"No Life 'Til Leather"

"Welcome Home (Sanitarium)"

First, came the great deluge.

A mighty rapid washing over every little piece, licking each marble clean, tearing the grand image apart. Like loose bricks, it all toppled under the flood’s grand weight, fell apart like a frame made of sticks. Andy tried to run, yet there was nowhere to turn to. The city - nearly entirely underwater. The red hallway - filled with millions of tears, all of them tearing the redheaded girl’s pictures clean off the walls, throwing them around, letting them float above the surface, unreachable to the boy’s hand. He kept scraping the bottom, staring up at the faint glimmers of light breaking through - unable to swim upwards, unable to reach the end of the hallway and open the door. Somehow, he knew she wouldn’t be there. Not tonight, not ever again. Why would she? Who would ever want to see such a disgusting sight as himself? All wet with blood of the righteous, a dimmed light barely floating above his head. The beams of radiance on his back had long gone dim, disappeared entirely, like Droz’s once did. Something was poking its way through his curls, tearing apart his skin and climbing out, onwards, towards freedom. Vines of primal desire, the violent urge to live, they caressed his brain, entwined themselves gently around and hugged it tight. Images of angels strung up with nooses around their necks plagued his vision, a devil clad in black held his eyes wide open. He tried to scream, to shove the creature away but to no avail. It laughed and laughed, enveloping his very soul in a veil of pure cold - their fingers burned his skin with ice, their frost-white hair covered his gaze. He could see nothing but a face. A laughing, smugly grinning face, a crude mixture of familiar eyes, noses and lips. Cheeks and brows, hair and foreheads, all mushed together into one, crude mockery of a person he once used to know. It laughed and laughed, pushing their fingers deeper into his eyes, tearing their protective layer and popping them open. White substance painted the chamber, mixed with red and gave orange. He fell to his knees and begged for it to stop, but it never did. The vines sprouting from his head kept growing, his spine elongated to monstrous sizes. Despite his pleas, despite his words and cowers, the familiar demon in front would not stop laughing. Laughing and cheering, cheering and laughing. Eager to watch his metamorphosis, to watch him lose what made him Andy.

And he could only whimper. Snuggle up to his own tail and cry. This was his life, now.

This was his new self.

…

One morning, when Andrew Reiff woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed(roll) into a horrible vermin. No, actually, nothing of that sort. He lay on his shattered wings, and if he lifted his head a little, he could see the broken fragments floating lazily by his sides. The bedding (roll) was hardly able to contain the shards, which now seemed to be leading a life of their own, pastured by the boy’s gaze. He was utterly terrified.

“...” Without a word, he stood from the ground. A little heavier than usual, his head tilted to the side, as if pulled down by a foreign weight tugging at both his sides. His stomach grumbled, not from hunger, but from the deep wound still embedded within. “Damn it.” He thought, feeling up the smooth, slippery surface that now broke through the cloud of gray hair and ran all the way around, curling around his head. He knew this would happen, just as it was foretold in the many, many cautionary tales he’s heard. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they said. As if on its own, his tail wafted around the air, tracing circles and cutting through the morning dew with some hints of grace and elegance. When it came into vision, Andy’s face went pale all over.

He sat back down on his bedroll and caught the slippery intruder between his fingers. It fought back, trying its best to cut itself loose and failing miserably. Bending under the sudden jerks and feral movements, the tail had no real idea what it was doing. It wanted to run, yes, but where? Run away, but only as far as its own length let it, as the base still remained bolted down to the boy’s skin, right at the very bottom of his spine. He examined the wriggling worm close, sliding his fingers along the gray-ishly black, glistening surface. It felt weird. Like leather, but not quite. Pleasant, yet disgusting at the same time. And the desperate jerks and motions, like some snake trying to bite the hand holding it’s throat. It made his blood freeze over and complexion turn from white to green. The pain in his chest, the bullet wound, did not exist anymore. It was just a dot of red, completely insignificant in the face of this monstrosity.