The Creature

"There is a kind of seeing you don't come back from. One moment the world is the size you always believed, and the next you know it was never that small."

Just inside the door the house closed around us, still and dark and holding its breath. The air was thick and too warm and wrong somehow, and it pressed in on me and raised the hair along my arms. What little light was left came grey and useless through the curtains, and the shadows lay heavy in the corners, and the whole weight of what we were doing — two women, uninvited, standing in the dark of a stranger's house — came down on me at once and turned my breathing shallow and fast.

Something rose in my throat, sour and hot, and I swallowed it back. My mind kept showing me things — what might be waiting behind these walls, blood, a struggle, worse — and every picture drove my heart harder. I looked at Sharon. She had gone still just inside the room, all her attention narrowed to the dark ahead, and the same thought kept turning over in me, cold and unwelcome: what did she really know? She had been here already, alone, and had said nothing until she had no choice. Whatever she was still holding back stood in the room with us like a third person I could not see.

"Be careful," I whispered as we crossed the living room, the words out before I had thought them. Every step felt like a violation, as though the house itself knew we should not be there. "We don't know what we might find in here."

"I know," Sharon said, low and level, and there was something screwed down very tight beneath the calm of it. "But if there's any sign our husbands were here, I want to find it."

She pulled up short in the doorway ahead of me, so abruptly that I walked straight into her back. Her body had gone rigid, one hand flat to the frame as though bracing for something only she could feel coming. "What is it?" I breathed.

She lifted her head, listening, or scenting. "Do you smell that?"

I went still and let it reach me, and it did not take long. It came crawling up the back of my throat, thick and sweet and foul — the smell of meat left too long, of something dead and turning. "It smells like… rotten meat," I said, my voice failing on the words. Sharon's eyes were fixed on a door at the far end of the room, and mine followed hers to it, and I understood the smell was pouring out from behind it.

For a moment neither of us moved, the reek and that closed door hanging in the air between us. Then Sharon started towards it, her jaw set, and the sheer resolve of her — walking towards a stench like that rather than away from it — frightened me almost as badly as the smell did. It took everything I had to make my feet follow. Every nerve in me was howling to run for the front door and keep running. Only the thought of Nial, of some answer waiting somewhere in all of this, held me on course behind her.

By the time I caught her up she had her fingers curled round the edge of a sliding door, her knuckles white. She glanced back at me, and it was not fear in her face but a hard, braced readiness. I tried to find the same in myself and could not.

"Ready?" she asked, low and even.

I nodded, though my hands were shaking badly enough to make a lie of it. "Do it," I whispered.

She dragged the door back. The rollers shrieked along the track, deafening in the silence, and as the gap opened the smell rolled out over us so thick it stung my eyes and buckled my stomach. Behind the door was a small landing, and beyond it a narrow staircase dropping down into the dark, walled tight on both sides. The last grey light died a few steps down. Below that there was only black, and the smell came breathing up out of it.

We went down. The carpet ate our footsteps but the stairs groaned anyway, one by one, and the walls ran so close I could have pressed a palm flat to each. With every step the light behind us thinned and the stench thickened, until it coated my tongue and the back of my throat and I was breathing it in like water.

At the bottom stood another door, white-painted, ordinary as a bathroom door. Sharon went to it slowly, carefully, as though the air itself might shatter, and raised her hand towards the edge of it — and froze. Her head whipped round to me. She pressed a finger to her lips.

"Do you hear that?" she breathed, barely a sound at all.

I held myself still and strained past the pounding of my own blood. The house ticked and settled; wind pushed faintly at some far window — and then, beneath it, something else. A soft, dragging rustle from the other side of the door. Something moving in there.

Sharon's hand closed over the handle. The knob gave a small rattle as she tried it — and out of the room beyond came a sound that turned my blood to water: low, and deep, and rolling, and horribly alive. A growl. No dog ever made a sound with that much chest behind it. Everything in me went cold, and my body tried to back away up the stairs without me.

"We should go," I whispered, shaking, the words half a prayer.

Sharon's jaw tightened. "It's probably just a frightened dog," she said, and did not believe a word of it, and I could hear that she did not. She turned the handle anyway, slow, all her dread in the care she took over it.

The growl came again, louder, nearer, and it was a warning if I had ever heard one in my life. Every part of me was screaming to be gone, and still that stubborn, wretched need to know pinned me where I stood.

The latch clicked, and the door swung inward, and what was in that room took the strength clean out of my legs.

It was enormous. That was the first of it, before my mind could make any sense of the rest — the size of the thing, low and black and taking up the whole far side of the room, hunched down over something on the carpet. A creature. A massive black creature, all heavy shoulder and haunch, its coat drinking what little light there was so that its edges seemed to bleed away into the dark, and it had its head down and buried to the ears in the opened belly of a man, and it was feeding.

The man had been dead for days. It was in the colour of him, in the swollen, straining wrongness of the flesh the thing had not yet got into, in the way the smell of him had filled a whole house above. Under the body the blood had spread and gone dark and tacky, a wide black stain soaked into the carpet, and the creature's muzzle worked and pulled in the wreckage of his stomach with a wet, ripping, unhurried sound.

Then it lifted its head and looked at us.

It did it slowly, without the smallest hurry, the way only a thing that had never once in its life been afraid of anything would move. Its face was slick and black and running red to the eyes with the man's blood, and a length of him hung torn from its jaws and swung there, glistening, and its teeth — I saw its teeth. Its eyes came up and fixed on us and held, and there was nothing behind them. No fear. No hesitation. No question at all. Only two more warm things that had wandered down into its room. Flat, black, empty eyes, and I had never in my life been looked at like that by anything, and every animal part of me understood exactly what the look meant and screamed it at me: dead. You are already dead.

There was a second man. He sat slumped against the wall to one side, chin dropped to his chest, eyes shut, so grey and so utterly still that my mind filed him at once with the first — another dead thing in that dead room. Except that a man opened up the way he was opened — a deep wet gash dragged clean across his middle, his shirt soaked black to the waist with it — had no business still sitting upright. Blood had run from his mouth and crusted at the corner. I took him for a corpse.

The creature made the sound again, low and swelling, coming up out of the deep of its chest — and it was the worst thing I had ever heard, because it was not the warning of an animal that thought we could hurt it. It was ownership. Mine. Whatever had held me frozen shattered then, and I screamed. It ripped up out of me before I could think, raw and huge, filling that small room to the walls.

Sharon's hand cracked across my face. Hard enough to snap my head to the side, hard enough that the sting cut clean through the terror.

The corpse against the wall opened its eyes.

They came open all at once, white and wild in the ruined grey of his face, and locked onto us, and his mouth began to work with no sound behind it at all, shaping one word at us over and over, flinging it at us with the last of whatever he had left: Run. Run. Run.

Sharon was already moving. "Run!" she screamed, the word torn ragged, and both her hands hit me in the back and drove me at the stairs.

My legs would barely hold me. On the second step my foot caught the lip of it and I went down hard, both knees cracking into the treads, pain firing white up through me. Before I could get up Sharon crashed into the back of me, her knee ramming my thigh, and we went down in a tangle against the wall. "Shit!" she spat, hauling at the banister to drag herself upright, and my clumsiness had turned our one chance of escape into a scrabbling mess.

Behind us the room had gone silent, and the silence was far worse than any sound, because it meant the thing had stopped its feeding, and I did not know what that meant except that it was still down there, taking its time. My arms and legs had turned to something slow and useless. I could not make them do what I told them.

Then the door at the bottom slammed shut with a crack like a gunshot, and the shock of it threw me back into my own body. I wrenched round, pain tearing up my spine, and looked down. The wounded man was hard against the shut door now, holding himself up on it, his opened and bloodied face turned up the stairs at us — wild, half begging and half raging. "Get the fuck out of here!" he roared.

The shout hit me like a hand and shoved me into motion. Whatever was down there, the only way clear of it was up, and I went, scrambling up on hands and feet, the pain in my knees drowned out by the one animal need to be gone. Sharon was right at my back, her breath coming in tearing gasps that matched my own.

At the top I looked back, once, because I could not stop myself. He was still down there at the foot of the stairs, folded over and fading, lit grey by the last of the light through the small window beside us, his face a ruin of pain — but he found the breath to shout it one more time. "Go!" The word chased us up the stairwell and put the fear back into my legs.

Sharon's hand clamped round my arm hard enough to bruise and hauled me across the living room, the two of us lurching into each other, every step of it driving at the front door and the dark beyond it.

Then she was past me, her grip gone, all of her shrunk down to that door — and she hit it and wrenched it open and was through without one backward glance, out into the dusk.

"The door!" I shouted after her — wait, don't leave it open, don't leave it a way out — but she did not slow and did not turn, already gone into the dark of the yard, and I skidded to the threshold and grabbed the door and hauled it shut behind me with both hands.

The cold slapped me full in the face. "Sharon, wait up!" I yelled, and flung myself off the porch after her, the wet grass sliding under my shoes and near enough taking me down as I ran for the car.

She threw herself into the driver's seat. The door banged, the engine tore into life, and the taillights flared red.

The thought of being left there — outside that house, alone, with that thing behind a door I had shut — was worse than anything my body had ever known. I drove my legs harder than I knew they would go. "Don't you dare leave me!" The scream came out of me cracked and raw as I closed the last of the gap.

Somewhere off in the dark, sirens started up — the thin climbing wail of police, more than one of them, coming closer. It went through me both ways at once: help was coming, and I could not be here when it came.

I got the passenger door open and hurled myself in and slammed it so hard the whole car rocked on its springs.

For a second — or something much longer, I could not have said — we just sat, the two of us, dragging in ragged breaths, staring at nothing, neither of us able to shape a word. The dark of the cabin held us, and the silence in it was its own live thing. Our two faces hung pale and faint in the windscreen, ghosts looking back in at us.

The sirens climbed higher and closer and snapped us both loose. "Drive!" My voice came out a raw bark. It went into Sharon and she moved — her foot went flat and the car leapt forward, the back tyres spinning on the gravel and kicking up a spray of grit as we tore away.

We flew down the dark road, and seconds later they came the other way — three of them, four, police cars, blue and red strobing through the inside of ours as they screamed past towards the house. They were not coming for us. They had somewhere far worse to be. I watched them shrink in the mirror and could not decide whether I was grateful or about to be sick, because whatever was in that house belonged to them now — and I had left a living man down there in it.

I sagged back into the seat as the last of the adrenaline drained out and left me shaking and hollow. The streetlights dragged past the glass in long smears, and none of it seemed real. My eyes filled and spilled. I knotted my fingers together in my lap and gripped hard to still them and could not, and behind my eyes it played over and over and would not stop — the room, the smell, that head coming up, the blood on it, the dead man's eyes flying open, his mouth making that word.

Neither of us spoke. The silence lay between us thick and total, and I was glad of it, because there were no words in me for what we had just seen, and I did not think there were any in her either.

"Get out."

Sharon's voice sliced the silence clean in half. I had not even felt the car slow, but here we were, stopped at the kerb outside my own house, the engine still running, and she was staring dead ahead through the windscreen and not at me.

"Keep your mouth shut. We were never there," she said. Flat, steady, final — except that right at the edge of the words something was coming loose, and I understood, dimly, through the fog of my own shock, that she was holding herself together by sheer force and had chosen this, the coldness, as the only way she had to do it.

I sat frozen, unable to make myself move, my mind still down in that dark room. I turned to her and opened my mouth and nothing came out — no argument, no question, nothing at all.

"Get the fuck out!" she screamed, and the raw force of it jolted through me. Her hands were locked round the wheel, the knuckles bloodless, and even from where I sat I could see them shaking. Whatever she was in that moment, she was hanging on to it by a thread.

I fumbled the door open — my hands would not work it cleanly, as though I had forgotten how — and half fell out onto the footpath, my legs turning to nothing under me so that I nearly went down over the kerb.

I had barely got my feet under me before she leaned across the seat and dragged the door shut behind me, hard enough that the slam rang out down the whole silent length of the street.

I stood in the hard white of the streetlight and watched her pull away from the kerb far too fast and go, the red of her taillights shrinking down the road until they were nothing.

The engine faded and left me with the buzz of the streetlight and the small ordinary night-sounds of my own street. I was shaking from head to foot. I wrapped my arms around myself, cold to the marrow, and could not have told anyone whether it was the night doing it or the thing that had got into me back in that house and had no intention of leaving.