Rebirth

Egypt 1881

A man stood at a bare window, staring out at rolling fields of dunes in hues of warm browns and yellows like his own skin. The land beyond Cairo and the Nile River was all desert, untouched and unspoilt by the hands of men. Men did not want it because the land was dead, reserved for the burial of kings. The man's dark eyes scanned the horizon and was as always drawn to it, not knowing why.

For his entire life, or that which he could remember, he had always been drawn to the West Bank of the Nile, to the sandy flats and seas of dunes. No matter where he went he was always drawn back. This man was a wanderer, having no home and no money, eternally seeking for something he didn't understand as he had no memories. There was an unbreachable block in his mind, and behind it a dark place where he knew his memories must have been. Yet there was something else in the darkness, something that gave him headaches while awake and nightmares while asleep. The dark tantalized him and terrified him, and so he never stopped moving, afraid that if he remained in one place too long he would be forced to meet that darkness inside himself.

The man had no real sense of how long he had been on his long journey. Years melted into decades, and those melted too into centuries. His age was not measurable in any standard unit of time for he was beyond time, an immortal, and even he himself didn't know how old he truly was. By his features one would have thought him a young man in his mid-twenties, of a Middle-Eastern descent that was more ancient than the Arabian lines. His black hair was thatched and smooth, hanging straight down to his shoulders in heavy locks to frame a princely face and penetrating light brown eyes. With his large, long hands he swept his hair back over his head, trying to arrange it into some semblance of order, when suddenly his fingers tensed and gripped at his skull.

A headache was starting again, a dull ache in the back of his neck which spread like a slow fire over his scalp to finally roil fully behind his eyes, blinding him with pain. Light, sound, even smells made the pain worse, and he stumbled away from the window to the bathroom of his bare tenement apartment to try and get some relief. The porcelain of the dirty sink felt cold to his feverish and shaking hands as they gripped the edges, his knuckles standing out whitely under his thin skin. He braced his weight shakily on the basin edge, leaning over it in his nausea. He could hear the sound of  blaring horns of a siren entering through his window as a British imperial vehicle raced past his building, and the noise made the pain flare up so much that he vomited. The gummy yellow bile slid down the porcelain, the smell making his pain worsen to the point where he was crying and didn't realize he was doing so.

Spittle dripped from slack lips as he breathed weakly over the basin, staring past everything in his misery and helplessness. A drop of saliva dripped from his lip into the draining slime, the sound seeming to bring something to life in his brain. His mouth twitched once, was still, and then twitched once again. He could feel his heart begin to beat faster. His throat, burned from the stomach acid that had so recently passed through it, spasmed and clenched once, twice. His teeth shone out brilliantly white, his thin lips curling over them for a second here and there. A deeper voice that wasn't his said very softly, “You know I can make your pain go away...”

The man's face went slack again and he breathed in and out quietly, his focus still far away. Slowly, ever so slowly, his mind registered the other voice, and he numbly whispered, “Leave me alone.”

His lips twitched again and curled malevolently over his teeth, still trembling with drool as they moved. “I will never leave you alone. I will always be with you... and you know whyyyy.” The voice’s intonation was mocking and darkly amused, quickly abandoning the comforting, seductive timbre from before.

A tear slid from the man's eye after his mouth went slack again. He knew that this other person, this voice, was the evil of the darkness. It tempted him all the time, in his dreams and before his waking eyes. It tempted him with the memories imprisoned within the impenetrable shadow of his amnesia. The man wanted his memories, but knew that this evil was their guardian and would not give them away freely.  It wanted something, something terrible, and the man was never prepared to give it what it asked. Yet the pain of the headaches was worsening day by day, becoming so bad that he was beginning to think of suicide, if only it would make the pain stop. This was why the evil voice was pushing its advantage; it realized it had the man cornered within his own desperation.

It spoke again, and the man could even feel his lips moving beyond his control and was horrified by it. As if stabbing its words like a dagger into the man’s side, the voice hissed, “I will never let you go. You will never be free.” The voice withdrew the edge and became once more a mix of seductive and patronizing. “What you must understand is that, of the two of us, I am the genuine. The darkness which frightens you is not there to keep you out... it is there to keep me in.” The man could feel his lips pull back, as if the thin string by which it kept its rage in check was fraying. “It's there to keep me from claiming the body which belongs to me. You grew out of me only to keep this body alive, and your time is over. I will have my body back, do you understand me?” The man slowly looked up into the mirror at his reflection, and his eyes widened in fear to see his mouth literally snarling with bared teeth, gums black around his white teeth. “I will have back what is mine!”

The man tried to speak, but the evil wouldn't release its hold on his mouth. He stared at his reflection, looking at the saliva that dribbled down his chin. His lips where curled past clenched teeth, gritted so hard that the muscles on his temples stood out. The hateful speech had been so frantic and violent towards the end that his tongue and the insides of his cheeks had been bitten and torn, bleeding black blood which oozed out in strings within the saliva, barring it and turning it gray. The man's eyes darted frantically back and forth, feeling the tensed muscles on his temple twitch, the tension continuing to the muscles on the back of his head, his neck, closing in around his face. He felt like he was drowning inside his own flesh, his eyes and nose the only parts remaining above the surface and sinking fast.

His black hair began to turn red from the tips towards the roots, red like the color of abattoir blood. In his brown eyes the veins began to swell and burst, causing a bleed which clotted the whites of his eyes. The red bleeds moved around the edges of his irises, circling like vultures, and when they had it surrounded, the irises themselves began to change slowly from brown to orange, bleaching themselves, edges to center just like his hair. He stared out of his pupils, the last part of himself that remained as the rest of his face grinned cruelly, whispering, “You wanted to know what lay beyond the shadow. See it, then.”

Suddenly the man's body jerked back like it was thrown, sliding along the empty wooden floor until his back hit the far wall, disrupting some old plaster. He lifted his hands to his face and felt that it was under his control again, his heart pounding in fear. Yet a pain flared in his hands, and there, before his very eyes, his fingers began to twitch and grow, stretching painfully. The bones grew faster than the skin and tendons, stretching them and straining the connections, until the tips of his bones burst through the pads of his fingertips, which then slowly grew up and around them again. The pain was enormous - hot tendrils of fire shot down his nerves from his hands down to his wrists and arms, then up to his shoulders. From there it began manifesting all over his body, burning it with fever. With bloody hands the man tore his clothes off, unable to stand the feel of them on his skin anymore, skin which was being stretched tighter and tighter as his internal structure grew. Bones grew faster than the other tissues and in bursts, stretching his dermis until he could hear it begin to tear, the sound like ripping canvas.

Inside his mind the voice moaned obscenely. Feel it. Feel this pain. Relish it. Enjoy it... The man screamed and choked, coughing and sputtering saliva and blood onto the floor. The sound quickly ceased as his throat began to change shape. Why do you cry? Is the pain really that terrible? Can you not bear it? Can you not stand to see the glory of what you cage?

A terrible ache developed in his face, intensifying around the bridge of his nose, along his cheek bones and eye sockets and down to his jaws. His bloody, torn hands gripped at these places, trying to ease his agony, and the voice said again, You are nothing but a husk, a prison to contain my magnificence. I will be free of you. I will be free! Even if I have to tear you apart to do it!

Suddenly the bones of his new bestial face burst forth from the skin, parting the flesh of his nose and lips into shreds as his new skull exploded out from behind them. Sharp fangs grew in under his human ones and pushed them out of the way. The old teeth fell to the floor like clattering chips, piercing the palms of his hands as he braced himself face down, breathing out of his deformed face in quick, wet gasps. The tissues of his face slowly crawled over his protruding bones, wrapping around the structure of his new muzzle like worms surging over a carcass. He could feel his lips thin out and grow back, his tongue elongate and re-root itself farther up.

You are nothing but a prison of flesh. There was no other purpose for you but to contain me.

A burst of pain and a tearing by his lower back signaled the release of his tail bone into the open air. It uncurled like the tongue of a butterfly and stretched out, new vertebra growing in by the second to increase its length. Muscles and tendons crawled up along it, to the point where the tail forked into two prehensile tips, and then to the ends, which were sensitive like fingers and had ridges underneath for gripping.

I hate you! I hate having lived inside you for all these millennia. Your agony cannot be great enough for the darkness you have kept me in! You will suffer and you will die!

Silky fur the color of a lion’s pelt sprouted all over his body, and a long, thick horse's mane of hair, red and bright like fire, grew from his head and the crest of his now elongated neck. The shape of his skull refined itself into some horrid mix of canine and equine, and his ears moved to the top of his head, sticking up straight like aloe leaves and ending squared off. Old scars edged the tops as if they had been cut, long ago.

The creature lay on the floor, panting in his new body, feeling pain now and again as tissues here and there would change, altering themselves. His pupils were wide with fright and shock, and the voice inside his head said at last, I am finally free, and there is no longer any use for you. His eyes opened wide and his mind screamed in terror as the darkness surrounded his consciousness, caging it tighter and tighter until there was no room left for the spark of his soul, and its light was extinguished forever. The monstrous form lay on the floor for many hours, still and cold as if dead.

It was well past sundown when the great body, lying quietly in a pool of its own saliva and blood, eventually came back to life. It opened its flame-orange eyes, the only part of itself that it could move, and blinked a few times as it focused on itself. The pupils were points of malice, looking confidently at its body even as the limbs began to function again and move. Stiffly it got its legs under it, elongated like the back legs of a dog, and stood up, its ears just brushing the ceiling which itself stood eight feet above the floor. It walked clumsily to the bathroom and examined itself, touching its face and neck, feeling the familiar contours of its ancient flesh. Long black talons extended from the flesh of its fingertips, curling dangerously like the claws of a bear, and these clicked and squealed on the surface of the mirror, tracing the lines of its reflection delicately.

In a quick turn it walked back into the main room, its feet falling silently upon the floor gracefully now as it moved to the window to look out upon the dead desert of the west bank with a smile. A deep, gravely sound issued from its throat, the inflexible vocal cords loosening into horrible reverberant laughter that seemed to fill the Valley of Kings all the way from the East Bank of the river. The sound rolled like thunder and frightened the people who hearkened to it in the surrounding tenements.

With lips curled tautly over rows of sharp, needle-like teeth, the creature from the darkness said, “Ahhhhh... I am finally back home. My beloved Egypt, Setekh had returned to you at last.”