Trembling With Fear 11-03-24

The Patchwork Man, by Derek Moreland

I wake.

Though every sinew is agony, I wake. Though the chambers of my heart pound with molten iron, I wake. Though the world around me heaves as my eyes swim in trenched sockets, though my bowels twist and strangle themselves within my belly, though my hands and feet are weighted with an anvil’s forge…

I wake. From my unholy baptism, I wake.

I rise and, over the thundering crash of my own smelted blood, I hear a cackle. I turn to face it, the sound stinging, burning my senses, assaulting me. Burying me in its terrifying unfamiliarity. The sound is below me, beneath me. I cast my gaze down and find a specter, a pale shadow in a long white coat, capering and screeching and pointing at me. The hair on its wizened scalp is moldy and streaked with ash. Its clothes are stained, dusty and threadbare, its eyes shining mad. 

The wight waves and cavorts, gibbering madly, claiming it created me. That I am its whelp, born of no mother. Its immaculate conception, its proof of mortal godhood. I know not how I understand its mewling, slobbering tongue, so I reach out and take it, squeezing the meat of it between my fingers and watching as founts of rusty red ichor bubble between my digits. I notice now that my skin is sallow, bruised and pockmarked, stitched through with thick black cord and pulsing with angry heat.

The wight no longer gibbers. Now, it shrieks through laced fingers, a newborn banshee attempting to contain its mournful wail within its own hands. This noisome ghost offends me, its anguish a pale shadow of my own. I lift a limb once again and twist. There is a popping crunch, then silence as the specter’s body collapses. Its head is still in my hand.

I lift the decapitation and gaze into its eyes, watching as they dull and glass over. The tongueless jaw hangs slack now, the blood cascading freely over the lips and teeth. Is this who I am to be? Is this the purpose to which I was formed? A creature of immaculate pain, borne of pain, harbingering pain, delivering pain to those who cross my path?

My first act upon becoming was to cause torment, my second to cease that torment with murder. I matched my own agony with agony upon another. But his silence is not my release. I still burn with the misery of living.

No more. I will not live in anguish. I will not visit anguish upon another again.

With torturous effort, I lift my limb once more. The thick digits curl around my neck. I push past the swollen, rotted flesh and into my own throat, a symphony of fresh anguish lashing me. I pull, tearing the stitched meat, the larynx, the esophagus loose and free from my frame. Blood gouts, sizzling, syrupy, over my chest, my shoes, the corpse at my feet. I gag as the pain finally, laboriously, recedes.

I fall.