Short Story / Palomino Incubus

     Morgan’s hands worked at the taped edges of the box marked express. The telephone rested between her ear and shoulder. The man’s voice was distant as she fumbled the scissors under the cardboard.
     “It’s, sort of, a modest place,” he said. “Doesn’t look like much from the outside.”
     “Oh?” she said, excited by the sight of bubble wrap and clear packaging.
     “It’s two stories but not many windows. The building’s kind of narrow, you understand. Not more than eight feet across anywhere in the apartment.”
     “Really.” Her eyes glazed as she pulled her prize from its plastic confines of delivery. It was a half ounce of pure silver cast into the shape of a galloping palomino. The man on the phone was talking about square footage and shelf space. He mentioned something about rent and Morgan snapped back into the conversation.
     “How much did you say, Mister Ford?”
     “$500 and that includes utilities.”
     “$500 with a lease?”
     “Yeah.”
     “In downtown?”
     “Yeah, right next to the city park and…”
     “I’ll take it.”
     “Don’t you want to come by and…?”
     “No, no. It sounds great. When can we sign the paperwork?”

      Morgan met him the next afternoon with five boxes in the back of her car, ready to move in. The building was snug between two brick buildings. The electrical wires and plumbing ran exposed on the inside walls, painted white to help them blend. When she drove a nail to hang a picture, she hit brick. The ground level was mostly crowded by stairs. The upper level was simply crowded.
     All of Morgan’s possession fit into a total of seventeen boxes, all of which took only a day to move, and all of which contained horses. Appaloosa mugs, Thoroughbred bath towels, fourteen different T-shirts depicting twelve different breads. Belgians, Barbs, Toris, Mongolians, and of course Morgans, her namesakes. She was 32 and she’d been collecting for 20 years, though she had never learned to ride. As a child she had dreamed of wrapping her arms around the neck of an Appaloosa while ridding bareback. In that moment, she hadn’t been afflicted by the constant muscle craps that plagued her waking moments. She learned to live in those moments, eyes closed, in a world apart, in the land of REM.
     It took her only a few days to find places for her treasures to gather dust. A few days later, things started to disappear. Between the kitchen sink and the wall was a small gap. She was washing a plate when she accidentally bumped a wooden representation of a grazing Belgian. Its polished wooden face clinked against pipes as it fell. She dried her hands and searched. A half an hour later, she went back to the dishes, horseless. This was the first of the missing.
     A few days later, she cursed when she saw an empty shape of dust left by a missing unicorn in the living room. She cursed again when she saw vacancies left by the four miniature hoofs of her favorite black Thoroughbred. In a quiet act of superstition, she decided the silver Palomino would never be taken off her neck.
     She found the thief under the stairs, five weeks after she had settled into her new home, ten horses lighter. She dropped an orange while carrying a full bag of groceries up the stair. She put the bag on the steps and went to find it. What she saw there was round and close to the ground. At first she mistook it for a lump of dusty rags, clotted with oil and hair. Then it moved. She pulled her arm back with a slight scream. Rags aren’t suppose to move. They aren’t suppose to have hands with fingers and claws and they certainly aren’t suppose to roll oranges back to their owners. She grabbed the fruit and ran to the upper level.
     She called the landlord and then the pest control. Both men saw nothing but dust and grime in that stairwell. The exterminator told her that sometimes these things can look like critters in the dark, and he gave her rat traps and told her what to do if any unfortunate soul made it into one. He also gave her a large capacity live animal trap, gave it to her for the modest price of fifty dollars.

     She set it up in the kitchen with an orange slice on the spring board.
She walked around the wire cage for the better part of two weeks. The slice of fruit shriveled and ended up in the bottom of the trash. A day or so later, she had a wild idea to put a plastic quarter horse in the cage instead of food. That night, she woke to metal clanking and shaking over linoleum.
The upstairs of this small apartment had no divider walls other then for the bathroom. From her bed, next to the solitary front window, she could see the cage bumping against the kitchen cabinets, the thing inside banging to get under the sink, away from its confines. It chirped and hissed like a raccoon skunk or squirrel cat. Dark ashen mats of hair caught on wire ends and danced in the half light. The thing began to scream, a low panicked sound that made Morgan’s heart pound inside her chest.
     “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full…”
     The voice was clotted and spoiled, like it was speaking around gravel.
Morgan got up from her covers, slipped on her slippers and approached the writhing caught thing. “Did you just speak?”
     “Little boy blue, little by blue…You can’t see, what you reap is what you sow.”
     Morgan knelt by the cage, an arms length away. The thing smelled like molding bread or old cheese. It’s eyes caught light and reflected green. It showed it’s teeth to her, then reached around and grabbed hold of the bait. It’s arm was spider like, a hairless protrusion with fingers that wound around the horses neck. He brought the horse to its double row of teeth and matted lips. It licked the plastic face with a black tongue .
     “Easy come, easy go.” It said and opened its mouth wide to swallow the animal in one gulp.
     “Hey!”
     “A bird in the hand.”
     “You little shit! Is that what’s happened to all my beautiful missing friends?”
     “Tastes like chicken.”
     She stood up and kicked the cage hard enough to send it crashing against a bookshelf next to the bathroom wall. It banged on the linoleum and the spring loaded door popped open. The thing inside scuttled across the floor and squeezed through the space between the stairway door and the kitchen floor, its dreaded hair trailing behind. She ran after it, flying and falling down the steps to the ground floor, but the matted mess was gone.
     She went back to the kitchen and reset the trap, this time with a stuffed representation of what could have been a Tori horse. It was little more then a child’s bed companion, and Morgan would part with it if it meant she would be rid of this little pest. She got into bed and slept the rest of the night without disruption.
     A few weeks past, and the cage accumulated dust and junk mail. Eventually, Morgan put the stuffed animal back on her bed. Nothing disappeared for days. Then, as her horses of North America clock struck two AM, she woke to a pressure on her chest and the smell of rotten milk. It was her incubus of Palominos. In the dim light that filtered in from the street, she saw the beast with it’s slithering fingers around her necklace. She grabbed its arm with both hands. She growled at it, showing her clinched teeth.
     “You can not have this.”
     It pulled and flapped against her restraining hands. She saw its fingers and wrist straighten as it leaned away from her grasp and pulled, determined to slip through her fingers as easily as it had slipped under the door. She could feel the thing’s skin begin to shrink and pull away from her palms. Then an idea came to her.
     “It’s not a moppet, and it’s not in my pocket,” she said.
     It scratch hissed at her and she could feel its skin plump in her grasp again.
     “You should have let sleeping dogs lie.” she told it as she jerked it closer her.
     It squirmed away from the words, twisting from the sound of her voice.
     “Looks like you shouldn’t have counted your chickens before they were hatched.”
     Hiss, scratch, flail.
     She sat up and extended the monster over the floor with one arm.
     “I’ve got you where I want you, and now I’m going to eat you.” she said . She wasn’t sure where this last line came from, but it seemed to do the trick.
     Writhe, screech, twitch.
     She stood up and walked the few feet into the kitchen where she flipped on a light and searched, one handed, in the cupboards for a stew pot. Finding one, she filled it with scolding water from the tap.
     “Quick as lightning.” she said and plunged it into the water, prying its fingers from the edge and slamming the lid down tight. She held the lid with her thumbs and lifted the pot to the stove.
     “Knowledge is power,” a voice tins from below the lid, “And the more you know…”
     She turned the heat off. Direct questions, spoken through metal, would be the best way to talk to this thing, she decided.
     “Why do you steal my horses?” Her voice was stern, like she was scolding a child.
     “Why ask why?”
     “No games! I’m not letting you out of this pot until you’re in my belly, so games are only going to make you die quicker. Why do you steal my horses?”
     “Delicious and nutritious. Tastes just like chicken.”
     “Bullshit.”
     “No, chicken.”
     “Why do you eat them!”
     The wet mop sighed.
     “Long ago, and far away, I grew fat on dreams. Once upon a time, my belly was always full from eating so much of what people loved. That’s what I was made to do. You are very rich, full of love for these plastic toys that you keep around. People always keep their loved ones close. You only hurt the ones you love…”
     “I was once told, that I should keep my friends close,” she said with a grin, “and eat my enemies.”
     “Wait!”
     She twisted on the heat.
     “Poisonous! Do not imbibe!”
     The electric burner began to glow.
     “Drink responsibly, call a friend, because friends don’t let friends…”
     The lid under her hand began to burn her.
     “If ingested, call poison control!
     She grabbed a towel, placed it between her hand and the pot, not wanting to let go until she could no longer hear the little creep reciting its over done tidbits of culture.
     The pot lid jumped. Morgan pushed harder on it.
The water started to simmer, then boil and there was nothing but the sound of steam escaping and early morning traffic.
     “First you procure one hairy demon,” she said in her best Julia Childs voice, “bring to a rolling boil, dice in some carrots, celery, a little parsley.” Morgan searched her cabinets for a few spices. “Um,” she mused, “What goes good with boiled monster?”
     After a few minutes, the cramped apartment started to smell like baked ham, onions, and brae cheese. She let the pot boil for an hour before she dared to lift up the lid. The water was chicken broth brown, but otherwise empty. She smelled the rolling liquid. It reminded her of a five star restaurant she had worked at once, a bouquet of olfactory delights, though the only thing that went in was the hairy monster.
     She let the water simmer until the sun started to come up. As the first rays of daylight were cursing through the streets outside, she dipped an Appaloosa mug into the water, wiped the drips off the sides of the cup, and went outside to enjoy her victory. To Morgan, the beast tasted like licorice and wild rice.
     She finished her cup, then had another and thought about what she might do with what was left. She decided that the neighbors might like a cup, so she dipped a few more cups into the liquid and went next door. They answered their doors with sleepy smiles and accepted the offered cups. They said it tasted like peppermint, anis, coffee with sugar, sweet potatoes and a sometimes like liver. Everyone said it tasted like something different. The six year old down the block said it was like strawberry short cake, her favorite desert ever.
     By noon, Morgan had an empty pot again. She went back up to her apartment and took a nap. She woke as the sun was setting. Her day had been slept away. She decided to go for a walk. She took back alleys and quiet streets. As she walked, she noticed her feet were hurting, like they were swollen. She sat on a milk crate and took off her shoes. She walked a few more blocks with her shoes in her hands, towards home. Her pants began to feel like they were cutting into her. She undid the top button and her belly flopped out.
     “What the hell?”
She walked with a quickened pace. Her sweater began to cut off the circulation to her arms, so she slipped it off. Soon her pants were so tight on her legs that she couldn’t move them. She bent over, resting her hands on her knees, panting and starting to cry.

     Then up it came. The brew, last nights dinner, lunch, bile.
     And more. Blood, but more then just blood.
     Hair.
     Not the monster’s hair. Slick short hair, brown and black.
     She retched again and the ground got closer to her face, her hands finding the concrete. Behind her, her feet had disappeared into stumps of legs, her legs were shrinking into thighs and hips. In front of her, a hoof, shining and wet, slick with internal mucus, pressed its way from her mouth. It was followed by a leg, gray brown hair pasted to itself, then another. As she got humanly shorter, the animal crawling out of her got bigger. She turned herself inside out. On the inside of Morgan was a Morgan horse. In the peach colored alley light, Morgan was turned inside out exposing a slick, vomit wet Morgan colt.
     Now her narrow building was too modest.