Dazzling yellow light streams from everywhere and nowhere. Bright as the desert at noon, so bright my teeth ache. The light seeps into my ears, sets them buzzing, then ringing, then pounding until I’m sure there’s blood pouring from them. I can’t move my arms to check. They don’t listen to me anymore. Maybe they’re not even there.
A shape emerges from the glare. Two arms, two legs, one head, but it smells like roadkill and stagnant water. Like vinegar and sludgy flesh, like rotting planks in the aftermath of a house fire. It drags itself forward on segmented legs, knees bent backward, shoulders pinned together like the haunches of a four-legged predator. Its rib cage is flayed open to reveal a blighted chasm shivering with maggots. Terror blooms in my joints, in the hollow of my chest where my curse lies in wait, ready to flay my torso open in the same way if I let it. The animal inside me growls low and dangerous and presses itself against the bars of its cage, and I know who he is without needing to know why.
The flayed man lurches closer, and his face jolts into focus against the bright yellow invading my skull. A face eaten down to the bone, long white worms coiling between sagging layers of decayed muscle and graying fat. He draws a rattling breath. The worms of his face shiver in place and then, in a single sinuous movement, flow into the yawning oval darkness of his mouth.
My vision fills with slurred images. Clouds’ shadows as they drift over cracked earth. The nightly path of the constellations. Trucks drawing trails of light down the highway.
I’ve been watching you.
They’re not words, and I don’t hear them. One minute my head is full of pictures and the next they’re gone and only the impression of the words remains. Is this how my mom feels, when nothing makes sense? I want to spit in his face. I want to attack. I want to do something, anything, but my body has deserted me.
The flayed man shakes his head. Maggots tumble over his lower lip.
Restraint is tedious, don’t you think?This time, the images are of carrion, of discarded protein bar wrappers spinning away on the wind.Why not give in?
Temptation smells like spent matches and sugar. I could let go and be consumed by the beast roaming restless in my chest. How would it feel? Agonizing. Sublime. My throat spasms, and I suddenly have control of my tongue. “My mom—”
His face doesn’t move, but my mind is filled with his laugh. An earthquake, an avalanche, rattling my skull, shaking me by the neck like a predator.
You’ll see. Hunting is sweetest with a pack.
He pivots on broken legs, graying tendons stretching to their breaking point. The yellow light grows brighter, making him shimmer like a mirage.
Run, if you like. But running is for prey. Are you prey?
An urgent beat against my ribs. I need to say something, to ask him, to demand—
The flayed man turns back to me, and his eyes glitter like twin abysses as he opens his mouth and howls.
A keratin shiver the length of my limbs. Not a sound, but an aftermath of sound, a reverberation that shoves like cactus spines against my eardrums. My curse bolts, chain rippling loose and molten, as the flayed man howls again and the yellow becomes even brighter, so bright it pierces my eyeballs and shreds the nerves beyond. My palms burn and my knuckles crack and, for a second, the chain wraps around my ankles and I’m not sure of my hands and my joints wail their desire to twist into something monstrous.
Iron in my hands. Don’t think, just control. My breath is hot and fast, but the chain is there. When I pull, it coats my face with tears that taste like ash. Inch by inch, I haul my hunger back into its cage. When I open my eyes, the yellow light is gone and the flayed man is gone too. I’m curled on my side on the linoleum, my tongue caustic with rotten cactus and grief, I’m a canyon in a flash flood and I’m drowning, and then it’s gone and it’s only me and the kitchen floor and the sudden horror of returning to what’s real.
My heartbeat presses furiously into my windpipe. My knuckles are purple and misshapen, my wrists splintered and useless. I shut my eyes and the yellow aftermath lingers.
Just pretend it’s not real, Ellis. Pretend it’s just one more thing to outrun. But I can’t, it’s already in my brain, terror riding the wave of nausea rising through me. The flayed man is real, and he howled out my curse and left me at its mercy.
My throat spasms. I cough, and it becomes a dry heave, and my ears are ringing again, and fear is ripping through my stomach. Once you see him, he’s got your scent. That’s what Brian said. Once you see him, he’s coming to eat your heart.
I need to tell my mom that I believe her, that I know why she attacked Joanne, that he tried it on me too. I need to get up. My limbs feel too light, like they’re not mine anymore. I flex my toes, just to be sure. They move when I tell them to. Come on, Ellis, get up. Get up, Ellis. Get up, get up,get up—
In a second. One more heartbeat to see if I can pretend it’s not real. One more. One more. One more. One more. Please.
The linoleum is cool on my cheek. I wrap my arms around my knees, hug them to my torso. The flayed man is gone. He can’t touch me. Just as soon as I get my breathing steady, I’ll get up, I’ll check on my mom. I’ll keep the panic out of my voice, I’ll reassure her, I’ll do whatever it takes.
It’s still there, the smell. Like a meal left out too long on a picnic table, or a cut that’s starting to get infected. A dark, sticky, stinking pool oozes into the cracks in the kitchen tile. Blood that seeped from the flayed man’s withered limbs while he stood. Just like the blood that was left behind in Uncle Bill’s house after he disappeared.
Terror propels me upright. My damaged wrists scream in protest, but it doesn’t matter. I burst through the door of my mom’s bedroom, and I’m hit with the scent of carrion. A vicious crimson stain spreads across the comforter, drowning the delicate pink flowers. A knot of segmented worms gleams pale and sickly on the pillow. In the center, where the blood pools thick and sticky, is an indent in the shape of a person.
My mom is gone.
21
I STARE AT THE PLACE WHERE MY MOM ISN’T. I STAREand stare. If someone touched a lighter to my arm, I wouldn’t remember to flinch until the skin was black. I’m no longer something permanent.
Then I scream.
It tears out of my throat like an invasive vine. I gag on it, keep screaming, unable to stop long enough to breathe. I cry like I’m coughing up my lungs, harsh, racking sobs that tear at my windpipe.
