a return to the house of death (10)

For weeks now he had seen the memories of others like dreams and the house was full of them. The past and the future had engulfed the present and one another and all that remained were isolated occurrences shorn of greater meaning. The wheelchair followed his thoughts in desolate silence. During lucid moments he imagined life continuing, taking employment, discovering romance, starting again. He washed the dirt from his hands and body but the smell remained for it had moved inside and become of thought. He folded her remains carefully within their best linen, a present from her mother when they had moved into the house, and returned it to the grave he had dug once before. While he felt little as he did so he was aware that he should and so said goodbye although this was not goodbye but only something happening then that at another time wouldn’t be. Everything was a minor event that bore a universe around it of absolutely no consequence. She would return tomorrow, yesterday, a week from now, or wouldn’t. Little matter. The bodies of their friends were less decomposed and far messier and he sloshed them into sheets and buried them in a shared grave and the utility of the unconscionably large flowerbed became clear. For them he said nil but they had been good friends in their way. He would forget them. He already had. The wheelchair watched him work. He climbed the stairs back into the house and walked its hallways and rooms. There were many voices speaking but nothing discernible; as one they roared into obsolescence. He tried to recall if he had always heard them but conceptually always meant so little as this was this only until that was this. He went upstairs and into their bedroom and in the bottom of the wardrobe found his better belt. He tied it firmly around his neck in the way that he had shown her. The sunlight that shone through the window on the stairs was dulled by the weight of the dreadful cloud but was quite beautiful. He had never noticed it before and had thought the window was a mirror, that the houses and gardens and trees across the old loam pit were its remarkable revelations. He stood on the top of the bannister and pulled himself up to the open loft hatch and tied the belt around a timber joist. The house around him moaned in celebration. There was a ringing in his ears and a great elation and his vision clouded in a roseate hue and yet he saw everything at once and felt fiercely holy. This would not be happening tomorrow.

a return to the house of death (9)

He woke early though it could have been late, it had become difficult to tell. The air in the room was as heavy around him as swarming adults. Her body was in parts skeletonized, soft tissues shed like an immense burden. He fingered the visible parts of bone with fascination and they felt smooth and thrilling, and perfect. He leaned over her and ran his tongue around the hollow cavity of her mouth, her teeth, the remnants of stretched black skin around the bottom of her face; he loved her in a way that would have been impossible during life, with absolute commitment. The head of their mutual friend stood vigil on the pillow, the eyeballs putrefied and spewed from their sockets in murky rivers. He had placed the body and the body of their other friend into one of the guest rooms, positioned carefully on top of the bedclothes. The flies had returned for their great unveiling and he felt surrounded in a way resembling great popularity. Their fragile structures sank inwards. In the bathroom he urinated with some effort, the piss dark and syrupy. He was dehydrated and very undernourished. He took a sip from a cup of day-old instant coffee and went downstairs and to the living room. He recoiled very marginally but felt no surprise that the wheelchair had returned. The blood on its seat was thicker if anything and even more plentiful and still sticky, the smell familiar and pleasing. He sat opposite the wheelchair and looked at it for several minutes and remembered carrying it to the skip. If it spoke at all which of course it didn’t, if such things were possible within the very fabric of normality it said ‘behold my structure, for present is of but past and future only and at once and nothing more but some’, but of course it didn’t. He stood and instead sat in the wheelchair, lowering himself deliberately into the seat and feeling the blood smearing against and between his buttocks like the most intimate embrace. The chair shifted slightly under his weight. The universe itself was unforgiving but he alone, he thought, had learnt. He gripped the handrims and felt awash.

a return to the house of death (8)

Perhaps a week later there was a knock at his door that rattled through the house like heavy weights falling from considerable height. He had resigned from his meagre employment for what he described to his line manager as 'moral reasons' quickly after the incident and neither invited nor expected any visitors to his premises and he was surprised by the knocking. He was nude and streaked with long-dried purge fluid and his flaccid penis was puckered and densely foreskinned and near-submerged into the folds of his scrotum. Against his preferences and wishes he walked to and then opened the door. It was impossible for him to assess the pungency of the lingering stench as he was accustomed to it and even lusted after it during his brief excursions into the back garden. Two of their mutual friends were pressed into the doorway and one clutched a wine bottle soaked in condensation in large jewelled droplets and the other clutched a bunch of flowers and their smiles slipped like vast erosions when they saw him, the smell, the filth, the ocular vacancy, the genitalia. He smiled and felt the muck cracking on his cheeks as he did so and stood aside and invited them in. They were quite afraid but despite this and out of concern for her they entered past him and said nothing of the unexpected revelations of his current presentation. The stronger of the two doubled over in the hallway when the smell caught his nostrils and vomited heavily and loudly onto the white painted floorboards that were piled at their edges with dust and grit. The sick slapped it like a hand on buttocks and piled in complex textures, and even while he continued to expel and despite the degeneracy into which the house had visibly lapsed he apologised profusely, said he didn’t know what had come over him, spat the words past half-digested parts and bilious remnants and guttural glottal hacks. He dismissed the lot of it with a slack shrug and led them into the living room where the smell was at its least noticeable. They sat in an armchair each and he went to the kitchen and returned with three glasses and a corkscrew and also a claw hammer, all laid out neatly on a plastic tray. He opened the wine and poured them a glass and they all drank in silence.

So, he said eventually.

How have you been? asked one of them. We haven’t seen you for a while. How’s…?

She’s fine, he said. She’s upstairs.

He refilled their wine glasses and they all drank in silence. The sick friend swilled the wine around his mouth to ease the pieces from between his teeth before swallowing, and when he swallowed he vomited again, down his front this time. It dripped from the corners of his mouth apologetically and his face was pitiful and deeply sorry. He couldn’t lean forwards without spilling the sick in a hot pile from his sweater to the floor at his feet, and so reached blindly around him at arm’s length for a cloth or some such item with which he would wipe his face. His fingers closed around a tea towel sloppy with putrefied insides, and he had raised it to his face before he had seen what was on it, and just as soon as he did he heaved purge of his own straight onto it. The hammer sank easily into his head and his feet kicked as though his last thought was of swimming somewhere distant and his grip on the tea towel tightened and tightened and then loosened and he fell to the floor, the hammer jutting from his head like a physiological appendage of some kind. His friend dropped the flowers and wanted to stand but felt unable to do so. He was crying and holding a mostly full glass of wine in his other hand.

Would you like to see her? he said, his hand spattered with blood. Their mutual friend had fallen forwards off of the armchair and onto the crisp floor where the largest blood stain had been. Blood pooled around him in spurts from the hammer wound and he relished the coincidence. He observed the other friend wetting his trousers and was pleased. Everything came from mess and filth and amounted to nothing but. The nutty smell of frightened piss belonged to the process. It fit perfectly here.

Oh god, he said. Oh no. What have you done.

Come on, he said, pulling him up to his feet.

As they climbed the stairs they could hear the great performance of the flies that became unbearable as they reached the bedroom door. He opened it and their friend pleaded no and other such efforts but entered regardless, his legs working through instinct alone. He didn’t dare look but did so, at the bed, the dreadful palette so alien from life, the remains, the happening circle. The ravenous appetites of death. All amounted to this nothing that was everything. He lurched backwards and fell against the desk and cut his forehead open, and stood and tried to run. He was in the doorway waiting for him and pushed him to the carpet.

He knelt upon his chest and sawed around the neckline with a kitchen knife and tugged and hacked at the windpipe and sails of skin and meat until the head was detached and the screams had overcome even the flies and then ceased, and when it was done he placed the head upon the pillow alongside her and returned for the wine for he felt a prodigious thirst.

a return to the house of death (7)

Her body was now mostly unrecognisable. The sheets were sodden with fluid around her remains and the odour was breathtaking, awash in her organs. It was as though the entire room had been given over to death, as though death and it were then as one. The maggots had consumed the body and now migrated from it for their imminent rebirth. In the midst of life we are in death. As they hatched gradually the sound of their wings was deafening. He stood in the room and felt them land upon his skin, felt their disappointment at his continuing life and the little promise it offered; the room held nothing further of interest for them. Her perfect teeth were fixed in a smile and she looked quite happy given the circumstances; her skin was slipped and mottled, the colour of a cola bottle, her face almost pitch black, and it looked ready to cave in on itself, as though one poke would finish it. He yearned for the revelation of the complex beauty of her bones. He undressed with his back to her then approached the bed and scooped great handfuls of fluid and gunk from around her body, which he rubbed across his bare skin, his chest and arms and legs and face until like her he was the colour of death. The flies cared little. These acts of love, he thought, are thermodynamic.

a return to the house of death (6)

A few days later the telephone rang. He raised the receiver and spoke. Hello? Hi Jill. Yes I'm fine. Are you? Well yes, yes, these things are sent to try us as they say. Busy mostly, work. A lot of work. Oh she's fine yes, really well. Has she not? She's been quite busy too. In and out a lot. Right. Well it's only a few days Jill. I appreciate that. I know she does. She's a considerate person. Very much so, she says it all the time herself. You want to speak to her? Well she's not here actually. No, no, she went out an hour or so ago. I haven't seen her for a few days. Pardon? She's fine Jill. No I haven't seen her no. How do I know? She's sent me some messages. One or two. She's just busy. Spending the nights with friends I think. Do you know Sarah? That's her. Yeah, that's her. Nasty breakup I think. Another one, yeah. More off than on. This is it. Poor girl can't seem to get it right. Thank you Jill, that's sweet of you to say so. I will. I will. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'll ask her to give you a call just as soon as I see her. Okay. You take care. Give my love to Donald. I will now. Bye now. Bye.

Her phone vibrated on the coffee table almost immediately. He picked it up. One message received. Entirely unpunctuated. What makes the old so wilfully ignorant. He tapped to open the message. Give me a call when you get this love just for a quick chat nothing to worry about I hope sarahs ok and youre ok love mum xx

He turned the phone off and removed the SIM card and then destroyed it and went upstairs. He gagged on the landing at the smell. He just couldn't seem to get used to it.

a return to the house of death (5)

He felt great remorse for the way things were left and three days later returned to the garden to retrieve her body from the thin dry soil, digging the first few feet or so with great whacks of the shovel and scooping with his two cupped hands after that, to avoid further damaging her flesh with accidental impact. Eventually he felt his fingers brush against the skin of her arm as cold as stone and he scraped the mud away gently like an archaeologist unearthing something of immeasurable significance. When he had exposed the whole of her he lifted her and carried her towards the threshold as though they had been recently wed. She was very bloated and the skin around her jawline and her shoulders was greenish, and as her body was manipulated within the cradle of his arms he saw purge fluid oozing from the corners of her mouth. Inside he carried her to their bedroom and laid her onto her side of the bed, resting her head on the pillow, the movement of which pushed much more fluid from her mouth. He dabbed it away with a white handkerchief on which his initials were embroidered. He rolled the tissue of her face back up and into place as best as he was able. Her eyeless stare was captivating and weirdly intense, as though she could see right through him. Uneasy, he went downstairs to the kitchen and took the medium sized food bag into which he had placed her eyeballs from the refrigerator and carried them back up to their bedroom; he returned the eyes to their sockets and felt the comfort of privacy. He unfastened the pyjama top she had been wearing when it happened and eased it out from underneath her. Her torso was peppered with blisters of varying sizes; he presumed them to be filled with the emmited liquids of her putrefying body and caressed them beneath his fingertips, a sensation quite unlike anything he had ever experienced. There were some stains upon the bed linen around her and he observed a kind of oozing from her anus. Her gone viscera sought urgent release. He poured himself a glass of the mid-range red wine they had enjoyed, just supermarket stuff, and swallowed it down; he poured another and drank it too, then another and did the same. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and climbed into the bed. The curtains were drawn but the sun was still very bright, the room aflame with it. He could hear the radio still on in the kitchen below his bedroom, some breakfast show. He had lit candles all around the room. He nestled his head into the crook of her armpit. There were maggots working her. He snuggled up alongside her. She was very cold. The stench was bracing. Let the bed take her, the bed they had chosen, let the bed take her fibres in its. He held her dead hand in his and felt the old chemistry.

a return to the house of death (4)

When he woke up the next morning she was not in the bed next to him and he considered this an oddity as – despite some insomniac tendencies in getting to sleep – she was customarily a very deep morning sleeper after around 6am. He dismissed the thoughts and climbed from the bed and pulled on some pyjama shorts and left the bedroom to urinate with urgency. She was hanging from the open loft hatch from his good leather belt, her face swollen and almost blue in colour and her thick mammal tongue extending from her lips in a particularly simple way. She had soiled herself, he presumed at the point of hanging, and lumps of shit were gathered on the floor beneath her feet and streaking down her bare legs. He touched her stomach tenderly and it was incredibly cold. He went into the bathroom and urinated loudly with massive relief, then washed his face and wet a flannel which he took back to her body and wiped the shit from her legs and from around her anus; he rinsed the flannel and left it to dry upon the radiator, carried a few lengths of toilet roll over to where the body swung and picked the shit from the floor and threw it into the toilet which he flushed. In the bathroom he looked into the mirror and pulled two or three different faces, said “no, oh no” in two or three different tones of voice and seemed quite satisfied. At the body he pulled a face and shouted “no, oh no” very loudly, which felt incredibly cathartic and he felt a peace quite unlike any he had felt during the course of their relationship. He climbed onto the bannister and untied the belt from around her neck; he had not wanted to cut through the leather as it was one of his better belts. Although he tried to support her weight as he did this she inevitably slumped from his grip and landed on the floor at the point at which the stairs turned in a manner which would have suggested terrible pain had she not already been dead and well beyond such trifles. He took ahold of a thick clump of her hair and dragged her the rest of the way down the stairs, across the white painted floorboards in the hallway and down the short flight of some six or seven concrete steps that led into the back garden. The house was situated in a shallow valley where once loampits and brick kilns had employed the myriad working classes of the growing suburb, and the garden sloped accordingly towards its foot; though of good size it was a dismal garden, laid two thirds to trampled piss-yellow lawn, the remainder an empty soil bed swallowing the gardens entire width, no plant or even weed or other life of any form in evidence. There was a small outbuilding that housed a toilet, its cheap plastic cistern half melted away by a fire during a house party some years earlier, twisted into majestic geometry by the roaring flames. The hair could be heard breaking strand-by-strand in his grip, and when he let go of the body in the middle of the grass he had a fair amount of it stuck to his palms, which he wiped off on his pyjama bottoms and watched the breeze carry to the farthest edge of the garden.

He used the rusted shovel that had been left in the soil to begin to dig and felt energised as he did so. The soil shifted easily in a way he hadn't imagined it would, and he imagined himself to be fundamental and important and necessary and it was a good feeling. After a few minutes of intense work he saw the curve of a skull amongst the dirt and the great chunks of brick fragments and he lifted it carefully as though it were conscious and he under its perverse scrutiny. He had not held a skull before and he was thrilled by its weight and by the incredible smoothness of the neurocranium. He ran his fingers around the curves of the orbital fissure like a needy lover. It really was quite a handful. He placed it back in the soil and continued digging but was he could not stop thinking about the skull. He put the shovel down and took the skull inside and put it into a kitchen cupboard that was empty save one or two mugs and an almost entirely unused teapot. When he returned to the garden he was carrying a very sharp kitchen knife as well as a crafting scalpel his partner had used for the occasional art projects she undertook, and a handful of the medium-sized plastic food bags he liked to use for freezing or otherwise storing foods. He gripped her hair firmly in one hand and pulled it taut and used the scalpel to make several incisions around deep into the scalp around the circumference of her head, and when he yanked at the hair that he had sort of looped about his hand the hair and the scalp were severed from the skull in quite a grim if easy manner. This he placed into a food bag which he set down next to him on the grass. He then used the scalpel and the kitchen knife both to scrape as much of the residual tissue and gore as it was possible to do to reveal the brilliant lustre of the bone beneath, and whilst it had not until then been his intention he worked the scalpel beneath the tissue of her face and began to peel it from the skull and down towards her neckline like a thick latex mask. He vomited several times during this process and seemed intrigued by his own physical responses. He gouged out a single eyeball which he placed into his mouth, working it around his tongue and soft palate as though he trying on clothes or shoes and then spat into a food bag. He removed the other eye also and placed that into the same food bag. The bared neurocranium was different to the skull he had found and unsatisfying, he presumed because of its youth. Her body was rich with flies and the promise of new life. It was getting warmer.

a return to the house of death (3)

During their initial works to the reconfiguration and superficial presentation of the property the couple discovered a wheelchair pushed to the rear-most point of the small bare brick tunnel that comprised the main basement cavity. It struck the both of them as odd as they had made extensive excavations of the basement space already – it was in fact one of the first parts of the house they had explored once contracts had been exchanged – and unearthed little but the usual rubbish one would expect to find in a basement of such limited dimensions: a rolled up rug or carpet, some jeans, a couple of coat hangers and cigarette butts, an old record player with a crack across the breadth of the plastic lid, the standard detritus, they had supposed at the time, of a primarily comfortable urban life.

During each of these excavations, carrying the rubbish up the stairs and to a hired refuse skip in the street outside, they could say with almost complete certainty that there had been no wheelchair, and yet here it absolutely was. He was touching its chrome like the flanks of a lover to exemplify this fact, pulling it back slightly and then pushing it forward by the handles. Its presence was unarguable. Carefully he pulled the wheelchair backwards through the tunnel and to the bottom of the stairs, then lifted it up and carried it up to the hallway, surprised by the lightness of the item without the bulk of a cripple inside it; he imagined wheelchairs as heavy, unwieldy things, creaking and groaning in the gothic style, but this was a slick sporty model built from lightweight composite materials, wheels angled for speed and precise turning. In the light of the hallway they could see that the wheelchair was caked in blood, which in some places - where the blood had pooled, in the declivities of the padded seat cushioning, for example - was still tacky to the touch. They had both wanted to take a turn in the wheelchair but decided against it given the blood, and instead wheeled it out of the front door and hoisted it into the skip with the old carpets, the rug, the broken record player, all manner of other rubbish that had now been removed from the basement of the property. A wheel continued to spin for minutes after they had closed the front door behind them like a reliable generator of great woe.