Chapter Four
He throws his shoulder into the door, breath in ragged bursts, feet skidding against sticky motel carpet. The handle refuses to turn; the deadbolt, once stiff, is soft and spongy now, like the door itself is rotting in his hands. He can hear the goddamn thing behind him — not fast, not even close, but enough to freeze him. It slithers forward in horrible, wet jerks, dragging strands of mattress stuffing in its wake. The air is sweet and thick with rot.
He shoves his weight into the wood, into the crack of light beneath the frame, into any hope of getting out alive. His hand slips on the knob, greasy with sweat and softening like cheap wax. Even the hinges groan. Jesse drives a boot into the door. Nothing. It just bows under him, drooping in the middle. He might as well be punching clay.
He sets his feet and tries again. This is all wrong, this isn’t supposed to happen. He’s run-down, fucked up, a deadbeat with an old truck and a life of bruises, but he can break a goddamn door. Should’ve just slept in the cab. Kept moving. The same sour thoughts that have hounded him across a thousand miles, across a thousand hours, now sinking into his flesh like maggots. He should be out of here, halfway to the next hellhole. The next maybe. Instead, he’s in this one, watching everything he ever feared — every gut-twisting nightmare — turn solid in front of his eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” he gasps. The air feels like soup, like he’s breathing through wet fabric. Every gulp is a thick, sweet drag in his throat. He turns, back against the useless door, and pounds his fists into the wood, once, twice, three times until they split and bleed.
A low sound leaks through the room, more a feeling than a noise: the slow pulse of a heavy breath, the dragging, humid death rattle of mold. The carpet is a warm and clotted stink under his boots. Nothing is right. Nothing is solid. Everything bends. Everything rots. Everything caves in around him, shifting, pushing him toward the waiting arms, the long strands of mattress stuffing tangled in its limbs. The surface is already split down the middle, a gash in the fabric, a wound ready to open wide and take him.
Jesse closes his eyes and screams, his voice bouncing back from the sagging walls, like they’re mocking him. Like they already know. He doesn’t have long. When the creaking room settles, he hears it again, closer now, the moist whisper of the creature pressing on, its footfalls wet and careful.
He kicks the door in a final, helpless shot of anger and terror, feeling it buckle under him like old fruit, like the thin skin of everything he once was, everything he ran from, everything that’s finally devouring him whole.
It splits wide, seam ripping from top to bottom. A long, weeping wound in the mattress, alive and wet and too goddamn real. The smell hits him like a fist. Jesse gags and drops to his knees. “Stay,” it whispers, like a voice from a mouthful of blood. “So warm… so safe… never alone…”
Jesse reels back, choking. He’s smelled decay before — his whole life a procession of things gone sour, gone spoiled, gone dead — but this is worse. Thick as soup, thick as glue. He presses the sleeve of his shirt to his face, but it doesn’t help. The room is all smell now. All taste. All nothing he can escape.
And the sight of it. Jesus Christ, the sight. Inside the torn seam: flesh. Not foam. Not fabric. Blackened, seeping tissue like an open gut. Wires twisted in the meat like veins, broken mattress springs like a rotten cage of ribs. Alive. All of it alive.
The horror is blinding. Jesse shakes his head, tells himself it’s a nightmare, a fever, a trick of the goddamn light. The thing on the bed doesn’t care. It knows he can see. It knows he can’t look away. The mattress yawns open, a cavity of hungry skin. There’s a tenderness to it, a wrongness more personal than hate. The promise of comfort, stitched in blood.
He forces himself to stand. “Fuck this,” he growls, almost breathless. He staggers back, nearly tripping over his own feet. The room is melting, going soft, going weak. Carpet is mush beneath him, wet and giving, like old bread left to rot.
It’s hopeless, and Jesse knows it, but the instinct to run is a screaming animal in him. He stumbles toward the bathroom. Maybe a lock he can still turn. A door he can still close. He half laughs at himself, hysterical. He half sobs.
Every surface swells and recedes, a nightmare pulse. It’s in his head. It’s real. He can’t tell the difference anymore. The air is thick and moist as the breath of something dying. Of something that wants him to die too.
“Goddamn it, move,” he mutters, cursing himself, pleading with himself. His voice is paper thin, rattling in the syrup of the room. Sweat drips down his back. Fear wraps around his spine.
It knows. The thing. The room. The goddamn hunger he thought he could outrun. They know there’s nowhere left. Nothing left. Jesse runs anyway, lurching away from the impossible, twisting, slick cavern.
He trips, falls, catches himself with hands that shake and fail him. Everything slick. Everything wet. He wants to scream, but he knows there’s no point. No one to hear him. Not in this place, not in any place he’s ever been. The room is empty. The world is empty. He always knew.
Jesse collapses against the bathroom door, heaving. Desperate. Certain. He closes his eyes, opens them, and sees nothing different. No way out. No escape. The horror advances, merciless, inescapable.
The broken lamp is heavy in his hands, sharp with stupid, fading hope. Jesse charges the creature, knowing how this ends. The lamp sinks in easy, easy as meat. Black ichor bursts from the wound, hot on Jesse’s hands. The creature wraps him in an impossible embrace, one long arm around his waist.
It doesn’t fight. It doesn’t need to. The lamp goes deeper, and Jesse stabs it again, a grunt with each desperate thrust. He tries not to hear the soft, wet moan that leaks from its mouthless face. He tries not to feel the burn of ichor as it splatters his arms, his chest, the last scraps of everything he is.
He wants to hate it. Wants to die hating it. Wants to fight like he can make it hurt, like he can make it care. The awful knowledge seeps in through his skin: It doesn’t.
His fingers are numb where they clutch the lamp. He pulls it out and drives it back in, useless, exhausting himself, too stupid to stop, too stubborn to give up even now. The creature holds him tender, close, the metal stem buried to the hilt. A sigh ripples through the room. Jesse hears it everywhere: in the soft, sagging walls, in the sticky carpet, in his bones and his breath and his own traitor blood.
The lamp goes slack in his hands. His voice is thin, breaking. “Not like this,” Jesse says. He says it again and again, a chant, a plea, a broken prayer. The numbness spreads. The fight leaks out. The creature pulls him closer. The strength is unreal, inhuman, irresistible.
His skin screams where it touches his, where it wants him to give in, to sink under, to just stop fighting and fucking disappear. He feels his body going weak, going slow, going limp in the long, impossible arms. The blackness crawls under his flesh, into his lungs.
A sickness deep as loneliness wells up and chokes him. The room pulses in his throat. He’s the only one who ever thought he could win this. The fight was over before it began.
Jesse drops the lamp, and the creature wraps him tight, tighter. His own body shudders with relief, with betrayal. He knew. God, he always knew.
The last thing he hears is himself, screaming raw, as the creature drags him toward the open seam of the mattress.
The mattress yawns open wide, slick and pulsing. The creature drags Jesse closer, step by brutal step, a terrible intimacy in its tender strength. His fists pound at the rubbery arms. Jesse tries to scream, but the cloying air eats the sound. His mouth breaks the surface for a final, desperate gasp before the mattress seals over him.
There is no way out. There never was. The black, moist cavity gapes, and Jesse is hauled toward it, dragged inch by terrible inch. His body is a ragdoll in its grip, dangling. Useless. Small. The sweet, sick warmth of the room becomes the sweet, sick warmth of the creature, wrapping him, drawing him in.
His heels leave bloody streaks across the floor, an afterthought of meat and time and rage. Jesse pounds his fists against its arms, but it doesn’t care. Nothing ever did. His own voice fades in his head, smaller with each ragged breath.
The smell is overwhelming. The sight is all that’s left. Rot and flesh and the end of everything. He wants to cry out. He wants to die on his own terms, cursing and screaming, making it count. He wants a lifetime that doesn’t end in a motel room.
He feels the tug, the pressure, the surety of letting go. “No,” Jesse says, a last whisper to himself. “No, no, no.” The air chokes him. The smell and the soft and the end chokes him. His voice is a whisper he can’t hear.
His body gives in, gives out, goes limp and heavy. It draws him in. The horrible, tender strength of it. The horrible, final embrace.
His legs are the first to go, pulled into the waiting seam. Jesse still kicks, still jerks, still tries to fight the impossible strength. His own futility crushes him.
“Fuck,” he sobs. “Fuck, not like this.” It echoes in his bones. His mind. The long, last moment before everything is black and full and over. He’s held tight. Tighter.
The mattress envelops him, flesh into flesh. His chest sinks below the surface, too fast, too close, a throb at the edge of consciousness.
It pulses and pulls and Jesse gives in. His head drops back. The air is blood and rot and thick and full and ready to swallow him whole.
Jesse disappears under the surface, one last burst of terrified instinct, one last scream he can’t even hear, and the soft, wet silence of his final moments.