Chapter 20
I GIVE MY MOM A FEW MINUTES TO SOAK IN PEACE, then rinse her hair out and leave the showerhead dangling impotently over the side of the tub.
There’s nothing remarkable about the way the soapy water ebbs around her sagging frame, or the shaky way she climbs out.
How could I hate someone so feeble? How could I blame her for everything she’s done?
Then I remember the scent of Joanne’s blood, like congealed oatmeal and plastic flowers and fingers stained green from latching and unlatching the door chain.
My mom shuffles to her bedroom and begins pulling on her pajamas.
“I started packing for you,” I explain, gesturing at the suitcase splayed open on the floor like a pinned butterfly. Her favorite sandals nestle against rolled-up sweaters, wispy blouses, the entire contents of her underwear drawer. “What else do you want to bring?”
She turns her back on it all. Tugs at the pink-and-cream florals of her sheets.
“I’m tired,” she murmurs as she crawls into bed.
“No, Mom, we have to go.”
Her hair splays across the pillowcase. “You’re so dramatic.”
“No, I’m not, can we please—” I swallow the rest of what I want to say. There’s no time for bargaining, even less for an argument. “You can nap while I finish packing and get the car. I’ll wake you up as soon as I’m done, and then we’re leaving. Okay?”
She sinks into the floral embrace of her silky pillows and ignores me. Is this what it’s going to be like, for the rest of time?
As I turn to go, my mom stirs. “Ellis, baby.”
“Yeah?”
Her voice sounds like melted Jolly Ranchers, strange-sweet and syrupy. “Remember that time when you left your math homework behind at that gas station? Where was that?”
“Grand Junction,” I mutter. “And it was a rest stop.”
Her laugh flutters like wind chimes, and she pushes a damp chunk of hair back from her forehead. “Yeah. And we drove three extra hours back through the mountains to get it, remember?”
I remember, Mom. And I remember every goddamn time you’ve reminded me of it.
I already know what comes next. Except it doesn’t. Instead, she sighs, “The desert was so beautiful that day.”
My stomach clenches. I forgot that part.
The sky so blue and cloudless it was like a child’s drawing, the orange-red mesas slipping by, crowned with towering rocks like winking monuments that whispered, Everything changes, if you just wait long enough.
Scrubby trees the color of burnt coffee and tumbleweeds like hungry bundles of razor wire and the endlessness that took my breath away, that made me feel blissfully inconsequential, like I could do anything and the world would let me.
That was the first time I fell in love with the desert. In the tug-of-war my mom’s disease set us on, I’d forgotten all about the wonder of it.
“It was, Mom,” I say, my throat thick. “It really was.”
Her eyes flutter closed, and her breathing slips into a soft, even rhythm.
When I was a kid, the nights I couldn’t sleep I’d shuffle my way to my mom’s bed, a glass of orange juice or a slice of buttered toast in hand as an offering, and she’d mumble awake and let me curl up on top of the duvet like a cat.
I’d wake there in the morning with a discarded plate or a dusting of crumbs next to my head and study my mom as she slept: the careful way her cuticles were pushed back to make way for her nail polish, the silk daintiness of her pillows and the way sleep made her breath ragged and rhythmic.
In those moments, perfection felt just out of reach.
Another minute, and I’d know who I was supposed to be.
Always, just before I found out, her alarm would blare or she’d roll over and snort awake.
Maybe next time, I’d tell myself. I just have to keep trying.
If I nestled on top of the covers with her now, would it feel the same? Would I finally catch that thing that will remake me the way my mom wants?
A vibration in my pocket. I pull out my phone, and Veer’s name sears my vision.
For a second, I consider declining her call. Let it go back to me and my mom, like old times. Except if I lie down, I might fall asleep, and I have to be the adult here. I have to get us ready to run.
When I press the phone to my ear, I find my throat’s dried up and I can’t bring myself to speak. There’s a long, heavy pause before Veer says, “Ellis?”
“Yeah.” The word scratches my throat on the way out.
“I thought I should call. Um, how are you holding up?”
The fuzziness of the connection can’t hide the exhaustion in her voice.
“My mom’s asleep.”
“I didn’t ask about her.”
I tiptoe through the kitchen and slip out the front door.
What am I supposed to tell her? That my body is bloodthirsty and my mom’s a monster?
That we’re preparing to skip town without saying goodbye?
That I’m beaten down and overwhelmed and it’s taking all my strength to hold back the flood of terror waiting to break over me if I take even a moment to think about what might happen to us?
“Is Joanne okay?” I ask, instead of answering.
I can hear Veer’s swallow on the other end of the line. “We worked her all the way there, but, you know. She’d lost a lot of blood.”
I don’t want to hear the thing that Veer is trying not to say, but, like a scab I can’t stop picking at, I’m also desperate to make her say it.
“But you got her to the hospital,” I prod.
“We worked her all the way there, Ellis.” She says my name like a diagnosis. “Because I care about my fucking job. We both know it didn’t make a difference.”
I want to feel guilty. I want to feel monstrous. Instead, I feel nothing.
“Okay,” I say, numbly.
“The cops will want to talk to your mom.”
A strangled feeling pinches my throat. “You talked to the police?”
“She died, Ellis,” Veer snarls.
“What did you tell them?”
“I don’t know.” Agitation makes her words come faster. “That there was a lot of blood. I don’t know what happened.”
She could have told them about my mom’s warping jaws, and the needle she saw in my hand. But she didn’t. I don’t want her pity. I can’t be in debt to Veer, not now.
“Why’d you tell them that?” I snap. It sounds like an accusation.
“Because I don’t know what I saw!” I can’t help my flinch. Her rage is palpable, even through the phone. “So you’d better figure out what you want to say, because otherwise they’re going to figure it out for you.”
A small silence. She’s waiting on my answer.
“Thanks, I guess.” I hate how lifeless it sounds.
“Okay, then.” Her voice turns sharp edged, almost cruel. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I realize, too late, that it’s not pity she’s offering after all. Not even protection. It’s the power to decide for myself what comes next.
I want to reach out and take it. But she’s already hung up.
That stings. But there’s still my suitcase, and the car, and the waiting road.
Except when I let myself back into the apartment, something smells off. I’m reminded of the house party and the eaves that wept blood, and of the sticky, congealed darkness around the edges of Uncle Bill’s freezer. Of the arid desert aroma in his office.
That’s what the air smells like now.
A twinge behind my belly button. I fumble for the dead bolt, but my hands land six inches to the left of where they should.
The shadows are too dark, the space around them too bright.
I shut my eyes to reorient myself, but it plunges me into a cacophony of scent: dry flesh stretched to breaking, bones picked clean by wind.
I think I open my eyes, but all I see is blankness. I try to blink a few times. Nothing changes. Are my eyes still closed? Are my feet still on the ground? I’m suspended in the void, I’ve fallen down a well.
No, I’m in our apartment. My mom is in the bedroom. I’m in shock, or I’m having a seizure, or who knows what the fuck else, but I know one thing: none of this is real.
My eyes are still closed. I just have to open them.
When I do, all I see is yellow.
Dazzling yellow light streams from everywhere and nowhere.
Bright as the desert at noon, so bright my teeth ache.
The light seeps into my ears, sets them buzzing, then ringing, then pounding until I’m sure there’s blood pouring from them.
I can’t move my arms to check. They don’t listen to me anymore. Maybe they’re not even there.
A shape emerges from the glare. Two arms, two legs, one head, but it smells like roadkill and stagnant water.
Like vinegar and sludgy flesh, like rotting planks in the aftermath of a house fire.
It drags itself forward on segmented legs, knees bent backward, shoulders pinned together like the haunches of a four-legged predator.
Its rib cage is flayed open to reveal a blighted chasm shivering with maggots.
Terror blooms in my joints, in the hollow of my chest where my curse lies in wait, ready to flay my torso open in the same way if I let it.
The animal inside me growls low and dangerous and presses itself against the bars of its cage, and I know who he is without needing to know why.
The flayed man lurches closer, and his face jolts into focus against the bright yellow invading my skull.
A face eaten down to the bone, long white worms coiling between sagging layers of decayed muscle and graying fat.
He draws a rattling breath. The worms of his face shiver in place and then, in a single sinuous movement, flow into the yawning oval darkness of his mouth.
My vision fills with slurred images. Clouds’ shadows as they drift over cracked earth. The nightly path of the constellations. Trucks drawing trails of light down the highway.
I’ve been watching you.
They’re not words, and I don’t hear them.
One minute my head is full of pictures and the next they’re gone and only the impression of the words remains.
Is this how my mom feels, when nothing makes sense?
I want to spit in his face. I want to attack.
I want to do something, anything, but my body has deserted me.
The flayed man shakes his head. Maggots tumble over his lower lip.
Restraint is tedious, don’t you think? This time, the images are of carrion, of discarded protein bar wrappers spinning away on the wind. Why not give in?
Temptation smells like spent matches and sugar. I could let go and be consumed by the beast roaming restless in my chest. How would it feel? Agonizing. Sublime. My throat spasms, and I suddenly have control of my tongue. “My mom—”
His face doesn’t move, but my mind is filled with his laugh. An earthquake, an avalanche, rattling my skull, shaking me by the neck like a predator.
You’ll see. Hunting is sweetest with a pack.
He pivots on broken legs, graying tendons stretching to their breaking point. The yellow light grows brighter, making him shimmer like a mirage.
Run, if you like. But running is for prey. Are you prey?
An urgent beat against my ribs. I need to say something, to ask him, to demand—
The flayed man turns back to me, and his eyes glitter like twin abysses as he opens his mouth and howls.
A keratin shiver the length of my limbs.
Not a sound, but an aftermath of sound, a reverberation that shoves like cactus spines against my eardrums. My curse bolts, chain rippling loose and molten, as the flayed man howls again and the yellow becomes even brighter, so bright it pierces my eyeballs and shreds the nerves beyond.
My palms burn and my knuckles crack and, for a second, the chain wraps around my ankles and I’m not sure of my hands and my joints wail their desire to twist into something monstrous.
Iron in my hands. Don’t think, just control.
My breath is hot and fast, but the chain is there.
When I pull, it coats my face with tears that taste like ash.
Inch by inch, I haul my hunger back into its cage.
When I open my eyes, the yellow light is gone and the flayed man is gone too.
I’m curled on my side on the linoleum, my tongue caustic with rotten cactus and grief, I’m a canyon in a flash flood and I’m drowning, and then it’s gone and it’s only me and the kitchen floor and the sudden horror of returning to what’s real.
My heartbeat presses furiously into my windpipe. My knuckles are purple and misshapen, my wrists splintered and useless. I shut my eyes and the yellow aftermath lingers.
Just pretend it’s not real, Ellis. Pretend it’s just one more thing to outrun. But I can’t, it’s already in my brain, terror riding the wave of nausea rising through me. The flayed man is real, and he howled out my curse and left me at its mercy.
My throat spasms. I cough, and it becomes a dry heave, and my ears are ringing again, and fear is ripping through my stomach. Once you see him, he’s got your scent. That’s what Brian said. Once you see him, he’s coming to eat your heart.
I need to tell my mom that I believe her, that I know why she attacked Joanne, that he tried it on me too.
I need to get up. My limbs feel too light, like they’re not mine anymore.
I flex my toes, just to be sure. They move when I tell them to.
Come on, Ellis, get up. Get up, Ellis. Get up, get up, get up—
In a second. One more heartbeat to see if I can pretend it’s not real. One more. One more. One more. One more. Please.
The linoleum is cool on my cheek. I wrap my arms around my knees, hug them to my torso. The flayed man is gone. He can’t touch me. Just as soon as I get my breathing steady, I’ll get up, I’ll check on my mom. I’ll keep the panic out of my voice, I’ll reassure her, I’ll do whatever it takes.
It’s still there, the smell. Like a meal left out too long on a picnic table, or a cut that’s starting to get infected.
A dark, sticky, stinking pool oozes into the cracks in the kitchen tile.
Blood that seeped from the flayed man’s withered limbs while he stood.
Just like the blood that was left behind in Uncle Bill’s house after he disappeared.
Terror propels me upright. My damaged wrists scream in protest, but it doesn’t matter.
I burst through the door of my mom’s bedroom, and I’m hit with the scent of carrion.
A vicious crimson stain spreads across the comforter, drowning the delicate pink flowers.
A knot of segmented worms gleams pale and sickly on the pillow.
In the center, where the blood pools thick and sticky, is an indent in the shape of a person.
My mom is gone.