The Worms

NOTE: this horror story was born from a simple escalation: what was worse than being buried alive? Well, being buried dead, of course. What follows is an early exploration of imagery and an attempt at mild body horror.

CW: Visceral descriptions of autopsies, being buried alive, and being eaten.

Something was wrong.

Nicholas K. Linkletter III, ‘Slick Nick’ to his friends and Mr. Linkletter to everyone else, had started slurring his speech five minutes into the board meeting. Then he put his head in his hands, muttering something about smelling lemon tea, and collapsed on the desk. His fellow board-members quickly turned him over, loosening his tie, and called the ambulance. Mrs. Jennings had checked his pulse and tried to administer CPR — a sensation that Nicholas found quite odd, as Mrs. Jennings was an avid smoker. The air tasted foul to his tongue, and he knew he should be coughing.

The medics arrived in only five minutes, having been out on another call. They took over for Mrs. Jennings, feeding a tube down his throat, and forcing air into his lungs with a blue plastic oval. This was much less comfortable at first for Nicholas, but his lungs were breathing cleaner now, not filled with leftover smoke that had settled in Mrs. Jennings’ lungs. He felt the sharp stabbing pain from a needle in his arm, and his body was lifted into the air by two strong arms, and onto a metal surface that clattered under his weight.

It was halfway to the hospital before it occurred to Nicholas that perhaps he should not be conscious. The nagging doubt of his situation began to grow in his skull, at the base of his neck. The paramedics were talking to each other, trading medical stats like blood pressure. Then, suddenly, his left eye was blinded as the medic pried open the lid and shone a light straight into his iris. Then, the light vanished, sending bright sparks and multicolored blobs dancing him his mind. The other eye soon followed suit. He wanted to squint, or turn away from the painful light, but he was paralyzed, and couldn’t move a muscle.

The hospital was worse. His body was wheeled into the emergency room, and inspected briefly by the doctor on call — again the eyes were checked, and the body poked. At last, he thought, they would tell him what was wrong with him. Instead, a long drawn out dial-tone filled the room, and after a few moments the doctor sighed, and spoke in a loud clear voice for the room to hear:

“Time of death, 11:20 am.”

Something was wrong.

Nicholas was not a religious man. Nor was he superstitious. He knew he was not dead, because he could still hear, and think, and feel. Gamely he tried to move, to blink, to shout or mutter or anything that would tell this fool of a doctor that he was wrong — that there was still life in his old withered form. But nothing came. He was trapped, somehow, a prisoner in his body.

Nicholas became furious as he was wheeled away from the doctor. How could that quack miss something so obvious? His heart must still be beating — too faint for the hospitals equipment to see. His brain was still working — quite well in fact. Indeed, the only thing that didn’t seem to be working were his muscles. His body felt quite useless lying there like a mannequin.

And then, the motion of the gurney stopped, and he heard someone walking away.

Silence.

Hours passed, and as Nicholas lay there, boredom and certain fury gave way to an uncomfortable doubt. Could he be dead? Was he now a spirit, ready to travel to the afterlife? Feeling not a little foolish, he tried to will himself to heaven, separating his tie to the sack of flesh he was connected to. It was to no avail. Still he stayed, limp and frail. Was this death? Did everyone lie here like some grim mockery of a corpse, jailed in the bones and sinews of their former life?

Finally, after what seemed like days, he heard someone enter the room he was in, muttering to someone else about paranoid rich-folk, and wasting time with unnecessary autopsies. It was a stroke, they said, plain and simple. Dead before he reached the hospital. And now because the old man’s wife had some grudge against a board member, she’s made enough of a stink to get the police involved, and make sure it was natural causes.

At last! Nicholas mentally sighed with relief. Now they would discover something was wrong. Good old Maureen. Normally he would have rolled his eyes at her harping, but now it would save his life. A clattering of metal near his head focused his thoughts, as the woman near his stomach coughed, and said in a calm, almost board voice:

“Scalpel.”

Nicholas’s thoughts froze. A piece of metal scraped near his head, and he heard the rustle of plastic. No, Nicholas thought. This wasn’t what I wanted. Don’t cut me open. You can do something else, can’t you? Mentally he shouted at the doctors, frantically, as he pictured the sharp blade moving nearer and nearer to his flesh.

Suddenly, a sharp burst of fire pierced his mind. His throat was being cut, neatly, from shoulder to stomach. Flaps of skin were carefully sliced and pulled aside, as muscle and tissue were carved like a turkey on thanksgiving day. Each second was a new agony, as nerve endings that had never felt the air — had never been bombarded by oxygen — waved gently in the air-conditioned room, sending mind-searing bursts of savage torture directly to Nicholas’s brain. Try as he might, there was no respite, no mercy. He could not scream, nor move away from this hellish pain. His muscles did not clench, his breath did not quicken, he could not even find the sweet release of unconsciousness. He could do nothing, but lie on the cold metal table, and feel every millimeter of pain.

Was he dead? Was this hell?

At last, at long last, after what seemed like years, he felt the pain slowly ebb away. He realized as awareness returned that no one else was around him. The doctors had gone, and the pain of his open body was leaving him. They must have finished, and had left.

The memory of the enveloping pain echoed though the chasms of his mind. Feebly, his thoughts coalesced once more into words and emotions. Images flashed into awareness, and faded quickly as he tried to remember anything but the horrible hours of pain that he could not escape. And he felt himself beginning to go mad.

Again, the boredom returned — at first, a welcome change from the hell he had gone through. Days turned into weeks, into years. Still nothing but the inky void and the cold metal table. The budding insanity that had seeded so suppley in his mind began to grow, birthing friend and foe to speak with. Chants of children’s rhymes long since discarded crept like spiders through the cracks of his thoughts. And new rhymes as well, old and eldrich words in long dead languages, forgotten by mankind for eons. Bizarre and ancient animals came to spend the hours with him, and angels and demons as well. Disembodied heads whispered secrets to him, while severed hands and feet carefully massaged his aching body. Old warlords laughed at this feeble limbs, while scholars and seers giggled mad songs, or explained their misunderstood treatises. They poked, stroked, and nudged his helpless body, curious and prolific.

He felt cool and calm whispering voices and warm hands lifted his naked form, clothing him in rough and uncomfortable cloth. He felt a sponge on his face, and a brush on his lips and eyes. The loving and tender touches were heaven to him, pulling memories of maternal love and warm summer nights to his mind. He basked in the memory as long as he could, until he felt himself lifted and set down on a soft cushion. The clothes were thin, and he could feel the round hard buttons pushing into his back as he heard a lid above him close.

Panic began to return as he felt his coffin lifted and moved. In the hazy panic of his mind, it seemed like only seconds passed before the coffin stopped, and the lid opened again to the sound of somber music. Soft echoing sniffles highlighted the deep and droning tones of a man intoning a eulogy to a departed soul. At once horrified and fascinated, he listened.

Dimly, as the words filtered through the haze of boredom and pain born madness, he remembered the name Nicholas. The deep voice now speaking would be his pastor, speaking from some holy book. And now, the woman speaking would be his wife, or perhaps sister. It was hard to remember. He felt like he should listen to the words, hear what the people he left behind were saying to him. About him. But try as he might, the language they spoke meant nothing to him.

He recognized that some were men, and some were women. He guessed that some were sad, and some were happy. Once he thought he recognized a sob, but it might have been a laugh. The twisted barbaric language filtered through his cushioned ears, and echoed through his skull. The sharp plosives pierced his thoughts, while the slimy sibilances picked their way around his awareness. Lateral moans and groans played a grotesque backdrop, broken only periodically by a wet and sagging gutturals. He cried and writhed under the horrid alien music, trying to escape the rhythmic and unearthly chanting, the chattering slurping coughs of the damned…

And then the lid was closed.

He tried to find peace in the muted silence, but filtering like mist through the walls came the far off droning of the dark menagerie, wailing and hollering their woeful carols. He dimly felt the coffin move again, and slowly sink lower, as if on an elevator. Then, muffled thuds from above as something heavy settled on the lid. Then at last, a blissful and soothing silence.

Time had no meaning for him now. There was nothing but eternal darkness and silence in his soul. The animals returned at first, as did the rhymes and insects and colors and everything that had kept him sane through this long ordeal. They tried to coax him back to himself, to bring him home, but after what felt like generations, they stopped coming. He could still feel the cold fabric around him, and the cushion at his back.

And slowly,

Ever so slowly,

He became aware of a scratching noise.

Worms! He could hear them clearly now. They were crawling all around his coffin, searching for a way in. They squirmed their slimy path through the dusty earth, slipping through the mud like rank needles, aching to feed through pin sized mouths on his rotting husk of a body. Their progress reverberated through the wooden coffin, as loud as a waterfall now. He could not shut out the noise, no matter how loud he thought. Frantically, he tried to escape, his broken useless limbs dead to his efforts.

Then the unrelenting waterfall gave way to a sudden snap. The susurrus stopped as the echo of cracking wood filled the earth. Slowly, excruciatingly, the worms began to move again, heading towards the source of the splintering: directly above his left ear. The splintering grew louder as the worms moved faster, and in a sudden downpour of mud and dust, the coffin lid gave way, throwing tons of dirt on his limp form, covering his useless corpse.

Now he could hear them clearly, squirming and worming their way though the crusty dirt towards his flesh. Now he could feel them, slowly and painfully working their way thought his muscle and skin, scraping away cartilage and hair, sending each nerve-ending to paroxysms of pain with each morsel. He felt their slimy smooth sides curl and twist through his innards feasting on his fat.

He could not scream, he could not flinch. His muscles were locked away from his thoughts, neither flexing nor twitching at his helpless gibbering pleas. His mind was trapped forever until the worms finished their meal, scraping the bones down to nubs, and then to dust, and perhaps not even then. Would he ever be free from this hell? When would he truly die? Or would he forever more be a mind, floating eternal in a muddy sea under a stone sun carved with the promise that he was in a better place?