What nobody knew was that the wet sponge on Agnelli’s head was now dry...
Warden Lawes raised his hand again. And then, dropped it.
This time it was different. The lever went down and the whine of the generator built steadily, and then thick, black smoke began to pour from the electrodes. Agnelli’s whole body began to buck and twist in the chair, straining against the straps, as he twisted and contorted. The smell of burnt flesh, scorched hair, and now fresh-baked shit began to fill the room, joined by vomit, as one of the other witnesses started to heave on the floor.
Warden Lawes and Elliott exchanged stricken glances, as a strangled, gurgling screech erupted from Agnelli, as the current seared his flesh and ripped through his nervous system. His bowels and bladder emptied, as he lost control of his bodily functions. He began to buck and thrash around, the heavy leather straps barely holding him from leaping up, as if to run out of the room. I sat there, simply too stunned and sickened to move, as the revolting display reached a new level. I couldn’t move, as other witnesses pounded on the doors and begged to be released into the prison yard.
It reached a crescendo as, with a rending, “CRACK!” Agnelli’s legs suddenly straightened and the front of the chair broke away from the back. Agnelli’s legs began to spasm and jerk convulsively, straight out in front of him. This was never supposed to happen.
Warden Lawes turned to Elliott and shouted, “Shut it down! Cut the power right now!”
Elliott shut off the power and stepped back from the switchboard. His face was ashen and sweat poured down it, as he surveyed the scene in front of him. Doctor Sweet stepped forward and, with trembling hands, held his stethoscope against Agnelli’s scorched chest.
“Warden, Sir... He’s still alive...”
It was worse than that. Agnelli was regaining consciousness and began to twitch, then, thrash from side to side. Groaning at first, then wailing as his burns registered and the shock wore off.
Warden Lawes looked at Elliott and cried out, “For pity’s sake, man, finish it!”
Elliott merely shook his head and said, “The generator’s out. I’ll have to go and fix it before we can go again.”
He hurried through the green door, as Doctor Sweet dipped into his medical bag, producing a hypodermic syringe and a bottle of morphine.
“I’ll have to put him under, until we can finish him off. This should do it.”
One of my colleagues yelled, “Why not just finish him now, you butcher?!”
“I can’t, he has to be legally executed, according to the law. Don’t blame me for this mess!”
Sweet filled the syringe with a hefty dose of morphine and plunged it into Agnelli’s arm, hoping to kill the pain and keep Agnelli under, until the generator could be fixed.
It didn’t work.
Agnelli only began to thrash all the harder, moaning and groaning in his dying agony. It was obvious that the morphine had no effect whatsoever, and that Agnelli would be fully conscious in a matter of moments.
Lawes looked over at Sweet and said firmly, “I don’t care what you do, just keep him alive and under, until Elliott gets back.”
Doctor Sweet was grim-faced, as he dipped into his bag again. This time, he brought out a bottle of chloroform and a mask. Soaking the mask, he clamped it firmly over Agnelli’s blackened face. Agnelli began to gag and struggle, but Doctor Sweet and two guards held him firmly, as the anaesthetic took effect. Agnelli’s moans and struggling slowly ceased, as he went under from the dope.
Elliot hurried back into the room, saying, “The fuses are fixed, never mind repairing the leg rest, let’s just get this over with.”
Warden Lawes nodded, as he waved the Doctor and guards away from the stricken Agnelli. They moved over to help the three people lying in dead faints on the floor of the chamber.
As they did, Lawes turned to Elliott and dropped his hand.
The room filled with the familiar hum, and Agnelli’s flaccid body shook itself rigid again, his legs straightening right out in front of him. Elliott watched him, as he worked the current up and down, before shutting it down for the final time.
Doctor Sweet walked over from one of the fainted witnesses, hooked up his stethoscope, and pressed it against Agnelli’s still form.
“I pronounce this man dead.”
The Warden turned to those of us who were still conscious and said, with a trembling voice, “That’s all, gentlemen. Please leave.”
We were hustled silently out of the death chamber. As we left, I sneaked a glance over my shoulder. Already, the guards had unstrapped Agnelli’s limp form from the chair. It slumped forward onto a stretcher, with loose eyeballs and a lolling tongue, as what had been a living, breathing person was wheeled away for the autopsy, required by State law. A lynching would have been kinder and less messy.
The other witnesses were silent, as though stunned by the mayhem we had just witnessed. We gathered in the prison yard in silence, as though shocked or ashamed.
Another reporter turned to me as I stood there, smoking a cigarette, with trembling hands. He said, “This was your first one, wasn’t it? You’ll get used to it.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, across the prison yard.
Star and Nine
by Sarah K. Thompson
I shivered as I kicked open the door of the dank prefab that squatted sullenly in the wind-ripped long grass of the abandoned caravan park. It was a sour December evening, and the sickly sun was sinking rapidly behind livid, tormented clouds. The hut was a decaying ruin, beginning to meld back into the earth, slowly being claimed by tendrils of mould and black, stringy weeds. I lit the dim storm lantern that swayed seasick in a shade the colour of spilled wine in the room, which was small and crammed with junk and rickety, rotting furniture – mattress, table, cooker, sink – all covered in time’s putrefying slime and mouldy stains. I threw my army-surplus rucksack onto the rotting floor, and squatted next to it, scratching my itching skin.
I’d come back because there was nowhere else to go, driven here once again by my disgust and my shame.
I rubbed my forearms, and felt something pulse and squirm under my skin. I’d had this crawling sensation for days, but I’d assumed that it was psychosomatic, allegorical, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. I feel dirty, therefore I itch. Then, after one of the hot baths I’d taken to wash away the memory of his touches, I’d seen a worm emerge from my flesh. It had burrowed out, through the blue-veined skin of my groin, and had lain on my skin like a wet shred of meat, tiny, convulsing, pinched at either end. I had plucked it from my thigh with horror and squashed it against the cracked porcelain. The slick of purple blood was still there the next day, irrefutable evidence of what was happening to me.
I soon came to realise that I was infested. There were maggots under every inch of my skin. I could see them move under the surface, casting ripples, like shifting desert sand. Sometimes, usually at night when I was still and warm and alone, they pierced through my skin, swaying blindly like plants sprouting in stop-motion video. Fissures formed at the creases – wrists, elbows, groin, the backs of my knees. My arms became covered in lacerations, worm-cast scars, where they burrowed in and out of my flesh at night. The skin sloughed off in raw chunks. It got worse each day. My body was riddled with worms. They excavated me, as though I were a corpse. I scratched, tearing the skin – they slithered out of reach of my fingers, tunnelling deeper into my body.
This was his doing. I’d come back to beg for his mercy.
I pulled myself up to the grungy sink and eyed myself in the broken mirror that hung above it. The movement of the worms filled me with fascination and revulsion. One of them was working its way free at the outer corner of my right eye, where my skin had become irritated and raw. It was twisted and pulsing, like the umbilical cord of a rat, a motile thread no thicker than a candlewick. The half-centimetre of it that hung from my eyelid swayed like a charmed cobra, coiling around my wet eyelashes. Peering more closely
into the dirty glass, I could see that the creature was emerging from the white of my eyeball itself, rather than under the skin. Nauseated, I stretched the red membranes of my eyelids apart with the finger and thumb of one hand, and pinched at the creature with the other. It tried to retreat, but it had come out too far, and, getting a good grip on the maggot with my fingernails, I began to pull out of my eye. It resisted at first, and I felt a horrid tug of suction, where it fattened and dug into the walls of my cornea. I twisted and coaxed, not wanting it to break, and eventually, I slid the whole length of it out, trailing vitreous mucous. I stretched it between my fingers. It was as long as a cigarette when I pulled it out thin, one of the longest I’d found yet. I held it on my palm for a moment, where it writhed wretchedly, and then, I firmly crushed it between both hands. It split open with a burst of bluish spume, and I rubbed my hands together, obliterating all traces of the tiny creature. I wiped its viscid remains onto a filthy towel, and over the rough fabric of my jeans.
My eye stung, and I longed for some eye drops, but my bag didn’t contain any, so I splashed my eyes with water from the dirty sink. The water had a rusty tang, and I decided against drinking any of it. Instead, I opened a bottle of plum wine that I’d brought in my bag, and sucked it down as though it were mother’s milk. The ferric taste tainted it, too. Night fell, and the wraith-laughter of the wind rattled around my ears. I sank onto the stained mattress and covered myself with my blue sleeping bag. I drifted fitfully between sleep and waking, itching and crawling, with disgust. Oh, that itching! It was unbearable. I could feel them slithering over one another, with that ceaseless, swarming motion, at once purposeful and blind. I felt them emerge under cover of night, navigating my tender goose-flesh. I felt them on my face when I licked my dry lips, tasting the sore at the corner of my mouth. What sleep I got didn’t soothe me. I dreamt of hives of fat serpents, and a door that stood on its own in a void, violet landscape. It opened a crack, showing a cold and dreadful pale light beyond, and I knew he was on his way.
Dawn brought no relief. The maggots assaulted me as soon as I woke. I could feel them tickling between my eyelids. They groped toward the light, and I could hardly close my eye. The mirror showed me half-a-dozen of them, writhing over the surface of my eye. More filled the lower eyelid, like Medusa’s eyelashes, and I wept a constant stream of pink tears that occasionally washed out one of the loathsome grubs, which would slither down my face and land on the ground. Every time this happened, I would crush the tiny monster under foot or thumb, and soon, my dank sanctuary was covered in little bloody smears. On the left eye as well, there were undulations shimmering under the white scleral surface. The constant movement of the worms gave my eyes an unreal and horrifying cast. I scraped as many of them from me as I could, and sat down in my misery.
By the time he arrived it was dark again. He filled the doorway, tall and powerful, with thick, jet-black hair and a spice-coloured winter jumper and black trousers tucked into sturdy kicking boots. I had hardly moved all day, hunched in the corner, muttering to myself and compulsively spitting to get rid of the blood-tang in my mouth. A trail of worms coursed from my right eye, and I was covered in bloody smears. The wine was finished. It had stained my mouth and given me no comfort. Maggots crawled on the lip of the green glass bottle. When he saw me, a look of boyish wonderment spread across his face.
He crowed, “O-ho! What have we here? Is that you, Star? Oh, child, you don’t look so good!”
I stared up at him, paralysed with despair and revulsion and hate. I tried to speak, but my mouth felt swollen. I licked my lips again, but it was like opening my mouth in a cesspool. I could feel his cold and cloying poison. He spoke with my accent, but his voice was low and as rough as sharkskin.
“Not so pretty now, are you, Princess?”
He crouched down and took my face in his gloved hands, tilting it this way and that, with a medic’s concern, trying to get a good look at me at in the seedy light. His skin was smooth and still, and his eyes were as black and bright as the waters of the Styx. The touch of his thick snow gloves only aggravated my discomfort, and my nerves throbbed as though they were trying to escape from my body. His name was Nine, and he was one of the Devil’s own children. There are abominations who appear in this world, who have the shape of men, but are not; whose pleasure is to inflict pain and suffering, to stir up the restful heart; and to ensure that no conflict ever has a resolution. Nine and his cruel siblings move effortlessly in our world, unbreakable, casting atrocities and revelling in their mayhem. Whether they really are demons, or twisted humans, or malign visitors from a world beyond our own, who can say? But, someone once told me that they were fiends who had been thrown out of Hell for their cruelty, and my heart knew it was true. Their hanging menace had paralysed my childhood. The wise stayed at home, and hoped not to attract their attention, and prayed.
I wept, “What’s happening to me?” I pleaded, “What have you done? You promised that I’d be safe.”
Nine laughed, a mean, malicious sound.
“Well, you are safe, star-child. Of course, you’re safe. You’re just... oh, love, I’m sorry, but what a fucking state you’ve got yourself into. Shit, would you look at those things?” Some of the worms had crawled onto his gloves, and he brushed them off with affected delicacy. “Oh, you should look after yourself. You ought to be more careful who you mess around with. You never know what you’ll pick up.”
He stepped up and sprang away from me, with an athletic motion, making the hut creak eerily. He turned suddenly to face the shabby door and his back shuddered. Shadows lurched. I knew he was laughing again, and when he turned back to face me, a black tear of mirth rolled down his cheek. He spread his arms, mimicking compassion.
“Oh, there, there. poor Princess. Nine’s here. Nine will make it all better for you.”
He held me tight in a hug, from which no comfort could be derived, and leaned in toward me, with breath as cold as Pluto. His soft, ruby lips were slightly parted, and I saw his forked black tongue flicker behind his pointed teeth. I recoiled from him, but he held fast and kissed me on the cheek, as gently as any lover could. I could smell his unbearable foxglove odour, as that melanic tongue snaked around my ear with a sound like vultures devouring wet flesh. His cold mouth moved over my face, slurping up the writhing worms and swallowing them down.
I was shaking with fear. Eventually, he broke away and stood up. He grinned and wiped the last few purple threads that hung from his mouth, leaving smears of blood on his chin.
“That’s better. You look almost human now.”
I scrubbed his sticky saliva and my hot tears from my face. I struggled to my feet, “Make it stop! Please, Nine, I know you can help me. You have to make it stop. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t bear it – I’ll kill myself. Oh, God, I wish I were dead.”
The smile drained from Nine’s face.
“How can you say that? You die, one second before your time, and I’ll chase you through Hell for all eternity,” he said. “You ungrateful whore! How can you talk about killing yourself, after all I’ve done for you? I saved your skin, when you were wandering around like a motherless pup. You wouldn’t have had a chance, if I hadn’t saved you. I took pity on you, when no one else would have you, and gave you everything you asked me for, and this is how you thank me?”
“I can’t stand it any longer. The itching...”
“You brought this on yourself,” he sighed. “You never learn, none of you.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I whispered.
“Oh, you had a choice, star,” he snapped nastily. “You always have a choice.”
I sobbed hysterically. Every part of me crawled with the worms. They gave me not a second’s peace. In that same dark room where Nine had occupied my body, I clawed at my skin, leaving bloody tracks.
“Nine... I can’t bear it!”
I scrambled toward him, across the rotting floor, and he pushed me away. He ran his gloved hand through his thick
hair and looked out of the window into the blackness beyond, with expressionless eyes. I had come back, because in the streets, people recoiled from me. I had the mark of the Horde, and was a pariah. I had crossed the border, and there wasn’t even pity left for me now. The first time I’d come here to hide, it was a self-imposed exile, running from my own shame that seemed so trivial now. I had broken the curfew that sultry autumn evening to escape from my fat pimp’s beatings. I had stumbled across the abandoned caravan park by chance. I’d entered the shack that looked the least damaged, looking for somewhere to lie down in peace, only catching sight of him when it was too late.
He had looked beautiful at first, half-wreathed in the violet shadows, behind the shabby, plastic table in a writer’s pose. He’d watched me from under long lashes, locking my gaze with his nightshade eyes. It was only when the forked tongue flicked out over pointed teeth that I realised what he was. When I tried to back away, I’d found myself unable to move.
It was my first direct contact with one of the Horde, and I hadn’t understood the threat. I’d lived my life in the shadows. Wasn’t I in Hell already? I’d poured out my story and begged him to let me be. Nine had listened, a smile growing, eyes of black fire. Nine had held my hand and seduced me with threats and promises. I spent one night with him, for the absolution of my sins. He could rid me of my tormentors, he said, and the price would be small. He promised me a release from pain. Hardly seeing the difference between this one and all the other men who possessed me each night, I had surrendered myself to the demon. My memories of the night are blurred and febrile, a jumble of forms and feelings, my mind full with the raw screaming of my nerves. Isolated images crept irregularly into my head, the scent of belladonna, cold flesh, pain, and the colours of a bruise. I knew then the sensation of being possessed utterly, in body, mind, and spirit. I felt infused with his poison, and I knew that whatever soul I had, I had finally abandoned. For a while, that knowledge had given me strength, the strength of one who had nothing left to lose. But, there was no peace.
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