Ante Mortem

FROM THE BOWELS Benjamin Kane Ethridge

His scream was an outflow of bubbles.

He sat in an underwater silo, glowing blue fish swimming in cycles high above, radioactive halos in a murky universe. Something took the oxygen from the water and delivered it into his lungs, helping him breathe without reassurance or explanation. An aquatic plant with purple fronds clutched his arms and stroked his body with gentle kisses. His buttocks hung down inside the prickly oval cup of the plant’s flower.

He tried to speak but a hand reached through the ambling silt and placed something cool on his tongue, halting his words. It felt like a pile of broken straight razors. Their flavor made him hungry, so he rolled them around his mouth, ignoring the way they cut into his flesh. The blood made them taste even better.

A voice squeezed through the pressure of the deep: “They are the seeds. They are the brood.”

His esophagus felt like a split bamboo shaft and his stomach divided in wobbling partitions. The digestive acid cooked his lower organs.

Yes! The hand in the watery dark that grazed his cheek had slender, female fingers. He swallowed more razors and had his fill. He squirmed inside the flower as the strain built at his sides. Bubbles poured from his mouth as he screamed at the possibility of the pressure never stopping.

Sam woke up to a fading pain in his gut. Barbara was pounding the bathroom door with her puny wrist. Slowly, he realized he was on the toilet, just like every other day this week.

Barbara’d been talking, but he only noticed her just now. “Hold your horses,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Disgust touched her voice. “Yeah? You gonna go all the way this time?”

“Shut up.”

“I’m leaving, Sam.” Her voice held no conviction.

“You’ll just come back like they all do. Stop pulling my dick.”

“Creep!”

“Yeah, maybe I am.” Sam grabbed some toilet paper, wiped himself and pulled up his boxers. When he turned to flush, he saw something that alarmed him more than the dream. Past the toilet seat, he saw a scarlet stew of shit and blood.

He flushed. The sludge coiled into a gory cyclone and burped up clear—thankfully clear—water. It might not mean a thing. Sitting on his ass and writing nine hours a day could have baked up a nice batch of hemorrhoids, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

He went back and turned Barbara on her stomach. She didn’t look happy at all, but she also didn’t object.

Ten minutes later, he’d sweated away his frustration, but, just like earlier, there’d been no climax. He hadn’t had one since he’d written that damned story.

Barbara soon drifted off and he lay beside her, not daring to shut his eyes. An hour later he heard something outside. The noise had made his teeth click. A hollow, booming sound, loud and heavy.

Like something massive striking down on the ocean floor.

The B-porn on cable had too much plot and Sam’s legs started twitching. He thought about writing but gave up the notion for fear of more delusions. Constance hadn’t called in two weeks now. But calling her, or calling Barbara, that was showing weakness.

His hardness eventually got the better of him, so he punched in Constance’s number. She was the freakiest of his steadies: nipple-biting, hair-pulling, and an occasional finger up his asshole. He never felt right with her, never felt right without her. It was an old feeling.

He was twelve. Driving to the theater. Upholstery smelled of sex and malt liquor. Pat Benatar sang on the radio. The greatest moment of his life had been a blink before the Cadillac wrapped around the telephone pole and everything tore away. But as his mother sucked on her boyfriend, Sam saw something vital in her eyes; she was content, at ease with her pains. Had her mouth not been occupied, it may have worked up a smile.

Later, watching the sheeted bodies roll away on their gurneys and listening to a stammering, although well-meaning, police officer, Sam Ruthers decided to find that happiness his mother had. Maybe he’d have it longer than the single moment she’d be given.

Call him sick, but remembering his mother blowing a guy was a fond memory, the greatest memory.

The phone rang for a fifth time.

Another ring, but this one cut short as a watery recording played. He slammed down the phone.

Constance called around lunch time the next day. Hearing her voice almost made him choke on his cheeseburger. He was too tired to deal with freaks this early. Hot freak, but freak nonetheless.

“You called yesterday?”

“Your voice’s echoing.”

She hesitated. “Parking structure outside the library.”

“You haven’t called in like two weeks.”

“Sorry.” It was a small sounding word. “Want some company this weekend?”

Weekend? He couldn’t sound desperate and ask why she didn’t come over sooner. Weak.

“Maybe I will, but I have to finish some editing. I’ll give you a call later. I gotta run.”

“I do love you. You love me, right?”

The words tickled his lips. “Yes, of course I do.”

And an hour later he told Barbara: “Are you nuts? I love you more than television. Take some time off and come over tonight.”

“It’s been a shitty day,” Barbara answered, too languidly to expect an explanation. “So what about all your other little tramps? They on the disabled list?”

“There’s only one tramp for me. Hey, I gotta run. See you tonight. There’s some kid at my door.”

“Don’t be mean. Love ya.”

“Love ya more.”

A frail kid stood outside, holding a cardboard box full of candy bars. Obviously none of the candy had been filched. “Good afternoon, Sir. I’m selling these delicious treats. They were donated to the South Malden Middle School fundraiser, which helps the—”

“Save it, partner.” Sam took out a loose twenty from his back pocket. “Give them to your friends or something. Better yet, eat ‘em yourself.”

The kid walked off, swinging his box. Sam’s eyes darted out to the street. Something moved. The manhole cover had lowered.

“Kid?”

The boy turned with a frown.

“Is there something out in the street?”

The middle-schooler examined the street with more attention than it warranted. The boy shrugged. “There’s a smashed paper cup.”

Sam closed the door.

He might still be tired from all the tossing and turning last night. But the manhole moved. Two or three times, he crept to the window for another look. In between those times he lounged, watching TV, eating cold mushroom pizza.

When night fell, the neighborhood became a collection of floating rooftops. Sam had to convince himself bubbles weren’t wandering skyward in the racing blue shadows. His uneasiness was chased off when Barbara’s corvette bumped into the driveway. The brake lights flowed out behind like iodine wash.

He waved. She didn’t see him. God, she was gorgeous. Not as smoking-hot as Constance, but few were. He waved harder to get her attention, then froze.

Out in the street, in the iodine sea, a face peered from under the manhole lid. Long webbed fingers wrapped around the lid and its iridescent knuckles bent in a rancorous rainbow. The Nightlid had no hair on its head or face. When Barbara turned off the ignition, the red color drained from the creature’s skin, leaving behind flesh the color of marrow.

Sam leaned closer to the window, trembling. The Nightlid’s eyes were diamond-shaped stones, black as the emotionless gelatin orbs of a shark. It looked just like what he’d written.

He tried to open the window. Barbara bent inside to retrieve her purse. The manhole lifted higher and fog blanketed the street. Sam wrenched at the latch, pulling with both hands. What the hell was wrong with it? He shoved with his entire body. The window slid over.

Another arm came out from under the lid.

“Barbara!” he shouted.

“Hey babe.”

The manhole lid dropped; the sound was so loud Sam flinched but Barbara acted as though she’d heard nothing.

“Is the front door unlocked?”

Sam tried to speak, but could only nod. The world grew calm and quiet, only darkness and clicking stiletto heels.

Unbuttoning his shirt so fast his fingers stung, Sam rounded the bed and approached Barbara. He briefly thought of the thing he’d seen in the street, but it was pleasantly distant in his tangled thoughts. He peeled off his jeans in a single swipe that brought them down to his ankles. His hand went to his boxer shorts, but Barbara’s deft fingers caught him.

“Let me,” she said and kneeled. His boxers went down. Her lips parted in a wet ruby ring. She squeezed him. He put his palm on the back of her head, drawing that ruby circle closer.”You make me feel so good. I love you.”

Her gray eyes hovering before his erection were not convinced, but she began pleasuring him nonetheless. Her teeth felt coarse around the ends, almost the texture of bristle. She’d never performed so poorly before. What was wrong? He wanted to yell, to tell her to go brush her teeth, or see a fucking dentist. But Sam Ruther knew where his dick was buttered. “I want you!” he cried instead.

Barbara pulled back. She was gummy-lipped and breathless, but still lovely. “Harder than before,” she said. “Give it to me hard!”

She was no Constance, but he entered her with relish anyway, in one great rush. “Harder!” she cried.

Sam quivered. Could it be? Was he to orgasm? But not already, he despaired. Don’t you dare! He closed his eyes and concentrated. Something uncoiled, ready to blast free, but then sucked back inside, cold in his chest. His pleasure disappeared.

Sam opened his eyes to a synergy of light and shadow breaking through liquid heavens, to rolling dunes on the ocean floor and finned forms gliding in the distant haze, and to blood. Lots of blood.

He was kneeling on a stone dais in the sand. The water did not bring his body upwards. There was a strange gravity in this ocean. His groin and hips wore shattered guts, bone fragments and blood like fragile underwear. This too did not seem to wash away.

A gray coral reef curled up a slope to the left of the dais. Computer monitor, keyboard and mouse had been integrated inside the rough gray husk. Sam drifted through walls of sparkling sediment. He walked in the throes of the abnormal pull and hunkered down next to the monitor.

It was his computer. All of his programs and story files were there, even the Nightlid story, but he bypassed looking at any of them. All the disgusting pornography he’d been too scared to download was now open for examination. He gleefully masturbated. The jism hit the water and parted in loops of white silk. Still, there was no pleasure with the coming. The ecstasy was taken from him, even in his dream.

The thing in the street, he thought. That goddamn Nightlid! He wrote about one stealing a sailor’s lust—only a story, only a story, only the truth. No! He began to stroke himself again.

A burning sword crashed through his skull, pulling him from the dream. He shrieked, made a move to reach up, but pitched over. Reality returned. Barbara held the broken neck of a vase—his favorite imitation Ming—its jagged white edges like a hundred chalky knives.

“You filthy shit!” Her dress hung from her shoulder in a slant, as though she’d hastily pulled it on.

Blood sheeted into his eyes. He put his palm there to stop the rush.

“I told you it hurt! You made me bleed, you rapist!”

“Barbara I was dreaming—”

“I almost let it go.” A disgusted sob caught her words for a moment. “But you go over and start jerking off to that!”

Sam looked at his monitor. Five opened windows showed a variety of graphic car wrecks. For a moment, one of the photographs looked like his mother, smashed between a telephone pole and three feet of Cadillac steel, in her mouth a penis torn from its scrotum. Sam’s stomach pitched. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he struggled to find his breath. “With me, I mean.”

He tried to stand but Barbara stabbed at him with the ceramic shard.

“Don’t follow me or I’m calling the police!”

Barbara grabbed her purse. He didn’t watch her go.

It took a long time to get to sleep. Around 2 AM, Sam slipped into a deep, meaningful slumber and dreamed of a woman using him. He prayed it was Constance, but never had the chance to see the woman’s face.

The next morning the toilet was red and overflowing.

There was a diving supply store just north of the Sports complex. If he was going down into the sewers, he wasn’t risking noxious gases. Three hours and four thousand dollars later, he returned home with a trunk full of diving equipment, everything from fins to tanks.

He’d considered bringing a gun, but he had no idea if there were flammables in the sewers, and he didn’t feel like testing the theory out. Instead, when he got home he retrieved an aluminum bat and a flashlight from the back seat of his car. There wasn’t time to think up something better.

Dressed in his SCUBA gear, he walked out into the street. With each step, the world around him changed, the air deepened with bubbles and trees became swaying bands of green in a rocking sea. A yellow sandbar led to a sunken cruise ship that had landed on its side like a gunshot victim.

He climbed the side of the indistinct deck, bat and flashlight held tightly under arm. On top he found a large porthole and took a few minutes twisting off the glass before lowering himself into a corridor.

He thumbed on the flashlight, casting an indolent crescent of light ahead of him. Fish floated through the space, red and black starfish hugged the walls, plankton drifted through the thick ether. This place, this dreamland, was home to the Nightlids.

Sam saw a pair of tits poking through a nest of starfish and a series of smiling vaginas along the walls. He wanted to fully explore the wall-vaginas, but what might they be in the real world? Sewer laterals?

Instead of probing, he continued on.

The corridor opened to a wide, oaken ballroom. Torches lined the walls of massive wooden stairwells that slipped inside dark hallways.

His eyes found the bodies and he could hear his breathing intensify behind his mask. The nightmare wasn’t truth, but the bodies looked real. Two lay draped across the stairs, ripped open east to west, flesh and bone raked into the stone. Another had fallen sideways against the wall, her head split all over in a savage highway.

Sam knew her. He knew all these women. His ex Trixie, and Barbara, and a city hooker from last month. He could tell each woman from her nude signature. These bodies were not dream-induced.

His body shook and his heart blasted in and out. “What did I do?”

The hallways scraped with invisible claws. Slim figures seeped out of dark spaces, their surreal, gleaming white bodies touching the torchlight. First it was ten, then fifteen, and then dozens more. The Nightlids grouped at the top of the stairs like a welcome party.

Sam’s knuckles cracked as he gripped the aluminum bat. It felt light and inadequate. All of those solemn, black diamond eyes were on him, but none made a move. They stared—and he stared back. “Well come on!” he yelled. “I’m through with this, so come on!”

Only stares. Several flicked eager smiles, showing no teeth in their lipless mouths.

He grimaced at them. “What the hell are you?”

“Our children, Sam.”

He felt faint at her voice.

Constance stepped out of the shadows, wearing a sequined, royal blue gown that flowed back into the watery corridor behind her. It looked like the sea had lovingly dressed itself around her tender body. “It’s nice to see you where you belong, Sam.”

He stood there, the unspoken question too apparent.

Constance favored him with a dainty smile. “You never finished the story, so I chose to find the source of all sources. You’re a bottomless well of creation and your ideas will offer many more children before we’re through.”

“Children?” Sam pointed his bat at the group. “Those things?”

The half-smile came to her face again. He wanted to bash her head in with the bat, but he waited. “Why did you kill the other girls?”

“Your energy belongs to us,” she said. “Your toys always sought to take it away. Besides which, you don’t need them any longer.” A malicious twinkle caught in her eyes.

He could hear the steps of the Nightlids coming down the stairs. Constance laid a hand on his shoulder and with the other she held out her index finger. “Come on Sam, you’ve let me stick it up your ass before.”

From tiny holes in her finger seeped a pale blue fluid. “Let’s fuck one more time.” A thrill went through her glazed eyes.

Sam swung the bat hard. A clawed hand caught the end and tore it from his grasp. Slithering forms fell upon him. The Nightlid children ripped his clothes from his body as he struggled to break free.

In his mind Sam saw a bloody toilet bowl and understood the truth. Those painful bowel movements had been deliveries. All the unseen eggs floating on the vermillion surface, waiting for him to send them to their new home.

He lashed out, but his hands were cinched. He snarled at Constance, “I’ll die before you put those things in me!”

“The eggs have always been inside you, dear,” she said. “I’m just fertilizing them.”

“No!” Sam got a hand loose. He reached up and ripped off his rebreather. His lungs took in the heavy, rotten atmosphere of the sewer. Everything melted in his vision. Clarity returned through a series of whistles. The sound rose on the air from the gaping mouths of the Nightlids.

“The children will breathe for you,” said Constance. Her voice purred in his ear. He felt clean air push into his lungs from out of nowhere.

Constance had lost her gown—she looked like the others now, only bigger—braided muscles running from neck to slimy arms. She stroked his face and moved behind him. The porous index finger slid easily into his asshole and began to saturate his colon with her vile seed. Sam moaned as the pressure built in his abdomen and the taste of shit layered his mouth. The torches guttered and the temple darkened. He sobbed in the failing light and finally, wretchedly, came to grips with love.

It was his first time.