Authors: Alan Spencer
Dead vocal cords threatened, “I will wash you in the blood of our dead child."
“What are you saying?” He couldn’t hold back the torment of watching his dead wife skulk about the room, bleeding from the face and legs. “Don’t talk like that. It wasn’t my fault. The situation was out of my control. I never wanted any of this to happen.”
“I’m still dead regardless of your feelings.” She turned direction, then threw open a back door and entered it. “
Dead
forever
.”
Clop. Clop. Clop.
She was barefoot and skulking about the station, seeking something, and what, he failed to imagine. He wasn’t going anywhere, experiencing so much pain. After many moments, she returned, coming in closer. He gazed up at her. She was a ghoul drooling blood and broken bits of teeth. Her robe came undone, her sagging breasts spattered in red, the distended belly blackening from the middle, the rot slowly spreading to other vital places. She kicked up a horrendous smell.
“W-what are you doing, Katie?” He managed to speak through a tight throat. “Stop this insanity.” He raised his voice. “Dr. Krone, where are you hiding—where are you? Stop this, stop this now! You know me, Katie. I wouldn’t intentionally hurt you.”
He scanned the room. There was nothing outside the windows except snow for miles. He was trapped with his dead vengeful wife.
Out of nowhere, she dropped a steel bucket onto the floor with a rusty clang. She propped it between her legs, and droplets of blood pinged inside. The flow increased once the bucket was in position. He stared in horror. The pain was abating in his shoulder, but the shock of the scene kept him still. Deathly afraid.
Why is she doing with the bucket?
“What’s Dr. Krone doing to you, Katie?—he’s doing something to you. You must tell me what it is.”
Katie’s smile wasn’t natural, and it wasn’t hers. It curled too much at the sides, and it spread out so long, the lips couldn’t possibly stretch that far. Again, she was a ghoul, so pale and dead. This wasn’t his wife. Dr. Krone’s imagination was at work, distorting and darkening reality.
“I warned you, you could die.” She watched the blood fill the bucket. “Face your fears. You said you wanted to get well. But you get so violent. You’re a danger to society. Do you want to be locked up, Mr. Horsy?”
“You bastard!”
She cackled in delight. Her belly shriveled audibly. She clapped her hands once, looking down. “Oh, the bucket’s full now.”
Craig used the wall to work up to a standing position. He hobbled for the entrance, but he was driven back to the ground, tackled by the shoulders, and yanked back to where he came from. Her stink washed over him in the form of blood and bile as he was sent crashing beside the bucket. He reached out to tip it over, but he was too late. Seized by the neck, kicked between the shoulders, head lifted, hair yanked, neck forced forward, he was dunked into the steaming bucket of crimson.
“
Gahwk!
”
He closed his eyes. Sticky blood filled his ear canals and nostrils. It was so hot, unnaturally warm, it burned his face at a scalding temperature. Gobs of flesh were mixed in. Placenta. After-birth.
Muffled hysterics. “
Drown in your child’s blood!
”
He was doing just that. His head swelled and filled with pressure. He refused to open his mouth. He couldn’t call it blood, it was disgusting and not of a human. It was red. It was black. It was animal’s blood. It was rancid blood. It was the blood rendered from tainted meat.
He thrashed, but Katie sat on his back like an anchor. He frantically scanned the floor with his hands, searching for a weapon. What he found was an electrical cord. He played with it, tugging and jerking it back and forth. Desperate for air, his skull tightening against his brain, his mouth threatening to open and scream and taste the vile contents of the bucket, he tossed up the cord. The first attempt was lame, landing uselessly to her left. He collected it again, each bend of the cord another second he was closer to drowning. The next attempt, the cord whipped her back, and she laughed out loud, amused by his fight.
“You have to do more than that, Mr. Horsy, to stop me!”
Angry and fueled by the wicked sensations crawling up and down his spinal cord and bursting into his skull, he threw up the cord and somehow it wrapped around Katie’s throat. He tightened the slack and jerked it forward. She cawed in shock and faltered from his back. He lifted his head up, gasping for air. Gel-thick fluid dripped down his face and clotted his hair. The berating laughter at his impending death ceased.
He cleaned his eyes with the tips of his fingers and faltered against the check-out counter, weak and panting. “Katie, you don’t have to do this. Please, you’re killing me. Let’s talk about this.”
She was facedown on the floor. Motionless. Her chest didn’t move to breathe. “Katie?”
Craig crept to her. He didn’t trust her. This wasn’t his wife.
Fresh blood circled her head. She’d cracked her nose against the floor. He touched her with his foot. “Katie, are you alive?”
She remained still.
And that’s when he caught Dr. Krone watching through the back window. It was frosted over, his features two eyes and a nose. He darted away once he was caught.
“No you don’t!”
Craig sprinted across the shop and threw open the back door in pursuit. The doctor disappeared into the storm, well hidden. Running outside, he sucked in the below-freezing cold and accepted the mean gusts that smacked into his body.
“
Stay out of my mind!
” He belted it out once more, this time falling to his knees. “
Stay out of my mind, you demented asshole!
”
The winter sucked him up, and trapping him, the snow piled all around him until he was buried.
The device resembled a giant corkscrew connected to a man’s head. Leather straps down the man’s cheeks and buckles clamped firmly at his chin. The man wore a straightjacket, and he was sedated. The drool and glassy eyes revealed that much.
Craig watched the tip of the corkscrew puncture into the man’s skull with a drawn-out squish and brittle cracking. He also wore a steel rim around his forehead, the bottom part of a crown. Blood rivulets streamed from puncture wounds around the circumference of the head.
Ka-chunk.
The corkscrew dug deeper, the entry twisting meat, hair, and rendering fat spurts of blood. The man working the device wore a white lab coat. He used all of his strength to grind the device farther into the victim’s head. His back was turned, and Craig couldn’t see his face.
Ka-chunk.
The room stank of death. Wet leather and copper. He observed in the darkened shadows the outline of other corpses. They were strewn in piles five high, twenty bodies thick. They were all wrapped in straightjackets. Blood stained the floor and gurgled and belched down a drain.
Ka-chunk.
“I’ve got another one!” the man cheered. “Another brain for the pile, Danny-boy. We have to work faster. There’s not nearly enough of them for our studies.”
The operator wrenched back the giant screw and the skull cap and half of the man’s head was uprooted. He twisted the steel cork back, rung by rung, until the brain slithered from the metal coils and into a plastic receptacle.
Craig’s view was obscured, and all he could watch was a gloved hand—a hand that was caked in blood well above the wrist up to the elbow—touch and caress and poke at the row of buckets that each harbored wet slithery brains.
The man whispered, “Just a few more is all we need…only a few more, son, and the machine will be ready.”
Edith Miller
Craig’s shoulder continued to ache. He hadn’t dislocated it, but he couldn’t be certain. He was no doctor. He wasn’t cold anymore, the snow that had buried him missing. The air was dry and stale. There was little ventilation. Katie’s blood had dried on his face, and hands, and shirt. What had he just witnessed? A man’s brain was removed. It had to be Dr. Krone’s work. The bastard was up to more than Craig could ever imagine, and this was the beginning of finding out.
Was it on purpose he witnessed the snippet of a memory, or was he somehow connected to Dr. Krone’s mind? The scene itself was disturbing. Stacks of bodies. Buckets of freshly removed brains. And did the man call out to his son? Craig was confused and realized it was best he cover his ass instead of evaluating a vision he didn’t understand.
He stopped walking.
He had no memory of this place.
Craig roamed the halls of a mausoleum. Green marble walls, gray marble floors, he eyed the brass plates without recognition. The names were unfamiliar. How he wound up here, Dr. Krone would only know.
He scratched at his face. The blood was drying and itching him. He was exhausted and wanted to close his eyes, and sleep, and quit being the victim for a change. But there were so many corners that anything could pop out and attack, no moment was safe. The place was turn after long hall, turn after long hall.
Craig listened after catching a muffled startle ahead. Footsteps scuffed the tiles and then suddenly stopped, alerted by something. “Is that you, Dr. Krone? I can hear you. Show yourself. Just me and you this time, okay? No more tricks. Let’s talk man to man.”
Silence.
He refused to break down. He wouldn’t grovel to Dr. Krone like he did on the ice. This was a fight to escape his mind, and only Dr. Krone could provide the way out.
“I heard someone down there. Step out and show me your face.”
His patience was depleted, so he bounded forward and rounded the next corner, catching another person anticipating his arrival. She charged the opposite way from him. The person was unfamiliar. The mausoleum wasn’t triggering any memories either. This was his adult body. He didn’t revert back to a child or a teenager.
He pursued the stranger. “Hey—stop!”
The woman yipped at the command, startled that what she’d seen was real. She was five feet tall. Dirty blonde hair in strings and matted strands about her head. She harbored a black eye and a long gash across her cheek, perhaps inflicted by a claw. She wore a pair of torn-up jeans and a gray sweater. The stranger was stained in blood, especially at the shoulder area. The woman was worn down, the kind that’d seen a lot of eighty-hour work weeks.
“I won’t hurt you.” Craig softened his tone and slowed his advances. “Who are you?—did Dr. Krone do this to you?”
She stopped and sneered at him. The woman confronted him, taking fast strides, suddenly struck by a surge of courage. It was Craig’s turn to be startled. The woman clutched his shirt and drew him close. Her breath stank of cottonmouth and cigarettes. “He’s after you too, isn’t he?”
He sucked in a thick breath to steady his words. “Did he hook you up to that dreadful machine?”
“What do you know about it?—tell me who you are.”
She looked even older at a closer view. Late forties, early fifties. Her black eye made it difficult to maintain eye contact.
“I’m Craig Horsy,” he explained nervously. “I-I don’t know much about Dr. Krone. I was supposed to visit a psychiatrist, and I ended up here. They injected me with drugs, and I wake up hooked up to a machine. Needles punctured my eyes and skull, and there’s so much of that bright fucking light, it scorched my retinas. And then I’m reliving my memories. Dr. Krone said it’s supposed to be therapeutic. But he’s insane. He somehow made it so my dead wife attacked me. That’s why I’m covered in blood. He won’t let me out of my mind.”
“That’s where we are,” she said. “But it’s all of our minds. We’re hooked into the same machine.”
“Then how come I’m here with you? Do I know you?”
“Does the name Edith Miller sound familiar?”
Craig thought hard. “No. And why am I here in a mausoleum? I’ve actually never stepped foot into one before.”
“Have you seen any of the doctor’s memories yet?” She picked at the scab on her cheek, lessening her defenses. “That’s why we’re here. Sometimes we happen upon the doctor’s memories on accident. This is why we’re here. This is his father’s resting place.”
She pointed at the wall, specifically at the bronze marker that read—
Bruce Denning
1899-1985
He was confused. “Who’s Bruce Denning?”
“Nobody important, but Bruce isn’t alone in there. Dr. Krone’s memory showed me what this place means. I saw Dr. Krone opening the slot and placing his father’s corpse with Bruce’s. He’s kept his father’s body in hiding. They’re criminals. The name on the plate isn’t accurate. There’s two bodies sharing one slot.”
“They’re worse than criminals,” Craig said. “They’re lunatics with the means to break into our minds.”
“He won’t come here,” Edith reassured him. “He doesn’t want anything to do with the mausoleum. It’s too painful to revisit for him. He stays outside, though. He knocks on the door sometimes and tries to talk me into coming out. Forget that idea.” She shouted toward the east hall. “Fuck you, Dr. Krone!”
He traced his finger down Bruce Denning’s marker. “I feel sorry for Bruce having to share a grave with the likes of a Krone.”
“Do you know anything about Dr. Krone’s father?”