Back in college, I worked for a chain of what my mom called “playhouse pizza parlors.” I’m not sure if that’s the technical term, but it’s apt descriptor for neon wonderlands of pizza buffets, arcade games, towering tube slides, and crowded prize counters.
Shorty after graduation, I promoted to manager and transferred to an older restaurant. I remember the first time I saw it like it was yesterday. An oversized boxy building with peeling paint and dirty windows stood sentry in a half-empty parking lot. I steered my car over the buckled asphalt and parked at the rear of the building.
The day was oppressively humid; exiting the car felt like stepping into a damp, hot tube. I could taste the air: warm and wet, flavored with car exhaust and smoke from the grassfire burning down south.
Inside didn’t feel much better. Not as hot, thanks to the swamp coolers, but every bit as damp. The drab dining area contrasted sharply against the bright whirl of the indoor playground beyond.
Even though I’d never met my staff members before, I knew all of them. Lanky teenage boys. College girls with sporty ponytails and unusually white teeth. The retiree working for pocket change and friendship. The no-nonsense assistant manager who would be either my greatest ally or my worst enemy.
But one girl piqued my curiosity.
Her hair caught my eye first: pale curtains reflecting the multicolored lights of the game room. I got the impression that she would have been nervous if she hadn’t looked so tired. She could have been nineteen or thirty-nine, with a fine-featured face dominated by the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.
I felt something when I saw her. Not that electric energy people like to talk about, not even attraction in the purest sense of the word. But something strong. Something that, under certain circumstances, could be beautiful or rotten.
Her name was Marjory.
Marjory had a beautiful smile that didn’t quite mask the distrust beneath. She worked the prize counter, trading stuffed animals and cheap plastic toys for reams of paper tickets. She played the piano every Sunday at church. The pizza parlor was her second job. Her first was at a local elementary school, where she helped with music and theatre classes. She was an amateur seamstress who designed costumes for school shows and made Halloween costumes for kids who couldn’t afford to buy one.
“That’s really sweet of you,” I said.
For just an instant, Marjory’s smile touched her eyes. She held my gaze for a giddy moment.
Then she closed up. I could see it, every bit as clear as doors swinging shut. That warm, shining moment withered and died.
She barely spoke to me for days. It drove me crazy even though it shouldn’t have. After all, she was a stranger. Worse, she was my employee. She didn’t want to open up. She didn’t want to be my friend.
But by the end of the month, I’d have given just about anything for one of her bright-eyed smiles.
One night toward the end of September, she called me at home. I’ll never forget her voice. Small and nervous, almost shaky. Like she was afraid I’d yell at her. “I’m sorry to bother you. Jeff and Tasha called in sick.” Her words echoed over the phone line, watery and distant, nearly drowned by music and laughter in the background. “Caleb left early. And Melissa had to go home. I’m working alone. It’s been really busy and I don’t think I can…” She trailed off miserably, small voice nearly lost in the hubbub.
“I’ll be there soon,” I told her.
t was the worst closing shift I ever had.
Three birthday parties and fifty other customers in the dining area, not counting the nightmare in the playground. A little girl froze in terror at the top of the biggest slide. It took her mother and I forty-five minutes to coax her down the ladder. One of the coin changers jammed, and an unfortunate kindergartener started a merry-go-round of vomit in the ball pit. Dishes piled up, the pizza buffet ran out twice, and a couple of teenagers decided to tip over a pinball machine.
The last customers finally trickled out over an hour after closing.
I worked as hard and fast as I could, but Marjory still did at least double the work. Even so, we were there for hours.
After I’d swept and mopped the floors, restocked the prize counter, and powered down the machines, I realized Marjory was gone. I scanned the floor – eerie and dim, crowded with the blank glass panels of unplugged machines – but caught no sight of her.
I searched the dining area, the bathrooms, and the kitchen. Clean, gleaming, and empty.
My stomach lurched. Had she cut out early? Crept home on the sly while I was closing up for her like a moron?
Feeling dispirited and almost leaden, I leaned against a steel counter.
And I heard voices. Faint, thin, and muffled, but unmistakable.
I followed the sound to the walk-in freezer. It was definitely Marjory; by this point, I’d recognize her voice anywhere.
“He won’t believe it was overtime.” Fear laced her words, sure and insidious as poison. “He’s going to be so angry. I don’t…I don’t know what to do.”
A low, crooning string of gibberish followed, like a song whispered by a madman.
My skin began to crawl.
“Shut up,” Marjory moaned. The voice continued, rising like a cold wind. “For once, please, just listen like you promised and shut up.”
More nonsense syllables, strung together in a broken melody. My head suddenly felt light. Everything around me looked jagged and bright, verging on unreal.
“I won’t let you. Never again.” Her voice broke. “I should have known.”
More of that broken, nonsensical melody.
Marjory laughed miserably. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. That isn’t why I wanted you here. Please just -” She broke off suddenly. The mad little melody continued, broken and almost inhuman.
Then Marjory screamed.
The sound coursed through me like an electric pulse, shattering my paralysis. I barged into the freezer. Marjory stared from the corner, wide-eyed and openmouthed.
And she wasn’t alone.
A body – dull white like dead fish, jagged and bony with too many joints – clung to her back. Round black eyes glittered over a lipless slash of a mouth.
It shifted weirdly and broke apart, unraveling like threads pulled from a sweater. Thinner and longer they became, glimmering like moonlight made solid. Then they reared up like conjoined cobras and slid into her mouth.
When the last rope of light disappeared behind her lips, Marjory spun around and threw up.
“What was that?” My voice shook wildly, issuing without any conscious effort on my part. I felt sick, possessed with the whirling, overbright dizziness of a fever. “Marjory? What was that?”
“It comes out when I’m afraid,” she answered.
“But what is it? What is it?”
“Something bad.” If I’d been in my right mind, her tone probably would have made me angry; she spoke as if to a child. “Something I have to control, even when I’m scared.”
“But what is it? What is it?”
“When I was a little kid, a little kid,” she said, “I had a cousin. He tried to hurt me. I was so scared. I can’t even…” She trailed off and covered her mouth. Her shoulders shook.
When she spoke again, her voice was almost too soft to hear.
“The thing you saw. It came out of me. Out of my pores. And it shoved that boy into a river. When he tried to climb out, it held him under until he drowned.”
“I don’t understand.” This wasn’t fair. I was barely listening, and I knew it. But it was better to babble than to hear something I didn’t want to comprehend. “I don’t understand, Marjory.”
“When I’m afraid, it comes out. If I don’t control it…if I don’t keep it jammed down…it kills what scares me. I have to control it. It’s my burden. My demon. And I know you’re not religious, but that’s what it is. A very real, very bloodthirsty demon that pretends to help, but only kills. I let it out anyway sometimes, when I’m weak.” She extended an arm and pulled her sleeve back, revealing a neat ladder of half-healed cuts and brutal scars. “This is what I do to punish myself. To remind myself that I can’t be weak.”
She watched me for what felt like a long time. I stared back at her uncomprehendingly, waiting for that white monstrosity to rise from her skin like mist and coalesce into that hideous form.
It didn’t.
After a while, Marjory cleaned up her own vomit while I stood there, crying. Then she walked me to my car. The warm night air carried the fresh, wild promise of a thunderstorm. It cleared my head as effectively as a cold shower. I drew a deep breath and looked up, focusing on the deep violet clouds quilting the sky.
“Good night,” she told me. “Don’t be scared.”
I drove away without a word as rain began to fall.
Only when I was home, shivering on my couch and fighting back tears, did I wonder what Marjory was afraid of.
Marjory came in the next day caked with so much makeup that she looked like an aging ventriloquist dummy. The thick layers and skillful contouring weren’t nearly enough to hide her swollen jaw.
We didn’t speak for weeks. The mutual silence hurt me in ways I didn’t understand, ways that made me feel frustrated and stupid.
That changed on a slow, rainy evening in mid-October.
Marjory practically thrummed with anxiety. I don’t think she so much as looked at me the entire shift. Whenever I came too close, she skittered away and pretended to survey the rows of stuffed animals.
I knew something was coming, but not what. I kept thinking of that glimmering monstrosity, breaking into pieces and forcing its way down her throat. And then I thought of her swollen, makeup-caked face.
Finally, she cleared her throat. I looked up sharply. She was staring at the stuffed animals again. Neon lights reflected off her white blonde hair, ethereal and lovely. When she spoke, I had to strain to hear her. “I have a question. It’s a weird one. I’m sorry.”
I waited.
“I make costumes. Mostly for school plays and kids who can’t afford them at Halloween.”
“I remember,” I said. “You told me before.”
She took a deep, shuddery breath. “I’ve been making a bunch. There are too many to fit in my apartment. My boyfriend –”
My heart plunged to my feet. But why? I already knew. I’d known the moment she came into work with concealer-caked black eyes.
“- doesn’t like them. At all. But it’s almost Halloween, and I made a lot of promises to a lot of kids. So I wanted to ask, can I store them here? Maybe in the break room?”
Sure, I wanted to say, but only if you tell me what the hell is going on. I felt betrayed, somehow. I’d been with her when she was afraid. I’d seen her secret, that white horror crawling into her body. I had no choice but to see it. I’d been scarred by it.
And she wouldn’t even acknowledge it.
“Sure,” I said. “If you want, you can use my office.”
She finally looked at me, so obviously shocked it would have been funny under other circumstances.
Then her face broke into that smile. The wide, sincere one that touched her eyes and made them glow.
And for a minute or two, I didn’t care about throat demons or abusive boyfriends.
Marjory brought a trunkload of costumes on her very next shift. I helped her hang them in my office. Most of them were, indeed, for children: bumblebees and fairy princesses, superheroes and zoo animals. Detailed and well-made, but not awe-inspiring.
One piece, however, literally took my breath away.
It was a pair of breathtakingly intricate wings. They were enormous, nearly as long as I was tall. Each meticulously lacquered feather practically glowed: emerald and gold, silver and ruby, diamond and sapphire. A dozen colors, shimmering like gemstones and precious metals. The sheer amount of work it must have taken left me dumbstruck.
“Lucky kid,” I finally said.
She smiled nervously. “These are mine. The staff get to dress up, too, and I thought…”
I waited for words that never came. But that was typical. Marjory always trailed off. Like her words weren’t worth remembering. Like no one would listen to them anyway.
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t true. That I couldn’t get enough of them. Or of her.
But I didn’t know how, so I didn’t try.
The next day, she asked permission to enter my office. “I need to take the wings home tonight. Just to color-match.” She smiled anxiously. “I’m making a dress to go with them.”
Visions of Marjory in a slinky silver dress and glimmering angel wings danced through my head. I banished them as well as I could. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to ask. Go in whenever you want.”
She took them home. I expected her to come in for her shift the next day, radiant and maybe even excited enough to talk to me about her dress.
But she didn’t come into work for three days.
The other workers exchanged glances and frightened whispers. Their eyes followed me wherever I went, anxious and glittering.
Finally I’d had enough. I went to the assistant manager and asked bluntly, “Do you want me to call the police?”
“We tried before,” was her terse response. “But the boyfriend’s a cop.”
It was like I’d been punched. I looked at her helplessly and saw my own fear reflected back at me. “Shouldn’t we at least try?”
“She got in trouble for it last time.”
I went to my office and pulled up Marjory’s information. I read and reread her address, committing it to memory. But I didn’t go.
I didn’t sleep that night.
Marjory came into work the next day.
She approached the building, cradling the wings in her arms. My heart leapt to my throat. I bolted out to meet her, grinning ear to ear.
She didn’t smile back.
Confused, I looked down at the wings and gasped.
Shredded in places, shattered in others, and mended with garbage; it looked like someone had hot-glued beer cans, chip bags, and foil wrappers to the remaining feathers.
“What happened?” I whispered.
Marjory pushed past me without answering.
I found her a little while later, standing at the prize counter. She stiffened as I approached, but didn’t look at me.
“What happened?” I repeated.
“I told you. My boyfriend doesn’t like costumes.” Marjory absently tucked her hair behind her ears, revealing her neck in the process. There, stark as mud against her pale skin, were bruises clustered around a deep, half-healed cut.
I didn’t know what to do.
The playground’s mad swirl of lights played across her face: pink and blue, sun yellow and lime green. She looked very young just then, like an unusually tall and particularly exhausted child.
“Are you…are you okay?” I asked nervously.
She finally looked at me. There was nothing childish or bright in her eyes now. “Yes,” she said. Then she swept her hair back over her shoulders, obscuring the bruises, and smiled.
Helplessness exploded in my chest, heavy as lead. “If you need help, I’m always here.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
“Thank you,” she repeated.
I left, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t want her to see me cry.
That night I found Marjory’s wings in the dumpster, crushed under pile of bulging trash bags.
The children’s costumes steadily trickled out of my office as Marjory delivered them to their owners in time for Halloween.
Now, Halloween used to be one of the busiest nights. A combination of planned parties, teenagers, sugar-high trick or treaters, and the usual dinner crowd – not to mention the holiday spirit – created a madhouse.
Everyone on staff was scheduled. Everyone came in except Marjory.
I was terrified for her, but I made excuses. I couldn’t leave in the middle of the rush; I was the manager, for God’s sake. Besides, Marjory didn’t want my help. She didn’t want anyone’s help. She never asked for it.
Unbidden, an image of that horrifying monster bloomed in my mind’s eye.
She had all the help she needed, if she needed any help at all.
But that feeling wouldn’t go away. I wasn’t the only one who felt it, either; I caught my staff exchanging frightened looks throughout the night.
The uneasiness persisted through the entire shift and beyond. I was literally sick with it; nausea plagued me on my drive home, and I was ready to throw up by the time I opened my front door.
As if on cue, the phone rang.
Somehow, I knew who it was before I even picked up. “Hello?”
“Help me,” Marjory whispered, in a tiny, terrible voice I could barely hear. “Please. I tried the cops, they won’t – they said I was a nuisance caller because he – oh no – oh no, oh my God –”
She sobbed. I heard a commotion on the other end, a series of thumps and thuds and a shattering crash.
Under normal circumstances, her apartment was twenty minutes away from my apartment. I got there in five.
The front door wasn’t locked. I burst in, struggling to take in the carnage around me. Overturned furniture, shattered glass, and blood, so much blood – spattered on the walls, puddles soaking into the carpet, plumes of scarlet splashed across the ceiling like an abstract masterpiece.
And there, crumpled in the corner –
I tried to run to her, but I couldn’t move forward. I only moved down. Sinking. I was sinking; my knees had given out.
A man kneeled by her smashed and broken body, watching her with horrifically wide eyes. He would have been handsome and clean cut, were in not for the blood and viscera clinging to his skin. He didn’t even notice me. Or if he did, he didn’t care.
I stared at Marjory uncomprehendingly, trying to make sense of it even as part of me tried to forget it. Her eyes alone were intact: grassy green, bright as ever over the ruined cavern of her face.
Then she lurched.
I sobbed, equal parts horrified and overjoyed.
Her torso jerked upward. A series of deep, harsh pops reached my ears. She jerked again and twisted forward. Her stomach strained upward, like a sped-up pregnancy. She lurched again, dragging herself belly-first. Then she split open.
And I saw feathers.
Silver and gold and ruby and emerald and diamond and sapphire, and more: jagged aluminum and multicolored foil, candy wrappers and plastic bottles. Garbage. The garbage her boyfriend used to ruin her costume wings, transformed into beautiful feathers.
The monster tore out of her, clawing the blood-soaked carpet to shreds. Marjory’s corpse clung to its feet, a battered and hideous cocoon. With an earsplitting and strangely musical shriek, it kicked her off and stood.
It was beautiful and horrendous, insectile and mammalian, angelic and demonic. Enormous eyes – one clear grassy green, the other black, glittering with cloudy formations like stars – fell upon the wide-eyed man. Then its mouth opened – a quivering black hole, an endless void – and screamed.
I heard it for only a second before it cut out, leaving thick silence in its wake. But that made no sense; its mouth was open, its throat was bulging, and it was screaming. I struggled to understand what as happening, barely aware that something hot and wet was flooding my ear canal.
Only when blood streamed from my ears and down my face did I understand.
The monstrosity launched itself at Marjory’s weeping boyfriend and tore him to pieces. Part of his scalp – wet, floppy, covered in fine yellow hair – fell across my hand. It felt like a wet rubber glove.
When it finished with him, the creature turned to me.
I stared back at it, mesmerized by its bright green eye.
It flew at me, face twisted in a rictus of wild fury. Its wings were beautiful: wide and ethereal, rich gemstone hues glowing alongside cruel shards of metal.
The monster drew level with my face, alight with rage, mouth open in its endless scream. Even its eyes were angry. Worse than angry; that beautiful green eye was full of hate.
Then it drew away, folding in on itself in ways that made me sick, and shot out the open door.
I don’t remember anything else. Not the police, not the ambulance, not the hospital.
Marjory’s boyfriend was convicted for her murder. I came close – the prevailing theory was that he and I had planned it together – but ultimately escaped charges.
I left town the moment I could.
Most of the time, I tell myself I’m crazy. That I made it up.
But I know better.
I don’t know if I could have saved her – the police, after all, wrote her off as a nuisance caller – but I could have done better.
If I had, she wouldn’t have hated me at the end. I know she did. I know because of the way that monster – her protector, her demon, her remainder – stared at me. That beautiful green eye burned with rage. She wanted to kill me. I wish she had.
If I had done better – if I had not failed her – maybe I’d feel differently. Maybe I’d even be with her, wherever and whatever she is. Or maybe I’d just be dead.
Either way, I feel like I’d be better off.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9jh120/i_knew_a_girl_who_had_beautiful_wings/
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