10: Abyss
The lacerations run all across his body, stinging terribly despite the airlessness.
"Yes, yes, these are shallow cuts, Inamorata. Ha...yes, that perfectly describes you, after all you are the beta, but in reality...you are a gamma, I'd say. Also… the cuts hurt but you won't die. And do not worry, I won't let you die pitifully from infections or some such. That would be far too cruel, likewise it would be much too anticlimactic for you to die that way. You must go into the next life beautifully, grandly."
He flinched when she licked the blood from the wound on his cheek. "Succulent."
It hurts, he thought, but it's bearable. I can handle this. It's like when I fell on the playground in elementary...just a scrape and bruise that can be fixed by a bandage.
"Oh..." she says. "How strange. I'd never expect you to wear that sort of face, Yamaoka. So brave. So cool...No tears yet, huh? Good, good...I want them to come later, when you must, when you need to, not now. You can...but you needn't, now you would just be doing it because you want to, croc tears, for my sympathy or empathy or whatever you call it. But see here. You won't get it. Not ever."
She went to the door, turned off the light, and left.
In the dark the pain was worse, for he couldn't focus on anything, he couldn't see anything to distract himself from it. The stinging got worse until it felt like his whole body was drenched in fire. He shut his eyes then and tried to distract himself with memories that were faint and faded with time and something else, something he'd hidden from himself for so long. He reopened his eyes to the dark and he saw a light in it, in the corner of his eye and he followed it but it kept at the edges of his vision and he gave up once he was on his stomach. He groaned from the foam floor, it was soft yes but the texture across his incised skin was rough and painful. His cheek rested on the foam and he shut his eyes, the silence heavy against his head, ears, and mind. Laughter, it came somewhere from the dark, behind him, above him, below him; anywhere and everywhere except for where he could see. His teeth and gums ached from raw-flesh bacteria. Every time he looked back into the darkness he felt it becoming longer and, in a way, stronger until he didn't want to look at the infinity it had become.
She returned with the light that flickered now and again as she crouched over him, grabbing him and putting him on his back. She playfully slapped his face.
"You're already feeling it, huh? Practically delusional you are, already… that's no good. But it is good that I found out so soon. Just means I have to pamper you more. Tell you what, for today you can come out for a little while. Into the kitchen, you can see what I dragged in today."
She put him in a chair and put her finger over his lips then hers, gesturing him to be silent. He knew, even without her saying so, that if he made any attempt to scream for help, he'd be dead by the time his scream was heard by anyone. He was naked and looking out the window, he figured it was the twelfth floor or thereabouts, it was high up anyhow. She brought a black garbage bag out from the closet by the fridge, putting it on the counter. The contents toppled out: a head, a leg, a torso with breasts, an arm with no hand, and two eyes which he now noticed belonged to the head. She picked up the head and set it on the table before him.
"This and the rest of this pretty lady is all yours. Yes indeedy. Aren't I kind, Yamaoka? And sorry about taking a leg and arm, but hey, that's the cost of you not being my dinner tonight. Some peaceable, tranquil type ghouls like to think our kind can fast for a whole month after just having one body, but I don't believe that's quite right; why, that's more akin to starvation than anything else. I don't think self-emaciation is such a noble act, in fact it's rather pretentious and high-headed, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if all these peaceable sorts have their heads so high that the clouds blind them from what reality truly is, which is: We are creatures of predation, we are made to eat, and it just so happens our food is your flesh, Yamaoka… why my kind finds that to be a moral struggle is a labyrinthine enigma, it's like your kinds vegetarians and vegans, they are utterly insufferable. But that's just me. Now..." she returns to the bits and pieces, grabbing an eyeball. "It's time for your feast."
Should we call it? Red and blue reflecting off the front windows. Saying I love you to a corpse that you hated when its chest harbored a beating heart. Ah the spirits of grains staining the carpet and the lino beneath cracked and revealing the rasping screwed-on floorboards. The knife from the kitchen drawer glistening red from her arms. Isolation. The sun melting in the window, daylight blinding your eyes. Here alone until the rotting smell is strong enough to bring knocking at the front door. Eating yourself internally. Taken away and thrown away into a room that you are in for years. You leave but are segregated from your peers until you extract your heart and trap yourself in rotting walls. Thoughts ringing like that night when you saw a flash, blood, and your ears deaf from the noise. Fading in and out from what's before you, existence mingling with disembodied visions that make less and less sense as your eyes remain open for many a dawn and dusk. Can't find what you need. You lose teeth but the nightmare continues. Daylight an undying hammer upon your consciousness. I'm comfortable in the dark.
Time changed in the darkness, day and night nonexistent, merely perpetual darkness and the lightbulb that arrived along with the pain. The words I love you come now and again and she smiled when he said them to her, but the words weren't meant for her. She kissed his petrified lips. His stomach distended with human flesh. The smell of excreta, faint and close.
"I worked too hard on this room for you just to defile it like you did..."
He sat on the toilet, Kirika waiting with him, her back to the door.
Then back to the dark until she returned with the light, the pain, and the sustenance. His soles and palms are exposed flesh and bone. But at the brim between the flesh and remaining skin… the skin inches minutely, infinitesimally across the sinew.
"Ah... Never had it before but I'll let you have it. I didn't even know she was gravid. Lucky!"
I hate you. I'll kill you. I'll die. Ah...you hear crying two doors down, so loud and morose and seemingly interminable. The pills rattle in the bottle and you see her run upstairs with them but you don't follow for this is the nth time she's gone. You sit on the couch and listen to the door upstairs slam shut. She doesn't die that night and she never takes the pills. You're watching kids playing in the park and remember playing too. But now all those friends are all gone except Jun who's at your door asking you to come out. You never let him in and remain palsied beneath the sheets watching the day paint a picture across the ceiling. It's hard to breath some days and you let yourself suffocate, hoping your heart will catch in your throat and you don't have to suffer the stigmata incised upon it. You read in a book about how candles are sometimes put at the head of the bed, two for a corpse. So you see a flames flickering at the bottom of your peripherals and you assume you're already gone, you may as well be you figure but none of the candles are for you and in intervals you hear a familiar voice calling your name, then an unfamiliar one and then none. And for a long while there is only silence, the knocking at the door stops, the city slumbers without reason, and you stay between four familiar walls that slowly degrade into obscurity as the past impinges upon the present and you cannot feel what is happening in the now and you don't what is happening you don't know who you are, you forget and nobody can remind you who you are and you keep wondering and your wallet is missing and your birth certificate and anything that can tell you who you are what you are and what this all means is gone and you are just there in bed but also not also somewhere else in a place that is impossible to describe since it is fashioned of memories so dirtied and oblique that there is no trace of you ever having existed in that space but you feel so at home here, so comforted despite being surrounded by shadows and headless figures that keep their distance despite you reaching out and begging and wanting warmth that never comes until a shadow falls upon your hurting, kneeling self-consumed frame and comes closer until what casts that shadow is before you and you bring up your furtive eyes to see her… Shinro Masahiro a stranger who shows love more than any living thing you've ever seen, giving love without catch or contract or secret selfishness and you feel happy and you're waking easier and notice your smile sneaking upon your lips, letting it stay since it no longer feels like a sin.
"I love you..." Shinji said, his eyes vacant but mouth smiling.
Kirika pinched his cheek. "Me too, me too. Not you. But myself. I love myself. I like you though. A lot actually. You last longer than most I've done this too. Much much longer. But that probably because of your rising RC levels. I never fed anyone flesh before, never occurred to me. Notice I leave your outside self alone some days. That's too see if it's working. And surprise surprise, it is. Truth be told I had no idea if it'd stick...but that's science I suppose, no results without tests my little Guinea. All right, next comes the biggest test so far for you resilience, both this..." she hit his leg. "And this..." she tapped his temple.
The knife stabbed his leg and his irises enlarge and he screamed. He struggled but she put her knee on his stomach and held his legs down with her other as she sawed into him. The blade dull. He screamed I love you, Shinji Yamaoka. The blood splattered across her hands and face and she grinned. I hate you. Leave me alone. Alone he was all alone. Her laughter infected him and their guffaws echo with delirium. Come out, Shinji. It's lonely without you. The screaming, laughing, crying intensified as the blade cracked bone. The sirens echoes through the air and the lights, blue and red, are blinding. His face is cold. Hers is blue. There's redness seeping down her fingers. Voices out of tune crooning in his ears as he screamed and laughed and cried while blood spilled from his near-amputated leg. Her teeth sink into the exposed flesh and she stared at him while swallowing with her grin of crimson. Call it: three twenty-two PM.
"You think it's here?" Shinro said.
Uea nodded.
"Do you know what floor?"
"Not really," Uea said.
"We can't go floor to floor...it'd take too long."
"We did take long to get here..."
"Yes, I'd say your fault but it's as much mine as yours."
"Right. So, how you want to do this?"
"Let's go to the roof and climb our way down, looking through the windows."
"I don't see how that's better than floor to floor searching."
"It's not much better but at least this way we don't got to wait on the elevator."
Make it end. Bring him back to me. I don't want to live. Huddled in the corner in the dark that's close and warm and he held his half-collapsed face, putting a finger into the hollow of his eye socket while his other hand scratched the foam with fingers stolen of their nails. The shatter of glass outside, the clatter of chairs, outside the room. Footfalls coming to the door. The door opened. A shadow falls upon the moribund frame. He turned toward the burning light and he raised his last hand. His exposed jaw opened and he tried to talk but couldn't, difficult to talk with the pain and a missing bottom lip. The light played through the wholes in his chest and the air made a draft through his ribs. She looks so peaceful more than she ever did when alive. It's as if death was the only help, the only cure for pain.
"Shinji?"