by Karina Halle
And one singular face in the darkness that started out as a blurry speck and came closer and closer, the edges of cheekbones bleeding out like black oil against deep space. A grin as welcoming as a rusted rake. Eyes that swarmed with red hurricane clouds.
This face of a monster was laughing, silently.
At me.
And I couldn’t breathe.
Warm liquid pierced my nostrils. My nose had dipped below the waterline.
I raised my head and opened my eyes to the harsh bathroom light, sputtering. I had almost fallen asleep in the tub. Or had I already been asleep? My heart was pounding wildly in my ribcage. I could have died. After all this, what a way to go.
I composed myself and pressed my hands on the bottom of the tub until my shoulders were safely above the water, the remains of bubbles clinging stubbornly to them like cartoon dandruff.
How long had I been out ? My skin was pruney and a greying pink and only a few tufts of bubbles remained floating in the oily water, which was cooling fast.
I wasn’t ready to face the world yet. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. I leaned forward and turned on the hot water faucet, prepared to stay in the bath forever.
The tap shuddered and gave off a strange, metallic grinding noise that shook the blue and white tiles around me.
But no water flowed. It was dry.
I twisted the knob further.
Still nothing.
I started to wonder if perhaps my parents were having plumbing work done to the house, when a terrible sound - that could only be described as a scream - emerged from behind the faucet fixture, followed by a weird scurrying noise.
I instinctively inched away from it until my back was flush against the tub.
A drop of water dripped out, creating a ripple on the water.
Then a black, moving drop; a tiny spider. It also created a ripple, but instead of floundering in the water, it moved its little legs in a hurry, as if it were swimming toward me.
“Oh, ew,” I cried out softly, and began to splash it in the opposite direction.
Another shudder shook the whole bathroom. Someone, somewhere laughed.
Suddenly, black water gushed out of the tap, flowing so fast and strong that I was frozen in shock.
Frozen until I realized it wasn’t water, but spiders. Hundreds, thousands of baby black spiders that were rushing out, streaming into the bath with me, cutting through what was left of the bubbles with their scurrying, writhing bodies. Each one was no bigger than a freckle, but united they created a squirming blanket of horror.
I screamed. I just screamed bloody murder until the bathroom shook and tried to get out of the tub. My feet and hands slipped wildly beneath me and the spiders were making their way up my arms, my torso, onto my shoulders, my neck.
I splashed and screamed until spidered water filled my mouth, then slapped myself silly along my stomach and legs and chest. They popped and squished under my hands, leaving behind a burst of fresh pain, like they oozed stinging acid goo that clung to me like their flattened bodies. I twisted around, wildly, blindly, and when I couldn’t find my footing, I flung myself over the edge of the tub and flopped onto the bathroom floor like a slab of meat.
One quick glance at the bathtub was all I needed to see; it was filled to the brim with the evil arachnids that never stopped flowing out of the tap. They trickled over the side in charcoal streams against porcelain, still heading for me like an unstoppable army.
They were up my nose, in my mouth, in my hair.
Everywhere.
I heard my parents calling my name, the door handle jiggled. I scrambled to my feet, still making some horrible kind of gurgling scream.
“Help me, help me!” I screeched, and threw myself at the door, pounding on it with my fists until they were bruised and tenderized.
“The door, Perry, let us in,” my dad yelled, but I kept throwing myself against it, trying helplessly, foolishly to get out. I didn’t want to look behind me. The bathroom shuddered again and it sounded like the world was being torn apart.
With my back against the door and spiders still clinging to my bare skin, I turned and saw the tub breaking up at the bottom, the drain becoming a wider and wider hole until that’s all there was; a fathomless, dark fissure to nowhere.
Two human-sized spider legs, three-feet long each and coated in coarse black hair, crept out of the opening, wrapping over the edge of the tub. They clung to the wet porcelain, and with straining joints, tried to pull up whatever was left in the hole.
I didn’t want to see what that was; I knew there’d be six more legs to follow.
I grabbed the door knob and throttled it harder, then finally remembered that I had locked it. I pushed the button in and the door was thrown open by my parents, who were looking at me in utter shock.
I collapsed into my mother’s arms, totally naked and wet and cried into her shoulder, “Get them off me, get them off me!”
“Calm down, Perry,” my father said, and I felt his hand on my head. Seconds later he had a towel and was wrapping it around me.
“What happened?” my mom asked, sounding near tears herself. “What happened to you?”
She held me back at arm’s length and I clutched at the towel at my chest. She gasped as she looked over my limbs.
I nodded and said, “I know, I don’t know what…they just all came at me, I…”
“What did you do to yourself?”
“What?” I asked, and followed her gaze down.
I wasn’t covered in spiders. I was covered in numerous scratches, all forming Xs in bleeding, swollen abrasions.
My head spun. I looked up at my parents. I looked over their shoulders at the bathroom. The tub was intact, the water filmy but empty, the bathroom floor was wet but bare. There were no spiders.
There never were any spiders.
And I had been scarred with Xs.
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know, I didn’t do this, I didn’t.”
I didn’t, right? How could I have, I was taking a bath. A bath with spiders that magically disappeared.
But I’d never hurt myself; I hadn’t done that since I was 15.
“We’re making an appointment with Doctor Freedman,” my mom said briskly. “Tomorrow.”
I hadn’t seen Doctor Freedman since I was 15.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The last thing I remembered after the bathroom scene was my parents taking me to my room and trying to get me in bed. They wouldn’t listen to what I said about the spiders, they wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t make the Xs on my body. They didn’t listen and I got angry and threw the book on demonology at my dad.
It nearly hit his head, and when he picked it up and read the title, he went whiter than snow.
I’d say I didn’t mean to throw the book. That I was acting without thinking. But part of me wanted to hurt him. Bad enough so that he would see how serious this was. And I wasn’t joking.
Then Ada was at my side, trying to placate me with tears. It must have worked because a few hours later I came to again. My mother gave me several yellow pills, anti-anxiety drugs, and all three of them watched me as I took them, then watched me as I relaxed in bed and watched me as I fell asleep into a lucid dream world.
But now I was awake.
I was cold.
And before I pried my eyes open, I knew I wasn’t in my bed.
I was outside, on all fours, along the spine of my house. On the roof, the fucking roof.
It was black as all hell, with the winter wind whipping around me, moving dark clouds in front of the moon and stars so I could barely see anything except the faint glow from the windows below that lit up the nearby trees.
My hands and feet rubbed against cold, rough shingles.
It didn’t feel like any of this was real. How could it this be real? I was on the roof!
Why was I up here?
Was this another dream? If I jumped off the edge of my h
ouse, would I fall like I fell into the river? Fall and then wake up in Maximus’s bed? Or would it hurt? Would I die?
I tried to stand up but I teetered to the side. My balance was off. The pills would do that.
I crouched low to the roof and looked around, keeping my fingertips on the shingles for security. There was only one way to get up here and it was the only way down. I slowly crept toward the western edge, taking quiet steps in my bare feet, so careful not to alert anyone below. Once I got to the edge it sloped off a bit and eventually came close to a lower part of the roof that was below my bedroom window. There I could sneak along and get back inside without anybody knowing.
I was near the edge and about to make my way down when I heard something THUMP behind me, like a giant bird just landed from out of the sky.
I didn’t want to turn around. Up until that moment, I had been happy just going with the motions. I wasn’t panicking. Sure, I was blacking out and ending up on the roof of all places, a place where I could fall off and die, a place where some part of me wanted to go and I didn’t know why, or even worse, a place I had been summoned to. But if I didn’t think about it, if I kept it at the back of my mind and treated all of this like just another dream, maybe I wouldn’t lose my mind. Maybe I could just shrug it off.
But the thump changed everything.
Because I wasn’t afraid before. I wouldn’t let myself be.
And now I was terrified.
I wasn’t alone on the roof. I was up there with something that wanted me there. This was part of the deal all along.
And this fear, the fright that shattered my nerves and made my tongue buzz like metal, it was more real than any dream. Sometimes it was only the strongest, most palpable terror that really made you feel alive.
I paused, keeping my hands and feet strong and balanced against the roof, and turned my head to face the visitor.
At the other end of the house, lit up by the spotlight-like moon that pierced through a thin cloud, was a…thing.
An infant-sized creature. Black as coal with two legs and two arms. And two leathery wings that sprouted from its furry back. Stormy red eyes. Burnished teeth. A wet, gurgling laugh.
I heard a voice inside my head. A most terrible, horrific, depraved voice. A voice that sounded like it was washed with bones and lit with smoke and fire. It was beyond deep and sounded a million years old, like it had crawled out of the bowels of the earth, before the first insects crawled on its shores.
Jump, it said. Its words reverberated in my head, bouncing around my skull.
My mouth dropped open and I grew increasingly slack, like someone had applied a paralyzing move to my neck.
Jump.
Jump before I make you.
It didn’t give me much time.
Like a shot, the beastly thing sprang forward, running on two legs first, then all fours, while wild wings flapped. The tips of each wing were armed with what looked like a silver oversized bee stinger and it shone fiercely in the moonlight.
I screamed, then found the strength and agility to turn and leap onto the area below.
I hit the shingles hard. They slid out from under me and I was sliding down the sandpapery slope, my window out of reach. I dug my fingers in and kicked with my feet, trying to stop my descent, until I was almost all off, my armpits digging into the gutter that moaned and creaked beneath my weight.
My bedroom window was slammed open and Ada was first on the scene.
“Perry!” she shrieked when she saw me hanging below, as she leaned out the window.
“Help me!” I cried out, trying to lift myself up and onto the roof as much as I could. My arms and abs strained ferociously under the pressure.
Ada continued to call my name, not doing anything until my father appeared beside her. I don’t know what he said, I was concentrating too hard on not falling to the brick driveway below. I don’t know if it would kill me but it would break my bones in a million pieces. He took one look at me then disappeared, calling for my mother.
I heard a slippery laugh from above.
I looked above the window, where Ada was watching me in full panic.
The thing was there, perched inches above her on the higher slab of roof. She cried out at me for my safety, blissfully unaware of the creature.
Because that’s what it was.
Lovecraft couldn’t have thought it up himself.
It had the body of an overgrown baby but with longer limbs. Pearly claws for fingers and toes.
Bat wings that were marked with veins and crawling with lice.
Its head was slightly too round to be a human’s. It had no ears. No nose. Just solid red eyes that, up close, bulged out of its head like a rat and an impossibly wide mouth filled with double rows of shark-like teeth. A familiar smile, now in its original form.
I watched it, afraid to take my eyes away, as my lower body swung beneath me. I was getting tired. It wanted a staring contest and I didn’t know if I could win.
Just when my arms began to slip an inch, my dad appeared back at the window with a rope. He threw it toward me and told me to grab on.
Meanwhile, I could hear my mom scurrying on the ground below, hauling something metal on the bricks, most likely, hopefully, a ladder.
“Grab the rope, it’s easier,” he yelled. I looked up at him and I’ll never forget it. The amount of pain and excruciating worry on his face was something I never wanted to see again. There he was in his pajamas, hair messed, face red and sweating, trying to save his daughter from imminent harm. Trying to save her from herself. I kept focused on that – on him – not the thing above, and with my last bit of strength I grabbed the rope.
The rough fibers cut into my scraped hands but I gritted my teeth and let him and Ada haul me up until my feet were at the gutter, and I was able to push off and fling myself on the window ledge.
Two pairs of arms reached out, grabbed me around my waist and shoulders, and I was finally inside. I collapsed to the ground, panting hard, aching all over and bleeding from my hands and feet, covered in extra abrasions from the shingles.
I made it.
I was alive.
But I was far from safe.
~~~
“Perry, are you listening to me?” my mother asked as she brought the car off the freeway and down a one-way street downtown.
I wasn’t. I wasn’t even aware of where I was.
Oh, right. Heading to the head doctor. Going to see if there was something wrong with the old noggin.
Things were moving slower now. Slower now that I was conscious and taking in the dead winter trees on the side of the street and the glum faces of pedestrians as they faced another grey day. Things were slow. And then they would speed up. Like the morning. I went through on autopilot but had no idea what I did or said.
I kept starting at one place and ending up in another. I was missing parts of my life. Something had happened on the roof last night, but I didn’t know what. My parents were afraid I had crawled up there, wanting to jump. I couldn’t tell them yes or no. I wasn’t suicidal. But I had no answers. Just the truth. And they couldn’t handle the truth.
“Earth to Perry,” my sister chimed in my ear. I tilted my head ever so slightly in her direction and eyed her in my peripheral vision.
She had decided to come along for my appointment, and then we were to drop her off at school. I didn’t think mom would go for it, but Ada pleaded her case of moral support and she relented. I think my mom was relieved, actually. She didn’t want to be alone with me. Especially after the whole…well, after the whole yesterday.
Secretly, I was comforted that I had Ada with me. It made the return to Dr. Freedman and the nasty case of déjà vu more bearable. I felt like I was losing everything. I needed someone in my corner, and at the moment, she was all I had.
I used to have Dex for that. Then again, I used to have a lot of things.
Thinking about him for that brief instance made me sad. Heart-fluttering like a broken l
eaf, that kind of sad. I swallowed it and forgot about it. It was better to be angry, if I had to still be anything.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in a quieter voice. She glimpsed the sadness briefly.
I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Just nervous.”
My mom shot me a quick look. “The doctor will help you, Perry. Just like he did before.”
Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of, I thought. I knew what he was going to say, what he was going to think and do. It hadn’t been that long. He’d make me talk, pretend to listen, and write me a prescription. I’d continue to look like a raving loon until the pills squared that away.
I was going to become Dex. He had been on medication, he probably still was. It was meds meant to keep the ghosts away, and for the most part, they did a good job. I had said before, in a fit of anger, that it was cheating. That it wasn’t fair that I had to deal with them and he didn’t. Now I had that same opportunity to make them all go away.
But how could I do that? I knew now what was behind the curtain. I saw the shadows, the ghosts, the lost ones, the demons. How could I willingly go on blindly, knowing they still lurked and still wanted me. Somehow it was worse to be in the dark about it. That’s when they’d really sneak up on you.
Minutes later we had parked and were making our way into a nondescript medical building. The memories – the injustice – came flooding back. The shiny floors that made your boots squeak. The drab yellowing walls. The ugly faux wood paneling in the elevators.
We got off on the third floor and turned left down the carpeted hall. A few people emerged from one office, chattering to each other. Feeling self-conscious, I pulled down my sleeves so that you couldn’t see the ugly bruises, scratches and abrasions that had cloaked my body in the last 24 hours.
With my mom leading the way in her tweed pencil skirt, we squeezed past the pack of people who didn’t give us much of a berth. I kept my eyes focused on the floor, not wanting to acknowledge the strangers. Ada stumbled slightly in front of me, apparently elbowed by a blur of shiny maroon.
