Spectre

It chose me one frostbitten winter, in the dead of night.

The monster groaning in the shadows of the forest outside the window, fogging up the glass with its muggy breath. I can sense it pressed against the window behind the cigarette-stained curtains, trying to feel for cracks or crevices it can squeeze and ooze through.

— What if your lungs give out and your heart gives up? — That’s the kind of thing it whispers. Its voice is barely there but it snakes through the air like smoke and burrows into my ears to soak my brain in its fumes.

My cat would nestle on my chest and burrow into my ribcage searching for warmth as I got colder. He’s staring at me, blinking from under the chair.

He’s quite a beautiful thing, with orange fur, striped in brown, and flashing amber eyes, but I know he wouldn’t think twice about gnawing on the cartilage between my ribs. I know it as if I was in his little creature brain. I feel his patient longing to fit himself inside me.

He’s the size of lungs. He’d fit perfectly, sticky and warm.

My back is pressed against the cold cabin wall opposite the window. Legs twisted in front of me. One of them fell asleep eons ago, shards of electricity nipping at my nerves, from my knee all the way down to my toes, screaming at me to move, but I don’t dare.

I hold my breath. If I breathe it will smell it. Its shadow cast through the window like a ghost, like smoke on sunlight, I can see it swirl and swell in front of me and hang like strings of cobwebs stranded in mid-air.

I press myself harder against the wall. The cold burning my back, my bones jarring together and I bite down on my tongue.

Blood pools in my mouth. My breath reeks of fear and metal and exhaustion and it’s thick enough to curl under the edges of the glass and into its mouth. It will know I’m here. I hold my breath.

The cabin is so cold.

I feel my skin ache. It sticks to the wall through my t-shirt, the pores in my back constricting as they freeze together, slowly.

— What if you close your eyes and your kidneys fail and you can’t move for sleep?

My blankets are banished to the closet. Locked up away from temptation. The key is sitting somewhere in my bowels by now. Unless it’s already broken down with all the acid pooling inside me, lead poisoning me slowly. Is there lead in keys? Probably.

My insides slowly shutting down, turning into soup and sludge. My stomach is growling and bubbling, maybe it’s already started.

My throat tastes like acid and my teeth like sand.

I haven’t slept in days. I think. The curtains are drawn so no light filters in and time bleeds together, oozing slowly and painfully. I want to pull the curtain back, just a bit, just enough to let some light and warmth in. Just to catch a glimpse of what’s slinking through the canopy. But I can’t.

— What if? — it whispers and images flash through my mind. A bullet flying straight to my face, burrowing into my eye, into the back of my brain, caressing my skull from the inside.

Cracked through the glass so shards are taken with it, its splinters spread like sharp little tree roots skewering every little soft pocket of brain tissue.

I see fireworks going off inside my skull, sparks squashed between the folds of my brain as it fights to send its last messages to the rest of me before fizzling out, grey and soft and dead.

The air in the cabin is thick with stale, acrid, prickling cold sweat, I crave the forest’s air, though it might freeze me, anything is better than choking down the self-contained stench of fear, kept out by an inch of wood and iron, and I see the monster in my mind, solid as putrid smoke, squeezing through the crack in the window, blocking out the outside air. It would fill up my nose and mouth, snapping my teeth and pushing them down my throat, to curl over them like a dragon over its hoard in my stomach, forcing through my intestines, and seeping out of every pore, ripping them apart until it consumes me.

The cat would sit on my bones and purr.

He opens his mouth and he wails. A jarring mewling echo that sounds off the trees outside. Impatient for lunch.

My heart thuds in my throat and my stomach and my bowels. My pulse is banging against my bones. It’s thumping over the roaring in my ears.

My tongue feels like it’s screaming. 

Outside is silent.

My vision is wavy and stretches and warps the floorboards before me, and I feel like vomiting. Everything looks like it’s underwater. I swallow through the frantic hammering in my jugular, the edges of my vision blurring and dimming, shadows at the corners of my eyes creeping closer to steal my sight altogether.

The cat yowls again.

I count to five, my eyes burning furiously into the amber of the cat’s. I steady my breathing by holding it until my lungs are screaming. I slowly press my finger to my lips as if the cat is going to understand me begging it to shut up.

I listen for the monster but I’m met with heavy silence, punctured only by the scraping of the trees against the cabin wall.

I strain my eyes against the light that bleeds through the fibres of the yellowing curtain.

No more smoky shadows through the curtains, or languid snarling heavy breathing against the glass.

Relief turns my knees to water and my breath punches out of me. Bile rushes up from my stomach it forces its way up my throat, burning my flesh raw.

The cat under his chair turns towards the door blinking slowly as he settles on his haunches, purring deep in his tiny little ribcage, as I wipe the bile from my lips.

I take a shaky breath and a frantic giggle bubbles in my chest and forces its way up my throat in a hysterical shriek, over a metallic thud that freezes my blood in my veins.

Right before the smell hits me, the door creaks slowly open.