Free Infernal Affairs by Jes Battis

knobs. As I stared into the empty tub, I noticed a smear of something red against the porcelain. A bloody handprint.
    Something clattered in the hallway.
    I could feel my pulse rising. I left the bathroom and saw that the door facing me had also been left ajar. I heard the clattering sound again.
    “Hello?”
    I pushed open the door. This seemed to be the master bedroom. The floor was carpeted, and a four-poster bed stood in the center. A window above the bed had been left open, and the casement moved slowly back and forth, banging against the wall. Wind stirred the sheets on the bed, and I realized that there was something underneath them. I took a step forward, and then stopped. My breath caught.
    There was blood on the sheets. Blood on the pillows. Wind teased the edges of the top sheet, and I could see indistinct flashes of what lay underneath. I took another step forward, until I was standing at the foot of the bed. The bloodstains were still wet. I looked up at the walls. They were clean and bare. No parent stains and no spatter. All of it was passive blood flow. I stared at the carpet, but couldn’t see so much as a stray drop. It didn’t seem possible, unless someone had been killed in a vacuum. But it also wouldn’t have been the strangest thing I’d ever seen.
    Slowly, trying not to disturb any of the stains, I lifted up the sheet. A cold shock passed through me as I saw the body lying underneath.
    It was mine.
    I was wearing the same clothes. My jeans were soaked in blood, and my feet were bare. My hair lay across my face, obscuring one eye. The other eye was open, staring blindly. My lips were parted, my mouth flecked with blood. My throat was slit from ear to ear, completely transecting both carotid arteries. The cut was clean, and I could see where the fat and muscle tissue avulsed to reveal bone.
    “Even dead,” a voice said, “you’re still beautiful.”
    I turned around, struggling to breathe.
    A tall shape stood in the doorway. It seemed almost too angular, a piece of perverse trigonometry. It was made partly of smoke, but I recognized its eyes. They stood out against the darkness of its plastic face. Two burning pinholes. They were the color of dirty ice.
    And they knew me.
    The force of that knowledge slammed into me, devouring me, and I almost doubled over from the pain of being comprehended so perfectly. Its knowing seared me black from the inside. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I had no breath. There was nothing inside me, no blood, no torsion or fibrillation, just a dry puparial casing. It had sucked out everything I was with a single look.
    I couldn’t look at it anymore. I turned back to my body on the bed. I reached out with my fingers to brush my own flesh.
    It was cold. I was cold.
    “Not even necromancy will bring you back from that,” it said. “Oh, it could bring back a few pieces of you, held together with willpower and a bit of duct tape. But never all of you. That’s gone forever.”
    “Did you do this?” I asked.
    “No. You did.”
    He was standing directly behind me now. The smoke of his limbs curled around me, his impossibly long fingers hesitating, just an inch away from my neck and shoulders. I turned. His eyes were level with my own. I looked deep into them, searching for something recognizable. All I could see was a crystalline structure, perfect, endlessly replicating itself. And beneath that, something dark and liquid, older than the first nano-bacterium, but far from primitive. A radiant hunger.
    “Why did you do it?” I asked.
    “I told you. I didn’t.”
    “Not the body. I mean me .” I refused to look away. “Twenty-eight years ago, you attacked my mother. You left her broken and alone, bleeding in a parking lot. And you made me. I want to know why.” “You really want to know?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Tell me.”
    He smiled. “Because it was fun.”
    I screamed at him. I screamed every obscenity that I knew, in every language