Case File #137: David Surfaces
Tales from the Bureau
A sound from the doorway.
Small. Higher frequency.
“Daddy?”
He was blind.
No, that wasn’t right. It was dark. But he had started to make out blurry shadows moving ahead in the dark.
He couldn’t move. He was covered in something wet and oily that felt like ropes. They slithered around his arms and legs and coiled tightly around his neck. They pulled together, constricted, then relaxed and constricted again.
His head was fixed, facing forward.
Something sticky and deep had settled around it. It covered the sides of his face and his ears.
When he heard It trying to breathe… No, when he heard himself trying to breathe it sounded muffled, like he was hearing from underwater.
(It was trying to breathe)
Was he breathing?
No. Something was forcing it. He could feel the rhythmic squeezing. He could feel the tendrils wrapping his lungs and massaging them. He could feel them… expanding... contracting... The air moving in and out.
He was moving.
His hand was moving.
He could feel it. Feel the hand. Feel its five fingers and the palm and the wrist and the weight of the arm attached to it. It just wasn’t his.
Except it was.
He tried to stop moving. Nothing.
It felt like a dream. It felt like one of those dreams where you were trying to run but your legs wouldn’t move.
But this was different.
It was his hand. He could feel it. He could feel the fingers opening and closing. He could feel the wrist rotating. He just wasn’t the one doing it.
The movement was precise and deliberate, but it belonged to someone else.
Something else.
He tried to scream.
The sound didn’t reach his throat. It collapsed somewhere along the way, swallowed up by the warm, wet pressure that surrounded what was left of him.
(What was left of him)
He didn’t understand that yet. Not fully. The thought was there, a shape in the dark, of something large and terrible waiting for him to look at it directly. But his mind kept sliding off it the way your eyes slid off something you didn’t want to see.
His body turned.
He felt it happen. The whole structure pivoting, balance shifting, weight transferring from one foot to the other.
The living room swept past in a blur of shapes and color. The television. The lamp. The photographs on the wall. His body stopped and stared at one picture in particular: a family photo taken last summer in the backyard.
(Karen…)
“Karr-en”, David’s body mouthed. It paused. Tried again. “Karen.”
“My wife”, David’s body said. It was more confident this time.
(No…)
“Nicky.” The thing nodded David’s head. There was a slight pause, and then David’s finger began tracing the last figure in the photo. The girl. “Samantha.”
David remembered. He could still feel Karen’s hands resting lightly on his shoulders. The cool breeze moving through leaves, shifting their dappled shadows around his face. School had ended and Sam and Nick were out of school. Karen’s mother had come to visit. She’d taken the photo.
It was… listening. Paying attention.
He recoiled.
Tried to. Couldn’t. There was nowhere to recoil to.
He couldn’t get his bearings. He couldn’t tell where he ended and this other thing began. Was it inside him? Or was he inside it?
He couldn’t tell.
Something dense and warm had settled into his abdomen, displacing his organs, causing a pressure that made him want to vomit.
He could feel it growing. Expanding. Tendrils reaching out from its spongy, central mass like roots from a pit. Threading in and between his ribs, coiling around his spine, reaching upward and pressing through the space at the base of his skull and into his head.
What had happened?
He couldn’t remember clearly. He knew he’d been on the couch.
Karen was out of town. Gone to visit her mother. He’d put the kids to bed and stayed up a little too late waiting for her to call; let him know she’d made it. He’d had a few drinks and fell asleep watching TV.
Then… something happened. What?
And then? Nothing. This. This dark. This pressure. His body moving without him. And something was here. With him. Beside him. Inside him.
The thing was curiously rifling through his memories. Tasting them.
David was still trying to assemble the meaning of it inside his head when he realized his body was no longer moving.
The thing was talking again. It was practicing.
David’s mouth was opening and closing. Sounds were coming out. Wet, formless, gradually sharpening into something that approached English. The thing was using his voice. It was testing it. It was determining how it worked.
“Ahh.”
His voice. His throat. His tongue shaping sounds that he had not chosen to make.
“Heh. Hoh.”
He listened to himself being learned.
It was still too unreal. The horror of it hadn’t connected. It was like it was happening to someone else. He was only a passive observer. And then…
His body stiffened.
The thing had stopped practicing and had turned to face the small figure that had opened the bedroom door and come inside.
A small, sleepy voice.
“Daddy?”
The dark ignited.
Every circuit. Every thread. They all fired at once. Not a thought. Not a plan. The purest impulse a human body can produce.
(Samantha)
His daughter was in the room.
His daughter was in the room and something was inside him and his body was not his own. It was turning toward her now. Turning toward the sound of her voice. David understood. In a single, annihilating instant, he knew what had happened and what it meant.
His daughter was standing inside the doorway.
She rubbed her eyes and stared up into the thing’s face. The face of the thing that had cut him open and crawled inside.
The thing that was wearing her father.
CASE FILE #137
Observation Log — Identity ConflictHost consciousness remains present under sustained motor suppression.
Secondary system exhibits continuous access to host memory structures.
Linguistic output demonstrates rapid improvement in accuracy and context.
No evidence of shared control or cooperative signaling.
Separation between host identity and system function cannot be established.
End of Installment Four — David Surfaces
Next: The Hollowing
Ugh… David’s possession is unnerving! He needs help!!! Are you going to have a priest perform an exorcism aimed at permanent expulsion before David is consumed by this mysterious being?
Love this.