bleeding. Alarm zipped up my spine. Not again!
Surgical wadding crinkled when I moved, which spoke of an actual wound on my shoulder and the weird truth of what I’d experienced earlier in the evening. I’d never heard of tactile hallucinations that inflicted real injuries. But if such mental torment was even vaguely possible, what was I in for now?
Yanking the sheets to my nose, I twisted the heavy cotton in tight fists, entranced by this latest nightmare dredged from my darkest fears. But secretly I knew: these were not fears conjured by my brain alone. The fabric of my existence was warping beyond the accepted; something other-worldly wished me harm. The hideous discolouration began to throb, bulging towards the floor. I tried to convince myself it was truly all in my mind, I would ride it out and have myself committed tomorrow. But I no longer believed that lie.
“Bea!”
Trembling, I began to hum ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, a habit I’d picked up when I was younger and struggling to ease the anxiety over starting at another new school – distraction by music. But my petrified dirge didn’t do Kid Cudi justice. And this experience was so much worse than whispers behind hands and Third-grade stares.
“Someone!” I called with rising hysteria.
The sodden roof sagged and broke open, giving birth to a skinless head that writhed its way through. The skull was about the size of a wolf’s and similarly elongated to accommodate a ragged hole crammed with long yellowed fangs. Where its eyes should have been were bloodied cavities. Instead of relying on sight, the demon sucked air moistly through slitted nostrils, apparently dependent on smell to guide it.
“Anyone!”
A repulsive body disgorged, and with it the stench of the morgue. It was totally flayed, the absence of skin revealing gnarled sinew and leathery muscle, stippled by rot. I tasted bile. My humming intensified. The creature clung upside down. Front facing the floor, its hook-tipped wasted limbs jutted backwards, piercing thick plaster at impossible angles. The rift in the roof grindingly sealed, caging us together. It paused and swivelled its head a full circle in response to my fevered humming, then cocked it to the side. I shut up, too late. Clearly it also possessed a good sense of hearing.
Quivering violently, its abdomen split open, spilling entrails onto the ground. I could do no more than blink, frozen by horror and nausea as the steaming bowels congealed into a double of the original demon with a sickening squelch. The first creature stayed where it was on the ceiling, while the second struggled to its feet on the floor. Its looks didn’t improve on standing, hunched over and stringy and even less tolerable now much closer to me. About the size of a small man, it stank. Ugly beetles and centipedes oozed through the mummified gristle of its form. Those teeth and claws looked exceptionally sharp, made to rip and tear. The grotesque twins snuffled eagerly, twitching their heads to test the surrounds.
Without taking my focus from them, I desperately fumbled objects on my side table for something that would suffice as a weapon, finally gripping the polished marble of my mermaid. The sculpture had saved me from a pervert, why not a fiend? Ferocious growls and splintering wood reverberated out in the hall. Vovo and Cherish unleashed their full might against my closed door. I could almost feel the shaking of the frame when the cats ran and repeatedly pounded into the oak barrier, howling in frustration.
They were too far away and I was out of time. Even if my aim was perfect, I only had one shot and had to choose which of my two enemies to target. Both beasts’ full attention lasered in on me, like they sensed my intent, and each of them scuttled with murderous speed towards my bed. I let lose with an ear-shattering scream, launching from the sheets to hurl the mermaid with all the force I could muster at the one on the ground as my door flung open.
Events of that awful instant seemed to occupy hours. In three long strides, Fortescue rushed into the room wearing a nightshirt and a fearsome expression, the cats surging around him. Strangely, I had the chance to notice his purple socks and white knobbly knees before flying stone impacted the creature’s forehead. The monster on the ceiling screeched in fury and shuffled closer to me as its twin faltered backwards, violently shaking its head to free the stone lodged in the spongy flesh between empty eye sockets.
My mermaid flew sideways to shatter one mirrored panel of my wardrobe. Glass cascaded to the parquetry, my best hope of resistance bouncing out of reach under my bed. A riled snarl twisted the jaw of the creature I’d hit. All the defensive strategy had achieved was to make the wretched thing angrier. Now sporting a hole of pulped tissue in its forehead, it jumped up onto my mattress. I cowered against the bedhead, nowhere else to go.
“Not on my watch,” Fortescue declared, heaving a spear with such anger-fuelled power it crunched through the thing’s backbone and burst out of its ribcage, skewering a desiccated pulsing heart.
Vovo was on the creature in an instant, dragging it down and out of sight at the foot of my bed. Cherish jumped into the air, his paws hooking into the one on the ceiling and hauling it to the floor. The fracas was punctuated only by unpleasant ripping noises. Fortescue trusted the cats with the rest of the job and gazed searchingly at me.
Tears tracked his cheeks and his bottom lip trembled. “I deeply regret this is happening to you, Winsome. Do not fear, I shall get help.”
Then he swiftly backed out of my room, taking the cats with him. “NO!” Don’t leave me with those things! “Fortescue come back! Please. Don’t leave me all alone,” I whimpered, closing my eyes and resuming Kid Cudi. After what felt like years, a voice rose over my humming.
“It’s okay, Bear. You’re not alone. I promise. I won’t leave you alone ever again.”
I stared unseeing. Smithy hesitantly walked towards me from the doorway with upraised palms. Glancing down, I sat board-stiff in bed, my hands tangled in the sheets and fingers locked as if in rigor mortis. He edged closer, pausing by my side. I came back to myself, dazed and shivering.
“I’m going to get in there with you.” His tone was soft, like that of a rescuer pacifying the survivor of a car crash.
“On the floor … anything?” I whispered.
“There’s nothing there.”
“No spear?”
He carefully surveyed the floor and shook his head. “No spear. You were screaming at the top of your lungs. In between bouts of …” His expression suggested I might be unstable, capable of sprinkling fairy dust and befriending unicorns. “Humming.”
I looked at Smithy properly for the first time since he’d entered, realising it would be far more unbalanced to let him into my bed. He was in nothing but boy-leg undies, not saturated and clinging like the jelly-bean pair of earlier this morning, but surface-of-the-sun hot just the same. I missed his blue hair. Things were so much simpler when he was a marauding, obnoxious menace.
Bea would probably call the police if she saw us like this. There would be a restraining order. And rightly so! On his feet, barely dressed, Smith was spellbinding. My eyes devoured him. He’d hit the gym a great deal by the looks of it, defined muscle on a fit, lean frame with tennis-player legs from all the running. His lightly tanned skin outdid that of a Brazilian surfer. I considered throwing caution to the wind and requesting he turn on the spot to display the behind view. What the heck? He already thought I was unhinged.
Unhinged – that reminded me! Dreadful monsters haunted my room in another impossible episode that so garishly mimicked reality. As a padded cell beckoned in a few hours, I decided to risk Bea’s outrage. I could blame the impropriety of a semi-naked boy in my bed on my unfolding psychosis.
“I’ll stay on my side. I’ll just hold your hand.”
He slipped between the sheets. With exaggerated care, he moved close enough to prise my fingers apart, pushing me further down the mattress and chastely tucking the sheet around my shoulders. One of my arms remained on the cover. He lay on his side with a virtuous distance between us and placed my hand in both of his.
“Better?” he inquired earnestly.
“Is it true Hugo’s missing?”
“Yes. He’d didn’t return from their hunt for … someone.”
I hadn’t been acquainted with my bodyguard very long, and found him a pest often, but there was something endearing and so lost-kitten (maybe lost lion-cub) about him beneath the I-can-kill-you-with-one-glance demeanour. I wanted him here, safe with us; not out in a hostile night filled with beasts, real and imaginary. My focus wandered to the wardrobe, the central pane of mirror that should be there, gone. The floor was littered with broken glass.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” The implications extended far beyond my paltry teenaged understanding. “Hugo told me … No, he begged me to stay inside. But I didn’t believe anything he said. It feels like I’m breaking apart, like I should be carted away to a lock-down ward in the asylum.”
“You don’t need to go to the psych ward, Winnie. And whatever’s going on, I don’t think you’re to blame.”
“Really?” I sucked an unsteady breath, staring at the ceiling and not at all sure the alternative to insanity was an improvement. “Bea’s telling me impossible stories that can’t be real. Yet all these horrible things keep happening, bleeding from my dreams into reality.”
My anguish forced him to do the only decent thing, his resolve crumbled and he moved across