Monster Suit and Dreamhead Chapter 1 [Original Novella]

snowmachine (64)in #story • 7 years ago

All that money Momma gave me for therapy I spent on a psychic instead.

“An albino python is following you? That's a symbol of the divine consciousness,” the psychic said. "You are a lucky girl."
“I don't think lucky is the word I'd use."

The psychic Miss Creed worked out of a converted industrial building. We reclined on plush, velvet chairs in the dark. She'd forgotten to pay the electric bill.

"A girl like you has special gifts. Primordial gifts," her voice echoing dull metallic from the rafters. "The snake is a sign that some old force is awakening within you."

"So why does it hate me?"
"It doesn't hate you, it just speaks another language."
"It's still an asshole."
"You're talking about a divine messenger of demons."
"No, I'm talking about the jerk snake that won't leave me the fuck alone."

Flick. She switched on a lighter in the dark and lit a cigarette. My head throbbed.

"You want one?"
"Yeah, but no. Thanks."
"Trying to quit?" she asked.
"Two whole days," I said, and then, to change the subject. " I figured you'd have some tiny office with tea cozies and incense."
"Everyone figures that.”

I sighed. I needed to remember to breathe.
Breathe in. Out. In. Fuck it.

“Did you know I had an abortion this week?” I said. “And the daddy wanted to keep the baby. Are you fucking kidding me? We weren’t even dating anymore, it was a one night mistake. And I’m a waitress. Sorry, ex-waitress. I got fired ‘cause he kept calling my work, asking for snow. The dad, of course, has no job. He’s every cliche in the goddamn book. He looks like a greaser with his leather jacket and slicked back ponytail. And that’s not even the worst part. Do you want to know what is?”
I didn’t wait for her response.

“It doesn’t matter how much I hate him, or how much of a joke I think he is. I could burn down the planet with my anger and it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m even worse of a cliche than he is.”

I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes, inhaling the smoke.
“One day I’m going to get away from this all,” I said. “I’m going to go to the ocean.”
“Miss Creed didn’t respond. The darkness took on an oppressive quality.
"What does it want?" I asked. "The snake."
I would be prepared," she said, "for your journey through the dark night of the soul."
"I want it to go away," I said.
"If you wanted that, maybe you should've paid for the therapist."

On the way home, the damn thing followed me. On a billboard it wrapped itself around a giant beer bottle, flicking its steely tongue. Someone scrawled her on sidewalks in chalk, hidden in graffiti names, on televisions during commercials in sports bars. I saw her in the flash of cell phones in the dark. In storm clouds. In my cold exhale.
I asked a group of men smoking underneath a street lamp for a cigarette.

“It’ll cost you,” said the tall one, wearing a patchwork Fedora and bringing his cigarette to his mouth like a love spell, his coat pulled back on his wrist to reveal a white snake tattoo.

“I don’t have any money. I spent it all on benzos and whiskey. Did you know I’m a schizophrenic? I see signs of the apocalypse everywhere. One day soon I’ll probably snap and start stabbing people on the street.”
“Jesus, you can have a cigarette,” he said, and fumbled in his coat pocket.
“Forget it, I quit anyways,” I said, and kept walking.

I climbed up the long, wet steps of my apartment. I thought I’d dropped my keys, but after searching for several seconds I found them in my left pocket, instead of the usual right. I unlocked the door, and went inside without bothering to turn the lights on.

I grabbed a half empty bottle of wine, lay down on the couch, and called Acedia.
“I don’t understand why this is happening to me,” I said. “Was it all those demonic rituals I did as a child? Did someone give me some bad drugs at the abortion clinic? Am I becoming my mother?”
She sighed.

“Sissy, can this wait?,” she said. “I just got to the Elite Four.”
“You’re still playing Pokemon? I beat it in four days.”
“I’m a completionist,” she said. “ You run headfirst through everything. You don’t know how to enjoy games.”
“I’m being followed by a voodoo white snake and possibly all of hell, because I might have accidentally sold my soul to the devil when I was a kid. Now put down the fucking gameboy.”
“Have you talked to it?” Acedia asked.
“The snake?” I said. “I mean, I threatened it a few times.”

“Don’t sound so incredulous, just talk to it. Ask what it wants,” she said, and then. “You know, I had the strangest dream about you.”

“Don’t even start,” I said.
Acedia ignored me.
“You had a bottle of diet coke, and I warned you not to, but you poured pop rocks in it. Then it exploded and flung you into space. We never saw you again.”
She’d put down her game. Okay.
“Look,” she said, her voice quiet, and her breathing sounded like the breathing of someone dying, hooked up to tubes, though I knew she was sitting on her bed surrounded by textbooks and snack wrappers. “Look, you have to talk to it and ask it what it wants. These things don’t just torment you for no good reason.”
“What do if I do if I don’t like the answer? What if it asks me to do something I can’t do?”
“That’s a bigger problem.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t have the answer for you,” she said.
Acedia hung up.

A storm rolled through the campus, approaching my sinking apartment building. The trees in the courtyard bent backwards. I checked the clock beside my bed. 3 P.M, but it might as well have been midnight. It always seemed more of a gothic castle than a girl's university.

Storms used to be a safety net. They wrapped me in cool pressure. I'd climb into one of my mother's red sweaters and sip earl gray tea and play Diablo with all the lights turned off.

But my computer had been broken for months, and instead of earl gray I owned a cabinet full of rock salt and a pentagram to protect myself that I borrowed from the Wiccan in my English 101 class. When the storm hit, I poured the salt in a circle around my bed, carved STAY AWAY on the headboard, with a little of my blood rubbed into the wood grain.
I swallowed two xanax and pulled the bedsheets over my head. I rubbed the pentagram between my thumbs, waiting for the xanax to kick in. I pressed my face to the sheets.

I woke several hours later to the snake sitting on my chest.

I tried to move, but her weight bore down on me. My ankles twisted in the sheets she pulled down, and a trail of glass and black python blood and rock salt led from my bed to the broken window. The pentagram dangled from her mouth.
“Relax,” the snake said, not with her mouth but her eyes. “Your knuckles are white."

When she moved her scales rubbed against my collarbone. She could've coiled around me five or six times. I never noticed before how huge she was. She'd been shedding her skin, and when she shook, sloughing the last of it off, white scales burst across my room.
"Have I done something wrong?" I asked.
“You have sins to pay for, but that’s not my problem,” the snake said.
She slithered off the bed, trailing through glass. I clutched at my chest, my arms, to make sure they hadn't been stripped and swallowed.
“Follow me,” she said, “or I’ll never let you rest again."
Panting, I kicked off the sheets and nearly fell to the floor. I limped after the snake, who was coiling down the stair bannister. I opened the hallway closet, grabbed my coat and shoes, and put them on while I tried to keep from tripping down the stairs. She was so huge I could've mistaken her for a woman with sinuous curves, crawling across the floor.
I followed her behind the apartment complex, toward Axel Hill, where the moon swung bloated in the fog. I climbed through the ditch, whispering 'fuck' over and over again, my head pounding, my mouth ashy. I wanted to run, but I remembered her threat, "I'll never leave you alone again," and I didn't dare test it.
Mosquitoes stung my neck. I slapped them off, trying to avoid puddles of mud sunk into the wet grass.
On top of the hill, where the moon bleached the grass and the snake in pale light, I sat down, heaving for breath. Something glimmered in the grass.

I picked it up, and it was soft and thin in my hands.
It was a skinned human face.
Water droplets hit my arm, my face, and I flinched.

Then the water slowed in the air, and hung suspended. The sound of thunder boomed, and streeetched. I touched one of the rain droplets. It was like crystal. It reflected my face back at me.
“Do you see-”

Lightning struck me. It pushed my eyes and pried opened my mouth. Whiteness like a hot swinging bulb. It burned my blood. White cloth tied my arms and legs close. A white gag stuffed my mouth. White snakes slithered up my legs.
I couldn't move. The white cloth bound tighter against me the more I struggled.
I opened my mouth to scream and white static spilled out. The snakes rearranged the static into letters. Oooooooo....the static said.

"Ooooooo..... you're so good for us, my wicked little girl."

The snakes untied my arms and wrists. The white chair crumbled underneath me, and I collapsed. They slithered off, leaving behind little trails of white light like wriggling wedding lace. Ooooo....
I rolled over, burying myself in my hair.
So good.