Chapter Text
Heady fog like perfume fills up my nostrils. Every other sense is starting to fade away. All I can register in the dark surroundings of nighttime is the sense of something behind us down the road. I clasp my hands tighter round the steering wheel, half-praying. Something is caught in my throat – the air is so thick and watery I can’t tell what it is. “Amelie,” I mutter. My head feels stiff and I can’t turn to face her. All I see is the long road stretching ahead, pavement shrouded almost entirely by the shoots of heavy rain and the flare of smoky gray spreading out and covering every angle. I beg that the Lone Star Motel comes into view soon, the image of its once-torturous neon lights now comforting me. A piano seems to play softly in the back of my mind, the keys thrumming out in the low, menacing tones of a minor key. I feel tears well up in my eyes – this car is so fucking stuffy, I realize, the smells of everything now mixing with the damp scent of fog and petrichor. “Amelie. Amelie.” I call my partner’s name again. She’s fast asleep in her seat and I still can’t look. She has to hear the piano too, because in my head it keeps getting louder, louder, banging out the notes and crying its tones unevenly in my ears…
“Amelie!” I scream. She wakes at the instant I spot the red-and-blue signage gleaming not far in the distance. Amelie begins to curse and glance around, questioning me. The fog is still thick even as I pull into the shiny, deserted parking lot of the motel.
“What was that? What the fuck was that, Erin?” She yelps. I shush her almost instantly, waiting for the swallowing piano to fade out. Its keys quiet down, tapped weakly in my head by the lightest droplets of rain until they only make up the backing soundtrack. Quiet. “Quiet,” I touch her hand. “We need to go.” And I feel the thing still behind us, somewhere back on the road. It would be impossible to escape by driving: the only thing ahead is more empty, eerie town and dark expanses of open fields just begging for something to tear them up. We’re here for a purpose. We won’t be washed away by the rain.
I fasten my grip around her wrist and tell Amelie exactly what to do. “Grab everything now. We won’t head back to the car until morning, do you hear me? Everything you can fit reasonably in your grasp, get it. And we are going to run the hell up those steps.” My voice comes out far more commanding than I would’ve thought I’m capable of – but it drills something through to Amelie. Good. The sound of something far in the distance breaks through the light drone of the piano. A rustle in the dewy low grass or maybe a scratch in the dampened asphalt… I’m close to tears. Amelie nods, not really understanding what I’m scared of but trusting me nonetheless. She packs light things into her purse, a first aid kit tucked under her arms, a few precious samples in a box. I tuck only a few spare vials and my walkman into my labcoat pockets, not wanting to leave my equipment unattended. After a stutter when I’m trying to divide my attention between the presence approaching and the piano in my mind, we click out of the pick-up truck and make a dash for the stairs to reach our room in the motel.
The metal creaks and squeaks underfoot and I’m about to collapse just from the sound, extraordinarily loud in the rainy night. I look behind myself at the ground below, straining my eyes in ears to sense what it is exactly that is coming up the road. It has to be close now, it just has to. But I can’t tell, God damn it, because of the fog. It still fills my nostrils and it starts to creep up my sleeves. Amelie is fumbling around with our room key, dropping it against the sage-green metal hatches that make up the platform. I take it from her hand, not mumbling sorry, still splitting up my mind between the stresses of multiple senses while I shove the key into the lock like I’m driving a stake through a vampire’s heart. The door opens not without struggle and we fall in instantly, soaking wet with the traces of rainwater hanging hard on our jackets. I wrestle out of my labcoat, taking care to hang it safely on the rusty coatrack by the door. I’m so sure that I’m safe as I click the lock to our door shut, hoping that the thing will simply disappear.
But then I realize something. Something crucial.
The sample! I cry out in my head, my pupils dilating and my body going stiff. That first sample of the fungus we found upon our arrival, the thing so key to my studies – our studies. “Whew, we’re okay. We’re okay, Erin!” Amelie slowly approaches me. I jerk away at the press of her sweat-and-rain-coated fingers against my skin. She mutters sorry, looking at my face with an apologetic expression on her face. No, not apologetic – pitiful. Her smooth features are bent slightly with a specific kind of sorrow, the kind bared by a cat looking at the half-eaten remains of a wolf’s kill. Rain crashes down outside deafeningly. It takes up the same rhythm as the piano. Amelie used to play, I recall.
“We are okay, right?”
Suddenly she looks to me for guidance, her face changing. The valleys below her cheekbones and the bends between her brows lead me to the conclusion that fear has come back to her, sticking to her like the beads of water clinging to her hair. She wants to know that things are okay according to me. But nothing is okay – especially not now, as my periphery is suddenly glaringly obvious, the creature I so dreaded finally in my sights. I shove her down low against the ground, clutching her forearms tight while she holds me the same way. “What?” She asks simply, confused and worried. “I forgot the sample,” I half-explain.
“Which one? Oh my God, which one?” She switches and turns to panic immediately.
“The fungus. From the office.”
“Didn’t we take pictures?” And this almost gives me hope – until I recall that we did not, in fact, take pictures. Curse our polaroids and their lack of film.
“No.” I reply simply. I duck my head down, clutching my face. “No, no, no,” And I immediately turn up, climbing slowly up to the dresser so I can just see out of our room’s window.
In the rain, falling so hard, shrouded by fog, dusting so thickly over the parking lot, is the creature. Its skin – or carapace, perhaps – is a greenish black textured lightly by gritty scars. It’s hard to say how many details I really perceive and how many are the products of my mind filling in the gaps, but I’m sure I’m seeing something. What looks like its head is large and spanning, similar to the cap of a portabella mushroom. It draws its stemlike limbs agonizingly slowly up the parking lot, pathing towards the truck. Of course it is, damn it! I feel a droplet of something trail down my cheek – something wet. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s sweat or tears or rain. I’m too focused on the thing with its sticky, thin arms tapping against the metal of our pick-up. The fog still seems to choke me even from the outside while I watch the entity slither its limbs through the gaps in the doors and find its way inside. I can’t tell from my space in the window what exactly it’s doing or looking for inside of the car, but I have a hunch.
The hunch is confirmed when, in the morning, after I’ve bawled and quieted the slamming of horror-movie piano keys in my head and passed out and slept (not without nightmares), I check the truck and find no sign of the fungus sample. I find myself surprisingly not too badly wounded by this loss.
But as we drive around town, looking for something similar to our original findings, I can’t help but sense something behind us, sticky footsteps clunking miles behind in the rain.