More Than Life Itself

by Nassise, Joseph

  Slowly, tentatively, he reached out again.

  This time, the cover yielded slightly to his touch but didn't pull away. It still didn't feel right, though. Unlike any other book he'd ever touched, this one was warm, pliable, like a living thing.

  He half expected to hear it breathing.

  Horrified, yet strangely entranced and fascinated at the same time, Sam gently pulled the cover open.

  The pages came apart like soggy newspaper, and the room was filled with the stench of things long left to rot. Sam was reminded of the time he'd found the remains of the household cat after it had been clawed open by an angry raccoon, its organs left splayed out to bake in the morning sunlight.

  Holding his breath, he glanced at the title page.

  The words written there were gibberish.

  Meaningless.

  What the hell?

  Nose wrinkled in disgust, he bent closer in an effort to see them better, to try and decipher the script. Maybe he just wasn't seeing it clearly …

  Up close, with the reek of the text filling his nostrils and turning his stomach, the words suddenly swam into focus.

  Sam began to read.

  ***

  Three hours later he was finished.

  The book was horrible, disgusting … and utterly captivating. It outlined a secret ritual that ancient Coptic priests had used to save those inflicted with what they saw as supernatural ailments and strange, unearthly diseases. Diseases surprisingly like the one that was eating Jessica alive, minute by minute, hour by hour.

  The ritual itself was straightforward. Seven murders corresponding to seven major bodily systems - the circulatory system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, the muscular system, and the skeletal system. A major organ or bodily part was to be harvested from each victim and ingested by the patient. The entire sequence had to be completed within seven days, with the patient ingesting one offering every twenty four hour period, and each victim had to be killed in a different fashion than the one before.

  By the end of the week, the patient would be cured.

  The rational, scientific side of him wanted to laugh. No way in hell could this ever work. The ritual was bullshit, pure and simple. Modern science had long ago replaced the various superstitious practices that had been used to "heal" people in earlier eras. Gone were the days of leeching, bleeding, drilling holes in the skull and other horrific measures that had been utilised in the name of medicine. This was the 21st Century, not the 13th.

  And yet …

  And yet the other side, the wretched, reckless, desperate side, said: "What if?"

  What if it was true? What if the ritual worked? What if he could save Jessica's life?

  Thoughts of how he'd come by the book pushed at him, lending credence to the ritual contained therein. It wasn't every day you received a book of ritual magick from an eyeless street prophet who came and went like the wind. If he could do that, he could certainly deliver a ritual that actually worked, couldn't he?

  The very idea was blasphemy, but still he paused, considering it, such was his desire to keep his little girl from Death's cold and unloving hands. Anything was worth it, anything at all, even the life of a stranger, wasn't it?

  He glanced back down at page where the ritual was laid out.

  Check that. The lives of seven strangers.

  He had reached the point of desperation. Sam knew it. Otherwise, he never would have run out into the rain on a will-'o-the-wisp's chance of actually learning something useful from a homeless street prophet who stank worse than last week's garbage. But could he slaughter seven innocent people in cold blood on the crazy off-chance that this ridiculous ritual could help his daughter?

  Time stretched, but then he had his answer.

  No.

  No, he couldn't.

  And just like that, Sam Dalton gave in to despair, just as he had done following the death of his wife. Like an alcoholic drawn to the bottle, Sam was drawn to this darkest of human emotions, and he felt it settle over his shoulders like a well-worn coat. "Fuck!" he cried, hurling the book across the room in anger.

  He stomped around the room cursing and screaming, trying to release the hostility that lurked just beneath the surface of his skin like a balloon waiting to explode, but even that didn't help.

  There was only one thing left to do, he decided.

  Time to get blind, roaring drunk, while he could still afford to do so.

  He retreated to the kitchen, savagely kicking an end table aside as he moved past, but once again fate stepped in.

  Both the liquor cabinet and the refrigerator were empty.

  Unable to find even a single bottle of beer anywhere in the house, he grabbed his coat and stalked down the street, headed for the nearest bar.

  ***

  "Is this seat taken?"

  Sam turned to find a woman standing nearby, indicating the seat next to him. She was dressed in jeans and a tight fitting shirt, her blonde hair spilling down across her shoulders. Without waiting for an answer, she set herself down onto the stool next to him and signalled the bartender.

  "What a shitty day, ya know? I damn well need a drink." She ordered a scotch on the rocks, glanced at what Sam was having, and got him another while she was at it.

  He'd seen her here several times before. Gossip had it that she was a widow, a fact pointed out to him once by an overeager bartender trying to play Cupid six months after Denise had died. At this point he didn't care if she was Queen Elizabeth - anyone willing to buy him a drink was okay with him, dead husband or not.

  They exchanged first names and Sam promptly forgot hers, but readily accepted the drink. Given his current state, he probably would have forgotten his own if he hadn't had it his whole life.

  Much of the rest of the evening passed in a blur. Soon she was as drunk as he was, and when the bartender shouted "Last Call," it seemed only natural for him to suggest they continue drinking at his place, since it was only a few blocks down the road.

  Maybe it was the loneliness, maybe it was the despair, maybe it was simply the seven glasses of rum he'd consumed since her arrival, but when Sam's senses swam back into focus sometime later, he found himself on the couch in his living room, making out with the woman, whatever her name was.

  Her hands were all over him, her lips pulling at his own. Her breath stank like scotch and cigarettes, and in the harsh light of his living room she appeared older, more haggard than he remembered.

  Anger reared its ugly head.

  What the hell was she doing here? What did she think she was doing? His daughter was dying and all she wanted to do was suck face and rut like a bitch in heat on his couch?

  Wherever the anger came from, it blossomed like a fast-moving forest fire, his rage becoming overwhelming in an instant. He tore his face away from hers and wrapped his large hands around her delicate throat, squeezing. He was determined to choke the shit out of her, to teach her a lesson about coming on to people when they were as desperate as he was.

  Instantly she fought back, slapping at his face, clawing at his hands with her fingernails, bucking against him, but he used his body to pin her to the couch beneath him, to hold her in place. He'd teach her a thing or two. A voice seemed to be speaking in his ear, a deep guttural voice speaking a language he did not recognise, but one he knew he'd heard or maybe seen before. Almost unbidden, his lips formed the words, slowly at first and then with greater precision and volume, until he was shouting out the phrase over and over again, drowning out the woman's weak pleas for him to stop. She kicked and struggled, her mouth gaping open like that of a fish out of water, but his size and strength meant the deck was stacked against her from the start.

  Her eyes rolled in their sockets and her face grew a stark shade of red.

  Her hands pulled feebly at his own, no longer able to strike him with any real strength.

  As if in a trance, Sam kept repeating the strange line, over and over, as h
er struggles to free herself grew increasingly ineffectual.

  Squeezing.

  Squeezing …

  Long after she was dead, Sam kept at it, unaware and unseeing.

  ***

  He stared at the corpse, afraid to move, to attract its attention. He could just imagine her suddenly sitting back up and chasing after him, a revenant spirit out for revenge, hungry for his flesh.

  The notion made his skin crawl.

  He shook himself, forcefully chasing the images away. He didn't need to scare himself silly; he was having a hard enough time with things as it was.

  He'd strangled her.

  He'd fucking strangled her.

  What the hell was he going to do now?

  The answer, when it came, was so obvious he was amazed he hadn't seen it sooner.

  He scrambled up and away from the corpse, hunting for the book he'd cast aside so angrily earlier that night. For a moment he couldn't find it anywhere, and fear seized his soul as he imagined it had vanished as swiftly as its deliverer, but then he saw one corner peeking out from beneath the drapes covering the bay window.

  Snatching it up, he flipped through the pages, searching.

  The phrase practically leapt off the page at him.

  "Tua vitam rapio ut alius supersit." He still didn't have a clue what it meant, but at least he knew he wasn't going completely crazy. The ritual required that the phrase be said when the victim's life was taken. Without it, the victim's death would be useless.

  At least he'd gotten that right.

  For a moment his conscience nagged at him, screamed at him that he had just committed murder, and that no stupid ritual was going to save Jessica …

  He smothered the thought and moved on, a strange sense of excitement growing in his soul.

  The chart was a few pages further in the text, and it specifically outlined the organs and other bodily parts required for the ritual. Sam's knowledge of anatomy was limited; while he could probably find the heart or the lungs, telling the difference between a liver and a kidney would be difficult without more research.

  Okay, a lung it is. At least I know where it is. Removing it can't be that hard, can it?

  Getting started was, however.

  Five minutes of delay turned into ten, then fifteen.

  Finally he couldn't take standing around any longer.

  He had to do something.

  Book in hand, Sam walked around the sofa, moved through the living room to the kitchen and through the connecting door to the garage. There, he rooted among the tool cabinets and storage boxes until he found the thick tarpaulin he'd used a few years before while repainting the interior of the house. He dragged it behind him back into the kitchen, moved the table out of the way, and spread the tarp out on the floor. He replaced the kitchen table where it had been, in the centre of the area now covered by the tarp.

  You're not really going to do this, are you? a small voice asked in the back of his mind.

  Oh yes I am, he replied, and the voice shut up, as simple as that.

  He returned to the living room.

  The woman's corpse was right where he had left it, half on and half off the couch.

  Before he could lose his nerve altogether, he stepped forward, bent over and thrust his hands beneath her armpits. Lifting her upper body off the floor, leaving her head to sag limply forward, he dragged it across the room and into the kitchen. He rested a moment just inside the door, and then moved her closer to the table. Taking a deep breath, he heaved upward, bending backward while doing so, until her ass cleared the edge of the table and he could dump her on top of it.

  She fell with a muted thump.

  He adjusted her legs to make certain she didn't topple back off, and then rested a moment to catch his breath.

  Now that he had the body on the table, he was struck once again by the magnitude of what he had done. An hour earlier he had been kissing this woman's lips. Now those same lips were cold and blue, mute testaments to the overwhelming power of grief and the evil that lurks deep within its shadow.

  No matter. What's done is done. Think of Jessica.

  Get the lung.

  Right.

  Steeling himself, Sam reached out. Hesitantly, almost reverently, he unbuttoned the woman's blouse, letting the material fall away to either side. He undid the front clasp of her bra and let each end drop to her sides as well, leaving her exposed to the waist.

  Her skin, where his knuckles grazed it in the course of undressing her, was already cool to the touch, and the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents leeched even more of the colour from her flesh, leaving it pale and pasty white.

  He took a moment to go through the pockets of her jeans as well, thoughts of a car abandoned at the bar making him nervous, but he was unable to find any car keys. Maybe she had walked, he thought, making a mental note to check the living room later for a pocketbook or purse of some kind.

  Next, Sam pulled on a pair of plastic yellow dishwashing gloves and then turned and surveyed the tools he'd laid out on the counter behind him; a wide selection of cutting implements of various shapes and sizes. He'd need a strong blade, he knew; one that wouldn't bend too much. Something long but thick and preferably wide so he wouldn't have to cut more than was necessary.

  He debated for a moment and then chose an older carving knife from the set his mother had given to him and Denise on their anniversary three years earlier.

  Hefting the blade in his right hand, he turned back to the corpse and considered where to begin. On its surface, the ritual itself was rather simple; the inflicted had to ingest seven organs harvested over seven days from seven healthy strangers. Each organ had to come from one of the major bodily systems - circulatory, digestive, respiratory, muscular, nervous, endocrine, and skeletal - but, as with most things in life, the devil was in the details. Each of the victims had to be killed in a manner that reflected the bodily system from which the organ would be harvested.

  As Sam reviewed the ritual in his mind, his gaze lifted slightly and fell on the dead woman's face.

  She was staring at him.

  Her head had slipped to the side and her eyes lay open now, bloodshot and staring.

  Accusing.

  His heart pounded violently in his chest, and the hand holding the knife suddenly shook uncontrollably.

  No matter that he'd come this far, no matter that Jessica's life might just hang in the balance; finding those dead eyes staring at him was almost enough to make him drop everything and walk out of the house so that he could turn himself in to the first cop he could find.

  Almost.

  Sudden thoughts of the fate that awaited Jess rescued him from the fatal impulse, however.

  "Come on, come on, you can do this." His voice seemed to echo in the silence of the cellar. "You can do this."

  He'd seen more than his fair share of CSI episodes, and knew what a Y incision was supposed to look like. Steeling himself, he raised his arm, gritted his teeth, and then sank the blade into the woman's pale flesh near her left pectoral muscle.

  Blood welled up from inside the body and seeped down its sides to drip, drip, drip onto the plastic sheeting he had laid down earlier.

  Working with a kitchen knife was a lot harder than using a razor sharp scalpel, and more than once he had to resort to pulling the knife out and starting again, but at last he had a fair representation of the typical incision. Laying down the knife, he slipped the fingers of both hands into the incision, gripped the edges, and pulled it back toward him and away from the ribs.

  The flesh came free with a sucking sound, exposing the bloody sternum and ribcage, and an overripe stench wafted up from inside the corpse.

  That was all it took. Sam's detachment crumpled. He barely had time to turn before the contents of his stomach came barrelling back up to splash across the tarp at his feet. He spent the next several minutes retching, the spasms so strong that he was left gasping for breath, his eyes watering from the effort.


  He stumbled over to the sink and washed the vomit from his face, standing there with his head hanging downward until he was certain he had regained control of himself. It took a few moments, but at last he turned and faced the corpse once more.

  You've come this far, no sense in stopping now, he thought to himself. It was just a body now; nothing more than a pile of skin and blood and bones. Nothing he did could bring her back, so why not move ahead and see what happened? Keep your thoughts on Jess. It's all about Jessica. Everything else is irrelevant.

  Before resuming the dissection of the body, he opened the cabinet just above the sink, where he stored the cold medicine, and removed the jar of Vicks VapoRub. Dipping a finger into the gooey mixture, he smeared a sizeable amount beneath his nose. The medicinal scent brought fresh tears to his eyes, but overcame the smell of the newly exposed viscera in the corpse.

  Now fortified, he stepped back over the body, ready to continue his efforts.

  He didn't have any rib cutters handy, so he used a pair of long-handled garden shears to cut them away one by one. A sharp tug, and the entire sternal plate came away, giving him the access he needed to the organs beneath. A few quick cuts of the knife, and the lung finally came free in his hands.

  He dropped the organ into the Tupperware container he'd prepared for it on the table next to him. Picking that up, he moved over to the sink, where he turned on the tap water and rinsed the organ as thoroughly as he could, lifting it out of the container with his hands and allowing the water to cascade over as much of its surface as it could reach. It was bad enough that his baby girl was going to be eating someone's lung; he didn't want her ingesting the blood and bodily fluids that went with it.

  Now clean, or as clean as it was going to get, the lung went into the blender next to the sink. It made a soft, squishy sound when it hit the bottom, the spongy grey tissue pushing against the glass like some kind of alien life-form from a grade B science-fiction film.

  Sam stared at it, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that he'd just butchered a woman in order to remove her lung. A lung he intended his five year old daughter to eat.