CRASH!
His eyes snapped open, met with nothing but darkness broken by the faint edges of furniture catching moonlight. Dread crawled up his throat, the sensation of inevitability reminiscent of walking down a hallway in the dark and imagining something was coming up behind him, or how he always expected something to walk around the corner as he was closing his bedroom door in the dark. It seemed misplaced. It was so deep – something primal, an emotion that wrapped a choke-hold around his brain-stem and screamed at him to run. But he was just in his bed, he’d just been drea—
What was a bed? How did he know that word?
In his confusion he shifted under the covers, gripping the edge of the mattress in his hands.
His hands.
He scrambled to a sitting position, jostling the entire bed. Raising the mysterious appendages, he rotated them, studying them with a mix of horror and fascination in the weak moonlight.
A woman he’d never seen before, but somehow knew as his wife, rolled over on her side of the bed with a bleary blink in his direction.
“What’s wrong hon—”
“Shut up!” he snapped back, on edge with his discoveries.
Bending his fingers, Arka marveled at the fact that they were familiar and alien at once – as if he hadn’t just woken up in another world void of even the comfort of his usual form. His mind felt split right down the middle, divided in to a past and present unforgiving in their contrast. He understood he was something called a ‘human’, that the woman in bed with him was his wife, that he was lying in a bed in a house, and that it was the night before Christmas. And despite straddling a fine line between sanity and otherwise…he recognized it all somehow.
And even if he hadn’t there was no time for despondency. The same noise that must have interrupted his sleep sounded again, a sound like the house settling, some of the ‘popcorn’ ceiling crackling and heaving a cloud of dust as something massive traversed the roof. Where his instinct caused him to freeze, brain going in to hyper-drive to analyze the situation, fear drove his wife to speak. Incessant, insufferable. He already hated her.
“Arka, what about the kids?” she asked, reaching out to wrap a hand around his arm. Her touch felt electric for all the wrong reasons – like a spider crawling up his pant leg, it was unwanted and unnatural, a place it shouldn’t be. He shrugged her off.
Children. A boy and a girl. Alison & Waker.
Just as in the life before, he despised them. As a horse he’d had no use for his pathetic offspring. Each had been a means to an end: Alison, a way to exact revenge on his Mother for not appreciating him for what he was. Waker had been an attempt at something worthy of carrying his genes, but ended up being an undeniable failure. He ‘knew’ that these children were not the product of origins quite so depraved, but that they were just as much a burden.
“What about them?”
For a second he saw disgust in his wife’s face, revulsion for the thing she’d somehow married and now forced herself to stay with for the good of the children. Arka wondered if this version of him had always been this way, or if he’d brought his distinct brand of slime with him when he ‘woke up’. There was surprise mixed in with her distaste, so he thought perhaps the human Arka had been different before this moment.
Existentialism aside, he wanted to get away from her, and even the wastes of skin called his children were a good reason. Pushing himself up off the bed, he moved towards the door, surprisingly sturdy on two legs instead of four.
Opening the door slowly, he let his eyes adjust to the even darker hallway of the second floor. There were no windows, just an expanse of carpeting leading to the other end of the second story where his children’s rooms were. The staircase was just a ways off, leading down in to near pitch-black darkness…a darkness filled with the sounds of rustling, thumping, and crashing that sounded like an invasion. He’d had no intentions of going to check on his children as it was – maybe go downstairs, check the fridge, scratch his armpit with a yawn and grab a beer at three in the morning before going outside to see what’d fallen on the roof – but the rustling required immediate attention as it was.
He knew he had a gun.
Turning back in to the master bedroom, he ignored the silent accusations of his wife’s gaze as he made a beeline for the closet. As quietly as possible he shoved aside a few boxes on the shelf lining its walls and pulled down the one with the pistol inside. He didn’t believe in keeping it in his bedside table, citing the thought that one of his moronic children might get hold of it and shoot him by accident someday. It was close enough in the closet. Shoving the full clip in, he made for the staircase, ignoring his wife’s suddenly frantic questions. (Arka, why do you need a GUN? Are the kids out of bed?) Useless.
The steps were wooden, cold and smooth under his bare feet as he crept down the staircase. One hand was wrapped around the banister to keep him steady in the dark, the other holding the pistol, finger resting along the trigger-guard.
He could see almost nothing but shadows as he reached the first floor, the same sickening sense of dread clawing at his mind again. Something crashed to the floor with a sound loud enough to make his ears ring, causing him to slam his back up against a wall for cover from the direction it came from. Sliding along the wall slowly, he kept his breathing as even as possible, focusing intently. Fear and panic would get him nowhere. He tracked the nearly constant sound of rustling to the front room where all the presents were nearly stacked by his wife around the tree. Almost without warning his apprehension was replaced by white-hot anger. Whomever had the balls to break in to his house also had the balls to destroy – or steal, noisily – the things he’d spent his precious money on. The money he hadn’t even wanted to spend in the first place because what had his stain-on-humanity children ever done to deserve it?
Quietly, quietly, quietly he reached around the edge of the doorway to flick on the light-switch just on the other side of the wall, unwilling to relinquish his cover in case the intruders were armed.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw, not even that part of him that used to be a horse and had watched all sorts of so-called ‘unnatural’ magic.
Beasts, four-legged, skin like an oil slick black and iridescent in the light of the Christmas tree, traipsed through the presents. They didn’t necessarily seem concerned with what was inside each brightly wrapped box so much as destroying the contents, crushing plastic toy cars and Barbie dream-houses in webbed, clawed fists. As soon as the light went on they froze, each turning their head at the exact same time as the other to look at Arka. They did not have faces, but he could feel what their expressions might have been.
For a moment they were at a stalemate, gathering of demons staring down a lone man...until the lone man took a step forward and every single one of the creatures shivered with hunger, inky faces seeming to pull on themselves until mouths ripped open. Tough, rubbery skin snapped as flesh pulled apart and rolled back on itself, revealing rows of teeth like nails, long and serrated and covered in drool.
“Woah, woah!” Arka yelled, taking a step backwards and holding up his hands to stop the creatures in their advance. Much to even Arka’s surprise, they did, hackles high though they waited for whatever he was that the foolish human had planned. And what did he have planned? In the face of seemingly imminent and incredibly painful death he could choose to fight. He was not the sort to go down without one. But he was calculating, and even confronted by the group of shivering, slavering hell-beasts, he saw a second choice.
“If I let you have my family, will you take me with you?”
Merry Christmas.
Arka
whirl the wheel oh father, oh satan, oh sun