Stepping forward carefully, so as not to frighten her ghost away, I approached my dead wife. With only a dozen inches separating us, I stopped, lifting a quivering hand to touch her bare arm and confirm her presence.
Tears broke, sliding 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 kept 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 dripped down her body and puddled at her feet. After a few seconds, nothing of her face remained but charred skull and lush hair. A centipede crawled from the depths of her left eye socket and back into her nose cavity.
I staggered away from her, gasping for air. That feeling of drowning in the frozen depths of darkness had returned.
The skin that had melted off her bones and 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’d lived through—was living through—Mel stood beside the bones of my wife, like a zombie. Her skin was pallid and decayed. A wet, rancid stench wafted around them.
“Join us,” they said in unison.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”
I retreated, 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 stuck 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. My dead wife gripped me with bony fingers, pulling me into her and shoving her dry 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, their laughter chasing after me. I tried to drown out their maniacal sound with my screams, but I had no breath to exhale. After careening through the void for seconds, hours, years, I slammed into something solid and—
Woke up on Xander’s hardwood floor, panting and sweating. A couple kernels of popcorn were stuck to my face. Scrambling to a seated position, I rested against the base of the couch and stared at the closed front door, wiping the buttery detritus from my cheeks. The locks remained in place, untouched.
“Holy fuck,” I wheezed, running my hands through my hair.
After a few minutes of allowing my body to settle, I stood, trotting to the front door to peek through the eye hole. Nothing was out there. No one. Turning my back so it rested against the door, I slid down and sat on the hardwood, staring across the living space. Serendipity continued to play. In fact, I hadn’t even missed that much of the movie.
Glancing at the floor in front of me, something caught my attention—something that reflected the overhead lights in the foyer. Crawling forward on my hands and knees, I noticed two sets of wet footprints.
One of them, for sure, belonged to a child.
2
At the sight of the foot puddles, I fled from Xander’s condo without bothering to clean my beer and popcorn mess or tighten my robe or shut the front door. Maybe I overreacted a little, but damned if I lingered in that place after what I’d just experienced.
Usually, I’m not the most jittery or easily startled person in the world. Do I have my moments? Yes. But who doesn’t? I can barely sit through a horror film without lowering the pillow from my face—especially if it features a cabin in the middle of nowhere. I’m terrified of cabins, both in movies and in real life. Apart from those nightmarish log chambers, real-life monsters and horrors are different. I can make my own terrible decisions in real life without having to suffer through the horrific ones made by intoxicated, hormonal teenagers—though, some might say I’m not too far off from that.
To be honest with you, I didn’t flee the scene out of fear. I’d already experienced the scary part, when my dead wife and daughter had appeared before me. I just couldn’t remain there—not even to lay on the couch and watch Kate Beckinsale date the wrong guy for way too long. The wet footprints that had seeped from my dream and appeared in my real-life nightmare drove me away. Was I supposed to mop up the mess and plop back on the couch to finish my movie, forgetting anything had ever happened?
I hightailed my skinny ass out of there because I hadn’t known what else to do. Well, first, let me choose my words better and paint a clearer picture. I didn’t run or flee.
