Ashley scrambled back. She reached into the next alcove and claimed another jar, sucked its contents down, and grew again. Sheets of bone from her eye sockets crept into her periphery, growing across her face. She raked long fingers toward the shadow, swiping at it. She felt it blink—a momentary release from its boring gaze.

She danced on long toes across the narrow chamber to the other alcoves, and the last jar. More marrow, more bone, less darkness. Her ribs crisscrossed in front of her, a shield over her soft, bleeding center. She charged the monster. She glared into its gaze, eye to eye to eye, until it sank back through the crevasse, back to the eye-walled pit, its vision winking out, leaving her in only natural darkness. She drove her ossified fist into the stone above the fissure, pounding it into grit, her hardened hands like hammers glancing off the slick stone till it crumbled. The opening gave and the ceiling fell, thundering, sealing the side chamber shut—like the jars, like the bone closing over Ashley’s face.

Her rapid breath flowed back at her in the confines of her outer skull. Her vision narrowed to the width of a single finger. She reached through the small hole and tried to pull at the bone, to break herself free. The skull mask clamped shut on her fingertip, growing over it, trapping it, shutting out all but a little light. She screamed inside her skull and the sound bounced around her ears. The expanding lattice of her ribcage lifted her off the floor.

Her breathing slowed. Cradled in her bones, with her own soft breath against her face, her panic settled into calm. It was quiet inside her bones, and no one could see her. Not the monster with his thousand eyes or Henri through his camera lens, or the thousands who had stared over the years at her height, her scars. She was hidden, shielded by armor of her own making.

They’d find her, though, she knew. Later. Long after her life was gone. She’d be a curiosity—a national treasure: the woman inside of a bone cave inside of a cave of bones. A freak. They’d take her bones away and seal them in jars. Study them. But the monster was gone. And so was the sacred marrow. Except for the sample in the lab. The open jar with its rich odor, its inescapable pull toward the cave. Perhaps, exposed, it would fall to dust. Perhaps, exposed, those who laid eyes on it would become monsters. Maybe covered with bone, maybe covered with eyes.

The last seams of her skull plates squeezed tight—only slivers of light slipping through and dancing across the inside of her skull like figures on a cave wall. All she could see was her own darkness, her own shadow, and the only eyes were hers. Nothing and no one looked back.

Making Monsters

MAKING MONSTERS