by S H Cooper
“You’re carrying its...baby?” I barely withheld a gag as I spoke the final word.
“No. I’m carrying it.”
“Enough with the cryptic bullshit,” I snapped. “Just spit it out.”
“It knew you were coming.” Her tone had become distant as she absently stroked her stomach. “It could feel it. It knows things.”
“T’svotil?”
“Yes. That’s its name. His name, I guess.”
“What is he?”
Her hollow gaze found mine. “A parasite. He came from a dark place where the gods aren’t gods. They meant to bring another, but the door they opened wasn’t big enough, not for the other. But he’s like smoke. He can get through any crack, no matter how small.”
She let her head fall so that her chin rested against her chest. Her fingers curled against her belly.
“He splits himself into smaller parts and infects people. Their mind first. He senses what you want and he shows it to you. And when you come, he takes the rest. Like the two out there. The husband was drawn here with promises of an escape from his rocky marriage. The wife came after, looking for him. He crawled inside them and ate away at their insides until only he was left.”
“And what about you?” I whispered when she had gone quiet.
“I’m his way out,” she said. “I came here for my dream job. I was desperate, you know? To prove myself. To be independent. Whatever. It’s all bullshit now. He sensed it even from a distance, he knew he needed me, and used what little strength he had to show me what I wanted to see. A perfect small town where I could work with farm animals. My sister didn’t want me to go —”
“Your sister?” I cut her off, a nervous sludge bubbling in my gut.
“Sasha.” She sighed. “I know she’s almost here. He knows. He brought her to you. You were meant to stop that woman from killing the boy and reclaiming this town for the other and she was meant to take me away. He’s trying to save himself. He wants to spread. Passit isn’t safe anymore.”
“You’re Nina,” I said softly, finally letting the gun fall all the way to my side.
A thin smile touched her lips. “I was. Now I’m just the incubator.”
“How do we get him out of you?” I asked.
Her shirt fluttered as the thing inside her squirmed in agitation. She patted the top of her belly to calm it.
“You don’t,” she replied with that same thin smile.
“There has to be a way. Something we can do to —”
She silenced me with a sad look. “You didn’t stick to the plan. You were supposed to come with Sasha. He can’t affect you because you already have the other in you. To look upon the other drives the hosts to madness. Their brains are still only human, and unable to handle both. But in here, down where he can’t see or be seen, he’s safe. He meant for you and the boy’s mother to be distracted, and then he would have used Sasha to take me, and him, away.”
“And now?” My words are wooden, flat. I say them even though I don’t want the answer. I see it burning with a feverish intensity in her eyes already. Even before they’d drop to the gun.
“You need to do two things,” she said with an apologetic edge to soften her otherwise terrible instructions. “You need to stop that woman. Don’t let her unleash any part of the ungodly into our world.”
“The ungodly?”
“The gods who aren’t gods. The eaters of belief and life. This one in me, that one in you.”
I cringed at yet another reference to Gorrorum being inside of me. He’s not, I wanted to tell her, but there was no point in arguing. Not with a dying woman.
“But first,” she continued even though I didn’t want her to, “you need to kill me. Before Sasha gets here, before he can take control of her and try to stop you. Before he can escape.”
Her stomach stretched sharply as she spoke and she groaned painfully, wrapping both arms around her midsection like she meant to hold her straining skin together.
“There’s not another way,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “So don’t give me some cliché attempt at trying to convince me. I either die here, with him, or I leave and die somewhere out there, where he can infect others. There’s no third option. I’ve accepted that. I’m not getting out of this.”
I’d never been hopeless. Not really. There’d always been something to look forward to, a silver lining. But I knew hopelessness then. I could see it in the hollows of Nina’s face, stretched so thin over her skull. I could see it in the fading light of her eyes, which fixed on me in an uncompromising stare. There was no fear in it, no second guessing. Only anguished certainty. I pressed the flat of my hand to my mouth, both to help quell the stirring nausea and to hide the trembling of my lips.
“What do I tell your sister?” I asked tightly.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was long gone before you got here.”
We stared at each other in silence.
I don’t want to, my fast-cracking frown screamed.
I know, her placid expression replied.
Her belly jumped and twitched, the panicked dance of a creature aware of its imminent slaughter. Nina stood up with great effort.
“One here,” she tapped her finger against the center of her forehead. “And one here.” She pointed at her writhing stomach.
“I—”
“Have to,” she finished. “You’ve seen what he does to people. There have been others, but they don’t last long. Our bodies can’t handle it. If he escapes, he could wipe us out in a matter of months, maybe a year, at most, and then he’ll just move on to somewhere else. The only thing keeping me alive right now is him. I’m already gone. I have been for a while.”
“But—”
“Here,” she said over me, emphatically jabbing a finger at her head and then at her stomach again, “and here.” The conviction she’d managed to work up frayed slightly and tears welled in the corner of her eyes. “Sasha will be here any second. Don’t let her see me like this.”
“You’re sure?” I was stalling, we both knew it. “You don’t even want to say goodbye?”
“I did already,” she said. “There’s nothing left to say.”
Another beat of silence.
The weight of the pistol when I first picked it up was nothing compared to then, when I raised it and settled its sites on Nina. She stepped forward.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, blinking back my fast blurring vision.
“Me too,” she said.
She closed her eyes, and the peace that spread across her features was like a sea put to rest after a storm.
And then I pulled the trigger.
Reunited
Stillness follows death. It settles over the body, once a person, now only a shell. It settles over the room, silencing the ticking of clocks and all the little creaks and groans a building makes. It settles over everyone who was there to witness that last breath before the end.
For just a second, the world stops.
I had slid down into a booth after the ringing of the last shot finally reverberated into nothing. The gun clattered against the tabletop. Nina lay at the end of aisle, the bullet hole in the center of her forehead, like a third eye, weeping red and black down her face. Two more had pierced her belly and put an end to the terrible twitching. I stared at her through a gray haze, numb, trying to tell myself I’d done the right thing. She’d wanted me to do it. It was the only way. But none of it made her any less dead, and none of it made it any less my doing.
I steepled my fingers and pressed them against my lips, eyes squeezed tightly shut. I still saw her, sprawled out across the floor, her bony limbs askew, the oily black of the parasite ungodly pooling underneath. All of the suffering she’d had to endure, only to wind up a corpse in a forgotten town with some stranger at her side.
It wasn’t an end I would have wished on my worst enemy.
It also wasn’t the end I wanted to give her sister.
I’d seen what cancer had done t
o my mother. Only for a moment, just long enough to kiss her cool cheek and apologize for not getting there sooner. She was already in the casket by then, done up to the best of the mortician’s ability. But the ravages of her disease could not be undone by some paint and polish. I wished I hadn’t seen her like that. All of my memories felt tainted after, like I’d slowly forget what she’d looked like when I was a kid and all I’d be left with was the shrunken, brittle version carefully laid out in her Sunday best.
My stomach rolled as I pushed myself to my feet. The linoleum of the diner spanned like a chasm between me and Nina’s body, both impossibly long and altogether too short. I crossed to her on leaden, unwilling feet, until I was standing over her. Her gaze had become glassy with a distance only found in death and, when I slid my hands beneath her arms and lifted her as much as I could, her head lolled backwards, and it was all I could do not to stare into the emptiness.
Her body slid with relative ease across the floor, despite her bloated stomach, and I shuffled backwards toward the counter. We left a dark trail smeared behind us. I dragged her behind the counter and then through the swinging door, which screeched at being disturbed. The dark and disused kitchen didn’t offer much in the way of hiding spots, so I settled on the farthest corner, tucked behind a rusted sink amid a bed of cobwebs.
To add some sense of dignity, I folded her hands over her chest and attempted to close her eyes, but as soon as I lifted my fingers away, her lids relaxed so the whites became visible again. A moth-eaten dishrag that had been hanging over the side of the industrial sink became her burial shroud.
It was hardly an ideal resting place, but for how little I had known Nina, I believed she’d prefer it to letting her sister find her.
I sat heavily on the floor beside her, aware that the minutes were ticking by and Janice and Sasha were drawing ever closer. I knew I had to leave her there before they arrived. But the more I tried to convince myself to rise, the more my body shook. The filthy kitchen walls pressed in and in and in, until I could taste the old smoke and cooking grease that stained them. I grabbed at my neck, unable to draw in breath, and hunched over, a hundred screams tangled in and around one another like worms. The room blurred behind a veil of burning tears.
I was convinced I was dying. Gorrorum was finally leaking from my brain, down the back of my throat, choking me with the melted bits of his Fingers from the inside. Curled into the fetal position, I fell sideways with my fists buried against my eyes to shut out the shrinking, spinning room.
Little by little, as I rocked back and forth on grime covered tiles, the vice grip of hysteria holding me hostage receded, until my mouth fell open and the dark that had been building inside wrenched itself free in a single, broken keen.
And with that scream came a flood of emotion, a swirling, chaotic miasma that threatened to throw me into another panic attack if I stopped myself from releasing it. It wasn’t Gorrorum carving his way out. It was fury and hurt and terror stemming from the very center of my being.
It was pure and deliciously human.
Once drained and mostly myself again, I clutched the edge of the counter top overhead and hauled myself up. The walk back out of the kitchen, away from Nina’s body and the terrible thing that had forced its way inside of her, was like a funeral march for one. Head hanging, hands knotted together, heavy footsteps pushing through a dreamlike fog to get back out into the humid evening.
Janice and Sasha arrived to find me sitting cross-legged on the damaged hood of my car. I was leaning back on my hands, staring up at the endless diamond stretch of stars that blanketed Passit. Janice kicked open her door, got halfway out with questions already filling her mouth, and then froze with a queasy grimace.
“Are those…” She swallowed her sick and looked pleadingly at me, as if begging me to deny what she was seeing illuminated in their headlights.
“Bodies,” I confirmed instead.
“And did you do that to them?” Sasha, more hardened than the younger woman, asked without flinching.
“One of them,” I said. “The creature Janice’s mom is coming to drive out was in them, like a parasite. They were the last, I guess, and already dying. The guy shot himself, the woman attacked me. I defended myself.”
I kept it short and vague. No mention of the third.
“Was there anyone else here?” The thick hope in Sasha’s question was crushing.
She was gone long before you got here.
If she caught the heartbroken crease that flickered across my brow before I had a chance to stop it, she didn’t comment on it. Maybe she didn’t want to see it. Her entire body drooped and she slammed her hands against her quarter panel with loud, repeated curses.
“No,” I replied with tired composure. “Only them.”
“Where is my mom?” Janice threw the car door shut and paced beside it, eyes searching the dark. “Where is Ben?”
“Not here yet.”
“Then where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
Janice looked at the bodies again and then at the diner with its broken front window, and then up and down the deserted street, all the while raking her fingers through her hair and down her face.
“I’m going to look around,” she announced in a hurried half-shout. It was enough to snap me out of the daze Nina’s death had cast over me.
“Don’t be stupid,” I snapped, a heated rush of irritation shoving the words out. “There could be more of those things.”
“You’ve been here for a while and haven’t had any more problems.” She was already taking steps towards the diner.
I couldn’t let her go in there! Especially not since Sasha started to follow.
“Stop!”
“Janice is right,” Sasha said over me. “Nina is here somewhere. I have to find her!”
“No, wait! It’s dark, you don’t know what’s in there!”
“I have a flashlight on my phone!”
“You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“I didn’t come this far to sit around with my thumb up my ass!” Sasha had pushed past Janice and was almost at the diner’s entrance.
I wasn’t in control of my body then. Days of little sleep, the blood on my hands, my mother, Gorrorum, T’svotil, Ibsilyth, Marcus and his fucking sweater vests that I couldn’t even be sure he actually owned. All of the anger and hurt that I’d been burying in order to keep moving erupted into a flying leap from the hood of my rental car at Sasha’s back. We crashed to the ground in a tangle of screams and near-inhuman growls. I had her pinned, face down, against the street, my fingers turned to claws in her blonde hair. She bucked and kicked, swatting awkwardly at me while I drove my knees into her spine.
“Stop it!” Janice yelled, futilely trying to get ahold of me to pull me off.
Sasha threw herself to her side, knocking me sharply on to the pavement, and reared back, fist cocked and ready to swing. Janice caught her by the wrist, but her momentum sent them both off balance.
Sasha heaved Janice toward me and staggered back a few steps, chest heaving. A thin trickle of blood glistened from one nostril.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” she warned with a jab of her finger. “I’m going to find my sister.”
“Sashaaaa.”
The dry, rasping whisper silenced all of us. Janice slid off me and sat back on her heels, the color gone from her face. Sasha was squinting at the diner, her posture stiff and wary.
“Nina?” She called uneasily into the gloom.
“Sashaaaa.”
Dragging footsteps followed, as slow and excruciating as the sound of her name had been. In the pale edge of light that just reached the building’s facade, a hand grabbed limply at the door frame. Like a marionette on uneven strings, Nina jerked one foot forward, swayed unsteadily, and then followed with the other. Her head rolled backwards on her neck, snapping back and forth between her shoulder blades with each convulsive movement.
“Sashaaaa.”
Sasha’s lips moved, but no sound came out. She’d started to reach for her sister, but had stopped, horrified indecision keeping her trembling hand from extending fully.
Nina wheezed. “Take...home…”
With a frightened cry, Janice fell on to her bottom and scrabbled away until she had backed into Sasha’s car. “What is that?”
“Sashaaaa.”
“It’s…” Sasha couldn’t take her eyes off of Nina’s body as it lurched another step closer. “It’s my sister…”
“No,” I found my voice and tore it from the back of my throat. “Look at it! Does that really look like your sister?”
The hand that had started to reach for Nina closed, and then drifted back to cover Sasha’s mouth. “What happened to you?” Her low moan, birthed from a jagged hole torn deep in her core, was muffled behind her fingers.
“Home...”
Nina halted and slumped at the waist, causing her belly to bulge grossly. Her head fell forward and, with a croaking groan, she began to lift her face toward Sasha. Black sludge dribbled down her chin and from the gaping bullet hole. Thin threads spasmed in her eyes. Sasha reeled with a scream and I lunged, yanking her back as Nina’s dangling arms reached for her.
T’svotil, barely clinging to life in Nina’s broken body, was seeking a new host.
I thrust Sasha behind me and, in her shocked grief, she didn’t fight. She crumpled to the ground, arms crossed over her chest, clutching at her shirt and screaming. Still screaming.
Too late, the monster that had been Nina realized what was happening. Even if it had, it was too weak to stop it. I grabbed Nina’s head between both hands and yanked it up so that we were face to face. It bared tar stained teeth at me and hissed, but already its eyes with all their wriggling little worms were widening, caught in my gaze and seeing Gorrorum’s.
If the Festering Father insisted on taking up space, I was going to put him to work.
The flesh of Nina’s face rippled. I could feel T’svotil slithering beneath my fingers, frantically searching for a hiding spot to preserve some tiny part of himself. But I shook Nina’s head, and the eyes were back on me, bright with pure loathing. Her nostrils flared and, together, we fell to our knees. My nails sank into scalp and cheek, and Nina’s body quaked, spilling black from every orifice until it ran down my hands and arms. Still, I held on, making the body face me until her skin had turned a sallow yellow in the headlights’ glow and the oozing had stopped.
