A series of unfortunate events

      Daniel shivered, curled up in a ball in a corner of his sister’s bedroom, the glass on the floor one wrong breath away from tearing into his skin, tasting his blood, making sure the off-grey ash mixed with dust gets imbedded in his flesh forever and ever and ever because he cant take pain. Because he will yelp. Because he will yelp and it will hear him and he will be dead and possibly eaten and no one will clean his wounds then, his flesh forever left dirty.       He tried to even out his breathing. Pretend he was nine again, hiding from his mum in his sister’s closet after he had cut his hair off over the bathroom sink.       It didn’t help.       If anything, it served as a reminder that he was in his sister’s house and her bedroom window was broken and she wasn’t there, but the monster was.       He could hear it walk around on the first floor, it’s many legs hitting the floor almost erratically.       It reminded him of Lizzie pacing.       …       He shouldn’t have come in.       He should have called the police the moment he found her front door open, he should have stayed outside instead of going to investigate.       Now he is stuck in the house with a monster that will probably kill him. He only caught a glimpse, but whatever it was, it was much bigger than him and it certainly wasn’t human.       And it was walking around the first floor.       He couldn’t jump out of the window because he would probably break his legs, and he couldn’t bring himself to make a run for the door. It would hear him running before he reached the bottom of the stairs.       Daniel swallows dryly, blinking tears out of his eyes, struggling to breathe past the hands he was pressing to his face.       He shouldn’t be just sitting here, he should at least hide before it inevitably goes up to this floor, he should fucking move!       But he can’t bring himself to.       So, he just sits, counting seconds until he hears the stairs creaking under the creature’s weight.       It’s a thousand seconds flat from the moment he’s begun counting when he does. Despite not being much different from the squeak of the floorboards, the sound pierces his mind like a red-hot syringe needle, injecting raw horror into his brain, immediately going through his whole body.       It takes him eighteen seconds to scramble to his feet, making far too much noise in the process.       It takes only two for it to open the door.       For a moment that seems to stretch for seconds so slow and endless that Daniel can’t count them anymore he is staring directly at it.       It has five legs of strange shapes that look broken, one of them sprouting out from it’s bulging stomach, and four arms on it’s contorted torso, long spines of bare bone protruding from what must be it’s back, it’s flesh exposed by skin being stretched to the point of becoming transparent. Daniel can see it’s blood pumping. Daniel can see it only has hair on it’s head.       It only has hair on it’s human head with his sister’s face.       It takes him four seconds to climb out the window, splinters from it’s broken frame getting stuck under his nails.       He doesn’t quite stick the landing. Why would he? But, despite his knee feeling horribly out of place, he manages to get up and run, not seeing where he is stepping in the dark of the night.       Trip, fall, get up again, and run.       Trip, fall, get up, climb a fence, run.

***

      It’s midday by the time he reaches a point when he can’t run anymore. He can’t even move after he falls down onto a bench, sweating in his hoodie.       It takes him four attempts to unzip it.       He doesn’t bother even trying to take it off.       His face and neck are covered in ugly red blotches, his blood boiling under his skin.       His knee hurts.       His head hurts more.       He’s crying.

…

      He stays on that bench for another three hours before someone wakes him up.       He should really go to the police and report a break into Lizzie’s house.       He should go to his parents' home and face their wrath for running away — a small price for having a place to sleep and recover and have his knee fixed, really.       He doesn’t.

***

“Are you sure you don’t need an ambulance, miss?” The kind stranger asks again. Daniel suppresses a winch. He’s used to people calling him a girl, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. It’s almost as painful as his twisted knee or his hurt head. “Yes, ma’am, I’m alright.” He nods, getting up. His eyes water at the pain that shoots through his knee and he has to bite his tongue. “I’m going to head home now!” He lies, waving the kind woman goodbye “Have a nice day!”       He manages to keep his stride somewhat straight right up to the moment he rounds the corner, nearly collapsing, only staying upright thanks to the wall of a building he caught himself on. He winches, feeling people staring at him. He must look like a homeless man. He wants to just stay still for a moment, but the thought of making it so painfully obvious that he doesn’t know where to go makes him move.       He begins to go through potential places where he should go. He can’t come up with any. He’s never tried to run away by himself before, but he is sure as hell not crawling back to them and proving them right.       And sure as hell not going back to Lizzie’s house.       He exhales shakily, sitting down on another bench, having reached another playground. He’s walked six blocks on a dislocated knee. He should at least try to put it back… “Fuck!” He hisses through gritted teeth.       Nope. Not doing that.       God. What has he gotten himself into?       More importantly, what has Lizzie gotten herself into?       …If she’s even alive. Probably not. That thing must have caught her to replicate her face so thoroughly- or maybe it didn’t replicate it at all, just stuck her head into it’s broken body with withering limbs.       Daniel feels strangely numb at the thought. He must feel more upset at his sister, his best friend being dead.       Characters in movies usually scream or cry or-       Well. It’s not like any movies his parents let him watch had anything in common with reality, anyway.       God, it’s so hot, he feels like he’s dying. But being able to see his boobs under the tank top is worse than being baked in his hoodie, so he just suffers silently.       Its not like it’s even in the top five of his concerns right now.       He feels a raindrop fall onto his hand.       Fantastic. Just what he needed.       He’s really trying not to cry.       This was the point where he started considering crawling back to his parents, but they were on the edge of town and he was halfway to the city center.       He physically couldn’t travel that distance on top of how long he ran earlier. Even if it wasn’t for a dislocated knee, everything else hurt regardless.       He was failing at not crying. “Are you alright?” He gets started out of his despair by a voice that sounded like grains of sand being rubbed together. In front of him stood a young looking girl in a moth-eaten green coat. “I- Yeah, I’m-” Fuck it, he decides, sighing heavily “No, I’m not. I live super far and my knee hurts and I don’t have any money to get back.” Maybe he’ll get lucky and she’s going to take pity on him, give him money for a ticket back. “You can wait out the rain at my place if you want.” She offers, instead. Daniel can’t believe this stroke of luck. Maybe it’s karmatic balance or something. He’s had a pretty shitty day before that. “I- Really? I- I mean, you don’t even know me, are you sure…?” “Well, we could fix that pretty easily.” She shrugs “My name is Ava.” Ava stretches out a hand for him to shake.       He tries to make his voice lower and manlier: “I’m Daniel.”       Her skin is hot, probably just in comparison to of how cold his hands are, and dry. He had never met anyone with skin that had this… Papery texture.       He shook off the uneasy feeling, letting go of her hand and she starts to walk, probably expecting Daniel to just follow. He does.       Trying to distract himself from the pain — he’ll be resting soon anyway — he watches Ava intently.       He has, he likes to think of it as a skill, to notice small behavioral quirks and patterns that other people display, like the way they eat their food, what they start and end with, or if they continuously brush their pocket, checking if whatever is supposed in there is still there, so he to him it became obvious rather quickly that Ava was… Uneasy about something. It was the way her hand constantly twitched to check her neck where her hair brushed it and how she kept subtly looking to the sides as if she saw something out of the corner of her eye and needed to check, and, most noticeably, it was how she scratched her collarbone, and scratched, and scratched and pulled her sweater collar away from her neck to scratch the skin directly. Daniel hadn’t seen it, but he was certain it was red.       That is to say… His rescuer definitely, most certainly was not well, but he wasn’t going to point it out to her. God knows he pushed his luck enough today already, he isn’t risking sleeping on a bench out in the rain.       So, save for an occasional pained hiss, he kept quiet. “I’m sorry for the mess.” She says when they reach her apartment door and she unlocks it, but it sounds like an afterthought. “I wasn’t preparing for guests.” “It’s quite alright.” He assures her, standing by the door he closed behind them as she searches for the light switch under the coats hanging on her wall. The air smells stale.       When the lights come on, they are yellow and warm. Ava kicks off her shoes, discarding them by the door and goes into a room behind a narrow archway.       He awkwardly bends, trying not to move his knee, and with some effort rids himself of his ratty sneakers without falling over and dislocating another joint in the process, so he counts that as a success.       After he’s done, he sees Ava standing in the hallway, looking at him expectantly. “I made you a bed.” “Oh- um, thank you…” Well that was fast. Ava simply nods and disappears into a room. Following her in, Daniel sees that the door had been propped open using some books, covered in dust so thick it looked like it hadn’t been as much as touched, which was impossible when something was regularly passed past.       He ignored the tiny pale cocoons in the dust, walking over to the couch, which was made into a temporary sleeping place for him.       The bed sheets and the pillowcase had tiny holes in them.       He didn’t mind.       In the living room, where he was, was also an archway into a tiny kitchen where he could see Ava putting a kettle onto the stove.       Something fluttered in front of Daniel’s face and almost flew into his eye. As if in cue, Ava spoke up in an apologetic tone: “I have a bit of a moth infestation going on right now, I hope you don’t mind them too much.” “I can live with it.” Daniel offers her an uneven smile, even though she has her back turned to him still, fussing with something. She nods.

…

      Ava’s tea has a strange metallic tinge to it. Daniel guesses that there’s something wrong with her water pipes. It’s okay though. He’s not picky.       And it would be rather rude to not drink the tea that the woman who set his knee joint back into it’s socket made him.       Still, they didn’t talk much more, that night.       Daniel got his knee set in, drank his tea in polite silence, and went to sleep dreading the next morning when he would have to leave.       The air was musty and all the dry foods had moth larvae in them, but it felt safe.       It felt safer than his room that had the lock on the outer side of the door, at least.