Chapter Text
He liked the way fingers coiled. Three joints each, pulled together by thin bone, and it only took a bit of free will to bend them back until tendons ripped and snapped. If the mosaic of the human body was a jenga tower of interconnected flesh, then the hand—the hand was not any more elegant, but it was, at least, intricate. A miniature construction of an otherwise inefficient lump of organs, like cycling through a third graders’ science fair and finding the idiot smart enough to put together a project that wasn’t a baking soda volcano. Yet, so delicate, one smack of the hand in the wrong place and the whole sad little construction fell apart.
He like to poke and prod at fingers like the segmented abdomen of a centipede until its exoskeleton popped.
For a while, he probed Sixer about getting rid of the dead weight, tracing over knuckles and the little hairs that grew over them. A pinky finger—that’s what they all called the small one—was good for getting smashed by shutting doors and drawers, and nothing else. So what use was two of them? Never mind six, four was enough. He started calling the extra finger Sixer, and then the whole man with it. That’s the index, the middle one, the ring finger, the pinky, and the one-of-a-kind sixer. The subject of removing useless extremities was dropped soon after, because he tried one night to do the job for him, and woke the next possession-night to all the knives melted into the basement’s blast furnace.
He eyed the plunger, fingers clasped around the handle, and then the toilet clogged with brown sludge in front of him. It gurgled a little over the seat, which meant that for the very first time, Bill understood the human need to projectile vomit. Stomach bile boiled and clawed at his throat. (That was another unfortunate bit of the human body—too many liquids. Flip them inside out and they gushed like a popped pimple. He wondered what it would be like to stick a vacuum down the gutter and suck it all out.)
Fortunately, he wasn’t some sad fifteen-year-old scraping for summer job cash. So he gave the scene one satisfied look over, dropped the plunger with a resounding clack on the ground, dusted off his hands, the pruny little Rube Goldberg machines, and walked right out of the Mystery Shack’s public bathroom.
There were approximately four kinds of people Bill saw in a day, after he was plucked out of the snow and dropped into the haphazard excuse for a tourist trap: the anomaly of human intelligence slash twenty-three year old man in charge of the place, his girlfriend, the teenage girl at the cash register, and the customers shuffling in and out with brains smoothened by the allure of redundant objects at marked up prices. They would sometimes watch Bill like he was one of the odd animal attractions, in his disgusting, oversized hand-me-down T-shirt, with the label reading, YEAH, I’M A GAMER, DEAL WITH IT , as he mopped the entrance floor—watching the odd, inhuman glint in his eyes, and he watched them back.
There were no customers when he stepped out of the bathroom. He scanned the room with narrow eyes, all the freakish little trinkets on the shelves, the girl with her boots on the counter and a phone in hand, slack-jawed, lazy, absentminded as the device sucked up her attention span. He eyed the ajar front door.
And quickly, he darted like a cat straight for the exit, rushing out the door, the sandals that smelled like Old Spice flip-flopping down the wooden deck stairs. It was a little pathetic, to be running away instead of after someone, keeping quiet instead of laughing at the way fear made people trip on their feet, but if he was at the bottom of the barrel, square one, he had to start somewhere—
“Dude, come on,” the girl called, following at a walking pace down the deck stairs, and Bill tripped on another stupid invisible wire. He fell face first, forehead colliding with a pebble and grass sticking up his nostril. The pain throbbed dully against his skull, and his hands clawed at dirt, digging at it as he lifted himself up. He knew everything, the entire universe, the knowledge in orbit around his consciousness seeping galaxies of life at his finger tips and the tip of a hat—except he didn’t have a hat, his hands were made of flesh, and all of that knowledge was scrunched up into a ball and shoved into the five-by-six-by-three diameter of a human brain. It hadn’t been updated in about two months, which meant Bill did not know there was another trip wire.
Him, falling for a mouse trap.
The girl leaned over and grabbed him by the arm, then dragged him back through the grass, up the stairs, his lumpy nasty organ-filled body bumping against each step—he wouldn’t willingly stand up and give her that satisfaction.
“You literally tripped on the same wire, like, a week ago.” She stepped through the door, attempting to drag him through, but due to the odd angle, his head blocked him. She easily gave up and dropped his arm.
He glared up at her. “I KNOW THAT. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M PLANNING.”
“Yeah, man. Just a glimpse into your sick and twisted mind.”
“HA-HA-HA. SO FUNNY. WE GOT A REAL JESTER OVER HERE.” She only gave him a mildly concerned look—not out of worry, but the rather the teenaged look of detached judgment capable of instant-killing any victim—then let her hand fall from the door, her brief interest phasing away and the phone alluring her once more. The corner of the door bonked against his head, sharp, and it sent an acute shot down his threaded nervous system. He hissed and kicked a leg at the door. Except, with his lacking understanding of non-triangular body coordination, his foot just slid weakly against it, and it creaked away slowly as though mocking him. It was pathetic. Kept like some feral animal in the confines of a shoddy cage. No end in sight to the days upon days that blended into one another, leaves turning on trees, weather barraging a decades-old place immune to the full spectrum of Oregon forecasts, cleaning bathrooms and sleeping in a room he once knew in a different shape, and then doing it all over again.
“You want any snacks?”
He glared up at the ceiling from the floor. “THE POTATO CHIPS.”
She didn’t respond, and he wanted to gouge out some eyeballs.
“PLEASE,” he spat.
“Alright, potato chips it is, then.” She pressed some buttons on the vending machine. "Oh, and you gotta finish cleaning up in the bathroom before Melody's back."
"WHEN I GET OUT OF THIS WRETCHED HELLHOLE, I WILL PERSONALLY SHOVE YOU INTO A MEAT COMPACTOR AND WATCH YOUR LIFESPAN SHORTEN TO NOTHING WITH MY OWN EYE."
"Yeah, yeah. Stop yelling, man."
A bag of potato chips smacked him in the face.