54

SHARON WAS THIRSTY; SHE was burning up. Her lips felt puffy and foreign, like they belonged to someone else. They were dry and cracked and bleeding. She lay on the floor of the cabin wanting nothing more than for her suffering to be over. Blood oozed out her open mouth onto the floor; her face was slick with it as she rested on the dirty carpet. Unable to lift her head, she pushed her body forward with her legs a few inches—ignoring the shrieking pain in her useless arms and her damaged ribs—until she was clear of the gooey mess. She immediately started drooling more blood onto her new location. It wasn’t pouring out of her mouth and it wasn’t gushing, but it had been oozing sluggishly for hours. Sharon knew she should be worried.

But she was too tired to be worried. She had been fading in and out of consciousness for indeterminate periods, each time lingering in some fuzzy netherworld a little longer and sinking into it again a little faster. Maybe this time when she closed her eyes it would be the last time. Maybe this time it would all be over, this crazy nightmare she had been thrust into with Mike McMahon. Strong, steady Mike, with whom she had shared her bed and with whom she had fallen in love.

That was the only real regret Sharon felt as she waited for the end. She had slept with plenty of men, starting at about age fourteen—or was it twelve? She couldn’t remember for sure and that was so sad—when she perfected the art of using her sexuality in exchange for drugs or alcohol. Dozens of men throughout the years, mostly during those four sick, insane years of high school when she had been out of control. Not so many recently.

But during all those hookups, all the times she had awoken in strange places next to strange men, often much older than Sharon and whose faces she could often, frighteningly, not recognize, she never once felt a connection, a bond beyond the physical like that which she had experienced for such a short time with the new chief of police of Paskagankee, Maine. She treasured that bond and didn’t want it to end but at the same time was thankful she had been able to experience transcendence above the physical at least once before exiting the pain of this world into whatever the next one held, if even there was a next one.

The front door opened, squeaking slightly on its hinges, and Sharon knew it was the Court–thing returning to its lair. She wondered if this would be the time it finished her off. As she raised her eyes toward the cabin’s only entrance, trying to ignore the pain pounding through her body, she was surprised to see that the spirit no longer floated above the floor; it was now walking with its feet solidly placed on the soiled carpet.

Something was different, though. The thing wasn’t exactly walking; it was limping. Badly. It would rest its entire weight on its left leg, then hop/shuffle painfully on its right, before coming to rest again with the full weight of its body on its left side.

Sharon noticed the thing was now dressed differently, too. Instead of the tattered red hunting jacket with its checkerboard pattern and the disgusting matted hair, the apparition now wore a Paskagankee Police uniform and looked, incredibly, impossibly, unbelievably, like Mike McMahon!

Sharon smiled, her bleeding lips screaming painfully at her to stop, as her eyes rolled up into her head and she was gone again.