Anthony stuttered across the floor. Lance backed toward the doorway and looked on as the ghost jittered a strange step on the hardwood. The clothing Anthony wore looked different somehow. It was beginning to fray in places and pieces of it were floating into the air. Soon more chunks tore free, and Lance realized that it wasn’t only clothing that was vaporizing, it was also flesh and tissue breaking off like an aspirin in water. The pieces flew away and broke down further in the dreary light, until they were dissolved completely. More and more parts diverged from Anthony’s main mass, until it looked as if a small tornado of white flesh was spinning in the room. The ghost’s gaping face still sat at the top of the twisting clot, its eyes staring at Lance’s until they began to look past him. Lance watched as they widened, seeing something beyond the house around them. Utter terror flowed through them before they disintegrated too, and the knife fell to the floor, where it stuck solidly in a board as a gout of black fluid rained down around it. Lance thought he heard a scream echo in his ears, and then all was still.
Lance felt the wall press against his back and stop his rearward progress. He looked at the spot where the dead thing had stood, and watched as the last traces of the dark gas dissipated from view. A clicking noise pulled him out of his awe at what had just transpired, and he raised his attention to Erwin as the apparition snapped the last buckle home around its narrow waist. The ghost’s hands lowered to the handles at its hips, and caressing them with a fondness that nearly made Lance recoil.
“You were right,” Erwin said, as he took a step toward Lance and drew a blade out of its sheath. It was cleaver-like in shape, but thinner and threatening in a way that he couldn’t describe. “He was always afraid of these.” Erwin looked lovingly at the shine that issued from the edge of the knife. Lance pictured the ghost’s tongue extending from its dead lips to lick the knife’s curve, and shivered. “His mother too,” Erwin continued. “Their beauty was lost on them. They couldn’t appreciate their shapes or the blood they could bring forth.” The ghost convulsed in what Lance could only call ecstasy, and he saw the stub of a penis below the belt begin to stiffen.
Lance’s fingers clenched and released as his gaze dropped toward the floor where the knife stood stock-still, its point buried within the grains of the wood. The naked abomination across the room followed his sight to the weapon. Erwin twirled the blade in his hand around a finger in a quick flicking motion. A dare. Lance braced his hands against the wall, and then pushed off as he dove toward the knife in the floor.
Elation filled his chest as he realized he would reach the knife in time. His knees skidded on the bloody floor and his fingers closed around the handle. He began to pull up on the weapon, already seeing the path the blade would take as his hand drove it straight into Erwin’s thin chest, but then there was a burning in his fingers that were pulling on the knife. He yanked again, but there was something wrong with his hand.
He saw his fingers falling away from the handle as the pain ignited at the end of his arm. All four digits dropped to the floor, cut cleanly through just behind the second knuckles. Blood flew from the stumps that still tried to grip the knife. Lance pulled his hand back to his chest and stifled a scream of agony as he scooted toward the door, crab-walking with his good hand and legs beneath him. His eyes found his missing fingers on the floor, and he watched in awe as they curled reflexively like dying worms. The flat places that were left in his fingers’ steads pumped blood in streams like four small garden hoses. The pain was immense, a throbbing drumbeat of misery.
Erwin stood holding the cleaver-like blade close to his face. A red line traced the cutting edge, and Lance watched as the ghost’s tongue slithered out from behind its exposed teeth to lick the blood from the steel. Its eyes closed, and then flashed open again.
“Just how I remember it.”
Erwin bolted toward him, his arm swung back. Lance jumped to his feet and turned toward the door. His shoes slipped and he cursed his legs. Every cell in his body reached for the opening, knowing what followed only feet behind him.