Chapters:

After Hours

Tripping over a child’s severed limb, Sean Gerber’s eyes fell to the cascade of white pills strewn across the floor. He dropped to his knees and with shaking fingers picked up each of the tablets off the soiled carpet, flicking off pieces of flayed flesh and counting as he did. Stopping once to start his count over, Sean delicately touched each one with his finger tip and mouthed the numbers. They were all accounted for. He popped an unstained pill into his mouth and breathed a sigh of relief.

With the medication cupped in his palm, Sean stood and walked through his home. If his neighbours had looked in, Sean would have appeared to be cradling a small animal against himself, but the blackout curtains hid him from the world. Gingerly, carefully, Sean walked to the bathroom and placed the pills into his work bag. Overnight he had resorted to dipping into his supply of work meds which came with a layer of added anxiety about the eventual hospital restock he would have to perform later. He was being watched at work as it was, Sean was sure of it. No need to draw more attention to himself. However, the settling glow that came with his dose was slowly rising up in him and wiping away those worries as well. The uneasy fog that had seeped into his home overnight was dissipating and for the first time in what felt like days he could actually think straight.

First realization: it wasn’t a severed limb, it was his stethoscope. Stupid.

Second realization: there was cooked macaroni across the carpet, not flayed flesh.

Shame replaced his fear and Sean returned to the living room. Dawn’s rays carved themselves through drawn blinds to display his house is its dismay. He stood alone in a mess that extended beyond the misplaced electronics and spilled pasta. The strewn pillows had large cuts across the leather with cotton-white stuffing expelled onto the floor, the TV had a cooking-pot-sized compression to its surface and had fallen from its wall mount, the house’s rear sliding door was shattered from the inside. The scent of morning dew mingled with the house’s stale odour, failing to overtake it. A darkness hung over it all.

Among the chaos, Sean’s eyes were drawn to a semblance of order on his coffee table. A pattern that gleamed in contrast to the morning light, surrounded by bedlam. Various kitchen knifes had been delicately arranged on his coffee table. They were placed deliberately and carefully across its surface, carrying an air of foreboding. Sean could see the edge on each glinting in the morning light as the fall breeze bit into his skin. And sitting on the shredded couch in front of the knives was a young girl, purple, bloated, her throat cut to the bone. Her lips moving in a muted whisper.

Without a pause in his step, Sean walked right past the sofa, refusing to look at her. He shut his eyes and gently shook his head in attempt to dissolve the vision. Sometimes, unfortunately, it took a few minutes for the medication to kick in.

However, he could not deny how irrefutably real the knives were and the deadly, ominous presence they carried. A presence he wanted to ignore. Sean tried, moving around the room and straightening overturned chairs, picking up pieces of glass all without fixing his attention on the weapons or the hollow figure on the couch.

A rush of cold washed over his scalp and forearms like an electric current.

Sean stopped, standing in the hallway. Sweat dimpled across his forehead and upper lip. An unsettling darkness etched itself across his back in the form of a burning stare. A stare coming from the tattered couch in the living room.

He didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t want to see her face, but the gloom that started crashing into him and his psyche was so strong that he would have done anything to stop it. It was a deep, pressing blackness that squeezed on his chest and pulled him down from the inside. All at once, he felt as if eighty-pound weights had been added to his arms and legs, straining him to move. A headache shot behind his eyes and caused them to well. He wanted away from her. Ideas on how to rid himself of this turned dark and heavy. He thought of the knives. All at once Sean realized he would do almost anything to get some relief.

No, Sean thought, not after getting through a night like that. You’re not going to take me down that easily. Exhaustion dipped his head against the wall’s pale plaster. Sean took a deep breath and turned towards the couch. It was empty.

But of course it was. That’s what the medication was supposed to do. A chuckled escaped Sean’s mouth. It cut through the heavy air with such a harshness that startled him. And although she was gone, the knives still remained.

In all of his thirty-two years he had never thought of hurting himself in any way. He had worked as a paramedic for over a decade and, whether through his work or daily life, many of the people he encountered claimed to have thought about suicide in one way or another. That didn’t have to mean they had planned a day to do it or conceptualized that they would have the capacity, but the thoughts had obviously been planted in their head at some point in their life. One patient he had had claimed to have experienced the inexplicable urge to jump in front of a bus while walking to school when she was only twelve. It had scared her so much that she asked her parents to drive her to school for over a month afterwards. Over the next twenty years of her life the thought faded, but the concept of dying and the frailty of life had embedded itself in her psyche. Sean remembered how she had vibrated with anxiety just talking about it.

However, for reasons he had never been able to understand, Sean had never been that person. The necessary childhood events that circumvented his proximity with death had also shielded the concept of taking his own life. Even now, alone in his home with his belongings in disarray and knives glittering on the table, he couldn’t imagine hurting himself. Never.

But a few hours, or even a few moments ago?... well, maybe.

Sean shook his head and tried to push away the murk. The most frustrating thing about the situation was how he was constantly being perceived by others in a positive light. He was constantly experiencing the unabashed urge to keep up a cheery disposition when faced with friends, family and coworkers. People came to him for advice, his family relied on him for support. To show them anything but the strength they all required wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t be enough.

Teeth clenched, Sean tried to smile and moved through his home fixing what he could, taking account of the irreparable. The final tally was upsetting, but nothing he couldn’t manage. By his recollection there were still a few days left to rearrange things before going back to work. Wouldn’t want to leave it this way in case the kids decided to finally come by. Sean still had the picture they painted together taped to the fridge. He adjusted the magnets so that it covered a newly-marked dent in the stainless steel.

How long had it been since he’d seen them? Weeks, certainly. The thought came with an impulse to take another pill. He took one from his pocket and swallowed it dry.

The knives remained on the table.

Sean’s phone chimed from the kitchen counter behind him. Based on the sizable mark on his cabinets, Sean assumed the cell phone had been thrown across the room at some point in his stupor. The screen had no cracks, the case he had invested in seemed to have done its job. The screen lit up with five missed messages. Reading slowly to account for the headache, Sean leaned against the counter, his back to the living room.

Without opening the messages, he saw two of the texts were from work; missed calls no doubt asking for him to come in for over-time. Another two were from his father, which he had intentionally ignored while on shift, four days ago. The last one was from his ex wife, two days ago.

Staring at the screen tempted a relapse in his sadness. How was it possible that the only contact he had with the world was through his work, his father and his estranged ex. The current state of his home certainly paid reflection to his mental state, but Sean’s phone should have at least provided some resemblance of escape or outlet. He was single now, where were the girlfriends? Where were the invites to go camping with his buddies or grab a drink with a co-worker?

And why did he have an itching feeling the messages didn’t quite line up? How many days had it been?

Behind him, a soft patter of fluid drummed slowly on the carpet. It began slowly resembling the pace of a ticking clock but increased in speed with each muted drop. Within seconds it sounded like a pipe had burst from his living room ceiling. He could picture the thick repulsive black water releasing across his living room and saturating the furniture. Sean wished that was the case. Under the sound of the gushing liquid came low, faint footsteps. Their light weight softly compressed the carpet in measured, even steps. Coming closer. Sean knew better than to turn.

His eyes remained on the phone’s screen, fingers instinctively reaching for another pill. Left hand in his pocket, he rolled the medication in between forefinger and thumb, trying to ignore the sounds behind him.

Why was she still here?

The footsteps became crisp through the damp resonance as they fell on the kitchen’s tiled floor. She was less than five feet away now. The counter Sean leaned against ended a foot to his right offering a direct pathway to the living room. He turned to his left and closed his eyes, praying silently that the medication would kick in. Sean grit his teeth, relishing the internal sound of tightened molars against the rush behind him. The stench of coppery-decay was overwhelming.

It was all in his head, he knew that. He just had to focus on something else, distract himself; give his body time to metabolize the pills. Think about something else. Anything else. Bloodshot eyes opened again to the phone’s messages.

His ex-wife had sent the message two days ago... why did that seem so strange? Sean felt blurry and confused and tried to concentrate on the voice that was whispering through his subconscious. The hangover-haze may have lifted but with it had carried the lucidity of his consciousness. They had drifted together to respite in a hovering cloud just over the crest of Sean’s thoughts, offering a taste of the clarity he could not attain. In his unfulfilled concentration the myth of Tatalus came to mind; the story of the Greek king of Phrygia whom Zeus tortured for eternity by the temptation of low-hanging fruit and sitting water that were constantly out of reach. It had served as a lesson against mortal’s testing of the divine and aberration of the god’s laws. Sean by no means saw pity on Tatalus, a man who committed the horrid acts of cannibalism and filicide, in fact he agreed the punishment was probably deserved. But the subjection of unsatisfied temptation seemed so cruel to Sean in that moment even if only because it applied to him. And, Sean thought to himself, in today’s day who doesn’t unintentionally test the laws of the divine? CPR, cosmetic surgery, hell even the little white pills that lined his pocket. Would the gods show mercy on him if they looked down today?

The wet dripping sounds had stopped. The whispering had stopped. But in his blurry thoughts Sean had failed to notice. Gone was the weight of the room, the gloom that was previously settled in his chest, the odor of rotting flesh. Hand chocked against the cool marble counter, he stood up straight and took in what felt like his first true breath of the day.

Living room, kitchen, hallway; it was all just as he had left it without any imprint on the specter. Because, of course, she had never been.

The phone rang in his hand, displaying the number of his supervisor. The sun had grown to be more than a suggestion, yielding heated cracks in the un-parted portion of curtain like flowers blooming through the partitions of a sidewalk. Sean could feel the warmth of the day breaking through the house’s chilled atmosphere, stirring his mood and the life he displayed to the secular world. He was feeling so confident. And then he answered the phone.

He knew he had missed something. The realization trickled slowly over his consciousness like a viscous tar, filtering past the medicated fog that had settled on his brain cells. His supervisor was speaking, but Sean didn’t hear his words, only the tone behind them. He pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment and looked in disbelief at the date glowing across the top of the screen. If his ex had messaged him two days ago, it had been at least three days of him alone in his home, not just overnight. Three days. He had had no idea.

A wave of equal-parts fear and shame bent him over.

With only the slightest of hesitation, Sean answered and gave an attempt at a warm chuckle to accent his story of oversleeping. The shift had started over an hour ago, he would have to replace the TV another time. Nausea crept back into his throat.

Sean refused the offer of taking the rest of the day off sick, using the city’s current under-staffing as the reason. But in truth, he just wanted to leave. He wanted to get out of the house and put these terrible thoughts and images behind him for any possible length of time.

Sean hung up and gathered his work bag and uniform, making sure to pick up the stethoscope off the living room floor.

He went outside to his car, the sun’s rays giving a new bitter-sweet sensation suddenly less uplifting than before. Keeping his eyes low, Sean packed the car and pulled out of the drive way without looking at the house. Sean knew that if he happened to look this time, he would see the same thing he always did; a darkened, vacant house with a slightly unmanaged lawn and a roof that needed replacing. The house would be sitting in a darkened, unconscious state of waiting, the windows resembling the glazed stare of a morphine high.

And sitting in the upstairs window would be her: a girl no older than eight with eyes a burnt bloodshot red, flesh the colour of dirty plaster. Bruised purple skin would border her ragged cut throat and it would be bleeding, pouring onto the window pane and his bedroom floor. And she would be staring at him.

He knew that even if his neighbors were walking by, they wouldn’t see her. Just as if the window was open, they wouldn’t be able to hear her whispers crawling from his home. But Sean did. Even now, driving away in a state of exhaustion with the radio cranked he could hear the girl’s voice resonate again and again.

You failed. You failed. You failed-

Next Chapter: Evisceration