Putting a finger to my left nostril, I let loose a stallion’s snort to sharply escort the stench of ash out of my brain. Its momentary absence left no buffer to enter the realm of sleep before it came again, persistent as the clingy perfume of a prostitute. Another night and no relief. I didn’t need to ponder the source of the smell. I knew it was pouring from every orifice of the Beast that I, in a dire yet impossible attempt, was trying to ignore. The creature loomed beyond the pane across from my bed, gently trickling her claws on the wood. A childhood memory of aspen branches haunting my skylight rose like bile, then faded bitterly.
I pulled a pillow over my head. Fear had long ago removed its mask to reveal agitation. Boredom had long replaced anxiety; the sleepless dark, the smell, the creature confining me to perdition in house arrest. None of it chilled or thrilled me anymore. Time had no government here, fled with its subjects to some other world, far away, yet my patience faltered, slipstreaming with the beat of my heart. Surely by now the Beast had to be as dis-interested as I was of her little game.
It had really only been days since I’d woken in the new world, to discover I couldn’t move one muscle in my body. Not a finger, not an eyelid. I could not even raise my chest in breath without her consent. The power of the creature whittled sensible thought down to a nub. Her very will could slam doors, break dishes, throw the covers off the bed. If she decided I wasn’t going to rest, I wasn’t going to rest. She was an unruly raven, gargling ominously, and prodding her beak at the half-dead rabbit of my normality.
For the second time that night, tucking the pillow back beneath my head and turning to face the glass, I captured her eyes at the window into my home, crippling me. Her pupils, catlike, were shimmering orbs of artichoke and fluorescent maize, flashing in and out of existence, broken only by a transparent and vertical third eyelid that slid into view from time to time. I couldn’t see more than that of her warped body in the dark, but he could feel a predatory smile rove over his own skin.
“Can’t sleep?”
You know I can’t. Thought was the only function she allowed me, and she snagged onto every trailing wisp of it, slurping greedily on my rage, my discomfort, my original panic that had whittled down to agitation.
“What a shame.” Her voice mocked from beyond the pane. It was deep and practiced, but warbled the hair in my ears. English clearly wasn’t her first language, but she didn’t struggle to speak it. So badly I wanted to draw a blind, roll back over and close my own eyes to escape this nightmare for another- but she wouldn’t let me. Instead, I sighed and threw off the comfortable sheets, her will guiding me. My feet were chilled but I approached her, just beyond the window at an eager pace. Were the glass pane not in the way, our noses would have touched.
“Might as well get up anyway.” Her voice echoed through a sudden explosion of light. She’d flicked on the nearby lamp and my pupils popped with stars. I blinked rapidly to chase them off, now beholding the grim appearance I begged to be a nightmare, and had accepted it was, but one I would never wake from. It was somehow more terrifying lit than it was in the pitch.
“Good morning.” She purred, leaning back and flickering her tongue along her teeth, lapping up my discomfort. “You must be-” She took in air as I glowered internally at her. “-so excited the weekend’s over. Back to school!”
I’m not.
I headed for the washroom in practiced routine. The heat in the hallway betwixt the rooms blistered and licked at my pyjamas on the way. When I can’t see her reflected, this realm I am locked in lunges for me like a cat- I hate the relief she brings when the mirror makes it fade away. I know she enjoys that hatred more than all the others. She knows I need her.
As I turned on the faucet for water, I caught myself in her glassy stare once more in the glass. We moved in tandem. My hair was erratic and stuck up all over. Bags and worry lines wrinkled my profile as the bristles of the toothbrush grappled with last night’s meat from my molars. I broke the fierce eye contact with a gargle of minty mouthwash.
Back to my room to prepare for the day, through the charbroiled hallway. I shook from relief as the cool air of my bedroom curled about my face. It only stung when I couldn’t see her, but always that smoky, ash smell persisted. As she sneered, my own lip curled up in reply. My eyes narrowed and drank in her features with renewed hatred and disgust.
Her chest was flat and spattered with freckles and the odd hair. She had papery skin, white as milk but sinewy as a calf that lacked it. A tidy moustache balanced precariously on thin lips and a ginger sprig of hair hung limp both higher above and just below it.. She raised a black comb and I imitated her perfectly, parting on the left. The Beast donned my Monday clothes and I felt a quaking deep in my kidneys as I dressed with her. A white buttoned shirt, circle glasses with large black frames, royal blue tie done up unbearably playfully in a trinity knot and black corduroy slacks.
It was more than an exact doppelgänger of me- it was my own body, forcefully shed and replaced by another. She was a ghastly hermit crab, perpetually slinking from home to home and decided my skin was to her liking. All that was different was her eyes- her pupils bullied the irises out of their way to make them far too black. That and the knot she did up my tie with- She either didn’t know how to tie a full-Windsor knot or did it just to annoy me more.
As she spoke, I felt his own mouth move.
“I can really see myself in you.”
Stop this.
“And why should I?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
The trip to school was agonizing. Transit was a lengthy walk to the railroad and without a consistent reflection, I was a pendulum adrift in tumults of confining darkness. Cobalt and crimson chuffed greedily in this realm of inversion. White, whisker thin outlines sketched what might have been sidewalks in the living plane, but they boiled. The only light was spattered in brief paintings to the world beyond- windows in distant houses or shiny cars that stretched me wide for the briefest seconds and then snapped all my bones back into place. I hopped along in synch with my poached body, through puddles that reversed gravity and threatened to throw my empty stomach out of his mouth.
Solace found me on the train, if only for a few stops. The Beast loomed large in the glass. I pressed my cheek to her, claustrophobic. A wry grin flashed and her filthy tongue slicked the grime off the public window. My torment, always comical, brought up raucous laughter that fogged my view as the stench of her smoggy breath belted my senses. An announcement overhead meant the school was the coming stop. She gathered her bags and bounced for the exit, plunging me back into the incinerating pool of darkness. I saw her for one brief moment more before she was cut off by a missing persons poster taped to the bus stop.
~
The students listened with rapt attention as the Beast’s charismatic voice called out to the classroom. I willed my eyes, trying to see through the smear of the whiteboard as the mastery of the Bard boomed through the room beyond. The Beast was playing the role of Malcolm.
“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it; he died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owed, as ‘t were a careless trifle!”
Traitors, the lot of them, smiles glinting in the fluttering overhead bulbs. She had gifted the other parts out to the class during time I’d allot for silent reading and note taking. A mousy looking brat of thirteen years provided Duncan a voice, and a blonde boy named Carter spoke as MacBeth himself. How dare they soil words so expertly lain in modern reprints, mocking thespians and my classroom law in one fell swoop. The scene halted and analysis on it began from the rippled pupils.
“Mr. Petterwick?”
The beast missed no beat. “Johnny-boy.”
The class stifled a giggle as John swallowed, clearly unsure if he liked being dubbed such. He’d been the studious type that I enjoyed teaching. “What did-” A pause, perhaps to check the name. “-Malcolm mean by that first sentence?”
The Beast mused from my desk and casually picked up the book, fidgeting, weighing it back and forth between her palms.
“Does anyone have thoughts on what Malcolm meant?” A timid hand raised and the creature pointed at it. I fumed. That particular little wretch had never been interested in my class, more inclined to doodling on her desk and wasting everybody’s time. The Beast’s charm seemed to permeate beyond the sallow skin and a heat bubbled under my collar. Stupid children. How could they not smell her?
“I think Malcolm meant that Cawdor did nothing in his life that was as nearly impressive as how he died. Is that right?”
“Very good! Catch!”
Something shiny sailed through the air and I felt seething hatred as one of my prized toffees was hurtled to- Serina’s? Sabrina’s - clutching hands. A reward for such an easy observation? I could feel the Beast smirk and knew it was another of her follies to annoy me.
The bell rang and the class filed out for lunch.
~
I could only smile at the thunderous plunk of the rock, smashing into my jaw and dislocating it. Bits of my cheeks fettered, holding tight to my teeth, while the rest rippled away and ripped to pieces. It hurt as my eyeballs bobbed on the breathless surface of the pond as the Beast’s felid gaze watched from above. I was drowning, unable to breathe yet unable to die. Another pebble soon rolled in her hand contemplatively beyond the edge of the stone precipice, on a balcony that overlooked the water from the outdoor lunch area. My streaming eyes shimmied and danced like flames as they reformed, stretching sinew to grasp my ear, cheek, scalped hair, broken nose. As I felt almost whole again, the severity of the pain lessened and, as if on cue, the next stone dropped and it happened all over again. I pleaded with her, the rot of muck and algae overflowing my senses. She rested her chin on her hand and smirked down, bored.
Why?
I knew why.
Suddenly, the Beast was not alone. A black haired angel stepped up to join her at the railing.
Don’t you dare.
Laverne Rouford, a school councillor, a woman who’d kept time of day as her own but her need to be loved as public as a neon sign. She dressed in a sunny green shirt with a black skirt, white stockings and black buckled shoes. Around her neck was a white ribbon and fastened to her shirt was a sticker promoting safe-spaces in schools. She was as cute and exotic as a unicorn, with a smooth Irish accent and smoother legs. She’d been hired out of desperation halfway through the semester, after the fourth disappearance, to help the students cope with grief. Her deep brown locks and green eyes often crashed ugly thoughts into my brain. She was always heralded by the smell of expensive perfume and the painful pull in my loins. Her breath on my face was a recurring daydream. Her hand rested on the Beast’s shoulder, a look of concern on her face. They spoke at length and though my lips matched his captor’s, I could not hear what buttery words slithered from my stolen mouth. Though, I was almost positive the phrase ‘I suppose I’m not myself lately,’ was turned. Laverne’s fingers plucked like a bow on string, to and fro on skinny arm flesh, gripping it and whispering delectable secrets I would have slaughtered someone to hear myself.
~
As the final bell’s ring still pounded in my ears, I was crammed into the window of the train again. Laverne clung to the Beast’s arm, infatuated. That cruel temptress, who had sneered in contempt at all previous advances, spurned my flowers and idly toppled chocolates into the trash, now hung off the body she’d dejected so many times. She’d always claimed she was wed to her employment, to the children’s benefit, but she’d fallen for this facade like an idiot.
Candles turned to pools in the living room hours later. Wine glasses clinked, pasta was slurped like meat from bone, brittle hands rubbed at warm shoulders before moving south to uncharted territory. I felt a strange déjà vu mixed into my disgust and contempt. As clothing became less and less, I only longed to cast my eyes elsewhere. Streaming briskly, we marched up the burning stairs to my bedroom, realizing my old life was a fuzzing memoir and it was the Beast that Laverne would remember. That the world would remember.
-
“What’s the matter?”
More hours had passed. Laverne was laying in a mess of warm blankets on the bed, exhausted. The Beast loomed close, cigarette breathed, pools of fire glinting through the bedroom mirror. For the moment, I could bring my limbs to obeyed my authority, though I did not register the sensation at first. A dog, after weeks of being on a short rope, may not realize it’s been unchained. A chance at freedom can be smothered by expectation. I sucked air sharply in after a moment of recognizing she was no longer doing it for me. I spent a few blissful moments eagerly stretching out my muscles. And then my tongue which I wasted no time making demands.
“Release me.”
The Rohypnol had dropped into her cup with a splash.
“Say please.”
I’d offered her the water as she sat alone in the library.
“Now!”
I grinned nervously at her, the tablet dissolved. The primal need after rejection by Laverne was too powerful to ignore.
The Beast pouted.
“That’s a mean tone you’ve taken, Mr. Petterwick. What’s wrong? I thought that-” She gestured a thumb to the naked, ebony haired woman passed out on the bed. “-was your biggest fantasy. Didn’t you enjoy the show?”
The book slipped out of her hand. I told her she didn’t look well and helped her hobble to my car, complacent as a kitten.
“Let me out, you vile creature!”
The first kiss. A sensual rub. A promise she’d feel better soon.
She bore down at him. “I thought a pervert like you enjoyed shit like that. But I suppose you’re no voyeur. You’d prefer the hands-on approach.”
The Beast reached down and pulled a shed skin of the missing high school student off the carpeted floor of my bathroom, shaking it out like a wet towel. With a slimy protest, her fist entered an elongated ear hole- the exit wound of her own form- and traipsed up, squelching her fingers into the empty eye sockets and placing a thumb in the hollow between her chin and lower teeth. Another puppet.
“’Just relax, Elise.’ ‘Oh, Mr. Petterwick!’” She chimed in a poor falsetto.
“I said I was sorry!”
“’Mr. Petterwick, I want to go home.” The beast mocked.
“Stop this! I’m sorry!”
“Please, Mr. Petterwick!”
“It was an accident!”
“No, it wasn’t. You knew exactly what you were doing to that girl. And the one before her. And the one before her. You’re only sorry now because you’re getting punished for it.”
A memory flooded my mind. The ripping of flesh, being lifted by my sinuses, shocks of pain through my body. The claws piercing through the sponge of my nose, to my brain and slurping up my very essence like a smoothie. Turning inside out. The world no more than a death rattle as she pushed me through the mirror, into purgatory, a writhing mass of tentacles and claws left behind pulling my skin on like a new suit. The shed body of Elise, what she had been wearing, discarded in a heap on the floor.
I snapped back to reality and felt my eyes wet with tears. The monster I’d become certainly deserved to be punished, but this? This endless burning, ash-soaked realm of pain and torment surrounding me while I was forced to watch another live my life? Be admired by the students? Be successful with the woman of my dreams? Never being driven to do the things I had to do? It was too much. Hell could not be worse than this.
“You’ve punished me enough! Please, just…make it stop.”
“Aww, are you begging for death already? Just pitiful.” She assumed the falsetto voice once more and moved Elise’s jaw, the morbid puppet. “Even I lasted a few months!”
The tears broke and wouldn’t stop.
“You would rather I kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that the only reason? Are you sure it’s not the screams that bounce around in this head of your’s? The last begging croaks of all the missing students you’re responsible for? The ones that choked out for help, for their parents, as you squeezed the life out of them? The guilt of leaving no witnesses to your shame?”
“STOP IT!”
“I bet you never told Laverne of her power over you, did you? How her rejection drove you to madness, rape and murder?”
Salty snail trails paraded on my cheeks and I slammed my fist against the glass. The beast smirked and flung the husk to the floor. She gnashed her teeth in a vicious smile and once again, she took control. My limbs snapped back to her will.
“You don’t want to watch me live your perfect life, right?” She leaned in close.
No.
“Well, I can fix that easily.”
Smoothly, a bony fingertip raised to my tear stained cheek, until it found my eye. The squishy texture protested, yet gave slightly under the force. I wanted to scream, needed to scream. The Beast didn’t let me blink, even as more tears pooled and rained. A bubbling static plucked my skin into gooseflesh, tickled pores and made a xylophone of my spine, and feverish sweat broke out all over my body. A vile squelching noise and blood splattered into the tears.
Laverne lifted her head from the bed at the noise, turning to watch as a slurry of blood and tissue splattered the mirror. Curious and beautiful, she approached. To my surprise, she was watching me in the mirror instead of the Beast. Her pupils were too large, catching light in catlike habitude. Her voice chimed, piano keys, as she walked over, putting her arms lovingly around the Beast.
“Don’t worry.” She spoke to me directly from over the monster’s shoulder. “Our kind really doesn’t need eyes to see.”
The finger began to press on my other eye.