The Visible Filth

by Nathan Ballingrud

  The place stank of sweat and rotting food. Flies buzzed angrily somewhere inside, and a few cockroaches ambled away, incurious and unafraid. Sunlight hacked into the dark interior, and heat spilled out in a thick collapse. The AC that had frozen him the last time he was here had apparently died.

  So much for anybody cleaning up. “Christ,” he whispered. Then: “Eric? Are you in here?”

  He walked down the hallway into the kitchen, which bore evidence of continued neglect. Dishes were strewn around the counter space and piled in the sink, where an odor exuded from a stack of plates like an evil intelligence. Crumbs and stray bits of cereal crunched underfoot. Another handful of roaches perched like lookouts from their pot-handles and their glass rims, their antennae waving in bored appraisal of this new element.

  Eric’s voice traveled from somewhere deeper in his apartment. It sounded like he was speaking around a mouthful of food.

  The living room looked much as it had before, just a little more so: clothes were draped across the back of the stained couch, socks gathered in little colonies in the corners and on the chair. A PlayStation sat in the middle of the floor, long cords extending in black umbilicals to the television, and to the controller resting beside the couch.

  There was a different kind of smell in here, something sweeter and fouler. It emanated from the darkened corner toward the back, which led to the bedroom. Will didn’t want to go any further; he knew what it was.

  But the voice came again, floating out of the bedroom on a current of decay. “Will.”

  Will stepped into the bedroom. Eric had the blinds drawn, but sunlight leaked in through the slats, giving the room an odd, underwater feeling. Like the rest of the apartment, it was a mess. Eric was lying on the bed in his boxer shorts, the sheets kicked to the floor. He was sheened in sweat. He turned his head to watch Will enter, revealing the hideous wound distorting the left side of his face. It had gotten worse. Crusted with black blood, it had swollen and dried, reopened, dried again. Flies droned around his face, strutted boldly across his skin like little conquistadors. The stink of infection stopped Will at the door.

  Eric tried to speak; the wound made it difficult for his mouth to move the way it was meant to. “What do you want?”

  “I need a place to crash.”

  Eric apparently had nothing to say to this. Will couldn’t really blame him.

  “I need to stay on your couch,” he said. “Just for a day or two. Just until Alicia’s ready.”

  Eric shook his head. “No.”

  “I’m up against a wall, Eric.”

  “No!” This effort caused him some pain, and he turned his face into the pillow.

  Will shook his head. “It’s going to be good. I’ll even help you clean up a little bit. You’ll see.” He went back into the living room, ignoring the sounds Eric made. He made a space for himself on the same chair he’d sat in before, while shepherding Eric through his nightmares. He dialed Alicia’s number on his phone.

  It rang four times before she answered it. “I told you not to call back.”

  “That was last night! Are you okay? What are you doing?”

  “Will – I am trying to fix my life, okay? I need you to stop calling me. It’s not helping.”

  “I left Carrie. I broke up with her this morning.”

  There was a long pause on the other side. Finally Alicia said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hear that, Will.”

  “But – that’s a good thing. Right?”

  “I don’t know. That’s up to you, I guess.”

  “But – what? Alicia…”

  “Will, I’m with Jeffrey. I love Jeffrey. Do you understand that?”

  He shook his head, unable to accept what he was hearing. Unable to accept the magnitude of his mistake. “No, I don’t understand it.”

  “I don’t know when we’re coming back to the bar. Maybe not for a while, okay? Don’t call back. If you really care about me, don’t call back.”

  With that, she hung up.

  Will sat back on the couch, waiting for the right feelings to happen. The heartbreak, the anger, the tears. But he didn’t feel any of them. What he felt instead was a terrible yearning. He didn’t even know what for. But he felt it like a physical ache, like something on fire. He looked at the dark hole of Eric’s bedroom, trying to will him into the doorway. They could address their pain with alcohol. Together – as friends. He just needed somebody.

  And then, as though he had conjured him with a magic spell, Eric appeared there, leaning against the doorjamb, his flesh gray and loose. “You can’t be here,” he said. A fresh rivulet of blood had made a path along his jawline, and even now pushed lethargically down his neck.

  A thought suddenly occurred to Will. “Eric, did you call the bar last night, looking for me?”

  Eric’s face clouded over. “No,” he said, and turned to go back into his bedroom.

  Will leaped from the couch and pinned him to the door frame, putting his face close. The stench of infection shoved its way into his nose, but he ignored it. “It came from here. Who called the bar?”

  He was astonished by how weak Eric had become. Just a few days ago he would never have been able to hold him; Eric would have broken his teeth for even trying. But now it was like holding a listless child. “They did. Those freaks.”

  “What freaks?”

  Eric turned his face, exposing the wound. It was spectacular. Will leaned in closer, a grisly curiosity overwhelming his aversion to the smell. It seemed outrageous, something too Hollywood to be real. The edges were swollen and damp with lymph, and they seemed rubbery, like the borders of a mask that could be yanked off. He peered more closely, wondering if he’d be able to see the teeth, the long ridge of the jawbone. As Eric tried to speak, Will could detect the movement of the tongue somewhere in the depths of the injury, like a grub rooting through offal.

  “What freaks, Eric? Were they the kids from the bar that night?” Knowing already.

  “They said they wanted to give you a present. Now get the fuck off me. I’ll kill you. I will kill you.” The sustained speech was agony, and Eric’s knees buckled. Will caught him underneath his arms and half dragged him back to his bed, where he collapsed limply, finally curling up into the fetal position. He lay there, sobbing like a child, while Will stood over him.

  It took him a few minutes before he understood what the present they’d left him was. When he understood, he had to lean his hand against the wall while a tide of vertigo swept through him.

  It just needed a place to be born. That’s all it ever was.

  When the vertigo passed, he knelt beside the bed, placing his hand gingerly on Eric’s shoulder.

  “Can you feel it inside you?” he asked. “Moving around?”

  A change came over Eric’s face: it went still and pale, as though something essential to the function of life had been wrested from him, or had simply run down. He blinked, said nothing.

  “You can, can’t you.” Will brushed the hair back from Eric’s forehead. An intimate gesture. A kindness. Eric tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. “Is it going to come out through your face? Or do I have to make a hole for it?”

  “Go away.”

  “People think you’re such a nice guy,” Will said, petting Eric’s hair softly. “They don’t see you the way I do. They don’t see the way your eyes go flat when you’re drunk. You’re ugly in your heart. I can see it.” He stared at him there, wasting away in his own bed, crawling with flies and marinating in his own stink. He’d always been ugly inside, and now, finally, anybody could see it. He wanted to drag him through the street, or down to the bar, and hang him from a hook on the wall. He wanted to make it plain to everybody. “Do you have to be dead first? Or will it break you open while you’re still alive?”

  Eric sobbed. Tears spilled from the corners of his eyes and ran into his hair, his ears. He reached out and clutched Will’s hand. He brought it close to his face, almost kissing it. “Please kill me,
” he said. “Please. I don’t want it to come. I don’t want to be alive when it happens. I’m scared.”

  “I wonder what would happen if I called it.”

  Eric’s whimpering stalled. He fixed Will with a look of naked terror.

  Will went back into the kitchen and did a little search for a bottle of something, anything to smooth the edges of the experience. He found a third of a bottle of some basement brand rum in the back of one of the cabinets, and walked calmly back into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed by Eric’s side and dialed up Garrett’s number on his phone.

  When the grotesque language began to spill into his ear, he put the phone on speaker, and set it on the mattress. Eric mewled like an animal, curling into himself. Will felt the old, empty ache bestir itself again, and he welcomed it as one would welcome an old friend. They listened, and he drank, for some time. The heat crowded the air out of the room. At some point, when the light sliding through the blinds had taken on a golden color, he ran out of what was in the bottle. It fell to the floor, where it rolled under the bed. Shortly afterwards Eric began to give birth.

  His body went rigid on the bed, a thin keening sound slipped through his teeth. Will leaned in close, watching the rupture in his face. It was a blood-rimmed crater into dark precincts. Eric’s thin wail interlaced with the cracked slurry of words leaking from the phone, combining to produce a beautiful threnody, a glittering lament that landed in him like hooks.

  Thick bone cracked with a shocking sound, and blood spat from Eric’s face, splashing in a sudden thick river over his cheek.

  Something struggled into the light.

  Will felt the presence of it before he could see it. He felt an answer to the long ache. He leaned over Eric’s shuddering body, brought his face close. He opened his mouth over the wound, touched his lips to its ragged edges. Fix me, he thought. Please. Make me whole. He closed his eyes, felt the billowing heat of it. Something moved against his tongue and he sobbed with a terrified gratitude as it probed the roof of his mouth, his teeth and his cheeks. Filling his mouth. He opened wider and gulped it all in, blood leaking from the seal of his lips. Eric began to shriek, repeatedly and in escalating volume, and a host of startled cockroaches scrambled from their lairs, climbing up the walls and rising into the air with their dark, humming wings, a swarm of Christ-bound spirits.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nathan Ballingrud is an American writer of horror and dark fantasy. His first book, the short story collection North American Lake Monsters, was published in 2013 by Small Beer Press to great acclaim, including winning the Shirley Jackson Award and being shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter.

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