Chapter 43 - The Charnel Pit part 9

I didn't respond. Slowly, furtively, I opened my jaws and slid the blade between my teeth. I had to angle it a little to fit it under my new fangs but I managed to fasten my mouth around it adequately enough.

"I said arise, stubborn one!" my maker snarled.

I reached beneath me and grasped the severed limbs I had hidden in the gap between my body and the wall. As I did, the snow piled atop me trickled down around my nose and lips and chin. I gripped the arms by the rough-hewn meat of the elbows, where I had sawed them off of the Neanderthal's body.

I heard my maker stomp toward me. "You will obey me, worm!"

I summoned to my mind the image of my father's head vanishing in a cloud of vaporized blood, the way his legs had kicked when his body collapsed to the ground, and then I sprang at my adversary. The snow that had gathered around my body exploded in a white haze. It swirled around me as I flew at my opponent, a tiny blizzard that obfuscated my attack. I brought up the two severed arms as I yelled around the knife in my mouth.

"Yaaaaahhh!"

My maker mistook the dismembered arms as mine. He grabbed them by the wrists, just as he had before, and yanked them from my grasp. In his surprise and anger, I think he meant to split me in two, for he threw his arms out side-to-side with terrible force rather than pivoting to throw me across the chamber.

He stumbled back in confusion, arms thrown wide, a dismembered limb dangling from each fist.

For a moment, he gaped at me. His mind could not quite process what his eyes were seeing. He must have thought I'd grown an extra pair of arms.

I pulled the Neanderthal's blade from my mouth. Plunging it into his heart, I declared, "Foul spirit, I claim my vengeance!"

My maker fell back, howling. Black blood gushed from his lips and spilled down his chest as he reeled away from me. "No!" he shouted in a terrible gurgling voice. "You must not! You must not!"

I pursued him, catching ahold of his cloak, and when he tripped over the leg of one of his victims, I followed him to the ground. I threw my weight upon his thrashing form, pinning him beneath me. His nails drew furrows in my cheeks. Cold black blood sprayed across my face and neck. I grasped the handle of the blade and yanked the knife from his chest, then plunged it into his heart again. Then one more time for good measure.

He was still struggling. Blood bubbled and splashed from the wounds in his chest like boiling water. There was blood all over him. Blood all over me. I pulled the knife out of his chest and drove the blade into his throat, angling it in just beneath the arch of his jawbone, aiming for his brain. He tried to heave me off but he had lost a lot of blood and was weakening rapidly. The advantage was mine.

Yanking the knife from his jaw, I gripped the handle in both hands. Quickly, before he could defend himself, I swung the blade down into his throat and began to saw at it rapidly. He bucked and twisted but could not dislodge me. When I had cut his throat from ear to ear, I tossed the knife aside and drove my fingers into the bloody grin I had carved into his neck. I leaned forward, pushing down, digging into the cold meat of him, twisting my hands at the wrists so that I could hook my fingers in his bisected esophagus. Then, with a final grunt of effort, I pulled the two sides apart and ripped his head entirely from his body.

Ebony fluid pumped from the ragged stump of his neck. I staggered up and fetched his head and held it up by the hair, a gory trophy. I was amazed to see that there was still life in his head. His eyes glared at me. His lips writhed. And then the eyes shifted. He looked down at his headless body.

The body behind me sat up with a lurch. One of the Foul One's hands took flight, catching me between the legs. I yelped and threw my maker's head across the chamber, but the hand did not release me. If anything, its grip tightened, dirty claws sinking into the most sensitive part of my anatomy.

"Let go!" I grunted, but I was afraid to wrestle too energetically with my foe lest I unman myself.

Incredibly, the other arm began to flop around, fingers groping for the knife I'd used to part his head from his body.

Starting to panic, I grasped the fingers clutching my testicles and began to bend them backwards, snapping the bones in them one by one until I was free.

I stumbled to a distance, cupping my aching anatomy. The Foul One's body was still sitting up, black blood geysering from the stump of its neck. The arms swept around, searching blindly for me.

What if he didn't die, I wondered. What if the fiend managed to find his severed head and replace it on his shoulders? Would the two parts rejoin, the flesh knitting together as my wounds had repaired themselves?

I saw the head lying nearby and scrambled over to it.

Still alive!

Those hate-filled eyes rolled in their sockets, fixing me, promising retribution. I retrieved the knife and returned. Sinking to my knees beside the disembodied head, I began to stab the blade into its skull. "Die! Die!" I panted.

It was horrible-- yes, I know. Gory and depraved. But thinking on it now, I would have to say that there was an element of it that was also perversely comic. Horrible things often have a way of tickling our funny bones, do they not? That is because fear and comedy are quite similar in nature—both prompted by the grotesque and unexpected. So it was with me, stabbing my maker's head again and again, trying to put out the light in those eyes, to sever its connection to a body that was thrashing around like a fish. I began to laugh as I drove the blade into his skull. My hysteric peals echoed off the walls, flapping around the charnel pit like black-winged birds. Terror, triumph, relief, disgust… it all came exploding from me in clangors of uncontrollable hilarity. My fate might be a tragic joke, but my maker's ignominious defeat was the ultimate punch line.

Sitting here at my laptop in my sitting room in Liege, it still makes me chuckle a little to think on it, even thirty millennia later.