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  When it was over, Daphne rolled on her side, with her back to Haden, and started to weep. The bridge of flesh that connected them was flexible enough to allow a modicum of free movement.

  “Are we sure this is what we want?”

  Haden pressed his body against her back, clutching her stomach from behind.

  “It’s what we need. We’re not happy. Haven’t been for a while.”

  “I hate this.”

  “Here,” Haden said, offering his hand. “Let’s wash the day off.”

  They edged to the side of the bed, sat there for a moment. Daphne wiped away the tears that traced runnels of mascara down her cheeks before standing up.

  Inside the bathroom, the septic smell was almost overpowering.

  “I think it’s coming from under the sink,” Haden said. He bent down, feeling a tug as Daphne refused to follow, pulled her down by the arm, and swung the cabinet doors open. The stench nearly knocked them over.

  Squatting under the rusted belly of the sink was an animal with oily black skin. It looked like road kill with the shape of a bullfrog, which tapered whitely into something resembling a larva. The face that grinned up at Daphne and Haden was filled with teeth like heroin needles bent out of shape.

  “What the fuck is that?” Haden said.

  “The catalyst.”

  “What?” Haden burst out. “Did the Curator say something else to you?”

  The animal made a noise halfway between a squeak and a croak and vomited a stream of yellow bile on the couple. As soon as it touched their skin it started to hiss and bubble.

  Haden shrieked, clawed at the bile sizzling beside his left eye. Daphne made a low keening sound and wiped away the clumps on her breasts and throat. The force of their struggles sent the couple sprawling to the floor.

  The animal retched, ejecting another surge of vomit, splashing the place where their bodies connected.

  This was it. The separation had begun.

  “Oh fuck, what do we do?” Daphne said. The words came out in a single, panting breath.

  “Let it burn through.”

  The pain was excruciating. The slightest draft felt like a whip against the corroding flesh. The acid bore through muscle and vein, reddening the yellow froth around the wound. It trickled sluggishly and dripped on the floor with a faint plopping hiss.

  The acid had melted through half the bridge of flesh, when it reached the hook joining Haden to Daphne. As soon as the first drop touched the hook, something woke up inside Haden, and his body went into revolt.

  He screamed as a second hook burst through his shoulder and lunged at Daphne on a feeler of tendinous flesh.

  She jerked away. The hook carved a deep gash along the ridge of her clavicle, retreated, and lunged again.

  Haden grasped it in mid lash, started to pull. He could feel it tugging uncomfortably in his chest. Then there was a pop, followed by a gush of blood and lymph. The tendon came sliding out like a dead snake. Haden whipped it across the room.

  The hook imbedded in Daphne’s hip started to wriggle as the acid ate it away, sending a wisp of smoke into the air.

  A third hook burst out of Haden’s thigh, leaving a wide gash. He saw the fourth slither under the skin of his abdomen before it shot out in a vivid spray of blood. The hook wriggled free, spraying the floor and walls with red, and attacked Daphne. It raked her pubis, opening a gushing slit all the way up to her navel before penetrating the skin.

  Haden went to pull it out of her, and then remembered the box cutter.

  “Quick, this way!” he screamed, as the hook from his thigh lunged at Daphne, struggling for purchase.

  Together they crawled naked across the floor, clawing their way into the main area. Once they reached the altar, the hook from Haden’s thigh pierced the fatty tissue under Daphne’s ass. She yelped in pain.

  Covered in blood, looking like an overgrown miscarriage, Haden reached up and snatched the box cutter off the altar. He extended the blade and started cutting the tentacles.

  When he was finished he moved to the leftover flesh connecting his body to Daphne’s.

  “No!” she screamed, but he ignored her and started cutting anyway.

  Daphne bit her lip against the pain. Tears poured down her face. Without even knowing it, she grasped Haden’s free hand and squeezed until the skin went white. With a final back and forth sawing motion, they came apart.

  Haden moaned loudly and let his upper body slump to the floor. He started to cry, loud choking sobs that threatened to rip his lungs and larynx.

  Daphne lay shivering on her back. Her body conveyed a network of tiny red rivers. She had never felt so cold, or so alone.

  Slowly, her hand slid out of his.

  #

  The Curator entered his private museum, a vast chamber piled high with the artifacts of a million broken relationships. Peering through the eyeholes of his mask, breathing harshly, he moved toward the recent additions to his collection. Among them were two stuffed bears, one male, and the other female. He arranged them in a lewd position and started to masturbate. As he stroked himself, he remembered Haden and Daphne. How young they were. How desperate to be apart.

  As he came, spraying the bears with his semen, he reflected how for Haden and Daphne, the scars of that evening in the motel would never heal. The place was redolent with loss, sadness, and pain.

  The Curator couldn’t imagine a better place if he tried.

  Walter’s Last Canvas

  Paul Shrimpton

  Walter Heimbach sat alone in his decidedly cramped flat.

  A single, bare light bulb illuminated him overhead as he delicately added another brush stroke to the large canvas stretched out before him.

  Walter was old, his face etched with a lifetime of wonders and woes. His skin was dry as parchment, marred by a prominent map of creases, laughter lines and crow’s feet.

  The lines ran deep. His humble surroundings told the most part of his story. He was a man with meagre belongings. Wealth had been elusive for Walter. He had always had enough to scrape by but never enough to be comfortable. A tatty, brown leather suitcase sat collecting dust on top of a scratched and bashed wardrobe. A small portable TV set nestled amongst an impressive array of tablets and medicine bottles on the bedside table. The picture rolled and flickered as canned laughter filtered out of it's tinny speakers. Dirty, thin sheets with frayed ends, haphazardly made up the single bed. No pictures of sentiment adorned the walls. His family had left the mortal world many years since. Walter led a solitary life.

  No wife. No children.

  A long time ago, he had a sister. But she had gone decidedly insane towards the end of her equally uneventful life. She'd been dead for ten years now. Discovered on the sofa in her front room. Hands still clutched at her throat as she choked to death before her favourite soap opera on the telly. She had succumbed to a stubborn boiled sweet lodged in her throat. Countless cats kept her corpse company for nearly a fortnight before she was found. Or what was left of her. She had been taking in feline strays for most of her adult life. And by the time of her accordingly sublime death, had an impressively sized pack of the creatures. The smell of cat shit was an overpowering and persistent odour pervading the entire house. Repulsing visitors by the time they reached the doorstep.

  Few had stepped into her squalor prior her death.

  The cats had resisted gnawing on their owner for five days before, half starved, they began devouring the body. Walter was duly informed of her passing.

  Contact between the pair hadn't exactly been consistent over the years. The siblings had walked polar opposite paths in life. Hers one of staid, simplicity and routine whilst his was one of chaos and anarchy. Walter's many misadventures, owing largely to a heavy intake of drugs and alcohol, had led to a breakdown of his relationship to both mother and father. He'd been struck off the will and all communication severed due to one final, fateful, straw during the festive season of nineteen sixty five. A heavily intoxicated Walte
r announcing that he was choosing to relieve himself at the dinner table. His reaction to a less than positive debate, instigated by his sister, regarding his questionable lifestyle.

  Not by accident, a lot of the steaming, dark yellow piss went over his sister. Hysterics ensued and the first and last time his father had hit Walter soon followed. He had been smacked as a child, like most children of the era, but his Father's fist connecting with Walter's adolescent nose and the spectacularly bloody aftermath drew a line between the pair that would never again be crossed.

  Walter's subsequent Christmases were generally a cocktail of misguided anger, lonely self pity and loathing. All washed down of course with a bottle of whatever was strong and cheap at the time.

  Walter had multiple excuses for his actions and downward spiral in life.

  He was an artist. Artists were predominantly by nature unreasonable, provocative and unconventional. And, generally by definition, utter piss heads. The public actions of an imbued artist all but forgivable when fuelling a private creation of potentially groundbreaking historical merit and beauty.

  Walter hadn't failed to see the irony in the outcome of his parents decision to bequeath their earthly possessions to his sister. He wasn't in the least surprised.

  She would mature equally bereft of children and, quite soon after their parents passing, become notoriously known as the cat lady of Islington. The family home was ultimately inherited by the very pack of near feral cats that had consumed the softer, fleshier parts of their deceased benefactor. The added kick in the balls was that she drew more fame in her passing than Walter had collectively through his years as a struggling artist.

  Walter snorted bitterly to himself, reeling in his wandering mind and turning it back to the painting. The masterpiece. He dipped the fine brush into the coloured mess on the palette gripped in his free hand. Round and thin rimmed spectacles perched too far down the length of his nose. Walter squinted into them as he applied another minuscule detail to his portrait. Glancing to the right of the canvas, intensely studying the reflection in the tall mirror. The self-portrait, whilst a work of genuine talent with pinpoint attention to detail, had a strangely unsettling quality. An underlying red hue gave the image a hellish tone. But, Walter surmised, this was an unavoidable part and parcel by-product of its creation and intention. The blank canvas, once mounted to it's sturdy wooden frame, had been graced with a generous coat of blood.

  Walter's blood.

  The reasoning, an alchemical process, had been outlaid in a rare book of 'Alchemy and Witchcraft' known simply as 'Diabolist', that had somehow entered Walter's possession.

  He discovered it rather clumsily during a drunken frenzy, the result of throwing an empty litre bottle of cheap vodka at the wall of his very bedsit. The glass bottle didn't break but merely punched a hole through the thin plaster. The neck protruding horizontally out of it's new, snug hole in the wall. Walter had stared at it. Then shouted at it. Then finally ripped it free and successfully smashed it against the interior brickwork of the more effective, opposing, outer wall. But then, even in his heavily intoxicated and agitated state, he noticed the smell. Seeping into the room, filling it with it's cloying, repugnant odour. Walter had thrown up. Violently retching and heaving till his chest burned and his gut throbbed. Initially Walter had assumed its origin could only be the stinking flesh of a decomposing animal. Entombed between the plaster boards. A bird. Or, from a more considered observation of his surroundings, a dead rat. Walter, to his dismay, found the stench to have fantastically sobering properties, and set about the undesirable task of sticking his hand into the dark hole and searching for the damned putrescent thing. And find something he did. Walter had to break more of the plaster away to sufficiently extract the source of the stench in all its glory. His fingers brushed a soft outer skin. Hopeful fantasies of discovering hidden treasure, a trinket box perhaps, were quelled upon it's exhuming. Walter thought it was leather that the old tome was wrapped in. Until he saw the eyelid. And what looked like a lip. Stretched out of shape and bordered by an extensive array of finger prints. On the back of the book two ears provided fasteners for the human skin covering. Dried and treated the way you would another piece of quality hide.

  Walter threw the macabre wrapper in the bin without hesitation. It was the book that he would keep.

  Walter had heard tales of the maddened scrawls of Benvenuto Cellini. Revered Italian medieval sculptor who, after a chance encounter with a necromancer, developed a short lived interest in the black arts. The culmination of Cellini's passing passion being a scant publication of the slim 'how to' encyclopaedia of practiced and theoretical dabbling in the black arts. Near legendary in it's scarcity, owing to the book being blasted by the church as satanic and a witch hunt for copies of the book that resulted in some nice bonfires. The only presently existing 'known' copy reputedly residing in some secret location at the behest of the Vatican.

  And now Walter had a copy too.

  After a time consuming period of translation (he had no prior schooling of what he established to be Latin), Walter was already plotting how best to put the near mythical 'reference piece' to good use. He could make a few quid selling it on to an antiquarian dealer. Maybe more if put to auction. But the more he translated and understood, the more his curiosity transcended obsession. What if this spell book worked? This was after all the holy grail of incantations and invocations.

  Having completed the prerequisites as laid out in 'Diabolist' (These consisted of utterances aloud in a language Walter couldn't pinpoint. Hoping he had pronounced the strange words correctly by mouthing aloud phonetically). Walter had then set about his masterpiece. The theory presented in the mythical tome was that upon completion of all the relevant instructions, the creator of the likeness could attain that image, that face, that physique eternally. Walter could have chosen an entirely new face and character. But fearing that would prove too weird had decided to use his own, familiar face. Not possessing any pictures of himself as a youth, Walter had opted to work from his reflection and from distant memory to paint himself as a strong, handsome twenty something. This, for Walter, proved harder than it sounded and he toiled laboriously for a good few months on the rendering. Walter set down his brush and admired his work.

  Meticulous to the finest detail, Walter had just about completed what was clearly his finest work.

  He lit a cigarette and let his eyes drift away from the painting. The women. That was at the forefront of his mind. He was once a lady killer, but unfortunately, age hadn't been kind to him.

  He hadn't mustered an erection for at least a year now. This was the final insult to his deteriorating body and soul. There was nobody left but Marjorie. She was his home help/cleaner and current object of desire. Dowdy, heavily set and fifty. Something he wouldn't have looked twice at not too many moons ago and she presently proved to be proof in the pudding that he had indeed lost his knack. His advances were knocked back without the batting of an eyelash. Walter, a stubborn bastard, was persistent though. Maybe, when it was over, he would fuck her first, he thought. A broad, wry grin revealed the black voids of missing teeth, framed by his few remaining discoloured ones as he fantasised, picturing himself thrusting her to a noisy climax. Her skirt hitched over ripped brown nylons, robust body roughly bent double over his table as he pounded away. His grin receded as the comical image of his own bony arse and frail, liver spotted body seeped into the fantasy.

  Walter stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing pub ashtray, a handy memento stolen the last time he could afford to drink out. He coughed, a dry rattling cough that sounded potentially terminal. A glob of brown jelly coated the inside of his mouth and he toyed it's elastic texture with his tongue for a while before fumbling for something in his trouser pocket. Walter spat the offending mucus into a stained and rigid handkerchief before stuffing the filthy scrap of fabric back in his pocket for further use.

  Rubbing his hands together, Walter narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips.


  It was, after all, time for the final act in the ceremony.

  A drastic action from Walter was required for the completion of the spell. Or should it be pact? An offering to be made to an omnipotent being of indescribable power. And to Walter's knowledge, this 'being' was of previously unknown title without the vaguest of origin. The final binding element was, predictably enough, the ultimate sacrifice. Walter didn't feel comfortable with the idea of suicide, but, if his booze ravaged mind believed in the powers held within the page of 'Diabolist' then why should he care about giving up his physical body to be reborn. A fresh start in new flesh. Walter didn't give two shits about his present, depressing state of affairs. He was passed caring years ago. Still, the unknown was a scary place to Walter. Poets had romanticised death as the greatest journey one could take. But Walter didn't want a one way fare.

  What if he didn't come back?

  As much as he despised everything he had become, Walter didn't want to forget what he could have been. Should have been. Heavy was such, the burden of his bitter disappointment of still having everything to prove in his mess of a so called life.

  It was unquestionably a gamble.

  And ultimately, when all was considered, even with so little to lose, Walter was scared.

  So very, very scared.

  Walter looked up at the beam running through the middle of the room, a half foot clear of the slanted ceiling. A solid piece of timber that looked four times Walter's age and sturdy enough to support a dozen of his diminished size and frame. A thin, vertical, rope sized furrow in the wood suggested the possibility it already had. Walter took the painting carefully down from it's easel and lay it face up on the carpet before him.

  Walter removed the precariously placed spectacles from the tip of his nose and placed them on his bedside table.

  What the fuck was he doing? Walter shook his head and screwed his eyes tightly shut. His fist clenching into a bony, mottled ball, beating his hip softly.