Making Contact

Chapter Nineteen

A sigh of relief came from the bathroom stall as the sound of tinkling echoed in the ladies room. The lights in the room dimmed suddenly and the low rattling of the air vent ceased.

“What the fuck?” Zarah muttered from the stall. The sound of toilet paper rattling from the dispenser as she pulled and tore a few squares was extra loud in the silence. The dimmed lights returned to their normal brightness but then continued to grow brighter, while the rattling from the air vent came back with a vengeance. The loud humming-buzz of the lights and wild grating noise from the vent sent a chill down Zarah’s spine as she quickly wiped and flushed. She cursed again as she pulled up her pants then held her arm over her eyes to block out the blinding light. She struggled with the lock on the stall then stumbled out, her head throbbing in tune to the buzzing overhead. As she stepped up to the sink and turned on the hot water, the lights went out with a pop and the sound of the vent stopped completely again.

Zarah froze with a hand inches away from the water rushing out of the faucet. The bathroom was dark except for the bit of light streaming in from the bottom of the bathroom door. Her head pounded with her heartbeat like the booming sound that precedes the entrance of a monster in a horror film. With that thought in mind Zarah took a shaky step towards the false safety of the few inches of hallway light under the door, when the light furthest into the bathroom crackled and buzzed to life, giving the far wall and floor a soft yellow glow that Zarah could see from the corner of her eye.

“Don't look,” she kept telling herself, the feeling of unease weighing heavily  in the back of her mind. She told herself to get the hell out of there, but her body had a will of its own, and she found herself slowly craning her neck towards the buzzing. She braced herself on the sink counter as a circle of darkness appeared on the wall. Tendrils of black smoke stretched out from it, like creeping tentacles, and wiggled outwards from the wall, spreading their darkness as they grew and stretched across the wall and floor, over, under, and across the bathroom stalls, and above her head.

Zarah took a step back, away from the darkness enveloping everything in its way, but she froze at the wiggling slippery thing that flicked against her ankle, the cold dampness she felt through the slacks and boots. She looked down in slow motion, the thumping of her heart in her head growing louder with every inch of movement. A tentacle of shadow wiggled at her feet, then another, and another. They wound themselves up her legs, and the cold touch of the living smoke made her teeth clatter as much as the primordial fear that assailed her. She wanted to bolt, to jump up out of the dense smoke and run for the door, and through it. If she could, she would run down all thirty-four flights of stairs, out into the street, and down the road, as far as her legs would take her, until her heart burst from the strain, but there was nothing she could do but shiver and whimper in the dark.

Her jaw was taught and wouldn't loosen enough to shout for help or even shriek in fright. She tried to reach down with her hand and fan away at the smoke, but now it was wrapping itself around her waist while other tendrils wiggled around her wrists and up her arms. Zarah’s tears poured out like fountains, rolling down her face, joined by streams of snot as her body quaked. She stared at the source of the darkness, at the swirling ring of black smoke on the wall, as the whirlpool’s diameter widened until it touched the floor. That's when two red dots began to form from within the smoke, like tiny balls of flame that were slowly rising to the surface of the abyss, their red comet tails swirling and rippling as the red orbs came closer to jutting out of the darkness.

Zarah’s urge to turn and run, and her inability to, made her heart beat more frantically as her mind whirled. She felt like someone was starting up a blender in her skull as the rim of a hat poked out of the smoke, then the upturned collar of a blackened coat, and a face that was almost human with deeply set burning red eyes that seared themselves into her retinas. The dark figure grinned as it walked out of the small ring of light toward her. Zarah couldn't pull her eyes from the red that stared into her soul and made her chest feel constricted. It glided to her, smoke trailing off of the figure’s cloak and hat as it came face to face with her.

“Why yes,” the low rumbling voice that sounded like chunks of metal grinding against each other could be felt vibrating within her bones, “I do believe that you will satisfy my thirst, my lovely.”

Zarah screamed, but the sound never left her lips as the figure from the darkness pressed his blood soaked lips to hers.