Chapter Text
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
- Franz Kafka, author of The Metamorphosis
You remember being born, don’t you? The shock to the system, eyes fluttering open. Mother’s white neck with the scar-shaped blue veins blooming up into her face, visage washed out with a blood red smile, as if she’d glimpsed nirvana in your waking gaze. Physicality tightly bound together yet still so murky, foggy. Awareness like knuckles pressed to your cheeks in a punch.
Mother had said, “You’re awake, Cassandra.” Newborn lungs. Tight breaths. Heaving chest. Yes, mother, I am, you wanted to say.
Within the walls of the castle that Mother had stormed like a Goddess returning to Her realm was a portrait of three sisters. They were done up in pale colors like spring pink with rosy cheeks full of life, their curls so fresh that they were perfect. The plaque below their portrait read Bela, Cassandra, Daniela. Mother had you and your sisters stand there in your newborn bodies like a christening, a baptism, right there in the hall. You remember, right? She made you all aware of your names. She gave them to you like a mother would, Mother did. Mother with her pale green eyes the color of mold spores on rotting bread, Mother with her opulent veins of cold blue, her beating heart and living woman guts.
Understanding blossomed in your wiggling insides no different from a flower bursting from soil. The awareness of a second life, bright as pillars of light from the sun, but whose? Cassandra’s or Cassandra’s? You stood in the hall with the portrait of Cassandra with her two sisters by her side in her pretty living girl dress and you felt your insides wiggle with maggots, with bugs, with flies, a dead girl soup in your forever festering belly.
And then it was Bela and Cassandra and Daniela. Or maybe it was Bela and Cassandra and Daniela. So you drank and you hunted and you wondered: Where is Cassandra in Bela and Cassandra and Daniela?
“Dude, where’s my car?”
- Beloved homosexual and noted car enthusiast, Oscar Wilde
Ethan doesn’t wake up. He surfaces.
At Dockweiler, where he had his first kiss one summer, all his mother’s children would torment one another. If it wasn’t his older sister, it was his younger sister holding his head below the waterline after he’d taken a prank too far. This feels the same, all realization born from gasping breaths. When his smoke-scorched lungs are hit with air, they’re full of painfully puncturing needles. Each breath drags its way through him. Within his singing skull is a headache so voracious that his brain feels like a frightened, beating heart.
Despite never closing his eyes, it feels distinctly like he’s opening his lids for the first time today. The fluttering of them feels shredded with sandy sleep crystals. Greeted with the sight of a gray stone ceiling, the bricks laid messily, Ethan groans. He wishes he were staring up at his sister’s untamable smile, teeth bared in equal measures of love and threats, surrounded by the Pacific’s grand body-churning current. Instead, he sees a poorly lit dungeon, splattered with blood, remnants of people who mercifully are not his family.
Phenomenal, he thinks but doesn’t say. He doesn’t say anything. Ethan just shifts to his side, rocks pushing against the roughened skin of his palms, his dark pull over, and keeps moving. He’s always moving.
A recollection strikes his body like a match. His body burns with the memory: An explosion. Overwhelmed with the thought Rosemary must be cold, just in her pajamas, the little pink top he put on her, the small socks she kept trying to pull off her tiny feet in their family home. Gotta give her his jacket, and he did. A button in his hand, deceptively light. The fleeting wish that maybe this is all a bad dream; how could this happen? Why them, again and again? All his life, he had taken God’s name in vain. Would have been a fantastic time to make a believer out of him by intercepting in the shitfest that was his life. Then again, a big goddamn bomb strapped to a big goddamn monster born out of a fucking fungus seems like a fairly colossal interruption. Who writes this shit, he thinks, tired knees to the ground. He’s got a red pen in his pocket that is itching to draw some squiggly lines, to scrawl ‘see me after class!’ onto it.
It’s probably someone else’s good fortune that he’s not a red-pen-happy teacher, that he’s standing on his feet in a decrepit dungeon littered with lanterns beaming sodium-vapor orange at him. Not Rosemary’s, not his. Maybe Mia’s, he muses humorlessly. They were getting pretty argumentative at the end, there, quibbling about baby books, the volume on the television, what to play on the radio. Minor things that would shift into mountains; a refusal to communicate that went both ways.
“It’s alright,” he interrupts himself, like hitting the brake on his car. (Not the SUV they have—had?— now, no; the muscle car with the long white bonnet that he loved so much.) “Chris was getting them out of there.” The reminder does not keep him warm; it hits him like a solid block of ice. Regret splashes over his chest coldly. Thirty six and a single mother to a six month old. Some great husband he is. Was. “Fuck,” he says as though spitting out blood.
Without Rosemary to look for, he doesn’t want to be in some freaks’ torture dungeon. Without Rosemary, actually, he mostly doesn’t want to be anything or anywhere. Truth be told, he could almost welcome nothingness. He’d pretended once, coming home from a shift at Blockbuster manning the front alone. He’d pretended that he was dead and gone, face down in his pillow, shoes still on, unbreathing.
Rocks skip across the dungeon floor as he walks, bones still reorienting themselves into whatever constellation he is now. Ethan has feet, he has hands with all ten fingers and a wedding band to boot. He’s got skin, eyes to see with, a mouth to speak with. As far as he can tell, he’s all Megamycete-polluted human again.
“No such thing as peace,” he grunts, shuttering a cell closed behind him. There’s a presumably Megamycete-polluted rat in there he’s not interested in getting to know.
This dungeon is one he knows. Still damp, still spooky. It has sharp turns, cutting hallways that smell like garbage. There are flies here, he thinks. There should be flies here, he realizes. Ethan hoofs it through the human wreckage: blood, guts, probably some shit somewhere in the mix. Smells like it. But there are no flies, none that he can spot with the naked eyes he has again. There’s nothing but him in the world as he travels, grimacing while he wades through human-wine, shoes growing sticky with the viscosity of it.
While his steps cling to the stone, he ascends. The stairs echo in the darkness. When he arrives, the castle shifts like a funhouse, mirrors casting false images of places that should not be so that Ethan enters the hall the same way a roach intrudes on a party. Castle Dimitrescu hasn’t changed a lick, he notes, passing through the grand room, leaving bloodied imprints of his brogues on the pristine tile. Part of him feels a little rush of something warm over ruining the floor. It feels good to push chaos onto others, for once. Just call him Eris, he thinks, before the universe rights itself again.
It’s hard to say if he feels her or sees her first. She is a whirlwind, a tornado, entirely monochrome save for her red, red lips. Ethan’s grandmother, god rest her wicked wooden-spoon-happy soul, wore lipstick like that. It came in a black tube with gilded rims shaped like honeycomb. His sisters, both of them, would sneak into their grandmother’s room to sit at the vanity with its old knobs, its piles of cosmetics, where they would put on their grandmother’s rose petal lipstick while hushing and giggling at each other. Ethan would stand in the doorframe frowning because they were told not to go in Grandma's bedroom.
The memory leaks out of him. He’s chewed up then spat back into this moment, where a large gloved hand is snatching up a fistful of his dark pullover. Gloves black like pitch, like oil slick, like the plastic tubing around wires that keeps them from going up in flames, hiss as they tighten. His gaze snakes along the long line of her white-wrapped limb, ivory as bone, while his legs kick in a desperate but fruitless search of purchase. He looks into the lit up face of the Lady Dimitrescu of House Dimitrescu whose name sure as shit isn’t on that plaque, he remembers. She looks as angry as flames.
“Filthy, despicable man!” Her voice is thunder claps, is a storm. She is the storm, he thinks. It pisses him off a little bit; what a fucking inconvenience, he thinks before she slams against him against a Doric pillar white as eyeball jelly. Debris falls in a little dust cloud around him. Ethan goes rabbit-shocked, heart pounding painfully in his chest, still somehow listening to a part of him that can’t be bothered to be afraid anymore.
Alcina Dimitrescu with her spoiled milk complexion goes, “You dare show your rancid, fulsome face here again?! You come back into my home, where my daughters sleep, and to what end? A mistake?” Once more, his back collides with the stone; Ethan coughs weakly, throat unable to spill over with fully formed words. Each slam comes with a shuddering, splintering noise like something is breaking. “Have you nothing to say for yourself? Nothing at all!”
Pot calling the kettle black, he thinks dully over the roar of her fury.
Not that she’s giving him much of a chance to speak. All that fabric bunched up around his throat, beneath his jaw, is suffocating him. One more wallsmack, he coughs, breathes plaster. Then he chokes, words all smashing together in his mouth. What does he have to say for himself? Nothing, not anymore. None of this matters. He’s never going to see Rosemary again, and for a blissful moment, he feels something aside from overwhelming grief.
Gripping her giant wrist in both of his hands, Ethan siphons her rage into him. For a moment, they’re both just angry parents. He hates that, this empathetic sensation pulsing unwantedly within his muscle, but he hates that she has her daughters and he’s lost Rose again more.
Feeling ugly, feeling mean, he bares his teeth in a grimace to say, “Yeah. Just one thing. Hope you took your geritol, Granny.”
Then he kicks her in the diaphragm, and Giganto is stumbling. Enraged spittle trails down her white chin. Her python’s grip on him slackens enough that Ethan’s feet find the floor, but they slip so his back does, too. On the ground, looking up at her, Big Bertha is bigger than he remembers, but smaller somehow, too. She is too real, too alive, too much of a thing to contend with. All he wants to know is anger, but here he is without a Boomstick.
So he skedaddles, pushing himself to his feet, brogues squeaking as he bolts across the hall. At his back, Alcina Dimitrescu bellows, “That was six, manthing!” Was it? He wasn’t fucking counting on account of her attempting to murder him.
In massive strides, she pursues him. The click of her heels follows him. Each step is a thunderbolt scorching the floor, transporting him back to being thirteen and seeing Jurassic Park for the first time. Paranoia signals throughout his body to go on alert, panic ricocheting along his tired muscle. Ethan cannot move fast enough from the danger beating down his back in a monsoon. The dungeon was not necessarily preferable to this, but a piddling little thought unravels in his cold, out of shape frontal lobe: What if this is a preview?
Ethan cuts across the hall, finds the stairs. They’re black wood with red carpet rolling down each luxurious looking step. He flies up them, travels down the lush carpeting that frankly these witches don’t deserve. (He and Mia were discussing getting carpeting on the steps or at least some kind of rug nailed down for when Rose began walking. If his baby girl was gonna fall on a step, he damn well wanted something this soft for her little bottom to hit.)
Beyond the ring-shaped railing encircling the hall is an actual hallway he slips into while Alcina Dimitrescu hunts him to some unknowable end he doesn’t give a shit about understanding. Ethan is fairly positive that all this will lead to is his, what, third death? The concept of keeping tally on all the times he’s been ruthlessly slaughtered is weirdly easy to consider.
There in the hallway, he hears a tiny fluttering of wings, the barest hint of a buzz orbiting his skull in such a way that, momentarily, he feels fucking insane. There isn’t a fly here to torment him, just some tall bitch with a murderous agenda. The impossible fly hovers around him, anyway, filling his brain in the tones of a demented wind chime thrown into a jumble by the storm on his back. It stays in place around his skull before zipping away from him, cutting ahead as precisely as a blade. Time passes, but not enough to let him realize this is strange.
At the end of the warm hallway, some complex cocktail of foreboding blooms in his chest while he comes face to face with a carving of a woman screaming, pressed into the opulent double doors keeping Ethan stuck in the foyer. In a chilling wash, the burst of emotions consume him: The iciness of fear, the panicked burning. Above all else, he feels most worried about escaping, so he puts down the emotions thundering away in his heart like he does so often these (Those?) days. Palms flat to the wood, he pushes the doors with a face mounted on them open.
The grand wooden doors part like velveteen curtains. As they yawn open, stacks of windows glowing sunset orange unveil themselves. Between them: Stars. An impossible to understand nighttime sprawl.
His brain parses it as the night, at least, a curtain sparkling with stars. Constellations he never bothered to learn twinkle mysteriously at him. Like taunting winks, Ethan thinks.
Below him is a long stretch of deep well blackness, like a lake that has been still for years so the rot at the bottom barely visible through dirty water. When he looks down, the curtain of night is cylinder shaped, going round and deep, deep, deep. A tube full of stars, full of windows into loving homes he’ll never be a part of again.
Alcina approaches. Flight or fight kicks in.
His sister liked Alice in Wonderland. She read it a few times, tried to get him to join her like some kind of siblings-only book club. Springing into the rabbit hole, he looks up, remembers the White Rabbit and the woodland trail Alice chased him down. The memory is triggered by the revelation that the impossible fly is real. Over his head looms a tiny buzzing speck of black with its delicate, pellucid wings. That’s not too weird, he thinks. A slaughtering floor in the shape of a noblewoman’s wine cellar seems like the perfect breeding ground for flies. In the Bible, which Ethan only ever skimmed because he had nothing better to do at Sunday morning mass, they called Satan the Lord of Flies.
Sinking past the windows where he hears snippets of conversations he knows— Ethan picks out a heartbeat in time, his sister telling him he’s a spoilsport for not reading with her— feels like falling into the underworld, into hell. It feels a little like dying again, relinquishing all of himself to the wind crashing against his back as though it’s the tornado carrying him to Oz. At least it isn’t Godzilla in a floppy black hat anymore.
Instead of Godzilla in a comically large hat, it is a small black dot of a fly, with fluttering wings and gigantic eyes against the wind whipping all around them as they descend deeper. The briefest of moments passes, wherein he remembers that flies possess a three hundred and sixty degree view of the world. Ethan cannot stop himself from wondering what the tube of stars must look like from the fly’s view; is it a night sky? Is it a blanket, consistently falling around them? A curtain unrolling itself like a celestial carpet in constant performance of an award night they are both intruding on? Is he party crashing with this impossible fly?
Before he can dissect this thought, the fly flowers into flies upon flies, a gloomy day fog of them bearing uncountable diaphanous wings all aflutter in an ugly buzzing around him. The horde coagulates into the shape of something heart-stoppingly recognizable, but a wall shoots up between Ethan so the knowledge falls through him as easily as summer showers. This was something his therapist told him he was good at; putting distance between himself and the situation through distractions, alternating thoughts like he’s speeding along the highway. Flicking his turn signal on, he swerves into another lane and thinks: Hm. I wonder where I’m going to fall.
Before him forms the frame of a woman cloaked in black. Ethan thinks: Mia has these black pants that look fantastic on her. The cloud of flies crystallizes into skin whitened by who knows what, makeup or perhaps the pallor of death. Mia rarely wore makeup; when she did it was gentle diffused tones that enriched her warmth so she looked like she was fresh off a vacation at the beach. The woman being born in front of him wears expensive oil slick black gloves that reach out for his shoulders, pulling him close. Only then does his brain put a halt on every other thought not related to the moment. The gyri and sulci making up his brain send signals to his frontal lobe, telling him, Hey, buddy? You might want to tune back in.
Suddenly the moment is back inside of him. He breathes in a shudder so fragile that it cracks like glass, right down the middle, baring his fear to her. It’s the one with hair black as dirty well water, cascading out from beneath her heavy hood in a stringy, wavy mess. Wrapped around her is a cloak that flaps openly behind her, the same as beating bird wings. A rejectable thing, devoid of humanity nightmarishly clots together. And like a nightmare, pushing her back only invites her closer. With bared teeth, the witch hungrily leans in so she and Ethan become one living, breathing unit. They fall, hand in hand, like birds of prey locked together by their feet in a death drop.
He hears his sister reading aloud, in her little girl voice with the lisp that two missing front teeth gifted her with. “Down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”
Together, they land. Ethan takes the brunt of their fall. A shock of pain carves bleeding fissures through him immediately, screaming aches splintering across his architecture. There is no time to revel in the solidity beneath him or how remarkably human he feels in enduring the agony as she brackets his hips with her thighs. Ethan’s brain pelts him with a thought he’s had more often than he wants to admit. The witch feels startlingly solid for a mess of flies piling together in the shape of a woman. She feels as though she’s realer than anything else in this horrifyingly familiar room with its instantly recognizable ceiling. Like she means to scavenge from his corpse, the witch descends upon Ethan, mouth hanging free with baleful laughter. On her breath, he smells dampness and long dead insects.
“Miss me?” she whispers loudly, nose inches from his, one of her be-leathered hands running from his stomach to his chest then up to his neck in a tense grip.
…Which one is this again?
In her eyes there is a twinkling of madness he’s been too close to too often in one evening. Ethan doesn’t make it a habit to get this close to many people; this is a proximity reserved for his wife and daughter only. Still, the witches all bowed their heads to his neck like they were lovers. Deja vu settles into his gut, but he fails to recognize which witch sits on him right now. He knows her eyes, though, hungry huntress’ eyes bursting with the golden part of a flame. All three of them had it, like they were on fire from the inside, and couldn’t wait to set the rest of the world ablaze.
The rest of the world is the Bakers’ garage, where Jack must have toiled away from time to time, or at least stored his tools. A bath spiraling between red and blue washes them out, limning them in a panicked warning to pull over, to stop, but she’s inching closer to him, closing the distance. The witch is so white that she looks silver. He pictures her like she is the blade of a guillotine swinging down upon him.
Every guillotine needs an executioner to drop the rope. Tonight’s executioner comes to stand beside them, between their frames huddled together like prey and predator, looming over them like a storm. She’s the one turns to look first, the smile melting from her face with the bleeding mouth. Feeling no different from a seal caught in a shark’s vicious jaw, Ethan only lets himself look up at the new threat when the old one’s attention is fully caught.
Skittering away, the witch gives him a full view of Jack Baker, sunken-cheeked, mad-eyed, teeth-baring grin. Ethan feels a surge of panic shoot through his veins that turns him into an ice sculpture. While she stands in her click-clicking heels, he freezes, giving Jack ample time to pull Ethan to his numb feeling feet.
Numbness spreads throughout his body as a dance ensues. It’s one Ethan has done over and over in his mind, winding himself up in his memories, spinning together yarns of could-haves or should-haves. He should have tried hard, he could have driven to the left a little more. If he hadn’t laid with fear in that house, letting it bewitch him into twitchy panics, maybe things wouldn’t have had to go the way they did. Jack and Ethan act out the moment the bar slid right through his head, splitting his skull the same seam rippers tear apart fabric. The fibers and textiles of Jack Baker are ripped apart, spilling, hanging, dripping in great dying threads of gore. Despite the way his body knows the fight like it knows its spine, Ethan tumbles out of the car as if he’s run a marathon. He still feels like a loser.
Flames take hold of the car’s white frame. Ethan’s old Dodge Challenger burns right up as he rolls out of it, crashing to the floor with a panicked dry heave; there’s nothing for him to empty himself of. Vulturelike, Jack descends upon him. Fear runs so cold in Ethan’s veins that he freezes long enough for Jack’s strong fist to curl around his dark sweater. Hauled off his feet for the second time in a short hour (or so, who the hell is counting, really?) Ethan struggles to pull away from Jack fruitlessly.
“You think that’s the whole magic trick, boy?” For only a moment more Ethan is in his grip. Jack tosses him to the wall, but his his back meets a less level surface.
“Shit!” Ethan hits the shelf lined with tools; wrenches, nails, bolts. They all scatter to the floor, glimmering silver in the light of the garage. His brain lights up in something akin to relief when a shotgun is knocked loose with the rabble of tools, falling to the ground in an empty sounding clatter. A glimmer of gold falls in specks from the weapon. It’s a break action shotgun, wooden grip polished but scuffed with marks that look like bolts of lightning cutting across an impossible sky.
The shotgun clatters again when his hand grips it. In his fierce grasp, it feels cold and light. In the wake of a discovery, Ethan feels like a hook ensnares the pit of his belly, rips it open. It’s unloaded. Of course it is. “Shit, shit, shit.”
From another point of view, the chase that ensues in the garage, wrapped around a burning car, might have been funny. Someone else, completely removed from the situation, might have found the comedy inherent in this Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote style chase. Maybe that someone is Ethan, who yells, “Leave me the hell alone!” while running in a circle, searching for ammo.
More likely, that person is the black haired Dimitrescu woman. The normal sized one whose name might have been— Cassandra? Aleksandra. He thinks it’s Aleksandra, at least. Aleksandra Dimitrescu sits on the bench table, legs crossed, lazily leaning back on her palms so that the hood of her coat almost slips back enough to expose her monochrome face. Ethan can see the moon-pale whiteness of her skin, black cracked lips curled up in a cat’s grin. She’s having a blast.
“Yoohoo,” Aleksandra calls when he rounds the corner. She’s coming into his line of vision again. Balancing in the palm of her hand is a box, green cardboard inked up with a name on the side.
Ammo. It’s ammo. The witch is offering him ammo, holding it out like a book for him to sign. He thinks about this; Hell is probably not real, because he would be there telling some poor schmuck about his baby girl while they both got tortured for eternity. Like, oh, hey! Looks like our immortal souls are trapped here forever. Would you like to hear about when my daughter made the cutest little babbling noise at the doctor’s office? Or what her favorite book is? Ethan knows it by heart now!
The moments that made Dulvey worth it weren’t always when he was laying head-to-chest with his wife, though they certainly were pretty sweet. Without those moments, he wouldn’t have the ones that made everything completely worth it; the ones where he got to sit with Rosemary in his lap, one of her picture books open in his other hand. Or the ones where he’d watch her watching television, blocky colors lighting up the screen and reflecting across her open-mouth astonished face. When she would laugh at a new noise, like tape being pulled from the roll or a bag of chips opening. The way she slept against his chest, drooling and dreaming. He used to count all the little things he saw in her that reminded him of Mia. Her nose, for one, but her eyes, too; the doe-y wideness of them, the color of their irises the same blue-gray like a lake that had frosted over in the dead heart of winter.
In the recollections that pelt him like rain, Ethan realizes this is Hell. That is the Devil Herself and this is Hell and he signs his name away to Her. What is the point when he will never have those moments again?
The box is smooth to the touch, warmed from her palm. Inside is enough bullets to tear Jack to smithereens, to render him shrapnel. Behind Ethan is the purring laughter of the Devil as he loads the shotgun. None of the clicks the gun emits while he readies it are loud enough to drown out her amusement, the buzz of her flies. She goes into a haze of blowflies that envelop him into darkness for a moment, then nothing. She’s waiting by the closed garage door now, lazily leaning against it with one of her booted feet against the metal. When he looks up, Ethan spies two golden eyes watching him. The eyes of a hungry wolf, swathed in black, a haze of a woman. Danger before him, danger at his back.
When he swivels, he pulls the trigger. It’s methodical. An explosion of gunpowder goes off before Ethan, the pop of the gun loud and ringing. There is panic bleeding out of him now. Despite the new hole in his head interrupting the healing process of the old one, Jack stumbles forward to push Ethan to the ground.
Panic burns right through all the receptors in his body, each of them clamoring to tell him to move quicker, to get out of the way but there’s only time for him to save the family jewels when Jack suddenly sinks the head of his revving chainsaw into the garage floor. Where he got it from, Ethan has no idea. Behind him, the Devil is still laughing but he thinks he’s too sane to actually believe She just said, “I need to hear you… Give me more of that, those delicious noises you make!”
Is this Aleksandra? He finds himself on his feet, thinking about the Dollar Store Brides of Dracula as if he’s sorting through paperwork at the last minute. The redhead was easiest to distinguish from the others, because she was the one that reminded him most of an ex who broke into his dorm room to watch him sleep. How she managed that feat was not something he dwelled on until he’d graduated, and even then he tried not to think about it more than to marvel at her audacity.
The other two, however, were distinguished only by the color of their hair. But now that he thinks about it, the blonde one might have called him ‘little one’ at some point; the brunette was probably too busy planning out how to pose his large intestines over her bedpost to come up with a nickname for him. Ethan pictures it for a moment, the brunette all bundled up cozily in her grand bed with his gore dangling overhead while she smiles contentedly, no different from a child waiting to awaken on Christmas morning. The worst fairy lights he can imagine.
Ethan watches Jack laugh the whole way out the door, shambling along while hyena-giggling about finding something else to do him in with, leaving the dead chainsaw in the ground. Over a mad man’s monologue, he hears the sharp clicking of heeled boots sauntering over to him in a swaying catwalk. Surprise fails to flip about in his gut when he looks over his shoulder to see the black haired one closing the distance between them, wearing the kind of confidence only a pantheress can wear when she’s in her element.
Raising a gloved hand to squeeze his jaw tightly fails to receive a reaction from the wealth of emotions stagnating inside of him, too. Even through expensive leather, he feels her talon-like nails. It makes him wonder if she’s like her mother. “Oh? All that fear, leaking out of you at the sight of me.” A, overwroughtly disappointed hum falls past her parted black lips.
“Let me go,” Ethan spits with his cheeks squished together so it sounds more like, leff meef goff .
“So scaaaary.” It comes out in a sensuous lilt. Ethan grits his teeth together, detesting the tease in her voice. “And where would you go?” Stunned laughter renders her sanguine voice wobbly, surprised by his audacity or stupidity. As if he cares which it is. “What a precious little stray pup you make. Have you somewhere to go, manthing?”
A snarl still manages to slip out of him. “Fuck you.” Forest fire rages within his limbs; he has an angry fever settling over his body.
“That’s not somewhere to go,” Aleksandra (?) titters. “That’s a thing to do.”
“Cut the shit, Aleksandra.”
A beat passes that immediately tells Ethan that is not, in fact, her name.
“My name is Cassandra,” she informs him, an edge peeking out of her voice that reminds him of a switchblade. With one last tight squeeze, she pushes him to the floor. In most cases, he would understand a woman shoving him over the inexcusable act of forgetting her name when they’re so close to one another that they could smell each other’s breath, but in Cassandra’s case, he thinks she’s mostly lucky he bothered trying to recall what her massive mother named her.
“What do you want,” Ethan asks plainly from the floor, shotgun in his hands, face pinched together in brutal fury.
A myriad of answers could slip out of her mouth. He imagines all the scenarios, all the things she wants to say. I want to eat you alive, Ethan. Okay, he’s dead. I want your manblood. He doesn’t have that shit anymore. It blew up with the rest of him. Oooh, manflesh. Yeah, same deal as the blood. Ka-boom.
She stands over him, tall and proud and vicious, luxurious black clothing dripping from her form. Her moon white face is accented by the black lips, the stains of red and brown and black around her mouth, old gore going rotten on her body. When she opens her mouth again, speaking in tones of twinkling amusement, it looks like a wound splitting apart. Encased in a suburban garage in the middle of nowhere, she looks like a monster from beneath a child’s bed, or the beast in their closet.
“Mm. I want to mount you,” she says very delicately, “on my wall. I want to disembowel you and tie your innards up into bows for my sisters to wear. Bela thought you were handsome, and Daniela would be delighted to keep you with her forever. I know them well.”
“I hope you know your sisters,” Ethan retorts.
“I’d like to know you,” Cassandra says with all the mundanity of trying on a pair of shoes.
Feeling like a top frozen in space for a moment, Ethan regards her with a wary stare. When he does not speak, she takes a moment to smile down at him in a smooth, catlike fashion. Then she plunges to her knees before him, cloak puffing out behind her in a storm cloud, as if she’s bringing bad weather with her very presence. This time, Cassandra’s touch is open-handed. Expensive leather tugs his skin taut as she runs her palm across Ethan’s cheek, obviously glancing about his frame in search of something. What, he cannot begin to guess. For all he knows, she’s mapping out how she's going to segment him into pieces for all three of them.
Instead, she says, “Show me you can hunt.” And in a flash, he wants to know what she’s playing at. A burning curiosity dances between them as their gazes connect as if joining in a promise made with their pinkies.
Suddenly she is flies again, a mob of angry buzzing floating from one space to another. The flies that make up Cassandra Dimitrescu in all her unholiness travel from wrapping around Ethan to the doorjamb behind him. He watches her form again, bleeding wound of a mouth split open in mad laughter. Between her delighted, childish giggles, she whispers, “Jack’s coming…” in singsong before bursting out into an uproarious boom of laughter again. Her cloak fans out behind her, bat-like, as she disappears into the doorway.
Understanding sinks down deep to kiss the marrow of his bones. Trying to expel the sensation does nothing for him; he does not want to admit it, but she is right. Jack’s coming, and he’s bringing Hell with him.
In the hallway where nothing exists but the darkness, Ethan takes soft, cautious steps. It smells of dampness in the narrowness, where he’s utterly alone yet completely aware that could not be further from the truth. Wrapping his brain around the silence feels akin to spraining a muscle that no longer wants to move, or perhaps hasn’t moved in ages. A quick glance behind him reveals that the garage is still there, just as empty sans the burning car. It seems like it might burn forever. Briefly, Ethan considers the possibility that he’s just like that forever burning car now.
Beneath the crunch of his shoes is the wet sliminess of the impossible hallway's rotten floor. When he and Mia visited his family in California, all his nieces were on a Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark kick. His wife had the fantastic idea of taking them on a tour of the Winchester house. It was a marvel of architecture and morbidity, and he needed to bond with his nieces while he was in town, she would insist. If only they all knew he’d be a resident of the Winchester house knockoff eventually.
It is an impossible hallway, a transitional space that never ends, a place to simply be led away without point, an empty hallway whose only purpose is to confuse the ghosts. Along the walls beat veins of molded brick, the spider legs black lines throbbing painfully with the promise of an origin point that he’s not being welcomed into. It’s hard for Ethan to tell if he’s grateful or enraged by its rejection of him. He wants out, yet he desires the stability of what he’s been given, too. A part of him wonders if a wolf has ever felt this way, pursuing injured prey into the thickest parts of the forest.
There is a crunch. It is as loud as a gunshot, just as horrifying. When Ethan finishes putting all seven trillion of his nerves back into his body, he finds himself making eye contact for the second time tonight with Jack Baker. The shadows part for Jack, just like they always do, like they have nothing on him and must defer to his insanity.
Worse for wear, Jack is mending himself in tendrils of bleeding pink muscle and lipid yellow fats. Sinew runs itself along the meat, stitching the Baker patriarch back together as easily as a suture. Nature’s disgusting, wriggling butterfly tape. In its desperate, life-saving writhing, the meaty tubes sewing themselves back together in Jack’s skull spit out a splatter of strawberry red blood, something slimily clotted over. It lands square on Ethan’s face.
Without warning, he’s turned by the shoulder in a whirl. Squirming darkness meets him, a haze of flies jellying together into the form of the Devil Herself. In the buzzing, he hears the elegant purring laugher spilling out of her still being knitted together form. There are monsters manifesting all around him and he is helpless to them. Every one of his ancestors possesses him for a moment in a jittery jolt that rips a horrified cry out of Ethan. Her gloved hands on him are so tight that he’d be afraid of bruising if he thought any of this mattered, but she just pulls him close so he’s looking down at her as if they’re momentary lovers, not people who want the other dead. Like he hasn’t already killed her, like he didn't watch the hand cradling the back of his head calcify before falling off.
Despite the fact they’re both dead, Cassandra’s moon white face swoops up to his in a hungry arch, mouth open with laughter. It is the opening notes of a cacophonic symphony erupting noisily around them. The Winchester house knockoff hallway awakens with spectral havoc.
Behind him, Jack still approaches, casting his darkness into the long forever-hallway. Before him, Cassandra slips her pink tongue out to lap at the blood on his face. He feels her tongue drag along his face, tasting Jack’s blood and Ethan’s sweat in a mixture that sends a palpable, obvious shiver up her midnight covered spine. A shuddery moan falls from her gored over lips. Part of Ethan feels like he’s intruding on something he really, really doesn’t want to intrude on— like that time he walked in on his roommate getting frisky with a girl from his biology class that he might have hit on a few times prior.
When she’s done with him, Cassandra puts her gloved hand to his chest, heaves him back. She then tells him, “You’re not a one pump chump, are you?” Sneering, she glides backward, sheathing herself into the shadows where the light falling from the bald light cannot touch her. In the velvety darkness, he still sees her sulfur yellow wolf eyes waiting to be entertained.
Pleasing women who aren’t his wife is not exactly something he has ever made a habit of, but it seems he has no choice in this particular matter. Briefly, he thinks of women at bars and at work who hit on him a little too aggressively, so he actually realized what was going on in their brains when they asked him out to coffee or what he was drinking. There’s a level of self awareness in him still prevalent enough to question why the fuck he seems to attract women with a gutsy streak. (He kind of likes it. That’s why. He liked that Mia was plucky and wanted to travel the world without him. It meant she had moxie.)
When his back connects to Jack’s chest, Ethan reacts on instinct. His mind lights up in remembrance of the first time Chris Redfield had made him pull off this move; Ethan didn’t have the strength of adrenaline propelling him into movement and he mostly had no desire to hurt another person in his body, not with Dulvey behind him. Still, military training was something he had to do, and so he grabbed Chris’ arm, tried to pull him up over his shoulder to slam the bigger man’s back onto the ground. But Chris didn’t budge, which meant Ethan was put on strength training for the better part of a season. When he did finally manage to pull off what one of Chris’ goons called a ‘Death Valley Driver’, there was applause.
This time, there is no applause, just Jack Baker on his back staring up at Ethan in wild, baffled delight. At the time, he’d felt childish. Now, he wishes there was anyone but the Devil Herself in this hallway with him. Jack Baker laughs at him, like he knows how alone Ethan is. The thought pulverizes all of his conviction into nothingness. Suddenly, he is just as afraid as he was on the farm all those years ago. His therapist would have been excited at the prospect of prodding at his brain in this state, but too bad for him: Ethan is dead and alone.
While Ethan takes several wide steps back, Jack hauls himself to his feet. “Hoo, boy! Now that’s taking me back to my youth. Come get your pound of flesh, Eeeeethan.” It’s like his brain hadn’t been blown apart by the shotgun in Ethan’s grip at all. He’s even fucking reminiscing like they’re talking over beers in the late afternoon on a Sunday. Mortification pumps like thick blood in his veins when the fear sends nervous fireworks all across his body.
Helplessness ensnares his heart then grows three times in a thunderous band so his chest is hammering, hammering, hammering. The bones are too small for all the panic trying to burst out of Ethan. In his unspooling brain is a recollection of the therapist he picked out by hand then promptly ignored telling him that revisiting memories like he does is a form of exposure therapy. Ethan thinks to himself there is nothing therapeutic about watching a man’s head tumble out like ribbons unfolding, because it’s fucking brain matter, skull shards, splotches of gray like vomit full of processed food. He hears her laughing, the buzz of blowflies, or perhaps that’s just the sound of her giggles. Cassandra’s delight is akin to a child in a candy store, plucking caramels out of plastic bins, claiming candy necklaces, spinning as she collects lollipops.
“Ooh, so you can hunt,” she says, the purr of a cat in her snow white throat heavy with necklaces.
Instinct pools hotly in the pit of his belly. Ethan swivels on his heel, shotgun held in his vise-like grip, before he levels the barrel at her. In the sights, he sees her open, laughing mouth, the spill of blood dried over black-brown and red, crackling. Crackling cackling Cassandra leaves the midnight shadows to grab the barrel, pressing it to the center of her forehead, and in his panic, he forgets. “Mm, give it to me!” she trills, black lips curled delightedly.
The trigger twitches, a panicked jump. The bullet sails from within the chamber through the long barrel, journeying along until it bursts from the metal head of the shotgun. Cassandra, too, unspools: she cracks right down the middle so that all the blowflies buzzing inside of her spill out into the open.
When his ears stop ringing, Ethan stands alone in the cramped, stony hallway of the Baker home. It has an end in sight now: A door waiting for him to open it. In the memory, a fly circles a bald lightbulb hanging overhead. This is the only bit of her that remains.