Getting the words out was the hardest part.
"They tried to tell me you weren't real, you know that?"
Amanda couldn't help but take a long drink as she said it, hands trembling slightly but managing to keep the glass almost still. She dearly wished it had something in it other than orange juice; dearly wished she hadn't promised to be Hannah's DD, so she could leave right the fuck now. She didn't know where she'd go, to be honest -- where could she go that she couldn't be followed? -- but there was a small, deeply animal part of her that told her to leave, now. Get on a train, catch a bus, jump into the sea itself if she had to. Leave. Go. Do something! Something that wasn't sitting here.
The slender, smiling thing in its red leather jacket and black leather shoes smiled even wider at Amanda over its own crystal glass. It blinked, its eyelids flowing in a long, unhurried display of utter serenity, making sure to catch Amanda's gaze again and pin her slowly back into her head with its stare.
"And why would they tell you that?" It let its hand drift, as though weightless, through the air as it made a little gesture to encompass itself.
"I seem quite real to me. Perhaps you could affirm?"
Its smile never wavered. Neither did its stare.
Amanda couldn't help but let her eyes sink down to catch that too-wide smile. Its teeth, like its flesh, were so very white against the cut-crystal glass, halfway filled with some clear liquid. Vodka, it had said -- Amanda wasn't sure if that even mattered. Perfectly white teeth in a perfectly white face against perfectly pink lips. Not a single blemish. Not a single blush of life.
Not like a living creature would possess.
Amanda tried very, very hard to put her glass down gently, but her brain felt so far away from her hand that it was as if she was not truly in control of it but rather issuing polite requests and begging for a response. She tried to tell herself this wasn't its influence, couldn't be its influence, just the adrenaline of the situation. It couldn't have her already, could it? No, she'd watched it carefully. It had never touched her. They couldn't influence you if they hadn't touched you. At least, that's what everyone on the website said.
When the clunk of her glass hitting the table arrived in her ears, she squeaked loudly. She had forgotten it was still in her hand.
The thing's mirthless little giggles ran like dull knives across her brain. It brought one perfect hand down to the table, now, and began to slowly tap-tap-tap its fingers onto the wood. Taptap, taptap, pause. Taptap, taptap, pause.
"I'm waiting. Rabbit," it said, eyes widening into razor-sharpness for the merest fraction of a moment.
Amanda realised she hadn't inhaled in some time. She sucked in a breath so hard she nearly choked on her own spit. Her tongue wouldn't cooperate.
"It. You. The, the. Um. The websites."
Her mouth felt filled with ash. She tried to take another drink: it didn't go away.
"I was... there are sites. Servers, old forums. Most people don't know them. They're... they talk about spotting..."
Amanda felt the word creatures die a quiet, unmourned death on her lips.
"Like... like, not..."
"Not human."
Her eyes were fixed upon the smiling thing's smiling lips. Legs terribly asleep, mind terribly awake. Unable to move; a rabbit, paralysed by a gaze of a snake.
The thing opposite her took another sip from its glass, setting it down again with utterly liquid elegance.
The rabbit felt her eyes lock to the glass and follow it down, entirely outside her will. Amanda couldn't be sure, but it looked to be that the level of the thing's drink had not changed since it had first picked it up.
Amanda wanted to scream. Wanted to vomit. Wanted to press her thighs together and rub-
What?
No. She would be okay. It was too public, here, for the thing to make a move -- and if it tried, she had her talismans. Still, her heart jumped, pulsing against her clammy skin as if crying out in sympathy for whatever withered thing lay within the creature's cold breast. Amanda drew breath once more; she tried not to loathe how primal, how animal, the feeling of simply breathing could be when in the presence of one who defiled the very notion. Tried not to think about what filled its lungs. If it even had them...
She took another breath, slower this time, and forced herself to measure out four pitiful seconds as she blew out as little as she could physically manage. Her lips pursed to slow the stream of air, wrapping around the breath like she was sucking gently on her mother's teat, tongue wrapping it, eyes flickering shut, body pressing against her mother's hot flesh and feeling that loving hand curling up-
What the fuck?
Amanda's eyes opened wide and she blinked, all attempts to control her breaths dying as the panic gripped her. She tried to lift her gaze from the glass upon the table, those too-slender fingers with their perfect nails still cradling it like a lover.
Tried to lift her gaze-
Tried to lift-
Paralysed.
"Poor little rabbit" came the soft, sweetly mocking voice of the thing that sat on the other side of the table. "You must be so scared."
Its voice in Amanda's ears was a softly beguiling coo, and it washed over her with the penetrating warmth of a bath and the irresistible pull of a tide. In a peculiar way Amanda found she craved it: its honey was something beyond the terror-stillness that gripped her every muscle, a balmy liquid sound that oozed between the cracks in thoughts that were frozen so tightly into paralytic fear. It found those dark and icebound places inside her and caressed them, drawing them out with syrupy promises and a lingering need for more of those words that were so very gentle.
The thing across the table crooned to Amanda, so quietly that her ears were forced to strain as they greedily sought to catch each word and savour it. As it did so, it stroked its hand up and down its glass, as though running its fingers soothingly up and down Amanda's spine.
She shivered, imperceptibly, at the thought.
"It's alright, rabbit, I understand" it said, voice dripping in equal measure with sincerity and condescension.
"Really, I do." Amanda's eyes were still fixed upon the glass, but the thing's hand was there no longer.
"You're just so stressed, aren't you, little rabbit?" Amanda's vision had started to dim around the edges. She wanted to look away, to look up, to blink...
"All those thoughts, swirling inside. All those nasty little stories, filling you with ideas." Amanda's stomach muscles clenched: her body was trying to purge something poisonous inside, and Amanda was dizzy to wonder if the creature had somehow contaminated her or if, perhaps, her body was simply becoming as delirious as her mind.
"Telling you that there's something to be scared about." Amanda could no longer see beyond the very rim of the glass, her eyes pinned through the pupils by a speck of cold blue light.
"All those venomous little lies that those cruel, cruel people told you. Telling you that someone here wanted to hurt you. That sounds so wrong, doesn't it, little rabbit?" Amanda's ears were filled with a tinnitic ringing, a whistling roar that devoured the sounds of the quiet bar in which they sat and collapsed Amanda's universe into nothing but the glass, and the words, and the unseen hand.
"Your little heart is beating so fast, little rabbit." Amanda's sight was a dark tunnel of void and gleam, feeling more than seeing. Feeling the motion of the thing's hand as it slid across the table, past its undrunk glass, to lay just within the peripheries of Amanda's unseeing sight.
"Is it beating so fast for me, little rabbit?" Amanda's head buzzed. A memory emerged, unbidden, of childhood swimming in deep, blue pools in a forest she had never seen. Friends giggling, diving, staying under longer and longer. Dizziness. Too much hyperventilation?
"Or is it beating so fast for what you fear you'd do, little rabbit, if you could move your hand just... a little... closer?"
Amanda felt the motion, rather than saw it, as the hand of that thing reached out and made as if to grasp her own. That thing, that being, that smiling, grinning, gloating creature that wore the image of a woman so much better than any person of flesh and blood could possibly hope to wear it was reaching out to touch-
The Snap! of the fingers just below her lolling head -- didn't touch, mustn't touch! -- caused Amanda to jump back in her seat, the back of her skull clunking painfully against the wood of the booth's bench. She barely, barely repressed a screech of shock, instead looking up wild-eyed at the grinning teeth that sat on the other side.
Saw a woman, beautiful, tall, and looking genuinely worried for the health of the woman she herself was talking to.
Her expression broke into furrowed brows and a chewed lower lip, tones of warm care seeping out as she tilted her head to one side. "Are you alright, Amanda? You started to slur a bit, and you seem very... I don't know, out of it? Are you having a... sorry, I think you called it a 'hypo'?"
Her accent wasn't quite native, someone who'd come from overseas but had lived here a very long time. Perhaps Scottish, or maybe Irish, Amanda had never been too good at telling them apart. Her words were polished, refined: from money, perhaps, or maybe just from an expensive education and parents who had poured a little too much of their too-limited funds into their beloved girl. Perhaps that's why she had an air of determination about her, even now as she expressed so much compassion for someone she hardly knew.
