Footsteps of Spring

立春 [7] / [7]

Her expression became distorted, her eyes sparkled with a furious glint, and her body started to contort and change form. And a hideous form it was―her skin became sallow, began to peel, bubble, and then started to fall from her face, from her hands, until she resembled a corpse. The smell got stronger and stronger.

His hand clutching the glass shaked violently. He didn't want to drink. But the way Cynthia looked at him, an evil, widening grin both terrible and alluring, beautiful and grotesque, made him helpless, as if he were a man possessed by demons of the past beckoning him towards some future oblivion.

Shaking hands moved the glass to his own lips. He drank the substance in the glass. Because his hands shook so much, some spilled from his mouth.

When he finished drinking, Cynthia laughed in maniacal triumph; an eerie chuckle devolving into maddening hysterics, so well beyond the point of lunacy, that he felt he himself going mad, with his ear drums to the point of bursting from shrill cackles that rose to a deafening crescendo.

Alexander was struck with terror, he never saw her like this. The bend of her unworldly body twisted into impossible shapes and contortions.

He just looked at her, his body becoming rigid, like a human doll. Soon he couldn't move, he couldn't feel, he could barely breathe; he was as a prisoner in his own body.

'Poison,' he managed to utter before he could no longer speak. She moved, snakelike, to face Alexander, looking at him straight in the eye. The moment their eyes met in the air, he screamed in abject horror, but no sound could escape him.

It wasn't Cynthia's face. It was the mummy that he found in Sarah's house. His desperate screams filled the room, and his own head . . .