By John Saxton
Artwork by Painless Wayne

My wife has begun to suspect about the murders. I’ve been careful; got away with it for about eighteen months. Carved them up. Buried them. Watched my own back. Yet she has begun to suspect. Too many late nights at work. I have to find a way to silence her.

The long, heavy knife waits beneath the bed. 

She caresses my cheek. But her eyes cannot conceal the suspicions she harbours.

I have to find a way to silence her.

I close my eyes against the betrayal.

                                                     * * * * *

As I lie there, in the cold and the dark, I do not comprehend. It seems - it seems - that I am in a very confined space. My senses become hyper-charged. I smell damp earth. I hear the scratching of tiny insects. Feel the hard, cheerless touch of a wooden prison.

My sight pierces the darkness and comprehension dawns.

I lie within a coffin - and yet I do not. For my perspective is not one of upward vision. Gravity is defied. I am pressed against the coffin lid, looking down. There are inches of space between myself and the other occupant of the oblong box.

A face of shrivelled, discoloured skin and stitched eyelids fills my field of vision. Now I smell putrescence. The nose has almost completely decayed. The lips are rotted, receding to reveal a rictus grin. Teeth, though far from white, are even and all present. Shoulder-length hair. Brunette. The smell of a familiar fruit becomes pungent in my nostrils. Terrible realization begins to seep into my consciousness as I focus now on the pendant around the papyrus-skin of the corpse’s neck. A gold heart, bearing the simple initial, “E”. Elizabeth. My mother.

Apricots. That was it. The shampoo she used to use was fragranced with apricots.

With an ear-wrenching sound, the stitches give way around the eyelids and rip free of the dead skin. Eyes, the colour and texture of rotten black grapes, stare blindly at me. And she emits the most soul-destroying screech imaginable.

My own scream will not come.

I squeeze shut my eyes.

The screeching stops.

The temperature rises.

Almost against my will, my eyes snap open again. And I gaze upon the face of my father. Cremated two weeks ago. Dead from a broken heart, following the premature death of my mother, eighteen months previously, from a brain haemorrhage.

The heat intensifies. His skin darkens; seems to ripple. I endeavour to shut my eyes. I cannot. His hair ignites, flames spreading like a micro-forest fire. His eyes begin to bubble. Flesh turns black. Epidermis peels away. And my sanity seems to peel away with it. 

My eyes close against the heat and the roar of the flames.

Silence.

Seeing once again. Greens. Reds. Pinks. Whites. Yellows. More still.

Blindingly bright. Intermittent in nano-seconds.

Rhythmic thunder booming in my ears; in my head.

Tangled humanity. Sweat-soaked. Frenzied. Limbs flailing.

My vision zooms in on an individual in this frantic mass of bodies.

My daughter.

She lies on the floor, choking on her own vomit. They trample her, as though she is nothing more than an extension of the dirt floor. A disembodied voice announces the changing of the track. Momentarily the thunder stops. The thrashing of the people ceases.

Then it begins again. With a quickened rhythm.

She lies motionless now. Eyes dead.

                                                    * * * * *

The pain! The lights have gone. The music has stopped. And the pain has begun.

It’s coming from behind; the base of my skull. Excruciating. Penetrating. In a deep and physical way.

I’m in our bedroom. In our bed.

My wife is by the wall. The last thing she had said to our daughter was to take care at the rave. Now she is silent by the wall. On the wall. Her feet are not touching the ground. The hilt of a large knife protrudes from her mouth. The blade is buried in the wall, pinning her by the skull. She dangles. Dripping and twitching.

The pain inside me crescendoes. I find my scream. And it splits the night, even as my whole being tears apart!

Then: tranquility, ecstasy, unquestioning love. Feelings so mixed; so welcome.

The ripping of my skull and then my body becomes a silent, slow-motion explosion.

I find myself - myselves - surrounded by flecks of red, submerged in an all-encompassing sea of blackness. Soul-mates. Fellow-travellers.

Then a greater presence. Something akin to an invisible sunrise. Unseen, yet awesome.

And I am filled with the diametrically opposed emotions of humility and pride. Yet these emotions exist as one.

Just as we exist as one. Chosen for a purpose that we do not yet know. A purpose that we may never understand.

As we float in this endless blackness, red fragments of a greater whole, none of that really matters.

It is enough to know that we are.

      THE END