Free Unseaming by Mike Allen Page B

forget again. Understanding means madness. The man’s voice, the voice of this other self, is the voice he always hears whispering in times of terrible stress.
His guardian self keeps talking, but Delmar stops listening, because a new voice distracts him, murmuring right in his ear. It’s Meaghan again; he can practically feel her lips against his skin. “Don’t listen, Daddy. He can’t stop you from knowing.”
Delmar watches himself in the film, scrambling to draw a second, smaller circle, about the size of a manhole, at the center of the larger one. It’s an agonizing, slow process, taking time even in time lapse, with the activity seen in shadow at the far window getting more and more frenzied, impossible to comprehend. Oftentimes the mother, who his mind admits is Lynda, must be Lynda, seems like she’s having an exasperating time keeping the little girl inside the circle.
As Delmar watches, his immediate surroundings fade. Soon’s there’s nothing left but the picture show flickering on the fog and Meaghan’s voice in his ear.
“Sweet Daddy. Don’t you worry ’cause I still love you. I understand it all. You tried to use evil to do a good, good thing, but you had to be evil to use evil. But you did it ’cause you love us and love can be evil and good together.”
The time lapse reverts to normal speed. In black and white, Delmar and Lynda are arguing. She turns hysterical, terrified as his gestures grow more frantic. In the background, unnoticed by either of them, the little window rattles. Darkens. Bizarrely, it looks like hair is growing around the frame.
The voice changes oh-so-subtly, still with the timbre of a child, but more adult, more knowing. “What you did was so powerful it could never work, never, without the blood of an innocent. I know, Daddy, I know.”
In the film he screams, the contortion of his face grotesque in total silence, and his wife pushes his daughter toward him. He takes her wrist, produces the knife. Still unnoticed, the window pushes open, just a crack, and the hair-tendrils that have worked their way into the room begin to thicken and lengthen into streams, into ropes. Something huge is oozing through the gap around the glass, pouring down the wall as if made from soft clay.
“I should have been smarter, Daddy. I shouldn’t have been so scared.”
The image goes out of focus, becomes a crazy split screen, left and right visions going out of sync. In one lobe, Delmar, weeping as he chants, holds his daughter’s bleeding arm over the inner circle, its black designs coming to life, shining, burning as the blood strikes it. In the other lobe, the window pane bows and shatters as a slimy mass of dense hairy jelly shoves its way through, unfurls in an explosion of sucking lamprey mouths and clusters of lidless human eyes.
Staring down from the corner again as the insanely hideous thing lands on the debris and springs—and it is as if the creature strikes a wall where the outer circle is drawn, as if it crashes straight into curved aquarium glass. The creature is not repelled by the barrier, but hangs there in the air, sticking to the invisible wall like a tarantula hugged against a fishbowl, its dozens of limbs splayed out radially from its squirming core, like a spider escaped from a deranged hallucination.
Delmar has released his daughter’s arm. He’s kneeling by the circle, the book beside him, cords standing out against his neck as he chants. And the little girl sees the horrid thing hanging in the air. And she screams. And she runs. Away from the center of the circle. She runs out of view of the disembodied ceiling observer, and the thing crawls so fast around and across the surface of the invisible barrier, scuttling spider-fast, as Lynda lurches too late to catch her daughter.
All through this, Meaghan’s whisper has never stopped.
“Don’t you want to know really why we love you so? Because you’re just like us, just one of us, all part of us and us part of you.