My senses heightened as a piercing scream drew my attention. It was so loud and so out of the blue that for a very long time I didn't realize that it was coming from Liz.
She was sitting at her desk, screaming like her throat was tearing itself apart.
Just now, we were having a meal like usual.
What happened?
My eyes shot up and down to look for an explanation, before they caught something.
It was jutting out from her thigh—a black, shiny metallic shaft. It came from under the chair, through the floor. The torn fabric of her legging was stretching and wrapping around it.
Specks of blood spattered across her tortured face and soaked into her sweater of a deeper red.
My hand was already shooting for the handle of the knife behind my back.
Once I could get a hold of the knife, I started to hack away at the black shaft from under the chair.
Blood was falling in drops next to her feet, some of it running down along the shaft that extended from under the floor.
Liz gripped the rod with both hands and tried to hold it in place as it continued to elongate, like a strand of wrought iron, with its sharp tip inching toward the ceiling.
I stabbed and slashed, chipping away at it like carving a tree bark, scratching its surface. The leg did not feel like flesh. I was digging into metal. Even this 22cm knife was not going to do anything to it.
Liz tightened her hands and wrenched violently. The leg contorted inside her grip like a wrung towel.
The leg, now writhing in soundless agony, instinctively tried to pull back. She grabbed onto it so it wouldn't budge.
She was trying to tear it apart.
Blood was now coming out of her hands. I couldn't tell who it belonged to.
She torqued one hand to twist another round, her whole body shaking due to the tremendous pressure.
The leg would not tear. She wasn't strong enough.
I dug the knife inside its flesh between her two hands and started sawing frantically back and forth.
A groove was forming as the blade sank deeper.
The leg finally split in half as the upper section snapped off like a bamboo tree.
The other end violently jerked back and sank under the floor again.
With her bloodied hands shaking, Liz climbed out of her chair and crawled to the other side of the room.
There was no hole in the chair or on the brick tiles.
We huddled in the corner. She picked up one of the knives by the wall and held it in front of her, the tip pointing at the desk where she'd been sitting.
I looked at the wound on her thigh.
"It's okay, it's okay," she said. "Listen." Her eyes spread so far apart that I could see the shallow pockets behind her bottom eyelids.
I tried to breathe as quietly as I could. We were waiting for it to come back.
The hours ahead would be excruciating.
While her whole body was trembling due to the pain and the cold, her breathing was regular.
It was almost as if she wasn't breathing.
Her eyes were fixed on the floor, completely absorbed in the moment.
A small part of me was afraid that she was losing her mind.
I kept looking at my feet and the wall behind me, trying not to lean against the cold surface. My heart was beating madly in my chest. Around this time I would start imagining things. My mind would flash these images where something would come out of my foot or my chest.
A black, metallic spear.
I wanted to rush through the front door and race across the fields. It was an impulse to flee, to vanish from the face of the Earth.
The feeling had always stuck with me in these encounters, even after all this time. I quietly laughed to myself. What a funny thought. There was nowhere else to go.
Her injuries—
I turned to Liz again.
"It's fine. I'm fine." Her voice was shaky. She was looking far out the distance, clutching the knife with so much force her knuckles visibly popped out of her hand.
"I'm fine," she said again, this time more softly.
You're bleeding, I told her while getting up to retrieve the gauze and disinfectant, before she gripped me by the wrist.
I turned my head back to see her shaking her head.
I'm fine, she insisted.
We sat and listened, pinning our ears back for the slightest sound that would signal their presence.
We waited for the monster to rear its ugly head.
We waited.
We waited until sunrise.
The cold light peeked through the boarded windows and the thin slits lining the contours of the closed entrance.
Liz sat by my side, her body rigid, the knife still clenched tight in her hand.
Even after many hours, she still had that same intense look on her.
The fresh blood on her sweater had dried. Every piece of clothing she owned had already been dyed fully from top to bottom with her own blood. Her thigh had fully healed, the torn fabric exposing her skin where a bloody puncture had been previously.
When she noticed my gaze, she looked back at me.
"I'm okay," she said. "I'm okay. I'm fine. Stop looking at me like that."
I swore at myself in my own head.