Chapter 5
Jesse isn’t standing, isn’t fighting. He’s slumping, slipping, disappearing into a tar-pit of wet, stinking blackness. He kicks, breathes, screams — but everything is soaked, slowed, swallowed. He can feel the mattress pulling him down, pulling him under. No escape. No chance. Not like this. It’s like he’s inside a wet lung, flexing and closing, exhaling rot. The world is collapsing around him. He chokes on it, drowning in mold, in sweat, in sour, sucking heat. How many seconds? How many hours? Every sense bleeds into the next. Everything blurs.
He flails, twisting, limbs spasming for a hold. It’s like thrashing in tar, like screaming in mud. The mattress is too soft. Too wet. Nothing to grip, nothing to fight. His arms are swallowed. His legs. His life. His mind. Don’t give up, Jesse. He can hear the desperation in his own head. Don’t give up. Goddamn it. He kicks, but the air turns to syrup, slowing him, smothering him. The black is thick, too thick, so thick he can feel it touching him. Itching. Burning. A stinging, bubbling fire on his skin. Like sweat. Like acid. He thinks of holding tanks at the job site. Fresh concrete. Wet, smoking gray, hungry to fill space. To fill lungs. Jesse! Jesse! Not yet! Not yet!
The mattress is breathing him in, pulling him under. The slick, soft cavity of it sucks at his chest. It’s dragging him. Consuming him. His struggles sound small, like they’re happening to someone else. He feels his head slip forward, slip down. His mouth is wide open, howling without sound. All around him, the world is squeezing tighter. A wet fist closing. Inside it, Jesse Morgan is nothing but a small, dark stain.
The blackness grows a voice. “Stay. So safe. So warm.” Jesse kicks harder, a spasm, a reflex, one last burst of terrified strength. He jerks. He arches his back. No. No. His legs vanish into the softness. Something in him snaps. Something in him breaks.
He feels it all at once, the heat of it, the stink, the slow, strangling pressure of it. Everywhere. Inside. Around. All at once. The thing wraps him like an open mouth, wrapping him, crushing him. Breathing him in. Breathing. Him.
Everything collapses to a pinprick, an atom, a last desperate thought. A final, muffled scream.
The world has forgotten him. Inside the mattress, Jesse’s life is reduced to heat and stench and muffled screams. He presses the soft walls of it, flesh yielding to flesh, thought to hunger, life to oblivion. He doesn’t know where his body ends and the creature begins. Does he still have a body? Does he still have a mind? He’s trapped in here, drowning in the hot dark, and the universe outside is impossibly, infinitely far away. He can’t reach it. Can’t reach anything. Can’t. Reach.
Jesse is touch. Jesse is stink. Jesse is slow, terrible pressure. The walls flex around him, walls of meat and fabric and rotten living tissue. It’s more than a mattress in here. More than just fabric and springs. More. Less. It’s a world of oozing, pulsing meat. Each shuddering, wet movement pulls him deeper, the walls shivering at his touch. Flesh yielding to flesh. Thought to thought. Memory to nightmare. The smell is beyond rotten: sour milk, copper, mold, ammonia. Like blood. Like shit. Like fear. It’s the last breath of a dying thing. Jesse is a dying thing.
He gasps, struggles. Air. Breath. Not enough. Never enough. The walls press into him. They are him. The slow pulse of it in his chest, in his skull. Thick as blood, heavy as sleep. Jesse fights, but he can feel it inside, creeping, feeding, filling him. The pressure, the intimacy, the horrible tenderness of it all. Inside him, around him. Under his skin.
Jesse is rotting, absorbing, collapsing. He isn’t just being smothered; he’s being consumed. Thought by thought, dream by dream, touch by touch. Not Jesse. Not anymore. Not Jesse. He is burning, unraveling, dissolving into the mattress’s wet black memory. It turns him inside out. Reduces him to sense and scream and flesh and not-flesh. Jesse. Jesse. It devours his name.
It devours his mind. Where is he? Who is he? Oh god oh god oh god. He’s fighting to stay Jesse, stay Jesse, stay Jesse. The thoughts loop. Tangle. Disperse. The mattress holds him tight. “Stay. Safe. Stay. Safe.” Jesse hears the whispers, feels them. They run through him, run into him. He presses against the flexing walls. The walls are his mind. His body. The universe. Soft and black and crushing him.
He fights. He fights. He fights.
He stops.
The thoughts slow. Sticky, stuttering things. Trapped in a dead world. A wet womb. A mouth. A grave. “So. Warm. Safe. Warm.” The words mix with his own. He’s not sure whose are whose. The finality of them. The pressure. The end. The end. Oh god the end.
His scream is a soundless, endless echo. And the mattress answers. The walls tighten. The world goes dark. Jesse disappears into the thick black of it. A last, fading thought. A last, soft crush. The black goes soft. Goes black.
Voices bleed through the black. Desperate. Soundless. Some plead. Some pray. Some simply sob. Jesse realizes, with bone-deep horror, that he is not alone inside the mattress. The voices grow louder. Closer. Not whispers, not anymore. Full-throated, broken things, echoing endlessly. So many of them. So many.
“Get me out… oh god… please…”
“Don’t leave me here…”
“Safe…”
“So cold…”
“So warm…”
Their terror presses against him, hundreds of voices, hundreds of them. The full weight of it sinks in. He isn’t alone in here. He isn’t. The mattress has taken them, too, just like it’s taking him. It hasn’t just collected bodies; it has collected minds. Scraps of its victims, fragments of their fear, still alive, still trapped, still screaming. “Oh god… please… oh god… oh god…” A wet sigh, a living hell, a prison. It echoes, bleeds, echoes again. “Don’t leave me… don’t… please… don’t…”
The words crash against him, over him, like waves. Louder. Closer. Not echoes, not anymore. Raw and sharp, and Jesse feels them, he feels their hopelessness crawling under his skin, smothering him, burying him. The voices are too close, too many, too loud. Too loud. “Please… please… please…” They’re like a physical thing, like a weight, like the end of the world.
His thoughts bleed into theirs. Is he Jesse? Is he Jesse? The panic runs cold. He fights it, fights the terror, fights to stay himself. Stay Jesse. Stay sane. “Get me out… please… out… please…” He’s slipping. He’s losing. He’s being absorbed, absorbed into the others, into their screams, their despair.
Their memories run through him, a flood, a tide. Unstoppable. Horrible. He is hundreds of voices, and hundreds of voices are him. Some pull at him, pull at him with desperate fingers, with words that taste like blood. “So cold… I’m so cold… safe… warm… please…” The weight of them sinks into him, becomes part of him. “Get me… get me… get…” The last thing he hears is everything. Is nothing.
The blackness folds around him. The thoughts loop, stretch, die. It happens fast and slow and never and forever. The voices are the dark. The dark is the universe. The universe is the mattress.
Jesse screams into the echoing black, into a world that has already forgotten him. The silence is absolute.
The mattress exhales. A final, bloated swell. The seams draw together, wet and sure, then everything is still. The whole room holds its breath. The whole world holds its breath. Then: Nothing. Nothing.
Time is frozen. Silent. Empty. No pain. No terror. No Jesse. The horror is over, the blackness of it shrinking, disappearing, leaving behind the smallest trace of warmth, the softest hum of vacancy. It’s over. The world is not.
The stench of rot lifts like an old veil, unraveling, fading almost instantly. The fan overhead, which had stopped entirely, shrieks to life, a sudden burst of speed before it slows, slow as breathing, lazy as time. It wobbles on a loose screw. Breathes. Turns. Breathes.
The busted lamp, an old brass thing, flickers once, twice, then holds steady. The sheets, torn and soaked minutes ago, lie smooth and clean. The universe is a silent echo. The echo is an empty room. Room 6. A motel room. A grave.
It looks no different than it did the night before. Stale. Forgettable. Peeling wallpaper, orange shag, old cigarette burns in the carpet. The fan clunks above, the motor half-dead. A few mosquitoes buzz the broken screen, but they’re not very enthusiastic.
The whole room washed in dull, sickly neon from the sign outside, humming softly in the silence. VACANCY.
The world moves on.