a return to the house of death (8)

Perhaps a week later there was a knock at his door that rattled through the house like heavy weights falling from considerable height. He had resigned from his meagre employment for what he described to his line manager as 'moral reasons' quickly after the incident and neither invited nor expected any visitors to his premises and he was surprised by the knocking. He was nude and streaked with long-dried purge fluid and his flaccid penis was puckered and densely foreskinned and near-submerged into the folds of his scrotum. Against his preferences and wishes he walked to and then opened the door. It was impossible for him to assess the pungency of the lingering stench as he was accustomed to it and even lusted after it during his brief excursions into the back garden. Two of their mutual friends were pressed into the doorway and one clutched a wine bottle soaked in condensation in large jewelled droplets and the other clutched a bunch of flowers and their smiles slipped like vast erosions when they saw him, the smell, the filth, the ocular vacancy, the genitalia. He smiled and felt the muck cracking on his cheeks as he did so and stood aside and invited them in. They were quite afraid but despite this and out of concern for her they entered past him and said nothing of the unexpected revelations of his current presentation. The stronger of the two doubled over in the hallway when the smell caught his nostrils and vomited heavily and loudly onto the white painted floorboards that were piled at their edges with dust and grit. The sick slapped it like a hand on buttocks and piled in complex textures, and even while he continued to expel and despite the degeneracy into which the house had visibly lapsed he apologised profusely, said he didn’t know what had come over him, spat the words past half-digested parts and bilious remnants and guttural glottal hacks. He dismissed the lot of it with a slack shrug and led them into the living room where the smell was at its least noticeable. They sat in an armchair each and he went to the kitchen and returned with three glasses and a corkscrew and also a claw hammer, all laid out neatly on a plastic tray. He opened the wine and poured them a glass and they all drank in silence.

So, he said eventually.

How have you been? asked one of them. We haven’t seen you for a while. How’s…?

She’s fine, he said. She’s upstairs.

He refilled their wine glasses and they all drank in silence. The sick friend swilled the wine around his mouth to ease the pieces from between his teeth before swallowing, and when he swallowed he vomited again, down his front this time. It dripped from the corners of his mouth apologetically and his face was pitiful and deeply sorry. He couldn’t lean forwards without spilling the sick in a hot pile from his sweater to the floor at his feet, and so reached blindly around him at arm’s length for a cloth or some such item with which he would wipe his face. His fingers closed around a tea towel sloppy with putrefied insides, and he had raised it to his face before he had seen what was on it, and just as soon as he did he heaved purge of his own straight onto it. The hammer sank easily into his head and his feet kicked as though his last thought was of swimming somewhere distant and his grip on the tea towel tightened and tightened and then loosened and he fell to the floor, the hammer jutting from his head like a physiological appendage of some kind. His friend dropped the flowers and wanted to stand but felt unable to do so. He was crying and holding a mostly full glass of wine in his other hand.

Would you like to see her? he said, his hand spattered with blood. Their mutual friend had fallen forwards off of the armchair and onto the crisp floor where the largest blood stain had been. Blood pooled around him in spurts from the hammer wound and he relished the coincidence. He observed the other friend wetting his trousers and was pleased. Everything came from mess and filth and amounted to nothing but. The nutty smell of frightened piss belonged to the process. It fit perfectly here.

Oh god, he said. Oh no. What have you done.

Come on, he said, pulling him up to his feet.

As they climbed the stairs they could hear the great performance of the flies that became unbearable as they reached the bedroom door. He opened it and their friend pleaded no and other such efforts but entered regardless, his legs working through instinct alone. He didn’t dare look but did so, at the bed, the dreadful palette so alien from life, the remains, the happening circle. The ravenous appetites of death. All amounted to this nothing that was everything. He lurched backwards and fell against the desk and cut his forehead open, and stood and tried to run. He was in the doorway waiting for him and pushed him to the carpet.

He knelt upon his chest and sawed around the neckline with a kitchen knife and tugged and hacked at the windpipe and sails of skin and meat until the head was detached and the screams had overcome even the flies and then ceased, and when it was done he placed the head upon the pillow alongside her and returned for the wine for he felt a prodigious thirst.