Neil
By: Elroy Craich
Tags: Horror, Suicide, Transcendence, Cutting, Body Horror

Let me tell you about Neil.

Neil was a cutter. And Neil like to drink.

You know, it’s always hard to say with guys like that. Chicken, egg. Do they drink because they’re depressed? Are they depressed because they drink? Does it matter? (I think it matters).

Anyway, so neil got in the habit of mixing his vices. A drunk with a straight razor is a bad scene any way you cut it, and the way he cut it was lots of little lines, all up and down his flanks and ribs. I saw him with his shirt off one time, when we got chased out of the building by a scorpion outbreak in the basement. Man’s sides looked like uncooked hash browns, all stringy white tissues with veins of ruddy scabs, barely contained under a series of brown and oozing bandages.

Man was a mess, is all I’m saying.

So anyway, we got to know about Neil. And so we went up to talk to him, me and the sistren, having a word. It was a long talk and it was a good one, and he said, give me one more weekend, and I’ll go wherever you want to take me. I want to get better, he said. I just need a little time.

I’ll always wonder why I listened to him. I wasn’t born stupid, I guess I just got that way. I’ve always been the less brave of my sisters, though. And I always had a weak stomach. And the fact was, in that apartment, that night, there was a funk like no fucking other. Smelled like rubbing alcohol and old corned beef, and the stuff that builds up between your toes when you go two weeks without taking your boots off. A quality of cheesy, glistening putrefaction, with two shots of vodka on it, poor man’s iodine indeed.

So like idiots, we said sure.

We knew we had fucked up by Saturday morning. There was a silence I didn’t like from upstairs, and there was leakage through my ceiling in the shower, a fine pink redolence that was viscid enough to dangle, an icicle made of hot dog brine, before breaking off to splatter on the floor like a turd through a basketball hoop.

By Tuesday the smell had got out.

And by Friday, we got back together with a breaker bar and a pair of bolt cutters. Not weapons. We love Neil. We weren’t there to hurt him. But he wasn’t answering, and nothing we could do seemed to wake him up.

Cheap ass landlord used interior doors for exterior placement. Molokai and I were through in less than a minute.

Inside the apartment was breathing.

There was fine fuzzy moss on every surface, fine white cilia trailing down to bitter black base layers. The walls were bulging and fat with retained water, the drywall going gritty and loose. The ceiling hung like the belly of a sick horse, distended. Someone had left the hot water tap running, and it had overflowed the floor, evaporated into the ceiling, fed a little delta of fine sickly yellow mushroom. Chantrelles bloomed from his ass-print on the couch. Plate mushrooms lined the walls here and there like the balconies of little kingdoms. Spiders and flies skittered in the dim dark. The whole place moved with the motion of the waters, sloshing slowly, like the lung of a great animal, riddled with tumor.

And there was the bedroom door.

Molokai shouted NEIL and I almost screamed.

He’s probably in the bedroom, she said. Why don’t you check, I said. Why don’t you check, she said. Fine.

So I stepped across the little delta and touched the doorknob. Cheap plywood door. The doorknob fell right out. The door was rotted through and through, softer than a preacher’s ass and twice as dissipated. And then I was inside.

The next room was the same. Except for Neil’s bed.

See, I said Neil had been mixing his vices. And he had been mixing ’em real bad. His mattress was soaked through with blood, the white carpet had filthy brown-red trail to it from the bathroom. The filth and muck spread evilly over the floor, viscid and brown, patterns of mushrooms in the rich fleshy deep pile soil.

There was something in the bed, though.

Molokai was heaving. But I had to see. I had to. Not such a coward now, am I Molo? Not such a coward now! No, your little man had to see what he had wrought with his pitiful fucking mercy. What price Neil had paid for my indulgence, for my weakness?

I lifted the blanket.

Underneath, the blood had eaten through the fabric, eaten into the springs, turned them into rusty spires. But the blood had fed things, many things, over his weeks and months and years of passing out in blood soaked silence, snoring weakly while the ichor of his life soaked into the Egyptian cotton and cedar pine. And it had fed something. Something alive, maybe not alive the way you or I would be, but the way we’d want to be. A pulsing city of mycelial glory, a tiny vampire metropolis where Neil’s gory bed had been. I saw rills and fondelles of the most delicate mushroom, witch’s butter as big as a drowned man’s tongue. Blossoming spiracles and vesicles that drank the air with ascorbic labes, and towers of sporulating ambition that ejaculated white colonizing spores, and even now, I might be breathing it- breathing it — breathing it- breathing it — breathing it — breathing

Well. Anyway. We never saw neil again after that. But then we never wondered where he was, anymore, either.

Epilogue

And maybe there is some truth to the rumor that vandals broke in the next day. And maybe they stole a few things, like neil’s dad’s old feather boa, and his bankers boxes full of feverish love poetry and desperate entreaties to be something and someone and everything and nothing, and maybe all that did happen. And maybe that mattress and box spring were missing, the next day.

Maybe there’s some truth to it.

I do know that there’s part of the basement we boarded up, and we light incense to cover the smell. And we don’t have scorpions anymore like we used to, or rather, now they’re well behaved.

Go down there at midnight, and see them line the halls in black chitin legions, claws raised high in tribute to their new megalopolis-god.

Some nights a man can hear them praying.

Praying for Neil.

Or praying to Him.