Chapter 38
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
“It looked like something out of a movie,” Jack told Boris when he arrived back at the hotel just after midnight. “A circle and squiggly lines—”
Through a mouthful of leftover pizza, Boris said, “Did you use the salt?”
“What? No.” In fact, he’d completely forgotten the handful of salt packets Boris thrust at him before he left.
“You were supposed to use the salt!”
“Well, nobody tried to curse me—”
“Salt neutralizes demons,” Boris grumbled, finally swallowing. “It’s not for curses.”
“I know, but—”
“Never mind,” Boris sighed. “You got out alive, and that’s what matters.”
“It is?”
“Yeah! I don’t know if you noticed, but people aren’t surviving this. If you get shot, I dunno, man. It might be curtains for you.” He dragged a finger across his throat, made a cutting noise.
Jack rolled his eyes. “Thanks for the concern, but I think Brenda came back from the dead.”
“Who the fuck is Brenda?”
“Doesn’t matter. She got shot.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Long story. Look, the point is, some people come back, and some don’t.”
“Huh.” Boris made a face of consternation. “That kinda changes things.”
Jack shrugged. Didn’t dare voice his worries—that there could be complications from dying that only came clear after the time loop ended—for fear of giving them legitimacy. If Boris echoed his concerns, that would make them real.
So he just sat silently until Boris said, “Hey, can I use your bed again?”
Thank fuck. A distraction. “Sure. You need me to guard you?”
“Yeah. One night with that lady was enough to last me a lifetime.”
Jack glanced pointedly at the swimsuit magazine on the counter.
“Those ladies would be fine,” Boris said. “This one looked like a corpse.”
Tonight, Jack sat with his back to the headboard. Boris curled into a ball on the other side of the bed. Jack wasn’t exactly sure what his presence was supposed to do except make Boris feel better, but he didn’t question it.
The television blared in the background. Some crime show that Jack was only vaguely interested in played across the screen.
He rubbed his eyes and forced himself to pay attention. This was no Staring Down the Barrel, but the female lead was witty and competent, and he found himself entertained nonetheless.
He woke to the chatter of the television and the sound of water dripping. A distant hiss, like air escaping a tire. A cold breeze left him reaching for the blankets, gravitating toward the warm body beside him. His leg crashed against a muscled back. Not Carla, he realized, raising his gaze slowly.
Boris.
Shit. Jack was meant to be keeping watch.
He sat bolt upright. The frozen air settled into his bones, made ice of his marrow. His breath puffed in clouds before him.
Across the room, a shadow lurched.
Jack shook Boris’s shoulder, never taking his eyes off the figure. For it was a figure that emerged from the darkness, or more accurately, a silhouette: a woman, tall and spindly like a cartoon character, lumbering with the urgency of a sleepy drunk.
“Go away,” he choked. The words tasted like ash in his mouth. When he inhaled, a chill shot all the way down his throat, into his lungs. He coughed, stricken.
Boris didn’t stir. Jack shook him again, desperate now. A groan escaped his mouth, clouded the air like a white flag.
The figure drifted nearer, swaying with each step.
“Jack,” mumbled Boris, voice thin and reedy, like it was forced from him.
“I know, I fucked up,” Jack gasped, fingers clenched in the fabric of Boris’s polo shirt.
“Tell it… go ‘way.”
“Fuck off,” Jack panted, gaze glued to the woman drawing nearer. Every word froze his throat further. He imagined it was crawling with icicles now. The wrong flex of muscle and he’d surely be impaled.
The silhouette only paused, head cocking like a dog’s.
Supposing that he may as well treat her like a dog, Jack repeated, “Fuck off. Go away.”
“Go…” Boris mumbled, the world’s smallest echo.
The figure hesitated, regarding them curiously. Then came a surge of wind that sent the curtains billowing and straining from their rod. A frigid gust shot across the bed, so fast that Jack could barely blink. Didn’t blink, in fact, because it seemed even his eyelids had frozen.
Boris had neglected to mention the cold. Only the dead, staring eye sockets growing ever closer, step by step, until at last the figure stood at the end of the bed, inches from the sole of Jack’s foot.
In the background, the television flickered to static.
“Fuck,” whispered Boris. Jack tightened his grip on his shoulder, the only semblance of reassurance he could offer.
He needed to run. Needed to call for help. But those empty eyes captivated him, and he could not look away.
A strange sense of calm settled over him.
Boris made a sound like a dying animal and Jack thought that maybe he should be worried, that maybe he should look away from the serene depths before him.
But he was so warm, so relaxed, drawn deeper and deeper into that beckoning oblivion, where he could finally fade into nothingness like he’d always secretly wanted to.
No responsibilities. No one to disappoint.
No thoughts to trip over, words to choke on.
Only soothing darkness, pulling him down, down, down into ecstasy—
“Jack!”
—heat at his throat, pain that smoothed into pleasure, hot and dizzying as sex—
“Jack!”
—better than sex—
“JACK FUCKING HAZEL!”
Something brushed against his face. The tickle of a lover’s lips, the first caress of flower petals in spring.
And then came the pain, hot and disorienting. It dragged him straight from ecstasy and back into that frozen, dark room. His cheeks stung, throat burned.
That overwhelming arousal he’d felt only moments ago faded as he glimpsed the figure standing only inches from him, empty-eyed and staring.
Droplets of blood stained its pale lips, dotted the gaunt hollows in its face.
A smile, smug and self-satisfied, too wide to be human, unfurled across lips thin as string.
Jack’s guts twisted into knots. At his side, Boris bellowed something incoherent—a command, a plea for help, a wordless acknowledgment of terror, Jack didn’t know—and swung the floor lamp, missing the figure’s hip by mere inches.
It wobbled, lurched away.
Boris jabbed the lamp like a spear. Glass shattered. The shade connected with solid flesh, crumpled from the force. “Get the fuck outta here!”
Jack slumped against the headboard, heart thundering, head swimming, unable to fight the heaviness in his limbs. His bones had been replaced with lead. His blood had turned to ice. At his throat, his pulse burned hot as a brand.
Beside him, shoulders squared, lamp in hand, Boris lunged and struck the dark, swaying figure. Glass crunched beneath his feet.
Something flew from his hand. Tiny particles arced into a spray of sand, of snow.
No, Jack realized abruptly. Salt.
His eyelids slid shut. He fought to open them again. Needed to see what happened next.
But it was just Boris, a lamp, and a handful of salt against something that had dragged Jack straight out of his own body and into a realm of pleasure that he couldn’t fully comprehend, even now.
What hope did they have? Why watch as his friend (someday, somehow, maybe more) was desiccated in front of him, sliced into ribbons of meat by teeth and claws?
Why watch when he couldn’t even move his lips, let alone lift his head?
There was no winning the fight against his eyelids.
Jack knew this, and still he struggled to keep them open as Boris snarled and growled and yelped, socks sliding against the carpet.
The television flickered, bright light piercing the darkness as Jack peered through his lashes at the scene before him.
Dying was supposed to be peaceful, wasn’t it? That must be why he couldn’t bring himself to shout, to do anything more than watch as Boris tried and failed to defend them.
A hand closed over his ankle and tugged, wet and slippery and warm. Jack slid from the edge of the bed and dropped unceremoniously to the carpet, rough beneath his cheek.
“Shit,” Boris hissed. Another gust of frigid air swept over them.
With a groan, Jack forced his eyes open. A socked foot narrowly sidestepped his outstretched hand.
“C’mon, Jack, c’mon,” Boris said, voice increasingly frantic. He struck again with the lamp, then leapt backwards with a yelp. The cord dragged over Jack’s fingertips, smooth and plasticky.
Then he dropped into blackness.
He woke to pounding at his door.
“Jack!” Boris yelled. A hand thumped against wood.
Jack groaned, rolled to face the clock. 3:47 AM. Not even daylight yet.
His neck ached, a pain so deep that it pierced straight into his throat. His temples throbbed.
He sat up, stumbled toward the door in only his undershirt and boxers. Must’ve had too much to drink, he reasoned. Haven’t sobered up yet.
But he didn’t remember drinking anything. Not with Carla, and certainly not with Boris.
The lock clicked. Before Jack could turn the knob, the door crashed open. A frantic, disheveled Boris barged inside, caught Jack by his shoulders.
“Jesus, Jack! Are you hurt? Look at me. Let me see your neck.” Boris grasped his chin, forced him to turn his head. Dim light flooded in from the hallway.
“I-I don’t think so.” Jack floundered against him and tried to pull away, but Boris’s grip only tightened.
“What does that mean? Here, come on, let’s turn on the light. Fuck, I definitely broke that lamp—”
Light flooded the room. Jack blinked against it. Wished he were back in bed, nursing his terrible hangover. “Why are you here?”
“Just shut up for a second, I need to make sure you’re OK. Fuck, fuck! I thought that fucking thing fucking killed you—”
“What thing?”
“The thing, Jack! The lady! The fucking lady! The fucking time loop reset. I was just here, like, two minutes ago. Don’t you remember?”
“What?” Jack blinked at him, struggling to parse through the fog in his brain. “I-I don’t—”
“It’s fine, OK? You’re fine. I don’t see any marks. You’re already better.” Boris collapsed onto the edge of the bed, elbows to his knees, face buried in his hands.
Hit by a sudden wave of nausea, Jack stumbled to the bathroom and only just made it to the toilet. Vomit splashed into the bowl.
Boris appeared at his side. “You’re OK, you’re OK,” he chanted, hand rubbing circles between Jack’s shoulders.
He heaved again. That hand tensed against him, then resumed its circles.
Fuck. What the fuck had happened? He remembered a dark room, cavernous eyes, the sort of bliss that could only be conjured in a dream, and Boris wielding a lamp like a spear—
Shit. He was supposed to be keeping watch, but he’d fallen asleep and… And then what?
He wiped bile from his lips, sat back on his heels. “Did I die?”
“I—Nah, I don’t think so.”
“I couldn’t move.”
“Yeah, I think that thing—I don’t know what it did. You just froze and it, um, it latched onto your neck so I-I threw some salt at you, and I think that’s what woke you up.”
“You were yelling my name.”
“Yeah. You scared me. Real bad.”
“I fucked up.”
Boris shrugged, leaned over him to jiggle the handle of the toilet until the yellow bile swirled away. “You wanna come hang out with me in the lobby?”
Jack shook his head.
“I’m scared to leave you here, man.”
He couldn’t bear the thought of all those stairs. Was afraid to stray too far from the toilet, his bed. Nausea fluttered in his stomach. “I’ll be fine.”
“We almost died.” Boris dragged his fingers down his face, moaned. “If that loop didn’t reset—”
Jack threw up again.
Boris spent the rest of the night hidden under the blankets, curled around Jack, shaking.
Another time, Jack might’ve relished the contact, the hard press of Boris’s body against his own (finally, finally).
But his head ached and his throat throbbed.
He drifted in and out of sleep, occasionally startling awake, afraid of the shadows despite the yellow lamplight.
The warm body at his back, coupled with a firm embrace and murmured reassurances (“I got you, no one’s gonna hurt you now, alright?
”), was just comforting enough that he could fall into sleep the same way one might fall down a well; quickly and gracelessly.
When daylight finally seeped between the curtains, Boris slipped from beneath the covers, cupped Jack’s face so very gently (and fuck if he didn’t absolutely melt into those hands), looked him in the eye, and ordered him to call the front desk if he needed anything, anything at all.
He returned to the lobby pale-faced and unusually sweaty.
Jack spent rest of the day huddled under a blanket, religiously sipping the water that Boris kept bringing him, nibbling on stale soup crackers pilfered from the kitchen. The television blared.
No one else had disappeared.
Jack felt a strange sort of satisfaction.
Was he the next target? Should he have disappeared, too?
Boris claimed there was blood all over the sheets.
That whatever had happened was messy, dramatic.
That Jack just laid there and bled even after a combination of salt and screaming woke him from whatever trance he’d been in.
If he’d actually died, would he have come back? Or would he be another news report?
At three o’clock, he called Carla.
“I’m not gonna come by today,” he said, voice cracking.
“Why the fuck not?”
“Boris and I, uh, got attacked by that thing last night. The lady he told us about.”
“What the fuck?”
“My head hurts so bad,” he said, nearly sobbing. Even thinking about what had happened last night sent a fresh wave of fear through him, scurrying into his hollows like a horde of rats seeking shelter from some unfathomable horror.
“Are you OK?”
“I think it tried to drink my blood.”
A long pause. “I’m coming over.”
“Hurry?”
“Yeah, baby, I’ll hurry. I’ll see you soon.”