Jane had just…shut down.
It had taken two whole days of this before Paul realised what was wrong; before his mind grew willing or able to accept the reality of what had happened.
She was growing tired of him.
That had to be it.
There could be no other explanation. He’d been the consummate perfect partner; he’d washed their bedclothes each and every day to keep her smell to a minimum, he washed her hair each evening, too, careful to remove any clumps that came free from her scalp and discreetly discard them in the rubbish bin when she was unaware.
He still held her close each night, too.
They’d listen to the rain pelting the window pane till dreams sought their council and they’d wake in each other’s embrace just as lovers should. It hadn’t been easy on Paul, doing that. Jane was slowly beginning to putrefy now, and it was no easy task to drift off to sleep with her aroma so close and present, but he did it for her.
For love.
It was beginning to upset him that she couldn’t see the effort he was making.
It had been four nights since his boss, Clive, had made his unexpected visit, and Jane had been strangely despondent after the man left.
The next day…dead silence.
Dead air.
The sun shone in their bedroom window and Paul squinted his eyes to avoid the harshness of its glare as he pulled on the small handles, opening the window. Fresh air brushed past his face as he did so, feeling wonderful on his skin.
It lasted only seconds, then the good, clean air seemed to sense the decay in his room and retreat as fast as it had entered his home.
It was as though Jane’s smell was so powerful that it cast out any other. So pungent that nothing clean nor pure could penetrate the aura of rot that clung to the air around her like a vapour.
Paul left the window open, anyway.
He moved back to the bed, yawning as he stretched his arms above his head.
The sunlight streaming through the glass was of a kinder sort that the morning air. It seemed to shine on Jane as she lay there, staring up at the ceiling with her hollow sockets and seeing through it.
It was hard to tell of she was awake at all, these days, considering how inanimate she’d become.
Women and their moods.
Maybe her period was due.
That could be it.
He’d never ask her that – he was far too much a gentleman for such discourse – but the signs were all there, minus the blood between her dark grey legs.
The sullen silence.
The listless mood.
The blowing off of all his advances.
Yes, he surmised, as he lowered himself onto the bed by her side. It was most likely her time of the month.
Paul ran his hand through her hair, soft as he could. He looked deep into the chasms where her eyes had been, searching for any sign of the warmth that had been resided there.
There was no warmth to be found.
Instead, what he found was soup.
Or something that looked like soup.
The gelatinous matter had pooled in her sockets like tiny puddles that shone up towards the bedroom ceiling, seeing nothing.
Fascinated, he dipped one finger into the sloshing liquid that filled them. It was thick and clung to his finger like syrup. The remains of her eyes had finally putrefied to the point of liquefaction.
Jane would see no more.
He’d clean the sockets out later.
A medium sized spoon should do it.
Paul sighed. “What happened to us, baby?” he asked her.
“We were so close…so close. Now it’s like we never talk. It’s as though you don’t want to talk. Have you grown bored of me, Jane, is that what this is? I thought you were happy. I thought we were happy. Aren’t you content with me?”
Jane’s silence seemed to almost mock him.
Feeling tears well up in his eyes, Paul moved closer. He pressed his lips softly against Jane’s, ignoring the way they seemed to shift and slosh around under the blackened skin as he did so.
“I love you,” he whispered, pressing his warm lips against the dead black slugs that were her own.
Within moments, Paul’s pleas for love grew to something more.
Just as they always did.
He felt that familiar stirring in his loins as he kneaded open her slimed lips with his tongue, reaching between his own legs as he pushed in deeper, exploring the darkness between her lips as though it was the very first time.
He wrapped his fist around his engorged cock as his tongue touched hers. Began stroking as her passion met his own.
This is it, she’s responding!
Paul was overjoyed.
Jane’s tongue met his own with a passion the equal of it. His cock throbbed as he flicked her tongue with his own, and felt her flick back.
It was beautiful.
They were together in the moment, alone and adrift on a sea of renewed love, where only the bounds of their desires and their dreams could restrain them. They were on top of the highest mountain, burning at the centre of the universe and…
Something was wrong.
Jane’s tongue felt too small. It moved too quickly and her passion seemed to have no rhyme or rhythm at all.
Disgusted, Paul pulled his wet tongue from her mouth, bringing with it a thick trail of saliva that clung to her black, festered lips like fresh semen.
Letting go of his cock, he positioned himself on his knees between her open legs and leaned forward.
With his hands, he pried her lips open again, wider this time and no longer with gentleness.
It had been a few days since they’d kissed, and as Paul peered into the darkness beyond her lips, his anger towards her grew. This wouldn’t have happened if she’d only let him touch her.
As he opened Jane’s mouth wide, he first noticed that all of her teeth seemed larger. It was as though they’d grown. It took him a second to understand that the effect of the enlarged teeth was merely an illusion, caused by her decaying, shrivelling gums.
Paul had no time to worry on the matter, as he felt the first judder of real disgust.
There were more pressing matters to attend to, inside Jane’s mouth.
She’d been made a home of.
Maggots.
Hundreds of them.
Paul reeled.
The maggots that had nestled inside dear Jane’s mouth had made a meal of her tongue.
God knew how long they’d been feeding in the dark, stinking hollow of her gullet or her mouth, but they had fed well. Their little white forms seemed to writhe in delight; whatever passed for their bellies now full to bursting with the liquefying flesh of his girl.
And Paul had been kissing them like little lovers.
The tiny grubs made a happy home in the swamp of her decaying flesh. Her mouth was a living cave, teeming with squirming, writhing parasites. Paul had no idea when it had occurred, and ascertained that it must have been a fast process.
Watching his true love change was like gaining weight. One day you looked in the mirror, expecting to see that same old physique, and instead you were faced with a monstrosity.
There never seemed to be any through-line. No clear journey from A to B.
It’s like evolution¸ he thought as he gazed into the wriggling, living mass in her mouth. You see the stages, but not the stages between the stages.
The disgust that was beginning to rise up in Paul was met and matched by his anger. Rage loomed on his horizon like heavy clouds threatening thunder.
He pushed it back down, alarmed at his resentment towards Jane.
It felt like a betrayal.
Still, as he watched the maggots continue their frenzied feed inside her gullet, only one thought played through his head like a broken record.
This is all her fault.
There was no denying it.
Paul was getting angry.
LOVE WILL TEAR US APART
&n
bsp; “This isn’t what I thought it would be, Jane. I thought when we lived together, things would be different…better.”
Jane’s corpse was a hive of parasitic activity. In the three days since Paul had last made advances on his lover, her condition had deteriorated at a rapid pace. The maggots nested inside her had made their way to the surface, spread across her warped, blackish blue skin like hungry imperialists. She was little more than bone and festering skin. Her once beautiful features, having survived the massive blow to the skull and still remained near-exquisite, were long gone. Never to return. The contours of her skull seemed to push out from beneath her skin, reducing her beauty to a deathly grimace.
No, he thought. Not a grimace…a smile.
She looked like she was grinning.
At him.
Was she mocking him?
The grubs had eaten away the fullness of her lips, leaving only a grotesque protrusion of jet black gum and browning, fractured teeth. She grinned up at him from her death bed as though he was a fool.
Paul was beginning to think that perhaps he was.
This had been a disaster.
The early days - the honeymoon period, some would call it - had been fantastic. They’d made passionate love those first wonderful nights. She’d been attentive in her rigor-sexual acquiescence. Keen to satisfy his every need.
Her wet centre had been a sanctity for his lust, his needs. Her breasts had held their suppleness to a miraculous degree.
But it was not to last.
I guess love never does last. I guess it’s true. All good things faded, came to an end, leaving hearts shattered, libidos fraught and hope obliterated.
Jane was little more than fetid, cloying meat. Her skin sluiced from her body, staining the already filthy bedsheets till they were unfit for even the homeless.
Paul was starting to realise that love was not enough. Perhaps it was never enough.
Even when the sex had ‘dried up’, they’d still had their romance…their endless talks about the future, the past and every tiny minutia in between. She’d been a great listener, a perfect canvas for his dreams and his ambitions.
All that was gone now. The dream was over.
Jane would never again be the shining lighthouse in his stormy sea, leading him home.
Flies buzzed around Paul’s head as he stared into the pits of her eyes, anger thrumming behind his eyes, beating blood into his brain. He swatted them aside nonchalantly, trying to ignore their incessant pestering, as he wondered what to do next.
The relationship was over.
He was man enough to know it.
It was true, what the singers sang…
Love didn’t last.
He’d done everything for Jane.
Everything.
He’d freed her from that awful casket, deep in the cold dirt of forever, and brought her home to a place of love and warmth and simple joy.
He’d replaced the endless dark of the grave with the comfort of a warm bed, clean sheets and the box-setting of a plethora of brilliant television shows.
And what had he gotten in return?
An infestation of flies, a stink that would probably never wash away, and two whole weeks without wages, as he’d attended to her every need.
And after all that, she was mocking him?!
The bitch had a damn nerve on her.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he ordered quietly.
Jane continued to smile.
“You’ve changed, Jane. You’ve changed so fucking much I barely recognise you anymore. I’d be better off in a relationship with a mannequin. What the hell is wrong with you?”
The maggots eating their way through Jane’s neck surely made it hard to talk, but that was no excuse.
He’d tried his hardest. Why couldn’t she?
Paul watched her smile that shit eating smile, and in it, he saw every single mocking girl he’d ever worked up the nerve to ask out on a date. Every single girl he’d tried so hard to befriend. Every sister of every childhood friend who’d caught him sniffing their soiled undergarments and every schoolteacher who’d balked at his erections in class.
Jane grinned her grin as, before his eyes, the slideshow of his life’s most embarrassing moments flickered like a horror movie. A bad dream, not dreamt but remembered.
“I said stop laughing at me,” he repeated through tight lips.
With shaking, grasping hands, he picked up one of her severed arms, now little more than a stinking slab of meat not even fit for a dog. Wriggling maggots toppled from their home and landed silently on the bed, as he raised the arm and swung it directly at her face.
Jane slapped herself hard.
Her jawbone, freed by the massive deterioration to the muscle ligature, shifted to the side a few inches. It dropped open, hanging far too low. More maggots slid from her nostrils and were caught in the protruding jaw like fish in a net.
To Paul, it was the final insult. She wasn’t merely laughing at him, she was pulling faces!
“I said STOP IT, CUNT!” he screamed in her face.
Paul tossed her arm across the room. It hit the east wall with the crack of shattering bone, and landed by his boots.
His new boots.
Enough was enough.
“You’re not the girl I thought you were, Jane. You’re just like all the rest!”
Growling now like a mad dog, Paul lunged at the rotting corpse dissolving into his bed. His hands found purchase in the meat of her throat. It was easy to penetrate the skin. Both hands sunk deep into the putrefied skin like she was little more than sludge. In up to his knuckles, he ignored the black muck that oozed from the sides of his delving grip, and pushed in further.
Finding bone, he yanked it, hard as he could.
Jane’s bashed in, misshapen head came free from her neck with a solid crack. The skin tore as easily as paper.
Pulling his hands from the depths of her flesh, he grabbed the head by the hair. He raised it before his face, disgusted.
Then he punched it.
And punched it.
Over and over again.
All his anger, all his disappointment, was written in that mocking, rotting fucking face.
Paul whaled punches into Jane’s mangled head until his fingers bled fresh, living blood. Until her very skull came apart like dead twigs and spilled its liquids and its bristling infestations all over the duvet.
Then he tossed it aside.
The remains of her head collided with the television set, toppling it over with a crash.
Paul was past giving a damn.
He gazed down in horror at the armless, headless thing pooled out before him on the sheets. Her one flat breast bubbled with inner life as the host fed its inhabitants. Below it, her pussy was a dark cave, glistening now with only white movement and slime.
What had he done?
What the fuck had he done?
It all came crashing down around him in that moment.
A million mistakes.
All those urges acted upon.
His embracing of the depravity.
His delusions of love.
His…sickness.
He’d beaten the woman he loved. He was no better than a common thug.
“Jesus, help me…what have I become?”
Screaming, Paul buried himself in the ruined, headless and armless torso beneath him. He wailed as he pushed his hands into the abdomen, tore with hands like frenzied claws at the folds of her vagina, and scraped the skin from bone around her legs.
He threw the wet chunks of flesh over his shoulder as he dismantled Jane’s remains, weeping like an infant as he pulled apart his toy.
Within less than a minute, there was no more Jane, and Paul’s bedroom was a smorgasbord of ligaments, limbs and meat.
It was then that a quiet voice behind him uttered, “What in the unholy kingdom of fucks!?”
He turned just in time to see his boss, Clive, loose a torrent of vomit all over both himself a
nd the carpet.
A FRIEND IN NEED IS A FRIEND INDEED
It took Paul a second to realise what he was seeing, and a few seconds more to realise who he was seeing.
Clive.
What the fuck was Clive doing here?
For a split second, his eyes met his boss’ eyes from across the room. Between them lay a wasteland of body parts and bloated, crawling internal organs. Clive’s eyes were a blur of tears and terror, as more of the wretched contents of his stomach were expelled all over the bedroom floor.
The vomit would hardly do any more damage to the carpet.
Paul figured the carpet was ruined.
He felt a strange sense of guilt as Clive’s moon-size eyes seemed to plead with him for an answer. Just a moment, fleeting yet near incapacitating. He’d often wondered what it would feel like to be caught with his pants down, literally.
To be caught in the act of masturbation, or stealing.
He imagined it would be crushing, devastating. As though all his soul had been laid bare.
The feeling he had now, was both less than that, and more. He felt exposed, yes, but not unjustified in his actions or his predicament. After all, what had he really done?
He hadn’t hurt anybody on purpose. His fight with Jane had been a mistake.
He’d simply been trying his honest best to make a relationship work. These things weren’t easy. Paul knew that.
He also hoped his boss would understand.
The look on Clive’s face told him that wouldn’t be the case.
Perhaps he should explain himself, he thought.
The poor, terrified man was backed up against the wall now, his round belly heaving from the deep breaths he was taking.
Was he hyperventilating?
It looked like it.
This must have come as a shock.
Paul briefly looked down at himself, buried elbow deep in rotting flesh, naked and covered in stink.
It was understandable why Clive was so freaked out.
He looked a real sight.
“Let me explain,” he implored, removing his arms from the open pit of Jane’s stomach. As he opened them in a gesture of goodwill, small slimy fragments of her innards slopped from between his fingers like watered down shit.
“Stay away from me!” Clive screamed.
Love Lies Dead Page 4
