Phrog Spirits #4
The spirit was glad it had kept the axe all this time.
There was no way the man would have fit into the space between the walls with his arms still attached.
He also would have put up much more of a fight.
And the only alternative path was up the stairs, making its presence known once more.
One time too many, that would have been.
Ghosts can’t appear too many times without drawing unwanted attention.
It would go back for the arms later, it decided, so it had set them in a corner and covered them with dirt.
There was good meat on them. With his arms hacked off, the man had lost consciousness, allowing the ghost to pull him up.
It had taken nearly all of its strength, but they finally made it, and the spirit had…
lost form for a moment or two. It needed to eat, badly.
Or it would lose the ability to interact with the physical world, it feared.
Shaking its head to bring focus, the ghost rose and hovered over the man’s legs. He was wearing shorts, and the ghost decided to start by consuming one of his largest muscles first.
The ghost that was once a boy named Steven hunched down, grabbed the man’s right ankle, lifted the leg to its ghost mouth, and bit down fiercely.
***
When she emerged into the attic, Remy couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
More blood, a trail… no… a river of blood (Dad’s blood) led from the hole in the floor just next to her head to the far wall, where she could make out two dark shapes.
Her eyes continued adjusting to the lack of light and she confirmed Dad’s face as he screamed again.
Something about his body looked… off, though.
The second figure was stooping over him, holding one of his legs.
“Hey!” she shouted, hoping to startle the wall-lurking bastard long enough to either give Dad a chance to fight back or herself time to find a weapon or think up a plan of action. None of those happened, though.
The other person dropped Dad’s leg and turned toward her and charged.
Remy vaulted herself up by the arms and stood, the top of her head nearly making contact with the low beams of the ceiling.
As they neared, she saw it was a boy, older than her but not by more than a few years.
He was filthy and looked feral, a bit like a caveman with his tattered clothes and grime-streaked face.
His eyes were dark and sunken, like pebbles pushed into soil.
His movements were frantic, animalistic.
Blood coated his chin, smeared on his cheeks.
More blood ran down his arms in red lines, dripped from his fingers, and he reached for her throat.
Remy ducked, barely evading him, and he snarled and growled.
She dove across the room, landing close enough to Dad that she could tell he had passed out now.
And close enough to see what she couldn’t quite discern about him at first. What was wrong with him.
His arms… were… gone. Completely. Both of them had been severed.
His shoulders now ended in stumps, one with a sharp edge of bone protruding, a shard of white in a sea of crimson gore.
Blood was running freely from the wounds, dark and viscous and far too copious.
He was going to bleed to death in a few minutes, she feared. Or less.
Remy tried to look away, but her eyes only made it as far as his left calf muscle, where she saw a rough circle of divots like a shark bite. More blood leaked from a half dozen of the deepest punctures.
“Oh… oh my god,” she said.
The feral boy was coming at her again, still snarling like a rabid dog. Moving slowly, as if he wasn’t sure what to do either, but he was only a few feet away.
“Must… feed,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Losing… strength.”
Remy fought to process any thoughts, to focus and do something.
Anything, besides stare. Dad was still breathing, but barely.
Should she try to revive him? She doubted he’d be much use to fight off the psycho living in their walls, but maybe he could move, could manage to walk or even crawl long enough for them to get away. But how? Pain could do it.
No, she thought. I can’t do that. I can’t hurt him any more.
Instead, she needed to fight. She tensed her legs and waited until the boy got a little closer, then sprang toward him, hoping to catch him off balance and knock him down.
They landed together in a rough heap, each thrashing against the other’s force, her trying to pin him as he tried to do the same to her.
Remy, locked in a death grip with this masochistic nonhuman freak inside their house (not their house, it must have been his), felt like she was wrestling an alligator, desperate for an advantage, so she raked her fingernails across his forehead, and the sight of more blood…
so much blood… his and Dad’s… puddled in the basement…
trailed across the floorboards… splashed along the walls…
pouring from vicious wounds all over her father’s body… it was too much.
Too much blood. She couldn’t handle it anymore.
She screamed now, louder than Dad. More feral than the boy. A sound that filled the whole of the house, the spaces between the walls, cascaded from all the misplaced vents and rattled the crooked bones of this awful place. Everything turned red, like the blood.
Remy lost herself in the cascade of red.
Then she tasted blood, as she bit down on the boy’s throat and ripped free a hunk of flesh. Spat it onto the floor beside them.
Everyone in the attic fell still.
A few minutes later, only Remy was breathing.
The End