Archive of Our Own

There was something inside of Cheryl, and she needed to get it out. Sometimes, it welled up in her throat like some great reservoir of dark bile, concentrated to a fine, pinprick point, like it might pierce through the front of her trachea. Others, it settled down deep in her ribs, so that when she laid in bed and turned her head into the pillow, she could feel her heart struggling to beat around the intrusion. Too scared to move, of course, for fear that it might break her. It felt, in some way, like a small ball of white lancing pain which moved through her upon its own wont, leaving behind it a lingering path of lightning-bolt excisions within her most intimate flesh. Her boyfriend, Arthur Elias (who demanded he be regarded as Elias), considered himself an expert on these kinds of things.

You see, he was the sort of person who worked with bodies. Dead bodies, that is. A mortician and funeral director. He reeked of what Cheryl could only imagine was embalming fluid or something similarly acrid, whether it was lingering on his jacket by the doorway or wafting off his wrist while he grabbed her hair during sex. During the nights she complained, he fingered her between the ribs and told her, “I’ve seen some crazy things cutting people open. Maybe you have a needle stuck in there, precariously hung over your heart. Or maybe you just think it’s God trying to make a new person from you, but really you just make it up because your brain chemistry is fucked.”

“I’ll have to tell my psychiatrist,” she replied in languid, comfortable agony.

“You better.” He said things like that often. ‘You better’. Better what? Clean up around his nice little Brownstone before he got peeved? Cheryl didn’t put much stock in it, yet found she had no reply for him save for the utterly inflammatory nothings of well and long-quelled fury. So instead, she’d turn away to do the dishes a little too loudly or sling her arm over her eyes and put her back to him in bed, where he’d find himself flush against her anyways. At the end of the day, she didn’t see him so often. She was out during the days, and he was out during the nights, electing for a nocturnal lifestyle, for morticians were an untouchable sort that few cared to know. Her association with him as an untouchable of course meant that there was a certain amount of comfort granted to her, like neglecting work from the little allowance she got out of his paychecks – which were hefty, considering his persuasion of work.

So, she kept herself busy with watching the world when she wasn’t curling around the constant sliver of discomfort in her ribcage. She kept a journal with her, and in it she scribbled down the little lives she saw passing to and fro throughout her days, adding a little gravity or weight to the importance of their lives. She illustrated how she thought they were beautiful, or perhaps the dark secrets they might carry tucked away into their breast, because everyone had a little weight they were carrying. Baggage was the wrong word for it. These were shards of guilt jam-packed into tight little jars, which they screwed closed with all their strength to put on a high shelf somewhere in their heart, where hopefully it would collect dust and they’d simply adjust to the sensation of it. Jenny at the coffee shop, for example, is cheating on her boyfriend; so there might be a fist-sized lump somewhere in her heart that she’s simply learned to live with, like a benign tumor. That tumor, of course, is nurtured by the fact that he regularly stands her up for dates. Cheryl had watched her bicker on the phone far more than she’d ever seen her smile. For Jenny, Cheryl wrote a fun little murder; the kind she’d be able to get away with. A fantastical idea of strangulation by piano wire. This and more she imagined, although she blamed her usually grim results on Elias, who often liked to talk about his forensic suppositions of the corpses he wheeled in and out of the mortuary.

A mortuary which he sometimes called upon her to watch during the nights, when some other emergency with his business associates drew him away. She didn’t mind, of course, except for the first time when he had left a corpse on the table, and she’d screamed at the top of her lungs upon wandering into the back. Now, she was somewhat used to it, although it still gave her a start, whenever he didn’t happen to warn her.

Like tonight. Elias gave her a key to the place long ago, and tonight – Thursday, 12:46 AM, by the clock on the wall – he had indeed left out a body on the table after running out on some emergency errand. He was missing fluids or equipment, which she didn’t quite understand the specifics of and had never really bothered to. She stared at it, or him, and slipped her bag off her shoulder. Everything about the corpse was alternately sunken or swollen, all discolored and decidedly alien-looking, shriveled, and tight around the bones. And naked. But she wasn’t so morbidly curious as to glare at his groin for any longer than she had to besides to make a perfunctory note not to look there again. The slight alarm, though, felt like it sliced open some deep tissue in her chest. The ache was back. She rounded about his desk, took a seat, and wondered about her precise entertainment for the night. She could scroll. She could endlessly scroll. With the freedom to put her sneakers up on the desktop and— Mouse jostled; the computer monitor flickered on. Not yet logged out.

The invasion of his desk proved to be an enticing opportunity. She’d never quite done it before, just sat around on her phone until he eventually came back to finish up the night’s work. So… Why shouldn’t she snoop around? Clicking around on the desktop, she found the most recent cases delivered to him. Tonight, specifically, it seemed. Most recent was the man on the table, a John Doe; found dead to the elements in a small tent underneath a highway ramp. Except, of course, for Elias’s findings that he was shot. Twice in the back and one in the side. She frowned, rubbernecking to see, and indeed, there was a little hole in his left side which she hadn’t seen coming in. Shuddering at the idea of a cold, cruel demise, alone and probably unawares, she minimized the window and tried to put it out of mind with the next file.

Adam Reynolds. White male. Thirty-eight. Time of death estimated to be 3:45 PM, same day, November 12th, 2023. Manner of death: unknown. Cause of death: Strangulation by wire. Received by County Sheriff’s department for storage until transport—
Strangulation by wire?

Cold welled up in her, icy fingers groping up her breastbone and pressing between her ribs, a chill palm sliding up the nape of her neck to tickle her scalp. Something and nothing at all passing through her, bitter wind in the night. It was that morbid curiosity, wasn’t it? Like a font within her, driving her to go and see the end of an unfortunate story. So, she leaned forward, checked the locker number – 8 – and stood, stopping only to give the place a cursory review. On her immediate left, past the desk, was the storage closets, restroom, and the lobby; to her right, twin glass doors that opened out into the small yard beyond, pitch black in the night, now, even with the curtains drawn. Across the room, the fridge, where the corpses were kept ‘on ice’, as Elias liked to say.

And, of course, between it all, John Doe laid out on the slab, looking and smelling especially unpleasant. Maybe a trip into the fridge would be a good thing, after all. Especially as thoughts crept up into her mind, percolating from some ephemeral and far-off place. Brief, unbidden, she was in bed again, alone, after Elias had struck her first the first time. Her fingers had been splayed over her swelling lip, and she supposed that’s what the froggish mouth of John Doe reminded her of, yet she recalled no warmth at all when Elias leaned into bed behind her. He had been cold, reeking of cigarettes – which she soon picked up anyways – and had said, “I’m sorry, baby. I get mean when I’m nervous. Like a bad dog.”

And all she had really been able to muster up was, “I know.” And they had left it at that.

The cold air of the fridge stung Cheryl’s skin, even through her jacket, in a horrid sort of way that easily turned into comfort. Prickling her attention back to her surrounds rather than the confines of memory. It made her fingers numb, slow, unfeeling as she prodded about the handle of locker 8 and pulled it out.

A corpse. A shroud drawn over it. ‘Adam Reynolds’, read the tag on the toe. Here was her man. All laid out. She just had to… Draw the cloth back. Reveal him. Yet, she found she couldn’t quite reach over. Couldn’t quite commit the deed. Did this count as violating the dead? And the lights in here! Stark, sterilizing white, as if the buzz of them alone could eventually clean her off the very tiles should she stand in one place too long. Removed, entirely, from the material realm of the rest of the mortuary. Someway, somehow, this was all separate. A little sliver of cold amidst a body much larger than herself. To step into this place was to be forgotten. Only the dead walked here.

What a strange sense of urgency, when it felt as if something had just tried to escape her, some wriggling in her intestines, solid and prehensile. Electric, a jolt zipped up her neck, and all her limbs went abuzz, and that pain in her chest rolled over and made itself comfortable upon the crook of a rib, just as if it were a cradle. A gasp escaped her, and she found herself yearning for warmth, enough so that she could simply forego all the melancholy and yank back the shroud to reveal—

A man. Not Jenny’s boyfriend. The way his throat had been torn up made her skin crawl, the room abruptly turning over on its side. Cold, gray, lifeless; pulled up as if the binding threads had been torn, curling into itself. Like boiled bacon. Do you know what boiled bacon looks like?

Cheryl fought the urge to throw up, gingerly placing the shroud back in its proper place just as the corpse shook.

Shook with a crash. Shook with a flicker; was that the light, or was it just Cheryl’s imagination? She held very, very still for a moment, trying to pace herself, run it back through her memory. Maybe, in the next room, something had only fallen. One of the paintings on the wall, or Elias’s certification, or maybe even something from his desk. Yet, creeping forth in her mind’s eye, prowling through the backdoor, all the glass shattered, was a shadow of a man. She would step through the threshold, and he would be taller than her, broader than her, the details of his face obscured by her mind rejecting the very fabric of him. Fear did that to you; it erased what should be nakedly apparent in front of your very own eyes. It made murky the starkest of pains and most precise details, only to come back in blaring, vivid detail when you least expected it, lying peacefully in bed. Stalked once more by old pursuers. In the next room was death, and all his lethal instruments. When she moved, it was in jitter-step, uneven and trembling, two sides of herself fighting back against each other. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Gingerly, her fingers found themselves around the cool handle of the door, where she lingered for some time in rigid, miserable anticipation. She turned it, slow, listened to the oily click of the latch retracting, and took a deep breath. Reynolds, and his ruined throat, were left out underneath the uncompromising lights.

In the work room, the door was completely fine. There was no glass on the table, and cold wind wasn’t whipping in like a maelstrom. Frozen in a moment of cold refrain, she stood half-within the threshold, scanning the walls, the door, checking to see if the curtains had been disturbed, looking for what had fallen. Not a thing.

Out of the corner of her eye, a shift. So incremental, like ink stirring within itself, somewhere near the backdoor. She stared through the glass, until her eyes grew dry and sore, until she had to blink. Nothing. But she swore, she swore, there was something in the dark. Just behind the door.
vA shape in the glass. Staring back at her. Little black orbs reflecting the slightest sliver of light, following her as she stepped fully into the room. A stark painting, ever watching, no matter where one stood in a room.
The shadows seemed to pull closer, the lights seemed to grow dim, and for a moment she thought the blood was simply rushing to her head at the sight of this terrible shape. But no, they were lingering, lurching, drawing near. Like little fingers reaching out to brush through the loose tresses of her hair. Vigilant, she stared through the glass, skirting the far side of the room, past John Doe – who she insensibly feared would reach out to grasp him – to flit behind the desk. She bent low, gingerly opening the drawer as silent as she could, shuffling through his belongings. A knife, or hammer, or anything that she could use should the shape make itself overly comfortable. Should this sensation, this wriggling feeling in her chest, prove to be ill-fated. Nothing. Nothing at all. The next drawer, and—

The smell of Elias’s cologne wafting up from his belongings had her nosing into his sweater the first time they had met. The first time he had crowded her up into the dark stoop of his Brownstone and masticated her with his teeth. When she had found that ‘no’ was such a slippery word. It had come out of her like a soft ‘hhhh, hhhh’, ineffectual to his carnal discovery of her. This was the only time she had ever smelled that cologne on him. In her hands, now, it was still dewy at the nozzle, recently used. Why? Why would it be? A leap of the imagination, and two shadows mingled in the doorway, his familiar silhouette and something alien altogether. She scrubbed the image from her mind, putting it back where it came from, straightening up and knuckling her eyes. Somewhere, almost distant but not quite, was a rattle, like the air-con complaining or… No.

It was a growl. Emanating lowly from the doors, the panes of glass gently vibrating in their slows, and when Cheryl looked that way, she saw spittle dripping against the glass. Even from here – safe, right? – she saw her head in a maw rowed with yellowed teeth, flecked with filth, saw it bearing down on her. There lurked a beast, so black she could only see its fangs.

For a solitary moment, her vision swam darkly. Her heart had stopped, stilled in her chest as the loose shard within her scraped past it, and she felt glass coming up her throat with each breath. Cutting, cutting, and she had to catch herself, blindly, on the desk, legs threatening to give out from underneath her. She clutched at her chest, her gaze rolling away from that thing behind the class and toward John Doe. The table of surgical equipment beside him.

Unsteady, bracing herself on the edge of the desk, she went around to the embalming table – her heart hadn’t stopped, it was racing, and she was breathless, and the pain was fantastic and bright and prismatic. All the while, the shadows clutched at her, laughing at her lament. Terrible and mocking. She lunged for the equipment, took up the scalpel, wedging the plastic safety off the plate with trembling hands. The beast all but a few feet away from her, now.

There, glimmering faintly in the dark, two blue eyes stared up at her. John Doe’s. His head had lolled to the said and Elias had left his eyes open. Except, he said, “That won’t work.”

Cheryl shrieked so hard that stars danced behind her eyes, her head going utterly numb. She might have fainted were it not for the hot wire running up through her breastbone.

His lips barely moved, and now all seemed quiet. She was certain, then, that she’d made it up. She was certain, just then, that this was only a nightmare.

“It’s not of this world. I’ve seen it before, I know. You can ask its name. If you want. Can find out what it is. But the knife just won’t work,” he droned, voice muffled yet distinct at the same time.

For her part, Cheryl could not mutter a response. How could she? How could she talk to poor John Doe? She wanted to tell him that she was sorry that he had been shot, because it seemed like the common, decent thing to do. But it wouldn’t matter. There was life in his eyes, but it was discompassionate, uncaring, and it was… The same kind of exhaustion she saw in the mirror every morning. Finally, finally, she managed to whisper, “What’s happening?” Her voice betrayed her, trembling, yet recognition flickered in John Doe’s eyes.

“Something terrible. Something unfair. I’ve… seen it. Seen it walking in the dark. Following people. And then they don’t come back. And I’ve seen you before,” rattled John Doe. “I’ve seen you, and I saw it following you. And I should have warned you! I’m so sorry. It looked at me. It bit me, without ever… I can’t explain it. But I’m here with you now. I can feel it, that pain in your chest…”
Cheryl was weeping now. “I don’t understand. I don’t—” But she shut her eyes, hard, until dark shapes whorled behind them. Over her shoulder, she could feel it growing, breathing, keeping pace just outside the door. Steeling herself, she clutched the scalpel in a white-knuckle grip, turned toward it, and squeaked out, “What—?”
vTwo voices uttered, emanating from the black, overlapping, one Elias’s, one abysmal: “I am the Barghest, the Skriker in the night. I am what you see before death. I am the needling in your chest. The infertile drippings of your navel. The dog which digs up your grave. Here I will gnaw on your womb. Here I will devour. I will pace the door, and night will reign eternal, until you undo the latch. Until you love me. Until you let me love you. I am the Barghest, the Skriker in the night, the seed of your wounds.”

Very briefly, Cheryl thought about turning the scalpel toward herself, but realized that… No. No, it would not get very much done, would it? So, rather than pay it the dignity of an answer, she turned instead to John Doe, and his kind, tired, yellowed eyes, full of blood, and asked, “Now?”

“Now,” he croaked, his words curdling in his throat, “I think you won’t like what I have to say. But I can feel it! It hurts. It’s blindingly painful. Like god threw lightning down at you. I don’t know why. I should be dead, shouldn’t I?”

She nodded dumbly, watching his eyes sluggishly blink. A strange look of acceptance. “You were shot. I think.”

“I saw it. And I died. And now you’ve seen it, so I think…” He rattled, then, and deflated. Very still, for a moment, where all Cheryl could do was hold her breath until he gulped for air once more. “It’s hungry. It wants what’s in you. That… Suffering. It wants your suffering.”

“My suffering?”
His bloody eyes rolled in their sockets, fixing on the scalpel. Then, back to her. Nothing to say.

So, she would have to after all. “But I can’t—”

“It’s your last chance, I think. Don’t go out like I did. You’ll have to…” John Doe looked exceptionally saddened, now. Like when a father must tell their child the dog’s been put to sleep. “You’ll have to cut it out. Take it out of yourself. God, I can feel it. How do you live with it? Mine was a soft ache. All over. And I thought I was just sore from sleeping on the ground…”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to! I didn’t ask for this. You can’t make me.” And did she really mean him? Did she?

“I don’t think anyone has ever asked for anything to happen to them. The world isn’t fair like that, miss. But I think if you just… Believe in yourself. I don’t know. You seem strong. A good soul. I think you can do it, and I think you can survive. Just don’t go outside. And don’t let the night go on forever.” He shut his eyes. Sighed. “I want to rest too. And don’t you? We’re both tired, I think. I’m dead, but you don’t have to be. And I won’t be able to rest easy, I think, if you die here tonight. I should have told you; I should have told you…”

She could feel it. She could feel it so intimately, sitting right next to her heart, threatening to pop it. And by the way John Doe’s chest shook when he drew his moribund breath, she could tell he felt it too.

“Where… Where?” she asked, pitifully, each word another swallowed needle.

“The bathroom might work.”

There was something inside of Cheryl, and she needed to get it out. Sometimes, it welled up in her throat like a great reservoir of black bile, concentrated to a fine, pinprick point, like it might pierce through the front of her trachea. Others, it settled down deep in her ribs, so that when she laid in bed and turned her head into the pillow, she could feel her heart struggling to beat around the intrusion. Too scared to move, of course, for fear that it might break her. Faced with the task of excising it, she found herself a mess. The woman in the mirror was a ghost of herself, sweat-slick, with dark rings around her eyes and lips bloodied with worry. Her hands would not stop shaking, and every time she looked at the coy glint of the scalpel, she felt as if the very film over her brain quivered. The bathroom of the mortuary was small and cramped, six by six enclosed, and the door behind her, now, was but a mass of flesh, sealing her inside. She had tried to run the tap, but it ran black and deep and would not drain, and when she peered into its depths, she felt she might fall into it. And never stop falling.

So, she turned the scalpel in on herself. She made an incision just under her sternum and swept left, along the crescent of her rib, until the blade caught on the hard-soft cartilage which held the small ones together. It burned, searing, like letting fire into herself; but it was nearly naught in comparison to what lay deeper. So, she went again, pressing her fingers into the cut, probing further and further. Sinew snapped and tore. Her legs wobbled and went stiff, and she knew that if she budged an inch, she would no longer be able to stand. Her fingers lost near all their articulation, and soon it was just the gentle swing of her arms to guide the scalpel, as if she were working a scythe against wheat.

A long time ago, she had stopped breathing. She wasn’t sure if it was here in the bathroom, or with Elias on the stoop, or maybe even before he ruined her. But there was a certain sense of peace, now, as she grew closer to the object of her suffering. That ball of white-hot fire, lingering in her chest, burning into the forefront of her mind. She was resolved. She was resplendent. She reached within herself and closed her fingers around it and drew forth what felt to be a perfectly smooth, round ball from her body, no wider than half an inch. She ran it under the blackened water, then held it to the flickering light. There was no longer anyone in the mirror. Cheryl was gone. She had never trusted mirrors anyways, always suspicious that there was a whole other world on the other side. A different person staring back at her, that one day might reach through to replace her.

Instead, she found her reflection in a pearl. A little black pearl. And she peered into it; she peered into it so very closely for her answer, as if she might glean her salvation in its eerie pearlescence.

And out of the corner of her eye she saw—
vNothing.

No black dog chased her through the night. She fell unconscious in the bathroom, having at least slid herself down the wall, where she was found by Elias, and later, paramedics. When she awoke later, in a hospital bed, she was startled to find that she was alive.

They told Cheryl that she had nearly cut into her own heart. Lucky, she missed the artery. Once she was medically cleared, there was a stint at an in-patient facility – involuntary – and after twelve days of peace, they discharged her. She did not go back to Elias, nor did she collect any of her things from him.

Everything was left. Cheryl. The Barghest. John Doe. Her belongings.

She asked after the pearl, at the very least; no one had it, or had even seen it. She suspected its loss was for the better.

Nothing much changed at all, really.

It was all…

Just…

Simple.

During the night, she went for walks. They were nice, and the air was crisp in her lungs, every breath new and fresh and enriching. But, when she heard the gentle scraping of nails across the street or dirt behind her, she stopped and listened. Intent. Something dripped, dripped, dripped. And she turned. Always alone, each and every time, and with a curious little purse of her mouth, she kept on walking. Undisturbed. At ease. With only herself.

In absentia, ex valtiel.