Jane Prentiss

## Character Information

**Jane's Statement:** *I itch all the time. Deep beneath my skin, where the bone sits, enshrined in flesh, I feel it. Something, not moving but that wants to move. Wants to be free. It itches, and I don’t think I want it. I don’t know what to do.*

*You can’t help me. I don’t think so, at least. But whatever it is that calls to me, that wants me for its own, it hates you. It hates what you are and what you do. And if it hates you, then maybe you can help me. If I wanted to be helped. I don’t know if I do. You must understand, it sings so sweetly, and I need it, but I am afraid. It isn’t right and I need help. I need it to be seen. To be seen in the cold light of knowledge is anathema to the things that crawl and slither and swarm in the corners and cracks.*

*You can’t see it, of course. It isn’t real. Not like you or I are real. It’s more of an everywhere. A feeling. Are you familiar with mysophobia? That disgusted fear of mess and rot. Makes you feel that itch in the back of your mind, like the mold there too, in your own brain, rotten and hollow and spreading. Is that real?*

*I’m sorry, I know I’m meant to be telling you what happened. What brought me to this place. This place of books and learning, of sight and beholding. I’m sorry. I should. I will.*

*I haven’t slept in some time. I can’t sleep. My dreams are crawling and many-legged. Not just slithering and creeping, though it is the creeping that draws me. They always sing that song of flesh. I hope you will forgive me for such a rambling story. I hope you will forgive me for a great many things, as it may be I do worse. I have that feeling, that instinct that squirms through your belly. There will be great violence done here. And I bleed into that violence.*

*Do you know, I wonder? As I watch you sitting there through the glass. Eating a sandwich. Do you know where you are? You called me “dear”. “Have a seat, dear.” “You can write it down, dear.” “Take as much time as you need, dear.” Can you truly know the danger you are in?*

*There is mold gathering in my attic. A fat, sprawling mound that crouches in the shadowed corner. It thrums with life and malice. I could sit there for hours, watching the fields of moss and spores on its surface. I have done. It is not the patterns that enthrall me, I’m not one of those fools chasing fractals; no, it’s what sings behind them. Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home. That I can be fully consumed by what loves me.*

*I don’t know how long the mold has been there. It’s not even my home, I just live there. Some sweaty old man thinks he owns it, taking money for my presence as though it will save him. I used to worry about it, you know. I remember, before the dreams, I would spend so long worrying about that money. About how I could afford to live there. Now I know that whatever the old man thinks, as he passes about the building with brow crinkled and mouth puckered in disapproval, it is not his. It has a thousand truer owners who shift and live and sing within the very walls of the building. He does not even know about the seeping mold. I wonder how long he has not known. How many years it has been there.*

*How many months has it been like this? Was there a time before? There must have been. I remember a life that was not itching, not fear, not nectar-sweet song. I had a job. I sold crystals. They were clean, and sharp and bright and they did not sing to me, though I sometimes said they did. We would sell the stones to smiling young couples with color in their hair. I remember, before I found the mold, someone new came. His name was Oliver, and he would look at me so strangely. Not with lust or affection or contempt, but with sadness. Such a deep sadness. And once with fear. It didn’t matter, because no one in the shop wanted to hear about the growing rot. I tried to tell them, to explain, but they did not care. The pretty young things complained and I left.*

*That was when I still called myself a follower of Gozreh. I would spend my weekends in communion with nature. I wanted something beyond myself, but could not stomach the cleric of the temples or the druids of the forests. I knew better. I knew that it was not so simple as to call out to well-trodden gods. I never felt from my worship anything except exhaustion and pride. I thought that those were my spiritual raptures.*

*I wish, deep inside, below the itch, that they were still my raptures. I have touched something now, though, that all my talk of ley lines and mother goddesses could never have prepared me for. It is not a god. Or if it is then it is a dead god, decayed and clammy corpse-flesh brimming with whispering spores.*

*When did I first hear it? It wasn’t the attic, I’m sure of that. I never went in the attic. It was locked and I didn’t have a key. I spent a day sawing through the padlock with an old hacksaw. My hands were blistered by the end. Why would I have done that if I didn’t know what I would find? The face of the one who sang to me dwelling within the hidden darkness above me. I had seen no signs of decay. I know I hadn’t. So how else would I have known that I needed to be there, to be in the dark with it, if it had not already been singing to me?*

*No, that’s not right. The mold does not sing to me. It is simply the face. Not the whole face, for the whole of the mound is infinite. An unending plane of wriggling forms swarming in and out of the distended burrows and honeycombed growth. The mold is nothing but facade.*

*I used to pick at my skin. It was a compulsion. I would spend hours in the bathroom, staring as close as I could get to my face to the mirrors, searching for darkened pores to squeeze and watch the congealed oil worm its way out of my skin. Often I would end with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Did I hear the song then? Or was it last year, passing by a strip of green they call a park near my house, after the rain, and smelling a thousand blades of grass amidst the dirt and moss below?*

*Perhaps I’ve always heard it. Perhaps the itch has always been the real me, and it was the happy, smiling Jane who called herself a worshiper of nature and drank wine in the park when it was sunny. Maybe it was her who was the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretense that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the endless sea of growths that need a home. That love us in their way.*

*I need to think. To clear my head. To try and remember, but remember what? I was lonely before. I know that. I had friends, at least I used to, but I lost them. Or they lost me. Why was it? I remember shouting, recriminations, and I was abandoned. No idea why. The memories are a blur. I do remember that they called me “toxic”. I don’t think I really knew what that meant, except that it was the reason I was so very painfully lonely. Was that it? Was I swayed and drawn simply by the prospect of being genuinely loved? Not loved as you would understand it. A deeper, more primal love. A need as much as a feeling. Love that consumes you in all ways.*

*You can’t help me. I’m sure of that now. I have tried to write it down, to put it into terms and words you could understand. And now I stare at it and not a word of it is even enough to fully describe the fact that I itch. Because ‘itch’ is not the right word. There is no right word because for all your Institute and ignorance may laud the power of the word, it cannot even stretch to fully capture what I feel in my bones. What possible recourse could there be for me in your books and files and libraries except more useless ink and dying letters? I see now why the mold hates you. You can see it and log it and note its every detail but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.*

*I do not know why the mold chose me, but it did. And I think that it always had. The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid. There is mold in my attic. Perhaps it can soothe my itching soul.*