Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

But still, God bless it, that meat-suit kept on running.

Again, that chitinous click, like some horrid beak clacking shut —right behind me, and also to my left and right, and maybe above. I grit my teeth and kept on going.

A faint susurrus of whispered words jabbed into my brain like an ice pick, unknown to me but awful nonetheless. A threat, I thought.

No —not a threat, exactly. More like an invitation.

I was pretty sure I oughta pass.

I slammed the bed-frame against the ruined stairs, the metal feet digging into dirt floor and rotten wood as I wedged it between them. Something cold and slick wound its way around my waist —a tendril seemingly of darkness itself. I kicked and scratched, and scrambled up the makeshift ramp, rusty springs piercing my skin. The creature bellowed —aloud or in my head I wasn’t sure —and drew closer, as if intoxicated by the scent of fresh blood.

My hand found the doorframe at the head of the stairs and gripped it, pulling me toward the faint candlelight. The creature tightened its grasp. I locked my gaze on my knuckles, ghostly white in the scant illumination. The pressure in my meat-suit’s brain eased, the visual input a balm against the senselessness of the creature at my feet. Behind me, the creature snapped and clicked —in hunger, perhaps, or maybe in anger.

I glanced backward toward it, and the strength of its assault intensified, yanking me backward toward the darkness that enshrouded it. My fingernails dug into the doorframe, splinters plunging into the tender flesh beneath them.

And suddenly, I realized how this game was played.

I tore my attention from the beast that held me, and once more focused it on the door, the hall, the blessed candlelight. That candlelight was my tether to the rational world, and as I fixed my gaze on it, the demon’s grip on me slackened. It squealed in frustration, mirroring the squeal of the bed-frame beneath me. Heartened by its cries, I kicked and thrashed —my foot connecting against something hard and brittle behind me, which caved in with a sickening crack .

Suddenly —briefly —I was free. As I pulled myself through the doorway, something wrapped around my ankle, and despite myself, I looked back. I caught a glimpse of translucent gray flesh, the glint of jet-black eye —a ruined beak of brownish red. Pain erupted behind my eyes, and I fought to keep from yelling —unwilling to give away my position to whatever else lurked in this godforsaken place.

It dragged me back toward the doorway, toward the darkness, toward its shattered, snapping beak. I skittered backward along the dusty floor, finding no purchase with which to stop myself.

I found no purchase because I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t looking because I was too busy trying to reach the mirror.

It was but a shard of mirror, really, jagged-edged and dulled with age. It lay on the floor a few feet to the right of the basement door —tantalizingly close. As the creature yanked me backward, I snatched at it.

Glass bit into the meat of my palm, into my fingertips, but I held on to that mirror as though my life depended on it. I’m pretty sure it did.

As I slid through the doorway toward the creature, I twisted in its grasp, angling the mirror as best I could to pierce the darkness of the basement with the hallway’s candlelight.

The creature thrashed, recoiled as the light struck it —but it didn’t let go. It still had me by one shoe, my leg dangling off the side of the stairwell, shaded from the reflected light by one rotted joist.

I kicked at the heel of that shoe with the toe of the other, over and over again —still sliding backward, toward the pressing darkness.

Finally, my shoe came off, a sacrifice to the angry beast. I flopped back into the hallway with a thud. Then I crab-walked backward a few feet away from the basement door, my meat-suit’s survival instinct and terror working hand-in-hand to get me the hell away from there and further into the protective candlelight.

Don’t get me wrong —spent and shaken as I was, I appreciated the help. But at that point, it wasn’t strictly necessary.

The creature was gone —swallowed by the darkness below.

Upstairs, a quiet cacophony, like a nightmare cocktail party heard through a shared wall. Myriad drips, drops, and plinks as the torrent outside found its way into the decrepit structure —pooling in depressions, leaking through cracks, pouring off of jagged ledges where the first-floor ceiling had caved in. Dozens of voices, some raised, some quiet, talking all at once in tongues both foreign and familiar. The thud of heavy footsteps above —shuffling, skipping about, and unless I was mistaken, dancing. The crackle of a warped and timeworn record from somewhere far away, playing Patsy Cline at half the speed and twice the warble. And the snap and hiss of candles in the damp.

The hallway I was in extended the length of the building, stretching into murky nothingness to either side of me. The floor and walls were blackened and peeling, as if from fire. The ceiling —plaster, by the look of it —sagged in places, and was entirely absent in others, mildew and yellowed water marks blossoming here and there the length of it.

I picked a direction at random, my one stocking foot stained with ash and soot as I scuffed along the empty hall —wary, alert. I’d never seen the inside of a skim-joint before. I don’t know what I’d been expecting from a place demons go to get whacked out on moments stolen from the humans they profess to despise —something speakeasy-er, I guess —but this sure as hell wasn’t it. This place made your average crack house look like the Ritz. But hey, I’m sure the rent was reasonable.

Beside me was an open door. I ducked inside. A small, square room, with bare wood floors and a ceiling of rotting plaster. In one corner was a candelabrum, anchored to the floor by tiny termite hills of wax, a halo of soot dancing on the wall behind it in the shifting candlelight. In the other corner lay a man. Many men, in fact —though in reality, this thing was not a man at all. His visage shifted as he slouched, eyes fluttering, against the join of the two walls, alternating between a half a dozen human faces at random. His lips moved as he lay there, muttering in a voice that shifted tone to match each face, as though the lot of them were in conversation, each talking over the other in an unintelligible stream of syllables.

Though he lay there helpless and twitching, this creature was no doubt a powerful demon, and one accustomed to dealing with humankind. Demons of the lesser orders are unable to alter their appearance in the eyes of man; their gruesome physiognomy is merely a reflection of their own corrupted natures. Should they desire to walk among the living unnoticed, they’re forced to take a living host —and even then, if they possess that host too long, their nature will begin to warp the host as well. And powerful demons who do not deign to interact with humankind —like, I suspect, the beast I left downstairs —simply do not bother to alter their aspect to accommodate human perception, leaving puny human minds like mine to piece together something that makes sense out of the nonsense that they’re given. But this guy, even ensconced in whatever skim-trip he was on, maintained some semblance of human appearance. Granted, without a conscious, focused will, the shapes didn’t hold for long, but never did he slip from displaying a human form —never did he offer a glimpse of his true nature. That meant power. That meant danger. That meant I was glad he was asleep.

The man-demon shifted in his slumber, and his arm, which had previously rested across his stomach, flopped to the floor. His shirt-sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, and the tender flesh of his forearm was pocked with track marks —though no needle could mark a demon’s flesh for long; the injury would heal itself before any scarring could occur. And indeed, these marks weren’t from a needle at all, but from countless shards of skim. One such shard was in there now, like a jagged bit of colored glass inserted just beneath the skin —I could see it flickering below the surface like lightning contained within a cloud.