by S. Gates
The fingers holding your chin tighten, Ori's blunt fingernails (how is anything about this creature blunt?) digging into your cheeks. They continue grinning down at you. The moment stretches, a growing sense of dread mixed with a hint of anticipation starting to curl in your abdomen. Your arms begin to shake, you've been on your hands and knees so long, but you don't want to move first. The shadows in the room flicker at the periphery of your vision as if they were a fire in reverse. The room grows chilly. Out of the corners of your eyes you can see the dark fire crawling up the walls and across the ceiling and onto the scrupulously vacuumed carpet. A tendril reaches Ori's leg and slithers up one thigh. It snakes over their sexless crotch, around their torso, and down the arm that holds your jaw.
You flinch.
Ori wrenches your head to the side with such force that you find yourself flat on your back before you can even suck in a startled breath. They sit astride your chest, their knees squeezing your ribcage, their face hovering close enough to yours that you can feel your breath reflected back to you. "Douglas," they say again, and this time it sounds less like ravenous rumbling and more like seduction. Despite yourself, you shiver not because of the cold. Your heart trips over itself to climb out of your chest. You want to scream, to cry, to do something, but Ori's regard holds you in place like a lepidopterist's pin.
"This is a hallucination," you finally manage to say. Your tongue feels thick and unwieldy in your mouth and the denial taste like ashes.
"I assure you that it is not," purrs Ori. "What could I do to make you believe me?" They appear to consider the question for a few seconds. "Would you believe me if I sent you home with your innards decidedly not on the inside? Hmm... No, you're far too frail for that." Their eyebrows draw together and they chew delicately on their bottom lip; you are certain that it's an affectation that they believe gives the impression of puzzling out some great mystery. Their fingers leave your face and trace down your neck before settling on your right hand (you're still wearing their ring). They grab your other hand with theirs and bring both of your hands up to their flat chest. "Oh, I know. I could give you myself. Perhaps that will show you how serious I am."
They push your fingers into the flesh just below their clavicles. It's firm and warm and a little rough, sort of like fine-grain sandpaper. They press your fingers harder. The skin beneath your fingertips gives way with an uncomfortably wet slurping noise; your fingers are lodged in Ori's flesh almost to the first knuckle and you can feel your nails scrape something hard. "Jesus fuck!"
Ori doesn't pay attention to your outburst or the way your legs flail uselessly as you try to push yourself away from them. Their eyelids flutter closed, their brow wrinkles ever so slightly, and their lips part just enough to allow you to see the points of their shark teeth. You feel them shudder under your hands as they draw in a breath. Gooseflesh prickles up on your skin as they trail their fingers down to your wrists. In contrast to the flesh in which your fingers are lodged (oh my god, your panicked brain supplies, oh my god), Ori's hands are chilly and unyielding. Their fingers close around your wrists with enough strength that you think you feel your carpal bones grind against each other.
Ori's breath hisses out through their fangs, and they jerk your hands down. Skin rips as it follows the motion, sloughing free of Ori's ribs as if nothing had ever actually connected it at all. Ori's diaphragm shudders as they bend almost double over you and pin your hands to to the floor at your sides. The horror paralyzes you. Their skin has split far enough that their intestines slither out onto your belly in a tangle. Instead of looking pained, their expression is almost rapt. Like someone riding the most exquisite orgasm.
They take your right hand and thrust it into their abdominal cavity without even opening their eyes. Your fingers graze something hot and wet and you try to cringe away. Ori refuses to let you, forces your hand around something and tears it out with a vicious cry. It's impossible to tell if the trembling you feel is them or you.
Their head drops. "Take this," they tell you, curling your fingers around a swiftly cooling lump. Their voice has a husky quality you typically only associate with the aftermath of a vigorous fucking, and it makes your stomach lurch to hear it after what's just happened. "This is my spleen," they continue. "Cherish it."
They dip forward a little further and nuzzle lazily at the soft spot where your jaw meets your neck. The shivering is definitely you. Between your bodies, you can feel their innards writhing as if they had a mind of their own. While the spleen in your hand is losing warmth by the second, the rest of Ori's viscera are still hot and living. You hazard a glance down only to squeeze your eyes shut against the sight. Everything is slick with greenish black ichor streaked with red. Loops of Ori's intestines squirm around and flop against your hips and thighs. Against your neck, Ori sighs contentedly.
"I could stay like this forever," they say. "It's been so long since I've felt anything like that." The arm that has been propping them semi-upright slowly gives way, lowering Ori's weight onto your chest. The ichor squelches and you swear you could hear the intestines squeaking as they're trapped between you. Ori's tongue flicks out, licks a quick swipe over your carotid artery. "What do you think, dearest one?"
You hadn't even realised you'd begun to cry, but then you feel the tears rolling down your cheeks. "Please let me go." The words come out choked by the lump of fear in your throat.
"You're no fun," says Ori. You can feel them pouting against the vulnerable skin of your neck. "If I let you go, will you consider what I've said? Have I proven to you that I'm serious?"
"Yes! God, yes! Please let me go and I'll think about it, I promise!" In this moment, you would swear fealty to Adolf Hitler himself to wake up from this nightmare.
Ori sighs. "Very well, then."
Like that, you're slumped in the bathtub. The water is hot enough that you can practically smell the steam around you. The shower curtain hangs undisturbed and the only light in the room is still that of the street lamp outside filtering in the window. Everything is so painfully mundane that you actually manage to think, I am never falling asleep in the shower again.
The fingers of your right hand still grip something.
You don't need to turn on the light to realize that it's Ori's spleen.
You have no idea what to do with a fresh spleen beyond get rid of it. Kneejerk reactions flicker through your brain and are discarded as quickly as they surface: try to flush it (it won't go down), throw it in the garbage (what if the trash collectors see it or someone reports the stench), put it in a tupperware container and stuff it in the back of the freezer (what if Simon finds it), just fucking leave it where you found it (there are so many things wrong with that plan).
For the first time in your life, you wish you were a pet owner. They never held any appeal before, prone to being dirty, smelly, and needy as they were, but now... It would be undeniably useful to have a hungry little critter to just feed Ori's organ to.
That thought brings all the rest to a halt. It's not a bad idea, least of all when compared to your other panicked impulses. The neighborhood is suburban enough that there are bound to be strays, raccoons, hell, you've even seen a hawk or two circle around once or twice. Just get some leftovers, chop the spleen into tiny bits, and leave them out for the scavengers.
The spleen is oddly bloodless, but you don't risk setting it down. You use your other hand to turn off the water, grab a towel, and clutch it to your chest in case Simon passes while you're on the way to the kitchen. When he doesn't, you drop the damp thing over the back of the sofa. You leave squishy wet footprints in the carpet and slippery ones on the linoleum tile.
There's one cutting board in the entire house, a cheap monstrosity that dates back to the Paleozoic era which is made of a plastic that you can't take the chance of contaminating, so you just grab a chipped plate and drop the thing on it. A quick examination of the fridge reveals something that might have once been Chinese take-out. It's absolutely rank; probably th
e stuff Amanda brought over when you think of it. However long ago that was.
(Everything is so liquid and surreal in the wake of your shower. It feels like it was a hundred years ago when you saw her last.)
There are a few other things that show signs of growing an independent ecology, so you grab them as well. Chopping everything up stinks to high heaven, and by the time you're done there's unidentifiable slime squished under your fingernails where the ink from the newsprint you handle at work usually lives. It does not take long, however, and it leaves you with a pile of mystery goo, the contents of which you feel vaguely comfortable no one will question.
You take the plate with the leftover-and-spleen slurry to the kitchen's narrow door and pause. The back yard (what little of it there is) faces a few other houses and basks in the dim glow of a distant street lamp. While you're fairly certain no one is awake, you're pretty sure that tonight would be the one night someone would glance out the window to see you throwing things out in nothing but your bare skin. With the slime on your hands, putting your towel on is out of the question.
Instead of spreading the slurry in the yard like putrid grass seed, you open the door just wide enough to scoot the plate onto the stoop with your toes. As soon as it crosses the threshold, you pull your foot back, shut the door, and throw the deadbolt. It's out of your hands now. You can sleep now, you hope.
You wash your hands in the kitchen sink, using the vegetable brush to scrape the sludge off. A few paper napkins take care of the grungy fingerprints you left on the doorknob and deadbolt. The towel you take back to the bathroom and throw over the shower curtain bar. Your dirty clothes get scooped off the floor and thrown in the laundry hamper. Within a few minutes, everything looks completely normal. You slither into one of your favorite pairs of boxers and fall face-first onto your bed.
* * *
You won't hear about the family down the street that calls animal control when their daughter tries to adopt a peculiar stray cat a few days later. She will claim–in the fumbling words of a six year old–that the cat is friendly. She will argue that it wound around her feet and rubbed against her knees until she agreed to bring it inside. She will say that she doesn't mind the way its eyes are a solid, glazed green, or the fact that its jaw unhinges when it yawns to reveal three sets of needle-sharp teeth. She will cry when her parents try to take it away, and she will cry even harder when the cat fights back and bites off the first joint of her father's pinky finger.
You'll be too busy to pick up the whispers of gruesome pet mutilations. The first will be a dog who slips his leash while walking in the evening and fails to turn up before bed. His owners will find him on their front step with a smear of blood trailing behind him. His stomach will have been shredded open and some of his organs will be missing. The second will be an indoor/outdoor cat whose owner never neutered him. His owner will never know what happened, either, but the cat will be found in the back yard of a neighbor a few doors down, his limbs and tail gnawed off and eyes missing. There will be a few others before everyone learns to keep their four-legged family members safely inside at night, and then the victims turn primarily into wild squirrels, chipmunks, and non-migratory songbirds.
You will notice the way that raccoons start to congregate near your back door, if only in a vague way. You'll notice one night that they sit on their haunches in a grim semicircle, their eyes wide and seeming to glow in the dim light. You'll never think much of it, though, attributing it only to the fact that they once saw you leave leftovers outside, rather than the contents of those leavings.
* * *
When you wake up that afternoon and drag yourself downstairs, Simon sits at the kitchen table. "Hey dude," he says around a mouthful of ham and cheese sandwich. You grunt vaguely in response as you shuffle toward the coffee maker.
Unperturbed, Simon continues, "So, any particular reason you left a plate out last night?"
Your heart jumps up into your throat, but your hands stay steady as you pour some coffee and add sugar to it. "There was a little kitten outside last night, so I gave it some leftovers."
Simon snorts. "I thought you hated cats."
You shrug. "Momentary lapse of reason, I guess."
"Hah. That's it, hide the fact that your heart isn't hardened to cute fuzzy things by using Pink Floyd album titles. Masterful distraction." But Simon returns to his lunch without questioning it again. Once he's eaten everything but the crusts, he takes his plate to the sink and rinses it. You sip your coffee while he takes the "bread skins" (his term, not yours) and stuffs them down the drain. With the water still running, he flips the switch over the sink and lets the garbage disposal run for a few moments before turning it and the tap off.
Once he's out of earshot, you let out a frustrated groan. Instead of going to all of that trouble last night, you could have just put the fucking thing down the drain and let the blades of the garbage disposal do the rest. Hell, you could have flushed it once you'd cut it up, or just thrown it out with the leftover mash you'd made and no one would have been the wiser.
But what's done is done and the ideas your calm and collected brain provides are useless in the daylight. The plate you'd left out is in the sink, licked clean by whatever nocturnal creatures roam your neighborhood. And, more importantly, Ori's "gift" is gone.
* * *
You can't sleep.
Your next shift is that night, and it's less like trying to drag a boulder behind you when you finally finish, but you're still exhausted. You come home, throw your ink-stained clothes in the laundry, and stand in the shower only long enough to scrub off the worst of the grime from work. Once sufficiently clean, you crawl into the same pair of boxers you wore last night and haul yourself into your bed.
But you can't sleep. No matter how exhausted you feel, no matter the lassitude in your limbs when you try to get up, do something else to occupy your brain and trick it into letting you drift off. After spending nearly an hour tangling yourself in your covers, you peel them off your legs and roll to your feet.
While sleep eludes you, you decided to start in with video games. The character you'd created to play with Simon in Diablo II gains several more levels and a rare piece of gear before you get tired of listening to digitized monster gurgles. By the time you're completely sick of it, three hours have passed but you still twitch restlessly when you try to lay down.
Rather than sit again at your desk, you grab your laptop and settle in against your headboard. Gaming no longer holds any appeal, so you turn to the internet. The thought of trying to while away the time on mindless web games curdles before it manages to even fully form, so instead you fall back on an old mainstay. You comb restlessly through your bookmarks for your most-visited gay, lesbian, or gonzo porn sites. You cycle through them one at a time, but you can't find it in yourself to be properly aroused enough to masturbate before trying to sleep again.
Finally, you decide to browse to your favorite message board. Your recent unnerving encounter with Lucien aside, it's still an enjoyable way to pass the time with minimal emotional or intellectual investment. The conspiracy theory board is as volatile as ever: threads about the tsunami seem to have ebbed, replaced by speculation about a fish-kill off the Louisiana coast and a recent rash of bird deaths over Chicago (an estimated $200,000 dollars of damages in windshield replacement and lawsuits from Alfred Hitchcock's estate, one poster jokes).
One thread, though, catches your eye. It's dominated by a screenshot from the homepage of a small Virginia newspaper. The headline reads: "Local girl hangs self with barbed wire; Police suspect bullies to blame." In and of itself, a common-place tragedy, but the post accompanying it strikes you as strange.
"Remember that night? That's Marionettestrings," an anonymous poster says.
A chorus of "what" and "who" follows, but then another name that you recognize appears in the thread: SilentHarper17. "She did what she thought was right," SilentHarper says. "Are you fuckwits willing to believe me now?"
/> You hover your cursor over SilentHarper's screen name. An email link populates in the bottom corner of your browser window, and it appears to be a legitimate address, rather than something bogus provided to satisfy a required field. Not that this particular message board is legitimate enough to have any sort of fields be required for posting.
Unsure of why, you click the link.
It opens a new browser tab for your webmail and auto-fills the address. The cursor flashes in the blank area for the message body, a steady and inviting pulse. Without thinking, your fingers find the home keys on your laptop's keyboard and you start typing.
All you include is your screen name on the message board's associated chat service and the note, "If you're awake, I'd like to talk."
The reply is swift, as if SilentHarper had been lying in wait for your message or something like it. The new instant message notification pops up in the corner of your screen, SilentHarper's name highlighted in it.
"I don't sleep anymore. Alena says that chosen ones don't need sleep, but I think she is just trying to break me. It won't work. What did you want?"
You consider your response for a moment. What do you want? After a moment, you send, "I can't sleep either. Maybe she isn't lying. I don't know. Things have gotten weird. I keep seeing weird things, nightmares. Last night I swear this kid made me tear out their spleen with my bare hands and I think they wanted me to eat it. I fed it to the strays."
Their response takes a little more time, but it arrives within minutes. "You aren't going crazy. This is real. Alena says that you belong to Ori, right?"
Seeing Ori's name printed in SilentHarper's chat window makes your diaphragm seize. Your fingers skitter over the keys. "I don't belong to anybody," you want to say, but the message that sends is a simple, "yeah."
"My condolences," SilentHarper responds. A few moments later, "Alena tells me that Ori is an erratic player at best. It's very old. Possibly senile."
