The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

18 | Monster in the Mirror

Casper lay in bed staring at the mirror, and the creature in the mirror stared back at him.

Maybe it looked like him, behind the shadows that slurped up its features into an impenetrable veil, but right now, it was a thing of the dark. All he could see of its face was a long grey tongue and teeth that made black hooks in its vacuous jaw.

All caught, glistening, in the thin slice of moonlight.

Shadows obscured it, swallowing detail into the frightening mystery of the dark, but its shape scooped blackness out of the night. Its limbs flailed. Mad, twitching spasms that jerked through the air, the wings of a fly half-crushed by the swatter. Buzzing, it swarmed in circles on the floor. Its shape rippled with each movement as if it jerked around the shattered mush inside it.

Each time it moved, Casper flinched, his body a quivering, shackled mess hiding with the covers up to his chin, but he couldn't take his eyes off it. That thing.

Wasted, its skin clung to bone the way chicken skin does when you've scraped out all the meat and left it out to rot. Each glimpse illuminated by the moonlight oozed putrid yellow pus across bloated, green-black skin that at once swelled with the gases of decay and crumpled against its rickety bones.

Broken bones. What kind of creature twisted like that? It hunkered there amongst a nest of sheets with its arms twisted behind its back and its ribs knives jutting from its skin. Its spine twisted to a serpentine contortion and it slithered through the length of it each time the creature coughed. A horrid, retching sound that splattered grey bile across the sheets.

When it didn't cough, it hooted, low and chilling beneath its breath.

Casper couldn't move. Fear lay a weight on his chest that crushed his ribs into his lungs and forced the blood of their haemorrhaging choking up his throat. He couldn't breathe, but he still fucking breathed too loud, wheezing sobs pushing past his lips, too loud, too loud. That thing could hear him. His toes kept twitching and he couldn't keep them still.

Could it get through the mirror?

It can't. You know it can't. It's stuck there. It's just a dream.

The creature shrieked and lurched forward in the bed. Casper scrambled up the bed, hands pressed to his mouth. All the dark corners of the room hung so close, physical things slurping at him, and the gurgling beasts within tugged open the portal for the creature in the mirror.

The tongue slathered over its lips and its chin and its hollow, rotten throat while its spastic limbs flailed.

I will consume you. Its voice was the grate of metal against bone, wet with the oozing badness of rot. This is all you are.

The headboard pressed like ice against the back of his neck and Casper shook. Was it watching him behind the gluttonous shadows? Or did a burnt slather of uninterrupted scar lay across the space where all its features should be? Blind and still as the room around him. Comatose darkness but for the squirming of things hidden behind the veil.

Thin, white worms underneath its skin.

Go away. Why can't it just go away?

Back when he was a little kid, he'd squeeze his eyes closed and pray the monsters left. If I can't see it, it can't hurt me. It can't hurt me. Don't let it hurt me. But he knew better now. It was when you faltered in your vigilance, let your eyes flutter closed to the relief of darkness. In that moment of weakness, the monsters struck.

Sometimes they struck even when you did everything right anyway, but if you watched so long your eyes ached, the sleeplessness suffocated you, and every good thing faded to ash, then at least you tried. At least you fucking tried, and it wasn't all your useless, shitty fault.