a return to the house of death (4)

When he woke up the next morning she was not in the bed next to him and he considered this an oddity as – despite some insomniac tendencies in getting to sleep – she was customarily a very deep morning sleeper after around 6am. He dismissed the thoughts and climbed from the bed and pulled on some pyjama shorts and left the bedroom to urinate with urgency. She was hanging from the open loft hatch from his good leather belt, her face swollen and almost blue in colour and her thick mammal tongue extending from her lips in a particularly simple way. She had soiled herself, he presumed at the point of hanging, and lumps of shit were gathered on the floor beneath her feet and streaking down her bare legs. He touched her stomach tenderly and it was incredibly cold. He went into the bathroom and urinated loudly with massive relief, then washed his face and wet a flannel which he took back to her body and wiped the shit from her legs and from around her anus; he rinsed the flannel and left it to dry upon the radiator, carried a few lengths of toilet roll over to where the body swung and picked the shit from the floor and threw it into the toilet which he flushed. In the bathroom he looked into the mirror and pulled two or three different faces, said “no, oh no” in two or three different tones of voice and seemed quite satisfied. At the body he pulled a face and shouted “no, oh no” very loudly, which felt incredibly cathartic and he felt a peace quite unlike any he had felt during the course of their relationship. He climbed onto the bannister and untied the belt from around her neck; he had not wanted to cut through the leather as it was one of his better belts. Although he tried to support her weight as he did this she inevitably slumped from his grip and landed on the floor at the point at which the stairs turned in a manner which would have suggested terrible pain had she not already been dead and well beyond such trifles. He took ahold of a thick clump of her hair and dragged her the rest of the way down the stairs, across the white painted floorboards in the hallway and down the short flight of some six or seven concrete steps that led into the back garden. The house was situated in a shallow valley where once loampits and brick kilns had employed the myriad working classes of the growing suburb, and the garden sloped accordingly towards its foot; though of good size it was a dismal garden, laid two thirds to trampled piss-yellow lawn, the remainder an empty soil bed swallowing the gardens entire width, no plant or even weed or other life of any form in evidence. There was a small outbuilding that housed a toilet, its cheap plastic cistern half melted away by a fire during a house party some years earlier, twisted into majestic geometry by the roaring flames. The hair could be heard breaking strand-by-strand in his grip, and when he let go of the body in the middle of the grass he had a fair amount of it stuck to his palms, which he wiped off on his pyjama bottoms and watched the breeze carry to the farthest edge of the garden.

He used the rusted shovel that had been left in the soil to begin to dig and felt energised as he did so. The soil shifted easily in a way he hadn't imagined it would, and he imagined himself to be fundamental and important and necessary and it was a good feeling. After a few minutes of intense work he saw the curve of a skull amongst the dirt and the great chunks of brick fragments and he lifted it carefully as though it were conscious and he under its perverse scrutiny. He had not held a skull before and he was thrilled by its weight and by the incredible smoothness of the neurocranium. He ran his fingers around the curves of the orbital fissure like a needy lover. It really was quite a handful. He placed it back in the soil and continued digging but was he could not stop thinking about the skull. He put the shovel down and took the skull inside and put it into a kitchen cupboard that was empty save one or two mugs and an almost entirely unused teapot. When he returned to the garden he was carrying a very sharp kitchen knife as well as a crafting scalpel his partner had used for the occasional art projects she undertook, and a handful of the medium-sized plastic food bags he liked to use for freezing or otherwise storing foods. He gripped her hair firmly in one hand and pulled it taut and used the scalpel to make several incisions around deep into the scalp around the circumference of her head, and when he yanked at the hair that he had sort of looped about his hand the hair and the scalp were severed from the skull in quite a grim if easy manner. This he placed into a food bag which he set down next to him on the grass. He then used the scalpel and the kitchen knife both to scrape as much of the residual tissue and gore as it was possible to do to reveal the brilliant lustre of the bone beneath, and whilst it had not until then been his intention he worked the scalpel beneath the tissue of her face and began to peel it from the skull and down towards her neckline like a thick latex mask. He vomited several times during this process and seemed intrigued by his own physical responses. He gouged out a single eyeball which he placed into his mouth, working it around his tongue and soft palate as though trying on clothes or shoes and then spat it into a food bag. He removed the other eye also and placed that into the same food bag. The bared neurocranium was different to the skull he had found and unsatisfying, he presumed because of its youth. Her body was rich with flies and the promise of new life. It was getting warmer.