3.8
CONTENT WARNING: This update contains body horror and descriptions of gore.
Landis tries to swallow, but there’s a lump in his throat that feels like it’s the size of a fist. His feet are rooted to the ground - he can’t even force himself to turn around and look at Otter and the other witches. Hopefully Otter had enough sense to make a run for it. Landis doesn’t want him to have to see this.
“Why,” Landis says weakly, not even bothering to turn the word into a question. The entity makes its awful, heaving motions again, but this time an actual noise comes from it as well - a noise that sounds more like shrieks of pain than laughter.
Did you think you were free of me forever?
It tilts its head slightly upwards, and Landis swears he can see the flash of teeth in its indistinct face, an exposed lower jawbone dripping with mud and pond scum as it grins at him. Landis’s stomach churns.
“Why,” he asks again, more forcefully, directing it at the witches, “did you want this thing to come back here?”
“We wanted to see if it was real,” Gen murmurs, only barely loud enough for Landis to hear.
“Or if you just killed all those people because you were crazy,” Aster chimes in from behind them.
“We sort of figured you weren’t,” Sparrow says, “and we thought binding such a powerful entity as our familiar might be kind of, you know, helpful. In the grand scheme of things.”
“We were going to bind it to you,” Tara says. Her voice is shaky, the threat of tears thick at the end of the sentence. She’s the only one who sounds properly afraid of the thing standing in the fire pit.
Oh good. Bind it to something. Like that doesn’t have enough precedent for being a terrible idea. Landis bites the inside of his cheek before he can say it out loud. Yelling at the witches isn’t going to do anything at this point, and Gen, who’s the closest to him, is still holding a knife. Figuring out an escape route has to take precedence right now. He’ll find a way to get back at the witches later - maybe he’ll tell Austin, and Austin will tell the police. Even if witchcraft isn’t illegal or anything, Gen still attacked him with a knife.
You see? the entity asks smugly, cocking its head to one side. Your world cannot be free of me. Someone will always summon me back here.
It’s right. Landis doesn’t know how to kill it - if it can be killed, even. Stabbing Austin to release the entity was only a temporary fix, and it took the whole endeavor of containing the entity about two steps back. And now that it isn’t bound to the lake anymore, it can just keep coming, over and over. Why had he been such an idiot? Why had he let himself think he could breathe, just for a second?
I’m bound to this thing until I die, Landis realizes, in a moment of refreshing clarity. He finally understands: this entity and him, their lives are intertwined. They’re never going to stop meeting - even after leaving the lake behind, he’s still the caretaker. Landis feels like his mind is floating away from his body, tethered by the loosest of strings.
“What is that thing?” Otter asks, the sound of his voice snapping Landis harshly back to Earth.
“It possessed Austin,” Landis says. He isn’t sure how much of the story Otter has actually heard, but given that he knows about Austin and Landis talking to ghosts, possession should still sit within his realm of understanding. “It…killed my friends.”
Getting the words out feels like pulling an infected tooth. He feels the weight and shape of them as they leave his mouth, and wonders if any of Paper Museum is here somewhere, watching, passing silent judgement. None of them came in the car, but that doesn’t mean none of them followed. They tend to linger just out of sight unless they want to be a part of things
Killed your friends? The entity sounds bemused. In case you’ve forgotten, you killed your friends. I only asked for bodies. They never had to be the bodies of those close to -
“Shut the fuck up.”
The words tear themselves free of the lump in Landis’s throat. His arm, the one Gen cut to feed the fire, only barely hurts anymore, but as he curls up his hands into tight fists he can feel blood dripping down in between his fingers.
“You didn’t even ask,” Landis says loudly. He lifts his chin up, trying to sound stronger than he feels. “The first time - Mal was just there, and the lake started bubbling, and I didn’t have a choice. It was too late to find someone else - I didn’t know -”
But you chose to kill the rest of them.
“What fucking choice did I have?” Landis feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin. “They all started calling me again, wanting to talk to me - about Mal, about getting together again, about how I was doing here. They would have found out, eventually -”
“Landis,” Otter cuts him off. “You don’t have to answer to that thing.”
The entity’s head snaps up, its face turning in Otter’s direction. It’s still grinning. Who is this?
Landis opens his mouth to answer, but he can’t force any more sounds out. His nails are biting into his palms, leaving little crescent-shaped scars, and his body is shaking like a leaf. He wishes he had stuck to his guns and killed himself after helping Austin on the island. If he had, maybe this wouldn’t be happening right now. Otter wouldn’t be in danger, and would be sitting at the apartment, waiting for Austin to come home.
“This is boring,” Aster complains, and Landis hears the sound of her sliding off of Otter’s lap. She walks up to the fire pit, circling it, and draws close enough to the entity to brush its chest with her fingers. “When are you going to possess him already, hmm? We didn’t bring you here just to stand around and talk.”
The entity’s gaze never leaves Otter, and even as Landis is staring right at it, he doesn’t process what’s happening until Aster screams and jerks forward. Her hand is sunk wrist-deep into the thing’s chest, and she tugs frantically on it, but can’t pull it free.
“Gen,” she pleads shrilly. “Gen, help -”
Landis looks over at Gen, who’s frozen to the spot, her face slowly changing from an expression of glee to one of abject horror. Aster screams again as the entity slowly envelops her forearm. She digs her heels into the ground, but all it does is leave long score marks in the dirt as she’s dragged farther and farther into the fire pit. Landis feels like he’s going to vomit. How is it fitting so much of her inside of it?
“Stop it,” Otter says forcefully. “This isn’t right.”
The entity pauses. Aster is no more or less stuck inside of it, but still can’t free herself, grunting as she tries to wrench her arm out of its body.
You’re correct, it says. This is taking far too long.
It shifts. At first, the undulating motion of its torso is barely perceptible, hardly indistinguishable from the way it was dripping before. But then the entity’s body unfolds, a crowd of emaciated, rotting arms bursting from its surface and latching onto Aster, sinking spindly fingers into her skin. She opens her mouth, probably to beg, but sputters and chokes as mud drips down over her face, suffocating her. Drowning her. For one, horrible moment, it looks as though Aster is standing inside the entity, its body open, the hands and bones of its inner workings closing in on her like an iron maiden. And then -
And then it’s as though she was never there.
Landis’s only warning that he’s about to pass out is a slight grayness on the edge of his vision. He doesn’t understand what it means until he feels his knees give out, the cold, wet leaves barely cushioning his head as it bounces off the ground.