The Unwelcome
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The Unwelcome
The Unwelcome
Jacob Steven Mohr
Winchester, UK
Washington, USA
First published by Cosmic Egg Books, 2021
Cosmic Egg Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., 3 East St., Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK
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© Jacob Steven Mohr 2019
ISBN: 978 1 78904 559 8
978 1 78904 560 4 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933429
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Jacob Steven Mohr as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
US: Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, 7300 West Joy Road, Dexter, MI 48130
We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.
To Steve and Marie Filizola, who knew I could.
OTHER BOOKS BY JACOB STEVEN MOHR
The Book of Apparitions 1731453876
Daughter of Man 1629898805
The more we get together, together, together,
The more we get together, the happier we’ll be.
‘Cos your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends.
The more we get together, the happier we’ll be.
Raffi
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner
Not about to see your light,
But if you wanna find hell with me,
I can show you what it’s like.
Danzig
Contents
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Prologue: Names
Chapter 1 Confession
Chapter 2 Girlfriend
Chapter 3 Skin
Chapter 4 Boyfriend
Chapter 5 House Rules
Chapter 6 Jill
Chapter 7 Ben Alden Walks Under the Moon
Chapter 8 Under the Gun
Chapter 9 Touch
Chapter 10 Through a Wide Keyhole
Chapter 11 Glasspowder
Chapter 12 Happy Campers
Chapter 13 Welcome Wagon
Chapter 14 The Outsider
Chapter 15 Riley’s Last Dance
Chapter 16 Help Me, Kait
Chapter 17 Nobody’s First Choice
Chapter 18 Truth
Chapter 19 Flesh
Chapter 20 The More We Get Together
Chapter 21 Game
Chapter 22 Lonelyworld
Chapter 23 Welcome
Chapter 24 Lover
Chapter 25 Suspect
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Guide
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Prologue: Names
Start of Content
Prologue: Names
The imposter waited in the empty world.
The air smelled like snow. The sky over the little hunting cabin was the white of chalk dust, and the skeletal fingers of the bare trees grasped up into it, reaching hungrily, dark against the clouds. The woods stretched out for miles in every direction, but the cabin crouched in a small clearing off a gravel lot at the edge of the narrow, winding road that threaded through the trees like a vein of ore. Here there was no sound but the hollow groan of the wind and the subtle creak of the trees moving in its grip and the noise of the imposter’s own lungs working the cold air. He could see his breath. The imposter puffed out through chapping lips, watching white steam whirl and vanish in front of his numb face, marveling at the sensation of it. He was perched on the cabin’s front porch, the wood cold through the seat of his jeans, his chin propped on folded hands. He cocked his head to one side and he listened, his eyes half-lidded.
There were bodies in the forest, and he could hear their voices.
The imposter had wondered before if the world had always been empty. But he could not imagine it otherwise. He had wandered until wandering sickened him in the belly, and the unending vacancy of things had been the one constant across years of hypnotizing solitude. But he supposed the possibility remained. Perhaps he had arrived too late to witness the center draining out of the world or perhaps he had simply missed the signs. It did not matter. Now the world yawned hollow. Depleted, barren.
The bodies numbered four: three female, one male, college students all. They were deep in the shaded valley to the north now, moving slowly away, towards the water. Their voices bumped against one another in his head like marbles in a pouch. The imposter listened to them with feverish intensity, parsing the different sounds, separating them like a sieve. Man, woman. Frightened, anxious, vicious, brutal. The names he strained away; these did not matter, either. They were extraneous data. Meaningless, like labels pasted onto empty jars. The bodies were flesh, and flesh did not have names.
But she was among them.
That girl—Heart-Brecker.
The imposter moistened his dry lips irritably. Her voice was hard to separate from the soup of noise inside his head. Once this had been easy, like lifting a melody from the crash of a waterfall. Once he would have known her voice from a chorus of a hundred others. But she had mingled with the bodies, clinging to them stubbornly, aping the movements and habits of flesh. He felt his rage and his desire rise in him like magma, semisolid and too hot to touch. He imagined her as he had known her, naked, or perhaps wrapped loosely in the sheets of the bed they once shared. He pictured her writhing under his touch as the backdrop of the empty world boiled away into a void like a night sky, and his face slashed open in a pale, joyless grin. He would take no pleasure bringing her to heel. But he would do it, because he loved her.
He would do it because there was nobody else.
Now he turned his attention to the vehicle idling just off the lot, partially hidden behind a threadbare shrub next to the rusted-out mailbox. The imposter had pretended not to see the Jeep arrive, but in truth the sound of the engine and of the tires grinding the asphalt beneath them had given the game up long before the vehicle actually rolled into view. Now he could see the driver from the corner of his eye: a great mountain of a body crammed behind the steering wheel. The skin stretched across the broad, freckled face was pale and blotchy, and two dark, piggy eyes stared out from beneath the heavy singular brow that hung over the face like a low-flying cloud. The lips were broad and fleshy and seemed to have no real shape of their own, and the hands gripping the wheel were enormous paws tipped with thick-knuckled fingers. A swamp creature, the imposter mused. A museum model of a Neanderthal or the Megatherium. Something ancient and primitive and monstrously strong.
A peculiar nameless unease settled over him. He knew this body was called Cormac, but this meant as little to him as the fact that the vehicle the body drove was called Jeep. And yet he could not discard the name. He had used it to summon this body here, being the body called Riley, just as he had been the body called Ben, and before that, Alice. Their names tumbled in his head like dice, clacking against one another. Suddenly their voices became overwhelming. He tried to shake the feeling away, but it was like strong ropes thrown across him, pulled tight by the weight of names, of voices, of flesh. He could not silence them; he could not escape the sound of the screams. It was like being drawn down into a great quagmire. It was like drowning or already being drowned.
The imposter’s insides squirmed with disgust. How did he let this happen? How had he allowed things to come this far? The big body inside the Jeep swung the driver-side door out and emerged behind it, broad enough almost to darken the sky. At last the imposter allowed himself to turn his head, taking in this interloper fully, noting with some small glee the look of bewilderment on the other body’s milk-colored face. He wondered what it would be like to wear that face, however briefly. He thought again of the other faces he had peered through that day alone, and the day before, and before and before. He considered his own features, hanging from his skull like a heavy wooden mask, smiling and yet expressionless in the same go. Then he thought of her face, hidden partially behind the fanned-out sweep of her hair, twisting away from him into the darkness, and his teeth ground together like stones. His hand flexed around the handle of the hacksaw, then he stood up slowly, as though he had nowhere in particular to be.
“Hey!” he called out in a cheerful voice. “You’re not supposed to be here…”
The big body looked up, startled, seeing the imposter striding across the gravel towards him, but no fear registered on the broad face. There was only dull confusion, mixed with perhaps a kind of relief the imposter would never learn the source of. The thick lips moved and sounds poured out, and the imposter responded, though he could not remember what words he said. But he remembered putting his hand forward to shake, and the feeling of that ape-like paw wrapping around his hand as though it would crush it
.
Then the terror did come… and the imposter felt it, really felt it rushing up within the other body like the start of some terrible, wracking climax. The center of things collapsed and drained out from under like the pull of quicksand. He put the hacksaw in the other boy’s hands and watched him lift it towards the exposed neck without any hesitation. But of course there would be no hesitation. It was inevitable, the imposter knew. Inexorable, like rot, like decay.
It was too late to correct course now, too late even to scream.
After all—by then, neither of them was really there at all.
Chapter 1
Confession
Kait Brecker always became somebody else when she closed her eyes.
The horror sprang up behind her shut-tight eyelids—and suddenly she would be replaced, wearing somebody else’s skin and teeth and hair and treading the curving, shadow-haunted corridors of another life. It was always the same, this conversion. The face and features were different, sometimes in some obvious way, sometimes subtly, but the feeling never changed. It was cold and sharp, like a needle in her vein.
It was a Sunday within the dream, and the wind was breathing winter’s cold overtures down the back of her neck as she watched a handful of brittle brown leaves tumble around and around the yellow bowl of the Armistice College “Front Lawn.” The air was full of noise. Here gathered protesters—the usual gang, waving pasteboard signs and chanting slogans in singsong. Or here were lovebirds, in pairs, along the duck pond railing, pawing lecherously at each other while their orange-and-black striped scarves whipped in the cold wind. Or there, in the center of the lawn, a scrum of brawny seniors lobbed a Frisbee back and forth across the wide grass plot, hollering jubilantly, their bodies blurred with motion. She did not know why she was here, seeing all this. This was not her body, not her life.
But she would see him soon. She always saw his face in the dream.
She could almost picture him already: here, there, somewhere, always on the periphery. Sway-backed and limp-shouldered and grinning ear-to-ear, with his thumbs thrust into the front pockets of his jeans. He was waiting for Kait. Waiting for her to look up, to see him and smile.
But she would not look for him this time. This body would walk briskly across the dry, crunching grass, and Kait, riding along inside the hollow bones, could peer out through the holes in the skull at the crowded world as it swept by. Past the grass and past the pond, thrilling in that dream-winter’s bracing shiver and in the lovely, weightless sensation of that new, fresh skin, free of the intolerable burden of being Kaity Brecker. And when Lutz popped into frame like he always did, she’d be ready, ready to look past him, too, just another part of the world outside this body, outside this new Kait Brecker’s life.
She could avoid him forever, in the dream. She could look down at her splayed hands and read alien histories in the lines on the palms, stare into the mirror’s reflection and only see the pale blur of a stranger’s face. But even this was poison under her skin. She had wished for it, this crowded, faceless world, but she knew it could not last. It was an eggshell, a balloon about to burst, a cotton-candy memory that would melt in her mouth. She knew it wasn’t real, any of it—but it stung worst of all because she knew, deep in her dream-bones and dream heart, that this sharp and lovely dream, it would never come true—