The crippling weakness that had befouled me and propelled my involuntary trip down memory lane seemed to be pushing me into a spiral of psychosis. The blackouts had been hitting me on and off for what felt like hours. I finally got a grip when the whispers in the middle of the night started. At first, I couldn’t be sure if they were my own imagination or just a part of the nightmare that had become my existence. But when they persisted, eventually, I willed my eyes open. The vacuum had somehow stopped, I must’ve torn the cord out of the wall when I fell down. The putrid soup within it still looked to contain my blood and the meats that The Slob had sucked out from inside me.
“Hey, wake up. Please, wake up and untie me. Wake up and untie me, please,” the voice kept on.
I looked in the direction I was picking up the noise from and saw the mysterious woman that The Slob had left tied up. She was still in the chair with the black garbage bag on her head, except now she seemed to be doing a much better job of controlling her breathing. She struggled, trying to wiggle free from her restraints to no avail. She needed my help. I looked around for my pants but they’d gone missing. The Slob must’ve taken them with him.
“Please help me, lady, it’s so hard to breathe right now,” she begged.
I wasn’t too trusting of the situation. The woman looked like a victim, but who could be sure? The house’s bricks and mortar were built on madness, I couldn’t trust anyone. I mustered some strength and elevated myself. My face was cruelly swollen to nearly double its normal size, the nose bone remained exposed but much of the open flesh finally seemed to be drying. My insides felt scrambled, and when I stood up, some fresh drippage was still running down my thighs.
“Listen, I’m sorry but… I don’t know you. How do I know you’re not crazy too? There’s no way for me to be sure you can be trusted,” I remarked.
“Take the bag off,” she replied.
“Why, what will that prove?”
“When you see what he did to me, I think you’ll understand that I’m just as much a victim as you. So, please, take the bag off.”
She was tied up; I surmised that removing the bag shouldn’t put me in any additional danger, so I did just that. If this woman wasn’t part of the evil in this house, maybe we could find a way through this together. Fuck it, what did I have to lose anyway?
I placed my fingers into the small hole toward the top of the bag and began to widen it. Once I had stretched it out far enough, I could see what she was referring to. Her entire scalp had completely gone missing, bloody white meat exposed made her a gruesome sight.
That was child’s play compared to the next reveal. Everything that surrounded a typical mouth was gone, there were no lips or skin any longer. Her teeth sat entirely exposed, she could be best described as resembling a skeleton that had never decomposed. She looked more like some kind of extreme Halloween decoration than a human. The sight of her face caused me to wince. I felt bad doing it with her looking at me, but it was involuntary.
“If you had to guess, taking into account your own experience with him, where do you think he might’ve sewn my lips?” she asked me with an expression that was hard to deconstruct since her face had already been. Despite the oral havoc, her speech was still clear.
It was hard to focus on what she was talking about; I couldn’t stop looking at her exposed gums and absent lips. I really wasn’t prepared to answer her question, so I didn’t. Instead, I just decided to untie her. The torture inflicted upon her had made me a believer. She was intelligent to suggest I take that bag off.
There was a strange calmness she emitted when discussing her horrors. One that seemed to rub off on me as well. Between the two of us, things felt much more rational now. In a chaotic and gravely disturbing situation, we were like two pieces of a puzzle sitting snugly that just might be able to work together.
“I heard you come in the other day; I never knew another woman to do door-to-door sales.”
“First… and last…” I muttered defeatedly.
“Yeah, I’m guessing that you wish you never took that job,” she snickered, somehow finding a moment of humor, but quickly piped down when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.
“I don’t know how I could be so stupid, I just thought this was another dirty house. Another quick sale. Now I’m part of it.”
“Well, I might have just a little bit of good news for you,” the woman said. It was hard to tell if she was trying to smile or not.
“What could possibly be good in this horrible place? Don’t tease me, I don’t have any tears left to give,” I warned.
“I’m guessing you’ve been up here the whole time for your relatively short but punishing stay, is that right?” she asked.
I responded with a sluggish nod.
“So, this is what I know for sure, he doesn’t keep the girls for long. He’ll abuse them for a week or so and once he’s tired of raping them or has mangled them too extremely, he disposes of them…”
“How long have you been here?”
“A little over two weeks now. There are exceptions to every rule, if he takes a liking to you, or if you make yourself useful, he may keep you around. But I’ve seen over a dozen go since I’ve been here. Some of them I’ve seen him eat and others seem to just disappear altogether. After he took the top off,” she pointed to her raw skull, “he had me sit down. Then he forced me to watch him boil my scalp and hair. I sat there smelling my own flesh fill the air of that disgusting kitchen. Then, like a dog with a new treat, he gnawed on the rubbery skin for a while before slurping it down with all my hair like you would spaghetti. He seems to really enjoy that part. I kept praying he’d choke on a hairball but I guess that’s just a cat thing…”
“I have no words for how much that makes me want to vomit,” I said without really thinking, I probably could have been a little more sensitive to her situation. I was speaking without a filter like there weren’t wads of my own fetus still caught in my teeth.
“How much you want to vomit? I had to fucking watch it.”
“What about the others? Do you know what he does with them?”
She walked over to the window and slid the shade aside. We could see the weathered, gigantic barn gave off an eerie glow toward us. It seemed so much larger than when I’d first laid eyes on it. It looked like hell. It probably was.
“Beats the shit out of me, but whatever he does, it happens in that barn over there,” she said, pointing through the barred window. “That’s where he takes them. I’ve seen many go in but never one come out.”
“I wonder what’s inside…” I pondered, proposing the thought aloud.
“I don’t, and I have no intention of finding out. I’d prefer to just escape this demon house first and let the authorities do the investigating. I’d rather learn about it years later… when I know I’ve survived—no, when I know we’ve survived. Then we can watch it on television, from the comfort of my apartment, deal?”
What a wonderful fantasy. Regardless of how outlandish it seemed at the moment, it was still a nice thought in my head where most positivity was nearly extinct. I decided to humor her, maybe she knew something I didn’t.
“Okay, deal, but how exactly do you plan to do that?” I asked in a tone that implied the options for escape felt slim to none.
“Back to the good news. Feels like it’s just about time,” she said, unzipping her jeans. I had no idea what she was doing at first but I noticed her lips had, in fact, been infused to the area I’d guessed after her initial question: her vaginal opening. The entire area appeared to be extremely raw and irritated. A cruel thick black stitching was used to sew her oral lips to her lady lips.
They dangled below like a bizarre clown-like mouth waiting to tell a circus joke. Every few seconds, it felt like they might start laughing. It was the strangest pairing I’d ever seen. My ordeal had been disturbing enough but the sight still sparked my worry. It reminded me that things could always get worse.
It took a moment for me to realize what she was doing. For a woman on the more petite side, she could hold a lot inside her. She shit out a turd that was by far the largest I’d ever seen from a woman. Grander than anything left behind in the ladies’ room and bigger than anything that’s ever come out of me. The smell of the hot fecal air invaded my yawning sinus and caused me to shudder.
She’d been holding it for a while. After all, she’d been here much longer than me. The Slob must have been force-feeding her quite often or maybe this was just her first opportunity at some privacy. After she was done, she used a pillowcase from the bed to wipe her rear. She tossed it into the closet and turned around to look at me.
“My apologies, I know this is mortifying and disgusting. Somehow, I don’t really care anymore, but inside, I know I should,” she said, beginning to sift through her excrement with a finger that was covered in a hunk of plastic from the garbage bag. Eventually the plastic slipped off her finger and she continued using her bare skin without missing a beat.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked her, still not understanding the purpose of her rude act.
“A couple of days ago, he left me alone in the basement for a few minutes. He’d just finished carving up some girls and wanted me to wash the blood off the butcher block down there. One of the dead girls was still on the floor when he left. I searched her body to see if she had anything useful on her. Wouldn’t you know it, I found a small keyring in the back of her jeans. He came back down quickly though so I had no choice but to swallow them. I knew if he heard one jingle of metal, I’d end up right next to the girl I stole them from.”
“Keys! Keys for what?!” I exclaimed, jubilation all too real.
“There’s a gun case in the living room, I’m not sure exactly what’s in it, if they’re loaded, or if there’s ammunition, but…” she said, finally locating the small cluster of keys in the train-load of feces and extracting it. “I know it’s these because I’ve seen him open that case before. It’s clearly visible, this key has a unique tone. You see how it’s almost a green color?” she asked me, pointing toward it with a shit-smeared finger. “I made sure to memorize that.”
“What about the other two?”
“Those are a mystery. We could only hope the front door. We can’t bet the house on that though. Our safest bet is to go for the guns and kill that fucking slob first. Once he’s dead, we can take our time finding a way out.”
“No arguments here,” I said, meaning every word of it. I didn’t have any better ideas and we needed to act fast. Normally, I might have a second thought on a strategy that had my life on the line, but there simply wasn’t time.
“By the way, I don’t even know your name, I’m Sandra,” she said, offering her shitty hand to me.
“Vera,” I said, not hesitating to shake it.
“So, Vera, we have one last riddle to solve though. How do we get out of this room when it only seems to unlock from the outside?”
“Well, I guess that’s the million-dollar question now, isn’t it?”
