by J L Aarne
Wyatt picked the pencil up and rubbed the lead with his thumb, a burning in his eyes as he wondered if the bookcase would ever be anything now other than a jumble of abandoned pieces. He put the pencil back exactly where it had been and cleared his throat. “Dad?”
There was a sound like someone taking a step before hesitating, the sigh of their clothes brushing against things in the dark outside the light of the single bulb. Aaron liked old cars and Lorrie had bought him a yellow and black ’58 Ford Fairlane Sunliner for their 20th anniversary. It was a beautiful car. They didn’t take it out much, but Aaron had driven it in a couple of local parades and he talked about taking it to car shows, though they never seemed to find the time. As Wyatt stood there, he knew that his dad was standing in the shadows on the other side of the covered car. He could feel eyes watching him; it was a sensation he was familiar with.
Maybe it was the cat, Ruby, lurking beneath the car or over behind the boxes stacked in the corner. Lorrie and Aaron had a yard sale once every other year or so and some of the boxes held old blankets and sheets and unwanted clothes; perfect for napping in if you were a cat. Another time, he could have convinced himself that it was just the cat, but those times were gone, and things were different now. Wyatt had been feeling it for a while, maybe since even before Silas left. If Wyatt had been his sister or his mother or some friend dropping by to see how Aaron was doing after the stroke, it would have been the cat.
It wasn’t the cat.
Wyatt thought about leaving the garage and going inside the house, but he wasn’t there to see his mom, and if he did see her she would ask him about why he was there, and because he couldn’t very well tell her he thought his dad was a skin-stealing monster, he would have to come up with a believable lie. He didn’t leave, he remained standing beside the workbench in the light and glanced back at the door to gauge the distance between himself and it should he have to make a run for it.
“Dad? Um… Dad, can we talk?”
“Talk?” came Aaron’s voice out of the dark. It sounded a little rough and unused, like he had been asleep and Wyatt had woken him up. “Talk?” he repeated, and he moved out from behind the old car’s back fins. “Talk of what?”
Wyatt watched him move around the car toward him and it looked like his father, exactly like him in every way, but he found it hard to recognize him. Back when Wyatt had been an intense, brooding, bookish teenage loner, he had read a lot of books on psychology. In hindsight, he understood that he had been looking for answers. There hadn’t been any answers for him in those books, but he had still read a lot of strange and interesting stuff. What he was experiencing with his father was a perfect example of a Capgras delusion: the absolute conviction that a friend or loved one has been replace by an exact replica. Oh, Dr. Graham would love that, he could only imagine the pills he would have to take then. One of the many reasons she was never going to hear about it; any of it. Wyatt watched his father walk toward him into the light, something cupped in his right hand against his chest, and he knew it wasn’t his father, but he also knew he wasn’t delusional.
“Oh, god,” Wyatt whispered, lifting a hand to his face. He could feel grief pushing at the back of his throat, but he refused to allow that pressure to become tears. Not yet. Later, but not yet. He rubbed his eyes and dropped his hand.
Aaron held out his right hand toward him and Wyatt looked down as he opened his fingers to reveal a tiny green treefrog. It blinked up at him, wiped at its face with one of its little front feet, and prepared to jump. Aaron licked it off his palm before it could leap. Wyatt’s stomach flipped over as he bit down with an audible crunch.
“Good,” Aaron said with a satisfied smile.
“Sure. Yeah, yummy,” Wyatt said.
“Yummy,” Aaron said, as though tasting the word like he had tasted the frog.
Wyatt leaned back against the workbench with a sigh, unable to take his eyes off his father. The thing wearing his father, he reminded himself. It wasn’t like he needed reminding though; he couldn’t escape it. This was not his dad, but what did he call him (it) then?
“You’re not him,” Wyatt said.
“Not him?” Aaron asked.
“You’re not my dad,” Wyatt said, anger slipping into his voice. “You’re not, are you?”
Aaron tilted his head slightly and frowned at Wyatt. Then he sighed, and it was such a human expression of surrender that for a moment Wyatt was unsure. Then he said, “No. I am not Dad.”
Wyatt nodded. He stared down at his shoes while Aaron licked the palm of his hand clean of frog slime. Finally, Wyatt said, “So, now what?”
Aaron rolled his eyes up to him, his head still lowered to lick his fingers. He lowered his hand and considered Wyatt thoughtfully. “I don’t understand your question,” he said.
“Now what?” Wyatt repeated. “You’re not my dad and I know you’re not my dad, so now what? What do you do? What do I do? I can’t just… You can’t just… My mom lives here. I can’t just let you—”
Aaron put his hands in his pockets, still looking thoughtful, and asked, “Why?”
“Why?” Wyatt said incredulously. “Why? Because you’re a fucking monster! You—you ate my dad, then you put his skin on and—”
He cut himself off, hit all at once with the realization that he didn’t know for a fact that the fleshgaits ate the people they impersonated, but that it was likely because their skinless bodies were never discovered, and that if this thing standing before him wearing his father’s face and his father’s puzzled frown had eaten him, then he had digested him and shit him out of his father’s own anus. He couldn’t speak because he was sure that if he opened his mouth again he was going to vomit.
“You cannot tell,” Aaron said, watching him with alarm. “Your mom. My… Lorrie. You cannot say.”
“Or what?” Wyatt choked. He put his hand over his mouth, telling himself to be calm, to be cool, to not puke everywhere and make himself vulnerable so the thing wearing his dad could have a chance to eat him too. “I have to go.”
He ran from the garage. Following the map he had made in his mind while waiting for Aaron to emerge from the dark, he bolted for the door, slammed it open with his body, nearly tripped over his own feet, then flew down the driveway to his car. He knew that the creature wearing his father’s skin was right behind him all the way. He could feel its hot breath on the back of his neck and smell something swampy like the flesh of a treefrog caught between its teeth wafting over him.
When he reached the car, he looked back and Aaron was standing calmly in the open doorway of the garage watching him flee. He appeared confused and a bit alarmed, but he had not given chase.
Knowing this didn’t do a lot to slow Wyatt’s racing heart. He got into his car, started it, backed out onto the road and drove home. He drove at least ten miles over the speed limit the whole way back, his mind racing with images that flew through his head and became distorted like the pictures in a kaleidoscope. Dad in the hospital, mom in the kitchen, tiny tree frog, carpenter’s pencil, withered grey creature inside of Ned’s body, serpent’s scales and black-eyed children and a wolf shaking stars from its midnight coat. This was his world now, all of it, every insane inch of it, and there were things in this world that wanted to eat him. He had always known it, but he hadn’t understood before. Had he been so stupid that he thought understanding would protect him from it? That understanding would make the bite of it sting less?
He hadn’t thought that it would bite him as hard as it had, that was the truth. He had been afraid of his own pain and death because of the things he could see for as long as he could remember, but no one else saw it. His mother and sister and father saw nothing but shadows when they looked at shadows, nothing but darkness and the normal things that went about after the sun set. He had been ready to accept the possibility of his own destruction, but it had never occurred to him that the monsters would get to him through them, or that they even could. It was naïve, he knew it, but he h
ad believed that the light meant they were safe. Now that creature was living in his childhood home, sleeping at night beside his mother, wearing his father’s face, the face of a man it had murdered.
According to Silas, Wyatt was supposed to be the line in the sand between people (families like his own) and monsters like the one inside his father’s skin. Silas could tell him there was a decision to be made, but there was nothing to decide. His aunt could lecture him about having a choice, but she saw it all theoretically, through a window of her own cowardice. This wasn’t a theory, it wasn’t hypothetical, it was happening.
When he got home, his hands were shaking so badly that he dropped his keys unlocking the door. He was bent over to pick them up when his phone started ringing. He took it from his pocket to check who it was and cursed when he read Dr. Graham’s name. Her office would be calling him because Wyatt had missed his past two appointments. Dismissing the call was harder than it should have been with his hands shaking, but he managed it without dropping the phone then tossed it down on the coffee table once he was inside.
His breathing was heavy and quick, and his heart was racing, and Wyatt realized he was having a panic attack, and had probably been having it for a while, so he hurried to the kitchen and got a bottle of whiskey out of the cupboard over the fridge. It was half empty, and it was warm, but it would have to do. He took a drink straight from the bottle before filling a glass, which he took with him into his bedroom. He was still shaking, he was still on the verge of hyperventilating, but he could feel his heartbeat gradually begin to slow as he crossed the apartment.
In the bedroom, he swallowed half an Ambien and washed it down with warm Jim Beam. The bed felt stiff beneath him as he crawled into it, but he knew that in no time at all, the drug would start to kick in and the mattress would become a big puffy marshmallow of comfort.
While he waited for that to happen, he drank a little more.
“What’s wrong?” Thorn asked him. His voice floated softly out from beneath the bed, disembodied and soothing.
“Everything,” Wyatt said, which was what it all too often felt like. Everything was wrong with the world, everything was wrong with him, and there was no fixing it. Everything was hopeless.
“Yes, but more specifically, what is wrong now?” Thorn asked.
“My dad’s a monster,” Wyatt said.
There was a minute of silence while Thorn thought about this. Then he asked, “Actually or figuratively?”
Wyatt laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, so he stopped. “Actually, literally a monster. A monster killed him and put him on like he was some kind of new tux from Versace and then it decided it liked the fit of him so it kept him and now it’s living in my house with my mom and I can’t stop wondering if it’s cannibalism if you eat a person when you’re not a person but you digest it and shit it out when you are a person. Is it self-cannibalism? Is that a thing? I don’t know but I want to stop thinking about it and I can’t.”
That contemplative silence again, which Wyatt filled with whiskey. “I’m sorry,” Thorn said.
“For what?” Wyatt asked. “For my loss? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I thought he’d be okay after the stroke. Except he wasn’t, was he? Or, he was, but then he had to go fucking camping and get eaten. And I’m the only one who knows. I’m the only one who can know. What am I supposed to do about it? I can’t let it live with my mom, it’ll kill her or something if she burns its dinner one day or ruins its favorite shirt in the laundry or for no reason, just because she’s there and it felt like a snack. But then what am I gonna do? Kill it? It’s my dad.”
“How long has it been living there?” Thorn asked.
“I don’t know. Like… a few weeks. Since they came back from the camping trip after he got out of the hospital.”
“Then your mother is probably safe.”
That should have comforted Wyatt and he understood that was what Thorn was trying to do, but it didn’t much. He imagined his mother living with the monster, who she thought was his dad, never knowing that it was actually the creature that had killed his dad and ate him. The creature that could decide one day to do the same thing to her. She would sleep beside it and make suppers for it and do its laundry and hug it and kiss it and wonder why her husband was never the same after the hospital, and she would never know the truth. She couldn’t.
Could he really do that to her? It was monstrous, but that was the choice Wyatt had before him now and that was why he was getting drunk.
“Thorn? Will you hold my hand?”
Wordlessly, Thorn extended his hand from beneath the bed. Wyatt took it and felt the cool fingers close around his. Thorn had long fingers, just a little too long to be a man’s, and his nails were claw-like and thicker and tapered to short points at the end. Wyatt ran his thumb over one and felt the shallow grooves that ran the length of each nail. Some animals had grooves like that in their horns.
He didn’t know what Thorn looked like because he had never actually seen him and had only ever touched his hands. Sometimes Wyatt tried to imagine what sort of creature Thorn was. What did he look like? How big was he? Did he walk on two legs like a person or did he have a hundred legs like a centipede? But it didn’t matter because Thorn had always been there. Even when Wyatt had thought he was crazy, he had been constant. He could be the most hideous animal in the whole world and it wouldn’t matter because Wyatt loved him.
“What do they want?” Wyatt asked. “The fleshgaits and the other things. Silas thinks they’re more active because of the serpent. The serpent is stirring or something is what he said. But so? What does that do for them? If it’s a war like Silas seems to think and the fleshgaits and the black-eyed kids are the beginning, then what do they want? Everyone wants something in a fight, right?”
“I don’t know,” Thorn said. “Fleshgaits can go wherever they want as long as they have a host. They’re like parasites.”
“Yeah, super aggressive parasites,” Wyatt said.
“Yes. But they do not fear the sunlight. It doesn’t hurt them or make them insubstantial or strip them of their power unless they are naked. There are some night creatures who are that way; they prefer the dark for its concealment, same as you do, but they can walk in the sunlight if they choose.”
“Okay, but they would have to look like people or something normal or everyone would know about them.”
“Yes, and most of them cannot walk in the sun. Those who can are rare and strange. I’ve heard stories about the Midgard Serpent. Many of them are obviously made up, like folk legends and fairy tales, but almost all of them mention the blacking out of the sun. If there were no sunlight to fear, the creatures of the night would be as free as you are to come and go whenever you like, and they’re stronger than humans, more powerful, so it is not a great leap from understanding that to realizing that they might take over the world.”
“That’s…” Wyatt hesitated to call it extreme or irrational, though that was exactly what sprang to mind.
Except it made sense. Night creatures were not subservient to man, they were subservient to the light. It came, and they had no choice but to flee. It was their greatest weakness. But if the shadow went on and on without end across the entire world, they would be unstoppable. If such creatures had an idea of paradise, it would make sense that it was a dark one.
“But that’s just a story, right?” Wyatt said. “You don’t know that’s what they’re trying to do.”
“I don’t, you’re right,” Thorn agreed. “Though it’s what they wanted to do the last time. It doesn’t mean it can be done, of course, but if any creature in the universe could do it, it would be the Midgard Serpent.”
“If there even is such a thing,” Wyatt said.
“True. That too could be just a story,” Thorn said. “Who can say? I’ve never seen it, but then, you wouldn’t see it until it broke free and if it ever did that, well… that would probably be the end of everything. So, you see, you can’t know for sure.”
“But if I was the leader in a fight like that on their side, if I believed those stories, or if I even just hoped they were true, that would be what I wanted,” Wyatt said.
He was a little drunk and Ambien didn’t mix well at all with alcohol (it said so very emphatically right there on the bottle) so he was a bit slower than normal, but he thought that sounded logical. It sounded right.
“There is something else I once heard a long time ago about the serpent,” Thorn said.
“What?”
“The blood is its own poison.”
Wyatt frowned and set the bottle of Jim Beam down on the floor. It was nearly empty, and he was feeling it. The alcohol made the sleeping pill so much more potent and he could feel himself falling asleep even as he tried to make his brain work so he could think.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps that you need to acquire the serpent’s blood to kill it. That would seem the most obvious meaning.”
“No.” Wyatt shook his head, or he tried to. His head was heavy. “Not doing that.”
“Why on earth not?”
Thorn sounded truly mystified and Wyatt wanted to tell him that from everything he had heard and read, and from what little evidence he had seen, if there was indeed a Midgard Serpent, it did not seem to be evil. If it existed, it was perceived as evil only because of its great capacity for destruction and chaos should it ever succeed in breaking free. The creatures that followed it and claimed to serve it, they were evil, he had seen them commit evil acts with his own eyes. His father, or what remained of him, was living evidence of their evil. They terrified him. Their power, their darkness, their violence all terrified him. The serpent did not terrify him. He was inexplicably drawn to the serpent. It fascinated him and he wondered and worried about that, but its potential for evil and chaos, though unimaginably vast, was incidental. Wyatt didn’t want to kill it. He understood that it had to be stopped, but he wasn’t going to poison it. There had to be another way.
