1. #3
“The god sees all, like Audrey said. Past, present, future.” Dierdre flicked a bored eye to the finally waning line of skins, as if counting down the time to when this would be over and she could go back to whatever it was ridiculously rich people did in their leisure hours.
Counting down to when the skins would go back to the barn, and she wouldn’t have to think about them.
“It only picks people It knows the Ashburys will miss, for some reason or another. One of them will be affected by your loss. And that person will think of this, of what you’ve become, and they’ll hurt. ”
Ash. That hurt would be guilt, would be more for himself than for her, but Claire guessed it counted enough.
“That’s what It wants. Emotion. Pain.” Dierdre shrugged and picked at a fingernail. “Which is why you made such a good candidate, Claire. You kept your pain at such a remove, but it’s still in there.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Claire’s voice was hoarse, a nascent hope turning it ragged. “What if it changed its mind, and it doesn’t want me anymore?”
“It’s run out of time to do that.” Dierdre gestured to the line of skins. “It needs something, and the body It has won’t last much longer. You should hope it works, Claire. Otherwise you end up like them. Divinely touched things don’t die, they just change.”
A divine touch left doorways, like Ash said. So whatever was about to happen to Claire, death wouldn’t be an escape. There was no escape from this unaltered.
The next skin to approach was the woman who’d waited at the dinner table, who’d carried Mike’s remains away from the kitchen.
Lucille, Lucy. She was in bad shape, the skin of one cheek hanging nearly to her collarbone, revealing a half-moon of writhing purple muscle beneath her eye.
The knot of skin on her neck had dropped nearly all the way down to her shoulder.
Claire had disassociated now, utilizing that same skill that had allowed her to function for so long under the weight of impossible grief, staying barely tethered to her body.
But she came down a bit as the woman approached, enough to turn her head to Audrey, remembering how she’d refused to make eye contact with the waitress as her wine was refilled.
Audrey looked at Lucille now, with an expression that wavered between disgust and a wrenching kind of sorrow.
Her lip curled around her cigarette as Lucille leaned forward, the loose, damp skin of her face brushing against Claire’s forehead.
Claire closed her eyes and threw herself back out of her body again, back into the liminal space that kept her sane.
Back to the hollowness that had gotten her here in the first place.
Dierdre was right. All her pain was still here, even though she’d battered it down. The god would have a veritable buffet of emotion to snack on.
Lucille pulled a deep breath into her ruined nostrils. Her pupils blew wide, her hand with its sagging skin reaching up to skitter swollen fingers over Claire’s side, the poorly stitched wound the god had made right over her hip.
“Blessed of the sea,” she murmured, her voice like something crawling up from unknown depths. Her mouth tripped over words, made them too rounded and ran them together. “It wants you and not us. What do you have that we don’t?”
Then she ripped open Claire’s dress, Claire’s stitches, and plunged her hand inside.
Claire bowed up off the table, howling, slammed back into her body by a sledgehammer of agony.
Someone wrenched Lucille’s fingers away, and Claire felt them pull out of her wound, slick and sucking, felt parts of herself in places they should not be. Her shriek turned to a moan, so she could hear the scuffling of shoes on the floor, Lucille being dragged away by other skins.
But she could also hear the sounds of slurping, lolling tongues fighting over the pieces of her body that Lucille had managed to pull out.
She glanced over, just for a split second, and it was enough—Lucille held something ropy, short and segmented and dripping.
She suckled the end of it, holding it high to try to keep as much from the other grappling skins as possible.
It reminded Claire of the hamster kept as her kindergarten class pet, drinking from his upside-down water bottle.
The pain was worse than anything she’d ever felt before.
Claire knew that, intellectually. But she floated far above it, the agony froth on a wave that she could skim down her hand to touch, but only if she wanted to.
The edges of her vision dimmed. Her insides felt like her skin was full of fire.
Her heart slowed down, a metronome in need of winding.
Maybe she could die, then. Die before the god did… whatever It was going to do. It wouldn’t be an escape, she knew that much, but maybe it would make things a little harder for the god. A little easier for her.
“Foul,” Audrey said vehemently, turning away from the skins. “We shouldn’t have let her in here. The Witnessing wouldn’t have missed one skin.”
“She’s your sister,” Dierdre said drily. “Technically, she’s family.”
“Not close enough, apparently.” Audrey lit up another cigarette. “She and Jo were in that same accident, with the boat. Lucy was the natural choice to be her replacement, when Wellsley didn’t want to give It Jo.” She grimaced. “Talk about a shotgun wedding. Patrick wore swim trunks.”
“Oh, right,” Dierdre said, apparently nonplussed by this oblique mention of her husband’s short-lived first marriage, conducted only to make a sacrifice.
“It was because of the accident. Not because you were the sister Wellsley loved least of the three. The only one the god wouldn’t take at all, because it wouldn’t hurt much to lose you. ”
Audrey’s manicured fingers arched like she might slap her sister-in-law. But she didn’t. “Lucy should’ve tried harder,” she said. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Dierdre rolled her eyes. “Sure. That’s how it works.”
Claire observed all of this through a growing haze, her vision feathering out at the edges, her pain growing more intense but also further away.
Distantly, she realized she was screaming, though it was more a moan, too thin to be a real scream.
I’m pretty sure I’m dying, she thought as she watched the skins scrabble over the scrap of her intestine.
Take that, tentacle god. Guess I’ll rot a little faster.
“Sorry, babe,” said Elias.
He stood over her in the same posture the skins had, his hair dripping salt water into her face, the tentacle growing out of his eye questing slowly in the air.
The other eye had changed since she’d seen him in the car; it was rounder, too big for its socket, and glowing a sickly yellow with no white or pupil.
He smiled with too many teeth, all of them finger long and needle sharp.
The pragmatic part of Claire wondered how he could still appear and disappear at will, though she knew it was a question without a real answer. It was Elias’s body, rotting, but it was also a god, and apparently the laws of the known universe didn’t apply.
Claire hoped it hurt.