Nilly Robot

A monster reveals himself and a lot of awkward questions are answered. (From Tales from the Valley: Phantasmagory Shorts)

CW: horror themes, briefly: gunshot wounds, monster gore —–+

Well, the situation was well and truly teakettled. I'd really gone and done it now.

When I turned and looked at her, Jenna skittered back with a small, terrified squeak.

Fair.

I had a pretty good idea what I looked like right then, soaked head to toe in former wall-demon, too many legs arched angrily around me. All the focus I usually set aside to look like a human being had gone out the window because I was tired and pissed off and shot an unreasonable amount of times.

Joe had gotten four hits on me before he ran off. Black blobs of whatever the hell I'm made of oozed down my back. It would have been nice if he'd shot that horrible thing he'd made come out of the wall while he was at it, but you know. Points for managing to hit anything, I guess.

My heart sank. This was probably the start of the end for them, then. The valley was a feedback loop once people started losing it.

Once people realized there was no way out.

But hey they'd lasted two, three weeks, give or take a month. I don't know, time is kind of messed up here. Good on them, though. That was better than some...

I hated this.

Why did this always happen? I didn't even really know these people. I didn't even like them.

It was my fault they were here, trapped in their messed up little dream worlds. Of course I felt guilty. Of course I felt bad, but what the hell could I do about it?

I rubbed my face and started going over my roster of hide-outs for the impending shitstorm. I waved most of the gore off. There was no point keeping up the “real person” act now that they saw me for what I was. The bullet wounds would have to wait until I was out of viewing range, unless I wanted to arm wrestle with someone's idea of how shot to shit I was supposed to be.

Jenna was injured. Her nerve signals were screaming Leg! Leg! in the back of my mind. I felt a pang of guilt. Someone should probably help her. I turned to look again and she skittered further back.

“Stay away...” she said.

OK, someone non-abomination shaped should probably help her, but we were experiencing a shortage currently.

“Your leg is broken,” I said, unhelpfully. She flinched. I guess I sounded about as bad as I looked. “There's splints and morphine in the laundry room. I don't know where the hell they got the morphine from though, so maybe just, uh.”

“What...” she squeaked, and honestly yeah. What indeed.

What was the point? What did it matter? It didn't, that's what. I felt sick to my stomach. She'd be dead in a week, maybe less if she was lucky. Why was I bothering? Really, there was no use sticking around making this lady's day any worse. I turned to leave.

“Wait,” she said before I could vanish. “You're hurt.”

I hesitated. This was a mistake because, for both emotional and injury-related reasons, I needed to get the hell out of there.

“Not really,” I said. “You just saw me get shot.”

She stared at me blankly.

“You think I'm shot, so am,” I tried again. It was a little more complicated than that, but now didn't really seem like the time to get into nuance. “Like the thing in the wall. It's why I was trying to distract you.”

She was quiet for a while. Assuming that satisfied her terror-fueled curiosity, I turned to leave again. No such luck.

“So then...”

The pain in my back began to fade and I could feel my shoulder muscles knitting back together. I'll be honest, I was perplexed. There was clearly some kind of misunderstanding going on here. I was already leaving. There was no need to go fishing for mercy points.

“What are you doing?” I asked and the confusion must have been enough to offset my horror-movie vibe for a minute.

“You can't just walk around bleeding everywhere,” she said with a sniff. “It's unhygienic.”

I made a weird little involuntary giggle noise at that. Suave. I can't imagine what that must have looked like coming out of whatever the hell I am.

“Right, wouldn't want to mess up the furniture,” I gestured at the ruined living room.

“What was that thing?” Jenna shivered and surveyed the wreckage. “For that matter, what are you?”

“Some asshole's personal problems,” I muttered, politely ignoring the second question, less politely ignoring the little voice that said I'd just answered it anyway. “It was something he made up. A reoccurring nightmare, maybe, or some kind of phobia.”

“It looked like his uncle.”

Yikes.

“Well, he should probably go do therapy about it instead of trying to kill us, but what do I know. Guess that's kind of off the table here, though.”

Jenna grimaced. People never liked my sense of humor. Oh well.

She gave me one last wary up-and-down before hoisting herself on an overturned couch. Her leg gave out from under her and I dove to stop her impaling herself on a pedestal table without really thinking about how that might come off. She grabbed onto me anyway, and let me help her back down. I tried my best not to loom.

“What are you?” she asked again. I still wasn't having it.

“Great question. I have no idea,” I said to the ceiling. It was spattered in wall-demon. I looked at the floor instead, which was also spattered in wall-demon. After a minute or so of awkward non-looming, I did feel bad about leaving it there. “Well. That's not true. I have some idea, but I don't like the answer.”

“I see,” she said.

We spent a while where I stood there not elaborating and she sat there on the floor with a broken leg until we both decided it was best to move on.

“Fine. Can you help me up, please?” she sighed.

I carried her to a less hazardous part of the living room and set her down on one of the few intact-adjacent couches. I guess we were overlooking the whole abomination thing now, then. That was good. When I went to stand back up, she kept a hold of my arm, eyes wet and pleading.

“What's happening to us? What is this?” she whispered. I felt that awful sinking feeling again. “Please tell me. Please.”

I can't handle this kind of thing. I'm not cut out for it. I'm too weak, too soft, too easy to drag into other people's problems. I hate it, hate it. Why couldn't I just shrug it off? Why did this always happen?

Anyway, whatever. I'm a wet, sappy mess, so I confessed.

I explained the valley, explained why she was there. I let her cling to my arm as I explained what was probably happening to her brain and felt a little bit like dying.

She cried, she begged, and the whole time she gripped my arm like I might disappear. Which was a fair enough read, honestly.

When she asked if I wanted this, if I did it on purpose, I didn't have the heart to lie. The righteous anger on my behalf was mortifying. The pity was horrific. I have enough of my own pity, thanks. The fact is, it was my fault she was here, no matter how much say I had in the matter. I did this to her and I hated that I couldn't make her understand that.

We sat like that for a while, arm in arm, her asking trembling questions, me looming over her like the terrible thing I was.

“Well this sucks,” she said, eventually. Boy, didn't it. “It must be tough. Watching this happen again and again.”

I had nothing to say to that, because if I opened my mouth I was probably going to cry and today had been awkward enough.

“You don't have to answer. I understand,” she said. Bless her, she did not, but the sentiment wasn't lost on me. I was not in the right head-space for another round of sentiment though, so I tried to excuse myself for the third time that night.

I gently pulled my arm away and tucked it behind my back with the rest of my awful appendages. The legs were starting to fade, but I still kept them folded away as out of sight as I could. They weren't really meant to bend like that, but they weren't really meant to exist either, so my aching joints could kindly shut up.

“You're in a lot of pain. I can tell from your nerve signals,” I said. Very cool, a very normal-human thing to tell someone. That train had sailed though, so the least I could do was try to be useful. “Let me go get the medical kit.”

“Can't you just fix it? Like I did for you?” she asked.

“No. That's... different. Best I could do is convince you it's fine. You'll hurt yourself even worse that way.”

And see, that was the thing. Real people didn't just bounce back once no one was looking. Real people also didn't have Cronenburg moments when they got too distracted and forgot to be person-shaped. Usually. The point was, real people died when things like me fucked with their sense of possibility, messed around in their heads and generally went around scaring the shit out of them. The valley was a feedback loop, after all, and I was the engine driving it.

I really, really needed to leave.

“Do you think Joe is alright?” Jenna asked as I turned away, a little quiver in her voice.

I felt around for him with my mind. Joe was curled up in the basement hugging his Colt .45 like a teddy bear.

“He's fine.” He was probably not fine. “After I get something for your leg, I'll go try and reason with him.”

“You shouldn't,” she said. “He'll shoot you again.”

“Probably. I'll be paying attention this time, though. I'm harder to hit when I'm paying attention.”

It's true. I'd only been shot twice before, and once was my own fault.

By then, I'd regained enough control to have the normal amount of legs again, but the fact that the real-life person in the room was still convinced I was a real-life Halloween costume was overriding most of my other adjustments. I could feel the bolts of static rippling across my face when I looked back at her. I didn't really want to think about what she saw when she looked back at me.

—–+ #Horror #ShortStory #Writing #Fiction

_____________________ Hello! I'm Nilly. I write stuff and draw stuff. You can also find me at mastodon.art.