Chapter 4 - The Static in the Blood
The cast-iron skillet felt impossibly heavy in Sarah’s trembling hand, yet it was her only tether to reality in a room rapidly descending into a waking nightmare. Outside, the chorus of overlapping whispers grew louder, swelling from a distant murmur into a roaring tide of voices that seemed to vibrate directly inside her skull.
“...the channel is open… let us in…”
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut, pressing the heels of her palms hard against her ears to block out the sound, but it didn't help. The voices weren't entering through her eardrums anymore; they were echoing through the bones of her jaw, sliding along her nerve endings like cold wire.
"Covering them won't stop it, Sarah," Thomas’s voice cut through the mental chaos, close—too close.
She snapped her eyes open. Thomas was standing right in front of her, his face mere inches from hers. The familiar warmth of his skin was entirely gone; he radiated a bitter, freezing chill that frosted the air between them. His eyes were completely pitch black now, the irises swallowed entirely by an expanding pupil that seemed to swirl with microscopic, metallic particles.
"Get away from me!" she yelled, swinging the cast-iron skillet in a desperate, horizontal arc.
The heavy iron connected with his shoulder with a sickening thud that should have shattered collarbone and bone alike. But Thomas didn't even stumble. He didn't flinch. The blow produced a strange, metallic resonance, like striking an anvil wrapped in wet leather. His coat tore open at the shoulder, revealing skin that wasn't flesh at all, but a dense, interlocking matrix of fine, silvery filaments pulsing beneath a translucent layer of epidermis.
Thomas looked down at his torn coat, then back up at Sarah with a pitying, serene smile.
"You're fighting the music, darling," he murmured, reaching out with agonizing slowness to catch her wrist.
His fingers closed around her arm with the grip of a hydraulic vise. Sarah gasped as a jolt of raw, freezing energy surged up her arm, paralyzing her muscles from the elbow down. The skillet slipped from her numb fingers, clattering loudly against the floorboards.
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On the floor nearby, the dark, serpentine parasite reared up, its tapered head vibrating violently as it slithered toward her boots, eager to complete the circuit.
Sarah knew that if that thing touched her skin, if she let the signal in, she would become just like Thomas—a hollowed-out puppet broadcasting a nightmare into the world. With a surge of adrenaline born of sheer desperation, she twisted her body, using her free arm to grab a heavy brass candlestick from the nearby side table, and drove the sharp base straight toward Thomas’s face.
