My hands shook and fumbled with the security chain and with the deadbolt. I couldn’t open the door fast enough. When I finally did, swinging it inward, the person I know I saw in the hallway—because I had cleared the fog from my eyes and made damn sure of it—had vanished. My heart echoed the pounding the door had taken. Chills broke across my skin.
“Callie,” I said in soft voice. I glanced to the left and right, but no one remained in the flickering hallway that reminded me of a low-budget horror movie. Strange, since Xander lived in a high-end complex with a motivated maintenance crew. “Holy Batmobile,” I whispered, trying to control my labored breathing.
Had I really just seen my dead wife through the peephole? I rubbed my face with open palms and slapped my cheeks. Serendipity had really jacked me up on pent emotion—well, that or recent events. Maybe both.
Deciding that I needed to turn the movie off, I pivoted and faced Xander’s neat apartment. Gasping from pure shock, I backed away again, this time into the hallway. My throat tightened to the size of a straw, making it hard to breath, and my eyes stung with tears.
“Callie,” I whispered again, disbelieving—but also hoping beyond hope—that my dead wife was really before me.
She stood in the entryway to Xander’s apartment. Her dark-brown hair fell over her shoulders in gentle curls, and her dark eyes beamed at me like moonlight reflecting off ocean water. The tip of her tongue rested on her upper lip, a nervous tic she had acquired at some point in her life. She used to poke it out whenever we hunted monsters and she aimed down the sights of her firearm. She made the same facial expression the first time we… well, you know. And, now, back from the dead, she stared at me with that same, anxious look.
“Callie,” I repeated, now from the hallway.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was small and quiet, but it belonged to her. It was her voice—unassuming and fragile and shy, at least until you awoke her hidden passions, and then it turned powerful.
I gripped the door frame to keep from wavering as the building swayed and shifted around me. Words eluded me for the first time ever. Even if I had something to say, I doubted I could have worked sound around the massive lump in my throat.
I had come home to her charred corpse seven years ago. How was it possible that she stood in the same room as me now? How had she found me? Did she know about Mel, how I had lost our daughter? Is that why she had come here? Was this even real—was she real?
Stepping forward, carefully, so as not to frighten her ghost away, I approached my dead wife. When only a dozen inches separated us, I stopped and lifted a quivering hand and I touched her bare arm to confirm her presence.
Tears broke and slid down my cheeks as my fingers ran over her cool skin. “I swear,” I said, “I was just making a sandwich and cutting onions.” I brushed a tear away. “That’s it. Oh, and I’m also really allergic to Xander’s condo. I think… I think it’s because he doesn’t have a pet. You know me. I need dander to function.”
Callie stood stone still. Her arms dangled at her thighs and her gray tongue pressed against her upper lip. I don’t think she blinked once.
“Hey,” I said, raising my hand to her cheek. “Are you okay?”
I wanted nothing more than to hug and kiss her, but something repelled me from getting any closer. She just stood there like a wax sculpture—inhuman and unreal.
“Say something.”
And like wax exposed to extreme heat, her skin began to melt. It slid down her body and dripped and puddled at her feet. After a few seconds, nothing remained of her face but her charred skull and lush hair. A centipede crawled from the depths of her left eye socket and back into her nose cavity.
I staggered further away from her, gasping for air. That feeling of drowning in the frozen depths of darkness had returned.
The skin that had melted off of her bones and had puddled at her feet now rippled and moved. It built upward into a column four feet tall. Features formed to resemble my daughter—Mel. I had witnessed her death, though. I had watched Medea slit her throat and spill her blood onto the wheel-traced floor. Still, despite what I had lived through—was living-through, Mel stood beside the bones of my wife like a zombie. Her skin was gray and pallid and decayed. A wet, rancid stench wafted around them.
“Join us,” they said in unison, “or die.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”
I retreated through the door and into the hallway, but my foot didn’t land on the floor—on anything solid. Teetering, as if falling from a cliff’s edge, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a black void descending into oblivion.
“Embrace the shadows,” they said together. “Embrace the darkness.”
In a blurred dash, they covered the few feet that separated us. Both of them stood inches from me as I struggled not to fall off the edge of reality. I could smell the death that lived within them hot in my nostrils.
Callie leaned her blackened skull forward. Through rotted teeth, she pressed out her gray tongue and licked my face. It was as dry as sandpaper. I cringed, unable to avoid it by stepping back any further. With her bony fingers, my dead wife gripped me and pulled me into her and shoved her dried tongue into my mouth. It tasted like frozen shit. Moving on pure reflex, I shoved her away from me. But she didn’t budge.
I did.
Unable to maintain my balance from the momentous push, I fell into the dark chasm. Callie’s and Mel’s laughter chased after
