Knitting String
an excerpt

1.

He studied the web of veins and arteries spread below the flesh of the arm, skin gone gray—nearly bluish—cold and dry to the touch. The blood had stilled just two days ago, freezing in its labyrinth and congealing within the chambers of its core.

It made him nervous to stand here, the only heart that still beat within this room, and indeed, it beat in an arrhythmic tone—a bird flapping and pounding its wings against the plate of his sternum. He pressed his hands down flat on either side of the body, forcing himself to keep looking downward, to keep his eyes from closing.

Someone had bothered to do the man (the former man, he corrected himself) the grace of draping a blanket around his waist, thus contaminating the muslin cloth with the corpse of a Jew.

He paused for a brief moment, hesitating—not uncertain, no, but anxious. He knew better, however, than to wait too long and, through over-thinking, lose his nerve. He was glad that the man’s eyelids were closed; he did not know that he could stare into the blank, dead eyes and still go through with what he was about to do.

The lips were parted slightly, caught in the moment of a breath, their last. They were colored about the edges, a creeping lavender juxtaposed with bone-white cheeks. The hair had not yet begun to fall out; it was thick and black, coiled into loose curls that brushed the shoulders. Judging from the features of the face and the slim physique, the man had been young—thirty years old at the very most.

His next inhalation caught in the back of his throat and he had to step back. He could not avoid shutting his eyes now as they seemed to close tight on their own accord. He struggled for a few moments not to vomit. His stomach had been empty for days, but he could feel a fluid rising from his gut, sharp and bitter.

He forced the muscles of his shoulders to relax and took a minute to focus on each and every breath that passed into his lungs. He still did not feel quite prepared, however, when he stepped forward once more.

There was a small knife lying on the table next to the corpse, slender with a silver-plated blade, expensive. The man picked it up and his hands fit around the mahogany handle with striking familiarity, thumb caressing the engravings in the wood in an almost self-soothing manner.

His throat shifted and he swallowed, hard. One more deep breath filled his chest and then his expression cleared, skin smoothing free of tension and its wrinkled brow, eyes fading to a focused concentration.

He pressed the tip of the blade into the flesh at the base of the man’s throat and dragged it upward. No droplets of blood followed in its wake; all humanity had long been sucked from this shell of a man. The knife shuddered slightly as it bumped over the ridge of the chin, carving a deep trench through the lips before splitting and slicing diagonally across the cheek and toward the outside of the right eye. The same cut was performed from the fork on the left, and the man set the knife down for a moment, pressing the back of his wrist to his forehead as though to dab away perspiration, his breaths shallow but measured. Then, lifting the knife once more, he cut away the skin of the cheeks and peeled back the forehead, revealing the meat of the face.

When alive, this flesh would have been crimson, gleaming with blood and pulsing in rhythm. Now it was a faded plum color, the bones more visible through the sheathes of muscle, thin and gray.

The man did not pause even for a second before delving the blade into the each mounded cheek, cutting upward alongside the yellow-pink cartilage of the nose. He peeled these back as well and dropped the squares of flesh on the table next to him almost carelessly before turning back to his work, slicing back each layer of tissue one by one with cool apathy. It seemed only a moment before he had removed all muscle from the facial cavity and piled it in a small hill by the still right hand of the corpse.

With smooth expertise only achieved through extensive practice, he moved on to the crest of the head, cutting back the skin of the brow and letting it fall back in a flap over the dark hair. He set the knife down briefly as he dug all five fingers of his hand into one of the body’s eyes and pulled, yanking the eyeball forward from its socket. There was a cracking sound as it was snapped off the optic nerve, which fell limp within the dark socket. The second eye followed in the same secular manner, rolling off the table when he put it to the side and dropping to the floor. He did not bother to pick it up.

He seemed to grow more anxious now, his movements becoming faster and more intense. He sliced off the muscle on the forehead in a single movement and dropped the knife to the side. His hands shook slightly as he reached over to pick up a metal mallet. He no longer appeared to be breathing. If anything, he more resembled a man half-dead himself, walking a line that passed so close to madness that it could be mistaken for insanity.

For a moment, things were frozen in solid time. And then the hammer dropped.

The skull splintered, the bone splitting under force, sending a cloud of white powder mushrooming into the air. The man coughed once and then leaned in even closer, forgetting the mallet and digging his hands between plates of bone and pulling out each piece of skull with an inhuman determination, leaving shards gouged into the milk-colored meat of the brain.

Impatient now, he reached in through the large hole he had broken in the skull, fingers pressing into the brain, silver matter lodging itself beneath his nails. The organ held tight to the spinal cord, and so the man cut it with the blade of his knife and the soft and wrinkled mass fell heavy into his hands.

He took no moment to pay his respects. With little dignity or reverence, he tore into the brain with his bare hands, ripping the lobes apart, pulling them into sections. As he went, his motions grew desperate, needy. A choking sound escaped his throat and the man pressed his fingers into the flesh, already slightly dried from two days without oxygen.

He was hunched over, his face scare centimeters from the empty skull of the corpse as he grabbed the knife once more and stabbed the brain over and over, destroying it, mutilating it until it was nothing more than a sticky mess of meaty matter speckled and piled on the table, gobs of brain material congealing on his palms.

He slammed his hands down against the wooden table, the force of his movement making it jar and skip slightly to the side. He could feel his stomach boiling and his heart spinning and turning in his throat as a sob worked its way to his mouth and nose and ears, splitting his head into pain as though he had broken his own skull into a thousand pieces….

His knees seemed to give out now and he crumpled to the floor, falling forward, forehead tilting to the ground, the stone tiles cold against his skin. Each tear was acid on his cheeks, burning hot and yet like ice, his pain ripping through each and every artery, vein, and capillary.

“No….”

He took in a breath and it twisted his lungs, wringing them like a pair of wet cloths. His shoulders pressed up toward his ears and he clenched his fingers in his hair, spreading the remnants of brain flesh through the dark locks.

“No—no…. God—please, I beg of you….”

His voice broke and he could no longer form any words, his vocal chords instead stretching into a meaningless cry, one that filled the very corners of the room. It was a scream forced from a throat that was quickly swelling shut, mangled and agonized.

It was the sound of a heart breaking. The sound of too much loss, too much regret, only now spilling forth, finding its release in a cry that soon rose to a painful volume and forming itself into one word—

“Lenore,” he screamed, lips brushing the dirty granite floor, the smell of decay and copper tight in the air, “Lenore—Lenore! LENORE!”

His voice reverberated off the walls and throbbed in his ears, an echo to the strained pounding of his dying heart.