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The click of its nails and the scrape against the wood was jarring in the silence, accompanied only by the sound of my frantic heart. Then a face was peeking in, hanging upside down off of the frame. It had no eyes, its skin was as pale as a corpse’s, and its bald head was elongated, with a gaping, smiling mouth of blackened teeth that were too large to fit in its face.
I tried again to scream. I tried to thrash, but all I managed to do was blink my eyes rapidly, tears beginning to stream down the sides of my face. The creature moved slowly, entering the room upside down, one spindly arm that was bent the wrong way after the next. Claws sunk into the plaster as it scaled the wall, heading for the tall ceiling. All I could do was follow it with my eyes.
It looked like a pale humanoid spider, with eight legs and a humanlike body that was skinny and hairless, its rib cage violently poking through the skin in places. Its head seemed to turn every which way, completely defying logic, bending all the way backwards as if it needed to keep its eyes on me at all times, which was odd, since it didn’t have any eyes.
I was sure it could see me just fine, because as it clawed its way towards me, its gaping mouth spread impossibly wide, rows of needle-like teeth glaring at me in the moonlight. It clicked its jaws together rapidly as it made its way up and over me to the wall behind the bed.
The sound the creature made was a sort of clicking, setting my teeth on edge. In seconds, it was hanging over my prone body, its head parallel with my own as it somehow managed to anchor itself to the wall, holding itself aloft.
I tried to scream for the upteenth time as its wide mouth full of teeth clicked only inches from my face. Instead of hot, foul breath, it was icy cold and smelled of dust and moss.
I screamed and screamed, but nothing came out of my mouth. The thing appeared to smile widely too, as if it knew I was trying to scream but couldn't.
One of its long arms arched over me, its claw the first thing to touch my skin as the very tip of it dragged down the side of my face. I wanted to vomit. I could see black spindly veins beneath the surface of its milky, sickly skin that was torn near the ribs, exposing bare bone. This creature wasn’t like Cilas and Cyn. There was a distinct lack of…thought in the way it watched me. Something about the way it moved seemed more animal than anything.
The clawed finger poked at my face, tracing a line down the silvery scar I already had, the one given to me on the last night I spent in this house with my family. Coldness filled my whole body as the creature cocked its head. A long, slimy black tongue crept past its teeth, descending towards my face, and licked over that silvery scar that slashed diagonally across my face, leaving a wet trail behind it. Tears fell harder now, pooling in my hair and my pillow.
Then its mouth opened wider, then wider and wider still, until its jaw stretched and unhinged, revealing rows of needle sharp teeth that descended down its entire throat. I stared into that chasm, screaming inside of my head but unable to make a single sound, until the moment its mouth grew so wide that it covered my entire face.
A tearing feeling in my throat gave way to a scream. It burst from me so violently that the creature recoiled for a moment, as if it wasn’t expecting me to break through its hold on me. My scream filled the halls and rooms of the old house, bouncing off of the high ceilings, traveling through the glass paned windows. I screamed until my throat was bloody, still unable to move my body. The monster reared back and shook its head at the high-pitched sound.
Then glass shattered, raining down onto the floor in tiny little glittering shards, as something massive and black as the night sky burst through. The pale creature shrieked, the sound guttural and broken as a shiny black tentacle wrapped around its body. Another tentacle joined the first, and then another, until the creature was held in place, suspended in the air above the bed.
My body was released from paralysis immediately, and I was able to scramble up the bed, my back slamming into the wooden headboard. Suddenly, Kaz was there, tearing the creature in half by pulling his long tentacles in opposite directions. Blood and gore rained down onto the floor, smelling rancid and bitter. Saliva filled my mouth, and I had to look away.
The creature shrieked and fought against Kaz, but ultimately, it fell silent, its guttural burble tapering into silence.
I turned back around in time to watch it drop to the floor in a fleshy heap as Kaz released it, his dark tentacles uncoiling. I met the swamp creature’s dark eyes and found him grinning back at me.
Iris
“You always have to have the last word, don’t you, Kazimir?” came a voice from the shadows.
Cyn appeared in the corner of the room in the form of glowing white eyes that slowly turned corporeal, just a writhing mass of smoke in the shape of a man.
My eyes bounced between the two creatures, and then to the nasty, fleshy heap on the floor. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth, black saliva pooling around it. Kaz nudged the thing with his tentacle…which I was just now seeing for the first time in all its glory.
I drank in the sight of the eerie cryptid. He had the torso of a man, his smokey greenish blue skin spotted with shining scales and black fins that ran down the length of his spine and under his forearms. His ears were webbed fins, and there were gills slashing through the sides of his neck.
My eyes traveled lower to the bottom half of his body. A surprised chuckle fell from my lips that had both of them looking at me strangely. I couldn’t help it though, because my brain immediately thought of Ursula, the sea witch. Kazimir’s body was that of a giant octopus or a squid.
He was onyx black with a dark green sheen, and he had scales that shimmered in the moonlight. There were eight massive tentacles that he stood on, as if they were legs, making him at least eight feet tall and much too large for this guest room. His black hair was more damp than wet, hanging down to his waist like a silky curtain.
“You killed my dog again,” came another familiar voice, tearing my attention from the swamptopus. Beside Cyn now stood Cilas, his long shadowy hair undulating like smoke around his broad shoulders. He stared down at the monster on the floor.
I choked, and all of the…menlooked at me. “That thing isn’t a fucking dog.”
Kaz’s lips tilted upwards as the two shadow creatures parted, each slowly moving through the room until each of them was on a different side of the bed. I was surrounded by monsters now, and yet the only one I feared was the one broken in half at Kaz’s feet…I mean tentacles.
“You’re lucky he’s still down, or you’d hurt his feelings. He has a temper when he feels disrespected,” Cilas said, running a shadowy finger down the side of my face. I sucked in a sharp breath at the touch, recalling many other things those hands were capable of. Then his words dawned on me.
“What do you meanstill down?” I peered up and over the edge of the bed as they watched me. The creature wasn’t moving, and its black sludgy blood was congealing beneath it. “Looks pretty fucking dead to me…”
Cyn sighed. “He’ll be back. Kaz only likes to piss him off, but it doesn't last long.”
I grimaced at the thought of that thing coming back to life. I was sure it had been seconds away from biting my face clean off.
“Maybe keep him on a tighter leash next time,” Kaz drawled. The strange lilt to his words drew out every syllable, like a snake speaking around a forked tongue. He looked at me again. “They call it Chaos, and that’s exactly what the big bastard is." He cut his eyes at Cilas. “If I hadn’t heard her screams, she would have been depleted by now.”
