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Solomon shoved himself to his knees, leaving red smears on the concrete. It hadn’t been a gentle fall. His head was ringing, his teeth aching, blood on his tongue with each rasping breath. He should’ve listened to Nina, should’ve signed up for track, should’ve—
A noise too choked & wet to call a scream raced down the hall behind him. It cut off suddenly, leaving only the ongoing sounds of ripping meat.
Sol stumbled to his feet. Later, he’d wish he had a plan to escape, some thought of the exit. In the moment, the only thought in his head was Get Away!
So he ran.
~ ~ ~
Nina yelped as the back of the pen exploded in her mouth. She immediately began rubbing her tongue with her sleeve, knocking her glasses askew and leaving gross black stains all over her sweater. “Ugh! Nasthy, nasthy! Make ith thop!”
Sol laughed. “That’s what you get for chewing on pens.”
Nina scowled and spat at him. It landed on his homework.
“Hey!”
“Tha’s wha you get,” she grumbled, getting to her feet and all but racing out of the room. Sol followed her to the hall in time to see her dart into the bathroom and hear the water start running.
“That’s due tomorrow, you know!” Sol shouted.
“Don’t be a dipshit, then!” Nina yelled back, before presumably going back to gargling water to get the taste out.
“It’s not my fault you decided to be stupid,” Sol pointed out. If he hurried to the kitchen, maybe he could still get enough paper towels to salvage his essay.
“It’s your fault for being a dipshit, dipshit,” Nina muttered as he walked past.
~ ~ ~
(There was a part of him, every time, that wanted to give her a half-joking smile and ask if she wanted him to kiss it better. But that stopped being okay when they were 10, so he doesn’t.)
~ ~ ~
“It’s just an ugly little spider!” Sammy yelled.
“It’s not the spider’s fault!” the girl in glasses shrieked right back, and wow, Sol hadn’t heard a word from her since school started but she was kinda scary, wasn’t she? “It was just going about its spider day, and you jerks crush it! It just wanted to eat some ants, probably! How would you like it if I crushed you for going to the cafeteria, huh?!”
Sol looked down at the mush of bug by his shoe and swallowed.
“It doesn’t care!” Sammy insisted. “It probably doesn’t even have a brain, it’s too little!”
“Is that what your mom says when you forget your homework?” the girl asked. “‘I’m so sorry, teacher, he can’t help it! He’s too little to have a brain!’”
Sammy stepped forwards, hands clenched, and the girl’s eyes glinted like—like she wanted him to hit her, to do something, to give her a reason to really tear them apart.
Sol reached out and grabbed her elbow. “I’m sorry we squished your spider,” he said quickly.
“Don’t apologize to me ,” she said, pointing to the ground. “He’s the one you hurt!”
“This is stupid,” Sammy said.
“You’re stupid,” she snapped back.
“I’m sorry, spider,” Sol said to the mush, because he really didn’t want to get dragged to the principal’s office again this year.
(And because… maybe he was, a little. He gets what it’s like to just be eating your lunch and have someone much bigger than you thump you on the head so hard you choke. It’s hard to imagine being so much littler that you explode from it, but it’s not fun to try.)
“Loser,” Sammy spat. He yanked the basketball out of Solomon’s hands and stomped away.
“It is just a spider,” Sol told the girl.
“And you’re just a boy.” Which was true.
(Sammy was dribbling the ball really hard, which meant he was really mad about this. If Sol tried to rejoin the game, he’d definitely be getting hit a few times with it.)
“I can help you build a sandcastle,” he suggested as a peace offering.
The girl squinted at him from behind her glasses. “I can build my own just fine.”
“But I make the best sandcastles,” Sol informed her, “and I can teach you my secrets, if you want.”
“Fine,” the girl said, flicking her ponytail over her shoulder. “Show me.”
~ ~ ~
(The secret was adding mud to the mixture and hold the bucket in place until the sand inside changed colors before lifting it away. You had to use the see-through buckets to do it, and you couldn’t even see through them that well, so it was tricky. Especially for two 5yr olds, fighting over the bucket.)
~ ~ ~
“The records show you were the last one to contact her phone. Can you tell me what you said, son?”
Solomon stared at the police officer. The words didn’t make sense, they didn’t fit together right. It was like his whole brain had been coated in glass and they just slid right off.
“Uh, sure,” he mumbled, fishing his phone out of his pocket. He opened their chat and handed it over, watched as the officer scrolled up through the increasingly concerned texts Sol had sent over the weekend to Nina’s last message: a photo of a stray cat with the caption, ‘Do you think mom will notice if I sneak it home in my bag?’
‘pretty sure, lol’ he’d responded. And then Sol’s dad had asked if he wanted to help work on the car, and he’d gone outside, and left the phone on his desk, and Nina—
~ ~ ~
(Nina never made it home.)
~ ~ ~
The phone rang three weeks later. Only one person in Sol’s contacts had “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat” as their ringtone. He practically dove across the room to answer it, banging his shins on the desk hard enough to bruise.
“Nina?!”
~ ~ ~
(It wasn’t Nina.)
~ ~ ~
The half-finished basement didn’t provide a lot of places to run or places to hide. The cinderblock room where they’d been keeping the— thing —must’ve been a recent addition. It didn’t even have lighting.
(Did they do this to Nina too? Lure her down here, shove her in? Were they faster about closing the door? Did it—those bodies in the room, he hadn’t gotten a good look, was she—)
Something splashed in the puddle by the old furnace and Sol crammed himself harder back into his corner, hands clamped tight over his face to muffle his breathing.
A low, thrumming hum started, more felt than heard, vibrating in his bones.
The first limb reached into view. Bone-thin, chitinous, with an almost-human hand curled into almost-a-fist at the end. The long claws, protected by the knuckle-walking, flicked against the back of the limb, the fingers rippling in a wave.
Sol bit back a whimper.
There were still bits of meat skewered on those claws.
The filing cabinet he was hiding behind shook as a second limb landed on top of it, and then the head —
Clusters of dark eyes that had glittered when facing the light looked like holes. An insectoid maw, too many moving parts rubbing against eachother in constant motion, red fluid too thick to just be blood dripping from them and painting most of the face. Long, dark hair hanging about the head as it stared down at him—
(He never had learned to like spiders.)
It took another step towards him, and Sol screamed. He shoved himself as far back as he could, threw his hands out as though that could stop something that he’d seen tear through six grown men, and shrieked.
(This was it. He wasn’t going home. At least he’d let the cops know where he was going, so they could find his body, but his mom—his dad—he wasn’t going to graduate, or turn 20, or get his own car, and it wasn’t supposed to end like this, what would even be left of him when it was through? What was left of Nina, unidentifiable hunks of meat in that room, or was there still a face or—no, no, they were going to go to prom together, laugh at every terrible decorating choice, drink the spiked punch, and she’d look at him like she had when she’d won her gymnastics trophy last summer, but she’d never look at him again, and he didn’t have a chance, he’d never had a chance, he’d wasted it all, and his best friend was dead , he hadn’t even noticed when she’d gone missing, hadn’t even said goodbye, none of them had said goodbye, and her mom—his mom—what would this do to them? What would be left of him? Would it rend him limb from limb, eat the remains, those fangs didn’t look good for biting—)
Something touched Solomon’s hand, and he yanked it back with a noise that would’ve been another scream if the last one hadn’t torn something deep in his throat and left him fighting for every gasp of air. He opened his eyes as involuntarily as he’d closed them, and found that awful face not even a full arm’s length away.
(He wanted to wake up now, please.)
“Please,” Sol gasped, before the sounds triggered a coughing fit which really didn’t help at all.
The creature—frowned. Or, its brow furrowed and its nose wrinkled, and it crooned as those awful staring eyes dropped closed. It caught his still-extended wrist in one horrible taloned hand, and—
(He expected the yank, the twist, the tear & scream, the sound of ripping meat & the arc of spouting blood, that awful gnashing maw clamping down to rip him to ribbons—)
—pressed Sol’s hand to its cheek. He could feel the mouthparts rubbing against eachother under his palm, feel the edge of a hidden ear against his fingers, feel the wet drip of invisible tears as his thumb rested on that soft cheekbone between two nightmares, salt burning in the road burn from his fall.
It hummed again, louder, less bone-trembling, intending to be heard.
(Sol almost laughed when he realized it was “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He almost threw up too. He didn’t know which he wanted to do more.)
Fumbling in the dark, Sol fished out his phone. Even screen light would be better than the basement’s lights.
It was worse.
It was worse to see every glittering eye facet.
It was worse to see the way the mouthparts clicked together.
It was worse to recognize the face it used to be, underneath it all.
“…Nina?” It was barely a whisper, barely a breath. It hurt like hell to say.
The thing that used to be Nina nodded. She pulled the rest of her body around the corner—too many arms, attached all wrong, but almost human in proportion—and pressed closer.
“What did they do to you?” he tried to ask, but couldn’t get past the first word without coughing. Nina looked worried, pressed his hand harder against her face, reached another of hers out towards Sol only to stop when he flinched. Then she turned away, hiding her face in his hand.
“Sssho’eee,” Nina rasped, mouth working so hard and failing to make the sounds she needed to.
Then she licked his hand, and Sol yanked it away with a yelp. Or tried to. Her grip was iron-strong.
“Not… not funny, Nina, I—”
“No ‘oke. Shho’ee.” Those eyes flicked open, then shut again. Nina let go and pulled back, thrumming again, and Sol could see the unnatural way her throat flexed to make the sound. “Nnnn’grrrie,” was almost a whine, but it didn’t seem like she was capable of it anymore.
“What?”
“Nn’grrrie.”
“Wha—” It hurt. He should really stop talking.
Nina looked down at her bloody hands, raised one to her mouth, and started lapping at it. “ Nn’grreee.”
“Please don’t eat me .” Solomon knew he couldn’t say it, but hopefully the speed at which he shook his head & slammed his arms up in an X in front of his chest got the message across.
Nina groaned and skittered away into the dark.
~ ~ ~
She was in the hall in front of the room when he limped over, hunched over the corpses. Under the hall light, she looked corpselike herself, too grey & stiff, even beyond her distorted form. Nina glanced up as he approached, then quickly turned back to her meal, angling her body to block Sol’s view.
(Solomon had braced himself for chewing noises as he got closer. The quiet slurping sounds were somehow so much worse.)
The door to the room was still open. He held up his phone as a light and looked inside, rather than think about any of the mess around him.
It was just a different kind of awful.
~ ~ ~
(It was probably the runes that convinced him this was beyond science. The lumps on the floor weren’t meat after all. The room was shockingly clean, aside from the bloody handprints clawing at the walls and the red circle at the center of the floor.
It looked like a cheap horror movie set. It reeked like someone had been held prisoner in it for three fucking weeks in the dark.)
~ ~ ~
(He did not make it out of that basement without throwing up.)
~ ~ ~
There were several more breakdowns before he made it up the stairs.
(Nina held him as much as he’d let her for all of them.)
~ ~ ~
Years later, when Nina pressed her face into Solomon’s wrist over a stack of occult books and moaned that she was hungry, he’d let her bite until the blood flowed free and drink until his head spun.
She never took a chunk or more than he could give.
(It was the least of the things he loved her for.)