Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Ishould have known what was happening because I was hot—too hot.
Middle-of-the-summer, high-noon hot. Even though the fans were on and the windows wide open, I could hear the blast of the whirling metal laboring in the humid air.
But I flung off the sheets and fell onto the floor, streaming with sweat.
The nightmare had been real, immediate, and so in my face that I scrabbled across the floor like some sort of crab creature, yanking open the door so I could spill into the hallway.
It was about thirty degrees cooler in the corridor.
I sagged against the wall in the darkness, feeling like I’d been hit by a bus. Everything everywhere hurt, my skin scraped raw, my joints overstretched. And there was a strange smell I couldn’t quite identify, but was all around me.
The entire rest of the house was stone silent. There was no sound from the neighbors, no sirens blaring outside, nothing that would have woken me up other than—
A shrill tweeting noise sounded from back inside my room, and I lurched around, staring wildly, trying to make sense of it.
My phone. It was my phone.
Mordechai. I thought the name before I remembered that it wouldn’t be Rabbi Mordechai, couldn’t be him.
Ever again. A wave of loneliness so intense it bordered on nausea swept over me as I crept back into my room, flipping on the light.
The phone lay on the tan carpet, and the walls smelled like fresh paint.
No, not paint, I realized, finally recognizing the difference. It was the smell of markers. Sharpie markers.
I blinked and stared, bleary-eyed, but there was nothing on the walls.
My phone chirped again.
I reached out and that’s when I saw my arm, really saw it, my arm and my T-shirt, my shorts and—
Oh, shit. I lunged forward and hauled the phone up, then race-crawled out of the room again, barely stopping myself before I crashed into the wall.
Scrabbling around, I flipped on the hallway light.
I cast a long glance down the corridor and saw the first Sharpie, lying on the ground with its cap next to it, like an errant child let out to play.
My phone sounded and I swiped it on, hitting the message app.
It’s started again. Max’s text read. What should I do? The horses are the worst.
Beneath his words sat three rounded squares, arrows in their centers. Video clips. The first showed an empty field. The second had caught an image of Max’s mother, Judith. The third showed Sam.
I frowned at the screen, reread Max’s text. There were no more horses on the Graham estate.
Sitting alone in the middle of my house at three in the morning with my body covered in the ink of what looked like a thousand Sharpie markers, I figured I could handle an empty field. I clicked the square open.
Then froze at the sound of terrified horses screaming in the darkness.
I stabbed the video off, then turned my sound way down for good measure. No. Way. No way that was actually happening, ghost horses screaming behind a demon-infested house. That couldn’t be real. I struggled to my feet, my hands shaking as I tried to walk to the bathroom and type at the same time.
Are you okay?? I texted Max. No way was I clicking on the other two videos.
There was no response. Of course there was no response. The house had probably eaten him.
I flopped into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.
And froze.
A stark, slashing command marked my face. My forehead. Perfectly executed in block letters backwards, so it reflected correctly in the mirror. GO BACK.
But that wasn’t all. My entire body was covered in Sharpie ink.
Pungent fumes clung to me like a second skin, acrid and sweet, making me gag even as my brain scrambled to understand what had happened to me.
The refrain of disgusting words that usually adorned my walls was only the start of it.
Slut, Whore, Failure, Loser, Freak, Beast stretched down my neck, spilling over my arms, so familiar as to almost be reassuring—except for the fact that these were on my own skin, my own body…
I stepped back, seeing more, and my heart lurched sideways in horror, then started beating at a frantic pace. As the scrawled words reached my breasts, my hips, they became different.
Horribly different.
Now you are a broken seal: A scarlet stain upon the earth ran along the curve of one breast. o! that I could play with you myself little sparrow curled in a wide circle around my hip. Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be…dove deep over one thigh, aiming for—
“What the fuck!” I hissed, vaguely recognizing the words as something real— something written by poets or scribes or whatever the hell a million years ago.
People who knew what they were doing. But these overwrought outpourings of a bunch of emo dead people had no business on my skin, etched like infernal brands.
I lifted my arms to find more text nestled in my armpit. The firefly wakens. And down my ribcage, in shakier script …in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
My face burned as I stared at the snaking curves, the sinuous lines.
The words scrawled over my too-white skin were beautiful.
Disturbing and invasive and completely violating, but beautiful.
And that made it so much worse. I didn’t want to feel anything but rage, but instead my belly twisted with an emotion I couldn’t name.
Something dark, but also gorgeous. Something—
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I whispered.
Even as I said it, I felt a flutter of something in my chest—not quite an answer, more like a held breath. Anticipation. Need.
Then outrage flashed again. This emotion, at last, felt right; purely, finally, unmistakably me. Boiling rage blasted up my spine like a holy fire, clearing everything in its path. Fury knotted up my guts and radiated outward, pulsing blasts of heat and ice.
For one brief shining moment, I was vengeance and retribution wrapped up in a barbed wire ball of get-the-fuck-gone and I was here to stay.
Me, not the creature inside me.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror as the moment bled away, my brows climbing so high on my forehead that my GO BACK order looked like a squashed marshmallow.
The words on my face and neck stayed flat and stark—but on my torso and legs?
They shimmered and jumped, scrambling a little on my skin before settling down again, and they looked different now, shinier…
almost pretty despite the desecration they represented.
I couldn’t help it. My mouth quirked a little to the side, and a soft, breathy chuckle escaped me. “You didn’t plan on writing that stuff, did you?” I whispered aloud.
There was no response.
I stepped back from the mirror and squinted down at my legs, grimacing in confusion as the shit covering me switched again—this time to something darker, more desperate.
Down the length of my legs to my feet, the writing diverged into languages I couldn’t decipher, but I could tell that I didn’t want to know what these words and symbols meant.
They practically pulsed with a wild darkness that, like the words on my torso, seemed like they’d been poured out in some kind of fugue.
I grimaced. How many markers had I gone through? Everywhere I could reach, I was covered in ink.
Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I could feel the pain, too, a dull throbbing ache that seemed to blossom up from the seat of my spine. I strained to see my back and winced. Ouch. With a sick knot of dread in my stomach, I kept going, curving just enough to see what I’d done.
Black and red bruises snaked down my back, the skin on my right hip half-scraped away. Apparently whatever skin I couldn’t easily reach I’d tried to sand off my body out of spite. Jesus Christ.
Steve better have left some bourbon in the house. Because this shower was going to sting like a bitch.
I glanced into the mirror again, glaring at the desecration of my forehead, my neck.
“Fuck you,” I said to my reflection.
But this time, the thing inside me was ready. A long, slow laugh rolled through my body, spinning through my veins. Don’t tempt me.
Furious, I wheeled away and stabbed the water on.
The shower did hurt like a bitch. I was beyond grateful that I could get the ink off my neck pretty well, but my arms had only gotten down to a faded gray, and my forehead was still a mess before I gave up in the early hours of the morning.
Max had texted back only once, that things had quieted down, and it was all I could do not to tell him to never contact me again.
It was Wednesday morning, and Steve would need his car eventually, no matter where he’d crashed.
The fact that he hadn’t texted me already was a miracle.
The bruising on my arms and back had blossomed into teeth-rattling pain, but I still focused on the house long enough to clean my bedroom and the bathroom, then move down into the living room, gathering up Sharpies as I went.
Then I went into the kitchen and saw them.
Every knife in the drawer was now sitting on the counter, lined up perfectly, an arsenal of home-based weaponry. A message? It had to be a message.
And the voice inside me, the messenger?
Definitely. Not. Me.
Not an alt, not a split personality, not even an imaginary friend gone terribly wrong.
No.
I had a demon inside me. A straight-up, horn-headed, swishy-tailed demon.
Forget the tortured fallen angel portrait I’d painted on my wall this last time or seen in the mirror at Mrs. Klein’s house.
Forget the crudely gross bulbous monsters I’d drawn countless times before that.
Mordechai had told me that first a demon would try to intimidate, then manipulate, and that was exactly what was happening here.
“Try all the games you want, asshole. I know how to evict you,” I muttered aloud to the kitchen knives, then to the appliances, the countertops—anything that would listen. “All I need to do is see you.”
The demon inside me didn’t respond.
Slowly, methodically, I replaced the Sharpies in their basket in the living room. Then I continued trying to clean the ink off my face and hands. Unfortunately, the ink was a lot more tenacious than it should have been. Especially on my forehead.
In the end, I had to admit defeat. I had things I needed to do. Places to go. Important places where normal people worked and breathed, and I couldn’t be walking around looking like the Illustrated Man.
I caved at about 6:30 a.m. and dug through all my shit until I found the card. Then I texted pharmaceutical queen Claire Bickwell.
This is Delia, and I’ve got kind of a weird problem. For reasons I don’t want to explain, I have Sharpie ink on my hands and forehead that is fading with soap, but not coming all the way off. Any suggestions?
To her credit, there was only about a 5.7-second delay before the response pinged back on my screen. Do you live close? Can you come to the store?
I sighed, staring down at the phone. Why couldn’t anything be easy?
Sure! I typed with a cheer I totally didn’t feel. I’ll be right there.