As I shuffled along I saw a flickering orange light around an upcoming corner. Nearly there, then, I thought, and the smell suddenly hit me in a staggering gust. Carnal, somehow disgusting and yet I felt an unexpected stirring in my pants. My mouth had gone dry.
When I turned the corner I was surprised to see the room filled with burning candles. At their center, lit ominously by their shuddering glow, was a large porcelain bathtub.
I had stopped when I entered, surprised first by the number of candles, but I found myself unable to move when one long, slender leg emerged from the tub, pointing prettily towards the ceiling.
The skin on this leg was mottled, scaly. Only the sole of the foot was smooth, giving it a strangely virginal look. It wasn’t green, though that was a small comfort.
The leg disappeared back into the tub and two arms slid slowly out, resting on either side. The skin of the arms were just as spoilt as the skin had been on the leg; the fingers began to drum along the porcelain and I saw their nails were long, sharp. An unsettling tap-tap-tapping noise filled the room.
I realized I’d been holding my breath and took in a great, gasping gulp of air. That was a mistake; I nearly gagged on the smell.
The thing in the tub made a low, rumbling sound in the back of its throat. I felt for an insane moment that it was calling to me.
My feet felt like they were filled with lead but I took one step forward, then another. I forced myself to move until I was standing at the center of the room, facing the bathtub and the thing inside.
It turned its head towards me.
I tried to scream. I tried to scream and nothing came out because it had fixed me with its gaze and I was frozen like a mouse cornered by a rattlesnake.
The skin on its face was as mottled and destroyed as I’d seen on its limbs; webs of damaged tissue ran along the cheeks, forehead, jaw like hot wax had been poured there. Where the nose should’ve been were two sunken slits like the holes in a skull on display in a science classroom. Its long hair was plaited in a strangely elegant braid that rested on one shoulder; I couldn’t tell the color, the candles gave the whole room an alien orange glow, turning everything into a smoldering sort of amber. The tops of its breasts swelled above the murky water in twisted mimicry of a pin-up girl posing in a bubble bath. I was struck by its contradiction, a thing of both revulsion and raw sensuality.
Then it smiled at me.
When it did, its lips split into an impossibly wide grin; it was so terrifying, so awful to behold that it took me a moment to realize the flesh there had, at one point, been slit beyond the normal reach of a human smile. The corners of its mouth had the shiny-smooth texture of healed-over skin and now the grin could extend almost to its misshapen ears.
Its teeth had been filed to sharp points.
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