Chapter 14

14

Footsteps. Slow, heavy footsteps.

I turn to see Henry. He’s already made it out of the hall; he’s not too far from me. He’s looking at me. Everyone else is looking beyond me, toward the hall, toward the noise, the smack of bare feet coming down hard.

I take a step forward, holding the fire poker tightly though I’m sure it makes me seem more pathetic than intimidating. I move to get a better look at whoever is coming down the hall. Naomi, now wearing her thong, her bra, and her Penny Lane jacket, follows closely behind me.

Before I can even process what I’m seeing, she’s screaming.

From the murky darkness emerges a pale, jagged shape. A creature. A skeletal frame.

Its movements are tortured, agonizing just to witness. Its labored approach is accompanied by the groaning I heard earlier, and wheezing. Gruesome wheezing. The sound of absolute suffering.

The closer it gets, the more I can see it, and the more human, the more horrific it becomes. It’s got these long, spindly limbs. It’s spidering toward us on all fours. It’s got a bald head, skin like cellophane, eyes like boiled eggs out of the shell. Its nose is narrow, nostrils gaping. It has no lips, but it has a mouth, a void, a giant hole filled with brown, rotten teeth. A desiccated tongue the color of ash juts out as the thing makes a new noise. A wordless howl.

“What the fuck!” Naomi screams. “What the fuck!”

The thing—the pale man—slows to a complete stop. He goes on howling as he begins to roll up, his bones cracking with repulsive intensity. He wears nothing except a pair of stained, stretched-out tighty-whities that slump from his hip bones. All of his bones are visible. I can count every rib. He’s been starved.

He lifts his emaciated arms and lurches forward, but he’s too eager. He falls face-first on the floor.

Naomi screams again.

I can’t look at her. I can’t take my eyes off the man. He’s splayed out; one of his arms is broken. I can see the fracture through his gauzy skin. His legs twitch, but other than that, he’s not moving. I know he’s alive because I can still hear him breathing. Wheezing.

I reach over for Naomi’s hand, silently begging her to take mine so we can turn and run out of here.

Then I remember the snow. I remember the gate.

I remember that I don’t have my phone, but she must have hers.

“We need to go,” I say, taking a step to the side, bringing Naomi with me. We pass directly in front of the man.

“He’s gonna die,” Naomi whisper-yells at me. “He’s about to die.”

“We need to go ,” I repeat.

There’s resistance. She’s resisting. She pulls free from my grip. I turn toward her, and she’s fixated on the dying skeleton man. For as freewheeling and oblivious and inconsiderate as she can be, Naomi is also profoundly empathetic.

She drops to her knees in front of the man, compelled by his suffering, undeterred by his monstrousness.

“Okay,” she says, reaching a hand over his back. “Okay. It’s okay.”

There she is. Once, back in high school, we were at her house and a bird flew into her bedroom window and broke its wing. She went out to help it, put it in a shoebox, rehabilitate it. I warned against doing this, telling her birds carry diseases and mites. She ignored me. She doesn’t listen to reason. She doesn’t listen.

I scan the room. No one’s moved. Tatiana is still holding Costel’s dick. With the exception of Henry, they’re all naked, which should make them seem less threatening, but it doesn’t. Because they’re the ones who did this. How long has this man been locked away? How long have they lived here letting him suffer and starve beneath their feet?

Did they break in? Take the house by force?

What the hell is going on?

“It’s okay. We’re gonna get you help.” Naomi reaches into her pocket. Her brows pinch together. She reaches deeper. Deeper. She tries the other pocket.

“Where is it?” she mumbles. “Where’s my phone?”

“You shouldn’t get too close,” Henry says. “This isn’t what you think it is.”

“Sloane. I don’t have it. I don’t have my phone. We need to get him help.”

She’s not thinking clearly.

“You shouldn’t touch him.” Henry’s tone has gone harsh. “You’re too close.”

The man stirs. The movement is subtle at first, but then his head lifts, neck reels back, and with his good arm he grabs Naomi by the hair. His frailty must be only in appearance, because Naomi fails to get away. He has her.

It happens so fast.

He bashes her head to the floor. Once. Twice.

Then he flips her over onto her back and he climbs on top of her, pinning her down with his revolting living-corpse body. He lets out another pained howl before he flops forward and sinks his teeth into her neck.

He bites her. He’s biting her. He’s fucking biting her.

I forgot I was holding the poker until it nearly slips through my hand as I lose control of myself, as I scream like I’ve never screamed, like no one has ever screamed. I see blood on the man’s face, around his rotten mouth. Blood splattering onto his pale, pale skin. Naomi’s blood.

My horror turns to fury and my grip tightens on the poker and I lift it over my head, and I dive forward, and I swing it as hard as I can, which turns out to be pretty hard, because when it lands it cracks the man’s skull, and the hook gets stuck in it.

And yet he continues to attack Naomi, slurping at her neck.

“Get off her!” I scream, yanking the poker. I put my foot on the man’s shoulder for leverage and manage to free the poker from his skull, and I bring it down again, this time on his back. His skin rips open, exposing his bones. I hit him a third time, on the neck, and the hook gets stuck again. I lean down and pull it across, opening a deep gash.

Now I’ve got his attention.

He pushes himself up on his functioning arm, the other dangling awkwardly at his side. He turns to face me, hissing like a cat. And before I know what I’m doing, I shove the poker into his eye. It makes a wet, squishing sound.

He doesn’t react. He doesn’t even bleed.

I pull the poker out and try again.

“Die!” I hear myself say. “Why won’t you die?”

He lunges toward me, wrapping his bone fingers around my ankle. The move is so unexpected, and I’m so shocked by it, that I don’t have time to ward it off, to kick him away. His hold is so tight it hurts.

It hurts even before he pulls me down and I drop the poker. Even before he brings my leg to his mouth, my calf to his decayed teeth, and clamps on.

He doesn’t have all his teeth, but there are enough. It’s torment. The destruction of my leg is quick and vicious.

It’s so horrifying. I’m looking down, watching it happen, what’s being done to me, and I feel completely helpless.

And then I look over at Naomi, and she’s holding her neck, trying to stop the bleeding, and her eyes glaze over, and I feel completely hopeless.

And the others, only a few feet away from us, just stand there. Doing nothing. Nothing but watching.

“Help!” I say, though I know no one’s coming to our rescue. “Help us!”

My vision goes spotty, and I might lose consciousness, and all of a sudden Henry is standing over me. Stepping over me. He digs his fingers into the gash in the pale man’s neck and starts to pull. It looks like it requires some effort, but not as much as it should to separate a man’s head from his body. Like untwisting the lid of a stubborn jar.

It takes seconds. It makes a disgusting noise, a sort of vile ripping.

The man’s head spirals toward me, landing right in front of my face. There’s still some of me between his teeth. Flesh and blood and chunky red something…I don’t even know. He’s so much more human up close; I can see the man he was before he became whatever this is. His eyelids remain open, and I have this terrible feeling that he’s looking back at me with the one eye still intact. This terrible feeling that he’s still not dead.

The skin of his neck hangs loose and he leaks this treacly substance that I don’t think is blood. It’s too dark and putrid, and it drip, drip, drip, drips. Whatever it is, there isn’t a lot of it.

Henry nudges the head with his foot and it whirls away. He kneels in front of me, pushing my hair out of my face with a cold hand.

“I hope you can forgive me,” he says.

I look down at my leg, at the wound that’s even worse than anticipated.

I look over at Naomi, and her eyes have rolled back.

“Help her! You have to help her!” My voice is shrill with panic, and it sounds so far away, like it’s coming from another reality, another universe. “Please!”

I crawl to her on my elbows, dragging my legs behind me, leaving a trail of blood. Her neck is a mess, a fountain spewing red through her fingers. It’s too much.

“Naomi? Nay. It’s me. Stay with me, okay?”

She whimpers, the only response she’s capable of. I press my hand over hers, over the gash.

“Please!” I scream. “Please! Help!”

“Drago?” I hear Ilie say. “What do you want to do?”

Tatiana mutters something in French. Then, in English, “Foolish to have guests here. Did I not say this?”

“Please, please, please, please…” I can’t watch her die. I can’t, I can’t.

“Sloane,” Henry says. “Listen to me. You need to make a choice.”

“Please…She’s my life. Please, help. I won’t say anything about the man. Please. Call nine-one-one.”

“You need to listen. You need to believe me.”

“I am listening. Please!” I look at Naomi, her eyelids fluttering. I hover my free hand over her mouth and feel that she is still breathing, but her breath is weak.

“Do you hear me? We are offering a choice to you, and to Naomi.”

“Are we?” Tatiana asks. “What happened to democracy?”

“It is good with me,” Ilie says. “They are fun. Beautiful. Elisa?”

“Yes, I agree. I love them. Both of them,” Elisa says. “Real American girls.”

“It’s time,” Costel says. “It’s been, what? A hundred years?”

“We haven’t encountered anyone else nearly as amenable,” Miri says.

“They will cause problems,” Tatiana says. “Mark my words.”

I’m too desperate to care about their conversation, whatever it’s about. “Please! I’m begging you. Please. She’s losing so much blood.”

“I say we drain them and move on,” Tatiana says. She inhales. “Don’t you smell it? They are sweet.”

“No,” Henry says, picking up the fire iron and swinging it over his shoulder. “We let Sloane decide their fate.”

He looks at me with that damn fox grin spread across his face. “How would you like to live forever?”