Father Jim Mallahan (extremeunction) wrote in zenithrp, @ 2016-06-20 21:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 038, jim |
Who: Jim
Where: His room
When: Late at night, and then at 7:45am
Jim had gone to bed alone, not too worried about Juno. Marco was watching her, and say what you would about Marco, but in Jim's experience the guy cared about Juno and he liked to be helpful. He just didn't always go about it in the most practical way, but Juno and Cecilia were around to keep him on task. If she said she was okay to just sleep across the hall for tonight, that was fine.
And although it was nice to have the bed to himself without having to worry about switching, he didn't sleep all that well. In the middle of the night he woke up, or thought he woke up—the room was still dark, but beside him he felt bed creak. It was a very mundane feeling, the usual slight tilt when someone climbed into bed with you, and it felt real—right down to the soft scrape of a woman's dry heel against the clean sheets.
It had to be Juno. It could only be Juno, even though she would never, ever do this. He wouldn't invite it and she wouldn't want to. Because there was definitely nobody else in the house who would casually slide into bed beside him, right? But he couldn't turn his head to look, couldn't open or close his eyes.
His breath was loud and laboured; it reminded him of the sound people made as they died, enormously loud but steady breaths that could be heard all over the house or the ward, through closed doors and up staircases. Darth Vader breath, one of the hospice nurses always said, a completely inappropriate piece of gallows humour that just made everything seem even more hopeless than it was. He couldn't move, except for the steady rise and fall of his chest, and he felt the same combo of exhaustion and vibration that he usually associated with running the lawnmower for a long time at home: tremor, sweat, numbness.
The thing in bed beside him, just outside of his peripheral vision, slid a hand into his hair and then climbed up to straddle his chest, one knee pressed down hard over his ribs. If pressed, he would have reluctantly described the figure as female, but it didn't seem important: its skin was pale greyish-yellow and stretched tight over the bone, scarred everywhere as if put together from scraps, naked. It gripped his shoulders for a moment, looking him over to relish the power it had. Long ropy locks of hair, twisted and just as beige-pale as the skin, hair the colour of dandruff, hung down to pool against his chest. He couldn't focus on the thing's face, though it seemed featureless: no eyebrows, a lipless mouth like a slash, yellowed sclera and watery grey irises, teeth like worn stumps as it smiled at him.
She was bent over him so close that he could smell her, the stink of old milk, the scent of dry, flaky skin that he always tried not to notice with visiting nursing homes, rotting teeth, traces of old urine and the ammoniac smell of failing kidneys.
It reached back languidly to clutch his balls in iron-strong fingers, squeezing hard and lasciviously, and when it was pleased by his motionless terror, it lunged forward again and fastened its bony hands around his throat. He couldn't fight it off, and there was no time for prayer or begging God's forgiveness—he couldn't think about anything else except the repulsion of being touched by this thing, and the need to somehow keep breathing.