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  She rubs her hands along her body up to her breasts and squeezes them. “Come on doctor, you know you want to. Despite all you’ve been through, admit that part of the brain inside your head has thought about me.”

  I close my eyes, forcing myself to accept this as nothing more than a dream. But I cannot help myself from feeling…from feeling pleasure. It’s been months…long agonizing months since I’ve experienced something even remotely similar to this. And damn my guilt, it feels incredible. I open my eyes, walk to her. She takes my hand in hers and places it between her legs. I find her silky rim and caress it gently, feeling her moist heat swallow my fingertips.

  “Say my name,” she says.

  I comply: “Shea.”

  “Everything is going to be all right, Michael.”

  Her fingers move from my hand to my erection, now fully engorged. I could see her nipples poking skyward, just as stimulated. I reach forward and cup her right breast in my hand, gripping the erect nipple between my fingers. Her dark hair flows out on the pillow—shit, Jessica’s princess pillow—smooth and shiny in the faint glimmer of the nightlight. Between her legs, where my fingers continue to stroke, a velvety patch of skin winks at me, devoid of even the tiniest hint of stubble. Her body is enveloped in the shade like gossamer lace. In this moment of surrealism, there is no other woman in this world I could want more.

  She pulls upon my erection, toward her…on top of her. I delight in the feel of her young, supple body against mine, the feel of her firm breasts and the pressure of her embracing legs. I close my eyes, find her slick spot, then turn my hips and slide into her like a knife in cake.

  Shea looks up at me, wide-eyed. She presses her lips against mine and says, “Do what Phillip once did to you…”

  I thrust forward, feeling something…different. Bigger, wetter, stronger.

  I open my eyes.

  Christine looks up at me from below my body. She smiles and grasps my cheeks with her hands. Lifts her hips up toward me. My erection fights hard against orgasm. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be Shea, not Christine…not Christine, the scene now weaving from one dream into another. The pillowcase behind her no longer has princesses on it. It now has blood on it…as do the rest of the sheets.

  True fear grips me, even here in my dream world as I realize that I’m no longer in Jessica’s bed making love to Shea. I’m in my own bed now, atop my wife, the sheets and mattress still soiled from Christine’s monstrous birth, from the baby Isolate, from the deer. Christine writhes below me, misguided pleasure painted heavily on her face. I push myself up and peer down between her legs, to the spot where I enter her. Blood spurts out onto the bed, wetting me. I try to pull out, but her hands grip my waist tightly, hurting me, forcing me into her.

  “Fuck me, Michael. Fuck me till I bleed.”

  With horror I look into her eyes. They’re glowing gold, staring at me, her mouth a glowering smile, black tongue falling limply from between her lips, oozing saliva down her chin. Her vagina grips me like a closed fist, squeezing painfully. I cry out, forcing every muscle in my body—my body that somehow in my dream has regained a bit of strength—to pull away. I hear a tearing sound and see the gauze taped across my abdomen falling away, revealing to me a dark, oozing crevice where my scar once was.

  The crevice opens and from within a tiny Isolate claw bludgeons outward, sending a shock of blood and gristle across Christine’s face…her face, now morphing into the Isolate thing she’s become in the real world, the same visage I encountered in my office, riddled with patches of hair and mottled discolorations.

  And her eyes glow bright gold, illuminating the entire dark scene like a powerful book light.

  I hear a painful bleating sound. The deer. I push past the flood of blood on the bed and peer over the edge to the floor. Only it isn’t the deer making the noise. It’s Bonzo the cat, gazing up at me with its forlorn eyes, opening its mouth and producing the injured deer sound. Behind it, in the entrance to the bathroom, Lou Scully appears. As in my earlier dream, he’s barefoot and covered in blood, mud, and pine needles, rotten leaves woven into the few strands of hair left on his head.

  In his hand: the hatchet. He raises it high.

  Christine writhes beneath me, powerful hands continuing to force me into her. “That’s right, Michael. Fuck me good.”

  I open my mouth, and an odd choice of words emerge: “But you’ll get pregnant.”

  Christine releases a bellow of laughter—a shameless, broken laughter that could only belong to someone who’s lost their mind—and rams me harder into her, bringing me close to unexplainable orgasm. “Pregnant? From a man who’s infertile? Come now, Michael. You must know by now that your boys swim in circles—that I needed the seed of the demon from the woods to plant a baby inside me.”

  Along with my fear and incredulity, anger now rises in me, hot and forceful. “And what of Jessica, Christine? What of our daughter?” My voice sounds distant, as if spoken from another room.

  Christine laughs again…and so does Lou Scully now. I shoot a glimpse at him. He’s standing in the bedroom, holding Bonzo the cat by the scruff of its neck, filthy skin now dangling in putrefying strips from his yellow, slack-jawed skeleton. Lou has become a living-dead thing, made up of gaunt, decomposing bones and shreds of fleshy gore. His skeletal grin opens and from within a horrid, cackling voice emerges: “She’s my daughter, Michael. Mine, mine mine!”

  A second Isolate claw—tiny, wet, and hairy—digs out from the seam in my gut. Both appendages, perhaps six inches in length and as thin as pencils, grope aimlessly in the air.

  “Lou used to fuck me long and good and hard, Michael. He gave me the baby you never could.” A string of horrible laughter attacks me from both of them, and as I scream my horror…

  NOOOOOOOO!

  ...I release my seed inside the monstrous, bloody pool of Christine’s vagina. As I do, the cat bellows in its horrendous deer-bleat, and I turn to see skeletal Lou holding just its head, its furry body a twitching lump on the floor, the hatchet in his hand dripping fresh, wet kitty blood.

  I turn my gaze away, shut my eyes as I empty the last of my seed into the Christine thing beneath me.

  “That was hot…”

  I open my eyes. Shea is beneath me now, her white skin devoid of blood, showing only its bruises and tattoos and a fine sheen of sweat. She smiles at me as she continues to pump me for every last drop I’ve got. I peer down at my wound and find the bandages still there. There’s no open gash. And no Isolate claws. Farther down, my shrinking erection slips free of her clean, moist—and bloodless—hollow.

  I roll off her and wedge myself against the wall, hugging her body for warmth and relishing in the afterglow that seeps into me. All at once those nightmarish images of Christine and Lou and Bonzo the cat are mountains away from me, and I find myself lost in a void of blackness where no more dreams interrupt the drug-induced sleep that consumes my ravaged mind and body.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I wake up in silence, thin strips of sunlight making their way in through the partially closed blinds in the room.

  But which room is this?

  I scramble up in bed, invulnerably aware of my nakedness and panicking as images from my dream reassert themselves in my head. Shea, Christine, Lou, Bonzo, blood. Having twice been a victim of the Isolates’ hypnotically induced nightmares, where both the waking world and the world inside my head tempestuously intermesh into a single, insufferable experience, I encounter my next few moments with utter caution. Clearly the Isolates interjected their unearthly influence into my mind as I slept last night.

  Or was it your CRUMBLING mind playing games with you, Michael?

  And where exactly did I sleep last night? The cop left me downstairs on the couch, still clothed and bundled in my coat. Now I’m in Jessica’s bed, naked and trembling like a jackrabbit in a hole. I lean back against the headboard, knees pulled in close to my bare chest as I shiver with uncertainty an
d perhaps a bit of fever, peering sideways at her dolls, still grouped together on the dresser below the window, twenty faces peering out at no one. Slowly, I slide my hand out against the sheets, smoothing the creases and feeling nothing uncommon. Investigating further, I find no evidence of Shea ever having lain here: no dark hairs, no telltale remnant of us having sex, the sheets entirely soft and unspotted. Perhaps it was only a dream. A horrible—yet pleasurable—stress-induced dream.

  I climb out of the bed, wincing from the agonizing pain in my midsection, bolts of hot fire lancing out from the wound to all points in my body, nearly knocking me on my feet. I peer down at the bandages and find that they’re beginning to loosen and unravel, fine strings—stained brown with blood and yellow from iodine—dangling obscenely as though, if pulled, a used tampon might be found on the other end. A swollen area of red skin meanders out from beneath the wound like a water lily on a polluted pond. With my index finger, I prod the area gently and find it warm to the touch, localized to that specific area, and more than likely, beneath the tattered dressing as well. I swallow hard. It feels like razors are in my throat. Pressing against the lymph nodes in my neck, I can tell that they’re swollen.

  Shit. My wound. It’s infected.

  Taking a deep breath, I step to the center of the room, fighting back the dizziness in my head, the chills in my body, the throb in my gut. I look around my daughter’s room with the same wide-eyed curiosity of someone who’s taken a long vacation, only to return to find everything looking both the same and different at the same time. Somehow this insight reminds me that I’ve still got my daughter to save, regardless of whether her mother is long gone to some ancient evil.

  “Michael…”

  The voice comes from inside my head, but it’s not the one the little man—my conscience—makes when I’m under stress and in need of advice. As if to confirm this, all but one of the dolls has its eyes closed now, whereas I can clearly recall that last night all of them had had their eyes open.

  I stare at the lone doll with the open eyes, realizing now that it’s the one with the loose head. My (crumbling) mind’s eye recalls seeing a trickle of blood oozing from its nostril, but it’s not there now. Swords of light slice in through the blinds and impale the dolls. One of those beams lances across the eyes of the doll looking at me, breathing artificial life into it.

  “What is it…” I say, my voice a weak croak.

  And the little man in my head tells me, Go closer.

  I take a step closer, eyes still pinned to the doll with the open eyes. The shuttered lids of the other dolls waver, as if the eyes beneath are moving from a REM dream. At the edge of the bureau, I lean forward and listen.

  Help me, Daddy…

  My daughter’s voice comes from the open-eyed doll, from the room itself, from my head. A surge of lightheadedness assaults my running thoughts, scattering them like leaves in a windswept storm. I stop, straighten my body, and grip the edge of the bureau for support. My wound screams its agony. My body shivers coldly. All at once I feel so awful, so devastated. My chest tightens and my stomach shrivels in pain, like a spider shot with insecticide. My eyes fill with hot tears.

  I look back at the doll, and for a fleeting instant its face appears to change into my daughter’s, as though a photograph of Jessica’s face was just projected over the doll’s. It disappears as the doll’s head pops off its neck like some wicked party favor, and tumbles to the floor with a dull clunk.

  The decapitated head rolls across the floor, toward the closet. Fearing it will land facing me, its features very much alive and contemplating me—just as I imagined yesterday—I push away from the bureau and stagger out of the room, gripping the doorjamb for balance. On the hallway floor before me are my clothes: the stained hospital scrubs and my coat, my boots and my wet, filthy socks. I step on them as I make my way into the bathroom.

  The connecting door leading into my bedroom is closed, thank God, as I am not prepared to face the aftermath of the bloody events that have taken place in there. I run the water in the shower, let the bathroom fill with steam as I work on my bandages. I remove the one from my forehead, not too concerned with what lies underneath, and not at all prepared to meet my battered face in the mirror. The one at my gut is a different story. The ruby-red patch of skin just above it indicates infection, my shivering body and now chattering teeth further evidence of a mounting problem.

  Slowly, I grip the corner of the tape and pull, removing the gauze inch by inch. Pain knifes at the gored flesh. Fresh air assaults it, bringing more pain, and some of the crudely sewn stitches pull free. Blood beads out in a dozen places…and then, as the stiff bandage comes free in my hand, I can see patches of thick yellow pus on it—mucky islands in a sea of brown and red.

  The steam in the bathroom feels good against my fevered skin, but is no comfort to the anxiety washing over me. Despite the tetanus shot and penicillin I took, it proved no match against the claws of the baby isolate: in the minutes after its birth, it had bathed in its afterbirth, burrowed in the woods, mortally wounded a deer and dragged the damn thing into my house. With those same hands, it punctured my stomach with its nails, dragged them through my flesh and tore a strip of it free, leaving inside me every deadly strain of bacteria picked up in its short, gruesome life.

  By force of habit I look into the mirror, but it’s steamed up and I can’t see my face. There’s a variety of cuts and bruises on my legs—one particularly nasty gash I don’t remember getting on my calf—and arms.

  You look like a guy at the wrong end of a barroom brawl.

  I toss the bandage away, then reach under the sink for a bottle of iodine. I cup a handful of it and splash it on my wound in the same crude fashion I might aftershave on my face. The bite of it is massive, and I have to clench my teeth to keep from screaming out. Once the pain tapers, I use some patches of gauze to clean my other wounds then go back to my gut and scrape away the pus pooling around the stitches, so thick that some of the black threads are buried in it. Shit, I think, shaking my head with disbelief. Pain and discomfort have become such well-acquainted friends.

  Hunkering down (and breaching my wound some more as blood begins to trickle anew), I look for my emergency pouch and realize I’ve left it in the bedroom from when I sewed up the deer. It looks as if—now that I need a new dressing and some fresh clothes—I’m going to have to face the butchery in there once again.

  With the water still running in the shower, I step in and spend the next twenty minutes of my life cleaning off every last bit of aftermath from my body, wincing every few seconds as the water runs over my wound. The shower acts not only as cleanser of dirt, but of the taint that’s poisoned my (crumbling) mind since I made the choice not to kill myself. This, coupled with the sleep I had, invigorates me and gives me the strength I need to carry on.

  The urge to get back out into the horrible world and get my family back rises in me like a time-lapse flower in bloom, and I quickly dry off from the shower and move to the connecting door leading into my bedroom. I hesitate for a moment, steeling myself for the scene I’m about to confront, now ignited by daylight. I take a deep breath, like one might do before diving to the bottom of a pool, and open the door.

  It would be hard for any human to adequately describe the carnage that has become of my bedroom. There’s blood everywhere, more of it than I could ever imagine—even having witnessed nearly everything taking place here. The floor, the furniture, even the walls, painted with streaks of blood, mud, pine needles, and leaves. The sheets are stained nearly back, Christine’s placenta a rotten piece of fruit in the center of it all. And the smell…it’s worse than anything I could ever imagine or experience, like a pile of abandoned trout beneath a week’s worth of scorching heat.

  Only when I realize that some of the blood on the bed still looks wet, do I recall my dream from last night having taken place here, in these very sheets, in this very bed. The image of me having sex with my possessed wife and the blood gushin
g out of her rebuilds itself in my head, and I can’t help but notice that the blanket on the king bed is now spread across half the mattress—right where I remember laying on top of her.

  You have to do it, Michael…

  Indeed I do. But first I pace around the front of the bed, pull fresh underwear, socks, and jeans from my armoire, dress myself, then grab a tee and a sweatshirt to put on after I finish dressing my wound. I locate the medical pouch on the floor next to where the deer had lay and put it on the nightstand, alongside the lamp.

  I then turn…and look at the blanket. Definitely wasn’t in that position when I left here last night.

  Oh my God…

  It’s moving…just a small ripple at its center, as though an anxious child is beneath, waiting for someone to pull it away so they could scream with gleeful pleasure.

  I reach forward, and just as I’m about to grab the comforter, a large rabbit leaps out like a shot from a gun. It hops to the headboard and cowers between the bloody pillows, trembling crazily. I notice a small bloody wound in its neck, the fur around it matted with blood.

  What is this?

  I remember the rabbit Bonzo the cat had chased outside Shea’s house, how both animals had nearly startled me to death (and drew attention to the Washburn family).

  It’s here that the image of Bonzo in Lou Scully’s hand in my dream filters back into me.

  Oh God, please, no…

  Leaning forward, I pinch the end of the blanket, keeping in mind how in my dream I’d seemed to be lying in this very spot, trying to climb off my wife and being wholly unable to do so. I shudder like a dead leaf in the wind, thinking back to the time I awoke from a similarly convincing dream and found my dog’s blood on my hands.

  I don’t want to do this…but I have to, and as I pull the comforter away and see what lies beneath it, I regret making the decision to do so.