by Laird Barron
***
By the second morning, the disconcerting sensation had spread to Jenny’s arms and legs, making them mysteriously tingly. The last few times this happened, Todd hadn’t been as drunk and stirred up an antidote, which he said included Alka-Seltzer, pickle juice, ginger beer, and a secret ingredient he wouldn’t divulge. The concoction tasted terrible but it always did the trick. She’d throw up about ten minutes later and then feel rejuvenated, normal. In those times, he’d tell her he’d given up drinking and collecting. She’d believe him, her being an optimist—both a blessing and a curse. They’d go out to movies, watch TV together snuggling close on the couch in the den, and he’d fix her a few lovely dinners—lamb with mint sauce and roast potatoes or chicken Tikka Masala. These idyllic “staycations” sometimes lasted just a couple of days but occasionally endured for weeks or even months, further filling her with an inexplicable and reckless sensation of hope.
But this time Todd was spending more and more hours locked in his office, so many that he didn’t notice that Jenny was sicker than on the other occasions. When she made even the slightest pain complaint, he told her to “shut the fuck up” because he didn’t have time to listen to her whining. She was “interfering,” trying to “control” him, and he needed to get back to work. Every time he spoke cruelly to her, she felt a slight heave inside her head or her stomach or her arm as if whichever body part was expanding. But that was ridiculous. Perhaps she had the flu.
The cramps resonated so severely the next morning that Jenny stayed in bed. She was drifting back to sleep when she heard a high-pitched wail rise up through the vent—the cry faint at first and then growing steadily in volume until she almost had to clamp her ears. It stopped as suddenly as it started, and then silence for about five minutes. The next screech grated against her ears so violently that she pulled a pillow over her head. As it dissipated, she unburied her face, and a chorus of chitters followed, like an army of cicadas accompanied by metal spoons banging against pans.
Jenny crawled out of bed and crept into the hallway, alternately massaging her temples and holding her stomach, her aches almost overwhelming her with each step. Leaning over the landing, she could see that Todd’s office door again was half-open, the cacophonous sounds drifting out from behind it and now including the frenzied chatter of what sounded like mewling cats, croaking frogs, and other animal noises she couldn’t identify. Her head throbbed even more urgently at the sharp sounds that spiked again in volume as she slowly descended the two short flights of stairs. Once she reached the door, she paused to listen in case Todd might be shuffling behind it or rummaging in the closet. With all the paper scattered on the messy floor, he couldn’t move around without making noise, though she couldn’t be sure with all the other ruckus.
Peeking inside, Jenny saw no sign of Todd. Maybe he was smoking outside, or more likely he’d slipped out the patio door to sneak to the neighborhood liquor store or make a cell phone call. He always insisted the signal wasn’t good in the house, though she never had any trouble with her own phone.
Still, not knowing if he could return at any moment, she entered carefully, tiptoeing through the paperwork. To the right, the cabinet doors in his bookcases vibrated in and out, the source of the animal chatter behind them.
Unexpectedly, she thought she heard Todd’s voice, making her spin around to see just the empty hallway.
“I love you. The one thing I fear most in the world is you leaving me,” the voice repeated three times like a broken record.
Then other words…accusatory words…
“Why is it you just lie there? Why is it you shrug me off when I touch you in the middle of the night?”
“That’s because I’m asleep. I don’t remember…,” her own voice protested.
“You should be ready to make love whenever I’m ready to make love to you.
“You just want to control me.
“You don’t know what love is.
“Rancid cunt.”
Now the cabinet doors rattled like a rapid heartbeat. The palpitations frightened her but also beckoned Jenny’s curiosity until she could do nothing else but fling them open. The action felt strangely freeing, even electrifying. She was finally going to see the books that came in the packages. But inside were no books—just cages and terrariums of various sizes filled with strange creatures.
Some beasts twitched their clusters of long gelatinous appendages, beating them like thumping cats’ tails. Others leered with gaping eyes over-sized for their bodies and their vaguely amphibian heads. Some spread razor-blade teeth and sashayed left to right on scaly chicken-like legs that weren’t quite in the right places. But most didn’t resemble anything she had ever seen—lacerated red flesh with spider webs of purple veins on translucent pale skin interspersed with dreadlocked fur and bulbous sacs that looked stretched almost to bursting with yellow pus. Things with too many ears, too many eyes, ears but no eyes, eyes but no ears, lips with teeth on the outside, others that puckered and occasionally extended long blue and green cyst-covered tongues.
Then their voices lowered and those that had appendages lifted them up and beckoned as if welcoming her, inviting her closer and still chittering, chittering, chittering.
Jenny’s head pounded with every scratch-on-a-chalkboard sound the creatures emitted. Her back stiffened as if the slightest movement would break it in two, her stomach churning painfully and melting into oscillating gelatin. The creatures’ chattering escalated, flesh glowing effervescently like cameras flashing, photographing not just her most intimate parts but x-raying beneath her skin to her brain and internal organs.
Then the shimmer faded like lights dimming in the cinema, replaced by fuzzy images that gradually cleared until she could see Todd in every one—a wall of TV sets, each broadcasting him having sex with another woman. At first, the sex was just sex, warm and sweaty. A black woman in missionary position. A tiny Asian body with long dark hair writhing in 69—perfect toned buttocks pointed in her direction. A redhead doggy-style.
Those images dissolved and were replaced with more deviant ones. A threesome with two women, one sucking his penis, another perched over Todd’s face, his tongue eagerly licking. Him rolling a nerve wheel over the nipples of a laughing brunette. Todd in black leather furiously beating another Asian girl with a riding crop as he roughly penetrates her ass, his partner screaming in delight.
The pictures then dissolved into multiple views of one petite woman with long straight blonde hair. Todd spooned against her like he used to do with Jenny, fondling a nipple, kissing her neck. She giggles. He whispers in her ear, “I love you. I love you unconditionally.”
The blonde turns, fixes her icy blue eyes on Jenny, and hisses, the “s” holding long and snakelike on her tongue.
“What are you doing in my office, cunt?!” Todd’s real voice shattered the spectral woman’s venomous face into broken shards of glass. The vision readjusted back to the creatures, now shaking furiously in their enclosures.
“This is my office and you don’t belong in here.”
Jenny’s head jerked towards the doorway and took in his angry visage and arms wrapped around a big brown paper bag. He chugged a hefty swig from the value-sized wine bottle wrapped within and placed it on top of a filing cabinet. And before she could even process her lack of an escape route, his fist pounded down on the top of her head.
Jenny crumpled to the floor, and Todd’s fist descended again. Her skull rang with its impact, her head immediately heavier, swelling, and the beak of his sharp silver raven’s head ring cut into her skin. The third time, his fist fell on the side of her temple, and as the pain registered, she also sensed scratching inside, as if something was moving, repositioning. Jenny heard herself screaming, “Help!” Or was it the victim of some other crime far away in the distance?
Jenny wanted to fight back, but Todd had her pinned so she couldn’t move. Again and again, his fist throttled her head. Then the pointed toe of his cowboy boot kicked
her side, triggering a loud crack and a sudden burning pain. Had he broken another rib? She tried to curl up into a ball on the floor so he couldn’t reach her stomach or her breasts, and she felt the next impact beat into her lower back. She was just screaming now. At the top of her lungs, surprised at how loud she could scream, her head expanding from the inside—big and airy and burning.
This was how it felt to die, the part of Jenny’s brain that wasn’t in full shock thought as she continued to scream, the windows shut so no one was likely to hear, call the police. Was there even time for her to be rescued? The blows came down again and again. Todd twisted her arm, pushed her face to the floor to better position his fist to target the rear of her head. Her insides churned and bile rushed up into her throat, the first spasm of vomit. But as orange chunks exited her mouth, something else did as well. The pressure stretched her esophagus, neck and head, excruciating as each expanded to its limit, and Jenny felt like she was choking, hemorrhaging, coming to an end.
Then a rush of fresh air flushed through her lungs as something inside shot from her open lips onto the floor. The chittering around her mounted, became deafening. Stringy appendages draped across the carpet, a mass of discoid flesh using them to pivot and leap across her head.
Todd’s blows stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Glass shattered, bars broke, a thousand scurrying, scampering, slithering sounds. Then Todd began to scream, a prolonged screech of agony. Aching, throbbing tension overwhelmed Jenny’s head as she forced herself to roll over onto her back and see what was happening.
Through blurred vision, she barely made out Todd’s body covered in the creatures, nibbling, gnawing, sucking, bits of his flesh crunching in the mouths of those that had mouths, bright red blood showering them en masse, dyeing their amorphous shapes in his gore. The protruding appendages of the thing that had been inside her stuffed Todd’s mouth, as if he’d swallowed something much too big to chew and the rest was trying to force its way in, pushing, curling back and pushing again. He could no longer scream, barely groan, his cheeks bulging. His eyes expanded out of their sockets. His nose exploded in a giant sneeze, blowing off his face into myriad tiny pieces.
Todd’s blood and snot soaked her, but other than clamping her own mouth shut, her hands and arms were too injured to reach up and wipe her face. Though basted in slime, she found herself silently smiling. Each bite or suction served as a release to her, a sign that he was feeling the physical manifestation of the beatings and emotional pain she had lived with for so many years. The old Todd that she had loved so deeply had dissolved into a distant memory, and this stranger who drank, smoked, and fucked everyone but her—that one blonde woman especially—held no resemblance.
His suit of skin was completely ripped off now, remnants of tattered red muscles all that lingered. As the creatures parted slightly, she could see Todd’s heart still pulsating—purpling with the pressure of pumping blood through severed veins. She looked up into his eyes to search for any sorrow or regret, but she could not identify either emotion. And then Todd’s eyes were gone, bursting from their sockets, shooting past her face like soft torpedoes and squishing into the wall behind her.
Todd’s heart was slowing now, the red meat almost completely devoured, inner organs bitten through, bones sparkling pearly white thanks to licking tongues and fleshy, suctioning pressure. The monster that had been inside her was visible again, a pale amoeboid entity fluctuating between solid and transparent, widening and narrowing as it navigated organs, thinning as it slipped inside Todd’s esophagus, expanding into a hammer shape as it battered against his stomach. Its spidery tendrils had fully looped themselves inside his skull mouth, curling into what was left of his arms and twisting around his spine like nerves in an anatomy model. The thing had completely avoided his brain, however, concentrating first on the destruction of the rest of his body. If the loss of blood had not been enough to make him comatose, might his mind not still be functioning, feeling every bite, every thrust, every squeeze?
The monster’s head penetrated Todd’s stomach with a loud splat, undigested food and fluids suddenly flying outward. But it didn’t linger long, its appendages pushing down to grasp his intestines, unfurling them like jump-ropes, ripping into his colon and pushing out of his buttocks like a cat of nine tails.
Jenny felt sad that Todd’s heart finally stopped before the monster reached his penis, inhaling it in a motion so quick that she could not tell if it was a gulp or simply an absorption. The devouring process was satisfying to watch but far too fast. She had suffered the bites Todd had taken verbally from her self-esteem, her creativity, her dignity, and the more overt pushes and punches for years, and especially the lies that twisted into her like slow-growing cancers. The denials of his drinking had been impossible to hide thanks to the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant changes in his personality from kind to cruel. And worse, the secret liaisons. She’d realized neither that he had committed so many transgressions nor the extent of their deviance and the relish with which he enjoyed inflicting pain on other women, women who enjoyed it. And worst of all, that he’d given his heart to another. At one time Jenny’d even had the naive thought he’d never cheat on her, that her battle was only with the sweet lure of alcohol. If she was safe from anything, for so long she had been so sure it was from him fucking another woman. Then she found out about one—maybe the blonde; she never saw a picture—and he begged her back, promised to cut it off right away, even quit drinking for a while, made her believe. And she did, even though she was a smart, educated woman. He was sober for six months, and then the packages began to arrive again.
A sharp crack woke Jenny out of her reverie. The beasts were now down to consuming Todd’s skeleton, a chorus of sharp crunches, chewing and squishy ingestion. The big thing hadn’t forgotten his brain, just saved it for last, tendrils and fleshy mass cracking the skull like a nutcracker, then allowing the little ones to slide in and slurp on it like a fine delicacy. The last body parts to disappear were his feet, ironic perhaps because Jenny had thought so many times that if he’d broken a foot or leg, Todd wouldn’t have been able to walk to the liquor store, push the gas pedal on the car, or make it across the room to hit her.
Finished with their meal, the creatures fell into a deep hum. Was it a song of satisfaction, satiation? They spread all around her on the floor. The larger monster, the one that had gestated inside Jenny, was now fully revealed—a bulbous thing with no discernable shape, fluctuating from spherical as a fat spider, then stretching long and flat with hunched sores and bubbles. At first, its many eyes seemed glazed and unfocused, but as if becoming conscious of the intensity with which she was watching it, they shot open wide and engaged her. And in that moment, all the creatures that had eyes did the same, turning in her direction in one sudden wave.
Jenny felt her terror return. Their food source fully devoured with Todd, would they now eat her for dessert? Those creatures that had nostrils seemed to be sniffing the air, considering.
The beasts crawled slightly in her direction in one great oozing wave, but then they turned towards the outer wall, climbing or slithering or simply spreading up the legs of Todd’s desk and onto its surface. Shattered glass and a few quick gnaws—or was that a burst of acidic spit shot from one thing’s mouth?—and the window and screen now bore a large hole. Tiny behinds, gelatinous masses and jittering tails disappeared into the darkness of the night. Were they looking for more people with damaged souls to feed on their twisted dreams, their desire to inflict pain? Or were they simply returning to the soil until someone else placed the next order in the mail?
Soon Jenny’s only companion in the blood-splattered office was the monster that had gestated inside her. Was it the queen bee, the mother alien? Or was it just the catalyst, the leader, the top chef that the others needed when the time came for the final devouring, when the human being was fully prepared, seasoned with negative thoughts and marinated with pain inflicted on others?
Jenny waited
and it waited. Then it lifted one of its tendrils and gestured in a wavelike motion, slowly, gracefully easing towards her—not a threatening movement, more a question. Its body didn’t move, just this armlike appendage, until it stopped right in front of her face, still undulating as if it wanted to touch her forehead but wasn’t sure if she would recoil or slap it back.
She knew she should be scared. Shouldn’t she? She should pull back and not risk that it would change its mind, hurt her. But the creature had been inside her and had not killed her, and she had already faced death tonight from her husband. What did she have to be afraid of? Instead she felt a mutual curiosity. What did it want from her?
Jenny leaned in, let the tendril touch her brow. A tingling surged through her head and into her arms, down her spine and legs and toes. Not an unpleasant feeling, almost healing though her rib bone was not re-aligning nor did the dull ache in her head from the repeated pounding dissipate. She felt an activity in her mind, and realization came to her. It wanted to understand. What exactly she wasn’t sure—probably why she had stayed with Todd so long and put up with all the pain he unleashed on her. That made sense, didn’t it? But she didn’t understand it herself. She wondered if she ever would.
After what seemed a long time but was probably less than five minutes, it pulled back its limb, stared at her for one more long moment. And then it, too, climbed onto Todd’s desk and out the window.
Once it had fully disappeared into the night, Jenny crawled to the desk herself, pulled down the cordless phone and dialed 911.
The Curious Death Of
Sir Arthur Turnbridge
G. D. Falksen
Now that the tragic death of Sir Arthur Turnbridge has largely subsided from the press, I feel it my duty to put right certain details of the case that have until now been kept from the public. I realize that my words will cause no small amount of resentment from the police, who, it will be remembered, were quite confident in their conclusions, but I feel I must put the record straight, especially given the role played by my friend Hieronymus Vos, the great Flemish detective. And let me be very clear on one salient point: everything that I am about to relate was witnessed by my own eyes.