Do Abominations Dream of Electric Shunts?

carduinal-cyn · #1

((Raymond LaSalle continued from 卒業.))

It took Raymond three minutes to form back into a human body.

He slumped onto the pavement in defeat. All his belongings were left behind in the chaos, even his clothes. He was bared to the world. His stomach protruded in a rather ungainly fashion; he pressed on it, hoping it might shrivel up and vanish. He was never sure whether his weight was a genetic fluke or a by-product of too much sitting and doodling. (Today, at least, he could point to a more definite cause.)

He used her, that's what they'd say. Kept her around as long as he could steady himself in those wondrous pink eyes, then sucked the life out of her. He knew that's what Noah would tell them. Noah was popular and friendly and all that other insipid garbage. They would never believe the truth in Sayuna's dying whisper: that it was all an accident, and no one was to blame for what seemed on its face to be a grisly act of murder.

Try as he might, Ray couldn't banish the memory from his brain. Sayuna was clay, and he was water: his touch softened her up, made her pliable and weak, and soon they were little more than a messy hybrid of slime and filth. A ceramics project from the depths of hell. Ray shuddered at the thought. He could still taste blood and raw pork, tinged with artificial strawberry and the unpleasant tickling sensation of hair caught in his throat. He briefly considered washing the taste out. His stomach sloshed in protest.

The human body is about 60% water. How much of his thirst had already been quenched...?

Raymond retched, and he coughed up a shrivelled, desiccated hand. Suddenly his mouth was full of it and he couldn't move his tongue and the fingers were digging into his lower lip and he gagged, gagged until all that was left of Sayuna spewed out onto the pavement in a puddle of mucous saliva. He cursed. The hand was stripped to the bone. The interlocking parts had fused together into some ghoulish cartoon character's glove, five little fragile white lines.

Ray crawled on all fours towards the puddle, unable to tear his eyes from the sight. When he came to it he sat there on his naked knees, dumbfounded, until the tears fell.

Raymond drifted forwards with slow, measured steps: an unthinking function of his own body, like the rhythm of his heartbeat. Students were milling about everywhere. Some he recognized; some he didn't. Some chattered about inane things — movies, TV shows, classes — and some were content to walk as freely as he. Ms. Duffy's biology classroom wasn't here, though, and so he pressed onward.

Walking...

Walking...

He was growing listless.

The halls of Duniway High School seemed to yawn on endlessly. The farther he travelled, the emptier the school became, and the people he passed by looked more like human-shaped silhouettes than high school students. The lockers melded into one, and the classroom doors became poorly drawn outlines. An ashy smell filled the air, and the bright sunlight grew dimmer by the minute.

Ray blinked.

He was standing across from a woman wearing an owl mask.

He felt a chill.

Run.

He turned to follow his immediate impulse, but found to his alarm that his feet were rooted to the floor.

The woman drew uncomfortably close. An evil chuckle fell from her lips as she cradled his face in one hand.

"Oh, Ray," she whispered.

Ray's heart stopped. All he could move were his eyes. His skin bubbled and burst in panic. He shut them tight, bracing himself for the inevitable.

"Look what you've done to me..."

He opened his eyes.

Beneath the owl's mask was Sayuna's face. She wore a wistful smile, and her eyes glowed as warm and pinkish-red as they ever did.

But as Raymond beheld her, he couldn't feel the familiar calm overtake his being. If anything, her eyes were working him into a panic. His neck bubbled and fizzed.

Sayuna's lips parted into an evil rictus grin. Her hair stood on split end. Her skin cracked like porcelain. The pink of her eyes, so synonymous with her in Raymond's mind, winked out. He found himself staring into soulless black pits that opened wide as their sockets.

Something warm and prickly stabbed into his cheek and kept right on going. Pressure mounted inside his head. The nightmare wearing Sayuna's skin was melting now, cracked jigsaws of flesh and gore dripping down her face like she'd stared into the Ark of the Covenant.

A bony thumb-shaped nub poked out of Raymond's mouth. Then, he felt sweet blistering pain stab him from behind his eyes, and he knew no more.

The boy awoke in the middle of an abandoned parking lot. The night sky sparkled obnoxiously overhead, for he knew he would sleep no more.

((Raymond LaSalle continued in Day 2...))