The Fissure King

You've heard scratchings. You'll have heard unusual... goings on. Have you ever stayed up too late or woken in the night to feel there's someone... in the room with you?

Janet woke from a deep enveloping sleep with no idea of the time. Without her glasses on she couldn't make out the time on the digital clock but there were no street noises and the light from outside was gone but for the distant glow of orange from the municipal posts.

Her partner, Paulie, stirred beside her and Janet put a hand out to caress the shoulder and take comfort from the solid warmth in the lonely banishment of night. She could not remember if tomorrow was work or leisure, she had no reference of time and she little knew her own age: it was that special half-awake psychology where only the present circumstances are real.

She ran her fingers down the fleshy flank and across the cool back, coming to rest in her favourite spot: that firm crease between bum and leg, a spot that former lovers had failed to be profficient in. Paulie was perfect in most every way and Janet liked to tell her so. But this crease was special and Janet kept to herself quite how much it pleased her, waiting till Paulie's breathing slowed and steadied in the velvet dark for her hand to drift down and just rest there in its magnificence.

She felt a thin line, like a long hair or a chip in bone china, along the length of the fold. Fine enough that it just registered on her sensitive fingertips, like the elusive hidden end of a roll of Sellotape. She pinched gently, trying to fish out the hair but it would not budge. She stroked and dug in lightly with her nail but it would not move. A moment... A moment more... She could not let it lie.

Turning onto her side, Janet used the fingers on one hand to separate bum from leg, her other hand coming in to pluck the intrusion from its resting place. But nothing there. Satisfied, she rolled back to where she'd been lying and resumed her previous position.

There! There again was this hair, this line, this intrusion. It was surely one of Paulie's long fine blonde hairs, beautiful in all situations bar this one. Janet felt her fingers dig quickly in annoyance only for her nail to drive within the hairline, opening till Janet's first two fingers were inside the opening crevasse. More intrigued than anything, Janet felt that the sides were cool and not slick with blood as one might expect. Without thinking too much, she delved a little deeper and found her four fingers up to their entire length within Paulie's leg.

Shocked, she realised that what was happening was not normal, was wrong. She pulled her elbow back but found her fingers clamped as if by subcutaneous calamari deep within the cloven buttock. Paulie stirred but did not waken. Panic growing in Janet, she pulled once more only for the rubber rings around her fingers to pull tighter, causing actual pain now as they seemed to suck on her knuckles and drag her deeper within. She screamed, unable to take this horror on her own. Her call wakened the sleeper whose head turned around to reveal glossy black baubles for eyes and rows of sharp teeth, black and knuckled like bamboo in the vague light from the distant street.

"Paulie!"

But there was no Paulie. Only the Beast. The Beast which turned a little more towards Janet as now her wrist was gripped tight where it entered the dead flesh beneath their shared covers and the inner mouths began to feed on her ensnared fingers within.

Crying now and punching with her free hand, Janet tried looking anywhere but at those gloating eyes, those slick tines. Her sobs and shouts filled her mind as much as the agony of her fingers as they were consumed. The Beast was fixed like a mountain to the bed and Janet would get nowhere while her wrist was still attached. An arm was growing at the other side of this monster, made of twigs and soil and night it rose up like a shadow high above their struggle; a spider coming to drink of her soul.

Bangs on the door, a struggle, a bump, a shudder as a force was applied. Paulie, the real Paulie, was there and she was coming to fight the daemon. The door flew wide and Janet's yell of relief turned at once to a whimper of fear. For it was not Paulie on the other side, but Janet herself standing there in the doorway: that night three years ago when she had come home so happy from that first date. So content with a certainty that the world had come full circle and felt right for the first time in her life. That evening she had kissed Paulie goodnight at the garden gate, by the streetlight, and floated upstairs to her bedroom to smile, to laugh and to rest for the future, their future, was just around the corner.

She recalled how she had sensed a smudge in the tangled bed, some shadow in the sheets, so carelessly left awry from a hurried departure earlier on that day. But three years ago, that is all it had been, a smudge or a shadow so fleeting and then gone.

Now, she looked back at her younger self and realised she was that shadow. And this Beast, this Hellhound, whether it had been inside Paulie all this time or not she could neither tell nor know. A love she had chanced upon that evening so long before, that had felt so natural and right, so exciting, so comforting, so all consuming was now consuming her.

She closed her eyes as the spider hand descended and the razor teeth parted for a kiss. She would never see Paulie again.