The Experiment by Louise Bohmer
The Experiment by Louise Bohmer
Over the course of many lifetimes, the experiment had grown into an addiction for the old man. What had started as a simple curiosity had slowly transformed itself into an addiction. The idea, or peculiar theory, became stuck in his head after he’d murdered the little girl on Fourth Street. As he’d strangled her, delighting in her fight for precious breath, he’d wondered: “Could he enjoy the suffering of his victims beyond their death?” Torture and murder, he found, offered such brief amusement. He wanted something more.
He’d long forgotten the first one he’d trapped. He even performed the process of ensnaring the spirit by rote now. He couldn’t even recall when the kidnapping of the souls had killed him. Occasionally, he caught faded memories of the last victim he’d enjoyed before his demise. Visions of a soft young whore in the back of some dirty tavern. Just as he’d been lapping the blood off her pretty torn face, his heart had stopped. Too many souls in one’s head wears a body out, he supposed. He’d died with the severed stump of her tongue clenched in his hand.
After that, the screaming of the souls in his head had reached a deafening pitch and he’d slept in a temporary bed of cold darkness. He’d awoke within this place he now called home, a small grey room with no doors or windows, just a table and one uncomfortable chair. He’d been given no hints as to what lay beyond his cube home. Not that it mattered to him anymore.
He would sit in the chair, close his eyes and tune his frequencies to the radio station of troubled minds. In his old human world, there were many people ripe with insanity. When he found one particularly inviting crazy person, he started to go to work.
As he readied himself for another night of hunting, lowering himself into the splintered seat, the faces began to surface within the wall in front of him. They clustered together and glared at him, exposing their sharp, thin silver teeth as they hissed at him. He laughed at their anger and dismissed them, as he called the Black Hand to gather them. The Hand eclipsed the wall with its darkness, and the faces shrieked as they fell back into their tormented prisons. The Hand was his tool for reading their nightmares. It worked like a truth serum to dig out their secret torment and breathe life into their hidden hells.
Now, free from distraction he closed his eyes and went looking for fresh prey. Tonight, the signal came quickâfrom the bedroom of a young woman. Her beacon was a severe phobia of the dark. How he loved to play with phobias. So easy, yet so entertaining and satisfying.
She sat in a tight ball beneath her quilt, reading a book as the clock plodded passed the three a.m. mark. Two more hours and she would feel safe enough to sleep. As she turned another page in her thick novel, the bedroom blinds pulled closed.
“What the hell?” She threw the book to the floor and dashed out of bed to open the blinds. She found they wouldn’t budge, as if nailed to the window. The bedside lamp began to flicker and she turned in time to see it swallowed by the wall. Darkness enclosed her as her weak legs forced her to sit on the floor.
The floor began to quiver beneath her. She felt fingers, covered in tiny insect hairs, tickle her legs. She shuddered as they crawled up her back and nestled in her hair. Screams betrayed her as fear smothered her voice. She heard the queer murmur of a chuckle close to her right ear.
“Oh, you are sweet,” the old man whispered in her head. “You’re filled with terror so pure and raw. It is delicious.”
The hairy fingers separated her pliant flesh. She wailed as they crawled beneath her skin, tickling her muscles. They burrowed their way towards the bone, like caterpillars writhing in their cocoons. The old man sat in his chair, grinning in orgasmic satisfaction. His eyelids had fused together, shedding their eyelashes, as they always did when he reached the zenith of pleasure.
Just as his toys of torment, the furry appendages, began to worm their way into his victim’s brain and eye sockets, he felt something in the girl shift. Her revulsion melted. Cold hands slithered across his shoulders and up his neck. A sense of malignant victory replaced the panic that had been raping her senses.
“Forgot about me, didn’t you, Chester?” An icy tongue licked the top of his ear.
“My Lora!” He tore open his eyelids with his brown thorny fingernails. He turned to face her as his shriveled skin lapped up his bloody tears.
“Oh yes, they did kill me,” She told him, as if reading his thoughts. Her body was a convulsing statue of ashen mud, her eyes eerie yellow streetlamps.
“I’d been trapping souls long before they found me, though,” she continued. “Don’t you remember who taught you, silly boy? Of course, you were hoping I didn’t survive the death, weren’t you? Wanted all the spirits and the suffering for yourself! You always were selfish when it came to pleasure.”
“How did you find me?” Grinding his teeth in anger, he glared at her. “And why did you trick me? I would’ve shared!” He threw his chair at the shivering wall behind him and the faces once more surfaced. Grabbing his depraved throne, they tore it to pieces and devoured the remains.
“It’s been a long time, Chester,” she cooed, moving closer to him. “Two hundred years since last I saw you. My, how time flies when you’re devouring souls! I’ve been looking for you for quite some time, sending out the false signal, hoping you’d take the bait. You’ve been crafty. How did you avoid me for so long?”
“What are you planning?” He backed away from her ruthless touch. Memories came to visit, sharp jagged visions from his forgotten human life. When he and Lora were both clothed in flesh, she used to bring him the most prized victims. He remembered the cold basement and the walls thick with a carpet of blood. She would tie them to the table and he would peel away thin strips of their flesh. Their screams had filled his ears with a macabre symphony of torture.
Lora had been the originator of the experiment. She had showed him how to go into their victims’ minds and snatch away their souls just before they died. It had been difficult at first to adjust to the many minds wailing inside his head. She had taught him how to keep them silent when he wasn’t manipulating them for sadistic glee.
But Lora had always been cocky and bold. One night, she had decided to take a handsome boy right in the alleyway next to their favorite hunting grounds. She had been discovered while dining on a section of the young lad’s innards. The drunken men who had spied her depraved banquet soon sobered up. They raped her before they tore out her heart and left her for the rats in the alley. Chester had not been particularly sad to see the end of her, tyrannical bitch that she was. Now here she was, spilling her drab liquid flesh all over his alternate reality.
“You’re probably wondering where I’ve been all this time,” she said, avoiding his question, dangling him like a mouse between feline paws. “I stayed in the human world. Limbo never really suited me. I found bodies with weak souls that suited my purpose. Oh, how those souls cried when I invaded their pathetic shells. I made them squeal far worse once I was inside. The girl I lured you with was tasty. I was far more creative with her torture than your sad attempt, however.”
“What are you planning, Lora?” he asked again, his voice now a shrill squeak.
“To take you back with me, of course,” she replied. She smiled and a sinister green fire leapt to life in the glowing embers of her yellow eyes. Her metallic forked tongue darted across her wet concrete lips.
He backed further away from her grasp. He realized too late that he had strayed far too close to the wall. His imprisoned souls let loose their serrated tongues and sank them deep into his flesh. He howled as they held him fast while they removed thin strips of his flesh. Torturing and consuming him in the same fashion that he and Lora once used on their own victims, so many forgotten years ago. They split open his skull with their hooked razor teeth and greedily tore at the soft meat of his brain.
When their grisly feast was finished, Lora slinked closer to the faces, smiling. They hissed and shrank back from her approaching presence. She laughed at them, mocking their fear, and dug her moist dribbling fingers into the soggy flesh of her jaw. A loud crunching pop smacked the air in the room as she pulled her mouth open until her chin touched the cleft between her breasts. Her serpentine tongue slid from inside her exaggerated maw and split into two sections. Pearly pulsing suckers lined the inside of each section.
The sections undulated, groping like an octopus, as they skulked towards the wall of faces. The faces shrieked as her slimy mouth-tentacles pierced the wall and began to suck the slippery visages into her veins. As she lapped up the last face, she heard Chester wailing inside her head. He cursed her with false promises of retribution. She laughed and asked him how he liked his new home within her rotten brain.
She closed her eyes and the room surrounding her melted like insignificant candle wax. When the open palm of a gentle breeze came to cup her icy cheek, she unsheathed her flaming gaze once more. She inhaled the spicy scent of suffering so common in the human world she once more occupied.
She had chosen the soothing ebony cave of a derelict alleyway for tonight’s hunt. She leapt up onto the filthy lip of a garbage bin, obese with trash and the stink of despair. She crouched there, like an ancient gargoyle sentinel, sniffing the air for the first whiff of fresh prey.
Embers of hunger twisted in her eyes as a young man stumbled into her inky lair. She stuck out her mental tongue and took a taste of his mind. High on Ecstasy and festering with suicidal thoughts, this one would be a delectable plaything. She let him get within a few feet of her perch and then pounced. As she sank her teeth into his eyes for the first bite, she inhaled the intoxicating perfume of his primal terror. Chester groaned in the basement of her mind, wishing he could steal a morsel of the young man’s pain.
