The Child: Chapter 19

Staying with Harlan

The boy’s tattoos left his body and hovered several inches over him. A menagerie of animals, wilderness, castles, knights, dragons, and creatures I had never seen before swirled in the air where only moments ago they had been attached to his flesh, appearing as if they were riding an invisible zoetrope.

I witnessed the impossible and terrifying. A thing — I had no time to consider what it might actually be called — a snake-like creature with a grizzly bear’s mouth and jellyfish tentacles opened its jaws impossibly wide and consumed another floating tattoo, a pig. The pig’s pink eyes went wide with terror for a moment before its life ended. I could hear a crunching sound from inside the snake tattoo.

Other animal tattoos snapped at each other, moving closer or further away depending on whether the tattoo was the aggressor or potential victim. It looked like every hungry beast from the depths of a horror writer’s darkest imagination had sprung into existence and were trying to eat each other.

I turned away from the boy and Harlan toward Albreda.

I pressed my hand onto the floor and slowly rose off the ground, leaning hard against the wall for support, and hoping, too, that a door would suddenly open behind me and I’d tumble away from this nightmare.

Albreda and Harlan’s words fused in my mind into an amalgam of terror: “You will die if you stay and you will die if you leave.”

Not deciding is deciding.

I turned toward Albreda. I’ll go with her. The boy was at Harlan’s, and where the boy stayed is not where I wanted to be.

I shilly-shallied toward Albreda, who had begun to move to the door, turning from Harlan and the boy, fearing that if I looked at them again I would be like Lot’s wife. My eyes fixed on Albreda; I picked up the pace and covered the last few steps like an Olympic race walker. When I was just a foot away from her, the boy’s tattoos flew from him to the space between me and Albreda. The creatures that had first been on the boy’s body, then spinning in the air above him, were now a wall of freakish monsters that extended from the floor to the ceiling. Getting to Albreda meant passing through creatures with bat wings and dragon mouths, lion claws and tentacles. Even the castle and mountain tattoos now floated in the air between me and Albreda, part of the barrier keeping me from safety. I squinted and thought I saw a woman in the castle’s window, a tattoo within a tattoo.

I cocked my head to the side. These flying tattoos were two-dimensional, mere projections with as much substance as the movie film on a theater screen. And just like movie images that fly from a projector to a screen, I could pass through them.

I took an unfettered step toward relative safety, toward Albreda. As I started to pass through the trick of light and shape, a brown and red rat bit my arm. It hurt, and I bled. This is no trick of light. I froze and before I could retreat from the tattoo wall, another creature, a tiger with a crocodile’s head bit my leg. Warm, wet blood trickled down my leg.

My heart quickened. I wanted to throw up.

The boy hissed, “Think again, Mark.”

I quickly stepped back. The creatures remained where they were, a barricade between Albreda and me.

I’m staying with Harlan and the boy. Not my choice, but there was no alternative.

As she slipped out the door, Albreda said, “Sorry. I don’t have enough power.” With her next words came a glimmer of hope. “Yet.”

To be continued… What you like to see or know about what happens with Mark, Albreda, Harlan, and the boy? Post your thoughts, ideas, and hopes as a comment.

The Child is an interactive puzzle fiction story. If you’ve stumbled onto this episode without reading the beginning, you can start at Episode One here.