Page 25 of The Deer and the Dragon
“Fuck!” I shouted at the locked door. I rattled the knob several times, then banged my palm against the barrier in quick, helpless succession. I twisted it time and time againuntil my hand pinked against the metal. My jaw nearly popped as I ground my teeth, panic and fury striking like lightning.
“No!” I cried out. I rested my forehead against the door for the barest of moments while I shoved every feeling, every fear, into an airtight box within myself. I couldn’t panic. I couldn’t cry. I needed to find a way out.
But I was allowed to be angry.
Of course, this psychopath would have installed a door set to lock upon closure.
“It’s okay,” I said to the empty room as I slowly rotated from the door, facing the staircase, the workbench, the single drain at the room’s center. I forced myself to voice every thought as I soothed the caged animal that clawed within me. “It’s fine. No one is here. I have time. Richard is gone. No one is coming for me. I can figure this out.”
I immediately looked to my phone but knew before my eyes hit the corner of the screen that there would be a flat line where service was meant to show perfect bars. I’d expected it, but it didn’t make it any easier. The thick cement walls canceled out even the strongest of city signals.
I forced myself to descend the stairs. The police had already been here. They’d found every earthly horror. There couldn’t be anything bad…which also meant if there were any tools or keys, they would have bagged them for evidence.
“Marlow.” I tried speaking to myself as if I were my own friend. “You can do this. You’ve been through the worst things that can happen to a person, and you’ve survived. Everything has an answer, and you’ll find it.”
But my parental voice lacked believability. Bile rose in me as I moved away from the door, stepping deeper into the basement. Maybe there’d be a small glass window I could break and scramble out of. I crossed to the vacated workbench, searching for a tool, a clue, for something. Maybe…
My breath caught. My heart stopped. I froze as I caught movement from the corner of my eye.
I spun on my heels and gaped at what I saw.
I tilted my chin down, staring into the messy hair, the pale face, the too-wide, Cheshire-cat smile of an inhumane child.
I choked on the chaotic nightmare, the hallucination, the impossibility.
The cup of my insanity had tipped over, violently splashing into every aspect of my life. I was alone. I’d been trapped in frantic solitude between four walls, a drain, and a single bench. There had been nowhere for a kid to hide.
I shook my head against the horrendous apparition as something clicked within me. Hallucination or not, I recognized the toothy, feline grin. Several months prior it had been burned into my mind by the now-dead man who’d grinned in my living room. I gaped in horror at the figment. I summoned courage, therapy, psychiatry appointments, and wasted hours of grounding exercises as I addressed the child.
“Please don’t be real” was all I could say. I’d spent months convincing myself everything was true. Now, I needed to be wrong.
Four feet tall, waifish thin, and in little more than a potato stack stood a beautiful, terrible ghoul. He positively sparkled as he said, “My, don’t humans say the funniest things.”
I locked onto the enormous, sky-blue eyes and stumbled backward. There was nowhere to go.
I lifted my hands as if to fight him off, demanding, “Who are you?”
“You smell delicious,” the little boy said, eyes twinkling. “What is that smell? So good, so good… What a flavor, what a flavor…”
He was real.
I was in my apartment all over again, helpless, looking for knives that weren’t there, wishing for a phone even if it didn’t work, knowing I couldn’t make it to the door in time to escape. The tornado of déjà vu whipped me in its violent winds until I was so dizzy, so nauseous I could scarcely breathe. Except, at least in my apartment, I’d known my enemy.
I had no frame of reference for the kindergarten nightmare that faced me now.
“Oh!” He gasped with boyish wonder, smile widening until it was bigger than his face. His teeth seemed to sharpen to a point as he looked at me. “Here I thought I wouldn’t be fed any longer after ten years of meals…and now my food can see me. What a delightful dessert. So delightful.”
I skidded backward until I slammed against cold cement. A sickly-sweet smell rolled off him, like the sugar and flesh of an infected wound. I searched for something familiar, something that made sense. The Cheshire boy looked no older than six and no younger than six thousand. There was a terrible ancientness to his bright, childish voice. The corners of his mouth reddened as if scabbed from cracking, breaking, and bleeding as his lips pulled far beyond his ears. The fluorescent light overhead flickered as if the very wiring in the home knew I was doomed. Though he stood a head and shoulders shorter than me, I knew that I would not survive him.
“Tell me who you are,” I gasped again.
He clasped his arms behind his back and took a step to the side, then another. He eyed me all the while as he said, “I think you know.”
“Who?” I asked again, though the question was useless. The answer didn’t matter. I was going to die.
“Call us legion, for we are many.” He winked and giggled with the high, bright twinkle of a death bell. “You’re just our type. How kind that my host sent a treat, even in death.”
“Stay back,” I said, voice quivering. I raised my hands uselessly as the little boy advanced.
