Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Blind in the House of the Headsman

Mehitobel Wilson

“Blind in the House of the Headsman” first appeared in Brainbox 2: Son of Brainbox, edited by Steve Eller, 2001.

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Mehitobel Wilson has been publishing horror fiction since 1998. She is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and many of her stories have been granted Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. Recent stories appear in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Sins of the Sirens, Damned: An Anthology of the Lost, and Dead But Dreaming: New Excursions in the Lovecraftian Universe, and selected stories have been collected in Dangerous Red. If you can’t pronounce her name, call her “Bel.”

May was inside the wall, and her eyes were open. Better on her back than on her knees; the shards of paneling would cut her throat, and her bruised knees couldn’t take her own weight anymore, much less his.

Maybe, baby, Maybe, she heard, his name for her.

Maybe, baby. She blinked and stared at the clean studs, still fragrant, packed with nubby gray insulation that puffed lint into her eyes with each Maybe thrust. The back of the paneling was satiny and printed with blue letters, the closest ones clear, the rest shadowed. The few she could read ran through her head, AST, and she tongued her palate, chanting the letters silently.

Maybe. Maybe he had punched through her face instead, and her brain’s best guess at peace was this space inside the wall. Maybe she was vibrating on the verge of death, the stabbing at her nape the last sparks of her spinal conduit. When death came, she would no longer remember him looming redfaced over her as she crabbed back onto the pillows, pressing her head against the wall, pulling his fist back and slamming it beside her face, catching one of her curls and tearing it from her skull as he punched through the paneling. Maybe, baby, maybe he hadn’t gnawed her jawbone, steered her bloodied skull into the hole with a sustained bruise of a kiss, bitten her trachea and pressed her chin back with his hardboned face, shoved her head through, let the hole’s edges score her forehead, her neck.

Maybe, baby, gusted the breath that powered his bloodstreaked cock, and she knew she was only in the wall.

May felt the cool glass of his ashtray settle on her sternum and knew this would take a long time. Her headless body lay before him. He would smoke an extra few cigarettes, she knew, and savor this. Her body was outside the wall. It was his.

AST AST AST ticked against the backs of her teeth, matching the rhythm. She felt the soft and dusty press, withdraw, press of insulation on her crown.

Her head was her own.

He owned the rest. In surgery, a wall of blue fabric had blocked her view of her own opened flesh. Sacs of saline were tucked beneath her pectoral muscles. He had used her vagina so thoroughly that it was as stretched as that of a mother thrice over. Dildos, fists, implements inspired by those he’d seen used in black-market Japanese films. He paid for her cunt to be tightened. Skin cultured in sheets from the cells of discarded foreskins, skin meant to reconstruct the features of burn victims, was trimmed into a new hymen and sewn to bridge her bruised soft walls. Nipped and tucked to be ripped and fucked. Again. All that lay on the far side of the sheet, and May, conscious, examined the warp and weft of the fabric, memorized the blue, called it cornflower, and felt none of the things they were doing to his body.

Two years later, he had undone all the work he’d bought between her legs, and had cultivated new tastes. Soon she would be on the table again, the saline sacs would be dragged from the muscles that had scarred around them, the natural tissue of her breasts would be scooped free and dropped into a Biohazard vat, and crescents of skin would be cut away, leaving her with the flat and aching chest of an adolescent. He’d tighten her again, of course, and he’d pay for electrolysis, leaving her mons bald as a child’s.

For now, nothing beyond the wood was hers. May read the cornflower letters branded on the pressboard. She didn’t feel it when he pulled his cock from her, didn’t hear the foil tear or the latex snap, didn’t hear the tink of his class ring against the bottle of Tabasco sauce, didn’t feel the nuclear conflagration when his cock seared into her again. She ticked AST, still, against her teeth.

She let him have the body and the head knew nothing of it. May, behind the wall, thought of guillotines, of revolt and freedom. She tasted fiberglass on her smile.

Then she felt hands on her jaw, hands wet with blood and pepper sauce and viscid semen, and they fell to her throat and slipped firm behind her neck, fanned fingers open to cradle her skull and draw her forth from the wall. She made a small sound, disappointed, as she came forth into the world again.

Maybe, my beautiful little thing, she heard. She clenched her eyelids and felt sharp crusts of insulation clotted between them. The pillow was soft against the highest knobs of her spine when he lay her down. She knew she would bleed on the sham and that he would be angry later.

But for now, May was a good lay, a beautiful little thing. She felt him stroke her hair and tried not to wince as red pepper burned the cuts bristling with splinters across her forehead. She felt pressure from beneath her shoulders; he was pulling the bedspread up, cradling her. He wrapped the flannel around her and lifted her into his arms, held her head against his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, still. She swayed in his grip and he shifted her to one arm as he used the other to run the shower. She felt the air around her grow heavy with humidity.

He let her down and purred at her, helped her step blindly over the side of the porcelain tub and into the running shower. When the water hit her flesh she flinched before realizing that it was good, not the scalding rain into which he often cast her. He gently thumbed the insulation from her eyes. He was so very kind sometimes, like now, with the good water. He loved her so.

She opened her eyes and saw herself as he did.

May, outside the wall, saw nothing at all.