Chapter Eight The Nova #3
The black form glowered over me, obscuring the room as it drew closer. My markings began to pulse brighter and brighter as it neared.
It shifted, the congealing forms starting to look familiar the more it tried. Long, spindly legs of a grasshopper, yet larger than life. A fin shifting before disappearing, a hand, a maw, then something familiar.
Two white eyes opened before me in the inky blackness, thin and long, then a third in the middle like a marquis.
Out of that form was produced a head. It slapped a claw out onto the floor that slowly deflated into something more human, but long and skeletal, before it disintegrated, though not before the next one came out the same as it pulled this new form from the shadow.
It was like a titan; then, as it got closer, it started to hold itself up straight, the bottom half just part of this ever-changing mass. But a torso was clearer, like a puppet held up by the beast. It stared, even blinked.
Then it held out its hand, a mimicry of my stance.
Just its proximity was enough for me to feel its presence. It may not have been touching me, but it was clear that this thing was beyond the earthly senses. It was like a tension: a draining, dreamy feeling that could only be compared to a leech of energy.
It stood before me, a statuesque vision of a man but not to be mistaken for a real one.
With its extended hand, its slender fingers brushed by my ear.
I was frozen, my eyes stuck in a widened state as I tried to make sense of the scene before me. The markings on my face glowed so bright, they almost cast a glare in my vision.
It plucked the iris from my hair and held it between us. The boisterous bloom was impressive even in the dark. The deepest blues and white variegation all throughout the petals.
I would say we stared, but I wasn’t sure, with the state of its eyes, where it was looking, or if it was looking at all. Could it even see?
It twisted the stem between its phantasmal fingers. Then, as slow as rising steam, all that was good about the bloom wilted. The vibrancy drained, the proud posture of the flower deteriorating until it was crisp.
Before I could pull away, its hands grasped my skull, pulling me forward.
I had time to let only one gasp escape, then I was face to face with the beast. Its human-shaped form was larger than normal, at an awkward scale, as if it had anticipated humans to be a little bit bigger, a little more creature-like.
My feverish skin felt like it was against ice in those hands, its featureless face so close my nose nearly touched it. I wanted to yell, to scream. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Despite being alone, I felt too embarrassed to be this vulnerable.
Something like a rattle, a noise of hollow bone on bone, a chattering of teeth, then that low baritone.
Then something else.
“Beast,” it mocked in my ear, with my own voice. The word disintegrated into an array of chittering sounds, then underlying whisperings of nothing.
I did not speak to it. I did not run. I could only wait for it to take what it had come for.
There were no other features on the face of the creature. The eyes were blinking and moving, possibly surveying. It leaned in, the featureless shadow hovering over mine, then to the side. I could have sworn I felt a breath against my cheek . . . its fingers enamored with the texture of my hair.
The iris, I thought. It likes the scent, I assured myself, attempting to keep my calm composure.
“Iris,” it hissed.
My eyes widened.
Its hand gripped my skull tighter.
I tried to grab its arms, its hands, but there was nothing really to grab onto. My fingers dug through the sludge-like shadow, dripping and pulling like warm clay.
Then the beast’s human marionette stood tall, its chest moving in unnatural ways—well, more unnatural than it had been a few minutes ago.
It curdled and squirmed like eels under the skin, or something worse I couldn’t possibly imagine that lived down there in the Otherside. Then the clicking noises again.
And to my dismay, my hypothesis of what could be causing those clicking noises was correct.
Down the middle of its humanlike torso, a vertical split revealed something sharp and black. As the blackness dripped away, I could see something white like porcelain.
These were teeth. That was a mouth. And it was going to eat me.
“No!” I screamed.
I didn’t have any more words to beg. How do you plead with a creature that was probably older than the earth itself? Like most of the Otherside, such beings did not adhere to earthly laws, no order but their own.
Without the pleas, I just screamed.
I summoned it from the bottom of my gut, vibrating my entire diaphragm. It came from the soul, as anyone who’d heard it would know.
Then nothing.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes.
My own hands were on either side of my face, my nails dug into my own skin and hair.
The room was still a mess. A mountain of books at the back of my library, the floor harboring more wounds from battling my curiosities.
Yet the beast, my Peculiars, and the iris were missing.
Daylight shone through the window, the sun returning on its promise of another day.