by Tim Curran
“IT CAN’T BE!” she shouted with everything she had. “IT CANNOT BE! I HAD A LIFE! I HAD PLANS! I I I I HAD I HAD I HAD”
But in her skull, there was blankness. It was gray, misting, formless. There were occasional flashes of things, bad things and terrible things and horrible things she did want to know about or think about.
Memory: in the corner of a room, a gathering dark mass, smoldering, flickering like a candle flame, solidifying into a narrow, tall shape that spreads its wings, watching her with a single glistening eye.
And when I call you, you will come.
Bria screamed.
It was as if somebody had punched her in the gut. The impact made her double over, and the nausea she’d experienced earlier filled her belly with bubbling grease.
What?
What?
WHAT?
But then she knew because her mind exploded with impure white light that revealed the shadows lurking in the corners. The light was like an eye, a cold sepulchral eye sweeping around like a searchlight, trying to get a fix on where she was and what she was seeing.
The elemental.
How do you address it? What’s its secret name?
Bria writhed on the ground until the waves of nausea subsided. Is that what the sickness and vomiting had been caused by? Had the elemental been trying to get into her head all day?
Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon. She knew it. She could feel it along the nape of her neck and in her stomach. Her temples were throbbing. There was a sense of expectation in the air. It was nearly electric.
What do you call it, Bria? How do you address it?
She began to scream again, trying to purge herself of something that was rising to the top of her psyche, a repressed something, a bad something, a horrible something that must not ever, ever, ever be remembered.
What’s its secret name?
Oh, what what what is its secret name?
15
The knife still in her hand, Debra Standish hit the floor, gagging out a silvery, shining effluvium that reeked of dead fish. It dripped down her chin. Skin that was not her own—pale, pink, and glistening with colors like gasoline on water—crawled over her bones, marrying itself to her anatomy, anchoring itself to the flesh beneath, becoming rigidly leprose with sprouting scales that were sharp to the touch, yet remarkably pliable.
It did not matter how many times she cut the alien skin free, it always grew back—quicker and more resilient each time.
She crawled on her belly towards the door, awful hunger pains making her convulse and gasp for breath. Pungent fish oil evacuated from her bladder and bowels. Her lips thick and rubbery, she tried to speak, to call out for help, but all that came out was a watery glub-glub-glub sort of noise, like the suffocating, sucking aspirations of a lungfish trapped on dry land.
But if I can only reach the door…if I can only get outside…
Yes, yes, the inside door was open. All she would have to do is open the screen door and then she would be free. How hard could that be?
When she did reach the door, it was no good. She could no longer stand, and when she reached up to turn the knob, she couldn’t. She no longer had hands as such—the alien skin had covered her fingers, too, webbing them together.
The glass panel was slid down on the door, covering the screen. Through it, she could see the world out there. The world she so badly needed to discover.
At an impasse, she was suddenly struck by a voracious, burning hunger. She had to get through that door; nothing else mattered. She raised questing hands (if that’s what they really were) and hammered them against the panel, leaving a sticky, clear film on the glass.
Oh please, please, please let me out! a voice cried in her head. Let me out of here! Let me out of here BEFORE…BEFORE IT HAPPENS!
What that was, she did not know. But she had a dire presentment of something terrible that was about to pass.
She beat on the glass.
She smashed her face against it.
She clawed at it.
Tried to scratch it and dig her way through.
But it wasn’t enough. The panel was made of tempered glass. It would require great force to smash through it. She would need to throw her whole body at it, launch herself like a missile.
Drip…drip…drip.
Oh God, it was coming from her. Liquid was dripping out of her hindquarters. Something was happening back there, something perfectly grotesque. It continued to run, only now it was thicker, viscous and it fell out in gelatinous drops.
Splat…splat…splat.
It was inside her.
She could feel it inside here.
Something moving, shifting, twisting up her guts.
A pool of fetid-smelling slime spread out over the floor beneath her. She slipped in it. She flopped and skidded, her webbed hands finding no purchase. Convulsions cycled through her, agonizing convulsions that made it feel like her bowels were being tied into figure eights and bowlines, knotted, twisted, pulled tighter and tighter. And then…
And then—
And then something let go back there with a fluid gushing, and she felt like a pastry bag being squeezed out, a gushing deluge of water and slime evacuating from her, pooling on the floor, waves of it rolling into the living room and splashing against the walls.
Don’t look…don’t look to see what this is, what you’ve made or been forced to create! Do not look at what has come out of you! What you have brought into being!
Don’t!
DON’T!
But she did.
Turning her flabby, scaly body nearly entirely around since it did not seem capable of bending at the waist any longer, she focused her blurring eyesight on the slime and on the roe that had come squirting out of her in hot jets. There were literally thousands of eggs and each were slowly pulsating as if what was in them was nearing the moment of birth.
Trying to scream and making little more than a watery hissing sound like a whale exhaling air through its blowhole, she threw herself at the glass panel and it shattered as she fell through it, her bulk taking the door nearly off the hinges in the process.
She crawled down the steps and pulled herself into the dying grass of the yard, sluggishly and with great effort, the way the first life forms must have originally pulled themselves out of the sea and onto dry land countless eons before.
16
The music was thin and reedy like the pipes of Pan. It drifted about the house, flowing and echoing, making the thoughts in Lara’s mind flutter like leaves in a gust.
She smiled thinly.
She grinned seductively.
She pursed her lips primly.
She licked them salaciously.
She is and she isn’t. She can and can’t. She will and she won’t. She has become the chaos and confusion that has ruled her from the center of her mind since she was a child.
As the music played on, something in her soul (or what there was left of it) went to warm butter. It was yellow and melting, cooling in the wrong places and taking on the wrong forms and yet liquid and forever running.
I don’t…I don’t…I don’t…I can’t remember…I can’t remember anything. Her thoughts were a vortex spinning in her fevered mind. I can’t remember how things are supposed to be and what’s right and what’s wrong…
Still, the music played on, seductive and destructive, closing down parts of her psyche and opening up others wide and bleeding.
Billy was squatting in the corner, worrying at the swollen, flyblown thing, prodding it, and this confused her and excited her and she did not know why.
Now he crept forward over the floor like a spider with a wispy, rustling noise, parting the black mists of flies like a freighter parts sea fog. He stood and he was not a boy and he was not a man. He did not have feet, but the hooves of a goat, and they clopped on the floor as he drew ever nearer. He stank of urine-drenched straw
and harvest fields, manure and rancid grapes crushed to wine. He smelled of heat and musk and fertility. His skin was gnarled and gray like tree bark, his hands were paws that sprouted dirty springs of trailing hair. Between his legs, a flaccid penis began to move, rising now like a cobra to the tune of a flute.
“Soon now, Mama, we will join the others,” his voice said, and it was like no voice she had ever heard—silken and sultry, yet raw and guttural. It flowed and whispered and grated like teeth on bone. “The place of gathering will call to us, Lara, and we will go…”
Yes, she thought, excited and disturbed. Oh yes.
Until then, there was the music that owned her, its rhythm the rhythm of her heart and its tempo that of her unbridled emotions. She could feel the blood pumping hotly through her veins as he got closer and closer, reaching out a shaggy, taloned hand to grip her blotchy skin. Adrenaline raced through her, and she wanted to dance like a pagan in harvest fields and leap through autumnal fires and be laid down by her lover in a field of barley and clover.
Take me, take me to the place I want to go, she thought. Take me to the place where I can commune, where I can join and be joined and made into one with the spirit of the sky…
Billy clopped ever nearer, reaching out and clawing ruts in her flesh until she cried out with joy. His musk sacs were as full as his balls and she wanted him to empty them on her and in her, to rub his oily hide against her skin. Her passion was rising, her hunger nearly insatiable. She could never be filled, never. His musk was perfume, and it made the sweat boil out of her. Her breasts ached and the muscles of her thighs trembled. She wanted to cage him in her long legs and never let him go.
Then he was on top of her, entering her, grinding, ribbons of his sweat stinging her face, his huge blubbery lips parting to reveal teeth that were long and yellow as his claws pierced her flesh.
It was then and only then that she screamed.
17
The Candy Lady was a wicked creature that promised treats and delivered tricks, beware the Candy Lady. Her eyes were swollen purple bruises and her face a sagging pallid expanse of corpse fat, pocketed and punctured with holes that bled a serous discharge. There was a knife in her hand. It was long and sharp, and she jabbed it into herself time and again as if to prove that it was indeed sharp and indeed the tool for the job of cutting and rendering child-flesh. When she did this, she shuddered as if it caused great pain to something inside her skin. But you wouldn’t have known it by her awful grinning Halloween mask of a face. It looked enormously pleased.
In the dog cage that Anna Lee Posey once used so many years ago to transport her sickly dachshund back and forth to the vet, Hannah Falconi sobbed pitifully.
“I know your displeasure,” said the Candy Lady, graying teeth jutting from her gums. “It is the hunger, eh, child? You are not well-fed and fattened. Hungry, hungry, hungry, are you?”
If Hannah knew what an erection was (and thankfully she did not), she would have likened the Candy Lady to one. For as Anna Lee talked, teeth scraping together and viscous gray drool hanging from her lips in threads, she was like a flaccid penis filling with blood, engorging itself and becoming fully erect. The Candy Lady was shriveled like a deflated laundry bag not seconds ago, but now she was full and fat, rigid with muscles and straining sinews in her neck. It looked as if there were two people inside her dress now and maybe, just maybe, there were.
Hannah kept sobbing, her mind a whirlwind of horror and dread. Old Mrs. Posey was a monster. She was every cackling, hook-nosed, wart-faced, green-complected hag from every storybook Hannah had read in her dear eight years. The Candy Lady was no sweet, kind old grandmother anymore, she was the Wicked Witch of the West and Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty, Roald Dahl’s Grand High Witch and the White Witch of Narnia, a tapestry of evil witches unfurling itself and its innate wickedness before her.
“A taste child, a sup, a morsel of meaty goodness,” said the Candy Lady, holding up a blood-dripping strand of red meat in scaly yellow fingers that looked like the talons of a buzzard. Fine black bristles grew from them. “Would you like to taste it? Hmm? Hmmmm, child? Don’t be shy…I won’t bite you…or maybe I will!” She licked the meat with a tongue that was pale and purple-veined like a peeled snake. “Yummy! Do have some! Do beg me to feed you, because if you do, oh, I certainly will! Certainly!”
Hannah wanted the meat. Never in her short lifetime had she wanted anything quite so much. Not only did her stomach hunger for it, but her fingers longed to touch it and her lips trembled for its feel and her tongue corkscrewed in her mouth to taste its salty blood-richness.
But it was her vocal cords that betrayed her. From deep in her throat came a single resolute response: “No.”
The witch grimaced and shook, her face contorted with bone-deep wrinkles and ruts like those of pine bark as if she were in great pain. One of her purple blood blister eyes narrowed into a slit, the other expanded like a balloon in its socket. Both went from the purple of contusions to a black-red. Scarlet tears ran from them. Seamed lips pulled away from long crooked teeth that were turning black as onyx. “No? No? What do you mean, no? What exactly are you saying to me, you silly little cunt?” the witch shrieked with venom. “Who are you to deny me? I offer you the meat and you must eat what I bring to you? Eat! Eat! Eat it up! EEEEEAT!” As evidence of this, she sucked the scrap of meat into her mouth and then she began digging into her own belly with her raptor’s claws, tearing out bloody cutlets and shanks that she shoved into her mouth, not chewing, but gulping and swallowing like a reptile. Her black teeth rent the offered meat, her gullet bobbing up and down, red juice and gray saliva hanging in ribbons from her scissoring jaws.
Hannah was screaming by this point and that only made the witch eat that much more frantically and voraciously, groaning and moaning with something quite near orgasmic pleasure as she filled herself with herself. She clawed her body down to yellowed rungs of rib beyond which throbbed the black, cancerous mass of her throbbing heart and the purple sucking sacks of her lungs.
Now her face narrowed into a snout and then a fleshless beak. In fact, her entire head was hairless now. Not the head of buzzard, but the skull of one, exaggerated and primeval, set with cavities and nares and a deadly hooked beak. It had only one eye, and it looked like a blood-beaded, over-ripened plum.
“Out now with you,” said the buzzard-witch as it opened the cage and dragged a screaming and crying Hannah Falconi forth.
The child tried to fight free, squirming on the floor, kicking and screaming but that only seemed to delight the witch.
“Look how you fight! What stamina! What determination! All to save your meaningless little life!” she shrieked. “How hot-blooded you are! How it seasons and spices your delicate shivering meat!”
The buzzard-witch laughed with a booming, shrilling, cawing sound like a flock of hungry crows.
Hannah was shaking and whimpering, noticing that the house was decaying around her. The walls dripped slime, and the floors developed seeping purple pustules, the ceiling dripping a foul ooze and hanging in seedy clots like the inside of a gourd.
And then something happened which to her young mind made no sense at all: the buzzard-witch screamed. Not with delight or sadistic glee, but with something akin to terror and possibly even agony. Her skeletal beak snapped open and closed, and she gripped her fleshless head with two scaly claws, muttering, “No! No, no, no, no! You do not dare! You do not dare do this to me now!” She froze up straight as a post, then seemed to go limp as an empty glove. She whirled and smashed into the soft pudding of the walls, cawing and squealing, seemingly caught in a dire battle with something that Hannah could not see.
“OUT! OUT! YOU GET OUT OF ME NOW!” she wailed. YOU HAVE BEEN BANISHED FROM THIS PLACE! YOU CANNOT RETURN! YOU WILL NOT RETURN—”
Then a voice Hannah knew well, one of age and wisdom and tenderness said, “Quick, Hannah! Run! Get out the door! Run as fast as you can! I can’t…I can’t h
old it for long!” It was the voice of Anna Lee Posey, the Candy Lady, everyone’s favorite grandma. “Please, dear…hurry…”
Then a misting darkness seemed to consume the buzzard-witch and she flapped dark wings and clawed out at Hannah. “NO! NOT LET HER GET AWAY! EAT THE LITTLE CUNT! CHEW HER! SUCK HER!”
Then the darkness retreated and the Candy Lady said, “Hurry, Hannah! Please hurry!”
The buzzard-witch was like some awful balloon that expanded, then deflated, filling and emptying, changing, reconfiguring itself with amazing speed—it was the buzzard-witch, then the Candy Lady, then the buzzard-witch, then the Candy-Lady, then the buzzard-witch, then the Candy Lady…a veritable storm of feathers and bones and pecking beaks and eyes and leathery wings as two entities fought for possession of the body of Anna Lee Posey which was in no condition for such physical theatrics and began to pop and crack, bones splintering and tendons pulling free like dark roots—
But by then, Hannah was pulling herself out the door and launching herself off the porch without using the steps. She landed in the yard beneath the dim, shadow-crawling radiance of the midnight sun which never moved.
She stared up in the sky, transfixed by what she was seeing, that gathering embryonic cloud mass that looked like a breathing storm entity being born.
This was it, she knew.
This is what everyone had been waiting for.
18
The light had gone from being murky to a sickly-yellow that seemed to engulf all and everything. The time was coming and Bria knew it.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer yet.
Yes, it was coming with a roaring, pulsating ferocity like some immense, eldritch subterranean worm rising to the surface, tunneling through black earth and pulverized bedrock, rising, rising, ever rising like a great, hungry fish from the depths of a dark lake coming up to feed. It was pure kinetic energy, black steam, and thrumming, sizzling, arcing fission.