Chapter 1: The Seamstress

 

The Seamstress

 

I didn’t know which came first, the nightmares or the hallucinations. Both were sudden, inexplicable, undiagnosable, untreatable and a part of me knew, a sign that something terrible was either going to happen to me, or it had already happened. Not that it mattered much which, because it was clear that there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I could feel it in my bones. 

But it came to a head when I met Her, with a capital H and a bow on top. 

I was in between college and jobs, wiling away the time to my next job interview or conversation with my parents about how I didn’t have a job yet. The word ‘job’ had started to evoke a fight-or-flight response in me that took some serious effort suppressing, because nobody likes a sweaty interview candidate, even on a sweltering summer day. My tie was done too tight but I thought it looked professional.

Then there she was. She was waiting at the entrance to the building where I was supposed to go in for an entry-level data-management-and-or-entry-who-the- fuck-even-knows-job. She was lighting up a cigarette, which was something I had always found kind of annoying and macho when men did it and frustratingly attractive when women did it. She swept long, strawberry blonde hair aside, and for a brief moment I recoiled. 

Her face seemed to be burning, from the inside, her skin coiling up on itself as the outer layer swirled and melted. It looked like there was a burning iron under her skin, coiling to get out, boiling the blood in her veins and the fluid in her eyes. The smell of burnt hair and cooking skin was overwhelming. 

But the image that would not leave my vision and would linger in my subconscious for the rest of the day, was the fact that she looked at me, her pupil melting down her cheek. Like a shirt being unraveled, stitches all around her face came undone, like her face had been sown onto her, string burning up.

That peculiar feeling of falling, of there being one more step than you anticipated when going down the stairs and for a moment there isn’t a floor, just an infinite dark hole, a yawning void ready to swallow you whole, gripped my intestines and squeezed.

She was fine. There was no burning. No brand. No heat. She was fine. Just a woman in her mid-twenties, hair down to her exposed midriff, in jean shorts and brown boots. She smiled at me half-heartedly, the way someone who hates children smiles at their friends’ kids, with a dash of uncertainty and lemon juice. “Can I help you?” Smoke billowed out of her mouth with every word. She looked like the guardian of some kind of ancient temple, if ancient temples came with concrete facades and ill-fitting glass doors. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I thought you had… something on your face.” Faint curiosity made way for amusement, and she laughed softly, like I’d just made a joke. “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I have a, uh, an interview here.”

“Oh, you won’t get it,” she said and took another drag from the cigarette. I’d have been offended if she hadn’t sounded so… confident? It hadn’t sounded like an insult, just a statement of fact. She caught my perplexed look. “You don’t want to work here,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Why not?” I asked, not about to let some random woman tell me what I could and couldn’t do. The handle on the glass door, too hot to the touch, rattled as I grabbed it, like the whole building was going to fall apart if I pulled too hard. “And what’s it to you?”

“Not your scene,” she said. There was a moment of hesitation, like she was making a decision, and then blew smoke away from me. “I’m Violet.” She didn’t stick her hand out. I did my best to conjure up a smile, the fish hook in the corner of your mouth kind. I still hadn’t opened the door.

“Quinten,” I said. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I just keep an eye out,” she said. “And you’re not going to get the job, Quinten. I’ve got an eye for this kind of thing. Cigarette?”

“No, thank you,” I said. I pulled the door handle. It gave an inch or two, and then jammed. “I think the building agrees with you.” An attempt at a joke. Break the ice, maybe. She didn’t laugh, just looked at me as smoke flowed out of her mouth like she was vomiting it up. A bead of sweat trickled into my eye, making me blink before she did. 

“What did you see on my face, Quinten?” Violet demanded. I found myself wanting to answer her before even thinking about it. There’s no way I could just tell her what I’d seen. It had been my imagination playing tricks on me. 

“Nothing.” 

“Didn’t look like you saw nothing, Quinten,” she said. She crossed her legs and leaned toward me. I was being scrutinised. I was a thing. I was a butterfly, a needle being slowly driven through my core so I could be put on a cork board and observed. “What did you see?”

“It just… looked like you…”

“Spit it out, big boy,” Violet said. It didn’t feel like a compliment. It took a moment to respond, a moment that buzzed in the air like a mosquito. 

“Like you were hurting,” I said. “Like your skin was coming off.”

Violet finished her cigarette and flicked it away, then stood up. “Go on,” she said. “Go get rejected. I’ll be here.” 

 

She was right. I bombed the interview hard. The three women whose eyes bore into mine asked me every question I didn’t have an answer to, made me look like the most incompetent asshole to ever grace this side of data management. I had never even heard of the programs they required me to work with. By the time the interview was over, I practically escaped. Reaching for the door, I felt their gazes follow me, like claws raking my clothes, my skin, my tie tightening like a noose around my neck. The door closing behind me, I heard them talk, their words indecipherable but audible, like nails scratching on wood. 

When the light didn’t turn on in the hot and humid stairwell, I ran down the stairs, skipping first one, then two, then more and more steps as I heard the scratching behind me, from the ceiling, from the walls. It was my imagination again, of course. 

I’d been having nightmares for days, maybe even weeks, and it had been messing with my ability, no, my desire to sleep. Back in college, I’d read that that could cause auditory hallucinations. But no amount of rationalising was going to help in that moment, I knew. If I didn’t run, whatever made the noise, the scratching right behind my ear, was going to dig its claws into me and tear me to shreds. So I bolted down the stairs and slammed into the double glass doors that reached outside and fell onto the blistering asphalt. 

“That was quick,” Violet said. The sound was gone. The stairwell behind me looked… well, to call it inconspicuous was unfair, there has never been a truly inconspicuous stairwell. But there was no monster, no chasing creature clawing at the glass. I picked myself up and dusted myself off. “Went well, then?” Violet had lit another cigarette. There was a faint smell in the air, like fried pork, quickly overpowered by smoke. 

“You were right,” I said. There were scrapes on my arms. “I, uh, I had a panic attack. In there.” I waved at the doors. “I guess I’ve had a rough couple of days.” I took off the tie and shoved it into my backpack. 

She looked me up and down. “No shit. You live nearby?” I shook my head. I had taken a two hour bus ride across town to come here. Finding work had not been easy. Some of the jobs I was technically qualified for required more years of experience than I had been alive. “Alright, come with me.”

“Excuse me? I like my kidneys where they are, thank you.” 

She rolled her eyes. “I’m getting you a drink, hot stuff. Calm down. It’s not far, it’s in public, and you get to keep most or even all of your organs because we’re going to pickle them until even the girls don’t want them.”

“What girls?” I asked, but she was already leaving, expecting me to follow. She swayed when she walked, like a grocery cart with a squeaky wheel: occasionally, like she sometimes forgot to. I figured there was nothing more for me to do in town today, and if she was buying, I might as well get a drink. 

The bar was, as she promised, by a busy-ish street. Not the kind of place where you went to get your vitals harvested or, potentially, fitted for a collar. I’d seen the kind of things city kids were into. This looked like an ordinary dive bar, with an ordinary wood countertop and ordinary bar stools and an ordinary, ornery bartender cleaning beer glasses. 

It started with my very first ever shot of tequila, which I promptly spat back out, and only got worse from there. There was beer. More shots. At some point a group of college students came in and got hammered. There was a girl dancing on the bar. I had no idea what Jell-O shots were and there was no way I’d remember by morning. At some point, someone’s lips were on mine and the taste of pure alcohol, watermelon lipstick and cigarette ash filled my mouth, a taste that would linger the rest of the night. 

“Why were you out there?” I asked Violet at some point during the night when I was lucid enough to think coherent thoughts. She downed a shot of Tennessee Honey and grinned at me. 

“Nothing better to do,” she said and her face peeled open like a ripe orange, revealing the muscles straining to keep everything together laid on a branded skull. She laughed when I fell off the barstool and helped me back up. Her skull was perfectly skull-shaped. “What’s your deal, big boy?”

My words had trouble finding purchase in my mouth. Alcohol and Adrenalin were a potent cocktail. “Just see things sometimes.”

“What, like visions?” She giggled. I shook my head.

“Just… nightmares. I’m just awake for them. Bugs crawling on the edge of my vision that disappear when I look directly at them. People dying. There was a clown once. He was in the fridge. That sucked.”

She laughed again. “Maybe they’re really there and you’re catching glimpses of the real world.” 

“I’m too drunk for this,” I groaned. “Just hope it ends soon.”

“In a real good place, huh?”

“You fucking know it,” I said and waved the bartender over. He put something liquid in front of me, and it smelled like weed and dishrags. No reason not to assume it was beer. “Not been sleeping great, lately.”

“Kafkaesque dreams?”

“Violet, with all due respect, what the fucque does that mean?” 

She ripped her face off. Except she didn’t. She just made the motion and my imagination did the rest. I squeezed my eyes shut as she laughed. “Dreams about harder, weirder, faster, stronger is what I mean.”

“I don’t think that’s how those lyrics go.”

“Said what I said.”

“Something like that, I guess. But like, night terrors. Like there’s someone in the room with me. Something. But bad.”

She nodded. “Ah,” she said. “Gotcha. And since you’ve been seeing those you’ve been seeing…” she pointed at her own face, at where I’d been seeing the brand appear. “You know… all of that?”

I nodded. “Got worse since I got out of college. Maybe it’s anxiety, having to figure out what I want to do and what I even can do with myself, yknow? Hey did know I woke up crawling across my floor once? I was scratching at the floor.”

“Huh,” Violet said. “Wild. I used to have dreams like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, started like that, too. I’d just broken up with my high school sweetheart aand I was in a shit spot. Like it broke me a bit, you know? But nobody takes you seriously if you tell them you feel like you’re falling apart like a soft-boiled egg.”

“Fuckin-A.”

“So yeah. Bad dreams too. Lasted a couple of weeks.” She shot me a sideways and extremely sneaky glance that I caught despite my inebriation. “Thought I was going to kill myself.”

“Oh? What did you do about it?”

“Do?” She said with another grin. “Hey, Quinten, have you ever done a titty shot?” I shook my head. “Well happy fucking birthday, you’re about to!”

There was no point where I remember deciding to leave. Just a fading, from moment to moment, as if I was unconscious on my feet at times, someone or something else steering my body around. I laughed. Yelled. Cried. Then I was outside, and Violet helped me throw up in an alleyway. There was an understanding we were going somewhere, though I had no idea where. 

A door opening. Going up the stairs. More throwing up in an unfamiliar bathroom, the sound of my own heaving bouncing off the porcelain, softened by Violet’s voice in the far distance, her fingers on the back of my head, telling me it was going to be alright. Being forced to drink several glasses of water. 

Being guided to a guest bedroom and lowered onto a bed. Someone tugging at my pants. Violet’s voice,  husky and low, whispered in my ear. “Don’t get any funny ideas,” she whispered. I remember chuckling. I wasn’t able to lift my head anymore, and Violet was so, so far out of my league I didn’t even consider it an option. Then I was lifted onto the bed, her hand traced across my face. I giggled. “Yet,” she added before she closed the door. 

And I was in bed. Alone. The room swam hard and fast, spinning so aggressively I worried the whole world was tipping on its side and I was going to be thrown out of the bed. The ceiling above me seemed to want to turn ninety degrees to the left. The old alarm clock’s numbers danced gently in my vision as I tried to blink them into focus, but my ability to read was a thing of the distant past. 

Taking in the room was an exercise. The bed in the middle, the headboard not even touching the wall for some god-forsaken reason. There was no dresser, no closet. Just a large room with a bed, two chairs against the far wall, right next to the window, a small bench and a small bedside table. It would have been a perfectly ordinary room. It would have been, if the head of the bed had touched the wall, and there hadn’t been someone sitting in the chair by the window. 

I blinked. There couldn’t be someone there. I would have noticed when I came in, right? Squinting, any attempt to bring the figure into focus failed. Maybe my monkey-brain was creating something out of nothing. A pile of laundry haphazardly stacked and made to look like a person. It would make sense in the morning, I told myself as a wide, toothy smile appeared on the person’s face. They glittered in the moonlight. 

Dread filled my mind, then my chest, and finally my throat, like bile rising up to spill out of my nose and mouth. If I moved, if I stopped looking, if I said anything, my brain told me, something awful would happen. If I tried to run or confront it, it would acknowledge me instead of sitting there and smiling. As long as I stared at it, it was just another hallucination. I’d had several in the past day or so, and maybe I wasn’t a hallucination. Maybe this was just a dream. 

There was no speaking, there were no words. I realised I couldn’t move. My voice had been arrested in my throat, my limbs had been frozen, and all my mind could conjure up was fear. Abject, total fear. 

The figure got out of the chair like a spider crawling out of its hole and I finally saw its eyes. Little white pinpricks as if it was a cardboard cutout and the moon shone through two holes the size of a needle. It had even more teeth now, glistening. I tried to scream but every muscle in my body had been taken from me. The figure fell down. There were more than four limbs moving it forward, and as it slowly, ever so slowly made its way across the bedroom floor, every touch of the floorboards was accompanied by a hollow click. Chitin on wood. My eyes burned.

But all this time, I saw its teeth, its smile, and its eyes, looking directly into mine. The room seemed to stretch out forever, its approach infinite and yet never far enough. Reaching the edge of the bed seemed as inevitable as it was impossible, so when I saw a hand that was wrapped in thin strips of silk and linen, with more knuckles than any hand should have, cold fear clumped in my stomach like ice. 

Another hand joined the first, and then finally, that horrible face that was only a smile and two eyes peered over the edge of the bed, only feet away from mine, and I wanted to scream, to cry, to beg, and I could do nothing. Only watch, feeling the old springs buckle as it crawled onto the bed. A hand touched my leg, and for a brief moment I thought my body had been returned to me as my muscles twitched. 

It hadn’t. An involuntary spasm. Something cold and sharp pressed against my bare leg. Slowly up, tracing the bone and muscle, hard enough to hurt but not enough to break skin, along the inside of my thigh, onto my hip. Something pulled at my shirt, and then a tearing sound, like scissors. The sound doubled as more hands went to work. I couldn’t look down, only saw the face in front of me. My clothes were removed from me in strips of cloth, exposing cold sweat to cool air. 

The thing, the smile, the eyes, looked at me. Then its hands were on me again and I felt pressure on me. I could no longer see it but the pressure on my chest grew and grew until I felt I could no longer breathe. A tear rolled down my face as I wished, desperately, for the nightmare to be over, to wake up, swearing I would never drink again, swearing to any and all gods that would listen that I would do anything for this to end. 

It didn’t. A soft wind brushed against my skin and I realised to my horror that the rhythmic air was breathing. Slender, sharp fingers very gently cupped my chin and turned my head to face upward, face to face with eyes that weren’t eyes but holes, deep holes into a world full of sharp things and fire as far as the eye could see, a promise of pain. Not teeth, but needles, needles as long as my forearm and sharper than any I had ever seen. 

Once again the hands were on me. Sharp nails digging into my skin, not enough to draw blood but enough to draw attention, raking up and down my flesh, sending shivers down my spine. Involuntarily, I had a reaction that was more hot-blooded than I would have liked, and one of the hands reached down, almost mechanically. There was nothing, no sense that I had even been touched. Just release, automatic and as if on command. A heat spread through my abdomen, powerful but short, and then pain. A stabbing pain, searing in my groin that traced the lines of my pelvis, and something warm running into the inside of my legs, something I quickly realised was blood as I heard the ripping of my skin. 

I wished a scream would fill my lungs but I could barely breathe with the creature sitting on my chest. The hands moved over my body, carving lines across my skin in perfectly straight lines, sometimes lifting an arm or a leg to draw a circle of blood around them. The bed soaked through underneath me, but it didn’t let up. My legs. My arms. My chest. A road map of torture was carved into my flesh and I could only wonder why. 

As if to answer, it arrived at my head. Very carefully, something that vaguely looked like a finger but wasn’t, sharp as a scalpel, was placed on my forehead, and then drew a line down. My face was separated, my nose torn in half, my lips cut in half. Hairline to chin. Then, as if trying not to damage an old book, the thing took the edge of the cut like a piece of paper, and lifted it. 

Another digit separated the skin from muscle with care and precision and a pain more intense than I had ever and could have ever imagined feeling. I felt every sinew cut, every muscle gently moved aside so that I could be flayed like a high school biology project. My eyes were left alone, but my eyelids were removed with a gentle directness. If I had been able to blink before, this would have been taken from me too. 

Skin slowly removed, it was lifted from me. I saw my face from the inside as the thing looked at me through the eyeholes, almost playfully, before it was moved aside. The pain had been immense. The worst I had ever felt, and completely unsurpassed and unsurpassable, or so I thought. I was wrong, of course. Its hands moved to my face again, and heard more than felt the hard claw-like finger touch bone. 

That’s when the grating started. Like nails on wood, I heard a scratching as shavings of bone were carved away from my face. The scratching, grating sound filled my head, filled my very bones. Fear and horror and pain filled my every sinew and every thought, blood and bile my throat, threatening to choke me completely. I hoped it would end this, somehow. 

It didn’t let it. Carefully, it lifted my head, forced my mouth open, and pushed me over the edge of the bed and forced me to vomit. A second later, I was on my back and the thing resumed its infernal surgeries. My face was carved. Then my neck, chest, arms, legs, were carefully flayed, piece by piece like a clockmaker might take apart a faulty timepiece. 

Seconds felt like hours, hours felt like days, stretching into weeks and months of slow, deliberate, elaborate torture. I cried tiers until my eyes dried and then cried blood until I was sure I would run out of that, too. But the creature continued its work. When it was done with its flaying and carving, I heard the sound of scissors again and my groin exploded with pain. I didn’t want to imagine what it was doing. 

Pain was pain was pain, and in my head I had given up the thought of living, yearned only for death and an ending, but something snapped when I felt parts of me being cut away from me with the pragmatic dispassion of a butcher removing offal from a carcass. Muscles and organs were being removed. I should have been dead. I should have been dead a hundred, a thousand times over, and yet I was here, still here, wishing for.a death that wouldn’t come, only its pinhead in front of me to keep me company. 

It reached up and I saw its hand, very carefully, take one of its teeth and snap it off like it was a dry twig, hold it up to its eye. It was the sharpest needle I had ever seen. There was even a small eye, and a strand thinner than any string carefully placed into it. 

I didn’t process what was happening until I felt the needle pierce the flesh of my leg as new skin was threaded onto me, stitch by stitch, sinew by sinew, with a needle thinner than a hair. New organs sown into me as my throat ached to scream and my eyes burned with fear. I had never felt pain until that moment. Every inch of skin was carefully reattached, every artery and capillary. Muscles were reattached, bones set after shavings had been carefully removed. My body was being remade, stitched back together, and I was too. From nothing. 

Only when it reached my face, did I realise there was more pain to come. Another implement, glowing brightly, was brought to bear in front of me. The heat seared my eyes, I had no more skin to feel it with. But I found out that even bones can feel pain if they are carved with a burning needle. A brand was carved into the bones of my face with precision, like a maker’s mark, doused with a layer of skin that was laid on my face with something that, if this had not been what it was, could have been called love.

It went on for decades. Centuries. Millennia. By the time the sun came up, I had somehow passed out. 

I blinked a few times. My head throbbed, and I felt nauseous to my core. My hair hurt and my mouth felt like it was full of cotton. I sat up on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid the spot where I had evidently thrown up at some point in the night. It took me a few tries to get up onto my feet making my way to the door unsteadily, and finally into the familiarly unfamiliar hallway. Vaguely remembering the direction of the bathroom, I went to go throw up. 

The sound of my own vomiting was familiar to me, and emptying my stomach one more time felt almost good, like I was getting rid of poison. Thinking about it, I was. 

Angling my head under the faucet as best I could, I rinsed my mouth, cleaned my face, washed my hands, then rinsed my mouth again. Standing up straight, I looked at the girl in the mirror. 

Hold on. I frowned and reached to touch the mirror, then back to touch my own face. That wasn’t my face. My face had a stubble and a heavy brow with deepest eyes. This was a young, fresh-out-of-college girl I had never seen before outside of some strange dreams. My fingers touched my face and it was really there. Something glowed under the skin.

Then, to my horror, the face shifted slightly to the touch, like a mask that wasn’t fastened tight enough. My mouth opened to scream when a voice from the bathroom door shook me away from the thing on the other side of the glass. 

“Don’t touch it,” Violet said. “It’ll settle.”

“What,” was all I managed, pointing at the mirror. 

“I know,” was all she said. I saw the glowing of the maker’s mark under her skin, like a fresh brand. “Yes, you’ll always see it. And now that you can, you’ll see it on others, too. Get used to it, don’t call attention to it. Some people will be able to see it. You judge if you bring them home with you. She’ll do the rest.”

“She…” I said softly, trying not to look at, not to touch the gently fading seams in my skin. I looked down, realised I was naked. “I’m…” I looked up at Violet. Here gaze no longer scrutinised, instead seeming appreciative. My skin was slowly starting to feel like it was tightening, like a glove being pulled taut, fitting better with each passing second. 

“Yeah,” Violet said. “I know. You can stay with me for a while. It’s not like you’ll convince your parents to take you back. Cigarette?”

I squeezed my legs together, and realised that a lot was different, now. Everything was different. I looked at Violet. 

“I… Sure. Why the fuck not.”

She gave me a wide, happy smile, and the brand under her face lit up. There was the gentle smell of burning flesh, but it didn’t bother me as much this time. It was strangely comforting. “Atta girl,” she said, and took my hand.

CW: Torture, Forced feminisation, forced orgasm, flaying, branding, night terrors, sleep paralysis, suicide mention.

You are reading story The Seamstress at novel35.com

 

The Seamstress

 

I didn’t know which came first, the nightmares or the hallucinations. Both were sudden, inexplicable, undiagnosable, untreatable and a part of me knew, a sign that something terrible was either going to happen to me, or it had already happened. Not that it mattered much which, because it was clear that there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I could feel it in my bones. 

But it came to a head when I met Her, with a capital H and a bow on top. 

I was in between college and jobs, wiling away the time to my next job interview or conversation with my parents about how I didn’t have a job yet. The word ‘job’ had started to evoke a fight-or-flight response in me that took some serious effort suppressing, because nobody likes a sweaty interview candidate, even on a sweltering summer day. My tie was done too tight but I thought it looked professional.

Then there she was. She was waiting at the entrance to the building where I was supposed to go in for an entry-level data-management-and-or-entry-who-the- fuck-even-knows-job. She was lighting up a cigarette, which was something I had always found kind of annoying and macho when men did it and frustratingly attractive when women did it. She swept long, strawberry blonde hair aside, and for a brief moment I recoiled. 

Her face seemed to be burning, from the inside, her skin coiling up on itself as the outer layer swirled and melted. It looked like there was a burning iron under her skin, coiling to get out, boiling the blood in her veins and the fluid in her eyes. The smell of burnt hair and cooking skin was overwhelming. 

But the image that would not leave my vision and would linger in my subconscious for the rest of the day, was the fact that she looked at me, her pupil melting down her cheek. Like a shirt being unraveled, stitches all around her face came undone, like her face had been sown onto her, string burning up.

That peculiar feeling of falling, of there being one more step than you anticipated when going down the stairs and for a moment there isn’t a floor, just an infinite dark hole, a yawning void ready to swallow you whole, gripped my intestines and squeezed.

She was fine. There was no burning. No brand. No heat. She was fine. Just a woman in her mid-twenties, hair down to her exposed midriff, in jean shorts and brown boots. She smiled at me half-heartedly, the way someone who hates children smiles at their friends’ kids, with a dash of uncertainty and lemon juice. “Can I help you?” Smoke billowed out of her mouth with every word. She looked like the guardian of some kind of ancient temple, if ancient temples came with concrete facades and ill-fitting glass doors. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I thought you had… something on your face.” Faint curiosity made way for amusement, and she laughed softly, like I’d just made a joke. “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I have a, uh, an interview here.”

“Oh, you won’t get it,” she said and took another drag from the cigarette. I’d have been offended if she hadn’t sounded so… confident? It hadn’t sounded like an insult, just a statement of fact. She caught my perplexed look. “You don’t want to work here,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Why not?” I asked, not about to let some random woman tell me what I could and couldn’t do. The handle on the glass door, too hot to the touch, rattled as I grabbed it, like the whole building was going to fall apart if I pulled too hard. “And what’s it to you?”

“Not your scene,” she said. There was a moment of hesitation, like she was making a decision, and then blew smoke away from me. “I’m Violet.” She didn’t stick her hand out. I did my best to conjure up a smile, the fish hook in the corner of your mouth kind. I still hadn’t opened the door.

“Quinten,” I said. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I just keep an eye out,” she said. “And you’re not going to get the job, Quinten. I’ve got an eye for this kind of thing. Cigarette?”

“No, thank you,” I said. I pulled the door handle. It gave an inch or two, and then jammed. “I think the building agrees with you.” An attempt at a joke. Break the ice, maybe. She didn’t laugh, just looked at me as smoke flowed out of her mouth like she was vomiting it up. A bead of sweat trickled into my eye, making me blink before she did. 

“What did you see on my face, Quinten?” Violet demanded. I found myself wanting to answer her before even thinking about it. There’s no way I could just tell her what I’d seen. It had been my imagination playing tricks on me. 

“Nothing.” 

“Didn’t look like you saw nothing, Quinten,” she said. She crossed her legs and leaned toward me. I was being scrutinised. I was a thing. I was a butterfly, a needle being slowly driven through my core so I could be put on a cork board and observed. “What did you see?”

“It just… looked like you…”

“Spit it out, big boy,” Violet said. It didn’t feel like a compliment. It took a moment to respond, a moment that buzzed in the air like a mosquito. 

“Like you were hurting,” I said. “Like your skin was coming off.”

Violet finished her cigarette and flicked it away, then stood up. “Go on,” she said. “Go get rejected. I’ll be here.” 

 

She was right. I bombed the interview hard. The three women whose eyes bore into mine asked me every question I didn’t have an answer to, made me look like the most incompetent asshole to ever grace this side of data management. I had never even heard of the programs they required me to work with. By the time the interview was over, I practically escaped. Reaching for the door, I felt their gazes follow me, like claws raking my clothes, my skin, my tie tightening like a noose around my neck. The door closing behind me, I heard them talk, their words indecipherable but audible, like nails scratching on wood. 

When the light didn’t turn on in the hot and humid stairwell, I ran down the stairs, skipping first one, then two, then more and more steps as I heard the scratching behind me, from the ceiling, from the walls. It was my imagination again, of course. 

I’d been having nightmares for days, maybe even weeks, and it had been messing with my ability, no, my desire to sleep. Back in college, I’d read that that could cause auditory hallucinations. But no amount of rationalising was going to help in that moment, I knew. If I didn’t run, whatever made the noise, the scratching right behind my ear, was going to dig its claws into me and tear me to shreds. So I bolted down the stairs and slammed into the double glass doors that reached outside and fell onto the blistering asphalt. 

“That was quick,” Violet said. The sound was gone. The stairwell behind me looked… well, to call it inconspicuous was unfair, there has never been a truly inconspicuous stairwell. But there was no monster, no chasing creature clawing at the glass. I picked myself up and dusted myself off. “Went well, then?” Violet had lit another cigarette. There was a faint smell in the air, like fried pork, quickly overpowered by smoke. 

“You were right,” I said. There were scrapes on my arms. “I, uh, I had a panic attack. In there.” I waved at the doors. “I guess I’ve had a rough couple of days.” I took off the tie and shoved it into my backpack. 

She looked me up and down. “No shit. You live nearby?” I shook my head. I had taken a two hour bus ride across town to come here. Finding work had not been easy. Some of the jobs I was technically qualified for required more years of experience than I had been alive. “Alright, come with me.”

“Excuse me? I like my kidneys where they are, thank you.” 

She rolled her eyes. “I’m getting you a drink, hot stuff. Calm down. It’s not far, it’s in public, and you get to keep most or even all of your organs because we’re going to pickle them until even the girls don’t want them.”

“What girls?” I asked, but she was already leaving, expecting me to follow. She swayed when she walked, like a grocery cart with a squeaky wheel: occasionally, like she sometimes forgot to. I figured there was nothing more for me to do in town today, and if she was buying, I might as well get a drink. 

The bar was, as she promised, by a busy-ish street. Not the kind of place where you went to get your vitals harvested or, potentially, fitted for a collar. I’d seen the kind of things city kids were into. This looked like an ordinary dive bar, with an ordinary wood countertop and ordinary bar stools and an ordinary, ornery bartender cleaning beer glasses. 

It started with my very first ever shot of tequila, which I promptly spat back out, and only got worse from there. There was beer. More shots. At some point a group of college students came in and got hammered. There was a girl dancing on the bar. I had no idea what Jell-O shots were and there was no way I’d remember by morning. At some point, someone’s lips were on mine and the taste of pure alcohol, watermelon lipstick and cigarette ash filled my mouth, a taste that would linger the rest of the night. 

“Why were you out there?” I asked Violet at some point during the night when I was lucid enough to think coherent thoughts. She downed a shot of Tennessee Honey and grinned at me. 

“Nothing better to do,” she said and her face peeled open like a ripe orange, revealing the muscles straining to keep everything together laid on a branded skull. She laughed when I fell off the barstool and helped me back up. Her skull was perfectly skull-shaped. “What’s your deal, big boy?”

My words had trouble finding purchase in my mouth. Alcohol and Adrenalin were a potent cocktail. “Just see things sometimes.”

“What, like visions?” She giggled. I shook my head.

“Just… nightmares. I’m just awake for them. Bugs crawling on the edge of my vision that disappear when I look directly at them. People dying. There was a clown once. He was in the fridge. That sucked.”

She laughed again. “Maybe they’re really there and you’re catching glimpses of the real world.” 

“I’m too drunk for this,” I groaned. “Just hope it ends soon.”

“In a real good place, huh?”

“You fucking know it,” I said and waved the bartender over. He put something liquid in front of me, and it smelled like weed and dishrags. No reason not to assume it was beer. “Not been sleeping great, lately.”

“Kafkaesque dreams?”

“Violet, with all due respect, what the fucque does that mean?” 

She ripped her face off. Except she didn’t. She just made the motion and my imagination did the rest. I squeezed my eyes shut as she laughed. “Dreams about harder, weirder, faster, stronger is what I mean.”

“I don’t think that’s how those lyrics go.”

“Said what I said.”

“Something like that, I guess. But like, night terrors. Like there’s someone in the room with me. Something. But bad.”

She nodded. “Ah,” she said. “Gotcha. And since you’ve been seeing those you’ve been seeing…” she pointed at her own face, at where I’d been seeing the brand appear. “You know… all of that?”

I nodded. “Got worse since I got out of college. Maybe it’s anxiety, having to figure out what I want to do and what I even can do with myself, yknow? Hey did know I woke up crawling across my floor once? I was scratching at the floor.”

“Huh,” Violet said. “Wild. I used to have dreams like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, started like that, too. I’d just broken up with my high school sweetheart aand I was in a shit spot. Like it broke me a bit, you know? But nobody takes you seriously if you tell them you feel like you’re falling apart like a soft-boiled egg.”

“Fuckin-A.”

“So yeah. Bad dreams too. Lasted a couple of weeks.” She shot me a sideways and extremely sneaky glance that I caught despite my inebriation. “Thought I was going to kill myself.”

“Oh? What did you do about it?”

“Do?” She said with another grin. “Hey, Quinten, have you ever done a titty shot?” I shook my head. “Well happy fucking birthday, you’re about to!”

There was no point where I remember deciding to leave. Just a fading, from moment to moment, as if I was unconscious on my feet at times, someone or something else steering my body around. I laughed. Yelled. Cried. Then I was outside, and Violet helped me throw up in an alleyway. There was an understanding we were going somewhere, though I had no idea where. 

A door opening. Going up the stairs. More throwing up in an unfamiliar bathroom, the sound of my own heaving bouncing off the porcelain, softened by Violet’s voice in the far distance, her fingers on the back of my head, telling me it was going to be alright. Being forced to drink several glasses of water. 

Being guided to a guest bedroom and lowered onto a bed. Someone tugging at my pants. Violet’s voice,  husky and low, whispered in my ear. “Don’t get any funny ideas,” she whispered. I remember chuckling. I wasn’t able to lift my head anymore, and Violet was so, so far out of my league I didn’t even consider it an option. Then I was lifted onto the bed, her hand traced across my face. I giggled. “Yet,” she added before she closed the door. 

And I was in bed. Alone. The room swam hard and fast, spinning so aggressively I worried the whole world was tipping on its side and I was going to be thrown out of the bed. The ceiling above me seemed to want to turn ninety degrees to the left. The old alarm clock’s numbers danced gently in my vision as I tried to blink them into focus, but my ability to read was a thing of the distant past. 

Taking in the room was an exercise. The bed in the middle, the headboard not even touching the wall for some god-forsaken reason. There was no dresser, no closet. Just a large room with a bed, two chairs against the far wall, right next to the window, a small bench and a small bedside table. It would have been a perfectly ordinary room. It would have been, if the head of the bed had touched the wall, and there hadn’t been someone sitting in the chair by the window. 

I blinked. There couldn’t be someone there. I would have noticed when I came in, right? Squinting, any attempt to bring the figure into focus failed. Maybe my monkey-brain was creating something out of nothing. A pile of laundry haphazardly stacked and made to look like a person. It would make sense in the morning, I told myself as a wide, toothy smile appeared on the person’s face. They glittered in the moonlight. 

Dread filled my mind, then my chest, and finally my throat, like bile rising up to spill out of my nose and mouth. If I moved, if I stopped looking, if I said anything, my brain told me, something awful would happen. If I tried to run or confront it, it would acknowledge me instead of sitting there and smiling. As long as I stared at it, it was just another hallucination. I’d had several in the past day or so, and maybe I wasn’t a hallucination. Maybe this was just a dream. 

There was no speaking, there were no words. I realised I couldn’t move. My voice had been arrested in my throat, my limbs had been frozen, and all my mind could conjure up was fear. Abject, total fear. 

The figure got out of the chair like a spider crawling out of its hole and I finally saw its eyes. Little white pinpricks as if it was a cardboard cutout and the moon shone through two holes the size of a needle. It had even more teeth now, glistening. I tried to scream but every muscle in my body had been taken from me. The figure fell down. There were more than four limbs moving it forward, and as it slowly, ever so slowly made its way across the bedroom floor, every touch of the floorboards was accompanied by a hollow click. Chitin on wood. My eyes burned.

But all this time, I saw its teeth, its smile, and its eyes, looking directly into mine. The room seemed to stretch out forever, its approach infinite and yet never far enough. Reaching the edge of the bed seemed as inevitable as it was impossible, so when I saw a hand that was wrapped in thin strips of silk and linen, with more knuckles than any hand should have, cold fear clumped in my stomach like ice. 

Another hand joined the first, and then finally, that horrible face that was only a smile and two eyes peered over the edge of the bed, only feet away from mine, and I wanted to scream, to cry, to beg, and I could do nothing. Only watch, feeling the old springs buckle as it crawled onto the bed. A hand touched my leg, and for a brief moment I thought my body had been returned to me as my muscles twitched. 

It hadn’t. An involuntary spasm. Something cold and sharp pressed against my bare leg. Slowly up, tracing the bone and muscle, hard enough to hurt but not enough to break skin, along the inside of my thigh, onto my hip. Something pulled at my shirt, and then a tearing sound, like scissors. The sound doubled as more hands went to work. I couldn’t look down, only saw the face in front of me. My clothes were removed from me in strips of cloth, exposing cold sweat to cool air. 

The thing, the smile, the eyes, looked at me. Then its hands were on me again and I felt pressure on me. I could no longer see it but the pressure on my chest grew and grew until I felt I could no longer breathe. A tear rolled down my face as I wished, desperately, for the nightmare to be over, to wake up, swearing I would never drink again, swearing to any and all gods that would listen that I would do anything for this to end. 

It didn’t. A soft wind brushed against my skin and I realised to my horror that the rhythmic air was breathing. Slender, sharp fingers very gently cupped my chin and turned my head to face upward, face to face with eyes that weren’t eyes but holes, deep holes into a world full of sharp things and fire as far as the eye could see, a promise of pain. Not teeth, but needles, needles as long as my forearm and sharper than any I had ever seen. 

Once again the hands were on me. Sharp nails digging into my skin, not enough to draw blood but enough to draw attention, raking up and down my flesh, sending shivers down my spine. Involuntarily, I had a reaction that was more hot-blooded than I would have liked, and one of the hands reached down, almost mechanically. There was nothing, no sense that I had even been touched. Just release, automatic and as if on command. A heat spread through my abdomen, powerful but short, and then pain. A stabbing pain, searing in my groin that traced the lines of my pelvis, and something warm running into the inside of my legs, something I quickly realised was blood as I heard the ripping of my skin. 

I wished a scream would fill my lungs but I could barely breathe with the creature sitting on my chest. The hands moved over my body, carving lines across my skin in perfectly straight lines, sometimes lifting an arm or a leg to draw a circle of blood around them. The bed soaked through underneath me, but it didn’t let up. My legs. My arms. My chest. A road map of torture was carved into my flesh and I could only wonder why. 

As if to answer, it arrived at my head. Very carefully, something that vaguely looked like a finger but wasn’t, sharp as a scalpel, was placed on my forehead, and then drew a line down. My face was separated, my nose torn in half, my lips cut in half. Hairline to chin. Then, as if trying not to damage an old book, the thing took the edge of the cut like a piece of paper, and lifted it. 

Another digit separated the skin from muscle with care and precision and a pain more intense than I had ever and could have ever imagined feeling. I felt every sinew cut, every muscle gently moved aside so that I could be flayed like a high school biology project. My eyes were left alone, but my eyelids were removed with a gentle directness. If I had been able to blink before, this would have been taken from me too. 

Skin slowly removed, it was lifted from me. I saw my face from the inside as the thing looked at me through the eyeholes, almost playfully, before it was moved aside. The pain had been immense. The worst I had ever felt, and completely unsurpassed and unsurpassable, or so I thought. I was wrong, of course. Its hands moved to my face again, and heard more than felt the hard claw-like finger touch bone. 

That’s when the grating started. Like nails on wood, I heard a scratching as shavings of bone were carved away from my face. The scratching, grating sound filled my head, filled my very bones. Fear and horror and pain filled my every sinew and every thought, blood and bile my throat, threatening to choke me completely. I hoped it would end this, somehow. 

It didn’t let it. Carefully, it lifted my head, forced my mouth open, and pushed me over the edge of the bed and forced me to vomit. A second later, I was on my back and the thing resumed its infernal surgeries. My face was carved. Then my neck, chest, arms, legs, were carefully flayed, piece by piece like a clockmaker might take apart a faulty timepiece. 

Seconds felt like hours, hours felt like days, stretching into weeks and months of slow, deliberate, elaborate torture. I cried tiers until my eyes dried and then cried blood until I was sure I would run out of that, too. But the creature continued its work. When it was done with its flaying and carving, I heard the sound of scissors again and my groin exploded with pain. I didn’t want to imagine what it was doing. 

Pain was pain was pain, and in my head I had given up the thought of living, yearned only for death and an ending, but something snapped when I felt parts of me being cut away from me with the pragmatic dispassion of a butcher removing offal from a carcass. Muscles and organs were being removed. I should have been dead. I should have been dead a hundred, a thousand times over, and yet I was here, still here, wishing for.a death that wouldn’t come, only its pinhead in front of me to keep me company. 

It reached up and I saw its hand, very carefully, take one of its teeth and snap it off like it was a dry twig, hold it up to its eye. It was the sharpest needle I had ever seen. There was even a small eye, and a strand thinner than any string carefully placed into it. 

I didn’t process what was happening until I felt the needle pierce the flesh of my leg as new skin was threaded onto me, stitch by stitch, sinew by sinew, with a needle thinner than a hair. New organs sown into me as my throat ached to scream and my eyes burned with fear. I had never felt pain until that moment. Every inch of skin was carefully reattached, every artery and capillary. Muscles were reattached, bones set after shavings had been carefully removed. My body was being remade, stitched back together, and I was too. From nothing. 

Only when it reached my face, did I realise there was more pain to come. Another implement, glowing brightly, was brought to bear in front of me. The heat seared my eyes, I had no more skin to feel it with. But I found out that even bones can feel pain if they are carved with a burning needle. A brand was carved into the bones of my face with precision, like a maker’s mark, doused with a layer of skin that was laid on my face with something that, if this had not been what it was, could have been called love.

It went on for decades. Centuries. Millennia. By the time the sun came up, I had somehow passed out. 

I blinked a few times. My head throbbed, and I felt nauseous to my core. My hair hurt and my mouth felt like it was full of cotton. I sat up on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid the spot where I had evidently thrown up at some point in the night. It took me a few tries to get up onto my feet making my way to the door unsteadily, and finally into the familiarly unfamiliar hallway. Vaguely remembering the direction of the bathroom, I went to go throw up. 

The sound of my own vomiting was familiar to me, and emptying my stomach one more time felt almost good, like I was getting rid of poison. Thinking about it, I was. 

Angling my head under the faucet as best I could, I rinsed my mouth, cleaned my face, washed my hands, then rinsed my mouth again. Standing up straight, I looked at the girl in the mirror. 

Hold on. I frowned and reached to touch the mirror, then back to touch my own face. That wasn’t my face. My face had a stubble and a heavy brow with deepest eyes. This was a young, fresh-out-of-college girl I had never seen before outside of some strange dreams. My fingers touched my face and it was really there. Something glowed under the skin.

Then, to my horror, the face shifted slightly to the touch, like a mask that wasn’t fastened tight enough. My mouth opened to scream when a voice from the bathroom door shook me away from the thing on the other side of the glass. 

“Don’t touch it,” Violet said. “It’ll settle.”

“What,” was all I managed, pointing at the mirror. 

“I know,” was all she said. I saw the glowing of the maker’s mark under her skin, like a fresh brand. “Yes, you’ll always see it. And now that you can, you’ll see it on others, too. Get used to it, don’t call attention to it. Some people will be able to see it. You judge if you bring them home with you. She’ll do the rest.”

“She…” I said softly, trying not to look at, not to touch the gently fading seams in my skin. I looked down, realised I was naked. “I’m…” I looked up at Violet. Here gaze no longer scrutinised, instead seeming appreciative. My skin was slowly starting to feel like it was tightening, like a glove being pulled taut, fitting better with each passing second. 

“Yeah,” Violet said. “I know. You can stay with me for a while. It’s not like you’ll convince your parents to take you back. Cigarette?”

I squeezed my legs together, and realised that a lot was different, now. Everything was different. I looked at Violet. 

“I… Sure. Why the fuck not.”

She gave me a wide, happy smile, and the brand under her face lit up. There was the gentle smell of burning flesh, but it didn’t bother me as much this time. It was strangely comforting. “Atta girl,” she said, and took my hand. The skin barely even moved anymore.

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