The Chris Effect

You look at me, with your hollow eyes and smile that’s not quite a smile, lick your lips with a forked tongue. You look human but aren’t; Thinner, short – like a midget – with scraggly hair and sharp, filed teeth.

“Now is when things get interesting,” you hiss at me, grabbing the empty, scorching frying pan off the stove.

I am terrified. I cannot move. I wonder how I am still alive.

I am tied to a chair in the kitchen. You dragged me down here while I was asleep. My wife is hopefully still sleeping upstairs, unless you’ve done something to her too, or will.

You touch the bottom of the pan to the stump of my arm, above the elbow that you’d just hacked off. Despite its ungodly pain, I don’t scream or even flinch. Whatever you did to me had left me paralyzed.

I awake to the sawing and piercing torture of you cutting off my left leg above the knee. You smile up at me, realizing I’m conscious again.

“I don’t expect you to stay with me the whole time,” you say in your raspy voice. “Pain has its way of playing with you. But you’ll get used to it. You’ll see.”

Unfortunately you were right. Soon, all four of my limbs are missing and cauterized. I didn’t pass out at all for the last one. I can still feel them; my feet and the desire to kick this foul creature, my fingers and the urge to untie myself from the chair and strangle it to death.

“You look so pretty!” you whisper in my ear. “Would you like to see?” I don’t answer, because I can’t. And you doesn’t grab a mirror; just taunting me.

Despite the tourniquets there are pools of blood on the kitchen floor. It used to me inside me, so much of it. Sorrow hangs over my head like a fresh haircut. If I could cry, I might die of dehydration.

You sit on my lap, facing me, and I can smell the putrid aroma of your breath. I wish I could gag. You study me, as if I am a painting. Perhaps I am to you.

Then you reach up and grab fistfuls of my hair and yank. “There’s too much of this,” you say, pulling and ripping out chunks of hair. This time I manage to fight back. But I am weak after all I’ve gone through, and you are stronger than you look. I can feel pieces of skin tearing off and you pull free clumps of my hair. Soon it’s all gone, and you admire my viciously scalped head, watching the blood drip down my face and onto my pajamas.

“Why?” I ask, dimly aware I am under my own power again. The paralysis had worn off. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because,” you say, coy and innocent, “you’ve earned it.”

You see me struggling weakly and laugh quietly; a horrific sound. “Now sweetie, don’t get too excited; you could hurt yourself.” You sit in my lap again and breathe directly into my face, seeing the effect it has on me. Once again I am limp, unable to move or speak. “Besides, we’re not quite done. Something’s…missing…” You scour me with your freakish, hauntingly black eyes. Then you smile; a ghastly sight to behold. “I’ve got it.”

Your mouth then gets larger, as if unhinging. You attack my face, your bottom teeth sinking into my neck above my adam’s apple. Your tongue slithers its way into my mouth, pulling my jaw open.

This is your way of kissing me. I want to retch. I want to pass out, but mercy forsakes me.

When you’re done raping my face, you pull back and wrench my lower jaw from my head. It tears free with a sickening sucking sound. You hold it in your boney hand and display it for me, proud of your work. My tongue, still attached, hangs limp down my neck, like a worm on a hook. You ponder it, seemingly pleased with yourself.

Next, you snake your slimy tongue behind my right eye and rip it out. It is a strange, bewildering thing to see one of your own eyes with the other, and not in a reflection.

To complete the look you desire, your masterpiece of my flesh and bones, you bite off my nose and one ear. Then you gather my parts into a pile, a collection of human remains, and marvel at them. You begin to put them in a sack, and say, “Aiiok will be most pleased with these.” You must know that I have no idea who or what that is.

You cut me loose from the chair and I lurch over, crashing loudly to the floor, face first in a puddle of my own blood. With vile amusement you hop on my back and tear at the clothing, ripping it off me, while also rending flesh from my back and sides and legs. Once I am naked you roll me over and face me.

“You are now Rah’Stuul Ür, the half-beast. If you wish to become whole again you must eat flesh. Human flesh. You will be called upon to-”

A scream pierces the air. I can’t turn my head to see, but assumed it was my wife. She must have awoken when I fell to the floor.

You look up and smile, and say, “Get her. Kill her. Eat her.” But I don’t move. “Do it, or I’ll do to her what I did to you. Rend her flesh, hack her bones, make her my pet.”

Still I didn’t move; I can’t. You now realize this. “Oh. Silly me.” Then you lean down and breathe in my face, and my mobility returned.

I look up and indeed see my wife, standing in the hallway.

“C-Charles?” she asks. How she recognizes me I’ll never know. She looks at me with confused, pleading eyes. How could I hurt her, this woman I love? I can’t.

“You love her, don’t you?” you ask, reading my mind. “And you can’t bear the thought of her pain, right? You’d rather die? Well you won’t! You are as eternal now as the sun. I will allow you to die when you’ve eaten enough flesh. Now eat hers, or I will turn her…into you.”

Sensing my refusal, you give me this ultimatum. Kill the one person I love more than anyone else or watch them suffer more than I could possibly bear. You have already destroyed my body; now you will destroy my heart.

“If you truly don’t want her to suffer, then make it quick.”

Hating you, and hating the monster I am becoming, I gather myself unsteadily to what’s left of my appendages, and through excruciating pain, lumber awkwardly towards my loving, terrified wife. She screams again and runs up the stairs. You watch me struggle after her, but don’t follow. You listen to the thumping of chaos above you and relish her cries of anguish.

After a while you come up after me, finding me in a corner of our bedroom. I’d strangled her using the stump of an arm, unable to think of a more painless death for her.

“Well?” you ask. “What’s taking so long? You have to eat her or it doesn’t work. Your life is now agony unless you consume flesh. Now eat up, regain some strength.”

Tears spill down my face as I begin to gnaw at her feet, but without a bottom jaw I cannot do much.

You see the problem, and in the first act of what you might express as mercy, you pull out a knife and begin cutting strips of flesh from her leg. “It’s okay. You’ll get the hang of it. You’ll do better next time.”

I hesitate, but eventually relent and eat the scraps of skin from your hand. You know I don’t have a choice. Perhaps it’s all in my mind – the only thing you haven’t taken from me – but I do feel strength returning. The more I eat, the less pain I feel.

What have you made of me?

You pat me on the head like a dog and tie a rope around my neck, then half lead, half drag me out of the house and down the middle of the road. As dawn slowly rises I wonder what will become of me.

***

They say a demon walks the Earth, in pieces, looking for that which will make it whole again. It craves flesh, but cannot eat unless summoned. So it waits. Waits to eat. Waits to become whole. Waits for its own death. You can call upon it to do your bidding. It doesn’t require your soul, like other demons of the underworld, just your flesh; whatever you can spare.

BACK

This entry was posted on March 21, 2016 at 12:38 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.