Crawling Out
By Timothy Paul Groth
Outside the revelry started. Screaming students rushed from the hotel, eager to join in the drinking and madness making. Ted waited in his room, where everything was put neatly away. For reading material he brought an old Scientific American, which he flipped through as the pain in his gut built up. It still felt like a normal pain. He turned the page, trying to ignore the racket outside. Hoots and hollers, and all the other old sounds of abandon crept in. They made the squeezing in his gut tighten.
And with the tightening the transition began. A rawer kind of pain dragged through the dull ache. Already stripped he headed to the bathroom and stood in the tub, waiting. The pulled muscle throbbing spread throughout his body. When it touched his skin it became the sensation of nails ripping free and wounds reopening. The first stream of thick, blue ichor dribbled out of his mouth.
More of it came. As his mouth stretched as wide as it could the first fingers emerged. Long, delicate fingers that ended in well-manicured nails. Without a jaw his mouth opened wider still and the whole right arm came out. It grabbed hold of the curtain rod. The next arm reached out, bracing against the wall, and then her head came free. A few seconds later shapely legs kicked their way out of Ted’s skin.
The pale woman in the shower hung the skin over the bar and then washed the ichor off.
Steve expected what he found in the dorms. Oh, at home college kids played up the studies and the stress, but on the campus they ran around like headless chickens. A cacophony of different movies and music played in the dorm halls. The yells of students with computer problems managed to rise above the other noise. He’d seen them and their sort coming down to Florida year after year to let it all out. Maybe trying to exhaust it before finals came.
The track lighting flickered. It might have been a moment of sleep. Steve had driven up the coast in a marathon of coffee, fast food, and liquor. Anyone near him could tell by the smell. Luckily no one came near him. They saw a deadbeat older brother, or maybe one of the local homeless that got lose on the campus after frat boys fucked around with them. It didn’t matter. He knew the room he wanted to go to.
When he found it he punched the door, smirking at the satisfying thwack. A moment later a boy answered. He was much as Steve expected. Hunched over, thin, and wearing glasses. A stack of paper’s sat on a desk next to a computer. Everything in the room had a place, so clearly so that from a glance Steve understood the organization of it. She didn’t live here, but he hadn’t really thought she did.
“Where is she?”
The boy cocked an eyebrow and then stood aside. It went against Steve’s preparations, his fevered daydreams as he wove between lanes. Entering with heavy steps Steve closed the door behind him and locked it. The boy did not seem to mind that.
“So, she’s snagged another one.”
“How do you mean?”
The boy sighed, the way good teachers sighed when their patience started running out. “Do you think you’re the first man to come blustering in here asking about Eris?”
The question never occurred to Steve, but still he had an immediate answer, “I just plan on being the last.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That she needed my help,” Steve said, distilling all their strange conversations to their heady essence.
The crowds did not part for Eris; instead they clustered around her. Pretty girls, dressed as daringly as she, chatted with her as old friends. Boys leered and made lewd comments, eyes hunting for their favorite parts. Ever since she had seen the revelry on TV she knew she needed to be there, no matter what promises and concessions she made to Ted.
Clubs and bars streamed by. When fights broke out she hovered at the edge, licking her blood red lips. It always disappointed. The first real wound broke up the fight. She would leave then, drawing the crowd with her. Those at the fringes overturned cars and made a nuisance of themselves, trying to bring her to them. A few she favored with a touch. Her fingers across their cheek, her lips on their forehead, or even a word whispered in their ears. Their eyes would go wide then and something of that moment pressed itself into the most guarded reaches of their memory.
Right before closing time, when the clubs reluctantly turned out the increased business, she sat at a bar. The crowd began to drift, to dance, to wriggle free of her. She did not seize them again. Their reins lay at hand.
The bar tender looked her over as he took her order, and he served the wine with his eyes still on her perfect features. At last he said, “You don’t look like a student.”
She cocked an eyebrow, “No?”
He shook his head and then resumed his examination of her. “They never have real confidence or character.”
Among all of the neatly arranged geek things Steve found evidence of Eris. Behind the button down shirts and slacks he saw her clothes: miniskirts, halters, low-cut dresses, and other things that she made more than tawdry. As he examined the room he looked now and then at Ted. He simply watched, allowing Steve to examine things freely. No pictures of her emerged from the search. No scrap of paper or jotted note gave a hint of a location.
“Does she live here?” Steve asked. He moved back to the locked door, watching the boy settle onto the edge of his bed.
“Sort of,” he answered. He scratched his head and then said for the third time, “You should just go.”
“What if I go to the police?” Steve sneered after saying it. The sneer fell away when he noticed that the boy did not collapse under that threat. No, it looked more like Ted was trying not to laugh. A flat, crease making smile twisted up his whole face.
“What will you tell them?” Ted asked.
It tumbled out, “That you’re holding Eris prisoner, that she’s not free to come and go as she pleases, that a woman is in danger.” But these things, which Steve accepted wholly, sounded desperate and shrill even to him. He had found only clothing in the boy’s room; not enough for a threat let alone a case.
“So,” the boy said.
“I’ll make you tell me,” Steve said. He did not advance on the boy though. Something in his eyes had made Steve freeze up. The boy had dull brown eyes, nothing like the vivid ones of Eris that needed every color to fully express themselves. Even so there was a similar potency to their gazes. But, Steve realized, there would have to be. The boy needed something to restrain Eris.
Although they spent all of his time off together they never consummated it. “Not yet,” she would whisper, “not until I’m free.” She trembled against him. Terrible heat, worse than anything Florida could offer, rolled off of her. They went out and she never wore sunscreen, but her pale skin didn’t darken. “I’m from somewhere sunnier,” she said to him. He believed her. She had the rich, black curls of a Mediterranean woman. In the fullness of her lips and prominence of her cheekbones he saw more signs of that area. Also in her eyes, not perfectly round but not almond either.
When she told him about her captor her eyes dulled from green to steel gray. Her voice became flat and the beach party raging around them stopped. Even the waves seemed to still for a moment. He needed to go to work, and he found himself needing her help to get up and on the road.
“Only four more days,” she said. At the end of each encounter she told him how much time remained.
“You’ve got a week pass?” he had jokingly asked the first time she said it.
“The longest I’ve ever gotten,” she answered with her most serious voice.
It had been true. At the end of the week she vanished. He did not see her at the hotel she took him to, and when he asked about the student who dropped their wallet in his bar they said that room. He’d just missed Ted’s checkout. They’d call the contact number for him if he wanted.
“No,” he said, “I have his school information. I’ll contact them.”
She had given him clues, pointed towards the information. He had it because he pried it from her during their long talks. She showered after their conversations, as if they had done more and she worked up a sweat. Not that she ever actually sweated. Even in the Florida heat she smelled only of honey, with the slightest hint of copper underneath.
The boy didn’t look so good. His face had twisted up like folks in antacid ads. Steve didn’t go. No matter how many times the boy demanded it he didn’t leave. The demands stopped. The boy’s lips moved, but he spoke only to himself. A low, whistling moan came out.
“I’m not going to see some werewolf shit am I?” Steve joked.
A nasty glare answered him. The boy’s eyes still had that edge in them, but panic joined it. Worse his eyes looked dim, almost like a doll’s.
“It shouldn’t happen this way,” the boy said. A thick wad of blue ichor came out with his words. More followed it, and then the boy seemed to stretch and sag. Like a tiny tent, whose inhabitant is waking up. When his mouth opened up like a flap it was Eris that came out, naked and smeared in that blood-like stuff.
Her eyes were as blue as what covered her. A cartoon ocean blue that made Steve think of real waters. How they got dark at night. His mind wandered from the sea to the hills near them. A melody played in his head as Eris approached him.
“Now,” she said, “let’s see who’s in there.”
Her fingers hooked on his mouth and pulled it open. Pain raced through Steve’s body, but fortunately a detached giddiness was on its heels. Then he felt nothing at all. A fat man with wild hair came out, covered in wine red ichor. He bellowed and then his eyes fixed on the skin he came out of. Wordlessly he picked it up and handed it to Eris, who took it and gave him Ted’s.