The ongoing stress has completely undone my brain, and I’m beyond tired. Is it early morning? It must be because light is slowly flooding the room.
I close my eyes and think about finding sleep again, but the headache persists. I need to fix this, so I rise and start to make my way to the door when the sunlight chooses to glance across a patch of white on the floor. A scrap of paper.
I have Tylenol in the bathroom.
But this finger-nail-wide note lies below the shelf with the dollhouse.
Curious, I squat to retrieve it and instantly realize it’s a partner to the tiny note from the letterbox. I must have dislodged and dropped it at the same time…or ripped it off accidentally, because the other note was a skinny strip torn by hand from some larger notepaper.
That note ended on the wordterrible.
I pick up the scrap and read onward.
“…things. By frankenstruct they mean made of many stitched-together parts like Frankenstein’s monster.”
What?
Oh fuck. I’ve been stupid.
I peer over my shoulder at my snoring bedmate, the manwith rows and rows of sutures crisscrossing him. Is he one? He is.Fuck me, he must be.
My heart ices up.
I sneak about collecting the minimum of clothes with fear riding me like a wild, teeth-bared dog.Please don’t wake.I have to get out of here.
Run, get down those stairs, fast, and away from thisthing.
He is not what I thought he was. He is not human.
As I back through the open doorway, trying not to let my teeth chatter, with my clothes bunched in my clenched fist, I digest this new word. That is a frankenstruct.
Morning has come and the storm has cleared. Pale light seeps through the poppy-strewn curtains, painting the white sheets and quilt that partially cover him with hints of red.
How appropriate. Red is for blood, for gore, for death and destruction.
He’s lying on his stomach, sprawled out with a leg, arm, and half his body uncovered by sheet. That male ass shifts while I look. I swallow, contemplate what I slept with. The landscape of bare muscle revealed is impressive, but the red puckered lines are frightening. Those must be where someone, somehow, constructed him from separate pieces of human flesh.
Unless Dad was wrong?
That guy he dragged away, what if they meant to scare me? Maybe they knew I was watching, and the fight was fake?
It didn’t look fake. A fresh, unsutured wound mars his left side, I never noticed last night, and I can see the sharp line where something went in or slashed him. Blood smears the sheet and his skin. If that was from last night, maybe he was protecting me?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything for sure.
I back fully out the door into the hallway but don’t dare to close the door. I’ll get dressed downstairs where the noise won’t alert him.
I was in bed with a monster.
Then he opens one eye, and I barely have time to hold my clothes to one side, behind the wall.
“Just going to pee.”
He shuts that eye.
My throat has closed in, and I mouth a silentfuck.
Molly said she has a shotgun.
