Pro-Life
by Todd Keisling
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| Illustration by Luke Spooner |
Karen’s talking to me again even though I haven’t grown a mouth. Her day at the clinic didn’t go as planned, someone caught her digging through the bin of biological waste and she had to lie about losing a piece of jewelry, and somehow that’s my fault. I’m not growing fast enough, she tells me. The ritual should’ve worked by now. I should have arms and legs. Teeth. A fuzzy head of hair. Eyes as bright as stars in the sky.
I don’t have a mouth to tell her
she’s an idiot for complaining to a pile of goo. I can’t tell her I didn’t make
up the rules. Eleven candles for the eleven points in the Tree of Life, lines
of salt to connect them, the summoner’s blood to express their devotion, and
the most important ingredient: human flesh.
There’s nothing in the scripture
that says how long this process takes. The human elders who communed with the
Void in the early days of man weren’t given specific instructions. She’s lucky
the ritual even survived this long but try telling her that. No, Karen, your
summoning ritual of choice isn’t guaranteed. You can’t beg for a miracle from
beyond the void and expect an answer on your terms. The Void is chaos for a
reason, lady.
If I could speak, I’d scream that
this sort of thing doesn’t account for time as she perceives it. Yes, the old
grimoire she stole from the library should have some sort of fine print, but I
didn’t write the damned thing. I’m not the author.
I’m just the Other, a voice from
the Void, and when I’m called, I answer.
Or I would, if I had a mouth.
~
I’ll be honest: for as
straightforward as necromancy tends to be, this sort of thing rarely works out.
I mean, sure, they’ll summon one of us to inhabit the body of whatever they’re
trying to resurrect, but they always lose the constitution to follow through.
Most of them don’t have the stomach to deal with the day-to-day upkeep. I
suppose it’s one thing to keep cutting yourself in an act of devotion and
another altogether when it comes to supplying the flesh.
I’ve seen some would-be
necromancers who were absolute headcases, but Karen’s on another level. Newly
divorced, dealing with the emergence of obsessive-compulsive tendencies and a
bi-polar disorder, struggling to come to terms with her infertility—the lady’s
got some baggage, and hiding beneath it is the true madness inherent in all
flesh: desperation. She’ll dig her way down to it eventually.
When she first called me from the
Void, the woman was barely keeping herself together. She was nervous—most of
them are—but trying to act composed, like a student on the verge of taking an
important test. I suppose I can understand. Calling down the power of the Void
to reanimate dead tissue is a commitment, one which most fail to grasp, and
Karen seems to be one of the few who understands.
She’s no stranger to esoteric faith
and devotion. When she first summoned me, she wore the sign of her savior
around her neck. I heard her utter a prayer under her breath, but not to me,
and certainly not to the Void.
And how quickly her faith turned!
The Void can do that. Show someone
even a glimpse of the true nature of the universe, the ravenous chaos that is
the cosmos, and their mind will eject all manner of faith. It’s the equivalent
of showing a child sleight of hand to explain a magic trick.
Now Karen doesn’t wear her savior’s
sigil anymore.
She wears a mask of determination
most days; others, she wears a mask of fear.
Right now, she’s throwing a tantrum
over how long this is taking, but in an hour, she’ll collapse in a heap on the
other side of the room, weeping quietly until sleep claims her. She’ll dream of
the child she can’t have, of her ex-husband who left her after a year of
suffering through her psychotic episodes. Her failures and insecurities will
manifest as shadows and stalk her through the dreaming.
She doesn’t know the Void hears her
dreams. They’re like music, sweet lullabies of agony fueling the dissonance
inherent in existence.
I want to tell her I can taste her
pain. I want her to cry to me so that I may drink her tears. Karen, I’d say,
your pain is delicious.
For the first few days, my single
eye was little more than a gelatinous ball oozing fluid, and the world before
me a blur of light and shadow. My vision has cleared since then. My womb is a
bucket, housed in a basement beneath Karen’s home. She visits me before she leaves
to go work at the clinic and she visits me on her lunch break to feed me
whatever amniotic waste she’s scrounged when no one’s looking. Every night she
visits to repeat the ritual, drawing the corners of the great Tree, slicing her
arm over the bucket so that I may taste her blood, and to recite the
incantations.
Sometimes she does this over and
over for hours.
~
In those first few weeks, you’d
think I’d already grown into something resembling a child. She doted and cooed
over me like a young mother, talking about the life she would give me. I’d
attend the best schools, be athletic while maintaining the highest grades in
academics, and care for her when she grew older. I’d be a doctor or a lawyer,
highly successful and rich, and my spouse would be the perfect match. Together
my spouse and I would have children of our own, grandchildren who would make
their grandmother proud.
Her fabricated lineage always ended
there because her tears would overtake her dreams.
So, I’d sit in my bucket, watching
her slowly descend another step into the madness waiting for her at the end of
the tunnel.
Poor Karen, I wanted to say. You’re
losing your mind over a collection of cells, hardly enough to consider tissue
or organs. I wanted to remind her of the unborn chicken she consumed for
breakfast that morning.
~
Weeks pass. My second eye has
sprouted from my primordial soup, and I can see the room clearly. Framed by the
circular silhouette of the bucket’s rim, my tiny portal to the physical world
beyond, and everything I see is a disappointment. Karen is upset again. She’s
lost her job at the clinic because they caught her stealing the biological
waste. They’ve known for weeks, she says. They waited until they could catch
her in the act.
For the first time since my
conjuring, I expect Karen to end her basement experiment in basic necromancy.
Maybe I was wrong. After more than a month of daily feedings, fluid and tissue
and occasionally a half-formed organ, my time on this plane of existence has
come to an end. Don’t beat yourself up, I want to say. Necromancy isn’t for
everyone, Karen.
And just when I’m prepared for her
to flush me down the toilet, Karen surprises me yet again.
Disheveled, her stringy unwashed
hair matted to her cheeks with tears, she peers into my bucket and smiles. She
sees my eyes. At first, she isn’t sure if they were there before, or if they’re
new additions to this arcane stew she’s had simmering for weeks now.
So, I do the only thing I can: I
blink with newly formed eyelids. She doesn’t notice the gloss of my nictitating
membranes, or the slow dilation of pupils like splitting zygotes; Karen only
sees what she wants to—a sign of life. That’s all she seems to care about now,
a sign of life. She won’t care for what comes after.
We stare at one another, me
incapable of reflecting any emotion while she projects all her emotion onto me.
In her eyes I’m that fully formed child, already in school, already making her
proud, already something she can brag about to her peers. She can’t see beyond
her fantasies.
You idiot, I want to say. You have
no idea what you’re doing.
But something about the wild look
in her eyes tells me she wouldn’t listen even if I could speak. The well of
madness in her heart has no bottom, an epiphany which sends a shiver through
the congealing mass of my body. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
~
Karen’s finally understanding the
commitment required to practice proper necromancy. The last time I saw someone
introduce an infant to the ritual was in the dark ages.
This goes without saying, but Karen
finally faced the desperation in her heart.
Now she’s lost her goddamn mind,
and I’m enjoying every second of it.
She’s here with me now, kneeling
across the room. The tissue slowly incorporating itself beneath me has elevated
my position in the womb of this bucket. She’s spread plastic over the floor of
the basement, and a chunky lump of smooth flesh hangs from an exposed beam.
Karen is observing the tiny figure, examining its features, questioning the best
place to cut first. I want to tell her the hard part is already done. Karen, I
want to say, just feed me the damn thing.
There’s a spark of inspiration in
her eyes. She looks at me, and I blink in encouragement. A moment later, she’s
carrying me across the room and placing me below the hanging infant. She slits
its throat, and I’m coated in a refreshing warm rain. Yes, this will do nicely.
Karen leaves the room and returns a
few moments later with a radio and a pair of rubber gloves. She turns on the
radio and strips off her clothes, revealing a bony frame coated in pale skin
and scars from all the cuts she’s made. Karen, I want to say, you’ve really let
yourself go. Haven’t you been eating?
For such a scrawny creature, Karen
moves with energetic purpose, and she goes to work on her sacrifice with the
precision of a sculptor. A slice here and there, degloving the parts in logical
succession, feeding me the scraps as she works her way along the body. The
radio station plays pop music which inserts a rhythm into her movements. It’s
almost poetic, like watching a ballerina on stage, with grace in every slash
and cut. I would have tears in my eyes if I could produce them.
While she works, the music is
interrupted by a piercing drone, and Karen pauses to look at the radio. A voice
cuts in to announce an AMBER alert, describing the missing child as
nine-month-old—
Karen turns off the radio. She
looks at me, at the cooling blood streaking her body, and goes back to work.
~
My head is forming. I have a jaw, a
nose, proper sockets for my eyes. No mouth, though, and I’m frustrated because
I need to tell Karen to slow down. The first couple of children were great, I
welcomed them and their sustenance, but now…
She isn’t following the recipe
anymore. There’s too much. She isn’t thinking things through. I want to tell
her to stop this nonsense, that I’ll grow on my own. Karen, I want to say,
sacrificing children so you can grow your own doesn’t make sense.
But these fingers and toes are
delicious. She’s slicing them piece by piece for me like fruit for her morning
oatmeal.
Yesterday she painted the Tree of
Life on the basement wall with a child’s blood. This piece of eldritch graffiti
joins a gallery of esoteric sketches and ramblings. The sacred stars and their
configurations, the ancient representations of timeless entities, words not
pronounced by a human tongue since the days of Zoroaster—all were painted on
the walls in a foolhardy attempt at displaying her devotion. What an
overachiever.
The Void doesn’t choose favorites,
Karen. You aren’t special.
And yet she brought home a stack of
dusty old tomes, performed a ritual I haven’t heard in a millennium. There was
a goat involved. She thought she was enhancing the process, and technically she
wasn’t wrong, but the constant sacrifice of children isn’t necessary. I’ve
grown beyond the need, but she keeps feeding me. At this rate I’m going to lose
my figure.
I’m going to grow into something
else.
~
Another week, and I’ve grown a
neck, the beginnings of a torso, the stumps that will become my arms. At the
bottom of my bucket, I feel cold metal and warm fluid against the flesh that
will be my legs and feet. Karen is pleased with my growth, but displeased with
the time, and has graduated from stealing infants to stealing school children.
Every few nights, she brings me a
fresh body. She tells me the authorities are hunting her. She cut her hair,
dyed it a different color. Yesterday, she ditched her car on the other side of
town and set it on fire. She stole another car from a grocery store parking
lot. She bought a handgun from a pawn shop.
Just in case, she tells me. She’s
too close to the end, she can feel it. And I’d tell her she’s right, she is
close to the end, only I would never tell her what end I’m referring to. Like
revealing a child’s sex, I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
Tonight, she’s listening to the
radio again. She’s dancing to the music while carving pieces from the child
strung up before her. Every slice yields another morsel tossed into my bucket.
Sometimes she steals a piece for herself, and she thinks I don’t see, but I do
and so does the Void. That isn’t hers to consume.
Come on, Karen, keep it together.
When she’s finished, she frees the
bloody skeleton from the hook and collects its pieces in a bag. She’s keeping
them upstairs in her bedroom, and when she’s done, she says she’s going to
build me a bassinet. She’s already built a mobile of bones to hang from the
ceiling, something to keep me occupied when she puts me down for a nap. She
thinks I’m going to emerge from this bucket the size of a human infant.
She says she wants to breastfeed
me.
~
Karen’s gone for an entire week,
and I’ve nearly grown comfortable with the silence when she barges into the
basement.
Except it’s not her. It’s a young
girl. She has a bruise on her forehead, long dark hair matted to her temples, and
bloodstains on her purple pajamas. She’s panting, her teeth are chattering, and
she can’t take her eyes off the bloody pictograms on the walls long enough to
notice the quivering mass of flesh sprouting from the bucket. Her fear is
exquisite, a sweet fragrance afloat in the air.
The little girl paces the floor,
struggling to catch her breath, muttering a prayer. Don’t let the bad woman
take me, she says. The child fights the tears in her eyes as heavy footsteps
beat the floor above us. I hear Karen’s cracked voice calling out for the girl.
A gasp fills the room. The child
has found me, and her discovery will be her undoing. She shrieks until her
voice fries in the gloom. More footsteps, the creak of the basement door. And
there’s Karen with a hammer in her hand, that wild look in her eye, her hair
frizzed in all directions like she’s been electrocuted. She looks at me, and
then at the little girl, and then there’s nothing more than whimpering in the
stillness.
Later, as she’s peeling the child’s
skin away from muscle, Karen tells me that was a close one. The child, she woke
up too soon and tried to escape. I want to tell her she’s getting sloppy. I
even manage a gurgling noise from within my gullet. A bubble rises to the
surface of the amniotic stew and pops in fanfare.
She pauses and looks at me,
smiling. Blood stains her teeth.
She tells me I’ll be the child
she’s always wanted, and the rest who’ve been born can rot for all she cares.
I’ll be hers and hers alone.
And that’s where she’s wrong. I
belong to nothing but the Void. And soon, she will belong to me.
~
Three days later. A door slams
upstairs. Footsteps running across the floor. The basement door opens, then
slams shut. Karen descends two steps at a time. She’s bleeding from her
shoulder, the wound tied in a darkened rag, and the precious fluid trickles
down her arm to her fingertips. She’s puddling on the floor.
I can smell her. The blood, the
sweat. The fear. A sweetly ripe smell of life. The seams in my face open to
taste the air on my tongues.
Upstairs, a voice booms from a
megaphone. Come on out, they say. Karen has until the count of five to
surrender or they’re coming in shooting.
Karen kills the light, and it’s
just the two of us in the darkness, but only one can see through the shadows.
She’s crying, chattering to herself about this not being fair, she just wanted
a kid, if only she hadn’t lost her job, if only her husband hadn’t left her, if
only I’d grown faster.
Upstairs, the countdown begins.
Five. Four. Karen sobs and backs herself against the wall.
“Karen,” I croak. The word is
guttural and full of fluid, the sound of air through bubbles of phlegm. “You
may have lost your mind, but I’m going to eat your heart.”
She sucks in her breath, the air
gone from the room in a deep hiss, and she points her weapon in all directions.
She asks who’s there. She’s not afraid to use the gun, she tells me.
I flex new muscles in the arms I’ve
never used and pull myself from the stew of blood and viscera. The bucket tips
over, startling Karen so badly she drops the gun with a yelp.
Upstairs: Three. Two.
Karen seeks the floor for her
weapon, threatening me with empty words. I crawl along the floor toward her.
Upstairs, the front door bursts
inward as men shout out their arrival. The whole house shakes, and Karen
freezes in panic.
My mouth is open. All of them are.
Now Karen is screaming at me, and
this time, my mouths scream back.
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