It started with a question.

Quick. Simple.

“Want to go somewhere quieter?”

Eve had no reason to refuse. He was nice, and frankly a rarity in the horrific dating scene that was Brentwood. So what if she’d known him for ten minutes? This was a chance to get to know him more. 

And so she followed him down the familiar trail, walking through the forest and letting the conversation carry her. He took her down a route she hadn’t been before, explained parts of the woodland that she would never have even considered in daytime. Honestly, it was cute. He was a little nerdy, a little chatty–quirks here and there that got Eve thinking: maybe this could work. Get back to the party, ask for his number before he leaves, simple. 

Then he stopped, the katydids chirping quietly for just a moment as he asked: “Do you think anyone would hear you, if you yelled at the top of your lungs right now? Say we come across a wolf. If you or I shouted for help, we’d be mauled by the time someone arrives, don’t you think?”

Eve forced a laugh, slightly incredulous. “...Probably not?” She offered, smiling through the response.

The common, pleasant chirping of the surrounding critters at once seemed oppressive. Eve’s hands dug into her jacket pockets, one gripping a knife and the other her trusty can of pepper spray. 

Just in case.

He turned to her, and under the dim light of the moon she saw the twist in his expression. His smile twisted upwards, a cruelness to it, and his actions grew more intentioned. The pad of his shoe made barely a sound as he stepped towards her, his body now occupying most of her vision. His voice escaped as a whisper, delight occupying every ounce of emotion mustered into the next query.

“I think we’re too far out by now. The trees, the distance, the crickets… They’d muffle any sound. Don’t you agree?”

It ended with a question.

Why wouldn’t it stop?

It usually stopped.

Usually, she could control it. She could stop it. Before it got this bad.

But now, he was staring at her, and he could see. He could see her skin. Her eyes. Her bones. Her body.

Please, she begged her consciousness. Please be an illusion. A hallucination.

Another piece of skin slipped from her control, splitting as it allowed more of her insides to escape. The crisp air hit her flesh like darts to a target, piercing her with reality.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Gaped and blinked twice. His hand jumped to his belt and froze there, centimeters away from a holster she knew all too well. Her own holster sat on a hip so amalgamated it could barely be called such a thing, abstractedly mirroring his.

“What are you?” He mumbled as his fingers stretched further, just barely grazing a pistol handle.

Another piece slipped. Broke. The facade shattered by cracks allowed to fester for too long. This is why I need to release more often, she reminded herself. It accumulates too much.

The gun was in his hand now. Raised high. 

“Hands up,” he demanded. When she didn’t comply, he repeated his order. “I said hands up, Dew!”

Dew observed her hands. On both appendages, the skin had flaked off, leaving swirling, black matter in its wake. The matter roughly mimicked the shape of a hand, and yet twisted beyond such typical restraints, elongating her “fingers” to a claw-like state. 

When did it get so bad? 

She did a mental count. Two months…maybe three? Good lord. She had really neglected this, hadn’t she?

“Don’t make me say it again.” There was a tremble in his voice. Fear.

Dew did as told. He sighed a breath of relief. 

“Thank you. Now, I want you to very slowly–”

A tendril of dark matter sprung from his shadow and into his back, stopping his sentence short. He coughed. Sputtered. Watched with his own two eyes how the tendril jut from his chest and began to crawl across his body. Slowly. Serenely. 

It took about two seconds for his irises to go blank, and less for the matter to finish engulfing him. Once covered, his body melded with the matter, losing all shape and structure as it melted into the ground. It formed a shadow-like shape that rushed towards Dew, joining the mass of matter within her as her skin finally began to mend back together. Her face stitched into position, all deformities hidden by a layer of her quickly-reshaping organs.

She sighed, artificial breath escaping as a shrivel of heat within the winter air. Her hands–now fully “human” once more–fell upon her face as she groaned louder than an overworked salary man on his fifth day of overtime. 

Before her lay a blood splatter so dark it nearly blended with the grime already covering the alley floor. She stared at the liquid, observing how it reflected the dim lights above. 

Less messy than last time, at least.

She watched the wind ripple the singular remain of her boss.

“Fuck.” 

Why is it always the important people who find out?

Sharp breaths fell from Melanie’s lips as she weaved through a crowd of what she hoped were pedestrians. The air fell heavy on her shoulders, and her skin tingled as if spiders had infested the very undersides of her bones, leaving no room for calm in the mess of sweaty people and palpable discomfort that was the city street.

She tried to focus on the box in her hand.

Haloperidol. She spelled it out under her breath. Eleven letters. Five syllables. Black, elongated font on a white-and-purple-and-green packaging, followed by more writing in the same black font that read ‘Mouth Dissolving Tablets; 5g.’

A blurry figure darted in the corner of her sight. She gripped the multicolor box so hard it crinkled under her thumb. Another figure appeared. The box gave way to the pressure, two corners of four now deformed.

She looked up again.

A smile met her gaze. A terrifying smile. The kind of smile where yellow, much-too-sharp teeth drip with excess saliva, peeking from a wide, stretched slit, its surroundings devoid of any shape or resemblance of lips. Melanie screamed. The face blinked, and yellow turned white in a blur of colors and shapes as the salesman before her backed away slowly.

“-didn’t want a voucher, ya’ could’ve just said no…” He mumbled, turning away to greet another passerby with a pitch about a buy-one, get-one-free coupon for a nearby Chinese restaurant. She blinked. Once. Twice. Melanie began to walk again.

The figures remained in the corners of her vision; humanoid, ghastly, and most of all, deformed. Their faces twisted as if they had been placed in a blender, with long red gashes running across their skin and noses where eyes should be, eyes where mouths should be, mouths where eyebrows typically go, and on and on. Melanie tried to ignore them. She failed to do so.

She flipped the box on its side. In tiny print, near the bottom left corner of the box, she read “typically takes one to two hours to take effect.” 

Melanie stopped abruptly. The box slipped through her hands like fine silk, slipping to the street floor. A woman bumped into her rigid state, stepping to the side only to jab a finger in Melanie’s face, cursing a storm upon the already-dreary cityscape. Try as she might, however, Melanie couldn’t understand a single word the woman said. Eventually, the woman gave up, leaving Melanie crushed on all sides by a crowd that refused to part for her. She bent down to pick the box up, only to find her hands shaking so badly that even forcing a finger to move took substantial effort. Her breaths grew shallow. And thinner. And–

She couldn’t breathe.

She clawed at her neck as if doing so could open her airways, crouching over herself in the middle of a dense, constantly flowing crowd. A loud noise sounded behind her. A noise that echoed and made her cover her ears. A gunshot. A scuffle. A shout then two more. Someone was screaming. Melanie curled further into herself. And all at once footsteps echoed to her right, left, front, and back. She could feel their vibrations reverberating through the ground, and sense the rush of wind every passerby created as they barely avoided stepping on her shaking figure.

Melanie closed her eyes, but doing so only caused them to appear once more. They stared at her through their cruel, misshaped faced, crooked eyes twisted in delight as yellow teeth practically sunk into her skin. But they weren’t practically tearing her apart. They were tearing her apart.

She could feel it: sharp pain. Everywhere. 

It began in her back and erupted across her being: from the inside of her body to the out, her hands, mouth, head, back, legs, feet, stomach, neck, ears, elbows, knees, arms, tongue, joints, shoulders, chest–nothing exempt from endless pain. Pain stabbed into her like raindrops falling in a bucket, starting sparse and slowly growing denser, thicker, and most of all, amounting to practically every part of her body. 

Her eyes were closed, and yet Melanie still found herself stuck in the realm of endless delusion. She stared at a wrinkled woman with mouths for eyes, both of which emulated the skunk-like smell of weed. The woman’s mouth-eyes stretched in synchronized smiles, a deep, chilling darkness erupting from the spaces between her teeth. 

It’s just my imagination, Melanie told herself, but the pain was too real. The scent was too thick. The blood in her mouth–

The blood in her mouth?

Well, yes, so there was. Nothing else could have this salty, iron-like taste, after all. But why would–

More of them appeared in her vision. Twisted creatures of every form, strikingly more detailed than Melanie had ever seen them. She just wanted them to go away. She just wanted–

The sound of a siren emulated from the real world.

Melanie, at last, opened her eyes. When she did so, however, her vision blurred; safe for the shapes swimming in the corners of her sight as always. She tried to speak, but liquid filled her mouth. The same liquid dribbled down her chin, pooling on the dirt-covered concrete as soon as Melanie opened her mouth. Red in color, it reflected the sight of a police officer standing above her, speaking into a walkie-talkie clipped on his uniform. She tried to understand his words, but everything seemed oddly muffled. She managed to make out one word: trampled.

She hazarded a glance at her body.

Footprints. 

Footprints scaled her figure.

Her arms lay limp at her sides, body shape twisted in the same way as her hallucinations. Her clothes, in complete tatters, draped her body in a bloody, fabric mess; red mixing with the off-white remains of a hoodie and sweatpants. Multiple body parts bent directions they weren’t meant to go, and her left elbow in particular had a splintered bone sticking up from it.

Strength left her body, leaving her to stare forward at the countless feet of onlookers. Her gaze rested on the box of Haloperidol. It had been stepped over to a point of obscurity, becoming a simple crushed ball of cardboard.

All at once, the world seemed oddly clear. She could see, and though her vision continued to blur, for perhaps the first moment in her life Melanie’s vision contained not even a single glimpse of a monster or hallucination of any sort. Had the Haloperidol finally taken effect?

Funny, Melanie thought, that I finally got medicine, and yet I barely get any time to enjoy it. She smiled; or at least tried her best to through the blood obstructing her airways. The constant pressure on her head lifted in lieu of an overwhelmingly light, dizzying sense. 

Melanie slowly closed her eyes, taking in every moment free from the monsters. Despite the pain and discomfort, the only emotion she could muster was relief.

She died peacefully, having obtained something she’d been searching for all her life. 

Clarity. 

At long last.