[Cheryl chuckles behind Quentin as he stumbles forward, painting his sneakers with blood as he struggles to hold back the worst of it. She rises to her feet, slow and steady like she has all the time in the world, turning her head to hock a mouthful of blood and a lumpy, red piece of viscera to the ground. It lands somewhere in the dirt across from the table Quentin lurches into like a glob of mucus.
The table wobbles and comes dangerously close to tipping over. Instead, it showers Quentin with garbage — piles of old newspapers, their pages yellow and brittle but greasy and soft, like old skin — and upsets the antique phonograph resting on the edge of it. The needle drops on the record before the crank handle begins to spin itself in frantic, jerky sweeps. The warped notes of a jaunty tune crackle to life from the bottom of the horn, a warbling echo that fills the cellar.
The lightbulb begins to die, ebbing intermittently. Laughing, Cheryl saunters forward. Her face is split in a grin so sharp her gums are visible, bits of Quentin's flesh still stuck to her teeth. Each time the light goes out, she gets a little closer to Quentin. And each time she gets a little closer to Quentin, the more he can see how rapidly her face is starting to decompose, her skin losing color, her hair turning grey and stringy, her flesh beginning to slide off her cheeks in mottled clumps as she follows him to the foot of the stairs.
All of this while Ash takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and doubles back to the porch.
His knuckles vibrate as he squeezes the handle, his heart beating a mile a minute in his throat. At no point should any of this be possible, but it is. Excluding the generators, he's never found a machine that works in the Fog or any of its realms. The cars in Springwood are dead. The security cameras in the Gideon Meat Plant are tuned to static. The phones in Haddonfield can only pick up dead air.
But somehow this is real, and you know what? Ash will fucking take it. Screw the red flags, he'd take this over an axe any day. The thought snags on something in his brain and mindlessly loops itself over and over, just like the record in the cellar when the needle catches on the vinyl. Itsrealitsrealitsrealitsreal—]
QUENTIN!
[He screams as loud as he can, hoping more than anything that Quentin can hear him over the engine, that Quentin can still hear anything at all, as he runs past the threshold and straight to the hatch door.]
no subject
The table wobbles and comes dangerously close to tipping over. Instead, it showers Quentin with garbage — piles of old newspapers, their pages yellow and brittle but greasy and soft, like old skin — and upsets the antique phonograph resting on the edge of it. The needle drops on the record before the crank handle begins to spin itself in frantic, jerky sweeps. The warped notes of a jaunty tune crackle to life from the bottom of the horn, a warbling echo that fills the cellar.
The lightbulb begins to die, ebbing intermittently. Laughing, Cheryl saunters forward. Her face is split in a grin so sharp her gums are visible, bits of Quentin's flesh still stuck to her teeth. Each time the light goes out, she gets a little closer to Quentin. And each time she gets a little closer to Quentin, the more he can see how rapidly her face is starting to decompose, her skin losing color, her hair turning grey and stringy, her flesh beginning to slide off her cheeks in mottled clumps as she follows him to the foot of the stairs.
All of this while Ash takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and doubles back to the porch.
His knuckles vibrate as he squeezes the handle, his heart beating a mile a minute in his throat. At no point should any of this be possible, but it is. Excluding the generators, he's never found a machine that works in the Fog or any of its realms. The cars in Springwood are dead. The security cameras in the Gideon Meat Plant are tuned to static. The phones in Haddonfield can only pick up dead air.
But somehow this is real, and you know what? Ash will fucking take it. Screw the red flags, he'd take this over an axe any day. The thought snags on something in his brain and mindlessly loops itself over and over, just like the record in the cellar when the needle catches on the vinyl. Itsrealitsrealitsrealitsreal—]
QUENTIN!
[He screams as loud as he can, hoping more than anything that Quentin can hear him over the engine, that Quentin can still hear anything at all, as he runs past the threshold and straight to the hatch door.]