perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew…. With an
anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked
the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself
face-to-face with his worst fear.
The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and
tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh
hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of
embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking
tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless
grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress,
the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of
decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one
hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion
but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair
that Margaret should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable
fate of all living things– It’s not Margaret, not this thing, unclean
thing, Margarite’s in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a
God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this,
sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with
God. — and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he
was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on
to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing
backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no
longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was
nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to
plunge him into despondency.
Then he saw that he hadn’t been visited only by this heinous surrogate
but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was
entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding
within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own
body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as
that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit
locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick,
irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a
mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as
fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and
jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes
or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or
orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it
from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was
seeing, merely the briefest glimpse.
The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the
cadaver’s rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh
remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and
that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the
bones.
Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been,
twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and
radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull
and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets.
This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had
prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn’t bear. He
heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not
lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream. Although it
seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he
yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In
spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in
spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in
that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely
five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the