Page 64 of Kiss Slay Replay

Ravi checks out the window again.

“Now.” He pushes the dresser aside.

“I know Danny needs a doctor, but we can’t just run out there without a plan,” I say. “It’s not just the birds. There’s a man. Some…I don’t know who he is. What he is.”

“I’m aware,” Ravi says.

“You saw him?”

“He came into the reception hall.”

“And?”

“I like our chances better out there than trapped in here, backs to the wall.”

“All right. I trust you.” We look at each other, our gazes lingering, and I want to shake the bitterness from him. I want to pull his hair and ask him why he never grew it out for me. I want to kiss his face, feel the familiar scratch of his beard, to retreat, escape into something that no longer exists, an illusion. I want him to hold me and tell me everything’s going to be fine and that this is just another bad dream, and when I wake up, I’ll be in bed next to him, and it’ll be like it used to, before the mundane drag of everyday life eroded the bond between us and the weight of wanting different things finally snapped it in half, before all the shitty things that we can’t take back, and it won’t be so hard anymore. So complicated. It’ll stop hurting so badly. I want him to do something, anything to make it hurt less.

But he won’t. He can’t.

Danny groans in pain again. He’s as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of bricks, and his breath reeks of decay, and his hand…his hand is just a pale, withered mound oozing that black tar-like substance. An hour ago, I thought he might be my future, and now I’m afraid he’s about to dissolve into nothing, to disintegrate in my arms.

“All right, Danny. We’re going to head out. You ready?”

“Born ready,” he says, attempting a smile. His teeth are rotted.

Ravi holds the door open for us.

The air outside smells like Danny. Like death. A thick fog shrouds the former campground. I can barely see a few feet in front of me.

It’s eerily quiet save for the random caw or scream that aggressively punctures the silence. There’s no cadence to them, no rhythm. I can’t predict when they’re coming or get any sense of where they’re coming from before the night snuffs them out.

I do my best on my injured foot, attempt to carry Danny’s weight as we turn left onto the path, moving toward the reception hall and the small parking lot.

“I don’t have my keys,” I tell Ravi. He walks a few paces in front of us, in danger of disappearing into the fog. “Ravi, did anyone call nine-one-one?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Ravi?”

He stops and turns to me. The pupil of his right eye is dilated; it bleeds into the white. His eye leaks that dark substance. It trickles down his face like a bleak tear. He looks resigned. He looks far away. I swear he was only a few steps ahead, that a moment ago I could reach out and touch him, but somehow the space between us has expanded, stretched to a distance I cannot fathom, even though we’re standing still.

“Did you hear that?” Danny asks me.

I look away for a second, just a second, and when I turn back, Ravi is gone. He vanished.

“Ravi?” He’s lost to the fog. He was there, and now he’s gone, and I can’t run after him because I’m holding Danny. “Ravi!”

“Willa,” Danny whispers. “Willa, it’s coming.”

There’s another scream. A blood-chilling, dizzyingly awful scream. It’s coming from behind us, I think. It’s not Ravi. It can’t be Ravi.

“Where did he go? Did you see? Did you see him?”

“I can’t see anything,” he says. “I think…I think my eyes are gone.”

I don’t want to look, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, so I look. His eyes are intact. But they’re black, and that inky mucilage seeps from the corners, streaking his sallow skin.

“Why the eyes again?” I ask. “What’s with the eyes?”