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The day goes wrong like this: oversleeping, missing breakfast, shattering your phone on your way to work and now him — this caricature of a man with knives under his skin, smile splitting wider than it has any right to.
When he first enters the store, his flesh seems to fit him well enough, though the sharpness beneath still presses at the seams threateningly. You can almost imagine serrated ends testing him from within, can almost feel the way they would slice into your fingers if you applied force. He pushes the door open and makes his way in, nearly silent save for the blaring colors of his outfit and the gentle chime of the shop door. The overhead lights paint his features with hard shadows, stark lines of chiaroscuro even as his eyes glimmer from between fine eyelashes the color of cornsilk. He’s taller than you by far, oddly intriguing with his gangly figure and long face framed by a mass of wild blond curls. When he moves he seems to sway as he walks; It’s as if his bones have been arranged by clumsy, uncertain hands and the suggestion of such disfigurement alone leaves you feeling vaguely ill. He’s so far proven harmless, simply looking about as he moves further between the tidy rows of petals and stems, but his uneven motions send anxiety prickling down your spine.
As he wanders the shop further, you’re able to place what’s bothering you — there’s an immutable sense of wrongness that hangs about him like a storm cloud. It’s intangible, invisible against his pristine coat and pressed slacks, yet still the air around him sings with an energy that sets your teeth on edge and sets alarm bells ringing in the back of your head.
Looking at him has the feel of a perverse optical illusion, gives you the sensation of seeing something unnatural and hidden, crouching barely out of your comprehension.
Tearing your eyes away, you busy yourself with tidying the succulents lining the register. On good days you treat them like your babies, dote on their feather-soft leaves and check on their roots but when you turn to them this time, it’s in a pathetic attempt to silence the growing dread that’s shifting inside you like a monster in utero. Without any real input from you, your fingers glide over their delicate ceramic pots as you avert your eyes, trying to distract yourself from his presence. Your traitorous ears deny you even that small mercy, and you find yourself starved for the scraps of sound he leaves in his wake, all the much louder for the comparative silence in the shop: the rustle of fabrics, the whisper of fingers against leaves, and finally, the thud of his footsteps as he slowly approaches. When his gaze meets yours his eyes flare like dying stars, the irises flickering with an unnerving energy that borders on manic. Instinctively your head snaps down and away, some unnamed yet deep-seated preservation forcing your motions as tangibly as a hand on your neck. As you stand there at the register, head bowed with enough effort to make your shoulders tremble, the man before you shifts and starts swinging one foot idly like a child, amused by your obvious distress.
And then there’s that damned grin again, languorous and smug as his thin lips lilt in a way that seems to say how pathetic your fear is, how funny. Indignation sparks in you at his smug expression, his obvious delight in the face of your terror, the anger making for a welcome reprieve against the dread that threatens to consume you. You seize the emotion blindly, attempt to use it to motivate yourself into looking once more into the face of this stranger in your domain. This time you get as high as his cheekbones, your gaze sweeping over the bottom half that gaunt face before the same instinctual fear grabs you between its teeth and bites, your focus scattering to the floor below you.
You realize even as you’re still averting your eyes that you’ve made a grave mistake.
An interesting fact about flower shops- they are nearly always filled with glass, and this place is no different. Even now light streams in from the outside, the first trickles of morning sunshine coming in thin and silvery to bounce off the hand blown vases and crystal-cut centerpieces in weak beams.
It’s there amongst the refracted light that you see it: a twisting mass, incomprehensible in its contortion.
Monstrous hands dangle so far down its sides that warped knuckles brush the ground fed by engorged veins curling snakelike between the bones. Your immediate terror is overwhelming, disorienting in its totality: it pours directly down your spine and drives ice into your veins, chasing out all rational thought in one. Your struggle to control the sudden wave of nausea is short but vicious; once your heart slows its assault on your ribs you rather stupidly attempt to hazard another glance at the thing in the glass. There’s a childish sort of hope that drives you; you desperately want to prove it was never there, was just a trick of the light or a hallucination a vision brought on by something, anything, even a stroke—
It sees you.
One crooked hand raises in greeting, misshapen fingers waving in a mockery of kindness, and a solid stone of fear drops in your stomach. Your throat tightens, the tendons of your neck tensing in anticipation of a scream as you inhale sharply and prepare to beg for someone, anyone to rescue you from this nightmare—
“Just this, please.”
A lily slides towards you over the counter, and you recoil at the sight as you struggle to reorient yourself. It’s only when you spot a pale shape beside the thing that you comprehend; adrenaline has blurred the world around you into shifting blobs of color and shimmering globules of light, and a long second passes before you grasp the significance of the ruby-and-cream rectangle he thrusts at you. Taking your eye from the fifty-pound note you blink at the flower, vaguely aware of the way you’re seemingly nodding in time with the bobbling petals. The air around you seems sluggish and thick —hard to breathe— and even harder to maneuver. As you reach for the pot it feels as if you’re swimming in syrup, like running in a nightmare. When your fingers move to the bill, you tense, painfully aware of the situation of perilous normalcy you find yourself in.
“Weather’s nice, innit?” You say mechanically, feeling as if you’re reciting a script for the benefit of some invisible audience. You simply stare as your arms move to punch the transaction into the register, make note of your hands counting the change and tearing away the receipt. The only hope you have now is that by finishing the transaction he’ll grant you the peace you so desperately crave, finally leave you to your solitude in this haven of flowers. For now though, you’re here trying to maintain composure under the man's strange gaze, heart trembling in your chest like a canary in a coal mine.
When you try to distance yourself by sliding the coins across the counter towards him, his smile curls impossibly wider and he slips both of those strange hands behind into his pockets. It actually takes your mind a few seconds of feverish churning to understand his inaction: he’s waiting for you to directly hand it to him, to place your smaller hand close to his own. Tolerating his presence now is nearly enough to reduce you to tears already but the idea of small skin-to-skin contact stands out as the biggest potential violation of the entire affair.
“Ah, sorry—” When you finally move to return his change to him, he catches you by the wrist and firmly holds you there, encasing you like a fly in amber. Your customer service training takes over once more and pulls you back to reality, a shaky smile masking your grimace. Fool you are, you can’t find it in you to pull away. Instead your arm hangs there, unresisting in his grasp as the change slips from your fingers and the falling coins hit the ground with a sound louder than thunder. The sight of his pale hand on your flesh is deceptively innocent, nearly laughably commonplace despite your rising dread, but when your eyes shut in a blink the truth becomes clear. In those split-seconds of darkness you can feel contorted fingers digging welts into your flesh.
His bloodless gums are on full display as he beams at you, grip tightening slowly, and those off-color teeth seem to gleam at impossible angles beneath the overhead lights. Without breaking eye contact he pulls your hand closer to his face, his sallow skin still threatening to split, and places a soft kiss to the center of your palm.
It’s sickeningly gentle, little more than an eskimo kiss, and it feels like nothing precisely until it feels like taking a brick to the temple. There’s no breath from his mouth or nose as he does it, simply the distinctly unpleasant rasp of his thin lips against your flesh, but the fact barely registers as this absolute stranger puts his mouth on you with the utmost care. He lets go slowly, almost unwillingly, and it isn’t until your arm slithers limply back down to hang by your side once more that you realize something’s different.
It comes on slowly, at first. A sound like a woman’s laugh, high and cruel, sounds from somewhere behind you and you nearly trip over yourself to turn towards the noise, only to be met with empty space. The once-predictable white wall there seems to deceive you, too; as you study it and the complete lack of color it holds, the concrete it consists of seems to pulse, twitching with some kind farcical impression of life and you leap away as clearly as if it’s bitten you. It isn’t until you bump the counter and the lily wobbles precariously at the makeshift register that you gradually remember you’re not alone. When you turn to face him again, however, the sight before you steals the breath from your lungs.
The colors of the petals pulse, leak, bleed around you, the hues seeping into one another until the displays all seem to throb in tandem, a technicolor nightmare that burns behind your eyelids long after you force your eyes to close. He’s still staring, sickening grin peeling wider, but the flowers start breathing in tandem, hundreds upon hundreds of throats terminating in soft wet mouths—
You can’t speak, can’t breathe, as the world around you fades into a strange rhythm you can’t identify: staccato cracking noises like broken pencils or bubble wrap. There’s a rock on your ribs, a weight in your chest, an incredible yawning chasm of pressure, and it isn’t until it gives with more of the same crackling that you realize it’s coming from you, breath ragged with bright, terrible panic. The distorted reflection from before seems to multiply, filling the empty places around you like so much seawater until any way you turn you’re tormented by glistening, staring eyes and misshapen hands. The room twists around you like a kaleidoscope, the colors of the bleating sobbing flowers bleeding into the fractals of hands and eyes. Cold kisses your fingertips, spreading into your palms. Before you can uncover the cause, the man reaches towards you and you watch through a haze of tears as he waves a hand in your face and snaps his fingers with a laugh.
The floor beneath you is cool against your cheek. The chill of the tiles is offset by the sunlight pouring through the shop window, and with a mind made foggy with exhaustion you push yourself upright. A long shadow drifts over you, followed by a man’s voice speaking softly close by. Looking up you’re greeted by a strange young man, his long sallow face full of worry as he stares down at you.
“I... um...” your mind is scrambled and words evade you but he hardly seems to notice eyes darting momentarily to the door before snapping back to you. When he speaks, his voice is flat and oddly unenthusiastic, as if he’s seconds away from checking out of the conversation.
“You’d fainted.”
When he offers a hand to help you up, something inside you flinches (no no no) and you look away, pretending to busy yourself looking at the quiet shop around you. Warm yellows and harsh whites flit in and out of your vision as you blink, making you squint. Ignoring the man for a moment longer, you struggle to your feet, tongue moving thickly in your mouth as you carefully choose your next words.
“I’ll be fine, sir. Just exhausted.”
He smiles at that. It’s strangely intimidating, more a baring of teeth then a grin, and your throat seems that much drier under his scrutiny. He stares at you without blinking for a beat longer before turning his attention to the lily in his arms, the receipt dangling between long fingers. “Will you?”
That catches your attention. The hair on the back of your neck rises at his words, prickling with some animal fear, and you nearly lose your balance from steadying yourself against the register. In the back of your mind a memory vision stirs; of flowers open-mouthed and obscene inside their planters held by twitching hands longer than your torso.
You shake off the images and turn sharply, ready to ask him exactly why you won't—
The shop is empty.
The shop is empty and with legs made leaden you hobble back behind the counter, trying to soothe the desperate racing of your heart as the clock ticks unceasingly. Normalcy is nearly yours when the door swings open again and a swarthy young woman rushes in, nearly tripping over herself in her haste to reach you.
“Was there—was there a man here? Tall, blond?”
“Yes,” you say, watching her warily. On principle you try not to share too much about customers, but her voice borders on a panic that inspires concern. “What was he like? Strange? Unusual?”
Yes, you want to say. He showed me things, things I don’t understand, things I can’t understand, flayed my mind apart until I wept—
Something flickers across the glass in the shop all at once, a rolling blackout of bony hands and melted smiles, all
pointing
at
you.
“No,” you lie, the words hollow. You feel your mouth moving but your voice sounds far off, as if you're addressing her from the bottom of a well.
“I didn’t.”