“Lovely jubbly,” he yelled as he held up the plate.

“Yeah, well, you try doin that with my old pans.” She wrinkled her nose; the clothes basket was full to overflowing with dirty nappies. Either they went in the washer or in the tub outside, and as she had just gotten the little ones off to sleep, and was on her downtime break, she knew who would be scrubbing shit, and real soon.

“Ha-aarry, are you…?”

The basement door burst open, and Harry lurched out. She sat forward – his face was beet-red, and one of his eyes looked funny – all milky-white sort of. “Harry?”

Harry opened his mouth but nothing came out. Instead he worked his jaws as if he were either trying to say something or pry loose a bone he had managed to lodge in his gums.

Her brows came together. “Are you stoned? Is that what you been doin down there?”

He lurched closer and now Summer could see that around his mouth it glistened blackly like he had been drinking engine oil. She tried to think what was stored down there that he could have been getting into.

He hadn’t said a word, or even looked at her. She started to feel the hair on her head and neck rise.

“Is it…fixed?” She got to her feet and stepped up on the couch.

Harry remained standing in the center of the room, arms slightly out from his sides, and turning slowly as if trying to find something.

“Harry, you’re scaring me. Stop it!” She put a foot up on the back of the couch.

He slowly turned toward her, and the good eye in his head suddenly went full black, as if the pupil had totally grown over all the white. He opened his mouth wide, then wider. She heard his jaws cracking. Summer was expecting the man to scream, but instead, several feet of black ribbons extended from his mouth.

Summer’s throat hurt, and she realized she was screaming, and couldn’t stop. She grabbed up a pillow and held it in front of herself, getting ready to vault over the back of the couch and sprint to the door.

Suddenly Harry just…exploded. The black ribbons came from every part of his body, growing hugely to become tendrils, pipes, and trunks of black flesh that all ended in thrashing tentacles. His eyes doubled, tripled and kept on multiplying, and then slid all over his grotesquely inflating body.

Harry, the man, her husband, just broke apart as if he were a shell casing being shed by the disgusting giant creature that now stood before her, filling the room with its bulk and its stink.

Summer’s nerve broke. She forgot about her kids. She forgot everything. She glanced over her shoulder to the door, and then leaped. She had been a sprinter at high school and used to be as fast as the wind.

The thing that used to be Harry was even faster – she never made it.