CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

 

 

AFTER WHAT FELT like hours, Rick left the barn and returned to the dismal moonlight.

He felt exposed.

His hands were bloody and he was carrying an old sack he had found hanging from a nail on the wall. The sack had originally contained a few pieces of rusted engine – random machine parts perhaps meant for the scrap yard – which he’d emptied out onto the ground. Now it contained only meat.

Faceless, nameless meat.

Back in the cottage he sat Sally on the sofa and once again removed the bandages from her tattered head, then placed the resultant white snake on the floor at her feet.

So much had changed between them but he and Sally had never been closer. He recalled the man he used to be with fondness, and truly waved goodbye to the past. Those were different people, the ones who had lived in a nice apartment and went to normal jobs. The people they were now would not even recognise themselves in the shabby meat puppets who had gone before.

The ghost of himself passed quietly from view, head down, hands open... he stared at Sally with fondness; her slashed features, the maggots that writhed in her bloodless wounds, the alien hunger that drove her.

Things were different. They were different. He loved his new wife in a way that he would not have been able to imagine as little as a few days before.

Very carefully he took the wadded cotton wool from her mouth, pulling it out of her throat like some huge mutated eel or giant maggot – the larger brother or sister of the ones he’d found between her thighs.

The cotton wool was now densely compacted, and it had absorbed whatever moisture had remained in Sally’s throat after her death. When it was removed, the throat closed up over the absence; it made a faint sucking sound, like a vacuum.

Rick got a knife from the kitchen – the sharpest he could find – and cut Rohmer’s meat into strips. He also found a tool box in there, so he brought it through, a rough plan forming in the fractured landscape of his mind.

Then, carefully, and without tears, he dropped the strips into Sally’s open mouth, forcing it down the unnaturally tightened cavity of her throat with the handle of the knife. After a few scraps had passed along her throat and the swollen, dead muscles relaxed a little, he was able to simply scoop the meat into her mouth.

It reminded him of a nature programme he’d once seen, where a mother bird dropped bits of food into the upturned beaks of her brood.

Despite the morphine, Sally’s jaws worked well enough to snatch at the slivers of flesh.

Rick kept his hands well out of the way, mindful that she did not snap off the end of a finger or thumb. Hideously, her yellow teeth began to crack when they came together, the force of her jaws too strong for the thin pieces of meat to fully absorb, and the jagged shards which remained looked lethal as tiny daggers.

After Sally had taken her fill he smashed out the rest of her teeth with a hammer.