Somnambulist

by Andrew Mackay

  “Mffghh.”

  Iris shook her head, but couldn’t throw the wing away from her screaming face.

  A dark barrage balloon formed between her knees as she screamed into whatever it was covering her mouth.

  The lights rapid-fired into her retinas, close to blinding her once and for all.

  The more she pushed and punched back, the heavier the balloon moved against her. The muscles in her throat constricted. Her lips blasted sideways, as the array of tiny black dots whirled around in the air and straight into her mouth.

  She closed her eyes in the hope it would all stop, but that’s when the pain began. It felt like jello forming in her mouth, pushing against her esophagus, trying to force her to puke.

  Then, there was the music; calm, chirpy, entirely at odds with the anguish she was experiencing.

  Iris’s throat closed tighter as the insects formed at the back of her mouth and inflated. Her cheeks bulged, as if a warm duvet was expanded over her tongue and filling her mouth.

  She tried to vomit, but couldn’t.

  Screaming for help didn’t work, either.

  The level of water twisted to the left, threatening to push the radio onto the floor. She just about managed to turn her head to see it all.

  Her soapy wrist slid out from Lennard’s hand, allowing her to try to push him back. When she opened her lone, right eye, he appeared to have vanished entirely, replaced by a giant whale-like creature.

  Pushing something that gargantuan in size was impossible for her. She reached between her thighs to barricade the invasion of her insides. Each time the lights snapped off and on, it produced a sizzling effect which syringes her ears with a deafening and acute molten lava.

  Her throat closed further, blocking off her oxygen completely, just as he hit her inner left thigh.

  To find a thick, fat slug inching its way toward her pelvic bone. The more she tried to grab at it, the slipperier it became, folding and waving through her fingers.

  The beady slug head nibbled at the pit of her left thigh, and sluiced to the right, through her middle and index finger, and into her stomach.

  There was only one path it could have taken.

  A stinging sensation shot through her abdomen. The slug only got so far before it rested and pulsed. Iris felt as if the slug tried to breath, and the more it did, the fatter it got.

  Inflating… growing ever larger… Iris’s body invasion hurt beyond words. Smothered by a litany of bizarre creatures, all entering her body and growing, slowly taking control.

  She splashed her free hand against the water as it twisted and turned out of the bathtub, as if trying to meet the scraping walls.

  Small beads of red bathwater punched through the air like minuscule dolphins, which was exactly the time that her legs turned to liquid.

  The bullets of red water splashed against the white porcelain and covered the radio. A few of them stretched down the radio’s speaker.

  The skin on her thighs defied gravity, and pulled together, kissing when they met like a wacky kind of glue. Her bones morphed into sticks of fire and burned through to the skin.

  When she looked down at her thighs, she found they had melded together with a scaled surface. Lifting both legs was easy, despite the agony. Her ankles fused together, coughing up smoke, which poured into her nostrils and into her lungs.

  The whale growled and snorted through the water as she flapped her one, giant leg up and down in an attempt to hit the radio.

  Her toes webbed together the harder she tried to kick the radio. It would fall one side or the other.

  Iris didn’t know if her streams of tears contributed to the amount of water in the bath. The fiery pain burning through her body as the slug pulsed inside her threatened to push her into unconsciousness for good.

  Her feet had morphed into a fin with a flap of brown skin where her toes usually were. A final attempt to kick the radio worked. It flew off the edge of the bath and smashed to the watery ground under the sink.

  Iris’s eyes veered right to see her mother burst through the door. “Iris?”

  Then, her mother’s face twisted into a crazy amalgam of pure terror and death.

  The pain alleviated in a flash.

  The walls pushed out to their original positions, and the speed of the flickering lights subsided.

  You fucking beast.

  Everything went dark…

  ***

  Iris sat on the couch with a blanket over her shoulders. A strange but friendly adult consoled her.

  “How are you feeling, Iris?” the lady asked, knowing she wouldn’t be getting an answer any time soon.

  Iris buried her toes on the carpet and concentrated her mind on her ankles.

  Anything to block her mother’s screams of murder and turmoil at the front door.

  Anything to barricade her view of the flashing blue lights revolving through the living room window.

  Anything to shut out the incessant cries of her baby sister who struggled for freedom in her father’s arms.

  Gina’s voice pummeled the walls in a state of delirium as she watched her son being escorted out of the house. “You sick beast.”

  If Iris closed her lips and focused her attention to her mind, she could just about make out the radio static from the police car outside.

  And her brother’s wails of terror.

  A friendly hand held Iris’s upper forearm, and produced a warm tone. “Iris?”

  She looked up at the woman and blinked.

  “Listen. When you’re feeling a bit better, we need to check you’re okay. Okay?”

  Iris nodded, not fully understanding what the lady meant. Despite her comforting smile, it made no sense to her. She didn’t protest.

  “Your mommy and daddy will come, too. It’ll be okay,” the lady said, before pretending to chuckle at the baby in her father’s arms. “Is that your little sister?”

  Iris nodded and held herself tighter. The draft running through the open door waded into the front room and bit at her exposed skin.

  “That’s nice. Don’t worry, Iris. Everything will be fine.”

  “No,” her father snapped. “It won’t be fine. It’ll be anything but fine.”

  The lady’s attitude soured in response. “Mr. Baskeyfield, please. If we could just wait until—”

  “—I don’t understand it. He was right upstairs with her. We didn’t hear a damn thing.”

  “Mr. Baskeyfield, please, not in front of your daughter—”

  “—That motherfucker.”

  He hushed at the crying baby and cradled her tighter. “I swear to God himself, if he ever did anything to anyone else, I’ll—”

  “—You’ll what?”

  He turned to the door, along with Iris, to see Gina in a state of distress. She’d calmed down momentarily; her initial expression of Hell now fully evolved into one of bitter regret and illness.

  Iris couldn’t bear to watch her parents fight. She turned her attention to the wall clock above the fireplace; six minutes past seven.

  It felt much, much later than that, though.

  “What will you do?” Gina asked her husband. “It is not a matter of what we do now, you know. It is a matter of what we could have done. So, I ask again, what will you do?”

  He didn’t have a response - not for her, anyway. He turned his head down and focused his attention on his youngest’s face.

  Irene had calmed down, now, and fallen asleep.

  Technically, I was there. I don’t remember any of it, obviously. I was just a baby at the time. Everything I know about what happened that Sunday night came from Iris, in fits and starts, over the course of many, many years. But that’s what happened.

  ***

  Nicholas’s face turned to stone as Irene finished her sentence. His fingers shook as he clutched the steering wheel.

  Irene sat next to him, guilt-stricken.

  She hadn’t the nerve to ask him how he felt.

  The gas station he�
��d pulled up at was eerily quiet, too. It was the only car at the pumps.

  Irene shuddered and folded her arms for comfort, reeling from the explanation she’d given.

  Little did she know that, in Nicholas’s mind, he’d stopped listening to her clinical yet downplayed relaying of events with little-to-no-detail.

  His mind had filled in the visual blanks like a giant IMAX screen playing out in front of his face, clipping and clutching to little signs of what it might have looked like.

  He wanted to say something, but his vocal cords had taken leave from his body. Now, he regretted hearing what he’d heard - not because he didn’t want to know, but because he’d forced the wrong person to tell him.

  Nicholas found himself in the position of wanting blood and wanting out of his own body at the same time. Irene was right. He could never unhear what he’d just heard.

  But it was his own doing.

  His own insistence.

  Could there be a chance that the imagery in his mind was way beyond what truly went down that Sunday evening all those years ago? Possibly. He didn’t know, and the chances were good that he would never know for sure.

  He found the words he was looking for. Two, little words that revealed his state of mind.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The quiet statement caught Irene by surprise. “You’re sorry?”

  Nicholas nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “What have you got to be sorry for?” Irene asked, not wanting to rock his mental boat any more than she’d already done. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  “You were right.”

  Irene wiped her eyes and kept her calm. “It’s not your fault. It’s my fault if anything.”

  “I put you in an awkward position,” Nicholas said. “It’s so unlike me. I just felt like I was being kept out, but, I c-can’t believe I did that.”

  “Ugh,” Irene spluttered and at once realized why her father did what he’d done.

  There were no words.

  She clenched her fist and thumped the passenger window. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  Nicholas vocalized his thoughts in something of a daze. “All those times we got together, she was keeping it from me. Every time we went to bed. Every time we spoke, met for a date, when Sammy was conceived, and she kept it from me.”

  “I know.”

  Nicholas blinked and hoped what he’d said hadn’t been taken the wrong way. “No, no, I’m not complaining. I’m thinking of her. My wife. My God, I never knew. I never knew.”

  A speeding police car drove past in the opposite direction to where they were headed. Another police car followed, and then another, all of them blaring their sirens and flashing their blue lights.

  Nicholas followed them with his eyes and turned over his shoulder to see them vanish from view in the back window.

  “Must have been that truck.”

  Irene sniffed and kept her eyes on her lap. All she wanted was to climb out of her own body and go die somewhere, quietly.

  “She’s going to kill him.”

  “What?”

  “Lennard. I think she’s going to kill him.”

  “Oh, Irene. Come, now. That’s not like her—”

  “—And why not? I know I would if I got my hands on him. You’re right, it’s not like my sister at all.”

  Nicholas closed his eyes and attempted to control his breathing. “I just need a little while to calm down.”

  Irene looked up and through the windshield at the Freeway Five Estate miles away on the horizon.

  “Right place,” she whispered. “Right time. Right circumstances. She’d have to be out of her mind in order to do it.”

  ***

  Iris had been walking for fifteen minutes in her bare feet. The weight of the green duffel didn’t weigh her down.

  Specks of blood and grubby, black marks adorned her nightgown. It had torn up her left side during the course of the night.

  She kept her head held high, focused and determined, as she put one foot in front of the other and walked, and walked…

  The gas station felt as if it rolled past her left side as she continued to walk towards the Freeway Five estate.

  The lone car parked in front seemed familiar, but not enough to stop her in her tracks. A man and a woman appeared to take a rest, at least in Iris’s eyes.

  But they weren’t of any concern to her.

  She didn’t even know them.

  A swift tilt of the head, and her pupils tightened to take the view of the five ghastly towers at the end of the road. The Freeway Five estate.

  She lifted her left wrist and focused on the black text nestling over the veins.

  The third tower.

  Apartment 706, on the seventh floor.

  Out of the blue, her wrist snapped forward and nearly hit her in the face. Someone had bumped into her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  As Iris lowered her hand, a blurry face focused into view. A woman around the same age as her, and with shoulder-length orange hair. Like Iris, the woman was also in her nightgown.

  “Please, forgive me,” the woman said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  A smile etched across Iris’s face, indicating all was forgiven. Before she moved on, the woman stopped to look her over once again.

  “Wait a second. Don’t I know you?”

  Iris stared blankly, unaffected by the question.

  “Yes, I do know you. Iris. Iris Baskeyfield?” the woman said with excitement. “My God, what are the chances?”

  Iris kept her eyes on the building, utterly uninterested in the woman’s recognition.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Jade. Jade Harkness. From Chrome Junction.”

  Still no response. It appeared Iris couldn’t have given any less of a shit if the woman decided to hop into the road and get hit by a bus.

  “So, what you been up to?” Jade giggled. “Hey, do you still have that silly little tattoo—”

  Jade’s mouth quit producing any more words when she saw said tattoo covering Iris’s left wrist.

  “Oh. You do.”

  Blink, blink.

  Confused and somewhat hurt by her old friend’s lack of response, Jade waved her hand in front of her face.

  “Can you see me, Iris?”

  Blink, blink.

  Jade kept her friendly manner up, secretly praying that Iris was just kidding around. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah, yeah. The sleepwalking thing.”

  Fascinated, and in need of affirmation that her memory was correct, she waved her hand back and forth across Iris’s face once again - to precisely no reaction.

  “It’s like you’re a waxwork of her. Absolutely still. No movement. It’s quite something, I gotta say.”

  To Jade’s shock, Iris moved off along the sidewalk just as a slew of police cars came screaming in the opposite direction.

  Jade hollered after her. “Good seeing you again, Iris.”

  Whizz-blare-whizz.

  Five police cars shot past Jade, pushing Iris’s gown against her chest, and her hair up over her shoulders.

  “I hope you wake up soon.”

  Fond of her memories of the woman, Jade smiled to herself.

  Iris didn’t see it.

  She had walking to do.

  A tower to visit.

  A score to settle…

  Chapter 19

  Iris reached apartment 706 on the seventh floor of the third tower block.

  The elevator ride stank of faint urine and economic poverty; a stench of failure that wouldn’t leave her brain any time soon.

  She’d successfully ignored the shabby landing that housed three other apartments; one adjacent to the door she stood before, and two on the opposing side.

  Iris couldn’t tell which of the four doors had loud hip hop music playing behind it, and didn’t much care.

  A cool draft blew across the landing, shifting some of the grains of dirt across her bare heels. Some of it collected around her feet
and threatened to leave an imprint if she were to move inside.

  The question of “moving inside” rattled through her brain. Her gray eyes slid over to the doorbell on the door frame to apartment 706, complete with a sticker of little yellow bird plastered above the button.

  Iris didn’t register her arm moving to the side of her body, nor the extension of her index finger. Her arm shook in such a subtle way that nobody else would see it. To her, the vibrations felt like an earthquake.

  The skin of her fingertip hit the plastic circle, but stopped short of applying pressure.

  What next? What if I press the button? Her thoughts battled for first place at the front of her brain.

  The answer was simple.

  The button will be pressed

  Cuckoo - cuckoo - cuckoo.

  Lennard Smalley looked up from the couch in the front room. The doorbell to the apartment had gone off. It was all he could do to shuffle his considerable weight to the front of his legs, grab the armrest, and hoist himself to his feet.

  His wife looked up at him with some concern.

  “Who could that be at this time of night?”

  A quick scan of the wall clock confirmed Lennard’s suspicion.

  “I dunno,” he said with a modicum of confusion. “It’s nearly midnight.”

  “Well, whoever it is, tell them we’re not interested.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about that. I’mma tell ‘em to go away.”

  Lennard scratched the stubble on his chin and he made his way into the landing. The creaking floorboards rumbled along the walls, not that they ever did when his wife traversed down them.

  Lennard eyed the bedroom door at the far end of the hall. It was slightly ajar on this hot night, and for good reason. Whomever was inside was fast asleep and snoring. That unmistakable sound of ruptured breathing through nostrils which hit the back of a throat belonging to someone much younger than he and his wife.

  “Sam?” Lennard called over the continuous drone of the cuckooing doorbell.

  No response.

  Satisfied that all was well, Lennard reached the door, unlocked the bolt, and pulled it open.