and sure enough, he had no trouble getting into the one car. Inside, the crinkled carcasses of dead leaves lay across the oil-stained concrete floor, their entrance granted by a window that had been knocked out by yet another fallen tree limb.
The door into the house proper was locked so he kicked it open, the new strength in his body something that was a surprise, but not reassuring. Catching the panel with his hand as it flew back at him, he stayed where he was, listening. When there were no sounds, he cautiously entered the back hall. Up ahead, there was a small kitchen and eating area, and out the far side, a dining room.
No furniture. No stench of trash or clutter on the counters. Nothing in the living room to the left, either.
There was a lot of dust. Some mouse turds in corners like coins collected. Spiders up around the ceiling and dead flies on the windowsills, especially over the dry-as-a-bone sink.
As he walked around, the floors creaked under the boots that were on his feet. He was sure that the air was musty, but he hadn’t been able to smell anything since he’d been tortured at that abandoned outlet mall. Probably a good thing. He had some hazy flashbacks to it when it had been going down, and he remembered retching from the stench. Maybe the shit had killed his nose, too much funk knocking out a fuse somewhere in his sinuses.
Up on the second floor, in what had to be the master bedroom, he found a laptop next to a jar. And a leather-bound book.
The three objects were set together in the corner by the cable TV hookup, the Dell connected to the internet and still plugged into the wall. Everything was covered with more dust, and he wasn’t surprised as he tried to turn the PC on that it didn’t work. No electricity in the place. Obviously no cable, either.
The jar was weird. Blue-enameled, capped with a pointed lid and in the shape of a vase, it was curvy in the middle, like a woman. As he held it in his hand, turning it, turning it, he found his total lack of sex drive, as well as his complete absence of hunger for food, as troubling as this power in his legs and arms.
Something was inside of the vase, banging on the sides as it was rotated, but the top was sealed, glued into place.
“Leave it alone,” he said out loud.
He did not. His feet took both him and the jar into the dim bathroom, over to the sink and the mirror. When he looked at his reflection, he stumbled. The skin on his face was all wrong. He was too pale, but more than that, it was like he was wearing granny powder, his features slipcovered with a matte, waxy outer layer that didn’t look right.
And he shouldn’t have been able to see this clearly in the darkness.
Absently, he shook the jar. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk—
With a slam, he drove the thing into the counter, shattering it. As the shards fell away, what was revealed horrified him.
He was no anatomy expert, but he was well aware of what he was looking at. A human heart. Shriveled and black, the organ that was the seat of humanity, literally and figuratively, had been violently orphaned from its rib cage, the veins and arteries ragged, not cut.
As if it had been ripped out.
Tearing open his shirt, he looked at his sternum. The skin was marked with tattoos, some better than others, but he didn’t notice his ink.
He had no scar. There was no evidence that he had been violated. But something had been done to him there . . .
With trembling fingers, he pushed into the sides of his throat. Where was the pulse? Where was his pulse?
Nothing. No fragile, sustaining beat in the jugular.
Wheeling away from the mirror, Mr. F lurched back into the bedroom and fell to his knees, dry heaving. Nothing came up his throat. Nothing came out of his mouth. No half-digested food. No bile. No saliva.
He was just like the vase. A container for something that was ruined.
As reality twisted and contorted, revealing a new nightmare landscape his brain could not comprehend, he let himself fall face-first into the carpet.
I just want to go back to before, he thought. I want to go back and say no.
The sense that he had been claimed and there was no breaking up with his new spouse was