Manx- Monstrous Kid in Backseat

  The Rolls had a roomy rear compartment, the back couch done in flesh-toned kidskin. A boy slept upon it. He wore a rawhide jacket with buttons of bone. He had dark hair and a round, fleshy face, his cheeks touched with a rose bloom of health. He looked as if he were dreaming sweet dreams; visions of sugarplums, perhaps. He wasn’t tied up in any way and didn’t look unhappy, and Vic had a thought that made no sense: He’s fine. You should go. He’s probably here with his father and he fell asleep and his father is letting him rest, and you should just go away.

  Vic flinched from the thought, the way she might’ve flinched from a horsefly. There was something wrong with that thought. It had no business in her head, and she didn’t know how it had got there.
...

  “Hey, kid,” she hissed. “Hey, kid, wake up.”

  The boy moved slightly, and then he sat up and turned around to face her. Vic saw his face and had to bite back a cry.

  It wasn’t anything like the face she had seen through the rear window. The boy in the car looked close to death—or beyond death. His face was lunar in its paleness, except for the hollows of his eyes, which were bruise-colored. Black, poisoned veins crawled beneath his skin, as if his arteries were filled with ink, not blood, and erupted in sick branches at the corners of his mouth and eyes and in his temples. His hair was the color of frost on a windowpane.

  He blinked. His eyes were shiny and curious, the one part of him that seemed fully alive.

  He exhaled: white smoke. As if he stood in a freezer.

- Sleigh House: The Other End of the Bridge