So they finally caught me. Lay in wait up on the escarpment, in the howling dark of a wretched unholy night, and now here I am in this vast dim room lit by glowing things, some kind of floating green worms whose existence I must doubt. Because that's the only plan I have left: doubt all of it, and maybe none of it is happening.
I love you, Marita Rose. You were always my cliché dream girl, my über shining one, my mamacita.
But did you tell them where I was hiding? Did you? If not, where were you when I kept my side of the rendezvous that night?
"You always did have an imagination to die for," you once told me.
"Try living in my nightmares if you think that."
"I never said it was a good thing. Besides, how do you know I'm not?"
Feels like the room itself is breathing, its breath sultry, fetid. The glowing worms pulsate in time to a low wavering hum. What manner of thing has snared me in its web?
It's impossible to ignore the doors: tall mahogany dreamlike portals that disappear into the ceiling haze like redwoods. But it isn't how they look that's chilling me to the bone marrow. No, it's the sounds and the smells that seep from beyond their dark cracks: shrieks, whimpers, sobs; wet sounds, like a spinal column being sucked and slowly coerced from its torso, like a peeled face and scalp flapping loose over a moaning skull, like a brainpan crunched to soaking dust between immense tusks; awful smells of spilled guts, the gamey copper of blood, the sour reek of rent viscera.
Girl, where are you? Will you come?
But they are about to open the doors. I don't want them to. I am six years old and the closet doors are rattling. Fuck. Fuck! Please, don't open those doors, okay? Just don't—
I step up to the escarpment on a hellish night, relieved I have been dreaming. But something's wrong. My girl isn't here. Was she captured? Marita Rose, I need you by me. What are those strange lights …? What—?