Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

Present day …

God, that stench.

Too-crisp Spam sizzled in a pan as I held my arm to my nose. The popping sound of fatty meat was loud enough to carry over Jean Valjean’s heartfelt plea to Javert from Les Misérables playing in the theater below our apartment. I’d accidentally burned the thinner pieces while peeling the potatoes and there was no salvaging it at that point.

Whatever finesse my mother had always had in the kitchen had failed to grace my genetics.

I hated cooking the canned crap, but Mom had developed a weird craving for meat lately, and we’d run out of the thin round steaks she’d come to like eating rare. I couldn’t help but wonder if her strange requests might’ve been her body trying to get better.

I hoped so, anyway.

Watching her devour rare meat with the blood running out of the corners of her mouth had me feeling like a spectator in a gory episode of Hostile Planet. An appetite-withering sight. Particularly since my mother had never really been much of a meat eater, anyway. Spam was a far cry from steak, but my stepdad Conner, if I could even call him that, hadn’t worked a couple days, which left us short on grocery money.

“Bee!” I called out for my younger half-sister, the nickname short for Beatrix, and tossed the charred spam onto awaiting plates. “D’you check on Mama, like I asked?”

“Oh, shit!” The thud of footfalls followed her curse, and with a smirk, I shook my head. At twelve years old, about four years younger than me, she carried a lot more responsibility than most girls her age.

Both of us did.

Mama’s illness had gotten worse. So much worse, and the fact that she refused to see a doctor about it only put more pressure on Bee and me to navigate the progression of her strange symptoms ourselves. While Mama still seemed to have her wits about her, there were moments. Terrifying moments. Like the nights she’d tell me that evil men were coming for me. The nights she’d be covered in sweat, her eyes glowing with unseen horrors.

Monsters, she called those invisible tormentors, but in her mind, they were as real as the deep black circles beneath her eyes. Although, as horrible as it was to say, with her sickly, distorted spine, silvery glowing eyes, and deep protruding bones, she’d begun to look like the very monsters of which she spoke.

Praying had never really been my thing, but I’d done an awful lot of aimless pleading on my knees over the last few weeks, and if God existed, he sure as hell didn’t offer much hope.

As I spooned the last glob of mashed potatoes for Bee, a knock at the door halted my plating. Frowning, I quietly placed the pan back onto the stovetop and wiped my hands onto a nearby kitchen towel. With cautious steps, I padded toward the hallway and peered at the entry door. Another hard thud jerked my muscles, and the audacity of whatever was behind that obnoxious racket heated my blood. I tromped toward the door and, through the peephole, spied a man I didn’t recognize.

Deep-set, beady eyes, a scar at his left eye, and an oddly crooked nose, like he’d been in one too many fights, made him look like a walking mugshot.

One thing I’d learned from living in a city like Covington–you didn’t answer the door to strangers. Particularly ones who looked like criminals.

He pounded against the door again, and I ground my teeth with annoyance.

“Yeah?” I called through the barrier. “What do you want?”

At first, he didn’t answer, and I watched him look around toward the hallway. Something about him–those dark eyes I’d only caught a glimpse of and the smirk of his lips–sent a crawling chill beneath my skin.

What a creep.

I glanced at the door’s deadbolt, making sure it was engaged. Unfortunately, the apartment didn’t have the greatest, or most robust, locks.

“I’m a friend of Conner’s,” he finally said. “Is he here?”

“No.”

“Any idea when he’ll be back?”

Studying his face proved challenging, since the guy seemed to refuse to look up. “Look, I don’t–”

At the sound of a piercing scream, my spine snapped straight, and I swung my attention toward the back rooms. Abandoning the weirdo at the front door, I dashed across the apartment toward the sliver of light shining beneath the bathroom door.

Light—the first sign that something was wrong. Mama had grown to hate the light. Said it hurt her eyes.

“Mama! No!”

A whisper of fear spiraled down the back of my neck at what I recognized as Bee screaming at my mother on the other side of the door, and I pushed through into the brightly-lit bathroom.

Mama stood alongside the tub, making a strange growling sound while water splashed onto the floor. Two pink-socked feet kicked out over the edge of the basin.

Oh God.

Bee!

Icy pulses of adrenaline took over as I rushed toward them and knocked my mother aside, into the wall.

The moment she was released, Bee shot up out of the water, her upper half sopping wet, and she let out a barky cough.

“What the hell are you doing!” I shouted at my mother, whose eyes gave off an iridescent flicker in the light.

On a screech, my mother barreled forward again, knocking into me, and pushed Bee back into the water.

Panic exploded through my muscles, my body no longer moving at my will, but on instinct. I grabbed my mother by the hair, throwing her off Bee. A chunk of dull, red locks sat in my palm as my mother slipped from my grasp and fell backward against the toilet. The slippery floor had her scrambling to get to her feet again, and I yanked Bee out of the bathtub, sliding on wet tiles as I pushed her toward the door.

Once out in the hallway, I hauled the door shut after us, tugging the knob to keep it closed.

“Go to your room! Lock the door and do not come out until I tell you!” I commanded.

“I was …” She coughed and sniveled. “I was … just trying to keep her … from drinking the water, and she … attacked me!”

The door thumped and jerked my arm as Mama fought from the other side. “She’s one of them! She’s one of them!” Mama screamed through the barrier. “Don’t let her get away! She’ll tell them I’m here!”

“Go! Now! Lock the door! Don’t open it, no matter what you hear!” I braced my feet against the wall and leaned back into the pull of the knob, holding the door closed, as Bee scampered toward her bedroom.

After another minute of fighting to keep her contained, the thumping stopped. Mama’s screams silenced.

With heaving breaths, I eased my muscles and straightened, no longer feeling resistance from the other side. “Mama?” I spoke low through the door, hoping she’d give a coherent answer. An explanation for what the hell just happened. She’d spoken of someone coming after her before, but had never projected those paranoid thoughts onto me, or Bee.

Nothing.

But the cloying scent that had been companion to my mother’s illness seemed stronger than usual. Thick and sticky, it clogged my throat, and I raised the back of my palm to my face in a poor effort to stifle the odor.

Over the past few months, Mama’s sweet floral scent, a comforting smell I’d known my whole life, had somehow faded under the weight of that unfamiliar stink.

Now it was all I breathed.

Ignoring the urge to gag, I turned the knob and entered the bathroom.

Mama lay slung over the edge of the tub, her face submerged in the water.

“Mama!” I sprinted toward her, and on a splash of water, she swung around, screaming again.

I reached for her arm, but she swung out first, plowing the back of her knuckles against my cheek. Pain zapped my bones on a burst of floating stars that wobbled my vision.

I shook off the dizziness when she swung out again, and ducked. That time, she failed to connect as her hands flailed in a fit of rage. Gathering her arms in a tight grip, I dug my nails into her frail bones, but a sharp sting pierced my hand where she sank her teeth into my flesh.

“Ouch! Shit!” I pushed her off me, and she slipped, arms thrashing around as she fell backward into the tub. When I tried to pull her up, her hands reached out for me and gripped my shirt, wrenching me toward the water.

A rush of fluids shot up into my sinuses on a deep burn, her grip unrelenting as she held me underwater. Panic crystallized my muscles. Water splashed with her frenzied kicking and grappling of my neck.

I reached out for the only thing I could get my hands on in the melee. Palm to her throat, I squeezed just enough to lessen her grip, and I held her there as my face breached the surface of the water on a gasped breath.

She yanked me down again, dunking my face underwater with her.

I squeezed her throat harder, and once again, she loosened her hold.

Each searing lungful of air scorched my throat and shot out of me on a coughing fit.

Frantic, she scratched at the back of my neck, trying to pull me under again.

“Mama! Please!” Breath weak in my lungs, I could hardly push out the words as my muscles locked around my chest. My legs slid across the tiles as I wrangled her arms to keep her from pulling me.

Submerged beneath the water, my mother opened her mouth. Eyes wide in a shocked expression.

As if her fight relented, she stilled while a haunting resolution flashed over her face, one that tickled the back of my neck.

I pushed away and stood over the tub, no longer holding her, but she didn’t bother to emerge.

Surely, the air had withered in her lungs by that point. Surely, she needed oxygen.

C’mon! Get up!

I lurched for her arm to pull her up, but halted when, from her mouth, a long, skinny, fibrous creature slithered out past her lips and into the water.

Three more tumbled after it–two from her nose.

A scream shook out of me, and limbs frozen with horror, I watched as the worms wriggled over the tub’s porcelain floor and forged a path through the water to gather at the drain holes. At least two dozen more poured free, forcing her mouth and nostrils wide. More still after that. They all wriggled toward the plugged drain.

My breaths arrived in small panting gasps as I watched the horror.

Until blackness consumed me.