Make Willing the Prey (Dreams by Streetlight) (17 page)

L
ewis
slowly buttoned his shirt.  How long had it been since he’d had sex?  A month? 
A year?  He had no idea how long it had been since he’d even seen a girl before
yesterday.  It was good to know he could still attract a cute woman like Jina,
even after his body had been so mutilated.

After Jina zipped up her jeans,
she touched his face softly.  He fought down an instinct to flinch.  It was
only Jina.  She had such a soft touch.  Nice fingers.  He smiled at her, and
pulled her close to him.  He wrapped his arms around her and they spooned
together on the couch.

“See?” he whispered.  “You’ve got
to take the good while you can get it here, or you’re in constant struggle. 
You can’t panic forever.  It’s exhausting.”

The reverberation of scratching
violins startled the both of them.  The turntable on the phonograph began
rotating, and a grainy orchestral arrangement wavered through the room. 

The static crackling grew louder,
three dimensional.  It was then that Jina noticed movement out of the corner of
her eye.  She looked past Lewis’s arm.

A crocodile, the same one from
before, slowly drug his belly across the floor towards them.  Dry reptilian
skin sliding over splintery wood echoed and enhanced the static from the
phonograph.

It paused and grinned at them. 
Crooked teeth ill-fitted its closed mouth and pointed out in all directions.

Lewis began trembling
uncontrollably.  He began chewing on his finger, the old kaleidoscope rattling
in his hands.

“Use that thing.  Now!” Jina
shouted.

Lewis found new confidence upon
realizing what he held in his hand.  He smiled, as though he were suddenly in
control.  Jina had seen that kind of smile before, earlier that day.  S.A. had
used it.

He lifted the kaleidoscope to his
eye.  He, and he alone, would rid their lives of this crocodile.  The
kaleidoscope would save them from S.A.

But instead of banishing the apparition,
or seeing it through the scope, he could only see a plain white circle of fuzz
down a darkened tunnel of mirrors.

Lewis blinked.

Something black began filling the
white from the center.

He blinked again.

“Come on,” Jina said, gripping
the upholstery of the couch.  “What’s taking so long?  Make it go away!”  The
crocodile opened its mouth.  Its toenails clicked against wood.

“I— I’m trying.”  Maybe turning
it would help.  But as he rotated the end of the kaleidoscope, the fuzzy circle
grew.  It reminded him of the stuff that grows on oranges.

Mold.

He shook it and turned it again.

S.A. smiled at him with a look of
enduring patience.

“It’s time to prepare for the
wedding,” he said from within the kaleidoscope.

Lewis blinked.

Another toenail clicked.  The
croc’s peeling green feet propelled it a step closer.

“Give me that thing,” Jina
snapped in her rising panic.

“We have to prepare for the
wedding,” Lewis mumbled from behind the kaleidoscope.

“What are you talking about?” 
Jina turned and tried to grab it, but missed.  She slid out of her entanglement
with Lewis and fell onto the floor.  Something unseen had pulled her off the
couch and began to drag her across the floor, towards the awaiting jaws of the
crocodile.

“Lewis,” she screamed, “stop me!”

He sat, motionless, and watched
her soberly.  “I can’t do a thing,” he said. 

“What?!”  Lewis didn’t respond. 
She slowly grew closer to its gaping mouth, its waving head.

But she didn’t stop when she
reached the crocodile.  She kept going, past him.  It turned its head slowly to
watch her, like a free swinging door on slow hinges.  Her phone fell from her
pocket with a plastic clatter.  With movement faster than she’d expect from
such a large creature, it lunged on the phone and caught it in his teeth.  It swallowed
in lurching gulps.

It could have eaten her instead,
but it didn’t.  She looked behind herself to see where she was being dragged. 
There was nothing there but a clear space along a wall.

“Why the hell can’t you do
something?” she shouted back to Lewis.

“We have to prepare for the
wedding,” he replied softly.  S.A. was still in control, had always been in
control.  Wedding, torture, whatever.  No point in fighting.

Jina hit the wall with a painful
thud.  A board creaked. 

“Lewis, please…” she sobbed.  Her
body pressed against the wall and was then dragged upwards.  Her feet dangled
freely.  The pressure built, crushing all of her.  Her back began to tingle in
pain.

But he only watched, listening to
the conflicting forces within.  His voice, the softer voice, said he should do
something.  But the louder force held him stationary, stalled in fear.  He had
told her he loved her.  But what could he do with S.A.’s triumphant laughter
ringing through his head?

The wall softened, or liquefied,
or something, and Jina slid through, leaving the wall as it had been before,
perfect, dusty, covered in faded stripes.

Now Lewis was all alone again. 
He stared at the crocodile.  He hated that crocodile.  Loathsome beast. 

He put the kaleidoscope back to
his eye.  Bugs filled his world.  He wasn’t sure if it was only one or two
termites reflected a hundred times, or hundreds of termites reflected once.  He
couldn’t be too sure, even though he thought he could make out a queen, and
drones, and larvae.  He tried to count them all, and gave up after five.

He imagined himself dropping the
kaleidoscope.  In his mind it rolled towards the crocodile with a hollow
tin-can rattle, and exploded in its face like a kaleidobomb, spreading reptile
meat all over the room.

But he kept it, clutching it in
his arms.

The crocodile’s mouth opened
again, slowly, like a music box lid.  Its tail lashed as it crawled towards the
couch.

Lewis seemed to notice the croc
for the first time, and he screamed, pushing himself into the back of the
couch.  He felt he was pressing so hard he would go right through the couch and
into the wall, through the wall and into the wall.

The crocodile snapped at Lewis’s
shoe, but Lewis was falling through the back of the couch, falling into the
wall, falling
through
the wall... encased in the wall.

S
omething
gave way, but there was no sound of splintering wood or bone as she had
expected. 

She stopped moving when her back
hit something.  The surface in front of her solidified, flattening her face. 

Jina tried to move, but the wall
compressed her, held her tightly.  The splinters from wood slats scratched at
her arms.  Blindness felt for her eyes, and all she could hear was the hollow
echoing of faint sounds in the room outside.

Blackness pressed in on her as
much as the wall did.  She struggled again, and found it difficult to breathe. 
Stale air whistled into her contorted nostrils.  The thought came that there
wasn’t going to be much oxygen here.

She opened her mouth and gasped
for breath.  The fact that she was panicking didn’t help.

Was this it?  Was this the end? 
She forced a calm, shifted her weight, and tried to make herself as comfortable
as possible.  She would have to wait for whatever came next.

She tried not to think about what
S.A. could do to her.

C
ool
darkness enshrouded him.  A firm, flat surface safely cradled him in back and
front.  The pressure against his nose in reassured him of this. 

He smiled, and thought to
himself,
finally.  Peace
. 

Then, the tickling began.  He
could handle a little tickling.  His long days and nights with S.A.’s
entomology experiments had hardened him, built tolerance.

But the sensation grew, all over
his body.  Millions of tiny, soft bodies clung to his skin.

He shifted his weight, trying to
move.  Bodies burst against his clothes, skin.  He felt the wet sliminess on
his hands and face that he could not rub off.

A particular tickle close to his
knee grew to an itch.  He tried to reach it with the nearest hand, but the two
inner surfaces that made up the wall held him, confined him.  Movement to
scratch was more than difficult.  It was impossible.

Lewis tried not to imagine them
eating his flesh, but when the tiny stinging bites began, he could avoid the
thought no longer.

For the thousandth time since
entering the house, Lewis thought he was going crazy.

A
fter what
felt like hours later, her arm budged, sinking into the wall a little.  Jina
awoke from her half-sleep.  What the—

She pushed, and crumbling bits of
plaster and wood fell.  The smell of dust filled her nostrils.  She fought off
a sneeze.

The wall deteriorated.  With the
new hope of escape, she flexed her muscles.  More pieces of plaster crumbled
away.  She bent her knee.  Wood slats creaked, splintered, and gave. 

Her sinuses could no longer be
ignored, and she sneezed, almost breaking her nose against the remaining
slats.  She shook off the burning swell in the center of her face as well as
she could and twisted her arm up to the new dent in the wall by her head.  A
beam of dusty light shone through when she wiggled her fingers through the
weakened wall.

After more struggling she pushed
her way out into open air.  She inhaled deeply, savoring the freshness and
openness of the old music room.  It smelled like flowers.

As she dusted herself off, her
attention was drawn to the couch.  Lewis sat in front of it, holding his knees
together and quivering intensely in a catatonic stare.  His whitened knuckles
clutched the kaleidoscope.  He trembled and ignored Jina altogether.

The room itself was drown in full
daylight.  It had been redecorated.  White satin draped over everything, with
iridescent lace draped over that.  Green ivy twisted around the ceiling, around
the windows, along the floor.  Red roses poked out from every crevice, and rose
petals were scattered all around the floor.  The room looked as though it were
ready for a... wedding.