It shouldn’t have happened.
Sara wasn’t supposed to be at work the day she was roped into a séance with her kooky colleagues, lulled in with the promise of red wine and tipsy chats with the dead. None of them believed in it, not really, but my wife who had stepped in for a sick colleague shrugged and said sure, because who could say no to alcohol and ghosts?
I can’t remember what I did that night, can’t remember feeling the trepidation which should have plagued me but didn’t. I only remember her coming home, hearing her fumble with her key as it jarred in the lock over and over again. I thought at the time she must be drunk but I realise now she was a stranger to this earth, jamming the key in the lock jaggedly and without any intent. When I eventually watched the ring doorbell footage back, her eyes were black holes of horrifying nothingness burning straight into the camera, an impossibly wide grin splitting her face open. Fourteen seconds she grinned toothily into the lens, right up until the moment I wrenched the door open and burst into view, oblivious.
I didn’t know, though. So I chuckled to myself, yanking the door open and drinking her in. My wife. It was the next morning that I noticed the subtle smear of blood grazing her collarbone, the only evidence of the horrific night which had ensued. But to me, she was just a little off her game, neck held crooked at slightly the wrong angle as she drank me in.
“Bit too much to drink?” I teased, watching as she attempted to walk into the house. Her movements were jerky, planting one leg in front of the other jaggedly as she powered towards me, stopping a mere inch in front of my face. I felt guilty when I recoiled at the stench, because nobody likes to be embarrassed after a night of drinking, but it was enough to force a near retch from my throat. When she silently stumbled past me, I noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes, and the bottom of her feet were cut to ribbons.
“Fuck, Sara,” I’d cried, “Where are your shoes?”
She’d just turned around, so slowly. Unsteadily. Her grin grew wider, endlessly wide, and it was the first time a terrifying sort of discomfort had stabbed at me.
“We don’t wear shoes where I’m from.”
Her voice was gravelly, far too deep. There was a pit in my stomach but I swallowed it down, watching my wife sway with an impossibly wide smile still growing larger on her face, eyes beginning to bulge out of her head. Then, as quickly as it came, the expression dropped from her face and was replaced with utter blankness, eyes empty. It was enough to knock the air from my lungs, goosebumps erupting over my skin.
“Are you alright?” I managed to whisper, but she only tilted her head slightly, a painful crack echoing around the room. She smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes at all, a sight almost as unsettling as the face-splitting grin. It felt like what a person would do if they were learning to smile but they couldn’t quite stop the hatred shining through.
“I’m awake,” she barked, and that was that. She stumbled past me again with such jerky movements that I almost asked her not to take the stairs, but she did, approaching them as oddly as an animal would. She climbed on all fours, taking them too slowly, bones crunching as she did. I was embarrassingly rooted to the spot, trying to justify it in my mind. I must have already known something had gone horribly wrong, but I buried it down. My wife was quirky, a little wild. She hadn’t drunk in a while. It was the wine.
But it wasn’t the wine. Three hours later, when I plucked up the courage to join her in bed, I couldn’t help but feel as though her eyes were locked onto me through the darkness. She was totally still, face pointed at the ceiling, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being stared at. I couldn’t hear her breathing, even though the running joke between us was that her snores could rouse the dead. I lay next to her, just the most overwhelming feeling of pure, undiluted dread running through my body. Run, my senses screamed, but it was illogical. Feeling her next to me had been a source of comfort yesterday, but tonight, it filled me with ice-cold terror. It was as though a stranger was weighing our bed down, and though I was too scared to check, I swore I heard her neck snap as she turned to look at me.
I tried to sleep, I did. But I was awake when I felt her weight shift and those horrible crunches sounded around me, my eyes squeezing closed as the weight of her body pressed onto mine. She clumsily climbed on top of me, on all fours, and I couldn’t bear to look. Her rancid breath tickled my cheek as her nose pressed painfully into my eye. For several moments she didn’t speak and I don’t think I breathed the entire time, frozen in place.
“I’ll chew your face off,” she growled, and I squeezed my eyes harder, a bolt of ice shooting through my body. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t breathe. I simply existed, trying to keep my breathing steady so she’d think I was asleep.
But she stayed there. She stayed on all fours, nose pressed into my eye and panting into my face for hours. All night, maybe. I don’t know, because my fear became so all-consuming that I entered a trance-like state, and when I roused from it, she was gone.
It kept happening.
I found her in the kitchen, blood dripping down her chin as she chewed through the raw chicken she’d merrily bought two days ago, the raw juices dripping onto the clothes she’d slept in. She didn’t acknowledge me when I stared in exhausted horror, just kept crunching through it and swallowing greedily.
When the police came, she was upstairs in the shower, scalding water bursting in horrible rainfall over her hunched frame and sodden clothes. Her skin reddened, but I’m an awful husband because I couldn’t bear to get close enough to pull her from the spray. She splintered her neck at an awful angle, regarding me in the doorway with a bloody, toothy grin.
“You’ll be next” she hissed, water bubbling in her throat as she choked down the liquid. I backed away, leaving her to it. When she came to speak with the police, she was sodden, raw meat and congealed blood jammed under her fingernails.
Bile rose in my throat at the words of the officers, because my wife’s work colleagues had been found this morning. Maura from accounting had her head chewed from her shoulders, fully decapitated and mauled so badly that her father struggled to identify her. Joan-who-always-brings-in-cupcakes had six fingers bitten off, three of them with the flesh torn from the bones. She was found hanging upside-down in the bathroom, wrapped around the light fitting in a way that probably shouldn’t have been biologically possible. The policeman paled as he explained it, but my wife stared straight past him, snapping her head back and forth till the officer’s words died in his throat.
She was going to be arrested, of course, but it took them too long, fear in the room palpable. I was surprised when she let the man’s shaky hands cuff her, but less surprised when she turned so, so slowly towards me, regarding me for so long with such cold, empty eyes that it sent me reeling. Her words were straight from the pits of hell, a voice which was simply not her own bouncing around the room and taking up almost the entire house as though seven people were speaking with her.
“When I’ve torn the flesh from their bones, I’ll come for you,” she uttered darkly, glee lighting up the evil radiating from her eyes, “When I slip from their vision and crawl into the darkness, it’s you I’ll find. I’m going to carve the scriptures of hell into your skin and I’m going to keep you alive while I tear you apart and leave you a mess of bones and flesh. I’m going to chew your face off and I’m going to consume you.”
I believed her.
She was pulled from my vision but I couldn’t breathe, because her words were not a threat, but a promise. I packed my things, and when I got the call, I tried not to succumb to the kind of fear I doubted many people had felt and lived long enough to tell a soul about it.
“You need to leave,” a tortured voice barked on the other end, “She’s gone- we’ve sent officers to your address. But she has a headstart on them. Sir, you need to go. You need to go.”
So I’m leaving. I’m running now, key turning in the ignition, breathing so laboured that I may well need the inhaler I haven’t touched since I was fifteen. I pray it’s my imagination, but I swear I see the bloodied top of a head in my peripheral, watching me giddily from the backseat.