I saw it through the stairwell window for maybe two seconds as we passed the fourth floor landing. Two seconds was enough. Two seconds was too many.
It was shaped like a person in the way a mannequin is shaped like a person. Roughly human proportions. Two arms, two legs, a head, a torso. That was where the resemblance stopped and the nightmare started. The skin was translucent. Not pale, not see-through, but the wrong opacity, like wax paper stretched over something dark and pulsing underneath. No face. The space where features should have been was smooth and blank, a flesh-colored oval with no eyes, no mouth, no nose, no indication that this thing had ever needed to perceive or communicate with anything in the conventional sense.
