One tiny creature was hurling itself at the cone of light as if it was an invisible force field that it could break through. The light would immediately scald its oily midnight flesh and it would shrink back squealing in agony only to attack again. I knew what and who it was even before I saw its face. I hadn’t seen his face the night he died, not until I picked up the newspaper the next day. I had been driving too fast when I leaned out the driver’s side window with the Tech-nine and let the Black Talons fly into the crowd of gangbangers. There was no way to see who I had hit, if anyone. The next day when I read that only one person had been killed, a six-year-old kid named Devon who’d been playing hide-and-go-seek with some friends when he’d been struck by one of my errant bullets, I didn’t even cry. I smoked the largest rock I could find and went out again to find those fools I had missed.
There were larger creatures that began to push their way in closer to the light. They were more brazen and they got so close that their inky black skin began to blister and burn as they huddled in close. They knew that they couldn’t get me as long as I stayed under the light, but they seemed determined that I should see them. They wanted to be recognized.
I looked past the gnarled and twisted horns and fangs and immediately began to put names to the faces. Donny, Tank, Warlock, Bean, Eddie, Malik. All rival drug dealers that I had murdered. There were other faces huddling in close to the light but I didn’t recognize most of them. How could I? I’d never met half of the people whose lives had been ruined by what I sold.
Blood was starting to pool in my sneakers. I could feel myself getting light-headed from the blood loss. I had to get moving again before I went into shock. I had to find some open highway and a car.
There were six streetlights in a row and then beyond it another quarter mile of darkness. More of the things had amassed around the perimeter of the light. I would have to go through them again. I began to run.
As I sprinted beneath the last streetlight, preparing to charge into the darkness, I saw what looked like a wall of the fearsome night things raging amid the shadowy twilight between the street lamps. Now I could make out all of them. The biggest mob of creatures, swarming directly in my path, were led by faces that I’d known most of my life. The Christians had been right after all. These things were not some genetic experiments gone wrong or the aftermath of some industrial accident. But they hadn’t come from hell either. They were the most fearsome of all the demons, my own personal ones.
“The way out is not around but through.” I whispered as I tucked my chin and hurtled right into them swinging the axe as I prepared to make my last stand. I saw demons with the faces of my mother and father lunge toward me and I prepared to cleave their heads from their shoulders. But I couldn’t. I dropped the axe and ran, trying to dodge between them, but I was slow from injuries, exhaustion, and loss of blood, and there were too many of them. Their fangs and claws cut into my flesh and this time they hooked in deep. I couldn’t break free, but I didn’t slow my stride either. I dragged them along as I sprinted toward the light. My mother and father latched to my thighs and buttocks, slashing at my back. My sister, and brothers, my aunts, and uncles, and cousins, former friends, and ex-girlfriends, everyone who’d ever had the poor judgement to invest their emotions in me, were gnawing at my chest and stomach, working my muscle and fat free from my bones, and burrowing into my organs.
One of the night things, an ex-girlfriend whom I’d gotten pregnant and then coerced into having an abortion, scampered up my back and began biting and clawing at my throat, lacerating both my jugular and carotid arteries with its hooked talons and shark-like teeth. The spray of blood seemed to excite the demons already clinging to me and attract even more. I stumbled, nearly went down into the herd of rapacious shadows, then righted myself and continued to run. Staring at the cone of light just yards away, like an oasis in a desert of pain and death. I began to scream just before the thing on my back tore out my larynx, silencing me. Still, I kept running. It was what I had always done. The only way I knew how to deal with life. But now, my demons were catching up to me.
Best Friends
I was almost asleep, staring across the darkened room in a drowsy twilight haze at the moonlight beaming through my window, when a shadow crossed slowly in front of it, blocking the silver light from view. My heart drumrolled in my chest as the dark shape, a piece of the night, detached itself from the larger body of darkness and began moving towards me. My breath came in rapid bursts filling the silence with the sounds of a quiet steadily increasing panic as fear sent a surge of adrenaline through my nervous system and shot up my pulse rate somewhere around one hundred and fifty beats per minute. Nothing should have been moving in my room. Nothing except me.
I wanted to reach for the nurse’s call button sitting on my nightstand but I was afraid to move from the relative safety of my blankets. The room darkened even more. The inky black silhouette appeared to be absorbing the moonlight and breeding more shadows into the already stygian gloom. A tenebrous curtain of night obscured everything from view as the shadow approached my bedside.
My heartbeat doubled. The blood surged through my veins as if propelled by a steam engine. I watched the dark ethereal shape glide to the edge of my bed and I dug my fingernails into the sheets, ripping them. I imagined the sound of footsteps even though I heard none. A cold draft preceded the apparition as it floated toward me, whispering like wind beneath a doorsweep. Slowly a distinctly human silhouette emerged before me, taking on more anthropomorphic features as it drew closer. The outline of a human skull with ragged tufts of hair clinging to its otherwise bald head, emaciated arms, bony hips, skeletal legs. I could hear it breathing as it hovered above my bed. The dark shape expanding and contracting as it inhaled warm climate controlled air and breathed out that chill gasp. I began to pant terrified little breaths that turned to steam in the frigid air radiating from the nebulous penumbra above me.
Then the shadow reached out one lithe wisp of a limb, lifted my sheets and blanket, and slipped into bed beside me, snuggling its icy flesh against mine. The scream stuck in my throat and came out as a whimper as it drew itself still closer. It was trying to spoon with me. A riot of goosebumps exploded across my skin and icy tendrils clawed my spine raising the hair on my neck and forearms. I could feel it against me, cold, clammy, dead, but breathing. I was more shocked that the apparition had any substance at all than by its lack of body heat.
Too weak to move, I lay there with those cold skeletal arms wrapped around me, that frail damp torso pressed against my back, and its frigid breath creeping down my neck.
When it turned its face toward mine its eyes were gaping holes that yawned wide, more shadows slithering deep within them. It was a portrait of sorrow. Sorrow so deep that it had literally become her, bending each feature into the shape of that one emotion. Still, I recognized her.
“God damnit! Why the hell does she keep following me!” My fear and guilt had merged into one paralyzing emotion. Whatever she had come here to do to me I knew I deserved it.
Her name was Sarah Michelle and she’d had a crush on me, but I’d been too afraid of what others would say about me dating the emaciated little nerd to show her even the simplest human kindness. I had killed her. Or, at the very least, I’d given her no reason to want to keep living.
I never knew that she had cancer. She’d kept it to herself. Never using it as an excuse when people laughed at her sunken corpse-like face or her bald and mottled scalp, giving no explanation for these abnormalities at all. Enduring all the taunts and torments with stoic indifference even when they said she had AIDS and accused her of being a heroine junkie or a crack whore. The other kids were so cruel that I had felt sorry for her. So I tried to be nice.
I spoke to Sarah whenever I passed her in the hallways between classes. “Hi” and “Bye” mostly. I offered her a smile whenever I could. I was just trying to make her feel...I don’t know...not so alone. When I’d first started speaking to her she w
ould eye me suspiciously and quickly walk away. It wasn’t long before she was returning my greetings and my smiles. It was like winning the trust of a wild animal. Soon I could see her lingering in the halls, waiting for me to notice and acknowledge her with a smile before shuffling off to class. I thought it was cute at first. Until she started following me.
Everywhere I went she would turn up. Lurking in the shadows. Staring. Flashing that weak nervous smile and turning away, blushing coyly whenever I would catch her looking at me. I was petrified that my friends would start to notice. That they’d tease me for hanging out with her. Say she was my girlfriend or something. Maybe say that I had AIDS too or that I was a junkie or a crackhead.
See, I was the new kid in school. I’d just transferred that semester and my popularity was something of a fluke. New kids were not supposed to be part of the in-crowd. The thought of being an outcast was the worse thing I could imagine.
“Dude, what’s up with you and the anorexia chick? You doin’ her or something? She’s always following you, man. What’s up with that?”
“She looks like a damned prisoner of war! Why don’t you tell your girlfriend to eat something for god’s sake!”
“You got a thing for crack whores now or what?”
It went on and on like that until I eventually started ignoring her, too. Just to make her go away. I didn’t want to get laughed at. I’d been teased before at other schools and it was not an experience I was eager to repeat. I mean, I was only trying to be nice to her. No need for us both to wind up as targets.
She broke down in tears the first day I walked by without speaking. All day I’d been avoiding her, ducking past and pretending I didn’t see her when I would spot her waiting for me between classes. Finally, after the last class of the day, she worked up the nerve to step right up to me and say “Hi!” All my friends were watching and I didn’t know what to do. I rolled my eyes, shook my head in exasperation, and walked right around her.
“Damnit, why does she keep following me?” I yelled, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Fuckin’ crack whore!”
Her strangled sobs were the only reply to my insensitivity. The agony of that heart, shattered, stomped, and immolated by my harsh words, echoed from deep within her. It was the sound of torture. The sound of utter hopelessness and despair. My own heart broke under the weight of that painful dirge but I still did not return to apologize or comfort her. I kept walking, silent in my shame and self-loathing.
What had I done?
It felt like I had just awaken from a dream to find that in my sleep I had drowned an infant or bashed open the head of a baby seal. But I had no such excuse. I had exercised my cruelty while fully conscious and awake.
“Who knows, maybe she is a crack whore? Maybe she did catch AIDS from a trick or something? I mean, she does look half dead.” I told myself, but it was no excuse. My cruelty, just like everyone else’s, was born of cowardice.
I wanted to run; flee from the human wreckage crying out in agony behind me. I felt wretched. Tears welled up in my eyes and I fought them back, steeled my expression and continued walking off down the hall. I could just barely hear my friends laughing beneath the sound of Sarah’s tears. I sat in my next class, staring at but not truly seeing the blackboard ahead, with the hollow eyed expression of the forever damned.
I saw Sarah less and less after that. She would disappear for weeks on end and no one ever thought to ask for her or inquire about her health or well being. It was as if she had never existed. After a particularly long absence it was announced in class that Sarah was in the hospital dying of cancer and that she’d been fighting it all year long. Enduring painful chemotherapy sessions and surgeries to attempt to excise the cancer from her uterus. She’d already suffered through one radical hysterectomy. There was nothing more the doctors could do.
I remember thinking how she’d been fine just weeks before. How she even appeared to be gaining weight and growing back some of her hair right before I had stopped talking to her.
“I just wanted her to leave me alone.”
And she did. Sarah died at the end of senior year, right before graduation. I never went to visit her in the hospital but I did go to her funeral. Her mother recognized me right away. She told me how much my friendship had meant to Sarah. How she’d considered me her best friend.
“She would always tell me how nice you were to her. How you were the only one who didn’t tease her. I think she had a bit of a crush on you. Thank you for being so kind. I know it meant a lot.”
I didn’t say a word. Sarah obviously hadn’t told her how horrible I’d been to her at the end. But I hardly knew the girl. She was just some weird chick who followed me around the school. But apparently the little attention I had given her was more than anyone else had. Enough to make me her closest friend. I held Mrs. Michelle’s hand and we wept together over Sarah’s grave.
Now Sarah’s following me again.
I first spotted her the morning after the funeral. I came down for breakfast and she was standing in my kitchen with the morning light shining right through her, encountering no resistance from her flesh. Sarah looked over at me when I entered the room then smiled and turned quickly away, blushing. I froze, my muscles and tendons locked in fear, staring at her with my jaw hanging slack and my tongue like a dead weight lolling stupidly in my open mouth.
Sarah looked terrible. She looked as if she’d just climbed off of the autopsy table. But then again she’d always looked like that. Her sunken cheeks and thin lips were drawn tight around a tremulous smile. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and seemed to be little more than holes cored into her face. I could almost smell the formaldehyde wafting from her pores. At first I thought she was some type of zombie until I saw that she was the only thing in the room not casting a shadow. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there staring at her with all my nerves jangling as if electrified. When I didn’t smile back, her face cracked with a wounded sadness. Sarah turned and bolted from the room, letting out a mournful wail like the sound she’d made the day I’d shunned her in the hallway at school.
She wrenched open the backdoor and slammed it with a loud bang. I was less than a second behind her when she ran out into the yard. Still, when I opened the door, the yard was empty. Sarah was gone.
I didn’t tell my mom about it or any of my friends at school. That would have meant admitting to my mother how cruel I’d been and admitting to my friends that I felt guilty about it. So I kept quiet. And Sarah kept following me.
Next I saw her at school. Waiting for me in the halls as she always had. She smiled that same tepid grin that looked now like a rictus of death and I quickly turned around and stalked off in the other direction, ignoring the questions from my friends who obviously couldn’t see her and could not understand why I was retreating from them. Of course they couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been able to see her when she was alive. Besides, I was the one she was haunting. I was the one who’d killed her.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Everywhere I looked Sarah would be there.
She was waiting for me in the bathrooms. I nearly killed myself one morning reaching for a towel as I spotted her staring at herself in the vanity mirror, picking the scabs on her bald head. She turned to me and flashed me that lip-less grin that made her look even more like a skeleton. Her arms and legs held no fat at all and very little muscle and every blue vein stood out prominently through her translucent skin. Sometimes she would be naked with her shriveled breasts partially concealed by one arm coyly draped across her chest. Her stomach completely concave and her ribs pressed tight against her skin. These weren’t the ravages of death I was seeing in her emaciated body. I knew that this was exactly how she had looked in life. I soon avoided taking showers.
I stared across the kitchen table at her every morning as I choked down oatmeal and stirred the runny eggs on my plate with a fork, swallowing hard and trying not to regurgitate. She would smile at me so that h
er red bleeding gums would show and her eyes would water up as if she really wanted to cry, but was only forcing that ghastly grin onto her face in an attempt to appear friendly, for my sake. Her cheeks were sunken so deep that it looked like she was trying to suck a lemon through a straw and her cheekbones appeared ready to rip through her skin. Her eyes were huge in her shrunken head and stared back at me looking wounded and expectant. I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea what she wanted. I wanted to implore her to eat something but then I would remember that it was far too late for that. She began showing up at every meal. I quickly lost my appetite.
The first night she appeared in my bedroom I had tried apologizing for not being nicer to her while she was alive. I told her I was sorry for not being a better friend. She smiled that same nervous unenthusiastic grimace and reached out and stroked my face with her fingertips. I leaped back about ten feet when those icy appendages raked my flesh. I kept forgetting she was dead. By then she had been following me for so many weeks that I had almost gotten used to her.
It was my mother who first began to notice my weight-loss. She would beg me to eat and then look frightened and concerned when I would refuse or regurgitate the few morsels I managed to ingest. She would constantly ask me what was wrong because I had completely withdrawn from all my friends and would stare off into space for long minutes, occasionally bursting into tears. Nothing could comfort me. Sarah’s melancholy presence haunted me every hour of the day.
Pretty soon the kids at school started to remark on my increasing strangeness. Not just my daydreaming and emotional outbursts but my deteriorating appearance. My cheeks began to get that drawn and sunken look. The bones in my face grew more and more pronounced as if my skull was rising to the surface. I spent hours in the restroom vomiting up what little I was able to force myself to consume. My friends at school were the first to make the connection to Sarah, even before I did. They recognized the same stench of death.
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