Slim: Book 6

Shifting Vision

Yasu nearly tripped over more books in his hurry to the small hallway. I heard him curse as the first door he opened turned out to be the bathroom, then his call for Lin.

Meanwhile, I stared at the wall of windows. It didn't seem like such a cool idea now to live with an entire side of your home made of glass, though how was I to expect that anything, supernatural or otherwise, would be able to make it to the twenty-fourth story?

And then it was there, as though it had been the whole time and I simply had to turn my head the right way to see it; long arms slithering against the window like the underbellies of slugs, and the great maw pressed up to the glass, all dark red flesh, black gums, and serrated, alien teeth, set within a human torso. It's flesh was a patchwork of black and pale skin, intermingled with hunks of charred flesh.

I recoiled back against Naru, my own scream piercing through my skull, though it couldn't have been very loud since I had so little breath to begin with. At the same moment, Ayako cried out and a soft roar, like a loud sigh, came from the kitchen.

Naru all but caged me into the sofa with his limbs.

"Where?" he asked, and the air pushed out from him in steady waves, brushing over me.

But I couldn't speak. My lungs seemed to have forgotten how to breathe in.

For watching the teeth grinding against the window, I realized they weren't teeth, but the jagged edges of a split open rib cage, somehow half healed into something resembling a mouth. The pair of slitted eyes I had seen before perched above the maw were actually two spots in the charred flesh where the collarbone showed through. A purple-brown stomach and liver licked against the glass like some sick version of a tongue.

And it wanted me. I could feel it, just as I had in my dream, that desperate hunger of a predator.

My lungs snapped back open in a gasp. I tasted smoke.

Ayako was furiously slapping at something with a rag.

"Idiot!" cried Lin. I couldn't see him, my eyes riveted on the malformed thing slobbering on the window, but I heard him tromp into the kitchen and switch on the faucet.

"What are you seeing, Mai?" Naru asked, more firmly.

There was no way to describe it. The way its arms slunk and stuck to the window, stretching as though made of rubber, I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the bones within and how they had changed with the twisted version of healing that had occurred to the torso.

"It wants to eat me," I heard myself squeak.

More slapping of a rag, this time it was wet.

"Lin, it's here."

"Your kitchen is on fire-"

A pop-crack-and a spidery line appeared from one corner of a window to the other. Yasu let out a little cry.

And Lin was back around the sofa between me and the creature, two fingers raised to his mouth. With the majority of its body hiddem from me, I somehow lost sight of its arms, as though I had shifted the wrong way again, and the gray-light coming through the glass filled in around Lin.

Lin whistled. I cringed, my feverish head protesting against the noise. My heart had abandoned beating to fly up somewhere in my throat, humming like a bird.

"It's going to eat me!"

"Mai, Lin kept it out all night. You'll be fine."

"Literally eat me," I insisted, my view blurring and my head spinning. I had ducked my head down and all I could see was the dark leather of Naru's sofa and his sleeve. I couldn't breathe.