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
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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 the horrible wall-thing he'd created 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. Fear was a feedback loop here.
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 for them, though. Well above average. Why, the last bunch only held out two days before... before...
Dammit.
I hated this.
Why did this always happen? I didn't even know these people. I didn't even like them.
I rubbed my face and started going over my roster of hide-outs. 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 nerves were screaming Leg! Leg! in the back of my mind. I felt a pang of guilt. Someone should help her. I turned to look again and she skittered further back.
“Stay away...”
OK, someone non-abomination shaped should probably help her, but we were experiencing a shortage currently.
I swallowed my disgust and focused on her screaming nerves. A specific kind of nausea-inducing pain shot through our senses.
“Your leg is broken,” I said.
She was gawping at me, so I ran my mouth to fill the silence.
“There's splints and morphine in the laundry room. Some of it's real, some of it's... not. Morphine is, trust me on that. I don't...”
Blank, nothing. The gawping continued.
“I dunno where they got it though, so maybe just, uh.”
Deciding that was a sufficiently awkward stretch of rambling, I turned to leave.
“Right, good talk.”
“Wait,” she said before I could vanish.
I hesitated. This was a mistake because, for both emotional and injury-related reasons, I needed to get the hell out of there.
“You're hurt.”
“No,” I said. “You just think I am. You saw... whatever you saw happen, so it did.”
“Are you in my head?” she whispered, with fearful fascination.
“Uh.”
Something poked me sharply in the neurons. “Is that you?”
Oh no. I retreated further but it was too late. The pain in my back began to fade and I could feel my shoulder muscles knitting back together. Honestly, I was perplexed. there was clearly some kind of misunderstanding going on here, and what's worse is she was good. This was going to be a problem.
“What are you doing?” I asked. The confusion must have been enough to offset my whole horror movie vibe, because she straightened up and pinched her face into its usual irritated scowl.
“You can't just walk around bleeding everywhere,” she said with a sniff. “It's unhygienic.”
I made a weird little involuntary giggle at that. Suave. I can't imagine what that must have looked like coming out of... whatever 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. “Something he made up. A reoccurring nightmare, maybe, or some kind of phobia.”
“It looked like his uncle.”
Yikes.
“Maybe he should uh. Probably go do a therapy about that then, instead of making it our problem. Guess that's kind of off the table here, though.”
Jenna grimaced. People never liked my sense of humor. Oh well.
She gave me another 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 let me help her back down anyway. I tried my best not to loom.
“What are you?” she asked again. I still wasn't having it.
“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 felt 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.
“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 shit. I'm not cut out for it. I hate it, hate it, how I couldn't just let anything go. Why did I care?
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 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.
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#Horror #ShortStory #Writing #Fiction
