Very slowly the woman lifted the washcloth off her face and revealed herself to be Margaret Morgan.
She seemed to be looking out of the TV screen and at Heidi in the actual tub, and then, on the screen, bubbles started to plop up through the bloody water, as if it had started to boil. Slowly, something began to rise between Margaret Morgan’s legs, but only gradually did it become clear that it was the misshapen head of the small creature with bulbous red eyes that, a moment before, when she had stood in the doorway, had been gripping her leg. It opened its mouth
and smiled, bloody water running off its head and plopping grotesquely back into the tub.
Then, very slowly, both Morgan and the misshapen creature slid lower in the tub and disappeared beneath the water.
And then suddenly the TV switched itself off.
The bathroom was silent except for the noise of Heidi’s breathing. She lay in the tub, soaking, trying to relax.
After a moment she sighed. Her hand fumbled blindly for the glass of wine balanced on the edge of the tub, without finding it. She groped again, but the wineglass didn’t seem to be there. Maybe she’d put it on the floor.
She reached up and pulled the washcloth off her face. She was already half turning and reaching to search for the wineglass when she stopped, seeing the water gone murky and bloodred all around her.
What the fuck?
she thought, and then thought she must be hallucinating. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the tub was still brimming with blood.
She scrambled back, the bloody water sloshing all around her and slopping over the sides and onto the floor. She was trying to get her feet under herself to get out of the tub but they kept slipping, the blood spattering her face and hair.
She opened her mouth and let out a piercing scream, but as she did something erupted out of the bloody water, spattering blood everywhere. It was, impossibly, another woman, somehow in the tub at the same time as she. But something was wrong with her, her arms bone thin and seemingly bloodless beneath the skin, her eyes darting madly about in the sockets. Heidi scrambled back, trying to sit
up, trying to get out, but the woman was already upon her, grabbing Heidi by the throat and beginning to squeeze.
Heidi felt her body tense, felt the woman’s thumbs digging into her neck, cutting off her windpipe. She kicked and thrashed, trying to break the woman’s grip, bloody water sloshing up and over the sides and going everywhere. Bloody water was in her mouth and eyes. She tried to scratch out the madwoman’s eyes, but the woman hissed and turned her head and she couldn’t quite get to them. Heidi beat on her arms, then tried to pry her fingers away, but they wouldn’t come loose.
Her vision was beginning to blur.
Oh God,
she thought,
I’m going to die.
And then the woman came closer and hissed again, smiling this time, bloody water dripping from her mouth.
Heidi made a last effort and turned her body hard, dragging on the woman’s arms at the same time. With a bang, the woman’s head crashed into the wall, cracking the tile, but the movement made Heidi slide lower in the tub, the water lapping against her chin now.
The woman’s grip loosened a little and Heidi gasped in some air. Before the woman could recover, Heidi did it again, as hard as she could this time, and this time the woman’s head struck violently enough to leave a splash of black blood on the wall. She gave a hideous unearthly scream, and a thick black liquid began to spew out of her mouth, getting in Heidi’s eyes, blinding her. She struggled to break the woman’s grip, but still she wouldn’t let go, and instead bore down hard, making Heidi slip even lower in the tub, forcing her head underwater, knocking it repeatedly against the tub’s porcelain bottom. Heidi struggled, tried desperately to break the woman’s grip, tried to get her head up and above the water, but the woman held on, bore down even harder. Heidi could hear her continuing to scream, the sound muffled beneath the water but still audible. She opened her eyes and tried to see, but could make out nothing beyond the redness of the bloody water.
And then, suddenly, the screaming stopped and the pressure eased.
She shot up from the water, still struggling, still fighting to break free, and gasping for breath. She braced herself for another attack, her fists cocked.
But somehow the woman was no longer there. Heidi’s gaze darted around, her heart pounding rapidly, coughing up the water that had gotten into her lungs. The water was no longer bloody. It seemed completely normal. What the fuck had happened? The fluid that had splashed all over was normal water as well, nothing unusual about it, and the woman simply wasn’t there. The tile splash guard above the tub was uncracked, no sign of blood anywhere. The TV channel was back to normal, showing the same Fred Astaire movie, and reception was perfect now.
Had she imagined it all? Dreamt it? But then why did her throat hurt? Was it simply that she’d swallowed water? No, she could still feel the woman’s thumbs on her throat, was sure that if she got up and looked in the mirror she’d see the bruises they had left.
But if it had been real, wouldn’t Steve have been in here barking his head off? Come to think of it, where was Steve? Why hadn’t he come when she’d been splashing and gasping for air?
Her head was still spinning and she was still out of breath, adrenaline coursing through her body. She tried to stand up and leave the tub but she was too dizzy and had to sit back down again, splashing back into what little water was left in the tub. She gathered her knees to her chest and leaned against the wall, shaking, trying and failing to make sense of what might have just happened.
After a while, she’d gathered herself enough that she could drain the tub and climb out. Dazed and still shaken, she stumbled from the bathroom to collapse facedown on the fainting couch. She lay there for a few moments, catching her breath, and then lifted her head and crawled toward the phone sitting on the table just beside the couch. Trembling, she picked up the receiver.
But who could she call? Herman maybe? His wife would be pissed if she called in the middle of the night but Herman would do his best to help her—he’d done that before. Her dealer? He’d be glad to hear from her, but his idea of helping her would probably be fronting her some product and gear, just to get her going with him again. No, that was out. Whitey? He’d probably come and sit with her awhile, but that’d be using him in a way that she didn’t feel comfortable with. The police? What would she tell them?
I’ve been attacked in my own bathroom, by some sort of corpse thing, nearly drowned, but there’s absolutely no evidence
. They’d think she was crazy. Maybe she was.
She should just throw on a robe and go down and knock on Lacy’s door, she told herself. She could make up some story to tell Lacy and Lacy would probably let her crash on her couch. As long as she wasn’t alone, she’d be okay, even if Lacy and her sisters had ended up freaking her out as bad as anyone.
But she usually wasn’t alone, she told herself. Usually, she had Steve.
Where the fuck
was
Steve, anyway?
“Steve?” she called. “Steve?” She whistled, but he didn’t come. She put the phone down and stumbled into the kitchen, looking for him. He wasn’t there, but the floor was dotted with bloody paw prints. And she was only now realizing she hadn’t seen them when she’d come back from Lacy’s—had she been that drunk? She’d assumed he’d been asleep but she hadn’t even checked. What kind of dog owner was she?
The paw prints mostly milled around near the door, and the door was splintered where Steve had been scraping at it. One set of bloody tracks, though, led away from the door and through the living room, toward the bedroom.
No
, a part of her cautioned herself.
Don’t go in there. Whatever is in there, it’s not something that you want to see.
But another part of her, a stronger part, was too concerned about her dog, too curious to know what had happened to be able to hold back.
Near the bedroom door there was a slick patch of blood, as if something had died there. She stepped over it with her bare feet, trying not to slip on the blood, and went in.
There was something in the bed, a shape there. She called out her dog’s name, but he still didn’t answer. Slowly, she approached the bed, tried to see what was in it, but whatever it was it was completely covered by the blankets, was impossible to see.
She reached out and took hold of the edge of the blankets. She pulled them back.
In the bed was a woman with blond hair who resembled her in every particular except that she was dead. Her wrists had been slashed and her skin had started to go gray. A syringe hung loosely from the vein in one of her arms, empty. She reached out and brushed the woman’s hair back, but it still looked exactly like her.
But it can’t be me,
she told herself.
I’m still alive. I’m here.
She pulled the blankets back farther, and there, near this false Heidi’s feet, was Steve. He was covered in blood, and the fur and
skin had been stripped away from his head, leaving it a pulpy bloody mess, a slick and shiny skull poking through here and there. His paws, too, had been severed and placed in a little pile near his belly, as if they were puppies ready to feed. He snarled when he saw her, his eyes mad with rage or pain, and when she reached out to him, he snapped, bit her.
Oh God
, she thought.
Oh God
, and stepped away from the bed, backing toward the door. Her mind was fleeing in a thousand different directions at once, and she slipped on the blood in the doorway and fell, hard. She crawled her way back into the living room, as quickly as she could manage, dry heaving, and pulled herself onto the couch. She reached again for the phone, this time dialed 911.
She was just raising the phone to her ear when something cuffed her hard on the side of the head, making her ears ring and sending the receiver flying. Standing over her was the woman she had hallucinated meeting the night before. Margaret Morgan, she had said her name was, and seeing her like this now, her skin unnaturally white, water dripping off her, Heidi realized as well that this was the woman who had tried to kill her in the tub.
For a moment they just stared at one another, neither moving, Morgan’s eyes calm but hard. And then Heidi tried to scramble up and Morgan shoved her back hard with one hand, seemingly without effort. When Heidi started to struggle up again, Margaret screamed, her mouth opening unnaturally wide to reveal a shining black mouth, darker than Heidi thought possible. When Heidi struggled to get up a third time, it was not Morgan who kept her back but rather a long pitch-black arm; it held her, wrapping tightly around her waist. It seemed to shoot up from the couch, pushing up through the middle of a cushion, and she couldn’t see a body attached to it. She struggled to break free, but just as she did so another pitch-black arm pushed its way through another cushion and clamped onto her thigh, digging clawed fingers in. Then another, pulling on her shoulder, and another still, this one clamping over her mouth.
She tried to cry out, all sound muffled by the hand. She struggled to break free, but there were too many arms, a dozen of them now, each of them grabbing hold of her body and tugging at it, restricting it, pinning her to the couch. And then there were several dozen pitch-black hands clinging to her everywhere, arms looping around her like darkness, tightening, cutting off her breath, dragging her back tight against the couch. She kept fighting, but then a hand clamped over her eyes and there was nothing but darkness. She could hear the sound of her muffled breathing, her muffled cries, and then something settled over her ears and all she could hear was the sound of breathing inside of herself and the furious beating of her own heart.
She felt herself lifted, propelled into darkness. The hands holding her began to feel less and less distinct, slowly thinning and changing into something else, something still restrictive, and at times disappearing altogether. The pressure on her mouth went away and she found she could breathe freely again. It slowly vanished over her ears as well and she could now hear her own panicked, desperate breathing. And then it faded over her eyes, but she still could not see. She blinked. No, there was nothing covering her eyes, but she was surrounded by darkness.
She tried to move her arms, her legs, but they were held fast, held spread far from her body. She struggled, but whatever held them was too strong and secure for her to escape from. She tried to calm down, tried to slow her own breathing, and slowly and gradually she did, listening to the sound of it easing and relaxing until she hardly could hear it at all.
But that was a mistake as it turned out. For as she slowed her own breathing, she began to hear an awful sound. It was a deep, vibrating sound, the kind of inhalations an animal might make, and it seemed to be wandering at some distance from her, slowly moving closer.
What is that?
she wondered. As images of a slavering mouth filled
her mind, she tried desperately not to imagine the body that could be attached to it. It came closer still, the breathing very loud now, and she could feel its hot, fetid breath against her bare skin.
A crackling sound came from overhead, and a red light began to flicker. There, far above her, in the midst of darkness, she saw a neon
Jesus Saves
sign begin to flicker, bringing her surroundings to her in flashes of light. Only there weren’t any surroundings. It was as if she were floating, suspended in an abyss, darkness pooling all around her. She was lying on a wide, long board that seemed to slowly tilt back and forth. Her arms, she saw, were strapped to the top corners of the board; her feet were spread wide and strapped to the bottom corners. She watched her body flash in and out in the strobe, as if it were deciding whether or not it would continue to exist.
The animal breathing had receded again, but she could still hear it, somewhere in the darkness, circling around her. In a flash from the malfunctioning sign, she thought for a moment she saw Margaret Morgan standing there beside her, a circle of women joining her and surrounding Heidi, but in the next flash they were gone again and there was nothing but her, the sign, and the darkness.