In the cemetery, the ground roils like the skin of a roadkilled animal being devoured from within by a thousand tiny, mindlessly chewing mouths. Skeletal hands break the loam, pulling themselves upward, outward, being reborn into a night that is suddenly alive with a million tiny clicking, popping sounds as their bones snap back into their original positions. This is terrible. This would be terrible enough. But ah, “enough” has never been the goal of such terrors.
Thick liquid, brackish and smelling of the grave, oozes out of the earth around the feet of the risen dead. It pools there, bubbles forming on its surface, releasing more unspeakable odors every time they pop. Then, as slowly as it appeared, the liquid runs up the length of the long bones of their legs, sticking there, sloughing off its decay, becoming muscle and sinew and skin. Piece by piece, the dead are reassembled, until they look perfectly human once more. No: better than human. Their skins are without flaw, save for a certain pallor which unites them, regardless of race, in a grayish undertone. They look as if they have been locked indoors for a hundred years, a thousand, millennia of isolation away from the open air.
They look dead.
But their faces are fine; their hair is thick and lush and lustrous; their bodies are smooth and chiseled, ripe with muscle and lush with fat. They span the gamut of human experience, and all of them are naked, and all of them are dead. They turn blank eyes toward the lights at the back of the houses occupied by Esther and Jennifer and their families. Then, as if in answer to a tone that only they can hear, they turn, seamless as swallows, and begin to walk away from those two houses. They begin to walk toward the school.
Their feet make no sound on the soft earth. Very soon, there is nothing left to show that they were ever there at all.
THE BEAUTY of the horror movie is in its distance. The things that happen are happening on the other side of a screen, terrible but removed, unable to touch the viewer anywhere outside of dreams. In dreams, anything is possible. In dreams, the Blob can ooze up from a shower drain, the man with the knives on his hands can stalk a boiler room that never was, the Wolfman can howl outside a bedroom window. But still, there is always the knowledge that the television can be turned off, that the movie will end, that the sleeper will wake; there is the understanding, primal and instinctive, that all this too shall pass.
Esther removes her clothes, shuddering at the smell of urine, at the way the fabric peels away from her skin. She feels like she has survived a war. The feeling does not pass as she showers, sluicing away the mud and blood that cover her, or as she bandages her hands and knees. She crawls into bed still shuddering, somehow convinced that things are very, very wrong, that things will never be right again. She is more right than she knows.
Jennifer has already showered, already had her face washed like that of a much younger child, and crawled into her own bed when Esther’s head hits the pillow. That is the cue. For the two of them to face the next part of the scenario together, they must fall asleep together; they must move from segment to segment together. It is the most artificial piece of an artificial world, this careful control of their movements, when normally they are allowed—expected, even—to choose their own path through the narrative. Esther closes her eyes and Jennifer is asleep, sitting up in bed with her notebook open on her knees. The pen falls from her hand to land on the carpet, uncapped, unable to dry out, because it is only set dressing, nothing real. Nothing of importance. It is only here to lend credence to the scene.
The girls sleep, and as they sleep, they see the risen dead marching on the small, nameless town where they have carved out a space for themselves and for their impossible friendship: they see them, pale and gray and naked, walking down sidewalks and along culverts, their eyes trained forward, toward some unknown and unknowable destination.
They see the moment when a college student stumbles from the bar where he’s been drinking away his problems and nearly collides with a naked woman, beautiful as the sunset, her eyes locked on the horizon. They see him light up, sure that his night is taking a turn for the better.
“Hey, you look cold—” he begins, and then the woman’s teeth are at his throat and her hands are at his belly, ripping with a strength that is inhuman and impossible, so impossible that for a moment his mind simply shuts down, refusing to acknowledge that this could be happening, and when the moment passes, it is followed by another moment, twice as terrible, in which all of this is real, is real, is so terribly, terribly real. His blood is between her teeth and on her hands and in her mouth, and he dies before he can find the strength to scream. The woman, the dead woman, takes what she wants from him and drops him to the sidewalk, licking her lips, which are redder now than they were before.
There is a new light in her eyes, and a new sureness in her step, as she turns to look toward the bar he emerged from. She sees. She understands. She beckons the nearby dead to walk with her to the door, and together, they lay silent siege. Not entirely silent: the screaming has time to start now, and time to continue, and time to die.
Their victims do not rise, but lay where they have fallen, dead, ripped open and exsanguinated, drained of everything that made them who they were. They are not a part of this narrative. They were barely a part of this story.
The dead continue to move.
THE SOUND of footsteps outside the viewing room caught the woman’s attention before she was fully aware of it. She whipped around, eyes narrowing, and peered at the half-open door. Lab protocols called for viewing rooms to be unlocked whenever in use, to increase accountability and prevent later lawsuits. The question of patient privacy was irrelevant: while Dr. Webb was a licensed therapist, none of her technicians shared her qualifications, and all the patients were required to sign a dozen releases before they entered an active pod, agreeing to let their sessions be viewed and even recorded. Given how easy it would be—how easy it was—for an unethical operator to twist an ongoing scenario, the accountability was an absolute requirement.
She had known this when she had infiltrated the facility, and when she had killed the original operator to take his place. She had simply been hoping to be able to slip out without killing anyone else. It wasn’t the loss of life that bothered her: she’d done much larger jobs than this one, some with fatalities that numbered in the double digits. It was the loss of potential income. She had been hired to get Dr. Webb’s data, distort any active scenarios, and discredit her work at the same time, not to destroy the place. That would have cost her employer substantially more. It was vexing, thinking about the lost income.
Slowly, she slipped out of her chair and moved to one side, where she wouldn’t be visible to anyone stepping into the doorway. Let them think the scenario had been left to run temporarily unattended: she’d read enough of their documentation to know this was allowed when things weren’t at a particularly tense juncture. For things like the scene in the school hallway, which had been necessary mostly as a transition between the increase in the two girls’ ages and the graveyard, she could have gone for a glass of water and no one would have thought twice about her absence.
But on the screen, the dead were walking, returning to the graveyard, moving toward the homes of the two girls who woke them, calling them from their eternal rest. Their skins were slick with blood, and their eyes were filled with the screams of the slaughtered, alive in a terrible bright way. On the screen, the light in Esther’s room had just come on, followed shortly by the light in Jennifer’s. This was not a casual moment. This room should not have been unattended.
“Hello?”
The voice was light, female, and low to the ground. The hidden woman relaxed slightly. She didn’t care whether her targets were male, female, or agender: what she cared about was her ability to overwhelm them with a minimum of fuss. Small people went down faster. Small people were thus to be preferred.
There was a soft sound, as of someone stepping hesitantly forward. The woman melted further back into the shadows. The longer she could delay this conf
rontation, the more the odds would be on her side.
She could see her uninvited guest now, through the space created between the hinge of the open door and the doorframe. It was a petite woman in a white lab coat and a dark sweater, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail that hung most of the way to her waist. She was pretty, in an abstract sort of way; it would be a shame to kill her.
The woman flexed her hands. Many things were a shame, and had to happen anyway, for the benefit of the job.
“Tyler?” said the invader, taking another step forward. “Tyler, where are—” Her foot hit the edge of the pool of thick, largely congealed blood. She stopped as she felt the texture of the floor change, and looked down, and went very still and very pale at the same time, until she could almost have passed for one of the dead things in Esther and Jennifer’s shared scenario. Her eyes bulged in her head, only a little at first, but more and more as the pressure of her captive scream grew. Finally, she opened her mouth, preparing to set that scream free.
The woman moved, quick as a thought, grabbing the sides of the invader’s head and twisting hard to the right. There was a brittle snapping sound, followed by the scent of the invader’s bowels voiding themselves, and all tension went out of her, replaced by the limp, floppy heaviness of the dead. The woman let her go. She fell to the floor, landing with a splat in the congealed blood.
The woman sighed.
She could walk away now, leave the scenario to run to its natural conclusion, leave the remaining technicians to stumble across the bodies of their peers and mask her intrusion with their own panicked response. She would have to leave the drive behind, but it would upload once it finished copying the data, placing everything safely in the cloud, ready to be collected when she next had use of a secure terminal. In the case that a break-in could not be performed seamlessly, it was always better to make it large, aggressive, and eye-catching. That increased the chances of the break-in’s true purpose being utterly obscured as the police swarmed over everything, ripping through haystacks in search of needles that had never been concealed. She could get away clean, if she left right now.
But she wouldn’t be able to guarantee that Dr. Jennifer Webb would die in her self-inflicted horror movie. She wouldn’t be able to look at her employer and remind him that when he asked for the best, he got her, making her bill less a contractual obligation and more a tithe to a well-inclined goddess of crime. If he had wanted someone who would walk away and leave the job half-finished, he would have gone with one of her peers, faceless, foolish creatures who put more stock in their skins than in their professional pride.
With another sigh, the woman bent and grasped the intruder’s ankles, using them to drag her into the corner. It was dark enough, and the blood was thick enough, that the trail this created barely changed the timbre of the room. She still had time.
Calm—ever and always calm—the woman reclaimed her seat and began once more to type.
___5. Capture.
ESTHER WAKES with a gasp, what feels like the ghost of a scream clogging her throat and choking her so that she can’t quite catch her breath. She bends forward, pressing a hand against her sternum, feeling the anxious, unwavering pounding of her heart. Whatever she dreamt, it has scared the life out of her.
It’s that unease, that feeling that something is wrong, that drives her from her bed to the window. The cemetery is a black stain against the lights of the town, which twinkle, fairy-like, all around it. She’s often glad that she didn’t live here until she was old enough to understand that the cemetery wasn’t actually a light-sucking monster lurking just outside her bedroom. She can’t imagine how Jennifer grew up on the cemetery’s edge without becoming even weirder than she already is.
But tonight, the cemetery seems to pulse, like something in it has been sparked back to life, waking and stretching and stirring upon the world. Tonight, the darkness is deeper and shallower at the same time, a contradiction she feels in her bones, that feels like it would be delighted to rip her stem from stern. The world is wrong.
A patch of light amongst the dark catches her eye. She turns, and for a moment, she would swear she sees a face looking up at her from beyond the fence, pale and silent and somehow inhuman. Then the moment passes, the face moves, and she is alone again.
Her phone vibrates, dancing on her nightstand. She grabs it, disconnecting it from the charger, and is unsurprised to see a text from Jennifer. Unsurprised, and oddly unsettled, because if she’s getting texts, she’s really awake. This strangeness, this twisted world, is not a dream.
U UP?
YES, she responds, and follows it with, SOMETHING WOKE ME. NOT SURE WHAT.
THERE’S SOMEONE IN THE BACKYARD, reads Jennifer’s reply.
Esther is about to ask her who, what she saw, why it woke her, when a new sound is added to the world, and she loses her patience for such easy questions: a scream rises from the downstairs, so high and pained that for a moment, her brain refuses to acknowledge it as human. Surely it’s a raccoon with its leg stuck in a trap, or a fox—she’s heard foxes can scream, although she’s never heard it with her own ears—protecting its territory near an open window. It can’t be human. It can’t be her father.
Then the scream breaks into a shuddering sob, deeper and broader and less possible to ignore, and Esther runs, still in her flannel pajamas, to the hall, down the stairs, into the living room, where three of the perfect, pale people have converged upon her father. He is bleeding from a great wound in his shoulder, raw and ragged and surprisingly blue inside, shimmering with all the colors she’s glimpsed at the butcher counter in the grocery store, the ones that have no place inside of a person. Esther freezes in the living room door, mouth working soundlessly, body seeming to catch fire and turn to ice in the same instant. Everything is floaty and far away, dreamlike.
I’m dreaming, she thinks, and the thought is warming and cooling at the same time, like a mug of hot cocoa with a dish of vanilla ice cream: perfectly mundane, perfectly reasonable, perfectly safe. She is dreaming, and none of this is happening to her—
(—and far away, a woman who no longer quite knew who she was stirred and moaned in her chemically-induced sleep, fighting against the drugs that fought with equal fierceness to keep her under. She no longer appreciated the wrongness of the world she dreamed: only that she needed to run, to flee, to save Jennifer before the dark could take them both down.)
—and that means she’ll wake up soon, safe and sound and untouched by any impossible horrors from the wrong side of the grave.
Her father’s wildly rolling eyes find her face, fix on it, and widen slightly, focusing through the pain, which must be unbearable and immense. Esther can’t wrap her mind around the scope of the pain her father is feeling, and so she pushes it aside in favor of taking a shaking step forward, licking her lips as she tries to force them to remember how speech is made.
“Esther,” whispers her father. His voice is cracked and shattered from the screaming, and she knows, she knows that these are the last words he’ll ever speak to her. These are the words she’ll preserve in the bell jar of her heart for the rest of her life, using them to shape and define herself long after the actual sound of his voice has faded into unmemorability.
“Esther,” he whispers again, and doesn’t scream, not even when one of the terrible things rips a chunk out of his bicep with its teeth. They look so close to human, but they’re not. Even their clothes are wrong, ill-fitting and torn in places, seemingly stolen from their original owners. People who didn’t need them anymore. “Baby girl, run.”
The last word becomes a wail, and one of the things—a woman by shape, with eyes like ice—turns toward the door where Esther stands. There is blood smeared all across the bottom half of her face, thick and gory, lipstick that will never catch favor with the fashion elite.
“Esther,” she purrs. Her voice holds all the life her eyes do not. “Why, what a pleasure it is to meet you. I suppose I owe you thanks. You’re th
e reason that I’m here. The reason that we’re all here.”
(The dead woman had an assassin’s face, and as the assassin herself sat behind the terminal which controlled Esther’s private nightmare, she smiled. Oh, this was going to be delicious. This could never have been anything but.)
“Why are you hurting my father?” Esther’s voice is that of someone much younger, younger, even, than she was when she first arrived in Massachusetts: it is the voice of a girl who has two parents, and no idea what it is to sit, silent and white-knuckled, through a funeral, and who is afraid of the darkness only because there is no light, and not because she knows what it might conceal.
“Because we can,” says the thing. “Because we’re hungry, and what’s hungry must be fed, don’t you think, Esther?” Her name is meat for maggots on the thing’s lips. “We’re so very, very hungry.”
“Run,” moans her father again.
“You called us, and we came,” says the thing. “This is all for you, Esther. You wished vengeance on those who’d hurt you. You made the proper offerings, gave us blood and tears and so many dearer fluids—all the humors, laid at our gravesites like you knew what you were doing.” The thing smiled, showing too many teeth, some with slivers of flesh wedged between them. “Ignorance, as they say, is no defense against the consequences of your actions.”
It’s an argument a future Esther would have been able to use against the children whose therapists had encouraged them to tell lies about her father, if she hadn’t been so shocked and stunned by what was happening around her. This version of Esther will never have the chance, or the need. Her father is bleeding out before her eyes. The things aren’t biting him now, but they don’t need to be, because the damage is done, and all the regrets in the world won’t heal the gashes in his skin.