Thrum

He makes love to me in the corridor.

I kiss him, hungry, and he knows exactly where and how to touch me; how to make my body and mind completely helpless. He’s painfully real to me, and I need him, and his low murmurs of satisfaction wind through me like a thread of comfort.

I fumble at the fastening of his antiquated trousers, yanking his starched collar open, my teeth at his collarbone, a desperate and frenzied undressing.

He fills me up, rolling into and against me, hot and vivid. There’s an ache deep inside me and it grows with each of his thrusts until I’m gasping, crying out his name. He is everywhere and everything. He holds my thighs apart with strong hands, groaning in my ear, calling me by name: Ami, Ami, stay with me. Stay. He comes with a low groan. I tighten around him, wracked by my drawn-out pleasure, until I feel that I’m no longer here. No longer human or corporeal.

I’ve ascended, or crumbled to dust, and his heaving form contains the universe of me.

And then Dorian is no longer Dorian. He is smaller, softer.

I pull away, still overflowing with desire, and I’m wrapped in Lily’s arms. She’s naked, her eyes hazy with lust, her lips pink and swollen. She tilts her head, breathing hard, her long lashes glowing red, red in the corridor’s light.

“Ami,” she croons, running a finger down my throat, “Don’t you want me? I thought we had something.”

I freeze. I want to push her away. I’m desperate to close my eyes, to erase the burning image of my dead lover. But I can’t. I’m captive to her. I try to speak, but my words dry up, shriveling like rotted flesh.

Lily makes an exaggerated face, pouting. “I asked you a question, Ami. What did I do wrong? I thought you cared about me.”

“No,” I manage, a pathetic, weak, rattle of a word. I try to escape, but I am helpless, my muscles atrophied in fear.

The ship’s hum grows louder, pulsating, an enormous heartbeat, until I’m deafened.

“No, what?” Lily demands, her voice cutting through the noise like heated steel. Her eyes are wild, and her face begins to morph, to become something monstrous, unrecognizable. Her voice echoes through me, painful with every reverberation. “You can’t deny it,” she spits. “We all saw what you did. I’ll show you.”

And she begins to unfold her skin, peeling it away as if it’s a garment, revealing bright red blood and sinew and moon-white bone, pulsing veins, glistening muscle.

I scream, at last, and everything goes dark.

I am alone in my room.

It feels like I blinked, and suddenly, Lily was gone. And now I’m here. My jumpsuit is zipped up to the throat, covering my trembling body, though I still feel horribly exposed. The ship’s insidious hum drowns out my thudding heart.

I stumble, rubbing a hand across my face.

A moment ago, Lily was showing me her insides. Before that, my back was pressed to the wall, my thighs still sweat-slick around Dorian’s hips. But here I stand, as if… as if it was a dream. Like neither of them were ever here. But my skin is hot and tender, my lips still swollen. Hardly daring to breathe, I unzip my jumpsuit, slowly, just enough to reach my hand inside, down between my legs.

I’m wet, my underwear soaked through. And when I pull my hand away, holding it up to the light, there is thick white cum on my fingers.

“No,” I whisper. How long have I been standing here? How long have I been alone in my room, fucked and left to forget?

Why can’t I remember?

“Dorian.” My voice is weak, fractured. I refuse to think of Lily. I refuse to accept the grotesque vision of her. And as soon as I make this refusal, the memory begins to fade. I imagined her in a fit of emotion. I made her up in my fear and pleasure, mixing and muddling my emotions.

“Dorian,” I say again. There’s panic in my voice. My body detaches from me, as if my heartbeat is drifting slowly away into the night, my shaking fingers fading from view, and I’m but a solitary speck in the stretch of endless stars.

Thoughtlessly, I push my hands into my pockets, searching for comfort or perhaps a reminder. But my pockets are empty. I feel distinctly that I put something there, that I was saving it. But it’s gone now. Did I drop something?

I look to the floor, and my heart skips.

There are red, liquid footsteps there: My footsteps. They lead from the door to where I’m standing, only a few paces, yet they’re clear as day: Blood. Thick and wet. Just like the blood I had seen on my hands.

Fear comes racing back, and I embrace it, clutching it with desperate fingers. It’s all that reminds me of who I am, what I am. I’m human. On a mission. In an alien ship.

I know that I should inspect the footprints. Maybe it’s a trick of the light. Another vision, a hallucination. But my pulse screams danger, my lungs constrict, and I’m choked by the need to get away. Far, far away. Off this ship. If I run fast and far enough, I’ll leave the bloody footprints behind, and they will fade into nothing but memory, and one day, that memory will disappear altogether.

I burst from my room and run pell-mell through the ship’s corridors. I pass another door to my room, then another just like it, and another. Or maybe they’re not my room; maybe the ship has finally opened up to me, allowing me to wander it fully, unsupervised. Or perhaps I’m simply dashing in a terrified circle, eating my own tail like a doomed ouroboros.

My lungs burn. I begin to stumble, weakening, succumbing to the heavy weight of dread and the limits of my already low stamina.

A new corridor suddenly opens to my left, and I pelt down it. My vision blurs with tears, or fear, or both. My lungs scream for air, but I don’t stop running. I have to keep going. I have to get away.

The light is dimmer now, or maybe it’s the walls that are darkening, crimson, rich, and sanguine, dripping like wet paint.

These corridors run thick with blood. Have they always?

My boots slide on gore. It’s like the floors have been flayed open, revealing living tissue beneath, and the thrum is the ship itself breathing, the sound of life coursing through this thing that has eaten me, swallowed me whole, and there is nowhere to go but deeper inside.

And as I go it gets louder, louder, a percussive pulse against my eardrums, my brain, my entire body. If it doesn’t exist but I hear it, and I feel it, doesn’t that make it real?

Things begin to move on the walls as I pass. I don’t want to see; I refuse to look at whatever is slowly emerging, undulating in shadow.

I won’t look.

But I have to.

My footsteps slow, my lungs fight for breath, and my muscles scream from overuse. I pause for a breath, for two, three. The walls swim like black-red soup, and something crawls, or swims, or drags itself up alongside me.

A body, drenched in blood. Naked. Shriveled like a revenant.

It reaches for me, its eyes wide.

I trip over my feet and fall backward, catching myself painfully with my elbows on the floor. I try to scramble away from the thing, but my boots can’t find purchase in the gory muck.

“Ami,” the thing says, a keening, pleading sound.

It’s Mahdi’s voice.

There’s not enough breath in my lungs, not enough strength in me to reply. To tell it that it doesn’t exist, to leave me the fuck alone. It is not real.

But even as I force myself to my feet, the red-orange light refracting off my tears and confusing my vision, I don’t believe my own fervent thoughts. It is real. Mahdi is as real as the horror in my heart, as the blood staining my jumpsuit.

I can’t stay here in this corridor of blood. I know that I have to get away. And I’m still certain that if I run far enough, I’ll find a way out. I don’t know if I’m racing toward the docking bay or deeper inside the ship, but I can’t stay where I am. Because the body is behind me, slithering through the thick tissue of the walls. And then another thing joins it in my blurry periphery. Another body? A figment? They follow me as I run, as I move through the vessel toward the heart of every terror that has woken me in the night and left me gagging on dread.

“Ami.” It’s Lily’s voice.

“Ami, wait,” says Vasilissa.

They are all here with me, my crew. These horrible ghoulish bodies, dragging themselves along the walls, the ceiling above me. I sob, a sharp and painful act, my lungs on the verge of giving out. What if I let them have me? Me, who survived when they didn’t? What if I let them exact whatever revenge they think I deserve?

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

My bones vibrate with the sound. It’s embedded in me now. A parasite, unseen, clinging to my nerves. Holding my heart in a web of forceful thread.

Ami. Where do you think you’ll go now?

I skid to a sudden halt. Before me lies a sanguine wall. There’s nowhere to go from here but back the way I came. And behind me, I hear the slithering, juddering movements of my crew, their muffled murmurs, their cajoling.

But wait — there’s a door. It’s black, devoid of light, as if the night has carved itself a space in the wall.

Go inside. Find what you’ve been looking for.

“Why did you leave us?” Lily’s voice is thick behind me, and I spin to face her, this human-shaped thing rising up from the ichor-thick floor. Sticky tendrils coat her hair and body, filaments of living matter, as if she’s being born from the corridor itself.

“I didn’t,” I croak, backing away. “You died in stasis.”

Lily’s face is as I remember it on Pioneer, gaunt, deathly pale, but blood-spattered and draped with gory webbing, clots of dark crimson clinging to her forehead, her cheeks. She reaches for me, and I stumble backward.

“Ami,” she says. Thick bubbles of blood ooze from the corner of her mouth. “I trusted you. I loved you. But the others saw what I didn’t. They left bits of themselves for you to find. They knew you better than me.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I protest, shrill, and as I move away from Lily, my back hits something solid. The black door. I’m shaking, stricken, terror clotting in my throat. She’s going to kill me. She’s going to wrap her gore-wet hands around my throat and drag me down, down into the corridor’s bloody tissue until we’re all submerged, drowned, digested by the ship.

Lily’s eyes flash with madness. “You did this to me.” Her voice is a roiling, painful hatred. “You did this to me.”

She lunges, just as I reach behind me and push on the door. It falls open, and I am falling too, into the blackness beyond.