Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  I put a cigarette in my mouth, raise my lighter, then decide that I don’t want it and put it back in the pack. “I’m not in the mood,” I tell her. I pocket the pack of cigarettes and say, “Listen, I have to go ch—”

  “Don’t say it,” Helen says. “Don’t even say it.”

  I blink at her, a little confused, and then I nod and say, “Okay.” I leave her there and go inside.

  ***

  She comes by a couple of more times after that, but we don’t talk much. Then she disappears. She doesn’t come in to the hospital at all. I flip through all the monitors for her, every night, but she’s not there.

  After she’s been missing for a week and a half, I’m sitting in the security office around midnight when my cell phone rings.

  My cell phone never rings.

  Seriously, never.

  I flip it open warily and the caller ID says it’s Helen.

  I don’t remember giving her my number.

  I have hers, but she shouldn’t have mine.

  I answer it. I don’t say anything in greeting; I just press the ACCEPT button and wait for her to start talking.

  “Are you there?” she whispers from the other end, after a moment of silence.

  “Yeah,” I say. “How did you get my number.”

  There’s some rustling, and then a noise that sounds like she’s blowing her nose, and then nothing.

  “Helen,” I say. “What’s going on.”

  “It’s dead.”

  “What’s dead.”

  “She is. She’s dead inside me.” There’s a barked sobbing noise, and then she blows her nose again.

  “That . . . sucks,” I say. When she doesn’t answer, I think that maybe this wasn’t the best response, so I follow it up with, “Do you know for sure. Do you know for sure that it’s dead.”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that? How the fuck would I not know? I’m a fucking maternity doctor, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Yeah,” I capitulate. “That makes sense.” This is one of those rare situations where it’s convenient that I’m principally unable to express emotion, because I’m feeling rather gleeful at this revelation. That fucking baby represented an all-inclusive end to my life, and not in the attractive sense, i.e. death. My existence would have been ruined. She had claimed she wouldn’t demand any responsibility on my part, but she and I both knew it wouldn’t end up working that way.

  But now . . . now it doesn’t matter.

  Now it’s dead, and I am once again free.

  “I need you,” Helen says. “I need you to come over.”

  “I’m at work, Helen.”

  “Leave.”

  I sigh. I could radio the janitor and have him keep an eye on things—tell him I’ve become violently ill with some sort of stomach virus, or something. I’ve never once missed a day of work, so I don’t think it would be too big of a deal.

  The problem, though, is that I don’t want to go over to Helen’s.

  I’m not emotionally equipped to even remotely be able to comfort a grieving woman who’s just suffered a miscarriage.

  I am, however, in a delightfully good mood. Death in general gets me pretty excited, especially the death of children, and more than anything, of course, the death of my child, that I had never wanted.

  I guess I’m just feeling kind of generous, or something. I tell Helen, after another sigh (this one simply for dramatic effect), “Fine, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you,” she says, but it’s not gratitude in her voice—it’s despair. At least, I think it is. It’s hard enough for me to figure out people’s emotions when I’m face to face with them; it’s another thing, entirely, when it’s over the phone.

  “Give me half an hour, I guess,” I tell her, and then hang up before she can say anything else.

  ***

  I park on the street, walk up the driveway, and ring the doorbell. I’m holding a bouquet of cheap yellow roses I picked up from an all-night convenience store on the way over. I thought a miscarriage probably warrants flowers just as much as a first date does.

  When she doesn’t answer, I ring it again, wait a minute or so, and then knock. When she still doesn’t answer, I try the door handle, and it’s unlocked. I figure, shit, I’ve been inside this woman, and watched her eat a baby, so I think that’s all pretty much worthy of entry into her home.

  “Helen,” I call out, stepping into the foyer and closing the front door behind me, hanging my long black coat on the rack. She doesn’t answer, so I walk down the hall and into the kitchen. There’s already a bouquet of roses in a vase on the table, where my tiger lilies had been once upon a time. They’re red and white, and far more expensive-looking than my shabby yellow ones. They’re a little wilted, though, probably a couple of weeks old and nearing their death. I set my own roses on the table and go into the living room.

  Seeing Helen, it’s so much like the time I first met her in the morgue that, for a brief second, I wonder if I’m time traveling again, Slaughterhouse-Five-style. I try to remember the last time I’ve slept. Last night, it was last night, yes. So this is really happening.

  “Why are you naked,” is all I can think to say.

  She’s sitting on one of her sheets, legs spread out before her like she’s waiting to be fucked, and maybe she is. Her stomach is round and gross. There are two empty pill bottles lying beside her, next to a gleaming surgical scalpel. I think back to the first night I saw Helen, in the delivery room with the stillborn baby and its murderous/suicidal father.

  “I have to be,” she says, her head lolling. There’s dried drool on her chin, and her eyes have never been deader. If she wasn’t sitting up and talking, I’d think she was dead. “I have to be naked because I’m going to make a mess. You know I’m a messy eater.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But what are you going to eat. There’s no baby here.” I look around, wondering if maybe there’s a fetus in a container I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t see one anywhere. When she doesn’t say anything, I repeat myself. “Helen, what are you going to eat.”

  She looks at her stomach and picks up the scalpel.

  “Helen,” I say, taking a step forward. “No. Don’t.”

  “What other choice do I have?” she asks, trying to look at me, but unable to maintain an eye-locked gaze because her head keeps tipping this way and that, like it’s too heavy for her neck to support. “You even said I’d just end up eating it, anyway. Besides, it’s kind of poetic, don’t you think?”

  “No, Helen,” I say, taking another step forward. “I really don’t think it’s very poetic.”

  “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?”

  “Yeah,” I say, drawing in a deep breath, unable to discern whether I’m more upset about the scenario unfolding before me, or about the fact that I just admitted to a live woman that I think she’s beautiful. She is, though, minus the fat stomach—her dead face, her golden hair splayed across her shoulders, her already-full breasts made ever-fuller by the pregnancy, nipples standing erect, the lips of her cunt seeming to whisper to me—yes, she is beautiful.

  Helen smiles. “That’s very sweet. I’m glad you think that.”

  “How is that relevant, Helen.”

  “Don’t you remember what Poe said? About beautiful women, and death?”

  I shiver a little as I recall the passage to which she’s referring. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Say it.”

  “No.”

  “SAY IT!” she bellows, startling me and making my heart skip. She’s breathing heavily, her teeth bared and breasts heaving, and I feel myself start to get inexplicably hard.

  I can’t remember the exact wording, so I paraphrase and say quietly, “There’s nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman.”

  The vicious look on her face dissipates into one of serene contentment, and she nods, closing her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you.” And then she casually drags the scalpel acros
s her bloated stomach.

  “Helen,” I say, falling to my knees and reaching my hand out in protest, but unable to keep my dick from rising in excitement as the blood begins to flow over the slope of her belly and down between her legs, soaking the sheet and the insides of her legs, slathering her vagina in red. “Jesus, Helen, what are you doing.”

  She slips her free hand into the slit across her stomach, reaching inside, and then stabs the scalpel farther into the wound, making careful cuts at whatever is within that’s keeping her from her feast. “I can feel it,” she says giddily. She has blood almost up to her elbows. “I can feel her. She’s very, very dead.”

  I collapse back against the couch and can’t do anything but sit there and watch as she fishes around inside of herself for our dead kid.

  “It’s a shame,” Helen says as she sets aside the scalpel and then plunges her hand back inside her gushing stomach. “We really could have had something, you know? We could have been a happy, fucked-up little family, and it would have been great. We would have put all those normal families to shame.”

  “Yeah,” I say, humoring her because she’s dying anyway. I’m just trying to figure out how I feel about the whole situation. Seriously, I like Helen. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend. And no, I’m not getting sentimental. On the contrary, don’t friends react a little more . . . intensely, when they watch their friends die? Especially when their friends are trying to wrench a dead baby out of their own stomach for the purpose of ingestion?

  I don’t know, I guess this is kind of a special circumstance.

  “I’ve got her,” Helen says, smiling wider than I’ve ever seen her smile. She struggles for a few more seconds and then lifts the wretched thing from within her, a red, humanoid creature, tethered to her by the thin rope of an umbilical cord.

  “I’m bleeding out,” Helen says weakly as she forces herself to sit up straighter. “I have to hurry.” For a brief moment, she looks at the fetus with a soft expression that I think is motherly love, or something, probably imagining all it could have been, and then she lifts it to her mouth and begins to eat.

  Now, we’ve already been through this part. The noises, the chomping, the groans, et cetera—so I won’t go into vivid detail. Just know it’s as jarring as it was the first time around. She still manages to pleasure herself as she’s eating, her sexual juices mixing with the ever-running blood, sometimes squirting out in a thin pink stream, or an occasional misty spray. She eats the umbilical cord, too—gnawing on it a little and then slurping the rest up like a spaghetti noodle.

  My dick could cut through diamonds right now. I’ve unzipped my jeans, and I’m stroking myself as I watch her.

  Finally, once she’s . . . I don’t know, full, I guess, she tosses aside what little remains of the fetus and looks at me. She’s completely covered in gore, from her face to her feet, and she’s shuddering with what I think is probably a combination of pleasure and blood loss.

  She reeks of the death smell.

  “Fuck me,” she says. “Fuck me as I’m dying.”

  “No,” I say. “Not until you’re dead.”

  Now is the part where I’m supposed to say something meaningful to her as the last wisps of life begin to drift from her. I’m supposed to, I don’t know, utter some long-winded soliloquy about our relationship, about all she did for me, or whatever. Maybe we would even kiss, and cry, and I’d hold her until I felt her breathing cease and her heart chug slowly to a final halt. I would delicately close her eyes and—

  Blah, blah, blah, go fuck yourself. If you’re looking for that kind of shit, go read a LaVyrle Spencer novel.

  That kind of shit doesn’t happen in my world.

  Nope. I just silently watch her die.

  Once I tell her I’m not going to fuck her until she’s dead, she must not have the energy to argue because she just lets herself fall onto her back and lie there. I wait until the rise and fall of her breasts stops, and the blood no longer pulses from her stomach, and then I get up.

  I drop my pants.

  I step toward her, out of my jeans, peeling off my shirt as I go, and then . . .

  I mount.

  She’s still warm, but that’s okay. She’s dead. There’s the baby weight issue, the flabby skin left behind from her stretched stomach, but that’s okay, too. I can look past that, because she is dead, and she is wonderful. She lies there, limply flopping a little as I fuck the living daylights (er, you know what I mean) out of her, and she is sex incarnate. I smack her dead tits around. I yank so hard on her hair that golden handfuls come out in my fists. I kiss her dead, bloody mouth and my tongue picks up flecks of fetus.

  Next, I decide to skull-fuck her, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. I jam my fingers into her eye and pluck out the eyeball, squeezing it in my fist and loving the feeling of its juices running down my forearm. Then, gently, I lift her head and insert my cock into the empty socket, thrusting in and out, feeling her brains churn around inside her head.

  Bear with me, it’s almost over.

  When the skull-fucking gets boring, I pull out of her eye socket and go back to fucking her dead cunt, shrieking and hooting and hollering like a crazed, maniacal barbarian. There’s so much blood everywhere, and it’s all just so fucking funny.

  Just as I’m about to come, I belt out a yodeling howl (think of Tarzan swinging on a vine) and bury my hands inside her. Shoving my arms in up to the elbows and squishing her dead organs, pulling some of them out and pitching them at the wall, tugging out coils of her intestines and rubbing them over my body, and then I absolutely fucking explode inside of her. It’s the purest orgasm any man ever felt in the history of sex—I lift out from my body and am sucked into space, my entire being shattering into individual chunks of ecstasy, and every god there ever was bows down to my carnal supremacy, and then there’s only light and it is a good light, I am not afraid of it, and it consumes me and then I’m back in Helen’s house, falling off her, covered in her blood and intestines, and I’m laughing—I’m not sure if I’ve ever laughed in my life, really laughed, but oh, I’m laughing now, and I feel better than I thought was possible. I look at my dick and it’s still spurting out intermittent spouts of residual semen, and my abdominal muscles are clenching ever tighter with the most exquisite bliss known to man.

  After a while, I stand and look around at the mess. I run a bloody hand through my hair, which has gotten kind of long, and for a few seconds I think about perhaps getting a haircut tomorrow.

  Deciding I should probably clean myself up, I find Helen’s bathroom upstairs and step into the shower, letting the hot water run over me for I don’t know how long. I think about what’s just happened, how glorious I feel, how my life will never be the same again. I have no idea how I’ll be able to equal or surpass the pleasure I just experienced, and I wonder if I’ve reached the absolute highest peak in my life. Whether the only way to go is down, and this is a little dismaying but I don’t care right now. I just smile, really smile, and let the water run over me.

  As Helen washes off me and swirls around the drain and gets slurped into the penetralia of the sewers, I guess I feel something. I don’t know what, but something.

  When the shower finally turns cold, I shut off the nozzle, towel myself off, and walk downstairs, naked. I stretch in front of the picture window and look out at the night. The arrogant grin of the moon is high, and its palace of stars gleams bright. The rest is darkness, and it is good.

  And then, the darkness is penetrated. Violated.

  Raped by two bold yellow lights drawing closer to the house.

  Headlights coming up the driveway.

  Scratching my head, I back away from the window and stand looking at the door, listening to the sound of the car outside. I look over my shoulder at the wilted roses in the vase on the kitchen table, and suddenly a lot of things start to piece together and make sense.

  Me and . . . I haven’t had sex in a long time.

 
My . . . someone was able to fix it for me.

  She really needs a new car. I think she’s got a lemon or something. It’s a great car, but it’s a piece of shit.

  He said he got his wife flowers, just like you told him to, and that it worked. They . . . fucked, I guess. And apparently now they’ve got a kid on the way.

  A montage of all the little things I’d ignored, all flashing through my head to the accompaniment of the Saw theme music that plays whenever the plot twist is revealed at the end of each movie.

  I sigh and think, Well, shit. This sucks.

  I hear the car engine shut off.

  I walk back to the living room and pick up my discarded shirt, taking my cigarettes out of the pocket and lighting one. I sit on the couch and look at the savage, grisly scene before me, and I try to think of how someone normal would react to it.

  I guess I’m about to find out.

  I hear the door open.

  I hear someone come inside.

  I hear a man’s voice call out, “Helen? I’m home, and I brought you flowers again, so I’m expecting to get some tonight!”

  I smirk as I smoke.

  I hope he likes sloppy seconds.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Little is known about Chandler’s origins. He has claimed, on separate occasions, to be both from Helltown, California, and Cleveland, Ohio. To date, it is still unclear from which locale he actually hails. He currently resides in Los Angeles, but sightings of him are rare. He is the author of Until the Sun, Just to See Hell, and Hate to Feel.