Chapter 8
Blood. Sweat. Toast. The distinct odors came to him in that order, one after the other. His mouth was dry and held the foul, metallic taste of blood. He used what little saliva he had to run his tongue across dry, cracked lips. He felt bedding beneath him, though it was crusted in what felt like even more blood.
Ryan managed to peel his eyelids apart but he shut them again almost immediately. Daylight streamed in through the open window of his bedroom and assaulted his vulnerable corneas.
He became suddenly aware that he was very, very cold. Ryan was lying half-naked on top of the sheets with covers strewn about and it felt like the window had been open all night.
He pulled his knees up to his chest and drew in his splayed arms to hug himself as he tried to grasp a blanket. He felt around the bed with one hand, searching for the edge of his askew comforter. His hand traced its way across the rumples in the soft sheets, then into a freezing, damp area of a night’s worth of chilled sweat. Then, as he brought it closer to his head, his hand landed in something else.
Ryan opened his eyes, raised his head, and looked down. He knew there would be blood; he could smell and taste that much. What he wasn’t expecting was just how much blood.
His hand was in the edge of a large splotch of it at the top of his bed, and his head and been right in the center of it only seconds ago. It was still sticky and deep red, and it was at least the size of a large serving platter. Even half-asleep, Ryan knew this wasn’t the blood from his fistfight with the man. There was more of it, a lot more. And it was fresher.
Ryan gagged and fought back the urge to retch. He used his hands to backpedal and scramble out of the bed onto the floor and away from the stain, the pool, as fast as he could. His eyes never left it, not even when he had scuttled backwards to the far wall.
He sat there, staring, for a long time, and he barely blinked. It all came back to him, piece by piece in rapid succession, clear as day. Ryan remembered all of it: the pain, the limbs, the fur, the hunt, the kill. He remembered it, but only the events, not the sensations, as if he was remembering a movie he had watched. That detachment however did nothing to lessen the impact of what he had done. There was blood on his lips, in his mouth, because last night Ryan had ripped out a man’s throat. Ryan had killed. He had ended a human life, and then he had eaten him.
This time, Ryan did vomit. He coughed and sputtered and gagged and watched as bits of partially digested human flesh spewed out of his own mouth and into a pool on the carpet. Then he vomited some more.
He tried not to look at what he was throwing up, but in the convulsing, Ryan caught glimpses. Mixed in with the blood and bits of human viscera were tiny pieces of t-shirt. Matted clumps of black body hair still stuck to their scraps of skin. Here and there, a fingernail. The sight made him retch even harder, but there was only so much vomiting he could do, and after a while, he had done it.
Ryan dragged himself across the hall and into the bathroom where he managed to pull himself to his feet and put most of his weight on the counter. He rinsed his mouth with tap water over and over. He squeezed half a bottle of toothpaste straight into his mouth and swirled and spit until his jaw was sore. Then came the moment he had feared the most: Ryan finally raised his eyes from the sink and looked at himself in the mirror.
All around his mouth was caked with dried blood, as was the entire side of Ryan’s face where he had slept in the pool of it. It was a reddish-brown mask that covered almost two thirds of face, like some sort of costume for a horrific, macabre masquerade. Ryan gazed into his own dark green eyes and searched them for some trace, some hint that behind them now lurked the soul of a murderer. He saw none.
He splashed water all over his face and neck and began to scrub violently, first with his palms, then with his fingernails. At the same time, he took long, unsatisfying gulps of lukewarm water from the faucet. His throat was sandpaper, but he didn’t dare swallow. Despite the toothpaste, Ryan could still taste the metallic tinge of the man’s blood that had dried in and around his mouth. As badly as he wanted to drink the water, he didn’t want to ingest any more human remains than he already had. In the back of his mind, Ryan knew that it probably wouldn’t matter anyway: anything he gulped down now would just be thrown up a few minutes later.
When he finally finished, Ryan looked up at himself once again. He looked almost normal. Aside from the black eye that had already begun to heal, Ryan appeared remarkably unremarkable.
There was nothing in his eyes or face to give Ryan away for what he had become, but he could feel that something was definitely different. He tilted his head and examined himself from different angles in the low yellow light of the bathroom, but he saw nothing.
Then Ryan realized that it wasn’t his appearance that felt off, it was himself. He closed his eyes and tried to probe the far-off recesses of his mind. Something was wrong in there, he could feel it.
It was as though there was an idea or a thought or a name that was floating just beyond the limits of his conscious mind. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t access it. Ryan screwed up his face in concentration and strained to uncover whatever it was that had taken root in his brain without his consent. He pushed and pushed, but nothing.
Ryan yelled out in frustration and felt a bolt of white-hot rage streak through his body. He felt the sudden onset of anger boil over in an instant like an overheated pot, and he lashed out, suddenly furious beyond consolation.
Before Ryan realized what was happening, he felt the muscles in his arm contract and then release as if spring-loaded. Every muscle in his body felt sore, and the tendons in his arm flared up in protest, but the flash of rage drowned it all out.
His closed fist connected with the bathroom mirror with a sickening crunch. It was over as quickly as it had begun and Ryan felt the rage seep away like the receding tide. All that remained was the pain: the soreness in his arm and the sharp new pain that radiated through his knuckles. He was sure that he had broken something, but as he withdrew his hand Ryan saw that it was the mirror that had cracked, not the bones in his hand. It was a long, thin, spidery fracture in the glass of the mirror, radiating out from a smear of blood where his fist had made contact.
Ryan looked down at his fist and unclenched his fingers. They ached as he extended them and blood seeped anew from the hand he had just scrubbed clean.
It was only then that he realized what it was that had felt off. The thing in his head, the portion of the brain that was no longer his own, it was now the territory of the beast. The thing that had burst through Ryan’s skin, that had hunted and killed, it was in his house. It was in his bathroom. It was in his head. The beast hadn’t disappeared, it had gone into hiding. As Ryan watched a single droplet of blood trail down the mirror, he realized that there was nothing to stop the beast from coming out again, nothing to stop him from changing, from the beast taking over completely, from making him kill again. The anger that had flared up so quickly wasn’t his own, it was the beast’s. Ryan had been frustrated and a savage instinct had taken over. He was no longer in control of his own body.
Ryan realized now how lucky he had been. Last night he had been alone in the house and the beast had been forced to find prey elsewhere. Scenarios ran through his head, one after the other: what happened when his luck ran out? If the thing could come out at any time, if Ryan truly had no control, what then? What if the next time the beast bubbled to the surface, the house wasn’t quite so empty? What if his mother or father was home? What if Ethan was there? He could hear both his mother and younger brother walking around the house above him. What if he changed right now?
Ryan felt like a time bomb without a timer. Like he was playing some bizarre version of Russian roulette where every second that ticked by was another empty chamber, but he had no idea just how many chambers, or bullets, there really were. Ryan was a killing machine that was too fast to see and too strong to stop, and he had no control.
He didn’t kn
ow how it was physically possible for him to transform into a monster, and he didn’t know what that meant for science or religion or the rest of modern thought. At that moment however, Ryan could not have cared less about the How. The only thing in his mind, and indeed it filled every unoccupied corner of his brain, was the What.
All Ryan knew was that he had killed, and that there was no telling when he might kill again. Never before had he felt like he had so little control over his life. He could barely comprehend the problem, and he certainly couldn’t solve it, yet it had burst into his life unannounced and it had changed absolutely everything. Ryan buried his head in his hands. He couldn’t deal with this, even if he had wanted to. It was too big. And so he ran.
Ryan stumbled out of the bathroom and back into his bedroom. He wanted nothing more than to stay here. He wanted to lock himself away from everyone and everything and allow starvation and dehydration to slowly and painfully deal out the only sentence he deserved. He wondered if he’d have the courage to do it himself.
As much as he wanted to hide himself away, Ryan knew that wasn’t an option. If he could transform at any time, the last thing he wanted to do was trap himself in the same house as his family.
Ryan locked the bedroom door so his mother wouldn’t find the bloody sheets, and then he rushed to the window. Without thinking any further he clambered up and out the window of his basement bedroom and onto the damp grass of the front lawn. The remnants of his jeans still hung in tatters about his waist and did nothing to protect him from the freezing October air. His naked torso and bare feet were even worse off, but Ryan didn’t notice the cold. He didn’t notice the pain of bare feet slapping against concrete and asphalt as he ran, and he didn’t notice the scream of sore muscles or the pounding protest of his countless bruises.
He ran. He ran without a destination and without stopping. He ran farther than he’d ever run and he never once thought about where he was going or how he would get back. Ryan ran as if he had no intention of ever coming back, and at that moment, he didn’t.
As Ryan reached the top of a gradual hill and saw Vanessa’s house off to the right, he knew he should have been surprised but he wasn’t. He’d never consciously intended to come here, but he figured it made as much sense as anywhere else for his body to autopilot to.
He slowed to a jog, then a walk, as he approached. He knew this wasn’t an improvement: now he was putting Vanessa in the same danger he was trying to save his family from. His feet however, were battered and bloodied and would take him no further. The exhaustion of the fear-fueled run was catching up to him, and his breath came in shallow gasps. Ryan didn’t know what he was going to say to Vanessa, and he wasn’t sure how long he could risk staying here, but he had to rest for at least a moment.
Vanessa’s car was in the driveway though her mother’s was not. In some detached, distant part of Ryan’s brain he thought he remembered something about a business trip, the kind Vanessa’s mother often took. It was then that another thought seemed to drift through his consciousness: it would mean one less corpse.
Ryan tried to shake the thoughts from his mind and focus on getting to the front door, which was taking every bit of physical and mental strength he had left.
Vanessa answered the door in a pair of faded jeans and a light blue shirt the precise color of her sapphire eyes. Her sandy hair flowed around her shoulders and she looked up at him as the shadows of confusion and concern fell across her face.
In the first instant after she had opened the door, Vanessa had smiled broadly at the sight of him. The smile had disappeared as quickly as it had come as she looked him up and down: his mashed face, his battered, exposed torso, his raw, bleeding bare feet.
Ryan didn’t notice any of it. He lost himself in her eyes and didn’t say a word. He had looked into these eyes before, a million times. Each time, they had infused in him a feeling, a confidence, a desire to be a better man. Now however, Ryan knew that wasn’t possible. There was no coming back from what he’d done, from what he was.
Finally his strength gave out entirely and his knees buckled. Ryan pitched forward, over the threshold and into Vanessa’s unprepared arms. He was too big for her and they both fell awkwardly to the floor.
Vanessa’s attempt at a catch turned into an embrace and she knelt there on the floor as Ryan buried his face in her neck. She held him then, with one arm wrapped around his torso and the other cradling his head. Ryan felt one gentle, delicate hand on his bare back and the other softly stroke the back of his head like his mother had used to do when he was a child. Then, for the first time since he had murdered a man in the street, Ryan wept.
Neither of them had said a word, and it stayed that way. After a moment Ryan felt Vanessa’s body begin to tremble as she broke down as well. Her tears fell onto his cheek and he sobbed even harder.
She inhaled sharply and tried to muster control of herself.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to answer. I mean, you don’t have to tell me and I don’t have to know, but…it’s freezing outside, you hardly have any clothes on, your feet are filthy and covered in blood. What happened, Ryan?”
Ryan didn’t move. He fought to compose himself long enough to answer, but he knew the battle would be lost the moment he looked into her eyes. He replied in a hoarse whisper.
“Something I can’t take back.”
Ryan didn’t know how long they stayed that way, collapsed in the entryway to the house. Her trembling continued, but her sobs made almost no noise. Ryan’s, on the other hand, started again and they came uncontrollably, one after the other. His cries echoed off the hardwood floor and photograph-covered walls and returned to his ears as a strangely-hollow wail.
They didn’t move for a long time. Ryan knew every second that ticked away was him testing fate, putting Vanessa in more and more danger of the beast clawing its way out of him and hurting her.
Something about Vanessa’s embrace however, kept him there. Ryan knew the danger he posed, but it felt so peaceful here, so warm and comforting, that it seemed impossible for something as terrible and savage as the beast to enter. After a while, he lost himself in the cries and the exhaustion until the beast felt like a distant memory. He couldn’t possibly transform here, in her arms. She wouldn’t allow it. She would protect him.
Eventually Ryan’s sobs subsided. He mustered what courage he had left and he raised his head to finally meet Vanessa’s eyes that were, even ringed with red and puffy from tears, so, so blue.
She brought her hand to his cheek. Her thumb softly wiped a final tear from his eye. Vanessa helped Ryan to his feet and kept one arm wrapped firmly around him. She supported what little of his weight she could as Ryan hobbled down the hall to her bedroom. Vanessa eased him onto her bed and then crawled down next to him. She took his head in her hands and held it to her.
Ryan closed his eyes and, once again, he wept.