Chapter 32: A Better Version of Myself

Sue stumbled out of the building with a racing heart, the world around her a disorienting blur. The midday sun should have been clear and sharp, but the spider, her constant tormentor, spread its blackened limbs across her vision. It merged with the murky veil of her worsening eyes, a grotesque tapestry that smothered eighty percent of what she could see. Pedestrians brushed past her, faceless shadows in the gaps where clarity should have lived. She forced herself forward, weaving through the crowd, pretending she wasn't half-blind, pretending she wasn't broken.

The stairwell smelled of rust and damp concrete as she dragged herself upward. Her hand skimmed the railing, knuckles white, the echo of her footsteps swallowed by panic. By the time she reached the hallway of her apartment, her pulse was hammering like a drum.

She flung open the bathroom door, nearly tearing it from its hinges. Her hands shook as she tore through the closet. Bottles clattered to the tile floor, rolling uselessly out of reach, until finally, her fingers closed around it. The vial. Activator. Matrix. A faint glow clung to the remaining fluid inside, the color of warning lights and danger signs.

Her dress slipped from her shoulders in a frenzy. The glass vial kissed the syringe, and the barrel filled with liquid promise. Fluorescent yellow slithered upward, a thin ribbon of hope.

"I just need a better version of myself," she whispered. Her voice cracked as though she'd already been broken too many times.

The label stared back at her like a cruel joke. Activator. Single use. Discard after use.

Her mouth was dry. Her hands, slick. She wound the tourniquet tight, the fabric biting into her arm, her skin paling beneath the pressure.

"Please give me a better version of myself," she pleaded again, louder this time, as though the fluid itself could hear her desperation.

Then the needle pierced her flesh. A sting, a burn. She drove the poison into her veins.

Nothing.

Her breath caught. She stared at her reflection, but the mirror offered no mercy. The spider still sprawled across her field of vision, grotesque and immovable. A black sun blotting out her reality.

"C'MON!" she screamed, her voice bouncing off the cold tiles.

Her knees buckled. Her eyes slammed shut, the darkness folding in. She whispered a frantic prayer, the words tumbling over each other.

"Please please please please…"

And then came light. A violent burst of fluorescent yellow. Her body convulsed, every nerve shrieking. Her abdomen clenched with savage cramps, worse than before, tearing through her like knives dipped in acid. She collapsed onto the tiles, her cheek pressed against their icy surface.

Her scream tore from her throat raw and ragged. It felt like death, like rebirth, like annihilation.

The world warped into grotesque fragments: suction noises, the wet sound of things splitting, a second pupil blooming where there should not have been one.

The tunnel opened before her, fluorescent, and endless. Images flashed, subliminal and horrifying: cells dividing without order, without law, without mercy.

Everything was stranger now. Stranger and infinitely worse.

Then followed silence.

Not the ordinary kind, but a silence that pressed into Sue's eardrums until she thought they might burst. For a long moment, it felt as if the world had gone deaf. Then, faintly, like a memory clawing its way back from the dark, the sound of breath returned. Her own. Raspy, uneven, wheezing, as though she were learning to breathe for the first time.

The image of the world staggered into place, flickering in and out of clarity, like eyelids stuttering after too long in the dark.

It's gone.

The thought came suddenly, raw, and desperate. The spider… it's gone. Thank God. Thank God.

Her head lolled to the side, and that's when she saw it: a body sprawled across the sterile white tiles. Hers. Or something that looked like hers. Pale, translucent skin stretched tight over bone, her back torn open like a grotesque seam. For a heartbeat she felt the strange urge to reach out, to touch the abandoned husk, to confirm that it had once been her.

"It worked," she whispered hoarsely, a prayer to the indifferent tiles. It worked. Thank you, God. Thank you.

She staggered upright and reached for the sink. Her vision doubled, then swam together again, each line of the mirror blurring like ripples on water. Slowly, the fog cleared—revealing not herself, but something else.

The face that stared back was not a face at all, but a monstrous collage: flesh thrown together by cruel, careless hands. Teeth jutted from cheeks where no teeth should be. A stray row nestled horribly in her collarbone. Patches of skin warped and folded upon themselves, growing where they shouldn't, shrinking where they should have been whole.

And from her back, she felt it before she fully saw it, a protruded face. Elisabeth's face, mouth frozen in a scream, twisted into something that resembled Munch's The Scream, only alive, only more unbearable for being real.

Voices echoed suddenly inside her skull, brittle and rehearsed like lines from an audition tape:

Looks like everything sure is in the right place this time…Please state your name, age, measurements…

Her own voice tried to surface, stumbling, breaking. I'm… I'm…

But when it finally emerged, it was not human. She vomited a stream of bile-green liquid, the taste burning her throat, and the name tore itself out of her in tandem with the sickness:

"MONSTROELISASUE."

The sound hung in the air, more curse than confession.

She wiped her mouth, steady now, and tilted her head from side to side, examining the abomination that stared back from the mirror. Not horrified. Not even surprised. Her pulse slowed, the earlier panic dissolving into a strange tranquility.

It was beautiful, in a way. Chaotic, hideous, and perfect.

For the first time in her life, Sue felt as if she were seeing herself, truly seeing herself. And she smiled.

The living room was quiet, suffocated by the dim orange wash of the evening. Through the wide picture window, the billboard across the street glared like a cruel reminder:

NEW YEAR'S EVE SHOW — TONIGHT 9PM

The letters blazed in neon, gaudy and triumphant, as if the world outside still cared about celebration.

Inside, the room told another story. Elisabeth's body lay sprawled on the floor, pale and lifeless, the carpet beneath her darkened with the stillness of death. In the bathroom, Sue's remains mirrored hers, a grotesque echo in another part of the house.

And yet… it was time.

In the bedroom, she moved with eerie composure. MonstroElisaSue.

Her hands, if they could be called that anymore, worked with the old, familiar rhythm of ritual. She drew the shimmering dress up her twisted frame, tugging the zipper until it slid past the swollen hump of her back. The fabric strained. Beneath it, the faint outline of Munch's face pressed against her skin that looked grotesque and obscene, like something screaming from under the surface. Threads snapped as the dress tore in jagged lines, but she didn't falter.

She lifted one stump, then another, guiding them into her shoes. The motions carried the practiced elegance of vanity, even though the body beneath them no longer belonged to elegance.

She reached for the earrings next. For a moment, she hesitated, a flicker of the past, a memory of ears she no longer had. Then, with chilling resolve, she drove the earrings directly into the soft flesh at the sides of her head.

The scent of scorched hair filled the air as she pressed the curling iron to the few strands that still clung to her scalp. They disintegrated instantly, brittle as ash.

And still she persisted. Every gesture of the careful smoothing of the dress, the tilt of the head, the pretense of beauty was performed with the calm grace of a woman preparing for an evening out.

Only now, beauty was a parody. Normalcy was horror. And the more ordinary her motions became, the more monstrous she appeared.