They were there, standing on the front lawn. Eli saw them through the window. He shouldn’t have looked but he did. Now the lights were out and he sat with his back to the wall, the window-sill just above his head.
Just as he shuffled slowly to the wardrobe’s corner the old wood creaked and Dominic snapped to face him. Without turning, their whole body appeared to shift and reorient.
Eli’s phone was ringing again with the polyphonic clamour he could never seem to change. He’d removed the SIM and sliced it in half with a pair of craft scissors but it still rang once or twice an hour.
“I’ve missed you so much, Eli,” they whispered; the voice at once cast from before and behind him. His muscles tensed and skin prickled as the hot, damp sensation of Dom’s tongue landed on the back of his neck. He lunged for the door but already his arms were stuck, their hands gripping his wrists and fingers twisting around the length of his arm up to the elbow. A third hand extended and clasped his mouth, a fourth wrapped tightly around his waist lifting him from the ground.
With a graceless thunk, a rock hit his window pane. He clutched the Swiss army knife his grandfather had given him for his 14th birthday and began to cry as a second rock hit the glass. “Eli, please let me in. I know you’re in there, I miss you.” It was as loud as if they were in the room. As loud as if it were shouted into his ear. Their voice was grotesque; a sloppy imitation of the real Dominic. “Please.” For a moment there was silence, then the sharp and jarring clash of glass from beneath him. He gasped and crawled on all fours to his venetian wardrobe, pulling the doors shut just as his bedroom door creaked open. Each step was unnaturally quiet. Their skin rippled and shifted, blackening and bubbling before returning to its pale, mascarpone white. Their eyes, unsettled like ink swirling in water, captured all the incandescent light of the street lamps.
The other Dom pressed against the doors, and Eli watched, unable to scream, as their whole body seeped through the slats and recongealed before him – once again a vision of statuesque symmetry. “I love you,” they said, as they removed their hand from his mouth and drove their lips into Eli’s. With fervour, Dom grasped Eli’s face with two hands and his thighs with two more. The two of them bubbling and expanding as hand upon hand, viscous and probing emerged from within the clothes, placing themselves on his body. This was not his Dom. He felt their tongue slipping deeper and deeper into his throat. All the while they repeated, “I love you, I love you” from any of the hundreds of mouths that formed and collapsed in the tar and the darkness. All the while Eli rasped, “I can’t breathe.”
“I can feel you with me, Elijah. I can feel your heart, at every moment, beating in my hands.” Still his phone was ringing, Dom’s name emboldened on the screen. “I know you’re here, Eli.” He watched while covering his mouth as this Dom’s fingers collapsed and reformed, falling from their hands after bubbling into a thick tar that poured from their palms onto the carpet. From his bedside, Dom picked up his book and held it to their face as the ooze from their person gushed down the cover, pooling at their feet. Eli buried himself between his coats, his eyes stinging with salt as they inhaled deeply from the pages of the novel. artwork : jordan evans
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