Free Unseaming by Mike Allen

of the family dog wrapping her leash around a younger Delmar’s stumpy legs.
It’s now Delmar’s father who sits with him, hunched at the other end of the couch. His father’s head turns on a neck mutated by swelling cancer lumps. You asked me to dig out this one , his father says, the sound coming through the surgery hole in his throat. Don’t whine to me. This is all your cross to bear.
The beam from the heard-but-not-seen projector shines on a wall of fog that conceals the other side of the room. Distorted on the fog, Meaghan’s face flickers in close-up, framed by straight dark hair just like her mother’s. The footage is black and white, rendering her bright green eyes a moist gray. He recognizes her unicorn pajamas.
A large hairy arm, a man’s arm, reaches into frame, takes her wrist. Her eyes bug, her face contorts. Delmar feels the prickling inside as the huge hand turns her wrist palm up, as another hand, the right to match the left, stabs a butcher blade into her forearm, slices a long black line.
All this has unfolded free of all sound save the rattling projector, but when Meaghan’s mouth stretches open to scream it’s loud and piercing and absolutely real.
Delmar starts awake. Lynda is beside him on the couch, still comatose. Meaghan screams again, somewhere in the house. Lynda doesn’t stir.
Delmar can’t bring himself to move, paralyzed by a gut-dragging-and-twisting spin of disorientation. He can’t remember a time when he’s heard Meaghan’s voice without Lynda close by, and he knows something is wrong with that, really wrong, and the voice that protects him is saying that too, that something’s wrong, he can’t really be hearing that. Yet upstairs—she has to be upstairs —she cries again, “Dadd-eeeeeeee!“
The noise as raw and loaded with pain as if she’s fallen on a bed of nails.
He runs for the stairs pell-mell. His daughter screams again, the sound like pins stabbed into his eardrums. When he reaches her bedroom door, her shrieks hardly sound human.
But he throws the door open, and she isn’t there. There’s nothing there. The room is empty, even of furniture.
Meaghan shrieks again. Now, the noise comes from downstairs.
The voice in his ear is whispering, It’s gotten out of control. You need the book. You need to get it now.
Delmar doesn’t understand what the voice wants. Or something in him doesn’t want to understand.
At Meaghan’s next howl, he plunges back down the stairs. But stops halfway.
On the couch, in Lynda’s place, a monster writhes, a black sunburst of ropy worms. The shrieks he hears are coming from somewhere in its center. It lurches to the floor, dozens of snaky limbs flopping blind, turning over lamps and end tables, capsizing the tv.
The book , hisses the voice in his ear. This time, he understands, and knows he has to obey.
He dashes through the den, toward the hall and the utility room at its end, but one of the black ropes twines his ankles, and then the thing is pulling itself on top of him, wailing in Meaghan’s voice. Keening syllables that are almost words.
His bare hands tear at the cables of black flesh sliding against his skin, but it’s as if two tendrils replace each one he breaks, lashing around his forearms and thighs and belly, struggling to hold him still. The thing is still screaming, now with Lynda’s voice. A snake-smooth band of contracting muscle coils around his neck, starts to tighten.
But he is stronger. He shoves to his knees, rips out the boneless limbs by their roots, hurls the thrashing tangle across the room.
Lynda screams, screams, screams.
He returns from the utility room with a huge book, its leather binding on the verge of crumbling, its pages flopping as he holds it open. The symbols in dark brown ink mean nothing to him, though they radiate a head-spinning wrongness. If these scribblings form words, he doesn’t know what they say—and yet he does. It’s as if another person inside him uses his eyes to see, his