Then one evening, Marnie came to me in tears.
“M-maybe Dr. Fulci was right,” she said. “Maybe this is all in my head. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I’ll try anything.”
I blinked at her, surprised. It was the most she’d spoken in weeks.
“I can’t do it,” she said, barely audible. “Will you help me?”
“Yes—yeah, of course. I’ll do whatever I can.”
I embraced her and told her we’d get through this together. I felt her tears seeping into my shirt but was afraid to look at the stain.
“Hey, come here!” Marnie called from the bedroom. “I want to show you something.”
When I entered, she was sitting on the bed with her laptop, practically bouncing with excitement. She spun the computer to me.
“Dr. Hardy,” she said. “He’s this big-shot psychologist working in the city who specializes in ‘psycho-oculus’ studies: the relationship between the brain and the eyes.”
I sneered. “That seems a bit pseudo-scientific. Are you going to Google again . . . ?”
“Just shut the fuck up and listen,” she said, sounding more like the girl I fell in love with than she had in ages. “‘The connection between the mind and the eye is one of the most poorly understood areas of physiology—and one of the most fascinating,’” she read off Dr. Hardy’s website. “‘Hallucinations, blurring, selective memory, spots—all of these can occur without any obvious physical trauma, yet they are undeniably physical symptoms. It is our practice’s goal to help patients improve through better understanding of the psycho-oculus, or mind-eye, connection.’”
When she looked up from the screen, smiling, her optimism was only somewhat diminished by the blazing meteor that was her left eye.
“Oh yes, I see,” said Dr. Hardy, looking at Marnie’s eye through a device that looked like a tiny version of the Hubble Telescope. His minimalistic, white, open-concept office projected quite a bit more professionalism than Dr. Fulci’s Frankensteinian laboratory, though I was beginning to wonder why this profession seemed to require such a wide array of weird, scary machinery.
“Inflammation. Redness,” the doctor continued. “Is it sore?”
“Yes,” she said, neck cranked back, shoulders at a geometrically bizarre angle, her eye being widened by a claw-like apparatus. I watched this all furtively from a chair up against the wall of his office.
“Is it tender?”
“Yes.”
“And you say you’ve tried calodrexidyn, polyspelimen, and topical adreno-ocolus lubricant?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” she repeated.
I was unsure of why he was asking these questions because, so far as I could tell, we’d included all of that information on the intake forms. Though his bedside manner was an improvement on Dr. Fulci’s, just being around him distressed me. He gesticulated inhumanly, like a giant praying mantis in human skin. He spoke pedantically, as if we were children who would be impressed by any little scientific fact. Like did you know that if you add vinegar to baking soda it makes a pretty great volcano?
After a while, he freed Marnie from the strange device and bid us both sit across from him at his desk.
“You made the right decision coming to see me,” Dr. Hardy said, his arms flailing like he was trying to get attention outside a used car lot. “Based on what you’ve told me, the problem could very well be psychological. I’m going to recommend a treatment plan that balances physical and mental therapy. Around here, we like to say that the mentis oculi—the mind’s eye—is your body’s sixth vital organ.” He smiled coyly and tapped his temple. “After all, what could be more vital than this bad-boy?”
Then he deposited a box of eye-care supplies into Marnie’s arms, including a plastic medicinal pad that would lock around her head for fourteen hours a day.
“I know you don’t mean to scratch,” he said, arms akimbo, “but sometimes our hands have a mind of their own!”
In addition to a wide array of prescription medication, Dr. Hardy scheduled weekly meetings and meditation sessions, aided by various “calming” mantras. He prescribed phone calls with his assistants. (“I call them my ‘clear-eyed’ gurus!”) He advised daily engagement with the Tao Te Ching.
And he got all the same results.
Marnie never touched the pad or missed a meeting. Every day, she was a “leaf floating on a river parted by a stone” or a “serpent not yet a snake.” Dr. Hardy’s gurus instructed her to draw her feelings via art therapy. Her drawings were inchoate, colorless, vaguely infernal. They looked to me like smears of charcoal pencil on parchment.
Her eye did, however, begin to improve. The swelling and redness reduced. The skin around it softened. The blood vessels attenuated. After a while, it looked almost back to normal.
Each day, I could tell that Marnie put serious effort into seeming fine. She turned the lights back on in the living room, the sound on the television. She didn’t cry anymore, at least that I could see. She never grimaced, but also never smiled. She told The Cheesecake Factory she might be able to pick up a few hosting shifts soon.
Little by little, her face became a mask of alrightness, until she almost seemed back to her old self.
Almost.
One evening, after she’d laughed a couple of times over dinner, after a few glasses of pinot grigio, after I’d just—just—allowed myself to believe we might be getting back to normal, I asked how she was feeling.
She replied, smiling, “There are circles of hell more comfortable than this.”
I came home from work a couple of days later, exhausted.
“Hey babe,” I called out. It’d been a long shift, but I had two tables send back compliments, so despite my fatigue, I was in a good mood. “I’m starving. Want to go to The Rathskellar for dinner? Wing night! My treat.”
No response.
“Marnie?” I said, letting my bag slump awkwardly to the hallway floor.
Which was when I saw the blood.
It was all over the kitchen floor, trailing from the sink to the bathroom and into the living room. So much of it, as if mortally wounded soldiers had been dragged through the apartment.
“Marnie!” I called again.
Laughter erupted from the living room.
My sweaty hand slipped off the doorknob. Ants scurried down my spine. An iron, sour stink wafted through the apartment—the pungent odor I’d imagine in a nail-polish factory.
Several of my steak knives of varying sizes lay in the kitchen sink, all bloody. The melon baller, from my mom’s gift basket, sat amongst the knives, covered in beet-colored viscera.
I called out to Marnie again, but her laughter continued from the other room.
Blood smeared the bathroom sink and mirror. All of this seemed unreal, like I was watching it on video, my head just a swivel for a movie camera.
I stepped into the living room.
Marnie leaned over the coffee table, hair covering her face. She tittered to herself—high-pitched, almost drunken laughter. Red soaked everything: her hair and forearms, the coffee table and the carpet.
“Marnie . . . ?” I croaked, stomach corkscrewing.
She stopped laughing, as if just realizing I was there. She slowly turned her head towards me and brushed the hair out of her face.
I puked all over the floor.
Her left eye was gone, a black-and-bloody hole where it should have been. The surgery had been imprecise. Slits and gashes decorated her brow and nose and cheeks. Fresh blood striated her chin and neck.
And on her lips, the widest smile I’d ever seen—an expression of absolute joy. Blood had drained into her mouth, between her teeth and gums. She didn’t seem to mind.
In her left hand was an apple corer. On the table in front of her was what had once been an eyeball, completely hollowed out and mangled.
“M—Marnie? Wha—?” My voice echoed from miles away.
She had her right hand shut tight. Dropping the corer with a gory clatter, sh
e cradled her wrist as though the hand might pop off and run away. She stood and held her hand out to me, giggling.
“I knew it . . . I knew it . . .” she said.
She opened her hand.
In her palm lay a translucent glob of . . . something. Something about the size of a dime. She held it up to my face, and I could see that the “something” was actually a small, spider-like creature. It had too many legs to be a spider, though—fifteen or twenty. The appendages wriggled as if the creature were drowning in the open air. Its flesh was completely clear, like gelatin or silicone, and its head looked a bit like that of a tiny, elongated turtle.
The thing craned its neck into the air, making a wet and sickening hsssssssssssss.
“I knew it!”
Then Marnie screamed—a shrieking, pealing laughter of unbridled relief.
The last thing I registered before the world went black was the sheer, unadulterated ecstasy in her remaining eye.
JOSEPH ANDRE THOMAS is a writer and literature teacher living in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto's MA in Creative Writing program. A recipient of the Avie Bennett Emerging Writer scholarship and the Canada Master's scholarship, Joseph’s writing has appeared in The Puritan's Town Crier and Untethered magazine.
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Illustration by Joe Radkins
Once upon a time, a girl threw a knife and impaled a rabbit through its eye. Pinned to the ground, the small beast made no movement or sound; it merely ceased to live. Red skipped to her latest kill, crunching the dried leaves beneath her boots. The blade slid out of the rabbit’s head with a wet scraping of bone against metal. Before sheathing the knife, she wiped it clean against her cloak, the blood camouflaging into the red fabric. Then she slung the corpse into a leather bag. Grandma would be happy with her haul that day: three rabbits, a pigeon, and a bunch of blackberries.
Red walked on the path through the tall oak trees until a small clearing gave way to a cottage. A cobblestone path led through a vegetable garden planted by her grandma with plenty of carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, and herbs. Her grandpa had built the house of light-gray stones from the river, with two front-facing windows split in the middle by an oaken door. Bundles of straw dangled from the roof, and a long chimney rose on the right, which fumed woodsmoke into the sky as Red approached.
When she neared the door, a faint slurping noise came from inside the cottage. Was Grandma eating leftover stew? She pushed the door open further and froze. Before her was an animal—or so she thought at first. Long tusks jutted out from the head of a boar covered in ragged brown fur drooping atop thick, human legs. In its enormous claws was her grandma’s body, soaked in blood. Her head hung low from her neck, her eyes locked in a vacant stare. The monster pulled its giant fangs from her chest. Flesh dangled from its teeth as it glared at Red. With a booming roar, the creature spewed the foul stench of blood and carnage throughout the room.
Red responded with her own roar, smaller but just as primal. She pulled her throwing knife from its sheath and in one swift motion threw it at the creature. The blade plunged into the fleshy snout between its long tusks. Rearing back its head, the creature dropped her grandma to the floor, blood spurting from her mouth. Red ran at the monster with another dagger already unsheathed. The grisly animal staggered backwards, pawing at the handle sticking from its face.
“You little shit!” the creature spat in a low guttural voice.
Before Red could attack, it turned and burst through the wall, the stones collapsing beneath its weight. As the creature fled into the forest, the chimney tilted into the new gap in the wall, pulling half of the cottage with it.
Red scrambled to her grandma’s side, but a falling stone crushed the old woman’s skull like a melon. Guts and brains splattered across the floor. Red choked on her breath and fell to her knees.
She stared in disbelief at her grandma’s headless, crimson-stained corpse. It took a few seconds for the stones and straw to settle into ruins, but to Red, it was an eternity. She touched her grandma’s dress and tugged at the fabric, hoping somehow the action would bring her only remaining relative back to life. When the body stayed motionless, she bent forward and cried until her tear ducts ran dry.
When the sun dipped behind the trees, casting a shadow over the remains of the cottage, Red decided there was no better resting place for her grandma than the home where they’d both spent their lives together. Red first gathered the fallen straw from the roof and laid it on her body. Then one by one laid the stones on top.
As Red worked, deep in her gut emerged a bitter aching that, with the laying of each stone, grew into a great anger. Kill the beast.
When she finished, she opened her weapons chest, which was battered from the rubble but still intact. The lid groaned as she opened it. Red equipped herself with a shoulder strap of throwing knives, a belt with two short blades in scabbards on either side, and wrist armor with sheathed daggers.
Before donning the armor and weapons, Red ran her fingers over the handiwork, recalling the hours her grandma had poured into making them. She remembered listening to the stitching of leather as she sipped hot soup by the fire on cold, wintry nights.
Red covered the weaponry with her cloak. Then she put on her rucksack with her travel gear: canteen, cook set, and a bedroll.
As Red entered the forest, she looked back one last time at the ruined cottage—once her home, now forever a tomb.
“I love you, Grandma,” Red said.
She needed to follow the monster before its trail went cold. Hoping to make up ground, she sprinted through the woods with leaves and sticks lashing her legs. At first, Red needed only to follow the blood-splattered blades of grass. However, the sky soon grew dark as rain clouds shrouded the moonlight, making tracking impossible in the low visibility.
Even though adrenaline and anger still coursed through her veins, she needed to stop for the moment and take shelter. Red found an overgrown bush and propped it up with sticks until she had a suitable shelter. Inside, she slid under her blanket with her hands on her daggers. Smelling the soft rainfall and listening to fairies dance upon their mushrooms, Red breathed deeply until finally settling into sleep.
Red was already awake when the morning sun filtered through the trees. She hastened after the creature’s trail, inspecting branches and leaves for signs of disturbance.
It was the early afternoon when Red tracked the trail to a tiny village. A narrow road sliced through dilapidated cottages lining both sides, leading to a tall steeple. The entire town reeked of the aged urine, excrement, and food waste filling the street gutters.
Red walked down the main road, hoping to find someone she could ask about a bloodthirsty monster. She stepped over a man who snored near an empty cup in the street. Red had no idea how anybody could live in these conditions. She clenched her nose and followed the steeple to the town’s center.
When she stood beneath the church, she found a small plaza full of villagers. Red climbed the church steps to get a better view. In the center of the crowd, a beautiful woman stood with long red hair cascading halfway down her blue peasant’s dress. She stood by a stone well in the middle of the plaza as she pleaded with the other townsfolk.
“We have to save him,” the woman said.
“He’s a crazy old man,” said a burly man with a booming voice. “Better him than us.”
“The Beast probably took him for a slave,” said another.
“For his bedroom,” a fat man croaked.
The crowd laughed.
“Even the Beast has higher standards.”
“Please. Please, I need my father. He’s everything to me.” She fell to her knees and cried into her hands.
“You can come home with me,” said the burly man. He wore a fur jacket with a wolf’s head hanging from the back. “I’ll protect you from the Beast.”
“I need my father back.”
“Oh, come on, Beauty,” an elder woman said. “Just
look at him! A strong man. Your father isn’t coming back. You’ll need some protection.”
“Forget it! You’re all useless!” Beauty, or so Red thought was her name, stormed off to the east of the church, rounding a small graveyard.
“Look at her go,” said a man in the crowd.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Another voice, accompanied by laughter.
“I’d love to bend her over.”
“Think she could handle us all at once?”
“And the next village over, too.”
“And the Beast.”
Disgusted, Red left the crowd to follow Beauty around the graveyard. She saw the blue dress turn on a side street, and as Red followed, she found her collapsed on the porch of a quaint home. Irises, lilies, and poppies decorated the front garden, and ivy crawled up the walls. The woman lay on the front step, sobbing into her palms.
“I saw what happened back there,” Red said, unsure of how else to approach her.
“Yes. They were awful. They would never have said those things if my father was here.” The woman rubbed her eyes and turned to Red. “Do you know him?”
“I . . .” As she looked up at Red, her scarlet hair brushed away from her face, revealing deep hazel eyes that shone in the sunlight. Red’s body tensed as tingles ran up her arms. Never had she beheld such a beautiful woman. “I don’t know your father. My name is Red. I live . . . well, lived in a cottage south of here.”
“Oh. Well, my father is a great man,” she paused. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“I understand,” Red said.
A moment of silence passed between the two of them.
“Is your name Beauty? I think they called you that back there.”
Howls From Hell Page 21
