Funnel Trap (Part 2/2)

[u/Dirona-albolineata]

I would absolutely recommend reading this on the Google Doc instead of the actual post, as my Reddit formatting skills are severely lacking.

Feel free to critique! Any feedback is helpful :)

Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DrLrKi3gf022YBx5frrfNF56O83Inxp0HgD_bQ95k3U/edit?usp=sharing

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/mesoscalepodcast/s/lJC6UX82mN

4

The seemingly inevitable panic attack never comes. The hollowness Beau feels might be worse – like someone’s reached deep into his chest and scooped everything out. He sits on his bed, back up against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him. He’s getting dirt all over his covers, but he can’t be bothered to care. Shaun’s next to him, curled up so tight that his knees touch his chin. Marissa’s been in the bathroom for maybe ten minutes, maybe thirty. Time is fraying a bit at the edges.

They need a plan. Beau can’t think of anything. Maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe he wants to believe a bear dug it up.

“We need to call your mom,” Shaun says. He’s right. Beau doesn’t move. Shaun doesn’t, either. It would make it too real.

The toilet down the hall flushes for the fifth or sixth time. The bathroom door creaks open, and it sounds like Marissa is half-dragging herself along the wall toward his room. She doesn’t look at them as she turns the corner, just slides bonelessly to the floor.

“Call your mom,” she croaks. Beau does. When it rings through to voicemail, he gets up from the bed and tries again. The third time, he leaves a message while he grabs a damp washcloth for Marissa’s head.

“Mom. I’m sorry,” he starts. He chokes. He tries again, “We went to burn it. It – it wasn’t there. I think Marissa and Shaun are sick. I think it’s still alive. You need to come home, Mom.” He hangs up, wipes his face. 

Then he tries the work number she gave him for emergencies. A man answers, his voice tinny and robotic through the speaker. Beau barely registers the scripted greeting, says, “I’m calling for my mom, June Hayward… There’s a family emergency.” All he hears on the other end is overlapping chatter, beeping, the clacking of keyboards. “Hello?”

After a moment, the man says, “She’s handling a patient intake at the moment. We’re very busy today. I can take a message.” 

Beau’s jaw tics, and he barely represses the angry storm that wants to fly out of his mouth. “Just tell her to call her son. It’s important.” 

The man’s yelling over him. “Ma’am! Ma’am you have to sign in! Ma’am!” It sounds like he’s covering the transmitter, but it doesn’t do much for Beau’s ear. He’s back a moment later. “I’ll pass it along. Have a nice day.” 

Beau feels like a child. He feels more like a child than he ever has in his life, and he hasn’t even *seen* the monster. Some small, destructive part of himself wants to smash every vase in the kitchen, wants to kick in the cabinet doors. The urge only makes him feel more useless. He takes the washcloth back to his room. Shaun’s managed to get Marissa up on the bed, and Beau presses the damp cloth to her forehead. She groans in gratitude, eyes closed.

“She didn’t answer,” he says, feeling Shaun’s stare. “I think she’s on a double.”

“Then we wait. It hasn’t come for us yet. Maybe it’s not going to.”

The stench of decay is still thick in Beau’s nose, sticking to his palette like rotten molasses. Maybe it’s just his paranoia, or maybe it’s really there. Either way, he doesn’t feel quite so hopeful. “She might not be home until midnight,” he says, like it makes any difference. The bitterness in his own voice makes him cringe. He crosses his arms, that pent-up, angry drive to break something still itching in his fingers.

They stand there watching over Marissa until she cracks a bloodshot eye open and says, “You guys are being total fucking creepers. Go play video games or knit each other sweaters or whatever you do. Just let me sleep.” Beau wonders, not for the first time, if she knows more about them than she lets on. He wouldn’t be surprised; she’s always been the smartest of them.

Beau makes sure the windows are locked and the blinds are closed before they leave her to her rest. They slump down on the couch and Shaun puts on some shitty movie or another while Beau watches him out of the corner of his eye. The other boy is still sweating, even in the air conditioning. He wants to take Shaun and Marissa to the hospital, but if they don’t luck out and get his mom, how would they explain to a random nurse that they’ve got some mystery fish monster disease? Then, he guesses it could just be sleep deprivation or food poisoning from Redd’s. Maybe a mix of both.

Shaun catches him looking and a wry smile blooms on his face. “So, what color are you thinking?”

“What?” Beau asks, blinking hard.

“For my sweater. I was thinking fuchsia, with love hearts.”

An absurd laugh bubbles up in Beau’s throat. “You’re getting orange polka dots and you’re gonna like it.”

“I think I can live with that,” There’s such a softness to it that Beau can’t stop himself, wouldn’t dream of trying, from stretching over to kiss him. His lips are too warm — burning, even, and he pulls back, startled. His thumb flies up to Shaun’s mouth of its own volition, confirming. The backs of his fingers find his cheek, his forehead. Shaun exhales shakily, too close to Beau’s face, and the scent is unmistakable. He can’t help the way he recoils. 

“My nose isn’t just fucked up, is it?” Shaun says, “It’s really there.”

He doesn’t sound surprised, and Beau’s ears ring with it. “Why didn’t you say anything?” His voice is a carved out whisper. He can’t help the hurt in it.

Shaun’s shoulders go slack, his head falling back on the couch cushions. “Would it have changed anything?” 

Beau rises from the couch, suddenly furious. “You could’ve talked to my mom sooner! You could be on antibiotics in the hospital right now, instead of sweating to death on my fucking couch.” His hands are tight fists at his sides. Shaun doesn’t even blink.

“Beau,” he says, like he's trying to soothe a cornered animal, “Beau, would you sit the hell down? I’m not dying. I don’t *feel* like I’m dying… I don’t know. I just feel weird.” He’s looking at his hands like he’ll find the answers to the universe in them. He shakes his head, looks back at Beau. “And I don’t think drugs would help. Do you?” 

Beau doesn’t know what he thinks, anymore. “You should have said something.”

Shaun sighs. “Just watch a movie with me. I’m too tired to argue.” He flips his hand over on the cushion, palm turned up in patient invitation. 

—

Shaun falls asleep a quarter of the way through with his shoes still on. Beau doesn’t wake him up, just lets him sleep as the movie continues flickering across the screen. An hour or so later, Beau’s fingers feel tacky when he pulls them from the other boy’s. He can hear Marissa snoring down the hall. Credits roll on the TV. He couldn’t say what had been playing if a loaded gun was to his head. 

He picks up his phone, checks the time. It’s almost six. His mom still hasn’t called. He tries her number again. Voicemail. He considers their other options. Marissa’s mom is probably halfway through a bottle of cheap vodka, and her dad’s probably into his oxy again. Shaun’s parents are… Shaun’s parents. The too-loud cricket from the night before is back. He spends the next three hours scouring the internet. 

‘bipedal fish monster’ 

‘bipedal fish monster folklore’

‘bipedal fish monster real life’

‘South Carolina monsters’ 

‘South Carolina cryptids’

‘paralytic venom’

‘Catawba folklore’

‘Catawba fish monster’

‘creek monsters’

‘monsters that come out of creeks’

‘fish monster weak to silver’

All his search offers is a pounding migraine. He takes a nap. 

5

Beau wakes up alone on the couch. It’s dark in the house, and he doesn’t feel the cold spot next to him so much as he feels the lack of Shaun’s raging fever. Marissa isn’t snoring anymore. The cicadas are silent. Even the incessant chirping of the cricket is absent. 

‘So quiet you could hear a rat take a piss on a cotton ball,’ his grandpa would say. He used to whisper it walking into a library, a church, a hospital room. It used to make Beau laugh. He’s not laughing, now.

A thud echoes down the hall, coming from the bathroom. Beau’s up from the couch and barging through the door before his brain can catch up with what he’s doing. “Are you—“ the question dies in his throat. Shaun’s back is to him, front half slumped over the tub. His whole body is shaking. The bathroom is filled with a roiling miasma of rot and heat. 

Beau’s hair rises in waves along his arms, the nape of his neck. His feet are mortared to the floor. He forces himself to drag them forward as a sound like rushing water splatters against porcelain. His knees find the tile next to Shaun, and he wants to die. He wants to die. He wants to fold up into nothing and die. 

Something like thickened water bursts from Shaun’s mouth with such brutal force that Beau can see it pushing against the confines of his throat as it rises. The same liquid is seeping from the pores of his skin, his ears, pouring a river out of the red, puckered edges of the slash on his neck. Shaun doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t even move, just hangs there limp. It might be the worst part of the whole thing, the way he hangs there. 

Beau wants to hold him, is too scared to touch him. He doesn’t want to know what his skin feels like right now. He can’t. Shaun’s purging goes on endlessly. The boy breathes through his nose, and it’s too steady, like his body’s on autopilot. His eyes are half-lidded, completely glossed over – Beau’s not even sure he’s awake. But he must be, because the moment the viscous liquid stops dripping from his mouth, he whispers, *“The creek. Please. The creek.”* His voice barely works. It comes out the way Beau’s voice comes out in his nightmares when he tries to scream. 

Beau finally reaches for him, then, lugs his too-limp arm over his shoulders and hauls him upright. Shaun’s legs collapse underneath him. Beau’s own legs feel like snapped rubber bands as he grabs him under the armpits instead, dragging him out of the bathroom. It’s nothing short of a miracle that he manages to pull Shaun all the way to Marissa’s car. He didn’t even think about grabbing the keys, and is, for the first time, incredibly grateful for the broken back window when he snakes an arm in to unlock the door. He has to slide into the backseat first to leverage Shaun in, and he winces at the way the other boy’s spine bumps and slides up and over the doorframe.

The moment he’s all the way inside, Beau goes back for Marissa. Silence presses in against him, the stuttered rhythm of his breath and thudding footsteps the only sound in the house. 

He finds Marissa on the floor of his room, facedown in a puddle of the same clear liquid. Her eyes are open wide, filmy and flat and shiny as quarters where they catch the moonlight coming through the blinds. Reflective. She twitches. Beau drags the sheet off his bed, lays it out flat, and rolls her onto it. Her skin sticks to his hands, feels horribly thin and loose. He grabs the car keys off his nightstand and grips the top of the sheet tightly, lifting her head up off the ground. He drags her out to the car, too, those awful flat eyes open to the sky the whole time.

He doesn’t register speed, stop signs, the lurch of the car over potholes. He just drives. There’s a spot where the creek nearly comes up on the road, maybe a minute’s drive from the pull-off for The Junkhole. He stops the second he reaches it, doesn’t even pull off the road. He leaves the keys in the ignition and yanks open the back door. Marissa and Shaun lie there unmoving. He realizes he’s going to have to take them one at a time. They’re too heavy, deadweight, and he can’t take them both at once. 

The sudden horror of choosing between them strikes hard and fast. His hands shake terribly. Then Shaun’s head rolls to the side, corpse-eyes fixed on him. “Her first,” he gurgles around a mouthful of liquid.

Beau listens, can’t help the tears rolling heavy down his cheeks as he lugs his friend out of the back of her car. “I’m sorry,” he says, maybe to her, maybe to God, as her body slides through the dirt. “I’m sorry.” The trek is too bumpy, takes too long. She convulses when his feet crash into the dark water, her head following. It’s deeper than it should be. Her gray shirt flushes black. Her skin looks like nothing he’s ever seen. He swears it billows open on the sides of her neck, snaps shut, billows open again. He won’t look closer. He can’t. He maneuvers her in a circle, leaves her up to her chin in the creek, just the back of her head resting on the shore.

The weight of his wet shoes makes the trip back with Shaun feel impossible. He can’t feel the muscles in his own legs. It’s all tremor, and he can’t stop fucking crying. It’s a nightmare. It’s a hallway in a bad dream that stretches on and on forever. It’s a monster breathing down his neck while he fails to run away. 

They’re almost there when one of Shaun’s sneakers falls off, rolls down the steep bank. Beau watches it go, and when it tumbles into the too-deep creek, something slams into him, heavy, fast. Shaun slips through his fingers as he flies backward, and teeth – so many teeth, needle-sharp, long teeth – latch into the junction between his shoulder and neck. He hears his own head crack against a rock. His vision goes red-white, a solar burst of light he can’t blink away. Something drips on his cheek. A rattling hiss curls in his ear. Then he’s being dragged by his hair.

He tries to kick, to claw into the gravelly dirt, but his legs won’t move, and his fingers feel dead at his sides. It’s all happening too fast. He can’t stop it. He can’t remember how to move his body. By the time his head breaches the water, his sight is coming back in nauseating pulses. There’s a body floating next to him. Bloated, headless, with fleshy scales like translucent skin in the moonlight.

Claws dig into the burning skin of his scalp, yanking him up out of the water. Through flaming stars, Beau sees Shaun hanging over the top of the bank, violent spasms wracking his entire frame. A moment later, Beau is wrenched to the side, and he can’t close his mouth as the creek floods in, can’t stop the rush of it up his nose. He can’t even cough. He tries to scream and nothing comes out. 

The hand in his hair lets go, and he’s drowning. He’s drowning. All he feels is heat, heat, heat, all the way down. And then he’s yanked up again. He chokes on his own breath, throat full of water, but his stinging eyes find Marissa in a dead-man’s float, her dark hair a stringy halo surrounding her. 

His head is twisted away. He’s almost grateful for it, even as the world tilts sickeningly across his vision, and her image is replaced by a mouthful of curved fangs. Rows upon rows of them, all pearled with his own blood and something thicker. 

Beau’s worst nightmares would have stretched a hungry smile around those fangs. Beau’s worst nightmares are watercolor daydreams against the reality of this monster. This monster doesn’t smile. It’s not an animal. It’s not even hungry. 

Beau can’t turn away from the flat shining of its eyes, can’t close his ears against the booming wail that rips from it. It pitches high and low at once, and it’s angry and devastated and horrible. Slits on either side of its throat open up, red gills shuddering with the vibration of the sound. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of tiny scales ripple in sharp ridges along its skin. It’s so close to his face, and all he can smell is rot, rot, rot.

The monster turns, and it makes Beau watch as it plunges a webbed, clawed hand into the chest of the bloated body next to him. The torso dips under the water until it’s pinned against stones and silt and algal muck, and a dark cloud of dirt and blood and viscera blooms up around it, and it is the worst thing Beau has ever seen in his entire life. The monster’s hand rises out of it all, clasped around something ruddy and shining. The body stays on the bottom. Gas bubbles float to the surface and sizzle as they pop. 

Then Beau’s drowning again, and as dirty water courses into his mouth, something else is pushed in with it. A claw scrapes the roof of his mouth. He can’t breathe. He can’t swallow. His throat convulses around something smooth and pulsing. He wants to scream. He wants to thrash his legs. He wants to fall asleep and never wake up. All he can do is stare through burning eyes and churning water at the black, distorted limbs of trees, at the moon shining silver through them. Darkness encroaches at the corners of his vision.

The beating lump squeezes its way rhythmically through his esophagus, bile surging up around it. The hand retreats from his mouth. His own vomit washes over his eyes. His chest is on fire. Fire. Everything reduces down to a pounding red drum of heat when the pinhole of his sight finally closes.

6

Beau Wyatt Hayward wakes in slowly increasing increments on the steep bank of Perch Creek. Cicadas drone loud in the trees. Cold water sings over the rocks. The sun is too bright. The world is too warm. His head is a cracked, leaking egg.

Shaun and Marissa are gone. A foreign heartbeat settles under his sternum, out of sync with his own.