Eric’s house smells of something awful, and I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it’s otherwise the quaintest little house I’ve ever seen, so I find myself capable of looking past the smell. He is a man after all, and men aren’t exactly known for their wonderful hygiene, should they have any at all.
I must admit that I’m tempted to look around before getting into bed with him, but there isn’t a point as I don’t plan on returning after tonight, when he leads me down the hall to his bedroom. It’s almost as cute as the rest of the house, but it smells even worse… go figure.
His bedding is all black and smells faintly of laundry detergent, I note when he pushes me down onto the bed. I look up at his ceiling while he rummages through his chest of drawers, for what I don’t know. As my eyes flit around the room, I notice the darker splotches of cream paint on the walls. Strange. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of the house at all. And then, I feel his weight on the bed and he’s leaning over me with one hand behind his back.
His faces hovers over mine and moves to my ear. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispers, kissing me suddenly. I giggle, kissing him back. “You could stay this way forever if you wanted to, you know.”
I giggle again, carefree, tipsy, but curious now. Young forever? I wish. “How?” I smile against his lips; they’re rough.
“You really want to know?” He asks, kissing me again; but something rings dangerous in his voice.
But I don’t care, so I tell him, “Yes,” and it’s the truth.
He pulls away, leaving me wanting, but the lust quickly turns to terror as he removes his hand from behind his back, revealing a large, gleaming, serrated kitchen knife. I want to scream. I should scream, but my fear chokes me as he thrusts the knife in my direction. He’s aiming for my chest—my heart.
Adrenaline kicks in, but not fast enough, and the knife cuts into my right shoulder when I try to dodge his attack. I cry out, and watch as the red oozes from my beneath my black jacket; it hurts terribly, and I can tell just by looking at it that it’s bad. It was meant to kill me. I need to get out of here, I look at Eric’s sick, twisted grin as he pins me down. He’s fucking crazy!
I try and struggle my way out from underneath him, but he’s sitting on me, pinning me down hard between his legs, getting a rise out of this, and it’s no use. He’s too strong for me, I realize as he touches the tip of the knife to my chest, pulling down my shirt as he guides the tip over my skin, clearly making an effort not to cut me…yet.
I’m terrified. I scream, but know that it makes no difference, because when he drove me here, I only saw a house or two, and they were spaced so far apart. “No one can hear you,” he whispers to me, too softly, too sweetly, confirming my thoughts. I don’t know what to do; he’s too strong for me to get away from, so I can only hope that someone drives by and hears me.
He raises his arm and he’s going to try and stab me in the heart, again. And this time, he probably will. I close my eyes, bracing for the knife’s impact, and as I do, I buck my hips in one last attempt to throw him off me. It jars him and he loses his balance, falling forward, onto me, and the knife rips into the side of my face, into my eye. I scream, unable to stand this pain and feel my head spins.
You have to fight, I tell myself. And I do. I push Eric off of me, away from me as far as I can push, strength shooting through me. More adrenaline. I leap off his bed and make a stumbling dash for the door, but he’s caught my wrist and throws me back onto the bed, sending my head crashing into the wall.
Eric crawls on top of me again as tears stream down my face and inconceivable sobs rip from my lungs. “No!” I cry, sobbing, and it’s a plea, a prayer, and it’s not good enough. His smile tells me I won’t escape from him as he raises his arm above my chest for a final time. He doesn’t hesitate to plunge the knife deep into my chest.
I gasp, or maybe it’s more of choke, unable to comprehend what has just happened. I want to shove him off me with what little strength I have left in me, but I can’t. I’m frozen. With shock? With fear? I can’t even tell! Don’t give up, I tell myself, beginning to fade, but as Eric takes his knife and twists it, I can’t help by relinquish myself to the ripping pain in my chest. I think I’m slipping away.
…
Everything is blurred and I feel unbalanced as I sit up. My head hurts, and everything around me feels wet. Wet? I question as sensation ripples through me. I can feel? I can feel! I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m—! My silent victory party abruptly ends when I look down at my legs in appalled confusion.
I’m transparent, and my whole body is a sickly bluish-teal color. My head reels as I look through my legs at the black sheets of the bed. I’m sitting in a pool of my own blood I realize, horrified, looking at my blood stained jeans and jacket, letting a cry escape from my lips. Looking myself up and down, I make the silencing discovery that there is a hole through my chest exactly where my heart should be.
I want to scream, to cry, but when I open my mouth, silence is all that escapes, and a tear rolls down only one side of my face. Curious, I reach for my left eye, but all I feel is its empty socket.
My missing heart constricts and my head spins recalling the events that took place… How long has it been? Hours? Minutes? Days? I don’t know. My world has stopped, and Eric, he’s... killed me!
I cover my ears and cry, hoping that it’s all a dream and that I’ll wake up. Even with my hands pressed to my ears I can hear, though, and I’m curious as I listen to the sound of someone humming. I recognize the voice. It’s Eric’s He’s still here.
I look up from the bed and out the bedroom door, down the hall which is illuminated by a single glowing doorway. I crawl off the bed and step down, expecting my feet to touch the floor, but they don’t, and I’m floating seamlessly through the air, out the door and down the hall to the doorway. I hesitate outside it, not sure if I really want to see the man inside the room, let alone what he might be doing, but I can’t go on without knowing.
What I see Eric doing inside abhors me. He’s leaning over my ruined, naked, dead body, stitching up my shoulder, humming to himself. My dead body reflects my new ghastly figure almost perfectly; with its missing heart and missing eye, but it’s beginning to yellow around the lacerations, and stained red from my blood—I can’t even imagine how much blood there must have been. I couldn’t have died long ago, I conclude as Eric strokes my corpse’s face, finished with my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says; and I want this apology to be for me, but it’s not. “I can’t fix your eye...” I’m abhorred again as he drops a sphere from the palm of his hand; my eye.
My eyes glance around the grizzly room; the walls are splattered with blood, puss and God knows what else, and mold is growing in nooks and creases all over the room. There’s an open wardrobe too, and its contents is grim; jars of pickled hearts, five of them to be exact, sitting in a urine colored liquid. It’s making me sick, and I uncomfortably wonder which one belonged to me.
Eric kisses my corpse’s forehead and rage seizes my body, and I’ve found my voice. “YOU’VE TAKEN EVERYTHING!” I scream, and the house shakes around Eric and I. Was that me?
Eric looks up from my body, at the wardrobe of hearts; likely making sure nothing happened to them during my fit, and then back. “Don’t worry, Dia,” he says, “I’ll take care of everything,” and unzips his pants.
I gasp, clamp my hands over my mouth and throw myself out of the door jam, slamming into the wall, stunned. He’s a damn necrophiliac! He starts to make noise and I plug my ears, trying to block him out, but I can’t. I can hear everything. I sink to the floor, putting my head between my knees, hopeless. This is so wrong!
I don’t know how long I sit there, while he rapes my corpse, but when he finishes he drags my body out of the room, locking the door behind him. I glare as he drags my body down the hall, leaving a thin trail of blood in its wake. He drags it into the bedroom and I follow him, unable to tear my eyes from the sight as he drops ‘me’ on the floor and opens up his closet, revealing a freezer. He dumps my body inside, whispering, “I’ll be back later, baby; I have to clean up the mess we made.”
I follow Eric into the kitchen and then watch him spend several hours on his hands and knees, scrubbing the hallway, his floor and his walls. He burns his clothes, my clothes, his bedding and anything else that had blood on it. He douses his serrated knife in a basin of rubbing alcohol and pours the remaining liquid into a plastic barrel, hiding it in the garage. Eric paints over bloodied spots on his walls, which quickly realize is the reason for the miscellaneous paint splotches I’d noticed upon arrival. During this process, I hover around him with tears streaming down only one side of my face. How could anyone do something like this?
When he pulls my body out of the freezer, he drags it to the bathroom, into the bathtub when he promptly washes and scrubs away all remnants of loose gore and blood; I see that he’s cauterized the hole in my chest, but I can still see my ribs trying to poke out of it. Upon closer inspection I also realize my lips have turned blue and that my remaining right eye looks hazy. I look so dead. I am dead.
I look to my right, at my reflection. I don’t look like the Dia Kovanoff who left the bar with Eric last night. I don’t look like anyone. I can see completely through my luminescent blue body; and through the hole in my chest, obscured only by my intrusive ribs. My clothes are shredded and stained with my blood. My left eye is missing and in its place is an empty, black socket, incapable of producing a single tear. I pull the hood of my jacket on to cover my too long, bluish-teal hair, and, unable to look at myself again, turn away.
“Are you happy, Eric?” But he can’t hear me, and soon goes back to misbehaving with my rotting corpse.
I am repulsed, even by my own reflection.
…
I listen to Eric go at it with my corpse for several days, lying hopelessly on the floor of his bedroom most of the time. He often walks right through me—he’s even dragged my body through me a few times—but he doesn’t notice, and I don’t feel it. I don’t feel any pain now, and I’ve tried to, but nothing works. I wish I could disappear already, and often wonder if it’ll ever happen.
In the past few days—maybe weeks; I’m in perpetual night and don’t even know how long I’ve been dead—I have learned about what my new ‘body’ can do. I can go through any surface, effortlessly, and anything can go through me, but I cannot leave this house, I’m trapped here. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, and any tears I had left when I died have since then dried up. I prefer to lie here on the floor, too. Maybe I’m going crazy.
Eric keeps himself busy when he’s not on top of me, too. He hovers over his computer screen often, looking at my face online. “MISSING: Dia Kovanoff” the captions leave. Someone is looking for me, which gives me hope, but I know that even if someone does find me here, it’s too late. Besides, no one is going to find me out here. No one is going to look here. He leaves the house, too; but I don’t know to where, and returns during any given hour of the night. He always comes home angry and then buries himself in my rotting corpse. Afterwards, he’ll shower, and he always leaves the body out until he’s done. It’s begun to stink.
I always have to look when he leaves the body out; I have to see if it’s still me, even if only a little bit. But it’s not. The remaining eye has frozen over, and I can’t even make out what was once a brown iris. My hair is all in tangles, and has dulled from shinning red to brown and grey. My mouth has crusted green and yellow around my blue lips, and my body is frostbitten all over, with soggy looking grey skin. Even my fingers look mangled, most of them are obviously broken, but whether I died that way or Eric did it later is unclear to me. My body has grown so limp and cold, too. I wonder how Eric stands it; especially the stench.
More importantly, though, what will he do when he can’t stand it anymore? There are four other hearts in that wardrobe, where are the bodies?
Suddenly, Eric’s bedroom door flies open and I reflexively go to hide in his closet; I’m terrified he’ll see me and try to hurt me again, even though I know he can’t. He saunters into the room wearing only a mint green towel, and changes into a pair of boxers and a black t-shirt, towel drying his ashy brown hair. I hide in the darkest region of his closet when he deposits my body back into the freezer, and watch as he scoops his sheets off the bed, retreating down the hall. I follow him into the garage, where he tosses his bedding into the washing machine, just as his routine goes.
I’ve watched him do this so many times that I know it by heart—wake up, fuck, go out, go home, fuck, shower, wash everything, eat, watch TV, and go to bed, only to reset in the morning. He does this every day, and I can’t imagine that he doesn’t get bored, but then again, I don’t know where he goes every day either.
Eric’s garage is too big for his single Honda Accord, and he uses the empty space for his…things. His walls are lined with shelves full of rubbing alcohol, disinfectants, unopened bed spreads, medical kits and clean, empty, plastic barrels. It smells almost as bad as the rest of his house, and that’s probably because of the full plastic barrels; some filled with the yellowing alcohol and others filled with red. I don’t even want to imagine what is inside of those ones—though, I have a pretty good idea.
…
It’s not many more days after that, that Eric can no longer handle the scent, the cold, the rot, or whatever else he’s grown sick of. I watch him drag my body into the heinous room I’d once found him in, with a bandana tied around his face because of the stench. Now, the shriveled, wet body looks nothing like me.
Eric cuts into my left leg, and I watch in horror as a mixture of yellow liquid and maggots ooze out. It’s making me sick, I turn away with my hands over my mouth as tears resurface for the first time in too many days. I wish I could block out the sound too, but that’s proven to be impossible.
He walks right through me when he’s finished, and I finally turn to look at the scattered pieces of my dismembered, disgustingly grey corpse. I want to drop to my knees, but I can’t move now—I must be in shock. And the hopeless feeling grows when he returns carrying a vacuum and what looks like an extra large Space Bag. Eric fills the bag with my bits and pieces, sucks out the air and drags it into the hall. I watch, following him, as he opens a closet door, revealing a tiny hatch in the floor.
A basement door—and I know what’s beneath his floor before he even unlocks it. He is a monster.
He opens it and crawls inside, dragging my bagged corpse into the ground with him. I follow him, wanting to die. I’ve already done that, though. He pulls a chord overhead, and the light flashes on, displaying four other Space Bags, with four bodies, in four different stages of decay, in perfect clarity.
Eric throws my body into the pile, switches the light off and leaves. I feel sick. Woozy. And do something I didn’t think was possible, as four pairs of glowing blue eyes stare at me—I faint. He’s done this before.
ns18.188.184.3da2
