Restless

Wood Side Apartments: Vagina Dentata

Eventually Jenny leaves the business district and passes into a residential area, but it doesn’t look any better. Now the weather has turned cold, with fog starting to move in. She doesn’t remember weather like this the last time she’d been here. Chain-link fence blocks her way into most of the buildings, and she has no reason to believe anyone is in them anyway. But then as she passes a sign that says “Wood Side Apartments” she hears a sound like a child laughing. Do teenagers come here to break into places and do all the shit they like to do? But the voice sounds even younger than that.

There is a break in the fence here, and Jenny goes through it. The main door of the apartment complex opens easily. She can’t hear the voice anymore, and looking at the place there is no way she can picture a family living here, even a desperate one. It’s full of filth and graffiti and smells like graveyard dirt. But then does that mean there is some child lost in here alone? Jenny keeps going, trying doors that don’t open and listening for the sound again. On the second floor she sees that the hallway is blocked by a set of bars like in a prison. That makes no sense, but neither does anything else anymore. And then behind the bars, as she squints into the darkness, she sees it – a child.

“Who are you?” she asks. “Are you all right?”

It’s a boy, and he just laughs at her. And she is certain it is her he is laughing at, because he is looking right into her eyes. This child doesn’t look homeless, and he doesn’t look upset or lost either. He is wearing clean clothes and has a decent haircut under a baseball cap.

“Who are you?” she yells, grabbing the bars. “What happened in this place?”

“Why are you standing over there?” the kid asks, as if he doesn’t even see the bars. “And what do you mean, what happened here?”

The boy is crazy, or has something else wrong with his mind, Jenny decides. He probably wandered off from some kind of home and now he needs help. But she can’t even reach him, and then he laughs and runs off down the hall into the darkness. She puts her face in her hands. “I can’t take this anymore. I don’t even know what’s happening.”

But then she hears a sound like a thump and a scrape, and takes her hands away from her face. Something else is standing behind the bars, and it isn’t a kid. It isn’t a grey monster, either. This thing is a woman.

“Are you—“ Jenny breaks off when she absorbs the whole picture. The woman-thing has a huge triangular helmet over her head, and is carrying an enormous knife. It doesn’t have ordinary clothes on, just an apron covered with dark stains. Did this thing hurt that kid? But Jenny didn’t hear a scream.

It faces her silently and Jenny realizes that it holds no answers, only serious danger. She turns around, runs to the stairwell door, but it doesn’t open. Heading down a different hallway instead, she finds another set of stairs, but when she goes down she can’t open the door at the bottom. Jenny almost panics. There is no getting out of this place. She starts running almost blindly now, up stairs and down them, past doors that won’t open and through doors that shows only empty apartments full of rusty appliances and no way out.

Finally she opens another random door – Room 307. She doesn’t even know where she is anymore, or what she expects to find. When she goes further inside she hears some kind of sick fleshy sound and sees a glint of metal in the darkness. Panicking again when she realizes she isn’t alone, she runs into a closet. She looks out through the slats of the door and sees it – the helmeted woman. And the apron is gone; Jenny can see its white ass and large breasts as it bends over the kitchen counter. But there is another thing moving on the counter, too. It looks almost like a man, with a muscular pair of legs and a man’s chest. But it’s not human, it’s headless like a mannequin. Yet it isn’t motionless and it isn’t dead either. It is squirming and writhing, and the helmeted monster is straddling it and moving.

Jenny gags when she realizes what she’s watching. The monster who she faced through the bars is fucking that man-thing… except the thing doesn’t even want it; it’s trying to get away. As the triangular helmet moves and the monster beneath it growls, blood oozes from between its legs where it rides the cock of the headless man. And Jenny is certain it is the man-thing that is bleeding, and she sees its struggles weaken as the blood pours over the counter. The mannequin thing is dying, as the helmeted monster gives a groan of what sounds like lust.

Overcoming her disgust and terror as much as she can, Jenny loads the shotgun and shoots through the closet door. The creature in the pyramid whirls and stands naked before her, thighs still coated with blood. It growls, grabbing for the knife where it leans against the counter.

“I’ve got nowhere to run. I’m going to die in this closet.” Jenny struggles to reload the gun as quickly as possible. When she looks up the thing is still standing there, wearing the apron now, as if it doesn’t give a damn about shotgun shells.

“I can’t kill it, can I?”

To her shock, the monster doesn’t even open the closet door, but grabs the knife and begins to move away, dragging itself slowly. Jenny only stares, breathing shallowly, and waits until it seems to be gone. When she opens the closet door, the man-like thing is lying sprawled over the counter, its crotch a massive wound oozing blood. It seems to still be moving slightly, and Jenny can barely keep herself from vomiting. Finally she wastes two shells killing it.

Before she leaves the apartment, Jenny looks in the closet again. There had been something in there with her, some kind of clothing. It turns out to be a man’s suit, gray with pinstripes, with a vest. It is perfectly clean, unlike everything else here. There shouldn’t be anything scary about a suit, Jenny reflects to herself. Except that it’s Mitchell’s suit. He paid way too much for the damn thing, and she would recognize it anywhere.

“You really are here…” Jenny breathes. Now she can’t leave this town, not even after what she has just seen.