Marya Should Be Studying

Do you remember where and how you acquired your scars, dear reader? The one on your chin, from a combination of new bike and old stump. The one on your hand, from the edge of a steel sink.

Or the reason you check all the locks on the doors, a couple times even, each night before bed.

Marya Hodges knows her scars. She knows the look in her mother's eye, and the way her elbow aches from that time she fell out of an aspen when she was eight.

This morning, well before dawn, Marya will pick up another scar. But in the mean time, dear reader, for this week's story...

Marya Should Be Studying by M. K. Dreysen

The stench of the thing fought its way up the back alley.

Past the garages, the ones turned to apartments and the ones turned to collections of forgotten stuff. Through the well-tended backyards and those better off covered in cement. Past the garbage cans, and the bikes the teenagers had left turned over in their driveways.

Every step away from the beast, the smell faded. Almost at the same rate that the entity itself clawed its way through the pre-dawn darkness.

Nowhere near as quickly as the misshapen creature made its way toward its target.

When it moved. It didn't, not continuously anyway. The twisted form sped, faster than thought, from stillness to stillness. A stalker, then. On the hunt.

For a little cottage, and the person who slept the fitful sleep awarded to someone who'd made her way past grandkids to great-grandkids and the arthritic world that waited for her there.

The creature paused beneath a hawthorn tree, just off the backdoor of the little collection of stone. The grass, when spring woke it, would show a dead trail from the sidewalk to the tree. And then to the porch.

For now, the night-thing paused. All around it, the stench settled, gathered, the smell searched for someone, something to cause to retch.

The creature, nose-blind to its own scent, grinned when it caught scent of the woman inside. And that she slept alone in her widowhood.

Even in its grin the creature gave nothing of itself to its surroundings. Its teeth were as dark as the shadow it crouched in.

****

Marya Hodges didn't want to wake before dawn.

She definitely didn't want to wake to a smell that would have gagged a maggot. She ran to the bathroom, desperate to spit the taste of it into the toilet, then rinse from the faucet.

Even the faint rotten-eggs odor of the city's water through the old pipes, something Marya normally turned her nose up at every morning, even that she could tolerate better than whatever it was that had awakened her.

"Skunk, has to be," she told her face in the unlit bathroom mirror. Right outside the front door, she thought.

A snore, Ashley's, drifted from the middle room. Technically the master bedroom of the little rent-house.

Marya, just like she'd let Ashley have the top bunk their freshmen year in the dorms, had given over the master bedroom without argument. Just having a room to herself, that was heaven. And with their desks and computers the only living room furniture, she had plenty of room in the old kids' room for that business, anyway.

"If I'm up, I might as well get some work done," Marya muttered to herself over the coffee pot.

The one that helpfully told her the 5:30 am time the skunk's dead self had boosted her to. "Ugh." Even Marya, an inveterate early riser, hadn't had to beat the sunrise in years.

Not since high school band practice. Dorm rooms, the little house she and Ashley had somehow discovered just a couple blocks off campus, junior year and getting to even an early morning class meant she hadn't needed a daily alarm.

Not like the forty-five minute drive through the Arizona desert, from home to the only school in the county. Marya hadn't known how to take her mom's look, when she'd realized that Marya had taken the scholarship offer in Houston rather than go to school closer to home.

Where she could drive her younger brother and sisters to school.

Marya's musings vanished with the last burst of steam from the coffee pot, and the waft of the brew that came with it.

She poured a little condensed milk from the open can in the fridge, and then the coffee in on top. Stirred it to warm life. Sipped and considered whether she'd be better off tackling the Sophocles essay while yesterday's lecture still held itself fresh in her mind, or...

But there came the stench again, overwhelming the peace the sweetened coffee had brought her. "Shit." Marya parted the blinds over the kitchen sink.

The streetlight out front showed no roadkill. Just the live oaks of campus and old cracked and buckled sidewalks and the potholes that made her glad of the alleyway in the back, on the few occasions when Marya did have to use her barely-hanging-on, hand-me-down Accord.

The empty street meant the dead skunk had to be in the back alley. So Marya girded herself for the endeavor by way of one more waft of the cooling coffee, before she set the mug on top of the microwave, no sense ruining that, and headed through the utility room to the back door.

She picked up her phone before she opened the door. The flashlight app was far more reliable than the back porch light. If she needed it, she'd turn on the garage light, but that was one of those sodium arc flood lamps that could call in the UFO's from Mars; Marya hated using it, as much for the noise as the fact that it lit the universe.

But she didn't even have to fumble through her apps. Oh, the stench was definitely waiting for her, present and worse out here than in the house. But she could let the screen door ease closed while she looked in vain for the source.

The alley lights, the couple of poles marking the block, gave just enough light to let her know the generator of the smell, whatever it was, was not torn to guts and bits in the middle of her and Ashley's back yard. "Well, ok then..." Marya whispered.

She turned to go back inside, thoughts of peppers and onions to cover the smell bubbling up when she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye.

And then the slam. Of Mrs. Real's door.

Mrs. Real's garage, just like theirs, was detached from the house, and set close to the alley itself, just back of the sidewalk. Between the house and the garage, there was fifteen feet or so of clear space. A rusty chainlink fence, just about waist high, divided the two yards, with a hedge on Mrs. Real's side cut flush with the top of the fence.

Nothing to block Marya's view. Even in that blurry time where the whole world waited for the sun's gift.

The slam of Mrs. Real's screen door didn't echo. It gave just one flat smack, sharp and quick. Marya jumped at the noise of it. Then paused and wondered if she'd missed it.

Because from here, about halfway into her and Ashley's yard, she could see through the screen. Mrs. Real's back door was closed.

And there was no way Marya's sweet, slow moving neighbor could have disappeared that quickly from her back step. Even if she had let the screen slip and slam as hard as it had.

****

The hunter had been born across the sea. Or, it had crawled its way out of the guts of an elk in the Rocky Mountains.

It could have dreamt itself in the darkness of an ice floe, or the dribbled mess of a dead whale carcass.

The creature had many bornings. Here, on the porch of Val Real's house, the hunter sought one thing. Identity.

The old lady's identity would suit nicely. And so easily taken, the faintest of holds on life and the creature could absorb that thread by the simplest of weaves. And when it was finished, it would let go of Val Real's identity as easily as it had been taken, to resume the hunt for the next one.

Ideal, exquisite. The creature slid through the reality of the door.

The screen slammed itself, somehow, in protest and in complete denial of the lack of wind or physical action to move it. No matter.

The creature wasn't listening, it heard only Val Real's heartbeat, the low flutter, and her intermittent snorted breaths as she neared awakening.

The hunter bent over Val Real. Then it laid a shadowed claw over her mouth to feel Val's breath. Satisfied at whatever it found there, the creature wrapped itself around Val.

Absorbed her, and in absorbing lost itself to the depth of Val's years and experience.

Val Real, the facade of her anyway, opened her eyes to darkness and the quiet rap of Marya Hodges' hesitant knocking at the back door. She grinned, stretching from her face to her toes, and stalked off to answer the young lady's request.

****

"Mrs. Real? Mrs. Val? Are you ok?"

Marya had looked around Mrs. Real's yard just as hard as she'd looked around her own. Not for a skunk, in this case, but for whoever had tried to open her neighbor's back door.

And, thankfully, Marya had come up empty. No footprints marred the grass, or the back steps.

Marya knocked on the door again. The screen door was latched, from the inside. Marya had checked that first thing, as soon as she'd reached the top of the steps.

Her heart hadn't beaten any easier, knowing that. But at least everything looked like she'd imagined something. Still, Mrs. Val had told her and Ashley that she liked early mornings. "Can't sleep anyway, my knees and hips hurt if I stay in one position too long. I take a lot of naps to make up for it."

Marya listened, was rewarded with the faint creak, then thud, of the deadbolt rotating open.

And then Mrs. Val opened the door. A lot quicker than Marya would have credited her. Mrs. Val moved with a lot more patience. Normally. "Is that you, Marya? Child, are you ok?"

Marya wanted to smile at that, her question thrown back at her. Really, she thought, what else would she be knocking on Mrs. Val's door for, except that something had gone wrong? A break-in or a breakdown.

Only, just like how easily she'd pulled the door open, Mrs. Val's voice was a lot stronger than it usually was. And Marya's neighbor stood a little taller, a little more even.

Or maybe that was just Marya's imagination. "No ma'am, I'm, we're fine. I just wanted to check on you. I thought I heard someone trying to open your back door."

Mrs. Val laughed. A good, strong, hearty laugh, Marya noticed. And quailed away from, because Mrs. Val's laugh didn't just start at her toes.

It wound its way into Marya's mind, wrapped its way around the base of her neck. "If someone did try and come in, the latch kept them out. See?" Mrs. Val pushed at the screen door, jiggling it to show that the latch held.

Marya focused on the hand that did the jiggling. A hand that showed none of the arthritis sufferer's hesitancy or pain while it grabbed and pushed. Marya's brain whispered to her, from somewhere deep a small voice said, "Run. Now. Get away."

Marya backed away from the door, down one step, two, to the ground.

Mrs. Real thumbed the hook of the latch up, opened the screen door, and waved, vigorously, to her young neighbor. "Why don't you come on in, Marya, so that we can enjoy a good cup of coffee together."

****

That small voice of terror and self-protection didn't hold grudges. Marya had ignored it and went into Mrs. Real's little kitchen anyway.

Now that she lay on her hands and knees, the old lady's hands wrapped in her hair and around her throat, fighting for her life and probably more than that, Marya listened to that voice.

And past the terror that burned her body, the voice answered again. "The butter knife, the fork."

They had sat down to coffee and toast. The knife and the fork and every other damn thing had come off the table and onto the floor when Mrs. Real had leapt across the little kitchen table.

Marya thrashed against the grip, too strong and sure, and reached for whatever she could grab. The little jelly jar, she hammered that at Mrs. Real's head but missed. Her old neighbor, the one that couldn't sit down on the toilet without the grab bars Ashley had put in last year for Mrs. Val's Christmas present, no way could that Mrs. Val have dodged Marya's desperate hands.

Marya threw the jar, then jabbed the fork into Mrs. Real's leg. That, the old lady couldn't dodge. And she didn't.

She also didn't react to the pain. Whether dealing with the arthritis or something else... but Marya kept going. She twisted, coiled and yanked, grabbed the butter knife and pushed and yanked again.

Until the opening came. Mrs. Real still gripped Marya's hair, but only just, and that down near the end of her ponytail. Mrs. Real's hand on Marya's throat dropped away, enough for Marya to twist fully.

And jam the butter knife into the old lady's throat, then up and harder again and all the way through to Val Real's brain.

Val Real, the physical part of her anyway, stiffened and died, a stainless steel wall now disconnecting the last of her brain function from doing anything her body would recognize as a command.

The creature that had absorbed her, absorbed itself into Val Real, leapt free. Val Real had been but a moment's vessel after all.

Marya fought it. There were no sights to see, no clouds or shadows or grasping hand hovering over her face.

Just a shadow over her mind. A net held Marya and dragged her down somewhere she refused to go. "Momma. Daddy." She called the names, some part of her reacting like she'd just dipped into an old nightmare. But nobody would come if she called.

Marya fought the creature; it was the smell that did it. Crept into Marya's nostrils and wrenched at the back of her throat.

She vomited, and cast the creature out to join its smell. Marya stumbled up, yanking the butter knife free of Mrs. Real's throat.

She waved the knife around, scattered blood with it while she shuffled, kicking the breakfast things away as she found the back door. "Go to hell!" she screamed at the darkness.

It didn't. It crawled, beaten but only temporarily, after Marya. A smell and a bad feeling, she should not have been able to see it but she'd at last won something from her battle. A glimpse of her foe.

Marya kicked at it, and stabbed with the knife. Maybe it was Mrs. Real's blood, maybe it was Marya's own anger and fury reaching through the knife, but something there burned the beast.

Burned it. And as Marya's realization twinned with her anger, cast it out. Marya forced the thing away, now she turned it to the outside and cast it from Mrs. Real's house.

She stood at the still-closed back door, panting, waiting for it to come back.

And when it didn't, Marya tried to think of just how the hell she was going to explain her neighbor's dead body, and the bloody kitchen it lay in.

****

Six months later, Dan Murphy, her landlord's handyman, worked on the main kitchen circuit in Marya and Ashley's rental. "Just putting in a GFCI outlet and breaker."

Marya sat at their kitchen table, a glass of water and Aeschylus keeping her and Dan company. "Mrs. Real's fire made Eulis nervous?"

"That, and the insurance company. I don't know that this would have saved Mrs. Real, but at least it would have kept her house from burning down around her."

Marya nodded and went back to her essay while Dan finished up. She'd jammed the knife into the unplugged toaster, and then plugged the toaster back into the wall. The sparks and smoke had started before she'd even made it out the back door.

She'd waited to call 911, and then wake Ashley, until the flames were visible through Mrs. Real's kitchen window. The fire had covered whatever had gone on in that house. At least as far as the police were concerned.

But Marya worried more about whatever dark spirit had caused it. She'd felt, smelled nothing of the creature since that time in Mrs. Real's kitchen.

Marya knew, though, that every morning, and most evenings, when she stepped out on the back porch and took a big sniff, then waited and breathed easy only when she didn't smell anything?

Marya Hodges knew that she'd be doing that every day. For however long she lived.