Vanishing Act ✔️

10

All control was gone. Sean looked this thing in the eyes, held his glass up high and toasted it.

"To My Secret, to Our Secret, to our dear Miss Carrie Anne Garrett."

To all on the outside, this was a simple toast, one that took mere moments and was even cordial, an amicable toast between old friends. Yet even as Sean raised his tumbler to his lips, his insides loosed and a warm stream of urine coated his thighs, wetting his jeans. All the while that gaze in this thing's eyes continued on and on for what seemed to him to be his entire lifetime and that of his father and his mother and their fathers and mothers and on back down to the evolution of the first man and woman, and then on back further until life was nothing but a slug crawling from the primordial ooze.

"There now, Sean," the thing spoke after this instant eternity, "isn't that better."

"Yes," Sean said; only Sean didn't say it. The voice was his, the throat from which it sprang his again, but that word was not his. That word belonged to this thing speaking through him and it tasted of rank sewage slipping through his lips. He could feel his stomach tighten and the vomit and bile rise, but he swallowed back, and this too was an act of the thing before him.

In that moment, Sean knew this is how sister had felt on that stage. He had thrown a tantrum and she had left to see her show, and this thing had smelled her out. It knew her and it knew she was alone the moment she entered that crowd and then it brought her to that stage and it took her and spoke through her and it made her a part of it. She had no control and she tasted that vile god awful surge of sin – and that is what it was – pouring down her throat, drowning her even as she could not lift a single word in protest.

Sean looked to the other patrons – to the waitress slipping a tray of empty glasses over the counter to the bartender, then adjusting her top once more; to the man in the polo, his lustful eyes salivating over the waitress; to the jackass in the jacket half carrying his young companion out the door as she stumbled four sheets to the wind beside him. Sean looked to each of them and knew they saw only two men sharing a toast at the end of the bar.

'Was it the same for Carrie?' he thought. 'Did she look out on that crowd hoping for help? Did she see me climbing up on the back of that bench and did she hear me shouting her name? Did she try to scream back, finding that her voice was no longer her own?'

"It is best you not trouble yourself with the past." The thing smiled at him, and this time he began to see its true self, those long teeth, longer, so long, and jagged. They were not sharp like canines, but rough and pointed like stalactites hanging down from a vast endless cavern, a gaping maw ready to swallow him whole.

"You want to leave, now," it said.

"I want to leave, now," it said again, but this time through Sean's throat. Then, the thing-Sean stood, slammed back the rest of his Maker's Mark, and left that bar. Inside, Sean was screaming.

As he stepped outside, the night air hit him, a cold slap in the face and for a moment, he took a step and it was his step. That fresh air had woken him and he had wrested back some semblance of control. That unnatural thing was inside, and he was here under the natural moon and the light of the city. Perhaps this was its warning – a warning to leave it alone.

Sean thought so. He was removed from that thing and he could leave and live out the rest of his life. But first, Sean vomited. He vomited for what must have been a half hour. He heaved and he wretched until there was nothing left and then he started again. He vomited until it ran red – and was that tissue, was that chunks of his throat – and then finally he felt that some minimal fraction of the liquid sin in which that thing had drowned him was gone.