Snared

16

Lindsay watched Jack step away from the closet. He closed the front door and threw the locks, fixing the chain with a decisive clack. Then he stomped across the room, waving his hand at Doug Richter.

“Give me the brand,” Jack said. “And shoot him again. He’s playing possum.”

“Now why would you go and tattle like that?” Mark asked from his place on the floor.

Startled, Lindsay leaped. Mark couldn’t be alive. The shotgun blast had hit him in the middle of the back—a back flayed of its skin, ripped away by Mark’s own hands.

She shivered and retreated to the wall. She could still see the whole room. She saw Jack catch the metallic talisman in his hand, saw Doug snatching at the floor for his shotgun. And she saw Mark. Mark who should be dead. Mark who wasn’t human.

He rolled over, pressed himself against the wall, and in a flash was on his feet. A moment later, moving too quickly for Lindsay to track, he stood in front of the window. The smile was gone from Mark’s face. Fury bent his mouth and weighed his brow.

“Welcome to the pain,” he said.

Suddenly the air was alive with movement. Lindsay squinted, trying to understand exactly what she was seeing, but it made no sense. It looked like the film of dust that covered the floor was rising like smoke to fill the room. The thin gray clouds began to tighten and grow dense, forming dozens of long, twisting ropes. As Doug Richter lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, one of the strands of dust whipped out and lashed his face and forearm.

He cried out and dropped the gun just as a second coil struck his neck with a fierce snapping sound. Jack ran across the room, holding the disk he’d called the brand in front of him. A strip of flesh from the gory mound in the corner snaked out and coiled around his ankle, sending him crashing to the hard stone floor. He rolled over, tried to get to his feet, but three more strips of bloody skin shot forward, wrapped around his ankles and wrists, pulled him into a spread eagle, and dragged him high into the air. The brand fell from his hand and clacked on the marble floor.

Doug struggled with the coil at his throat, digging his fingers into his own skin to get under the constricting noose. A rope of twisting dust formed above his head like a slender tornado and dipped down to join the end of the noose. Once the two coils touched, they fused together, and Doug was jerked toward the ceiling.

Both men hung in the air like marionettes. Their bodies dipped and swung as they struggled, but they could not break free of Mark’s bonds.

“Stop it!” Lindsay screamed from her place in the closet. “Mark, you have to stop this.”

He swung his head toward her furiously, like a starving wolf catching her scent. “You think you can tell me what to do? You think you command me? I’ve owned you and controlled you since the moment I saw you.”

“No,” Lindsay said, but her throat was as dry as the dust.

“You were so easy to manipulate,” Mark said. “So desperate to be necessary.”

Lindsay’s fear and misery hardened behind her ribs, turned to anger. She stepped forward, but Jack shouted “Don’t.”

Mark looked into the air at Jack’s bound form.

“He’s trying to lure you out from behind the icons. He can’t hurt you if you stay behind them.”

“That’s not true,” Mark said. “Not true at all.”

He stomped toward the closet, his blue eyes fixed on Lindsay. With a flourish he waved his left arm. Above him, the strips of skin holding Jack rippled. Then they whipped out, sending the burly man through the window. He screamed as the glass shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, and Jack disappeared into the darkness.

“Night Jack,” Mark said, walking faster across the floor. “Night Dougy.”

With another flourish, this time of his right arm, a dozen dirt devils spun across the room. When they reached Doug, they wrapped themselves around his kicking body like pythons. He dropped to the floor with a hard crack.

“Just the two of us,” Mark said, reaching the closet door. He glared at her, his eyes like blue flames. “Just the way you wanted.”

Lindsay hugged the back wall of the closet. “You son of a bitch.”

“More accurate than you know,” Mark said. “Now, about that pain?”

“Get away from me!” Lindsay cried.

“Or…,” he said, taking a step back. He threw his arms out, again in that pose of surrender. The tinkle of glass filled the room behind him. Something glimmered in the air over his shoulder, like a firefly. Then it seemed the air was full of fireflies, with lights flashing and fading. Only the swarm she witnessed was not living; it was made from the shards of glass. Like the dust, they defied gravity, moving like twinkling ghosts.

“Oh no,” Lindsay whimpered.

“Those don’t look terribly stable,” Mark said, pointing at the low corners of the door. Lindsay looked down at the icons, their imperfect placement. “Little Jacky wasn’t being very careful. I’ll bet the glass will find a way in. All it takes is a tiny break in the veil, like when Jack fell over the threshold of my room. Such a minor thing. The glass will slip in, and then it will start its work. The shards will spin and cut and gouge. You’ll feel like you fell into a food processor.

“Or, you can just come on out now, and we can do away with the gratuitous violence. I’ll snap your neck. You won’t feel a thing.”

Lindsay couldn’t answer. She searched Mark’s face for any sign of humanity and found none.

“No?” Mark asked. He balled his fists and struck the doorframe with a deafening blow.

Lindsay screamed.

Mark pounded the jamb again. He was trying to knock the icons loose. If even one came free, Lindsay was dead. She knew it. She knelt down and crawled across the closet floor. She reached out to hold the metal corner pieces in place. When her fingers touched the icons, a flare of fire met her fingertips. She yelped in pain and crawled away.

Mark stared in at her. A look of confusion spread across his brow. He took a step back.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Lindsay gazed up. Mark looked scared, though why she didn’t know. The boy next door took another step back.

Jack appeared at Mark’s shoulder. His face was lined with red cuts and his black shirt was torn in a dozen places. The brand rested in his palm. Jack shot out a hand and grasped Mark by the back of the neck.

“Burn,” Jack whispered, and flames exploded across the top of the metal disk. He thrust the brand forward with a punching motion, driving the searing metal into Mark’s cheek.

Mark’s eyes grew wide. His mouth fell open to scream, but no sound escaped. In fact, the only thing Lindsay heard was the crackling of burning skin. Lines like black veins traced over Mark’s face, down his neck, and over his chest. In moments, his arms, his torso, every exposed inch of skin was marred with the black lines, like a ragged mesh.

Jack backed away. He dropped the brand and watched in awe as Mark fell to the floor. The lines blossomed into black flowers of charred skin. Mark’s eyes, once as beautiful as a summer sky, turned white and cold and empty.

“Is he dead?” Lindsay asked. “Really dead this time?”

Jack looked up from Mark’s charred remains. “I think so,” he said, as if confirming a UFO sighting.

“I thought he couldn’t die,” Lindsay said.

Jack had no answer. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking like a fireplug. Slowly he shook his head back and forth. “Is it possible?” he asked.

From the back of the room, Doug Richter moaned. Jack ran to him and knelt down. The man’s entire body was covered in dust. Lindsay couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt, but he wasn’t dead, and she was grateful for that.

“I think it’s over,” Jack said, helping Doug sit up. A shower of dust fell from the tall man. He shook his head and coughed, raising a cloud around himself. “He’s gone.”

“He can’t die,” Doug said, his voice a thin and pained squeak. He wiped the remnants of filth from his face. “You know that. He will always walk among us.”

“But look,” Jack insisted, pointing toward the closet door.

Lindsay stood up. The blackened skeleton, which was all that remained of Mark, did not move. The flesh did not re-form. He was gone. Truly gone. It was time to get away from this place and find her parents, to hug them and tell them how much she loved them.

She stepped forward. Orange light flared, and her skin erupted with pain as if someone had set it on fire. Lindsay yelped and leaped back from the doorway. She searched her blouse and body for the source of the searing ache, but neither fabric nor flesh was scorched.

“You see?” Doug said. “Always among us.”

“Oh no,” Jack said, his face crumbling to an expression of utter despair. “That poor, dear girl.”

“What’s happening?” Lindsay cried. Panic replaced her pain. It sparked throughout her entire system, making her skin tingle and twitch disturbingly. Desperate to be free, she tried again to step over the threshold, and another sheet of burning agony pressed against her body. This time her scream was piercing. She danced anxiously from foot to foot, unable to understand what was happening to her.

“Jack?” she shrieked. “What’s going on?”

And for the second time that night, Lindsay felt something move low in her abdomen, like a worm twisting to make itself comfortable.

Mark?

Always among us.