“They’re in my bones. I can feel them in there. Moving around. Ohhh fuck, I can feel them gnawing on the core.”
I jolted back awake as Cassie asked me a question. Squinting in the afternoon light that seemed pointed directly at my face, I turned to look the other way. Endless miles of desert sand and scrub brush rolled by as we made our way through…New Mexico? Nevada? I wasn’t sure. I rubbed my face as I asked her what she’d said.
“I asked have you heard anything else from your sister since we left. I just want to make sure we’re not rolling up on her too unannounced.” I could feel her eyes on me. “Did she ever respond to your text?”
Letting out a sigh, I saw the ghost reflection of my face draw up in a slight wince. “I…I never actually texted.”
“What? You said you would. Damnit Baxter, I don’t want her to hate me anymore than she already does. She’ll think I put you up to it.”
When I turned to look at her, I could see how worried and frustrated she was and I reached over to squeeze her leg. “She doesn’t hate you. She knows it was my choice to cut ties with her after the last time. I told her that I loved her, but that I couldn’t have a junkie in my life. Not after all the lying and stealing back when she lived with us.” I met her eyes for a moment before looking away. “But when she called last night…I don’t know, Cas. Something was wrong. Or wronger than usual. She didn’t even sound high.”
I heard Cassie make a small sound that might have been a sigh or a snort of disbelief. “She was talking about something living inside her bones. That sounds like tweaker shit to me.”
I’d met Cassie through my sister—funnily enough, they had once been good friends after meeting at an NA meeting five years ago. But where sobriety took with Cassie, it had always been a much slippier thing for Mary to hold onto. I tried to help her, encouraging her to change while constantly making excuses, which Cassie said was a mistake. She told me that the only junkie that ever changed was the one that wanted to, and that Mary didn’t want to, at least not yet. When I finally accepted that was true and told Mary no, she was suddenly just…gone. No note, no cell number, nothing. I spent the first year blaming myself and Cassie, and the next two waiting for a call that she’d been found dead somewhere.
Instead, last night I got a call from her.
Hey BB.
Mary? Oh…um, God, it’s been so long…I…How are you? Are you okay?
I’ve been better, I guess.
What’s happened?
I want to be pissed at you for assuming I called for help or because I fucked up, but of course, as always, you’re right. You’re always fucking right and I’m always fucking wrong.
Mary, cut the pity party shit, okay? I thought you were probably dead, okay? No one is saying I told you so. I just want to know how you are.
Shit. I…I know. I’m sorry. I’ve missed you so much and then as soon as I hear your voice it’s like…fuck me. Let me start over if you’ll let me.
Um, sure. Sure. Go ahead.
Okay. Like I said, I’ve missed you. Cassie too, if you can believe it. I moved to Sacramento for awhile, but that went bad pretty fast. Got in with a rough crowd. OD’d twice in a year, and had some other stuff happen. When I left there, I wanted to come back to you, but I didn’t want you seeing me like that.
Shit, Mary. I wish you had. I’ve seen you bad before.
No, not like this you haven’t. I was real close to killing myself with drugs or just killing myself period. I hitched for a few weeks, just bouncing around wherever trying to not get picked up or rolled or…well, raped. Finally I landed in this little town where the biggest drug dealer is a dude that sells weed out of the back of his grocery store. I decided it was a good place to finally try and get clean.
Did you? Get clean I mean?
Yeah, I guess so. I don’t want drugs anymore, that’s for sure.
Well…shit, Mary, that’s so great.
Maybe it is. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything anymore. I feel like I’m losing it.
Why?
When I came to this place, I didn’t have any money. I got a job at the local laundromat, but I didn’t have any place to stay. I wound up squatting outside of town in this old house that had been abandoned for years. It wasn’t in too bad of shape, and I figured in a few weeks I’d have enough money to rent a place closer to work. I even managed to sell a few things from the house in town.
Uh-huh. That stuff wasn’t yours to sell.
Shit, I know that. But I’m telling you, the place had been closed for years. I figured no one would miss a few bits of dusty junk, and while the house kept the weather out, it wasn’t…well, something didn’t feel right about it. I thought maybe it was because I was squatting, but the longer I stayed, the more creeped out I got. I’d already been through the worst of my detox before I got to town, but I was still shaky all the time. I thought maybe I was just fucked up in the head and I tried to ignore it. When that didn’t work, I decided to check out the root cellar to see if there was anything else down there I could sell to get out of the house quicker.
Baxter, it wasn’t really a cellar at all. It was just a set of stairs going down into the dark. There was a brick wall running along one side at first, but then that was gone too. Just me and the flashlight on my cheap burner going down more steps. I almost turned around, but I kept telling myself that my fried junkie brain was just imagining things. That I’d get to the bottom and find a switch, and when I had some more light, I’d see that I was just in a deep basement or cellar after all. And after a little while, I did see some light down below.
It was an electric light, or that’s what it seemed to me. That was weird—the house upstairs didn’t even have power, but I was close enough to the end now that it seemed stupid to turn around. So I finished the last bit of stairs and stepped on what looked like a large stone circle just hanging in the dark. A big yellow work lamp was lighting up the center of it—I couldn’t see it, but I could hear a generator running somewhere in the dark behind the lamp, so I guess that’s how it was lit, though thinking back on it now, that doesn’t make much sense either, does it?
Either way, I was focused on the thing in the center of the light.
What was it?
It was a man. Or it had been a man. He seemed fused into the stone somehow, and his body was warped and bloated, hard and chalky white. I should have thought it was a statute—it looked like a statute of a deformed, naked man more than a real one, after all—but somehow I knew it wasn’t. I could feel the difference. When I put my hand near, I could feel fear and pain coming off his skin like a hot stove. And when I touched him, that skin split open and something came out.
Mary, I don’t think…
No! No, Goddamnit. You listen to me. Something came out and touched me back. I woke up back upstairs. I was terrified, but I thought it was a dream. I even went back to check the cellar, but you know what? There is no fucking cellar. Not even a door. Which is bullshit, because I remember that door. It was there.
Mary, try to calm down and let me…
No, please. Please just listen. It wasn’t a dream. I thought it was yesterday, but I know better now. My skin is getting hard. Stiff. I tried to go out, was going to try and go to the clinic in town, but the sunlight…it burns too much now. I have to sit inside in the dark so it doesn’t hurt so much, and even then, I can feel them inside me.
Inside you?
They’re in my bones. I can feel them in there. Moving around. Ohhh fuck, I can feel them gnawing on the core.
Mary, tell me where you are. Just tell me and…
No! You don’t come here. You don’t ever come here. I just called to tell you what happened. Tell you I love you.
No, you called me for help. Let me help you.
I…Maybe at first I did. Because I’m such a selfish bitch, I probably did want that at first. But hearing you, talking to you…no. I remember how much I love you. How much I’ve already put you through. You stay away. Bye, Bax.
No, don’t just h-
When I called her back, she didn’t answer. That was okay though. She may be on a burner, but it still showed up on my caller ID as Derby, NV. From there, it didn’t take long on the internet to figure out the laundromat she was working at. The house outside of town was a lot harder to guess, but I had some good options based on satellite photos. I was going to call Cassie from the road, explain enough so she knew where I was until I could make sure what I was really dealing with. But then she got home early from work and could tell something was wrong. I broke down and started telling her, all the while planning on leaving her behind. But she wouldn’t let me. She still loved Mary too.
We got into town late that next afternoon, and within an hour we were down to the last house on my list. I’d already started making plans to check the laundromat or ask around town if need be, but as soon as I saw the house, I knew it was it. Weather-beaten and gray, it still looked to be in oddly good shape for an abandoned house stuck out at the edge of the desert. I jumped out of the car as soon as Cassie stopped and ran up on the porch, trying to look in the windows for some sign of Mary, but the glass was dark with age or dirt, and I couldn’t make out anything other than dim shapes.
Moving to the door, I tried the knob, and felt a moment of relief when it turned easily. Cassie was behind me now, putting her hand on my shoulder as I shoved against it. The wood must be warped or…
“Honey, are you sure about this? We don’t even know if this is the right place.”
I grunted as I pushed against the door with my shoulder. “It’s the right place. I can feel it. If I could just get the damn…” The door suddenly gave way as I stumbled into a small front hall. “…door open.” Shuddering, I glanced back at Cassie. “Jesus, it’s freezing in here. How is it so cold?”
Stepping across the threshold of the house, her eyes went wide as her breath turned to visible mist. “What…It’s over ninety degrees outside. I thought you said there wasn’t any p…” Her gaze went past me as she trailed off, her mouth drooping into a hanging “O” as she stared at something behind me. She looked confused, but also terrified.
When I turned around, I saw why.
The room had probably once been a living room, but most of the furniture was shoved into the corners now, with a few different pieces speared against far walls. That was because the majority of the room had been taken over by a massive dome of spikey white that looked like some kind of stone or hard clay. Long lines of it stretched out to the far edges of the room, penetrating walls and skewering anything that was in their path. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen, but as I approached closer, I found myself thinking about egg sacs and tumors and…Mary.
“Baxter, no. Stay away from that thing.”
I didn’t turn back as I ducked under one of the ivory spears and drew closer to the main body of it. Stretching out my hand until I was close, I could feel heat baking off it even in the numbing cold of the room. I could feel it, and I could feel her. Somehow, Mary was in there. Trapped and needing my help.
Sucking in a breath, I pressed my palm to the thing’s surface. There was a moment of resistance and greater heat, and then things began to change as I started to understand. I saw the white skin of it, of her, begin to split open even as something began to push its way out to greet me.
Behind me, Cassie saw it too. Screaming, she turned to run for the door, and I wanted to tell her not to worry. That Mary would never hurt us. That fighting it was the only mistake.
But then I felt them on me. On me and biting and pulling their way inside even as I clawed at my skin and saw nothing there at all. One moment I had been watching the shadow of some great thing pushing past the pale, ruptured flesh of my sister and then I was thrashing on the ground, feeling as though I was being eaten alive. At the edge of my vision and sanity, I could see Cassie rolling on the floor closer to the hall.
And then we woke up. Not in the house, but in a motel in Reno. It was the next morning, and neither of us had any idea of how we’d left the house or traveled all the way to the motel. We talked about whether it had all been real. Whether we should go back and try to find out more about what happened. But no, we agreed. Real or not, it was all very strange and dangerous and tiring. We didn’t want to go anywhere at all.
Drawing the blinds on the room, I dialed down the thermostat as far as it would go. It was so miserably hot here. How would anyone want to live in this kind of heat and constant sun? Stripping off my clothes, I lay down next to Cassie. She was already back asleep, her breaths quick and shuddering, sending a small tremble across her pale, glistening skin. I kissed her forehead and envied her that sleep.
My body felt so restless, so…uneasy. I had no worries, but I was still very uncomfortable, as though a thousand ants were crawling through my veins while lines of chalk white beetles gnawed away at the marrow of my bones. But that’s okay, isn’t it? It’s like I always tried to tell Mary.
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