"Show Me Everything" by AJ Humphreys

Show Me Everything

by AJ Humphreys

How long’s it been since I wriggled my toes? 

That first stretch of a new dawn rattles an accompaniment of creaks and cracks. The neck raps out a unique staccato of crinkling pops.

I move a hand backward, expecting dusty, dirt-laden stone. It’s what I feel beneath these flabby, somehow recalcitrantly ramrod-straight legs. 

Instead, my fingers find something cold. Steel. My palm slips through a tacky film.

Copper. Mmmmmm. I inhale deeply of stale air, and my eyelids snap open. Blissful vitality. Flesh. Reflexes.  

Death’s odor is no stranger upon my wakings, yet to stir within a mausoleum is unfamiliar, even for me. See, Death is my entire purpose for existing. Many desire to curse death. I am its usher. Embracing each arrival with dignified blessings.

My legs flex, and I can finally stand up, sending the metal L skittering across blood and stone into the shadows.

Opposite me, the door is wide open. 

Beyond, the day commences. 

The air is crisp with waves of fog roiling over undulating knolls gone dormant. Gravestones protrude like buoys on the sea, bobbing far into the distance. Betraying the corpse resting beneath each. 

I wipe stubby hands along simple clothing. Once white, now almost entirely sweat stained.

I laugh. It’s cathartic and hysterical. The dingy rag tears along my torso like battered and aged parchment. Its backside is practically purple. The front, a mosaic of viscera across a canvas of sweat. 

No trousers. Only far-worse-than-blood soaked shorts, with an odd slit in the front. 

Should have put it in the back. 

I rend the cotton from my thighs and glare in disgust at the body beneath. No musculature. No length. Short. Pudgy fingers and toes to match. All mottled with strands of coarse black hair.

Let’s change that. 

I pass my hands over the paunchy gut. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight” I count out, tapping along ballooning abdominal muscles that flatten into rugged bricks of brawn. The appendages require an infusion of thick, corded muscle. 

Vertebrae twist and align upright, producing irksome results. At its zenith, the hunched invalid’s height hardly improves. 

Tacky, crimson finger swirls tattoo every taught surface now rid of unsightly hairs and languid heft. Supplanting the frame, a mass of hardened, battle-built musculature.

Far improved.

The morning stroll resumes until I spy a monolithic structure in the distance. 

With a snap, I’m there. 

Script along transparent glass reads, GAITES’ MORTUARY HOME.

Death’s domicile? Perfect.

My reflection greets me in the glass. The body looks as it should. Except the face. 

A hole driven through one temple and explosively out the other offers the only redeeming quality of a man whose mother surely copulated with a rodent. Buck teeth, beady eyes. Pock marks. An egregious rug of upper-lip fur.

My hands mold the features into something familiar. High cheekbones angle into a sharp, diamond cleft-chin. The brows slim, while the lashes thicken. Finally, smooth skin reveals long, tight lips. 

My fingers spin and whirl out thick ringlets of sable hair tinged with brittle grays. The organized chaos offers a facsimile of a bird’s nest. 

I address the rodent eyes last. A finger flicks each feeble orb. They swell like balloons conforming to their new features. Brilliant white irises spiral out, looming in dominion above all.  

Perfection. 

I stroll through the glass, needing just the pressure of my big toe to shatter the pathetic barrier. 

Within the dim hall, erupts a searing strobe of brightness. Unseen warblers wail in the looming shadows.

(Where am I? What IS this place?)

I snicker. 

(Who was that? Someone there?)

I do enjoy the dregs. Always saturated with delicious panic. 

“You’re still in here, are you?”

(Wait. Who said that?)

The panic is like a drug.

(No. Wait… I killed myself…This hell?)

I bark with laughter. 

“Not far off. But your vessel was forfeit. So, I usurped it.”

The passenger laughed. 

They rarely do that.

 “I suppose your spirit was more obstinate than most.”

He laughed again. 

(I feel you. Your maleficence is breathtaking.)

How novel. Souls never linger within broken coils; at most, a fragment or two may wallow before vacating to the void. 

However, I can feel the entire rat-man’s dark, twisted consciousness.

(May I show you something?)

I laugh harder than I have in millennia. “Yes! Yes! Show me! Reveal your  machinations and depravity.”

He’s giddy. We’re resonating. The twisted spiral I supply this world amplifies. An antithesis of that natural rotation which anchors reality. 

(Follow the hall. Left at the cross. Halfway down, double doors to the right.)

I stride deeper into the building. Foreign odors sickeningly clot and conceal the purity of Death’s miasma. 

The passenger shrinks away from my rancor at this unpleasantness. 

That cursed shriek continues unabated. 

“Enough. Spin you wretch.”

My fingers flourish, dextrous as ever, forming the spiral. Index over thumb. Middle digit clasping the index’s center knuckle. The ring finger overlays the middle, and the pinky closes the loop.

Power twists a slew of vines from within the walls. Sparks erupt, then all goes dark. And silent. 

(You will love my work.) The passenger seems happy. 

I don’t care for it. 

Flimsy metal doors swing laughably, revealing something—“GLORIOUS!”

Splayed cadavers line this not insignificant studio of death. Chest cavities pinned open against the floor, organs fastened aside their owners adorn each wall. Men, women, children, faces, appendages, genitals. None were spared the knife. All flayed for display from floor to ceiling. 

Truly magnificent. 

(I thought this was a masterpiece. But I see now…this was a preface to your arrival.)

“Well. If there’s no need to raze your soul, and this vessel is willingly bequeathed, I shall permit your admission to my grand contrivances.”

Images flash through my mind. Atrocities of the past and schemes for the future. Depravity always on the fringes, wailing.

He enjoys it. His madness of exuberant joy is so foreign. But satiating. Worth savoring.  

The doors whip open. “Police! Hands. NOW!”

Fascination has betrayed me. No intruder should ever catch me unawares. 

I turn my neck one-hundred-eighty degrees like an owl, eyes flexing from their sockets to greet the uniformed intruders. 

Fear forces their faces into poor mimicry. 

(Please. Show me everything.)

“Oh, you are a fascinating one.” I say, spiraling my new playthings. The passenger observers with the rapt attention of infancy.