Tagged: Short Story

Chapter Eight

Maybe it was the overwhelming dread he felt that night, or a direct invitation from the thing itself, but somehow, Ferrill found himself drifting back into the void. He could hear the floor groan underneath as he stepped through the fog.   

He had never been here before, an old Victorian parlor, but it felt unexplainably familiar. Everything from the frayed furniture to the lavender walls was coated in ages of dust. The room’s only light filtered in through slits in the walls, as the windows had been boarded shut. 

Ferrill gradually became aware of another presence, someone hidden in the fog and watching. Bracing himself, he turned to face it. There was an image on the wall, but the fog wouldn’t clear. The dust wouldn’t settle. He knew it was looking, but he couldn’t see the face.   

As he approached the parlor’s mantel, the fog grew thicker and the needle-thin rays of light began to fade. Though something in him wanted to stay, the void was spitting him out. 

***

The hospital room was white with daylight when Ferrill returned. Sitting up in bed, he found Helms still snoozing in his chair. He felt a strange compulsion to slip out of bed and hide somewhere safe. He could steal the squad car. Ferrill searched his bed for the keys, but they were nowhere to be found. 

He groped frantically, yanking up sheets and lifting the mattress. No use. Now on his feet, he looked to the officer. The gleaming keys were still looped to his belt. The creature’s visit must have been a dream, he figured. 

Ferrill approached hesitantly, slow to lay his feet across the cool tile floor. He reached out to the officer, a plan forming in his exhausted mind. He laid a hand on Helms’ shoulder and shook him awake. “Hey man, listen,” he felt the sturdy frame jolt alert. “I know what it wants.” 

Minutes later, Marshall joined them, steam trailing from his foam coffee cup. “Whaddaya got for us, kid?” 

Ferrill knew that the logic of his dreams wouldn’t win the detective’s confidence, but he had a feeling that Helms would take him seriously. He watched the officer as he spoke. “It’s trying to go home.” 

“Go on,” Marshall said, flipping open his folder. 

“I had dreams,” Ferrill wrapped fingers around his head. “I think it was in there, showing me things.” He saw the detective sigh to himself. Helms watched him with earnest eyes. 

“First I saw it here in the room, while you were asleep. It took your car keys and begged to go home.” Helms stiffened and reached for his keys. Still there. 

“Then I was in a house,” Ferrill continued. “An old, old place. So musty I could smell it. All the windows were boarded up and there was something looking at me, but I couldn’t see it.” 

“Do you know where it was?” Marshall seemed to snap awake. 

Ferrill shrugged, “I didn’t take down an address.” 

Marshall scowled and swiped a sheet of paper from his folder, handing it to Ferrill. The sheet held several photos depicting the room from his dream. “That’s the Morris house, a few blocks from South Street.” 

Morris. The name churned up something deep within Ferrill, like dropping a stone in a riverbed. It mirrored the same sorrow he felt last night, crying at the thought of his parents. He studied the photographs, taken straight from his own mind. “This is the house. I was standing right there in my dream.”  

“This was the house our first victim came from before dying in the alley,” Marshall said. “A team of investigators searched it up and down, but didn’t find anything but a few empty bottles with his prints.” 

Looking through the photos ached Ferrill. He longed for the comfort of his family, and he felt that his pain had an echo. Averting his eyes, he handed the sheet back to the detective. “This must be its home,” he said. “The homeless man must’ve found the thing while he was crashing there.”

“He could have looked right at it… and internalized it,” Marshall added. “Shaken up, he then fled to the alley, taking the killer from its home…” His face furrowed in thought. “It escaped, killing him in the process. Loose on South Street, it tried to hide until someone else happened to look.”

“It’s been trying to claw its way back,” said Ferrill. “So let’s take it home.”

Marshall took a deep breath. “Well, we don’t know what it will do when we get there. Say that’s what it wants. When you walk through the door, how’s it going to get out?”

Ferrill’s eyes fell low. “Nobody’s ever lived after seeing its face, right?” 

Helms wanted to interrupt the thought. He grasped for an alternate conclusion. “No one’s ever tried taken it home before,” he said. “If you give it what it wants, it might not turn out like the others.” 

It was a pitiful appeal to make the boy feel better. The detective shook his head. “Let’s not worry about that yet,” he said. “I’m going to look into this Morris place. If this house is where it came from, I’d like to know what the hell happened there. You should stick around here until I’ve got my answer.” 

The answer was clear, but Ferrill squirmed at the thought of wasting time in the hospital room. They couldn’t help him here, and the presence in his mind was growing restless. “Why wait?” he protested. “I swear it just wants to go home. Let’s go there and get it over with.”

“I’m not driving you to your own death, kid!” Marshall thrust a finger at the boy. He held it in air as he heard the anger in his own voice. He knew it stung the boy, and he felt Helms watching him. He took a moment to disarm himself. 

In a neutral voice, Marshall dictated, “We don’t know what would happen if you brought it home. We only know what it can do. Before we do anything to provoke it, I want to dig up as much as I can. We’re waiting for your own good, kid.” 

Ferrill sighed in acceptance. “Alright, we’ll wait,” he said. “But please don’t take long.”  

***

The sun was high when Marshall left, but there was no natural light in the city archives compartment he had reserved. He was not a young man, but the discoloring glow of the microfilm reader carved severe crags into the features of his face. His work had aged him. He was only a few years ahead of Helms, but he’s earned the distance between them. Helms was the little ankle-biter with a bark like a Doberman. The tough guy who cradled his gun like his manhood, but winced at the firing range. A punk ass. He still wore his heart next to his badge. Marshall thought he should have left the force after the South Street fires.   

Helms was still green, on the beat for less than two years. In that time, Marshall had taken a knife to his side and been painted in a hostage’s arterial spray. He had also stuffed his first body bag. But he took his licks like a man. He stuck it out and made detective because he had the guts for it—the fortitude that Helms only wished he had. Marshall had opened doors on sights no one should ever see, but he choked it down because somebody had to. The images come back sometimes, but he’d always been able to fight them off. Until now, he was certain that nightmares couldn’t hurt him.  

As he scrolled through scans of old housing records, he couldn’t rationalize the boy’s story. The house was real. The murders were real. And there’s an intangible conduit between it all. 

Grainy photos of Victorian homes cycled upward until he found what he was looking for. He had never set foot there himself, but he recognized the crumbling front porch from forensic photos. Built in 1880, abandoned in 1931. Its last occupant, Jacob Morris was found dead on the front steps. His wife was later found buried on the grounds. Marshall removed the film from the projector and quickly loaded a reel of death records. 

The body of Jacob Morris was discovered on the morning of August 14, 1931, with his coat draped over his head. His jaw had entirely separated and both eyes were gouged blind. A note was found in his breast pocket:

I cannot bear another night. The nightmares never cease. I tried to endure it as Anna did, but the burden is too great. Do not enter our home, but shutter the windows and lock the doors. Let it be a tomb for our memories and nothing more. Bury me with Anna, who rests beneath the oak tree. And know that she was innocent. We did not conceive our fate. It was brought to us by some infernal inception.  

Shutter the windows. Lock the doors.

A bottle of poison was left discarded on the porch behind him. Authorities concluded that Morris ingested it prior to receiving the fatal wounds. The front door was open. His family made only a cursory inspection of the front foyer before hastily boarding the home. 

Anna Morris was disinterred under the home’s oak tree, as the note indicated. Six months after the home’s construction, she was rendered bedridden with illness. Jacob allowed no visitors to their home. Though severely decomposed, Anna’s body was examined prior to burial with her husband. There was a deep tear running the length of her abdomen. Authorities suspected that Jacob Morris murdered his wife, but never named a suspect for his own death. 

Marshall read their medical reports with learned disinterest, harshly familiar with Morris’ wounds. A prototype South Street mutilation, decades before the first drifter turned up. He ran through reels of death records looking for similar reports, anything to set a precedent for a modern-day copycat. There was nothing of the sort from 1931 until his current case. Not a trace of the vicious modus operandi until someone entered the Morris home two years ago. 

Marshall stepped back to gaze at the gap in time, searching for a murderer that claimed its first years before he was born. Someone who hides in dreams. In the long shadow of an ageless killer, he felt small.      

Chapter Seven

Marshall shut the door behind him and laid his old folder on Ferrill’s bed. “Don’t open that.” He turned to the door and looked out the peephole. He thought a long moment before he began. “Your friend wasn’t the first to die that way.” 

“His name was Grant,” Helms corrected. He glanced to Ferrill. The boy was indifferent.  

“Over the last two years, we’ve found five other bodies, each with the same wounds. They were all recovered around South Street. The most recent was just this week.”

“I uh, found a homeless man in the alley,” Helms added. 

Ferrill turned to the officer. “We were in the alley the other night. That’s where Grant saw that thing. I thought he had lost his mind.” 

“Erratic behavior seems to follow the encounters,” Marshall said. “Witnesses say the victims would start to unravel in the days before their deaths. They would often see figures in the corner of their eye, or hallucinate threatening faces in the mirror.”

“I think Grant was seeing things, too.” Ferrill chose not to mention the face he saw in the window earlier. “How long did the hallucinations last before they…” he thumbed at his eyes, “ended?”   

Marshall tapped at his folder. “We spoke with friends of the victims. Four of them lived the apartments on South Street. One only lasted a night after claiming to see a ghost in the basement. Another suffered hallucinations for a week. That one started a big fire.” 

Helms sat quietly, recalling the smoke-covered night and the row of bodies carried out in red dancing light, one with a face cut to hell. 

“What about the other two?” Ferrill asked. 

“Drifters,” Marshall answered. “One is still cooling in the morgue, yet to be identified. The other was our first case of facial mutilation on South Street.”  

“He was a part of that big vagrant camp that used to fill up the alley,” Helms added. 

“Yeah, but he wasn’t a fulltime squatter,” said Marshall. “He’d only come to the camp when he needed a fix. Otherwise, he’d take up shelter in the abandoned homes on the edge of the neighborhood.” The detective stopped to ponder a moment, rolling his tongue behind his teeth. “The night he died, they say he showed up spooked.”

The detective’s eyes were aimed into space. He didn’t see Ferrill reaching for his folder. When he opened it, the dead face didn’t scare him. It was like starting up a home movie somewhere in his mind. The hospital bed fell away into a void. Helms and the detective were gone. Through a rolling fog, he could see the first victim, the drifter, alive and terrified, looking up from a dusty wooden floor. He heard a pained scream all around him, and he felt as if he were being pulled down a drain. The fog grew thick until there was nothing but a soft, distant sobbing.

Then a wash of light cleared the fog and there was Helms over his bed. The detective was watching behind him. “Ferrill! Can you hear me?” the officer shouted. His grip on Ferrill’s shoulders was shaky. The boy looked around, now back in the hospital, no sign of the drifter.

“Yeah I’m fine,” Ferrill answered, his mind slow to return. 

Marshall slid his folder from the bed. “You left us for a minute, son. It looks like you may have found a bad trigger in there.” 

Ferrill strained to understand what he saw, but hoped he wouldn’t see it again. Thinking about it made it seem near, like he could fall back into the void if he lingered too long on the edge.  

“Try to get some rest,” Marshall said. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me. Helms here will be by your side all night,” he turned to the officer, “so don’t worry.”  

As Ferrill watched the detective leave, he couldn’t ignore the faint, mournful sobbing that lingered in his mind.

***

The night refused to end, and Helms struggled to stay awake. Sometime after midnight, the boy rolled over and said Helms could turn out the light. The officer complied, but opened the curtains to allow streetlight. He didn’t want to sit quiet in pitch dark.   

The same thoughts had been running a circuit in his head for hours. Grant’s next of kin. The horrible legal mess that will follow. His career was doomed. And then shame would set in, shame for worrying about himself when the boy had a monster in his mind. Helms had caught only a shade of the killer, but he understood the fear that followed. The poor kid was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, tagging along with a bad apple. 

Fatigue took hold and Helms found himself nodding off. The bounce of his head would jolt him awake long enough to start the circuit again. To distract himself, he would tap his foot to a mental beat. Tap tap tap tap like a metronome. It became an absent-minded motion as his thoughts ran together, growing weaker until the rhythm was lost. 

***

Lying awake, Ferrill wondered if Grant was below him, down in the morgue. Silently screaming in a cold coffer. He imagined that he would be taken down there too before long. Following blindly to the very end. It shouldn’t be a surprise, he figured, that Grant would be the death of him.  

He pictured his parents, standing over his body, with his eyes and mouth stitched shut. I told you that boy was dangerous! He hoped they wouldn’t see the awful thing too, freed from his corpse to lurk in the morgue. The thought made his eyes water. He was a threat to everyone around him, a time bomb ready to release something evil into the world. He didn’t want to unleash the devil on some hapless bystander, not even the cop. 

Ferrill sat up in bed. He strained through the dark to see Helms, asleep and slumped in his chair. You did what you could, he thought. He was surprised—if not embarrassed—that Helms had bothered to stay. The officer had been tapping his foot for what seemed like hours, but now the room was uncomfortably silent. The yellow light from the lamp outside cast black shadows on Helm’s face, like deep dark sockets. Ferrill would rather see nothing at all, and reached to close the curtains.

But he stopped. His eyes were fixed on Helms, and he was afraid to move a muscle. He knew, without a doubt, what he would see in the window. It would be there, waiting for him to look. As it had been there in the rearview mirror of the squad car, and the TV screen. Now as he sat up in his bed, arm out and frozen still, it must be watching, aware of his fear. 

Like driving past a car crash, he caved to temptation and looked. The face stared back from the window, deathly white, with bitten, grimacing lips. It couldn’t be, though. Ferrill’s room was on the fourth floor. 

In the room, Ferrill heard a sound, tic tic. He looked to Helms. Fast asleep, his foot was still. Tic tic, just behind him. Ferrill whipped his head around and found the misshapen body standing by his bed. In the lamplight, its skin was like leather wrapped around long bony limbs. 

Its deep red lips quivered like it wanted to speak. Not breaking eye contact, it reached an overstretched arm across itself. Over its shoulder, the creature pointed a switchblade finger to the door. “H-h-home…” it struggled to vocalize, raspy and weak.    

Ferrill felt his fear give to fascination as he fought to understand. He watched as the creature crossed the room, its movement like bare tree limbs in a winter wind. Its face appeared over Helms. Ferrill felt the urge to shout as glints of streetlight danced across slithering claws, down Helms’ torso. His voice had given up, though. He couldn’t wake the officer as the wicked blades played across his belt like a spider. Tic tic as they walked across his body. Until they found what they were after.

The thing slipped its claw through the loop of Helms’ keyring, and raised the shining pieces into the air. The creature shook the keys with a jingle, then tossed them onto Ferrill’s bed. “H-huh-home,” it pleaded. 

Ferrill took the keys in hand and studied their emblem. They were keys to Helms’ squad car. He looked back to the creature. Still watching, it covered its face with switchblade hands, disappearing in the dark. 

Ferrill sat stiff upright for as long as he could. He moved only his eyes from Helms to the window until he could no longer keep them open.  

Chapter Six

Detective Marshall was on his way to the coroner’s office he when received a message. 

“We’ve got a witness. Firsthand and alive. The South Street stories are true.”  

That evening, Marshall met Helms at the police station. Waiting in his office, the Helms had a shaky little kid beside him. 

“I just saw the body,” said Marshall. “You saw it happen?”

“The boy saw it all,” Helms answered. “He saw its face.”

“And then what happened?” Marshall turned to the boy. 

The detective was asking for the unbelievable. Ferrill looked up from the tile floor. His voice ached. He hadn’t spoken since Grant’s death. “After it killed Grant, it tried to get away. Everyone else had shut their eyes, but I looked.” 

He choked back tears. “It must’ve noticed, like it could feel me watching. It turned and looked right at me. It yelled like I scared it, then it felt like I was breathing it in. I couldn’t see it anymore, but I could still hear it babbling and crying. All the way deep down somewhere.” Ferrill looked up at Helms. “Is it gonna come out of me?” 

Marshall swore to himself, somewhere between daunted and disbelief. Helms didn’t like this kid from the moment he saw him, but now he felt obligated to offer some comfort. At least to himself. “Not if you help us figure out what it is.” 

Marshall studied the boy’s face. He wasn’t making this up, and he was scared. “We’ll take you to a hospital and put you through some tests, alright? That should determine if there’s anything harmful inside you now.” It sure beats an autopsy. “If they do find anything, they can put you to sleep and take it right out.” 

The detective opened the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a dog-eared folder. “I’ll make arrangements.” He stopped and stood over Helms on his way out. “Somebody should call his family.”  

***

Late that night, Helms stood in a cold white hallway, waiting for the boy to finish his tests. The family had arrived earlier, now in the waiting room, trying to make sense of whatever bogus story Marshall had provided. He couldn’t stay with them. His nerves were raw by the time the boy had been laid down on the examining table. The sound of the young man’s jaw popping in the ambulance echoed in his head. We got to this one early. The kid has a chance.  

Marshall approached with a physician. “There’s nothing down his throat,” he said. The detective handed Helms an X-ray. The boy’s insides were displayed in black and white, no sign of trouble. 

“We’re running a CT scan now,” the physician added. “The boy wasn’t in pain when he arrived, but his behavior was a cause for concern.” He led the two into the lab. “He showed signs of severe paranoia when we checked his vision. He may be seeing things, flashbacks from the incident earlier today.” Helms shot a glance toward Marshall. 

Ferrill held still as he was moved into position. The machine’s steady drone surrounded him as his head entered the scanner. He had once heard of the magnets in these machines pulling piercings right out of the skin. He wondered if the thing’s claws were metal. 

On the other side of a mirrored barrier, Marshall and Helms watched colorful brain scans develop on a monitor. The physician grimaced. 

Ferrill wanted out. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he was aware of something alien in his mind. He felt fear, but not his own. 

***

When the scan was over, Ferrill was taken to his room. He’d stay overnight, and the physician assured his family that they would be notified of any developments between now and sun-up. Then he took the two men aside. The prognosis was troubling.

“The scan shows irregularities in the occipital lobe,” the physician said. “That may account for the hallucinations he’s having, and the talk of strange faces.” Helms and Marshall exchanged a glance. “It doesn’t stop there. His entire network seems haywire. It’s as if his neurotransmitter signals are being intercepted… or misinterpreted. The operator has gone rogue.”    

“Can you do anything about it?” Helms asked.

“We can treat him,” the physician assured, “but it’s not a clear fix. We’re not mending a broken bone, here. It would be helpful to know what happened earlier to cause this.” 

Helms hesitated. Marshall stepped in front and led the physician down the hall. He held a hand behind his back, clenching the dog-eared files. 

***

Helms sat across from Ferrill’s bed, under a TV bolted to the wall. He had draped a towel over the screen at Ferrill’s request. The boy had found its black reflection discomforting. Helms was allowed to stay the entire night. Now he was trying to keep the boy awake. Neither of them wanted to fall asleep. 

The kid didn’t talk much beyond terse little requests. Draw the curtains. Shut the closet door. He wouldn’t look Helms in the eye. When Helms looked away, he could feel the kid glaring at him. The day had been cruel to both of them, but Helms began to feel a weight in the boy’s company. Where the hell were you going?  

“I really didn’t see your friend,” Helms said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody.” The power in his voice was gone. 

His words grew stale before Ferrill turned his head. “You didn’t kill him,” Ferrill’s tone was confessional. “That thing did. Grant was gonna die anyway, and I guess I am too.” 

Helms remembered the bodies hauled in from South Street, each with their bloody eyes and open mouths. Now he knew what happened to them, but he had no clue how to stop it. “I’m sorry about Grant.”  

Ferrill glanced at the officer, but withheld his response. He was trying to forget Grant’s face. Then something odd occurred to him. He leaned forward in bed. “You told everyone not to look. You knew not to look at its face… How?” 

Helms didn’t know how to begin. The ghost stories had always been dismissible, but he had come to believe the worst since he discovered the vagrant. He never could let on how real it had seemed, but if anybody would believe him, it would be the boy. He called the detective into the room.

Chapter Five

From the wall, Ferrill could see that something was off with Grant. He wasn’t the sobbing mess that he became in the alley, but he was far from himself. Eyes still, slow to turn, nervous. He made a point not to bring up the previous night. Not even the matter of Grant’s money, still in the possession of the dealer. Ferrill paid for the beer.  

Grant leaned his back against the concrete. It was a sound barrier shielding the downtown neighborhood from the rumble of railroad tracks. At least here, nothing could sneak up behind him. Across the wall, layers of graffiti catalogued generations of ephemeral gangs, each leaving their colorful marks on the concrete before succumbing to the new blood. There was no fresh paint in this neighborhood. 

Ferrill watched as his drinking buddy absently stroked the contours of his face, lingering on the mouth. His eyes were elsewhere, as if he was studying his own image in a mirror. Grant had already accumulated a pile of empties, but didn’t line them across the wall today. His motions were automatic—something was heavy on his mind. 

It was like a grain of sand, stuck in the eye and stubborn to leave. No matter how much probing and how many tears welled up around it, the intrusion would persist and burn. Each glance, each effort made to ease the pain would only make it worse. 

The can in Grant’s hand had been empty for a long time, but it still rose up to his lips on occasion, lowered again with no thought paid. 

“I need to go home.” Broke the silence.

Ferrill looked down to Grant. “Whenever you’re ready. Take the rest of the beer with you.” 

Grant eased out of his stupor and looked back at Ferrill. “What are you talking about?” 

Confusion turned to concern on Ferrill’s face. “You said you wanna go home. You might as well take the case back. I’m sure not letting my family find it.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Grant stuttered. But he did feel the urge to go home. He didn’t think of his neglected apartment as a safe place, though. Not after the visitation. His mind caught flashes of the dusty old house from his dream. Something in him longed for it. 

Ferrill studied him from the corner of his eye. “Maybe you should sober up before you go anywhere.” I’m one to talk. Not trying to judge, here. “I’ll stick around until you’re ready.” 

*** 

Helms was eager to leave South Street. The detective had concluded that there was nothing left for them in the alley and stripped the tape as he left. The whole neighborhood seemed brighter, but he didn’t look in his rearview mirror until he had turned the corner. 

Grant felt the wall behind him vibrate. A train was coming. As it approached, the rumble of tracks drowned out all other sound. He began to feel ill. With his hearing overwhelmed, he couldn’t sense the thing creeping up on him. Now would be the perfect time for it to rear its ugly head. It was imminent. He stood away from the concrete. He had to escape the noise. 

Ferrill watched as Grant walked stilted across the empty lot. He tried calling for him, but the train snuffed his voice like a match in the wind. As Grant reached the street, he passed a parked car, a rusted relic that had been left there for some time. He heard a sharp tapping on the inside of the window. Louder than the train. Deafening. Just for him. He glanced into the car. Reaching from the tinted haze, a gnarled, rotten hand rapped persistently against the glass with needle-sharp claws. 

Grant quickened his pace, his head spinning as he fled the old car. He distinctly heard the window shatter behind him and took off running. He didn’t see the police cruiser coming down the street. Helms was going too fast, himself fleeing the demon presence of South Street, and preoccupied with the rearview. He stopped just in time to bounce the young man off his hood. 

From a distance, Ferrill watched Grant’s leg snap backward and swing limp as his body collapsed. He was off the wall and running in a heartbeat, the sound of the train lost in his head. Helms instinctively switched on his lights and leaped out of the car. 

Grant was dazed on the asphalt. He would live, but his leg would be a surgeon’s nightmare. Ferrill booked it past the vacant car and begged Grant for a response. 

“Let him breathe, kid,” said Helms in unsteady baritone. He pulled the radio and calmed his voice. He’d have to sound composed to call rescue, and he’ll likely have to correct this witness’ understanding of what just happened. 

“Where’s the damn fire, man?” Ferrill shouted. “Where the hell were you going? You could’ve killed him!” He took a closer look at Grant’s leg and choked. The young man on the asphalt groaned, but he didn’t move. 

Helms called for an ambulance and addressed the panicked teenager. “He ran out in front of me. You saw that,” he inspected Grant for another second. “And you’ve both been drinking.” 

Ferrill fought to clear his mind, but the beer had done its job. Anything he said now would be digging his own hole. Helms directed him to sit on the curb until rescue came. 

***

A familiar siren wail preceded the ambulance. When Helms saw the red lights flash around the corner, he felt a sinking in his gut. He called in the accident, but they were responding to his own negligence. Ever since he saw Ferrill bounding over, his mind had been drafting explanations. The case of beer by the wall would help. 

Two EMTs carefully loaded the young man onto a stretcher and wheeled him into the ambulance. The teenager was off the curb and following. “Is he gonna be ok?” he asked. 

“It looks like his leg got the worst of it. They’ll check him out at the hospital,” a tech answered. “He won’t be up and walking for a while.” 

Helms stood behind the vehicle as they loaded the stretcher in. The young man sat upright, and as the dazed expression left his face, his eyes found Helms. It was a hateful, accusatory glare, crawling under his skin and demanding a reaction. Helms didn’t look away, his palm grazing his pistol before clasping his belt buckle. 

As he glared, the young man’s breath became shallow. Helms noticed his face begin to contort, like he was putting on a mask of himself. There was movement in his throat like bugs under the skin. The young man gasped.

“Something’s wrong with him!” Ferrell shouted, grabbing the tech’s arm. The other EMT was already in the ambulance, trying to secure Grant’s head.

As Helms approached, he saw a deep red trail of blood pour from the corner of the young man’s cheek. Helms froze. Grant gagged and threw his head back. In a nightmare bloom, two rows of long blades sprang from his mouth. The EMT leaped out of the vehicle in a panic. Grant strained to scream as the blades spread, his jaw ready to separate. Something in his throat made a sickening crackle. Then the blades reached out from the mouth, leading a long black figure like a snake. Another followed. They were arms. 

Ferrill collapsed in a fit, begging someone to stop the bloody tableau. Helms drew his gun. “Don’t look! Don’t anybody look at it!”   

Through the sights of his pistol, Helms watched as the arms cracked Grant’s jaw wide open, making way for something hidden in his throat. Helms closed his eyes. He heard a frenzied wailing, but it wasn’t the young man. In the ambulance, Grant gasped for breath around the slender arms slithering from his body. The claws rose and spread, and a gnarly, bone-thin creature emerged. Bracing itself on the stretcher, it studied the broken leg, then turned to face him.   

The face was pale as death, and horrified. It looked over Grant for a moment, then with a gnash of its teeth, it plunged its claws into his eyes. Pistol in hand and eyes clinched tight, Helms heard a horrible splatter, then a scream. He fired his weapon and opened his eyes. The young man was motionless on the stretcher, drenched in blood. The creature was nowhere to be seen. The two EMTs were huddled behind the ambulance, hands over their faces. The teenager was trembling on the pavement. He clutched Grant’s bandana, torn loose in the violence. He turned to Helms, “I saw it.”