Jeff Strand - Dweller

Owen gave him a thumbs-down.

“Does that mean no, you’re not sick, or is that just a thumbs-down to the way you’re feeling?”

Owen lowered his head. It was difficult for a creature with oversize jaws to look pitiful, but Owen pulled off the feat.

“Here, let me feel your forehead.” Toby brushed away some of Owen’s hair and pressed his palm against his forehead. “You’re kind of hot, but I honestly don’t know how that compares to your usual temperature. You don’t look like you’re dying, at least. Maybe you should get some rest.” He tilted his head and placed his hands together under it, miming sleep.

Owen slowly wandered back into his cave.

Poor guy. This was the first time Toby had seen him feeling bad, but he had to get sick sometime, right? Everybody got sick. There was plenty of stuff in the medicine cabinet at home, but Toby had no idea how it would react with Owen’s body, so giving him human medicine was probably a bad idea. Rest was the best answer. And maybe orange juice.

What if his friend was dying?

He wasn’t dying. That was stupid. Glassy eyes and low energy did not mean that the Grim Reaper was chopping down your door with his scythe. Owen would be fine.

Still, Toby should at least make sure that he got into bed safely. They’d been friends for three years. Owen wasn’t going to rip him apart in the cave, especially when he wasn’t feeling well. Toby dug his flashlight out of his backpack, turned it on, and walked into the cave after him.

Owen pushed through some vegetation that hung in the corner-the secret passage that Toby had missed all those years ago. “Fancy,” Toby said. “It’s almost like you’ve got a beaded curtain. I hope you tidied up the place for my visit.”

Toby pushed through the “curtain” as well, stepping into a room that wasn’t much larger than his own bedroom. There were bones everywhere. As Toby shined the flashlight beam around on them, he was relieved to note that none of them looked human, not that he could necessarily tell a human rib from a deer rib at first glance.

“Nice place,” he said. “Not the decorating scheme I would have gone for, but it works. The scattered bones give it sort of a homey feel.”

A large pile of bushes, arranged almost like a nest, rested against the far wall. Owen lay down in it and closed his eyes.

“Don’t worry, buddy,” said Toby. “I’ll take care of you.”

He looked around some more. Not much to it. He hadn’t expected Owen to live in a nicely furnished luxury suite with fine china and a butler, but a bunch of bones and some bushes to sleep on seemed kind of sparse. The next time he came out here, he’d bring a picture of himself to tape up on Owen’s wall. Give the place a little more character.

“Hey, Floren, it’s kind of hard to breathe under here,” said a voice from within the pile of bones.

“So come out. You don’t need my permission.”

Larry pushed his way out of the bones. He was looking bad. He always looked bad, but this was a particularly gruesome day for him. Each of the stab wounds still had a knife embedded in them. The blades wobbled as he got to his feet.

“These hurt,” he noted.

“They would.”

“I can’t pry them out.”

“You did last time.”

“That was different.”

Larry’s appearance changed each time. Sometimes he only had one knife in him, usually in his chest. Sometimes he had no knives, but was covered with hundreds of stab wounds, far more than Toby had caused. Sometimes the cuts leaked. Sometimes they glowed. Sometimes they weren’t there at all. Once, Larry had just been a pool of reddish ooze-Toby knew it was him from the hazel eyes floating in it.

Nick hardly ever showed up. When he did, his body was filled with gaping holes and he didn’t talk much.

Larry tugged at the knife in his chest. “You stuck this thing in deep.”

“I was angry.”

“I’m really sorry about what we did. We should have been nicer to you while we were alive. I think, deep inside, we were just insecure about ourselves. We just wanted to be loved.” He chuckled. “A dumb way of showing it, right?”

“Okay, nobody wants to hear that,” said Toby. “Go back to the bones now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then melt.”

Larry shrieked as his skin began to bubble and smoke. There was a sizzling sound as pieces of flesh curled and dropped off his body, bursting into flames as they hit the ground. Within seconds Larry was nothing more than a knife-filled skeleton. Then the bones fell apart and he collapsed back into the pile.

Good. Toby had control over his imagination today. That wasn’t always the case.

“You know what would be funny?” he asked Owen. “If you didn’t exist, either. I could be out here talking to myself. The people at the loony bin would love that.”

Owen opened his eyes, looking sort of annoyed that Toby was still making noise when he didn’t feel well.

“If that were the case, though, I’d be a cannibal. I may be crazy, but I’m not that far gone.” He knelt down next to Owen and stroked his fur. “You’re not going to die on me, right? If you ever leave me, I’ll…I don’t know. I’d just be really sad, I guess. I’ll stop talking now.”

He sat with Owen until the monster fell asleep, and then went home.

Toby had hated his senior year of high school, but he had to admit that his senior photo was pretty good. If nothing else, it was the best picture taken of him in at least a decade. His parents wouldn’t miss a five-by-seven print. Tomorrow he’d take it to the cave and give Owen something to remember him by when he wasn’t around.

Or…maybe he’d decide instead not to be a complete idiot.

Owen was his best friend, but he’d also devoured two humans. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t in Toby’s best interest to have his picture posted right there on the cave wall. That might be a challenge to explain to the police.

As a double murderer who was buddies with a flesh-eating monster, it was very important that he not do stupid things. What he should do, right now, was make a list of dumb things to avoid. A mental list, though-if he wrote it down, it could be discovered, and that would be spectacularly dumb.

No pictures of himself on Owen’s wall, obviously.

Always leave in enough time to get home before dark. He’d screwed that up a few times. Yeah, he always carried a flashlight and had spare batteries in his backpack, but still, he should avoid walking in the forest at night. What if Owen had relatives?

Don’t talk to hallucinations. To be fair, he’d only done that once outside of the forest. Larry had sat down next to him at the library, and Toby had told him to go away. Not a big deal. Nobody had heard. But still, the “talking corpse” versions of Larry and Nick were figments of his imagination, and speaking to them outside of his mind was dumb. He did it fairly often when he was hanging out with Owen, only because he was so used to talking to somebody who didn’t talk back, but that needed to stop.

Don’t think about feeding people to Owen. Well, that wasn’t necessarily something he could control. He thought about it a lot. But after that one time sophomore year when he’d lost his mind and tried to lure J.D. out here-God, how could he have let himself get that far out of control?-he’d never done anything like that again. And he never would. So it didn’t need to be on his list.

Don’t get too comfortable. He messed this up all the time. He just couldn’t conceive of Owen hurting him. But there were a lot of lion tamers missing limbs because they stopped being cautious around their beasts, and he needed to remain aware that Owen was dangerous. He didn’t want to find himself lying in a hospital bed without his arms thinking, “Wow, I really should have been more careful around the creature with claws and razor-sharp teeth.”