Part VI

I moved to the door, nudging it the rest of the way open with my knuckles. The room beyond was the bathroom, fully decked out in yellow paisley wallpaper, antiseptic green tile, and baby-blue formica fixtures.

I saw myself in the mirror for a moment as I scanned the room. It was almost like looking at a stranger. My hair, instead of being straight and brown, had gone frizzy and white. My face had none of its usual color, bleached almost the color of my hair, and the lines of old scars were replaced with the ruts and grooves of age.

I looked away quickly. I didn’t want to see what else coming here might have done to me.

I could see the toilet peeking out around a small corner in an alcove to the right, a dead sunlamp mounted above it. I wondered who’d sit on the crapper with a heat lamp pointed at their face. Assuming it was Dad, I decided he was even weirder than his little house of horrors might have revealed.

To the right was a combination bath and shower, the only thing showing any real signs of use in the house so far. Unlike the other fixtures, the lip of the tub was chipped in places, showing the rusty metal beneath. There were small puddles of mossy water, breeding who-knew-what sorts of bacteria splashed on the floor beside the tub and along the rim. Blocking the view of whatever lay within was a vinyl shower curtain with a seascape pattern that looked more mid-90s than late-60s.

The crying was coming from behind the curtain. Steeling myself as best I could, I wadded one side of the curtain up in a trembling fist and yanked it back.

There he was. After all this time, all the bad dreams and wakeful nights, he was here in front of me. It wasn’t so bad. It was almost anticlimactic.

The thing in the shower stall was tall; probably just shy of seven feet. How I hadn’t seen its head peeking out over the top before pulling the curtain back was a mystery, but one easily solved. He hadn’t wanted me to see him, not until it was time.

The face was a pitted ruin, flaps of black and blue flesh interspersed with hillocks of burned and mutilated flesh, some of it leaking fluids that I didn’t want to consider. The whole of it looked like a mask that had been poorly stapled over a mannequin head. The eye sockets, like those of the family up front, were empty. Instead of flesh or whatever passed for a brain beyond, there were flickering flames that occasionally turned a rotten green. The mouth was just a wide gash, ringed with split lips and fractured teeth. It lay open though unmoving. The crying was coming from there.

The body was wasted, emaciated. Bones jutted through the broken skin in places, giving the impression of a skeleton someone had laid a sheet over and tried their best to stitch in place. At the shoulders, ragged wing-like flaps of skin hung. Unlike the rest of the meat on the thing, they were pallid, shot through with tattered holes as though moths – or something worse – had been gnawing at them.

The arms were longer than they should have been, hanging almost to the thing’s knees. It didn’t have hands; instead, it had spade-shaped claws with three fingers each, tipped with nails that extended several inches past the fingertip, black with veins of silver and red shot through them and looking razor sharp.

The crying stopped. The edges of that jagged gash in the middle of its face slid upwards and I was horrified to realize it was trying to smile. The fear came flooding back at that, caving in my chest with the force of a sledgehammer.

“You came,” it whispered.

One of those claws shot out towards me, circling those talons around my forearm. Though it looked fragile and skeletal, there was a terrible strength behind it and I could feel the bicep and the bone beneath screaming and creaking under the pressure.

I felt blood running down my arm, and realized the thing’s claws had punctured the flesh. The pressure increased. It was dragging me closer.

“You came,” it whispered a second time.

I began to scream.

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This story was originally published at KaineAndrews.com. Intrigued? Stay tuned for Part 7, next Thursday!

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About the Author

Kaine Andrews was raised in the wilds of Nevada, molded by NASCAR-loving witches, a Catholic school education and typewriter theft, granting a natural fascination with all things dark and dreary and demented scribblings. He currently resides in Oregon, where the omnipresent drizzle keeps him somewhat sane.