Melmoth's Offer
New original horror fiction from Arbogast
A big, fat cockroach scurried up the armrest and crawled over my shoulder. It reached my neck and came to rest on the throbbing carotid artery. When I felt the cold touch of its mandibles, I reached up, pinched the insect’s thorax, and squeezed until its dark ichor stained my fingernails. I tossed the corpse onto the filthy floor and never considered the cockroach again.
“This place is such a dump,” snickered the redhead on the couch beside me. I did not know her name. I only knew that the other homeless junkies referred to her as “Big Red.” The nickname was ironic because Big Red weighed less than one hundred pounds and stood an inch below five feet. When she smiled, she flashed a graveyard full of semi-rotten yellow teeth. Her sallow skin was mostly ink with small patches of stained and bruised white flesh poking through. I studied the tattoos: an overweight Venus holding the severed head of a blonde male with a sharp jawline, a raccoon wearing a crown and sitting atop a throne of garbage, and, most noticeable of all, the eldritch demon Baphomet floating atop a rainbow and flanked by two unicorns armed with Kalashnikovs. They were the markings of a deeply unserious person. And yet, in the few minutes that I had known her, she had proven serious about one thing: heroin.
“C’mon, man,” she said. “Give me a kiss of that Afghan gold you’ve been hocking all night.”
“I dunno, Red. That solution is the most potent one in my arsenal,” I cooed. “It’s pure, and even old timers who remember the uncut Turkish skag of the ‘70s can’t handle it.”
“Now I know you’re lying. Ain’t no way junkies from the ‘70s are still alive. How dumb do you think I am?”
I wanted to say something smart. I wanted to remind the little runaway, who was no older than a straight twenty, that she had voluntarily entered a flophouse with a known drug dealer. She knew the reputation of the neighborhood outside, and she knew that nobody—no one else in the whole wide world—knew where she was. I wanted to remind her of how idiotic all those decisions had been, but instead I shut up, got my syringe, and prepped the hot dose for her. I placed the lighter under the bent spoon and waited for the liquid to boil and stink. Big Red kept her eyes on the whole process. They grew larger and more covetous as her veins neared impalement. I saw her itch and scratch her arm until blood rose underneath the many layers of dry, dead skin. I thwacked the inside of her elbow a few times until I found the fattest crimson highway. I told her to close her eyes and think happy thoughts. Instead, Big Red started pontificating about Afghanistan’s recent history and the many failures of Operation Enduring Freedom. I didn’t have the heart (nor the desire) to tell her that the shot had no connections to Afghanistan at all.
The fix that sent Big Red into paralysis within two minutes was born and bred in a Bayboro laboratory run by a runt, hunchbacked associate of the Sinaloa Cartel. Delgado was his name, and he always loved to tease me, a townie drug dealer, that his solution could hardly be considered heroin at all.
“Little opium,” he’d say every pickup day. “All chemicals. Cemetery chemicals, and little opium.”
I checked the clock on my cellphone. I counted the seconds until five minutes elapsed. I wandered into the apartment’s gloom and removed my ratty backpack. From it, I pulled out a pair of black latex gloves and a makeshift burlap hood. I put the hood over her head, secured it with duct tape, then rolled up the barely alive junkie in a soiled sleeping bag. I hoisted her on my shoulders and walked out of the apartment building’s back door without incident. Nobody stopped me and asked me about my odd-shaped bundle. No curious neighbor peeped out from behind a chain bolt, and the handful of people out walking that night either kept their eyes on their shoes or on the blue lights of their cellphones. It was that kind of neighborhood.
I checked Red’s pulse one more time before I sealed her in the trunk of my car. I did my best not to think about my cargo during the twenty-minute ride out into Fenham, but that proved impossible. I wondered about Big Red’s life—her childhood, which I assumed was traumatic, and her high school years. I mused aloud about how a girl born in the wealthiest nation in the world, and in one of the nicer states to boot, wound up addicted to heroin. I also considered just how common her type was. It used to be, back when I first started slinging dope and pushing pills in Bayboro, that only real sickos and lowlifes enjoyed drugs enough to become addicted. Sure, back in the day, I sold endless bags of weed to frat kids and professional layabouts. Those types have existed forever and will continue to exist regardless of socio-economic trends. But, after 2008 hit, cynicism and hopelessness followed in the wake of the Great Recession. Everyone became a junkie: the pretty cheerleader, the high-strung office worker, the laborer with a bad back, your grandma’s best friend from Bingo. Everyone not lucky enough for a steady 9-5 with benefits became unemployed or underemployed zombies. Horrible for the country and its culture, but great for my bottom line.
Does that make me a vampire? Once upon a time, I’d say “Yes,” but not anymore, not after meeting the man in the funeral home.
I stuck to the pitch-black back roads that wound through the marshy countryside. I rolled down the window halfway through the ride and breathed in the salty tang of the far-off Atlantic. I fished for a cigarette in my pocket but only found a soggy, leftover roach. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “What the hell.” I put flame to paper and inhaled as much as possible. I felt light, almost as if I were floating above everything, as the green sign for Fenham, population 1,280, came into view. I made the familiar right turn by the abandoned Citgo station and kept it steady until I saw the weak, blue lights above the Doric columns.
The funeral parlor, aka Hastur & Denning’s Forever Home.
I rolled past the entrance and parked the car near a thicket of trees, thus making it invisible to any passerby. I grabbed a hammer just in case, but after opening the trunk and staring down at the motionless sleeping bag for several minutes, I relaxed. Big Red was still drifting along the Lethe. I grabbed the limp and lifeless body again and carried it down the well-worn path that led to the funeral home’s back entrance.
I pressed my finger on the solid white rectangle below the word: “Speak.” I probably pressed my lips too close to the intercom, but I wanted to make sure that the old man heard me.
“Melmoth,” I intoned into the receiver. I repeated the strange password a second time. With an audible click, the back door opened. I fumbled for a while in the dark until I found the dimmer switch. The room went from stygian darkness to a more acceptable gloom, allowing me to take stock of my surroundings.
The rear of the house was mostly empty, with an unused kitchen lacking pots and pans and a handful of hard plastic carts for transport. I placed Red on one of these carts. I couldn’t resist a childish urge to push the cart as fast as possible, then place my feet on the second shelf underneath Red’s body. I even said “Weeeee” as Red and I glided down the linoleum. When we came to a stop in front of the elevators, I cut out the ribaldry and returned to stone-faced seriousness. I pressed the down arrow, then pressed the button for the basement.
The elevator was cold and silent, smelling of a mixture of ammonia and earth. There were other smells too, which I always chalked up to the same “cemetery chemicals” that Delgado dumped into my knock-out shots for the man in the basement. Formaldehyde. Glutaraldehyde. Humectants. Sick smells—a bouquet of death and decay. I always hated going down into the home’s basement, but money is money, and the man in the parlor paid better than any regular customer.
I wheeled Big Red through a series of dark corridors until I saw the dim light blazing in the embalming room. I knew it was the embalming room from experience, and, unlike everywhere else in the home, it showed signs of habitation. There was dried blood on the tiles, and a sterile, antiseptic taste to the air in the room that hinted at regular usage. I hated it too; it always made me gag.
I moved to park Red underneath the burning overhead light but stopped when I realized that the room was full. In the small, cloying space, two other bodies lay stretched out on their own plastic beds. I studied both. One belonged to a wizened old man with more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei puppy. His scrunched-up face was frozen forever in a rictus grin that I found unsettling. His pale skin was a motley patchwork of yellows and purples, making him spotted and somewhat bovine in death. Across from him was a young man whose cause of death was obvious. My stomach churned at the sight of the self-inflicted entry wound at the temple. The man, or whoever worked for him during the daytime, hadn’t bothered to sew up the shocking wound.
“Just put the new one in the middle.” The voiced purred from somewhere in the darkness. I recognized the voice and its accent instantly. It was the man, and I did as he asked. I pushed Big Red one last time and dropped her off between her two new friends. I put my fingers on her throat once more.
“Still alive, but getting weaker,” I said. “Delgado is brewing it stronger and stronger every time.”
“Do you have anymore?” the man hissed.
“Anymore what?”
“Anymore of the drug?”
I reached into the pocket of my jacket and found the syringe. I had expected an empty needle, but, to my surprise, there were still remnants of the drug left. I held the syringe underneath the light so that the man could see. He let out a disgusting sound. I cannot describe it, but I can tell you that it sounded like lust. Pure lust.
“Hit her again,” he said.
“That’ll kill her outright,” I offered.
“Hit her again.”
I shrugged my shoulders once more. After all, what did I care? Big Red was just another customer, or rather just another dead customer in a long line of such miserable souls. She meant nothing much to me, just like she meant nothing much to the world at large. Besides, the man always paid and paid well. Red hadn’t even paid for the first hit.
I leaned over, removed the burlap hood from her head, and directly injected the rest of the syringe into Red’s neck. The plunger wasn’t all the way deployed before the man leapt from the darkness and began gnawing on Red’s throat. I had to jump back to keep from being bitten myself. I crawled on my hands and knees until I found a safe corner where I could watch and hear the last moments of Big Red. Her eyes opened for a split second, and her thin, cracked lips emitted a defeated gasp, before it was all over, and she went off to the nevermore world all alone.
As for the man, he was like a ravenous wolf—all fangs and frenzy—as he tore into the dead girl’s lungs. Blood gushed like a geyser until some parts of the embalming room looked like the middle of a red rainstorm. Big Red’s head lulled back and forth as the man chewed, and eventually, it shifted so far to the right that I heard it snap and fall off. It hit the wet floor with a dull thud, like an old bowling ball dropping on a well-oiled lane. The man kept feeding after that. He did not stop until after he swallowed a few of Big Red’s fingers.
The calm that followed was the worst. The man, with a mouth rimmed red with gore, slumped on the floor. I recognized the posture immediately—it was the slouch of a junkie deep in chemically-induced bliss. The man’s tiny black pupils contracted even further as his lids grew heavy, and his breathing, which was always a thin wheeze when he wasn’t feeding, slowed to an imperceptible humming. He was higher than a kite, and my existence didn’t register at all.
I let him bask in the deliciousness of the blood and drugs for a while. This was the man’s primary reason for being: drug-laced blood turned him on something fierce. He’d told me once before that getting a hit of heroin or a dollop of cocaine made the plasma taste so much better. He’d told me that it was better than sex or murder, and he confessed that he knew both well enough to be an expert. I had tried to ask him a little bit about his past, but he’d shot me down like always. The man…the ancient man of the parlor…guarded his secrets well.
After an eternity of minutes, I stood up and tried to tiptoe my way back to the elevators. Our SOP dictated that an envelope full of cash would be left waiting for my fingers by the front entrance. I was naturally greedy for money, but that night I was also greedy to get away. I didn’t want to sit through another sales pitch from the man; I didn’t want to hear another spiel about the benefits of trading places.
I only made it a pace or two before the man was awake, alert, and by my side. I felt his icy touch near the nape of my neck, and his foul breath warm in my ear.
“Have you thought about it?” he asked. “Have you really considered the proposal?”
“The answer is still no. I may not have a great life, but I’m in no rush to die. It’s enticing, sure, but I like the sunshine too much. Besides, I don’t want to steal such a perfect set-up from you.”
The man chuckled. It was a mirthless laugh. It was closer to a snarl than a smile. “Yes, I’ve avoided detection for a long, long time down here. In such a place and in such a position, death and dead bodies are routine. It’s the expectation. It’s lovely being able to eat in peace.”
“See,” I said in a jovial tone that was absolutely forced. “There’s no reason to mess up something that’s working. I bring ‘em to you, you have your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then the daytime crew cleans ‘em up for burial.”
“Cremation,” he hissed. “They’re always cremated.”
I nodded my head. “Economical and wise.”
The man grunted. “This is all pointless babble. I will have my answer. Do you accept the terms in exchange for undeath?”
Despite everything sane in my body telling me not to, I looked the man in his eyes. I said, “No.” No, I was not going to accept his curse and strap the dybbuk onto my back just because I was afraid of judgement. I told him that I’d take the chance of facing hellfire after my overdose or execution rather than embrace a guaranteed torture without end.
I didn’t want to live off corpses. At least not literally.
“You will say yes,” the man promised. “You will come to see.”
I didn’t say anything more. I used hand signals to confirm that the money was in the usual place. The question bored the man, but he indicated that yes, the cash was in its proper spot. I saluted him, then turned on my heel and made my way upstairs. I took the steps this time just in case. Elevators tend to be slow or break down, and I didn’t want to go out like a dumb and helpless victim in a horror movie. I at least wanted to have a fighting chance should the man attempt to make my decision for me.
I inhaled the fresh air as soon as I left the funeral home. The cool breeze felt good in my lungs. It felt nice to feel my living blood pump and settle and then pump some more. I found my car again, and once inside, I pulled out the envelope and counted the green-backed bills.
$6,000. Blood money. Twenty years of life reduced to six thousand dollars.
I counted the money a couple of times more before I opened the glovebox and retrieved a piece of paper and a pen. I wrote down all the supplies and essentials I needed to keep my operation going. I even sketched out an idea for expansion. I folded the paper three times and slipped it into my back pocket. I put the key in the ignition, backed out, and drove away from the parlor.
As I turned and headed back to Bayboro and its roaches and junkies and uncaring citizenry, I couldn’t help but feel that the man’s cold, lifeless eyes were staring at me. I could have looked into the rearview mirror and seen his pale, sunken face beaming at me with that awful, bloody mouth twisted into a smirk, or I could have gazed into the dirty glass and jumped out of my skin upon seeing his shadow racing after my taillights. Instead, like millions of people every day, I decided to play dumb, close my eyes to death, and drive forward back to my cancerous, exploitative routine.
It is a wonderful life after all.