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Her very first memory, intact memory, is of flesh. Not yet upon her, never upon her. But, with surprising clarity she can recall the sound of a distant, wet scraping.
A cold floor lies beneath her. She feels numb, yet she thinks she is sick as she slowly wills her body away from the bare surface. Her naked feet brace her against the ground, and she is standing. Before her lies a shattered string of memory, the earliest mystery she can grasp onto, in the form of a broken music box. Her mind supplies her with a familiar melody and, staring at the broken manifestation of her only dream, her numbness is replaced by loathing. She glares at the metallic corpse.
Outside of her focus lies a boy, blurred and shadowed by the unstable nature of their location. His face is distorted by weird lighting, but the boy’s clothes come across as familiar to her. A thick, long brown coat supports a key which she questions the purpose of, engulfing the dull shirt he has tucked into his dirty trousers. And, beyond the boy, sinewy, shapeless, squelching flesh. Flesh that moves, pulses. Faintly she recognizes the discordant screaming of what her mind curiously describes as a rogue signal, and suddenly the clarity brought on by her emotion becomes clouded. She would think herself in some strange nightmare, only she does not know for certain–and she remembers something about herself. She knows better than to trust possibilities.
As the ground begins to rumble the boy and her frantically survey the room around them, and run. There is a doorway and by the time she takes notice of that she has already gone through it. A platform, a bridge, is on the other side. She doesn’t look back for the boy, but she hears footfalls behind her. The flesh on the distant walls expands, reaches towards her, and by the meaty sounds accompanying the pattering behind her, she can assume it is following her. She is out of reach but cannot escape it entirely, the noises grow in volume, as does the mass. At the edge of her vision eyes bulge out of flesh like tumors.
She stumbles, and something animalistic claws at her brain. She regains her balance.
As the bridge begins to crack underneath her, light appears from the other end of the corridor. She feels the clawing again and something seizes her mind, a primal panic that overcomes the fog in her head with force. Clarity returns with a vengeance, and it seems as though she is a trapped animal. There is a frenzy in her mind that quickly escapes her as she loses grip of reality. By the time she is aware once more she is mere feet from the light. Mere feet from her escape, an unearthly window that flickers like the screen of a television. That savage feeling remains, and she is acutely aware that she can escape through the tv as she would through a door. There is no other option, her mind screams.
Her feet skitter to a stop against the ground as she recalls the boy, and she strains her ears to listen for footsteps over the creaking and groaning of the surrounding structure. She hears the telling noises just as she hears a loud crack, and looks back. The boy from earlier is stumbling desperately, too far behind her as the bridge gives and falls. A chasm appears between them, leaving the boy with the flesh and her with the exit. She doesn’t think as she runs to her end of the now-ledge, as she turns her back towards freedom. He nears his end of the ledge. She reaches out her arm and the boy doesn’t hesitate in jumping, reaching out his arm in turn.
Entirely too trusting for a stranger.
She is leaning over the edge more than she would like when their palms connect, but she cannot bring herself to care as her fickle memory reveals herself once more. She knows, as if it is a principle, that she could not forgive herself if she failed to save another child. For reasons not entirely known to her, her yellow raincoat sits heavy on her shoulders.
Yet, it is not a fellow child that grabs at her hand. The fingers clasped in hers belong to a pale copy of her kind.
The abyss beneath her becomes the least of her worries, for she finds herself staring into another abyss. Now, face to face with him, the boy’s features are clear. His seemingly ordinary black hair fails to hide pallor skin, that the eyes looking up at her are entirely too dark to be human. Black pupils swirl with something other, surrounding them a sickly gray sclera. The eyes are lifeless, the thing they belong to is lifeless. A hollowed out skin, the gutted corpse of a child, puppeteered by a cruelty masquerading as a peer. An empty cavity in something just like her, made to fool her. Made to take her.
She pulls the grotesque mockery of a kid closer to her, tilting her head to better observe it. She will be at this thing’s mercy if she pulls it up, but right now, it is at her’s. And yet, she would be lying if she said she didn’t judge it with a lonely desperation. She is almost begging to find emotion in its eyes as she looks over the once-boy: relief, confusion, fear, anything. She needs an indication that the thing is, in fact, still a boy.
She finds none. Nothing stares up at her, and she is decided. It is not a child, it is a child killer. And she is a child.
She yanks her hand out of the monster’s grip, sealing its fate. It screams as it disappears into the darkness below, just as the boy it assumed must have done as it forced itself into his body.
She remains for a few seconds, before standing and turning towards the doorway. Mounds of flesh cry out behind her, as does something else. Through it all, the squelching, screaming, creaking, comes a call from the other side of the light. It is something kindred, and it is something sad, but it is not her. Not anymore, that something whispers to her. She enters the doorway.
Her very first memory, intact memory, is of flesh. Though, she felt no regret as she left the flesh behind.