around, shimmying and bopping, sneaking up her throat and then sliding back down her esophagus like kids on a stair rail. It felt as if she was ready to spew hairy meatballs.
Groaning and holding her belly, she forced herself to stand up. She felt woozy. Her knees were full of foam rubber and her stomach was riding a raft through whitewater. Well, it ain’t morning sickness, you can be sure of that. She hadn’t had relations with anyone in many, many months. Between classes and work, there had been no time. She always told herself on lonely nights that it would change, that sooner or later her schedule would relax and unkink like a rope. But that never happened; things only seemed to escalate.
She leaned against her dresser so she didn’t lose her balance because she was feeling pretty weird and uneasy by that point. This brought her into contact with the mirror and, hell, she really did look like shit. She was pale with pink circles under her eyes. Her lips were gray.
Mirrors, mirrors, fucking mirrors.
She hated them because they invariably told the truth, and sometimes that was worse than just about anything else.
It was time for the morning’s elixir, a devil’s brew of Xanax and Topamax. Down the hatch, down the hatch. Wash throat liberally with water. Ah. Better. Or worse.
She stared at herself in the dread looking glass for a moment or two, certainly not liking what she saw. Her eyes were blue, but not a good sort of blue in her way of thinking. Not a Megan Fox blue or an Adriana Lima blue, just sort of a faded blue like jeans that have been washed too many times. Today they looked more bleached out than ever.
Then again, that’s pretty much how she felt head to toe.
She wondered where Alice was and what she might be doing. But mostly, she wondered about the basement and what was behind the door. If she had really heard those sounds and that voice yesterday.
You were pretty wired. You could have imagined it all.
“But I don’t think I did,” she said quietly to herself.
She heard the floor creak out in the hallway. Under ordinary circumstances, she probably wouldn’t even have paid attention to it…but living in the dragon’s lair, these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Though she badly wanted to lay back down, she stepped over to the door. It was locked. She always kept it locked now.
“Is someone there?” Bria asked.
She heard silence out there, but not the right kind of silence. She was almost certain somebody was there, that they were frozen up like a rabbit in a field, fearing discovery.
Alice is out there. She snuck up here to listen outside your door. She’s out there right now.
The thing was, Bria could feel her eyes peering at the door. The same way she seemed to feel them wherever she went in the house. They were always there, watching. It was like a reality show where they planted cameras in every room.
“Mother? Are you there?”
She heard lips smack wetly. “Why don’t you open the door and find out?”
I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
But Bria ignored the voice. She did not want to listen to it or think about what it was alluding to. She went over to the door and opened it, her guts still on the move in her belly. “What is it, Mother?” she asked.
Alice stood there, looking gaunt and unhealthy. Her eyes were dull and lusterless, set in brown-rimmed pits, a tic in the corner of her lips.
“I wanted to see if there was anything you needed,” Alice said.
“No, I’m fine. I feel a little sick to my stomach. I think I’ll just lay down for a while.”
There was a permanent smirk on Alice’s face. What drew Bria’s attention was the mottling on her cheeks and a gaping, open sore on her chin.
“You don’t want to eat?”
Bria tensed. “No…but then we don’t have any food here anymore, now do we?”
Alice leaned forward and Bria saw that her eyes, which had both been the most unremarkable hazel her entire life, had changed, too. The left was still hazel, but the right iris was distinctively green. Not a handsome green, but the green of pea soup or mildew. The pupil was hugely dilated, but the pupil of her other eye was normally constricted.
“Oh,” she said, “if you were hungry, Brianna, I’d find something for you.”
Like meat that fell from the sky? Bria almost said.
But she had the oddest feeling that Mother Alice knew exactly what she was thinking, that she was more than capable of crawling inside her head and looking around if she so chose.
“Well, you go lay down,” Alice said. “It was probably something you ate. You kids eat the most awful things.”
With that, she turned and left and Bria wrinkled her nose. Had it been her imagination or was there a moldering smell coming from her? Sort of like wet laundry left to dry in humid darkness?
Bria shut the door and locked it.
She went over to the window and looked out on Birch Street. Maybe to a casual viewer, the nabe looked just fine, but she knew better. She knew it was in a horrendous state of decline, only she could not put a finger on what it was exactly. But it was there—poisoned at its roots and seeping black toxins. It was in an advanced state of decay and within a week, she figured, its bones would be sticking out.
She thought of texting Aiden to explain this to him, but there was no point. She couldn’t even explain it to herself.
2
For Anna Lee Posey, the day began with misery, then wallowed in its own self-defeat, fully intending to be a tragedy by nightfall.
“Why, Anna? Why?” said the voice in her skull. “Why do you cause such trouble? Why do you bring misery unto us?”
Anna Lee tried to reply, but there was no replying because it was no longer her body to use and no longer her mouth to speak with. She was a prisoner in the machine, listening to the grinding of the great oily gears that turned and turned, the creaking and clanking of chains, smelling hot steam and axle grease.
The Other said, “The first time my back is turned, you try to use the phone! Silly old bitch, where did you think that would get you? Did you think they would come with their white coats and nets and put us away where we could not harm anyone or ourselves?”
Yes, yes, oh God yes, oh sweet glory, yes, yes, YES! That’s exactly what I thought and hoped and prayed for!
“Now, my geriatric old twat, you shall be rightly punished,” the Other said.
For a moment or two there was nothing, only that perfectly horrendous feeling of being occupied and owned…inhabited. Yes, that was the word. Inhabited like a house. And then…and then—
Then the world exploded with a chaotic eruption of white agony and it felt like a million-billion rats came surging out of the darkness of nonentity, all of them razor-toothed and starving, biting into the soft gray flesh of her brain, laying it raw, perforating it, clawing it, stripping it. Anna Lee screamed with horror and pain and absolute degradation. The agony knotted her like a rope, turned her into a writhing, whipping strand of nervous tissue that bled and arced with electric blue pain.
And then she was on the floor, really on the floor, alone in her body and mind. The pain had pushed the Other away and she was free, free, God almighty, free at last. Aching and hurting, her nose twisted and bleeding on her face, she scuttled along the floor. She would call the police and tell them all the awful things she had done and would yet do.
Then she felt the Other slip back into her like a greasy hand into a rubber glove and she was seized, held aloft li
ke a tiresome little puppy that could not stop peeing on the carpet.
“I can see you’re going to be trouble,” the Other said in a gravelly, rasping voice. “The pain almost kicked me out and we can’t have that. No, I’ll climb deeper into you this time, deeper than ever before.”
The Other made her stand and walk, shuffling forward numbly, uneasily, as she whimpered deep inside.
“Now we have business,” the Other said, its voice sounding stronger now. “A merry business to perform and a fine work to do.”
Anna Lee knew what it was and she knew what remained of her sanity was about to end.
3
Debra Standish was alone because Walter left her. Oh, it had been coming on for years, but once she ate the meat and an entirely new world opened up to her, he had been frightened away. A lifelong vegetarian, he would not eat what she offered. He would not taste it. He refused to even smell it. She chased him around the house, trying to force the meat into his mouth, but he was lithe and fast and he slipped away.
He had been looking for a reason to leave her for many years, she knew, and the meat provided that reason: Debra was insane.
No, no, no, Walter, she thought as she crouched naked beneath the stairs that led to the basement. It’s nothing quite that simple.
There in her little cobwebbed alcove, huddled in the darkness, she thought of the meat. She dreamed of it and lusted after it. She had been out of meat for nearly sixteen hours now and the most horrendous things were happening to her.
Things that made her believe that maybe Walter was right and she was mad.
But I’m not mad! I’m not!
It started with the hunger, of course, because that’s how the meat controlled you. One bite and you wanted more. You had to have more, so you stuffed yourself and then stuffed yourself again. With each taste the addiction became more pronounced. Your metabolism burned hot and high like a smelting oven and if you did not feed it more meat, the quicker it fed on you.
Debra knew these things without actually knowing them. She could not have put any of it into words, none that made any sense.
She only knew she was starving.
The hunger pains came infrequently now, but when they did it felt as if the guts were being torn out of her. She usually went out cold when they struck and woke up on the floor bathed in lukewarm sweat.
But something even worse was happening now.
It was her skin.
There was something wrong with it.
In the darkness, she ran her hands along it and instantly pulled them away with a cry of disgust. This isn’t my skin. Another skin has grown over it. Yes, an alien skin that covered her entire body. It felt cool to the touch and scaly like that of a fish.
Oh, not that…
Not fish…
Not goddamned disgusting slithery fish…
They haunted her nightmares since she was a child, bulging fisheyes staring out at her from weedy green depths, splayed fins, and oily, scaly skins. Her mom and dad fished for river suckers every spring. They would clean them, gut them, scale them and filet the bones from them, then salt them and dry them on racks.
And the smell, the godawful repugnant stench of the suckers was only secondary to the briny taste of their flesh and the nauseating flavor of the broth her parents boiled from them.
The fish shack…
The fish shack…
She still dreamed of the fish shack where the suckers were cleaned and deboned—the oily floorboards, the fishy stench, the scales and fish bones and river slime…
She began to shake, droplets of sweat popping out on her face. Dry heaves made her double over.
It seemed to have started when the hunger was at its worse, that’s when the alien skin began growing. That’s when it began to take her over.
At first, it was moist and mildew-smelling like some necrotic jellyfish had consumed her, wrapping its snotty tentacles around her in a mantle of pulpous flesh. Her skin became a soft ooze bubbling with secretions of dark slime. This was the subcutaneous layer, a flaccid carapace of fat and connective tissue. Then came the dermis which had the consistency of set Jell-O. Unlike the subcutaneous, which she could sink a fingertip into, this layer was resilient, almost spongy. Lastly, the epidermis which quickly sprouted a sheath of interlocking drab gray scales the sizes of nickels. At times of great excitement, an oily, fishy-smelling brine juiced from beneath them.
It had been like this everywhere—belly and breasts, back and legs, ass and hands, even her face and fingertips.
Now she was a horror that could no longer stand as such, and she feared her bones were becoming hideously elastic, her muscles and ligaments like well-boiled noodles.
It’s the skin, Debra thought then, running her fingers along the chitinous, radial patterns of her lips which were beginning to feel very much like the carbonate exoskeletons of corals. It’s not skin. Not really. It is a parasite that lives off what is beneath, leeching it, feeding upon it.
Crawling out from beneath the stairs, she left a clear emulsion of slime in her wake. She could smell brackish water leaking from her ass and vagina as she crept upstairs into the bathroom. She needed to fight back, she needed to free herself of this awful parasite that was eating her alive.
Using the sink, she pulled herself up and her legs bowed out awkwardly as if they were made of liquid latex. Fluids dripped from her. She gagged into the sink, expelling a pink clot of bile that squirmed with tiny marine parasites. Flatworms and nematodes wriggled at her vulva. She saw her face in the mirror and nearly screamed—her lips were fishlike, blubbery and suckering; her face oily and scaled, and her eyes were a blank translucent green, hexagonal in shape.
She found what she wanted in the medicine cabinet after much fumbling and dropped down to her knees once again.
A straight razor.
This was the only way.
Trembling, she began to slice into the parasitic integument that covered her. The pain was exquisite.
4
Kalen Sprik’s lover was Abe, of course, her dreamy, romantic, guitar-playing stoner boy from college. Whenever the nameless entity was with her, she saw Abe. If she had seen the pale, squamous horror that it truly was, she would have screamed herself insane. But starvation had set in and the addiction for the meat was an agonizing affair that twisted her mind and externalized the very thing she needed the most, which was Abe.
Abe loved her. Abe worshipped her. Abe was completely devoted to her. There was nothing Abe wouldn’t do for her.
She could hear him coming now, his soft footfall on the stairs, squish, squish, squish. That was a funny sound for him to be making, now wasn’t it? Kalen thought no more about it because only Abe could help her, only Abe could end the cycle of agony which was the hunger itself. He would feed her. He would give her what she needed which was part of himself.
Abe? she called out in her mind. Abe, I’m starving, I’m starving…
Abe would help her. He wasn’t like Johnny. Johnny had left her years ago. Maybe not physically, but emotionally and mentally he had packed his bags and taken the first train out. He was never there. Even when he talked to her, he was somewhere else. An automaton was left in his place, a dummy that watched sports and talked sports and when you asked him questions about anything—whether it was the price of tea in fucking China or the weather—he would encapsulate it in some sort of sporting metaphor of who rushed how many yards and who sank the most baskets and how many extra innings they went. He rarely offered anything more than a thin smile, his glazed eyes reflecting a mind that was out on the ice or out on the court.
Now he was in the closet.
She would never let him out of the closet.
Yes, you will, Abe said in her mind. And you will because it’s what I want. When I tell you to let him out, you most certainly will.
“No!” she cried. “It’ll ruin everything! Don’t you see how it’ll ruin everything?”
/> Abe did not like defiance. Unlike the Abe she had known in college, this Abe had a dark side and a sadistic streak running down his center. Now he surrounded her and it seemed like there were five or six or even ten of him, all of them shrieking at her, except they weren’t shrieking but squealing like rats. She could feel their little claws tangling in her hair and scratching her face and breasts and back, leaving red streaks on her ashen flesh which was no longer tanned or healthy, but speckled with sores.
“Please, Abe! Please, stop! Just stop this now!” she sobbed.
Which made him press his face into hers. It was hairy and jutting with bony ridges. His breath smelled like the inside of a chicken coop—old feathers and dander and rotting yolk.
She fought to her feet, covering her face with her hands as Abe wheeled about her, a dusty black thing that hopped and crawled and shouted squealing obscenities into her face.
You will do what I ask.
You will bring me what I want.
You will offer it in a way that pleases me.
You will never, ever deny me.
Kalen was forced back to her knees by his foul breath and the searing heat of his flesh that blew out at her in cremating waves. His voice was echoing through her skull, gonging like some great bell in her brain.
She looked up at him to beg for mercy and she saw his red, bleeding eyes, the grinning, puckering hole of his mouth, and all the yellow, gnarled teeth. I fed you when you were hungry and now you will feed me…do you understand? But she shook her head. There were things she could do, and there were those others that she dared not do.
“NO!” she heard her voice shout, filled with defiance.
Then he threw her to the floor, smashing her face against the hardwood until she was senseless and could taste blood in her mouth. She was dimly aware that he was tearing her clothes off, mounting her crudely. His salivating mouth slid up her spine, slithering tongue licking and tasting. He was raping her, only she did not cry out at the violation…in fact, she welcomed it, she yearned for it because in the cool/hot/warm/burning hive of her mind she knew that’s what love was: a hunger, an emptiness that needed filling and he was filling her. She felt him slide into her and he was unbearably cold. It felt like an icicle had been inserted into her. As he rode her, she could feel taut, wiry hairs like the bristles of a hog scraping against her bare back and his voice, at her ear, in her head, I am hungry and you will feed me, Kalen, or I will plant a seed in you that will grow and grow until it eats its way out. Filled with heat, trembling with desire, she could barely speak and when she did, her voice, broken and laid bare, moaned, “Yes…yes…I will feed you… I will give you what you want…”