Old Ways In

Old Ways In

By

Spencer D. W.

“You're so beautiful” The man's voice escaped as a long drawn-out exhale as the tips of his fingers floated over the pages of a photo album. Each picture is a moment in time that captured the moments of life, that being of his love, his obsession. The moments all before he had entered her life, though he wanted desperately to be a part of the snippets of the past he currently apotheosized. The young girl was held aloft by her parents on her first day of school, a smile drawn across her face that couldn’t be faked if she had wanted to. Jumping forward he could see her graduating high school, a fulgurant yellow dress under her graduate gown. Her parents on either side of her and extended family spread like wings forum their shoulders. One happy day beget another as she graduated College on the very next picture, and got a job with a top company. Every time her parents were there in the frame, those same faces flanked them. These were all moments he had wished he could have experienced with her, sandwiched somewhere between her and the rest of the family. 

The room where the man was jumping through time was dim, only flickering candles cast a faltering glow across him and the time machine he held in his hands. The flame glaring and flickering in his round, silver-framed glasses. He trembled as he peered through each page of the photo album again and again. Imagining himself forcefully inserted into each one of them. Being right beside her, an arm wrapped around her waist, a candid kiss on the cheek. He was enamored with the thought of it. He even imagined the next pages filled with him and her. So much so that he almost believed it as he flipped that last page again, expecting to see anything other than what he knew was there. It wasn’t him wrapped around her, it was another man. Tall and handsome, dressed corporate with a set of piercing blue eyes that pierced through the faltering light that danced across the picture, his arms around her waist just as he wanted, his disgusting fingers gripping at her hips, he could see the impressions in the fabric. His tremble escalated to a quake in his muscles, a racing of his heart. The man only appeared in this most recent picture, and yet his blood was boiling despite that fact. He slid it out of its protective sleeve and took a long look at it, a glaring blemish across a beautiful life. “You looked better than.” the man said peering over the picture and his frames that had slid down his nose, at the same blue eyes, lying on his side. No smile adorned his face, just a makeshift gag made from bed sheets. Zip ties around his ankles and wrists. The dim lighting reflected off those eyes just as they did in the picture, making a mockery of the waning light that struggled to fill the room, off the pooling blood cascading from that handsome man's open neck. Standing from the couch he crumpled the picture in one hand with each large gaited step, kneeling before him. He could hear the gurgling, frothing sound, the blood filling up the spaces inside his neck it should never be, mixing with the last bits of air he had left, though he would pass long before that was a problem. His eyes peered up at the man, the same pleading look he gave when he entered the home, and pulled what was his out of the bed. That same pathetic look was plastered all over his face. He tried to plead while he was being tied up, and gagged. Eventually, the man had to drag them apart and take a breather in the sitting room. Letting them both cool off. That time was past, and any semblance of calm he had gained while looking over those pictures left his body as he stared into those pleading eyes. Cramming the crumpled picture into the man's leaching orifice brought him some bits of calm back as he watched the blood soak into the picture and more rush around it like a sponge, fat with water being rung out. Knowing that as the picture faded with the blood, so would the man in it. 

The man left the sitting room, closing the double doors behind him. Moving straight down the spotless hall to the brightly lit kitchen. The girl, his girl lay across the floor. Bound just as the man was, her bare flesh against the cold linoleum tiles. Her pale skin contrasts the oil-black sheen of the tiles. She didn’t squirm when he entered like he had expected. She didn’t move in any discernible way. Her eyes locked on the ceiling, mumbling something under her gag. In the past this might of made him mad, furious even. The idea of being ignored by the object of his obsession, but she was different and he loved her with all her little quirks. The man leaned over and ran his fingers, still covered in the arterial blood from the sitting room across her chin, leaving small delicate smudges of her ex. She continued to mumble, eyes flicked back and forth as if she was reading from something. Though that didn’t matter to him, all she had to do was be present, and the memory they would make would be happily placed in the photo album where the stain of a man used to occupy.

The void of the hallway was bathed in golden light like a flick of a switch, pouring into the house and mixing with the light the kitchen radiated. The man’s calm composure he had just regained was lost in the same instant. He stood straight up and stomped down the hallway, peering outside through the sheer curtains that failed to hold back any of the light from three car headlights shining a spotlight on their special moment. A half dozen silhouettes stood in front of the lights. The blinding light obfuscated each of their features. Standing still as statues, the rain slamming against the window only distorts their forms more. The man knew neither of them got a chance to call anyone, it wasn’t the police, they would have already been breaking down the door, ruining everything. They just stood there at the edge of the lawn, sodden in rain and light. He wasn’t about to have this ruined, not now. His priority lay supine and vulnerable in the kitchen and he would not have that change. If this ended with an audience, so be it. Not God himself could pull him away from what currently entrapped his fixations. 

He stomped back to the kitchen, pulling the gag, soaked with saliva. She didn’t scream, didn’t say a word. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, looking past the man as if he didn’t exist. This time he could feel her disrespectful actions getting under his skin like a proboscis.

“There are people outside. Where are you expecting anyone?” His voice was calm, despite his eyes fluttering with an incubating anger. She didn’t answer. A smile crept across her face like an expecting mother seeing her husband show up at the hospital at the last second. Her eyes didn’t budge from their positions. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. 

“If that waste of time wasn’t infesting your life we would already be closer than anyone on this earth” Spittle flew from his wet lips as he was failing to contain any semblance of a calm composure. 

He re-gagged her, grabbed her under her arms, and started to drag her out of the kitchen and into the conjoining basement. Her heels banged against the flimsy wooden stairs as he haphazardly walked backward down them. With a flick of a dangling chain, the one light bulb struggled to turn on, illuminating the center of the cramped basement. The edges of which were covered in boxes upon boxes, nearly to the ceiling. A heavy wooden table lay in the center of the room. The man didn’t care anymore about the setting, he was not going to stop now. His body ached, a type of excited ache like an addict seconds before their next fix. Laying her on the dark wooden table, the bulb swinging no more than a few feet above.

This was rushed, it set his teeth on edge. Not being able to savor the moments between the moments he would create with her body. He flipped open a small pocket knife, still stained with blood from the mistake upstairs. He could only savor the little seconds before, and couldn’t have her fully, as he intended. Even more than being rushed he absolutely could not bear the thought of not following through now. He would sooner slice himself open for just a little taste of what he needed. To continue to plaster a mask like his in his day to day, he needed this and he was going to have it. 

He pretended not to notice her mumbling, he pretended to not notice how she seemed content, not a tear snuck out of her eyes. Maybe he wasn’t pretending he was ignorant of these things. Maybe he just wanted nothing more than to play inside her chest cavity and that was the only thing that he could truly focus on. Letting the tip of the blade rest its meager weight on her soft, delicate stomach was too much to take, but he just wanted the preamble. Though the anticipation he had wrapped himself sat at the edge of elation and torture, far worse than anything he was going to do to her. He always considered himself the victim of these women. Even the broken connections in his mind still knew how ludicrous an idea like that was. An imaginary friend of an idea he was trying desperately to make real. His justification for the horrid things he would do to them was because in his mind they had done far worse to him. 

So when the knife finally popped through her stomach and the first bit of pooling blood started to fill her belly button like a crater in a flood, his elation was like the same flood, pooling into every bit of his body. Everything around him faded away, the edges of his vision blackened as he let the feeling run its course, hanging onto it as long as he possibly could. In these fractions of a second, he was in paradise, soaked in gold and deified before humanity. A paradise that only deepened as his hands pushed inside the cavity he had now opened. Feeling her waning heartbeat through each inch of the intestine, dressing himself up to the elbows in sleeves of crimson life. He smiled like a child in a sandbox, cooped up all winter and finally getting to play outside again. He found peace in her writhing viscera. He didn’t care that after only a few seconds her heart had stopped. That her mumbling which had gone on the entire time, was now over. If he knew he had time he would have truly experienced everything she had to offer for hours, days if he could. 

As his hands slid across every inch of her insides he let himself drift off to every other girl he had experienced, it was like feeling them all again. Whether or not they struggled, fought, or screamed once his hands pushed their way into those soft exquisite bodies they were all the same. His. 

His eyes rolled back into his skull feeling the elation through his thighs as his nails ran along the ridges of errant organs and the secret parts of her ribs and spine. He felt something deep within her. Hard, much harder than any of the bones he had thoroughly enjoyed. It was moving against his hands like a lover playing with the other’s fingers. His heart sank and any ecstasy he felt left him. He tried to pull away, but it gripped around his hand, clasped as the same lover now scorned. Blood was filling the cavity rapidly. Not seeping as the dead do, pumping violently and filling the space. Fully focused and staring into the rising void in her stomach, intestines spewed out around her waist like a brand-new skirt. His hand disappeared within the red, pink, and black. The light above swung back and forth over him, but he couldn't see what was holding him. He pulled and pulled and it would not let go. It started to pull back, ripping at his hand and lower forearm. He felt pain fill all the spaces of his body that just moments ago were drowned in euphoria. This wasn’t real he thought, did he finally lose his grip on reality, indulged one too many times in this pleasure? He reached in with his other hand, trying desperately to unclasp his hands from whatever had him locked in place. 

As he pulled on what had him, he could feel it tighten like a vice. His knuckles and his fingers started to pull from their homes like the bones in chicken wings, he could feel tendons tearing in his hand and the pain of it wracking his body as he felt his fingers bending backward, skin giving way, setting them free. He fell back as the grip was lost. Falling back a few feet from the table onto his back. Both his arms were covered in her blood, but his right hand cascaded with his own. His fingers were mangled, some of which missing completely. All he could hear was his hyperventilating as his eyes locked with the remains of his hand. Just past the mutilation the light in the middle of the room started to dim, started to muddle, and gave way to the dark that surrounded it.

The room's temperature started to rise, it wasn’t just his body. Not the aftershocks of the pleasure he felt or the pain he was accosted by. it radiated outwards from the body like wind on a blistering day. Between each flicker of the bulb, he could see the body twitch, move, convulse against the shackles of death. No, she wasn’t struggling against death, she was a door that was being torn down, from the inside. He could hear bones breaking, and flesh tearing. After a few more seconds of the flickering lights, the convulsing appendages, then all forces were transitioned to what remained of her abdomen muscles causing a lazy geyser of organs and blood that pushed out the hole like toothpaste out of the tube. Two sets of hands, black and as slick as oil erupted from the still-twitching corpse. One hand dropped the pieces of the man's fingers as its unnaturally long digits looked for purchase at the edges of the wound. Twenty fingers pointed with thick nails gripping and pulling a violent birth. Forearms longer than the man's entire arm emerged from the wound, bending at the elbow it placed its hands flat against the table edges. With one large push, the heavy wooden table splintered under it and lost its legs on one side, rolling the body off and towards the bewildered man. The four arms righted the body again on the hot, smeared concrete, the body visibly steaming from its gaping orifice the man had made. Backing away from the epicenter. One hand only dragging him so far, he could feel his knees trembling. A primal fear filled him, everything in his body knew what he was looking at was wrong and he wanted to run but he was welded to the floor, to the sight unfolding before him. 

The hands of the creature kept pulling up, fighting to make its way into the world. A goliath through a small fleshy portal. As the man stared at the unholy process before him he could feel his grip on reality slipping. The edges of his vision changed, the cement under him looked like grass but still felt the same heating cement. The body changed between faces, some he recognized, some he didn’t.  A head emerging from the gaping womb that was birthing this monstrosity. A thin flesh membrane covering bony hard cavernous holes across its semi-spherical shape. One of its four hands pulled at the membrane, stripping it away, revealing a cosmos of color coalescing in the holes that covered its head and down its protruding spine and leaking out like smoke from chimnies. The man could not take his eyes off the colors swirling like smoke from this emerging anomaly. His vision playing tricks, showing faces he knew. His stepmothers have now taken front and center across the mirage being presented to him. 

He used his left hand to right himself and sprinted up the stairs, running from the rapidly emerging creature. He left the basement and closed the door behind him. As the door slammed shut the kitchen flickered like the light downstairs. Not the lights, but the entire kitchen. It was now his, childhood home he had fought to forget, fought to bury in his depravity that he fostered from that very place. A woman stood at the sink, a knife gripped against the counter, tapping it in annoyance. Fear and anger consumed him, he was lost in the illusion. The form of his long-dead stepmother contorted in the light. She didn’t turn to face him but he could see a sick mockery of her face in the window's reflection in front of her. It flickered between happy and angry with the light. As the man took steps around his stepmother like he would as a child. Not making a noise, in the childish hopes she wouldn’t know he was there. 

Two of her arms lurched forward grabbing and pushing him to the ground. Caught by the soft grass below the woman above him was now his first girlfriend. A severed head he held aloft in his outstretched hands. Pieces of her spine were visible from the ragged cut that was made across her neck with the same shitty little pocket knife he held in his hand against her head. Her body lying next to him like a couple on a picnic. 

He wanted to stay here, he remembered the feelings he felt when he let everything go and did what he had wanted to always do. Sawing at her neck with that pocket knife until her head gave way and pulled from its home. He remembered the hours he spent with her head and always thanked her for encouraging him to be true to himself. The headless body rolled over and wrapped a limp arm around his chest. He felt as if he could stare into her eyes forever. A deep green, that started to melt away to a swirling cosmos of color. The grass drifted away like ashes in a dry wind. The creature hung contorted above him. Two arms keeping their form aloft and the other two pushing the man into the black tiles of the kitchen. He couldn’t scream he just lay there staring deep into the swirling nebulae it bore. His surroundings still flickering between places he had been, and people he had killed. Every one of them tinged with images of his stepmother. Her red hair hung over the images like a frame and the anger in her eyes filled the surrounding space. With each strike molding the man he became like a chisel on soft rock. The dangling red strands of hair at the edges of his periphery floated as if underwater, the creature's face shifting with nonsensical bubbles that floated before it back into his stepmother. Looking up at the man through a layer of water, held down by his two hands in that old claw tub she would die in. She wasn’t scared then, she expected it of him, and she knew he wouldn’t follow through. No matter how badly the man wanted to now, he couldn’t. His grip loosened around the submerged form of his haunting tormentor. She rose like a rock appearing from a lowering tide but back to the present monster the water painting it back into his reality. Pushing away from it’s oddly loose grip. It stayed still, hunched in the kitchen, dwarfing the space with its presence. The man could now see it fully, two Pristine feminine legs melded into the nightmare that was the elongated upper body. The edges of which seemed to never settle, never remain static. A split-mouth along the length of it from where a belly button should be and ending just between the breasts of the woman that lay downstairs, dead. 

The man lay at the end of the hallway from the kitchen to the front door. His first victim lay just feet from him. No matter how much he told himself he had to get up and leave, open the door, and take his chances with the figures in the front yard, he couldn’t. The hallways barely contained the creature's hulking form of loose skin and protracted appendages. Its two front hands rested on the upper parts of the walls and banister as it followed the man down the hall in a deliberately slow motion. The pores across its head leaked that same nebula of color that changed his reality at a whim, at its whim. The man could feel tears running down his face, he only ever cried around her. The same fear that wracked his body as a child filled him now. The Monstrosity stopped just at the body of the corpse of the blue-eyed man. Feet from his murderer. The creature's distorted, crooked fingers ran across the man's face, gentle, grieving. 

The only thing the man could hear through his thundering heartbeat was the rain battering the house just outside the door he was pressed up against as he stared through a blurry vision at the grieving creature. It was the same grief he felt radiate from it that he had felt. The lingering smell of rot that filled the house, the alligator tears of his stepmother as the police took his father away, wrapped up neatly in that cold plastic bag. His gaze dropped down to the space between his legs, the wood floor flickered with diluted blood in water. Her laugh, mocking him as he cried. 

He still held a grip on his knife, it never left his hand, he held it close to his body, as one may hold a distressed child. The creature loomed over him, one of its four hands pushing on the softest parts of his abdomen. He knew that pressure, just as he did with his knife every time. It wanted to play in his guts as he had played in theirs. Slick Umbilicals spread from its mouth that opened along its body, and they started to sink in between the spaces of his ribs. Pushing their way in like fingers in Play-Doh. The massive hands tore through the skin of his stomach like tissue paper, nary a pop of resistance as he spilled across the floor in front of him. Though he felt every bit of it, his eyes wouldn’t close, and his mind wouldn’t cease. The reprieve of death, the only thing good that would come from his interaction with these women, would not be given to him.  He could feel the umbilical pressure wrapped around his heart and lungs, breathing for him, beating for him. It wasn’t going to stop. 

Just outside the door, the six figures stood, watching the house weep blood from just under its doorframe, the sound of a sobbing man, a sound not even the rain could drown out.