The End

She followed the trail of blood from the door. Hand prints painted the picture of screams, inelegant and brutal, until the fingers broke. She found them along the way. Seeing him in pieces did not equate the nightmare of his whole. The teeth gave her pause.

Sanguine brushstroked into the great hall, through the overlapping coils of plant and bone where the house absorbed itself, like unborn embryos broken down into constituent proteins. Un-Fung Shui, the cleanest, filthiest abortion of selfhood. She ducked beneath the canopy of shuddering villi, felt the warm streaks it left on her head, painted her for further digestion. Warm miasma drifted beyond, flatus of the damned.

From here the realm parted and pocked into caves and cells, some turned by the diligent digger, others fissured from cryptic motion. She kept to the edges, poked climbing membrane with her foot before daring to tread. A misstep ruptured a ripe pustule and she gagged at the reek and rot of eldritch sebum. She realized the strategic significance while her stomach churned. Arms plunged to the elbow in the thick, grainy pus and she raised a circle of her arms over her head, biologic halo, and shrouded herself in disgust.

The digger wept his cadence beyond. He spaded a deep trench for the discarded foot ending at the ankle. Thick tears oozed down his weathered, whiskered face, and he sobbed and sang and broke the ground, twisted his aching spine and mopped his fevered brow.

Reek masked her scent and the digger did not feel the gentle step of her feet as they slid along the ground. He only recognized her when he tossed his shovel back to the surface and tried to climb out of the completed grave. She shoved him off balance and he tumbled into the pit of his labors with a sharp, hurt cry. Something snapped, but she did not wait to see his tortured face. His shovel in her hand, she fled back along the blood spattered trail. He wailed after her, the monotonous and sour lament of the bowed and broken.

I am nothing!

I am worthless!

Without my sweat, there is no life.

Without my tears, there is no forgiveness.

Without my suffering, there is no truth.

I am nothing!

I am worthless!

Without my labor, I am no good.

She wept as she ran. Her hand clutched his battered and rusted shovel and she felt the urge to drop to her knees and beg. But the lifeblood spilled out a pattern of gory feasting at her feet, and she knew she had at last come to the end of her journey.

The cave.

She shook and whimpered but stood her ground. Betrayal pooled at her feet, spilled the last portions of her name. No. The Bitch had her name now, sucked from the gasping ventricular spout of his throat. Nothing remained of either of them now but her fear, his failure, and the last vestiges of freedom now festering in the horrid bowls of the monster.

“Damn. You.” She forced one foot onto the craggy stone of the cave. Then the other. “Damn you to hell!”

Where did she think she was?

The Bitch lolled within the dark shadows of the cave, her grand carapace bulged and streaked, her bulbous stomach distended, fleshy labia swollen and firm, once sallow breasts plump and leaking blood. Blind eyes lidded heavy over the charnal house of her face. Only the occasional twitch of her pincers hinted at anything but digestive torpor.

She raised the shovel.