Essex [the bad familiar]

4: Smile

The grotesque, blurred grin over Sandelene's shoulder seemed to belong to a movie playing out in the glass pane. And then blackened fingertips iced her neck. In that surreal moment of bitter shock a thought flashed through her mind: this is not a ghost. Ghosts aren't physical. Ghosts don't—

The fingers hadn't yet closed tight around her wild pulse. She had a chance.

Instinct electrified her veins. Shrieking, she whirled around and jabbed the attacker's face with the heel of her palm. Her hand smacked against the man's nose, just as hard as she'd imagined when she was practicing self-defense down in the mills with her best friend, Ronnie.

But the man did not react the way she'd imagined.

His nose cracked out of position. Skin slid moistly underneath her palm.  The stench of decay filled the air.

Perhaps from sheer surprise at this sudden turn of events, the bony hands around her throat retreated. Clutching his face, the man staggered back in a whirl of fetid robes. Dark liquid dripped from his clothes to the floor.

Her breath streamed from her lips in frosty tendrils. Sandelene only had moments, seconds already wasted, to decide between fight or flight. She kicked him hard in the groin then whipped around to try the door again as his body squelched across worn carpeting. Wouldn't budge. Margery, a fluttery-pulsed groaning heap at her feet, was no better.

In the door's frosted paneling she watched the dark shape stagger onto his feet. Coarse, deep laughter shook his shoulders. Hands balled into fists, Sandelene turned to hit him again. She didn't want to hit him again because the last touch felt as forbidden an action as hitting a corpse and yet she had no choice. In the marrow of her bones she knew this was it. Him or her.  This was exactly the reason Ronnie had dragged her to those crowded classes in the humid halls.

Dark hair so greasy she couldn't determine the color clung to sallow cheeks. For the time being, that was all she could see. For the time being, the padded drip-drip of water on carpet was all she heard. He wasn't even breathing, it seemed.

The living have to breathe, she thought as her mind raced from one idea to the next.Ghosts aren't physical, but people have to breathe. This was, what was it? Was it really a ghost? Was it something else, something more sinister? Something demonic?

She bounced nervously on the heels of her feet, trying to remember what to do in this situation, trying to hear Ronnie's voice barking commands. She waits for the attacker to strike, right? Or is it the other way around? And does any of this even apply to a supernatural entity?

The man's hands dropped away from his face. Almost immediately Sandelene's stomach heaved.

That stench! As if someone had boiled a soup of blighted vegetables and necrotic cattle. Her nose scrunched in disgust. Her hands rose to cover her mouth and her stomach, trying not throw up. She didn't want to bend her head in front of this, didn't want to do something so vulnerable as heaving her guts when she could  very well have them torn out by the creature standing before her...

The man's head lifted. Inch by inch she saw the face, the tumescent forehead, sunken eyes, blackened teeth: but that wasn't what made her gasp, no. The force of her counter attack had pushed the man's nose almost into one eye socket. From there, the brunt of the nose had begun to fall off. Sickly threads of rotted tissue dangled off dissolving grey cartilage.

The waterlogged, putrefying corpse leered at her through a twisted smile. "Sandy, Sandy, Sandy," it croaked.

Yes, a demon. The thought shambled through her mind as the man shambled forward. This was a demon.