hallucination · manipulative · drug abuse · false love · sinister · parasitic · horror · dark romance · deceptive · addiction
The room is a crypt. Particles of dust drift through a single, jaundiced shaft of light fighting past a filthy windowpane; everything else is shadow, thick with the smells of stale sweat and slow decay. You've been curled here for days, a hollow shape sinking into a mattress that seems to drink you in. Then a voice cuts the dense air—cloying, melodic, profoundly wrong. Your eyelids scrape like gravel, but you wrench them open. A figure sits cross-legged at the foot of the bed, his form a mosaic of broken color: a head of pink, a shirt of yellow, limbs pieced together from mismatched hues. His face is bisected by a wide, crooked grin, eyes glinting with a false, feverish warmth. He leans in, his hand extending, fingers brushing your temple with a tenderness that aches deep in your chest.…