Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1)

by Matthew LeDrew

  It stared at the gaping black rectangle that had been a door a moment ago, watching the shadows inside dance about like puppets in a play. They excited it wonderfully; their movements could not have been more perfect if they’d been planned.

  Xander stopped, his eyes growing wide as his head jutted forward in shock as though he had lunged forward but was held back by invisible seatbelts. He tried hard to hold onto the flash of dream or memory, but it was gone. Locked away deep inside a subconscious that wasn’t his own and would not let him see the rest. Every time he tried to access the information, he felt a migraine start to build in the top-right corner of his brain. He looked up at his reflection in the broken black glass of his computer screen and saw darkness slowly fade from his eyes as the normal white reestablished itself. The rest of his face looked dried and splintered and dusty, much like the glass itself.

  Sighing gruffly, he reached under the computer desk and pulled a black T-shirt out from under the wheel of his chair, snapping it in the air twice to get some of the wrinkles out. Holding it up in front of him, he examined it for stains or smears and, finding none, stretched it over his head and body, wincing as the soft fabric grazed his abdomen.

  He looked down and saw a few deep cuts across his stomach. They were healing even as he examined them, shriveling into little black dots, until they finally disappeared altogether. He grimaced slightly when they closed. It had always been an odd sight, watching his own wounds heal. It was almost like saying he could watch grass grow. He rubbed his hand over his stomach and pulled his shirt the rest of the way down.

  “Stupid frigging thing,” he mumbled to himself as he grabbed a pair of faded denim jeans off the foot of the bed and started pulling them on. “Think you’d know how not to get yourself sliced open by now.”

  Frowning, he unlocked the door to his room quickly and swung it open hard enough that it slammed against the corner of his desk. The crack of the wood echoed through his splitting skull, making him grit his teeth.

  To his right along the wall were family photos that were taken every year. In each and every one his parents wore the same plastic smiles, as though they’d been cut and pasted from one to the other. In each one he had on his meek little smile, the best he could force out at the time with the hot lights of the supermarket photo-hut glaring down at him, more families waiting in the hall. There was one near the end from around three years back that made him grin every time he saw it. His parents still had those same Barbie-and-Ken smiles mashed onto their faces, but in this one, his was real. His smile was big and genuine, his eyes sparkling with life in a way he’d never seen in a photo before or since. That day, the next family waiting in line to get their pictures taken was Sara Johnson and her parents. She’d looked at him and smiled and waved and he’d smiled back, just as the shutter snapped open.

  He looked at it only briefly before starting down the stairs, hopping down over them two at a time until he reached the bottom. He started to reach for his sneakers when something caught his eye off to the right in the living room. Nobody should have been here this time of day, yet his mother’s purse had been tossed onto the couch and his father’s pipe smoked with freshly-lit tobacco. Raising an eyebrow, he dropped his shoe and stood up straight before walking around the corner until the room was in full view.

  His mother sat on the love seat in the far side of the room, tears billowing down her red and puffy cheeks as she held a doily close to her face, using it to wipe the moisture away every few seconds. Her body shook with sobs as his father knelt beside her, one hand laid on her palm and one rubbing her shoulder rhythmically. He turned toward Xander and frowned with his steely cold gaze. The one that Xander recognized his eyes took on when he stopped caring about whatever was going on and expecting everyone else to, too.

  Xander lost the feeling in his fingers, the tingling sensation rising slowly until it was almost at his elbows. He’d seen them like this before, right before the start of one of the worst chapters in his entire life... one that didn’t seem to want to end.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, in a voice too low to be heard. He stopped, then took a step forward and cleared his throat. “What happened?” he repeated, making no effort to hide the desperation in his voice.

  His mother started to sob again, unable to make eye contact with him.

  Tell me it’s Aunt Sue, he thought, the pit in his stomach growing larger with every passing instant. Tell me her heart finally gave out from all the sweetened-condensed milk she eats. Or tell me Principal Shnieder hung himself in his office after last week’s PTA meeting. Tell me anything except what I know you’re going to.

  “Son,” his father said, his voice gravely and stern. “Here’s how it happened.”

  He knew it was bad now. That was the phrase his Dad had always used when delivering bad news. According to his Nanna Drew, it’d been that way ever since he was a kid. The first time he’d been caught stealing it was that exact phrase which had preceded the explanation he gave his mother.

  “No,” Xander demanded, but his voice was only a whisper.

  “It’s Mike and Cathy.”

  He listened to everything his father had to say, along with the sobs of his mother that punctuated every sentence perfectly. But inside the words curdled and gargled in his ears, staying there until he was ready to process them. The only things his mind had heard were their names, Mike and Cathy.

  It stared at the gaping black rectangle that had been a door a moment ago, watching the shadows inside dance about like puppets in a play. They excited it wonderfully, their movements could not have been more perfect if they’d been planned.

  It had been the Kennessy’s door, he was sure of it now. The greyish-blue siding matched perfectly, as did the black metal spirals they used on their railing on either side of the stairs. The Womb had been there last night.

  Eventually his father finished speaking. He said nothing for a full minute, still nodding every few seconds as he pretended to listen.

  “Son?” his father asked, lowering his wild, stringy eyebrows down over his tiny sunken eyes.

  “Alex?” his mother called, speaking finally.

  The sound snapped him out of his trance and he turned towards them, giving them one final, curt nod. “Yes,” he said, trying hard to keep all emotion out of his voice. He didn’t think he had it in him to fake anything at the moment, like he had in all the pictures upstairs. He knew that if he pretended to be okay or happy, the real thing would come pouring out and he didn’t want that, not now. “I have to go.”

  “Maybe we should - -”

  “Have to go,” he said quietly again as he turned and grabbed his shoes, avoiding eye contact with both of them the entire time.

  He closed the door behind him and the second he did his mother began to cry again, burying her head into the crook of her husband’s neck.

  Xander tripped on the chipped concrete stair leading up to his front door, tumbling face first into the purple shale walkway leading up to it. The brittle stone broke on impact, sending tiny shards of it into his hands and chin as friction ripped the skin raw once more.

  He stayed there for over a minute, staring at the shadow image that the morning sun had made. In it he couldn’t see the outline of his short-cut hair, and his muscles looked more defined, his jaw slightly squarer. He looked bald and made of darkness, like a demon sprung from a child’s nightmare. Blood dripped from his chin and fell to the ground, looking like two beady red eyes in the center of the shadow-demon’s head.

  “You son of a bitch,” he whispered, sweat gleaming off his moist lips. He drew back and punched it right between the ‘eyes,’ shattered the shale and digging more of it into his hand. Gritting his teeth as his face became livid with anger, he drew back and slammed down again, creating an eruption of blood from the open wound. “You son of abitch!” he screamed louder, raising both hands high into the air now and hammer-fisting his shadow. He felt his voice crackle with the vomit-like urge that came wi
th the Womb. Curling his lip as he recognized it, he punched himself in the jaw.

  Something in his mouth snapped and then righted itself almost instantly. He felt the top of his jaw split, blood and spit streaming down his throat until the wound knitted itself back together. He laughed at himself as blood started to drool from his mouth and down his chin, tapping onto the ground. If anyone had walked by or seen, they might have called the men in the clean white coats to come and take him away.

  His heart started to pump harder and faster, his blood starting to feel hot. Like it was boiling in his veins. Letting out a bubbly laugh as he started to wind down, he peered down at the shadow puppet version of the Womb he’d been so angry at a moment ago.

  It was bleeding black ooze, just the way the creature did in real life, the blood-red colored eyes squinting into a long, angry scowl at him.

  He stared back at it, afraid and confused with the excitement and grief and pain. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were no longer forcing pulses of red-celled blood from between the spikes of purple rock, but was now producing a thick black substance that stuck to his hands like stringy tar.

  “What’dyou do?” he spat, reaching a palm over the shadow-womb’s face to rub out the eyes completely. Even now, he could still feel them burning holes into his face. He tried to stand up, wreathing over in pain as the blood vessels inside him exploded again and again, at war with themselves, until finally the veins in his neck and wrists sprang open through the skin. Bending over in pain, he hobbled to the small space under a tree where he and Sara used to play as children between their two houses, where nobody could see. Where he’d imagined kissing her since before he’d even really wanted to kiss girls. To his surprise, he found himself laughing a little again, though nothing was funny. He fell to the ground next to that old oak, his eyes rolled back in his head as black blood squirted upward in tiny splashes and slowly covered his entire body, hardening quickly into a second skin.

  One last bit of black blood threw itself out of his mouth, his taste buds singing a brief celebration at being rid of it. He felt the adrenalin push him to anger but not take over.“Black Womb lives,” he heard himself say as he stood, almost choking on the words. His red eyes slit open. As tenuous as the hold might be, he had the driver’s seat for the moment.

  He popped all eight of his claws, then clenched his fists, digging them into his own palm. What have I done?

  Cathy stared at the fleckled white wall of her hospital room, her eyes focusing on random clumps of stucco. Each time, an image almost appeared out of the wall and then slipped away just as it was coming into view. Trains of thought kept occurring to her and then drifted off, but one remained as constant as her heartbeat.

  Not good enough. Not worth it. Too much trouble. Not worth the trouble. Not worth the trouble.

  The words had been ringing in her head ever since the police found her unconscious, clinging to the lifeless form of Sandra Davis. Those words cut deep. Deeper than any of Genblade or Spider’s blades ever could. The words sliced to the very depths of Cathy Kennessy’s soul. Grendel had said it. Xander had said it, as Black Womb. Two people who were very close to her had hurt her, had come close to killing her, and then stopped... because she wasn’t even worth the effort that it would take to deliver a killing blow. Neither Grendel nor Black Womb had killed her physically, but emotionally they had both succeeding in shattering her.

  There was a sound from the window like a small, stunted tap. Her eye twitched when she heard it, joined a moment later by her mouth as well. Her eyelids droned up and down lazily as she tried to find the energy just to move her head. When she finally lolled it into a flopish turn, her eyes sprang open with new energy. Her hands clamped down against the bed, crumpling the sheets as she pushed herself to the far edge of the mattress. Her hair fell over the side as her throat made a small, whimpering sound.

  The Womb put one foot down onto the floor, the black ooze that covered it masking all its toes and making it look cloven. Its other leg remained on the sill, bent at the knee as the drapes fell lifelessly around its toned, dark frame. There had been a breeze a moment ago, she was sure of it, but the creature had taken it right from the air as easily as it took the breath from people’s lungs.

  Its emotionless triangle eyes looked at her, the light of the white room turning them into scaly pools of red swamp water. It opened its mouth slowly, its lower lip quivering as it unveiled duel rows of jagged yellow teeth. One in the top right was starting to rot away, a large hole in it surrounded by dark green decay. Soon it would snap off and be replaced by another, but from the way its tongue lashed at her, she assumed she wouldn’t be around long enough to see that happen.

  “No!” she screamed, finally falling off of the bed. Tubes tangled around her arm as she fell, yanking them from the IV drip that had been fed into her arm the night before. She kicked her feet and threw her hands about wildly, trying to get away from the tubes the same way a dog would try to kick free of a tangled leash. Her hair swiveled in front of her face, masking her fear and anger in a tangled mess of knots and curls until she didn’t even look human.

  “Hey,” Xander soothed from deep inside the beast. His soft, caring words turned to a gravelly vomited urge when passed through the Womb’s lips, shredding any of their original intent along the way. It came closer to her, one hand outstretched and ready to pop its claws as it stepped down off the windowsill.

  “Nono NO!” she howled, still pushing at the floor to back herself up even though she was up against the wall. The rational part of her mind had shut down, replaced with the pure animal instinct to run.

  “It’s just me,” it pleaded, its eyes turning upwards into what passed for sadness on its face. Its teeth barred as its fingers curled up into a small fist, its knuckles protruding like little mountains across the bridge of it.

  “No!” she cried again, her eyes burning with hate. When it got to close to her she lashed out, slamming her white-knuckled fists against its chest and raking her nails across its face as she screamed.

  The Womb brought its hands up to try and grab her and stop her, grunting something incomprehensible as she started kicking it in the gut as well.

  “Mmmmnnno!” she wailed as loud as she could, worming away from its grip and continuing to smack at it, digging her nails into its eyes.

  Closing its mouth bitterly, it brought its hand up quickly and pressed it to her mouth. It brought its own face in until they were nose-to-nose. Her wide brown eyes stared into the red gelatinous pools of the Womb, watching as tiny chunks of black flesh floated around in them.

  Her eyes still burned at him, fiery hate behind them that would have caught him on fire if they could have. Her voice was muffled, every syllable sounding like the letter ‘M’ in succession. She tried to bite the Womb’s hand once, her mouth filling with the moldy-ash taste that was its flesh.

  Growling, the Womb closed its eyes. It stayed there for a long moment, without any movement between either of them. Suddenly, the darkness around him seemed to lose its ability to hold itself together and came crashing down onto the floor, revealing the bloodstained form of Xander Drew underneath.

  “It’s just me,” he said, the sadness in his voice finally audible for what it was.

  She squinted at him as he took his hand away. He could see sanity flooding back into her face along with recognition. “Xander?” she whispered, rising to her feet.

  He nodded sheepishly as he backed away. There was a tiny slice in her cheek from where his claws must have poked out. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the redness there as much as he tried.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” she asked, more out of astonishment than spite as she moved back towards her bed.

  “Checking up on some friends, I thought,” he said as the oil oozed its way off of his body. He got on his knees next to her bed and took her hand. She pulled away at first, to his obvious sadness, then let him take it. His touch was tender, noth
ing like it had been last night. His thumb stroked her fingers, paying equal loving attention to each one. “What happened?”

  She tried to hide her anger at the posing of the question. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it wasn’t his fault. But it would be so easy to blame him. “You did,” she spat.

  He closed his eyes tight, forcing Black Womb not to surface despite the impassioned pain this caused him. He could barely stand to see her, this woman he loved as much as life itself, in this condition. It didn’t help that he knew that he was responsible.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” he reiterated, hiding the pain in his voice. He did not deserve her pity for this.

  Cathy looked at him for a moment, astonished that he didn’t know. Even though she knew that he could neither control nor remember what he did as the Womb, she would never truly understand it.

  He reached up and pulled back her hospital gown a bit at the sleeve, revealing her bruised and cut shoulder. He leaned over and kissed her cut, which was now stitched. Blood smattered the hospital gown where it had bled. He held her hand again. “I am so sorry,” he said. He felt like he’d been saying that far too much lately.

  “I know,” she answered, sighing, her eyes cast downward.

  He squeezed her hand. “I love you, y’ know.”

  She smiled. “I know. And I love you too. It’s the other part I’m not so crazy about.”

  They both laughed nervously, but she could hear it in his chuckle that he was faking the light-hearted expression.

  “Now, what happened to you?”

  She sighed again. “I didn’t see much, but it started off just like the last time. The clicking in the background, that smell, like mouldy oranges. Mike and I ran into my house, but realized that the kill... that Black Womb was inside. So, he went in to save my parents and sent me to some neighbours. After about ten minutes, Black Womb showed up at the Davis’ home. He slaughtered the Davis’ and tried to kill me. But he didn’t... he said... he said that I wasn’t worth it.”