Skin and Bones (boyxboy) ✓

Chapter Eleven

"If you are alive, well... this is the mens room." I repeated. "Ladies is just next door."

She had a wild look in her eyes now, her face vaguely distorting as she came closer to me, but the low light changing angle on her face didn't seem to alter her look at all. 

"Wait!" She called out just as I decided that was a good time to leave. I felt sorry for her, in some sense, I understood she was going through something hellish and confusing. Somehow the wailing fear I was encountering never quite reached me. "Don't leave." She moaned.

I frowned. "I can't help you, sorry."

"But you can see me, you can see me!" She cried out.

I cringed at the noise, if people couldn't see her could they hear her? If not it was going to look particularly strange for me to walk out of the mens with a woman's wailing coming from inside.

"Sorry lady." I said, shrugging, feeling bad as I turned towards the door.

Just then I felt the strangest grip on my neck as I was shoved forwards, I turned around to see her form gliding on the floor almost as though she had forgotten how to walk and her face approaching mine so fast I gasped. My back hit the corner of the sink but the power in her hand as she wrapped it around my neck and pushed me backwards had me crashing partly into the mirror behind it. Nothing broke my heart pounded loudly in my chest, blood roaring in my ears.

Her form distorted around me, her hand was icy cold and chilling my skin. The hair on my arms was standing up on end as I tried to push her away but my hands sank into the strange empty space that I was pushing at.

Crazed eyes glazed over, the whites tinted pink, nostrils wide. I couldn't see anything else, the rest of the room blocked out by her. She opened her mouth and I saw clearly the unsettling lack of two teeth off to the right side of her mouth.

"Help- You can help me... Help me!" Her grip on my neck got tighter and her fingers felt unnaturally long. I tried to crawl away but I was beginning to really feel the lack of air and gasped out, her nails biting into my skin yet somehow not puncturing or even bruising me.

"Stop-" I managed to croak out, the corner of something behind me sticking into my lower back as I tried continuously to pull away from her.

Her phantom form seemed solid only where it mattered and I couldn't break myself free, there was a slow rise of panic beginning to build up in my lungs and looking up to see the strange way her eyes were dilating wasn't helping one bit.

Suddenly I realised the weirdest thing about her, the thing that had made me so comfortable recognising that she wasn't alive after all; the woman had no smell. Nothing lingered on or around her, even the common smell of sweat and skin that is so normal you don't notice it at all was absent and it was blindingly obvious that somehow this woman was there, but also not there at all.

Her long black hair tickled my arms. Hair and hands, solid, but the body was nothing. 

When I reached out to pull at her hair I was stunned when her form went sailing across the room and she landed awkwardly between two urinals, having somehow hit the wall and even appeared to be gasping in pain, looking up with terrifyingly wide eyes at the form that had tossed her across the room with nothing more than a breath of air.

It was Death.

She clutched her arm and groaned in pain and he looked over his shoulder at her, pure annoyance on his face. "Don't pretend to feel pain. You're dead." He said coldly.

She was surprised but instead of replying with a rebuttal she just buried her head, a little further than seemed healthy for someone in a body with bones, in her knees, and sobbed loudly.