Trapped Within

by Bradshaw, Duncan P.

  The front door crashed open and I heard a heavy thud on the hall floor. I adjusted myself and watched. A hand appeared around the edge of the doorframe, followed by the rest of Doreen. She was a mess. It took her a few minutes to actually make it to her feet. It was a scene I had had to endure many times, but tonight she looked different. She actually looked scared. Her long hair was wet and plastered to her face. Her makeup was a mess and her mouth was bleeding. Blood splashed on the tiles as she spat. She cursed and mumbled as she finally got to her feet and staggered towards the kitchen worktop.

  It was times like this I wish I was human. I just wanted to cry out and ask her what was wrong and what had happened? Regardless of what I was, she was still my wife. She lifted the bottle she had opened hours before and drank from it, washing the stale wine around her mouth and spitting down into the sink. Something small and yellow rolled about the sink like a roulette ball before stopping.

  It was a front tooth.

  “Fuck,” she screamed and picked it up. She caught me watching. “The fuck are you looking at?” I moved back into the corner of my tank.

  “Yeah, you know what happened, George. You want to know how my date went?” she said, ripping the front of her dress down.

  There were bitemarks and bruises all around her neck and chest. She stood there swaying in front of me. Her eyes burned right through the glass tank and into me. I was frightened. I had been wary of drunk Doreen before; even when I was human she was a fearful drunk, but now I was shaking in my lumpy green skin.

  The chair scraped along the floor as she sat down, grabbed the bottle, and drank from it. She hadn’t adjusted herself and her tits hung out from the ripped dress, sagging mounds of dead flesh. But who was I to judge appearances? I was a dirty fat toad with skin problems and bad eyes.

  Doreen sat in silence, playing with the top of her wine bottles. Her yellow finger circled the top, peeled the label from it, leaving the bits in the ashtray beside the cigarette that was almost burnt to the butt. I would have killed for the last few drags from that cigarette, or any cigarette for that matter. I really thought the cravings and human feelings would have long since vanished, but it seemed whatever had happened to me, whatever Doreen had done to me, hadn’t been a complete transformation. It was times like this that I wish it had been.

  A thump on the door stirred me from my thoughts. Doreen’s head shot up from its slump.

  “Hey, Doreen, let me talk to you, please?” said a male voice from out on the balcony. I watched as she pulled on an old cardigan, which had been hanging over the radiator, and covered herself up. I knew exactly who it was.

  Her date.

  I stuck my big tongue out and licked my lips. It was the only way I had of expressing myself. Fuck, it was frustrating. She glanced over at me. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot. She looked old and vulnerable. Her hands shook as she clung to the front of the cardigan. The door really rattled this time. I thought it might crash open with the force of the guy behind it.

  “Open the fucking door. I won’t let you do this to me. I have my wife and kids to think about. OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR.”

  Doreen walked to the window, leaning over my tank as she did. I turned.

  The guy’s face appeared at the window. He saw her and raised his hand, as if threatening to break the window. Doreen stepped back, her face pale. The guy’s fist just stopped short of the glass. I hoped he would leave. He didn’t. He moved away from the window, and then I heard our rusty letterbox open.

  “Doreen, just talk to me. You owe me that, at least?” He spoke in a softer tone. Doreen moved towards the kitchen door and hung around it. I didn’t like where this was going.

  “Just leave me alone, what’s done is done. I won’t tell anyone. Just go, please?” she said. Her voice was strong, at least. I didn’t want her to cry in front of this bastard.

  “I won’t take the blame for this. I mean, who are they gonna believe? I’m a respected shop owner and, well, you’re… you’re you?” I could tell by his voice he was smiling. My blood boiled.

  “You fucking attacked me. I have the marks all over my body to prove it. How about I call the police now and show them? How would that suit you and your wife and kids? They’d like that, wouldn’t they?” she screamed out into the hall.

  The door banged three, maybe four times really hard. This was it. He was coming in to finish what he had started.

  Doreen jumped back and ran to the rack of knives on the wall. My heart sunk when I saw that she had picked the smallest one available. She wasn’t thinking straight. Two more thumps at the door and then silence. He was gone, for now. Doreen was breathing heavily, but moved to the window and gazed out. She sighed before looking down at me. She smiled at me.

  It was over.

  “I think we need a drink, George. You fancy a wee drink? Like the old days?” she whispered. I did, but that wasn’t going to happen. She left the kitchen, switched on lights all over the house, and made her way to the living room.

  A few moments later, Charlie Rich was singing about a Sunday kind of woman. I knew this song, lyric by lyric, chord by chord, but after what had happened this evening, I couldn’t deny the lady her guilty pleasure.

  She turned it up and then appeared in the doorway. “Just going upstairs, Georgie. I want to get out of these clothes. It will help me feel better. Don’t go anywhere, okay, hun?”

  Okay, this was weird. She hadn’t called me Georgie or hun in such a long time. I was worried. I moved to the cleanest corner of the tank and made myself comfortable. My piss and shit almost covered half the base of the glass tank. I would soon have to hop up onto the little wooden hut she had bought the other week, although I wasn’t sure I could manage it. Tomorrow was another day, I would try then.

  I settled down to sleep. I knew Doreen well enough to know that she had crashed on the bed and would sleep until morning. Charlie was now singing about taking it all home. He would quit soon enough.

  I felt cold fingers pressing into my underbelly. Something sharp poked into my side. I tried to look but I was suddenly floating up from my filthy tank.

  Doreen had me cupped in her hands, close to her face. I could smell the stale wine and bad breath warm against my cold skin. She smiled. Pieces of the meal she had had earlier were stuck between her front teeth. She began to walk backwards from the kitchen.

  I have to admit it felt good to be out of the tank for a change. I can only recall being out once before, the one time she had actually cleaned my tank. She had set me down beside the dirty dishes. While she changed my bedding and popped in the new wooden hut thing, I had busied myself, licking the dry food from the plates. It wasn’t much, but it made a change from the dried worms from the pet store.

  Charlie was really going for it now, and Doreen set me down on the little glass table at the centre of the living room. An opened packet of fags and an overspilling ashtray sat beside me. Doreen, now wearing her best dressing gown—a black number with a cat embroidered on the sleeve—went to the stereo, lifted the needle and placed it back at the start of the record.

  Charlie was off again. I didn’t know what to do with myself, although the ashtray smelt really good. There were some really half-smoked healthy looking butts in there. Doreen picked me up again and began to sway gently to the sultry tones of the silver fox. I’m sure the neighbours were sick of him.

  Doreen had me in her hands, facing her, about a foot from her face. Those wrinkles. I hadn’t seen her this close up in months, and it wasn’t pretty. It seemed the little lip hair that she was always so self-conscious of had become an afterthought. Black hairs crawled out from the caked on makeup. Her lips were dry and her cheekbones poked out with a purpose. She was so very far from the beautiful blonde I had married all those years before.

  “Isn’t this nice, hun? Does it feel good to be out ?” she said, trying to make herself heard above the fox.

  I wanted to speak. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for what she had become. I wan
t to apologise for not being a good husband. I wanted to speak, but all I could do was blink and roll my tongue around my mouth.

  Doreen brought me slowly towards her chest. I wasn’t liking what I saw. Loose, almost grey goose-pimpled skin. A fact only I knew, Doreen goose-pimpled when she got horny.

  I didn’t like this one bit.

  She had me pressed belly down against the area just shy of her drooping tits. It felt awful. The more she danced the tighter she squeezed. She sang along softly with the record, so unaware of how uncomfortable I was.

  This was it, this was how my life would end, squashed to death on her chest. Thankfully she eased up when the track finished and took a seat on the sofa.

  After opening her dressing gown a little she placed me on her big milky thigh. Because of her size, I could relax without falling off. While she was lighting a cigarette, I looked around. On the opposite thigh, there were some bruises and what looked like scratches. I thought of the guy.

  I bet he was at home now, drunk, snuggled up behind his wife and whispering sweet nothings.

  Doreen flicked her ash onto the floor between her legs. “Did she dance as good as I do, George? You can tell me the truth. I don’t care anymore.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, after all these years, she asks me something like that. I looked up at her as she sucked hard on the cigarette, wrinkled lips almost touching together. I blinked once and hoped that she would take that as a no. She blew the smoke in my direction. I blinked again. The glowing end of the cigarette was drawing very close to me now, and I shuffled back on her thigh.

  There was a look in her eyes now.

  “Your silence worries me, George. I’m not liking it. It gets me thinking about what else she was good at. You can tell me anything now. It’s all in the past,” she said, holding the cigarette right next to my head. I could feel its heat against my face. I eased back some more and then lost my footing. I felt myself falling to the floor.

  She caught me. Held me in one hand and smoked with the other, never once taking her mad drunk eyes off me until she stubbed her butt out in the ashtray. I saw a glimmer of a smile crease on her mouth. Her left hand reached down to her chest and revealed a breast. It hung flat and lifeless on her overweight stomach.

  “I know you sit in that tank, George, and think of me and how things used to be. I know you watch me and have your dirty little thoughts. I’m still beautiful, I can’t fault you for that.” She held me up to her face and licked my head. The smell from her mouth was like shit and death. I knew something awful was happening inside that drunken stomach of hers.

  “You like that, don’t you?” she whispered. I didn’t. I closed my eyes. I felt her dry tongue run all across the top of my head and down my back. For a moment I swore she was going to take a bite out of me. “Oh, George, you taste so good. You always did.”

  I felt like throwing up all the crap she had fed me earlier. My stomach gurgled. Her hand squeezed my sides. She licked me again and, as she pulled away, saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth. She groaned.

  I watched as her free hand slid down her belly and disappeared.

  Oh fuck, Doreen, what are you doing?

  She began to writhe on the sofa and moved me towards the exposed saggy tit. I couldn’t do it.

  The hairs around her brown nipples were millimetres from my face. “Lick me, George, the way you used to. I don’t even care if you think about her. Do it, honey, do it for Doreen.”

  The front door crashed opened. She dropped me onto the sofa. I landed on my back and struggled to turn over. The cushions moved back into position as she stood up.

  A shadow stood swaying in the hallway. We both knew who it was. Doreen stood in the middle of the living room. I finally managed to get on my belly again. He moved into the light.

  His face was bloodied. He was smiling. “Alright, Doreen, I thought I would let myself in. Let’s have a drink. What you say?” he slurred.

  “Get out of here. I will call the police. I will tell them what you did to me. Leave. Now.”

  He uttered what sounded like a laugh and rushed her. She fell back into the fireplace, and the crack of her skull on the tiles was sickening.

  I crawled to the edge of the sofa. I wanted to jump down and get to her before he did, but what use would I be?

  I sat there, blinking, tongue rolling out over my mouth, and watched as he rained down blow after blow into Doreen’s face.

  She wasn’t moving by the time he spat in her face and gathered himself off her. I was waiting for him to notice me. Who wouldn’t notice a toad on someone’s sofa? He didn’t and, after checking her pulse with a bloodied hand, he left.

  When I was sure he had left for good, I took my chances.

  Just below me were a bunch of old magazines and some used hankies. Hopefully, they would break my fall. If they didn’t? Well, I was ready. I jumped.

  With the amount of shit and rubbish on the living room floor, it took me a while to get to Doreen. Her broken face stared at me. It was pulp. I couldn’t look at it and hopped around her bloodsoaked hair, out of sight of her dead eyes. I could do nothing but stay with her until someone came. They would take her to the morgue and take me to a pet shop. I hoped they would, but I didn’t care.

  Nobody did come. I spent my days eating anything that I could find on the floor; there were some dried up flies under the sofa and a couple of dead spiders in the hall. I was weak with hunger. The only fluids I had ingested were the drips from Doreen’s wounds, but that was days ago. I had lost track of time.

  The flies gathered not long after she had died. It was a pet hate of mine, how she would leave the windows open all the fucking time, but I was thankful for it now.

  They had come in ones and twos to start with, but as her corpse started to smell, they came in bunches. I stayed close to the wound at the back of her head and did pretty well. I caught a couple of fat ones behind her ear, but the others were too fast. I had to give up eventually and let them have their prize.

  I sat beside her—what was left of her—and watched the morning sun stream through the blinds. Something caught my eye.

  It wasn’t big but it was white, fresh, and crawling from the hole in Doreen’s head. Another appeared, and then many more poured from the wound. My tongue darted in and out of my mouth. I snapped a couple up. They tasted glorious.

  Before diving into that feast of maggots, I took a few moments and thought of Doreen, but I couldn’t even picture her face. For me now, she was just a means of survival.

  She would have liked that. She would have found that funny.

  Daryl Duncan was born in Northern Ireland sometime in the early seventies and was deemed too damn ugly to be taken outside so his mother made a nest for him in the family attic, where he was fed pages from horror novels dipped in Farley’s rusks. By his mid-teens, he had taught himself to read and found it ultimately more satisfying reading the pages than devouring them. So he read horror and never looked back.

  Nowadays Daryl still lives in Northern Ireland with his wife Karen and their two boys, Lewis and Scott. He is part of an amateur production group called ‘Dead On Films’ who made their first horror/comedy feature in 2015 entitled ‘Vapours’ and they plan to make some more when Daryl gets off his lazy hole and writes another script. As well as this, Daryl does occasionally try his hand at stories and wrote his first novella, ‘Skud’ in 2016 and it’s available somewhere on Amazon. He is currently working on a novel entitled ‘Keelshem’ which he hopes to release sometime before his death. You can find him on Facebook but he will probably ignore you, just kidding. (No, he actually will).

  Barry went first. Barry always went first. No reason, that was just the way it always was, always had been.

  Barry went first in everything. First girlfriend, first pint, first time having sex, first in a job, first to get married.

  First to have an affair.

  Greg was a follower, not a leader.

  So Barry
was always, always the first one in the water.

  Using his fins he propelled himself down. The cold of the English Channel bit him even through the wetsuit. He was used to it.

  A shadow cutting briefly through the rays of sunlight streaming through the water signalled Greg’s entry into the sea.

  Barry was always first, but Greg was never far behind.

  The two men dove deeper with practiced kicks of their fins. Bubbles streamed past their masks from the tanks strapped to their backs. As they sank deeper into the depths of the Atlantic the two men switched on their head torches. The LEDs cut through the growing gloom like lasers.

  The wreck appeared abruptly in their lights. A ghost ship, a relic of the past. A WWII German battleship, jammed upside down in a crevice on the ocean floor. Just visible between the dark green fronds of seaweed waving gently in the current and seeming to bring the ship to life, the hull was encrusted in barnacles. Tiny, silver fish darted around its grey hulking mass.

  Barry dutifully snapped off a few photos with his Nikon, the bright flash startling the fish.

  The Scharnhorst had been on Barry’s list of wrecks to explore for a long time. But, like everybody else in the diving community, he just never thought he would get the chance.

  The problem was, with only its hull visible above the crevasse in the ocean floor, there was no way inside. No way of salvaging whatever might be left inside the battleship. You could swim over and around its hull, raised at an angle from its position on the sea bed, and you could take photographs. But nothing more.

  The Scharnhorst had lain undisturbed here since it sank at the end of the Second World War. An ugly memorial to all the dead trapped inside.

  And according to anyone you talked to who knew about these things, that was most likely the way it was going to stay.

  But then Frank had got into trouble on that last dive he had done here. Barry hadn’t been on that one, but Greg had. And he’d heard Frank’s dying words, whispered into Greg’s ear with his last breath.