The thing’s flagella turned liquid and reshaped and re-formed as Mercy twitched, and that goddamned face blinked its eyes and its lips wriggled into shapes of soundless, impossible words. I gasped and covered my ears and I stumbled backward and my feet shoelaced together, crashing me to the floor ass first. From the lower vantage, the moonlight wasn’t as bright or as silver and as a result (or unrelated, I don’t know, I don’t know anything) Mercy’s face was hers again, and the thing on her chest was her green jacket she’d decided at some point to use as a blanket. She stirred at my landing on the floor but did not wake.

Despite the horror of it all, I sat blinking and turning my head, attempting to wrest the prior vision back into existence. I clambered onto my feet and like a shimmering heat mirage on an endless highway, Mercy transformed into Kathleen Blanchet’s corpse and the jacket was not a jacket but an anti-heart, one that strained to inflate and relaxed into its deflate, and fucking hell the face’s expression altered slightly (an arched brow, a narrowing of the eyelids) to communicate that I had its attention. Its lips writhed with a speed that was so unremittingly awful, involuntary whimpers, moans, and glottal chokes bubbled from my throat.

With the modest shortest-term goal of leaning against the wall, I reeled to my right, and as I did so I kicked Mercy’s shoulder bag, clanking it off the baseboard heater. Simultaneous to my movement, the TV room darkened, though not entirely, as a wispy cloud must’ve tissue-papered in front of the moon. In this darker dark, Mercy was not Kathleen but looked like a younger version of herself, a teenager like me, and perhaps this was the singular lie of the light that evening, or maybe it was a distant truth I wasn’t ready to confront. Either or any of the ways, I decided two things: I would wait for the cloud to pass, and I needed proof (that single inviolable, irrefutable, elusive syllable); Mercy’s version of proof.

I bent and rooted through her bag and pulled out her camera. That she hadn’t woken yet given my floor crater, heater clang, bag rifling, and various exclamations was, I grant you, improbable, narratively speaking. Though, given my back was killing me and my headache throbbed like a mini DJ was inside my gray matter thrumming the not-so-soothing industrial stylings of Ministry, maybe her not yet waking was very much purposeful.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?????