Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  I move ahead to look for him. He has to be here somewhere. The gun is tied in both my hands and my arms are stretched and locked as I move ahead. My ears are open as I try and listen for the sounds of clicks or growls or anything that I’m familiar with. There’s nothing, nothing but a heavy wind that’s barely sliding through the air and the sounds of thousands of cicadas all clawing away with one another.

  I can’t help but see a familiarity in the house ahead of me. There is one light on in the top left corner of it, only four windows show themselves on the front of the house, one is broken, the one is lit, and two are off.

  “Bash,” I call out but there isn’t anything that comes back to me. I look up and down the street and see nothing but a desolate dirt road, this house is here but its alone on the street. There are a few trailers about a hundred yards down the road but most of them are hidden behind a fence of barbed wire and most of them looked junked rather than in use.

  I move close to the door, my eyes are painted all over the front of the house, I have no idea where the water or the sewer went or how I moved from Manhattan to Louisiana but I continue.

  The front door is open, whatever lock was there was shocked off of it and whatever was left of it was rusted and twisted to the point where it had no use anymore. I move inside and can smell something rotting the second that I get in there.

  The scent hits my nose hard and I have to move one of my arms over my nose and mouth to make sure that I don’t breathe in that much of the sour smell. It immediately brings water to my eyes but after I run the back of my hand over my eyes the water doesn’t come back. I’ve smelled this scent before but never this pungent and never this vivid. Whatever was decomposing had been going for weeks not just hours or days.

  I’m quiet, I don't want to announce myself in the house. I’m not sure why but I keep my voice reserved to myself and lean around the stairwell that's in front of me. There is a light on in the kitchen but its flickering so bad that it's transitioning between fully dark and ghostly pale. Everything in there at least from my view is disgusting. Old food is stuck to dishes and pots and there is dirt and mold falling all over most of the surfaces. When I get close I can see old blood that’s turned black stuck on the wall. I hear a scream and I turn my eyes and the gun to where the sound came from. It’s from upstairs, from the room that had the light on.

  I move quicker but I don't run and I still don't announce myself in the house.

  When I get to the top of the stairs, I see a door, it's the door to the room and its locked with a padlock. I press my ear to it and can hear the screams coming out of a muffled mouth. I aim and fire and shoot out the lock and slam my shoulder into the door and move in.

  Chapter 114

  The smell is so bad that it churns my stomach. There are four people in the room, two of them were the parents, that was where the smell was coming from. I have to shield my nose again as it starts to move up through my sinus’.

  The bodies were there for more than a month, I can see most of the skin has already started to peel itself off the bone and whatever skin is left has died itself grey. Even under the decomposition I can see that the bodies were badly mutilated. There are parts of the bodies, intestines, old blood all over the corpses on the floor. The murder weapon could've been anything.

  There are two kids too, one of them is a little girl, she’s sitting in the middle of the massacre and looking up at me with cold but curious eyes as she sits their Indian style with her hands clasped in her lap. The other child is a boy who is laying on the floor, he has to be half the age of the girl, my guess is that she was at least eleven or so, he must’ve been more than seven with fresh bruises and purple swelling at his neck, red beads in his eyes. I didn’t need to go to him to check his pulse to know that he was dead too but he was a lot more recent than the two adults.

  “What happened here?” I ask, my voice isn’t sweet, it’s almost like I'm back in a world that I recognize speaking to someone that I need information from that doesn’t want to give it.

  “They didn't’ like me, they said I was different than them,” the girl says back to me. The moon plays a trick on her eyes, for a second, I see that matte black between her eyelids.

  I bend down and crouch, my gun is out but I’m not aiming it at all. “When did this happen?”

  “It’s been a long time,” the little girl said almost disturbed looking away like she was on punishment and ashamed to speak about it.

  “We need to get you out of here,” I say and I bend down and lift her up, putting her hands around my neck and lifting her by the back of her thighs, I can tell she’s uncomfortable, either it's with me or the fact that she hasn’t been held in a long time. She’s very thin, I don't know the last time that she ate or drank anything but I can feel bones even in the back of her thighs.

  I get her outside and then put her down on the steps in front of the front door. I go into my pocket for my cellphone but there’s nothing there. I literally only have my gun on me, I rub my hands over the rest of my pockets and find that everything is missing. All of it. Locks, cards, wallet, keys, weapons, all of it is missing.

  I look down the street at the old trailers, the junk boxes that are sitting in their lot. This time I can see that lights are on and I hear the whisper of generators sending power into them. “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Outside Baton Rouge,” she says to me, I can hear the twitch of accent in her voice now.

  “Honey,” I say to her after a second of considering if this is the best route to go. “How did they get like that up there?”

  “I did it,” she said with a smile like she was showing me a good score on a test from school. “I killed them.”

  “Baby why?” I asked her, crouching low again.

  “Because I hated them. Because they hurt me,” she said. “When are we going to New York?”

  I look at her with curiosity in my eyes. “New York.”

  “Yea, New York, that’s next right.”

  “What’s in New York?” it’s the only question that I can think of.

  “All the memories I still have,” she says back to me.

  Now when I look into her eyes I can see the blackness that’s there, staring at me, it's not a trick of the lighting or the moon anymore. There is something else alive in her and using her body for itself. I watch as blood starts to run out of her eyes and the corner of her mouth as her lips bend into a smile. “When are we going, when are we going?” she asks me.

  I take a step back and my arms regain their composure and I aim again. “Should I fucking kill her?” a grown voice steps out of the little girl’s mouth and I can hear the demon inside of her. I can’t, I know what it wants me to do but I can’t I know what life she’s going to lead if I don't do this and I fire a shot that punctures her forehead and ignites the demon that’s living inside of her.

  My hands move to my head and I lose all support in my legs and fall to my knees. The scream is so loud it's like its stepped outside my range of hearing.

  Chapter 115

  I’m back in Manhattan, on streets that I recognize, the streets that I’m comfortable enough to call home. I’m sitting in a cab, watching the skyscrapers and the people scroll past my window. I’m intrigued as I always am, absent of all the anxiety and the hate that comes with my line of work. I’m always second guessing people and I’m always in search of the worst inside of individuals. I have to be, I’m there to find out about the supernatural.

  Now though, sitting in the back of this cab, the sliding leather of the backseat, the television playing with no volume is talking about weather from a day that says its sunny when it’s busy pouring outside of my window. I can take a breath and really enjoy being relaxed as it passes over me.

  The cab drops me off in front of my building and I pay the driver when the meter totals my final price. I get out but I don't run to the door, rains never really bothered me all that much, I suppose I was never that much of a girl that tries to move i
n between the raindrops.

  I get under my awning, go through the double entryway, and then up the stairs to my apartment. I can’t believe that I’m home. The disaster that was my apartment isn’t there anymore. The door is in the same place that I left it and I know that on the other side of the door, everything with be its same bit of simple disorganization that all makes sense to me.

  I take all three keys and unlock all three locks and open the thick door and slam it shut and I see what’s familiar in there. The unmade bed, the computer screens that are all still glowing with an identical black screen over each of them and a cup of coffee that was abandoned at the desk that's probably frigid by now.

  “I’m home,” I say. It doesn’t matter what I did to the girl or what I saw at the house in Louisiana or what I did to that girl. That's a memory that I know is going to get lost in its processing. It won’t make it to anywhere where it's going to matter.

  Then the ground shakes under me. It’s bad enough that I have to put my hand to the wall to hold my balance. It gets worse though, I have to open my door and tuck myself into the doorway, that’s the safest place that I can think of but I know better, I pull out my gun. One of the last times I was in here I saw a demon that I’ve never seen before in my life jump to my building. I don’t trust it, I don’t trust entirely that someone or something isn't’ trying to kill me right now.

  I brace but it doesn’t stop. It almost takes two hands to make sure I stay on my feet. A giant slit runs through the wall on my apartment, the glass of my window breaks and the bars that sit outside of the window bend and twist off. That’s when I see the floor start to splinter and break apart and fall.

  Before I know it, my room is gone, completely gone. The doorframe is gone, I’m on a dark ground with something ahead of me. Thankfully the gun is still in my hand because when I walk towards what I see ahead of me, I don't know if I want to use it or forget about it entirely.

  “What are you?” I ask the darkness ahead of me as if the structure in front of me is going to answer me back.

  I see a massive black structure, its wet and bleeding moisture from it. It looks like something that was grown on another planet entirely, it’s not fat but its tall close to eight feet if I had to guess. There is something at the center of it too.

  It's me.

  I can see my face sitting in the center at the top. My eyes are open and my pupils are rolled backwards and the thin red hairs at the bottom of my eyes have nearly reached through the entire length of my eye. My entire body is cocooned in whatever this thing is. I want to save myself, I need to get myself out of there.

  I aim the gun out at it and fire a few scattered shots. The organic skin breaks apart where the bullets pierce and a thick blue spits out like vomit and smokes as it touches down on the ground. It does nothing to free the version of me that’s caught inside of the skin.

  I tuck the gun away and try to run up the wall, clawing my hands into the skin to try and hold my grip but it’s too slick for me to hang onto it. I rip my fingers into it but the blue that slides out when I do sets my skin on fire and I can see the skin on my fingers bubble as it starts to bleed off my body.

  I can feel a hand on my face. I can see Bash leaning over me, his blue eyes close to my own. “Arinna, come back to me,” he says.

  I turn around quick, I think that I’m going to see him right behind me but he’s not there.

  Then he shows his face again. “Come on, come back.”

  The room explodes around me everything touches the air and then my eyes open. I’m lying in the freezing water; Bash arm is under my neck and his other arm is wrapped around my midsection.

  His hand moves over my face but softly, he’s checking to make sure that I’m breathing on my own.

  “Where the fuck did you go?” he says to me.

  “I don’t know,” I say back to him. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 116

  Bash helps me over the next few steps before I’m confident that I can walk on my own without his help.

  We walk to the darkness ahead without interruption and without firing another shot. I can see where the tunnel empties out up ahead. The pipe leads to an opening which leads to a waterfall, I can hear the sound of falling water.

  Together, we reach it and see the massive pod of water that receiving the falling water of nine tubes. The pods are connected to a small ten vents that are taking the drain-off water that’s overflow from the pool.

  In the center is a body, a man standing there.

  I climb down and see that the man hasn’t look at us once yet but he hasn’t moved either.

  “What the hell do you think that is?” Bash asks me.

  In a voice that’s weaker than I expected I answer, “That’s the third seal.”

  I crawl down the ladder with Bash behind me and I land hard in the water which is up to my ankles, Bash comes down next to me. His gun is raised, I have this strange feeling somewhere inside of me that I don't need mine.

  Now that we’re closer I can see it, the small red triangle that’s plated with a decoration of black angled designs until it forms a makeshift shell for the lower end of the triangle itself. That’s it.

  “Drop it,” Bash says to the man at the center, the triangle hovering inside of his curved hands.

  I study the man containing the seal. He’s tall, resembling the wraith but with more muscle over his body. Eyes are wide and black with half his face buried under a similar paneling that latches onto the seal. That same plating is on his chest and shoulder and ribs. There are scars across his body too, horrible scars, any one of them looked like they could've killed him and most of them are still red and fresh like they were just created on his skin.

  Bash pulls the trigger back but the man at the center is too fast and puts his hand into the air and the bullets slow and stop before falling into the water like they slammed into a wall that was too thick for them to pass through.

  Another second passes and Bash flies through the air and slides along the pool of grey water until he hits the basin hard enough to send a vibration through the pool.

  I run at it, throwing two kicks through the air, both of them are slapped away, the being throws one and this one just touches my shoulder but it's enough to force me to slide across the water too. Once I stop, I spring myself up back to my feet.

  The being swings another kick and I back my face up and it misses me even though the moisture at the bottom of his boot splashes against my face. I throw a hammer fist at him but he backs his face off too quick.

  He circles me and I watch him, he’s barely paying me any notice but I can feel something in my mind like he’s prodding around up there, trying to find something that he wants to see. My eyes are stuck on him, where he’s going to move, how he’s going to move, I don't even have time to look back at Bash to make sure he’s fine.

  The entity resets itself and I do the same. He drives at me with six kicks, the first ones I hold even though it's like holding back a sledgehammer, the last ones are enough to push me back a few feet with each time his body collides with mine.

  I strike and get my fist against his chin but he turns and threw a roundhouse kick that nearly hit me in my temple. He landed, recovered, and threw another but I managed my way inside of the strike range and threw an elbow into his chest that sent him back a few feet.

  It came after me throwing hands at varying angles that I had to separate out my guard to try and block. It was like taking bricks at the wrist and forearm but my feet managed to stay planted.

  Finally, I swatted one of the hands so far away, it opened his guard to the point where he wasn’t able to close it again and I threw my back and drove my knee into the same spot in its chest that I had thrown my hand and elbow into which pushed him back and off his feet and I watched as his body skidded through the water.

  I waited for him to get up, I watched the water runoff his skin as his eyes finally managed to look at me from the distance that cut between us.
It ran at me, in the few feet before he reached where I was standing, he jumped in the air to try and throw another kick but I pushed my own foot forward and took out the leg he was trying to jump with and brought him face down into the water.

  I retreated back two steps as it brought itself to its feet. Its eyes staring at me while blood began to leak out of its mouth and nose. I didn't’ even realize that it was smeared on my face as well and the bones in both my arms had turned numb.

  It got close to me again with a missed kicked that I turned out from and two elbows came down in diagonal patterns and each one of them collided with my jaw but before I bounced backwards, I threw my own cut down elbow and it slammed hard into its throat. As it stumbled I threw a leg kick to each of its legs, one hit hard, the other broke something underneath his skin.

  As its body shifted downward to balance out the broken bone in its leg, I threw a diagonal set of punches right into the spot that I had been touching throughout the fight hard enough that when it sent him back its body didn’t move.

  Chapter 117

  I didn't’ walk up to it. The scream that exploded into the air and rattled around the wide steel enclosed pod was more than enough for me to know that it wasn’t going to get up again. I saw the scape of a cloud so dense and so dark from the body that lay in the filthy water that I almost had to ready myself again for another fight. It was more demon mist then I had ever seen escape from one vessel.

  I looked back at Bash who was still up against the rim of the basin, the sewer water washing up against him like he was the shore of a beach. I limped over to where the body had finally stopped and there in the water, hovering just above where the body was the triangle, the final seal that I had wanted and searched for. I bent down and picked it up, it felt heavy in my hand, a lot heavier than it looked from the outside. To be honest I thought that there was nothing but light on the inside of it from a distance.