The sound of the dripping was almost swallowed by the pounding of Ricky’s heart as he remembered fighting another monster on a warm summer day.
His trembling hand gripped the flashlight so hard that he could barely make his thumb press the button. The light nearly blinded him and then he was able to make sense of what he was seeing. Water dripped on the railing, flowed down the pipe and joined a puddle at the bottom of the stairs. Ricky exhaled with relief.
Inching his way to the right, he worked towards the door while he kept an eye on the liquid. It wasn’t blood, and it wasn’t forming into the shape of a demon, but he still wasn’t going to take his eye off of it.
That’s when he saw what was hiding beneath the stairs. The light touched flesh and it recoiled deeper into the darkness. For the brief instant that he saw it, the skin appeared so bleached that it almost looked translucent. Ricky angled his light and tried to probe the shadows.
The figure shrank even deeper.
Ricky put his back to the wall, and began to crouch down.
The thing was naked and curled into a tiny ball. It trembled under Ricky’s light. He extended his stake slowly, meaning to prod the thing. When it dodged the stake’s touch, Ricky was sickened by the way that the thing moved. It didn’t seem to have any bones to restrict it from compressing into itself. It was a giant, amorphous slug.
He didn’t mean to do it—the reaction was a reflex tied to his disgust.
Ricky struck out with his stake, piercing the weird flesh. A horrible scream filled the stairwell and a chemical smell stung his nose when slime oozed from the wound. Ricky jerked back, lost his balance, and fell back onto the tile. He pumped his legs to push himself away from the monster as it twisted in the light.
It almost looked like it turned inside out. The face emerged at the bottom and the spun around to look at him. Giant eyes squinted at the light and the lips split to reveal rows of teeth when the thing snarled at him.
A terrified sound escaped Ricky when he tried to push himself away. His back was flat against the wall but he needed to get farther away. Swallowing, he tried to get control of his own hands. It was like his recurring nightmare—when faced with the demon, he froze up. That nightmare was the reason that he had become a deputy. He wanted to find a way to take back control when faced with chaos.
With a deep breath, Ricky found some control.
He raised the tip of his stake to point at the monster and moved his focus, so he wasn’t looking directly at the thing.
It hissed and something wet slapped against the tiles as the creature continued to turn itself towards him. Ricky realized that he recognized something about the shape of its face. Stealing another glance at it, he confirmed it. The thing in front of him was a melted-wax version of the woman who had been manning the reception desk. The last time he had seen her, she had been barely alive in the shadows with Riley hovering over her.
“No,” Ricky whispered, shaking his head. He decided that he had to be wrong. There was nothing human about the thing that was cowering under the stairs. The flesh of it looked like it had been boiled down and then recast into a soft mold. The way that it was translucent, it looked like congealing fat at the top of a pot of stew that had been removed from the burner.
The fact that it had eyes and a mouth seemed impossible. The rest of the thing was just a lump of unformed…
A single finger began to emerge from the blob. As it poked through the membrane of the blob, Ricky saw one digit and then a second. Another finger poked out next to it. He forced himself to look away again, fearful of the eyes.
Ricky realized something horrible. The thing’s face had been created from the blob as he watched. What kind of monster would be created with teeth and eyes first? Something that was only meant to hunt and feed.
“Have to,” he whispered. He was trained to only use deadly force when there was no other possible option. In this case it was easy for him to make that assessment.
Looking back at the eyes and clamping his hand tight around the stake, there was only one logical target. A tiny blue spark was beginning to flicker in each eye. Ricky could feel the power there—the nascent thing was already trying to ensnare him in a trance.
With a feral scream, he pushed away from the wall, pivoted to his knees and drove the stake forward. The jagged end of the broken mop handle hit the eye at the same time that the top of Ricky’s head hit the underside of the staircase.
Blackness dotted with white stars closed in from every side. Ricky had a fraction of a second to wonder if his flashlight had given out as he swayed and began to tip. Just before he hit the floor his brain had one last coherent thought.
I’ve just killed myself.
# # #
The next knock came from the balcony. The sound was somewhat muffled by the curtains, but the three of them had no question between them where it had come from. Liz reached out to close a gap between two of the curtain panels.
Amber grabbed her hand before she could.
“I was just trying to fix the overlap,” Liz whispered.
Amber let go of her hand.
Liz reached for her phone—it was still playing music at a low volume. She picked it up and held her thumb ready to turn it up in case there
