Several cables wrapped themselves around Lisa’s breasts, groping at her exposed flesh before individual strands twisted themselves around her nipples, squeezing blood, bloating her teats as sharp copper points prepared to pierce them…
TRADE!
“No…no trade...” Roger’s words were wet with sorrow as he looked into Lisa’s watery eyes, “I’m sorry, Lisa – I love you but I can’t give it what it wants…”
Lisa screamed as her nipples were perforated, tiny jets of blood squirting from her pierced nubs.
TRADE!
“No! No trade.” Wracked with sobs, his head dropped as he turned his gaze away from her – away from the look of hurt and confusion in her face, a look he had caused before - only this was a hundred times worse. She couldn’t comprehend what was happening to her. Didn’t understand she was a pawn in a game – a battle between him and the entity that dwelt within the building’s walls – that her suffering and humiliation were just stakes, antes to be raised until someone folded. But Roger knew from the words that lay as yet unborn on the flesh of her quivering lips that she understood enough to know that he had the power to stop her pain – and yet he did nothing.
The sleeve of wires suddenly wrapped itself back around Roger’s flaccid penis, stroking him back to hardness, the probes in his brain teasing out memories of him and Lisa in bed, playing out scenes in his mind to accelerate his arousal.
The flex around his neck snapped his head back up, forcing him to look at Lisa as the water pipe twisted between her legs, positioning itself at her opening, and, as his cock swelled beneath the sleeve’s masturbations, he heard the boiler in the kitchen roar to life, the pipe plunging into Lisa’s vagina.
She screamed loudly as the jagged metalwork violated her…
“Trade! I’ll trade…just let her go…”
TRADE FIRST!
Roger heard the boiler shutting off and saw the pipe slide out from between Lisa’s thighs, a watery dribble of blood accompanying its withdrawal. The cables holding her to wall stayed firmly in place.
“Lisa…”
He tried to look her in the eye but she turned her face away from him, the gravity of the sacrifice he was about to make obviously lost on her - along with her love for him too, he guessed.
Perhaps that was for the best…
“I love you, Lisa, I can’t explain…just remember - I love-“
His last words to her were cut short as the copper strands in his brain wrapped themselves around nerves and neurons. He could feel the entity filling him, displacing his thoughts and memories, a taste of brick and plaster clogging his mouth. His vision was beginning to blur, growing darker, his sight now something more akin to pressure and temperature; the sensing of footfalls on a floorboard, raindrops on roof tiles, but whether through his dimming eyes or a sensed change in the room, he saw Sam’s body rise to its feet.
The transfer of Chillingworth’s essence into flesh and Roger’s into brick paused as Roger felt the entity’s surprise, its shock; its curiosity. Clearly Sam’s re-animation was not of Chillingworth’s doing or any part of its plan.
Sam’s corpse raised an arm and pointed at Roger, its mouth opening as a voice, dry as dust, rent the air:
“He’s ours!”
Roger recognised the voice instantly: the spokesman for the dead.
“He belongs to us…”
A stream of red dust burst from Sam’s lifeless throat, swarming like a billion tiny insects towards Roger. The gritty motes swirled around around him, eating at his bonds, scouring away plastic and metal. More cables exploded from the walls and ceiling, providing reinforcements, the dust released by their eruption sucked into the whirling maelstrom of red grains.
The room shook as varnished wooden boards snapped up from the floor, standing to attention like soldiers, forming a protective barricade against the worst of the dust until they too were eroded into minute particles, sawdust spinning in little twisters, eager to join their brothers in arms.
The wall at Roger’s back suddenly opened up, the cables that were still capable of doing so, pulling him into the void.
HE’S MINE!
“Noooo…”
Roger was aware of the churning in his guts, the tugging at his bowels. Aware, but not of any pain. Too much of him had been taken away to feel anything from the nerve endings of his body - his soul still remained, for now, but the flesh and bones belonged to someone or something else.
His belly swelled and bucked as if his whole abdomen was herniating, entrails pulsing and throbbing beneath over-stretched skin. The cables around him pulled harder, copper shafts digging deep into his flesh to protect their grip from the whirling storms of dust. The bulging in his abdomen continued as he became the rope in this tug-of-war, his taut skin beginning to split, blood pouring freely from the ever lengthening gash, a bloodied ribbon of intestines suddenly bursting out across the room under the force of the invisible hands that pulled at them.
NOOO!
Chillingworth gave a final desperate tug to save the body that was already ruined beyond salvation. The building’s walls shook and crumbled under the force of its resistance, windows cracking, glass panes falling from their frames out on to the street, the upper floors giving way, dropping white goods and furniture crashing into the empty apartments below.
The two forces were now merely battling for the sake of ego, their prize rendered worthless by their struggles. Like two feral cats
